The Last Aerie

  That last had woken her up, certainly, when but for Tzonov’s hand clamping her mouth she would have screamed. But only for a moment, until the drug began to work. The effect of that had been to put her back to sleep, her body, at least. Following which … they’d been in such a hurry that they hadn’t even paused to close her eyes. And denied all physical command over her limbs, thrown across Krasin’s powerful shoulders, Siggi had seen, heard, or otherwise sensed the rest as if it were happening underwater, through the liquid lens of some sickly churning submarine kaleidoscope:

  Corridor walls flowing by like waves in the apparently slow-motion jolt … jolt … jolt of Krasin’s stride; curved steel wall panels reflecting the ghastly flicker of faulty or shorting neons; an inverted descent through the magmass levels to the core, where the usual knot of technicians and scientists were nowhere in evidence, for Tzonov had either dismissed them or sent them on some clever wild-goose chase. Another descent, down steel ladders in the curved wall of the core and under the white bulge of the sphere Gate itself, to a place where Tzonov opened the cover on a magmass wormhole. He and Yefros sliding feet-first into an alien darkness; and Siggi with a rope round her ankles, hauled along behind and gliding in the smooth bore like some slow toboggan; Krasin bringing up the rear, pushing on her shoulders where he followed head-first.

  This was where Tzonov had relocated his arsenal: down in these warped nightmare regions where—for the sake of human sanity—no one ever went these days. Whole sections had been abandoned ever since the time of the original Perchorsk Incident; they had been opened up, briefly, following Harry Keogh’s escape to Starside; now they were closed again and would stay that way … to anyone but a madman and his followers.

  Dim lighting flickering into being, and Tzonov and Yefros holding Siggi erect, head lolling, until Krasin could take her from them. Then more jolting motion, and hideous magmass cysts, molds, and other … anomalies flowing past her frozen field of vision, until they reached—

  —The room.

  The room of the machine.

  It was then that Siggi had wished she was dead. But only her body was dead, and then only temporarily. That could easily change, of course, could easily become permanent. It all depended on how much Tzonov wanted, on how much he intended to leave her. If anything. Her death wish of a moment ago was forgotten; as they strapped her to the table, she no longer desired to die but to live! To live and talk and tell them everything! And she would, only too gladly, without all of this. If only they would listen, and if only she could speak.

  “She’s drooling,” Krasin said, oddly disgusted.

  “Trying to talk, perhaps?” This was Yefros, his voice a trembling, excited whisper. And now, but much too late, Siggi remembered something else about the sadistic locator: that he was an Operator, one of the few men who was qualified to perform what was euphemistically known as “an operation.”

  Siggi put every ounce of nonexistent strength into one last twitch of effort—to follow Yefros’s movements—and her head flopped loosely to one side. The locator was moving obscene equipment into position, donning a surgical gown, and pulling on rubber gloves. There wouldn’t be very much blood, but … Yefros was fastidious in matters such as this. Siggi screamed, but silently of course. The merest gurgle.

  Then a strong hand took her chin and turned her head the other way, and she felt rubber-sheathed brackets clamped into position in the hollows of her cheeks, to hold her head steady. She looked straight up, straight into Turkur Tzonov’s magnetic, malignant grey eyes, which peered into and through hers as if they were empty holes in her head.

  Until now everything had seemed, what, impersonal? Yes, that was the right word, so much so that it was almost as if it were happening to someone else. On their part impersonal, anyway. Siggi was so helpless, they could have done anything to her, used her however they would; but except for what they planned, so far they’d done nothing. Now, however, all of that had changed. Now it came down to Siggi and Tzonov, which made it very personal indeed.

  She wanted to curse him—which he knew, of course—but could only plead. She shouted with her mind, when all it required was a whisper. She offered to tell him everything, right now, here, immediately. She was a foolish woman, she knew, and weak. She’d wronged him, and now promised to put it right. From this time forward, she would swear eternal faith to Tzonov, his cause. She deserved to be used, abused, and discarded. He could shame her, trample her under, take all she had been or was now to mold to his own design or ruin forever. Physical ruin, yes, but not … not … not her memories … not her mind! Let her keep that, at least. For that was what made her Siggi Dam.

