The Last Aerie

by Brian Lumley

  Spiro’s eyebrows peaked. “A Lord, did you say?”

  “Indeed!” Wran answered. “For he has the Suck’s egg!”

  “Ahhh!” sighed the other, in amaze. “But … you must tell me all.”

  “All in good time,” Wran replied. “But for now let’s get on.” And to Nestor:

  Where was I? Ah, yes, Madmanse, which now falls behind and below. And up ahead: Mangemanse, where Canker Canison crows to the moon; and higher still … Suckscar! Hah! But now it shall have a new name, to go with its new master. What do you say to that, Nestor?

  In Nestor’s youth, he’d learned a trick to keep his brother’s thoughts out of his mind. Though his youth and even his brother were forgotten to him now (except he knew the latter as a vague and largely mythical “enemy” dwelling on Sunside), the trick itself remained accessible. It involved thinking obliquely, “to one side” of his main stream of thoughts, and so keeping his secrets to himself. The art was an instinctive thing, and useful now as never before. For Wran believed that Vasagi had melted in the sun.

  Perhaps he had, and perhaps not. But Nestor saw how hazardous it would be to admit what he’d done: namely, that he’d set Vasagi free after Wran had left him for dead. Perhaps for a similar if not quite the same reason, he should also leave well enough alone in the renaming of Vasagi’s manse.

  For which reason, finally: Let the name stand, he answered Wran in his own mode. Suckscar will suffice, for now at least.

  But then, a moment more and he gasped aloud. For suddenly Wran’s meaning had sunk in! That Suckscar should be named anew, with a name to suit … himself! Its new master! Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri! And finally, no longer guarding his thoughts but letting them fly free: For now … I really am Wamphyri!

  But: Huh! came Spiro’s mental grunt. And to Wran: Brother, you’re changeable as the winds chasing themselves around Wrathstack! I thought we’d arranged that I should be master of Suckscar? That way, between us, we’d control almost half the stack. And now?

  Now? Wran answered (and this time he was the one to guard his thoughts, ensuring they went only to Spiro). Why, with this simpleton Nestor in place—if we can fix it—it will amount to much the same thing! That way, before too long and after we settle one or two other scores, why, you’ll still be available to inhabit some other level, eh?

  Then for a while, gradually receding, their chuckles hung black as sin and just as secretive, dwindling to nothing in the mental ether. And now there were four flyers, all strung out in a row, climbing towards the higher levels and bays …

  “Nestor,” Wran eventually called aloud, as rocky caverns and ledges, fretted bone causeways, and external staircases of fused cartilage and stone slipped down and away into the abyss of air. “There goes Mangemanse below. Only four levels, as you see. More than sufficient for the great hound who dwells there, and not much I can tell you about them. Their master’s responsibilities are few; indeed, he seems to exist only to keep us apart! Wratha and the rest of us, I mean. But when we take to our beds, Canker is often on the prowl. He keeps more bitches than the rest of us—he has his needs, you know?—but his real mistress is the silver moon. Oh, you’ll hear his howling soon enough, as he sings his devotions to his goddess on high! Still, it surprises me he’s not here for my reception.”

  “Ah, but other things on his mind,” Spiro cut in across the blustery gulf. “For Canker builds a thing of bones!”

  “He builds … a what?” Wran shook his head and laughed his amaze.

  “A device of pipes large and small, made from the hollow bones of warriors where he finds them littered on the boulder plains. He’s spent the entire night with his lieutenants, flying to and fro, lifting up bones to his kennel.”

  “But why? For what good reason? A device, you say? What sort of device?”

  Spiro shrugged. “An instrument—musical, he says.”

  “Musical?” Wran was nonplussed. “Like the Szgany troupe which Devetaki Skullguise kept in Masquemanse? Aye, they were musicians—but Canker? An instrument of hollow bones?”

  “To help him in his devotions,” Spiro tried to explain. “He swears the moon’s deaf and can’t hear him, or else she’d come down to be his lover. And so he’s determined to sing all the louder, with the help of the thing which he fashions from these bones. How? Don’t ask me—ask him! Hah! And to think, they call us the mad ones! But we only rage, we don’t rave!”

