He looked around and saw flashes down amidst the shanties of the town square and spread around the common. Distant cracks of rifles firing floated to him, sounding so unthreatening as to be almost pleasant. A bullet ricocheting from the wall close enough to his head to make him wince disabused him of that notion and he started to scuttle as quickly as a vampire might horizontally. When he was over the balcony, he allowed his grip to fail and fell some twenty feet onto the hard stone, a landing he achieved gracefully. He snatched up his jacket and shoes from where he had left them and was about to dash into the safety of the abandoned apartment when he saw a flash on the common that illuminated what seemed to be ripples spreading from its centre, as if from a pebble tossed into a pond. His curiosity was such that it did not occur to him that this might presage a bad thing, until said bad thing turned out to be a mortar shell striking the castle wall. Then the window behind him shattered from the blast and he was thrown onto his back, stone chippings peppering his clothes and skin.
It could only be the Dee Society, he was sure. So much for the tiny gathering of concerned academics that the Ministerium had posited. Any society that could field upwards of fifty armed souls with supporting light field pieces was not a very polite society.
He felt the thud of a distant concussion travel through the land, through the castle walls, and into his back with a swiftness that the airborne sound lacked, and was thus warned of another incoming shell while it was still in transit. He rolled onto his front and thence to his feet in a blur of accelerated motion that left stone chippings that had been lying on his chest still in the air by the time he attained the safety of the room.
The detonation was closer this time, and he didn’t feel quite so happy with said attained safety as the gorgeous plasterwork cracked and rained down on his head and shoulders. Hoping to attain somewhere that actually was safe, he dashed for the door and so out into the hallway.
There he was, jacketed and lacing his second shoe, when his most recently attained safety was rendered anything but, although not on this occasion by a kilogramme of explosive but by the appearance of the far too ubiquitous Lord Devlin Alsager. He appeared at the base of a flight of steps to Horst’s right in a flurry of collarless linen and frills, Byronic and uncalled-for. He fixed Horst with a furious glare, and cried, ‘You!’
‘Obviously,’ said Horst, concluding the business of tying his shoelace.
‘You didn’t kill her, did you?’
Horst straightened up. He had a distinct sense that things were going to get very unfriendly in the next few minutes. When he was rested and fed, he was literally faster than the human eye could follow, could force himself from the perception of mundane folk, and had the strength of ten. Unhappily, he was neither rested nor fed, and he had consumed much of his reserves in repairing assorted pieces of damage he had suffered that night—rope burns, bullet holes, et al.
He looked at Devlin Alsager, a man better suited to propping up hotel bars in search of lonely divorcees, yet given the rank of general, the title of lord, and carte blanche to feed—quite literally—upon a population who looked to have enough problems without being further victimised by a twat.
It didn’t seem right to Horst, it didn’t seem fair, and he was a man who had a problem turning his back on things that were neither right nor fair. No more duplicity, he decided. No more going along with this charade.
‘By “her”, I assume you mean Alisha?’
‘First-name terms, eh?’ sneered Alsager, a man whose upper lip looked bereft without a sneer, a smirk, or a curl to disfigure it.
‘Of course first-name terms. She was a maid. It’s traditional.’ The strange alien part of Horst was playing around with ways of killing Alsager in the most exquisite of agonies amid a concerto of cracking bones and snapping sinews. For once, Horst let such fancies run.
‘Yes, of course it is,’ said Alsager, giving the impression that he was making a noble concession in admitting the point. ‘Yes, the maid. You didn’t kill her, did you?’
‘The maid who shot me? Twice, that is. Once through each lung. That maid? Just trying to be sure. Wouldn’t want to end up talking about a different one.’ Horst could feel his patience with the preening idiot slipping. The cold part of his mind was wondering if he could keep Alsager alive long enough to make him eat his own spleen, having first pulled it directly from the abdomen before driving it down that yakking mouth and sealing the gullet. Possibly, thought Horst. Why don’t we give it a go?
Alsager looked as if he’d just about done with the dance before the big event, too. ‘Of course her. You let her go, didn’t you?’
