by Ben Tripp
Sax was not setting out entirely blind. He had in the calfskin notebook his lists, his cross-references and provenances, and scattered points of information. He had a sheaf of documents from Eric at the Louvre. The details of the Interpol bulletin were useful as well. He started with that.
Aided by a petrol map from the nearest filling station and the GPS unit mounted on the dashboard, which Paolo could not operate but, for reasons mysterious to himself, Sax could, they found the site of the robbery—a local Great House that had been turned into a museum for tax purposes. They didn’t go inside. It was just a place to begin, a way to make physical the origin of the crime.
The house stood by a tributary of the larger river in a flat piece of ground. The property had a brick gated entrance but no wall; the gate was just a bit of pomp. The house itself was a pastiche of medieval styles, all lead-framed windows and rustic plaster, the sort of thing rich people whipped up in the nineteenth century to give themselves airs.
“The break-in occurred there, on the water side,” Sax said, reading from the bulletin. “Now, we know something else, which is that the criminal, that chap we just visited, got caught in . . . ah, damn, I’ve lost my place. Hang on . . . in Schönbrunn. So that’s our next destination, if it’s not too far away. I should have done this before—but I was so certain we’d get something from Bächtold.”
Sax phoned back to the farm in Petit-Grünenwald. Rock answered. Sax explained that their mission had come up against a minor obstacle and they might be detained in Germany a day or two; meanwhile, please stand by. He explained who Abingdon the metallurgist was and what to expect when the man arrived.
“You’ll have a great deal to discuss, I’m sure,” Sax concluded. “Abingdon is also a warrior, although his specialty is combat prior to the year 1600. Is Nilu still alive?”
“She’s hanging in there but she doesn’t look real good. I was talking about the hospital, but Mad Min says no way.”
Sax made a low noise in the back of his throat. “She’s right. Hospitals don’t know anything about what she’s got. They’d kill her without fail.”
“Didn’t Paolo say there’s a Catholic hospice where they can treat her?”
“If you try to take Nilu there, Min will kill her. Trust me on that,” Sax said, and with a few further words of instruction, ended the call. He knew Min’s type. All vampires must die, and also all people connected to vampires—even their infected victims, who could themselves become dangerous.
Sax settled in for the drive, Paolo conscientiously piloting the car along at precisely the speed limit, to the irritation of the German motorists who kept passing them flat out. It was approximately forty kilometers to their destination. They could make that, even at Paolo’s pace, in less than an hour. Which would give Sax that long to figure out what they should do next. He hadn’t a clue.
They’d been driving for twenty minutes when, with a great rush of noise, Sax’s left ear finally popped, the pressure equalizing with the sound of a huge, wet kiss. He’d been more than half deaf in that ear since the small Cessna got to cruising altitude. As if his ear was the key to all Sax’s discomforts, the faint queasiness that had also dogged him vanished, his mood improved, and he became hungry. They stopped at the nearest Mittag-Haus for lunch, and Sax once again encouraged Paolo to gluttony, this time with Sauerbraten mit Spätzle.
They emerged into the wan afternoon sunlight. At that time of year in Germany the sun never properly got started, ascending only halfway into the sky at midday before beginning its long, slow decline into night. It was cold and the wind was picking up, blustering in from the northeast. Sax took a look at the wire stand laden with touristic brochures set up outside the restaurant door; antique shops often advertised in this way, and thus he could see what sort of rubbish the lesser merchants were peddling. He studied the brochures—and then all the remaining hair on his head stood straight up.
“Paolo,” Sax said, snatching up one of the pamphlets.
“Sì, signore,” Paolo said, his voice strained by the freight of food in his stomach.
“What did Bächtold say about a ‘stone of murder’? Was that exactly what he said?” Sax had his auction face on, betraying no special interest in the colorful accordion-folded slip of paper before him.