  The dome of Tzonov’s skull gleamed shiny damp; as he shook his head in a negative response, droplets of sweat gathered and rolled round the orbits of his eyes to drip from his nose. His features, so perfectly balanced, were scarcely human; Siggi saw that clearly now. And his ego was likewise unstable. Capable of withstanding a slap, it could never take a full-blooded punch. And she had delivered a hammerblow! Since when had there been only one course Tzonov could take. And now he would take his revenge.

  “Ah, Siggi, Siggi,” he said, shaking his head again and smiling, however mockingly. “Trusting you was a mistake, and you know how I hate mistakes. But in setting Nathan free, you placed yourself in bondage. Oh, he has escaped to a new world—for the moment, at least—but you? How should I deal with you? By trusting you again, when your treachery is proven? Or should I let your punishment fit the crime? For there would be a wonderful irony in that, don’t you see? Nathan goes free, an ‘innocent’ in an alien world, and I control the door, the Gate, into just such a place. The only difference appears to be that you … that you are not innocent. Not yet. But we can change that …”

  She saw his meaning, and in a moment the numbness of her limbs was matched only by that of her mind. Her brain froze, but not so much that she couldn’t feel or at least sense the iciness of the sterile needle probes that slid into her ears through flesh and cartilage.

  Then Tzonov took a helmet that trailed a multitude of rainbow wires, the receiver, and let her watch him place it on his head. And still smiling his awful smile, his face slowly withdrew from her line of vision. Someone’s thumbs came into view, and closed her eyes as if she were already dead. Then, before the power was switched on, she heard Yefros say:

  “It’s much like a computer. We don’t have to delete it all. Let’s start at the beginning. Her birth?”

  And Tzonov’s answer. “Let her keep it. We all need to know we were born. It’s part of the will to survive. I want her to have that, at least. Without it, she’d be nothing but a bag of plasma. No, she must have something of will, for I want her to run, hide, and to be afraid. I want her to be even more afraid than she is now! As for her childhood: most of that can go. But her sexual awakenings, she should keep them. Siggi was good at that; it might even keep her alive a while, in Starside!”

  And then, scoring her soul like a blunt drill, his laugh! Above all else, even if she remembered nothing else, Siggi knew she would always remember that. Tzonov’s laugh: cruel, malevolent, vindictive. It would ring in the achingly empty corridors of her mind forever.

  Following which, darkness. For that was when they switched on the power, and began downloading her brain …

  PART FOUR:

  THE REST OF NESTOR’S STORY

  1

  Nestor, Necromancer! Hunting on Sunside

  Two years earlier in time, and an entire dimension away in parallel space:

  The vampire Lord Nestor’s first lieutenant, called Zahar (once Zahar Sucksthrall), coaxed all speed from his small and singularly burdened mount and headed for the barrier mountains. His mission was of the greatest possible urgency, for even now the sun was rising up beyond the gold-tipped crags, slowly but surely climbing to the highest point in its low but deadly arc. Deadly to all vampires, to the Wamphyri themselves, and certainly to their lieutenants.

  Already sunlight came
spilling through several of the high passes, glancing from the tallest peaks, permeating Starside’s gloomy upper atmosphere and banishing the stars, except those that burned over the Icelands far to the north. On high, even the sinister Northstar, motionless where it stood at its zenith over Wrathstack, the last aerie, was little more than a glimmer now. And when the sun was at its highest, shining on Wrathspire itself, then the Northstar would fade entirely from view.

  By then Zahar must be on his way back, or better still already back, safe within Suckscar’s massive walls and halls and labyrinthine ways. Oh, he would come to no harm so long as he kept himself and his mount out of the sun’s lethal glare, but the knowledge itself—that spears of sunlight would soon stab through the mists of Starside to sear on Wratha’s turrets and spires—was sufficient to speed him on his way. For when the sun is risen, the Wamphyri and theirs are cowards all. And if they were not, then they would be dead. Just as the “Lady” Carmen would soon be dead. But the true death, not undeath.

