The Last Aerie (11 page)

“Wrathspire!” cried Wran. “And why not? For it is indeed the very spire of the stack, and Wratha’s the Lady who dwells here. Her apartments are the loftiest and—dare I say it?—the lordliest. So where better to accept the grudging applause of my peers? And see, the Mistress herself awaits us …”

Riding a gusting wind, Wran’s flyer rounded a jagged natural buttress and settled towards a cavernous landing bay. The others were close behind: Spiro, then Gorvi jumping the queue, and finally Nestor. He was busy now, anxiously commanding his flyer:
Follow the others; stay in line; easy now … easy!
But not so busy he could fail to notice the Lady Wratha, where she leaned against the carved bone balcony of an observation port above and to one side of the bay.

Even a glimpse was riveting, magnetic, so that Nestor’s eyes felt compelled to linger upon her. That couldn’t be, however, for Gorvi’s flyer was already down and shuffling to one side, making room for Nestor’s beast. Nestor’s creature knew what it was about; balancing. on the wind, it waited its turn. Its wings were arched into huge traps, thrusters extended forward to take the shock of landing. Briefly, Nestor experienced a moment of vertigo: the sheer height was appalling! He didn’t look down but clung to reins and saddle, and wisely refrained from issuing any further commands.

Finally Gorvi’s beast cleared the landing area, and Nestor’s flyer inched forward and settled to the grainy rock. As thralls came forward to take the reins and lead the creature aside, Nestor slid gratefully to the ground. Except it wasn’t the ground but the mouth of a cavern two thousand eight hundred feet high above the boulder plains! And even safe on the floor of the vast landing bay, still Nestor staggered.

Wran came from somewhere, took his arm, and whispered: “Now is not the time to show weakness. Let me do the talking and all will go well.” Nestor was only too pleased to submit to this scheme; he was dizzy, awed, and had no words.

At the back of the landing bay, stone staircases with balustrades of bone climbed the rock wall to tunnels and balconies which in turn led to higher levels of honeycombed rock. Descending to the lower levels, other gangways passed through steep shafts or cartilage stairwells. But on high, looking down from one of the balconies, there stood Wratha. And lured by her presence, finally Nestor’s eyes focused upon her. And she was a sight for sore eyes.

For her part, Wratha merely glanced at him, however speculatively, before speaking to Wran. “The Lord Kill-glance, back from Sunside, I see, and all in one piece!” She raised an inquiring eyebrow. “The Suck?”

“Need you ask?” Wran returned, smiling like a skull. “Oh, I know your preferences, Wratha, but alas it isn’t so. By now Vasagi’s all rendered down, a stain on the hill where I pegged him out to await the rising sun. And indeed the sun was hot on our heels as we left.”

“We?” Again her eyes flickered over Nestor, and returned to Wran.

Wran glanced at Nestor. “His is a story I can tell at my reception.”

Wratha nodded. “Well, I prepared a feast for one of you, whoever was the victor. So now will you join me, in my apartments on high?”

The others, Gorvi and Spiro, were already on their way up a bone-embellished causeway. Wran and Nestor would follow them at once, but there came an interruption. From below, out of one of the sunken stairwells, the huge-shouldered figure of a man appeared, clad in the polished leather garb of a lieutenant. “My Lady!” he called up to Wratha. “I beg pardon for the intrusion, but … I believe it is my right?” His eyes under shaggy black brows were feral, scarlet in their cores. A true disciple of vampirism.

Wratha scowled down on him. “Vasagi’s man?”

“Indeed,” he replied. “I am Gore Sucksthrall: first out of Sunside … first-made of Vasagi in Suckscar … now Keeper of the Vats. It seems my master’s manse goes wanting a leader. If I am worthy of that honour, I would ascend.”

While Wratha and Gore exchanged words, the Lords on the stairs and in the landing bay paused to listen. As Gore finished, Gorvi the Guile (devious as his name implied), clapped his hands briefly and cried, “Well said!” For he could smell trouble a mile away, and invariably encouraged it.

But Wran grasped Nestor’s arm tightly and muttered, “Damn it to hell! A complication …”

And Wratha nodded and called down: “Well then, Gore Sucksthrall, maybe you’d better come up.” And sweeping her eyes over the others: “But gentlemen, no gauntlets if you please. It is a rule I’m obliged to enforce. Certain of my creatures are easily disturbed … and volatile to say the least.” It was meant as a warning, not a threat; Wratha kept her small, personal warriors chained when she had visitors. But as she slipped away, her deceptively sweet laughter came floating down to them. And to a man they knew who was mistress here in the aerie’s heights.

