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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.
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'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
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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.
'So what I'm saying is this: when you walk through an aerie, as often as not
you're surrounded by the fused, polished bones and the hard, leathery hides of
what were once men. And if you look closely enough - which is something you
very quickly learn not to do - then you start to recognize the shapes of
altered rib-cages, thigh bones, spinal columns and even . . . but I think you
get the picture.
'The Wamphyri can stand extremes of cold. That's not to say they prefer it,
simply that they seem inured. Except when under siege, they do heat their
stacks with a complicated sort of central heating. Gasses are burned in the
base of the stack and the hot air is channelled through pipes - great, hollow
bones, usually - to every level.
Other pipes carry the gas itself, which may then be burned as required. There
are two sources for these gasses.
'Each aerie has its refuse pit. "Refuse" to a Wamphyri Lord can be anything
from bodily wastes to wasted bodies. You know what vampires feed on. Well,
they're not obliged to (indeed they can go without blood, without sustenance
generally, indefinitely) and they do vary their diets with vegetable fibers,
various oils, even fruits which are gathered during sundown on Sunside. They
have vast storehouses of foods such as these, not to mention larders of
suspended troglodytes and Travellers. In this instance, let's consider their
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