  “Suckscar!” Wran cried, forgetting in a moment Canker’s doings. “And these were Vasagi’s levels: yours now, Nestor. Or soon to be, we hope. Not much to tell; not much to do, in Suckscar, for the heavy duties are all below. But Vasagi was the expert in metamorphism: he could make monsters! His vats will be yours now, including the beasts which are brewing in them. But you’ll doubtless fashion creatures of your own … given time, and with a little help. A favour for a favour, eh, Spiro?” He winked at his brother, gliding now to one side. “We can all use a little help, from time to time. But in any case, enough of that; for you’ll soon be exploring Suckscar to your heart’s content.”

  He lifted his head, looked on and up, and smiled a gaping smile. “And now—to my reception!”

  Three-quarters of a kilometre below, the collapsed mounds and shattered stacks of toppled aeries were stony jumbles on a pebble plain. Southwest, majestic now, the barrier mountains were golden in their peaks; while central and to the east, the grey gradually faded to yellow. Hours yet, some thirty or more, before the sun would strike through the central peaks and play her rays on Wrathstack, and then only in these highest levels. Still and all, in other times the Wamphyri would be preparing for their long sleep, for even the thought of the sun was unbearable. Except now … a victor had returned out of Sunside and desired his reception. It was only just, after all.

  “Wrathspire!” cried Wran. “And why not? For it is indeed the very spire of the stack, and Wratha’s the Lady who dwells here. Her apartments are the loftiest and—dare I say it?—the lordliest. So where better to accept the grudging applause of my peers? And see, the mistress herself awaits us …”

  Riding a gusting wind, Wran’s flyer rounded a jagged natural buttress and settled towards a cavernous landing bay. The others were close behind: Spiro, then Gorvi jumping the queue, and finally Nestor. He was busy now, anxiously commanding his flyer: Follow the others; stay in line; easy now … easy! But not so busy he could fail to notice the Lady Wratha, where she leaned against the carved bone balcony of an observation port above and to one side of the bay.

  Even a glimpse was riveting, magnetic, so that Nestor’s eyes felt compelled to linger upon her. That couldn’t be, however, for Gorvi’s flyer was already down and shuffling to one side, making room for Nestor’s beast. Nestor’s creature knew what it was about; balancing on the wind, it waited its turn. Its wings were arched into huge traps, thrusters extended forward to take the shock of landing. Briefly, Nestor experienced a moment of vertigo: the sheer height was appalling! He didn’t look down but clung to reins and saddle, and wisely refrained from issuing any further commands.

  Finally Gorvi’s beast cleared the landing area, and Nestor’s flyer inched forward and settled to the grainy rock. As thralls came forward to take the reins and lead the creature aside, Nestor slid gratefully to the ground. Except it wasn’t the ground but the mouth of a cavern two thousand eight hundred feet high above the boulder plains! And even safe on the floor of the vast landing bay, still Nestor staggered.

  Wran came from somewhere, took his arm, and whispered, “Now is not the time to show weakness. Let me do the talking and all will go well.” Nestor was only too pleased to submit to this scheme; he was dizzy, awed, and had no words.

  At the back of the landing bay, stone staircases with balustrades of bone climbed the rock wall to tunnels and balconies which in turn led to higher levels of honeycombed rock. Descending to the lower levels, others gangways passed through steep shafts or cartilage stairwells. But on high, looking down from one of the balconies, there stoo
d Wratha. And lured by her presence, finally Nestor’s eyes focused upon her. And she was a sight for sore eyes.

  For her part, Wratha merely glanced at him, however speculatively, before speaking to Wran. “The Lord Killglance, back from Sunside, I see, and all in one piece!” She raised an inquiring eyebrow. “The Suck?”

  “Need you ask?” Wran returned, smiling like a skull. “Oh, I know your preferences, Wratha, but alas it isn’t so. By now Vasagi’s all rendered down, a stain on the hill where I pegged him out to await the rising sun. And indeed the sun was hot on our heels as we left.”

  “We?” Again her eyes flickered over Nestor, and returned to Wran.

  Wran glanced at Nestor. “His is a story I can tell at my reception.”

  Wratha nodded. “Well, I prepared a feast for one of you, whoever was the victor. So now will you join me, in my apartments on high?”

