[Genevieve 01] - Drachenfels

by Jack Yeovil - (ebook by Undead)

  Here was a well-dressed young blood, his arm ending in a ragged stump, his throat torn out by some beast. Here was a little boy, his face flushed unnaturally red, his belly opened. Lowenstein stopped by the child, seized by a desire to place his hand on the apparently fevered brow, to find it hot or cool. He passed on, glancing at each in turn. Death by violence, death by illness, death by causes unknown. All death was here. The priests of Morr had placed amulets of the raven around the necks of all their charges, to signify the flight of the spirit. To the cult of Morr, remains were just clay. Bodies were revered for the sake of the living; the spirit was in the hands of the gods.

  Finally, Lowenstein came to the bier he was looking for. The dead woman was out of place in such a wealthy shrine. In her drab and patched gown, she looked more the type to be left in the streets to rot than to be pored over by the coroners and troubled by the concern of Crown Prince Oswald. All deaths among such people were suspicious, and yet few attracted the attention of the priests of Morr. All the other corpses here were from the monied classes. This woman had clearly been poor.

  Her throat had been raggedly cut, and the instrument lay on the ice beside the body. It was the dove of Shallya, blasphemously used in suicide. Lowenstein touched the open wound, and found it cold and wet. He brushed the lank, greying hair from the haggard face. The woman might have been pretty once, but that would have been long before her death.

  As a young man, Lowenstein had seen Erzbet dance. It was in Nuln, in a travelling fair in the Grand Square. The woman had performed an exhausting solo, combining the high balletic techniques of the Nuln opera with the wild, primitive displays of the forest-dwelling nomads.

  He had been aroused by the performance, by the tanned legs that kicked up her skirts, and by the dark eyes that caught the firelight. She hadn’t paid him any notice. That had been the night Bruder Wiesseholle, king of the city’s thieves and murderers, was killed. The next day, the fair was gone, and the criminals of Nuln were without a ruler. Erzbet had been good. Twenty-five gold crowns was her price.

  It had never varied, whether her intended was a mighty lord or a humble beadle. He had heard that—poor fool—she always insisted her clients debate ethics with her, and justify the removal from the world of those they wished to be rid of.

  And here she was, Morr’s meat at last. Her dead would be waiting for her. Bruder Wiesseholle and the numberless others. He hoped she remembered her ethical discussions now, and could justify each of her assassinations.

  He put down his candle by the corpse’s head and prepared to take what he had come for. If he were to plunder the other biers, he would doubtless find rings, coins, necklaces, stout boots, silver buttons, golden buckles. But Erzbet had no goods to lose, had nothing Lowenstein’s patron could possibly want.

  Except her heart.

  Lowenstein took the small knives, honed to a razor’s edge, from their oilcloth, and tested the one he chose against the ball of his thumb. It stung as it sliced with the merest touch.

  And her eyes.

  IV

  Genevieve took off her tinted glasses and looked up at the fortress of Drachenfels. It seemed different now, smaller. It was a pleasant spring day, and the ride up from the village was almost easy. The last time she had been this way, they had avoided the road—it was littered with the bones of those who had thought they could just walk up to the castle and knock on the door—and scaled the precipitous cliffs. There were other abandoned castles in the Grey Mountains, and they were no more imposing, no more haunted than this one. There were none of the traditional signs of an evil place: birds sang, the local vegetation flourished, milk went unsoured, animals were not mysteriously agitated. Even with her heightened awareness, Genevieve could sense nothing. It was as if the Great Enchanter had never been.

  Of course, Oswald’s men had prepared the way. Henrik Kraly had sent out a squadron of cleaners, cooks, carpenters and servants to make the place ready for occupation. There had been some initial reluctance among the villagers who had lived all their lives in the shadow of Drachenfels to hire on with the company, but the crown prince’s gold had overcome many objections. The lad who saw to her horse after she dismounted must have been born well after the death of Drachenfels. The young of the region were reluctant to believe the stories told by their parents and grandparents. And some of the old were impressed enough by the ballads of Oswald and Genevieve to conquer their aversion to the ruin and take positions with Detlef’s troupe.

