[Genevieve 01] - Drachenfels

by Jack Yeovil - (ebook by Undead)

  “I won’t do it! I shan’t do it! You can’t make me! I’m leaving this accursed place this hour, this instant!”

  Lilli shouted at her dresser, and the poor woman freed herself from Justus. She began packing the actress’ things into an open trunk.

  “Lilli, the show starts in an hour. You can’t leave!”

  “Just watch me, worm dung! I’m not staying here to be murdered and abused!”

  “But Lilli…”

  Word was spreading through the company of this latest calamity. There were crowds at Lilli’s dressing-room door, peering in at the star in disarray and the gory garbage strewn across everything. Lowenstein appeared, his costume complete but for the mask, and observed dispassionately. Detlef looked to the other actor, knowing that his career would be ruined too if Lilli betrayed them all.

  Lilli sat, arms crossed, watching her dresser pack, barking orders at the crying woman. She scraped at the blood on her face, and wiped away her half-applied make-up. She pulled out her fangs one by one and threw them at the floor.

  “All of you,” she snapped. “Out! I’m changing! I’m leaving!”

  Her giant slave prodded Detlef in the chest, and he got the impression he ought to get out of the room.

  In the narrow passage between the dressing rooms and the stage, he slumped against the wall. It was all going to be ruined! And Lilli Nissen was deserting him again. He’d never be able to get backing for another production. He would be lucky to get a job carrying spears in a provincial production of some tenth-rate tragedy. His friends would desert him faster than oarsmen escaping from a sinking galleass. It would take all he had to stay out of Mundsen Keep. He saw the Known World falling apart around him, and wondered if he might not do best just to sign up with some forlorn-hope voyage of discovery to the Northern Wastes and have done with it.

  “Somebody left it for her,” Justus told him. “It was wrapped like a gift, a gown or something. And there was a coat of arms on the note.”

  “Great. Someone wants this play taken off before curtain-up.”

  “Here.” The cleric gave him a bent and bloodied piece of stiff paper. There was an unreadable scrawl of a message, and the smudged impression of a seal. Detlef recognized it, a stylized facemask.

  “Drachenfels!”

  The Great Enchanter must still have supporters out there, desperate to protect their master’s reputation by putting a stop to this recreation of his downfall. Lowenstein stood aside calmly, awaiting orders from his director. Justus, Jessner, Illona Horvathy, Gesualdo and the others were all quiet, intent upon him. He could stop it here, and get out of it with the minimum of dignity. Or he could proceed with the play, simply ignoring the absence of the leading lady. Or…

  Detlef tore the paper up, and swore to Sigmar, to Verena, to all the gods, to the Emperor, to the grand prince, to Vargr Breughel and to himself, that Drachenfels would go on, bitch Lilli or no.

  The crowds parted, and someone came through, her lovely face shining.

  “Genevieve,” he said. “Just the person I wanted to see…”

  II

  Emperor Karl-Franz I sat in his box at the rear of the great hall, raised above his subjects, with Luitpold to one side and Oswald at the other. An attendant held out a tray of sweetmeats, which Luitpold had been gluttonously helping himself to.

  The red curtain hung in front of the raised stage, sporting tragic and comic masks picked out in gold. He glanced over his programme, gathering from the order of the names listed when each player would make his entrance. Drachenfels boasted a prologue, five acts, and an envoi, with six intervals, including one for a buffet supper. It should run about six hours.

  Karl-Franz shifted in his comfortable seat, and wondered whether Luitpold could sit still for the whole thing. It would be a great tribute to Detlef Sierck if the boy could manage it. Of course, Luitpold was eager to learn what his Uncle Oswald had done as a youth.

  Oswald himself sat cool and quiet, refusing to be drawn on what he knew of the drama. “The story is ordinary,” he had said. “It’s the presentation which counts.”

  The curtain’s rise was a good ten minutes late by Karl-Franz’s antique timepiece. He had expected no less. In his Empire, nothing ever started on time.

