[Genevieve 01] - Drachenfels

by Jack Yeovil - (ebook by Undead)

  “Yes,” she said, fixing Oswald’s man with her glance. “Yes.” He forgot the dresser.

  III

  “Have I ever told you about the time when the Crown Prince Oswald and I bested the Great Enchanter?” roared the fat old man.

  “Yes, Rudi,” said Bauman, without enthusiasm. “But this time you’ll have to pay for your gin with coin, not the same old story.”

  “Surely there’s someone…” Rudi Wegener began, sweeping a meaty arm about.

  The solitary drinkers of the Black Bat Tavern took no notice of him. His chins shook under his patchy grey beard, and he lurched from his stool at the bar, enormous belly seeming to move independently of the rest of his body. Bauman had reinforced the stool with metal braces, but knew that Rudi would still crush it to splinters one day.

  “It’s a fine tale, my friends. Full of heroic deeds, beautiful ladies, great perils, terrible injuries, treachery and deceit, rivers of blood and lakes of poison, good men gone bad, and bad men gone worse. And it ends nobly, with the prince destroying the monster, and Good Old Rudi there to guard his back.”

  The drinkers looked down into their tankards. The wine was vinegary, and the beer watered down with rat’s pee, but it was cheap. Not cheap enough for Rudi, though. Two pence a pint might as well be a thousand gold crowns if you don’t have two pence.

  “Come on, friends, won’t anyone hear the story of good old Rudi? Of the prince and the Great Enchanter?”

  Bauman emptied the remains of a bottle into a pot and pushed it across the polished and scarred wood towards the old man. “I’ll buy you a drink, Rudi…”

  Rudi turned, alcoholic tears coursing down the fatty pockets of his cheeks, and put a huge hand around the pot.

  “…but only on the condition that you don’t tell us about your great adventures as a bandit king.”

  The old man’s face fell and he slumped on the stool. He moaned—he had hurt his back long ago, Bauman knew—and peered into the pot. He looked down at himself in the wine, and shuddered at some unspoken thought. The moment was a long one, an uncomfortable one, but it passed. He raised the pot to his mouth, and drained it in a draught. Gin flowed into his beard and down onto his much-stained, much-patched shirt. Rudi had been telling his lies in the Black Bat ever since Bauman had been old enough to help out his father behind the bar. As a boy, he had swallowed every story the fat old fraud dished out, and he had loved more than anything else to hear about Prince Oswald and the Lady Genevieve and the monster Drachenfels. He had believed every word of the tale.

  But, as he grew up, he came to know more about life, and he discovered more about his father’s clientele. He understood that Milhail, who would boast for hours of the many women he pursued and won, went home each night to his aged mother and slept alone in a cold and blameless bed. He learned that the Corin the Halfling, who claimed to be the rightful Head of the Moot dispossessed by a jealous cousin, was, in fact, a pick-pocket expelled from his home when his fingers got too arthritic to lift a purse unnoticed.

  And Rudi, so far as he knew, had never adventured beyond Altdorf’s Street of a Hundred Taverns. Even in his long-gone youth, the old soak couldn’t have found a horse willing to go under him, hefted a weapon any more dangerous than a beer bottle—and then only to his lips—or stood up straight to any foeman who came his way. But, Rudi the Bandit King had been Bauman’s childhood idea of a hero, and so now he generally had a drink or two to spare for the old fool whenever he hadn’t the price in his pouch. He probably wasn’t doing the old man that much of a kindness, since Bauman was certain Rudi was floating himself to a coffin on his wines and ales and the burning Estalian gin only he of all the Black Bat’s patrons could stand.

  It wasn’t much of a night. Of the talkative regulars, only Rudi was in. Milhail’s mother was sick again and Corin was in Mundsen Keep after a brief and unsuccessful return to his old calling. The others just nursed their miseries and drank themselves into a quiet stupor. The Black Bat was the losers’ tavern. Bauman knew there were places with worse reputations—brawlers favoured the Sullen Knight, the unquiet dead flocked mysteriously to the Crescent Moon and the hard core of Altdorf’s professional thieves and murderers could be found at the Holy Hammer of Sigmar—but few quite as depressing. After five straight years at the bottom of the street’s dicing league, Bauman had withdrawn the tavern from the competition. Somewhere else could lose for a while. The only songs he ever heard were whines. And the only jokes he ever heard were bitter.

