The Last Aerie

by Brian Lumley

  His minders. They were like chameleons: ever changing. He had met several, but they came and went. Sometimes an E-Branch agent would be with them, other times they’d be on their own. They guarded him—against the vengeance of Turkur Tzonov.

  But if Tzonov really has sent Siggi through the Gate, Nathan thought, where he sat in an easy chair beside his bed, then he’s the one who will need guarding. From me! It was his vow. Ah, but where vows were concerned … well, he’d made them before. And so far they’d come to nothing.

  Outside in the corridor he heard soft, padding footsteps. His minders again? The duty officer? Almost unwittingly he put out a telepathic probe, and met with the mind of David Chung. The Chinaman (in fact a Cockney) stood right outside his door with his fist poised to knock.

  “Come in,” Nathan anticipated him.

  Chung entered, shrugged. “I’m on duty. I was just passing by.”

  “Really? But you paused outside my door. I thought it was one of my minders.”

  “Well, in a way I am. We all are.”

  Nathan pulled a face. “I’m not sure I like being minded so well.” Then he looked at Chung more squarely, where the other leaned back against the computer console. “And I think you were more than just passing by. What’s on your mind?”

  “My talent is on my mind, and this room, and … that earring of yours. Every now and then you touch it sort of thoughtfully, like a moment ago, as soon as I mentioned it. We asked you about Siggi Dam’s clasp, but not about that earring. Can you free it? I mean, would you mind if I held it for a moment? And would you also mind telling me where you got it?”

  Nathan freed the golden sigil from his ear and handed it over. “I’m surprised no one else has asked me about it,” he said.

  “But there’s been so little time,” Chung answered. “I think you’ll find they’ve all assumed it came from your mother, something Harry might have given her.”

  Nathan grunted and his look turned sour in a moment. “To my knowledge, the only thing she got from my father was me … and my brother, Nestor.” As soon as it was out he could have bitten his tongue. He’d wanted to leave Nestor out of this, though why he couldn’t say.

  “Nestor?”

  Nathan waved a hand dismissively. “You can forget him. Nestor … he died some years ago.”

  “The Wamphyri?”

  “Yes.” Oh, yes—yes, indeed—Wamphyri!

  Chung had been examining the golden earring, holding it in his hands, crushing it between his palms almost in an attitude of prayer. Now he gave it back. And: “Nothing,” he said.

  “What did you expect?” Nathan asked him. “It’s not of this world. It was given me by Maglore of Runemanse, in Turgosheim.”

  Chung shrugged. “It was an experiment. You were wearing it when you came through the Perchorsk Gate. I wondered if I could make a mind-bridge to your vampire world, that’s all. I should have known that I couldn’t. It was the same with Jazz Simmons. When he went through the Gate all contact was lost.” Then he frowned. “So Maglore gave it to you, eh? Another sign of his ‘affection’?”

  “Actually, it’s a strange story,” Nathan answered. “For you see, the loop with the half-twist is Maglore’s sigil, too. He’s something of a mage—a mentalist, as I told you—and on the night the Opposition sent their awesome weapon through the Perchorsk Gate, he dreamed of the Necroscope’s Möbius blazon. From which time forward he took it for his own.” He paused a moment, giving Chung the chance to say:

  “Blazon? It surprises me you know that word.”

  “Why?” Nathan raised an eyebrow. “It’s a Szgany word. Many of our words are more or less the same.” And when Chung made no answer he continued, “Anyway, my father died that night. Perhaps something went out from him in addition to the images which you saw here, and the fragment that entered the computer. Maybe his sign had the power to impress itself into the minds of all manner of sensitive dreamers and mentalists, such as Maglore of Runemanse. But as for me, I’d known it even as a babe in arms, though that was probably coincidental. When we were babies, my mother had given my brother and me leather straps to wear on our wrists, so that she could tell us apart in the night. My strap had the Möbius half-twist.”

  “Oh?” said Chung, smiling. “Coincidence? And your father was the Necroscope, Harry Keogh? Well, perhaps …” His smile gradually faded as he watched Nathan fixing the earring back in place. Then: “I’d better get back to my station.” But as he reached the door and opened it, he glanced back at the other. “Nathan, do me a favour, will you?”

