Warhammer - [Genevieve 04] - Silver Nails

by Jack Yeovil (epub)

  There was a smell in the office. Not garlic.

  A tapping came.

  The Vargr Breughel was shot through with secret passageways, sliding panels and hidden hollows. The theatre had once been haunted by the creature they had called the Trapdoor Daemon, who moved behind the walls and spied through one-way dressing room mirrors. That was also a painful memory, yet another Genevieve anecdote saved for a later play×one with a last act he still didn't feel ready to write. Besides, audiences didn't like it when the girl left the boy at the end. Downbeat closed on the second week of previews. Bruno Malvoisin, the Trapdoor Daemon, had been a shapeless squid-human mutant hidden under a huge cloak and hat×a role Detlef could play without fasting or exercise.

  Detlef went to the case where bound folios of his scripts were kept. The tapping came from behind it. And the smell.

  Water was seeping under the panel. Had the Trapdoor Daemon returned? Surely, poor Malvoisin was dead.

  Trembling, Detlef tripped the hidden catch. A small creature, hair in wet rat-tails, filth all over her, tumbled out.

  Instantly recognisable green eyes opened in her mask of dirt.

  'You came back,' he said.

  Not one of his better speeches.

  'I had to,' Genevieve replied.

  Detlef had a moment of might-have-been panic. If she'd tapped only a few minutes earlier, she would have come out of the wall while the Empire's premier vampire-hater was in the room, with expert pikemen within his call and a beltful of sharpened stakes. He swore he'd have fought for her, but the outcome would not have been in doubt.

  Under the ground or in ashes.

  Genevieve wiped off her face with a muddy sleeve. She still looked like a lass of sixteen summers.

  She touched him. His knees wouldn't support him.

  They held each other.

  III

  The office was the same, but Detlef looked older. Not just bigger, but softer, greyer. However, the fire in him was the same. Genius still flickered like a half-crazy light behind his eyes. She had not expected her thirst for him to rush back in such a flood, as if she'd tasted his blood last night, not ten years ago.

  The room smelled of blood. And of her.

  She'd been in the tunnels under the Vargr Breughel Memorial Playhouse before, but never had to swim out of a filth-clogged bronze empress and wade through the vile main sewers of Altdorf to make her entrance. She was a stinking ruin.

  Detlef took a speaking-tube from a hook and whistled into it.

  'Poppa Fritz'

  'Is Poppa Fritz still here? Still alive? He must be older than I am. It's wonderful that someone else doesn't change.'

  Detlef waved her quiet.

  'Poppa, I've, um, spilled something all over myself Yes, yes, I should try to keep my temper, but you know Tio Bland Could you send up Renastic with a tub of warm water and some soap? And towels.'

  Genevieve stood in the middle of the room, trying not to drip on anything precious. The hideous embroidered elf carpet, which Detlef had said would be the first thing to go when he took over the theatre, was still here.

  'You get used to it,' Detlef said to her, hand briefly over the tube. 'It's not so bad.'

  He still had the trick of reading her oddest thoughts.

  'Just coughing, Poppa Oh, and could you get Elsie to look in Kerreth's workshop and fetch the Genevieve costumes, if they're finished.'

  'Genevieve costumes?'

  He waved her quiet again.

  'Splendid No, there's no rush. Thanks, Poppa.'

  Detlef hung up the hook.

  'The one thing you could say that would make him suspicious, darling, was 'there's no rush'. With you, with this place, there's always a rush.'

  'I suppose you're right. I wasn't thinking.'

  Detlef was overwhelmed and not just by the sewer smell. She should have expected that. He had smears on his face and chest from hugging her. He wore a big, unbelted smock and even that was overfilled.

  'You haven't changed,' he said. 'You could be my grand-daughter.'

  'You haven't changed either. Not where it counts.'

  He shrugged sadly, not believing her. She took his hands and gripped.

  'Your eyes are the same.'

  'I need lenses to con my own scripts.'

  'That's not what I mean.'

  The taste of blood was in the air. Her tongue slithered over the razor-points of her teeth.

  On the desk stood a big pot of beef tea. Her eyes darted to it.

  'You haven't eaten?' he ventured.

  She shook her head. He let her hands go and picked up the pot.

  'Do you mind using my goblet? I can get a fresh one if you'd rather?'

  She took the pot from him and tipped the spout to her mouth. She opened wide and poured. It took half a minute to drain the tea. She set it down and wiped her lips on the back of her hand.

  'Better?'

  'Takes the edge off,' she said. 'It's not blood, but what is?'

  His hands crept up, involuntarily, to his collar, as if the room were too hot and he was buttoned up too tight.

