The Last Aerie by Brian Lumley Page B

with Vasagi the Suck. Alas, Vasagi is no more. I now call upon Wran—called the Rage, and rightly—to tell us all, and spare no detail of trial and triumph in the telling.” She sat down. It had been a standard opening; the Lords among them had all heard much the same before in Turgosheim, usually from Vormulac Unsleep, master of melancholy Vormspire.
    Wran sat up straighter, and made as if to begin. At which … an interruption! It was a sound or series of sounds: a burble of notes, piping trills, as of Sunside birds—issuing from a stairwell. At first an odd fluting, soon it turned to laughter, and then the two interspersed. Curious whistles, and gales of raucous laughter! And:
    “Canker Canison!” Wran scowled, before that one had even presented himself. But in another moment he appeared, with one of Wratha’s thralls bowing him in. Nestor looked, saw him, and his jaw dropped. So this was the missing Lord. But a Lord? The others around the table were mainly human—or born of woman, at least—but this one? Oh, there was something of humanity in him, but there was a great deal more of something else!
    Later, Nestor would learn a little of Canker’s history, his unutterable lineage : that somewhere in his ancestry there had been a fox, dog or wolf. Whichever, the creature had probably strayed from its normal hunting grounds on Sunside or in the mountains and wandered into the swamps east of Turgosheim to drink. There it had become infected by a spore and emerged a vampire changeling. After that, the possibilities were several:
    It had bitten or savaged someone, and so passed on a canine strain of vampirism. Or … inside the beast, a leech had developed from the vampire spore, whose egg later transferred to a man or woman, who became Wamphyri and ascended in Turgosheim. Or … some vampire had sired a litter on a dog bitch, she-wolf, or vixen; not necessarily by miscegenation, probably by biting the creature when she was pregnant. Or—in the case of someone like Canker—perhaps even sexually …
    Whichever, evidence of this—mongrel—ancestry had been apparent in the line ever since, and never more so than in Canker Canison. Standing upright and leaning forward (his normal posture), he was tall as a tall man but his limbs were all out of proportion. Shoulders, thighs and chest were massive, while forelegs were slender, sinewy, wolf-like.
    Canker’s hands … were hands; but his knob-like, thickly padded feet were plainly paws. Instead of nails, his hands and feet alike were equipped with claws. Face and head, while basically human, were also disturbingly doglike, with long jaws and canine teeth, triangular eyes, and pointed ears which were mobile, expressive, and thickly furred. Named after the disease of the inner ear which had driven his father baying mad and caused his suicide, Canker, by use of his metamorphism (also by physically sculpting them), had caused the lobes of his own ears to be fretted into curious and intricate designs, which included his sigil, a sickle moon.
    Canker’s hair was a wiry, foxy red; his eyes, too, though in dusk or darkness they could as easily turn yellow and feral. His gait was more a long-striding lope than a walk proper, and from time to time he would fall to all fours, then push himself upright with sinuous ease. When he laughed there was more than a hint of howling in it, and the gape of his jaws was enormous. Then, too, he would throw back his head and shake from tip to toe …
    He was laughing now, mainly at the long-suffering expressions on the faces of his peers. But as the dog-thing’s laughter died away, so his spiky eyebrows came together in a frown over his long, much-convoluted snout, and his voice became a growling rumble. “Eh, what? And have you started without me?”
    “The first gold is on the peaks, Canker,” Wratha observed, without turning a hair. “It is you who are late. For someone who observes the future in dreams, you scarcely seem to observe the