The Last Aerie (17 page)

From a swirl of gluey fluids, a great colourless eye gazed vacuously up at Nestor where he stood at the rim of a vat. The metamorphic liquid in the vat was almost opaque; the creature it covered was little more than a vague outline, like a series of submerged rocks covered with spines; only the quivering of the grey-green surface told of life. And the mindless gazing and swivelling of the eye, of course.

“A warrior,” Zahar informed quietly, tonelessly, almost as if he feared to breathe, where he stood directly behind Nestor at the vat’s rim. “A replacement. Vasagi lost several in Traveller traps on Sunside. Some of the tribes are very well organized under brave leaders. The Szgany Lidesci are clever indeed, and will pay heavily for their cleverness—eventually.”

Nestor’s vampire was alert, alive, wriggling frantically in his body and mind. It sharpened his previously dull and damaged wits, expanded his five mundane senses and awareness to their present limits, issued warnings he couldn’t ignore. He did not need to glance over his shoulder to know that Zahar was only an inch away, and that his good arm and hand hung down on a parallel with Nestor’s spine. He could almost feel the pent pressure in that hand and arm, and certainly he could “hear” the deadly design of Zahar’s mind. A lunge forward, a shove, was all that was needed.

Nestor stepped aside, and his motion was so swift that it left Zahar stumbling a little. And merely glancing at him, Nestor said, “What is this liquid?”

At the end of the vat was a ramp sloping down and disappearing into the murk and slop. It was flanked by narrow stone steps. Nestor moved towards that end, and behind him he heard Zahar take a deep breath. But inside Nestor, his vampire was still at work, and what was instinct to it became instinct to him. So that even before Zahar spoke, he knew what the fluids were: the metamorphic juices of life! This vat was a cold womb for the foetal fashionings of a vampire thing. And Vasagi the Suck had been both father and mother to the contents. The liquids were the white of the egg which sustains the yellow chick, a plasma soup of lymph and protoplasm, derived mainly from innocent blood but contaminated or “fertilized” with Vasagi’s own urine, blood, spittle and sperm.

“It is the sweet juice of forty Travellers, all squeezed by Vasagi!” said Zahar, his throat clogged with weird emotion, perhaps pleasurable anticipation? “It feeds his creature, oils its joints, and defines its very allegiance. Emerging from its vat, it would know
him
at once. In another sunup and sundown, it
will
emerge …” He let his voice tail off.

And Nestor looked at him. “But the question is, will it know me?”

Zahar shrugged, and struggled with himself not to smile. His thoughts were sinister and Nestor knew it. He also knew a little about Nature: the way the Travellers imprint wolves by midwifing the bitches and supplanting the dog fathers, so that the whelp grows up as guardian to child and man. It was one of those memories which occasionally sprang to mind, unbidden out of a mainly forgotten past.

But who could take chances with a creature such as this? What? Approach such a thing with outstretched hand as it woke to monstrous life and vacated its vat? Best to imprint it now, and stamp his own seal over whatever remained of Vasagi’s. He couldn’t know it, but the thought was not original to him. Or it was, but it had been spurred by the process of metamorphosis taking place within him.

He looked at Zahar again. “A man must be careful in this place,” he said, apparently innocently. “It would seem a dire thing, even perilous, to put a foot wrong and fall into a vat such as this!”

“Indeed, Lord,” Zahar agreed, with just the suspicion of a smirk.

“But
,” said Nestor, his voice hardening, “I am not a man. I am Wamphyri!” And he slowly, very deliberately stripped off his clothes, even discarding his belt and knife, to step down naked into the tepid swirl and sluggish gurgle. And fixing Zahar with his eyes, in which the spark of red was now grown to an ember, he moved alongside the bulk of the waxing warrior and touched it with his hands.

You are mine!
he told it.
All
which was Vasagi’s is mine! That which he was is now in me … I have eaten him! And you are my creature for ever and ever.

The ripples in the fluids became small waves as the warrior flexed its great body. Palps with claws which were as yet of soft, flexible chitin closed on Nestor, and various appendages lifted out of the glue to clasp him—but gently! He was … examined. And accepted. The thing lay still again, and its uppermost eye regarded Nestor with something of fixation, and perhaps something of fear.

You are a good creature
, he told it then,
and I shall care for you and feed you well. When you are ready to be born, call me and I shall attend to it myself …

And leaving the thing to wax and wallow, he waded to the steps, climbed them, and stepped up onto the level floor; and stood there with the muck dripping from him in small puddles, gazing at Zahar with eyes as cold as the warrior’s. But oh so much more knowing.

“Take off your leather jacket,” he told him.

“What?” Zahar stepped back a pace, his Adam’s apple wobbling. His eyes went from Nestor to the thing in the vat and back again. “My jacket, Lord?”

“Are you hard of hearing?” Nestor’s voice was harsh. “Your jacket—now!”

“Yes, Lord!” Zahar stripped it off, let it fall.

“Now your shirt of cloth,” said Nestor.

“Lord,” Zahar gibbered. “You may be Wamphyri—no, you
are
Wamphyri, assuredly!—but I am just a common thrall. A lieutenant, aye, and a vampire of course, but just a man for all that. To me these special liquids are a poison. If I were to do as you have done and plunge myself into them, be sure I would not surface! And even if I did, your warrior would roll on me with its spines.”

Nestor held out a hand for the shirt. “And yet these were the things you would have wished on me, just a few moments ago. Indeed, it was even your thought to push me in! Did you think I would not know? Now one last time: your shirt.”

Zahar needed help with it; Nestor dragged the shirt from the grey flesh of his back; for a moment they stood there, the little master calm and his great thrall trembling. And finally Nestor dried himself on the shirt. And:

“This is loathsome stuff,” he said. “I would not ask any man to swim in it, and certainly not a brave and loyal lieutenant. But neither do I want it on my body.” And smiling now, however sardonically: “Better put on your jacket, Zahar. Why, shivering like that, you’ll catch a chill.”

