Warhammer - [Genevieve 04] - Silver Nails

by Jack Yeovil (epub)

  And she needed to drink warm human blood quite often. That was never going to make her popular. This summer, with Antiochus Bland's Sanitation Bill posted all over this part of the Empire, it was also an invitation to be guest of honour at a corpse-burning party.

  At the city gates this afternoon, Genevieve had pointedly been asked to kiss a blessed amulet by a bored watchman who didn't take the trouble to clean the baubles between uses. Symbols of Shallya, Verena, Ulric and Sigmar were available. Just ahead of her in the queue, a fastidious merchant cringed at being handed a Sigmarite hammer still glistening with the slobber of a sickly farmer's boy. The silk-seller, unfortunate enough to have eyebrows that met suspiciously over his nose, was hauled out of the line by a couple of black-robed clerics of Morr and put to the Question. She gave thanks that Bland's Boyos were too intent on the merchant to pay attention to her insignificant person, and chastely pressed closed lips to a pewter Dove of Verena. She slipped through the gate, trying to ignore the yelps of indignation and worse emanating from the hut-like shrine of Morr set up beside the watch-point. Now she knew how stringently Clause 17 was being enforced. She had chosen one of the market gates, because word was that the daily stream of dodgy characters that flowed in and out of the Imperial city dissuaded the Cult of Morr from using silver icons×several sets had gone missing×in the kiss-the-god test. A clean conscience wouldn't have helped her with silver.

  Since then, she had dawdled in the Konigplatz like a first-time visitor from the sticks, pretending to count the jostling statues of past emperors, not talking to strangers like her mama had told her, hoping to see someone famous in the flesh. She pointedly bought half a dozen apples, eating them pips and all. Anyone who cared to pay attention would know she was the sort of girl whose diet didn't extend far beyond fruit, bread, cheese and the occasional turnip pasty.

  She had made sure to get green apples, not red.

  Yum yum. Human food. Wouldn't eat anything else, no sirrah.

  Never eat anything red. Or drink it either.

  The red thirst was starting to bite. Her fang-teeth ached and tore the inside of her mouth. The taste of her own blood made it worse.

  She had not fed in weeks. That made her crotchety.

  Apart from other inconveniences, she felt stuffed inside. Well-chewed apples filled her like mud. Her stomach and bowels weren't used to stubborn solids. It was an effort to keep the food down. How horribly ironic it would be: to pass all the other tests and be given away by undigested fruit-pulp.

  Under the great statue of Sigmar, cloaked in the cool dark of its swelling shadow, she held her body still. Sudden movements would betray her as not human. She deliberately lifted the last apple to her mouth, arm slower than the human eye, imagining the air as thick as water. She overdid it to the point where she might be mistaken for one of those strange street performers who do things as if living only half as fast as everyone else.

  The moons came out, shiny as new pfennigs.

  She was reminded of feeding and her fangs became needle-keen.

  She bit into the big apple, jaw-hinges dislocating momentarily, and took the whole core out. Her mouth was full, cheeks bulging like a hamster's, and she had to push with her fingers to get it all in. The trick of distension didn't work for her gullet, and she had to thump her throat to keep from choking.

  'Gone down the wrong hole, eh?' said a loiterer.

  She couldn't speak, but tried to swallow. A cannonball was lodged somewhere between her voice box and her stomach.

  The loiterer got close enough for a lot of little details to come in focus. His doublet had been tailored for someone else but invisibly mended to fit him, and was embroidered with mock cloth-of-gold. His boots were cheap too, tricked up with shiny buckles to look expensive. She scented a wrong 'un, but mostly saw the tiny throb of the pulse in his throat, between the ruff of his shirt and the sharply defined line of his beard. Under pink skin, she saw red and blue.

  She heard his heartbeat and perceived the flow of blood under his skin.

  He patted her on the back with one hand, dislodging the last of the cannonball and reached for her purse with the other.

  She swallowed gratefully and pinched his wrist instinctively, halting his grab.

  'You misunderstand,' he tried to wheedle. 'I am merely pointing out the vulnerability of your poke. The 'platz is full of thieves at this hour. And you must protect yourself.'

  'Quite so,' she said.

