Anna’s pacing, which had become a sort of frantic back-and-forth exercise that made me want to get out of the bed and hold her still, came to a sudden, arresting stop right next to me. She picked that moment to look me in the eye again, and I realized she’d been fighting back tears.
“I wouldn’t say we’re complete strangers,” I said.
“We met yesterday.”
“Fine, we’re nearly strangers, but… Look, I don’t understand any of this.”
“I know.”
She kissed me. It happened so suddenly I didn’t do my very best to kiss back, which I felt bad about as soon as it was over. It was soft, and passionate, and she smelled a little bit like cinnamon, and it made all the pain in my side go away and my head empty of rational thought.
Then it was over and she was slapping me across the face. I enjoyed that more than I probably should have.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked.
She ignored the question, or perhaps didn’t know whether I was talking about the slap or the kiss. I wasn’t sure myself.
“Who are you? Christoph isn’t your real name, I already know that.”
“Why can’t it be?”
“Because I asked you on five different occasions last evening and you gave me five different answers. And none of them were Christoph.”
“Well all right, I have had a lot of names.”
“And you know nothing about the politics of the moment, that much is very obvious.”
“How many questions did you ask me last night?”
“Several. I wanted to know what kind of man I rescued at the expense of the peace.”
I sort of felt sorry for her. If she asked me things while I was half out of my mind from pain and drink, she probably got a whole lot of honest responses that made no sense. I’ve had the sort of life that’s only logical when immortality is presupposed.
“You use a series of false names, know your tradecraft, and can read the Swiss code. All the evidence says you’re a spy, and I can’t trust you. Yet I’m certain you are not a spy and equally certain I can trust you, and I don’t understand why that is.”
“It must be my charm.”
She laughed. “You’re not without charm, but I’m not some fainting damsel, either.”
“I have noticed. And I’ve been a spy, once or twice. Just not recently. I’m more of a freelance merchant at the moment.”
“Those words are meaningless together.”
“How about wealthy drunk?”
“Better.”
“The ‘Swiss code’. You can read the Romansh dialect, can’t you?”
“Of course I can. That letter was meant for me.”
“Then who… oh, of course. No wonder you need to kill this man. You were supposed to do that in the garden. He was the messenger.”
I should have figured this out earlier, perhaps. Like, around the time I was standing in a flowerbed and looking at a murder scene where no blood was shed. Or when I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out a letter whose contents she didn’t find all that shocking. If I’d known she was the executioner-to-be and not the victim-that-wasn’t, I might have realized she was stalling until the sun went down.
“Maybe you should decide to trust me enough to explain what’s actually going on so I can help you in a way that doesn’t involve my being sent out as bait,” I said.
She laughed, but in a less charming sort of way. “I have no reason to tell you anything. You’re useless to me with that wound, and in honesty I should already kill you for what you’ve learned. That’s how it was supposed to happen, do you understand? You saw the letter, and even if you didn’t understand the contents, you could read the words. As soon as you proved that I couldn’t allow you to live. That’s why this all made so much sense! Use you to draw him out, wait for him to dispatch you for me, and then kill him and the realm is saved, and please stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“I just said I put you at risk on purpose and you look like you want me to kiss you again.”
“Well, I do.”
She sighed.
“You should get out of Vienna,” she said. “As soon as you can. Your life is in danger.”
“From you?”
“Possibly. If not at my hand, then because of me. I work for people who are considerably more ruthless. They will never allow you to keep breathing.”
“These are the people you owe this debt to?”
“It’s not my debt, but yes. It belongs to my family. They saved a life, but if the debt remains unpaid they’ll rescind it. And now I’ve added your life to that equation. So. Please leave Vienna.”
“I think you’re wrong. I can help you.”
“How do you mean to do that?”
“Did you see the knife he stabbed me with?”
Anna blinked a couple of times. “Yes. I have it here. I thought it was interesting.”
“It is.”
She retrieved it from a corner table and placed it on the bed.
The knife had a handle that was shaped like an H, a logical design because it was meant to be held in the fist and used in a punching motion. I hadn’t seen one in years.
“It’s called a Katar,” I said. “From India. It’s how I figured out what you’re actually facing. But before I prove I’m actually useful here, why don’t you tell me why the man who used it has to die?”
She nodded, slowly. This was progress.
“Have you ever heard the name Talleyrand?”
* * *
Hofburg Palace is the kind of man-made structure that makes me a little uncomfortable. It’s vast. I have seen vastness of all sorts before—the Romans excelled at it, especially the Byzantine edition of them—but most of the time complexity is traded out. A coliseum, for instance, is a giant building, but one with a lot of empty space in it. The Hagia Sofia in Constantinople (please don’t make me call it Istanbul) is giant and somewhat complex, but that complexity is mostly for visual effect, not utilitarian functionality.