  Countess Emmanuelle was wearing another astonishing creation this evening. It took the off-the-shoulder concept to such an extent that it might almost be classed as off-the-entire-body. The Grand Theogonist was already asleep, but he had his adviser Matthias beside him to prod him if he snored too loudly. As usual, Baron Johann von Mecklenburg looked uncomfortable with a roof over him, but he was wearing his court clothes better as time passed. Talabheim and Middenheim were conferring together. Plotting, probably. The halfling was drunk. Middenland had heard there would be dancing girls wearing very little, and was salivating in his corner, his programme quivering over his padded codpiece. Princes, counts, electors, high priests, barons, burgermeisters, dukes and an emperor. This must be the most distinguished audience in history. Detlef Sierck should be proud of it.

  A strange thought came to Karl-Franz. If anything were to happen tonight—if a keg of lighted gunpowder were hurled into the audience, for instance—then a country would fall. The empress could never reign in his stead, and all the other logical successors were here. Like every man to occupy his position since the time of Sigmar, two-and-a-half millennia ago, Karl-Franz was conscious of the precariousness of his seat. Without him, without these men, the Empire would be a writhing collection of warring cities and provinces within three months. It would be like Tilea, but stretching the continent from Bretonnia to Kislev.

  “When’s it going to start, father?”

  “Soon. Even emperors must wait upon art, Luitpold.”

  “Well, when I’m emperor, I won’t.”

  Karl-Franz was amused. “You have to grow up, prove yourself and be elected first.”

  “Oh, that…”

  The house lights dimmed, and the chatter died down. A spot struck the curtains, and they split, allowing a man in knee-britches and a wig to emerge. There was a smattering of applause.

  “Felix Hubermann,” said Oswald, “the conductor.”

  The musicians in their pit raised their instruments. Hubermann bowed, but didn’t produce his baton.

  “Your Majesty, my lords, ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a high, mellifluous voice. “I have an announcement to make.”

  There was a ripple of murmuring. Hubermann waited for it to die down before continuing.

  “Owing to a sudden indisposition, the role of Genevieve Dieudonne will not be taken at this performance by Miss Lilli Nissen…”

  There were audible moans of disappointment from several electors who ought to have known better. Middenland spluttered with indignation. Baron Johann and Countess Emmanuelle, for different reasons, sighed with relief. Karl-Franz looked at Oswald, who shrugged blankly.

  “Instead, the role of Genevieve Dieudonne will be taken by, er, by Miss Genevieve Dieudonne.”

  There was general amazement. Even Oswald was taken aback.

  “Your majesty, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, thank you.” Hubermann raised his baton, and the orchestra struck up the Drachenfels overture.

  The first three basso chords, keyed to the syllables of the Great Enchanter’s name, chilled Karl-Franz’s spine. The strings came in, and the curtains parted on a rocky promontory in the Grey Mountains. The chorus came forward, and began:

  “Listen, my masters, and listen well,

  For I have a tale of horrors to tell,

  Of heroes and daemons and blood and death

  And the vilest monster e’er to draw breath…”

  III

  After the Apparition-in-the-Palace scene, Lowenstein didn’t have much to do until the fifth and last act. He had to show his masked face a few times, giving orders to the forces of evil, and he had personally to rip apart Heinroth the Vengeful in Act Three. But it was Detlef’s show until the final battle, when he would re
turn to the stage to end it all.

  He had the dressing room to himself. Everyone else was watching the play from the wings. Which was a good thing, considering what he had to do.

  The material was laid out for him. The bones, the skin, the heart and so on.

  A cheer went up from the stage as Detlef-as-Oswald skewered an orc. He heard the dialogue continuing, and the clumping of boots as Detlef strode around the stage, demonstrating his swagger. Lowenstein gathered the vampire wasn’t doing badly.

  This was the moment his patron had been schooling him for. He read the words from the paper he had been given, not recognizing the syllables, but understanding the meaning.

  Lowenstein no longer had the dressing room to himself.

  Blue fire burned around the material, as it filled out with the invisible force. Veidt’s skeleton, clothed in Rudi’s fat and Menesh’s skin, sat up. Erzbet’s heart began to beat, hungry for Genevieve’s blood. The thing had the outline of a man, but was not the man himself.

