The yacht’s forward gangway lowered smoothly on its cables until the leading edge touched down with a reassuring steadiness. In the rain, a welcoming committee of sorts—the sort that isn’t very welcoming—waited beneath umbrellas. They were lean and ascetic people, all men, and they dressed as if in permanent mourning. The appearance of a corpse proceeding down the ramp followed shortly by his coffin borne by Bolam, Donner, and two members of the yacht’s crew did nothing to alter this impression.
The group of waiting men looked no more excited by Horst’s arrival than if he’d been a London omnibus arriving exactly on schedule, so he did not entirely take the words of the first of the men who stepped forward to greet him at face value. ‘My Lord Horst,’ said the man. His tones were dry, educated, and perhaps a little arch under the circumstances. ‘It is a delight to meet you.’
‘The pleasure is all mine,’ replied Horst with equal sincerity.
‘I am Velasco de Osma.’ A strong brow and nose were betrayed by a weak chin on an otherwise noble countenance. It was the sort of face that would have looked at home over a polished chest plate while busily engaged in the infection of South American natives with Catholicism and smallpox, while all the time robbing them blind of every grain of gold they might have. ‘And these are my associates.’ He turned to the two men who stood by, and indicated them one at a time.
‘Ewald von Ziegler.’ A small man bowed and attempted to smile graciously, but the effort made his neck retract into his collar slightly and the smile slipped up one side of his face as if trying to escape before admitting failure and settling into a weak beatific smirk. The outmoded ‘wipers’ of hair in the middle of his cheeks did little to improve matters.
‘And Burton Collingwood.’ The third man was tall, perhaps three inches over the six-foot mark, and broad shouldered. He was sleek with the effects of wealth, but it lay upon him like a silk scarf on a wolf. He regarded Horst with calculating eyes for a moment before speaking. ‘My Lord Horst,’ he said, ‘Lord’ sounding as false on his tongue as titles always did with every American. ‘It is surely good to have you with us.’ Horst detected no mendacity in his tone, but nor did he find any friendliness. He realised Collingwood was only pleased to see him as one might be for an expected package.
‘It’s kind of you to say so,’ he replied. ‘Such a pleasant reception. Thank you, gentlemen.’
He was directed through the double doors of a tile-roofed shelter to descend via a broad curving stone stair that followed the tower’s outer wall. Behind him processed the coffin bearers, and behind them von Ziegler, de Osma, and Collingwood. Horst noted a possible significance of the order—if the coffin were to be dropped, it would careen down the stairs causing all sorts of alarums and excursions en route. His welcoming committee would likely end up battered and broken, a very sensible reason for their following rather than preceding it. He, however, would have to deal with the situation himself. He was confident of his ability to do so—at the very least he could evade an errant coffin with ease or, if the whim took him, he could stop it providing he could find enough traction. Was, therefore, the order of the descent a test? Would the coffin be ‘accidentally’ dropped? He hoped not. It was a nice coffin, well finished and very comfortable, and he would hate to see its corners dashed and its surfaces scratched by a short career in stair tobogganing.
His hosts, however, had decided on nothing so cheaply dramatic, and the landing below was reached with all due decorum.
Horst’s welcoming committee inveigled him to walk with them, while his coffin was conveyed off in another direction. ‘It is being taken to your chambers, my Lord Horst,’ de Osma explained.
‘My chambers?’ Horst wasn’t really used to the concept of ‘chambers’ since his change in subspecies. A cellar or especially spacious cupboard would certainly have sufficed. Indeed, his last habitual resting place during the daylight hours had been a chest of the type used for storing out-of-season clothes or blankets. He halted for a moment, unexpectedly nostalgic for the cosy darkness and scent of camphor.
Misinterpreting the hesitation for displeasure, Ziegler interjected, ‘The windows have all been bricked up, my lord. All but one of a northerly aspect, that is, through which the sun never shines.’
