“Infest, eh?”
“Yes, like vermin. You and I both know your resources would be better used either against the Camarilla or—and I know sensibility is a stretch for you zealot-types—more sensibly by taking from Boston what you want and not worrying about the nebulous sect affiliation of the city, which isn’t quantifiable anyway. At least, we Giovanni see it that way. We know you have people in Boston; so does the Camarilla. And it doesn’t affect us in the least. Kindred…excuse me, Cainites battling in the streets, however, doesn’t do any of us any good.” Isabel took a seat on what she assumed to be a leather chair and crossed her hands in her lap.
Margaret followed suit. “Moderation is not diplomacy, Isabel. But we should take refreshment before we continue further. Jonathan!”
From the shadows beyond the room emerged a thin, pale young man, perhaps in his early twenties or late teens. He wore no clothes, and all external evidence of his gender had been removed—he displayed no phallus, nor pubic hair, and the only reason Isabel guessed him to be male at all was a suggestion in the tone of his musculature. His head and face were likewise hairless. And most unsettling of all was the fact that Margaret had removed all traces of Jonathan’s mouth and nose from his face; his sorrowful eyes peered out from the otherwise featureless alabaster expanse of his countenance.
Isabel kept her revulsion in check—of all the things she’d done in life and unlife of which others might have disapproved, at least they were basically human in nature. What some might have considered sexual perversion, acts of brutality or even depraved indifference all had their origin in the original humanity of their perpetrator or, more often, the mortality of their victims or subjects. With members of the Sabbat, like Margaret, viciousness often had no relation to humanity. Jonathan, for example, had been remade in the image of some androgynous ideal Margaret at some point had found aesthetically pleasant. Or perhaps she had so little sympathy with or empathy for the kine that Jonathan existed to serve her needs and deny his own. Surely, though, if he was a ghoul, he would need to take blood from her in some way. Were he not a ghoul, he would still need to eat. Perhaps he was some sort of Tzimisce “performance,” which Margaret flesh-crafted again and again as his needs arose, only to revert him to his present state afterward. Isabel dropped the train of thought entirely; there was no telling with someone so completely outside of normal thought as Margaret.
“Oh, don’t be so particular. I sealed his mouth as a service to you, so you wouldn’t have to hear him scream when you took blood from him. I know how agonizing the Giovanni Kiss is for its victims. I must also confess that I’m interested in seeing your feeding peculiarity in practice. You don’t mind, do you Jonathan, that my friend Isabel will be removing your head.”
“Don’t tell me you believe that rubbish, Margaret? That I can drink only from severed heads? Why, if that were true, wouldn’t I have sunk to your level of depravity long ago? After all, if we’re to believe everything we hear, I should suspect your Sabbat of mindless, destructive, cackling Satanism. And the simple fact that I’m here and willing to discuss your plans about Boston proves that rumors are sometimes unfounded, does it not? Would I bargain with such a fool?”
“You disappoint me, Isabel. By all means, though, feed. I was hoping for a display of madness or excess, and instead you tell me that I’ve placed too much stock in urban legend.”
Isabel took the opportunity to feed. Jonathan buckled beneath her, falling to his knees as she supped his life’s blood from his throat. As she drank, Isabel heard a reedy whine punctuated by incomprehensible clicks. She looked down, lost in the burning thrill of the vitae, to see two opening and closing scolices on the insides of Jonathan’s palms. Apparently, Margaret had not bestowed voice boxes upon them, and the thin whine was just air drawn in and expelled from them. The clicks came from the tiny needle-fangs that surrounded the openings, grinding and clashing as the hand-mouths writhed. Disgusted, she pushed him away.
Margaret met her eyes with a grin. “Well, the boy must eat somehow, must he not? Here, Jonathan, my poor child; take back some of what our judgmental saint Isabel has taken from you.” She opened the front of her sheer silk shirt, exposing a flawless ivory breast, the peak of which had been flesh-crafted smooth and unnippled. Jonathan reached out his hand and caressed his domitor’s skin, piercing the flesh ever so shallowly and no doubt drawing out savory trickles of her rich blood. “You should be glad, Isabel. Surely you would suspect me of attempting to forge a blood bond, had I given Jonathan his nightly due first.”
