[Genevieve 01] - Drachenfels

by Jack Yeovil - (ebook by Undead)

  Oswald held her, shaking her by the shoulders.

  Blood! Royal blood! Rich, spiced, hot-on-the-tongue, youthfully-gushing blood!

  The vein throbbed in his throat. She took his wrists in her strong hands, feeling their pulses. She heard his heart beating like a steady drum and saw him as a student of anatomy might a dissected corpse. Veins and arteries laid through flesh and over bone. The blood called to her.

  How long since she had fed? Properly?

  Oswald broke her grip and slapped her.

  She found herself and saw only his clear eyes in the dark. He kissed her on the cheek and stood back. The thirst could wait.

  Oswald went to each of them in turn, calmed them. Erzbet was the last. She had pressed herself into a corner of the passageway and refused to come out unless coaxed. She waved her knife. Oswald took her hand and pulled the knife out of it. The woman was mad, Genevieve realized, and had been for hours.

  Erzbet emerged from her bolt-hole when Oswald talked to her in a low, soothing voice. She clung to the prince like a frightened child to its mother during the daemon king’s scenes of a puppet play. Oswald detached the dancer-assassin from his shoulder and passed her to Rudi. The chastened, suddenly serious bandit took her on his arm—had they been lovers, Genevieve wondered?—and Erzbet pressed herself to his side. She sensed Veidt about to make a remark about their new burden, but he kept quiet. Good for him.

  The fires were dying. They walked again.

  Erzbet was useless now. And Veidt—weather-beaten and hardy Veidt—was ailing. He had sustained a wound during the battle with the gargoyles. It was just a scratch on his face, a newer scar among so many old ones, but it was still bleeding steadily and he had a greyish look. He was moving slowly now, lagging behind them. His sharpness was going and he blundered too often against the walls.

  Genevieve heard a clattering and looked back. Veidt had dropped his trifurcate crossbow, his dart pistol and his swordbelt. He was trudging on, trailing them like a prisoner his ball and chain.

  This was unthinkable. Veidt would never drag his beloved weapons through the dirt.

  Menesh, who had taken so many insults from the bounty hunter, went to him and offered a shoulder to be leaned on. Veidt put out a hand to steady himself, but missed Menesh and fell clumsily against the wall. He crawled on and finally came to rest, gasping for breath, at Oswald’s feet. Menesh pulled him upright and propped him against the wall. His face was ashen and he was drooling. He went into convulsions. The dwarf held him down.

  “He can’t go on, highness.”

  Oswald picked up Veidt’s dart pistol. It was a fine piece of workmanship, a coil spring-powered gun that could drive a six-inch nail through an oak door. The prince checked it for dirt and blew a cobwebby lump off the barrel. He thrust the weapon into Veidt’s hand and he gripped it. The bounty hunter had come through the convulsions.

  “We leave him,” said Oswald. “We’ll pass this way again.”

  Veidt nodded and weakly raised his hand in salute. He wasn’t holding the pistol correctly, Genevieve realized. His finger wasn’t on the trigger. If he wasn’t helped, he’d be dead by dawn. But they could all be dead by dawn.

  Menesh took a stone from his pocket and handed it to Veidt. The bounty hunter tried to pick it up from his lap, but it just lay there. A crude pick was carved on the rounded piece of rock.

  “It’s the mark of Grungni, dwarf god of the mines. Good luck.”

  Veidt nodded. Rudi patted his head as he passed. Erzbet swept her skirts over his legs. Oswald saluted him.

  Genevieve looked him in the eyes and saw his future in them.

  “Tell me, Mistress… Dieudonne,” Veidt said, each syllable an effort. “What is it… like?… Being… dead?”

  She turned away and followed the others.

  Rudi was struck down next, by a simple mechanical device Genevieve would have thought unworthy of the Great Enchanter. A mere matter of a hinged stone set in the floor, of counterweights and balances, of oiled joints and three iron-hard pieces of wood the length and size of a heavy man. They sprang out of the wall. Two—one at chest height, one at knee height—swung out in front of Rudi, the last—between the others—from behind. They meshed like a three-fingered fist, and the bandit was bent forwards and back between them. They could all hear his bones snapping.

