Prince of Wolves

by Dave Gross

  “Indeed,” said a sonorous voice behind me.

  I turned to see Count Yarsmardin Senir followed by other prominent counts of Ustalav. A quartet of servants—all exactly the same height—I noted, trailed them bearing trays of dessert wine. It is not often that I find myself surprised, especially by a veritable procession, although in my defense I note that the carpets of Prince Aduard’s palace are thick enough to muffle the advance of a Taldan legion.

  I bowed, and the gentlemen returned the courtesy in their native fashion, folded hands over their hearts. The ladies of Ustalav do not curtsy, nor do the mistresses of noblemen, but at the sight of my southern manners, one covered her smile with powdered fingertips.

  “I beg your pardon, Your Excellency,” I said to Senir. “I did not realize I spoke aloud.”

  Senir waved away my apology. His short gray hair gave him a military aspect, but as a third son, he had been given over to the monks of Pharasma until the passing of his childless elder brothers required his assumption of the family obligations. “Please,” he said. “We are peers, Count Jeggare.”

  “I meant respect to your clerical title, Bishop,” I told him.

  “Ah,” said Senir. “I leave that mantle within the walls of the Monastery of the Veil.” Senir tugged at the collar of his purple velvet coat. It looked uncomfortable. “Have you met Count Neska of Barstoi?”

  Aericnein Neska and I exchanged another bow, he clicking his heels to punctuate the courtesy. Neska had aged dramatically, as humans do, since I had first met him three decades earlier. Now the sagging wattles of his throat gave him the appearance of a vulture rather than an eagle. It was an apt change, since the vicious but futile wars he had since waged with his neighbors had fattened none but the carrion. The silver lining of his presence was that it would spare me further social intercourse with the loathsome daughters of Countess Solismina Venacdahlia, whose territory had principally contributed to the acres of graves dug by Neska’s ambition.

  Senir indicated a portly man of forty or so years and said, “Count Haserton Lowls.”

  Lowls made a quick bow and reached for my hand. I did not recognize him, for he must have been a child when I was introduced to his parents. He pumped my hand twice before Neska cleared his throat, and Lowls withdrew. “I beg your pardon, Count Jeggare,” he said. Flecks of spittle clung to his bushy moustache. “I never know the foreign custom, but I wish to impress upon you my excitement that a fellow enthusiast of the arts has come among us. I myself am something of a—”

  “Haserton,” said Senir. The Bishop’s condescending use of Lowls’ personal name did not pass unnoticed by the others, each of whom glanced away or hid a smile behind dainty fingers. Lowls turned from Senir to me with a bewildered expression, as though he were a child who had been admonished for choosing the wrong fork at dinner, but he still did not know the right answer. Senir ignored him and said, “May I present Count Conwrest Muralt, the new master of Ordranto?”

  Muralt had been distracted, looking over his shoulder through the ballroom doors as the servants opened them to admit Radania and Opaline Venacdahlia, the latter of whom cast me a snaggle-toothed smile as she returned from her stroll along the outer gallery. The pitiable woman had exhausted her prospects of marriage among the local nobility. That she would flirt so openly with a foreign lord of mixed blood was a testament to her desperation.

  “Count,” I said. Muralt said a few words devoid of charm or interest.

  “Forgive us for intruding on your reverie, Count Jeggare,” said Neska. “What was it that you found beautiful?”

  “I was admiring the ceremony before the cathedral.”

  “Ever studious, eh Venture-Captain?” said Lowls. His tone was eager, but the eyes of the other men fixed upon me, awaiting my answer. I suspected one of them had manipulated Lowls into this line of inquiry. When I had last visited Caliphas, I learned that the lords of Ustalav saw me less as a scholar than as a thief of secrets that they preferred remain interred with the bones of their ancestors. “Grave robber” and “plunderer” were their synonyms for “Pathfinder.”

  “Only curious, Count Lowls. The rituals of Pharasma are among the most poetic I have seen.”

  “And you must know something about that, I imagine,” said Count Muralt. “I mean, as a lord of Cheliax, you must have seen some extraordinary rituals.”

