The Last Aerie

by Brian Lumley

  They were still like that, facing each other—wondering what had happened, what was happening even now, in Perchorsk—when suddenly a babble of excited voices reached them from the corridor. The door stood ajar just as Chung had left it. Trask threw it open and both men looked out.

  Halfway down the corridor, Ian Goodly and a group of espers had gathered in a huddle. They were crowded round a door to one of the rooms, looking in. Others were running to join them. Trask glanced at Chung and queried, “Harry’s room? I had the nameplate taken down. When Nathan starts reading … it might have proved a distraction.”

  But as Trask and Chung started down the corridor, the espers at the door of Harry’s room backed off, then seemed almost thrown back by some force from within. And in the next moment the corridor was filled with a white light that flooded out of the room.

  The precog Goodly came reeling, rubbing at his eyes as the light faded to a hazy white glow. Trask grabbed him by the arm, said, “Ian, what the hell … ?” But Goodly was still too staggered to answer.

  Next down the corridor was Nathan’s math teacher. Not an esper or member of E-Branch, he’d been vetted and sworn to the Official Secrets Act before they had let him in. A small man of about thirty or thirty-five, with receding, mousey hair and wearing heavy, thick-lensed spectacles, he was white-faced and panting. Trask grabbed him and said, “What is it?”

  “After the Chinese gentleman interrupted the lesson,” the man answered, “we couldn’t settle down again. I … I went to get coffee, and Nathan took the opportunity to stretch his legs. He said there was something he wanted to see in one of the rooms.”

  Trask went to brush past him but Ian Goodly, back in control of himself, got in his way. “Ben, there was no warning,” he gasped. “Suddenly I knew something was going to happen, and where it would happen. I was in my office but headed straight for Harry’s room. That’s Nathan in there at the computer console.”

  The soft white light had vanished now. Trask and Chung ran down the corridor, avoiding espers where they stumbled about or leaned against the walls rubbing at their eyes. But as the two men reached Harry’s room, they skidded to a halt and cautiously looked in. Beyond the open door, Nathan was seated at the computer. Whey-faced, openmouthed, he looked up, saw them, indicated that they should enter. But Trask and Chung were looking beyond him, at the computer screen itself. And they both knew that they’d seen this before.

  The screen was unnaturally brilliant; it was the source of the soft white glow, which still surrounded the entire console. But the pastelcoloured moving pictures on the screen were brilliant, too: sharpimaged computer graphics, which told a story out of the past.

  Trask and Chung said nothing; stunned, they merely watched … and remembered.

  Remembered a squally February night some sixteen years ago, when every available esper had felt the “call” to E-Branch HQ, and had gathered here to witness the death of the Necroscope Harry Keogh, taking place in another world, another time, even another dimension. It had happened in the ops room, and now it was duplicated on the screen in these jerky, angular, but accurate computer graphics:

  A figure, human, male, in the shape of a cross, tumbling slowly, end over end, down a tunnel of thin neon bars or ribbons of blue, green, and red light; motion simulated by breaks in the ribbons—as if each streamer were a series of dashes expanding towards the viewer, like multicoloured ack-ack fire closing on an airplane—and each dash blinking out of existence as it “touched” the surface of the screen from within, giving the impression of falling.

  The figure was falling, tumbling in space and time towards some indeterminate destiny … or origin? That last was Trask’s thought, though where it had come from he couldn’t say. Perhaps it was his talent, defining the “truth” of what he witnessed.

  The cadaverous Goodly had joined them in Harry’s room; he stood between and behind Trask and Chung, touching their arms. And: “Now!” he husked.

  The falling, rotating figure grew smaller, “receding” as the coloured threads hit the screen that much faster. It became a mote, a speck, finally disappeared. But where it had been:

  A bright yellow bomb-burst! A sunburst of golden light, expanding silently, hugely, awesomely! And not only inwards but outwards, too, as if to break free of the very computer screen! An amazing three-dimensional effect, so that the four observers—Nathan, Trask, Chung, and Goodly—gasped and felt the urge to duck, turn their faces away. But they didn’t, because they were fascinated and must know.