  “If I can.”

  “When you get back to Sunside—or even before you get back—get rid of that earring. Maglore, this Wamphyri mentalist of yours, might have intended it as more than just a gift. I mean, you know what my talent is, how it works? I locate things, people as often as not. And it helps if I can lock onto something, such as Siggi Dam’s clasp, or an earring like the one in your ear.”

  Nathan nodded. He understood Chung’s warning. “You think Maglore has the same sort of talent? That he might have been using me to spy on Sunside?”

  “It’s just a hunch, but yes.”

  Again Nathan’s nod, as his thoughts flew back once more to his own world. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Before the dawn, while Nathan dreamed, Sir Keenan Gormley got back to him. Siggi Dam wasn’t among the Great Majority. And if she was no longer in this world, there was only one other place she could be.

  In his sleep Nathan sweated, tossed and turned, ground his teeth. His conversion to E-Branch and his newfound friends was now complete.

  But Gormley had other news for him, too, and as Nathan’s resolve hardened, so his plans must be altered. Möbius was no longer in his grave in Leipzig; only his bones were there now; the still-brilliant mind had moved on, gone elsewhere. There were other worlds beyond.

  It wasn’t quite a “dead end,” however. Hope hadn’t blinked out in its entirety along with Möbius; there were other incorporeal minds to contact, other mathematicians whose work in life had been just as enigmatic, just as metaphysical. Gormley had a whole list of them. Maybe Nathan should look some of them up instead.

  Except … the old problem might still be there. The dead continued to shun living persons who could speak to them. It was the legacy of Nathan’s father; for he had opened the way for them, taught them to seek each other out in their loneliness, only to betray them in the end. The betrayal had worked both ways, it was true, but in that respect the dead could be forgiven. They didn’t share the freedom of the living. They were immobile; they couldn’t flee before the advance of a necromancer but must lie still and suffer his tortures; they were terrified by the thought that such as Dragosani—and, in the end, Harry Keogh—might return, by the thought that indeed one such might already have returned, in the shape of this man from another world. For they knew that Nathan was here, and as yet they feared him.

  And so, as Nathan’s resolve hardened more yet, his sleeping form grew still and calm again.

  Calm, resentful, and cold.

  Perhaps even as cold as his Necroscope father …

  3

  The Nightmare Zone

  In his early days with E-Branch, the daily twenty-four-hour round of life itself was probably Nathan’s greatest physical and mental distraction. In his own world, where around fifty Sunside/Starside cycles were equal to an entire “year” Earth-time, a day was the equivalent of four to five of this world’s entire day/night cycles. And yet the Traveller physiology had clung to its preholocaust rhythms as developed through Szgany evolution on the vampire world prior to the advent of the so-called white sun, and the typical Traveller would sleep as often as three times—five or six hours a time—during the course of one long Sunside night.

  Here when it grew dark, one slept—and only one sleep, which would normally only be broken to answer calls of nature or duty—then woke up with the dawn. As for the impossibly short days: it seemed astonishing that t
hese people had ever found time to achieve anything. Yet what they had achieved was itself amazing. Nathan could scarcely begin to consider the extent of their science without that his mind reeled from the sheer scope of it!

  In fact, he was suffering a form of transdimensional jet lag, where his body was desperately trying to adjust to time scales and differentials far beyond the experience of any Sunside Traveller since time immemorial. But that wasn’t the worst of it; something else he must get used to was the foul weather. The seasons on Sunside had varied only marginally over four-year periods, when the climatic changes were so slow and slight as to be almost unnoticeable. Here in the “hell-lands,” however—especially London in the winter—the weather was hell! Not as bad as Perchorsk and the lands around, but bad enough by any standards. At least in Perchorsk the temperature had been more or less constant, and the mountain ravines natural as opposed to the man-made canyons of the city.

