The Last Aerie

by Brian Lumley

  But who could take chances with a creature such as this? What? Approach such a thing with outstretched hand as it woke to monstrous life and vacated its vat? Best to imprint it now, and stamp his own seal over whatever remained of Vasagi’s. He couldn’t know it, but the thought was not original to him. Or it was, but it had been spurred by the process of metamorphosis taking place within him.

  He looked at Zahar again. “A man must be careful in this place,” he said, apparently innocently. “It would seem a dire thing, even perilous, to put a foot wrong and fall into a vat such as this!”

  “Indeed, Lord,” Zahar agreed, with just the suspicion of a smirk.

  “But,” said Nestor, his voice hardening, “I am not a man. I am Wamphyri!” And he slowly, very deliberately stripped out of his clothes, even discarding his belt and knife, to step down naked into the tepid swirl and sluggish gurgle. And fixing Zahar with his eyes, in which the spark of red was now grown to an ember, he moved alongside the bulk of the waxing warrior and touched it with his hands. And:

  You are mine! he told it. All which was Vasagi’s is mine! That which he was is now in me … I have eaten him! And you are my creature for ever and ever.

  The ripples in the fluids became small waves as the warrior flexed its great body. Palps with claws which were as yet of soft, flexible chitin closed on Nestor, and various appendages lifted out of the glue to clasp him—but gently! He was … examined. And accepted. The thing lay still again, and its uppermost eye regarded Nestor with something of fixation, and perhaps something of fear.

  You are a good creature, he told it then, and I shall care for you and feed you well. When you are ready to be born, call me and I shall attend to it myself.

  And leaving the thing to wax and wallow, he waded to the steps, climbed them, and stepped up onto the level floor; and stood there with the muck dripping from him in small puddles, gazing at Zahar with eyes as cold as the warrior’s. But oh so much more knowing.

  “Take off your leather jacket,” he told him.

  “What?” Zahar stepped back a pace, his Adam’s apple wobbling. His eyes went from Nestor to the thing in the vat and back again. “My jacket, Lord?”

  “Are you hard of hearing?” Nestor’s voice was harsh. “Your jacket—now!”

  “Yes, Lord!” Zahar stripped it off, let it fall.

  “Now your shirt of cloth,” said Nestor.

  “Lord,” Zahar gibbered. “You may be Wamphyri—no, you are Wamphyri, assuredly!—but I am just a common thrall. A lieutenant, aye, and a vampire of course, but just a man for all that. To me these special liquids are a poison. If I were to do as you have done and plunge myself into them, be sure I would not surface! And even if I did, your warrior would roll on me with its spines.”

  Nestor held out a hand for the shirt. “And yet these were the things you would have wished on me, just a few moments ago. Indeed, it was even your thought to push me in! Did you think I would not know? Now one last time: your shirt.”

  Zahar needed help with it; Nestor dragged the shirt from the grey flesh of his back; for a moment they stood there, the little master calm and his great thrall trembling. And finally Nestor dried himself with the shirt. And:

  “This is loathsome stuff,” he said. “I would not ask any man to swim in it, and certainly not a brave and loyal lieutenant. But neither do I want it on my body.” And smiling now, however sardonically: “Better put on your jacket, Zahar. Why shivering like that, you’ll catch a chill.”

  “Yes, Lord.” Zahar sighed, lowered his head in relief and took up his jacket; and Nestor tossed the soiled shirt aside.

  Dressing himself, Nestor said, “Zahar, think on this: you had better mend your ways, and soon. There will be no more warnings. The next time I have reason to rebuke you, I will be speaking to meat on a hook in my cold store.”

  “Yes, Lord,” Zahar said again. And he knew it was true …

  “Will you sleep now, Lord?” Zahar inquired as they went up two levels to Suckscar’s great hall.

  “Yes,” Nestor answered. “My limbs ache; my head hurts; I’m not quite myself.”

  “It’s your change,” Zahar told him. “I’ve heard about such things. In some it is a long process, but you … your eyes are red even now! And the morning just begun. I think you will be a very powerful Lord.”