  He hung there in the wooden grip, dripping blood and screaming oaths. Then the wooden arms drew back as suddenly as they had leaped out, and he fell in a jellied heap.

  Oswald jammed a sword into the wall to hold the arms back and went to him. It was worse than Genevieve had thought. He was still alive. Inside him, whenever he moved, his broken bones would be a hundred knives.

  “One by one,” he said. “The devil is clever, my prince. You must leave old Rudi as you left Veidt. Come back if you can…”

  There was blood on the prince’s hands. Erzbet was kneeling by the bandit, feeling for his wounds, trying to find the broken places.

  “Stay with him,” Oswald told her. “Be alert.”

  So, only three came to the heart of Drachenfels.

  V

  This was a throne-room for a king of darkness. The rest of the fortress had been ill-lit and dilapidated, but this was spotless and illumined by jewelled chandeliers. The furniture was ostentatiously luxurious. Gold gleamed from every edge. And silver. Genevieve shuddered to be near so much of the stuff. There were fine paintings on the wall. Rudi would have wept to see so much plunder in one place. A clock chimed, counting unnatural hours as its single hand circled an unfamiliar dial. In a cage, a harpy preened herself, wiping the remains of her last meal from her feathered breasts. Genevieve’s heart fluttered as it had not done since she was truly alive.

  Oswald and Genevieve trod warily on the thick carpets as they circled the room.

  “He’s here,” said the prince.

  “Yes, I feel it too.”

  Menesh kept to the walls, stabbing at tapestries.

  One wall was a floor-to-ceiling window, set with stained glass. From here, the Great Enchanter could gaze down from his mountain at the Reikswald. He could see as far as Altdorf and trace the glittering thread of the River Reik through the forests. In the stained glass, there was a giant image of Khorne, the Blood god, sitting upon his pile of human bones. With a chill, Genevieve realized that Drachenfels didn’t so much worship Khorne as look down upon him as an amateur in the cause of evil. Chaos was so undisciplined… Drachenfels had never been without purpose. There were other gods, other shrines. Khaine, Lord of Murder, was honoured in a modest ossuary. And Nurgle, Master of Pestilence and Decay, was celebrated by an odiferous pile of mangled remains. From this stared the head of Sieur Jehan, its eyes pecked out.

  Oswald started to see his tutor so abused and a laugh resounded through the throne-room.

  Six hundred years ago, Genevieve had heard that laugh. Amid the crowds of Parravon, when the First Family’s assassin was borne aloft by daemons and his insides fell upon the citizenry. A laugh somehow amplified by the metal mask from behind which it came. In that laughter, Genevieve heard the screams of the damned and the dying, the ripples of rivers of blood, the cracking of a million spines, the fall of a dozen cities, the pleas of murdered infants, the bleating of slaughtered animals.

  He loomed up, enormous, from his chair. He had been there all the time, but had worked his magics so none could see.

  “I am Drachenfels,” he said mildly, the deathly laugh still in his voice, “I bid you welcome to my house. Come in health, go safely and leave behind some of the happiness you bring…”

  Menesh flew at the Great Enchanter, a dwarfish miner’s pick raised to strike. With a terrible languor, moving as might a man of molten bronze, Drachenfels stretched out and slapped him aside. Menesh struck a hanging and fell squealing in a heap. Blood was spurting from him. The harpy was excited and flapped her wings against the bars of her cage, smelling the blood.

  Drachenfels was holding the dwarf’s arm in his hand.
It had come off as easily as a cooked chicken’s wing. The enchanter inclined his head to look at his souvenir, giggled and cast it away from him. It writhed across the floor as if alive, trailing blood behind it and was still.

  Genevieve looked at Oswald and saw doubt in the prince’s face. He had his sword out, but it looked feeble set against the strength, the power of the Great Enchanter.

  Drachenfels opened a window in the air and the stink of burning flesh filled the throne-room. Genevieve peered through the window and saw a man twisting in eternal torment, daemons rending his flesh, lashworms eating through his face, rats gnawing at his limbs. He called out her name and reached for her, reached through the window. Blood fell like rain onto the carpet.

  It was her father! Her six-centuries-dead father!

