[Genevieve 01] - Drachenfels

by Jack Yeovil - (ebook by Undead)

  “Enough. I’m tired of hearing that.”

  “I know,” said Kosinski, with grudging respect, “but one hundred and nineteen thousand, two hundred and fifty-five gold crowns, seventeen shillings and ninepence. Why, it’s an achievement. I’ve tried to think of it, to see it in my mind, but I can’t…”

  “Imagine a city built of gold crowns, Kosinski,” said Justus. “Towers piled high as temples, stacks pushed together like palaces.”

  “One hundred and nineteen thousand, two hundred and fifty-five gold crowns, seventeen shillings and ninepence.” There it was again. “Why I’ll bet the Emperor Karl-Franz himself couldn’t lay his hands on one hundred and nineteen thousand, two hundred and fifty-five gold crowns, seventeen shillings and ninepence.”

  “I rather think he could. Quite a bit of it was his in the first place.”

  Guglielmo shook his head in wonder. “But how did you do it, Detlef? How could you conceivably spend such a sum? In my entire life, I’ve barely had five thousand crowns pass through my hands. And I’m a man of business, of trade. How could you possibly spend one hundred and nineteen—”

  “…thousand, two hundred and fifty-five gold crowns, seventeen shillings and ninepence? It was easy. Costs kept going up and expenses arose that weren’t foreseen in my original budget plan. My accountants were criminally negligent.”

  “Then why aren’t they in this cell with us?”

  “Ahem,” Detlef was shamed, “well, most of them were… sort of… um… killed. I’m afraid that some of the parties involved were unable to take the long view of the affair. Small minds and moneyboxes are the blight of the artistic spirit.”

  There was a drip of water at the back of the cell. Kerreth had been trying to catch it in rolled cones made from the pages of a book Szaradat hadn’t bothered to steal, but Kosinski kept eating the soggy paper. A mouse had found its way in yesterday and Kosinski had eaten that too. He said he’d tasted worse when campaigning in the Northern Wastes.

  “But still,” wondered Guglielmo, “to spend all that money just on a play…”

  “Not just on a play, my dear Guglielmo! On the play. The play that, had it ever been produced, would have lived forever in the minds and hearts of those mortals lucky enough to see it. The play that would have sealed my reputation as the premier genius of my day. The play that would, not to put too sharp a point on it, have earned back tenfold the meagre cost of its staging.”

  It was called The True History of Sigmar Heldenhammer, Founder of the Empire, Saviour of the Reik, Defter of the Darkness. Detlef Sierck had written it on a commission for the Elector of Middenland. The epic was to have been staged in the presence of Emperor Karl-Franz himself. Detlef had planned to call upon the full resources of three villages in the Middle Mountains for the production. The entire populations would have been drafted in to serve as extras, a castle of wood was to be erected and burned down during the course of the action and wizards had been engaged to present state-of-the-art illusions during the magical sequences.

  The natural amphitheatre in which the play was to have been staged was twelve days’ ride from Middenheim, and the Emperor and electors would have to be conveyed there in a magnificent procession. There would have been a two-day feast merely as a prologue for the drama, and the action of the epic would have unfolded over a full week, with breaks in the story for meals and sleep.

  Detlef himself, the greatest actor of the age as well as the premier dramatist, had cast himself in the role of Sigmar, one of the few in literature large enough to contain his personality. And Lilli Nissen, the famous beauty and—it was rumoured—sometime mistress of six out of fourteen electors, had consented to take the role of Shallya, goddess of healing and mercy. Mercenaries had been engaged to fight nearly to the death during the battle scenes, an enormous homunculus had been bred especially by skilled wizards to stand in for Constant Drachenfels, an army of dwarfs had been hired to portray Sigmar’s dwarf allies and another engaged to stand in under masks for the goblin hordes the hero was to drive out of the Empire—Detlef would have insisted on real goblins, but his cast baulked at working with them. The crops of three successive harvests were stored up to fuel the cast and audience, and almost one thousand professional actors, singers, dancers, animal trainers, jugglers, musicians, jesters, combatants, prostitutes, conjurers and philosophers retained to play the major parts in the great drama.

