The Last Aerie

by Brian Lumley

  “Yes, Lord. But—”

  “But?”

  Grig looked at the steps leading down, and at the nitre-streaked walls. “That is an odorous place, Lord: a kennel, by all accounts. Are you sure you would see it?”

  And again, as if at some command, the unseen creature howled far below, and a wave—an almost visible reek—of animal musk came wafting up out of darkness. There was ordure in the smell, strong urine, the stench of some feral beast’s lair. Grig turned to Nestor again, and said, “Lord?”

  “That howling … was not a man,” said Nestor.

  Grig shook his head. “No, Lord. Canker Canison makes creatures in his own image.”

  Nestor shrugged. “Still, I made a promise, and I must be known by my word. Also, Canker will make a powerful ally. Well, an ally of sorts.” He started down the deeply hollowed steps. “Wait for me, and when I return answer my call.”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  And Nestor proceeded down into Mangemanse …

  The spiral staircase was deep; Nestor went cautiously; his Wamphyri eyes were now so changed that he saw almost as well as in daylight. There was no more howling, but an aura of expectancy. Without even knowing he did it, Nestor sent his vampire awareness ahead of him, probing the root of the shaft. Something was down there, but keeping well back, and keeping quiet now.

  And Nestor sent: I am the Lord Nestor. Your master, Canker Canison, has asked me to attend him. Who harms me dies! If not by my hand, by Canker’s, certainly.

  Snuffles echoed up to him, but that was all.

  At the foot of the steps … Nestor was appalled! To the left, a natural cave led back into darkness absolute, in which feral eyes—huge, yellow, malevolent—glared for a moment, then blinked out. But this was not the source of his concern. That was the veritable midden which lay in a second, smaller cave, to the right.

  The reeking dung of some large beast, possibly the thing with the yellow eyes, was piled in slumping heaps out of which grew squat, corpse-white mushrooms; while around and in between the piles swirled sickening green puddles of piss! Nestor stood on a narrow, raised, unpolluted path midway between the two, the unknown guardian on the one hand and its despicable depository on the other. But if this was how Canker kept Mangemanse generally … then it well deserved its name!

  And holding his breath, he proceeded along a corridor towards an area where a row of tiny round windows let in a little grey light from the west, and also the wind, which hummed a different tune through each orifice and sucked away the stench of the stairwell midden. Perhaps this was where Canker had derived the inspiration for his instrument. But now, as Nestor left the windows behind and their song dwindled in his ears, so the way ahead turned inwards from the outer sheath and into the rock of the stack proper, and the corridor grew dark again.

  Striding out, Nestor found himself listening to the slap, slap, slap of his own footsteps on the worn stone; but when he came to a sudden, breathless halt, he knew that he heard much more than that. For from somewhere not too far behind sounded a soft and regular—yet strangely irregular—padding, and the panting of a loping fox or wolf … both of which paused only a split second after Nestor paused.

  One of two things: he was either being tracked, as prey, or he’d acquired a wary escort. Looking back, he saw the corridor disappearing into the gloom of its own curve, its walls glowing with a dim phosphorescence of their own; and in the core of darkness between the walls, at a height about central to a man’s thigh, those yellow eyes. The guardian of Canker’s stairwell, but escorting him … or stalking him? And his concentrated vampire senses detected a thought which sped by him in a moment into Mangemanse:

  Something is here: a trespasser, a sneaking thing … and human! It—he—pretends to know you and have business here, but I don’t trust him! No, he cannot be the one you mentioned, your friend. Only command me, and he shall be no more! It was never a human thought but a beast’s: the ill-formed message of a beast-mind, a dog or great wolf, but having far more of intelligence than any warrior or guardian so far encountered.