“I’ve had enough of this.” Isabel broke off the conversation. She rose, returned to the foyer, and collected her jacket. Without even attempting to make eye contact with Margaret, she shouted into the other room, “And I’m sure you can see that we have nothing in common, and therefore nothing to gain with even an empty alliance. Don’t be so foolish as to think you can pluck Boston like a ripe plum. Neither of the groups of Kindred who stand against you would permit it.”
“Ah, simple Isabel. Permission is not part of the problem. Within the week, Buffalo will fall to us. Hartford will be ours before year’s end. Already, a war party of archbishops has gathered a group of Cainites to dominate precious Boston by force or fortune. Take my advice, Isabel. Pay tribute, or crumble like the rest of the East Coast.”
But Isabel never heard this last; she had left Margaret’s wretched haven and summoned a private car to take her to Grand Central Station.
Friday, 27 August 1999, 12:03 AM
Wisconsin Avenue
Washington, D.C.
Polonia and Borges shared grave looks, which gave way to avaricious, vulpine smiles. Polonia cocked an eyebrow and closed his eyes in concentration.
Hundreds of miles away, a mortal, animated like a puppet by Polonia’s formidable will, rose from her prone pose and raised her arms above her head. Around her, in a circle, loomed a pack of ravenous Sabbat, waiting for just this signal.
Polonia released his control of the subject, whose last conscious thought was, “What am I doing here?” before the frenzied Cainites tore her to dripping shreds in their excitement. An expressionless vampire touched each of the howling Cainites on the forehead before turning them loose into the night.
Like rabid wolves, the pack descended upon Boston.
Monday, 25 October 1999, 12:15 AM
The Mausoleum loggia
Venice, Italy
“My Uncle Martino sends his regards.”
Isabel Giovanni stood in her dressing gown, a half-smile gracing her fair skin, the door to her chamber open to receive this guest. Young Kwei della Passaglia, “nephew” to one of the most prominent Giovanni vampires of that family, stood before her. In his hands, he held a small, wrapped box: a gift.
“Welcome, Kwei. Please, come in. May I offer you anything?” A test, thought Isabel. If Martino has his nephew—practically a boy!—ghouled, he would perhaps ask for a draught of vitae. Isabel closed her gown around her and pulled a heavy robe over her shoulders.
Kwei placed the gift box on the vanity table and looked around the room. Like a few of the other rooms he had seen in the loggia, Isabel’s seemed more like a temporary apartment or a guest house than a true bedroom. Isabel had a few personal effects scattered around, but the room certainly didn’t look lived-in. He noted a decanter on a cart on the far side of the room. “I’ll take a brandy, if you don’t mind. It’s uncommonly cool tonight.”
“Help yourself. And how is your uncle?” Isabel smiled. Martino had been Kindred for at least two centuries and probably more. Unless Kwei was a very well-preserved ghoul, Martino was more likely his great uncle ten times over, if they were related at all.
“Fine, very well, thank you. This season has given a very good bounty of the silk.” Kwei’s Italian was obviously more scholastic than conversational. “He knows you are very fond of silk, so he sent you the present. I hope I haven’t spoiled the surprise. Forgive my ignorance, but you are his sister?”
“So
mething like that.” Isabel brushed her hair as Kwei poured a shallow glass of brandy. Martino was an acquaintance of her sire, actually. Long ago, he had married his way into the Giovanni family and shortly thereafter become a member of the Giovanni clan. He and Isabel had no love lost between them— she considered him a yellow-fevered pimp and he thought she was a symbol of everything that was wrong with the clan, from vice to indulgence and everything in between. “It’s…hard to keep track of. The family is very old.”
Kwei smiled, sipping from his snifter.
“But please, Kwei, take a seat.” Isabel took a dress from the back of a chair and hung it, making a place for her guest to relax. “Did your Uncle Martino have anything else he wished me to know? I heard about the unfortunate demise of his father.” She could practically hear the quotation marks around this last. If Kwei knew anything about the unnatural aspects of the family, this would be his opportunity to impart that graciously.