  The genius was in good spirits as he rode at the head of his gypsy caravan of actors, musicians and show people. He was a good conversationalist, and eager to talk with Genevieve. They had been through the minutiae of Oswald’s quest, of course, but the dramatist was also interested in the rest of her long life, and was skilled at drawing out incidents she hadn’t spoken of for centuries. The breadth of his learning was impressive, and she found him well-informed about the great men and women of earlier eras. She had known Tarradasch, had seen his plays during their original runs, and cheered Detlef greatly with her opinion that the great dramatist was less skilled as an actor and director than as a writer.

  “A regional touring company today could better the original Altdorf productions of Tarradasch’s masterpieces without breaking a sweat,” she opined.

  “Quite! Yes! Exactly!” he agreed.

  It was a performance in itself, moving the company from the von Konigswald palace in Altdorf to the remote mountain fastness, and they had been on the road for some weeks. But the journey flew by, with stop-overs at the best inns, and leisurely evenings with the cast discussing their roles and practising their swordfights. By comparison, the original journey had been long, uncomfortable and fraught with danger. Genevieve felt nothing as she passed the sites of battles long-since won. She had made brief pilgrimages to the graves of Conradin—though there had only been bones to bury—and Heinroth, and found the markers Oswald had put up gone. There were no spirits lingering in the forests. Even the bandits had been cleared out years ago by the local militia. Despite it all, Genevieve found it difficult to be in company with Laszlo Lowenstein, the actor cast as Drachenfels. What she had seen of his performance was frighteningly good and, although he seemed offstage to be an ordinary, conscientious craftsman merely happy to be thrown a meaty role, she couldn’t forget the impression he made when he pulled on the mask and tried to radiate evil. Even his voice took on the timbre she remembered, and his daemonic laughter, somehow amplified by a device inside his mask, was bone-chilling.

  Rudi Wegener was with the caravan, Menesh the dwarf and Anton Veidt too. Veidt was old, lean and ill. He avoided her just as he had avoided her the first time. Rudi was also in poor health, she assumed, with his great girth weighing heavy on his heart and his great thirst similarly straining his liver and lights. Genevieve gathered he had suffered a loss recently, and approached him about it, but he hadn’t been eager to talk of Erzbet. That had been a long time ago. It had been a difficult subject to bring up, for Genevieve still recalled the first sign of the dancer-assassin’s madness, her unprovoked attack. Otherwise, Rudi was still prone to boasting and garrulousness. He regaled the company with fancifully embroidered accounts of his exploits as a bandit in these very woods, confident that all who might contradict him save Genevieve were dead and in their graves.

  Only Menesh, the lack of an arm notwithstanding, was much as he had been. Dwarfs are more long-lived than humans. Genevieve understood that her one-time comrade had become something of a ladies’ man since his injury forced him to abandon his life of wandering adventure. He was rumoured to have made several conquests among the girls of the chorus, and to be chasing the amorous record set by Kerreth, the fragile little costume master whose ways with the opposite sex were legendary. There was another dwarf in the company, Vargr Breughel, with whom Menesh was always arguing. Detlef told her that Breughel wasn’t a true dwarf, but human born, and that he hated to be taken for one. Menesh was always thinking of cruel jests at Breughel’s ex
pense, and Detlef, who held his assistant in high regard, had several times turned uncharacteristically severe and threatened to throw out the one-armed swordsman along the way.

  It wasn’t the same trip, though. And Oswald wasn’t with them. He would have to join the company later, at the head of the second caravan which would bring the audience to the play. Detlef was good company, and there was a spark between them she could not deny. But he was not Oswald, regardless of the role he was to take in the play.

  Then again, Genevieve knew she was not Lilli Nissen. The star travelled in her own luxurious caravan, which was driven by a handsome, black-skinned mute from the South Lands who acted as her personal servant and bodyguard. By his scars, Genevieve recognized him as essentially the woman’s slave. The vampire had been presented to the actress, and neither party wished to further the acquaintance. Genevieve saw Lilli’s face as if it were a-crawl with worms, and the actress pointedly refused to touch the undead woman’s outstretched hand. Detlef, too, obviously had little time for Lilli, but excused her on the grounds that, for all her foolishness and temperament, she could indeed be a goddess on stage. “She had the ability to make audiences love her, even if they would, singly or in twos and threes, find her less appealing than the average monster of the night. She’s probably possessed.”

