Horst thought back to the sacrificial victims that Encausse had offered him when he was newly risen, and grew serious, too. ‘There were some people who seemed to be willing enough.’
‘How many?’
‘Three. Encausse had three lined up for me to drain. I refused; it would have killed them.’
Alisha shook her head. ‘No. You’d have risen them. Three women, was it?’
Horst started to nod and suddenly realised the significance of their sex and number. ‘Are you seriously trying to tell me that they were to be “The Brides of Cabal”?’
‘I’m perfectly serious. They want Vlad Țepeș, and they’re using Bram Stoker for their research. They thought three brides was the necessary number because that’s what it said in the Vampire Instruction Book. In any case, apart from carefully chosen candidates for you to convert, your general care and feeding will not involve members of the Ministerium.’ She crossed her arms and looked at him critically. ‘How do you think Alsager and his cronies feed?’
Horst looked at her uncomprehendingly.
‘Devlin Alsager,’ she explained patiently. ‘He was in here just now. The Lord of the Transfigured.’ This last she said with ironic disgust, as if the words tasted vile on her tongue.
‘What does he eat?’ said Horst, uncertain of why she had raised such a question and unhappy about the way it was likely to go. ‘He had steak the other night.’
‘He might settle for that when his pelt is on the inside, but do you really imagine a werewolf handling a steak knife? Now, Alsager, he really is a monster. Even if he had never transformed in his life, he would be a monster. He loves changing. He enjoys being physically powerful and dangerous. He likes the violence and the terror he causes. Then the Ministerium comes along and offers him political power to go along with all that. He’s not having doubts. Not like you are.’
‘What makes you think I’m having doubts?’ he asked. He couldn’t fathom her at all. She worked for the Ministerium yet took every opportunity to deride them and undermine any loyalty he might have felt to them for bringing him back from the dead. The possibility that she was an agent provocateur sent to test that loyalty continued to trouble him.
She didn’t answer him directly, but said, ‘It’s a mystery why they chose you. The ritual to raise you was expensive to prepare—travel to the middle of nowhere to find you, transport back—it’s a lot of trouble when there are active vampires closer at hand.’
‘There are?’ Horst abruptly felt a lot less special.
Alisha wrinkled her nose. ‘Nosferatu. Little more than rats in human form, but they’re not all stupid. It would have been pretty easy to find one with enough brains and no morals to take the job.’ She looked critically at Horst. ‘Maybe they just wanted something prettier for their general of the dead.’ Before he could say anything about his dismay at being chosen for the purposes of good public relations—presumably with the intention of putting him on recruiting posters at some point—she said, ‘In any case, Alsager leads his pack out once or twice a month, out there.’ She indicated the city below with a nod of her head. ‘When they are sure you’re the right … man for what they want, when they think they can trust you, they’ll let you do the same.’
‘Do what, exactly?’ asked Horst with a growing sickness in his heart.
‘Leave the castle. Go down into the city and find your own food.’
‘Why would…’
‘That’s what a Lord of the Dead does, isn’t it? You can go down there and feed, and start making new vampires.’
‘I’ve never … I would never…’
‘Where did you think the blood for your meal came from last night? Willing donors? It was taken.’
Horst thought of the bowl full of blood, he thought of the glass. He remembered a piquant scent to it, that he had known even then that it had all come from a single source, had known he could smell terror in it, all the chemicals a human body dumps into the bloodstream when it wants to fight or fly. This body had been able to do neither, just lie helpless while a needle was inserted and a meal for the newcomer was drained. Over a pint of blood drawn. He thought of the empty glass, how good it had made him feel as he savoured the blood and the taint of fear that came with it.
Horst put the back of his hand to his mouth and stood aghast, his gaze flicking from one section of floor to another but all unheeding of anything he saw. He looked at Alisha. ‘Who are you? And don’t say “a friend”.’
‘I’m not your friend,’ she replied, meeting his gaze unflinchingly. ‘But you’re really not what we expected. I’m not so very sure that I’m your enemy either, after all.’
