[Genevieve 01] - Drachenfels

by Jack Yeovil - (ebook by Undead)

  Veidt had been trying for the thighs. That should have brought Erno down, but kept him breathing. The money was the same, dead or alive, but now he would have to haul the deadweight carcass to Liedenbrock’s house. And he was breathing hard already. He leaned against a slimy wall, and fought for breath.

  A physician had told him that something was eating him up from the inside, a sickness that might be the result of his life-long addiction to the strong cigars of Araby. “It’s like a black crab feeding inside you, Veidt,” the man had said, “and it’ll kill you in the end.”

  Veidt didn’t mind. Everybody died. If it came to a life without cigars or death with them, he’d not have hesitated about his choice. He took out a cigar now, and his tinderbox. He drew in a double lungful of smoke, and had a coughing fit. He hawked black, ropy phlegm, and made his way down the alley, steadying himself against the walls.

  Erno was dead, of course. Veidt pulled out his dart and wiped it clean on the corpse’s rags. He reloaded the pistol, setting the spring and the safety catch. Then, he unlocked the chains, and slung them over his shoulder. Chains were an expensive item in his line of work. He’d been using these, forged especially by dwarf blacksmiths, for over ten years. They were good chains, and had kept far more dangerous men than Erno in his custody.

  He took the dead man by his bare feet—he’d sold the boots after chaining him up—and dragged him back to the street. As he pulled, there were sharp pains in his chest. The black crab was settling on his ribs, he thought, eating away at the muscles holding bone together, and now his skeleton was grinding itself to dirt inside him.

  It wouldn’t be much longer before he collapsed like a jellyfish, useless to himself.

  His aim wasn’t so good these days, either. Good enough, he supposed, but he used to be a champion shot. When bounty hunting had been slow, he’d been able to pick up extra income from winning contests. Longbow, crossbow, pistol, throwing knife: he’d been the best with them all. And how he’d taken care of his weapons! Each was honed to the perfect sharpness, oiled if need be, polished, and ready to kiss blood. He still tried to keep up, but sometimes things were more difficult for him than they had been.

  Twenty-five years ago, briefly, he had been a hero. But fame passes quickly. And his part in the downfall of Drachenfels had been minor enough to be overlooked by most balladeers. That’s why he had allowed Joachim Munchberger to publish Veidt’s own account as a book. The mountebank had disappeared with all the profits, and it had taken him some years—working between jobs—to track him down and extract payment. Munchberger must have had to learn to write with his left hand.

  Now, the whole thing was about to start up again. Crown Prince Oswald’s emissaries had found him, and asked him to come forward and talk to a fat actor for some new version of the tale. Veidt would have refused, but money was offered, and so soon he would have to go through the whole dull story again for this Detlef Sierck—a runaway debtor himself, by all accounts—and again be overlooked while young Oswald luxuriated in the golden glow of glory.

  Oswald! He had come a long way down the road since his days as a snot-nosed boy. Soon, he’d be picking his first emperor. While blubber-bellied Rudi Wegener was drowning himself in gin, crazy Erzbet was raving in some cell and Lady Eternity was gorging herself on virgins’ blood. And Anton Veidt was where he’d always been, out on the streets, searching for the wanted and unwanted criminals, converting the guilty into crowns. Oswald was welcome to his position.

  Erno was getting heavier. Veidt had to sit down in the street and rest. A crowd gathered around him as he watched over his goods, but soon went away again. Flies were buzzing about the dead man’s face, crawling into his open mouth and nostrils. Veidt hadn’t the strength to shoo them away.

  So, haloed by insects, the two proceeded together towards the house of the fine gentleman.

  XII

  Detlef woke up to find himself face down in a sea of manuscript pages. He had fallen asleep at his desk. By the clock, it was three in the morning. The palace was cold and quiet. His candle had burned low, spilling wax onto the desk, but the flame still burned.

  Sitting upright, he felt the dull throbbing in his head that always came with periods of extreme overwork. Sherry would help. He always had some nearby. He pushed his chair back, and took a bottle from the cabinet near the desk. He swigged a mouthful from the bottle, then poured himself a glass. It was fine stuff, like all the luxuries of the von Konigswald palace. He rubbed together his chilled hands to get the warmth back into them.

