The Hollow Prince

by Mark Teppo

  Accusations of witchcraft were, traditionally, simple shorthand to dispense with those men or women who didn’t fit the perceived mold of the village. But as natural history and Humanism took root in the Renaissance, it became more difficult to distinguish between acts of witchery and scientific experiments. Purging the unwanted from the village wasn’t as quick and efficient as it had been in the past, and the mythology of the werewolf—the outlaw, the outsider, the beast who hides in the skin of a man—became a more effective method of cleansing the social body of the unwanted.

  Put a man in a room with a dead body, cover him with blood, and it is simple to turn the minds of those who knew the victim to the idea of lycanthrope. Who would commit this heinous crime? Why would this stranger kill our friend for no reason other than a demonic need to eat his flesh and drink his blood?

  We sell it to our youth every day on TV and in the movies. There are monsters among us, serial killers who haunt the dark bellies of our cities, taking the unwary and devouring them. Skinning them and wearing them like shirts. Turning their skulls into cups from which to drink the blood of the next victim. Beware the dark man, the one whose eyebrows meet and who has hair on the palms of his hands.

  After a while, the true monsters have to wonder if there is some credence to this myth of cannibalism. The logic becomes twisted and reversed. I am a monster, so I should be doing monstrous things. I should be a devourer of children.

  The flesh-eater in Brno was a lost soul, a man frightened of living in the twenty-first century, and he was trying to find his way. He was filled with too much fear, in the end, and the Chorus rejected him.

  But it was too late. He knew he had been discovered. He knew he would never learn any real truth about existence, about what it was to be human and to seek to become something else. He knew he had failed.

  Such bitterness. Such despair. The taste of it lingered for days, while I fought my own skirmishes with the same. Why did I keep seeking out this same poison again and again? What possessed me to make these choices?

  III.

  The tiny village of Béchenaux was like a spray of spring mushrooms on the bark of an old tree. A scattering of houses along the line of an old highway: two bars, a handful of restaurants, a post office with administrative services on the upper floor, a grocer, and a rambling old mansion that had been converted into tiny offices. Further back from the road were several radial arms of houses, each more ragged and lackluster than the last. Béchenaux had probably been an inn and a stable before the colonel-major arrived, and since his death, it had been quietly sliding back to that anonymity.

  And would probably keep on sliding. The road went all the way through to Switzerland, but it wasn’t a preferred route. Barely a scenic one.

  It was a perfect place for an old outlaw to fester in his bitterness: to sit in his drafty castle, poison himself with beer, and fight with old ghosts. The villagers were nothing more than support staff and like-minded survivors of the Napoleonic era. Too old to change, too young to welcome death. They had found a new enemy, and if Bento’s story was half-accurate, under Béchenaux’s guidance, they had built their own little heretic-free zone. Complete with an Inquisition-style dungeon.

  We couldn’t be here by accident. Europe was full of colorful pockets of still-thriving madness, but Bento knew too many specific details about this place. And the timing. Our arrival on the night of a full moon in a town that had a history of hunting werewolves. Too convenient.

  Two choices, then: they had been planning this little game for some time, or they came here regularly. The more I thought about it, the more the latter choice seemed correct. Especially in light of the reaction of the men who had come to Pierre’s house.

  They still believed in werewolves, rather seriously too, judging by the ammunition they were carrying. Which meant someone was giving them a reason.

  I lay in the brush behind a boarded-up house down the street from Pierre’s tiny house. My shoulder stung a bit, but the blood flow had stopped. Silver wasn’t dangerous to me without some other arcane attached to it, but the Chorus didn’t care for the proximity of the metal, and they still swarmed like wasps trapped beneath my skin. My jaw ached, like it always did when the Chorus beat against the back of my teeth. They were restless and hungry, pushing harder and harder against my wards. They wanted some satisfaction. Payback.

  In time, I thought. All in good time.

  It wasn’t the locals I was worried about. While they seemed to have marched themselves into the modern era with their werewolf-hunting tech, they were still just men with guns. Men with guns were predictable: they thought their weapons made them strong, made them safe. They didn’t have a Plan B for when their bullets weren’t enough.

  Where had the others gone? We had come in two cars. Six of us. Bento and me in Antoine’s car. Henri, Girard, and René in his flashy German car. Four of us had gone to the bar, and now I understood why Girard and René hadn’t been with us. After taking me down in the bathroom and moving me to Pierre’s house, had they gone back to the bar? Were they all there now, using the presence of the locals as cover?

  Antoine. Chatting up the blondes. Yes, his alibi. They’d be happy to vouch for him all evening if it meant some attention from him. He might have even allowed them to entice him away from the others. Just to lend some verisimilitude to his story.

  I heard voices and smelled hot ash from my left. The smoke had finally driven the men out of Pierre’s house. They weren’t happy about being outside, but there was nowhere else to go. When they got close enough, I let the Chorus taste them.

  Silver Bullet was leading. Pukeboy was in back. Silver Bullet’s friend was talking on a cell phone. Halfway between freaking out and getting a hard-on. We hit him. We tagged ourselves a live one.

