The Last Aerie (49 page)

“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 chief’s 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 remembered 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 1 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 1 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. 1 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 traveling, 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 1 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 web-like 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!

We were blinded, if only for a moment, or seconds at most. We staggered and stumbled as the earth trembled, and some of us even fell to the ground to hug it. Ah, but they were the lucky ones! They were shielded from what came next. For even as the clouds burned red and began their panic flight, so a hot wind from hell blew through the pass from Starside. And there was sulphur and stench and burning in it, and most likely poison, too. No, I am certain—there was poison!

I
smelled it, breathed it in, felt it burning on my face. A wind out of Starside … but warm? I didn’t know what to make of it. It was the breath of hell, or the exhaust of the weapons of hell at least; or possibly, but I doubt it, the awful stench of a vampire wizard’s experiment, which had rebounded and destroyed them all at a stroke …
And as if he were out of breath (this man who had not breathed in all of thirteen years), Agon Mitrea at last fell silent…

Until in a little while Nestor told him: “Not all of the Wamphyri were destroyed. The Old Wamphyri, aye, but not those who inhabit the last aerie now. For far in the east, beyond a great red desert wasteland, the lands have been ruled by vampire Lords from time immemorial until the present day. Their place is called Turgosheim, which is the source of —”

—Of this most recent … infestation!
Agon finished it for him, his deadspeak voice filled with loathing.

Now it was Nestor’s turn to fall silent a moment, and to tilt his head slowly on one side. And how his eyes burned red in the darkness of the cave as he gazed down on the corpse of the old chief and repeated his final word out loud: “Infestation? What, like lice, do you mean? You are very … frank, Agon Mitrea, son of Lexandru.”

I could not hide my feelings about you and your like even if I tried
, the other answered, bitterly now.
No, not even if you make me pay for it!

“No need for payment,” Nestor told him. “Not yet…”

Then what else do you want from me?

“Tell me about this poison,” Nestor said. “For obviously you believe that is what you died of just three years later.”

There were rumours, theories, wild guesses about it.
Agon Mitrea gave a careless deadspeak shrug. He was sure the Great Majority would want nothing more to do with him now, not after he had spoken to a necromancer. And exiled to eternal darkness, denied the comradeship of the teeming dead, what good would this monotonous non-existence of his be to him then?
The Szgany are not without their so-called “wise men”, seers and thinkers,
he finally continued.
Some had it that the Old Wamphyri, led by Shaitan the Unborn himself, had been wizards who called up one too many demons out of the earth. They said that the poisonous mushroom cloud must have been one such demon. But as I’ve told you already, I doubt it. Be that as it may, its poison spread like wildfire on Starside. The stony ground there was said to shine at night, and whatever was in that shine, it killed off the cavern trogs in their hundreds and produced as many grotesque mutations among them!

“A fox fire?” Nestor was curious now, for he’d seen just such a plume of shining earth on Starside, like a finger five miles long, pointing north from the glaring hell-lands Gate. Also, there were traces of that same luminescence in the foothills and along the base of the mountains to the west, where the trogs dwelled in their dank caverns.

Like a
fox fire, yes. But fox fire is the glow of rottenness, and this was the glow of death!

“Explain.”

There’s nothing much to explain.
Again the old chief’s shrug.
Those men with me in the mouth of the pass: by sundown their hair was falling out; their gums and fingernails bled; their faces turned white where they’d gazed into the hot wind through the pass. And none of them fathered children from that day to this. Several died, of which … I was one. As for the ones who stumbled and fell down in the heather or behind boulders when the earth shook—yes, and mercifully my sons were among them—they suffered very little. Only a sickness, a malaise, which wore off in time.

“Enough!” Canker barked from behind Nestor. “I can’t make head or tail of it. Oh, I believe that you speak to him and he answers you, but it makes no sense to me for I hear only you. Therefore I waste my time here. And I fancy you waste yours, too. Now, are you coming—or do I go on alone, and see you later back in Wrath-stack?”

Nestor looked at Canker, then at the lich of Agon Mitrea. He had no more questions for the old chief, and like the dog-Lord he had had enough of corpses for one night. He turned to follow Canker where already he was loping towards the exit… then paused and slowly turned back. And:
But I have not said my farewells.
He used his deadspeak.

Say nothing, but simply go!
Agon shuddered his relief.

Except—

—At the start of their question and answer session, the old chief had not been very forthcoming. That had been a mistake on his part, from which the teeming dead might learn something. And later, Agon had been … frank. Indeed he had been too frank. Despite Nestor’s recognition of the fact that the louse and the vampire are two of a kind, which is to say bloodsuckers, still he’d not cared for the old man’s comparison. So that now Nestor thought to himself:
this Agon really should be taught a lesson.

And drawing back his lips from his teeth in a snarl, and grasping the corpse’s elbow and upper arm, suddenly and without warning he gave a twist and a wrench, and tore the limb free of its rotting shoulder! Shreds of tattered black flesh hung down from the gaping socket and fat white graveworms wriggled where the dismembered arm flopped to the dusty floor. Then, as Agon’s mind yawned open like an incorporeal mouth to issue a scream of denial, so Nestor coughed up phlegm and spat it into his empty eye-sockets, and bayed with laughter as the old chief recoiled from it without moving the merest fraction of an inch.

Following which, smiling in his morbid fashion, Nestor set out after Canker. And as behind him the violated corpse issued peal after peal of silent, resounding shrieks—and the teeming dead in their urns and on their ledges cried out for pity—finally Nestor Lichloathe knew that he had earned his name in full.

And he was glad …

III