  She'd drunk a lot of blood, in passion and anger, since she was last here, but she'd never let herself be touched by the living men and women whose veins she tapped. She had known friends, victims, hosts, servants, pick-ups, enemies, meals, sacrifices. While he lived, Detlef was her only lover.

  But she could not ask him to let her batten on him.

  It would not be fair to bleed him and leave.

  'I've missed you,' she admitted.

  He sighed, in agony. 'I've not missed you, Gene. Because in my mind you were never gone.'

  She noticed a playscript on the desk and picked it up.

  'Genevieve and Vukotich. What can this be about?'

  She flipped over the pages. She remembered telling Detlef about the bad business in Zhufbar, when she had been shackled to the mercenary Vukotich and nagged him into thwarting a scheme of the Chaos champions Dien Ch'ing and Yevgeny Yefimovich. When sharing with him the whole story, tactfully omitting full details of a bedroom scene she realised was represented with uncanny accuracy in this play-script, she had realised that in the middle of it came their first meeting, when he was just a little boy and she a runaway from Claes Glinka's moral crusade.

  'It's a good story,' he said, a little sheepish. 'It'll be very popular. I wonder how that warm water's coming.'

  She looked at more scenes. She wondered how Detlef intended to pull off the confrontation with the five Celestial elementals. He usually resisted big special effects, claiming the most important magic in the theatre was in the verse and the acting and that giant gasp-inducing daemon apparitions transformations were just a sideshow. If audiences left the play talking about the monsters, then they had been distracted from the true import of the drama.

  It occurred to her that a play with a vampire heroine might not be kindly met in this season of Clause 17.

  'Detlef,' she said, 'you're too brave. This could be the ruin of you, but it's so sweet. Though I feel your 'Genevieve' is a little nicer than the original. Back then, I was basically earning a living as a dancing slut, remember? You shouldn't make me out to be some priestess of .Shallya.'

  'It's just an entertainment.'

  'You don't write anything that's 'just an entertainment'.'

  'How would you know? You've missed ten years. I've downslid. I do jokes and murdered kings and write myself parts which involve a great deal of sitting down. It's a while since I did anything really fine. You can't be a child prodigy at my age. A lot of things I've not even been able to finish.'

  He was acting, out of habit.

  'Rot and rubbish, Detlef. I've not been here to see you act, but I can still read. Your folios are available even in the savage outlands where I've spent most of my time.'

  'Pirated editions from which I've not seen a pfennig.'

  'And there are the sonnets.'

  He blushed red. All his poems were about her.

  'You've read the
m?'

  'Not all the run of To My Unchanging Lady were destroyed. Students pass copies around, some hand-written and bound inside misleading boards to throw off the book-burners. Do you know how much you have to pay to get hold of a suppressed work?'

  'Yes. I bribe the provincial censors to ban my best material so I can charge outrageously. Makes up for what I lose on those damned unauthorised folios. Being illegal is always good for cash businesses. Weirdroot tubers cost a lot more than potatoes.'

  She giggled and he laughed.

  'This is somewhere between uncomfortable and wonderful,' he said.

  'Wasn't it always?'

  Poppa Fritz came upstairs with Renastic, a new scene-shifter Detlef claimed was surprisingly strong for one so thin and sallow-looking, carrying a hip-bath full of warm water between them. Detlef had her hide behind the door. She was sorry for the deception: she liked Poppa Fritz and looked forward to cuddling with the old man. But Detlef was right: it wouldn't do just yet to let too many people know the vampire Genevieve was back in town. Renastic, a Sylvanian with a widow's peak, had potent breath and she was surprised to recognise him. She knew she would have to pass on the odd little scene she had witnessed from the secret passageway.

  Stripped of her vile clothes, she slid luxuriously into the water, sighing with pleasure. In an ever-changing world, some delights were eternal×like a warm bath after a long dirty spell.

  'One thing about that Renastic fellow,' she said. 'He has an odd little friend.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'As I was making my way through the old Trapdoor Daemon tunnels, I saw through one of the mirrors into a dressing room. There was only one candle lit, so it was dark, and the mirror is almost entirely crusted over with muck so I couldn't make much out. But your friend Renastic was there, in full evening dress with black cloak and all, dandling something on his lap that I couldn't quite see. Someone, rather. Someone child- or goblin-sized. Not a child, though. And not a goblin either, I think. He was playing with it, like a pet or a familiar. But the talk was heated. They were having quite a lively discussion, an argument.'

  'I've no idea who this small person might be.'

  'I had one of my weird feelings about him. Like there was no one there, at least no one with a soul. There was a certain amount of 'yes, master'-ing. They were talking about someone or something called 'Gottle'.'

