The Immortal Knight Chronicles Box Set 2

by Dan Davis

  A man so depraved he fashioned a raving mad peasant child called Joan into a parody of a soldier and set her on a path that led to her appalling death, screaming and bound as the fire destroyed her flesh.

  A monster with a heart so dark that he consumed children like capons, bathing in their blood even as they screamed their last.

  A heretic who called upon the power Satan and all the demons of Hell in the towers and dungeons of his fortress home.

  But that is a tale for another time.

  ***

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Richard of Ashbury returns in Vampire Heretic ~ the Immortal Knight Chronicles Book 5

  Read on…

  VAMPIRE HERETIC

  The Immortal Knight Chronicles

  Book 5

  Richard of Ashbury

  and the mass murderer Gilles de Rais

  1429 - 1440

  Dan Davis

  Copyright © 2018 Dan Davis

  All rights reserved.

  1. The Bishop of Nantes

  April 1440

  There was never in all my life a story more depraved and hideous than that of Gilles de Rais. For all the horrific, evil deeds that I have both witnessed and myself committed over eight centuries, it causes even me to shudder to relate the crimes of that great Marshal of France.

  It was a dark time for England.

  Our King was Henry VI, a young man who had been gifted the crown of France by the military successes of his father and who seemed determined to piss it all away. He was timid, soft in the heart and in the head, weak-willed and cowardly as a man and a king and sought only peace instead of victory.

  And so we lost.

  Before his majority, England had been ruled by a gaggle of lords who were the fading echoes of their mighty fathers. Administrators in their hearts, the only fighting that they excelled at was the squabbling of the court and in battle they were hesitant and had the alarming tendency to flee when defeat reared her head.

  The series of wars that we had waged against France for over a hundred years was limping toward a miserable end. After the soaring, magnificent glories of Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt, and Verneuil we were brought crashing to earth by the ignominious defeats at Orléans, and Patay.

  We were undone by many things but principle among them was the divinely inspired leadership of Joan the Maiden of Orléans.

  Those military defeats weighed heavily on me and the knowledge that the figurehead of our destruction had ultimately been burned at the stake for heresy brought me little comfort. I was heartsick and disillusioned at the collapse of our fortunes and had spent years in London, miserable and unable to summon the will required to return to France before it was lost forever.

  It was nine years after Joan’s execution, in early April 1440, that I received a hastily-written letter from Stephen Gosset begging me to join him in Brittany.

  Richard, I pray this letter finds you in better spirits than when we last spoke. There are rumours here of a familiar nature and it is imperative that you join me in Nantes immediately. The subject of said rumours is a man known to you and is one of remarkable power and thus I implore that you come attended by our strongest comrades. As always, our business in London can continue to be maintained by the Lady of the house. I beg you, Richard. Hurry.

  The scrawl was barely recognisable as Stephen’s, though it most assuredly was, and his usual care to encode the business of our Order had been abandoned for open clumsy innuendo. It was not even signed.

  “What do you make of this?” I asked Eva, who was the Lady that Stephen had referred to.

  “That you shall shortly have some bloody business to attend to,” she replied. “And I will be able to run our affairs here in peace without your glumness seeping from the walls.”

  I had found little to fulfil me in the running of our estates and managing trade. I had no aptitude for it. Nor did I enjoy the gathering of political and commercial information by the management of our agents and preferred to travel to see events for myself, whether it was to Scotland or Ireland or further afield. Even so, the concerns and passions of the people engaged in the local and regional events seemed so petty and transient, no matter how deeply felt they were for those involved.

  So Eva’s accusation of glumness was true, and I had been out of sorts for some time. My men liked to joke that all I needed was a battle to wage and a war to win but I had been fighting those for so long and all for nought. What did it matter whether this king or that sat on the French throne? They would all be dead soon enough, and the lords that supported them and the men who died fighting for them, and so what was the use in fighting?