  I did not like the way his mouth lingered over the word “extraordinary,” even if his statement fell short of insult. Everyone present, even the most parochial lord, knew that the people of my homeland were sworn to Asmodeus, whom we called the Prince of Law. To revere the Prince of Lies, as he was known elsewhere, alienated virtually everyone outside of Cheliax, yet to admit one did not was certain to send dangerous gossip back home, which was, I had no doubt, the principal function of the young new Chelish ambassador.

  Politics aside, it always struck me as a supreme gesture of hypocrisy to condemn one people for obeying the Lord of Damnation when one’s own nation revered the Lady of Death.

  “I have witnessed many extraordinary rituals,” I said.

  Neska smiled at my equivocation. “It is on Pathfinder business that you come to Ustalav, is it not?”

  I had spent the better part of the evening avoiding that question, and I was growing tired of the chase. “Yes,” I said.

  The four men awaited an elaboration, but I offered none. Instead, I gestured toward the window. “There they go,” I said, nodding at the whippoorwills. “Taking with them the mystery.”

  “Then you are sure to follow them,” said Senir. “Perhaps it would be best if you did. It has long been said that the mysteries of Ustalav sleep late and wake angry. I would not wish you to endure their ire.”

  “The only mystery I wish to solve,” I said, “is that of a missing Pathfinder.”

  “Indeed?” said Senir. “And this is an errand for the illustrious Count Jeggare? I should think Pathfinders go missing all the time.”

  “True,” I said. “But this one will be found. This one was mine.”

  “Was?” He had noticed my unfortunate use of the past tense, which I assure you does not reflect my hope and belief. “In that case, Jeggare, why do you bother?”

  “A slip of the tongue,” I said.

  Senir studied my face for a moment, as if looking for a sign that I knew more than I had revealed. “Perhaps you have other reasons for coming to our land,” he said. “If so, consider the fate of those who have meddled among the tombs of our glorious ancestors, those who fought against the Whispering Tyrant and those who fell to his corruption. Not all who lie beneath the soil of Ustalav sleep soundly. I give you my word, sir, as a fellow gentleman: you would do well not to disturb them.”

  Before I could frame a politic response, a hand slipped in to curl about my arm. Without turning, I recognized the unmistakable scent of Countess Carmilla Caliphvasos beneath a light mist of rare Kyonin perfume. As much as the smell of her bare skin, I remembered the countess’s passion for things elven, my younger self included. I did not have to feign the smile I turned toward her.

  To say she had not aged a day in over thirty years was no poetry. The barest dusting of powder whitened her face and décolletage, which was daring even for the young women attending the ball. The mole on her cheek was a fabrication, as was the ornate white wig that supported a lord’s ransom in jeweled combs, but everything else was exactly as I remembered from the hundred sultry Caliphas nights I had spent memorizing her personal topography. Carmilla was the woman who introduced me to the wider world of sophisticated love. If you read several meanings into the term “sophisticated,” why then it is a testament to your keen understanding and, I trust, your discretion.

  When first we met, her seduction made me late for my winter’s residence at Lepidstadt University, but I learned more at her hand that summer than I had in six months’ study of Ustalav’s most ancient libraries. At the time she had seemed older than I, although in truth I was at least twice her age. Thanks to my fat
her’s blood, however, I appeared as a young human of middle twenties. Now, however, the mirror had begun to mock me with its rumpled roadmap of my face, while Carmilla might as well have used a thirty-year-old portrait as a looking glass.

  “I see that the rumors of your bathing in the blood of virgins are not without substance,” I said. It was the sort of callow joke I made often in my youth, but she rewarded me with a smile. I extracted myself from her grasp just long enough to kiss her hand.

  “Coarse slanders,” she said. She batted me with a carved ivory fan I recognized as the parting gift I had given her. The weather in Caliphas had been cool since my arrival, so it required no great feat of deduction to realize that she meant to flatter me by flaunting it. She let the fan dangle from her wrist as she pressed a finger against Senir’s embroidered sleeve. “Still, the bishop here watches me closely each time we dine, making sure I sample every dish made with garlic.”