  Something of panic set in then, or if not true panic, an instinctive reaction to danger: a deadly cold, emotionless desperation, causing Nestor to shut down his own probes and emanations and withdraw into himself at once, like a shadow merging into deeper shadows. It was his vampire, of course—its sense of self-preservation—which now directed his actions. But if there was any sort of telepathic answer to the tracker’s murderous suggestion, that too was shut out, leaving Nestor naked and alone with his own fancies and imaginings. Perhaps it were best to try contacting the dog-Lord, except … could he trust Canker now? Could he really trust him?

  A few more swift, silent paces brought him to a junction like the hub of a great wheel, with spoke passageways or rooms leading off. Choosing the first room on the right and slipping quietly in through its arched entrance, Nestor put his back to the wall and waited. It had been his parasite’s instinct to cast the merest pulse of a probe ahead of him into the room—sufficient to discern no human or inimical animal inhabitant, at least, but no more than that—and then he was inside.

  Whatever followed him must pass close by. Depending on the nature of the beast, and if it failed to detect him, Nestor had two choices: to let it carry on, and then escape back along the way he’d come, or to leap upon the creature and try to kill it. To that end, his knife was in his hand.

  And standing there with his back to the cold stone wall, scarcely daring to breathe, Nestor looked all about his bolt-hole to discover its contents, function, and any other exits or escape routes which might exist. Of the latter, there were none: the place was quite simply a dry cave with a high ceiling, crumbling ledges, gloomy niches, and no obvious evidence that it had ever been inhabited or furnished … by men. But it did have its own function, and it did provide habitation of sorts. For spiders!

  Their black webs, half as thick as a man’s little finger, didn’t become visible until Nestor craned his neck to stare up through a great many irregularly concentric tiers of crumbling sandstone ledges—like the interior of some crooked, burned-out chimney—receding to the ceiling high overhead. Then the webs looked like intricately patterned cracks in the darkness, no two patterns alike, all of them faintly luminescent; layer upon layer of them, bridging the gaps between the ledges as they receded with them into the heights of the place.

  And he was still staring at them, pondering their meaning, when they began to shiver and tremble, all in unison, like the dewy webs of much smaller, commoner forest and plains species when their makers shake them to trap mites. Following which, the truth of it became obvious.

  Ever since childhood, Nestor had known something of the Wamphyri; Szgany legends had been full of them, despite that in those days the Old Wamphyri were no more. When Nestor had played with other Traveller children, he had always taken the part of a vampire Lord—indeed, as a child he had truly desired to be Wamphyri—so that it was not so very strange that these were the only genuinely material things he remembered from those forgotten days of yore.

  He had been familiar with all the Wamphyri myths, and had known about their powers: their mentalism; their ability to conjure mists out of their bodies; their familiars, the bats of Starside, great and small, which they commanded. But there was another part of the legend which was less well known: the way they used lesser creatures (such as the bat and the great red bat-eating spiders of Starside caverns) to spy for them and perform … other functions. One such myth had been that the Wamphyri used spider silk to spin their clothing, while another hinted that they kept the corpses of victims wrapped in spider shrouds, which preserved their meat for eating.

  Such memories sprang to mind now, perhaps enhanced and given substance by his new vampire instinct. So that even without knowing the mechanics of the thing, Nestor knew that something of these ancient beliefs was true. He also knew why the as yet unseen spiders in the ledges of the cave were shaking their webs: to trap whatever intruder had entered their
place, namely himself. It was an automatic thing and natural; in any case he was no cavern bat to go flitting to his death in the shimmering heights!

  He scarcely felt threatened—not by spiders, however large—but nevertheless turned more fully towards the doorway … and in that same moment became aware of the furtive slap of padded feet, and a low panting which issued from the mouth of the long corridor back to the stairwell. Whatever it was that stalked him, it was here even now. And Nestor gripped his knife that much tighter, and stayed hidden in the shadows of the doorway until the thing began to emerge into the hub of the cavern system. Then, seeing it come slowly, cautiously into view …

  … He took a last deep breath and held it, and continued to hide in the shadows. And the knife in his hand felt like a brittle twig, and his flesh soft as the pulp of fungi as the Thing more fully emerged, lowered its face to the floor where he had stepped—and sniffed with a drooling snout more than a foot long!

