The Last Aerie

by Brian Lumley

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” Nestor told him. “And in any case, who am I to say you’re wrong? I can’t even remember my own past—well, except in brief, meaningless flashes—let alone read the future!”

  Canker came to him and clapped his shoulder. “I am not offended. We are friends, you and I, and must always speak the truth to one another. That’s how it shall be. But tell me, how may I learn the music? I mean, I understand the principle, but have no idea of the tune. It is for dancing, am I right? And for singing? Well, I can sing, you may believe it! And I dance in a fashion, though not like you Szgany sing and dance.”

  “The tune?” Nestor was puzzled. “But I’m sure there’s more than one tune. I think I know a few notes of several. Bring me a flute out of Sunside and I’ll teach you.”

  “A song of love, of devotion, of worship!” Canker yelped his excitement. “That is what I require. I shall imitate your most beautiful tune, and fit my song to it. Then, eventually, I’ll lure my silver mistress down from the moon!”

  Moon madness! Nestor thought, but kept the thought well hidden …

  On their way back to the midden stairwell to Suckscar, Nestor was quiet a while before saying, “Something is amiss here.”

  “Eh?” Canker looked at him where they paused in the passageway to the foot of the stairs, where lurked the six-legged wolf creature. “Something amiss? In what way?”

  “It was my impression … that is, I was given to understand—” Nestor paused for a moment, and finished in a rush: “—that you lived like a beast!” And backing away a little from the other: “If we are to be true friends, then surely I can say these things?”

  Canker threw back his head and laughed, and was serious in a moment. “That is an image I have deliberately fostered. And after all, I am a beast! But so are they all. And you too, Nestor, or you will be. But yes, I understand your meaning. My reason for this lifelong subterfuge is simple: survival! If my so-called colleagues think there is nothing to covet in Mangemanse, then they will covet nothing. If they believe I dwell in a pigsty, they will surely stay out of it. Just as long as they consider me a strange, mad creature, I have little to fear from them; for quite obviously I am harmless—that is, as long as I’m left to my own devices and not threatened. When abroad, hunting on Sunside, I ravage and rage and pose a dire threat, to females especially. There seems no purpose to the things I do. Ah, but there is a purpose! Certainly I achieve some gratification, some small satisfaction, from certain acts which others might consider gross. But more than that I perpetuate my image, the light in which those others see me.” He paused.

  “Here in Mangemanse, however, as you have seen and as I trust you will keep to yourself, things are very different. My place is clean, neither a kennel nor a midden except in its approaches, which is a deliberate contrivance. What is more, I would hazard a guess that in its appointments—its staff, equipment, furnishings, and facilities—Mangemanse is superior to almost any other house in all this great stack! Well, with the exception, perhaps, of Wrathspire. For indeed Wratha the Risen likes her little luxuries. But only let some vile intruder enter by this route—or by any route, up, down, or sideways—and he’s bound to think as you thought when first you ventured here into stench and ordure, and so proceed no farther. Thus are my credentials, and my manse’s security, established.”

  “And shall remain so,” Nestor nodded. “Also, I know your state of mind … I think.”

  “My state of mind?” Canker raised a shaggy red eyebrow.

  “Your attitude in this respect,” Nestor answered. “I seem to remember that sometimes on Sunside, if a guard dog or wolf is tethered or kenneled for too long in one place, he may become ‘kennel-proud,’ which is to say he’ll suffer no other creature within the boundary of his territory. Whenever this occurs, only the dog’s master may command him within that perimeter or bring him safely out of it. Add to this the fact that the Wamphyri are notoriously territorial …”

  “Your reasoning is sound,” Canker said, nodding. “You are saying that perhaps I am suffering from this kennel-proudness, and it could be that you are right. Except there’s a flaw in it, for it doesn’t explain why I invited you to come down here. Unless for ‘master’ we substitute the word ‘friend.’ But understand this: one thing I am proud of is my ancestry, however mongrel. The dog, even the fox—and especially the wolf—they are all of them noble beasts. Don’t you agree?”