But Hofburg Palace, along with a dozen other buildings across Europe and Asia, crosses that line between awe-inspiring and disturbing. I look at these places and think perhaps humanity has done something wrong if we legitimately have a need for something so artificially complicated. I also wonder—especially when I end up in a long conversation about politics, which is thankfully not often—if spaces like this are built to address a need, or if they create one. Do we manufacture spaces for secret meetings, or do secret meetings happen because we designed the space for them and don’t know what else to do?
I’m also of the opinion that political problems can be solved by putting the right people in the same large room. I’ve shared this theory with a number of persons, throughout history, with more political savvy than I have, and all of them have told me it’s preposterous because of the complexity of the issues involved. So it was a surprise to learn that this was more or less exactly the premise of the congress: get all the people together and hash everything out. They just weren’t doing it in one big room. No plenary council meetings, no big central anything, just a bunch of back-room get-togethers. I couldn’t decide if it was a brilliant idea or the exact opposite of that.
Anna and I weren’t heading to Hofburg Palace for one of those meetings. We were going to a party.
It had been three days since she’d stitched me up, and in that time I’d recovered enough to walk around without wincing. Running was a challenge, but I could stand straight and not give the appearance that I’d recently been stabbed, and that was important, because I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself at the party to which I wasn’t technically invited. With any luck at all, I’d be able to move around without reopening the stitches; I was in my best suit, and blood is really hard to get out of a good suit.
I also wasn’t healed enough to experience a carriage ride without some pain. This was in a time when the choices of road were dirt or cobblestone, and neither was all th
at great when combined with a non-rubberized carriage wheel. Every bump was a reminder that I should have stayed in bed.
“You look pale,” Anna said quietly. She was sitting beside me as the coach made its way through the downtown.
“I’m in a little pain, but I’m okay,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m worried only that you look so sickly we will be unable to enter.”
“How sweet of you.”
She gripped my hand gently. “I am sorry about the pain. But we have larger concerns.”
“Nobody will notice how pale I am if I’m standing next to you. I could show up in my breeches.”
She smiled, and blushed a little. “There are greater beauties than I in court. You oversell me.”
I really wasn’t overselling. Anna was almost dangerously stunning. We were entering an arena in which stealth was going to be important, and she had completely failed in the part where we were supposed to pass unnoticed. Every man there was going to remember the moment they first saw her.
Anna was dressed in a style that was decidedly English, but with French influence— specifically in the waistline, which was typically higher in France than in England. It was at its tightest just underneath her bosom. Practically speaking, the style allowed for a looser corset, which was no doubt a huge relief to the wearer. The rest of the dress was in a style I’d heard called Gothic, with lots of padding and ruffles, a paneled bodice, and ornate lace. She continued to favor a powdered blue/turquoise—the base was white, but with blue lacing. The dress was off the shoulder. She would have been naked from the cleavage up except for the short Spencer jacket that took care of this.
Her hair, quite long when fully untethered, was up in a bun I think she must have had someone else help with. I don’t know for certain if she did, but there did tend to be an interest, historically, in dressing as if you required other people’s help. It meant you could afford to hire other people to dress you. Anna couldn’t afford any such person, but she lived in a building full of women who no doubt had experience with the hair of other people.
The ensemble was designed to draw attention to her breasts and her face, both entirely worthy of that attention. To that end, it might have been an effective espionage tool, because she could be carrying broadsword in her hands and nobody would notice.
It was difficult to believe she didn’t know how astonishing she looked.
“We’re here,” she said, as the gigantic marble edifice of Hofburg threw us into shadow. The driver stopped us at the end of a long train of carriages. We had arrived, but it would be some time before we could debark.
We were staring up at the Chancellery Wing. Each wing of the Palace could house the entire city in the event of a siege, which is the sort of thing you think about when you’ve lived through a siege or two. I didn’t fully understand the purpose of the party we were there to attend, which had no apparent connection to the negotiations. But it was known that most of the important people in town—those abbreviated names in that letter—were going to be there. All except for the T. That was Talleyrand, and he was not expected.
I now knew a great deal about the Frenchman named Talleyrand, but didn’t really grasp most of what I knew. This is how I am with politics. Like in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, most of the time political issues sound to me like disagreements over which end of a hard-boiled egg to crack in the morning.
Talleyrand wasn’t supposed to be in Vienna… for some reason or another. It was a secret, and it meant the man was holding meetings with various people of varied import in secret, and these meetings had relevance to the congress that I really didn’t listen too carefully about when Anna explained the whole thing. (I remember “lesser powers” and “Polish-Saxony” and “Marquis of Labrador”, but I couldn’t tell you how they all fit together.)
In order to keep these meetings secret, Talleyrand had hired a private security force of Swiss origin, and that—provided this time I had gotten the truth from her—was who Anna actually worked for.
