The Last Aerie Read Online Free Page A

espers gasped. “You mean he’s come back? He’s here?”
    Again Chung shook his head, showed them the brush in his hand. “This piece of wood, these few bristles, meant something, told me something. They told me that the Necroscope was alive; if not here, alive somewhere. Only let me pick up this brush or Harry’s other things, and I knew it. Now … it’s just a hairbrush, no longer alive. And neither is Harry Keogh. He died a few moments ago, somewhere. And we all saw it.”
    “Harry’s dead.” Ben Trask made no bones of it. “What we’ve just witnessed was him. Somehow, he found a way to let us know, give us peace of mind. That’s how I see it, anyway.”
    Ian Goodly came in with a pair of late arrivals: another esper and the Branch’s Minister Responsible. The Minister was in his mid-forties, young for his job, but had a mind sharp as a knife. He was small and dapper, with keen blue eyes, and dark hair brushed back and plastered down. His blue suit was fashionable in the Corridors of Power; somehow his dress as a whole marked him as a person of class. In no way psychically talented, still the Minister was Branch; he too had felt the call—something had lured him here—until a moment ago, when it had stopped.
    While Trask told the Minister what had happened, Goodly fetched coffee. Then for an hour, two, the entire group sat around and remembered Harry. They said very little but were satisfied just to be there. And despite that they should be jubilant, they weren’t. And for all that a great plague had passed them by, most of them felt they’d lost a friend.
    David Chung had put Harry’s brush in his pocket; every now and then he would reach in and touch it with his fingertips. But it was just a brush now, wood and glue and bristle, inanimate, without being.
    And that’s how it would stay for sixteen long years … 
    A fortnight later Zek Föener called from her Greek island home in Zante. She’d put it off until it was unbearable, but in the end had to speak to Trask. “Are we friends again, Ben?”
    For all that she couldn’t see him, he nodded and smiled. He knew that Zek would sense it, for she was a powerful telepath. “After that job we did on Janos Ferenczy’s creatures in the Med? We’ll always be friends, Zek.”
    “Despite that I helped him in the end?” Her voice was a little distorted by the line but her anxiety was real enough. Trask’s talent was working for him, so that her sincerity was as tangible as the steady beat of his own heart.
    He shrugged, which she would also sense, and said, “You’re not the only one who helped Harry, Zek.”
    “You, too? I somehow thought you would.”
    “I took a chance,” he told her. “If it had gone the other way … I could have ended up the biggest traitor mankind has ever known! By now there might have been a new world order.”
    “I know. I thought much the same thing. But it was Harry, after all.”
    “Half of it was, anyway,” Trask answered.
    “Actually, he died six, seven months ago,” she said.
    “What?” She’d taken Trask by surprise.
    “He was dead to us the moment he went through the Perchorsk Gate,” she explained. “Or as good as. There was no way we were ever going to see him again. He’d used both of the Gates, the one in the Urals and the one in Romania. He couldn’t come back; the grey holes would reject him.”
    Trask had been happy to hear her voice, talk to Zek, but suddenly his mood was grim. She’d brought something up that he didn’t like to think about. “That’s true as far as it goes,” he said, “but his son used a different route. Harry had considered himself the master of the Mobius Continuum, but in fact he was a novice. Those are his words, not mine. Harry Junior was the real master. But if anyone knows that, you do: it’s how he brought you and Jazz out of that place back here.”
    There was a pause before she answered. “The Dweller still worries you, right?”
    “The Dweller?”