  And it was exactly the same as before, and yet more than before: Those myriad golden splinters speeding outwards from the sunburst, angling this way and that, sentient, seeking, disappearing into as many unknown places. Those—pieces—of the Necroscope Harry Keogh? All that remained of him … or of his metaphysical mind? And what of the dart which had escaped into this world? Into our world?

  The screen held the answer.

  Suddenly it wiped itself clean, and in the next moment a new scene leapt vividly into view: of a building—or the top floor of one—shown in plan, with rooms and laboratories all clearly delineated. A very familiar layout, and so it should be. Trask and his two most senior agents recognized it at once:

  The plan shown on the screen was E-Branch HQ!

  And there was the golden dart: materializing in the ops room, lancing out into the corridor, speeding in a series of rapidly mobile stops and starts, as if searching, until finally it paused in front of a certain room.

  And that certain room was this one. Harry’s room!

  The golden dart passed inside, became motionless, shrank to a point of light and blinked out. And even as Trask and the others watched, the screen cleared itself off and immediately filled up again—with numbers!

  In the astonished silence Nathan’s gasp was clearly audible as he leaned forward in his swivel chair, until his face was only fifteen inches away from the screen. Where the other observers were concerned, this largely obscured the view. But they saw enough to know that this wasn’t their scene. And so did Nathan’s math instructor, who had joined them from the corridor.

  “Now what on earth … ?” The others heard his gasped query but didn’t look up. And for ten, twenty seconds the mathematical symbols and figures flowed and swirled in a hypnotic, sentient-seeming manner, forming rapidly mutating calculi apparently at random on the screen. Then, abruptly, they dispersed and left the screen blank. And the computer switched itself off …

  Trask picked up a loose electrical lead in numb fingers and looked at it. The set hadn’t been plugged in. The others saw the lead in his hand and understood the expression on his face. It must have been pretty much like the expression on their own faces.

  Chung spoke first. “And that … that splinter, dart, whatever it was, has been waiting here ever since?”

  “But for what?” Trask’s voice was hoarse.

  “For this,” Goodly answered. “Waiting for Nathan. To pass on its message. Harry’s message.”

  Trask knew that he was right.

  Nathan looked up and his face was paler than ever. “A message? From my father? But … what was it?”

  No one could answer him. But in Trask’s mind it seemed he heard Mrs. Wills again, her voice telling him something which her dead husband had told her:

  “‘Arry’s room? Well, yer’d best look after it, Meg, me love. I mean, yer never knows when he’ll be needin’ ter use it again, now does yer … ?”

  2

  Nathan’s Conversion

  The occurrences in Harry’s room had been almost sufficient in themselves to finally hook Nathan and tie him in with his new friends. As to his previous reticence: it hadn’t been so much that he’d doubted their friendship or even their motives, but mainly that he’d seen himself as being used. Now, however, he was beginning to see how he could use them: their superior knowledge of math and science in general. For what he’d seen on the computer screen—that final sequence of rapidly mutating formulae—was nothing less than
what he’d been seeing in his own mind for as long as he could remember: the as yet unfathomable numbers vortex as recreated by a machine or some incredibly tenacious revenant of his father.

  And if the vortex (the math controlling this so-called Möbius Continuum?) had been real and worked for Harry Keogh, Necroscope, then given the resources of this computer-geared world in which Nathan was stranded, he might also be able to make it work for him. And not only in this world, but in Sunside, too.

  So that now, and as opposed to the selfless motivations of Trask and E-Branch, Nathan’s own motives were mainly selfish: since the only way home was to assist his new friends, he would assist them all he could, and in the process attempt to discover his father’s greatest secret: the control of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum. For to know quite definitely that Harry Keogh had been here, worked here, been one of them, was all the spur Nathan had needed. If Trask and his parapsychological organization had been good enough for Harry, then they were good enough for him.