‘What? What does that mean?’ Horst was confused and the confusion was making him angry. He was starting to get the very distinct sense that when Alisha spoke of we, she was not talking about the Ministerium Tenebrae at all. ‘That you were?’
Alisha started to reply, but never got that far. The muffled sound of a shot stopped the words in her throat. She looked at the window. ‘Sometimes there’s shooting in the city,’ she said. ‘There’s almost no law down there.’
‘No.’ Horst was heading towards the door. ‘That came from inside the castle.’
He flung open the door to the antechamber, crossed it in a few long strides, and opened the door out into the corridor more circumspectly, Alisha a few steps behind him. If he was concerned about his exit being overheard, it was all for naught as pandemonium was breaking out in the castle, shouts and the clatter of footsteps echoing from the stone walls. Then there was another shot and a cry of mortal agony.
Horst gained the walkway around one of the castle’s sundry halls, this one being an impressive entrance from the inner courtyard. Some twenty feet from the door to the courtyard was Herman, a revolver in his hand, and a naked man some small distance from him, writhing prone in a widening pool of dark blood. The man was hirsute to a freakish extent, but as Horst watched and the death throes weakened, the dense hair on the man’s back thinned away as if melting into his flesh. With a blink of amazement, Horst realised he was watching the death of a werewolf.
Herman backed away towards the door, his revolver swinging from side to side, a warning to anyone else who might be foolish enough to try to stop him. Horst watched events playing out, utterly confused. Why had the werewolf attacked Herman? Weren’t they all on the same side? One big happy family of conspirators ushering in a shiny new age of monsters’ rights?
Then the door swung open and Herman turned to face this new threat. For a moment there was nothing visible outside. Then something moved slowly, walking steadily and implacably towards Herman. From somewhere Lady Misericorde’s voice rang out. ‘Keep your … people away from him, Lord Devlin! No more need die. I shall deal with this.’
A moment later the reason for her confidence became apparent. Why risk the living when the dead are available? The shape in the door resolved itself into a walking corpse, appallingly thin, its clothes hanging as loosely upon it as its own skin. Without hesitation Herman shot it in the head and it fell without a sound but for the faint crump of dropped laundry. Already there were three more behind it, and beyond them in the darkness of the courtyard that terrible, ponderous rhythm like a deathly pendulum marked by the walk of the dead.
Belatedly, Horst was beginning to realise that perhaps Herman did not hold the Ministerium in very high regard.
‘Oh, no.’ Alisha was at Horst’s side at the railing above, an audience for an impromptu Grand Guignol performance. Her voice was barely above a whisper, quavering with emotion. ‘Herman…’
It was impossible that he could have heard her. Yet, he looked up and saw them there. He did not waver or show the slightest expression of manifest fear. He only spoke, not shouted, a single word, and it came to them as if he had been standing a pace away.
‘Run.’
Then he turned, dropped two more of the revenants with perfectly placed bullets to the head, and then without hesitation placed the gun barrel
in his mouth angled up towards the centre of his palate, and fired the last round in his revolver.
As he fell, a red mist in the air above him, Horst turned away. He wanted to think it was in horror, and in a sense, it was. But it was an inner horror that, if he watched Herman collapse, his blood spraying across the blue marbled floor, Horst might find his dismay was rooted in the arrant waste of that sustaining, precious blood.
Turning away did, however, have the advantage of distracting him. Alisha was gone. Perturbed by her stealthiness as much as by her absence, Horst re-entered the anteroom.
Entering the room beyond, he surprised her at the cupboard where the cleaning supplies were kept. He was in the process of being impressed by her devotion to duty being such that she wanted to clean up the mess while Herman’s heart had barely stopped beating, when she pulled from the cupboard a coil of ochre-coloured rope with one hand and a semi-automatic pistol sporting a very businesslike silencer with the other. This latter she then shot him with, twice, once through each lung.
‘Ow!’ he cried, at least as much with indignation as pain. The pain, he had to admit, was not as great as he would have expected from two probably fatal wounds. ‘What…?’ It was, however, also suddenly much harder to speak, as the air wheezed out of the bullet holes like a poorly maintained harmonium. A moist, slightly bubbly harmonium.
