The Last Aerie (41 page)

But in the light of the latter … perhaps Vladi and his people weren’t so innocent after all.

“You’re waiting for the Ferengi,” Nathan said, but very slowly and carefully. “I can only tell you this: that he—they—would come if only they could be sure of their reception.” It was true enough, he was sure. But to himself:
Except they believe this place is hell, and I shall never enlighten them!

“Ahhh!” The old man released Nathan’s arm and fell back in his seat against the caravan’s side. “But … do they think we have forgotten them?” For a moment his huge black eyes were empty, but then they brightened. “Surely the Ferengi would not send you here without that they could recall you? When and how will you go back—from where will you depart—to reassure the Lords of their glorious reception here?”

Before, Nathan had spoken a half-truth. Now he must lie outright, or at least shape his answer carefully, to disguise his real purpose. But since he’d now associated these supplicant Travellers with the Wamphyri, he shouldn’t find too much difficulty in lying. There are Gates between worlds,” he said. “Back in Perchorsk, there was one such, but I may not go back that way. Now tell me: where are the other strange places?”

“Do they wait for you there?” Vladi was excited again. He tapped rapidly upon the side of his veined nose, producing a hollow, drumming sound, and said, “I know them, these Gates and the strange places which contain them! Only tell me where you would go and we will take you there.”

“Ah, but my route may be circuitous.” (Nathan’s turn to be vague.) “There is information I must gather along the way, before I can go back. You must not question me.”

“Ahhh!” (Again the old chief’s sigh.) “Now we understand each other! But do you see why I was cautious? These things of which we speak, they are not ordinary things.”

Nathan relaxed a little. “So, the Travelling Folk, you and your people, have waited all these years without number for the Wamphyri—the Ferengi—to return and lead you to greatness. But what of the
Old
Ferengi, who brought you here?”

“Gone.” The other’s voice was a sad, empty sigh. “Turned to dust in their crumbling castles, or stiffened to stones in their unmarked tombs, or burned to ashes in the fires of men. They are no more.”

“Men hunted them down?” Perhaps these hell-lands deserved their name after all: hell for the Wamphyri, at least.

“I won’t speak of it!” Vladi shook his head. “The Szgany Ferengi remain true. When you return you must tell them this: that
we
remember them still, and will always be true to their memory. While I live, at least…”

His ancient voice tapered away, and Nathan could see that he was tired. But before he would let him sleep, or sleep himself: “You still haven’t told me how you knew.”

The old man reached up and tapped his nose again, winked, opened the palm of his hand to show its deep etched lines. “I read things in the lines, in flights of birds, in the mists of the earth. I see things, hear things, know things, which other men can never know! I have …
feelings!
Voices call to me out of the winds; the planets that travel through the skies direct my travels; the waters of my ears and brain are lured even as the moon lures the tides. And as the Ferengi’s true blood of life was in my father, so my father’s blood is in me. Ah, for the blood is the life!”

The old chief stood up, turned down the lamp, and in the glow from the stove stepped to his bed beside the door. Nathan went to his own bed, a narrow bench at the back of the caravan, and curled up there. So old Vladi was a seer, a fortune-teller: he read future times … but he wasn’t a mentalist. And Nathan knew that he could leave his mind unguarded, so that Zek could come to him.

Before sleeping, Vladi’s whisper reached out to Nathan in the dark: “About your route. When will you know which path to follow? In the autumn, because I sensed that something was happening in the old places, I instructed my people to lay in food for men and beasts alike, so that we might winter in the caves of the foothills. But now … it’s cold out here in the open, and we may not stay too long.”

“Maybe in the morning,” Nathan answered. “Come sunup, I’m sure I’ll know by then.”

“They will … speak with you, you think?”

“Someone will, yes.”

“Ahhh!”