  The eyes were in a box on Lowenstein’s dressing table. There were seven of them. One of Rudi’s had been squashed beyond use in the struggle. His patron had told him it wouldn’t matter. He opened the box, and saw the eyes expressionless and veined in their clear jelly, like a clump of outsized frogspawn.

  Lowenstein plucked a blue eye, one of Veidt’s, from the sticky mass, and swallowed it whole.

  A section of his forehead peeled away.

  He took a handful of eyes and, fighting disgust, stuffed them into his mouth. He got them down.

  The composite creature watched from its eyesockets.

  Pain racked through Lowenstein’s body as the changes came upon him fully. Only three more to go. He popped one into his mouth and gulped it back. It stuck halfway, and he had to swallow another to keep it down. Spines sprouted from his knees, and the knobbles of his vertebrae broke the skin.

  His bones were expanding. He was in agony. There was one eye left. A brown one. Erzbet’s.

  As he ate it, the creature embraced him, taking him into its open chest, folding its ribs about him.

  The dying and dead sights of Erzbet, Rudi, Menesh and Veidt played back to him.

  …himself, masked, bent over a corpse in the Temple of Morr.

  …himself, masked, at a table, surrounded by ghosts.

  …himself, masked, wielding a red knife in a circle of candle-light.

  …himself, masked, crouched in a passageway, pulling bones free from a human ruin.

  Fire burned throughout his body, and he completed the ritual, shrieking. It was a wonder no one heard him. But there were wonders enough to go around.

  Veidt’s bones sank into him like logs thrown into a swamp. Rudi’s fat plumped out his gaunt frame. Menesh’s skin settled on his own, mottling it. And Erzbet’s heart beat next to his own, like a polyp nestling its mother.

  He was Laszlo Lowenstein no longer.

  Reaching for his mask, he was Constant Drachenfels.

  And he was looking forward eagerly to the fifth act.

  IV

  On the stage, she felt as if she were floating. Unsupported, she tried to find her way through the play without making a fool of herself. Some of the time, she could remember the lines Detlef had written for her. Some of the time, she remembered what she had actually said. Most of the other actors were good enough to work round her.

  The scenes with Detlef played marvellously, because she still had the flush of his blood in her. She could read the lines of his play from the surface of his mind, and she could see where she was straying from the text.

  Her first scene found her behind the bar in the Crescent Moon, surrounded by crowds, waiting for Oswald to walk into her life. The crowds were extras, hubbubbing softly without words, and from her position she could see Detlef waiting in the wings, his Oswald helmet under his arm, and the faces of the audience out in the darkness.

  Unlike the living actors, she could see clearly beyond the footlights. She saw the Emperor, attentive, and the real Oswald a little behind him, watching with approval. And yet, she was also seeing the real tavern, smelling again its distinctive smell of people and drink and blood. Individual extras—who would rush off and make themselves over as courtiers, bandits, villagers, monsters, orcs, gargoyles or forest peasants for later scenes—reminded her of the individual patrons she had known then. Through his play, Detlef was bringing it all back.

  One of the things about longevity—Genevieve didn’t like to think of it as immortality; too many vampires she had known were dead—was that you got to try everything. In nearly seven centuries now, she had been a child of court, a whore, a queen, a soldier, a musician, a physician, a priestess, an agitator, a gambler, a landowner, a penniless derelict, a herbalist, an outlaw, a bodyguard, a pit fighter, a student, a smuggler, a trapper, an alchemist and a slave. She had loved, hated, killed but never had children—the Dark Kiss came too early—saved lives, travelled, studied, upheld the law, broken the law, prospered, been ruined, sinned, been virtuous, tortured, shown mercy, ruled, been subjugated, known true happiness and suffered. But she had never yet acted upon the stage. Still less taken her own part in a recreation of her own adventures.

