The Last Aerie

by Brian Lumley

  I sense … thoughts, said Nestor. And I sense … whispers! Hushed, cautious words spoken in the dead of night. Someone hides—perhaps a good many someones—and they know we are here.

  Hah! Maybe they saw us limned against the moon, said Canker, at once falling into his mental mode. Or they’ve spied us darting out from the edge of the clouds. And then, in admiration of his young friend: You’ve come on faster than even I suspected, Nestor, and I have always known that you’d be great! Now then, where are these secretive whisperers in the night?

  Those three knolls there, at the edge of the woods. Nestor pointed. Between them, a wooded triangle. And central, a rocky outcrop weathered to a dome.

  I see it! Canker grew excited.

  Down there, that’s where they are. They are somewhere … down there. But a moment later: Ah! And now they guard their minds! They’ve sensed me listening in on them.

  Canker was puzzled. What, Travellers? Mentalists among the Szgany? Several of them? Well, and it’s not unheard of, I suppose. But together? In a bunch?

  Nestor was silent—too silent, now—and Canker sensed the darkness in him like a shroud for his shriveled soul. But there was something of awe, too, the sudden recognition or acceptance of knowledge which had been absent just a moment ago. What is it, Nestor?

  Still the other was silent, listening …

  Nestor?

  And at last he snapped out of it. They are not … they’re not what I thought they were.

  Not Szgany?

  Oh, yes, they’re Szgany. Or they were …

  Were? Canker scowled, finally admitted defeat, and barked out loud, “What in all Turgosheim and Starside together are you talking about? Give me a clue, can’t you?”

  If he had thought to galvanize Nestor he was mistaken. For now the other was quieter still and his mind even darker as he guided his flyer into a swooping glide towards the cluster of knolls. Following him down, the dog-Lord demanded, Well?

  And at last Nestor answered him. These are the dead of the Szgany, Canker. Which is why you failed to detect them. I realize that now, that these are dead men in their graves: tattered leather and fretted bone, or ashes in small urns, all gathered together in one place around that mortuary rock.

  Ah! Canker’s mental gasp. An ancient Traveller graveyard! Your art … you sniffed them out!

  But barely before they sniffed me out! For they smell me as the forest creatures smell a fire: with vast amaze and fear. Except it’s my talent sets fire to their old bones! Then, since they can’t run from me, they try to shut me out; they fall silent and wait for me to go away. But this time I’m not going to. Not for a little while, anyway. And you, Canker? You wanted to see me demonstrate my art? Well, now’s your chance.

  I cannot contain myself, the dog-thing admitted. What? A man who pursues his prey even beyond death? You’ll be a legend yet!

  They landed on the rim of the central outcrop and climbed carefully down. At its base, uncounted years had weathered the yellow sandstone into a series of shallow cavelets, useless as hiding places for living Szgany but more than sufficient for their dead. Which was exactly what they found:

  A mortuary, as Nestor had guessed—or known.

  In all the cavelets, niches had been carved in the walls where urn after urn reposed in the echoing rock. Entire families had been burned and interred here, as each member in his turn died; but that had been in the years of the Old Wamphyri, who were no more. It had been in the merciless years of the vampire, when the only safe way was to burn the dead. Since when there’d been some eighteen years of peace—broken only once—before Wratha came with her renegades out of Turgosheim. And in those eighteen years men had commenced to bury their fellows again, returning soil to soil. Or to wrap them in oil-soaked cloths and deposit them on ledges in dry places, where their descendants might visit from time to time and perhaps even talk to them. Except, of course, the dead could not talk back. Not to just anyone …

  This was just such a place. In the deepest, driest caves, ledges had been cut in the walls which housed complete carcasses, the mummies of old Szgany chiefs. None of the corpses was recent, and some must have lain here for—oh, the full eighteen years, by Nestor’s reckoning—since the earliest days of Traveller freedom.