  That first flush of fear was gone. They were getting into it now.

  How long had Antoine and the others been fucking with this town? They had been living with this fear of the full moon for a long time. Long enough to be ready to fight back, to get out from beneath the history that had haunted this valley for nearly two hundred years.

  I pulled back into the brush a little more, moving as silently as I could. They were hugging the houses, keeping their backs to something solid as much as possible. Pukeboy seemed to be doing a passable job as rear guard, keeping his eyes on the back trail. Just in case.

  Just fade, I thought, as they crossed the back of the abandoned house. Just let them go by, and fade into the forest. Head down the road and suggest to the first driver you find that you need to get back to Dijon. Easy to catch a train to Paris from there. You could be back before dawn. You could make the first workout session tomorrow. See their faces when they come in. Look who’s here, boys. Miss me?

  It’d be easy. And it was the smart play.

  But something in my gut held me there. Something deep inside me bubbled up, like black tar breaking through an old crust. It wasn’t just the Chorus—their noise I could deal with, eventually—this was some other outrage. The villagers were pawns, innocents who were being manipulated, and I wasn’t so naive that I didn’t realize that such guidance wasn’t part of what the organization did.

  We weren’t just Witnesses. There was enough bloodshed in the unvarnished history of La Société Lumineuse to warrant protecting their interests; and while the Lower Rank were charged with Watching, the Upper Rank—the Protectors and the Preceptors—did a great deal of . . . tweaking to the Weave.

  Béchenaux was their playground. Journeymen weren’t supposed to manipulate others—not until they were assigned to the field. But these boys couldn’t wait. They had to get a jump start on the true mission of La Société.

  Which is why I couldn’t run away. This little project was un-Witnessed. Which meant the rules of conduct weren’t in place. If I waited until I got back to Paris to deal with these guys, I’d have to do so under the watchful eye of the rank. Out here, Daddy wasn’t Watching.

  Out here, someone could get hu
rt and no one would have to answer to the how or the why.

  The Chorus swarmed down from my tight shoulder to my stomach and groin, moving like snakes filled with hot coals. I let their heat rise up my back. All in good time.

  *

  A half hour outside of Dijon, the road starting to incline into the Alps, Bento sprawled asleep in the backseat, Antoine started talking. We’d barely exchanged pleasantries in the last few weeks prior to my Trial, and for the first three hours of the ride, the car was filled with a forced silence. Now, spurred on by some invisible signal, he finally wanted to talk.

  “You don’t have the strength for this,” he said.

  This.

  I let the word hang for a long minute.

  “I’ll manage.”

  “There is no room to ‘manage,’ mon ami. Not here. You either excel or you die. There is no award for a ‘passing’ grade like you are used to in your simplistic American university classes.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why I stopped going to them.”

  “Your wit makes you clever, but it doesn’t make you smarter.”

  “And your father’s name didn’t exactly clear the way for you, either. You only finished five seconds faster than me, and I seem to remember you got tagged a little harder than I did. You may have been faster, but you weren’t quicker. So, much as I appreciate the concern for my well-being, cram it up your ass.”

  He smiled, a death’s head grin in the glow from the dashboard display. “You are predictable, Markham. You are quick to anger, and, some day, that won’t be enough. They won’t be enough.”

  I didn’t have an answer for that because I knew he was right. He knew about the Chorus, knew the secret hiding behind the chord of white hair wrapped about my throat; he knew that all my skill and power came from them. I wasn’t born and bred to do magick; I had learned it the hard way: by blood and fire. And, yes, someday, that knowledge wouldn’t be enough. I would face someone who knew better, who knew more about the secrets of the soul than I, and who would twist me as easily as I had twisted the Chorus into that knot of restless energy in my chest.

  That person could very well be Antoine.

  Can you afford to have him as an enemy? Rival, yes; it was safe to say that was the operative word to describe him now. But was it worth it to push him further, to widen that rift between us? And, to what end? Did I really think she was going to pick me over him?

  “She doesn’t love you, Markham.”

  I looked out the passenger window, unsure if he was scanning my thoughts or if I was just that easy to read.

  “And, even if she did, she can’t afford to. There isn’t any place in her life for a man like you.”

  The subtle inference: as compared to Antoine, who came from a long line of occultists, whose father and father’s father had been Watchers. He was part of an aristocratic family, and the French never really forgot the caste structure: the nobility, the landed gentry, and—far below—the little people. Like me.

  I glanced over at him. “Do you think she’s the prize? Like some toy you win at the fair. Is that what your grandfather’s sacrifice earned you? The right to chase a piece of ass versus self-knowledge. I’m sure he’d be real proud of you.”

  His hands tightened on the steering wheel, and nearly imperceptibly, I felt the car drift on the road. Just a little bit as his grip pulled the wheel to the right. Always the right, the Chorus reminded me, he always favors that hand. That was what got him into trouble during his Trial, and that was the way to beat him.

  I pushed them back. Not here. Not in the car.

