The Last Aerie (72 page)

As for the things he didn’t tell or at best obscured:

He told of his travels with the Thyre from west to east across the furnace deserts, but left out their intelligence, their telepathy, their subterranean society and civilization. For these were things which he’d sworn never to reveal to any man. He told of Maglore and Runemanse but made no mention of the seer-Lord’s beautiful human thrall, Orlea. His time with Orlea was for him alone. He spoke of Settlement, but left out details of Sanctuary Rock; for the rock was the last refuge of the Szgany Lidesci. And with regard to his escape from Perchorsk: during an “interrogation” by Siggi Dam, he had “stolen” her key to his cell. It was as simple as that. But of the four who heard his story to the end, two at least knew that this last was a lie, albeit a white one.

Just looking at Ben Trask, it was easy to forget—as Nathan had forgotten—his talent: the fact that you couldn’t lie to him, for Trask would know it at once. And as for Zek Föener: the fact that Nathan had conjured his own esoteric form of mind-smog, the numbers vortex, to obscure those several vague areas in his story, had been evidence enough of his deception. But as for the degree of that deception … Zek was as wise as she was beautiful; she knew that there are things we would all conceal, not necessarily out of shame but also trust. And so she, too, trusted.

Then there were the maps. Nathan had been as accurate as knowledge and memory allowed with regard to the barrier mountains, the great pass, fertile margins, swamps, burning deserts, Starside, the hell-lands Gate, the fallen Wamphyri stacks and Karenstack itself, which was the name of the last aerie as he had always known it; but again he’d omitted the places of the Thyre, the location of Sanctuary Rock, and several major Traveller trails through the deep woods. If the time should ever come when men of E-Branch or in the Branch’s employ passed through into his world, and if they should ever fall into the hands of the Wamphyri … Nathan would not want
Them
to know these things.

Finally he was done, by his reckoning, but in Trask’s eyes he hadn’t told enough. And despite that it was late in the day, Trask pressed him: “Nathan, about your escape from Perchorsk. And about… Siggi Dam.”

“Yes?” And he couldn’t keep the colour from creeping into his pale face.

But Trask found that he couldn’t ask his question, and so covered by saying: “We … think she’s in trouble?”

Nathan had been looking tired, but came awake in a moment. “Siggi? In trouble?”

Chung quickly explained, and Nathan answered:

“This Michael Simmons, Jazz? He must be the hell-lander—I’m sorry, I mean the agent—that Lardis always talked about. Michael ‘Jazz’ Simmons.” He paused to look at Zek Föener, whose sad eyes were full of memories, until she glanced away. “Lardis was fond of Jazz. Why, he even named his son after him: Jason Lidesci! I would have liked to have met him. And now you tell me you think that Siggi… ?”

“It’s the same thing exactly,” Chung told him, quietly. “We have Siggi’s clasp, but … she isn’t on the other end of it.”

“One of two things,” Trask spoke up. “Siggi could be dead, or she’s gone through the Perchorsk Gate.”

Nathan shook his head. “The Gate? Not after what I told her about the other side! What woman would willingly … go …” He let his question taper off unspoken.

“We, er —” Trask stumbled over his words, then let them go in a rush. “— We don’t think she went willingly, Nathan.”

Their guest looked from face to face, frowning, his flush gradually receding as Trask’s meaning got through to him. “You mean, Turkur Tzonov might have sent her through? As some kind of punishment?”

Trask looked right into his eyes. “Possibly. It all depends on what he was punishing her for.”

“Ben’s right,” Zek cut in. “Nathan, the Wamphyri aren’t the only ones who punish people. It was a different man who sent me through that time, but he was just as bad as Tzonov. I suppose I was lucky: the Lady Karen found me, and she seemed to like me in much the same way as this Maglore liked you.”

At the mention of Maglore’s name, Nathan touched the golden sigil in his left ear. Just a touch as he brushed his hair back into place. David Chung noticed the instinctive reaction but it made no impression on him; Nathan hadn’t told them that Maglore had given him the earring. Not that he’d been hiding the fact, but to him it had seemed unimportant.

But the earring was one thing and Siggi Dam’s clasp—and her inexplicable absence, which it had revealed—was another. Perhaps it was time Nathan told the whole truth about his brief relationship with Siggi. He made to do so, opened his mouth to speak … but Zek was here. Nathan looked at her and it was her turn to blush. Except she blushed for him, for she had her own suspicions. Being Zek, however, she offered Nathan an out:

“Tzonov and others like him will use any method to obtain information, make people tell them what they want to know. Torture isn’t the only way. Don’t feel that you can’t talk on my account, Nathan. But if you’d like me to leave …” She made to stand up.

Nathan reached out quickly and took her hand, drawing her down again. “It wasn’t like that.” He shook his head. “Or maybe it was, but it didn’t work out that way.”

Ian Goodly saw it coming and said, “Nathan, you don’t have to tell us anything about that. Well, just one thing. Did you actually steal the key to your cell, or did she give it to you? If she gave it to you, then we can probably reckon that Tzonov has sent her through the Gate.”

Nathan nodded, lowered his head. “She gave it to me. Tzonov found us together; he struck me and dragged her out of there; I found the key after she had gone. Also her clasp. But the key wasn’t a mistake. She hadn’t lost it. I’m sure that she left it for me …” He looked up and his eyes were harder now, likewise the edge to his voice. “You people—E-Branch on the one hand, Tzonov and his people on the other—are like two rival Szgany tribes. But you are all people, human. Or I thought you were. What he has done, if he has done it…”

Trask said, “It changes things, doesn’t it?”

Nathan nodded. “If it’s true, yes. Finally I will know—I mean, I’ll be
sure
—that I’m in the right camp, on the right side.”

Trask nodded. “Well, you are. But we still might have some difficulty proving it. On the other hand, there just
might
be a way to discover what’s happened to Siggi. If that’s the proof you need—and if you’re the man I think you are—then it’s all up to you.”

Nathan looked at him. “Up to me? To find out what happened to Siggi?”

Trask nodded. “The last time we had this problem, with Jazz Simmons, we asked your father to help us out. He had the necessary … skills? He was the Necroscope. But in everything that you’ve told us so far, there’s an all-important thing which you haven’t mentioned. Nathan, when you spoke to me telepathically in my sleep, in Perchorsk, I got the impression that you knew what Harry Keogh could do, where all of his powers sprang from. But there’s only one way you could know, and that’s if you can do it too. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Again their eyes met, and after a long pause Nathan nodded. “Yes. And I can do it. I can talk to the Great Majority, to the teeming dead in their graves. Rather, I
could
do it … if only they would talk back to me. But they won’t. Not in my world, anyway.”

Seated around him, the others sighed in unison. And Zek said: “I knew it! Your mind’s the same as Harry’s. Or it comes so close I could scarcely tell the difference. Not as cold as his, no, but the patterns are all the same.”

Trask nodded. “That’s what I felt the first time I saw you, Nathan: there was no doubt in my mind but that you were Harry’s son, and that you’d been modelled on him. And when you spoke to me telepathically … well, while you’re very much alive, still I felt that this was what it must be like, talking to someone who was dead.”

Goodly said nothing but merely gave a small shudder, which Trask sensed as a trembling in his elbow where the precog sat beside him. Glancing at Goodly, he said: “Well?”

“And so it starts,” Goodly answered, looking more cadaverous than ever. “My God, but it’s gathering now, Ben!”

“What is?”

“All of this. Why, the future is shifting even now. We’re not changing it, for what will be will be. But it knows …”

And Chung said: “The future is … sentient?”

“When it comes to protecting itself, yes,” Goodly answered. “You’d think so, anyway.”

“You should never try to read it.” Nathan shook his head.

And Zek agreed with him: “For it’s a devious thing.”

For a moment they were all silent, until Trask cleared his throat and said, “I know someone—a dead someone—who will speak to you, Nathan. At least I think he will. And after that… maybe the rest of them will follow suit.”

Trask wasted no time but ordered up two Branch cars, and his party was driven at once to a crematorium, a Garden of Repose in Kensington. It was a chilly evening and already dark when they got there, but the gates were open. This was a place which was never closed to mourners. Trask led the group to Sir Keenan Gormley’s tiny plot: a granite slab two feet square and some nine inches high, with a stainless steel plaque which carried his dates and an epitaph reading:

Much loved and missed,

but gone now into a better place.

Requiescat in Pace.

“His family,” Trask explained. “If it had been the Branch … well, it could be we’d have done something different. Something esoteric, in keeping with his life. Maybe this is for the best. At least it doesn’t attract attention. At least he
can
rest in peace. His ashes were scattered here, but this is his place.
He
is here. This is where Harry Keogh spoke to him.”

When the inscription was read out to him and the last line translated, Nathan shook his head. “They don’t, you know. For they’re restless, most of them. They think, remember, talk a lot. To each other. But it’s a lonely place there in the dark, and it’s certainly not a better one. And they miss much more than they’re missed.”

But as the last sentence fell from his lips, so he reeled and Trask caught his arm to steady him. “Nathan?”

For a moment he didn’t answer, because a gonging shout was still ringing in his mind:

HARRY!!!

And it had been so forceful, so brimming with life, that for a moment he looked to see whose mouth had issued it. Around him the espers stood silent, astonished. They had seen his jaw fall open, the shocked expression on his face. But in the next moment he knew, and shook off Trask’s hand as he went to one knee in the gravel beside the granite slab. And with his trembling hand resting upon the plaque, using his dead-speak, he said:

No, not Harry but Nathan. My name is Nath—

It’s Harry!
The other cut him off.
Why, I’d know you anywhere! Your warmth, your “voice,” your … presence! Don’t try to fool an old friend, Harry, but tell me where you’ve been for so long?

“Tell us what he’s saying!” Zek’s real voice, so urgent in Nathan’s ear, and her hand falling on his shoulder, caused him to start. She
knew
he was speaking to someone, but it was deadspeak, which was beyond her capabilities.

“He thinks I’m … he thinks that I’m my father!”

Not Harry?
Gormley’s “voice” was filled with astonishment, disappointment.
His son? My God! Has it been that long?

“Didn’t you know?” Nathan spoke out loud, which made little or no difference; the presence of the Necroscope was sufficient in itself; the dead man—his ashes—”heard” Nathan’s spoken words as clearly as his thoughts. “I mean, about the passage of time? Have none of the others mentioned it?”

Possibly
(Nathan felt Gormley’s deadspeak shrug).
Time is of little importance … here. Without you—or rather, without Harry—it’s been of no importance whatsoever!

“You’ve simply lain there?” Nathan knew that the Thyre were not idle in their graves, so that this seemed to him a terrible waste. “But what about the things you did in life, your interests in the corporeal world?”

Ahhh!
Gormley’s sigh.
But little use for such skills here. You see, I was a spotter; I knew when I stood close to exceptionally talented people. Indeed, I was the one who recruited your father, Harry Keogh, into E-Branch. There had been certain great injustices, and only he could put things right.

“I know,” Nathan told him, “for they—your people in the Branch—have told me. And now there are more injustices, and I have been recruited in my turn …”

So their conversation went, with Trask and the others hearing only Nathan’s side of it and making what they could of it. But finally the introductions and brief histories were out of the way, and at last Gormley asked:
Now tell me, what can I do for you? Tell you your father’s story? But I know so little of it. I’m sure the new people could tell you much more than me.

“Oh, I want to have Harry’s whole story, from beginning to end, eventually,” Nathan nodded. “But right now there are more important things. On my way here, Ben Trask told me one or two things about you. And he was right: your talent alerted you to my presence, and my likeness to my father fooled you into contacting me. But would you have spoken to me if you’d believed I was someone else, not Harry?”

… Ah!
Gormley answered, after a moment. And:
Perhaps not. And I’ll tell you why.

“No, let me tell you. There are things which even the dead fear. Am I right? And someone who talks to the Great Majority, well, he just might be one of those things. Do you understand me?”

The one thing Trask hadn’t told Nathan was how Sir Keenan Gormley had died at the hands of just such a “thing”: a necromancer called Dragosani, in the employ of the then USSR’s own E-Branch. And one other thing Nathan didn’t know: that Harry Keogh had used his Necroscope powers to kill Dragosani, going on to pare the Soviet organization down to the bone.

But now Nathan felt Gormley’s unbodied shudder, and knew that he understood only too well. And:
I am the victim
of just such a monster, the dead man told him. A necromancer, who tore my corpse to pieces in order to get at my secrets. And yes, you are right. These days … the teeming dead are careful who they talk to.