even something of the violence of his most recent past. But all of it so vague, disjointed and kaleidoscopic that it was impossible, even painful, to piece together. And Nestor had had quite enough of pain.
The one incontestable 'fact1 - the one answer which surfaced time and time again whenever he considered the question of identity and being - was the repetitive phrase: 'I am the Lord Nestor.' So that in a little while he knew who he was at least. But what sort of a Lord was he?
Physically: his skull still felt soft at the back, where plates of fractured bone were agonizingly mobile under an area of rough, puffy skin and subcutaneous fluids; but at least he could touch himself there without feeling sick. Apart from a slight blurriness of vision, his eyesight seemed sound in the pre-dawn light. Other than his lumpy, tender face - his nose which was definitely hooked now and still sore where the bone was knitting, split lips, and several loose teeth - no bones appeared broken in his limbs or body. In short, he knew that whatever he had survived, he would probably continue to survive it. Certainly he was hungry and thirsty for two men, and a good appetite is usually indicative of good health.
With this in mind he looked down on the fires in Twin Fords and the black smoke hanging like a pall over the town, and wondered if he'd find breakfast there. Probably, because after all he was a Lord. Also, he wondered if he would find some answers, clues as to his and the world's circumstances in general.
As for the three-quarters dead flyer: Nestor had seen its grotesque carcass as a hugely anomalous lump in the darkness of the trees: a sprawling blanket or tent of skins, or more likely a tangled platform of fallen branches. He had considered it no further than that.
Its true nature - the fact that it had transported him to this place, and that he had emerged from it - these things were entirely forgotten. But as twilight brightened into dawn and the rising sun lit up the peaks, and its golden light fell like a slowly descending curtain towards the tree-line, so he had cause to regard the creature anew. For now the thing in the trees was most definitely alive!
It tried to arch its broken wings, craned a prehistoric neck for the sky, and cried out in a hissing, clacking voice. But the shattered pines had pierced its membranous wings and crushed their fragile alveolate bones, and all its energy had drained away along with its fluids. Pinned down, grounded and broken, the creature could only despair its fate, for the vampire stuff in it sensed the sunrise as surely as a lodestone senses north, except the flyer wasn't attracted but repulsed. Or would be, if it still had the power of flight.
Walking unsteadily, gingerly around the perimeter of the triangular stand of pines at the rim of the bluff where the flyer had crashed down, Nestor observed the slate-grey, leathery skin of the thing; its long neck and spatulate head, and dull, near-vacant eyes. Despite that its head was huge, blunt and acromegalic, still there was something vaguely, disturbingly human about it; but nothing remotely human about the tentacular thrusters which it drove into the pine-needle floor each time it arched its torn manta wings, as if to assist in launching itself into flight. These reminded Nestor of nothing so much as a nest of giant maggots erupting from the belly of some dead thing.
And at the base of its neck, where its back widened out into swept-back wings ... was that some kind of saddle?
He might have climbed back under the canopy of the trees to make a closer inspection, but such were the thing's struggles that he feared it might flop down on top of him; and so he held back. At which point the jagged rim of sunlight creeping down across the tree-line fell squarely upon the creature - to devour it!
So it seemed to Nestor.
For the pines filled with stench and steam at once, as the doomed flyer's skin shrivelled and turned from slate-grey to the unwholesome blue of corruption and the texture of crumbling pumice. Its flesh quaked, bloated, split open in a dozen places, out of which its smoking fats ran like water! Then the thing screamed -a sound so thin, high and penetrating that it sliced like a sharp edge of ice