Necroscope: Defilers

  Grinning sheepishly, Manolis offered an apologetic twitch of his shoulders. “No, of course not,” he said. “What? A place like that … it would be much too obvious. My mind is working overtime, I think. But I received thee funny sensation to find such a name on thee map. Or perhaps ‘funny’ is thee wrong word. In any case, now I’m feeling very stupid …”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Trask told him—for the fact was that it had given him a ‘funny’ sensation, too. “Let’s face it, this is a nervy business. We’re all going to be a little jumpy until we’ve got something solid to go on.” Then, changing the subject to detract from the other’s embarrassment: “And is that it—no other places of interest? No little hamlets tucked away off the road?”

  “There are two other places of interest,” Manolis answered. “Or at least, they are of interest to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Let me explain,” said the other. “This morning I had thee opportunity to speak to Liz about your work in Australia. That was while we were driving to Skala Rachoniou. What she told me sounded like World War Three! What? Flamethrowers, napalm, and helicopter gunships? Amazing! And that was when you were going against only one of these creatures.”

  “Good liaison,” Trask explained. “Our Minister Responsible was able to convince the Australian authorities to give us all the help we needed. This time around, however …”

  “I know,” Manolis nodded. “A different country, different authorities, and a different situation. Still, our weapons are pitiful by comparison, and in pitifully short supply.”

  “I feel mainly responsible for that,” Trask told him. “If I hadn’t been so quick off the mark to get out here … but on the other hand, what difference would it have made? We have to deal with these monsters, and must do so with whatever weapons are to hand.”

  “Precisely,” said Manolis. “But as Liz explained it to me, thee Australian infestation was so deep-rooted that you had to burn and blast it out of existence. Well, good—but we won’t be doing much blasting and burning with a few spearguns and a handful of nine-millimeter automatics!”

  “I know,” Trask answered. “And if things get really bad, I might yet have to get my government to tell yours what’s going on and try to enlist their aid. But that isn’t going to happen if it means creating a panic situation right across the world! However, I do have the power—if only as a last resort—to call in air strikes from British warships in the Med. In which case, there’d be hell to pay later explaining it away. It would go something like this: ‘Today in the Mediterranean, a British military exercise went disastrously wrong when planes from the aircraft carrier …’ Et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Right,” said Manolis. “And that is why I find these other places on thee map interesting. One is a marble quarry on thee far side of this mountain; thee other is a deserted airport in thee foothills just before we are reaching Limari on thee east coast.”

  “An airport?” Trask was surprised. “But I was told Krassos doesn’t have an airport.”

  “Work was started four years ago,” Manolis explained, “and came to a halt a few months ago with thee failure of the euro, the devaluation of thee deutschmark, and a big decline in tourism. An independent German airline with its own small fleet of VTOLs went broke, and since they were footing thee bill …” He let it taper off.

  “I hadn’t heard about that,” said Trask.

  “Nor I, until I was over here that first time,” said Manolis. “But when one chats with thee locals, then one hears such things. All very interesting …”

  “But I still don’t know why you’re interested,” said Trask. “I mean, what has a quarry and an abandoned airport to do with our lack of weapons?”

  In answer to which Manolis smiled slyly, winked, and said, “Perhaps nothing—and I don’t want to get your hopes up—so it’s best that you just wait and see.”

  Then he turned in his seat and began talking in Greek, and very rapidly, to Andreas; and that one nodding his understanding, even though Trask couldn’t follow a word. Indeed if anyone had asked him, Trask would have remarked that it was all Greek to him …

  The tree line had fallen away behind and the road was that much steeper by the time The Aerie came into view amidst a jumble of fanglike rocks that formed the uppermost crest of the Ypsarias. It wasn’t so much that trees wouldn’t grow up here as that they couldn’t; there was no soil to speak of where vast marble outcrops thrust for the sky and only a handful of tortured, windblasted shrubs and herbs found root among the boulder clumps.

