The Last Aerie

  And Jim Wills, the cleaning lady’s husband? In life he’d just overflowed with words; and the one he’d loved to talk to most of all had been his wife. Was it so strange? And how many other lonely people “hear” their absent loved ones talking to them? Trask wondered. But out loud he only said, “What else has Jim told you, Mrs. Wills?”

  Perhaps there was a tear in the corner of her eye as she looked at him, but she hid it and smiled anyway. “Only as how I should be a good girl,” she said. “And treat others the way I’d expect to be treated. And remember that Jim loved me, and only me, all his days.”

  Trask nodded. “That’s all good advice,” he said, softly. “But I meant about Harry. What did Jim tell you about Harry?”

  She shrugged and sighed. “Not much. Just ter look after his room and keep it spick-’n-span, that’s all. ‘Meg, me love, whatever else goes ter the wall, you look after ’arry’s room,’ he says. And when I arsks him why, he shrugs and says: ’Well, yer never knows when he’ll be needin’ ter use it again, now does yer?’”

  She looked at the two espers and smiled, and the tears were gone now. “Anyway, that’s what my Jim always says …”

  PART TWO:

  NESTOR’S STORY

  1

  Sunside

  Three days earlier (by Earth’s chronological system), at the dawn of a long Sunside “day,” the vampire Lord Nestor had gone to earth in the forest a mile or two north of the leper colony on the fringe of Sunside’s prairie belt. In fear, loathing, and great trepidation—trembling, aye, even the necromancer Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri!—he had plunged headlong through the deep dark woods, away from the gold-stained horizon where the sun rose inexorably, menacingly, in the south.

  There in the gloom of the forest, stumbling into a stream, he had stripped naked and washed himself scrupulously clean in every part, until even his metamorphic vampire flesh was raw, red, and broken from his furious scrubbing. And in his shrinking mind (known also to his parasite vampire, of course), one terrifying thought eclipsing all others: that he’d spent last night among Szgany lepers, watched over by lepers, tended and fed by lepers, and … infected, perhaps? By lepers?

  Leprosy: great bane of the Wamphyri! And Nestor had been with these stumbling, crumbling people from sundown to sunup, in their place, unconscious in one of their beds, and covered by their blankets …

  They’d discovered him where his crippled flyer had come down in the forest close by; they had touched him, lifted him up, taken him to their colony. Their wooden spoons had carried soup to Nestor’s dribbling mouth, while his lungs had breathed air which theirs had breathed out! Their bandages and healing salves had covered his wounded face and eyes … but what were ointments against the curse of leprosy? And so he had scrubbed his body raw, then dressed himself in his soiled leather clothing, and with something of his composure regained followed the stream east and a little north.

  Mainly Nestor had walked in the shallow water, shaded by dense foliage along the banks. His eyes had been half blinded by silver shot, and though the lepers had picked most of the tiny poison pellets out of his flesh, it would be a while yet before his parasite leech could heal him completely. By sticking to the water he avoided obstacles; he couldn’t crash into things and further damage himself. But always he’d been aware of the furnace sun’s rising, however gradual, and had known he must find shelter before its lethal rays could strike through the trees and discover him there.

  And shortly, where the stream slowed, broadened out, and flowed deep over its bed, in a cave under a rocky vine-draped outcrop that jutted over the water, there Nestor had collapsed on a shingly ledge and stretched himself out to sleep, hopefully to regain his strength. But sleep was difficult; he was not long awake following a night’s rest in the place of the lepers; his mind wove this way and that as he considered and reconsidered his position, his chances.

  Actually, they were good: so long as he stayed here in this cave through the hours of daylight, he would survive. At sundown, avoiding the makeshift camps of Travellers, he would venture north, climb the barrier mountains by the light of the stars, and send out a mind-call through the passes in the peaks to his lieutenant, Zahar Lichloathe, once Sucksthrall.