  Senir bowed curtly at her quip, smiling but clearly not amused.

  “You cannot keep our visitor all to yourself, my dear Bishop,” Carmilla said, blithely ignoring the rest of our company without eliciting their offense. I cannot understand how she manages that trick, though I studied it often. “There are dozens of young people who have never met our dear Count Jeggare, and we must not deny them his acquaintance.”

  It is fortunate that I have had nearly a century’s practice keeping the mirth from appearing in my eyes, for Senir’s gaze was deep and keen. I saw in his eyes that he understood I had been rescued—and that I understood it as well. We both smiled as though we harbored no such thought. The others in our company smiled in much the same way, except for the uncouth Lowls, who blurted out something about making an appointment for me to see his sketches before his savvy mistress distracted him by demanding a return to the dessert buffet.

  As Carmilla guided me away, I procured a couple of glasses of sweet wine from a servant’s platter. We walked a while in silence, and she held my arm so close and pressed her warm body so gently against me that I felt a resurgence of the affection we once shared. Or the affection I once felt, anyway. There was no denying that I was not only young but, as they say, impressionable, and only a fool would assume that the experienced lady had invested so much of her heart in me as I had in her. It was a dangerous feeling, and unproductive, but I relished it for a minute as we strolled past portraits of princes and counts, each a generation older than the former. I imagined them as jealous rivals envying our revived happiness. Then I released the fancy like a captive bird freed from a cage.

  “I should be displeased with you,” Carmilla purred. “It wounds my pride to know you have been in Caliphas so long without sending me so much as a calling card, while you spent an entire day with that loathsome Doctor Trice.”

  “Incomparable lady,” I said, “even the greatest pleasure is sweetened by the prior dispensation of all tedious matters, and no pleasure is greater than that of seeing you again.”

  Carmilla tilted her head to appraise me. “A bit thick.”

  “Forgive me,” I said. “I am out of practice.”

  “What a shame,” she said. “I should hate to think our liaison spoiled you for the ladies of Cheliax.”

  I shrugged as though I could not deny it, and she smiled to accept the implied compliment.

  “Despite the intolerable length of your absence, I remain too fond to punish you as you deserve, my sweet Varian. Your youthful enthusiasms have remained bright in my memory over the years. Do not say how many.” She laid a finger upon my lips. “Let that remain our secret.”

  As we walked arm in arm, the subjects of the portraits hung along the outer gallery changed gradually in style and subject. The recent lords of Ustalav were robust, bearded, and mustachioed men or pale ladies arrayed in costumes that would not have seemed too plain in a Chelish opera house. Their forebears were another breed entirely, hard-faced men and women more often adorned in iron than in silk, their prominent noses less often diminished by the hand of obsequious painters. As we passed beyond the remembered monarchs of Ustalav, here and there were paintings obscured by dark velvet curtains. Carmilla noticed my interest.

  “The cursed and the damned,” she said.

  “The villains of history?” I asked.

  “Not always, no,” she said. “But princes whose legacies are best left to the obscurity of the Academy.”

  After a furtive glance to either side, she reached for one of the velvet pulls.

  “Wait,” I said, too late to stop her.

  She unveiled a portrait whose thick veneer was as cracked as the mud of a summer desert. Beneath the rugged contours of its varnish, the figure beneath was a man of undeniably fiendish character. Upon the bridge of his hooked nose was a draconic ridge, and from his brow rose a craggy expanse that expanded to either side in long white horns where a caricaturist might extend a sage’s eyebrows. Tiny white protrusions of bone dotted his prominent cheekbones, and his long chin was as sharp as a trowel. If age and lacquer had dimmed the hues for hundreds of years, one might expect his skin was originally the color of molten copper. It was the face of a hellspawn, one quite near in ancestry to his diabolic forebear.

  Carmilla released the pull, returning the portrait to obscurity. “Don’t look now,” she whispered. I could not help myself from turning to see a small group of the prince’s guests rounding the promenade behind us.