  The door opened, and someone new came in. Someone who had never been to the Black Bat before. Bauman would have remembered him if he’d seen him. He was a handsome man, dressed with the kind of simplicity that can be very expensive. He was no loser, Bauman knew at once from the set of his jaw and the fire in his eyes. He was at his ease, but he was not the sort to be used to taverns. He would have a coach and horses outside, and a guard to protect them.

  “Can I help you, sir?” Bauman asked.

  “Yes,” the stranger’s voice was deep and rich. “I’m told that I can generally find someone here. An old friend. Rudolf Wegener.”

  Rudi looked up from his pot, and turned on his stool. The wooden legs creaked and Bauman thought that this was finally going to be the tumble he had expected all along. But no, Rudi lurched upright, wiping his dirty hands on his dirtier shirt. The newcomer looked at the old man, and smiled.

  “Rudi! Ulric, but it’s been a long time…”

  He extended a hand. A signet ring caught the light.

  Rudi looked at the man, with honest tears in his eyes now. Bauman thought he was about to fall flat on his face in front of his old friend. With a painful thump, Rudi sank to one knee. Buttons burst from his shirt, and hairy rolls of belly fat surged out from behind the cloth. Rudi bowed his head, and took the outstretched hand. He kissed the ring.

  “Get up, Rudi. You don’t have to be like this. It is I who should bow to you.”

  Rudi struggled upright, trying to push his gut back into his shirt and tighten his belt over it.

  “Prince…” he said, struggling with the word. “Highness, I…”

  Recovering himself, he turned to the bar, and thumped it with his huge fist. Glasses and tankards jumped.

  “Bauman, wine for my friend, Crown Prince Oswald. Gin for Rudi, King of the Bandits. And take yourself a pint of your best ale with my compliments.”

  IV

  Once established in the palace of the von Konigswalds, Detlef set to work. As usual, the play would grow into its final form as it was rehearsed, but he had to get a structure for it, cast the parts and rough out the characterizations.

  He was allowed access to the von Konigswald library, and all the documents relating to the death of Drachenfels. Here was de Selincourt’s The House of von Konigswald, with its flattering portrait of Crown Prince Oswald as a youth. And Genevieve Dieudonne’s surprisingly slender A Life. My Years as a Bounty Hunter in Reikwald, Bretonnia and the Grey Mountains by Anton Veidt, as told to Joachim Munchberger; Constant Drachenfels: A Study in Evil by Helmholtz; The Poison Feast and Other Legends by Claudia Wieltse. And there were all the pamphlets and transcribed ballads. So many stories. So many versions of the same story. There were even two other plays—The Downfall of Drachenfels by that poltroon Matrac and Prince Oswald by Dorian Diesslboth, Detlef was delighted to find, appalling rubbish. With The History of Sigmar, he had found himself up against too many masterpieces on the same subject. Here, he had new dramatic ground to mark out as his own. It would especially amuse him to trounce his old critic and rival Diessl, and he worked in a lampoon of some of the more shabby mechanisms of the old man’s terrible play into his own outline. He wondered if Dorian was still infecting the drama students at the Nuln University with his outmoded ideas, and if he would venture to Altdorf to see himself outstripped by the pupil he had dismissed from his lecture on Tarradasch when Detlef had pointed out that the great man’s female characters were all the same.

  The title bothered De
tlef for some time. It had to have “Drachenfels” in it. At first, he favoured Oswald and Drachenfels, but the crown prince wanted his name out of it. The History of Drachenfels was impossible: he didn’t want to remind audiences of Sigmar, and, also, he was dealing only with the very end of a history that spanned thousands of years. Then he considered The Death of Drachenfels, The Fortress of Drachenfels, The Great Enchanter, Defter of the Dark and Castle of Shadows. For a while, he called it Heart of Darkness. Then, he experimented with The Man in the Iron Mask. Finally, he settled down with the simple, starkly dramatic one-word title, Drachenfels.

