The Last Aerie Read Online Free Page B

Trask frowned. But in the next moment: “Oh, yes, you mean Harry Junior. He worries me, right enough. The Perchorsk Gate worries me, and the resurgence of one of the Danube’s tributaries near Radujevac in Romania. They all worry me, for they’re all routes into this world from the world of the vampires.”
    “But they’re covered now, surely?”
    “Harry Junior isn’t.”
    And now it was Trask’s turn to sense the shake of a head. “He won’t be coming back,” Zek told him. “He was Wamphyri, yes, but he was different. As different as the Lady Karen. As different as his father. He fought for his territory on Starside, and he’ll stay there and keep it. He battled with the vampires, Ben, destroyed them, and to my knowledge he didn’t create one out of himself. He kept no thralls, no lieutenants, no vampire lovers. Just friends. But they did love him, even as much as the Great Majority loved his father.”
    She had reassured him. “Zek, I know you’ve turned me down before,” he said, “but I really think you and Jazz should come over here some time. Be our guests and stay in London a while at our expense, and tell us your story in full. No, you don’t owe us anything, neither one of you. But you said it yourself: we’re friends. And the pair of you have such a lot of information locked in your heads: about Starside, the Wamphyri, even things about Harry Keogh and his son, that only you know. The world’s improving, Zek—not by leaps and bounds, not yet—but who knows … maybe you can help it along the way? Or if not help it, protect it at least.”
    And before she could answer him, “I mean, it’s not like it used to be, Zek, not any more. You were used, you and Jazz both—oh, and too many others—by Russia’s E-Branch, and by ours, too. But lessons were learned and it isn’t like that anymore. We are learning all the time. I’ve thought about it a lot, and it’s as if everything the Necroscope touched upon has been improved and changed forever. Before he’d even discovered the Mobius Continuum, he had to use Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin to get into East Germany and talk to Mobius in his Leipzig grave. And where’s the checkpoint now, eh? As for Romania … Do you see what I mean, Zek? It’s as if mankind has turned over a new leaf, and all since Harry came along, or since he left us. But should we be surprised, really? I remember Harry once said, “There are a great many talents among the dead, and they have their ways of using them.” But it was him who showed them how to talk to each other, connecting them up in their graves. Since then—just look around the world.
    “Are they responsible, the teeming dead? Who knows what they’ve achieved, or how they did it? Communism is on its last legs, a dismal failure, and the world’s a safer place. After we send the rest of our false ideological gods packing, then maybe we can start over: a grand restructuring, the ecology of Mother Earth herself. Right now the world is safer, but it’s still not safe enough. Could you and Jazz help make it just a little bit safer, Zek? That’s what I want you to think about. If not for me, for Harry. I mean, don’t you reckon it’s worth finishing the job that he started?”
    “That’s cheating, Ben,” she told him.
    “Well, think about it anyway.”
    Later, she did think about it. Zek and Jazz both. But they didn’t go to London. It would take a long time for their wounds to heal, a long time before they would forgive the world’s ESP-Branches …
    While sixteen years isn’t a long time in the great scheme of things, still changes do occur. People, faces, places change; governments and organizations come and go; causes and ideologies collapse and others spring into being. But establishments are wont to continue, if only because they are established.
    Cold wars had come and gone; hot ones, too, however brief, localized; the world’s Secret Services were always in demand. Even during periods of