  Nathan had never in his life had a cold—until now! His nostrils had never before clogged up—until he breathed the fumes rising out of the underground stations. The efficiency of his digestive system, his bowels and the solid consistency of their contents, had never been in question—until he ate with Ben Trask at various Chinese and Indian restaurants.

  All in all, life was uncomfortable here. It wasn’t at all the world he’d envisioned as a stuttering loner in Settlement, when all he’d wanted was to escape into his own worlds of fantasy. But at the same time it wasn’t quite hell, and when the drizzly, dreary nights came down he didn’t have to hide from monsters. Unless they were monsters out of his own past, his own memory.

  Nathan’s most recent monster was Turkur Tzonov, but at least he wasn’t Wamphyri (though well he might have been, if what E-Branch suspected of him were the truth). Separated from Tzonov by many thousands of miles, Nathan couldn’t hit at the man personally, but he could do his best to damage his organization, ruin his planned conquest of Sunside/Starside. If not in this world, then certainly in his own. But to do that, and also to avenge if not save Siggi Dam, he must first get back to his own world, and take with him all the weapons he could muster.

  Nathan’s best weapon, Trask had assured him, would be Nathan himself. But a Nathan trusted by the teeming dead, and one who commanded the metaphysical Möbius Continuum as his father before him. With this in mind he applied himself yet more diligently to his studies, specifically the elusive and seemingly meaningless science of mathematics. And as the first ten days flew by his progress was such that he could be proud of it.

  As his instructor explained to Ben Trask on the morning of the eleventh day: “He seems to have a natural talent for it, an intuitive grasp of math. At first I couldn’t be sure; he was reluctant, easily sidetracked. But now … well, it could be you’ll soon have to replace me. My knowledge goes only so far.”

  Trask looked at the other across his desk. James Bryant was perhaps the perfect stereotype. Small and slender, studious in grey slacks and dark polo-necked pullover, blinking owlishly behind thick-lensed spectacles, he just had to teach something or other, preferably math. The Minister Responsible had pulled him in from one of the universities where his term of office had just run out. But Bryant’s mind wasn’t one-track; it wasn’t bound by his subject. He had known from the start, even without the Official Secrets Act, that E-Branch was no ordinary government department, and Nathan no ordinary student. And this morning, for some reason or other, he appeared to have reached the end of his tether.

  “Just how far does your knowledge go?” Trask asked him. “I mean, we’ve scarcely had time to talk to each other, let alone get to know one another. I know you were at … where, Oxford? Our minister wouldn’t have recommended you for the job if you weren’t worth your salt.”

  Bryant nodded. “Do you know what math is, Mr. Trask? Its definition? Roughly, it’s the logical study of quantity or magnitude. It uses rigorously defined concepts and self-consistent symbols in such a way as to disclose the properties and relations of quantities and magnitudes within its own parameters. It can be applied or abstract, can make connections or remain purely theoretical. Do you follow?”

  Trask nodded, then shook his head. “I’m no mathematician, Mr. Bryant. I follow you, but I don’t follow you—if you follow me. Yes, I know Einstein’s famous equation, but that’s not to say I understand it. Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind, what’s troubling you?”

  “Teaching Nathan is what’s troubling me, because I can’t teach him what he wants to know. Because math won’t cover it. May I explain?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Let’s look at that definition of math again. The first word we come across is logical. Nathan’s application is hardly logical. He wants to be able to ‘conjure doors’! He believes that if he can frame or control a certain equation or series of equations, then these ‘doors’”—Bryant offered a baffled shrug—“wilt appear. The physical out of the abstract.”

  Taking a deep breath, Trask shook his head. “Not the physical, but the metaphysical, certainly. And surely metaphysical and abstract aren’t incompatible.”

  “Exactly,” said Bryant. “Except I’m not dealing with metaphysics … though it strikes me that you are!” And remembering some of the things he’d seen in this place during the past fortnight, he glanced around the office. “But men can’t think doors into existence, Mr. Trask. Or for that matter anything else.”

  Trask wanted to say, Nathan’s father could, but somehow managed to keep his peace. “Men can think thoughts into existence,” he said, without meaning to be clever. “But I take your point, so do go on.”

