The Last Aerie (65 page)

Oh? But I had heard rumours that he was your adopted son, too.

So much
for rumours,
Nestor answered.

They might have conversed further, but at that point a sigh went up from Zahar and the other lieutenants and thralls where they craned their necks to look up at the soaring south-facing wall of Wrathspire. Their viewpoint was from a walled, natural promontory or broad balcony over Wratha’s main landing-bay, whose elevation was some sixty feet short of the bleached-white upper levels. Up there, along a line so regular it might even be a fault in the aerie’s rock face, the natural features of fissured chimneys and ledges, and vampire constructed buttresses, windows and cartilage catwalks, turned abruptly from a weathered grey colour to an almost crystalline white, and the very rock itself seemed calcined with fire.

And indeed it had been, for this was the sun’s demarcation line, above which the uppermost levels of the last aerie had been bleached white through centuries and even millennia of purifying sunlight. For when the solar furnace rose to its highest point over Sunside and blazed through the high peaks and passes, this was where its brilliant rays alighted, like a false halo to blister the corrupt head of the stack.

Up there on a ledge, to which she’d scrambled from a cartilage catwalk where it petered out, Glina hugged a small bundle to her breast and crouched in the shade of a shallow niche. But it was too shallow, that niche, and would not save her when the sun crept beyond the peaks and its rays swept from east to west across the face of Wrathstack.

Which was why Zahar and the others had issued their massed sigh, for even now the eastern corners of the upper spires were turning to glowing, blinding gold, as a seething vertical tide inched across the stone towards Glina in her crevice. She saw it too, and knew it was her time. Then—

—She stepped out upon the ledge, and lowered her feral eyes upon Wratha, Nestor, Zahar and the rest. But mainly Glina gazed at Nestor with eyes yellow as the brightening light they reflected, so that he could feel them burning on him.

And Wratha frowned delicately and said, “She hates you.”

To which he replied, “She has good reason.” But his voice was cracked and dry.

At which juncture—a strange thing! For suddenly Nestor wanted to cry out, to warn Glina of the sun’s approach, command her to come down, find a window, creep in out of danger. He had thought that compassion and all such feeble human emotions were dead in him and flown forever, but now seemed unsure. A certain poignancy, a gnawing frustration, chewed at his insides. Guilt? In a Lord of the Wamphyri? Ridiculous! And yet…

What
was
Glina after all but a harmless creature he’d stolen out of Sunside? What had she done to deserve an end such as this? But if she’d done nothing it was because she was nothing. Just a stupid Szgany bitch, a snap of the fingers. So why should he worry over her fate?

Wratha had heard him.
Exactly, she’s nothing. Why concern yourself? Because she was your first? But think: Wratha is your last. And is there any comparison? Between me and any Traveller shad? If so, then go to some other’s bed when your work is done. But be sure if you do that I won’t call for you again!
A threat of sorts, but he sensed an edge of desperation in it. Whatever they had had together, Wratha clung to it still. It gave Nestor power over her, which he would test eventually. But for the moment—

He made no answer, mainly because he was watching Glina; also watching the sun, or rather its seething, sighing, cleansing ray lighting up the face of Wrathspire as it drew close to the woman on her ledge. But much too late to do anything now. She was doomed.

Another sigh went up from the assembled vampires. It was strange: a sigh of horror from such as these! But this would be their doom, too, if ever the sun should find them out.

As a life nears its end, time speeds up
. Nestor couldn’t remember who had said that: an old man, he believed, on Sunside, probably. Just another fragment from his forgotten past fitting itself into place. But as for what it meant:

A man’s youth lasts forever, or seems to. But as he gets older, so the years get shorter. And his last few hours? They must fly like seconds. The same goes for women, of course. As for Glina, she was already down to those seconds. Five, four, three, two, one … and then no more.

At the end, the sun scythed across her in a rush!

She felt its deadly light on her face, in her eyes!

Her shoulders had been slumped, as in defeat, but now she snapped erect on her ledge. And as the first tendril of smoke puffed up in her hair, she looked one last time down on Nestor, and hurled the baby towards him!

It fell short, and went without a cry fluttering into the abyss. It seemed to drift on the air, but in fact fell like a stone. And was gone …

Then Glina cried out, but just the once.

She lifted up her arms to embrace the sun. Her face blackened in a moment and her shift billowed up from the steam and stench rising beneath it. Her hair burst into flames, and her shift followed suit. Yellow fire, almost invisible in the sunlight, enveloped her.

For a moment more she stood there—like a human torch, a sacrifice to the sun—then crumpled to her knees and toppled forward into eternity …

“Gone,” said Wratha with some satisfaction. And silently, to herself:
An old
flame, blazing to the end, finally consumed by its own fire. And all her “innocence” gone with her.

She turned to Nestor, but he was no longer there. Instead, she saw him descending from the promontory to the landing-bay, heading for Suckscar with Zahar.
Nestor!
she called after him.

Later
, he answered, without looking back. For he knew he had power over her. But he also had power over the dead, and now there was one among them who he must speak to …

He had her burned, blackened, broken body brought up, and in the privacy of his room of repose he approached her. But before he could even touch her:

You are cursed, Nestor
, she told him, in a totally emotionless deadspeak voice, freed now from all the agony of death but remembering it well enough.
You are all cursed, of course, but you especially.

He held back and said: “When I brought you up here from the rubble and the scree, my only thought was to … comfort you?” Oddly, it was the truth, but even Nestor could see the cynicism in it now.