  But he did not want to inquire of one who had been dead too long. No, he wanted one more recently dead—say, ten to twelve years—because he had a question for him which went back to his own unremembered childhood. Indeed, it concerned one of the few memories he still retained from the olden times before he’d been hurt and … and before he had forgotten things; before he became Wamphyri. And so he chose a cadaver which had only journeyed midway down the long, lingering road of dusty decomposition, and went to him where he lay upon his sandstone ledge.

  Then, as Nestor drew near, so the old one began to tremble. Not visibly—of course not—but in his deadspeak mind.

  “He knows me!” said Nestor, his voice the merest whisper, echoing away and back. “He knows me for what I am.”

  It was blacker than night in the cave, but this was of no consequence to Wamphyri sight and senses. The Lords Nestor and Canker could see as well—and indeed better—than in broad daylight. For daylight is bred of the sun, and nothing of the sun is of benefit to the Wamphyri. Except that men live in it.

  Canker Canison stood to one side of Nestor and back a pace, watching. He saw how Nestor’s hands trembled as he reached out and placed them upon the mummied forehead and sunken chest of the one who was no more. And it was hard for Canker to believe that anything of sentience remained in the tattered, withered husk which Nestor touched. But:

  Do you hear me, old Chief? Nestor queried. But Canker heard nothing—not even a whisper—for this was not mentalism but deadspeak. Do you feel my hands upon you? I know you do, for I can sense your mind clamped shut like a trap on a bear’s leg, and though your body can’t move, still your trembling is like a fever in you. And yet I say to you, you need not fear me.

  “Well?” Canker grunted from behind. For to the dog-Lord’s mind it seemed that nothing was happening. “What now?”

  Nestor turned his head and looked into Canker’s wolfish eyes, their blood-hued orbs and tiny pinprick pupils, yellow as his mistress moon. “Be quiet! Let me make contact with him. For until I do you’ll hear nothing, see nothing.”

  “Then what is this for a demonstration?” The other seemed affronted. “How can I know what passes between you, if indeed anything passes between you?”

  “Either be quiet,” Nestor snapped, “or go and leave me on my own here! There’s that which I need to know from this one.”

  “Huh!” But the other fell silent.

  I ask you one last time to speaks to me, Nestor told the cadaver. I want to know who you were, and I want to know what you heard, felt, saw, one morning in that time before you died, when the fleeing clouds glowed red, and the billowing belly of one cloud in particular—a great white nodding mushroom of a cloud—burned crimson over Starside. Do you remember? I know you do: when there was thunder in the air and earth alike, and warm unseasonal winds came rushing through the passes from the north. And I repeat: you have nothing to fear from me, not if you tell me these things as best you remember them. But if you do not … Thus the monstrous threat (for all that it was unspoken) was issued.

  In Nestor’s mind, conjured there by his own questioning, a scene from childhood opened up. He knew it of old, but never as vivid as this: a true memory, as if some lesion had finally repaired itself in the damaged whorl of his brain, adding colour and definition to previously misty monochrome pictures out of the past. And because Nestor’s thoughts were deadspeak, the pictures were seen by the extinct Szgany chieftain, too:

  The barrier mountains as viewed from Sunside; a thin morning mist drifting through crags which were silver-grey, because the sun had not yet discovered them. A glade hidden deep in the forest, mist-damp, all green leaves and dark green shade, where the birds had barely commenced their dawn chorus
before lapsing into abrupt silence; for suddenly the earth underfoot had given itself a mighty slap and a shake, and a sheet of pulsing, dazzling white light had turned the mountains to a black silhouette. Then:

  Webs of white lightning leaping and coruscating between the clouds over Starside, clouds which at once fled outwards from a certain spot in the white-pulsing sky. And the fleeing clouds all red in their underbellies, reflecting unseen fires. While bloating like some gigantic, loathsome mushroom in the cleared central space—

  A great grey cloud on an upwards-thrusting pillar or stalk of fire and smoke, growing up behind the mountains and swaying there; its puffball head all roiling and churning from within, displaying the madly blazing fires at its red and yellow heart!

  Nestor saw these things through the eyes of memory, which were also the eyes of a badly frightened four-year-old child, namely himself. But now as a man he knew for a fact that whatever the memory signified, it had happened; and also knew that it was important to him. He had woken up there in that forest glade, and cried out into the dawn. Something had brought him awake to witness the lightnings, the fires in the sky, and the roiling mushroom cloud. But what? Whatever it had been, it had sent him tottering, crying to his mother (his dear mother! But who had she been, and where was she now? And anyway, what difference did it make, for he was Wamphyri?) to be crushed in her arms and comforted. And it had caused him to ask her a question which had no apparent source, one to which he’d received no satisfactory answer:

  “Is my daddy … is he dead?”

  But even though he no longer remembered his mother—not a single detail—he recalled how quiet she had gone, and how her heart had fluttered as she held him against her breast.

  All of which was deadspeak, and so passed from Nestor’s mind into the mind of the old Szgany chief. And the old chief was trembling again, no less than the necromancer’s forgotten mother on that morning of mornings; but still he said nothing. Until:

  Well? Nestor asked him again. And will you remain silent forever? I think not. You know what I am, the nature of my art, for even now you can feel my hands resting oh so lightly upon your dead flesh. When I touch you—whatever I choose to do to you—you will feel it. If I were to break off one of your dry and crumbling fingers, you would feel the pain of it even as if you were alive. And if I were to dig into your wormy chest and squeeze your heart, it would be like a second dying … except you are already dead, and so I could do it over and over again. You know I speak the truth, and now it’s your turn to speak the truth. You saw the pictures in my mind, memories from my childhood? Yes, I’m sure you did. I want to know what they signify, and I want you to tell me … now! He took the skeletal hand of the chief carefully in his own powerful vampire hand, and blew the dust of the cave from the crumbling flesh and white bone knuckles. And:

  I … I may not speak to you! The chief’s voice was pitiful in its terror.

  You are forbidden to speak to me? Nestor stroked the hand and gently eased the fused fingers apart from one another.

  You are a vile necromancer! The dead will forsake me to darkness and loneliness forever if I breathe a single word to you.

  But you have already breathed a good many words, Nestor replied.

  “Speak up!” Canker rumbled from behind. “What’s all this muttering?”

  “Ah!” Nestor was startled for a moment. But then: “Muttering? Was I? Then be quiet and I’ll speak out loud for you. It will make no difference now that we’re in contact, myself and this wormy old thing.” And to the chief:

  “So. You are unwilling, and I am impatient. Indeed, my patience is at an end!” And with one hand upon the corpse’s brow, he used the other to crumble two of its desiccated fingers into dust! Behind Nestor, Canker gawped and gasped his delight.

  And now the old chief was no longer unwilling. Perhaps he had not believed it himself: that Nestor could hurt him even as if he were alive. But now he believed it. Part of his hand had been crushed into dust, and the pain had been real. It was the necromancer’s art: that the dead could sense him near, hear him when he spoke to them, feel him when he touched them—or when he did other things to them.

  And in Nestor’s weird mind the dead old man was screaming, for he’d felt his fingers pulped as beneath a falling boulder! They were dust and brittle bones, but when Nestor had crushed them they’d been as flesh again.

  For a while Nestor listened to the old chiefs screaming, and to the absolute silence of the rest of the dead where they were scattered about. Their silence, their fear, and their hatred. It made him feel powerful, especially their hatred. He was powerful, for he was the necromancer Lord Nestor Lichloathe, of the Wamphyri! But he was truly impatient now and desired to be up and away; away from this dead place and all its dead inhabitants, up into the night sky and searching for the living. For it’s blood which is the life, not dust.

  Now he sighed a false sigh and arched his hand on the old chief’s chest, until his blunt, powerful fingernails formed a bridge there. Only give a push … his hand would sink through rotten cloth and wormy flesh into the very soul of the one who lay there incapable of movement. And if the old chief had not had faith in Nestor’s talent before, certainly he believed in it now, especially knowing what was in the necromancer’s mind.

  Wait! he cried, his deadspeak voice broken like an old pot. I will speak! I’ll tell you everything you desire to know: the meaning of these things which you have remembered, how I myself remember them and what they meant to me. Indeed, I think they may be the reason I died before my time.