  And there was the “hotel,” The Aerie, looking like a scaled-down version of an ancient Crusader castle, its walls white in the brilliant sunlight, silhouetted against the aching blue of a cloudless sky.

  There was a parking area at the foot of that final jumble, and Trask swung right off the road onto a bone-dry surface that threw up a cloud of dust, which momentarily obscured the vehicle behind. Then the hood of Goodly’s car appeared, and as the dust settled, the precog slowed to a halt alongside the lead vehicle. Blinking owlishly, he switched off his engine, leaned from his window, looked at Trask in the other car, and raised a querying eyebrow.

  “We’re taking a short break,” Trask called across to him. “This place is called The Aerie, and apparently it will afford us quite a view. That is if you feel like making the climb, of course.”

  The Aerie was impressive in a gaunt, and antique sort of way. It reeked of ages past, like fossilised bones or the crumbling pages of an old, illuminated manuscript. Trask’s reference had been to the access route: a steep climb up steps hewn from the near-vertical rock face, along a series of dizzy, zigzagging causeways. Mercifully the way was at least partly covered over; canvas canopies, torn in places by forgotten winds, flapped in the rising thermals but somehow managed to cast a little shade onto the time-hollowed steps.

  There was or had been another means of ascension, evidence of which was still visible. A broken gondola lay rusting in one corner of the parking lot beside a derelict boarding stage, and a steel hawser was dangling loose from a gantry and pulley, its end lying coiled in the dust. Another length of cable was hanging halfway down the escarpment from the arms of a projecting crane, where winding gear stood idle above a wide landing bay.

  “That must be … how high?” said Liz, craning her neck and squinting up at the landing bay under the square flat roof with its tessellated wall. “Ninety or maybe a hundred feet vertical? Well, personally I’m glad that thing isn’t working, and I’ll be only too pleased to do this the hard way!”

  “Oh?” the Old Lidesci growled. “Then maybe I’ll remind you of what you said when we get to the top. If we get to the top!”

  And as the party of six set out to climb, Manolis recounted what he’d read of the place in the legend on the reverse of his map. “Thee Romans quarried white marble in these mountains, and thee original place was probably built by them. Later thee Crusaders took it over as a lookout. You will see why when we get up there. Most of thee Crusader lookouts and castles were built in thee high places; self-explanatory, of course. In thee later times there were earthquakes, and thee place collapsed inwards. Later still there were invaders, who pulled thee ruins down for whatever reasons. When Thee Aerie was built here, thee selfsame stones were used, and it has been standing as we see it now for some two hundred years or more. Recently, it was refurbished as an hotel—er, if not quite thee five-star. I mean, take a look at thee place. It is thee veritable ‘ancient ruin,’ eh?”

  At the top of the stairway, an old, partially crippled Greek gentleman and his two sons were waiting to greet them. They had seen the vehicles arrive and had hoped that their visitors were prospective guests. Gesturing the party inside a cavernous room where massive pine beams supported a vaulted ceiling, the proprietor recognized Manolis and Andreas as fellow countrymen, and began to speak with them at some length. While these three were thus engaged, the younger men of the household showed Trask and his people to a panoramic window an
d invited them to look out.

  The view was breathtaking; all of the southern coast of the island was visible, from Krassos town fifteen miles to the southwest, to Limari only seven miles away to the southeast. Lardis was staggered. “There’s nothing quite like this in all Sunside/Starside!” he wheezed, still catching his breath from the climb. “So much sea, sun, and sky! All of that colour! From the top of the Barrier Mountains of home, I’ve gazed on forests on the one hand and a boulderstrewn wilderness on the other, but nothing like this.”

  One of the young men of the house had understood something of what the Old Lidesci said, if not his references to the vampire world, and commented, “But from thee roof, you are seeing even more. Thee whole island—all of thee Krassos!”

  Andreas and Manolis had joined them at the window, and the latter was looking a little downcast. “Thee old man has told me a sad story,” he said. “For twenty years he and his family have made a living up here, but barely. Recently, however, some five years now, thee tourism has been bad. Now in this El Niño year, finally they are broke. They had four guests for just two weeks in May … and nothing else but occasional travellers, like us. Thee old man, he says he must close down now; his sons will go to Krassos town to find thee work. I feel sorry for him.”