Through all of this, Nestor didn’t take his eyes off her until the moment she drifted out of sight through an archway behind the balcony. Then he blinked, looked at Wran, and said, “Wratha?” But it seemed as if her afterimage still burned on his retinas, and he could still see her there:

She was
tall, even as tall (or as small, in company such as this) as Nestor himself, with hair black as night in plaits that fell to her shoulders. Around her neck, she wore a golden torque or harness, with ropes of black bat fur depending vertically to form a smoky curtain. Milky limbs gleamed as if oiled through the black stripes of fur, but her naked arms projected; likewise the points of her tilted breasts, a Jong pale oval of thigh, and a delicate knee.

The image was fading now, but Nestor continued to examine what remained of it
. Wratha’s eyes had been least in evidence. Protected by a scarp
of figured bone upon her brow, their fire had been subdued by the ornamentation of blue-glittering crystals fixed to her temples, and matching earrings in the furred lobes of her fleshy ears. But apart from the shell-like whorls of those Wamphyri ears, and the somewhat flattened aspect of a nose whose convolutions had not seemed too exaggerated—and the scarlet flicker of her split, vampire’s tongue, of course—apart from those things, she might well have been Szgany.

In short, she had looked more woman than a Lady of the Wamphyri as Nestor might have expected one to be …
looked
it, at least.

“Wratha the Risen, aye,” Wran answered sourly, starting up the stone stairs. But after two paces he paused, looked back at Nestor and said, “What, does she interest you then? Stricken, are you? What, you?” He slapped his thigh and laughed,
“Hah!”
—and was sober again in a moment. “Better watch your step, Nestor. She fancies young men out of Sunside.”

Nestor, following behind, inquired: “Something to fear?”

“Not really,” the other grunted, sweeping up the stairs. “Not unless you make her angry. It’s not a good idea, to make the Lady Wratha angry.”

And behind them both, Gore Sucksthrall followed in surly mood, saying nothing at all…

They climbed through three expansive levels to Wrathspire’s Great Hall, where the Lady’s thralls had prepared a table for five. The table was enormous: five feet wide and extending all of forty-five feet down the hall from Wratha’s bone-throne, it could easily have accommodated three dozen people. At its head, upon a shallow platform and so slightly elevated, there stood Wratha’s great chair, in which sat the Lady herself. The bone-throne was a monstrous, marvelous thing—the skeletal lower jaw of some vast, long-dead creature—which she had acquired along with the furniture and all other appurtenances of Wrathspire the day she’d arrived in this abandoned, derelict place out of Turgosheim. The stack had been derelict then, at least. But now, due chiefly to Wratha’s industry, it had returned to loathsome life.

Already seated when her thralls ushered her guests into the Great Hall, Wratha came briefly to her feet and made apology of a sort:

“I had prepared for five; since it appears we’re now six, my girls are setting an extra place—or perhaps two, for Canker may yet honour his obligations. Wran Killglance: as victor, you will take the chair directly opposite mine, at the guest’s ‘head’ of table. You others … may sit where you will.”

Female thralls scurried, finished setting places, then fled out of sight. Wran seated himself opposite Wratha at the end of the table as she had suggested, and indicated a seat to Nestor some three chairs away on his left. Nestor took the indicated chair and sat there wondering what to do with himself. The chair was built for a man, or more properly a Lord of the Wamphyri. Seated in it, he felt like a mere boy. In time his vampire leech, developed from Vasagi’s egg, would attend to that: his metamorphic flesh would stretch and fill out. But for now … well at least he could try thinking like a Lord.

Spiro Killglance sat on Nestor’s left, with some five or six chairs separating them. Opposite Spiro, Gore Sucksthrall took his place, and Gorvi the Guile edged into a chair across from Nestor. On the table in front of Wratha’s guests, wooden platters, hollowed into shallow bowls, contained barbed stabbing spikes of soft gold. There were leather drinking jacks, and several large jugs of fired pottery patterned in the fashion of Sunside’s Szgany, containing sweet water or weak wine for the jacks. Wratha knew better than to serve strong drink. Her own plate and cup were of gold; she likewise knew how to make her guests feel small and even unworthy.

The fare was scarcely extravagant: lightly braised hearts, kidneys, and livers of shads, and four suckling wolves roasted on spits and basted in a sauce of their mother’s milk, urine, and blood. Individual or special requirements were not catered for; the food was simply an expression of Wratha’s hospitality; the Wamphyri normally “refuelled” themselves in the first hours after sundown, according to personal needs, habits, and tastes. That which at this hour would be breakfast to a Traveller, was therefore a mere novelty to them.

Nestor, on the other hand, was hungry. He had last eaten well before sundown, in the cabin of Brad Berea in the forest. In the time-scale of a parallel world beyond the Starside Gate (which Szgany and Wamphyri alike called the hell-lands, because since time immemorial no one had ever returned from them), that was the equivalent of four days. There was no way Nestor could know that, but he did know that since sundown he’d survived on a few nuts, and a piece of wild fruit in the woods; scarcely sufficient to keep body and soul together. Well, too late now to worry about his soul, but his body must go on at least.

Also, while his memory was still largely impaired prior to his time spent with the Bereas, his mind itself was completely healed and receptive—
made
receptive by his parasite egg, which demanded that he be strong and cunning—so that he was constantly learning. The ability, indeed the
need
to learn anew had been sparked within him. And with no background as such, an empty past, every smallest item of new information was soaking into his brain like rain into desiccated earth. While deep in his subconscious, thirsty seeds of ambition, knowledge, even memory—however misshapen or mutated from their source material—were waiting to spring to life. But he could not become wise, strong, Wamphyri, in a depleted body. And so he ate.

He ate with gusto, stabbing a slice of shad liver, which was in any case a Szgany delicacy, and doing it justice as he held it in his hand and tore at it with strong teeth. And such was his hunger that the meat never even touched his platter! Another slice followed, and a steaming kidney, whole, which he maneuvered onto his plate without losing but a splash of gravy. Then a jack of wine, and tender flesh from a thigh of suckling wolf. The Szgany didn’t eat wolf, but Nestor didn’t know what the meat was. Whatever, he would have eaten it! It was strong and imparted strength. And while he ate, he studied his surroundings.

The Great Hall was all of a hundred and fifty feet long by sixty feet wide. It ran parallel with the south-facing wall of the stack, where windows had been cut through the solid rock to the chasm of open air that spanned the boulder plains all the way to the barrier mountains. In places, these deep embrasures in the wall of the spire were almost tunnels; in others, where the rock was thinner, they formed archways out onto high balconies of grafted bone, whose baffles of hide and cartilage were so constructed as to turn aside and deaden the buffeting of the wind. Framed in one such opening, Nestor observed the fluttering of a banner, which periodically displayed Wratha’s sigil: a kneeling man in silhouette, with slumped shoulders and bowed head …

Each window was fitted with black bat-fur drapes which presently stood open, giving access to the pale dawn light. Many hours still to go before the sun shone on Wrathspire, by which time the curtains would be drawn. But from where Nestor sat, if he turned his head a little, he could see the morning mists of Sunside gathering in the gaunt grey peaks and passes, forming clouds and drifting free. The sight was nothing new to him, except … in previous times, he’d seen it from the other side. Perhaps at that—at these distant echoes and thoughts out of the past, of Sunside and what he had been there—Nestor felt something of poignancy for a life gone and forgotten forever, but all such emotions were rapidly fading now.

In two of the “corners” of the mainly irregular hall, curtained areas hid Wratha’s smaller, personal warriors from view. But in a third she had deliberately left the drapes open. At the sight of the creature shackled there, her guests were reminded yet again of Wratha’s sovereignty in these dizzy aerial levels. Twice the size of a man and nine times heavier, with overlapping, inch-thick scales of blue-grey, chitin armour, the creature was mainly claws, jaws, and teeth. Going on all fours like a bear (despite that it once was a man, or
men
), it would occasionally rear upright, grunt and mutter questioningly, and shake its chains curiously—but purely out of habit.

During the daylight hours proper, when the sun was high and Wratha had taken to her bed, two of these beasts would be stationed in the stairwells near the launching bays, while the third would roam through Wrathspire top to bottom, guarding mainly against aerial incursions, but also patrolling Wratha’s chambers. The Lady’s lieutenants and thralls, some of whom had duties in these unsociable hours, had her scent upon them, of course, and so were safe. But as for any stranger …