  “I have them all, you know,” said Drachenfels. “All my old souls, all kept like that. It prevents me from getting lonely here in my humble palace.”

  He shut the window on the damned creature Genevieve had loved. She raised her sword against him.

  He looked from one to the other and laughed again. Spirits were gathering about him, evil spirits, servant spirits. They funnelled around him like a tornado.

  “So you have come to kill the monster? A prince of nothing, descendant of a family too cowardly to take an Empire for themselves? And a poor dead thing without the sense to lie down in her grave and rot? In whose name do you dare such an endeavour?”

  Oswald tried to be strong. “In the name of Sigmar Heldenhammer!”

  Oswald’s words sounded weak, echoing slightly, but gave Drachenfels pause. Something was working behind his mask, a rage building up inside him. His spirits swarmed like midges.

  He threw out his hand in Genevieve’s direction and the tide of daemons engulfed her, hurling her back against the wall, smothering her, weighing her down, sweeping over her face.

  Oswald came forward and his sword clashed on the enchanter’s mailed arm. Drachenfels turned to look down on him.

  She felt herself dragged down, the insubstantial creatures surging up over her. She couldn’t breathe. She could barely move her limbs. She was cold, her teeth chattering. And she was tired, tired as she shouldn’t be until dawn. She felt bathed in stinging sunlight, wrapped in bands of silver, smothered in a sea of garlic. Somewhere, the hawthorn was being sharpened for her heart. Her mind fogged, she tasted dust in her throat and her senses dulled.

  Unconscious, she missed the battle all the ballads would be about. The battle that would be the inspiration for poets, minstrels, sculptors, painters. The battle that would make Prince Oswald von Konigswald a hero famed throughout the Old World. The battle that would cause some to see in the prince the very spirit of Sigmar reborn.

  The battle that would put an end to Constant Drachenfels.

  ACT ONE

  I

  It wasn’t so much that the food in Mundsen Keep was bad, but that there was so little of it. Detlef Sierck was used to far more substantial daily fare than a measly piece of cheese and a hunk of rough, unbuttered bread served with a half-pitcher of oily water. Indeed, his current accommodations entirely lacked the comforts and services his position entitled him to. And those with whom he was compelled to share his circumstances did not come up to the standards of decorum and intellect he usually expected of his companions.

  “I do believe,” he said to Peter Kosinski, the Mad Mercenary, “that were I to own Mundsen Keep and the Chaos Wastes, I would live in the Wastes and rent out the keep.”

  The sullen fellow grunted, belched and kicked him in the head. This was not the sort of treatment usually accorded those of his genius.

  The room in which he found himself confined was barely twice the size of the average privy and smelled three times worse. He shared quarters with five others, none of whom he would have, given the choice, selected for his entourage. Each had a blanket, except Kerreth, the smallest, who had, upon the application of some little force, generously given his away to Kosinski, the largest. And they each had a piece of cloth with a number chalked on it.

  The cloth was important. Detlef had heard the story of the two comrades who playfully exchanged their cloths, with the result that a clerk who had mischanced to cough loudly during a speech by the high priest of Ulric was sent to the headsman, while a murderer of small children was required to throw three schillings into the poor box at the temple in Middenheim.

  “If you can afford it,” he said to nobody in particular, “never go to debtors’ prison in Altdorf.”

  Someone laughed and was slapped down by a soul too far gone in misery to see the humour.

  When Detlef woke up on his first morning in Mundsen Keep, he found his boots and embroidered jacket taken from him.

  “Which of you louts is responsible?” he had asked, only to discover the culprit was not a fellow convict but Szaradat, the turnkey. Guglielmo, a bankrupt Tilean wine importer, explained the system to Detlef. If a man were to stay alive and well-behaved long enough, he stood a good chance of being promoted from ordinary prisoner to trusty.

  Szaradat was a trusty. And trusties were entitled to work off the debt that had originally brought them to the Keep by filching whatever could be pawned, sold or bartered from lesser prisoners.

  The next night, his shirt and britches disappeared and smelly rags were left in their place. The only thing he had left to call his own, Detlef reflected, was the iron collar welded in place around his neck for the convenience of the warders. But the night after that, he woke up to find himself being held down by uniformed officials while Szaradat hacked away at his hair.

