The Last Aerie (2 page)

But his memory was a vague, frightening, and fragmentary thing, in which the only “sensible” thought was this:
I am the Lord Nestor, of the Wamphyri!

Eventually, dissatisfied with his lot and still seeking his lost identity, one night when Nestor saw a vampire raiding party flying with the clouds and could do longer resist the lure of the legend burning in his brain, silently be left Brad Berea’s cabin and set out for Starside. For he knew now that he must go home to the last great aerie of the Wamphyri and reclaim his lost heritage. And during the course of his journey, at last Nestor met up with his fate—met up with real vampires—and
became
Wamphyri!

As for Nathan:

By now, following the subterranean river, he had crossed under the Great Red Waste into a land previously of myth. And far in the east, shown a picture of his future by a dead Thyre stargazer, he’d determined to return to Sunside—but not his own Sunside.

For in the east as in the west, the land was split in two parts by a range of barrier mountains: south where the sun rose and shone on the land, and north where it lit only on the highest peaks. And the dark side, Starside, was of course a place of vampires.

But unlike the western Szgany, the people of the eastern Sunside were downtrodden Wamphyri supplicants; they even gave of their young to the vampires! A terrible place and terrible people, quite beyond Nathan’s understanding. Yet according to the dead Thyre stargazer, Thikkoul, at least part of Nathan’s future lay in a mighty Starside gorge called Turgosheim: home of the Wamphyri!

And so he left the desert and the Thyre, went into Sunside, was captured by his own kind and offered up to vampire lieutenants on their tithe route through the Szgany villages. So that eventually in Runemanse, vast promontory aerie of the Seer-Lord Maglore, Nathan learned all the lore of Turgosheim and the history of the Wamphyri in general.

Except he was not vampirized by Maglore the Mage but kept as a “friend” or “familiar creature,” presumably for his weird colours and seeming innocence—in regard to which the Seer-Lord was mistaken. For Nathan’s twin talents of deadspeak and telepathy gave him an advantage over Maglore’s thralls, lieutenants, perhaps even Maglore himself. Or so he was allowed to believe …

… Also allowed to believe that eventually he had escaped, when in fact he had been turned loose! And seated in the saddle of the flyer Karz Biteri (once a man, as were all Wamphyri constructs) Nathan had flown through the long night back to Olden Sunside/Starside, where in the dawn he had landed in the foothills over Settlement. Then Karz had flown on, presumably into the sun and a certain, perhaps merciful, death. And Nathan had gone down into Lidesci territory to discover, after all his trials, that his mother lived and was well; and Misha Zanesti, too, his long-lost sweetheart, alive and well.

But Misha had been Nestor’s sweetheart, too, if only in his damaged mind, dreams, and desires; and in partial memories that came and went he imagined that she’d spumed him for the love of some Great Enemy. But now … in his way the Lord Nestor knew that this same Great Enemy, in “fact his brother, was back in Sunside. Well, it was bearable that the “treacherous” Misha lived, but
not
that she lived with Nathan!

Along with one of his lieutenants, Zahar, Nestor raided on Sunside and found Nathan and Misha at the end of their nuptial trek. And attempting to take Nathan prisoner, Nestor was partially blinded and his flyer mortally wounded by the leader of the Lidescis, using a shotgun, a weapon from the hell-lands. Crippled, the great beast flew out over Sunside’s night forest and crashed at the southern rim.

There in the woods Nestor was discovered where he’d fallen and was taken in and cared for … by lepers! Waking close to dawn he had been terrified— even Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri, terrified—when he saw where he was. Leprosy, the great bane of vampires; and these lepers had cared for him, fed him, even breathed out the air he had breathed in!

He fled their camp, hid in the back of a dark, damp cave in the bank of a river, slept off his fever and fatigue, and let his metamorphic flesh heal his wounds … and dreamed hideous dreams of a yet more hideous future …

Meanwhile, when the lieutenant Zahar had seen how Nestor was lost, then he’d remembered his master’s orders. And because Nestor was a necromancer with powers transcending death itself, Zahar had carried out those orders to the full. Capturing Nathan and bearing him over the mountains, he had tossed him into the glaring hemisphere of the Starside Gate, an alleged portal to the hell-lands from which neither man nor monster had ever returned
.

So Nathan entered the world of his father …

PART ONE:

E-BRANCH

I

Harry’s Passing

To the members of E-Branch, bad dreams were an occupational hazard; it was generally accepted that nightmares went with the work. Ben Trask, current head of the Branch, had always had his share of bad dreams. Indeed, since the Yulian Bodescu affair twelve years ago, he’d had more than his share. And only half of them when he was asleep. The sleeping ones were of the harmless variety: they frightened but couldn’t kill you. They were engendered of the waking sort, which were very different: sometimes they
could
kill and worse. Because they were real.