  And it had all been ruined by something as petty and uninteresting as an outbreak of plague among the battlefield extras. Lilli Nissen would not budge from Marienburg when the news of the epidemic reached her, and hers was merely the first of the many returned invitations. Finally the elector himself pulled out and Detlef found himself forced to deal with a seeming army of angry creditors whose notes against the electoral coffers were suddenly refused. Under the circumstances, he had found it necessary to disguise himself as a priestly type and flee to Altdorf, where the elector’s ambassadors unfortunately awaited his appearance. There had been considerable expenses already, and those who had laid out the thousand gold crowns he had been asking for a reserved ticket were clamouring for the refund of their money. Furthermore, the three villages were rumoured to be clubbing together to petition the assassins’ guild.

  “It would have been magnificent, Guglielmo. You would have wept to see it. The scene where I was to best the forces of evil with only my hammer and my noble heart would have lived eternally in the annals of great art. Picture it: as Sigmar, all my allies are dead or flown, the dwarfs have not yet committed to my cause, and I stride—my massive shadow cast before me by a miracle of ingenious lighting effects—to the centre of the field of corpses. The goblins creep from their holes. For a full two hours, I stand immobile as the goblins gather, each more fantastically hideous than the last. Women and children were to have been barred from this section of the drama, and entertained elsewhere by acrobats. I had commissioned a choral work of surpassing power from my regular composer, Felix Hubermann. I had personally designed the monstrous masks for each of the goblin extras. When the hordes were finally assembled before me, I would have produced my hammer—my glowing, holy, singing metal warhammer—and it would have given off lights the like of which you’ve never seen. You would have been struck dumb for weeks by Hubermann’s Hammer Theme, and have felt your youth return as I displayed my heroism and courage in battle against the goblins and the Great Enchanter. It would have been the triumphant crowning moment of my altogether glorious career.

  “The Tragedy of the Bretonnian Courtesan would have been forgotten, The Loves of Ottokar and Myrmidia would have been completely eclipsed, and the critics who so sneered at my experimental production of Kleghel’s Great Days of Empire would have slit their throats for shame.”

  “If words were pennies, you’d have gone free long ago,” said Justus.

  “Pennies! That’s all I can hope to earn here. Did you note my visitor yesterday? The fellow with the evil eye and the frightful twitch?”

  Guglielmo nodded.

  “That was Gruenliebe the Greasy. You may remember him. He used to be court jester in Luitpold’s day. His speciality was a nauseating little act with trained lambs. When he became too old and fat and slimy to entertain anymore, he expanded his business. Now, he owns a string of so-called entertainers who clown and juggle and caper in taverns, and turn over a good three-fourths of their earnings to him for the privilege. If the fumbler drops the balls, the minstrel sounds like a basilisk in pain or the comedian uses lines that might just have been topical in the days of Boris the Incompetent, then you can be certain he belongs to Gruenliebe. Anyway, this piece of offal wrapped up in a human form, this veritable orc in a clown’s apparel, had the nerve to propose I work for him…”

  The drip dripped, and Detlef burned with the memory of the humiliation, the anger that still boiled…

  “What did he want you to do?”

  “He wanted me to write jokes for him. To turn out satirical lyrics at a penny a line, to supply his army
of witless incompetents with the stuff of laughter, as if one could teach a skaven to play the fiddle or a grave robber to discourse on the cuisine of Cathay. I, whose poems have moved princes to crying fits that will be with them their lives through. I, whose mere offhand remarks have caused hermits under a vow of silence literally to split their sides suppressing laughter…”

  “A penny a line,” mused Justus. “Do you know how many lines it would take to pay off one hundred and nineteen thousand, two hundred and fifty-five gold crowns, seventeen shillings and ninepence at a penny a line?”

  “As it happens…”

  Justus looked at the ceiling, and his eyes rolled. “You don’t want to know. The great library at the university doesn’t have that many lines.”

  “Do you think I’d make a good trusty?” Detlef asked.

  Kosinski laughed, nastily.

  “It was just a thought.”