  “If you kiss me,” Carmilla said, “they shall have some gossip.”

  I could not dispute her logic, so I obeyed. It had been so long, and I had forgotten how soft and how warm and how much I felt as though I were dissolving like the last of the winter ice, and soon all other thoughts were driven from my mind. When she pushed me gently away, I felt the despair of an exile. My face burned as much from regret for lost years as from the effects of the evening’s wine. Carmilla made a show of fluttering her fan as I recovered my composure. The spies had retreated, but now we had some assurance of what they would report.

  “I am doubly glad you have found me,” I told her. “While nothing compares to the joy of our reunion, I had hoped you might assist me in ...” I paused to frame my request in a flattering manner.

  “In that more tedious matter?” she suggested.

  “Indeed,” I said. “One of my colleagues is missing, and I have come to find her.”

  “Her?” remarked Carmilla. “Perhaps this other matter is not so tedious.”

  “Ours is purely a collegial relationship,” I said. “It is important to our Society that I find her.” Carmilla did not need assurances, but she enjoyed the pretense of my embarrassment. I wished I were a better actor, for I saw the whimsy perish on her face, so I added, “It is important to me.”

  She gave me a long appraisal. I feared I had broken the charm of our briefly revived romance, but she smiled. “How you have grown, my dear boy,” she said. She stroked an alabaster finger through my hair, and in my vanity I wondered whether she was tracing one of the silver lines that had become so prominent in recent years. “If only you could linger a while in Caliphas. Perhaps this time you could teach me a thing or two.”

  “I rather doubt that, my lady,” I said.

  This time her smile told me she was glad I understood the hierarchy. I was her elder in years only. With a snap of her fan, she attracted the attention of a servant skulking by one of the ballroom doors and indicated our empty glasses.

  “As it unfolds,” she said, “I have something that may be of use to you.”

  I felt a pang of hope before cynicism usurped its place. Never one to disappoint me, Carmilla legitimized my suspicion.

  “Naturally,” she said, “I have a small favor to ask in return.”

  Chapter Two

  Dance of the Sczarni

  Just give me the goddamned money.”

  Nicola arched his back to look down his skinny nose at me, black eyes goggling. He had no idea how much that posture made him look like a giant grasshopper. If we’d had an audience, I might hav
e told him so just to watch him turn red. Unfortunately, even the hired driver had wandered off to enjoy his pipe out of range of the valet’s complaints about the smoke, leaving us alone beside the cart laden with supplies for the expedition. The rising sun had burned away the morning mists, and it was getting hot on the cobbled street that wound up the hill from the seething markets. We’d finished our chores, and I was eager to get back down to the market for a cool draught of the local brew.

  “As you of all people should know, Radovan,” Nicola said, “I take my responsibilities seriously. The master entrusted me with his purse for a reason, and he made no mention of an allowance for you after engaging our additional security. That task settled, I presume you have ample personal funds to enjoy the marketplace, or wherever it is you choose to visit in Caliphas in your free time. If not, I recommend you manage your money more carefully. I would be glad to demonstrate a simple method of monthly accounting—”

  “Listen.” I poked him in the chest, not too hard since I didn’t want to give him a bruise he could show the boss. “You wouldn’t even have that purse if not for me.” The young pickpocket we’d encountered earlier had been no amateur, but I’d been doing it a lot longer than his ten or twelve years.

  “And for that service I will gladly commend you to His Excellency,” said Nicola. “And in personal gratitude I will overlook the matter of your attracting the constabulary.”

  He had me on that point. The gutter rat tried to bite me when I pinched him for the purse, and we were so close to the water that I couldn’t resist tossing him in. I should have realized he’d start crying “murder” as soon as he came up for air. Despite Nicola’s impeccable Jeggare livery, the guard who stopped us saw not a couple of innocent visitors to his fair land but a pair of foreigners with a fat purse. My devilish good looks didn’t help. Chelaxians are unwelcome enough in most places, but hellspawn are enough to start a riot.