The men stood and regarded Horst—an implacable expression on de Osma’s face that might even have been hiding boredom, and all the time Collingwood watched Horst as a man might watch a snake at feeding time in a terrarium, his distant coolness a mask over an expectation of sensation. As for von Ziegler himself, the apparent eagerness to please overlaid an evident lack of surety, and Horst realised that this was a man unused to making accommodations for others in either the material or immaterial sense.
‘That is very thoughtful of you,’ was all Horst could think to reply, to his own disappointment. Everything he said, however, seemed to carry a subtext for the men. They nodded sagely before moving on again. Horst followed, deciding as he did so to say as little as possible to them in future. He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or irked that they believed him to be more intelligent, or wiser, or perhaps both, than he actually was. In any event, it was certainly wiser to keep them believing that, and he appreciated ruefully that there would be no quicker way of disabusing them of those notions than opening his mouth.
As they processed—and Horst could not help feeling that they were in a procession without an audience—he heard the hollow beats of a dinner gong sounding some way ahead of him.
‘Ah, just in time for dinner!’ said von Ziegler. It was a lie; they had passed a low table upon which a French bracket clock had been sitting and Horst had noted the time in passing. Unless it was customary to keep remarkably eccentric mealtimes in whatever part of the world they had brought him to, then the gong had been sounded specifically for their convenience.
They arrived at what was apparently the dining room, double doors closed and, beside it, a well-Macassar-oiled butler of the shimmering sort waited with the implacability of an Easter Island sculpture. On their approach, he opened the doors and moved smoothly through ahead of them as if it were a dance step in a particularly graceful waltz.
‘Graf von Ziegler, Vizconde de Osma, Mr Burton Collingwood, and,’ he announced, pausing a beat before continuing, ‘Horst Cabal.’ Another beat, and then he added in an odd, rapid diminuendo like an English vicar finishing the parish announcements, ‘Lord of the Dead.’
Even while part of Horst’s mind was wondering what Debrett might make of that idiosyncratic use of titles, the rest of his attention was taken up by what greeted him within the room. The room was vast and high vaulted, certainly more likely to have once been an audience chamber for some ancient king given to grandiose gestures than anything as cosy as a dinner room. Feasts for hundreds of revellers that involved a lot of throwing chicken legs around and the harassment of serving staff, perhaps, but an intimate tête-à-tête, never.
Within the great echoing stone void of a hall, a dining table that would have looked impressive in almost any other setting stood a little beyond the centre of the room from the entrance, and aligned along its long axis towards it. Despite the bulk and grandeur of the table—some twenty-five feet in length—it was still like having a picnic blanket in the concourse of a major metropolitan railway station, the place of commuters taken by the staff who stood around, white towels over livery sleeves, even their practised savoir faire seeming insufficient for the setting. On the left-hand side of the table, a man and a woman stood talking, and they turned at the announcement to face the newcomers.
A servant appeared unbidden beside de Osma and his colleagues, and Horst was very nearly startled by the appearance of another at his own elbow. His senses far surpassed those he had enjoyed when merely mortal, and so he was not at all used to people sidling up to him undetected, demonstrating that a good butlers’ school can teach stealth skills that would put the ninja of Japan to shame, as well as how to fold a napkin, starch a collar, and other abilities generally more usef
ul to the world than throwing shuriken around.
He was conducted to the left side of the table, the woman being seated by another of the ubiquitous servants as he approached. As was his wont, honed over years of hot-blooded hormonal exhortation and still ingrained despite his changed nature, he cast an evaluative eye upon her as he approached. Her hair and eyes were dark, what he would have said was a Mediterranean type but for her deadly paleness. She was thin, too, and the suspicion of illness rose in his mind. He gauged her to be in her mid- to late twenties, though the simple black dress she wore would not have looked out of place on his grandmother, down to the choker and locket at her throat.
Belatedly, he shifted his attention to her companion, and discovered himself under at least as much attention from that quarter as he had lavished upon the woman. Horst’s hackles rose; he immediately disliked this man, and not simply because he was smiling arrogantly at Horst, having caught him in the act of assessing his companion.