“Ah, he said,” Paolo said, struggling to recall despite the influx of calories fuddling his brain, “that ‘she will come down from the stone of murder.’ Like that.”
“Did he by any chance,” Sax said, speaking with great care, “use the exact word Mordstein?”
“Yes. Yes. That is precisely what he said,” Paolo replied, brightening. Sax thrust the brochure into Paolo’s hands.
“Only Mordstein isn’t a stone,” Sax said. “It’s a castle.”
They drove straight to the castle Mordstein, not a long journey. Sax was nearly hysterical with excitement and kept demanding Paolo go faster, pointing out each time they were passed by another vehicle the relative age and infirmity of the driver. Paolo was patient.
Sax eventually burned himself out and slouched in silence, glaring at the brochure that listed the scenic castles of Lower Saxony. The thing that struck Sax as most bizarre was that Mordstein had a visitor’s center. If that were true, it would be the first vampire’s lair ever to feature a gift shop.
He speculated that Mordstein was only the drop-off point for the stolen goods, and Herr Bächtold had had his simple mind destroyed there in the parking area by vampiric telepathy, such as he had himself experienced when he encountered Madame Magnat-l’Étrange. In that case, Mordstein itself would be another dead end. The monster could have been anywhere at all, certainly nearby, but thoroughly concealed. There were a thousand noble houses and castles and caves and secret places all through this region. Mordstein wasn’t suitable. Vampires didn’t hide in plain sight. It wouldn’t work.
But it would work.
The entrance to the property was off a secondary road; there was a gray stone wall that split the landscape and vehicles entered through a quaint medieval gatehouse with turrets and drawbridge. Looming up above them across leather-colored fields was a range of jagged black-forested hills amongst which a black river snarled. The road wound through fallow ground, then entered the eternal shade of the trees and made its pilgrimage by serpentine ways amongst the ruins of what had once been a village, the structures collapsed and mossy, nothing left but green stone.
Then above the hills came glimpses of their destination. It was something from Grimm, a place of lost children and talking wolves. There above the spines of the trees loomed a crag of stone that jutted up like a monstrous black jawbone crowded with rotten teeth. It was clad to the shoulders in a carapace of shaggy black evergreens with the look of gallows crows clutching a tombstone, but the final eminence, rising up at a sickening height above the forest, was a riven claw of stone atop which hunched Schloss Mordstein.
The castle sprang from the brow of the cliff in spires of black slate and frost-colored stone, the bulk of its carcass a single square keep, narrow and tall. Bristling from this vertiginous finger of masonry were turrets, and pressed close around it were battlements thrown up to expand its size and defensive capabilities over a thousand years of warfare, until the entire summit of the mount was covered in fortifications like mussels clinging to an icy rock. Even the cliffs were pressed into service, scored with hewn steps that tottered down sickening steeps to lesser structures, slate-roofed blocks that pressed their bellies to the precipice and hung above empty, wind-screaming space.
“It looks,” Sax said, when they left the car for the “photo op” spot marked by a signboard, “like the place all the gargoyles in Europe came from. They flew out of those slit windows and spread out and perched in the night on all the high places, and when the sun came up, they turned to stone.”
“Shut up,” Paolo said.
Sax shot a look at his companion to see if he was
joking. He was not. Paolo understood the gravity of the situation. If the vampire was up there on that spur of rock in the sky, they would need an air force to invade it and an army to occupy it. What they had was a soldier, a burglar, a psychopath, and a false priest. Sax didn’t even enter into the equation, or rather, he certainly didn’t plan on doing so. Nilu might make a good excuse: he could claim he needed to keep an eye on her while everyone else scampered around up above doing aerialist tricks against the icy blowing sky.
When they reached the castle, there were a few dutiful Germans wandering around looking at things, but it was not a peak day for tourism in general, being freezing cold with a wind that worked its numbing fingers around one’s neck.
