The Last Aerie by Brian Lumley Page B

that’s what my Jim always says …”

 
     
PART TWO:

NESTOR’S
STORY

 
     
I

Sunside
     
     
     
     
    Three days earlier (by Earth’s chronological system), at the dawn of a long Sunside “day”, the vampire Lord Nestor had gone to earth in the forest a mile or two north of the leper colony on the fringe of Sunside’s prairie belt. In fear, loathing, and great trepidation—trembling, aye, even the necromancer Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri!—he had plunged headlong through the deep dark woods, away from the gold-stained horizon where the sun rose inexorably, menacingly in the south.
    There in the gloom of the forest, stumbling into a stream, he had stripped naked and washed himself scrupulously clean in every part, until even his metamorphic vampire flesh was raw, red, and broken from his furious scrubbing. And in his shrinking mind (known also to his parasite vampire, of course) one terrifying thought eclipsing all others: that he’d spent last night among Szgany lepers, watched over by lepers, tended and fed by lepers, and … infected, perhaps? By lepers?
    Leprosy: great bane of the Wamphyri! And Nestor had been with these stumbling, crumbling people from sundown to sunup, in their place, unconscious in one of their beds and covered by their blankets …
    They’d discovered him where his crippled flyer had come down in the forest close by; they had touched him, lifted him up, taken him to their colony. Their wooden spoons had carried soup to Nestor’s dribbling mouth, while his lungs had breathed air which theirs had breathed out! Their bandages and healing salves had covered his wounded face and eyes … but what were ointments against the curse of leprosy? And so he had scrubbed his body raw, then dressed himself in his soiled leather clothing, and with something of his composure regained followed the stream east and a little north.
    Mainly Nestor had walked in the shallow water, shaded by dense foliage along the banks. His eyes had been half-blinded by silver shot, and though the lepers had pricked most of the tiny poison pellets out of his flesh, it would be a while yet before his parasite leech could heal him completely. By sticking to the water he avoided obstacles: he couldn’t crash into things and further damage himself. But always he’d been aware of the furnace sun’s rising, however gradual, and had known he must find shelter before its lethal rays could strike through the trees and discover him there.
    And shortly, where the stream slowed, broadened out and flowed deep over its bed, in a cave under a rocky vine-draped outcrop that jutted over the water, there Nestor had collapsed on a shingly ledge and stretched himself out to sleep, hopefully to regain his strength. But sleep was difficult; he was not long awake following a night’s rest in the place of the lepers; his mind wove this way and that as he considered and reconsidered his position, his chances.
    Actually, they were good: so long as he stayed here in this cave through the hours of daylight, he would survive. At sundown, avoiding the makeshift camps of Travellers, he would venture north, climb the barrier mountains by the light of the stars, and send out a mindcall through the passes in the peaks to his Lieutenant Zahar Lichloathe, once Sucksthrall.
    Upon a time, Zahar had been Vasagi the Suck’s man; now Nestor’s, he had taken his necromancer master’s cognomen for his own. Lichloathe was the name that the Wamphyri of Wrathstack had given Nestor out of respect for his talent, which lay in tormenting corpses for their secrets. But it was not that Nestor loathed the dead, rather that they loathed him. As for the Wamphyri: they had grown to respect him, perhaps even to fear him in however small a degree. For with Nestor, something had come among them which seemed worse than dying: the dark and harrowing art of necromancy, by use of which an adept might carry vengeance even beyond death itself. It was an awesome talent. But