Roughly half of what Anna had told me our first afternoon together was true. She actually was a sleeper agent put up in the boarding house on someone else’s purse, and she really did receive a signal one day, but the part about the man in the carriage steering her around town was completely invented. She also knew the people she was working for by name and by face.
“They’re meeting us inside?” I asked.
“Yes. I’ll make contact, you don’t do anything except look for this… thing you think you can identify. We’ll try to do this without Adrian knowing you exist.”
“What makes you think your target is here?”
“It’s the only gathering of its kind on the social calendar for the next two months. If one wanted to destroy a negotiation, one would be better off doing it near the start of that negotiation.”
“And you’re sure that’s his intent?”
“Isn’t destruction the goal of all anarchists?”
“I believe the philosophy is slightly more nuanced.”
“Well don’t mention this opinion to anyone inside, whatever you do.”
Spies get information in ways that defy easy explanation. I never bothered to ask how her Swiss company learned that the talks—and Talleyrand specifically—were the target of an anarchist group. The likelihood was high that Anna didn’t even know the answer, and if she did she wouldn’t share it with me. And if she did share it, I probably wouldn’t understand how the logical leap was made. Information like this turns on the tiniest factoids imaginable.
So taking the anarchist story as a postulate, it was further determined (somehow) that a member of the Swiss team was directly involved.
The letter delivered to Anna that afternoon in the garden served two purposes. First, it notified her, an outside agent whose association with the Swiss was not known within the team, about the progress of the secret talks. Second, it informed her that the man delivering the letter was working for the anarchists, if not the sole anarchist in a group of one.
She was supposed to kill him then, but when she drew a blade to do that very thing, he surprised her. Those shark-teeth can be a shock, no matter how well trained you are. He shoved her over—the matted flowers in the garden were from her body, not the body of an imaginary murder victim—and fled. She gave chase, and that was when we met.
* * *
The carriage stopped at the main door, which was our cue to get out. A footman was there to assist us, and then down a red carpet, up a set of stone stairs, down two corridors, past a set of double doors, and we were at the party.
I felt completely overwhelmed the instant we entered the main ballroom. The noise of a hundred and more people talking over one another combined with music from the band at the far end of the hall to create an unsettling discordance. Added to that was the heat all those bodies were making, the smell of sweat and powder and perfume, and the visual spectacle of Vienna’s finest guests in layers of colorful and incredibly restrictive clothing.
For large parts of my life I wore little to no clothing, lived and hunted alone or among small bands, and spoke by pointing and grunting, if at all. Nearly every time I’m forced to attend a formal occasion I miss those days. I can’t even imagine what that version of me would think of this version.
I could understand immediately why Anna was so valuable to a spy organization, though, because she took to the room as if she owned it. She greeted dozens of people by name, curtsied and extended her hand, exchanged girlish bits of gossip and politely declined offers to dance—as she had only just gotten there and surely must give the first dance to me, her charming and nearly silent escort.
I was nearly silent because I am no good at these things, and because I knew nobody’s name. We had decided in advance that I was to play the part of an Englishman who spoke no German. It meant I had to communicate from time to time with people who also spoke English, but that didn’t happen too terribly often.
“You need to look as if you’
re enjoying yourself,” she said at one point. She was on my arm and speaking through a thoroughly brilliant smile. “People will notice.”
“I can’t believe anybody here is noticing anything about anybody. It’s too busy.”
“Have you spied our friend?”
“I don’t think I have, but it would be difficult to tell. What would an anarchist want in a situation such as this?”
She turned us toward one side of the room. “Do you see the man near the doors at the back? Red sash, balding, tapered face.”
I saw. He had several men around him, one or two self-evidently in his employ. “Who is it?”
“That’s Prince Metternich of Austria. This is his party. Now look to his right about five paces. Military red coat.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. Rumor has it he’s to replace Castlereagh as Britain’s representative here. He’s speaking to King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. Behind them both, near the band, is Tsar Alexander of Russia. A moment ago, King Frederick of Denmark arrived. He’s behind us near the door still, engaging Count Lowenheilm of Sweden in conversation. I can keep going, but do you understand?”
“Your anarchist isn’t just a threat to the crown, he’s a threat to all of them.”
“Yes.” She looked past me, over my shoulder, at someone halfway across the room. “Stay here, keep your eyes open. I see someone I need to talk to.”
“One of your Swiss coworkers?”
“It’s Adrian. It’s his team, and he’s a very dangerous man. I’d rather stand by you, but I’d also rather not introduce you to him, and I need to somehow make him understand what we’re up against.”
“Good luck. I’ll try not to be jealous.”
She kissed me on the cheek. “You are far more handsome. And I think he may be a homosexual. Now, put on a smile and find someone to make small-talk with so you don’t look quite so awkward.”
Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5) Page 5