And there Horst was, his last chance to dissemble before him. He simply could not be bothered.
‘Yes,’ he said clearly. ‘I let her go. This whole thing, this conspiracy, it sickens me. Alisha and poor Herman, God rest him, there’s more to admire in them, more bravery in their little fingers than in this whole debased fiasco.’ His words were punctuated by another shell striking the castle ramparts. ‘Yes, I let her go. Now, what do you propose to do about it, you mutt?’
Alsager advanced a step, his posture arcing forward a little as he did. Horst could hear bone and cartilage creaking and re-forming as Alsager began his metamorphosis. It sounded injurious to health if practised frequently, and Horst could only assume old werewolves resorted to walking sticks. It also sounded painful. As he watched Alsager sweat and grunt and tear at his clothes, he sincerely hoped so.
‘You think you’re so much better than me, don’t you?’ said Alsager, more in a snarl than a human voice.
Horst shrugged while he wondered if he should run or fight. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. It would be rude to actually say it.’
Alsager was finished with talking, however, both temperamentally and physiologically thanks to his larynx becoming rather too lupine for easy chatter. He took another step, and this time fell forward onto all fours. Clawed fingers scratched at the floor as he sought purchase for a headlong charge at Horst.
Horst, for his part, was wearing shoes with sensible rubber soles, and had no such problems. This he demonstrated by running at the wall with sufficient rapidity to run up it to head height, along until he was behind Alsager, whereupon he landed lightly, swivelled, and kicked the werewolf forcefully up his hairy arse.
His foot landed upon the wolfish perineum on the upstroke with sufficient force to loft Alsager’s hindquarters over his head in the manner of an airborne forward roll that lacked sufficient height to complete successfully. Instead Alsager landed on his back with his head pointing towards Horst. From this perspective, he saw Horst smile, wave, and hare off down the corridor at an impressive sprint. Alsager, while grateful that at least his testicles hadn’t been crushed in the encounter, was nevertheless furious at this outrage to his dignity. He rolled onto his feet, or paws, or claws, and sped off in murderous pursuit.
Horst had no clear idea where he was going, but anything in the 180-degree arc that did not include an angry lycanthrope seemed to have its charms. He was well past the stairs from which Alsager had emerged when he heard voices he recognised raised in anger from that same direction. It seemed he had blotted his copybook with the Ministerium Tenebrae to an irredeemable degree. Ah, well.
Horst broke left and headed in the direction he fondly believed must contain the main entry. As a child, he and his brother had been trooped around a fine selection of English castles by their parents in an attempt to inculcate them in the perplexing ways of their new home. In these he had taken a romantic interest, and could trace the evolutionary path from an Iron Age hill fort, through a motte and bailey, up to the concentric castle—his favourite—and onward to the star redoubts of the Napoleonic Wars. This place, however, confused him. While undoubtedly of great defensive worth, it seemed relatively modern, certainly no more than a couple of centuries old. It was full of halls and great chambers, but not a single courtyard he had yet seen. It was as if some terrifyingly rich individual had taken a fanc
y to some site, probably that of an older and more practical castle, and extended it so ruthlessly in his preferred style that the former building now only lurked here and there in the endless corridors that enwrapped the place.
He burst through a door and found himself overlooking the entry hall. Any pleasure at a successful piece of intuitive navigation, however, was swiftly muted on discovering it blocked, shoulder to shoulder, by a great crowd of dead men. As one, they looked up and watched him with no curiosity at all, merely seeking out movement. He glanced across their ranks and saw at their rear Lady Misericorde. She gave him an indecipherable look that disquieted him far more than the dead-eyed stares of her zombie army. Then the main castle door was opened ahead of them and the dead stumbled out into the night, to hunt and kill the attackers. The doorway was hopelessly congested, he could see; there was no swift exit to be had there. Alsager appeared at the door he had come through himself only seconds before, the werewolf’s claws clattering against the doorframe as he thrust himself through in pursuit. Horst had already gone, seeking out an alternative exit.
