The Last Aerie by Brian Lumley

Vasagi’s egg, would attend to that: his metamorphic flesh would stretch and fill out. But for now … well at least he could try thinking like a Lord.
    Spiro Killglance sat on Nestor’s left, with some five or six chairs separating them. Opposite Spiro, Gore Sucksthrall took his place, and Gorvi the Guile edged into a chair across from Nestor. On the table in front of Wratha’s guests, wooden platters, hollowed into shallow bowls, contained barbed stabbing spikes of soft gold. There were leather drinking jacks, and several large jugs of fired pottery patterned in the fashion of Sunside’s Szgany, containing sweet water or weak wine for the jacks. Wratha knew better than to serve strong drink. Her own plate and cup were of gold; she likewise knew how to make her guests feel small and even unworthy.
    The fare was scarcely extravagant: lightly braised hearts, kidneys, and livers of shads, and four suckling wolves roasted on spits and basted in a sauce of their mother’s milk, urine, and blood. Individual or special requirements were not catered for; the food was simply an expression of Wratha’s hospitality; the Wamphyri normally “refuelled” themselves in the first hours after sundown, according to personal needs, habits, and tastes. That which at this hour would be breakfast to a Traveller, was therefore a mere novelty to them.
    Nestor, on the other hand, was hungry. He had last eaten well before sundown, in the cabin of Brad Berea in the forest. In the time-scale of a parallel world beyond the Starside Gate (which Szgany and Wamphyri alike called the hell-lands, because since time immemorial no one had ever returned from them), that was the equivalent of four days. There was no way Nestor could know that, but he did know that since sundown he’d survived on a few nuts, and a piece of wild fruit in the woods; scarcely sufficient to keep body and soul together. Well, too late now to worry about his soul, but his body must go on at least.
    Also, while his memory was still largely impaired prior to his time spent with the Bereas, his mind itself was completely healed and receptive— made receptive by his parasite egg, which demanded that he be strong and cunning—so that he was constantly learning. The ability, indeed the need to learn anew had been sparked within him. And with no background as such, an empty past, every smallest item of new information was soaking into his brain like rain into desiccated earth. While deep in his subconscious, thirsty seeds of ambition, knowledge, even memory—however misshapen or mutated from their source material—were waiting to spring to life. But he could not become wise, strong, Wamphyri, in a depleted body. And so he ate.
    He ate with gusto, stabbing a slice of shad liver, which was in any case a Szgany delicacy, and doing it justice as he held it in his hand and tore at it with strong teeth. And such was his hunger that the meat never even touched his platter! Another slice followed, and a steaming kidney, whole, which he maneuvered onto his plate without losing but a splash of gravy. Then a jack of wine, and tender flesh from a thigh of suckling wolf. The Szgany didn’t eat wolf, but Nestor didn’t know what the meat was. Whatever, he would have eaten it! It was strong and imparted strength. And while he ate, he studied his surroundings.
    The Great Hall was all of a hundred and fifty feet long by sixty feet wide. It ran parallel with the south-facing wall of the stack, where windows had been cut through the solid rock to the chasm of open air that spanned the boulder plains all the way to the barrier mountains. In places, these deep embrasures in the wall of the spire were almost tunnels; in others, where the rock was thinner, they formed archways out onto high balconies of grafted bone, whose baffles of hide and cartilage were so constructed as to turn aside and deaden the buffeting of the wind. Framed in one such opening, Nestor observed the fluttering of a banner,