  “I’m tired,” Nestor told him, “and yet I am not tired. My body is astir. I want to laugh, but fear I might not stop! Ah, but then I could cry, too, except tears are unseemly in Wamphyri eyes. Also, I lust after … things, without quite knowing what they are. I am proud of Suckscar”—he turned suddenly on Zahar—“be sure to guard it well for me, while I sleep!”

  “As always, Lord.”

  “I must have, oh, several hours of sleep. Six, seven … eight should be more than enough. Then come to me and wake me, you or Grig. And so we shall continue until I know Suckscar—and all of my thralls, and the work they perform, and all there is to know—like the lines in the palm of my own hand.”

  “It shall be done, Lord.”

  “And be aware!” Nestor told him. “The other Lords—and perhaps a certain Lady, too—think I’m easy meat. Set a watch and see to it that the men are alert. Prowl among them when it is quiet, and if you catch one idling … punish him!”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “About Canker Canison …”

  “Yes, Lord?”

  “I trust him, for now. For he’s a great dog, and I have a way with dogs. But even the best trained dog may make mistakes. These are my orders: he is only to enter Suckscar when I myself am to house and awake. Is it understood?”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “Good! As for the rest: I trust Gorvi not at all. And the brothers Killglance are deranged. Well, so is Canker for that matter. But crazy like a fox, aye!”

  “And the Lady Wratha?”

  “We shall see what we shall see. She is very beautiful.” Nestor was uncertain. “She is a Lady.”

  “Huh!” Zahar felt obliged to return; and, when Nestor looked at him: “I have heard stories, Lord.”

  “Then tell me all,” said Nestor. “But some other time.”

  They were at the foot of the staircase where it swept up to Nestor’s apartments. “Sleep well, Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri,” said Zahar.

  “Be sure of it,” Nestor answered, and climbed the stairs.

  A fire burned in his hearth; there was water in an earthen bowl; the two girls were in his bed, already asleep. After washing himself, Nestor climbed in with them. One of them murmured and reached for his member. He brushed her hand away. Time now for sleep. Time for the other later.

  And between the vampire girls, soft and warm and musty, he slept like a dead man. Or one who is undead, anyway …

  5

  Mangemanse—Spiders—Canker’s Moon Lure

  When Nestor woke up the girls were still there, still asleep. Neither Grig nor Zahar had come to awaken him, for he had not slept out his full eight hours. The thing inside him had awakened him, for it had needs of its own; rather, its needs were now Nestor’s. It required to grow, wherefore he was required to be up and about, active, a vampire. And now he must take sustenance not only for himself, but also for his leech, his parasite.

  Nestor had eaten well in Wrathspire and shouldn’t have been hungry, yet deep inside him there was a different hunger. In his stretching bones an ache; in his loins a ripeness requiring an outlet; and in this core which he’d never even known was a part of him, a great emptiness, a gnawing red hunger. It was blind and it was insistent, and he knew that it was red. It was salt and it was life and it was death … and undeath. Now that he was Wamphyri, it was his weird, unnatural nature.

  His vampire women slept on. The soft loose breasts of one were in his face; the other was behind him, a leg draped across his thigh, the pubic covering of her quiescent core rough where it pressed against skin which grew ever more sensitive, even to the texture of shadows and the breath of bats. In the silence, Nestor could hear t
he hearts of the women pumping, the coursing of the blood in their veins.

  From below, through the honeycombed rock of Suckscar, he felt the motion of thralls where they patrolled, the murmur of far-off voices, the hum or chitter … of great bats, yes! His own Desmodus colony, where they clustered in the crevices of a dark lodge of their own. While from outside, from above—

  He could feel the sear of the sun on Wrathspire! Which was one of the several things that had awakened him. His skin, previously itchy from the touch of the musty hair of the woman sleeping behind him, now crawled. He knew that the sun was up, burning on Wrathspire, and that his own days of sunlight were gone forever.

  For a moment there was panic as all the memories of the last few hours of his life crowded where none had been before—as they ordered themselves and firmed from what might have been spumy dreamstuff into the rock of reality—and he knew where and what he was. Panic, as his own heart pounded a little faster, his limbs stiffened to immobility, and all of his vampire awareness reached out like a mist from him, like a presence in its own right, to gauge the day for danger. But there was no danger, for this was his place, Suckscar, and all that it contained was his.