  From now on—for the time being, at least—he would play it Trask’s way: a game of give and take. Right now it was Nathan’s turn to give, and no holding back. But on certain matters … Nathan had taken vows and there would always be things he could never tell. Or if he did, it wouldn’t hurt to obscure the facts a little …

  Since bringing Nathan to London, Trask had cleared most of his more mundane workload, that is, if anything of the head of E-Branch’s work could ever be thought of as “mundane.” Now he could afford to apply himself more diligently to Nathan’s case, and the rest of the day would be spent hearing out the story of his life and adventures on Sunside.

  Because Nathan had decided to make Harry’s room his own, that was where the session took place. Chung, and Trask, too, had heard something of the story from Nathan himself, or read of it in the first debrief reports, but now they wanted a far more detailed account. Now, too, Nathan was much less reluctant as first he outlined, then filled in a history of the life he’d lived on Sunside and in Turgosheim’s dark and hag-ridden Starside. For in fact it was something he was getting used to: this constant retelling of his story. First to the brown and spindly Thyre, supposed “nomads” of Sunside’s furnace deserts; then to Maglore of the Wamphyri in Runemanse; and again to Lardis Lidesci during Nathan’s brief return and sojourn with his own people.

  But this time was different: Nathan had been given sketch pads, pens, and coloured felt-tips. And as he talked so he would pause every now and then to draw maps of the regions he named. So that now for the first time, Sunside/Starside was delineated and took on shape and substance here in an alien world.

  Zek Föener had been brought in on the session: Zek, Trask, Chung, Goodly, and Nathan, of course. Touching oh so gently upon their minds, he knew their excitement and was filled with his own mixed emotions by the knowledge that these people had actually known and worked with his father. Indeed, Zek Föener had been the last person to talk to Harry before he’d left—or been chased—into Starside. Nathan still had to uncover the full story of that, and was spurred by anticipation.

  But in fact there were other maps of the vampire world: Zek herself had long ago drawn several crude sketches, mainly as an aide-mémoire, which she had brought with her out of her Greek island home to give to Trask. But Zek couldn’t possibly have known the place as well as Nathan: its rivers, forests, and deserts, its lowland swamps and high mountain passes, the Great Red Waste beyond the eastern extremes of the barrier range; and beyond that, sombre and sinister Turgosheim itself. Nathan even mapped a star chart, showing Sunside/Starside’s principal blue-glittering ice-chip stars as viewed overhead from Settlement in the middle hours of the long Sunside night. As for Szgany townships: in Zek’s time there had been no towns. Just the Travellers themselves, ever on the run from the Old Wamphyri under Shaithis and the rest of the vampire Lords.

  So in the course of telling his story, Nathan drew his maps—which matched up, however loosely, with Zek’s—until, under the fascinated gaze of Trask and his colleagues, Sunside/Starside became real as never before. And its people began to live and breathe as Nathan’s life was recorded and his world revealed its secrets … or some of them.

  The story was much as he’d told it to Maglore that time in Turgosheim, when the mage and mentalist had taken him into his manse unchanged, unvampirized, a man among monsters. Except this time it included his stay in Runemanse, and his escape on the back of Karz Biteri, a man changed by Maglore’s metamorphism to a leatheryskinned flyer, but still a man for all that. He told it all: of his flight back into Sunside, how Karz had left him there in the foothills and flown off into the sun on his own, to end his misery; how Lardis Lidesci’s watchmen had seen Nathan land, recognized him, and took him to their leader, and how Lardis had reunited him with his mother, Nana Kiklu, and the sweetheart of his childhood dreams, Misha Zanesti.

  Finally, he told of a Lord of the Wamphyri and his lieutenant, who came in the first hours of darkness to snatch him from his rediscovered love and dispose of him in the white-glaring maw of the hell-lands Gate on Starside. Of the rest: well, they already knew that. His imprisonment in Perchorsk, his escape, their own part in the story.

  As for the things he didn’t tell or at best obscured:

  He told of his travels with the Thyre from west to east across the furnace deserts, but left out their intelligence, their telepathy, their subterranean society and civilization. For these were things he’d sworn never to reveal to any man. He told of Maglore and Runemanse but made no mention of the seer-Lord’s beautiful human thrall, Orlea. His time with Orlea was for him alone. He spoke of Settlement, but left out details of Sanctuary Rock; for the rock was the last refuge of the Szgany Lidesci. And with regard to his escape from Perchorsk: during an “interrogation” by Siggi Dam, he had “stolen” her key to his cell. It was as simple as that. But of the four who heard his story to the end, two at least knew that this last was a lie, albeit a white one.

