The Last Aerie (18 page)

It had not been love (not on his part) but lust. Perhaps not even that, but need. For he was a young man, and his body an engine geared to life. But that was then and this was now, when his needs were the amplified needs of the Wamphyri! What had been a pulse, a throb, a fire in his blood … was now an agony, a driving force, the cap of a volcano straining against the pent pressures of the magma core. And these girls were not homely but very lovely. They were vampires with vampire stuff in them, which had changed and enhanced them, even as it now enhanced Nestor’s emotions—specifically, his lust.

He sucked the girl’s nipple into his mouth, felt it grow hard, and grew hard himself between her thighs. Still sleeping, she snatched air in a sharp gasp, parted her legs, reached down and guided him in. Her wet core was like an automatic thing, a creature in its own right; its slippery sheath sucked at Nestor like a pouting mouth, so that he need hardly move at all! Reaching down, he pushed at the second girl’s hip until her leg slid off his thigh, then parted her bush and sought her bud with his fingers. Her reaction was instinctive, immediate. Gasping, she opened herself, reared against him, and sucked at his hand. It was drawn in to the wrist, where the neck of her vulva tightened on him like a soft leather sleeve.

Nestor wanted to feel the girl he was in, to explore and know all of her. He freed his hand from the furry trap behind him and heard the girl moan. She was waking up. He rolled onto the one he faced and took the initiative, driving deeply into her flesh as if to split her. She, too, was coming awake. The free girl was kissing his ear, the tips of her divided tongue licking and wriggling inside it, while her hand moved between his legs, rolling his balls in her palm.

His tongue was drawn down a convulsing throat. Resilient breasts flattened under his chest and he squeezed their bulge with his upper arms. The second girl was now kneeling between his legs, rubbing Nestor’s back with her breasts; her hands were under him and his partner, toying and teasing around the area of their sexual organs, manipulating both of them. Nestor moaned, wanting it to last, but it couldn’t. And when he came it was as if fire jetted from him, which also activated an orgasm in his frantically writhing partner. And:

“Mine now!” sighed the second girl, catching his hips and rolling him over. And still jerking, trickling semen, drowning in the sweet, singing agony of his flesh, Nestor felt her sucking mouth come down on him, eager for the last drop. Then:

“Fuck me!
Me
now!” she gurgled, sliding her small, pointed breasts up his chest in a trail of semen from her mouth, lowering her moistly shuddering flesh onto his shaft, and shuffling her tight round backside in an ecstasy of erotic motion until he had slithered in …

So it continued, and at least one of Nestor’s needs was satisfied, but neither the first nor the last of them.
A
need, then, and the needs of his vampire women, too. A rare day when they’d enjoyed Vasagi’s so-called “lovemaking”—feeling his organ expanding into their bodies to fill them, while his hollow siphon proboscis of needle-tipped chitin slid into breast, neck, cheek or root of tongue, to draw off blood and heighten his unthinkable pleasure—but they had enjoyed Nestor’s. So had Nestor, despite that only one need had been served … so far.

And when finally exhausted all three lay still,
still
his hunger was there, like a raw red wound inside him. Some of the metamorphic ache of flesh and bones hadsubsided, yes, or been dulled by excess; but as Nestor drifted into a second, deeper sleep, his nameless hunger remained …

… And was absent when he woke up.

Replete, he started awake! Grig’s hand was on his shoulder. And Grig’s mouth was a dark hole in his grey face, open as if a hinge had snapped in his jaw!

“What?” said Nestor. And then he saw what.

His women had not woken up. The one with the small, firm breasts lay there, breathing but feebly, ashen and cold, completely exposed where Grig had laid back the bedcovers. But the other was motionless, corpse-like, without a breath of life in her body.

And: “What?” Nestor said again, trying to understand.

“That one, Maria, will live, Lord,” Grig told him, pointing at the ashen one. “But the other, Carmen … she must sleep for some time.”

“Sleep?”

“Undeath,” said Grig. “In your sleep, you drained her. You took from her and you gave to her. She was a vampire thrall but mainly human. When she wakes up she will still be a vampire but mainly
in
human. Essence of your leech is in her. Eventually, if she is allowed to continue she will be Wamphyri!”