  Everything …

  “Umph!” the girl in front of him murmured, as she turned a little and one of her soft nipples brushed his lips. And for a moment he remembered Sunside:

  He saw it in the eye of his mind, a reflection from the screen of his impaired memory: a misty riverbank in the still of evening, not far from Brad Berea’s lonely cabin in the forest. The place where Brad’s homely daughter Glina—an innocent in her own right, mainly—had taught him what little he knew and used his body for her pleasure, while in turn giving him pleasure.

  It had not been love (not on his part), but lust. Perhaps not even that, but need. For he was a young man, and his body an engine geared to life. But that was then and this was now, when his needs were the amplified needs of the Wamphyri! What had been a pulse, a throb, a fire in his blood … was now an agony, a driving force, the cap of a volcano straining against the pent pressures of the magma core. And these girls were not homely but very lovely. They were vampires with vampire stuff in them, which had changed and enhanced them, even as it now enhanced Nestor’s emotions—specifically, his lust.

  He sucked the girl’s nipple into his mouth, felt it grow hard, and grew hard himself between her thighs. Still sleeping, she snatched air in a sharp gasp, parted her legs, reached down and guided him in. Her wet core was like an automatic thing, a creature in its own right; its slippery sheath sucked at Nestor like a pouting mouth, so that he need hardly move at all! Reaching down, he pushed at the second girl’s hip until her leg slid off his thigh, then parted her bush and sought her bud with his fingers. Her reaction was instinctive, immediate. Gasping, she opened herself, reared against him, and sucked at his hand. It was drawn in to the wrist, where the neck of her vulva tightened on him like a soft leather sleeve.

  Nestor wanted to feel the girl he was in, to explore and know all of her. He freed his hand from the furry trap behind him and heard the girl moan. She was waking up. He rolled onto the one he faced and took the initiative, driving deeply into her flesh as if to split her. She, too, was coming awake. The free girl was kissing his ear, the tips of her divided tongue licking and wriggling inside it, while her hand moved between his legs, rolling his balls in her palm.

  His tongue was drawn down a convulsing throat. Resilient breasts flattened under his chest and he squeezed their bulge with his upper arms. The second girl was now kneeling between his legs, rubbing Nestor’s back with her breasts; her hands were under him and his partner, toying and teasing around the area of their sexual organs, manipulating both of them. Nestor moaned, wanting it to last, but it couldn’t. And when he came it was as if fire jetted from him, which also activated an orgasm in his frantically writhing partner. And:

  “Mine now!” sighed the second girl, catching his hips and rolling him over. And still jerking, trickling semen, drowning in the sweet, singing agony of his flesh, Nestor felt her sucking mouth come down on him, eager for the last drop. Then:

  “Fuck me! Me now!” she gurgled, sliding her small, pointed breasts up his chest in a trail of semen from her mouth, lowering her moistly shuddering flesh onto his shaft, and shuffling her tight round backside in an ecstasy of erotic motion until he had slithered in …

  So it continued, and at least one of Nestor’s needs was satisfied, but neither the first nor the last of them. A need, then, and the needs of his vampire women, too. A rare day when they’d enjoyed Vasagi’s so-called lovemaking—feeling his organ expanding into their bodies to fill them, while his hollow siphon proboscis of needle-tipped chitin slid into breast, neck, cheek, or root of tongue, to draw off blood and heighten his unthinkable pleasure—but they had enjoyed Nestor’s. So had Nestor, despite that only one need had been served … so far.

  And when, finally exhausted, all three lay still, still his hunger was there, like a raw red wound inside him. Some of the metamorphic ache of flesh and bones had subsided, yes, or been dulled by excess; but as Nestor drifted into a second, deeper sleep, his nameless hunger remained …

  … And was absent when he woke up.

  Replete, he started awake! Grig’s hand was on his shoulder. And Grig’s mouth was a dark hole in his grey face, open as if a hinge had snapped in his jaw!

  “What?” said Nestor. And then he saw what.

  His women had not woken up. The one with the small, firm breasts lay there, breathing but feebly, ashen and cold, completely exposed where Grig had laid back the bedcovers. But the other was motionless, corpselike, without a breath of life in her body.