Horst dashed down a servants’ staircase and along a narrow gallery that brushed both his shoulders as he ran. Ducking through a low door, and running across an unused kitchen, he found one remnant of the original castle and the imposing newcomer that sat in its lap as he plunged down a spiral staircase and the new stone turned to old amidst scar tissue of cement. His first thought on realising that he was entering the dungeons was pleasure. After all, a visit to the dungeons was the highlight of any trip to a castle, exceeding even the delights of a cream tea and the gift shop. His second thought was more prosaic. Dead end.
The sound of Alsager on his trail grew.
The first chamber of the dungeons was a guardroom: rough benches, a table, a stove with a metal flue that vanished into the ancient brickwork. There was a mirror hung in the corner over an outcrop of stone that the original builders had apparently decided was too much difficulty to remove and would, in any case, lend itself to the general air of entombment that they wanted to project to future inmates. On the outcrop was an old enamel basin, a jug, and a cut-throat razor. Hanging by this little still life from a steel spike driven into the wall was a leather strop. Horst momentarily considered taking the razor as a weapon, but it would put him in a corner, and there was no time. He ran from the grimy little room into a corridor that appeared to have been excavated by dwarves with a minimal sense of job satisfaction; all narrow and low, and with bits of stonework sticking out of the walls and ceilings.
Horst negotiated it sideways and so he was looking straight onto it when he found himself facing a barred window in the wall. For a moment, he was unmoved—it was nothing, just some silly grotesquery put on for the tourists, like that dummy beneath a bladed pendulum he’d seen with his family that time during a fortnight in Wales. Then he remembered that this castle was most certainly not open to tourists, that there were no cream teas, no gift shop, and that the corpse in the cell was most assuredly real.
It was hard to be sure, but the woman had probably been in her thirties. Her clothes were not badly soiled and Horst felt sure she had simply been taken from the town and died the same night. Her executioners had propped a table lengthways up against the far wall, tied her by her ankles to the upper edge, and then they had cut her throat.
There was little blood on the floor, but Horst knew there wouldn’t be. All he could think of was a wine glass, and a soup bowl, a solid red circle bounded in white china.
‘Found dinner, have you?’ Alsager was at the end of the corridor. Horst risked a glance the other way and saw it ended in a heavy door of tarred wood, bound in iron straps. In the full expression of his strength, he might have been able to tear it from his hinges, but he doubted it. He looked at the dead woman again, hoping to find enough anger to fight, but it wasn’t in him. All he could do was feel sickened soul-deep, and grieve for her. He was too tired and sorely dismayed to do aught else.
‘They wanted to feed her to me and mine after she’d been emptied for you, you ungrateful bastard,’ said Alsager as he moved slowly closer. His great bulk filled the narrow way. ‘I told them no. Give it to Misericorde to add to her collection. We prefer to kill what we eat.’ Alsager had won, and they both knew it. He could smell Horst’s indecision and weakness as surely as he could blood. ‘Course, you’re not really alive, are you? Never mind. In a minute you’ll just be properly dead.’
Horst pressed his back to the wall behind him, only to discover that there wasn’t a wall behind him. Alsager dashed forward but was too late to grab Horst before, with an ‘Oh!’ of honest astonishment, he flipped over the low wall of the well and fell into darkness.
An Interlude
‘I have some small acquaintance with castle dungeons,’ said Johannes Cabal in ruminative tones.
Horst paused in his narrative to say, ‘I’d be surprised … in fact, I’d be amazed if you didn’t. They seem very “you” environments.’ His gaze wandered, and his mood darkened as it did. ‘That poor woman. What a horrible thing they did.’
Cabal nodded slightly. ‘There seems to be an incipient sadism lurking beneath this enterprise. It’s odd. The Ministerium are clearly in it for money and power, the business of it all. It doesn’t seem in their style.’
‘The Red Queen,’ suggested Horst. ‘The dry sticks in the suits are the money and the executive expertise, but the grand sweep of the scheme … it seems a bit outré for them. It’s the mark of the Red Queen, I’m sure of it.’
