The Last Aerie (66 page)

Though he had resisted temptation until three-quarters of the way through sunup, eventually the lure of Wratha’s vampire body had sufficed to draw Nestor up into her manse even as the water from Gorvi’s wells was drawn by her siphoneers. And despairing of what he had seen as a human failing and weakness, still he’d gone to her.

But … it had not been the same. For Wratha it may have been, but not for Nestor. For he’d felt his dominance and had known that Wratha loved him, or that her feelings for him were a vampire’s equivalent of love. And the knowledge of
her
weakness in this respect had become his strength! Afterwards, when they had slept, then he’d dreamed again: of the numbers vortex, of course, and the One who hid in its heart, his hated brother, Nathan. But finally starting awake, Nestor had known that
this
dream had been different from any other.

For even when he was fully conscious, something of it had stayed with him, niggling there at the back of his changeling mind—that maddening, meaningless swirl of mutating numbers! Oh, it was faint in the sighing of the fading sunlight on the mountains, yes, but it emanated from Sunside and Lidesci territory nevertheless. And it was real. No longer a memory but a fact; absent for so long and only now returned, but actually returned …

Returned …

The thought of that—of his Great Enemy, returned—had made Nestor’s vampire flesh tingle. And Misha, his stolen love? Was she, too, out there even now, together with
him?
Were they lovers again, plotting against Nestor anew as once before they had plotted in an earlier existence?

And he had “known” that the answer to all of these inward-directed questions was yes!

And he had also known what he must do about it.

Back down in Suckscar, hearing Canker Canison singing to a pale, sunlit moon from some north-facing balcony in Mangemanse, Nestor had sought him out for his advice. And the oneiromantist dog-Lord had read his dream for him and looked into his future, but not without a warning: that the future is a devious thing.

“The danger lies not so much in reading what will be,” Canker had told him, “but in trying to alter it. The future is no less inviolable than the past. What
has
been is fixed that way forever. And what
will
be … will be!”

Still Nestor had wanted to know: “And for me?”

For answer, falling to all fours, Canker had tilted back his head and howled his misery! Then, springing upright again, he had clutched Nestor to him; and in the next moment his growl had been very deep and far too ominous as he said: “Perhaps it would be best if you took me with you, my friend.”

“Took you with me?”

“To Sunside in the twilight, where you’ll do your best to scratch this itchy old scar of yours. For it seems to me you’ll be staying there a while, whether you want to or not. And a day on Sunside is death, as well you know …” Then the dog-Lord had brightened. “Yes, that’s it! I’ll go with you! For that’s the way I saw it: that you were not alone.”

“I never intended to be,” Nestor had answered, shaking his head. “But I’ll not jeopardize you, for it isn’t your problem. No, I’ll take Zahar along. And that way this future you’ve seen won’t be changed. Except … I don’t yet know what you saw.”

“I saw trouble, fire, pain and torment,” Canker answered. “I saw brothers—twins and yet not twins—one of them hurt, damaged, perhaps permanently, and theother sent far, far away. Only don’t ask me which brother was which. And as for changing the future: don’t trouble yourself. For as I told you, it may not be changed. Nor will it be denied.”

And Canker had stood there whining, perhaps even crying in his way, as Nestor returned thoughtfully to Suckscar …

Then, almost too soon, it had been the twilight before sundown, and the grey peaks of the barrier mountains had beckoned Nestor as never before. He had felt lured by them where they turned to blue ash under a hurtling moon and ice-chip stars; lured by the peaks … and by the numbers vortex both! For instead of fading as of old, now the vortex had waxed in Nestor’s head to a living power, whirling like a dust-devil in his enhanced Wamphyri mind, so that he had been doubly sure that his Great Enemy was back.

And before the rest of the aerie was fully awake, Nestor and Zahar had saddled manta-winged mounts and flown to Sunside; so that by the time Canker had changed his mind about changing the future and rushed up from Mangemanse to restrain Nestor—and before Wratha had yawned three times, frowned and sent out a vampire probe to seek him out and discover the reason for his absence from her bed—it was already too late.