  Zek Föener came to Trask’s office door, looked inside and made to turn away. Trask called out to her. “Zek? It’s OK. Come in.” And to Bryant: “Please carry on. This is interesting.”

  Bryant looked at Zek, shrugged and said, “Good morning. I was just explaining to Mr. Trask why I can’t go on working with Nathan.”

  She smiled and said, “I’d like to hear that. Any insight has to be better than none. Most have been favourable, but all opinions count.”

  “My ‘opinion’ is that he’s a nice lad,” Bryant told her. “It isn’t that I don’t like him, only that I can’t work with him.” He turned back to Trask. “Back to the definition: rigorously defined concepts and self-consistent symbols. Mathematics doesn’t mutate. It grows, certainly, gets more complex the deeper we delve, but even to a computer a plus is a plus and a minus is a minus. Nathan wants to bend math; if rules don’t say what he wants them to say, he bends them.”

  “Isn’t that what rules are for?” Zek frowned. “I mean, didn’t we once believe that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line? And wasn’t it math that showed us we were wrong? Wasn’t it math that ‘bent’ the line and threw us a curve?”

  And Trask thought, But here in E-Branch we know that the shortest distance between two points is in fact a Möbius door! And I personally have seen Harry Keogh disappear through just such a door! While out loud he said:

  “Is it such a bad thing that Nathan is trying to create his own system with its own rules? Why shouldn’t he look at numbers from all directions? As Zek said: isn’t that what rules are for anyway, so that people who are clever enough can bend them?”

  “Not the rules of mathematics, no,” Bryant disagreed. And quickly went on: “Look, let’s get to the point. The deeper I go with Nathan the less certain I am of my ground. Soon I won’t know if he’s playing fair with me or if he’s … well, bending the rules. If he is he won’t learn anything. Not from me, anyway. So there’s little point in my trying to teach him.”

  “Then maybe you should try learning from him. Is that what you’re trying to say: that he’s outstripping you?”

  Bryant shook his head, his frustration beginning to show. “I’m not jealous of him … not yet, anyway.”

  “Maybe we should get another instructor, then? Someone who knows it all?”

  “No one ‘knows it all,’ Mr. Trask
. It just gets more complex, that’s all. My suggestion: from now on let him do his own thing, without outside help or hindrance. That way, as soon as he discovers that numbers simply are—that they don’t govern anything except themselves—he’ll stop fooling with them. Then, with his … well, I can only call it ‘intuition,’ he’ll probably go on to make a very capable mathematician.”

  Trask took a chance. “You know of course that we want him to find his doors?”

  “I guessed as much, yes,” Bryant answered. “Also that you are dealing with some pretty weird stuff around here. Metaphysics? You as good as admitted it just a moment ago.” There was a mildly scornful something in his tone that Trask, despite that he was sympathetic, didn’t much care for.

  “Pick a number,” Trask said. “Any number between one and a million.”

  “A trick?”

  “A demonstration.”

  Bryant sighed and said, “I have it.”

  Trask glanced at Zek. The merest glance, but she knew what he wanted. And smiling, she said, “All the nines. Ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine.”

  Bryant frowned, said, “How …?”

  “I bent the rules,” she told him. “The ones that guarantee the privacy of your own mind. I’m a telepath. Which is only one of the rules that get bent around here.”

  Bryant looked at her, and at Trask. “E-Branch? ESP-Branch?”

  “In one,” Trask told him. And: “Another demonstration. Tell me something about yourself. Anything at all. Out of your past. But among all the true things you tell me, make sure you stick at least one lie in there.”

  “What?” Bryant looked mystified.

  “Do it.”

  Bryant shrugged, said: “I was born at about two in the morning on the second of December, 1975, in—”

  “A lie,” Trask cut in. “You weren’t born in 1975.”

  The other blinked his eyes rapidly, and Zek told him, “Ben is a human lie detector. You can’t lie to him. Anything false, he sees, hears, smells, tastes, and feels it right away. We all have our talents, Mr. Bryant. Nathan, too. Except his is buried deep inside. We had hoped you could help us dig it out, that’s all.”