The Last Aerie (19 page)

And standing there with his back to the cold stone wall, scarcely daring to breathe, Nestor looked all about his bolthole to discover its contents, function, and any other exits or escape routes which might exist. Of the latter, there were none: the place was quite simply a dry cave with a high ceiling, crumbling ledges, gloomy niches, and no obvious evidence that it had ever been inhabited or furnished … by men. But it did have its own function, and it did provide habitation of sorts. For spiders!

Their black webs, half as thick as a man’s little finger, didn’t become visible until Nestor craned his neck to stare up through a great many irregularly concentric tiers of crumbling sandstone ledges—like the interior of some crooked, burned-out chimney—receding to the ceiling high overhead. Then the webs looked like intricately patterned cracks in the darkness, no two patterns alike, all of them faintly luminescent; layer upon layer of them, bridging the gaps between the ledges as they receded with them into the heights of the place.

And he was still staring at them, pondering their meaning, when they began to shiver and tremble, all in unison, like the dewy webs of much smaller, commoner forest and plains species when their makers shake them to trap mites. Following which, the truth of it became obvious.

Ever since childhood, Nestor had known something of the Wamphyri; Szgany legends had been full of them, despite that in those days the Old Wamphyri were no more. When Nestor had played with other Traveller children, he had always taken the part of a vampire Lord—indeed, as a child he
had
truly desired to be Wamphyri—so that it was not so very strange that these were the only genuinely material things which he remembered from those forgotten days of yore.

He had been familiar with all the Wamphyri myths, and had known about their powers. Their mentalism, and their ability to conjure mists out of their bodies; their familiars, the bats of Starside, great and small, which they commanded. But there was another part of the legend which was less well-known: the way they used lesser creatures (such as the bat, and the great red bat-eating spiders of Starside caverns) to spy for them and perform … other functions. One such myth had been that the Wamphyri used spider silk to spin their clothing, while another hinted that they kept the corpses of victims wrapped in spider-shrouds, which preserved their meat for eating.

Such memories sprang to mind now, perhaps enhanced and given substance by his new vampire instinct. So that even without knowing the mechanics of the thing, Nestor knew that something of these ancient beliefs was true. He also knew why the as-yet-unseen spiders in the ledges of the cave were shaking their webs: to trap whatever intruder had entered into their place, namely himself. It was an automatic thing and natural; in any case he was no cavern bat to go flitting to his death in the shimmering heights!

He scarcely felt threatened—not by spiders, however large—but nevertheless turned more fully towards the doorway … and in that same moment became aware of the furtive slap of padded feet, and a low panting which issued from the mouth of the long corridor back to the stairwell. Whatever it was that stalked him, it was here even now. And Nestor gripped his knife that much tighter, and stayed hidden in the shadows of the doorway until the thing began to emerge into the hub of the cavern system. Then, seeing it come slowly, cautiously into view …

… He took a last deep breath and held it, and
continued
to hide in the shadows. And the knife in his hand felt like a brittle twig, and his flesh soft as the pulp of fungi, as the Thing more fully emerged, lowered its face to the floor where he had stepped—and sniffed with a drooling snout more than a foot long!

Nestor had seen his share of Grey Ones, the wolves of the barrier mountains, but never a one like this. Something of the wolf was in it, certainly, but very little of Nature. No, for this was a creature spawned of Canker’s vats. And it had been bred in something of Canker’s “image”, at that.

Lupine, yes, but fox-red, too, its lope was nightmarish;
made
nightmarish by the fact of its six legs! The first four of these moved like the legs of any ordinary tame dog or wolf, in diagonal agreement, but the pair that brought up the rear moved in tandem with the center pair, like the small deer of Sunside’s forests when startled to flight; yet all with a sinuous grace. The thing was something less than eight feet long from snout to tip of tail, stood maybe thirty-six inches off the ground, and must have weighed in excess of four hundred pounds. The pads of its paws were larger than Nestor’s hands, with claws that clicked against stone where the flags of the floor were uneven.

And its head and face were … quite monstrous. Again, they reminded Nestor of a wolf—their
dimensions
were those of a huge wolf, certainly—but the furtive, unblinking intelligence behind the burning sulphur of the eyes, and the colour of its fur, that was all fox. In combination, the feral talents of the two animals would be formidable.