Resting a while in the barrier mountains, Nestor and Zahar had gazed down on Sunside. And by virtue of the numbers vortex, Nestor had known that his Great Enemy was down there even now. Except this time he could find him, by
following
that trail of alien numbers which rushed faster and faster, ever more maddeningly through his head. At long last he would track the maelstrom to its source and destroy it—destroy
him
—forever!

And Misha, if she was with him? She would be stolen away into Starside, to be Nestor’s thrall in Suck-scar. All of which had been explained to Zahar, so that Nestor need only caution him:

“If aught befalls me, my enemy must not go free. No, for I can’t bear the thought of that! If I’m destined for hell, I want to know that he got there before me, or that he’s following close behind. These are my instructions:

“He is mine and you shall take the girl. If all goes well we head home at once. But if I come to grief my order is this: drop the girl and take him! Do you understand?”

Zahar had understood, and also Nestor’s next instruction: that his enemy was to be tossed alive into the hell-lands Gate on Starside!

Then they had mounted up, and Nestor had told Zahar: “Now follow close behind and I’ll take you to them.” And he had. Up until which time, all had gone as planned. But from then on …

All had gone astray.

Oddly enough, Nestor remembered very little of it, other than that he’d followed the numbers vortex to its source, and discovered his prey heading west for Sanctuary Rock; the two of them together, of course. After that it should have been the very simplest thing: a Lord of the Wamphyri and his lieutenant, both of them mounted upon flyers, against a pair of Szgany lovers wandering in the twilight like lost waifs?

He had seen them from on high and could not fail to note the travois which they hauled behind them, weighted with their few worldly goods. And he’d known what that travois signified: that they were recently wed, and were even now returning from their nuptials. Well, what odds? Nathan had had Misha before, Nestor was sure, and it made little or no difference now. But it infuriated him nevertheless. And worse, it distracted him.

He saw man and mate, but failed to see the
other
who was there, their possible salvation. That other who carried a shotgun, which Nestor remembered as being “a weapon out of another world”.

Then, as the hunters descended through a thin mist under vibrating, membranous manta wings arched into air traps, the pair on the ground had seen them! Leaving the travois behind, they’d split up and scrambled in opposite directions. Acting on Nestor’s instructions, Zahar had gone after the girl while his master pursued Nathan. But in the milky swirl of a deepening mist, still Nestor had failed to appreciate the presence of a third Traveller. Until—

—Twin flashes of light, matched by a double-barrelled blast of sound! By which time it had been too late. Nestor’s flyer was hit in the face; indeed half of its face had been blown away, and the wonder was that the beast had managed to stay aloft. But that hadn’t been the end of it. There’d been more gunfire, this time directed at Nestor himself.

The agony of those tiny, poisonous silver pellets chewing deep into his metamorphic flesh! Almost unseated, somehow Nestor had managed to hang on. And reeling sightless in the saddle, his face a raw red mess and consciousness slipping as he fought to command his crippled flyer up, away, and back to Starside, again he’d remembered Glina’s curse and Canker’s warning.

Following which he remembered very little:

A
long low glide, and his inability to impress himself on his mount’s mind. The gradually declining beat of the flyer’s manta wings; its agonized mewling; the way it tilted first to the left, then to the right, its balance upset by the silver shot in its tiny brain. Unable to find the strength to climb, disorientated, dying, the beast had headed out over the Sunside forest… and crashed there.

The crash! The whiplash as he was hurled from the
flyer’s back. His body somersaulting, smashing against the bole of a great tree, falling through branches which snapped under his weight, down to the forest’s floor. And the darkness …

Then:

Ministering hands? Kindness? Ointments and bandages, to assist in the healing process which Nestor’s leech had already commenced. And brief bouts of consciousness. And the occasional wishful thought that perhaps Wratha had found him crashed and brought him back to the last aerie. But she hadn’t.

No, for the lepers had found him.”

His hag-ridden, blundering, half-blind escape from their colony in the predawn light, and the knowledge etched in acid on his vampire mind that he had been in their hands, in their care, and breathing their air for the greater part of a long Sunside night!