  “He sells it to Bendrago, the wig-maker on Luitpoldstrasse,” explained Guglielmo, who was himself sporting an enthusiastic but hardly competent fresh haircut. Detlef knew there were magicians or students desperate for certain other, less dispensable, parts of the human anatomy. He hoped fervently that Szaradat didn’t know any of them.

  Kosinski, with his wrestler’s physique and sore-headed bear’s temper, was the only one of the cell-mates not shorn. He was well on his way to being a trusty, Detlef assumed. He had the attitude for it. The others, all of whom sported the identical cropped style, were Manolo, a dusky sailor with an unfortunate fondness for games of chance; Justus, a devotee of Ranald fallen upon hard times; and Kerreth, a cobbler driven to ruin by three or four wives. Kerreth had lost his blanket and much else to Kosinski. Detlef guessed the brawny giant only let the cobbler have a mouthful of his bread and water on the principle that if Kerreth died Kosinski would stop getting the extra ration.

  There wasn’t much to do in the cell. Justus had a deck of Ranald-blessed cards, but Detlef knew better than to play “Find the Empress” with him, Manolo had obviously been a blessing for Justus, and had already wagered away a year’s worth of food to the trickster-priest. Kerreth had a three-inch sliver of hardwood he had smuggled in, and was working away in vain at the mortar of the walls. He’d barely scraped out half a cupful of dust and the stone blocks were as solid as ever. Detlef had heard the walls were fifteen feet thick.

  It was only a question of time before someone turned Kerreth and his sliver in to Szaradat for an extra privilege. Sometimes, he wondered who would betray the sailor. Kosinski, who didn’t care about anything, was the obvious choice, but if he hadn’t seen this opportunity to grease his way to trusty status by now, he probably never would.

  Detlef was honest enough to suspect he would be the one eventually to take Szaradat aside during their monthly exercise period and point out Kerreth’s sliver. And decent enough to hope to put off that treachery for as long as possible. But there was only so much an artist could take.

  There was a question that always came up. It was about the only conversation the prisoners—the talkative Guglielmo excepted—really took to. There were many ways of approaching the question: What did you do on the outside? Will you ever get out of here? How deep is your hole? How wide your river? How high your wall? How long your life? What these were all getting at was simple: How m
uch do you owe?

  After three weeks, Detlef knew to the penny how much his cellmates owed. He knew about the sixteen gold crowns Manolo had staked on the unbeatable hand of cards dealt him in the back room of the Gryphon and Star on the Sacred Day of Manann, god of the seas. And the three shillings and fourpence, compounded with interest to eighteen gold crowns, that Kerreth had obtained from a moneylender to purchase a trinket for his latest fiancée. And the ninety-eight crowns Kosinski had spent before learning that he had hired on to an expedition to the Northern Wastes even the most crazed of the other mercenaries thought suicidal. And the two hundred and fifty-eight crowns, twelve shillings and sixpence Guglielmo had borrowed from a certain Tilean businessman to purchase a ship’s cargo of fine wines that had gone to the bottom of the Sea of Claws.

  He knew about the five hundred and forty crowns Justus had duped out of a spice merchant’s wife in return for a course of cream treatments guaranteed to restore her to the full bloom of youth and beauty. He had been lucky to be arrested before the woman’s sons returned from overseas to sharpen their swords. Detlef knew about all their debts. And they knew about his.

  “One hundred and nineteen thousand, two hundred and fifty-five gold crowns, seventeen shillings and ninepence.”

  That was Manolo. But it could have been any of them. They all said it from time to time, sometimes with reverence like a prayer, sometimes with anger like an oath, and sometimes with awe like a declaration of love.

  “One hundred and nineteen thousand, two hundred and fifty-five gold crowns, seventeen shillings and ninepence.”

  Detlef was getting fed up with the tune. He wished the sum could alter, one way or another. Preferably another. If he had friends outside, patrons or sponsors, he hoped they would feel a generous impulse. But it would take a supernaturally generous impulse to do anything worthwhile to the figure.

  “One hundred and nineteen thousand, two hundred and fifty-five gold crowns, seventeen shillings and ninepence.”