  The “accidents” that had plagued the production in Altdorf abated, perhaps because of the presence of several of Henrik Kraly’s pikemen. One inn along the way had been reluctant to accommodate the players, the owner having had bad experience in the past with the theatrical profession, but Kraly’s men had quietly convinced him to change his ways. The only peculiar incident had taken place in a village at the foot of the Grey Mountains, where the caravan had been booked to stay overnight at a well-reputed traveller’s rest stop.

  Detlef had been sampling the excellent food on offer, and quizzing Genevieve about the Bretonnia of her girlhood, asking particularly about the still-remembered great minstrels of the day and the precise qualities of their voices. Breughel had come to their table in some state, accompanied by the owner of the hostelry.

  “How many are we?” Breughel asked. “In the caravan, I mean. Coaches, carts, wagons?”

  “Um, twenty-five, I think. No, I was forgetting Lilli’s boudoir on wheels. Twenty-six. What’s the matter? Have we lost someone?”

  “No,” said the hostelier, apologetically, “quite the reverse. You have one too many.”

  Detlef was taken aback. “You’ve obviously miscounted.”

  “No. The crown prince’s messenger specified twenty-six vehicles, and so I set aside space in the yard for that number. The space is filled, and there is one carriage left over.”

  “It’s Lilli’s,” said Breughel.

  “It would be,” replied Detlef.

  “And she’s not happy about leaving it in the road.”

  “She wouldn’t be.”

  The hostelier seemed unduly upset until Genevieve realized he must have recently been shouted at by Lilli Nissen. The famous beauty could be a mad gorgon at times. Detlef continued with his meal, complimenting the hostelier on his lamb chops in wine sauce. The man was from Bretonnia, and justly proud of his fare.

  “The thing I can’t understand, Detlef,” said Breughel, “is that we’ve counted the caravan twice over. No matter where we start we get the same number.”

  “Twenty-seven?”

  “No, twenty-six. But there are still twenty-seven places filled in the yard.”

  Detlef laughed. “This is silly. You must just have arranged the wagons wrongly, taken up too much room.”

  “You know what Kraly’s ostlers are like. The wagons are as evenly spaced as old Maximilian’s toy soldiers on a board.”

  “Well, haul one of the scenery wagons into the road to make room for the human flytrap, and have a drink.”

  The next day, at the off, Detlef and Breughel counted the wagons as they trundled up towards the mountain road.

  “There, my friend, twenty-six.”

  “And our own wagon, Detlef. Twenty-seven.”

  It had been a puzzle, but certainly paled when set beside Detlef’s experience at the von Konigswald palace. It was hard to take seriously an extra wagon as an omen of evil.

  But the next night, Kosinski the scene-shifter, still hobbling on his broken ankle, came up to complain.

  “I thought you wanted me to bring up the rear of the caravan.”

  “I do, Kosinski. You’ve the heaviest, slowest wagon. It’s the combination of your head and the scenery that keeps it back. You always have to catch up half an hour at the end of the day.”

  “Then who’s that behind me?”

  Detlef and Breughel looked at each other and said in unison, “The twenty-seventh wagon.”

  “And who’s that?”

  “Who knows?”

  They were camped in the open that night, the wagons together in groups. Four groups of six, with three left over. Twenty-seven. Detlef and Breughel independently counted the wagons again, and came up with only twenty-six. But there were still four groups of six, with three left over.

  “Detlef,” concluded Breughel, “there’s an extra wagon with us we can’t see all the time.”

  Detlef spat into the fire. Genevieve had nothing to add.

  “So, who is travelling with us?”

  Detlef hadn’t talked much that evening, and Genevieve hadn’t been able to draw him out. He had had a conference with Kraly’s men, and had them stand guard until dawn. When everyone else was asleep, Genevieve had counted the wagons. Twenty-six. She had an assignation with the youth playing Conradin that night, and fed well. He looked white and dazed the next morning, and avoided her for a while, so perhaps she had lost some of her control and taken too much.