  “Certainly,” said Nestor, though he was not convinced. But best to keep the dog-Lord happy.

  “For the wolf is a hunter who lives in the wild and relies solely upon his own skill,” Canker went on. “The fox is colourful, crafty beyond measure, a sneak thief and merciless killer. And as for the dog when he is trained? What more faithful creature exists in all the world?”

  Nestor was surprised. “Do the Wamphyri keep dogs?”

  “It’s not unknown. In Turgosheim, several Lords keep dogs, aye. They keep them as pets, and occasionally for the hunting. Ah, but it’s common knowledge that the Szgany of Sunside keep a great many dogs, for the security they give! Not only to guard their encampments against hostile strangers, but also for early warning of Wamphyri raiders. As for myself … why, Mangemanse is full of dogs! They are my children!”

  “Your chil—?”

  “Oh, ha-ha!” Canker capered. “I have wives, Nestor, a good many. And they’ve borne me a good many pups. Ah, you’ve likely heard it said that girls stolen out of Sunside don’t last too long in Mangemanse, eh? Not so? Well, that’s the way they tell it, anyway. But it’s untrue. Just because I kill on Sunside—and remember, Canker has killed with his member, lad!—that’s not to say I do it in Mangemanse. What, I should worry my girl thralls to death like a wild dog among goats? Not at all. They are my wives who pleasure me. But none outside Mangemanse knows it. Except you, for you have seen. They work in my kitchens, at my tapestries, in my laundry and butcher shop, even in the pens and launching bays. As for my yelping bloodsons: what better way to build an army, and staff it with faithful lieutenants, than to ensure they’re of your own blood? And so another legend brought to its knees. I am a beast, aye … when it suits me to be one!”

  Nestor nodded slowly and said, “Any who think you are mad, Canker Canison, quite obviously they are mad.”

  But as he made his way up into Suckscar alone, he thought to himself: As for your silver mistress in the moon … well, there’s madness and there’s madness …

  At the start of the next sunup, Nestor’s vampire came into its true ascendancy. In the interim, for a period equivalent to five days in the world beyond the glaring hell-lands Gate, he had expended furious and frightening Wamphyri energies exploring, charting, and reorganizing Suckscar. And in that same period he had grown, changed, taken on a shape which was like yet unlike his own, the shape of a true Lord of the Wamphyri. His excessive activity was like a fever in his blood, which would not let him rest; it was the Change That Shapes; it was his rapid metamorphosis into something other than the Nestor he had been. And as the furnace sun rose up again beyond the barrier range to banish the shadows from the mountains, then it was that his vampire leech became fully ascendant.

  The speed with which the change had occurred was astonishing, the activity of his parasite amazing. He would launch out from his manse upon his flyer, and when the others saw him circling Wrathstack, or soaring over Wrathspire itself, laughing into the wind, then they would wonder at it. But the fact of it was that Vasagi the Suck had been a master of metamorphism, and the answer lay in the genetic makeup of his egg. In that and in Nestor’s urgency to be Wamphyri!

  Then, too, the other side of his morbid ancestry came into play. But morbid only in the sense of its infinitely dark possibilities, not in the nature of the one who had explored, possessed, and used them: a man called Harry Keogh, Necroscope. In his own world a parallel universe away (and later in this one, too) Nestor’s father had been beloved of the teeming dead, the Great Majority. How could it have been otherwis
e? For Harry had been a lone candle glimmering in their eternal darkness, a warm spot in the chill of their unbeing, the only man of all living men who could talk to them and give them comfort. And more, he had been the only one who could die for them. In the end he had done just that: died for the dead and the living alike, for all the generations that were and those yet to come in two worlds. Except … his end had signaled a monstrous beginning, and Nestor was just another link in the endless chain.

  Thus Harry’s darkest talent, or an even darker one, had been inherited by this Gypsy son of his, just as it had been passed on to Nestor’s brother, Nathan. But in Nestor the dark side was ascendant, and the dead would never love him. Indeed those who had passed beyond, and should be beyond all fear and feeling, would very soon fear him above all other living, dead, and undead creatures. Fear him, yes, together with all of his works. Because some of them would even feel the works of the vampire Lord Nestor!