  The others, Gorvi and Spiro, were already on their way up a bone-embellished causeway. Wran and Nestor would follow them at once, but there came an interruption. From below, out of one of the sunken stairwells, the huge-shouldered figure of a man appeared, clad in the polished leather garb of a lieutenant. “My Lady!” he called up to Wratha. “I beg pardon for the intrusion, but … I believe it is my right?” His eyes under shaggy black brows were feral, scarlet in their cores. A true disciple of vampirism.

  Wratha scowled down on him. “Vasagi’s man?”

  “Indeed,” he replied. “I am Gore Sucksthrall: first out of Sunside … first-made of Vasagi in Suckscar … now Keeper of the Vats. It seems my master’s manse goes wanting a leader. If I am worthy of that honour, I would ascend.”

  While Wratha and Gore exchanged words, the Lords on the stairs and in the landing bay paused to listen. As Gore finished, Gorvi the Guile (devious as his name implied), clapped his hands briefly and cried, “Well said!” For he could smell trouble a mile away, and invariably encouraged it.

  But Wran grasped Nestor’s arm tightly and muttered, “Damn it to hell! A complication …”

  And Wratha nodded and called down: “Well, then, Gore Sucksthrall, maybe you’d better come up.” And sweeping her eyes over the others: “But gentlemen, no gauntlets, if you please. It is a rule I’m obliged to enforce. Certain of my creatures are easily disturbed … and volatile, to say the least.” It was meant as a warning, not a threat; Wratha kept her small, personal warriors chained at all times. But as she slipped away, her deceptively sweet laughter came floating down to them. And to a man they knew who was mistress here in the aerie’s heights.

  Through all of this, Nestor didn’t take his eyes off her until the moment she drifted out of sight through an archway behind the balcony. Then he blinked, looked at Wran, and said, “Wratha?” But it seemed as if her afterimage still burned on his retinas, and he could still see her there:

  She was tall, even as tall (or as small, in company such as this) as Nestor himself, with hair black as night in plaits that fell to her shoulders. Around her neck, she wore a golden torque or harness, with ropes of black bat fur depending vertically to form a smoky curtain. Milky limbs gleamed as if oiled through the black stripes of fur, but her naked arms projected; likewise the points of her tilted breasts, a long pale oval of thigh, and a delicate knee.

  The image was fading now, but Nestor continued to examine what remained of it. Wratha’s eyes had been least in evidence. Protected by a scarp of figured bone upon her brow, their fire had been subdued by the ornamentation of blue glittering crystals fixed to her temples, and matching earrings in the furred lobes of her flesh ears. But apart from the shell-like whorls of those Wamphyri ears, and the somewhat flattened aspect of a nose whose convolutions had not seemed too exaggerated—and the scarlet flicker of her split, vampire’s tongue, of course—apart from those things, she might well have been Szgany.

  In short, she had looked more woman than a Lady of the Wamphyri, as Nestor might have expected one to be … looked it, at least.

  “Wratha the Risen, aye,” Wran answered sourly, starting up stone stairs. But after two paces he paused, looked back at Nestor, and said, “What, does she interest you, then? Stricken, are you? What, you?” He slapped his thigh and laughed, “Hah!”—and was sober again in a moment. “Better watch your step, Nestor. She fancies young men out of Sunside.”

  Nestor, following behind, inquired, “Something to fear?”

  “Not really,” the other grunted, sweeping up the stairs. “Not unless you make her angry. It’s not a good idea, to make the Lady Wratha angry.”

  And behind them both, Gore Sucksthrall followed in surly mood, saying nothing at all …

  They climbed through three expansive levels to Wrathspire’s Great Hall, where the Lady’s thralls had prepared a table for five. The table was enormous: five feet wide and extending all of forty-five feet down the hall from Wratha’s bone throne, it could easily have accommodated three dozen people. At its head, upon a shallow platform and so slightly elevated, there stood Wratha’s great chair, in which sat the Lady herself. The bone throne was a monstrous, marvelous thing—the skeletal lower jaw of some vast, long-dead creature—which she had acquired along with the furniture and all other appurtenances of Wrathspire the day she’d arrived in this abandoned, derelict place out of Turgosheim. The stack had been derelict then, at least. But now, due chiefly to Wratha’s industry, it had returned to loathsome life.