In Horst’s earlier days when he had enjoyed such simple pastimes as routinely breathing and not bursting into flames in daylight, he had excelled in what he termed ‘seeking companionship’ and what his parents had called ‘womanising’, his mother with pursed lips, his father with a stern brow during the lecture and a wink at the end of it. He disliked the term himself; it sounded predatory when all he was doing was being friendly, usually very friendly, and frequently extraordinarily friendly. He liked women and, he was relieved to discover, they liked him.
In his joyous odyssey through the massed ranks of womanhood, he did, however, often happen across other men who fitted the epithet womaniser rather too well. They did not tend to be nice men, which was why Horst cavilled so strongly against the term being attached to himself. They used, often abused, and discarded. Rudeness was one thing—indeed, Horst excelled in applied rudeness when that application involved himself in limited engagements with an audience of one, occasionally two, and on a particularly memorable occasion, twelve (a women’s lacrosse team had won a famous victory, the players were looking to celebrate, and Horst was looking lonely in the tavern where they discovered him. The progression of subsequent events seemed almost inevitable in hindsight). To repeat, rudeness was one thing, but these womanisers stooped to impoliteness, and that was unconscionable to Horst. These men broke hearts, and when they noticed at all, it made them laugh or, at the very least, smirk. It was a distinctive sort of smirk and one of the few things in the world that could move the usually equitable and equanimous Horst to feel murder flicker in his breast.
The man was smirking that very class of smirk, and Horst knew there and then they would never be friends.
The head of the table was occupied only by a high-backed chair, no more decorative than any of the other chairs, but its height gave it the air of a throne. Horst remembered the whispered references to the ‘Red Queen’ and decided to ignore the chair until such time as it was occupied. On the tall chair’s right hand sat the unknown man to whom Horst had developed such an easy and swift animosity. His clothes were expensive enough that the slovenly manner in which he wore them only served to add to his undeniable charisma by advertising his nonchalance. He was wearing a jacket of maroon velvet that Horst found himself coveting somewhat, a black waistcoat, a soft white linen shirt, and a black cravat. The cravat was partially untied and the shirt’s top button undone. It was a statement of style that Horst had used many times in the past and it galled him to see this man using such similar devices. He became very aware of his own impeccable turnout and wondered at what point he had turned into his brother. He would have to study some periodicals and find out exactly what had been going on between the period of his second death and his second resurrection. News and events he would get to certainly, but he would turn to the fashion pages first.
As for the man himself, his lean and hungry look would leave Cassius seeming bloated and soporific. His face was well shaped and, it pained Horst enormously to admit to himself, undeniably handsome in a shallow, matinee-idol sort of way, should you happen to like that sort of thing. He wore his hair long, in a flowing mane of gentle waves that ran from a sharp widow’s peak to comfortably below his collar. Horst, unused to envy, found words like ‘gigolo’ and ‘widow-chaser’ slithering around inside his head, hissing and dripping venom.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to sit next to the man, for the pale woman sat between them. As the welcoming committee arranged themselves on the other side of the table, Horst noticed that the place to his right was also left empty. ‘Are we expecting anyone else?’ he asked de Osma, who had taken the seat directly opposite to him.
‘Not quite yet,’ said the Spaniard as he smoothed an errant raindrop into the cloth of his jacket’s biceps. ‘When he has been recovered, he shall join us.’ He looked up and straight into Horst’s eyes, a brave or foolish thing for a mortal man to do. His expression was sleekly satisfied. ‘Just as you were.’
Horst looked down at his dinner setting while he considered his next words. Part of him noted that it seemed very simple in comparison with those of the other diners, but he did not give that so very much consideration. He looked up again and said, ‘And just who are we? Gentlemen, I am grateful for your efforts in bringing me here, but your reasons … what are your reasons?’
‘We shall dine first,’ said de Osma. ‘Discussion can wait until afterwards.’
Horst glared at de Osma and he felt that strange and all-too-atavistic sensation flex within him again. It would be simplicity itself to transfix the irritating little human and make him …
Human.
Horst bit down his emotions with difficulty. He had always been an even-tempered man, a man to whom anger was a rare and unwelcome visitor. He didn’t like the way that somehow it had gained a latchkey. He liked even less how he had started to take a shine to its visits.