  II

  From the terrace of the convent, Genevieve could see the deep, slow, glass-clear waters of the River Talabec, hundreds of feet below. Bordered with thick, sweet-smelling pine forests, the river was like the central artery of the Empire. Not as long as the Reik, which ran a full seven hundred and fifty miles from its rise in the Black Mountains to its mouth at Marienburg, but still cutting across the map like a knife-slash, from the rapid streams of the World’s Edge Mountains through the heart of the Great Forest, swelled by its confluence with the Urskoy, to the inland port of Talabheim and then, heavy and thick with the black silt of the Middle Mountains, into the Reik at Altdorf. If she were to cast her kerchief from the terrace, it could conceivably travel the length of the Empire to the sea. Just now, a riverboat—unusual this far up—was pulling in to the jetty that served the convent. More supplies for the Order of Eternal Night and Solace.

  Here, secluded from all, she liked the idea of the waters running like the bloodstream. She had come to the convent to be out of the world, but her centuries among men had given her a taste for their affairs. A taste that Elder Honorio discouraged, but which could still not be suppressed. As the comforting dark fell, she saw the tall trees dwindle into shadows and the risen moon waver in the waters. How were things in Altdorf? In Middenheim? Did Luitpold still rule? Was the Crescent Moon still doing business? Was Oswald von Konigswald yet the elector of Ostland? These were not her concerns, and Elder Honorio dismissed her interests as “a prurient liking for gossip,” but she couldn’t be without them. The boat below would be bringing animals, clothes, tools, spices. But no books, no music, no news. In the convent, one was supposed to be content with the changelessness of life, not caught up in its chaotic tumble of events, of fads, of trends. A quarter-century ago, Genevieve had needed that. Now, perhaps she needed to return to the world.

  The convent had been founded in the time of Sigmar by Elder Honorio’s father-in-darkness, Belada the Melancholy, and had remained unchanged in its isolation down through the centuries. Honorio still wore the buckles and pigtail of a long-gone era, and the others of the order favoured the fashions of their lifetimes. Genevieve felt herself the child again, and sensed censorious eyes criticizing her dresses, her hairstyle, her longings. Some of the others, the Truly Dead, disturbed her. They were the creatures in the stories who slept by day and would burst into flame at cock-crow if not safely packed in a coffin layered with their native soil. Many bore the marks of Chaos: eyes like red marbles, wolfish fangs, three-inch talons. Their feeding habits offended her polite sensibilities, and caused much hostility between the convent and the few nearby woodland villages.

  “What’s a child, more or less?” Honorio asked. “All who live naturally will die before I next need to razor the bristles from my chin.”

  Genevieve had been feeding less of late. Like many of the old ones, she was outliving the need. In some ways it was a relief, although she would miss the rush of sensations that came with the blood, the moments when she felt most truly alive. One thing she might regret was that she had never given the Dark Kiss; she had no get, no young vampires to look to her as a mother-in-darkness, no progeny to seed the world.

  “You should have had your get while you were still young enough to appreciate them, my dear,” said the graceful, stately Lady Melissa d’Acques. “Why, I’ve birthed near a hundred young bloods in my centuries. Fine fellows all, devoted sons-in-darkness. And all handsome as Ranald.”

  Chandagnac had been the Lady Melissa’s get, and so the vampire noblewoman treated Genevieve as a granddaughter-in-darkness. She reminded Genevieve of her real grandmother in her manner of speech and in her fussiness, although the Lady Melissa would always physically be the golden-haired twelve-year-old she had been eleven hundred years ago. One night then, her coach had been held up by a nameless brigand thirsty for more than money.

  According to the grimoires of the order, Genevieve would lose her ability to procreate with the passing of the red thirst. But maybe not: in the libraries of the convent, and through a simple observation of her companions in the order, she had learned that there were as many species of vampire as there were of fish or cat. Some abhorred the relics and symbols of all the gods, others entered Holy Orders and lived the most devout of lives. Some were brutish predators who would drain at a draught a peasant girl, others epicures who would sip only, and treat their human meals as lovers rather than cattle. Some, skilled in sorcery and wizardry, could indeed transform themselves into bats, wolves or a sentient red mist; others could barely tie their own bootlaces. “What kind am I,” Genevieve would occasionally wonder to herself, “what kind of vampire am I?”

  The thing that marked her bloodline—the line of Chandagnac, reaching ultimately back to Lahmia—from the vampires of dark legend was that they had never died and lain in the earth. The transformation had been wrought lovingly while they still drew breath. She might have no reflection and feel the need for blood, but her heart still beat. The Truly Dead—sometimes known as the Strigoi—were more dead than alive, essentially walking corpses. Few of them were decent, they were the bad ones, the child-stealers, the throat-tearers, haunters of the grave…

  Genevieve and the Lady Melissa played cards on the terrace as the sunset faded, the quality of the game improving as their night-senses awoke. Genevieve ran her tongue over her sharp teeth, and tried to think two or three hands ahead.

  “Now, now, my girl,” said the Lady Melissa, her child’s face grave, “you shouldn’t try to read your granny’s mind like that. She’s much older and wiser than you, and could easily give you the vision of the wrong cards.”

  Genevieve laughed, and lost again, trumped from nowhere.

  “You see.”

  The Lady Melissa laughed, as she scooped the trick. For the moment, she was genuinely a giggling child; then she was the old lady again. Inside the convent, the Truly Dead were rising. Wolves howled in the forests. A large bat flapped lazily across the sky, blotting the moon for a moment.

  Twenty-five years ago, Genevieve had been in at the death of the most evil man alive. The effects had been calamitous, and unforeseen. Throughout the Known World, the agents of evil—some of whom had masqueraded for years as ordinary or even exemplary citizens—were transformed into their true, monstrous selves, or struck down by invisible arrows to the heart, or blasted to pieces by explosions. A castle in Kislev fell silently to the ground, crushing a coven of witches to a paste. Thousands of spirits were freed from their ties to the earth and passed on, beyond the ken of mediums and necromancers. In Gisoreux, the statue of a martyred child came suddenly to life, speaking in an ancient dialect no one could understand, the spell upon him at last lifted. And Prince Oswald and his companions became the heroes of the age.

  Emperor Luitpold, shamed by his initial refusal to aid Oswald’s expedition, had sent in a troop of the Imperial Guard to clear out the pathetic remnants of Drachenfels’ foul servants from his castle. Goblins, orcs, trolls, hideously altered humans, degenerates and hordes of unclassifiable creatures had been put to the sword, or burned at the stake, or hanged
from the battlements. The Emperor had wanted to raze the place to the ground, but Oswald interceded, insisting that it should stay standing and desolate as a reminder of the evil that had been. Drachenfels’ books, papers and possessions were argued over by the grand theogonist of the cult of Sigmar and the high priest of the cult of Ulric, but eventually found their way into shrines and libraries throughout the Empire, accessible only to the most esteemed and unblemished of scholars.

  Genevieve, meanwhile, had refused all offers of reward and returned to the Crescent Moon. Her part in the adventure was over, and she wanted to hear no more of it. There were too many dead and worse for her to make light of the story. But the tavern had changed, and was thronged now with the curious and the disturbed. Balladeers wanted her story, the devout wanted relics of her person, relatives of the monster’s victims inexplicably wanted reparations from her, politicians wanted her name to lend to their causes, a clandestine group of young sons-in-darkness wanted to form a vampires’ guild around her to lobby the Emperor for the lifting of certain laws against the practices of their kind.

  Those loyal to the cause of Drachenfels tried several times to assassinate her. And those narrow-minded worthies who couldn’t bear the thing she was decried her part in the fall of the Great Enchanter and tried to make her out as his secret ally.

  Most unnerving of all were the flocks of young men who became her admirers, who would bare their throats and wrists to her, begging her to drink deeply, who would sometimes take an edge to their veins in her presence. Some were of that sorry type who plague all the undead, those who crave the Dark Kiss and all it brings. But others claimed they would be content simply to bleed their last for her, to die twitching and ecstatic in her arms.

  There was only so much she could stand, and eventually she embarked upon a riverboat for the convent. She had heard such a place existed, and various of her cousins-in-darkness had given her contradictory stories about a remote refuge for vampirekind, but only now did she make the effort to find the truth behind the stories, to petition for admittance into the Order of Eternal Night and Solace. When she had needed to find them, they had got in touch with her. Evidently, they had their agents in the world.