He staggered a little, unsure whether he should drop to one knee because he’d been shot or because it was the dramatically correct thing to do. He did so anyway, to give himself something to do while he thought about it.
Alisha, in contrast, required no thinking time at all. She had shoved the gun into the loop of her maid’s apron and opened the French windows and was now on the balcony, tying the end of the rope off around two of the stone balustrades. When she was done—and it took only seconds—she gave it a few fierce tugs to check its security before heaving the coiled bulk of the rope over the rail and into the darkness. It had not even had the chance to become taut under its own weight before she was pulling a simple looped harness over her head and shoulders to rest in her armpits, snapping its carabiner onto the rope, and curling a length around her body. She climbed over the rail and leapt without hesitation into the void.
She got perhaps a yard into her spectacular escape when it all came to an abrupt halt. Her first thought was that a tangle in the rope had jammed the carabiner, producing the sudden shock, but then she looked up and saw Horst standing on the balcony, his feet braced against the bases of two alternate balusters, one hand upon the rail, and the other holding—she realised with a sharp flame of terror in her guts—the free end of the rope, slightly frayed where he had apparently snapped it atwain as a child might a thread. He looked down at her, and by his expression, she took him to be greatly irked.
‘I want you to remember this,’ he said. Blood, black in the half light, glistened from the bullet wounds, pulsing slowly like crude oil from a punctured drum.
She swallowed, forced down her fear. ‘If you’re going to kill me, just do it, monster. Don’t gloat. It’s unseemly.’
Horst’s expression darkened still further. ‘How are you supposed to remember anything if I just drop you?’ he demanded. ‘You’re a member of this Dee Society they mentioned earlier, aren’t you?’
‘I’m telling you nothing.’
Horst almost spat with frustration. ‘They are going to be here any minute to find you. Dee Society … yes or no?’
She said nothing but looked defiantly up at him, and then gave a quick glance below. Horst was sure she was gauging how far she could rappel before he let go and whether it would make any difference to her chances. The quickness of the glance and the fact that she didn’t then try to go any further assured him that she had arrived at the conclusion that the only difference conceivable was a fractional one in the depth of the crater she would make on impact with the riverbank below.
‘I’ll take that as a “yes”. You’re opposed to the Ministerium?’ He didn’t even wait for an answer this time. ‘Good. I can’t say I like them, either. Go. I’ll tell them I threw you in the river. But you and I, we are having a serious conversation soon. I will look for you.’ Alisha looked at him somewhat dumbfounded and he found he had to waggle the rope a little and repeat, ‘Go!’ to motivate her. ‘I’m strong, but I’m not Atlas. I can’t hold you up forever.’
Demonstrating the admirably pragmatic and rapid decision making with which he and his lungs were already acquainted, she slipped away without another word, making swift progress towards the earth below where, Horst had no doubt, the next part of her pre-planned escape route waited. Perhaps a dehydrated bicycle or a folding horse; he could put nothing beyond her. Such fancies kept him occupied for the next minute as he gathered the remains of his failing strength and concentrated on not inadvertently killing an ally.
Probably an ally, he corrected himself. There was still much to learn in this mysterious castle of the Red Queen before he could be reasonably sure where lay the battle lines.
Devlin Alsager crashed through the door some twenty seconds later. He was a good eighteen inches taller than he had been last time Horst saw him and a great deal hairier, but he still bore the very distinctive swagger and poor choice in cologne.
The werewolf stopped abruptly when it saw him, forcing a little backpedalling as his claws skittered on the polished stone of the floor. Still, he did it with an agility and, it had to be admitted, a soupçon of panache that rendered the performance quite stylish rather than ridiculous, and for that, Horst disliked him all the more. Devlin made an attractive werewolf; all rippling musculature beneath a pale grey pelt of beautiful fur that curled and ran in waves as if part of the metamorphosis involved a small army of cosmetologists and a gallon of hairspray. ‘Where is the bitch?’ he roared in a voice that would have shredded the larynx of a stevedore.