  Already seated when her thralls ushered her guests into the Great Hall, Wratha came briefly to her feet and made apology of a sort:

  “I had prepared for five; since it appears we’re now six, my girls are setting an extra place—or perhaps two, for Canker may yet honour his obligations. Wran Killglance: as victor, you will take the chair directly opposite mine, at the guest’s ‘head’ of table. You others … may sit where you will.”

  Female thralls scurried, finished setting places, then fled out of sight. Wran seated himself opposite Wratha at the end of the table as she had suggested, and indicated a seat to Nestor some three chairs away on his left. Nestor took the indicated chair and sat there wondering what to do with himself. The chair was built for a man, or more properly a Lord of the Wamphyri. Seated in it, he felt like a mere boy. In time his vampire leech, developed from Vasagi’s egg, would attend to that: his metamorphic flesh would stretch and fill out. But for now … well, at least he could try thinking like a Lord.

  Spiro Killglance sat on Nestor’s left, with some five or six chairs separating them. Opposite Spiro, Gore Sucksthrall took his place, and Gorvi the Guile edged into a chair across from Nestor. On the table in front of Wratha’s guests, wooden platters, hollowed into shallow bowls, contained barbed stabbing spikes of soft gold. There were leather drinking jacks, and several large jugs of fired pottery patterned in the fashion of Sunside’s Szgany, containing sweet water or weak wine for the jacks. Wratha knew better than to serve strong drink. Her own plate and cup were of gold; she likewise knew how to make her guests feel small and even unworthy.

  The fare was scarcely extravagant: lightly braised hearts, kidneys, and livers of shads, and four suckling wolves roasted on spits and basted in a sauce of their mother’s milk, urine, and blood. Individual or special requirements were not catered to; the food was simply an expression of Wratha’s hospitality; the Wamphyri normally “refueled” themselves in the first hours after sundown, according to personal needs, habits, and tastes. That which at this hour would be breakfast to a Traveller was therefore a mere novelty to them.

  Nestor, on the other hand, was hungry. He had last eaten well before sundown, in the cabin of Brad Berea in the forest. In the time-scale of a parallel world beyond the Starside Gate (which Szgany and Wamphyri alike called the hell-lands, because since time immemorial no one had ever returned from them), that was the equivalent of four days. There was no way Nestor could know that, but he did know that since sundown he’d survived on a few nuts and a piece of wild fruit in the woods; scarcely sufficient to keep body and soul together. Well, too late now to worry about
his soul, but his body must go on, at least.

  Also, while his memory was still largely impaired prior to his time spent with the Bereas, his mind itself was completely healed and receptive—made receptive by his parasite egg, which demanded that he be strong and cunning—so that he was constantly learning. The ability, indeed the need to learn anew had been sparked within him. And with no background as such, an empty past, every smallest item of new information was soaking into his brain like rain into desiccated earth. While deep in his subconscious, thirsty seeds of ambition, knowledge, even memory—however misshapen or mutated from their source material—were waiting to spring to life. But he could not become wise, strong, Wamphyri, in a depleted body. And so he ate.

  He ate with gusto, stabbing a slice of shad liver, which was in any case a Szgany delicacy, and doing it justice as he held it in his hand and tore at it with strong teeth. And such was his hunger that the meat never even touched his platter! Another slice followed, and a steaming kidney, whole, which he maneuvered onto his plate without losing but a splash of gravy. Then a jack of wine, and tender flesh from a thigh of suckling wolf. The Szgany didn’t eat wolf, but Nestor didn’t know what the meat was. Whatever, he would have eaten it! It was strong and imparted strength. And while he ate, he studied his surroundings.

  The Great Hall was all of a hundred and fifty feet long by sixty wide. It ran parallel with the south-facing wall of the stack, where windows had been cut through the solid rock to the chasm of open air that spanned the boulder plains all the way to the barrier mountains. In places, these deep embrasures in the wall of the spire were almost tunnels; in others, where the rock was thinner, they formed archways out onto high balconies of grafted bone, whose baffles of hide and cartilage were so constructed as to turn aside and deaden the buffeting of the wind. Framed in one such opening, Nestor observed the fluttering of a banner, which periodically displayed Wratha’s sigil: a kneeling man in silhouette, with slumped shoulders and bowed head …