  He ordered the pages on the desk, shuffling them together. His working text was nearly complete. All the alterations prompted by his interviews with Rudi Wegener, Menesh the dwarf and the crown prince were pencilled in, and he doubted whether the testimony of the bounty hunter Veidt or the vampire lady Dieudonne would make much difference. Research was the skeleton of the play, but the flesh on it was all Detlef Sierck’s. His audience would expect no less. Oswald had even encouraged him to depart from history at a few points, the better to reach the truth of the matter. Would that all patrons were as enlightened in the matter of artistic license.

  His headache began to fade, and he re-read a few pages. He had been working on his curtain speech, the summation of the drama, when he had fallen asleep, and an ink-trail scratched across the bottom of the last sheet of paper.

  He’d blotted his soliloquy with his cheek, and guessed the ink would be dried in by now. He must look a fool.

  His own words still moved him. He knew only he could do justice to such a speech, only he could convey the triumph of good over evil without falling into bathos or melodrama. Strong men would weep as Detlef-as-Oswald spoke over his fallen foe, finding at last a touch of sorrow for the ending of even a life such as Drachenfels had led. He had planned to have Hubermann underscore the scene with a solo gamba, but now he decided that the music wouldn’t be necessary. The lone voice, the stirring words, would be enough.

  “Let joyful towers a tintinnabulation sound

  That the Enchanter Great is under good ground,

  And let th’infernal churches sound their bells

  To welcome Constant Drachenfels.”

  Outside the window lay the grounds of the palace, and beyond them the sleeping city. There was a full moon, and he could see the immaculately laid-out lawns as if in a monochrome etching. The crown prince’s ancestors, the previous electors of Ostland, stood in a row on pedestals, seeming staid and monolithic. Old Maximilian was there, in his younger days, waving a sword for the Empire. Detlef had seen the current elector being assisted about the place by his nurses, blathering to all who would listen about the great old days. Everyone in the household knew the time of Maximilian was drawing to an end, and that the days of Oswald would soon be beginning.

  The architects Oswald had engaged to assist in the settings for the play were also planning to remodel some of the palace. More and more, the crown prince was taking over the business of the von Konigswalds. He spent most of his days closeted with high priests, chancellors, Imperial envoys and officials of the court. The succession should be smooth. And Detlef’s Drachenfels would mark the start of the Oswaldian era. An artist is not always set aside from the course of history, he supposed. Sometimes, an artist could as much make history as a general, an emperor or an elector.

  He scratched his moustache, and drank more sherry, savouring the quiet of the palace by night. It was so long since he had known sustained quiet. The nights of Mundsen Keep had been filled with terrible groans, the screams of those who slept badly and the incessant drip of the wet walls and ceilings. And his days now were a total cacophony of voices and problems. He had to interview actors and the leftovers of Oswald’s adventurers. He had to argue with those too hidebound to see how to convert his ideas into actuality. He had to put up with the shrill complaints and the nauseating cooing of Lilli Nissen. And, through it all, there was the clumping of booted feet on wood as actors stamped through rehearsals, the hammerings of the
workmen constructing devices for the play and the clatter of the cast members learning to fence for the fight scenes. Most of all, there was Breughel, always roaring “Detlef, Detlef, a problem, a problem…”

  Sometimes, he asked himself why he had chosen the theatre as an outlet for his genius. Then, he remembered…

  There was nothing to compare it with.

  A cold hand caressed his heart. Out there in the gardens, things were moving. Moving in the shadows of the electors’ statues. Detlef wondered if he should raise the alarm. But something suggested to him that these shapes were not assassins or robbers. There was an unearthly languor to their movements, and he thought he detected a faint glow, as of moonlight, to their faces. There were a column of them now, robed like monks, their shining faces deeply shadowed. They moved in complete silence towards the house, and Detlef realized with a chill that they weren’t displacing the grass and gravel as they walked. They trod on the air, floating a few inches above the ground, the cords of their robes trailing behind them.