And to prove it, long after the old chief began to snore, Nathan lay awake, waiting and listening for that someone …

It was so obvious that Ben Trask wondered why they hadn’t seen it from square one. But having wondered, he’d known the answer to that, too: that mindspies are not spies in the classic sense of the word. David Chung had been pretty close with his suggestion that they go in with a team of specialists. But it wasn’t until Trask got in touch with the Minister Responsible, and he in turn spoke to others on a similar level in the Corridors of Power, that everything came together. Chung’s sort of specialists wouldn’t be required. A different type of specialist was already in place.

For fifteen years now the West had been helping sort out Russia’s problems; ever since those three momentous days—the 19th, 20th, and 21st of August, 1991—when as the result of a bungled coup against the then President Mikhail Gorbachev, old-style Communism had died a well-earned death and signaled the giddy ascent of two hundred and fifty million oppressed people to freedom and a true democracy. But while the mailed fist and the apparatus of the Old State were mainly absent now, the helping hand of the West remained extended, and its influence was never more in evidence.

West of the Urals (only a little more than seventy miles from where David Chung had found Nathan and Zek Föener had contacted him), in the chill, sparsely populated foothills of the Timanskiy Kryazh near Izhma, American geosatellites had detected evidence of oil and gas fields which might well rival those at Ukhta in the south. Exploratory drilling had started two years ago; satellite predictions had been confirmed; the Anglo-American consortium would collect its very reasonable fee and pull out in two to three years’ time as per the contract, leaving other Western outfits to complete the pipeline. And from then on the Russians would pay a royalty or percentage in perpetuity.

Meanwhile the hard-hats were still there, working in situ and resupplied on a regular basis by jet-copter out of Stockholm via Helsinki. Why not from Moscow or Sverdlovsk, or from the long-established fields east of the Urals in Beresovo and Ust’balyk? But if the Soviets had retained that sort of technological capacity or know-how following their industrial, economic and ideological collapse, then the West would never have been allowed in in the first place.

Part of a Western aid program agreed in the early 1990s, the Izhma Projekt was only one of many hundreds of schemes in progress right across the old USSR, from the Black Sea to the Kamchatka Peninsula, and from Novaya Zemlya to Irkutsk. Now a small portion of that huge debt—in the shape of a wanderer from another world—would flow the other way, but with any luck the Russians would never know of the repayment.

Except:

“Maybe our luck just ran out,” Zek said, worriedly.

It was a little after 1:30
A.M
. GMT in London, and about 5:00
A.M.
local in the woods west of Kozhva, where her call had shocked Nathan from his sleep. She’d kept it short: told him to head due west for Izhma, and what to look for. Then, almost too hurriedly, she’d pulled out. Now Zek’s face was drawn, and not only from concentration.

Ben Trask’s voice echoed her concern when he asked, “What is it, Zek?”

“Unless I miss my guess,” she answered, “there were other minds out there scanning around, looking for Nathan. And one of them was female, and powerful!”

Most of the other Branch members were present, including Ian Goodly. He said, “That would be Siggi Dam. She’s their very best.”

It was hardly reassuring. Likewise Zek’s: “But there was more than just that one. And at least one of the others was a locator, I think. His probe wasn’t telepathic, anyway.”

The reason they had chosen this hour (the early hours of the morning in the Urals) was a simple matter of human frailty. Espers need sleep as much as other people, and the Opposition’s agents no less than anyone else. At five in the morning, people were at a low ebb. There was a flaw in that line of reasoning, of course: namely that Turkur Tzonov would understand the principle, too. But it had been a calculated risk.

Trask said: “Do you think they overheard you?”

“Not overheard as such … but they might have sensed my presence, just as I sensed theirs.”

Trask looked at a blow-up of the area superimposed on the large screen. “Terrain?” he queried of no one in particular.

“Fairly flat,” someone spoke up. “Hard ground and a few woodland trails. Some moorland and frozen marsh, but plenty of cover in bands of dense, boreal forest. Climate? Cold enough to freeze the … antlers off an iron elk.” (That last in deference to Zek, Millicent Cleary, and Anna Marie English.)