  Upon a time, Zahar had been Vasagi the Suck’s man; now Nestor’s, he had taken his necromancer master’s cognomen for his own. Lichloathe was the name that the Wamphyri of Wrathstack had given Nestor out of respect for his talent, which lay in tormenting corpses for their secrets. But it was not that Nestor loathed the dead, rather that they loathed him. As for the Wamphyri, they had grown to respect him, perhaps even to fear him in however small a degree. For with Nestor, something had come among them which seemed worse than dying: the dark and harrowing art of necromancy, by use of which an adept might carry vengeance even beyond death itself. It was an awesome talent. But torturing the dead in Wrathstack was a far cry from this bed of pebbles in a cool dark cave.

  So Nestor had lain there making his plans: to climb the barrier mountains and call for Zahar, who would come for him with a flyer to bear him back to the last aerie. Before then, however, a seemingly endless day and the best part of a night had lain ahead, and Nestor would be wise to rest his mind and body both. Yet still sleep eluded him.

  In part, it was the agony of rapid metamorphic healing; worse far, it was the terror of dreams he knew he must dream: of sloughing flesh and a crumbling ruin of a man shunned and forgotten, perhaps walled up and abandoned, fretting to dust little by little in some cold, lonely Starside niche or crevice. A man called Nestor.

  So he’d tossed and turned in a fever upon his pebble bed, and as the day wore on the air had grown heavier, stirless, and finally oppressive. Beyond the low mouth of his cave, dragonflies had danced over the slow-flowing water, where sunbeams glanced and sparkled like gold and silver fire on the ripples. It had all seemed so very peaceful out there, harmless; there had been a time in some misty mythical past when it was quite harmless, he felt sure. But now—

  —Nestor could almost hear the sunlight seething like a refuse pit! Only let him venture beyond the mouth of this cave into those soft yellow rays … they would eat him alive like the metal-molding acids of the Szgany east of the Great Pass, whose skills in the forging of war gauntlets alone kept them safe from the raids of the Wamphyri! The sunlight would kill him, reduce him to so much smoke and stench, to tar and sticky black bones. For Nestor was a vampire, and the sun his mortal enemy.

  And yet it had not always been like this. Except … he couldn’t remember when or how it had been different!

  In Nestor’s early days in the last aerie, towering tall over Starside’s barren boulder plains, he had frequently suffered from sleeplessness. Then the place had been alien to him, and full of fearsome sounds: weird sighings, strange laughter, and screams—a great many of those. Eventually he’d discovered a trick by means of which he might lull his jittery mind and thumping heart to sleep. It was a simple device: he would try to recall to memory details of that earlier time, before he became Wamphyri. All a waste of effort and useless as counting goats on a crag, for he rarely remembered anything of his life before those days he’d spent in the lonely home of Brad Berea, deep in the Sunside forest.

  But in his cave by the gurgling stream, safe for the moment from his terror of the lepers and the sun alike, this time Nestor had tried a variation on the theme. He had attempted to recall all that had occurred since that night when he left the shelter of Brad Berea’s cabin, to follow the coldly glittering Northstar and seek out the Wamphyri in Starside. And this time it had worked! Almost before Nestor could begin gathering his few vague memories of pre-Wamphyri times together, at last he had fallen asleep.

  Except his device worked better than he’d supposed, so that even sleeping the chain of thought which he had set in motion continued. Thus, as Nestor’s body rested and his metamorphic flesh worked unseen to repair itself, his dreaming mind recounted in vivid detail all of his morbid story.

  But few m
en would have called it dreaming …

  At first it came in flashes:

  Nestor’s near-drowning … the burly Brad Berea fishing on the riverbank somewhere east of Twin Fords, and saving Nestor’s life when his body came drifting, head down in the water. Then Brad’s cabin … his daughter, Glina, who had wanted Nestor for his body. Well, she’d wanted something more than that: a man to call her own, and fill her lonely days and nights. He had been all of a man, certainly … enough for any woman. As well, though, that she hadn’t wanted a mind.

  For Nestor had been an amnesiac. Damaged, his head broken, he had no memories, no past. Except a lone voice in the back of his mind, which was wont to repeat insistently: “I am the Lord Nestor!” But only a notion, for obviously he was not Wamphyri. The sun didn’t harm him; he ate common fare, like common men; his senses were less than a vampire’s, indeed less than those of a whole man. No, it had been a fantasy, some lone fragment from lost times … Or a forecast?