‘The Mark of the Red Queen,’ repeated Cabal slowly. ‘Your speech sounds like it’s stitched together from the titles of yellow novels, as it ever was.’
‘Life’s an adventure. Well, mine is. Yours, too.’
‘Not by choice.’ Cabal was adding marginalia to his notes. ‘If the knowledge I seek was readily available, and if society wasn’t so protective of its corpses, few of the travails I needs must undergo would be at all necessary.’
Horst shrugged and rolled his eyes in mock sympathy. ‘People and the mortal remains of their loved ones, eh? So unreasonable.’ Then he remembered something and grew serious. ‘But be fair, Johannes,’ he said, his voice slow and deliberate. ‘How would you feel if, say, Father’s grave was desecrated and his body despoiled?’
Cabal’s pen stopped abruptly. He stared at the page without reading a single character for several long seconds. Then he looked up slowly to meet Horst’s gaze. ‘Desecration,’ he said, just as tonelessly. ‘Despoiled. Very emotive terms you choose, brother. Let me answer your … hypothetical question with one of my own. If Father was still alive, and one of us was in danger, terrible mortal danger, and the only way he could save us was at the cost of his own life, what do you think he would do?’
‘That’s not a fair question, Johannes.’
‘Nor was yours.’
There was silence, but for the ticking of the clock. Johannes Cabal turned his attention back to his notebook. He gestured impatiently at it with his pen. ‘Continue.’
Chapter 6
IN WHICH SCUTTLING AND VIOLENCE OCCUR
When most people look at a stream tumbling down from the mountain heights—fed by melt water and bubbling springs, jogging merrily down past rock and tuffet, glistening and giggling, finally arriving with a hastily acquired sobering air of maturity to disembogue into the river in the valley below on the inner side of a meander—they pause a moment and sigh with appreciation at a beautiful and natural spectacle.
Some people, however, think, Oh, happy day. What an ideal location for a military construction. And that delightful stream can serve both to provide water and to carry away corpses and shit. Oh, happy, happy day.
This was the fate of the stream that—its gambolling days long behind it—now sluiced its way down a covered culvert from the mountains backing the castle and ran through rigidly defined parameters beneath the structure providing water first in a well in the kitchens, then in the dungeons, and finally received the outpour
ings of the soil pipes. The tunnel ran without airspaces down to the concavity of that pretty meander of yesteryear, now forced into the role of moat, and ejaculated its filth and leavings via a grating that was cleared of bones and bodies once a year, or biannually if the dungeons had seen unusual numbers of traitors, dissidents, and other expendable types.
Recent years had seen a collapse in such protocols, however, and the grating had not been cleared. Then again, it had not been maintained, and the press of rags and disposable humans against it had created a partial dam some weeks previously. The rising levels of water in the wells had gone unremarked, as had their sudden lowering in the early hours of one morning a fortnight before. Thus, no one was aware that the uncared-for bars of the grating had broken and it now hung partially ajar, letting the castle’s leavings flow directly into the river without hindrance. In terms of living souls, this was moot. Prisoners tended to be in poor condition and often already dead before being dumped down the dungeon well in its part-time role as a cadaveric waste disposal. Even those who had not breathed their last always found that breath to come soon after the fall, the length of submergence in the subterranean stream being challenging even to a practised pearl fisher. The arrangement worked to almost everybody’s satisfaction, with the exception of those making the trip, and if their opinions had mattered so very much, then they wouldn’t have found themselves diving down the dungeon well’s gloomy throat in the first place, obviously.
Thus was the case with living souls and dead bodies, but as the exception proves the rule, so the undead found said case wanting and this was much to his relief.
Horst’s moment of surprise was just that—a brief moment—before he reacted autonomously with shock, and time slowed as his reactions accelerated. By the time he hit the water, the wait was boring him. His arms were already leading him and he broke the surface of the dark, turbulent water with his fingertips, slipping into the cold embrace of the imprisoned stream with ne’er a splash.
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