  Oswald had promised to set aside an hour each day to be interviewed, to be questioned about the truth of his exploits. And he had endeavoured to track down those of his companions in adventure still living, to persuade them to come forward and discuss their own parts in the great drama with the writer who would set the seal on their immortality. Detlef had the facts, and he had a shape for his play. He even had some of the speeches written down. But he still felt he was only beginning to grasp the truths that would lie behind his artifice.

  He began to dream of Drachenfels, of his iron face, of his unending evil. And after each dream, he wrote pages of dark poetry. The Great Enchanter was coming to life on paper.

  Oswald was not without the aristocrat’s traditional vanity, but he was strangely reticent on some subjects. He had commissioned Detlef’s play as part of a celebration of the anniversary of his enemy’s death, and he knew very well that the event would serve to increase his renown. Detlef gathered that it was important to Oswald to be in the public eye after some years as a background presence. He was already the elector in all but name, and his father wasn’t expected to last out the summer. Eventually, he would have to be confirmed in his position and be, after the Emperor, one of the dozen most powerful men in the Empire. Detlef’s Drachenfels would silence any voices that might speak out against the crown prince. Yet, for all Oswald’s political canniness in backing a production that would remind the world of his great heroism just as he was ready to take part in the running of the Empire, Detlef still found the crown prince occasionally a little too modest for his own good. Incidents that in the accounts of others were hailed as mightily heroic he shrugged off with a simple “it was the only thing to do” or “I was there first, any of the others would have done the same.”

  It wasn’t until Rudi Wegener came forth to speak that Detlef began to understand what had happened in the Reikwald on the road to Castle Drachenfels, and how Oswald had bound together his companions in adventure almost by sheer force of will. And it wasn’t until the cult of Sigmar finally allowed him to examine the Proscribed Grimoires of Khaine that Detlef realized quite how monstrously potent Drachenfels’ age-spanning evil had been. He began to connect with the research he had done for The History of Sigmar, and—with a nauseating lurch in his stomach—tried to get his mind around the concept of a man, a mortal man born, who could have been alive in the time of Sigmar two-and-a-half thousand years ago and yet who was still walking when Detlef Sierck had been born. He had been four years old when Drachenfels died, exhibiting his prodigious genius in Nuln by composing symphonies for instruments he never got round to inventing.

  Detlef wrote speeches, sketched settings, and whistled musical themes to Felix Hubermann. And Drachenfels began to take monstrous shape.

  V

  The tall, gaunt man who stuttered too badly crept away, his moment in the spotlight over.

  “Next!” shouted Vargr Breughel.

  Another tall, gaunt man strode onto the make-shift stage in the von Konigswald ballroom. The crowd of tall, gaunt men shuffled and muttered.

  “Name?”

  “Lowenstein,” said the man in deep, sepulchral tones, “Laszlo Lowenstein.”

  It was a fine, scary voice. Detlef felt good about this one. He nudged Breughel.

  “What have you done?” asked Breughel.

  “For seven years, I was the actor-manager of the Temple Theatre in Talabheim. Since coming to Altdorf, I have played Baron Trister in the Geheimnisstrasse Theatre production of The Desolate Prisoner. The critic of the Altdorf Spieler has referred to me as ‘the premier Tarradaschian tragedian of his, or indeed any other, generation’.”

  Detlef looked the man up and down. He had the height, and he had the voice.

  “What do you think, Breughel?” he asked, so low that Lowenstein couldn’t hear him. Vargr Breughel was the best assistant director in the city. If there wasn’t a prejudice against dwarfs in the theatre, Detlef thought, he’d be the second best director in the city.

  “His Trister was good,” said Breughel. “But his Ottokar was outstanding. I’d recommend him.”

  “Have you prepared anything?” Detlef asked, addressing a tall, gaunt man for the first time this morning.

  Lowenstein bowed, and launched into Ottokar’s dying declaration of love for the goddess Myrmidia. Tarradasch had claimed to be divinely inspired the day he wrote it, and the actor gave the best reading Detlef had ever heard of the speech. He himself had never played in The Loves of Ottokar and Myrmidia, and if he had to be compared with Laszlo Lowenstein, he might consider putting it off a few decades.