“But Nathan is hardy,” Zek said. “A Traveller in the company of his own kind.” She’d taken that from Nathan’s mind in a blurred, rushed sequence. “But I wonder: what on earth were they
doing
up there, those Gypsies?”

“Let’s just be thankful they were there,” said Trask. And: “Weather?”

“Frozen snow on the ground,” the same researcher replied. “And according to the Finn weather station at Kotka, a lot more of it on the way. But just soft, steady snow. Maybe we should also be thankful that it’s not going to be a blizzard! It’s due to start in two hours’ time and keep going for a day and a half. In any case, the supply plane won’t leave Stockholm until it’s over.”

“Oh, really?” Trask grunted. “Well in that case I’ve got some bad news for the pilot. The first hint of a break in the weather, and he’s airborne!” He glanced at Chung. “And David, I want you to get some sleep. Tomorrow morning you’re with me on the first flight to Stockholm. Then, obviously, I want you on that supply plane to Izhma. If our man is coming in out of the cold, I don’t want him getting lost.”

Trask looked at the other espers and smothered a yawn. “As for getting your heads down: with the exception of duties, the same goes for all of you.” He stretched his shoulders and eased his neck. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m dead on my feet. Time we called it a day.” And as they started to disperse: Thanks for being here, everyone.”

In a matter of minutes he and Zek were alone. “And especially you,” he told her. Thanks for being here.”

“Your coffee is dreadful,” she said. “But David booked me in at the hotel down below, and theirs is quite good. We could talk about Harry maybe, for a while … ?”

Trask looked at her. She looked as tired as he felt, and this was her first time in England. A very capable woman, Zek, but right now she must feel lonely as hell. So did he, come to think of it. But then, he had for most of his life. “Sure,” he nodded. “A nightcap would be great.”

They drank coffee in Zek’s hotel room (Trask had a small brandy with his), and talked awhile about everything and nothing, until Zek fell asleep fully clothed on her bed. Then Trask pulled a cover over her, put the light off and returned to his easy chair.

And when she gave him a shake it was morning …

VIII

Not Quite Hell,

And Sheer Hell!

In the uncomfortable, noisy confines of the jet-copter’s passenger cabin, Siggi Dam studiously avoided the thoughts of her closest travelling companion and reflected upon the events of the last two days …

Back in Perchorsk, Turkur Tzonov had been coldly furious for some thirty-odd hours now. In a way, this had suited Siggi well enough; she had been more than satisfied to steer clear of him. But even on the few occasions when they had come together accidentally, she’d not dared to look into his mind. For some reason (as a result of their showdown, perhaps, or something else which had happened since their trip out to Little Kozhva on the snowcat), Tzonov now demanded the same degree of mental privacy as Siggi herself. He would know it if she attempted to spy on him, and she didn’t want to give him any excuse to use similar tactics on her.

Siggi knew how stupid she’d been,
and
how incredibly fortunate. Stupid in what she had done, and fortunate in that she hadn’t been found out. But surely Tzonov’s failure to discover her treachery meant that he was stupid in his turn, or at the very least blind. The latter was true, she knew. His egomania blinded him, preventing him from seeing the truth. But if the time should ever come when he did see it…

In the evening following their return from Kozhva, esper assistance had arrived from Moscow in the shape of two lesser telepaths and a locator. The latter was a thin-faced, effeminate weasel of a man named Alexei Yefros; Siggi knew him through their work and disliked him intensely. Despite his suspect sexual proclivities (or perhaps because of them) Yefros was a misogynist with an especially ugly sadistic streak. Fully aware of Siggi’s telepathic range, still on those several previous occasions when they’d met he had not once attempted to camouflage thoughts which could only be likened to a cesspool. An admirer and close confidant of Turkur Tzonov, he was ruthless, ambitious, and extremely dangerous.