Nestor tried hard to grasp the principle. But the intricacies of vampirism were such that even with his own vampire’s instinct, still he was confused. He stood up, took the undead girl’s hand in his, let it flop loosely, lifelessly back among the furs. “On Sunside,” he said, speaking slowly and mainly to himself, “when the Wamphyri make their thralls, they are
only
thralls! So what’s so different here?” He looked at Grig accusingly. “And why do you understand when I do not?”

“I have been here some time, Lord,” Grig answered, “and I have learned. There were things which Vasagi did, and things which he did not do. He bred vampires—
not
Wamphyri! On Sunside, in the hunt, the Lords take women for their pleasure and the comforts they give; also for their blood, of course.
Some
of their blood. They also take men, for thralls, lieutenants, and for the provisioning of the manse. The difference is this: they don’t kill them. They take a little, give something back. The fever gets into their Szgany victims, who are then brought back here or make their own way. Or they are discovered by the Travellers and put to death on Sun-side. Except …” He searched for words, and Nestor grew impatient.

“Yes, except?”

“Except, if a man or woman is drained—if so much blood is taken that he or she “dies”—then the vampire, your vampire, compensates, gives more of itself. The more you take, the more you give. And after the sleep of undeath, the transition is that much faster.”

Nestor looked at the “dead” girl again, but with a different expression on his face. “She could be … Wamphyri?” He glanced at Grig and held up a hand to still his tongue. “Yes, I know:
if
she is allowed to continue …” He looked at the other woman. “But this one, Maria … is only a thrall.”

“But a
weak
thrall, Lord,” Grig nodded. “For your hunger was very great. The furs are soaked red where your thirst ran over! She needs food, soup, meat. In order to serve you again, she must first recover.”

Suddenly Nestor felt bloated. Suddenly he was aware of his red hands, face, even his eyes. He was still a novice and had taken too much. While his system was changing, it had not yet had time to adjust or prepare itself for such a gorging. His ascendant leech had been too eager!

He reeled beside the bed, clutching the high stone headboard for support. And indicating Carmen, he choked out: “Deal with that. The provisioning.” But as Grig lifted her up light as a leaf: “No, wait! Lie her in state somewhere, until I can think. Then return and care for this one, this Maria. But for the moment —” Nestor’s gorge was beginning to heave, “—
leave me alone!”

And as Grig carried Carmen from the room, Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri groped his way blindly to the curtained niche in the corner, and almost but not quite made it…

Nestor and Grig went down into Mangemanse. At least, Grig
would
have accompanied his master, if he had been allowed. But where a deep dark stairwell descended in a steep, narrow spiral into black bowels of rock, and a recess in the wall facing the shaft housed a second bat-thing guardian, there Nestor took his lieutenant’s arm to bring him to a halt. And he pointed out a sigil carved in a flagstone at the head of the steps. It was Canker’s mark: a sickle moon.

Then, as if at some signal, though none had been given, a growl echoed up from below and was followed by a single, ululating howl, which slowly died away. The guardian showed alarm, flowed forward in its niche and hissed, but Nestor cautioned it:
Be quiet, all is well.

And: “Lord?” Grig looked at him uncertainly, and waited.

“Canker and I have an agreement,” Nestor told him. “When in future we visit, we go alone, of our own free will. It was not my intention that you would accompany me further than this point, but that you’d wait here until I return. Then you shall show me Suckscar, taking over where Zahar left off. For there remains a great deal to be seen, and I want to know all. Meanwhile, move about and make yourself useful by all means, but stay within earshot of this stairwell. When I return, I shall call for you.”

“Yes, Lord. But —”

“But?”

Grig looked at the steps leading down, and at the nitre-streaked walls. “That is an odorous place, Lord: a kennel, by all accounts. Are you sure you would see it?”

And again, as if at some command, the unseen creature howled far below, and
a
wave—an almost visible reek—of animal musk came wafting up out of darkness. There was ordure in the smell, strong urine, the stench of some feral beast’s lair. Grig turned to Nestor again, and said, “Lord?”

“That howling … was not a man,” said Nestor.

Grig shook his head. “No, Lord. Canker Canison makes creatures in his own image.”