  Trask nodded. “Not the best place to open an hotel.”

  Manolis disagreed. “It is an excellent place for thee fresh air, thee swimming, thee hiking through thee mountains! He says thee cooking is superb, and thee rooms big and airy. And as for thee views—”

  “The views are wonderful,” said Liz, “and we’ve just got to go up to the roof. But did you say swimming?”

  “You’ll see,” Manolis nodded, and he spoke to the young men in Greek. “There. And now they’ll take us up to thee roof. Ben, I couldn’t leave without doing something for these poor people. So I’ve ordered drinks and a little food on thee roof. It is my pleasure to pay, and I shall leave thee large tip. So shall we all. Come.”

  The interior stairways rose steeply from level to level of all four highceilinged floors. Along the way, the Old Lidesci took the hindmost position with Liz at his elbow. Noticing the way he would pause every now and then to sniff at the air, she asked him: “Is something wrong?”

  “Eh?” Lardis looked at her, blinked, then shook his grizzled head. “No, nothing. This place may be called The Aerie, but it smells only of life and humanity and time. Especially of the latter. I have seen real aeries, Liz—the great aeries of the Wamphyri—which stank of death and undeath. The walls of this place have windows where the sun gets in, and they’re hung with pictures and tapestries. The ones I knew were clad in the bones of men and beasts, furbished with the fats of women, and draped at the windows so heavily that no sunlight got in! So don’t you concern yourself that perhaps I’ve noticed something odd, for I haven’t. It’s just that old habits die hard, and I entered this place of my own free will.”

  She nodded and said, “Good,” and thought to herself, I wish I’d never asked!

  By then they were up onto the roof, surrounded on all four sides by massively thick, five-foot-high walls with the merlons and embrasures of a regular castle. Manolis called to Liz, drew her attention to the west-facing wall—one of the two sides of The Aerie that had not been visible from the parking lot—and indicated that she should look out and down.

  Perhaps a mile away to the west, the ultimate fangs of the Ypsaria range climbed some six or seven hundred feet higher yet with twin spurs that advanced in parallel, like the spined back of some impossibly huge, petrified Jurassic stegosaurus, almost to the foot of The Aerie itself. There, finally, they crumbled down into boulder clumps and sheer-sided outcrops, of which the last one formed The Aerie’s foundations.

  But only a hundred yards from The Aerie’s base, between the spurs where they were less pronounced, a natural rock basin had been fashioned into a swimming pool, with a paved sundeck and a ceramic surround in a classically Greek pattern that traced the basin’s oysterlike contours. A flagged path led from The Aerie through sculpted boulder jumbles to the side of the pool, where a three-metre diving board projected over the deep end. Several small stacks of sun-bleached loungers were also positioned poolside, along with a bundle of parasols, and the setup as a whole would have looked very appealing if not for the fact that—

  “There’s no water!” said Liz.

  And Manolis held up his hands in dismay. “Those peaks over there. They are thee natural water trap. In thee winter months, thee rain flows down between thee spurs like a river. It passes through cracks in thee rocks into a natural reservoir and feeds a well at thee foot of Thee Aerie. Thee water has always kept a certain level. No matter how much water is taken out, thee well refills itself to that same level. It had never once run dry in living memory … not until three years ago. Thee swimming pool used water from thee well—crystal-clear, pure drinking water. But three years ago, suddenly thee level is dropping. When they take out thee water, it doesn’t refill.” He paused and shrugged “Obviously thee greatest need is water for living, not for swimming. So thee pool—”

  “Goes empty,” Liz finished it for him. “No pool, no guests. No guests, no money. A vicious circle.”