The tourist destination was not the castle itself, the tower on the crag, but rather the later, more fairy-tale-looking revetments that had been built at the foot of the cliff several hundred years after the original fortification was complete. This knightly retreat, in addition to the fortifications that secured the lower slopes, had a fine manor at its center with elegant windows, decorative chimneys, and plastered towers with oxblood-colored half-timbering to offset the severity of its walls of stone. It was charming yet imposing. It looked, Sax thought, like an excellent spot for one of Jean-Marc’s luxury hotel projects, if he had still been around.
This lower portion of the Castle Mordstein was where visitors came. There was no hotel, but a restaurant, a shop for souvenirs and books, and an interpretive center had all been fitted into the manor house’s ground floor. As noted on quaintly lettered notice boards in the gift shop, to the fortress on the crag, the große Schloss, there was no access. It was strictly Privatgrundstück. Not that many would care to visit. From the foot of the cliff it rose up so steeply and high that it appeared, through an optical illusion akin to that seen at the base of skyscrapers, as if the lofty towers were perpetually toppling over onto the lower part of the castle, or Unterschloss, and the viewer would soon be crushed beneath tons of brutal rubble.
Paolo took many pictures with his phone. Then, while Sax browsed the gift shop and purchased everything he could find that contained information about Castle Mordstein, Paolo wandered away from the prescribed paths and got a sense of the off-limits portions of the castle. As he later reported to Sax, he found a gravel road for employees to enter from the back by the river, and a footpath that twisted its way up the forested slope that appeared as if it would eventually connect with the ridge from which the crag rose. Each way was heavily signposted with warnings to turn back: Betreten für Unbefugte verboten and all the rest of it.
The lower slopes were steep but not impassable. Some distance down the gravel road there was a fork and a second road turned off beneath the trees, but where it went, Paolo didn’t know. There was an enormous signpost at the fork that read VERBOTEN with skull and crossbones and a drawing of large rocks falling on a stick figure.
On his way back to the parking lot, he had been discovered by a man in blue coveralls pushing a barrow; the man told Paolo he had gone to the wrong place, go back. Paolo mimed having to urinate, and shrugged and kept on walking. The man in coveralls didn’t pursue the matter. Security, it seemed, was informal, driven less by secrecy than insurance liabilities. For his part, Sax was impressed when he heard of Paolo’s improvised dishonesty. It gave him hope for the monk.
As Paolo was rejoining Sax in the parking lot, he had seen a very handsome red-haired woman staring at him from atop one of the fortification walls. She wore a down parka with her hair flaming out of the hood and her eyes were definitely upon him. It was no wonder laymen were always getting in trouble, Paolo admitted—the world was a teeming sea of attractive women with bold eyes.
They drove over the last little hill before the French farmhouse. The car’s wheels rumbled on a cow grate and woke Sax, who had dozed off again; he blinked and looked around him at the darkness and said, “Back already?” and propped his cane between his knees. Home at last. One of his homes, anyway.
It had been, by Sax’s standards, an extremely busy day. The return trip from Castle Mordstein had been unremarkable, but it was a great deal of traveling, and the plane back to France had been buffeted with stomach-churning turbulence. Paolo turned the nose of the car into the farmyard, which was outlined by hedges and a low wall of rubble. The headlights swept over these details and just as quickly forgot them, and then they were pulling up in front of the barn. There was much activity there. Light shone through all the gaps in the walls, and the doors, partway open, embraced a glare of bright, hot color.
“Our metalsmith is here, I suspect,” Sax said, and made a noise of satisfaction in the back of his throat. He thanked Paolo for driving, by which he meant, Thank you for putting up with a crotchety old man all day, but which he couldn’t possibly say as it would diminish his carefully cultivated image as a crotchety old man. Then he got out of the car with his cane in one hand and his sack of guidebooks in the other, and hobbled toward the barn.