  He was frozen to the spot, not with fear exactly, but with fascination, as if under the influence of one of that species of venomous serpent that chooses first to charm, then to bite.

  The window was open, but he did not remember unfastening it. the night air was cold on his face.

  The monkish figures floated higher now, feet above the ground, drifting upwards towards the palace. Detlef imagined sharp eyes glittering in their indistinct, half-seen faces. He knew with a sudden burst of panic that whatever these beings might be they were here for a purpose, to visit him, to communicate specifically with Detlef Sierck.

  He prayed to the gods he’d neglected. Even to the ones he didn’t believe in. Still, the figures rose into the air. There were ten or twelve of them, he thought, but perhaps more. Perhaps as many as a hundred, or a thousand. Such a crowd couldn’t assemble in the gardens of the palace, but perhaps they were there despite all possibility. After all, men didn’t float.

  A group of the figures came forward and hovered outside the window, barely out of Detlef’s reach. There were three, and the one in the centre must be the spokesman. This figure was more distinct than the others. Its face was more defined, and Detlef could make out a forked, black beard and a hooked nose. It was the face of an aristocrat, but whether a tyrant or a benevolent ruler he could not tell.

  Were these the spirits of the dead? Or daemons of darkness? Or some other variety of supernatural creature as yet uncatalogued?

  The floating monk looked at Detlef with calm, shining eyes and raised an arm. The robe fell away and a thin hand appeared, its forefinger extended towards the playwright.

  “Detlef Sierck,” said the figure in a deep, male voice. “You must go no further into the darkness.”

  The monk spoke directly into Detlef’s mind, without moving his lips, there was a breeze blowing, but the apparition’s robes weren’t moving in it.

  “You should beware…”

  The name hung in the air, echoing in his skull before it was uttered…

  “Drachenfels.”

  Detlef could not speak, could not answer back. He was being warned, he knew, but against what? And to what purpose?

  “Drachenfels.”

  The monk was alone now, his companions gone, and fading away himself. His body suddenly caught the wind and was twisted this way and that, coming apart like a fragile piece of cloth in a gale, and wafted away on the air currents. In a moment, there was nothing left of him.

  Covered in a cold sweat, his head hurting more than ever, Detlef fell to the floor, and prayed until he fell into a swoon.

  When morning came, he discovered he had watered and fouled himself in fear.

  ACT THREE

  I

  It was a typical riverboat romance. Sergei Bukharin had travelled down the Urskoy from Kislev, an ambassador to the Empire from Tsar Radii Bokha, Overlord of the North. He joined the Emperor Luitpold just after the confluence of the Urskoy and the Talabec. Genevieve was immediately taken with the tall, proud man. He had won his scars championing the tsar against the altered monstrosities of the Northern Wastes, and wore his hair and moustaches in long braids threaded with ceramic beads. He radiated strength, and his blood was richer than any she had tasted since her retirement to the convent.

  Aside from Henrik Kraly, Oswald’s steward, Sergei and Genevieve were the only passengers on the Luitpold travelling the length of the Talabec to Altdorf. There was a glum and withdrawn elven poet who had come down from Kislev with Sergei and debarked at Talabheim, but he kept his purposes to himself and was shunned and mistrusted by Captain Iorga and his oarsmen. Of course, Genevieve was shunned and mistrusted too, but they seemed better able to deal with her condition than this alien, unknowable creature. At Talabheim, the cabins were swelled by an influx of merchants, a pair of Imperial tax collectors and a major in the service of Karl-Franz who insisted on debating military matters with Sergei.

  Genevieve spent the long, slow days on the long, slow river belowdecks, dreaming restlessly in her bunk, and her dizzying nights with Sergei, delicately picking off his scabs and sampling his blood. The Kislevite seemed to enjoy the vampire kiss—as most humans do if only they allow themselves—but was not otherwise all that interested in his deathless lover. When not in her arms, Sergei preferred the company of Major Jarl or Kraly. Genevieve had heard that the tsar’s people put little store by women in general, and vampire women in particular. There was the famous example of the Tsarina Kattarin, who had sought the Dark Kiss and extended her reign over Kislev. A conspiracy of her great-great-grandchildren, frustrated at the block she represented to the dynastic succession, had led to her well-merited assassination. The vampires of Kislev and the World’s Edge Mountains were all like Wietzak, self-important Truly Dead monsters who at once looked down on humankind as cattle and feared the day-dwellers for their hawthorn and silver.

  She never pressed the matter with Sergei, but she guessed the brave warrior was a little afraid of her. That could well be the attraction for him, the desire to overcome a breath of fear. For her part, she was pleased to pass the dull journey—mile after mile of tree-lined banks, and the eternal grunting and straining of the bonded oarsmen—with a strong taste in her mouth and a roughly handsome face to look at. By the time they were within a few days of Altdorf, she was already growing bored with her Kislevite soldier-diplomat, and although they exchanged accommodation addresses, she knew she would never see him socially again. There were no regrets, but there were no really pleasant memories either.

  The Luitpold upped oars as it was hauled to the quayside, between two tall-masted ocean-going merchant ships down from the Sea of Claws with goods from Estalia, Norsca and even the New World. Sergei strode down the gangplank, saluted her from the docks and marched off to court, presumably intending to stop off with Major Jarl at the first bawdy house along the way to remind himself of the feel of a real woman. To her surprise, Genevieve found a tear welling in her eye. She wiped the red smear away and watched her lover walk off with his friend.

  “My lady,” said Kraly, impatient now the trip was ended. “The crown prince’s coach is waiting.”

  It was an impressive vehicle, and out of place on the malodorous docks of Altdorf, between the stacked-up goods and the dray-carts. Liveried servants waited by the black and red carriage. The arms of von Konigswald were picked out in green and gold. Kraly gave a dock-worker a crown to carry Genevieve’s luggage from the Luitpold to the coach. She refrained from mentioning that, for all her girlish appearance, she could best the emissary’s bruiser in an arm wrestling contest and pick up a heavy trunk one-handed.

  Genevieve bade a respectable farewell to Captain Iorga, who looked relieved to be rid of his half-dead passenger but wasn’t afraid enough not to suggest she book a return passage with him if she intended to go back to the convent in a month or so.

  After years in the convent, the scents and sounds of Altdorf were again a revelation. The Luitpold had pulled into the docks
just after sunset. Torches had been lit to facilitate late workers, and Genevieve could smell, taste and hear as well as any creature of the night. Here was the largest city in the Empire; indeed, in the Known World.

  Built upon the islands of the Reik and the Talabec, but extending widely on the banks, Altdorf was a city of bridges and mudflats, surrounded by tall, white walls with distinctive red tiles. Hub of the Empire, home of the Imperial court and the great Temple of Sigmar, and known, so the guidebooks say, for its universities, wizards, libraries, diplomats and eating houses. Also, as the guidebooks omit to mention, its cutpurses, spies, scheming politicians and priests, occasional outbreaks of plague and ridiculous overcrowding.

  None of this had changed in twenty-five years. As they pulled into the city, Genevieve noticed that yet another layer of dwellings had been built upon the mudflats, creating a permanently wet, permanently unhealthy beehive structure in which the poor—dock labourers, dwarf wall engineers, street traders—lived in a distinct counterpoint to the fine houses of Altdorf’s rich.

  There weren’t many vampires, because of the bridges. Wietzak and his kind would have found themselves penned in on all sides by running water. Were she ever fully to die and become like them, one of the Truly Dead vampires, a walking corpse with an eternal bloodlust, she would have to avoid this city forever. For now, she drank in all the sensations, seeking out the pleasant scents of good Altdorf cooking and a ready-to-be-loaded cargo of herbs and ignoring the mud, the rotting fish and the sheer press of unwashed humankind. Left to herself, she would be glutted on blood tonight, but she supposed other arrangements had been made for her. A shame, for here there was life in the night. The Crescent Moon would be opening for business, and other taverns, the theatres, concert halls, circuses, gaming houses. All the rich, gaudy, rotten, beguiling pursuits of the living. The things which, in six-and-a-half centuries, Genevieve had been unable to put behind her.