  The story progressed, as Detlef-as-Oswald gathered together his band of adventurers and set out on the road to Castle Drachenfels. Again, as on her recent journey along the same road, Genevieve found herself remembering too much. The faces of her dead companions were superimposed on the faces of the actors representing them. And she could never forget the images of their deaths. As Reinhardt Jessner blustered and slapped his padded thigh, she saw Rudi Wegener’s skin draped over his bones. As the youth she had bled conferred with Detlef, she remembered Conradin’s chewed bones in the ogre’s lair. And as the actor playing Veidt sneered through clouds of cigar smoke, she saw the bounty hunter’s face on Lilli Nissen’s dressing room floor.

  Lilli would be half-way down the mountain now, speeding back to Altdorf and civilization. And the creature who frightened her, who murdered Veidt and the others, would be close by, perhaps coming after her next. Or Oswald.

  The play advanced act by act, and the heroes braved peril after peril. Detlef had imagined a jauntiness in their progress Genevieve couldn’t remember. There were heroic speeches, and a passionate love scene. All Genevieve could recollect of the first trip were long days—painful for her under the sun—on a horse, and desperate, fearful nights around a fire. When Heinroth was found turned inside-out, the script had her make a vow over his corpse to continue the quest. In fact, she had considered backing out and going home. She played it down the middle, her old fears suddenly reborn, and Detlef improvised a response finer than anything he’d written for the scene. The blanket of pig entrails representing Heinroth looked more real, more shocking, to her than the actual corpse had done.

  Illona Horvathy had some difficulty working around the changes in the script, and was nervous in her scenes with Genevieve. But Erzbet had always been afraid of her and the actress’ uncertainty worked for the character. Watching Illona’s athletic dances—she was more skilled than Erzbet had been—Genevieve worried she would take some knocks in the fight scene in the last act, and that the drama would come to a premature conclusion.

  In the love scene, Genevieve, still floating with the wonder of it all, opened the wounds on Detlef’s neck. She heard gasps from the audience as blood trickled over his collar. The ballads lied about this. It had never happened, at least not this way. Although—twenty-five years later—she realized how much she had desired it, Oswald had never really responded to her, had kept his blood to himself despite his formal offers. He had once given her his wrist, as a man feeds a dog, and she had needed the blood too much to refuse. That still rankled. She wondered how Oswald would react to the perpetuation of the old story, the old lie. How he was feeling now as he sat next to the Emperor, watching a vampire feed on his surrogate?

  The hours flew by. In the play, and without, the forces of darkness gathered.


  V

  For Detlef, the evening was a triumph. Genevieve was an inspiration. During the comparatively few scenes when the character of Oswald was off-stage, he watched his new leading lady. If she were to apply herself, she could be a greater star than Lilli Nissen. What other actress could really live forever?

  Admittedly, she was drawing on deep personal feeling in the role, and the sheer excitement of the event was getting to her, but she was also a fast study. After a few moments of hesitation in the early scenes, she was growing in confidence and now effortlessly dominated her scenes. There were established, professional actors out there struggling to keep up with her. And the audience was responding. Perhaps the theatre was ready for a vampire star? And he could feel her inside him, whispering in his head, drawing things out of him. Their love scene was the most incredible thing he had ever played on the stage.

  Otherwise, the performance was working perfectly, each part falling into place exactly as planned. Detlef keenly missed Vargr Breughel’s comments from the wings, but felt by now he could supply them himself. “Less,” he heard his friend say during one speech; “more” in another.

  The other players gave him what he needed of them, and more. The trick effects functioned on cue, and elicited the proper reactions.

  Even Kosinski, drafted in for his bulk in the wordless role of a limping comic ogre, got his laugh and was childishly delighted, begging Detlef to let him come on again whenever a scene could accommodate him. “Don’t you see,” he repeated, “in the mountain inn, I could be a bouncer… in the forest, a wolf-trapper…”

  Detlef had a man stationed near the privies, and after each interval he would report back with what he had heard. The audience—probably the toughest in the Empire, as well as the most influential—was in love with the play. Old men were in love with Genevieve, the character and the actress. Reluctantly, his spy repeated Clothilde of Averheim’s gushing enthusiasm for Detlef-as-Oswald, which took in the timbre of his voice, the cut of his moustaches and the curve of his calves. Impulsively, he kissed the man.