Nestor shrugged. “Still, I made a promise, and I must be known by my word. Also, Canker will make a powerful ally. Well, an ally of sorts.” He started down the deeply hollowed steps. “Wait for me, and when I return, answer my call.”

“Yes, Lord.”

And Nestor proceeded down into Mangemanse …

The spiral staircase was deep. Nestor went cautiously; his Wamphyri eyes were now so changed that he saw almost as well as in daylight. There was no more howling, but an aura of expectancy. Without even knowing he did it, Nestor sent his vampire awareness ahead of him, probing the root of the shaft. Something was down there, but keeping well back, and keeping quiet now.

And Nestor sent
: I am the Lord Nestor. Your master, Canker Canison, has asked me to attend him. Who harms me dies! If not by my hand, by Canker’s certainly
.

Snuffles echoed up to him, but that was all.

At the foot of the steps … Nestor was appalled! To the left, a natural cave led back into darkness absolute, in which feral eyes—huge, yellow, malevolent—glared for a moment, then blinked out. But this was not the source of his concern. That was the veritable
midden
which lay in a second, smaller cave, to the right.

The reeking dung of some large beast, possibly the thing with the yellow eyes, was piled in slumping heaps out of which grew squat, corpse-white mushrooms; while around and in between the piles swirled sickening green puddles of piss! Nestor stood on a narrow, raised, unpolluted path midway between the two, the unknown guardian on the one hand and its despicable
depository
on the other. But if this was how Canker kept Mangemanse generally … then it well deserved its name!

And holding his breath, he proceeded along a corridor towards an area where a row of tiny round windows let in a little grey light from the west, and also the wind which hummed a different tune through each orifice, and sucked away the stench of the stairwell midden. Perhaps this was where Canker had derived the inspiration for his instrument. But now, as Nestor left the windows behind and their song dwindled in his ears, so the way ahead turned inwards from the outer sheath and into the rock of the stack proper, and the corridor grew dark again.

Striding out, Nestor found himself listening to the
slap, slap, slap
of his own footsteps on the worn stone; but when he came to a sudden, breathless halt, he knew that he heard much more than that. For from somewhere not too far behind sounded a soft and regular—yet strangely irregular—padding, and the panting of a loping fox or wolf … both of which paused only a split second after Nestor paused.

One of two things: he was either being tracked, as prey, or he’d acquired a wary escort. Looking back, he saw the corridor disappearing into the gloom of its own curve, its walls glowing with a dim phosphorescence of their own; and in the core of darkness between the walls, at a height about central to a man’s thigh, those yellow eyes. The guardian of Canker’s stairwell, but escorting him … or stalking him? And his concentrated vampire senses detected a thought which sped by him in a moment into Mangemanse:

Something is here: a trespasser, a sneaking thing … and human! It—he—pretends to know you and have business here, but I don’t trust him! No, he cannot be the one you mentioned, your friend. Only command
me, and he shall be no more
! It was never a human thought but a beast’s: the ill-formed message of a beast-mind, a dog or great wolf, but having far more of intelligence than any warrior or guardian so far encountered.

Something of panic set in then, or if not true panic, an instinctive reaction to danger: a deadly cold, emotionless desperation, causing Nestor to shut down his own probes and emanations and withdraw into himself at once, like a shadow merging into deeper shadows. It was his vampire, of course—its sense of self-preservation—which now directed his actions. But if there was any sort of telepathic answer to the tracker’s murderous suggestion, that too was shut out, leaving Nestor naked and alone with his own fancies and imaginings. Perhaps it were best to try contacting the dog-Lord, except … could he trust Canker now? Could he
really
trust him?

A few more swift, silent paces brought him to a junction like the hub of a great wheel, with spoke passageways or rooms leading off. Choosing the first room on the right and slipping quietly in through its arched entrance, Nestor put his back to the wall and waited. It had been his parasite’s instinct to cast the merest pulse of a probe ahead of him into the room—sufficient to discern no human or inimical animal inhabitant, at least, but no more than that—and then he was inside.

Whatever followed him must pass close by. Depending on the nature of the beast, and if it failed to detect him, Nestor had two choices: to let it carry on, and then escape back along the way he’d come, or to leap upon the creature and try to kill it. To that end, his knife was in his hand.