They
were
formidable!

The guardian took another weird, loping pace forward; its long snout again touched the floor where Nestor had paused, and sniffed; and the long, sensitive ears swivelled to point at him in his hiding place. He would draw further back but didn’t dare move. This creature wasn’t something he could shout at and subdue. It wasn’t one of his own but Canker Canison’s, over which he had no claim or control at all. It had allowed him to enter this place “of his own free will”. But that didn’t mean it had to let him out again.

Nestor had instinctively, automatically shuttered his eyes. Still the yellow orbs of the wolf-thing found the red flush of his own, and grew large in its sloping face as its entire body aimed itself like an arrow at his doorway. Then, growling low in its throat, stiff-legged, and salivating from jaws like an ivory mantrap, the thing advanced.

And it was no more than five of Nestor’s paces away when he felt a tap on his shoulder!

Any ordinary man might have fainted at that touch; even the bravest Szgany Traveller would have cried out; but Nestor was no longer Szgany, no longer a Traveller. He was Wamphyri! He moved but a fraction, turning his body only an inch or two at most, but his knife-hand moved like greased lightning. And he slashed unerringly at whatever had touched him.

The keen edge of his blade bit into but didn’t quite cut the rope-like thing touching his upper left shoulder. Instead, the weapon seemed
attracted
to that slender, hairy strand, and in order to retrieve it he must wrench sharply downwards; which only served to bring him into further contact with the thread of gluey spider silk. Slapping against the sleeve of his jacket from shoulder to elbow, it adhered at once—and began to vibrate!

Nestor glanced out of the door; the wolf-thing had come to a halt and was crouched down snarling only two paces—or a single bound—away! Its sleek muscles were bunching even now. While descending from above, a foot or two overhead …

A great red spider crept effortlessly, head-first down the strand; and in the walls, the ruby-glinting eyes of others were visible where they swung from ledge to ledge, coming to investigate the nature of their victim. But there are spiders and there are spiders. Relatives of these creatures dwelled on Sunside, too, in deep caverns from which they emerged at dusk to fashion their webs and trap moths. That species was three to four inches long, with a bite that was poisonous but rarely fatal. It produced a numbness and even partial paralysis, accompanied by dizziness and vomiting, but lasting only three or four hours at most. That was Sunside, however, while this was Starside; these aerie spiders were at least four times longer, with forty or fifty times the bulk!

Nestor gave his arm a desperate yank and his sleeve was torn away down the stitches, to dangle there on the adhesive thread. The violence of the movement shook the spider loose; it flopped to the floor and at once rolled itself into a ball; without pause, Nestor kicked it straight into the face of the wolf-thing. And as Canker’s creature reared back and yelped, he stepped into the open with his knife-arm upraised.

“What’s all this?” Canker whiningly queried, loping forward across the open span of the hub. “Is it the Lord Nestor? What, and do you threaten my creatures?” He grinned.

“Do I …
what?”
Nestor was astonished, and angry.

“Hah!”
Canker barked. “Or do they threaten you, eh?”

The great spider scurried by them into the darkness of the cave, and Canker’s “guard-dog” shrank down and grovelled, then backed off with its tail between its legs. Canker scowled at it and said, “Well done!” Then pointed and added, “And now begone!” The creature turned and slunk away, returning the way it had come.

“Your dog would have attacked me!” Nestor accused. “And your spiders
did
attack me!”

“On the first count, wrong,” said Canker. “My ‘dog’, as you have it, was instructed to follow you and see you came to no harm. He was only suspicious because you were so furtive, whereas I had said you would be bold! And on the second count, also wrong, because the great red spiders are only ‘mine’ insofar as they dwell here. I don’t—can’t—command them; they are what they are and do what they do. But … you have spiders of your own, surely? Or should I say, there
are
spiders, in Suckscar. Ah, but I note your confusion! As yet you’ve not explored your manse to the full, and so you fail to understand the special functions of creatures such as this. Well, that’s easily put to rights; let me show you.”