  Glina made him a man—in part, anyway—but never a whole man. Pondering a vanished past, Nestor’s mind was wont to wander; lacking the cohesion of memory, his brain and body seemed detached, as if he lived by the will of another. Knowing Glina’s flesh and having her (or rather, being made love to by her) became instinctive, an automatic thing; so that in fact there was nothing of love in it. But with blood racing in his veins and his shaft rocking to and fro within her, passion of a kind would light in his eyes, and emotion of a sort blaze up in his heart. But it was never love. Glina had known that.

  And sometimes at the climax of Nestor’s strange cold passion, as he jerked to a crescendo in her body, she had sensed that he would like to kill her. For then at the height of their sex, his hands would leave her breasts and seek her throat, so that she must protect herself. Sometimes, too, she would hear him speak a name: Misha.

  Misha! It had been like a curse, bitter as a wormy apple on his tongue. So that Glina had hated this Misha without even knowing her, because Nestor had known and loved her. Yes, and she’d hurt him more than Glina ever could. Or so Brad Berea’s homely daughter suspected …

  Came the night of the Wamphyri! Their flyers wafting high overhead … the propulsors of their warriors making thunder and stenches in the clear night air! But the house of Brad Berea was hidden in a forest thicket, camouflaged, secret, secure. The Wamphyri passed by like swift-fleeting clouds, heading north for the Northstar, to Starside across the barrier range.

  But Nestor had seen them; he felt their weird allure; and in the back of his mind, as always, a small but insistent voice repeating: “I am the Lord Nestor, of the Wamphyri!” A vampire Lord? Perhaps he had been, upon a time, and now by some freak of misfortune was changed back to a man. One way or the other, he had to know.

  That night as the house slept, Nestor crept out into the dark and took his leave of the Bereas. But trekking through the gloomy heart of the forest, he was never alone. Like a clot of blue ice frozen and glittering over the barrier mountains, the Northstar was both beacon and companion. For he knew that the star of ill omen shone down not only on Sunside, but also on Starside and the last great aerie of the Wamphyri …

  Towards dawn Nestor had found himself in the foothills—and in the presence of monsters!

  A pair of Wamhpyri Lords had come to fight a duel on Sunside, which Nestor witnessed. Wran Killglance was one (called Wran the Rage after his furies), and Vasagi the Suck the other. Vasagi’s face was a nightmare in itself: with no mouth or chin as such, but a tapering trunk and flickering needle proboscis, like the siphon of some monstrous insect … but worse than a nightmare when Wran was done. For then Vasagi’s face had looked like the hole which is left behind when a limb is wrenched from its socket, all bloody and dripping from its rim.

  But Nestor had been more than just a witness; indeed, he had been part of the fight, and had probably saved Wran’s life. For in his horror of the conflict—the animal ferocity which the enormously powerful combatants displayed—Nestor had temporarily forgotten his perverse desire to be a “Lord” himself; and of the two who fought, Wran had at first seemed the least alien …

  At first, aye.

  Later, with the flush of a false dawn flowing like molten gold along the far southern horizon, Wran had dragged Vasagi to the hillside and pegged him down to await the sun’s rising. And while he worked, so he questioned Nestor about his part in all this, and discovered his motive: that he would be Wamphyri. At that, a grimly ironic scheme had entered Wran’s mind. Here was one vampire about to die—Vasagi, and his leech still in him—and here a Szgany youth just itching to take his place! And why not? Wran owed him that much, at least. It would be such a simple thing to arrange.

  It had been arranged! Wran had sent Nestor on some small errand, and in his absence opened Vasagi’s spine through skin, flesh, muscle, and ribs to find and drain his leech. For to a vampire the blood is the life, and the best vessel from which to drink it is another vampire’s parasite—preferably an enemy’s!

  Drained and dying, finally the Suck’s leech had deserted him and issued its egg. As Nestor returned, Wran caught up the small, skittering, pearly spheroid in his hand, to stare at it in grim satisfaction. He knew that if he, Wran, were a suitable vessel, then Vasagi’s egg would soak like quicksilver through his skin and inhabit him; but he already had a mature parasite leech of his own, which would devour any intruder in a trice.

  Then, opening his fist to show Nestor the naked egg, Wran had called him closer. And as if blowing a kiss, he’d sent the thing flying into the other’s gawping face!