  Detlef forgot the tall, gaunt actor, and saw only the humbled Ottokar, a haughty tyrant brought to the grave by an obsessive love, dragged into bloody deeds by the most noble of intentions, and only now conscious that the persecution of the gods will extend beyond his death and torment him for an eternity.

  When he finished, the crowd of tall, gaunt men—hard-bitten rivals who would have been expected to look only with hatred and envy upon such a gifted performer—applauded spontaneously.

  Detlef wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d found his Drachenfels.

  “Leave your address with the crown prince’s steward,” Detlef told the man. “We’ll be in touch.”

  Lowenstein bowed again, and left the stage.

  “Do you want to see anyone else?” Breughel asked.

  Detlef thought a moment. “No, send the Drachenfelses home. Then let’s have the Rudis, the Meneshes, the Veidts and the Erzbets…”

  VI

  The madwoman was quiet. In her early days at the hospice, years ago, she had shouted and smeared the walls with her own filth. She told all who would listen that there were enemies coming for her. A man with a metal face. An old-young dead woman. She was constrained for her own good. She used to attempt suicide by stuffing her clothing into her mouth to stop her breathing, and so the priestesses of Shallya bound her hands by night. Eventually, she settled down and stopped making a fuss. She could be trusted now. She wasn’t a problem anymore.

  Sister Clementine made the madwoman her especial concern. The daughter of rich and undeserving parents, Clementine Clausewitz had pledged herself to Shallya in an effort to pay back the debt she felt her family owed the world. Her father had been a rapacious exploiter of his tenants, forcing them to labour in his fields and factories until they dropped from exhaustion, and her mother an empty-headed flirt whose entire life was devoted to dreaming of the time when her only daughter could be launched in Altdorf society. The day before the first great ball, to which a pimply nine-year-old boy who was distantly related through marriage to the Imperial family was almost certainly going to come, Clementine had run off and sought the solace of a simple, monastic life.

  The Sisters of Shallya devoted themselves to healing and mercy. Some went into the world as general practitioners, many toiled in the hospitals of the Old World’s cities, and a few chose to serve in the hospices. Here, the incurable, the dying and the unwanted were welcome. And the Great Hospice in Frederheim, twenty miles outside Altdorf, was where the insane were confined. In the past, these cloisters had been home to two emperors, five generals, seven scions of electoral families, sundry poets and numberless undistinguished citizens. Insanity could settle upon anybody, and the sisters were supposed to treat each patient with equal care.

  Clementine’s madwoman couldn’t remember her n
ame—which was listed in the hospice records as Erzbet—but did know she had been a dancer. At times, she would astonish the other patients by performing with a delicacy and expressiveness that belied her wild, tangled hair and deeply-etched face. At other moments, she would recite a long list of names to herself. Clementine didn’t know what Erzbet’s litany meant, and—as one dedicated to a cult which forswore the taking of any intelligent life—would have been horrified to learn that her patient was recalling all those she had murdered.

  Erzbet was supported in the hospice by generous donations. A person named Dieudonne who had never visited had ordered the banking house of Mandragora to set aside a hundred crowns a year for the hospice as long as the dancer was in its custody. And one of the first families of Altdorf also took an interest in her case. Whoever Erzbet had been, she had had some influential friends. Clementine wondered if she was the maddened daughter of some ashamed nobleman. But then again, her only regular caller was a remarkably fat and unsightly old man who smelled of gin and was clearly no one’s idea of a leading light in high society. Who she had been was less important to the sister than who she would be.

  Now, even Clementine had to admit Erzbet would most likely never again be anybody. Over the years, she had withdrawn into herself. During the hours she spent in the sunny quadrangle at the hospice, she simply stared into emptiness, not seeing the sisters or the other patients. She neither sewed nor sketched. She could not or would not read. She had not danced for over a year. She didn’t even have nightmares anymore. Most of the priestesses thought of Erzbet’s quietness as a sign of merciful healing, but Sister Clementine knew this wasn’t so. She was sinking fast. Now, she was a convenient patient—unlike some of the raving creatures the order had to deal with—but she was further into her own darkness than she had been when she was brought to the hospice.