  They were right, though. We were starting to converge, Antoine and I. Working toward a collision. No longer on parallel tracks, we were starting to fall inward, the gravity of a star named Marielle pulling us toward an unavoidable confrontation.

  It was the way wolves are, isn’t it? When they get old enough to want to try out their teeth, to see if they could bite harder than their brothers.

  *

  More howls, echoes bouncing down from the slope above Béchenaux. It sounded like an entire pack of wolves was perched on the ragged outcroppings, watching the village below like a pack of hungry vultures. There was a metallic undercurrent to the sound, a vibration that added an unnatural edge to the howling. It was easy to think that it was the sort of distortion that a supernatural throat would cause, but as I didn’t believe in werewolves, I tried to figure out where I had heard that sort of ragged . . . distortion before. Yes, distortion. Like from a speaker. Like from a car stereo—an after-market one, powered by a heavy amplifier sunk in a trunk.

  Like the one in René’s car.

  I drifted to the corner of the building I was behind, and glanced to the north. Upslope from the town. There on the left side. The moonlight made the crumbled wall look like the skeletal hand of a giant that had been uncovered after a thousand years of erosion. The colonel-major’s keep. The one with the dungeon.

  That’s where they’d be, waiting.

  But not all of them, the Chorus hissed, feeling the bloom of power ahead of me. There’s at least one of them down here. They swarmed into my head, coloring my vision, and everything became laced with silver and violet.

  The foursome had made their way down to the better-lit stretch along the main road, and had gathered some other friends. The vibe was turning from fear to excitement as the aggregation of bodies started to give them some shared spine. There’s just one; we are legion. From my vantage point half a block away, I could make out a couple more pistols and a shotgun. The party had picked up some hardware.

  On the other side of the street, closer to the ruined fort, the Chorus could feel the tiny blur of magick. Someone was weaving misdirection and shadows, keeping themselves from sight as they closed in on the unorganized band of men.

  Eventually one of them was going to suggest a plan, and then everything else would be a reaction. Act first, the Chorus whispered in my throat. Tug the chains.

  I nodded, and let them dribble from my lips as I wove an illusion. Lupus fabulus. Electricity began to crackle along my skin as a spectral shimmer of fur swept across my flesh. My vision deepened, the colors darkening, and my sense of smell became more acute—gas fumes, ash, rain-bearing wind, sweat, fear, charged ozone, oil—as I slipped into the mirage. I growled in my throat, and the Chorus amplified the sound so that when I opened my mouth and let the noise out, it was a rumbling roar of bestial fury.

  The Chorus dragged in my wake as I scrambled out into the open, streaming like serpents of black smoke. I dashed across the road, bent double with the façade of my illusion. The hunters spotted me, and only one managed to get a shot off before I reached the other side of the street and vanished behind a building.

  As soon as I was out of sight, I killed the illusion, straightened up, and started running. Across a low stone wall, down an alley, across a yard, over another stone wall—more rickety than the last—through a patch of trees, and around a narrow warehouse. I came to a stop behind a large truck, crouching down beside the large tires. The Chorus squeezed my heart, slowing it down, as I watched through the gap between the undercarriage of the truck and the pavement. Watched for movement.

  Distantly, the Chorus could feel the massed movement of spirit energy in the street as the hunters swarmed up the road toward the gap I had run through. They would follow the obvious trail. For now. Not knowing what to expect. Not quite sure what they had seen. They would go all the way down to the corner and then come back, slowly.

  The magus was on my left, still hiding. Still Watching. He had probably Seen my illusion, but he hadn’t moved. I couldn’t even sense if he was looking for me.

  Just to be safe, I faded back to the next street, went wide, and came back from the other direction. It took a little more time than I should have spent, but getting into that position meant I was between the magus and the keep, and he was now between me and the hunters.

  If anyone was going to feel the squeeze, it was going to be hi
m.

  The moon had started tussling with a flock of stringy clouds, their rolling combat written out across the landscape as patches of light and dark. As the moon extricated itself from the long arms of a cloud, its light moved across a narrow two-story building with a leaning chimney. Crouching on the roof, half-hidden by the chimney, was a dark patch of shadow that refused to budge under the moon’s gaze. Chorus-sight cut through the night fog hiding the magus.

  Girard.

  He wasn’t comfortable on the roof. The pitch was steep, and the shingles, like the brick of the chimney, looked past their prime. Like everything else in the valley: well on the way into the entropic embrace of decay. A perilous sort of perch. Easily dislodged.

  Shotgun, the Chorus laughed, all you need is a shotgun. And they reminded me where I could find one.

  I demurred. I wanted the pistol. The one with silver bullets.

  The howling from the hills started again. The same loop. René must have one of those New Age CDs that capture the “natural” world—frogs in the rain forest, crickets in the fields, wolves in the arid hills. I wondered what sort of Lovecraftian nightmare the villagers would think was in the hills if René picked the wrong track and blasted frog noises instead of wolf howls.

  Under cover of the noise, I moved to the side of the house, looking for a trash can. I found a recycling bin instead, half-full of aluminum cans and plastic. Something quick. Something noisy. They’d work well enough.