  Nestor had seen his share of Grey Ones, the wolves of the barrier mountains, but never a one like this. Something of the wolf was in it, certainly, but very little of Nature. No, for this was a creature spawned of Canker’s vats. And it had been bred in something of Canker’s image, at that.

  Lupine, yes, but fox-red, too, its lope was nightmarish; made nightmarish by the fact of its six legs! The first four of these moved like the legs of any ordinary tame dog or wolf, in diagonal agreement, but the pair that brought up the rear moved in tandem with the centre pair, like the small deer of Sunside’s forests when startled to flight; yet all with a sinuous grace. The thing was something less than eight feet long from snout to tip of tail, stood maybe thirty-six inches off the ground, and must have weighed in excess of three hundred pounds. The pads of its paws were larger than Nestor’s hands, with claws that clicked against stone where the flags of the floor were uneven.

  And its head and face were … quite monstrous. Again, they reminded Nestor of a wolf—their dimensions were those of a huge wolf, certainly—but the furtive, unblinking intelligence behind the burning sulphur of the eyes, and the colour of its fur, that was all fox. In combination, the feral talents of the two animals would be formidable.

  They were formidable!

  The guardian took another weird, loping pace forward; its long snout again touched the floor where Nestor had paused, and sniffed; and the long, sensitive ears swiveled to point at him in his hiding place. He would draw further back but didn’t dare move. This creature wasn’t something he could shout at and subdue. It wasn’t one of his own but Canker Canison’s, over which he had no claim or control at all. It had allowed him to enter this place “of his own free will.” But that didn’t mean it had to let him out again.

  Nestor had instinctively, automatically shuttered his eyes. Still the yellow orbs of the wolf-thing found the red flush of his own, and grew large in its sloping face as its entire body aimed itself like an arrow at his doorway. Then, growling low in its throat, stiff-legged, and salivating from jaws like an ivory mantrap, the thing advanced.

  And it was no more than five of Nestor’s paces away when he felt a tap on his shoulder!

  Any ordinary man might have fainted at that touch; even the bravest Szgany Traveller would have cried out; but Nestor was no longer Szgany, no longer a Traveller. He was Wamphyri! He moved but a fraction, turning his body only an inch or two at most, but his knife hand moved like greased lightning. And he slashed unerringly at whatever had touched him.

  The keen edge of his blade bit into but didn’t quite cut the ropelike thing touching his upper left shoulder. Instead, the weapon seemed attracted to that slender, hairy strand, and in order to retrieve it he must wrench sharply downwards; which only served to bring him into further contact with the thread of gluey spider silk. Slapping against the sleeve of his jacket from shoulder to elbow, it adhered at once—and began to vibrate!

  Nestor glanced out the door; the wolf-thing had come to a halt and was crouched down snarling only two paces—or a single bound—away! Its sleek muscles were bunching even now. While descending from above, a foot or two overhead …

  A great red spider crept effortlessly, head-first down the strand; and in the walls, the ruby-glinting eyes of others were visible where they swung from ledge to ledge, coming to investigate the nature of their victim. But there are spiders and there are spiders. Relatives of these creatures dwelled on Sunside, too, in deep caverns from which they emerged at dusk to fashion their webs and trap moths. That species was three to four inches long, with a bite that was poisonous but rarely fatal. It produced a numbness and even partial paralysis, accompanied by dizziness and vomiting, but lasting only three or four hours at most. That was Sunside, however, while this was Starside; these aerie spiders were at least four times longer, with forty or fifty times the bulk!

  Nestor gave his arm a desperate yank and his sleeve was torn away down the stitches, to dangle there on the adhesive thread. The violence of the movement shook the spider loose; it flopped to the floor and at once rolled itself into a ball; without pause, Nestor kicked it straight into the face of the wolf-thing. And as Canker’s creature reared back and yelped, he stepped into the open with his knife arm upraised. And:

  “What’s all this?” Canker whiningly queried, loping forward across the open span of the hub. “Is it the Lord Nestor? What, and do you threaten my creatures?” He grinned.