She laughed a laugh empty as space.
Not so, Nestor. It was to beg my forgiveness.” Except you are Wamphyri and don’t
know how. And anyway I do not, will not, cannot forgive you. Will you make me? Oh, I know you have the power. But though I may say the words, you know I’ll recant them in the very moment they are spoken. And what difference would it make? You are cursed. Not by me alone, but by all the dead.”

At which the vampire in him rose up. “So be it! What? And should I fear the dead? On the contrary: they fear me.
Hah!”

But after a moment, she told him:
For now, perhaps. But in the end? You should never forget, Nestor, that all things have a beginning and an end. And as for the teeming dead: I think you should fear them, yesss …

He suspected it would be the last thing she ever said to him and felt a momentary panic. “Explain yourself.”

But she was silent.

Then he called for Zahar, and told him: “In the twilightbefore sundown, bury her in the Starside foothills above the hell-lands Gate. Find a crevice in the rocks, and wall her up. But don’t tell me where you put her, for she’s forgotten now and should stay that way.”

And to himself, in a fashion similar to Wratha’s short and cynical eulogy:

Forgotten, aye—and all her curses with her!

But do curses die as easily as women? Even vampire women, in the right circumstances? And even the Wamphyri, when their time is come?

Somehow, Nestor doubted it…

IX

Return
of the Enemy—

Nestor’s Revenge—

Canker’s Moon-mistress

Gradually, achingly, Nestor came awake. But not to his soft bed and the comforts of some vampire girl’s breasts and buttocks in Suckscar. And yet his first thought was this:
my life as a Lord has made me soft!
Which was a contradiction in itself, for as a Lord of the Wamphyri Nestor was hard as never before; both physically and mentally hard, with little or nothing of human emotion left in him, and certainly nothing of the frailty of human flesh.

But even the metamorphic flesh of a vampire has its weaknesses, such as sunlight, silver, kneblasch, and the sharp and splintery point of a hardwood stake; and, of course, a certain disease—a destroyer of the flesh itself, that causes it to slough away in lifeless pieces—which men have named leprosy and vampires avoid as surely as sunlight! For where the latter may be mercifully swift, the former is tortuously slow, irrevocable and utterly merciless. The hundred year death …

Nestor came more surely awake, and at first was surprised by a discomfort so great it was pain. Then he remembered where he was; and the damp grit in the corner of his mouth, the small pebbles pressed into his face, and the earthy smell of a riverside cave confirmed it: his location and predicament both.

He broke fragile scabs in the corners of his eyes as he forced them painfully, shrinkingly open, ready for the bright and deadly dazzle which might await them even now. But no, he was safe; his sleep had been a long one—of exhaustion, recuperation, replenishment—from which the setting sun and his vampire nature had finally called him awake.

For outside, beyond the low, frowning mouth of his refuge, the gurgling river was a leaden grey and showed nothing of reflected sparkle. It was the twilight before sundown, which in a few more hours would turn to night… his time.

He sat up—but too swiftly, abruptly—which caused him yet more pain. Indeed, it seemed there were several small hurts in his body unremembered from this morning, which only now made themselves apparent: a lump inside the knob of his left shoulder, where he’d broken his collarbone in the crash; lower ribs which were bruised, aching and possibly broken; massive bruising covering all the left side of his body, hip and thigh. Ah, but
that
had been a tumble!

As for his face and eyes: they were healing, and rapidly. And Nestor knew it was the swift metamorphic reconstruction or revitalization of damaged parts which hurt him so. His vampire flesh had expelled those pellets of silver which the lepers in their colony had missed; his cracked and broken bones were fusing even now, so that soon they’d be stronger than the original material; the ravaged flesh of his face was sealing itself with scar tissue which eventually he could keep or shed to suit himself. (Probably he would keep it, if it was not too unsightly, as a reminder of the debt owed him by the Szgany Lidesci.)

The Lidescis … the name was like bile in Nestor’s mouth. Perhaps it would have been better after all to let Wratha talk him into a massed raid upon them: himself, the dog-Lord, Wratha and all their forces. If he had not been so stubborn—if he’d told his colleagues his secret, showed them Sanctuary Rock and led them in the battle to take it—things wouldn’t have come to such a pass. But as it was …

What of this Nathan—his Great Enemy, the master of the numbers vortex, his unknown
brother
—now? And what of the bitch Misha, who had betrayed Nestor in a world largely forgotten? For those two were the real cause of his current fix, and the hell of it was that even now he didn’t know the outcome of his plan to trap and dispose of them: whether it had worked in whole or in part, or whether it had been a total failure.

Only Nestor’s lieutenant, Zahar Lichloathe, once Sucks-thrall, could tell him that. And Zahar was in Suckscar, if he lived at all! But however things had gone, from Nestor’s current point of view they’d gone disastrously wrong! Yet on the other hand… perhaps it wasn’t so terrible after all. For as he put out tentative vampire probes into the evening all about, and as he employed enhanced Wamphyri senses to
listen
and
smell
and
feel
the mental ether, nowhere could he detect the numbers vortex or even a trace of it. For the first time in as long as Nestor could remember, his mind seemed completely clear of it.

As he gingerly fingered his torn but mending face, brushed tiny pebbles and grit from his hair and prepared to go out into the lengthening shadows of twilight where the birds of the forest were hushed as they settled for night, Nestor thought back on the recent events leading to this present moment … After Glina had cursed him (a curse that echoed even now in Nestor’s memory like a weird invocation, and one which seemed to be working at that!) and following immediately upon her subsequent suicide: