[Genevieve 01] - Drachenfels

by Jack Yeovil - (ebook by Undead)

  Detlef sweated through ten shirts, and consumed three gallons of lemon water. Illona Horvathy shone on stage, and continued to be a total invalid in the wings, clutching her bucket and occasionally throwing up quietly in it. One of the bandit extras was slashed across the arm by Jessner in the duel, and had to be doctored in the dressing room. Felix Hubermann worked like a man possessed, wringing melodies from his musicians that no human ear had ever before apprehended. During the magic scenes, the music became unearthly, almost horrifying.

  Detlef Sierck knew this was the night for which he would be remembered.

  VI

  Then, the last act came.

  Genevieve and Detlef were alone on stage, supposed to be at the door of the very chamber in which the play was being performed, the great hall of Castle Drachenfels. Gesualdo, as Menesh, joined them, a miner’s pick in his fake right arm. His real arm was strapped beside him, but by squeezing a bulb in his hand, he could control the fake to give it the semblance of life. The musicians were silent, save for a lone flute suggesting the unnatural winds flowing through the haunted castle. Genevieve could have sworn that no one in the audience had exhaled for five minutes. The actors looked at each other, and pushed the door. The scenery descended around them, and the stage seemed to vanish. Genevieve was truly back in…

  …a throne-room for a king of darkness. The rest of the fortress had been ill-lit and dilapidated, but this was spotless and illumined by jewelled chandeliers. The furniture was ostentatiously luxurious. Gold gleamed from every edge. And silver. Genevieve shuddered to be near so much of the stuff. There were fine paintings on the wall. Rudi would have wept to see so much plunder in one place. A clock chimed, counting unnatural hours as its single hand circled an unfamiliar dial. In a cage, a harpy preened herself, wiping the remains of her last meal from her feathered breasts.

  Detlef and Genevieve trod warily on the thick carpets as they circled the stage.

  “He’s here,” said Detlef-as-Oswald.

  “Yes, I feel it too.”

  Gesualdo-as-Menesh kept to the walls, stabbing at tapestries.

  One wall was a floor-to-ceiling window, set with stained glass. From here, the Great Enchanter could gaze down from his mountain at the Reikswald. He could see as far as Altdorf, and trace the glittering thread of the River Reik through the forests. In the stained glass, there was a giant image of Khorne, the Blood-God, sitting upon his pile of human bones.

  With a chill, Genevieve realized that Drachenfels didn’t so much worship Khorne as look down upon him as an amateur in the cause of evil. Chaos was so undisciplined… Drachenfels had never been without purpose. There were other gods, other shrines. Khaine, Lord of Murder, was honoured in a modest ossuary. And Nurgle, Master of Pestilence and Decay, was celebrated by an odiferous pile of mangled remains. From this stared the head of Sieur Jehan, its eyes pecked out.

  Detlef-as-Oswald started to see his tutor so abused, and a laugh resounded through the throne-room, a laugh carried and amplified by Hubermann’s orchestra.

  Six hundred years ago, Genevieve had heard that laugh. Amid the crowds of Parravon, when the First Family’s assassin was borne aloft by daemons and his insides fell upon the citizenry. In that laughter, Genevieve heard the screams of the damned and the dying, the ripples of rivers of blood, the cracking of a million spines, the fall of a dozen cities, the pleas of murdered infants, the bleating of slaughtered animals.

  And twenty-five years ago, Genevieve had heard that laugh. Here, in this great hall.

  He loomed up, enormous, from his chair. He had been there all the time, but Detlef had cunningly placed him so his appearance would be an unforgettable shock. There were screams from the audience.

  “I am Drachenfels,” Lowenstein said mildly, the deathly laugh still in his voice. “I bid you welcome to my house. Come in health, go safely, and leave behind some of the happiness you bring…”

  Gesualdo-as-Menesh flew at the Great Enchanter, miner’s pick raised. With a terrible languor, moving as might a man of molten bronze, Lowenstein-as-Drachenfels stretched out and slapped him aside. Gesualdo-as-Menesh struck a hanging and fell squealing in a heap. Blood was spurting from him. The harpy was excited, and flapped her wings against the bars of her cage, smelling the blood.

  Drachenfels was holding the dwarf’s arm in his hand. It had come off as easily as a cooked chicken’s wing. The enchanter inclined his head to look at his souvenir, giggled, and cast it away from him. It writhed across the floor as if alive, trailing blood behind it, and was still.

  Genevieve looked at Detlef, and saw doubt in the actor’s face. Gesualdo was screaming far more than he had in rehearsal, and the blood effect was working far better. The dwarf rolled in a carpet, trying to press his stump to the ground.

  Lowenstein had torn off his left arm. Gesualdo’s real right arm erupted from his back, displacing the fake, as he tried to stop the flow of blood. Then, with a death rattle, he fell still.

  Lowenstein…

  …Drachenfels opened a window in the air, and the stink of burning flesh filled the throne-room. Genevieve peered through the window, and saw a man twisting in eternal torment, daemons rending his flesh, lash-worms eating through his face, rats gnawing at his limbs. He called out her name, and reached for her, reached through the window. Blood fell like rain onto the carpet.

  It was her father! Her six-centuries-dead father!

  “I have them all, you know,” Drachenfels said. “All my old souls, all kept like that. It prevents me from getting lonely here in my humble palace.”

  He shut the window on the damned creature Genevieve had loved. She raised her sword against him.

  He looked from one to the other, and laughed again. Spirits were gathering about him, evil spirits, servant spirits. They funnelled around him like a tornado.

  “So you have come to kill the monster? A prince of nothing, descendant of a family too cowardly to take an empire for themselves? And a poor dead thing without the sense to lie down in her grave and rot? In whose name do you dare such an endeavour?”

  Astonishingly, Detlef got his line out. “In the name of Sigmar Heldenhammer!”

  The words sounded weak, echoing slightly, but gave Drachenfels pause. Something was working behind his mask, a rage building up inside him. His spirits swarmed like midges.

  He threw out his hand in Genevieve’s direction, and the tide of daemons engulfed her, hurling her back against the wall, smothering her, weighing her down, sweeping over her face.

  Oswald came forward, and his sword clashed on the enchanter’s mailed arm. Drachenfels turned to look down on him.

  She felt herself dragged down, the insubstantial creatures surging up over her. She couldn’t breathe. She could barely move her limbs. She was cold, her teeth chattering. And she was tired, tired as she shouldn’t be until dawn. She felt bathed in stinging sunlight, wrapped in bands of silver, smothered in a sea of garlic. Somewhere, the hawthorn was being sharpened for her heart. Her mind fogged, she tasted dust in her throat…

  VII

  Like the rest of the audience, the emperor was amazed and appalled. The death of the dwarf had broken the illusion of the play. Something was badly wrong. The actor playing Drachenfels was mad, or worse. His hand went to the hilt of his ceremonial sword. He turned to his friend…

  And felt a knifepoint at his throat.

  “Watch the play to its finish, Karl-Franz,” Oswald said, his tone conversational. “The end is soon.”

  Luitpold jumped from his seat at the grand prince.

  With grace, Oswald stuck out his hand. Karl-Franz’s heart leaped as the knife flashed, but the grand prince simply rapped Luitpold’s chin with the hilt. Stunned, the boy fell back onto his chair, his eyes turning up into his head.

  Karl-Franz drew a breath, but the knife was back next to his Adam’s apple before he could let it out.

  Oswald smiled.

  The audience were torn between the play on the stage, and the drama in the Imperial box. M
ost of them were on their feet. The Countess Emmanuelle fell into a dead faint. Hubermann, the conductor, had fallen to his knees, and was praying fervently. Baron Johann and several others had their swords out, and Matthias levelled a single-shot hand gun.

  “Watch the play to its finish,” Oswald said again, prodding his weapon into Karl-Franz’s flesh.

  The Emperor felt his own blood soaking into his ruff. No one in the audience made a move.

  “Watch the play,” said Oswald.

  The audience sat down, settling uneasily. They laid down their weapons. The Emperor felt his own sword being unsheathed, and heard it clatter against the wall as it was thrown away.

  Never had the Empire seen such treachery.

  Oswald turned Karl-Franz’s head. The Emperor looked at the figure of the Great Enchanter, who was swelling on the stage, becoming the giant the original Constant Drachenfels must have been.

  The laughter of an evil god filled the great hall.

  VIII

  His own laughter echoed off the walls.

  He could barely remember his life as Laszlo Lowenstein. Since eating the eyes, so many other memories crowded his mind. Thousands of years of experience, of learning, of sensation, throbbed like wounds inside his skull. In the time of the rivers of ice, before the toad men came from the stars, he was battering a smaller creature with a sharp rock, tearing at the still-warm flesh. With each remembered fall of the icy flint, his mind convulsed, drowning in blood. Finally, something small and insignificant was squashed into dirt. His stubby, stiff fingers plucked the eyes from the dead thing, and he ate well through the winter. He felt alive again, and filled his lungs with air flavoured gorgeously by the fear that filled the great hall.

  Laszlo Lowenstein was dead.

  But Constant Drachenfels lived. Or would live, as soon as his body was warmed by the blood of the vampire slut.

  Drachenfels looked from Oswald on the stage, quivering with fear as he had once done, to Oswald in the audience, smiling with resolve as he held his knife to the Emperor’s throat.

  And Drachenfels remembered…

  The harpy squawked in her cage. The vampire lay in a dead faint. The dwarf bled slowly, fingers clamped over his stump. And the boy with the sword looked up at him, tears coursing down his face, maddened by the dread.

  Drachenfels raised his hand to strike the prince down, to pulp his head with a single blow and be done with it. The vampire, he would amuse himself with later. She might last for as much as a night in his arms before she was broken, used up and done with. Thus perished all those who defied the dark.

  The prince fell to his knees, sobbing, his sword thrown away and forgotten. And the Great Enchanter stayed his hand. An idea formed. He would have to renew himself soon, anyway. This could be used. This boy could be put to good advantage. And an empire could be won.

  Drachenfels picked Oswald up, and stroked him as he might a kitten. He began to propose his bargain.

  “My prince, I have power over life and death. Your life and death, and my life and death.”

  Oswald wiped his face, and tried to bring his sobbing under control. He could have been a five-year-old bawling for his mother.

  “You do not have to die here in this fortress, far from your home. If you wish it, you do not have to die at all…”

  “How…” he blubbered, swallowing his sobs, “…how can this be?”

  “You can deliver what I want to me.”

  “And what do you want?”

  “The Empire.”

  Oswald cried out involuntarily, almost a scream. But he fought himself, forced himself to look at the Great Enchanter. Under his mask, Drachenfels smiled. He had the boy.

  “I have lived many lifetimes, my prince. I have outworn many bodies. I have long since traded in the flesh I was born with…”

  Unimaginable years earlier, Drachenfels remembered his first breaths, his first loves, his first kills. His first body. On a vast, empty plain of ice, he had been abandoned by squat, brutish tribesmen who would now seem to have more kinship with the apes of Araby than true men. He had survived. He would live forever.

  “I am like that girl in many ways. I need to take from others to continue. But she can merely take a little new blood. Her kind are short-lived. A few thousand years, and they grow brittle. I can renew myself eternally, taking the stuff of life from those I conquer. You are privileged, boy. I’m going to let you look at my face.”

  He took off his mask. Oswald forced himself to look. The prince screamed at the top of his lungs, disturbing the dead and the dying of the fortress, and the Great Enchanter laughed.

  “Not so pretty, eh? It’s just another lump of rotten meat. It is I, Drachenfels, who am eternal. I who am Constant. Do you recognize your own nose, my prince? The hooked, noble nose of the von Konigswalds. I took it from your ancestor, the loathesomely honourable Schlichter. It’s worn through. This whole carcass is nearly at its end. You must understand all this, my prince, because you must understand why I intend to let you kill me.”

  The harpy twittered. Oswald was nearly himself now, the complete young prince. Drachenfels had read him right, seen the self-interest in the adventuring, the desperate need to outdo his forebears, the hollowness in his heart. He would do.

  “Yes, you shall conquer me, lay me dead in my own dust. And you will be a hero for it. You will grow to great power. Some day, years from now, you will have the Empire in your hands. And you will give it to me…”

  Oswald was smiling now, imagining the glory of it. His never-admitted hatred of Karl-Franz, Luitpold’s brat of a son, rose to the surface. He would never lick the boots of the House of the Second Wilhelm, as his fathers had done.