  Just looking at Ben Trask, it was easy to forget—as Nathan had forgotten—his talent: the fact that you couldn’t lie to him, for Trask would know it at once. And as for Zek Föener: the fact that Nathan had conjured his own esoteric form of mind-smog, the numbers vortex, to obscure those several vague areas in his story, had been evidence enough of his deception. But as for the degree of that deception … Zek was as wise as she was beautiful; she knew that there are things we would all conceal, not necessarily out of shame but also trust. And so she, too, trusted.

  Then there were the maps. Nathan had been as accurate as knowledge and memory allowed with regard to the barrier mountains, the great pass, fertile margins, swamps, burning deserts, Starside, the hell-lands Gate, the fallen Wamphyri stacks and Karenstack itself, which was the name of the last aerie as he had always known it; but again he’d omitted the places of the Thyre, the location of Sanctuary Rock, and several major Traveller trails through the deep woods. If the time should ever come when men of E-Branch or in the Branch’s employ passed through into his world, and if they should ever fall into the hands of the Wamphyri, Nathan would not want Them to know these things.

  Finally he was done, by his reckoning, but in Trask’s eyes he hadn’t told enough. And despite that it was late in the day, Trask pressed him: “Nathan, about your escape from Perchorsk. And about … Siggi Dam.”

  “Yes?” And he couldn’t keep the colour from creeping into his pale face.

  But Trask found that he couldn’t ask his question, and so covered by saying, “We … think she’s in trouble.”

  Nathan had been looking tired, but came awake in a moment. “Siggi? In trouble?”

  Chung quickly explained, and Nathan answered:

  “This Michael Simmons, Jazz? He must be the hell-lander—I’m sorry, I mean the agent—that Lardis always talked about. Michael ‘Jazz’ Simmons.” He paused to look at Zek Föener, whose sad eyes were full of memories, until she glanced away. “Lardis was fond of Jazz. Why, he even named his son after him: Jason Lidesci! I w
ould have liked to meet him. And now you tell me you think that Siggi … ?”

  “It’s the same thing exactly,” Chung told him quietly. “We have Siggi’s clasp, but … she isn’t on the other end of it.”

  “One of two things,” Trask spoke up. “Siggi could be dead, or she’s gone through the Perchorsk Gate.”

  Nathan shook his head. “The Gate? Not after what I told her about the other side! What woman would willingly … go …” He let his question taper off unspoken.

  “We, er—” Trask stumbled over his words, then let them go in a rush “—we don’t think she went willingly, Nathan.”

  Their guest looked from face to face, frowning, his flush gradually receding as Trask’s meaning got through to him. “You mean Turkur Tzonov might have sent her through? As some kind of punishment?”

  Trask looked right into his eyes. “Possibly. It all depends on what he was punishing her for.”

  “Ben’s right,” Zek cut in. “Nathan, the Wamphyri aren’t the only ones who punish people. It was a different man who sent me through that time, but he was just as bad as Tzonov. I suppose I was lucky: the Lady Karen found me, and she seemed to like me in much the same way as this Maglore liked you.”

  At the mention of Maglore’s name, Nathan touched the golden sigil in his left ear. Just a touch as he brushed his hair back into place. David Chung noticed the instinctive reaction but it made no impression on him; Nathan hadn’t told them that Maglore had given him the earring. Not that he’d been hiding the fact, but to him it had seemed unimportant.

  But the earring was one thing and Siggi Dam’s clasp—and her inexplicable absence, which it had revealed—was another. Perhaps it was time Nathan told the whole truth about his brief relationship with Siggi. He made to do so, opened his mouth to speak … but Zek was there. Nathan looked at her and it was her turn to blush. Except she blushed for him, for she had her own suspicions. Being Zek, however, she offered Nathan an out: