Read Online The Last Aerie by Brian Lumley - Free Book Online

torturing the dead in Wrathstack was a far cry from this bed of pebbles in a cool dark cave.
    So Nestor had lain there making his plans: to climb the barrier mountains and call for Zahar, who would come for him with a flyer to bear him back to the last aerie. Before then, however, a seemingly endless day and the best part of a night had lain ahead, and Nestor would be wise to rest his mind and body both. Yet still sleep eluded him.
    In part, it was the agony of rapid metamorphic healing; worse far, it was the terror of dreams he knew he must dream: of sloughing flesh and a crumbling ruin of a man shunned and forgotten, perhaps walled-up and abandoned, fretting to dust little by little in some cold, lonely Starside niche or crevice. A man called Nestor.
    So he’d tossed and turned in a fever upon his pebble bed, and as the day wore on the air had grown heavier and more oppressive. Beyond the low mouth of his cave, dragonflies had danced over the slow-flowing water, where sunbeams glanced and sparkled like gold and silver fire on the ripples. It had all seemed so very peaceful out there, harmless; there had been a time in some misty mythical past when it was quite harmless, he felt sure. But now—
    —Nestor could almost hear the sunlight seething like a refuse pit! Only let him venture beyond the mouth of this cave into those soft yellow rays … they would eat him alive like the metal-molding acids of the Szgany east of the Great Pass, whose skills in the forging of war-gauntlets alone kept them safe from the raids of the Wamphyri! The sunlight would kill him, reduce him to so much smoke and stench, to tar and sticky black bones. For Nestor was a vampire, and the sun his mortal enemy.
    And yet it had not always been like this. Except … he couldn’t remember when or how it had been different!
    In Nestor’s early days in the last aerie, towering tall over Starside’s barren boulder plains, he had frequently suffered from sleeplessness. Then the place had been alien to him, and full of fearsome sounds: weird sighings, strange laughter, and screams—a great many of those. Eventually he’d discovered a trick, by means of which he might lull his jittery mind and thumping heart to sleep. It was a simple device: he would try to recall to memory details of that earlier time, before he became Wamphyri. All a waste of effort and useless as counting goats on a crag, for he rarely remembered anything of his life before those days he’d spent in the lonely home of Brad Berea, deep in the Sunside forest.
    But in his cave by the gurgling stream, safe for the moment from his terror of the lepers and the sun alike, this time Nestor had tried a variation on the theme. He had attempted to recall all that had occurred since that night when he left the shelter of Brad Berea’s cabin, to follow the coldly glittering Northstar and seek out the Wamphyri in Starside. And this time it had worked! Almost before Nestor could begin gathering his few vague memories of pre-Wamphyri times together, at last he had fallen asleep.
    Except his device worked better than he’d supposed, so that even whilst sleeping the chain of thought which he had set in motion continued. Thus, as Nestor’s body rested and his metamorphic flesh worked unseen to repair itself, his dreaming mind recounted in vivid detail all of his morbid story.
    But few men would have called it dreaming …
    At first it came in flashes:
    Nestor’s near-drowning … the burly Brad Berea fishing on the riverbank somewhere east of Twin Fords, and saving Nestor’s life when his body came drifting, head-down in the water. Then Brad’s cabin … his daughter, Glina, who had wanted Nestor for his body. Well, she’d wanted something more than that: a man to call her own, and fill her lonely days and nights. He had been all of a man, certainly … enough for any woman. As well, though, that she hadn’t wanted a mind.
    For Nestor had been an amnesiac. Damaged, his head broken, he had no