  And so Zahar shivered as he landed in a writhing ground mist, bundled Carmen down from the flyer’s back, tossed her over his shoulder, and climbed a scree-littered saddle between spurs; until at the top he saw the southern rim aglimmer with yellow fire, but not yet awash in it. And pegging her out on a mound of stony earth—hammering in the ironwood pegs left-handed, for his right hand and arm were still painful from the process of metamorphic healing, which as yet was far from complete—and making fast her wrists and ankles with strips of tough leather, he shivered again and even jerked to his feet on two occasions, turning in a complete circle and gazing all about. For it had seemed to him that while he worked, someone had watched: a sensation he’d known often enough before, but only when Vasagi the Suck was alive.

  Vasagi: master of mime, metamorphism, and telepathy alike. Except the Suck was dead now, and Nestor the new Lord of Suckscar … yet still Zahar shivered. Perhaps he sensed the uneasy vampire spirit of his old master—/asagi’s ghost, as it were—wandering restlessly abroad in the mountains, waiting fearfully for the sun, doomed for eternity to steam into mist with each recurrent sunup yet to come …

  Finally Zahar was done and the undead corpse of Carmen all tied down, and not a moment to spare. Golden fire was creeping on the south-facing crags, setting the peaks ablaze, staining the saddle a poisonous yellow as the sun, as yet unseen, swung slowly east. And Zahar knew that if he did see that fiery orb, then he’d see no more. It was time to be gone.

  Again the feeling came that someone or thing observed him, but this time in his haste Zahar ignored it and ran back to his flyer. A moment more and he’d launched … a gentle glide, down and out over the boulder plains. But behind him he could almost hear the sun’s golden claws scrabbling on the rocks, and feel the yellow beast’s breath turning the air to acid. And his terror of burning was so great that he never once glanced back but sat hunched in the saddle, eyes staring straight ahead, as he sped like an arrow for Wrathstack.

  While behind him, between the spurs where the rim of sunlight crept ever closer to Carmen’s feet, and the vampire stuff in her finally recognized the peril and brought her starting, then screaming awake from undeath to sure death—

  —Something other than sunlight came creeping, like a shadow from the shadows of the crags! A thing in a cloak and mask of cloth, with holes cut for its yellow-flaring eyes. A thing that took up a rock and broke the ironwood pegs, helped Carmen up and led her staggering, sobbing from the sun’s sighing encroachment. And up over the dark rim of the saddle the thing led her, and down a scree slope into the permanent darkness and safety of a north-facing crevice in the rocks.

  As they went, so she cried out, “What … ? Who … ?” For as yet she was like a lost child, with little or no understanding of her whereabouts and circumstances, except that she was a changeling whose change—whose very existence—had almost been terminated.

  But the one in the cloak and mask merely hushed her and replied, Quiet, now, Carmen, all is not lost. As was my fate, so is yours. Yet we have both escaped it. We are banished now, for the moment, and sent out of our rightful places. But still we’re alive, you and I; we’ll live on and grow strong, and one day return. We’ll return for our revenge, which will be sweet, I promise you! Trust me. I know the way.

  And gasping, clutching her terror-parched throat, fainting in his arms in the darkness of their refuge, she knew that it was true, that if anyone knew the way it was this one whom she had thought dead and gone.

  Oh, she had been glad enough then that he was no more, that the handsome Lord Nestor had come to take his place. But not as glad as she was now that he was back, not when it meant life to her. Both glad and terrified at one and the same time. For despite an awful, hideous alteration, she could not deny but that this was her old master. She’d guessed it as soon as she heard his mental voice, and now knew it definitely as he took off his mask and tossed it down.

  But his face! His mangled, maniac face!

  And then she knew no more, for a while at least …

  All of which lay two long years in the past, and only part of it known to Nestor (and then erroneously) where he lay healing and dreaming under the bank of the river in Sunside.