‘Bitch?’ said Horst mildly. He arranged himself in an armchair with elaborate nonchalance. ‘Why, were you planning on mating with her?’ He found himself unexpectedly unimpressed by the presence of a werewolf. He had, after all, spent a year with a travelling carnival and had thus spent plenty of time with freaks, monstrosities, and other members of the public. A massive, powerful man-wolf hybrid, a creature of primal myth was, therefore, disappointingly underwhelming, all the more when you understood that its human form was a scoundrel, a poseur, and an awful dick.
‘Where is she?’ demanded the wolf-cum-boor. He took a few steps closer and finally seemed to notice the blood on Horst’s chest. ‘She shot you!’ His tone implied Horst had allowed himself to be tagged in a playground game and therefore ended up kissing a girl or something else equally horrid. There was certainly an air of the class bully in the way he said it that made it through the wolf’s vocal cords of rusty piano strings.
‘She certainly did,’ agreed Horst. He grimaced slightly, a man finding a strawberry pip stuck between his teeth. He coughed once, then again more violently, and spat into his hand. He held his expectorate up between thumb and forefinger—more solid than one might expect, and slightly shiny. ‘Ah. A souvenir. A .32-calibre, I think. The other did me the decency of going straight through. So, yes. She shot me, and you can see the good it did her.’
‘Where is she?’ repeated Devlin, low and threatening.
Horst tutted, a first-class passenger who has just discovered some ruffian in his train carriage. ‘I threw her out of the window. I heard a splash after a few seconds.’ He rocked his head while he recollected the moment. ‘Quite a few seconds. You don’t realise how high we are here until you throw somebody out of the window.’
And here he paused, and looked significantly at Devlin.
‘She still managed to shoot you.’ Devlin’s wolfishness was slightly in abeyance, the muzzle shortened, the hair less flowing. Horst hoped he wasn’t going to change all the way back, since he was naked, and Horst had endured enough unpleasantness for one evening.
‘I was distracted by the commotion in the hall,’ explai
ned Horst, keeping his tone light and bantering enough to be profoundly insulting without being obviously so.
Horst was also playing for time a little. He was concentrating on regenerating the torn and friction-burnt skin of his hand where the rope had been wrapped around it, and where the length secured around the balustrades had argued with him for a second as he snapped it off. These tattered shreds of expensive silken climbing rope now lay under him on the chair. He hoped Alisha had shown enough aplomb under pressure to dump the bulk of the rope into the river, or he might find himself faced with some difficult questions as to its provenance. ‘That man Herman. Your travelling dog show seemed to come off second best there. Just as well m’Lady Misericorde was to hand with her shambling entourage or I might have had to deal with him, too.’
This barb landed, and Devlin’s still very lupine ears folded back with anger. ‘He had silver bullets!’
Horst held up the bullet again, scratched at its side with his thumbnail, and showed the resulting gleam to Devlin. ‘So did my former maid. It didn’t slow me down greatly.’ He smiled complacently and, he gauged, infuriatingly. ‘I really must crack on and create some new vampires as we’re obviously going to need them. Not too quickly, though. I’ll be careful about who I choose for the honour. Don’t want to let just anyone in, do we?’
This, at last, was too much for Devlin, who turned on his heel and stamped out all of a dudgeon. Horst was displeased that such was the state of his metamorphosis by this point that Devlin was showing very little tail and far too much buttock cleavage. ‘Don’t forget to shut the door!’ he called after the retreating werewolf. ‘I am temporarily without staff.’
The door slammed, and Horst—perhaps forgivably, perhaps not—laughed.
Chapter 5
IN WHICH HORST CLIMBS A WALL AND DISCOMFORTS A WEREWOLF
It took perhaps twenty minutes before it occurred to anyone that it might be a good idea to see if there was any trace of Alisha beneath Horst’s window and, when they did, they neglected to bring along any of Devlin’s gang of shapechangers who might have been able to find a scent. There was no body and no rope in evidence, and they accepted Horst’s story without demur, two bullet wounds and a scowling vampire lord being sufficient to close that avenue of inquiry.
The Brothers Cabal Page 8