  And: “What?” Nestor said again, trying to understand.

  “That one, Marla, will live, Lord,” Grig told him, pointing at the ashen one. “But the other, Carmen … she must sleep for some time.”

  “Sleep?”

  “Undeath,” said Grig. “In your sleep, you drained her. You took from her and you gave to her. She was a vampire thrall but mainly human. When she wakes up she will still be a vampire but mainly inhuman. Essence of your leech is in her. Eventually, if she is allowed to—to continue?—she will be Wamphyri!”

  Nestor tried hard to grasp the principle. But the intricacies of vampirism were such that even with his own vampire’s instinct, still he was confused. He stood up, took the undead girl’s hand in his, let it flop loosely, lifelessly back among the furs. “On Sunside,” he said, speaking slowly and mainly to himself, “when the Wamphyri make their thralls, they are only thralls! So what’s so different here?” He looked at Grig accusingly. “And why do you understand when I do not?”

  “I have been here some time, Lord,” Grig answered, “and I have learned. There were things which Vasagi did, and things which he did not do. He bred vampires—not Wamphyri! On Sunside, in the hunt, the Lords take women for their pleasure and the comforts they give; also for their blood, of course. Some of their blood. They also take men, for thralls, lieutenants, and for the provisioning of the manse. The difference is this: they don’t kill them. They take a little, give something back. The fever gets into their Szgany victims, who are then brought back here or make their own way. Or they are discovered by the Travellers and put to death on Sunside. Except …” He searched for words, and Nestor grew impatient.

  “Yes, except?”

  “Except, if a man or woman is drained—if so much blood is taken that he or she ‘dies’—then the vampire, your vampire, compensates, gives more of itself. The more you take, the more you give. And after the sleep of undeath, the transition is that much faster.”

  Nestor looked at the “dead” girl again, but with a different expression on his face. “She could be … Wamphyri?” He glanced at Grig and held up a hand to still his tongue. “Yes, I know: if she is allowed to continue.” He looked at the other woman. “But this one, Marla … is only a thrall.”

  “But a weak thrall, Lord.” Grig nodded. “For your hunger was
very great. The furs are soaked red where your thirst ran over! She needs food, soup, meat. In order to serve you again, she must first recover.”

  Suddenly Nestor felt bloated. Suddenly he was aware of his red hands, face, even his eyes. He was still a novice and had taken too much. While his system was changing, it had not yet had time to adjust or prepare itself for such a gorging. His ascendant leech had been too eager!

  He reeled beside the bed, clutching the high stone headboard for support. And indicating Carmen, he choked out, “Deal with that. The provisioning.” But as Grig lifted her up light as a leaf: “No, wait! Lie her in state somewhere, until I can think. Then return and care for this one, this Marla. But for the moment—” Nestor’s gorge was beginning to heave “—leave me alone!”

  And as Grig carried Carmen from the room, Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri groped his way blindly to the curtained niche in the corner, and almost but not quite made it …

  Nestor and Grig went down into Mangemanse. At least, Grig would have accompanied his master, if he had been allowed. But where a deep dark stairwell descended in a steep, narrow spiral into black bowels of rock, and a recess in the wall facing the shaft housed a second bat-thing guardian, there Nestor took his lieutenant’s arm to bring him to a halt. And he pointed out a sigil carved in a flagstone at the head of the steps. It was Canker’s mark: a sickle moon.

  Then, as if at some signal, though none had been given, a growl echoed up from below and was followed by a single, ululating howl, which slowly died away. The guardian showed alarm, flowed forward in its niche and hissed, but Nestor cautioned it: Be quiet, all is well.

  And: “Lord?” Grig looked at him uncertainly, and waited.

  “Canker and I have an agreement,” Nestor told him. “When in future we visit, we go alone, of our own free will. It was not my intention that you would accompany me further than this point, but that you’d wait here until I return. Then you shall show me Suckscar, taking over where Zahar left off. For there remains a great deal to be seen, and I want to know all. Meanwhile, move about and make yourself useful by all means, but stay within earshot of this stairwell. When I return, I shall call for you.”