  “For I shall return from dust. You will find me a way back. You will find me a man with too small a soul, a man steeped in blood. You will be his patron, and I shall enter him. Then, you will deliver to me your friends. I shall take sustenance from them. All who stand with you this day shall die to bring me back.”

  An objection fluttered on Oswald’s lips, but perished there, unsaid. He looked at Genevieve, prone on the floor, and there was no regret in his heart.

  “Then, we shall bend the electors to our purpose. Most will be led by their own interests. The others, we shall kill. The Emperor will die, and his heirs will die. And you will make me emperor in his stead. We shall rule the Empire for an age. Nothing will stand before us. Bretonnia, Estalia, Tilea, Kislev, the New Territories, the whole world. All shall bow, or be devastated as no land ever has been devastated since the time of Sigmar. Humanity will be our slaves, and all the other races will be slaughtered like cattle. We shall make whorehouses of temples, mausoleums of cities, boneyards of continents, deserts of forests…”

  The light was burning inside Oswald now, the light of ambition, of bloodlust, of greed. He would have been this without enchantment, Drachenfels knew. This was Oswald von Konigswald as he was always intended to be.

  “Kneel to me, Oswald. Swear loyalty to our plan. Loyalty in blood.”

  Oswald knelt, and drew his dagger. He hesitated.

  “You could not kill the Great Enchanter without earning a scar or two, could you?”

  Oswald nodded his head, and slashed at the palm of his left hand, at his cheek and at his chest. His shirt tore, and a line of red ran across his skin. Drachenfels touched his gloved fingers to Oswald’s wounds, and raised the blood to his ragged lips. He tasted, and Oswald was his forever.

  He roared his triumph, and whirled about the room, smashing articles he had treasured for millennia.

  He took the harpy’s cage and crushed it between his great hands, squashing the poor thing inside until it was silent, the bent bars of her prison twisted deep in her flesh. He hurled an oak table through his stained glass window, and heard it shatter on the rocks a thousand feet below, a tinkling patter of multi-coloured shards raining around it.

  His enchantment reached throughout his fortress, and his servitors were struck down. Flesh turned to sto
ne, and stone turned to ashes. Daemons were freed, or hurled back to their hells. An entire wing crumbled and fell. And, throughout the world, his expiry was felt by the lesser enchanters.

  Finally, when enough had been done, Drachenfels turned again to the trembling Oswald. He snapped the lad’s sword between his fingers, and hauled a heavy, two-handed blade down from the wall. It had been dipped in the sacred blood of Sigmar, and plated all over with silver, now worn through in patches.

  “This is a weapon fit to kill Constant Drachenfels.”

  Oswald could barely lift it. Drachenfels fixed him with his stare, and willed strength into the prince’s limbs. The sword came up, and every muscle in Oswald’s body trembled with the effort, with the fear and with the excitement. Drachenfels tore open his armour. The stench of his rotting flesh filled the room. The Great Enchanter laughed again.

  “Do it, boy! Do it now!”

  IX

  This wasn’t the finale Detlef had written. Something was badly wrong with Lowenstein. Not to mention Genevieve. And Oswald. And the Emperor. And, in all probability, the world…

  Lowenstein-as-Drachenfels, who was acting more like Drachenfels-as-Lowenstein, had departed from the script.

  Half the house-lights had come on now, and the company were spilling from the wings towards the auditorium. They kept away from Lowenstein, but their eyes were fixed on him. The audience were in their seats, looking between the monster on the stage and their imperilled Emperor. Grand Prince Oswald, the mask off at last, dared them to try for him. And the actor whose mask was the reality surveyed the chaos he had wrought.

  Detlef’s prop sword felt very puny indeed in his grip.

  Lowenstein stood over Genevieve, who was in her stage swoon. Her eyes opened, and she screamed. He bent down to her, hands like claws.

  She rolled away from his grasp, and scrambled to her feet. She stood beside Detlef. They faced the monster together. He felt her in his mind again, felt her fear and her uncertainty, but also her resilience and her courage.