  And as his metamorphic vampire flesh expelled the last few silver pellets of Szgany shot and the last drop of yellow pus, and the small wounds knitted over, so his dreams switched from the vacant meanderings of subconscious psyche to a more positive theme, when he lived again the life he’d known in Suckscar in his early days as Nestor of the Wamphyri …

  Time had passed since Nestor’s ascension—six months, then nine—and the might-have-been “Lady” Carmen was all but forgotten. But the young Lord Nestor’s awful talent, which he had discovered through her, was not. Despite that it repulsed him, it also fascinated him, so that he was driven to experiment. For he was a necromancer with the power to question the dead, and he was the only one in all Wrathstack who could do it. It made him equal, perhaps even superior, to the rest of them.

  But they all had their various quirks and talents, if “talent” may adequately describe Wamphyri mutations, anomalies, and aberrations. Wran with his rages, which gave him the strength of three; his brother Spiro, who constantly practiced to achieve his father’s killing eye, though with no noticeable success so far; Gorvi, whose guile was such that he would even cheat himself, if that were at all possible. And of course the Lady Wratha with her mentalism and mind-cloaking technique, so that she was able to read the thoughts of the others while yet keeping her own to herself—mainly. Even the dog-Lord, with his lycanthropy, which made him look even more like some monstrous wolf when he went off hunting on Sunside.

  Yet Nestor’s talent was … different.

  Word of it got out (this was hardly surprising; Wratha had spies everywhere, in all of the manses), and well within a year everyone in Wrathstack knew that Nestor was a necromancer. Meanwhile, Canker Canison had become a frequent visitor to Suckscar, and his and Nestor’s friendship had developed.

  “Useful, is it, this weird talent of yours?” Canker growled one evening, when at last the sun was off the peaks.

  “It probably will be,” Nestor answered, “aye.”

  They were sitting in one of Nestor’s private rooms, a place that looked south to the barrier range. He liked to sit here at this hour, watching the peaks turn from gold to grey. He would even sit here in the predawn hours, and witness the reverse. But on those occasions, long before the first true rays came stabbing through, then the curtains would be drawn and Nestor gone off to other, safer places.

  “But just exactly how do you use it?” Canker asked. “How are you using it now, I mean?”

  Nestor shrugged. “At present, I merely … experiment.”

  “You talk to dead men? And did it happen just like that? Suddenly you could talk to them?”

  “Ah … no,” Nestor answered. “The first time, one of the dead talked to me. Except she was undead. Since when … well, the dead would not speak to me a
t all, if they had a choice.”

  “She was undead, you say?” Canker frowned and his red eyebrows crushed together over his snout. “Then how could you be certain of your talent? The undead are not truly dead.”

  “This was a thrall,” Nestor replied. “She was a mere vampire, not yet Wamphyri. At the time … I was inexperienced and had taken too much from her. But even so she would only become Wamphyri if I allowed it, which I did not. She had no mentalism as such, or should not have had it, and yet she spoke to me in my mind. She was dead, Canker, but when I touched her she knew me and named me for her murderer! In which she was correct, of course, for I could not suffer her to live.”

  “And after that?”

  “I had her destroyed: scorched at sunup on the high crags, which put an end to her. What’s more, it put an end to what was left in me of pity. And it was only then that I became Wamphyri in the fullest sense. For in our hearts we are cold creatures, Canker, and I was not cold—not completely—until then.”

  “We’re not so cold,” Canker argued. “Indeed, we can be hot as a furnace at times! But we know how to do what must be done, and that without a deal of fuss. We are survivors, Nestor!”

  “Without emotion, feeling, purpose? What use to survive as a piece of stone?”

  “This is your leech arguing,” Canker coughed. “It can only be. You are playing word games, and your parasite directs their course. For as you must know by now, when the mood is on us we argue just for the sake of it, like now. But emotionless? Purposeless? The Wamphyri? Is that what you’re saying? Then you don’t know the half of it! But I believe I do know what’s wrong with you, my lad! Why, you haven’t given yourself a chance! You think you’ve seen it all. ‘And is that all there is to it?’ you ask? ‘To slake my thirst on blood forever and a day, and grow no older or wiser but live like some bloated leech in a pool?’ Aha! But Canker has the answer.”