And ‘human’? What had possessed him to think in such terms? Something flexed inside his heart again and he felt both fear and pleasure at its presence. So distracted was he that he hardly noticed the waiter—again—until the man was at his side, filling his wine glass.
‘No,’ said Horst, angry at himself, angry at these men, confused, uncertain. ‘I do not drink … wine…?’
For now he saw it in his glass, red and opaque, and he smelled it, warm and tinged with iron.
His first impulse was one of disgust, yet even as he tried to find words to express it, his hand closed unbidden around the stem of the glass and it was rising towards his mouth. He was conscious of the eyes upon him, and closed his own that they might not see the fear there as his lips parted, his upper canines extending in a small smooth tensing of muscle that was a small ecstasy in itself, the tiny tchink as one grazed the brim of the glass, his slow inhalation that drew the scent into his mouth where it stained his tongue with need, and finally the slightest inclination to start the warm, fresh blood trickling into his mouth. For the first time in his life and his unlife, Horst Cabal was truly terrified, and it was of himself.
The glass was empty. Somehow it was empty. He opened his eyes and saw the redness thin against the glass, the drops pooling inside. It took a small effort not to lick them out. Instead he carefully placed it back on the table, rested his hands on the tablecloth, and looked at de Osma.
De Osma hardly noticed him; servants were fussing around, placing plates of food and restocking wine glasses with, in the cases of all the other diners, wine. Horst sat and glared, fighting down a tempest of violent emotion while these men who had raised him from dust and brought him here laughed and fluttered napkins and ignored him when he could have killed every one of them where they sat and before the supercilious smugness of their expressions had had time to fade. He felt like a bomb on the edge of detonation, a ferocious animal on a fraying leash. Didn’t they know who he was? Didn’t they know what he was?
‘No,’ Horst said. The repressed violence sounded in his voice like the warning creaks of thin ice underfoot. ‘We will not discuss it later. We will di
scuss it now.’
The table grew suddenly quiet. Von Ziegler shot de Osma a nervous glance. For his part, de Osma seemed momentarily startled, but he guarded that moment well and looked at Horst seriously though with a small hint of reproachful acquiescence. ‘As you wish, my Lord Horst.’
‘Horst?’ It was the man two places to Horst’s left. He spoke with an English accent, the Thames Estuary evident in even that single syllable. ‘You’re never called “Horst”, are you?’ Then to the woman between them he said, ‘Once knew a German girl and her uncle was called that. She said it was an old man’s name.’
Horst’s head swung to face the man as smoothly and as threateningly as a gun turret. Their eyes met over the woman’s head and, despite the violent animosity bubbling inside him, the man met his glance easily and arrogantly.
‘Who,’ said Horst, the tight grip on his emotions making his voice toneless and mechanical, ‘the fuck are you?’
Where repressed violence charging the air so strongly it stank of psychic ozone had failed to make much of an impression on the man, a single expletive succeeded. The woman squeaked, but whether with outrage, amusement, or amused outrage, it was impossible to tell, although whatever it was, it caused her to drop her fork. The man—surprised first by Horst’s words, and then by the sharp tinkle of silverware on china—quite lost his aura of sangfroid for a moment. When he recovered it, it was no longer pure; now it was streaked with wariness and hostility.
It was Collingwood who stepped in as peacemaker. ‘Gentlemen, please. We’re all friends at this table, all with a common goal. Perhaps’—he looked to de Osma as he spoke—‘we should go along with my Lord Horst’s suggestion that we, ah, fill him in on what this is all about.’
‘That would be lovely,’ said Horst, forcing a smile onto his face. ‘Thanks.’
De Osma looked at his dinner, sighed, and put down his knife and fork, apparently not a man who could eat and talk business at the same time. ‘Very well. Perhaps you’re right. We shall start with introductions. My Lord Horst, may I introduce you to my Lady Misericorde, Lady of the Risen, and my Lord Devlin, Lord of the Transfigured. My lord, my lady, Lord Horst, Lord of the Dead.’
The Brothers Cabal Page 4