  Nestor was fascinated. “Say on—but first you’d best tell me your name. For it seems improper to share this mutual event from the past of both our lives, without that we’ve first been introduced. And after all, you know who I am, but I’ve not yet had the pleasure.”

  Must I t-tell you my n-n-name? The other’s voice shivered, almost as if it would fly into shards.

  “Oh, yes. For if you lie to me … I’m sure that your sons and daughters and their children are still abroad in the world of the living. So that even when I’ve finished with you, there shall always be other fish to fry—if you have lied to me!”

  My sons? The old man was distraught; Nestor could almost sense him wringing his hands, though of course he lay motionless on his shelf. And … and their sons?

  The necromancer merely shrugged. “I am a vampire—indeed a Lord of vampires, Wamphyri—and prey upon the living. But tell me the truth and you and yours are safe. I’ll not bother them … I swear it.” Nestor’s voice was the soul (or soullessness) of sarcasm.

  You swear it? You? And should I believe you?

  “Do you have a choice?” Nestor smiled with his voice … and then stopped smiling. “Enough! Let’s have done with this now. Should I squeeze your heart, until all of the worms that are in it are pulp?” He pressed down lightly, until the nails of his hand cut through the mouldy cloth of the other’s shroud.

  No! No! The old chief gasped his deadspeak denial. Only hold off, necromancer, and I shall tell you all. And without further pause, he did:

  I am—I was—Agon Mitrea, son of Lexandru, and like my father before me I led the Szgany Mitrea through fifteen years of Wamphyri oppression; also through the balmy years of peace. Until They came again, briefly, out of the Icelands, but only to be destroyed at the hell-lands Gate. And that is the time and the event which you have remembered from your childhood. I cannot be mistaken.

  “What? The destruction of the Old Wamphyri?” Nestor’s fascination grew by leaps and bounds.

  Indeed. The corpse gave a motionless deadspeak nod. After that, gradually the Szgany stopped travelling, most of us, to make our lives in towns and settled camps. But following the fire in the sky, the thunder in the earth, the DOOM across the mountains in Starside, I had only three years left. And I will tell you about it:

  That morning of which you speak—it must be fifteen or sixteen years ago now—I witnessed that same awesome wonder exactly as you did, though I
suspect I was very much closer to its source than you were; too close, in fact. The pulsing white light, a great sheet of it that threw the mountains into silhouette and burned like naked fire on the ball of the eye; the crack!—sharp as a stone split by the heat of a furnace—followed by a dull rumble of continuous thunder in air and earth alike; the weblike lightnings and fleeing clouds, all red and flickering in their underbellies. And then that monstrous mushroom ball, growing taller than the mountains themselves, climbing higher and higher, with the fires of its guts all spilling out from its heart!

  Nestor saw it all in the dead man’s mind just as he himself had described it, but closer and from a different angle. And now he said, “You say you were closer than I was—much too close, in fact—but where were you exactly, and what do you mean, too close?”

  In those days my people lived only a few miles from this very spot, this ancient Szgany burial place, Agon answered at once, for he was well under Nestor’s control now. We dwelled in a settled camp west of the great pass through the barrier mountains. That morning I was out with … with my sons—

  But in the next moment, realizing what he had said or given away, Agon paused in shock, as if he’d suddenly clapped a hand to his mouth.

  Nestor smiled and said, “Ah, and so you do have sons? Now I can be sure you’ll tell me the whole truth. But go on: you were out that morning with your sons?”

  Out h-hunting with them, y-yes, old Agon continued, wishing it were possible to die again, right now; which he would gladly do, if only it would put him and his beyond the reach of this fiend. We were up before dawn; the rabbits come out in the dawn, likewise the deer and wild pigs. There are good hunting grounds in the eastern foothills, beyond the mouth of the pass. We had been there and were on our way back, loaded down by the weight of good meat; all Sunside on our left hand, a glorious sun just breaking free of the horizon, and the mouth of the pass on our right …

  And that was when it happened—when the fading stars were blotted out entirely, and all the sky over Starside turned blinding white!