He gave a mock sigh, grunted, 'Promises, promises!' Then he grinned. 'OK, you win. And anyway, I ache enough already.'
At the end of the next leg of their journey, the sun appeared to have moved some degrees eastward, at the same time sinking appreciably lower in the sky; or maybe it was just that the Travellers had come down out of the foothills, so lowering their horizon. Whichever, Jazz noticed a definite urgency - a heightened awareness - in Lardis and his people; the pass through the mountains was still only a few miles to the east, and the sun's descent seemed that much more obvious. Yes, and Shaithis of the Wamphyri had a score to settle, so the sooner the tribe reached its cavern sanctuary the better.
Following a fairly well-defined trail down out of the foothills, the going had been quick and surprisingly easy. A little less than twenty miles had been covered in the time allowed for only half of that, and Lardis was well pleased. He called camp on the westward bank of a river at the edge of the great forested region, told his people they could have four hours of rest. He sent out hunters, too, into the thigh-length savanna grass after whichever birds and animals lived there. Then he found himself a spot on the riverbank and cast a line there, and sat in the long twilight with his back to the bank fishing and making his plans.
Meanwhile his men had found signs left by runners (free- and far-ranging members of the tribe who acted as Lardis's intelligence agents), which corroborated previously arranged liaison points for both the next Traveller group, only five miles ahead, and the primary encampment some twenty to twenty-five miles beyond that. As Lardis got his hook into a large catfish and hauled it ashore, he was well satisfied. Things seemed to be working out exactly to schedule.
As for Jazz and Zek: while she bathed in the river he worked on her SMG, clearing the blockage and oiling the parts, getting the weapon back into serviceable order. In the event of another confrontation, two guns would be better than one. Also, Jazz had called for the rest of his equipment to be brought to him; he wanted at least one member of this Gypsy band he travelled with, preferably Lardis himself, to understand the workings of various items - specifically the flame-thrower. When his gear arrived, Jazz found to his surprise that no one seemed to have tampered with his packs since he'd re-packed them. And maybe that was just as well. In the bottom of one pack there was a small nest of six deadly Russian fragmentation grenades. About the same size as hen eggs, they reminded Jazz of foil-covered chocolate Easter eggs in the compartmented, sawdust-packed tray of their wooden box. If anyone had tampered with those... Jazz supposed he'd have heard about it long before now.
Lardis, on his way to the campfire with the huge catfish jerking spasmodically where it lay across his shoulder, nodded to Zek and Jazz on the riverbank and called out: 'Let me just rid myself of this, then I'll be back to see these tricks of yours.'
They watched his burly figure out of sight over the rim of the bank, then turned back to what they were doing. While Zek finished drying her hair, Jazz tested her gun one last time; he drew back its cocking piece sharply and was rewarded by the clean, clear, very familiar ch-ching of metal parts engaging. Then he squeezed the trigger and the breech-block flew forward, slapped firmly home. Jazz nodded his satisfaction, put the gun on safe and slotted a full magazine into its housing. He handed the weapon to Zek and said: "There, and now you're a power in the world again. I still have six full mags and ammo to refill four of them. That's five apiece. Hardly an armoury, but a sight better than nothing.'
He picked up a grenade and weighed it in his hand. It had a twist-action, ring-pull pin. Packed with high explosive, on detonating the shell would break down into two hundred curved metal splinters, each one scything outwards from the blast at the speed of a bullet. Devastating! Even the most powerful vampire Lord wouldn't stand a chance against one of these. At the very least he'd be maimed, and at best decapitated. Jazz would have used them back in the pass that time, except he hadn't been sure what Arlek's lot had done with the grenades, and anyway his SMG had been more immediate.
Zek dragged his thoughts back to the here and now with: 'Do you want me to tell you about the Lady Karen's aerie?'
Jazz stood up, said: 'Yes, while I bathe. I'm starting to smell like you did the first time we met! Shouldn't look if I were you - it's gruesome in here.' He stripped down to his shorts, took a dive into the water. Then he swam back close to the bank and started washing himself. 'OK,' he said, 'let's hear about these vampire castles. I've a feeling it won't be pleasant, but whatever you consider to be worth the telling
And so she continued with her story...
16
Karen's Aerie - Harry at Perchorsk
'First of all, let me explain that no human being could ever adequately describe an aerie of the Wamphyri. I don't think our language, or any language of the old world, has the right words for it. Or if there are such words, then the description would become so repetitious - so laced with grisly-sounding adjectives - that the entire exercise would soon become a bore.
That's why I'll tell it as I saw it, like describing a picture or series of pictures, without putting too much emphasis on the grotesque anomalies and abnormalities of the ... but there! - do you see what I mean?
'The Lady Karen's aerie had belonged to Dramal Doombody, and so it has to be fairly representative of all the aeries, or castles if you wish, where they sit atop those fantastic stacks. So let's begin with the stacks themselves:
'As far as I was able to tell they're natural, weathered out from the mountains in their slow retreat. Why the stacks should remain while the earth around them crumbled... I'm no geologist. Maybe they were once the cores of a series of volcanoes, choked with a basalt magma which was tougher than the surrounding cones. The craters have long gone but these titan plugs remain. That's theory, of course, and anyway it doesn't matter. The stacks are real, and since time immemorial the Wamphyri have built their aeries on them.
'But just looking at a stack from a distance, you don't see the entire picture. By that I mean that you don't see the actual stack. It's there, inside the shell, but what you see is that shell, which through the ages the Wamphyri have built around the inner core. So ... the next question has to be: what is this artificial "skin" made of?
'Well, I think the best way to answer that would be to liken a stack to coral on a submarine shelf. The stone is there, and the living coral forms a skin on it, and the skin dies and itself becomes stone. So on the submarine shelf the "skin" is dead coral. And on the stacks... it's dead flesh.
'When an aerie requires repairs or extensions, the Wamphyri breed cartilage creatures whose sole function is to bridge a gap, form a section of wall, roof over a new hall or causeway. Which is to say, their living bodies form the building or repair materials. Except I said "breed" and that's the wrong word. They don't really breed anything, they merely change what already is. They take out of storage a troglodyte, perhaps, or punish a vampir-ized henchman who has been remiss in some way, or maybe steal a Traveller or two from Sunside. All human or sub-human flesh is the same to the Wamphyri. They can take it, change it, mould it to their individual needs. These cartilage things lock themselves in position wherever they're required, die and eventually fossilize there. Being of vampiric origin - having been vampirized - they take a long time to die; maybe they don't die as we understand it, but simply age and become... fixed.