He led the way back into the spider cavern, but Nestor stayed where he was. “What?” Canker glanced back at him. “Do you hold back? No need for caution now, Nestor. Indeed quite the opposite! The more noise the better!” And with that he barked and capered, and laughed in his mad-dog fashion within the cave. The echoes of his actions went up, and dust rilled down, and high overhead the luminous webs stopped shivering and grew still.

“Blind!” Canker laughed. “Or very nearly. Ah, but they
hear
well enough! Why, you must have crept in here, Nestor, that they should mistake you for something small. But quite obviously we noisy creatures are not bats, and so the spiders are fled to their high niches. But come, see, and understand.”

He loped through the cavern, across a floor inches deep in defunct, cast-off webs which had lost both their glow and adhesion, to a corner which was festooned in dusty drapes of spider silk. And behind these shrouding curtains …

“There!” said Canker, pointing.

And now Nestor saw that the old Szgany legends were true. For there against the wall stood a geometrical structure, like a small section cut through a beehive honeycomb. Six hexagonal tubes formed the base, with five more on top, then four, three, two and one. A pyramid of tubes. Storage tubes of wax, produced and fashioned by the spiders, in which to preserve … what?

The tubes were almost seven feet long by two feet across the bore. Nestor approached the pyramid and brushed dust away from wax which was not quite opaque. The tube he had chosen was in the row of three, about shoulder high, the fourth in height from the floor. And lodged within, all wrapped in silk threads except for his face—was that a human figure?

Well, sub-human anyway. For it was a brown and leathery trog from Starside’s caverns under the barrier mountains, apparently mummified and more than a little shrivelled. But dead? Nestor fancied he saw the faint flutter of an eyelid and the merest twitch of a protuberant lip. Also, the wall of the waxy tube directly above his face was misty, as from shallow breathing.

“Bravo!” said Canker. “Your developing vampire instinct: you chose to examine the one cell currently in use.”

“Cell?” Nestor looked at him, and Canker shrugged.

“Hatchery, then.”

Nestor frowned, shook his head, and Canker sighed. Then, leading the way back out: “Now listen,” he said, “and I shall explain. The spiders fashion these combs in size according to their prey. Here in Mangemanse—and throughout the aerie in general—we, the Wamphyri, provide the prey, wherefore the tubes are man-sized.

“The process is simple: We hunt on Sunside, or in this case on Starside, down in the bottoms beyond the sucking sphere of white light.”

“The hell-lands Gate?” (Again Nestor’s resurgent memory.)

“Indeed, in the trog caverns where the earth shines. Hell-lands Gate, did you say? Aye, I’ve heard my thralls call it by that name, when I’ve brought them out of Sunside. Let me begin again:

“We hunt on Sunside, and take thralls, lieutenants, women! But not everyone can be a thrall or lieutenant, and sometimes a woman can get used up too quickly. Of course, there is always the provisioning: a manse has its needs no less than its inhabitants. I have warriors to feed, and familiars. And then there are my common vampire thralls and my men. But what use to keep a surfeit of flesh around, especially if it be useless, surly, or ugly?

“Well, I have cold storage rooms, as do we all. But … I prefer my meat red and afoot when I can have it. Right now, I don’t have much use for the spiders, none of us do. But in time of siege, if that should ever come to pass—and well it might, for we have powerful enemies in the east—or if ever fresh blood should prove hard to come by … then the aerie’s spiders come into their own.

“For they have a bite which will put a man to sleep as easily as my own—
ha, ha!
Except men will rise from my bite, if I wish it, while the spider bite will freeze them for long and long. It is not undeath, no, but similar in its way. It does not make vampires but simply preserves … meat. And so you see the value of the spiders. Bitten by them and wrapped in their cocoons, a man is slowed down, down, down and lasts a year or more. So that if the time comes when I may not journey abroad, well, so what? My larder is full at home. Oh,
ha, ha!
I have thirty men preserved in this way; aye, and even a handful of women …

“The antidote is produced by the female when her eggs are due to hatch. It lets blood flow freely in the incubator: that is, the body of the victim, in which she has laid her eggs. In men, these are deposited in the gut; and even as the antidote stirs the victim to agonized life, so the hatchlings are busy eating their way out!