As he approached the barn, Sax heard the bellowing whoosh of the portable forge Abingdon took with him to all the festivals, clanging steel, and laughter. He smelled hot iron and the stink of bituminous coal smoke. For a grand moment he felt like the general at the head of an army, about to set off on a campaign that would be written in history books. Then a human outline appeared in the doorway of the barn, a woman’s silhouette, and she emerged from the hot brightness into the cold blue moonlight and Sax’s bubble of good spirits burst and disappeared.
13
* * *
France
Paolo’s eyes fairly sprang from his head. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life had just stepped from within the barn doorway and put her slender arms around the old man’s neck.
“Hello, Uncle Sax,” she said, and smiled.
Emily had arrived at the farm that morning, just before noon, at the same time that Sax and Paolo were touching down on the airstrip outside Chemnitz five hundred kilometers to the northeast. She had with her an old-fashioned and impractical box suitcase of canvas and leather that Sax had given her for her tenth birthday, as well as a proper Cordura nylon roll-aboard thing without any charm. She was dressed in navy wool peacoat, roll-cuffed jeans, and paddock boots, her hair an explosion of black curls held behind her ears with a red cotton paisley-printed headband. When she opened the door and called into the maison de maître to see if anyone was in, Emily was startled by the sudden appearance of a short Japanese-looking woman only partially concealing a big carving knife against her side.
“Who are you?” Min asked in her toneless suspicious voice.
“I’m Saxon’s niece,” Emily said, using the semiformal version of Uncle Sax’s name because it sounded more important.
Then Rock emerged from the back of the house, where he and Gheorghe had been watching le foot on television. He took one look at Emily, still in the doorway blocked by the small but feral Min, and did a double take.
Emily caught the reaction. A lifetime as a biracial woman had taught her that most people automatically put her in whatever category suited their prejudices—she was high yellow to ill-disposed black people and an octoroon to ill-disposed whites. But Rock smoothly offered to take Emily’s suitcase, apologized for his inability to speak French, asked her if she knew any Arabic, and when she replied she was American, he asked her if she’d like a cup of coffee, because he had made some.
So far, so good. Then Gheorghe had emerged from the back of the house in socks and T-shirt. He saluted Emily with the beer in his hand.
“I’m Emily Saxon,” Emily said, introducing herself to everyone at once. “I’m Sax’s niece from New York.”
“So he is not the only surprise in Saxon family,” Gheorghe said.
Rock shook his head. Emily ignored the remark and squinched up her eyes, unsure how to pose the question uppermost in her mind. “Are you— Look, this is going to sound stupid, but are you—the vampire-hunting t
eam?”
A couple of hours later, right around the time Paolo was translating Sax’s question that would drive Herr Bächtold to scream and claw at the walls of his cell, Abingdon arrived in his converted bread truck with gaudy paintings of hammer and anvil on one side and a knight à cheval on the other. In this vehicle he traveled the festival circuit; kept his forge, tools, and armor safe; and often as not, slept in the back. Or didn’t sleep, but reclined, indoctrinating a fair disciple into the mysteries of the metallurgist’s hammer, as he put it. Abingdon was composed of lean, raw muscle, his fair skin always chapped with wind, sea, sun, or sheer diabolical heat from the forge. His shaggy red-blond hair looked like flames. There was an impressive white scar across his forehead from side to side where the edge of a shield had struck him during a melee before a cheering crowd. His heavy-lidded eyes and easy smile got him into endless trouble, and he didn’t want it to end.
Abingdon instantly made friends with Rock; Gheorghe didn’t altogether trust him—or anyone—but he knew a fellow rogue when he saw one. The difference between Abingdon and a clever grifter was primarily his doctorate, and he didn’t hang the diploma in the back of the old bread truck. Still, they had something in common, as Gheorghe often went on the continental circuit himself, to fairs and festivals, performing as part of a troupe of jugglers and acrobats. He was a skilled but indifferent performer, being more interested in what opportunities for larceny were available in whatever town hosted the event.