“It is the greatest tragedy, thank you for your condolences,” Kwei replied. Probably not even a ghoul, Isabel reasoned. “Such is the danger of my uncle’s occupation. Many from the East would have him fail.”
“Yes, well, many in the West would have him fail, too. Your uncle is a bold man, Kwei, as I’m sure you know.”
Kwei raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean by this?” He inflected the question incorrectly, the emphasis falling on this and not mean.
“Surely you know that he and I are not the most cordial of relations?” Isabel replied. “He would have told you that in preparation for the journey.”
“No, he did not. I am sorry to hear this.”
“It’s not your fault. I won’t punish you unless he goes out of his way to offend me. Now let me see that gift.” Isabel’s smile was barbed.
With a nervous look, Kwei handed Isabel the package. It was heavy. Isabel wondered to herself if Martino was unhappy with Kwei, or whether the boy had done something to upset his “uncle.” The gift inside would tell the truth of the tale. Certainly, the trip itself would have been exciting for the boy, who had probably never left Hong Kong. Martino knew, however, that he and Isabel had an unsettled score between them. Years ago, she had sent one of her own ghouls to deliver a wedding gift to one of the members of his mortal family. Martino considered the gift, delivered by proxy, to be a great slight—not only had Isabel refused to deliver the gift in person, she had sent a censer stoked with an incense to which the bride was terribly allergic. The poor girl had taken a great whiff and immediately fallen into a reactive coma. Martino dismissed the embarrassed ghoul, only to have the young man’s throat slit several hours later. A terse note in della Passaglia’s hand informed Isabel of her gaffe. Not that she had ever liked him anyway, or would have considered attending the wedding. Still, it looked either spiteful or amateur on Isabel’s part, depending upon which way one viewed the accident.
With this on her mind, Isabel opened the box. Inside rested a dense, rectangular object wrapped in an opaque tissue paper. A piece of folded rice paper sat atop the gift. Isabel opened the note and read:
I—
Enclosed find something that I hope will help you with your current charge. I hope turning the pages doesn't irritate your delicate skin.
—M
She unwrapped the gift: a book bound in a silk cover. Martino knew Isabel hated his silks. She considered them as coarse as him and marred by numerous flaws. This was his revenge for the incense—a subtle yet unmistakable flouting of Isabel’s tastes. In the world of the Kindred, such subtleties carried great weight; it was how the race of Caine balanced their intricate scores of status, how they tallied points at various stages of the game of Jyhad. Martino had, from his point of view, evened the score by murdering Isabel’s ghoul so many years ago. Now that he had the opportunity, Isabel saw, he took the chance to place himself in the lead by not only acknowledging her tastes, but forcing her to put them aside for the sake of his assistance.
Still, she had recourse. Martino’s “gift” no doubt related to the ancient vampire she tracked—perhaps a geomancer’s matrix that revealed the location of its crypt or an Eastern necromantic ritual that could counter one of its potent abilities.
On this, Isabel gambled. The journal Marcia had found pointed out the likely location—or at least a recent location—of the creature she sought. By returning Martino’s gift to him, she could prevent him from achieving his petty victory over her. Such was the nature of the gamble. Could she afford to turn away this information, knowing that it might possibly forfeit whatever advantage she could glean from it? Or should she avoid allowing Martino to take the lead in their private war, a war that paled in comparison to the larger stakes at hand concerning the matter of the old clan’s return?
In the end, though, Kindred are proud creatures. Isabel had made her decision as immediately as it had been presented to her.
“Why, Kwei, I’m afraid your uncle’s distance from the loggia has put him regrettably out of touch. This isn’t the book I was looking for. I couldn’t possibly allow him to give it to me—it belongs in his own library, where someone might be able to make better use of it than I.” She carefully handed the book back to him, making an elaborate production out of not opening it at all. “Please, return it to him and let him know that I appreciate the gesture, but that I just can’t allow him to sacrifice his own resources so greatly for my benefit.”
With that, she hurried Kwei della Passaglia from her chamber and into the hallway, smiling good night to him as she closed the door.