  She exerted pressure with her thumb and forefinger, digging into the loiterer's wrist. A shiny sliver dropped from his fingers to the cobbles×an edge rather than a blade, but keen enough to do the job.

  'You're a cutpurse,' she said.

  His face was screwed up with pain. Nails had forced through the finger-seams of her glove and were stuck into his wrist. Bright blood welled up like a soap bubble and fell, tumbling over itself, to splash on cobbles.

  The blood shone with colours only she could see.

  She had to force herself not to throw herself on the ground and lick up the spillage.

  She looked into the cutpurse's eyes. And saw no reflection of her face.

  He was terrified. Then cunning, growing too confident.

  'And you're a leech,' he sneered. 'Unhand me, monster!'

  A small crowd was gathering. Fellow pickpockets, she guessed, come to admire or critique the sham swell's technique. The professionals must have noticed her quickness at fending off his expert poke-grab. No one now thought she was an innocent girl on her first visit to the big city.

  A watchman was coming this way. By his helmet, with its feather and shiny badge, she knew him for one of the ceremonial toy soldiers who policed the more public and official districts.

  She let go of the thief's wrist, but he took hold of hers.

  'We've got one of them!' he shouted. 'Officer, send for Bland's Boyos. This foul inhuman creature must be turned over to the Cult of Morr. We've a leech for the burning!'

  A cobblestone bounced off her forehead. Insults and excoriations were called out. Several of the crowd held up flaming torches on long sticks. The lamplighters, of course. As the hisses and mutters spread, the effect was uncomfortably close to mobs she remembered of old. Yokels with firebrands and farm implements, swarming over the countryside. Ranting clerics and pompous rural burgermeisters, leading from behind. Execution without trial, and the shrill cry of 'Death to the dead!'

  Five hundred years ago, well before Antiochus Bland ascended to the Temple Fathership of the Cult of Morr, the Undead Wars×fomented by the von Carstein clan, those Sylvanian lunatics who claimed to speak for all vampirekind×had set off the worst of the persecutions. The average Count von Carstein proved enormously keen on leading armies of rotting mindless strigoi against the higher races and dreaming of an eternal feast of blood. However, those master tacticians tended not to be about when vampires you could actually hold a conversation with were picked off in ones and twos by those doughty bands of scythe-waving, fire-building, stake-brandishing clods every village had sitting around the inn waiting to impale, incinerate or quarter anyone to whom they took a dislike.

  'Off with her head,' shouted some silly woman.

  'Beheading's too good for the likes of her!'

  The rake Chandagnac, her own father-in-darkness, had been among many comparatively blameless purge victims, hunted down and destroyed by clerics of Ulric. Since Chandagnac had also gifted the ill-remembered Tsarina Kattarin with the Dark Kiss, Genevieve supposed he was indirectly responsible for as much bother as the von Carsteins. Just as the Undead Wars were dying down, Kattarin overwhelmed her addle-headed mortal husband to become absolute ruler of Kislev, exerting a bloody grip that lasted centuries. She'd be on the throne still if her great-great-great grandchildren hadn't got fed up with an immortal ice queen blocking succession and conspired to transfix her like a butterfly. The body, preserved by the cold of Kislev's Frost Palace, was still on display as an Awful Warning.

  'Put silver needles in her eyes,
' shouted a thin girl with more imagination than most. Genevieve had not heard that one before.

  'That's a good idea, Hanna,' said a friend of the cleverclogs. 'Silver needles!'

  She found herself backed up against the base of the statue of Sig-mar.

  The torch-flames got closer. The watchman forced his way to the front of the crowd.

  'What's all this, then?' said the copper. 'Move along smartly, you lot.'

  The watchman, tabard let out over his comfortable stomach, caught sight of the cutpurse and reached for his cudgel.

  'Oh, it's you, Donowitz. Still dunking for pokes? And picking on the young ones again. It'll be Mundsen Keep this time. No more warnings.'

  Genevieve noticed that Donowitz wore his cap aslant to conceal a wax ear. He'd been clipped at least once.

  'I am entirely innocent, your worship,' said the cutpurse. 'I found this daughter of darkness preying on decent living folks. She's a ghastly monster of the night. An undead hag in a girlish shape. Look at the red in her eyes. See how she shows her fangs and claws.'

