Brian Lumley - The Source

'So, I've covered a few points, helped to give you something of a picture of Wamphyri life and how their aeries operate. It's all too complicated for me to be more specific than that. Now, if you still want to hear it, I'll go on and tell you about my own experiences in the Lady Karen's aerie

Jazz had finished bathing and now climbed out of the river. He felt a lot easier, relaxed; the water had washed away most of his coiled-spring tension. He squeegeed the water from his body with the hard edges of his hands, shivered a little in the oh-so-gradually fading rays of the sun where it sat over the horizon's edge. As he began to dress and before Zek could continue her story, they spotted Lardis returning across the rim of the riverbank.

Jazz had disassembled most of his combat-suit harness, leaving only the belt and upper cross-straps with their various attachments. As Lardis arrived and cast a speculative eye over the several items of gear where they lay spread out, so Zek gave Jazz a helping hand to get himself kitted-up again. He preferred to sleep fully-rigged, or at the very least in 'skeleton order', so that he could wake up ready for any eventuality.

Finally, taking out a cigarette and lighting it, Jazz turned to the Gypsy leader — in time to see him twist and yank the pin from a fragmentation grenade!

Jazz drew air in a gasp, threw Zek aside and down, leaped toward Lardis. The other had not yet seen the consternation on Jazz's face. He frowned at the grenade in his left hand and the pin in his right. Jazz snatched the grenade away from him. He'd been counting in his head: one, two, three -

He hurled the grenade out over the river. Four, five -

It made a small splash — and immediately made a much larger one!

The detonation thundered, but most of the razor-sharp shrapnel was lost in the river. Some fragments whistled where they slashed the air overhead; a fountain of water rose up, sprayed out, fell back; the echoes of the detonation came back from the foothills and the water of the river slapped in wavelets against the bank. Dozens of stunned or dead fish were already floating to the surface.

Lardis closed his mouth, looked at the firing-pin in his hand — hurled it violently away. 'Eh?' he said then. 'What — ?'

Jazz scowled at him, said: 'Pretty effective fishing!'

His sarcasm was lost on Lardis. 'Eh? Oh, yes, I suppose it is!' The squat, bemused man turned away, went to climb the riverbank and calm his people where they came running. 'Indeed it is!' he finally, emphatically, agreed. 'But I think I prefer to do it my way.' He glanced at Jazz's weaponry laid out on the riverbank. 'Er, show me these interesting things of yours some other time. Right now I've much to do.' Jazz and Zek watched him walk away…

As Jazz packed his kit again and settled down comfortably where he intended to sleep, Zek continued her story:

'I had my own room in Karen's aerie. She and I shared the topmost level — literally acres of rooms, all of them enormous — where we were the only human creatures. Remember, the Wamphyri are human; it's the vampire in each one of them which makes him alien, and Karen's vampire had yet to gain total ascendancy. So we were the only people up there, but there was a warrior. It was a small one of its sort, which is to say it was about as big as an armoured personnel carrier and just as deadly! It guarded the stairwell to the next lower level. That was how well Karen trusted her aides.

'Then there were the water-drawing creatures, which I've already mentioned. And that was all, nothing and no one else.

'Every so often (I calculated at the time that it was about every twenty-four hours) Karen would hold audience. She'd call her lieutenants up from below, all seven of them, none of them having an egg, and apportion the aerie's duties or check on orders already issued. Then they'd make their reports, warn of any deviations in the balance which the aerie maintained, detail their recommendations, and so forth. It was like a military "O"-group, in a way, with Karen as the C-in-C. And she carried it off very well. These were the only occasions when I saw Karen's men without their gauntlets. Her warrior had orders — direct from her mind — to savage anyone who attempted to enter her level wearing a gauntlet.

'But don't be misled by anything I've said about her. Don't in any way make the error of believing she was vulnerable. For she wasn't; not physically, anyway. She was Wamphyri! — the real thing — and her lieutenants knew it. She looked, and for the moment perhaps still thought like a young woman, yes, but that was only the shell.

'Within her she had a vampire and its strengths were hers, growing stronger every day. If she appeared weak it was simply that she didn't want her underlings to test her, didn't want to have to punish them as she'd been obliged to punish Corlis, for that might mean calling again upon the monster within her for its assistance. And she was dedicated to her stance, which was to hold it at bay. Let it gain true ascendancy just once… she believed it would dominate her always. And eventually it will, of course, for that is the nature of the vampire. Karen is doomed to change, to metamorphosis, to the gradual deterioration of what she was into what she must become…

'I remember that toward the end of my captivity there in her aerie, I asked her what Corlis could have done that she'd wished to banish him to the hell-lands. Perhaps because I was the only one she could talk to without worrying about their motives, she told me all about it.

'Corlis had been the biggest of Karen's men, both in size and in the aerie's pecking order. He was also surly, a troublemaker, the Wamphyri equivalent of a male chauvinist whatever — in spades! Even as a Traveller he'd been a brute, but that had been forty years ago. Then he had been taken in a raid, since when he'd served Dramal Doombody — if "served" is the right word for it. God knows why Dramal suffered him, but the ways of the Wamphyri are never easy to figure out. Maybe at one time Dramal intended that Corlis should have his egg. But that's pure guesswork, of course.

'Let me explain Corlis like this: he wasn't true Wamphyri, but if ever a man should have been then he was that man. And he knew it.

'Most men would shrink from the idea, but not Corlis. He wanted an egg — and the power it would bring. He wanted to be master of the aerie, a Wamphyri Lord. He would like nothing better than to ride to war on the back of a flying beast, and command his warriors in their terrifying aerial battles. But while he and the others called themselves Wamphyri, they knew that in fact they were merely the undead servants of their true vampire mistress. And that was the great thorn in Corlis's side.

'He had asked the Lady Karen that she make him the aerie's warlord. To which she'd replied that she had no need of a warlord, for there was no war. He had demanded rank and position above his fellows, only to be told he had no right to such honours. There was room for only one master (or mistress) in an aerie, and in this aerie that one was the Lady Karen herself. Then Corlis had offered himself as Karen's consort and protector — at which she'd lost her temper and told him she'd rather sleep with a warrior! As for his protection: he should worry about protecting himself, especially if he intended to continue his current campaign of mischief and annoyance.

'But Corlis wasn't to be put off lightly. He'd argued heatedly that the other Wamphyri Lords were plotting for war, that now that Dramal was dead the aerie was vulnerable, and that Karen, a mere woman, could never hope to achieve any sort of effective command of her army in battle. She should choose her champion now, without delay, and the champion she chose had better be him!

'At that Karen had ordered him out of her presence, Corlis and the other six with him. Four of them had made to obey her, but the others…