“Lepers.”

“Leprosy.”

The Great Bane of the Wamphyri!

Nestor snapped out of it… and found himself stripped naked, scrubbing himself in the river, scrubbing the feel, the smell, the taint and even the knowledge of leprosy out his body, his brain, his very existence. Except the knowledge was there forever, and he knew it. What had been could not be altered.

Shivering, he went to the riverbank and dressed himself in his soiled clothes, and thought:
It is contagious, but not inevitable. Also, I’m aware of the danger, and so is my leech.

Within him, he knew that his parasite was working to discover and destroy anything of leprosy—anything alien at all—which it might find in his body and blood. But he knew, too, that it had already tasked itself to produce an antidote to the poison of the silver shot; also, that it worked hard to replace the tissues damaged by the shotgun blast and his crash both. In short, he knew that his leech was overburdened.

But he
must
put it out of his mind. A man might live with lepers for years and remain free of the taint, and he had been with them for one night only.
(What, with his torn
flesh, open and inviting of contagion? And them feeding him, touching him, breathing on him?)

Damn … it… to … hell!

Nestor gritted his teeth, shook his head furiously, gazed north through bloodshot, blood-red eyes and glimpsed the first stars of night glittering over the barrier mountains. And high over the last aerie, the Northstar like some frozen blue jewel, calling to him as once before it had called.

But the ice-chip stars were blurred, twin-imaged, and his damaged eyes filled with tears, of pain and frustration, as he tried in vain to fix those celestial gems in their orbits. All to no avail. It was useless; the healing could not be hastened but must take its own time; he must rely on his darker vampire senses to see him through the woods and across the mountains.

Well, and that was something which Nestor had done before, too, with nothing to rely upon but the damaged mind and memory of a dull Szgany youth, and when all he had known was what he wanted to be. And now that he was? It should be easy.

So he set off north, and gradually his aches and pains settled to a dull background throbbing, and his at first cautious tread took on pace, rhythm and the easy flow of the vampire to eat up the miles.

As before, the Northstar was his pharos; it guided him along the shortest route, though naturally he followed trails old and new where they were available, just so long as they pointed in roughly the right direction. And in the deepening night Nestor was in no great hurry, for the night was his friend and he was Wamphyri and inexhaustible …

… And hungry.

In a little while he knew his whereabouts: the woods some three miles south and one east of Settlement. Upon a time he’d played here as a child, and hunted here as a youth. The memory came and went, insubstantial as a tendril of ground mist, evaporating in his mind. His childhood and youth were forgotten in a moment, but instinctively, still he knew where he was. Four miles and he’d be into the foothills. And all the long Sunside night spread before him, through which he’d climb the barrier mountains to safety long before the sun was up.

Except he knew now that Wamphyri “inexhaustibility” was a fable; his travails had taken it out of him; despite his long sleep he
was
beginning to tire … and he was still hungry.

In a hundred years’ time—ah, but it would have been so easy! To find a point of elevation, spread his stretchy Wamphyri flesh into an airfoil, fly and glide home to Starside. But Lord though he was, in that respect Nestor was still immature. He had progressed, yes, but not yet to that point. Not yet to the extent of that incredible skill or art. Indeed, as of yet he’d not seen a one of the Lords of Wrathstack in actual, physical, unassisted flight, though Canker had sworn that they all could do it, if or when necessary.

But flight! Just think of it: to launch oneself and drift aloft on the night winds! Nestor inclined his head and glanced longingly at the star-shot sky—

And saw manta shapes gliding up there!

At first his thoughts were chaotic:

What, a search-party? Had Zahar or Wratha organized lieutenants and thralls to come across the mountains and look for him? Well, Wratha perhaps … but Zahar? It seemed unlikely. Despite that Nestor had sworn he’d be back, his man Zahar must see this as his chance for ascendancy. Just how he would manage it was hard to say: Zahar had no egg and he wasn’t long a vampire himself. But it was a chance, certainly.