  Genevieve became acutely aware that her mouth was open and her gloves shredded. Her red thirst was up, she was coiled to spring. If it was to end tonight, she'd take some human bastards to true death with her. They might have her head off, but she'd go out with the taste of Altdorf blood in her throat.

  'We're going to do what Temple Father Bland says, and treat her properly/ said Donowitz, instantly self-elected mob-leader. 'Strip her for the Question, lay silver lashes on her skin, then despatch her with stake, fire and sickle.'

  'Oh aye,' said rather too many .enthusiasts.

  'Hold on,' said one fellow. 'I must rush home and fetch me old dad. He wouldn't want to miss this.'

  'Sell tickets, why don't you?' Genevieve shouted at the dutiful son as he scurried off.

  'None of your lip, monster,' said the watchman.

  'Officer,' she said to him. 'It's a fair cop. My name is Genevieve Dieudonne. I am indeed a vampire ghastly monster, undead hag and so forth. I freely surrender myself to the Konigplatz Watch. Kindly escort me to a cell to await the laying of actual criminal or spiritual charges against me. I should like to stand on my right as a citizen of the Empire in good standing to send one written message, to my friend the Emperor Karl-Franz, whose life I happened to save from the infernal designs of the traitor Oswald von Konigswald and the Great Enchanter Constant Drachenfels.'

  She hated bringing it up all the time, but the situation seemed to demand it.

  The copper scratched his chin. Someone poked her leg with a stick and she involuntarily snarled.

  'Well, um, miss, I, er'

  'Don't be blinded by her vampire powers of fascination,' said Donowitz. 'And don't hark to all this legal nonsense. She's a dreaded leech and we've caught her in bloodsuckery. She's no more rights than any other abomination.'

  'Didn't you people hear what I said?' Genevieve shouted, annoyed. 'Thirteen years ago, I saved the whole Empire!'

  'That's as may be,' said Silver Needles Hanna, 'but what have you done for us lately?'

  She was prodded again. A mean-eyed dwarf in short lederhosen had got between everyone's legs and was close to her. He had a special prodding-stick.

  'Death to the dead!'

  The cry was taken up.

  She was prodded again, through her skirt. The gnarled stick was a bit sharp.

  'Shove it in her heart, Shorty,' said Hanna. Genevieve had expected more from Silver Needles, but people always turned out to be disappointments.

  With that in mind, she still tried to look imploring to the watchman.

  Someone tipped his helmet from behind and the peak slid over his eyes.

  'I have your watch-number officer,' she said. 'I'll remember it if you let this unruly mob run riot.'

  She had misjudged the copper. He looked stricken at being singled out.

  'See, she's divined this poor fellow's watch-number with her magic powers,' said the vendor who'd been happy to sell her unripe apples all afternoon. 'She's a witch as well as a vampire.'

  'It's written on his helmet, goathead,' said Hanna helpfully.

  'I can't be doing with all this,' said the watchman. 'My shift ended at nightfall, lust be sure you do a decent job of it.'

  He turned and walked away.

  The prodding dwarf was closer, gurning up at her with yellowed teeth and eyes.

  'You think that once they've done for all the vampires they won't turn on dwarfs next?'

  Another mistake. Shorty lifted her skirt with his stick and leered at her knees. Half the crowd laughed. The other half complained this wasn't in the dignified spirit of a proper vampire-slaying.

  'Oh, let Shorty have his fun. It's not as if she were human.'

  The dwarf put his face to her skirts and drew in a huge breath, sucking at her scent.

  This was just disgusting!

  'Hang this lark for a game of tin soldiers,' said Genevieve.

  She braced herself against Sigmar's plinth and stamped on Shorty's face, jabbing her heel against his squash nose. Her kick propelled Shorty off the cobbles. He cannoned through the crowd and splashed down satisfyingly in a puddle.

  'What a bully,' said Silver Needles Hanna. 'Vampires are all the same.'

  Genevieve had inherited the dwarf's prodding stick, which seemed a lot shorter in her grip than it had in Shorty's stubby fingers. She held it up like a duelling blade. People pulled out the knives and swords kept out of sight when the watch was around. Someone even started powdering a pistol.