  None of which was known to Nestor himself, for the Necroscope Harry Keogh had died when Nestor was still a child, and Nestor had long since forgotten Nathan as a brother and now thought of him only as some hated rival or grim enemy out of the past. But Harry Keogh’s talent was in him for all that, or a hideously warped version of it, at least.

  Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri—Necroscope? No, never.

  But necromancer? Ah, indeed …

  It started like this:

  Nestor was out flying. It seemed the only way to ease his spirit, still the weird tides surging in his blood, and calm his burgeoning Wamphyri passions. Out there in the crisp, cold air, under fading ice-chip stars, feeling the rush of the slipstream over his flyer’s head and neck, he could forget … things. And that in itself was strange, for in truth he had very little to forget. Except perhaps the rushing whirlpool of numbers spiraling in his head, that madly whirling vortex which on occasion he dreamed of even now. The vortex and its treacherous origin: the mind of his olden enemy on Sunside.

  For upon a time Nestor had loved; the ache was still there in his heart, and the hatred. He had loved, and had been rejected. Or rather, his olden enemy had stolen her away. That was as much as he remembered of it; that and the fact that afterwards … well, he had not been the same. Nor would he ever be the same again. For his change then had been physical, wrought of a damaged mind and body, while his change now was psychical, of the spirit. Indeed there was very little of the human spirit left in him. But an inhuman spirit?

  And so Nestor rode out upon his flyer and bared his teeth and laughed into the wind, even though he felt that the laughter wasn’t entirely his. But the gold was back on the peaks of the barrier mountains and he dared not fly too high. Soon the tallest towers of Wrathspire would be bathed in yellow glare, and all of Wratha’s curtains closed against the light of day. That was still several hours away, however, and for the moment Nestor displayed his newly acquired mastery of flight, urging his beast into intricate aerial configurations in and out of Wrathspire’s hollow turrets and fretted rock needles.

  Then … he saw the Lady Wratha herself.

  She was in a turret, watching him at his play and keeping her thoughts hidden. Nestor had sensed her there before, on several occasions, but had never seen her. Seeing her now, distracted by her presence, he momentarily lost control of his flyer and came close to striking a bartizan. But his mount, concerned for its own skin as well as its master’s, instinctively avoided the collision.

  Hearing Wratha’s laughter, Nestor wheeled his flyer in a tight circle, alighted on a quarter-acre of roof like a small, sloping plateau, dismounted, and went striding towards her turret observation post. “Funny, was it?” he queried angrily. “To distract me, so that I might easily have crashed, wrecked my flyer, and gone tumbling over the edge to a certain death?”

  From somewhere behind and below her there sounded a warning, echoing rumble and the clatter of scrabbling claws. The turret must conceal a stairwell down into Wrathspire. It was one of the Lady’s exits onto the roof. And Wratha had brought up an escort with her, one of her small personal warriors.

  Now her laughter, gay as a girl’s, died away. “Oh, and do you find me a distraction, then, Nestor?” Wratha’s expression was almost but not quite innocent as she stepped from the turret to display herself in her revealing robe of black bat-fur ropes. “But a pleasant one, I trust. Anyway, there was nothing malicious in it. This is my place, after all, and I often look out from here. Oh, I’ve watched you once or twice, and monitored your change. Aye, and I like what I’ve seen of you.”

  Nestor came to a halt ten paces away as something dark rose up behind her, adding its darkness to the shadows inside the turret. And then he asked himself: Has she deliberately lured me here? Nestor had left his gauntlet behind, hanging from his flyer’s saddle. Well, and what odds? Even with his gauntlet he’d stand no slightest chance against even a small warrior. These were some of the thoughts that passed rapidly through his head as he stood glaring at the Lady and the shadowy shape in the turret behind her. But in the next moment:

  Ridiculous! he thought. What am I thinking of? I land on another’s territory unbidden and of my own free will, approach her in anger, and at once consider murderous combat—with a warrior? Madness! Quite obviously this white heat inside my body and head is burning up my brain!