As for this one, it wasn’t so much a bad as a weird dream. And weirder because Trask was wide awake, having driven his car through the wee small hours of a rainy night into the heart of London, and parked it opposite E-Branch HQ … without knowing why. And Trask was fussy about things like that; he generally liked to be responsible for his actions.

It was a Sunday in mid-February of 1990, one of those rare days when Trask could get away from his work and switch off, or rather switch on, to the normal world which existed outside the Branch. It should have been one of those days, anyway. But here he was, at E-Branch HQ in the middle of the sleeping city; and in the eye of his mind this weird dream which wouldn’t go away, this daydream repeating over and over, like flickering frames from an old monochrome movie projected onto a window, so that he could see right through it. A ghost film; if he blinked his eyes rapidly it would vanish, however momentarily, and return just as soon as he relaxed:

A corpse, smouldering, with its fire-blackened arms
flung wide; steaming head
thrown back as in the
final
agony of death; tumbling end over end into a black void shot through with thin neon bars or ribbons of blue, green, and red light.

It was a tortured thing, yes, but dead now from all of its torments and no longer suffering; unknown and unknowable as the weird waking dream which it was. And yet there was something morbidly
familiar
about it; so that watching it, Trask’s face was grey and his lips drawn back in a silent snarl from his strong, slightly yellow teeth. If only the corpse would stop tumbling for a moment and come into focus, give him a clearer shot of the blistered, silently screaming face …

Trask got out of his car into a sudden squall of leaden raindrops, as if some Invisible One had dipped his hands in water and scooped it into Trask’s face. And muttering a curse as he turned up the collar of his overcoat, he glanced at the building across the street, craning his neck to peer up at the high windows of E-Branch. Up there he expected to see a light—just one, burning in a window set centrally in the length of the entire upper storey which was the Branch—lighting the room which housed the Duty Officer through his lonely night vigil. Well, he saw the Duty Officer’s light, right enough, and keeping it company, three or four more which he hadn’t expected. But he saw more than the lights, for even the rain couldn’t wash away the tortured, monotonously tumbling figure from the screen of his mind.

Trask knew that if he were someone or thing other than who and what he was—head of a top-secret, in more than one way esoteric security organization—that the experience must surely scare the hell out of him. Except, well, he’d been scared by experts. Or, he might believe he was going mad. But there again, E-Branch was … E-Branch. This thing he was experiencing, it must be in his mind, he supposed. It
had
to be, for there was no physical mechanism to account for it. Or was there?

Hallucination? Well, possibly. Someone could have got to him, fed him drugs, brainwashed him … but to what end? Why bring him here in the dead of night? And why bring these other people here? (The extra lights up there, the shiny black MG Metro pulling into the kerb, and the bloke across the road—an E-Branch agent, surely?—even now running through the rain towards the Branch’s back door entrance.) Why were they here?

“Sir?” A girl struggled stiffly, awkwardly out of the Metro. She was Anna Marie English, a Branch esper. English by name but never an English rose—nor any sort of rose by any other name—she was enervated, pallid, dowdy, a stray cat drowning in the rain. It was her talent, Trask knew, and he felt sorry for her. She was “ecologically aware”; or as she herself was wont to put it, she was “as one with the Earth”. When water tables declined and deserts expanded, so her skin dried out, became desiccated. When acid rains ate into Scandinavian forests, her dandruff fell like snow. In her dreams she heard whale species singing sadly of their decline and inevitable extinction, and she knew from her aching bones when the Japanese were slaughtering the dolphins. A human lodestone, she tracked illicit nuclear waste, monitored pollution, shrank from yawning holes in the ozone as a coral polyp from a diver’s probing spearpoint. Yes, she was an “ecopath”: she felt for the Earth and suffered all of its sicknesses, and unlike the rest of us
knew
that she, too, was dying from them.

Trask looked at her: she was twenty-four and looked fifty. Despite his pity, perhaps paradoxically, he thought of her in harsh, disassociated, almost disapproving terms—thick-lensed spectacles, liver spots, hearing aid, straggly-haired, crumpled blouse, splay-legged—and knew he disliked her because she mirrored the decline of the world. And that was
his
talent at work. Ben Trask was a human lie-detector: he recognized a lie when he saw, felt, heard, or otherwise perceived one as other men recognize a slap in the face; so that conversely, in the absence of falsehood he must acknowledge truth. Except Anna Marie English’s truth was unbearable. If Greenpeace had her and could make the world believe in her, they would win their case in one … though of course it would be lost at one and the same time. For they’d suspect that they were too late. But Trask also knew that it wasn’t quite like that. The world was a huge creature and had been sorely wounded, and Anna Marie English was just too small to sustain so much damage. But while she was suffering almost beyond endurance, the Earth could go on taking it for a long time yet. This was Trask’s view of it, anyway. He supposed it made him an optimist, which was something of a paradox in itself.