“Yes, Lord.” Zahar sighed, lowered his head in relief and took up his jacket; and Nestor tossed the soiled shirt aside.

Dressing himself, Nestor said, “Zahar, think on this: you had better mend your ways, and soon. There will be no more warnings. The next time I have reason to rebuke you, I will be speaking to meat on a hook in my cold store.”

“Yes, Lord,” Zahar said again. And he knew it was true …

“Will you sleep now, Lord?” Zahar inquired as they went up two levels to Suckscar’s great hall.

“Yes,” Nestor answered. “My limbs ache; my head hurts; I’m not quite myself.”

“It’s your change,” Zahar told him. “I’ve heard about such things. In some it is a long process, but you … your eyes are red even now! And the morning just begun. I think you will be a very powerful Lord.”

“I’m tired,” Nestor told him, “and yet I am not tired. My body is astir. I want to laugh, but fear I might not stop! Ah, but then I could cry, too, except tears are unseemly in Wamphyri eyes. Also, I lust after …
things
, without quite knowing what they are. I am proud of Suckscar —” he turned suddenly on Zahar, “— be sure to guard it well for me, while I sleep!”

“As always, Lord.”

“I must have, oh, several hours of sleep. Six, seven … eight should be more than enough. Then come to me and wake me, you or Grig. And so we shall continue until I know Suckscar—and all of my thralls, and the work which they perform, and all there is to know—like the lines in the palm of my own hand.”

“It shall be done, Lord.”

“And be
aware!”
Nestor told him. “The other Lords—and perhaps a certain Lady, too—think I’m easy meat. Set a watch and see to it that the men are alert. Prowl among them when it is quiet, and if you catch one idling … punish him!”

“Yes, Lord.”

“About Canker Canison …”

“Yes, Lord?”

“I trust him, for now. For he’s a great dog, and I have a way with dogs. But even the best trained dog may make mistakes. These are my orders: he is only to enter Suckscar when I myself am to house and awake. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Good! As for the rest: I trust Gorvi not at all. And the brothers Killglance are deranged. Well, so is Canker for that matter. But crazy like a fox, aye!”

“And the Lady Wratha?”

“We shall see what we shall see. She is very beautiful.” Nestor was uncertain. “She
is
a Lady.”

“Huh!”
Zahar felt obliged to return; and, when Nestor looked at him: “I have heard stories, Lord.”

“Then tell me all,” said Nestor. “But some other time.”

They were at the foot of the staircase where it swept up to Nestor’s apartments. “Sleep well, Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri,” said Zahar.

“Be sure of it,” Nestor answered, and climbed the stairs. A fire burned in his hearth; there was water in an earthen bowl; the two girls were in his bed, already asleep. After washing himself, Nestor climbed in with them. One of them murmured and reached for his member. He brushed her hand away. Time now for sleep. Time for the other later.

And between the vampire girls, soft and warm and musty, he slept like a dead man. Or one who is undead, anyway …

V

Mangemanse—Spiders—

Canker’s Moon Lure

When Nestor woke up the girls were still there, still asleep. Neither Grig nor Zahar had come to awaken him, for he had not slept out his full eight hours. The thing inside him had awakened him, for it had needs of its own; rather, its needs were now Nestor’s. It required to grow, wherefore
he
was required to be up and about, active, a vampire. And now he must take sustenance not only for himself, but also for his leech, his parasite.

Nestor had eaten well in Wrathspire and shouldn’t be hungry, yet deep inside him there was a different hunger. In his stretching bones an ache; in his loins a ripeness requiring an outlet; and in this core which he’d never even known was a part of him, a great emptiness, a gnawing red hunger. It was blind and it was insistent, and he knew that it was red. It was salt and it was life and it was death … and undeath. Now that he was Wamphyri, it was his weird, unnatural nature.

His vampire women slept on. The soft loose breasts of one were in his face; the other was behind him, a leg draped across his thigh, the pubic covering of her quiescent core rough where it pressed against skin which grew ever more sensitive, even to the texture of shadows and the breath of bats. In the silence, Nestor could hear the hearts of the women pumping, the coursing of the blood in their veins.

From below, through the honeycombed rock of Suck-scar, he felt the motion of thralls where they patrolled, the murmur of far-off voices, the hum or chitter … of great bats, yes! His own Desmodus colony, where they clustered in the crevices of a dark lodge of their own. While from outside, from above—

He could feel the
sear
of the sun on Wrathspire! Which was one of the several things that had awakened him. His skin, previously itchy from the touch of the musty hair of the woman sleeping behind him, now crawled. He knew that the sun was up, burning on Wrathspire, and that his own days of sunlight were gone forever.

For a moment there was panic as all the memories of the last few hours of his life crowded where none had been before—as they ordered themselves and firmed from what
might
have been spumy dreamstuff into the rock of reality—and he knew where and what he was. Panic, as his own heart pounded a little faster, his limbs stiffened to immobility, and all of his vampire awareness reached out like a mist from him, like a presence in its own right, to gauge the day for danger. But there was no danger for this was his place, Suck-scar, and all that it contained was his.

Everything …

“Umph!” The girl in front of him murmured, as she turned a little and one of her soft nipples brushed his lips. And for a moment he remembered Sunside.

He saw it in the eye of his mind, a reflection from the screen of his impaired memory: a misty riverbank in the still of evening, not far from Brad Berea’s lonely cabin in the forest. The place where Brad’s homely daughter Glina—an innocent in her own right, mainly—had taught him what little he knew and used his body for her pleasure, while in turn giving him pleasure.