  “And thee circle keeps on turning,” Manolis nodded. “Now we have thee El Niño, and no end in sight. And so I feel sorry for these people …”

  The rest of the party had spread out around the walls; they were gazing out through the embrasures—following the curve of the world, the island of Krassos in its entirety—from horizon to horizon. But in the southern wall, Liz spied a canvas-draped pedestal … the base of a telescope.

  She removed the canvas, polished the glass on the sleeve of her dress, looked for small change in her pockets. Manolis gave her some silver coins; she thanked him and slipped one into the slot. As the instrument whirred into life, Liz put her eyes to the binocular scanners, then turned the metal barrel on its swivel until it pointed south and some thirty degrees west.

  “What are you looking for?” Manolis asked her.

  “Skala Astris,” she answered. “The Christos Studios. I just wondered if I might be able to see them from here.” But in fact that wasn’t all she was wondering.

  Ben Trask saw what she was doing and came striding. Having overheard their conversation, he’d detected something in Liz’s voice and knew that what she’d said wasn’t the whole truth. He came quickly, with a worried expression on his face. “Liz?”

  But Manolis was still talking to her. “You’ll be fortunate, I think, to see thee studios from here. It must be six or seven miles. Still, if thee telescope reduces thee distance to—”

  “Liz!” Trask said again, more urgently.

  As he took her elbow she let go of the telescope and turned to face him. Standing close by, Manolis thought the look on her face was oddly defiant. But by now, like Trask himself, Manolis had noticed the darkening purple under Liz’s eyes. And suddenly he, too, understood.

  Straightening up and holding her head high, Liz said, “So, then—am I going to be mollycoddled for the rest of my life by you and E-Branch? You weren’t taking such loving care of me out in Australia, when you threw us in at the deep end, Jake and I. So what’s changed now?”

  “Liz!” Trask growled warningly. “What, are you crazy? You know what’s changed. Australia changed everything. And I didn’t throw you in at the deep end, not really. Ian had forecast—”

  “That we’d be okay, I know,” Liz cut him short. “So if you can put so much faith in the precog’s talent, why not in mine?”

  Trask took her shoulders. “Because Malinari can’t hit back at Ian, that’s why! Because he can’t follow his talent home to its source! And also because that filthy, bloodsucking bastard … because he’s already taken too much of what I’ve loved, of what I’ve lived for. Too much life, Liz—the lives of others, and too much of my life, which I’ll be paying for forever—so I’m not about to let him have yours, too.”

  Liz knew what he meant.
He was only now getting over Zek—getting over it, but he’d never be able to forget it, not until Malinari was dead—and now Millicent Cleary was or might be in some kind of trouble, too. Liz could read it in Trask’s mind as clearly as if he was speaking it out loud. Not the whole story, just his obvious concern. Similarly his concern for her—for Liz herself—was also crystal clear.

  Just looking into Trask’s eyes she could read the truth of it, as if his talent was working in both directions: He had lost Zek … Millicent Cleary was trying desperately hard to step into the breach and help Trask pick up the pieces, and she was close to succeeding … Liz had now replaced Millie as Trask’s kid-sister figure. Of course he worried for her.

  Still feeling a little hurt, but knowing now how much Trask was hurting, too, gradually Liz’s shoulders relaxed and she let the tension drain away. A moment or two more and she was sorry, if not apologetic. But at least she was willing to explain.

  “It’s just so bloody frustrating!” She blurted it out. “And yes, I know you’ve seen the purple under my eyes. I always have it, but even more so now. That’s because I’ve spent the morning scanning every little town and village we’ve been into since we left the Christos Studios. Not in defiance of your orders, Ben, not really, but because I guessed you’d sent us out on—well, not a wild-goose chase as such, but you didn’t think we’d have too much to worry about in the west of the island. And you were right—there’s absolutely nothing there. It had to be done, I know, so it wasn’t a total waste of time, but—”

  “You feel that I haven’t made the best use of your talent,” Trask cut in, releasing her shoulders.

  By now the others had come to see what the fuss was about. Ian Goodly, who was first to arrive and had heard something of what was going on, said, “She could be right at that.”