  'Before we proceed further,' she said, 'there's one thing I'd like to get perfectly clear. You're all criminals. Cutpurses, ponces, jack-up artists, hugger-muggers, layabouts, bawds and the like. And you're about to murder me. But you feel pretty good about it. You've had a hard day stealing, fleecing, whoring and cheating, but you think killing me is, as it were, your good deed for the week. Doesn't that strike any of you as insane? Have I ever hurt any of you? Except 'Dunkin' Donowitz and the prod-happy pervert, both of whom started any trouble they got. So far as you know, have I ever hurt anyone you've ever met?'

  'It's not what you've done,' said Hanna, 'it's what you are!'

  'I thought as much.'

  Genevieve flung the stick away. She invoked whichever Gods of law were left over to care about justice for the undead. Tensing her thighs and calves in a semi-crouch, she fixed her mind on a point thirty feet above her head and sprang up into the air. With a run-up, she might have made it to the raised warhammer. As it was, she slammed against the statue's broad belt, face scraping weathered stone belly-muscles. Her clumsy hands found no hold, and she slid down between Sigmar's mighty thews. She scrabbled for something×anything!×to grab.

  'Sacrilege!' shouted too many people.

  Genevieve had cause to thank the sculptor who defied conventional morality by insisting that the greatest memorial to the founding hero of Empire be anatomically correct and heroically proportioned enough to get a grip on. When Altdorfers swore by Sigmar's holy hammer, they didn't just mean the one he held up ready to smash goblin skulls.

  She found rests in the muscles of Sigmar's knees for her boot-toes, drew in a breath, and climbed the statue monkey-fashion, swarming up over the hero's waist and chest. Perching on his shoulder like a gargoyle, she leant against the flaring wings of his helm. Up close, she realised that the white texture of his beard came from centuries of incontinent pigeons.

  'That's what we have in common, my lord,' she breathed. 'One minute, you're a hero of the Empire. The next, they're crapping all over you.'

  Just about now, being able to shapeshift into bat-form would have been a useful attribute.

  Something burning spanged against Sigmar's helm. A lamplighter's torch, thrown as a makeshift spear. Someone down there in the swelling crowd would probably have a crossbow.

  It was time to make a dignified exit.

  'Death to the dead!'

  There was a flash, a sizzle and some screaming. The pistolier had fumbled hi
s loading and set fire to himself. They couldn't blame her for who was she fooling? In their current mood, the crowd was likely to blame her for sour milk and clogged drains.

  A couple of bold would-be vampire-slayers were trying to scale Sigmar's plinth. One fell off and was caught by the crowd, then tossed up to try again.

  Genevieve took a run along Sigmar's heroic arm, got her hands around the shaft of his more conventional hammer and swung a couple of times, trying to remember the tumbling moves she had learned in Cathay from Master Po. She launched herself into space and reached forward like an acrobat, aiming herself at the huge flat green scowl of the Empress Magritta.

  The tradition was that every new emperor and empress was supposed to commemorate their investiture by commissioning their own statue and adding it to the crowd in Konigplatz. After two and a half millennia, space was at a premium. Most of early post-Sigmar emperors were worn down to little more than stubs. City planners still dreaded another upheaval like the Year of Seven Emperors, which had forced them to demolish the beautiful little shrine of Repanse de Lyonesse to make way for a spectacularly ugly and undignified jostle of poisoned, stabbed, hot-collared and defenestrated one-week wonders.

  Even that was less of a disaster than the statue of the Empress Magritta. After the Bronze Lady browbeat the electors into giving her the throne, she decreed her statue should reflect her stature and be twice the height of Sigmar's. When she was eventually succeeded, after a deft bit of backstabbery, the often-forgotten Emperor Johann the Grey was acutely embarrassed by the colossa frowning down disapproval on the whole city, and wondered how to go about breaking tradition by getting rid of the thing.

  The problem was half-solved when the statue proved so heavy that it plunged through its shoddy sandstone plinth and lost three-quarters of its height by sinking long legs and most of its body into the sewers and tarns under Altdorf. A story went that on the night of the Big Plunge, the stern stone face of the Sigmar statue was seen to smile broadly. Die-hards who spent centuries whining that things were never right again after the Bronze Lady was booted out perpetually sought to raise public subscriptions for the re-elevation of the statue to its former glory.