  “Do I … what?” Nestor was astonished, and angry.

  “Hah!” Canker barked. “Or do they threaten you, eh?”

  The great spider scurried by them into the darkness of the cave, and Canker’s “guard dog” shrank down and groveled, then backed off with its tail between its legs. Canker scowled at it and said, “Well done!” Then pointed and added, “And now begone!” The creature turned and slunk away, returning the way it had come.

  “Your dog would have attacked me!” Nestor accused. “And your spiders did attack me!”

  “On the first count, wrong,” said Canker. “My ‘dog,’ as you have it, was instructed to follow you and see you came to no harm. He was only suspicious because you were so furtive, whereas I had said you would be bold! And on the second count, also wrong, because the great red spiders are only ‘mine’ insofar as they dwell here. I don’t—can’t—command them; they are what they are and do what they do. But … you have spiders of your own, surely? Or should I say, there are spiders in Suckscar. Ah, but I note your confusion! As yet you’ve not explored your manse to the full, and so you fail to understand the special functions of creatures such as this. Well, that’s easily put to rights; let me show you.”

  He led the way back into the spider cavern, but Nestor stayed where he was. “What?” Canker glanced back at him. “Do you hold back? No need for caution now, Nestor. Indeed, quite the opposite! The more noise the better!” And with that he barked and capered, and laughed in his mad-dog fashion within the cave. The echoes of his actions went up, and dust rilled down, and high overhead the luminous webs stopped shivering and grew still.

  “Blind!” Canker laughed. “Or very nearly. Ah, but they hear well enough! Why, you must have crept in here, Nestor, that they should mistake you for something small. But quite obviously we noisy creatures are not bats, and so the spiders are fled to their high niches. But come, see, and understand.”

  He loped through the cavern, across a floor inches deep in defunct, cast-off webs which had lost both their glow and adhesion, to a corner which was festooned in dusty drapes of spider silk. And behind these shrouding curtains …

  “There!” said Canker, pointing.

  And now Nestor saw that the old Szgany legends were true. For there against the wall stood a geometrical structure, like a small section cut through a beehive honeycomb. Six hexagonal tubes formed the base, with five more on top, then four, three, two, and one. A pyramid of tubes. Storage tubes of wax, produced and fashioned by the spiders, in which to preserve … what?

  The tubes were almost seven feet long by two feet across the bore. Nestor ap
proached the pyramid and brushed dust away from wax which was not quite opaque. The tube he had chosen was in the row of three, about shoulder high, the fourth in height from the floor. And lodged within, all wrapped in silk threads except for his face—was that a human figure?

  Well, subhuman, anyway. For it was a brown and leathery trog from Starside’s caverns under the barrier mountains, apparently mummified and more than a little shriveled. But dead? Nestor fancied he saw the faint flutter of an eyelid and the merest twitch of a protuberant lip. Also, the wall of the waxy tube directly above his face was misty, as from shallow breathing.

  “Bravo!” said Canker. “Your developing vampire instinct: you chose to examine the one cell currently in use.”

  “Cell?” Nestor looked at him, and Canker shrugged.

  “Hatchery, then.”

  Nestor frowned, shook his head, and Canker sighed. Then, leading the way back out: “Now listen,” he said, “and I shall explain. The spiders fashion these combs in size according to their prey. Here in Mangemanse—and throughout the aerie in general—we, the Wamphyri, provide the prey, wherefore the tubes are man-sized.

  “The process is simple: We hunt on Sunside, or in this case on Starside, down in the bottoms beyond the sucking sphere of white light.”

  “The hell-lands Gate?” (Again Nestor’s resurgent memory.)

  “Indeed, in the trog caverns where the earth shines. Hell-lands Gate, did you say? Aye, I’ve heard my thralls call it by that name, when I’ve brought them out of Sunside. Let me begin again: