The Last Aerie

  The Guile tried not to look too surprised, but Nestor saw how his eyes narrowed. And eventually, carefully, Gorvi said, “But you’ve been talking to my man, Turgis.”

  “Isn’t that why you sent him to me?” Nestor raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps you should have cut his tongue out, and sent him to me dumb! Turgis told me nothing—except that you were interested in my necromancy. That was enough.”

  “Huh!” Gorvi snorted. “And they call me the Guile!” But in a little while: “Very well, I do have a man—or the body of a man—who has or did have secrets. And yes, it would be in my interest to know the things he knew. Indeed I would give a lot to know them. Even so much as half of the profits.”

  “An even split?”

  Gorvi nodded.

  “But of what?”

  “Knowledge! Flesh and blood! Red revenge! Women for your bed! And sly, taunting laughter on our lips when the others see what we’ve achieved! All of these things and more.” Gorvi grinned to show his needle teeth and crimson gums. “Well, what do you say?”

  “I say you’ve told me nothing, as yet.”

  “Very well,” said Gorvi. “Now hear my story:

  “Almost two years ago, when first Wratha led us here out of the east, our first raids on Sunside were against a pair of Szgany townships named Twin Fords and Settlement. And that was when we first learned that there are Szgany and Szgany. In Turgosheim’s Sunside, for over a hundred years, our prey had given us no real trouble. But here they fought back! We lost flyers and men that night, which we could scarcely afford. Indeed, we lost almost all of our lieutenants. And we vowed revenge!

  “The first of our losses happened in Twin Fords, and we Lords were lucky that we weren’t among them! The men of Twin Fords—some of them at least—knew what they were doing; they’d had dealings with vampires before. They had crossbows, which had been forbidden in the east since Turgo Zolte’s time. Tipped with silver and steeped in kneblasch, their bolts were of ironwood. Also, they wore long knives in their belts and were equipped with sharp wooden stakes!

  “Vasagi the Suck took a bolt in the side, but to him it was little more than a scratch. And in any case, Vasagi was a master of metamorphism; he would quickly shed the poisoned flesh and replenish himself. The fact that he’d been shot at all, however, had come as something of a shock. And as I said, the rest of us were lucky. We were lucky, aye, but as for our lads … the majority of our lieutenants went down and stayed down.

  “Ah, but didn’t we make them pay for it? You can be sure we did! We wrecked their town, ordered our warriors down onto their houses to crush them flat, made as many changeling vampire thralls as we could, and instructed them to report to us with all their goods in Starside before the dawn. Canker Canison ravaged with a vengeance; the Killglance twins raged like the madmen they are, naturally; and the Lady Wratha … well, she was wrathful! As for the town: we’d turned it to a shambles and it was the beginning of the end for Twin Fords. But it hadn’t even started yet for Settlement.

  “That first town was serious work. It had been necessary to recruit thralls and lieutenants, have them fill our manses with all the good things out of Sunside, and set them to work for us in Wrathstack, the last aerie, to make it livable. And despite our losses, in the main we’d been successful. Szgany losses were far greater, and what are a few lieutenants, after all? Still, it had been serious work. But Settlement would be for fun. So we thought …

  “It was Wratha’s idea. She must have thought, ‘Now that my dogs have done their work, maybe it’s time I let them off the leash a little.’ For we were Wratha’s renegades then, do you see? And we might have been even now, if she wasn’t such a thief. But that woman … for every four we recruited, she stole one away! That’s what broke us up, and that’s the way we’ve stayed. Oh, each of us has a part to play in the maintenance of the stack—huh! and some play a greater part than others, too!—but as for the rest of it, we’re on our own.

  “But there, I’ve strayed a little from my story.

  “So, Wratha rewarded us by turning us loose on the second Szgany town, this veritable fortress of a place called Settlement. Well, she and the others were straight into it, no warning and no quarter given. But as for myself, right from the start I hadn’t liked the look of it. Especially not after the trouble we’d had in Twin Fords.

  “Now Settlement stands in the midwest, directly below the foothills at the edge of the forest. The entire town is housed within a massive timber stockade with watchtowers and four huge gates, and giant crossbows mounted on the battlements …” Gorvi paused and frowned.

  “But why do I concern myself to tell you all this? Surely you must know something of Settlement from your Szgany days?” A moment more and he snapped his thin fingers. “Ah, no! I remember now: you have no memory before the time of Wran and Vasagi’s duel.

  “A pity, for if you had, perhaps you would also have the answers to my questions … without that you must torture the dead for them!”

  Nestor shrugged. “I still don’t know what your questions are.”

  “I’ll get to it,” Gorvi told him. And after a moment:

  “That first night, after Twin Fords, I let the others go ahead and raid on Settlement while I settled for smaller prey. There was a house on a knoll in the foothills, overlooking the town. I had seen its lights, however briefly, from on high. But as we stationed our aerial warriors windward of the town behind a jut of crags, landed our flyers in the hills, and called up a mist, the lights were extinguished. It made me suspect that just like the people of Twin Fords, these Settlement folk had also had dealings with vampires. All the more reason to steer clear of the town.

  “Well, I’ll cut a long story short. While Wratha and the others fell on the town, I made straight for the place on the knoll. And without pause I landed my flyer on top of the house and crushed it, then looked for survivors in the rubble. There was no one there. But scanning all about, I discovered a woman hiding in a stand of trees behind the broken house. She knew I had spotted her, made a run for it and ran right into me! She was mature, good looking, and had a fine body on her. I would have struck her down at once, there and then—taken her for my thrall, and taken her, too—if not for an interruption.

  “A youth, no older than you yourself, Nestor, had come up from the town. He was the woman’s son, surely. And he attacked me! One man, or callow youth, and he dared to attack Gorvi the Guile! It was astonishing. Ah, but he had a knife! The blade of his weapon was coated with deadly silver, which burned me where it glanced off my ribs and sliced my forearm. And meanwhile the woman had found a hatchet!

  “Somehow I had been unarmed, my gauntlet had slipped from my bloodied forearm. And these people—how they could fight! The one with a knife and the other with her ax! Suddenly I was in trouble, and so called out to my flyer, ‘Roll on them, crush them!’

  “The clumsy beast made to obey me. Thrusting itself out of the shambles of the house, it struck the woman with a wing tip and knocked her over the rim of the knoll in its steepest part. She disappeared with a cry into darkness. That left the youth, and a single clout stunned him.

  “But I was wounded and that concerned me. Cut with silver, my ribs and arm would take a while in the healing. The hunt was over where I was concerned. I drank from the lad, only a little but enough, bundled him into my flyer’s pouch, and launched for Starside and Guilesump.

  “So my captive became a common thrall, and went about his menial tasks for a month or two in the basement levels of the last aerie. But later, when it became clear how extraordinary were these Settlement folk—like thorns in Wamphyri flesh—then I considered him again.

  “The trouble with the Szgany Lidesci is this: they have a superb leader, a man called Lardis. Thralls taken from other towns and camps have informed us that Lardis was a young chief in the old days, in the time of the Old Wamphyri. Now he is an old chief, and so much wiser. No one knows our ways better than he does, and no one is better trained and equipped to kill us!
Indeed, that’s his vow: to destroy the Wamphyri utterly, every last one of us. But he won’t, because he can’t. And even if he could, we would destroy him first.

  “But … how may we go about it? What are his weaknesses? Apparently he has none! And his strengths? Well, to start with, he has Settlement. Yes, it’s still there! However much we tried to destroy the town during those early nights, in the long days that followed Lardis would build it up again. Except the houses are now traps for flyers and sometimes warriors, and there are twice as many crossbows on the stockade wall. So now Settlement exists solely as a lure for unwary vampires, and you could be forgiven for asking: why don’t we simply avoid it? But to know that there are men there—and probably women, too—through the long dark nights, is in itself a lure! It is as if Lardis were flaunting himself, saying, ‘Come and get me!’ And oh, we would dearly love to.

  “For there’s good rich fighting blood in these Lidescis, Nestor. Good lieutenants in the making, good strong women for the loving, good flesh for the fashioning. And apart from all that, there’s revenge! For do you know, while we got thralls out of Twin Fords that first night, we got nothing out of Settlement but a bad taste in our mouths! Well, our get amounted to a handful at best. And of course there was this Jason, whom I took from the house on the knoll. But damn few thralls out of Settlement, and that’s how it stands to this day. This Lardis Lidesci, he hunts changelings down with a will, and bums them before they can make it across the barrier mountains. So that now he’s as much a legend as we are!” Gorvi paused again, and glanced sideways at Nestor’s face in an attempt to gauge his thoughts … then looked again, more sharply.

  And: “Is something the matter?” Gorvi queried. For a peculiar, faraway look had come over Nestor’s face, and he’d turned his head and eyes to gaze towards the southwest. In the direction of Settlement, in fact.

  “Jason, did you say?” Nestor’s voice had also undergone a change; it was uncertain, faltering. Blinking his scarlet eyes, he stroked his temples and issued a small moan, as if he felt a pain. “This one you took from the house on the knoll—Jason?”

  “Aye,” Gorvi nodded, frowning now. “What of it?”

  And again the look of pain on Nestor’s face. But not truly a physical pain. Merely that of remembering. Then … it came to him in a flash! And: “Jason Lidesci,” he said. “Lardis Lidesci’s son! That house you destroyed on the knoll: it was the Old Lidesci’s place. You had your greatest enemy’s son in the palm of your hand, and you didn’t even know it!”

  “What?” Gorvi’s mouth gaped open. “Are you sure? How can you be sure?”

  “Because … because I knew him,” Nestor answered. “Jason, the house on the knoll, the town, everything! As you described it, so I remembered it. Some of it, I think.” But already the dazed look had crept back onto his face. He groaned, clenched his teeth, and slammed a fist like a rock into the palm of his hand, then cursed and turned away. “It comes and it goes. One minute I see … things, and the next they’re forgotten.”

  “Our greatest enemy’s son!” Gorvi clapped a hand to his pallid forehead. “I might have known it! He was trouble from the very start! Surly, difficult, and defiant. And when I sent for him, to question him about the Szgany Lidesci—that is, after they had become important to us—then he tried to make his escape from Guilesump and set out over the boulder plains for Sunside. Which would have been the end of him, of course, for the sun would have done for him. Except it didn’t come to that.

  “I have warriors which guard the stack from ground attack. They drove him back and my lieutenants went to pick him up. No such luck! He dodged them, came back to Wrathstack, and commenced to climb it by an exterior route. It was the worst possible move; on the approach to Madmanse the climb peters out, and the face leans into an overhang. But why did he climb? To what end? He would either fall or be retaken by a flyer, and he would be mine dead or alive. Well, I was soon to learn why he made for the heights. It was because he intended to kill himself!

  “Such is the fighting spirit of these people. Rather than divulge the secrets of the Szgany Lidesci, this Jason—Lardis’s son, you say?—would climb up to a high place and throw himself down. And that’s exactly what he did. Moreover, he had a sliver of ironwood with him which he held against his heart. When he crashed down it was driven into him and that was the end. For after all, even a vampire is only flesh and blood.

  “He had fallen some one hundred and eighty feet onto a wide ledge and was dead in the instant he hit. I left him there as a warning to others. But as you know, Starside’s air is sharp and desiccating. Things rarely rot here but shrivel and mummify. As we are wont to say, dead men ‘stiffen to stones.’ There are no carrion-eating birds here, and there was no way up to the body for my bulky earth-bound warriors, which might otherwise devour it. So … I left him there. Until a few hours ago.

  “For recently I have heard it rumoured that you have the skills of a necromancer and torture dead men for their secrets. And that’s why I’ve come here, against my better instincts, out onto the boulder plains at sunup to talk to you. I want you to talk to him, and discover the secrets of the Szgany Lidesci!”

  Nestor was almost himself again. “What secrets, exactly?”