  It had taken nothing more than that: it was the quickest, easiest way to become a vampire. Not the virulent bite, which brings about lethargy, death, and undeath; and not sex, which likewise transmits stuff of the vampire between bodies. For in cases such as these the transition is only gradual. The victim will become a vampire—always, invariably—but not always Wamphyri. Ah, but when the egg itself is passed on …

  The melding had caused Nestor such pain as he could never have believed possible without experiencing it. By the time he had recovered strength enough to crawl, the sun was very nearly up. But there on a bluff, Vasagi’s flyer had waited, its spatulate head nodding this way and that in a soughing breeze off Sunside’s forests, and Nestor had known what he must do.

  Making his way to the flyer, he passed close to Vasagi, who still clung to life despite his hideous wounds. Then the Suck had begged him to loosen the pegs which held him fast to the hillside. For after all, Nestor already possessed Vasagi’s egg and would soon become heir to his flyer. So what more could he want? Surely he could afford to spare his life, what little of it remained, and not leave him to melt in the sun?

  Nestor had been naive in the ways of the Wamphyri. If his egg were a mature leech, doubtless it would have caused him to laugh. But with his own agonies so fresh in his mind, he could scarcely bear the thought of another’s. And such agonies: to slump into gurgling glue, vaporise to roiling smoke and stench, and steam away to nothing, like a slug tossed into a campfire! And so he’d paused a moment to loosen and yank free the Suck’s pegs, before carrying on towards the patiently waiting flyer.

  Before, there’d been a crossbow bolt transfixing the V of muscle between Vasagi’s neck and shoulder. Nestor knew, for he was the one who had put it there (Wran had pulled it out when he pegged Vasagi down, just for the pleasure it gave him). Now the ironwood bolt lay in the bloodied dust, and Nestor’s empty crossbow swung at his hip. Automatically, he had taken up the bolt and clipped it into its housing under the crossbow’s tiller. For if he was really on his way to Starside, it would be as well to take a weapon along—especially now that he knew what to expect there! The crossbow should provide some security, at least. For in all Sunside there was no finer shot than Nestor. So they had used to say back in … back in … back where? But Nestor no longer remembered.

  Then he’d found Vasagi’s bloodied battle gauntlet hanging by a thong from the flyer’s saddle, where Wran had left it f
or him. But even then—with the deadly furnace sun so close to breaching the far horizon, and just as close to sending out its sighing, searing golden rays—still the flyer had known its would-be rider for a stranger and would not launch …

  … Until the crippled Vasagi sent a mind-call winging, to stir the beast to action: Aye, you were ever a faithful creature. When I told you to stay, you stayed. But now you belong to another—it pleases me to give you to him—for a while, at least. And now it’s time to fly or die. So fly … fly!

  Only then, on Vasagi’s command, had the flyer extended its wings; and as alveolate bones, membrane, and muscle stretched in metamorphic flux, so the creature had launched itself aloft! A moment more, and then—

  —Wind whipping in Nestor’s face as his mount glided out and turned in a rising thermal over Sunside! And as its arched manta wings formed vast scoops or air traps, so the beast rose up towards the peaks, where soon the sun would strike with hammers of gold. But Nestor was no longer afraid, not of anything. For welling up from deep within his changeling’s mind and body, he’d heard the first discordant notes of a strange, savage, and wonderful song—Wamphyri!

  And how that silent song of metamorphosis had thrilled in his contaminated blood, for at last he had known he was on his way.

  To Starside!

  To the last aerie!

  Wamphyri! Wamphyyyyri … !

  In Nestor’s dream the past came alive with such immediacy and in such vivid detail, it was as if he lived it again. Indeed, as if it were happening even now:

  With the reins trapped in his right hand, and gripping the left-hand horn of twin pommels in the other, he used his knees to cling tightly to the hump of the well-rubbed leather saddle; and flattening himself down out of the slipstream, he leaned a little forward into the force of the blast. But even lacking fear and feeling a wild exhilaration, still he hung on for dear life. The wind in his face snatched at his breath and struck cold against his clenched teeth; he found his position precarious, to say the least, and jammed his heels firmly up under the flyer’s wings where they met its body, to give himself more purchase.