  But on reading Stephen’s letter, I felt an ember deep within me begin to burn once more. Could it be true, I wondered, that Stephen had uncovered an immortal in Brittany? And a powerful immortal at that. Scanning the words again and again, I felt the stirring of my true purpose once more.

  I quickly summoned back to London Walter and Rob, engaged three trusted young valets, and arranged for our journey across the Channel to Nantes in Brittany, where Stephen was currently employed.

  On his most recent period away from England, Stephen had fulfilled an old ambition by attending the College of Sorbonne in Paris to study theology and law and thence had become a lawyer for the Church. His intellectual excellence, enhanced through his unnatural long life, had enabled his swift progression through the institution. Despite his repeated insistence to his masters that he lacked any professional ambition, he soon found himself so well regarded that he was able to apply for and was granted a position in the episcopal see of Nantes.

  Why would such a brilliant young man, they asked him, seek to bury himself so far from Paris, which was the centre of learning for all the Earth? Of all the great lords of the Church that you could serve, why request the service of the Bishop of Nantes?

  Stephen had made his typically smooth excuses and they in turn had waived him off as another fool who would rather never reach his potential than to fail in the attempt.

  But it was not the Bishop himself that attracted Stephen, nor the lowly position as episcopal notary, but instead was whispered rumours that had travelled all the way from the distant wastelands of Brittany to the grand halls of Paris. Rumours that hinted at a great and bloody evil. Some months after his curious relocation to Nantes, Stephen sent his scrawled letter.

  One line in that letter was ever on my mind during the journey and I wondered what it might mean and who it might refer to.

  The subject of said rumours is a man known to you and is one of remarkable power.

  “Damn you, Stephen,” I muttered on the dockside in London. “Why must he speak in unanswerable riddles?”

  At my side, Walt shrugged. “Likes being clever, don’t he.”

  We crossed from London to Nantes by ship, travelling along the southern coast of England across to the northern coast of Normandy and then following that dangerous, craggy coast around headland after headland in choppy dark seas until finally we reached Saint Nazaire in the mouth of the Loire. From there we travelled upriver to the great city of Nantes.

  “Strange,” Walter said as we passed through that country. “Strange to be back here again.”

  We stood at the rail of the boat as it sailed up river on the flood tide, pushed by a stiff westerly wind. It was cold and spring seemed delayed, as if the land lacked the strength to throw off the remains of winter.

  “Is it strange?” Rob asked, wistfully. “Seems fitting, to me. We brought much evil to these parts.”

  “Wonder if they remember us,” Walt said. “If they remember the White Dagger Company and that bloody banner we fought under.”

  Rob nodded. “A field of red with yellow flames beneath rising up to touch the white dagger in the centre. Who could forget it.”

  “It was not evil we brought but justice,” I said. “And all who lived then are long dead, as are their grandchildren. Whatever strangeness you feel comes not from the land but from your
own imaginations. Pull yourselves together.”

  They said nothing in response which spoke volumes about their true thoughts. And the truth was I felt disquieted myself. Not so much by memories of the distant past when I had hunted Brittany and Poitou for the black knight Geoffrey de Charny but by more recent ones.

  Our disastrous losses to the French a few years before had shaken me to such an extent that I was not the same man as I had been. It seemed so unnatural that our veteran army had been defeated by a mad young woman still in her maidenhood. An unholy reversal of the true order of things and it was simply the final insult for our nation, which seemed to me to be in sharp decline.

  The Loire, up which we sailed was the great river of France, stretching more than six hundred miles from the central highlands in the south, up and across the land to the west coast and its waters fed the richest valley in Christendom. The very same river had formed the limit of the English dominion in the war, making a great front line upon which our armies had pressed for years.

  It was the great bastion on that river, the city of Orléans, that we had needed to crush for us to become masters of all France. On the Loire was it that the French armies led by that mad young woman Joan of Lorraine had instead defeated us time and again, earning herself the name the Maiden of Orléans.

  And it was where my own weakness and indecision had led to the slaughter of thousands of magnificent English bowmen.

  But Orléans was halfway across France to the east and there was nothing to be done about the war any more. Through treaties wrangled and petty sieges conducted, King Charles VII was carefully and inevitably winning back his entire kingdom from the English and Henry VI was gladly giving it to him. Order had finally been imposed on the countryside and the bandits and thieves, the bands of routiers, and rampaging free companies driven out by forces loyal to the king.

  Nantes was the picture of peace as we moored in the city on the 15th May 1440. The grandest buildings were of the typical Loire sandstone; either grey-white or yellowed-cream depending on the way the sun fell on the walls or beautifully carved columns and reliefs of the towers and facades. Still being built and covered in scaffolding, the cathedral was already grand and well-proportioned and perfection itself without being ostentatious. At first glance, the same could have been said for the city as a whole, although there was much in dire need of repair when we got into it. A large portion of Nantes had been reduced by a terrible fire and the acres of blackened timber, jutting up at all angles like the limbs of burned corpses, were yet being cleared.

  Thinking of the urgency expressed in his letter, we did not pause even to secure lodgings in the city but went straight to the cathedral and asked after the Bishop’s notary Stephen le Viel, which was the pseudonym he was using. It seemed as though we were expected and while Walter, Rob and our servants waited below, I was shown up almost directly to an antechamber and bidden to wait before the porter left by a different door to the one in which we had entered.

  I sat waiting in the antechamber, listening to the hustle in the hall beyond and the shouts of the builders working on the cathedral outside. The decoration all around me was quite beautiful and even the tiles on the floor were bright and shining reds and greens, glistening in their rich glaze.

  “Richard!” Stephen cried, flinging the door open and striding toward me. “How quickly you have come.”

  His clothes were rich and his hair cut into a fashionable length beneath his cap and he seemed rather fat and happy.

  We embraced and I held him at arm’s length. “You insisted upon urgency and so here I am. What is it that you believe you have uncovered in this damned duchy?”

  He glanced over his shoulder into the hall from where he had emerged and, taking me by the elbow, pulled me away and lowered his voice.

  “Rumours of children going missing from lands to the south of this city, about twenty miles away, right across a great swathe of countryside.”

  I sighed, feeling the ember of excitement fading fast. “Is that it? Missing children again, Stephen? How many times over the years have we followed rumours such as this, only to find the most mundane of causes? They are almost always found drowned in some overgrown pond or wash up miles downriver. It has never once been an immortal.”

  All while I spoke, he flapped his hands at me to lower my voice and he hissed at me. “It is dozens, Richard.”

  That gave me pause. “Dozens? Are you certain?”

  He looked me in the eye. “Scores, sir. Perhaps even more. Scores of children gone missing, never to return.”

  I pursed my lips. “And you think an immortal is the cause? Why so? Why not slavers, taking them off the coast and from raids inland? Probably the damned Moors again.”

  He opened his mouth to answer but a powerful voice rang out from the hall beyond where we stood.

  “Stephen? Is it your man or not? Where have you gone, Stephen? Why are you always vanishing when I need you, Stephen?”

  My friend straightened up and whipped around and raised his voice. “Yes indeed, Milord Bishop. We are coming now, Your Grace.” He rolled his eyes at me and lowered his voice. “Quickly, Richard. I have told the Bishop that you are a faithful man who has conducted many investigations of a secular nature for various lords over the years, especially in Normandy. Only by telling the Bishop this has he allowed me to bring you here to be engaged in a secret but official capacity to investigate these rumours.”

  I nodded slowly. “I am a faithful man, am I? Faithful to whom?”

  Stephen swallowed, his face growing pale. “Why, to me, Richard. It was the only way to get them to trust you enough to bring you in.”

  “I see.”

  The voice from the chamber rose again. “Stephen! I hear you hissing out there like a pair of old maids. My patience grows thin, sir.”

  Stephen, as outwardly subservient to authority as ever, turned on his heel and strode into the chamber with his head bowed and I followed.

  The Bishop’s audience hall was sumptuously decorated with wood panelling and fine carvings covered in gold leaf and painted in rich vermilion and indigo. Elegantly proportioned windows filled one wall, overlooking a portion of the cathedral that was covered by scaffolding swarming with builders.

  At the top of the chamber the Bishop sat on his throne, which was quite tasteful, as far as thrones go, and it was positioned behind a long table where clerks and priests examined papers filled with tabulated texts and calculations, and architectural drawings. None of the other men paid us any attention at all as we approached the great lord who was Bishop of Nantes.

  “My apologies, Milord Bishop,” Stephen said as we drew near. “It is indeed my man who has come, finally, from his recent work in Normandy. Please allow me to introduce—”

  “Fine, fine,” the Bishop said. He was a tall, fat man with a rather kindly face. Some Bishops, grasping and ambitious as they often were, aroused in me nothing but immediate and lasting contempt. But I must say that the Bishop of Nantes did not. His manner was rushed but his tone was not overly rude. “So, you have experience with this sort of thing, do you?”

  I glanced at Stephen. “I have some experience with the investigation of certain dark crimes, Your Grace. Only, if you will permit me to say, I am afraid I do not yet know what you mean by this sort of thing.”

  The Bishop pursed his full lips. “No, indeed. Well said, sir. We must reserve our judgement until the facts are established. But this business with le Ferron is cause for concern enough.”

  “Le Ferron?” I said, addressing Stephen.

  The Bishop nodded to Stephen, who turned to me. “Two days ago, at Pentecost, a priest named le Ferron was seized. Dragged from his church before the parishioners and thrown into a black dungeon. Le Ferron and his brother are noblemen and vassals of Duke Jean, the Lord of Brittany, and so this is a grave crime against the Duke that must be answered for.”

  “Bah,” the Bishop said. “The Duke will order the release of le Ferron and if he has any
sense, the Marshal will give him up.”

  “The Marshal?” I asked. “What Marshal?”

  The Bishop raised his eyebrows at Stephen. “You did not inform your man of the subject of his investigations?”

  Stephen made a little bow. “I thought it best not to put such a thing in writing and was a moment ago about to explain it to Richard before you requested that we attend to you, my lord.” Stephen fixed me with a warning look before explaining. “The man who has broken the Duke’s peace is also the subject of our investigation in the missing children. He is Gilles, Comte de Brienne, Lord of Tiffauges, Laval, Pouzages, and Machecoul, the Baron de Rais, Marshal of France and Lieutenant-General of Brittany.”

  I believe that my mouth gaped open like an imbecile’s for a moment but swiftly I found my jaw clenched in quivering rage.

  The name was known to me. It was one I had not heard for almost a decade but a name that had often been spoken in the past along with that of another. For Gilles de Rais had been the closest companion to and steadfast captain of the Maiden of Orléans. And I had always suspected that it was he who had been the architect of her victories. It was he, surely, whispering in her ear, who had directed the French to victory and not the divine voice of God’s angels in her head, as she had claimed. For why should God send angels to aid the French and not the English?

  It was not only I that held these same suspicions about Gilles de Rais, for he had been rewarded with high honours. Indeed, Gilles was one of only four lords granted the honour of bringing the Holy Ampoule from the Abbey of Saint-Remy to Notre-Dame de Reims for the consecration of Charles VII as King of France. It was at the coronation that Gilles was also made Marshal of France in recognition of his superb generalship in the campaigns. His appointment as Lieutenant-General of Brittany also meant that he was the King’s representative in the region, similar in some ways perhaps to the sheriffs of English counties. These were the highest possible appointments that could have been made for a young military leader.