  “Why, is it not obvious?” Gorvi raised his eyebrows. “Now listen. The reason this Lardis and his people are such a nuisance to us is simple: by daylight they’re up and about setting traps and such in Settlement and the regions around, and then by night they vanish into their hiding places, which we haven’t yet found. What I want to know—or rather what we, you and I, need to know—is this: where do they go to, and where and when are they at their most vulnerable? As soon as we discover these things, then we shall raid on them with as much force as we can muster and make them ours. For once they’re scattered, then they’re finished. We can pick them off at our leisure.”

  “It would appear to make sense,” Nestor nodded. “But tell me: just where would you have me perform my … examination of this Jason Lidesci?” In his weird and damaged mind, all memories of Settlement in a previous time had faded away again, but he felt the place had strong connections with his old, unknown enemy. With him and with someone Nestor had loved very dearly, who had betrayed him in favour of that same old adversary.

  But Settlement? Had his betrayal—and the damage to his mind, which had robbed him of his past—had it really happened there?

  So far, in his raiding on Sunside, Nestor had avoided Settlement. He’d told himself it was out of respect for those same fierce Travellers Gorvi had mentioned, the Lidescis. And indeed their name seemed far too familiar on his tongue. Only speak it … visions would pass like the streaks of shooting stars across his mind. Not memories as such, but monochrome scenes—bursts of white light and black silhouette, burning like afterimages on his scarlet retinas—of mighty stockade walls and towers, with foothills looming on the one hand and dark forests on the other. But then there would be pain—in his brain, his very mind—and the scenes would shatter into fragments like a piece of slate broken against a boulder.

  These uneasy thoughts of Nestor’s had taken but a moment, by which time Gorvi had answered, “Where will you examine him? Why, in Guilesump, where else? For that’s where Jason’s body is. I have his body, and you have the talent.”

  Nestor looked at him. “You’d have me enter your manse of my own free will? Ah, no. I prefer a neutral place.”

  Gorvi scowled. “Where, then?”

  Nestor thought about it. “In the glare of the hell-lands Gate, in the first hour of the next sundown …” He paused and thought again. “No, better than that, we’ll wait until all of the others have gone off raiding on Sunside. Then you’ll fly to the Gate alone—well, with a dead man for company—and I shall follow on behind. And we’ll see what we’ll see.”

  Gorvi shook his head, looked puzzled, but finally agreed. “So be it.”

  Following which there was nothing else to say or do. And shortly thereafter in the sky over St
arside, twin manta shapes pulsed and scudded with the clouds for Wrathstack …

  In fact it was three hours after true sundown before the rest of the inhabitants of the last aerie had departed Wrathstack to go raiding on Sunside, but Gorvi was patient and Nestor had all the time in the world. For if the truth were known, the necromancer was not sure he wanted to know Jason Lidesci’s secrets after all; he was perhaps afraid that he would learn too much.

  But Gorvi flew out as prearranged, and Nestor followed on. And just within the glare of the hell-lands Gate, they gentled their flyers to earth and Gorvi got down the long blanket roll from his beast’s side. Opening it, he beckoned Nestor closer.

  As the Guile had forewarned, the lich was a broken, shriveled thing. Its contorted face told Nestor nothing: it could be anyone’s face. It had been badly battered in the fall from Guilesump and had dried like a papery wasp’s nest, all crumbling and flaky. And the body and limbs were no better. Most of the bones were broken, and some protruded like white kindling as from the makings of a fire.

  “How long had he lain there, on that ledge?” Nestor inquired.

  “Two years,” the other shrugged, “but not uselessly. Whenever I had a difficult thrall—it happens occasionally—I would take him to a high window and let him look down on this one, and ask him if he could walk upon the air like the Wamphyri. For as you must know, we Lords can fly when we must, but common thralls and lieutenants can’t. The sight of this Jason all crumpled there would usually bring them to their senses. And if not … there were always other ways.”

  “Two years,” Nestor repeated. “You must be right: the air of Starside is sterile, bloodless. It’s as if we’ve sucked the life right out of the place!”

  “Not us but the barrier mountains.” Again Gorvi’s shrug. “Where there’s no light there’s little or no life. But there’s always undeath.”

  “This is a mummy,” said Nestor. He gazed down on the shattered body, though as yet he had not touched it.