  His thoughts were confused, a jumble, entirely unguarded.

  “Aha!” said Wratha. “And so he rises!”

  Nestor was taken aback. He glanced this way and that and saw nothing. “Who rises?”

  She smiled at him wickedly, teasingly, perhaps. “Why, your leech, my young Lord! Your parasite. He—or it—rises to ascendancy.”

  It explained a lot and was the only clue Nestor needed. “I … I had wondered,” he said lamely.

  “Don’t we all,” she answered, “when first we feel the fever heat, the boundless energy, the furious passion? But looking at you now … oh, it’s perfectly obvious! Your leech is risen and is as one with you. Yes, you are Wamphyri. You need not concern yourself with getting there any longer, Nestor. You are there! And soon your fever will cool and leave you fully forged and in command. Or so you’ll believe, anyway.”

  Her words shocked him in one way, pleased him in another. But shocked, pleased, or both, still some spiteful or prideful urge caused him to reply, “And was there ever any doubt?”

  “Possibly not.” She tossed her head.

  “Possibly?” He shook his head. “No, definitely not! And if the change had been slower, d’you think I would have submitted to Gorvi the Guile’s time limit and let them throw me out? Hah! Gorvi setting limits, indeed! What? They would have to invade me in my manse and drag me out of it first. And believe me, the Suck had monsters no less than your own! Well, and they’re mine now.”

  She clapped her hands. “You have such energy, Nestor! And all from your leech. But if you weren’t so strong, the change would not have been so fast. And so you see, you and your parasite fit each other like a hand in a glove. You are … strong, aye.” Her eyes beneath their scarp lingered on him. “But just look at you. You were a boy, and now you’re a man. You were—oh, a good six-footer. But now you’re six and a half! You were handsome … well, half-handsome, I suppose, but lacking style. And now you’re dark, sinister, seductively powerful. Every inch a true Lord of the Wamphyri. Come, step closer.”

  He did so, saying, “Canker is not dark, sinister, seductive. He is a monster. Gorvi is gaunt as death and devious to a fault. Only Wran fits my picture of a true Lord, and he is overweight and has a wen! What’s more, I suspect that he and Spiro are mad. So all in all, it strikes me there’s nothing glorious about the Wamphyri. Not this bunch, anyway.”

  “But their passions are glorious,” she answered quietly, her voice husky where she laid a trembling hand upon his arm and felt the blood coursing and the muscles bunching. “And am I not glorious?”

  “You are very beautiful,” he answered, “or would appear to be. And yet … I have heard tales.”

  “
Would appear to be? Tales?” Her voice was suddenly cold as she drew back from him. “What tales?” Sensing her changing emotions, Wratha’s guardian creature rumbled and glared green-eyed at Nestor from the darkness of the turret. Knowing that the thing would react instantly to her slightest command, he took a precautionary pace to the rear and towards his flyer where it nodded vacantly some small distance away.

  “Just tales,” he answered. “The way you keep your eyes hidden beneath that scarp of bone; the blue crystals in your temples, to cool the furnace of your glance; the lie of your flesh, which is not a girl’s but a hag’s. Aye, all of these things and more. For as I understand it the Wamphyri, especially their Ladies, are often deceptive in appearance …”

  For a moment she was silent, then:

  “Listen to me,” she told him, but with nothing of anger. “Listen and learn. In a hundred years—or even two hundred, if you are fortunate—you will be an old man. But will you look like one? Of course not, because you are Wamphyri! Vain, as most of us are, you will look much as you look now. It is how you will keep yourself. And it is how I have kept myself. What? Would you have me wrinkle to a prune when I can look the way I do? For remember: the blood is the life, and it is also the youth! It is my gift to look this way forever, and so I shall. It is my nature … and yours. But I may tell you this, my handsome Lord Nestor: Wratha was never a hag. I was beautiful, and I still am. Except …

  “You have made it very plain to me that you don’t appreciate beauty, so begone.” Her voice had turned sour. “This is my roof and I did not give you permission to land here. It would serve you right if I loosed my guardian creature upon you.”