Kwei, no fool, had some inkling of what had just occurred. Many times, he had seen the Byzantine and decidedly Western minutiae of this social drama unfold before him, as it related to his uncle or one of the other Europeans or Americans in his uncle’s employ. He breathed a sigh of relief, knowing as he was excused from Isabel Giovanni’s room that, for a brief moment, his life had been at stake. With another sigh, he turned and walked to his own guestroom, knowing that when he returned to deliver the news to his uncle, his life would once again be on the line.
Tuesday, 26 October 1999, 4:02 AM
The Mausoleum loggia
Venice, Italy
“This doesn’t make any sense.” Chas furrowed his brow and looked at the other Kindred in the room.
“An unfortunate fact, but one to which I can offer no better answer. This is simply how things are, and I can’t give you any better rationale without delving into the finer details of our spirit magic, which I’m not sure you’d want anyway,” replied Ambrogino Giovanni. “Isabel understands as much as she does only because she has a grounding in our necromantic practice. To be honest, it shouldn’t really matter to you anyway. You’re just muscle.”
Chas didn’t know whether that was an insult or a simple declaration. Sometimes these old vampires hadn’t had contact with others in so long, their graces atrophied.
“Don’t worry, Chas. Here’s how it works.” Isabel reclined in her chair rubbing her eyes, seemingly grateful for the chance to step back from what had been an intense conversation with Ambrogino. “We talked before about the ghosts, remember? Well, as it turns out, a huge shockwave of spiritual energy just devastated their world. Think of it like a hurricane, blowing through a city and destroying everything it touches. In the aftermath of this spiritual storm, the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead blurred a bit. In some places they were so weak, any spirit could force its way through. In other places, they didn’t have to force their way through—the storm left gaping holes in the veil between the worlds.”
Chas chimed in, wanting to make sure he understood. “Okay, so, that means what? There are ghosts out and about? Wandering through the world? What the fuck does that mean? Unless we have something specific to do with them, why should that matter at all?”
“It matters because of the consequences,” Ambrogino added. “Know primarily that necromantic magic is a science, not an art. When creating the effects of death magic, quantifiable results are almost alw
ays reliably produced. If the desired result does not occur, something has failed somewhere in the chain of events required to bring it about. This may be something uncontrollable, such as great force of will on the part of a given ghost. It may have been a formulaic step the necromancer has omitted. It may have been something so minor as a brief lapse of concentration, or a mispronunciation of a spoken word. Whatever the case, some requirement has not been satisfied.”
“Okay,” Chas said, incredulous again, his eyes becoming slits.
“All that, we’ve established. In the case of the spirit storm’s aftermath, however, something else has become a part of the equation—something unquantifiable. It might be a very potent Kindred, or an unthinkably powerful spirit,” Ambrogino continued.
“Or, as some Kindred have guessed,” Isabel interrupted, “it might be the hand of God Himself.”
Chas snorted. “God? You think God came down from heaven and started slapping vampires and ghosts around? Wouldn’t it have been a bit more…oh, I don’t know…fucking obvious? Wouldn’t He just cast lightning bolts down from the heavens or make the sun shine all day and night?”
Ambrogino stood, directing a scornful finger at Chas. “Do not presume to understand God, whelp. Before Him, you are nothing but a mote of dust in the cloud that circles the world. You’ve heard it before: ‘He works in mysterious ways.’ The simple fact that we can’t empirically find a cause for the storm or its results suggests something far beyond our capacity to understand, let alone master. Something more powerful than our magic, or indeed, the magic of anyone else who has come forth to offer a less mystical reason.”
Isabel cut in, hoping to defuse Ambrogino’s ire and bring them back to the subject. “But the situation with the ghosts is not the gravest matter, even though it does present us with the most immediate inconvenience. I mentioned God because it seems that the storm was not His intention. In fact, He seems to have taken steps to clean up the detritus left by the storm. The agents of God now want to take back the night—they want to destroy the ghosts who have forced their way back from their rightful deaths. Sometimes, they run afoul of vampires, whom they also consider monsters to be exterminated. This is what you ran into after your inexpert handling of the Camarilla negotiation in Boston.”
Clan Novel Giovanni: Book 10 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 15