  But the journey was over now. She looked around for Detlef, but he was busy with Breughel and the architect, arguing over sketches. They could only see the castle as a giant stage set to be exploited for the maximum impact. Guglielmo, the Tilean business manager, was off with the local burgermeister, going over a list of provisions ordered and paid for. Genevieve put her glasses on again, and saw better through the tint.

  The rest of the company were going merrily in through the great front gates, looking for their quarters, relieved to be off the road. Lilli Nissen swept past with her little retinue—slave, dresser, astrologer, face-paint adviser—and went into the castle like a queen making a call on the lesser nobility.

  Genevieve stood on the road, hesitating. Looking behind her, she saw who else hesitated. Rudi, Veidt, Menesh. They each stood alone, looking at the fortress, remembering…

  V

  The first night in the fortress, Rudi threw a party and invited everyone. There would have been a party anyway, to mark the end of the journey, but Detlef Sierck was kind enough to let Rudi throw it. Of course, Crown Prince Oswald had provided the food and wine, not to mention the fortress itself, but Rudi was there to bring the party to life.

  The last weeks, since Oswald found him in the Black Bat, had been good for Rudi. He hadn’t been drinking less, but what he was drinking was of a better quality. He’d been telling the old stories again, with his usual “improvements,” but now there was a marked difference in the interest of his audiences. Detlef had listened attentively to his accounts of the original quest to Drachenfels, and the theatre people encouraged him to recall his other exploits.

  Rudi had always liked theatre people. Erzbet had been with her gypsy circus when they first met. He and his band had passed themselves off as strolling players on many occasions. Now, at his party, the company were enjoying his best theatrical story. He was remembering the time when, shortly after holding up a party of noblemen in the Drak Wald Forest, he had been forced to stage a performance for his erstwhile victims in order to convince them that his band were indeed show people rather than bandits. In his retelling, he claimed that the Lord Hjalmar Poelzig had recognized him straight away, but still insisted on the performance to humiliate Rudi. Surro
unded by the lord’s militiamen, Rudi’s bandits had improvised a tragedy about a bandit king and his dancing queen and, at the close of the play, Poelzig had been so moved that he decreed that Rudi should be rewarded and allowed to go free under the lord’s own protection.

  Detlef roared with laughter as Rudi told his story, impersonating the wily lord, and the brash young man he had been.

  Deep inside his drink-besotted brain, Rudi remembered the real lord, and the five good men he had strangled with bowstrings when he caught up with the bandits. He remembered the lord’s jailer—hardly more than a boy—and the way he had screamed as Rudi battered him to death against the stones of the prison before making an escape through the castle’s stinking drains. Sobbing and befouled, the bandit king had crept away in shame like an animal of the forest. Those had been days of blood and filth and desperation.

  The more he spoke of the days of plunder and glory and adventure, the more Rudi came to know that this was the real truth of the matter. What had happened didn’t matter any longer. Erzbet was dead, Poelzig was dead, the boy was dead, his brains paste on the floor—the times were dead. But the stories lived. Detlef understood that, with his histories and his dramas. And Oswald too, with his play that would pass all their names down to future generations. Rudi the dirty murderer, Rudi who howled in grief and fear as he smashed in the skull of an innocent child, would be forgotten. Rudi the bandit king, Rudi the stalwart ally of brave Oswald, would be remembered as long as there were stages to dress and actors to walk upon them.

  Reinhardt Jessner, the chubby young player cast as Rudi, called for another story. Rudi called for another pot of gin. The fires burned low, and the stories ran out. Eventually, Rudi slumped insensible. He could see the others—Detlef laughing, the vampire Genevieve as pretty as she had ever been, Veidt haggard and silent, Breughel arranging for more wine—but couldn’t move himself from his spot by the fire. His belly weighed him down like an anchor. His limbs felt as if he were shackled to four cannonballs. And his back—his never-set-properly, never-right-again back—pained him as it had done for a quarter century, sending messages of agony up his spine.