  'Sounds dwarfish.'

  'That's what I thought. 'Gottle of Glood'. I heard another name, one which doesn't have very pleasant associations: 'Vlad'.'

  'So Alvdnov's little friend is named after Vlad von Carstein? No wonder he doesn't show his face much. He isn't liable to be very popular in the current climate.'

  ' 'Alvdnov Renastic'? There's something strange going oh there.'

  'There's something strange going on everywhere. Tell me something I don't know, Gene.'

  'That'll have to wait until after I'm clean.'

  She sank under the water, letting it close over her face. Her knees rose from the seas like mythical islands, her hair floated like catchweed and trapped the toy ships Poppa Fritz had put into the bath.

  IV

  The corpse with the gaping hole under his chin lay face-up in the gutter of the Street of a Hundred Taverns, ringed by clerics and coppers.

  'His worries are over,' said Johannes Munch. 'This could have waited.'

  Bland turned furiously on the watchman, struck speechless by such rank stupidity. Surely the Sergeant with Special Responsibility for Unlawful Killing must heed the undead menace. With each passing minute, the dead man became more dangerous.

  'I think, sergeant,' interpreted Liesel von Sutin, Bland's scribe-proclaimer, 'that the Temple Father feels it is exactly that unhelpful attitude which has brought us to this dreadful pass.'

  Munch looked wearily at Bland and Liesel.

  'I lament for the old days, when the clerics of Morr stood decently back and let a copper do his job, then quietly came in and dragged the stiff off to the Temple for disposal.'

  Bland wondered if there was anything suspect about the reddish glint in the sergeant's eyes. It mightn't just be a devotion to cheap Estalian wine. A question would have to be asked about Sergeant Johannes Munch.

  A Clause 17 sympathiser in the Old Town Watch had sent a runner to the Temple of Morr with word of the suspect slaying. Bland had known straight away that this marked the start in earnest of the campaign. Everything else had just been preliminary. With a quivering sense of purpose, Bland had rallied his core team×Liesel, undeadslayers Preiss and Bruin×and held a brief prayer circle, then hastened over to the site of the homicide. The Temple Father had taken resolute charge of the situation, ordering Dibble, the cloddish watchman who had first tripped over the dead man, to fetch the Sergeant with Special Responsibility. The pockmarked Munch was initially hard to locate because he was 'at choir practice'×an accepted euphemism for getting blind drunk while telling lies about old cases down at The Blue Lantern, the coppers' tavern.

  Munch didn't seem to feel this particular man-slaying worth interrupting a good Filthy Harald anecdote over. Bland, expecting as much, had gone over the watchman's head and summoned a specialist from private practice. Her carriage had just arrived and she was crossing the street.

  'Now we shall see some progress,' Bland announced.

  Rosanna Ophuls, scryer-for-hire, slid between Munch and Liesel, then took a casual glance at the dead man.

  'Throat torn out with a docker's hook,' she said. 'Gang killing. Fifteen crowns please, Temple Father.'

  Bland knew Ophuls was wrong.

  This was the Street of a Hundred Taverns. And among those hundred was the Crescent Moon, notorious haunt of the vermin undead. It was a problem to determine exactly where the establishment was, though Bland didn't believe the rumours that the Crescent Moon shifted its physical building nightly. Just as soon as the place hung up a sign visible to proper human eyes, he would have the damned haunt of noxious evil closed down and put to the torch.

  If you let the leeches run loose, this was what happened.

  The dead man's wound was ragged and dry, black rather than red. His eyes were open, frozen in terror.

  The scryer stood with her arms folded, tapping her foot. Bland judged her for an irritating person, a woman who would never show the commitment necessary for the campaign. It was time for another proclamation from the Cult of Morr, against the 'nay-saying ninnies' who heeded not 'the dangers of the dark'. He made a mental note to have Liesel work something up. With the campaign in full boom, the cult's scribe-proclaimer was busier and busier.

  'With respect to your professional abilities, Miss Ophuls, might not a second glance×indeed, a proper scrying×reveal that this is merely supposed to look like a gang killing?'

  The woman looked down at the dead person.

  'Surely, the bloodlusting fiend, consumed by the madness of his or her red thirst, fell on this poor×indeed, innocent×soul and drained him dry, then used a hook or some other such implement to cover up the crime, to cast suspicion elsewhere.'

  Ophuls wasn't convinced. She was not doing the job she expected to be paid for.

  'You haven't even touched him,' Bland said.

  'She doesn't really need to, Temple Father,' said Munch. 'That 'poor×indeed, innocent×soul' is Ibrahim Fleuchtweig, war chief of the Fish. Last week, three Hooks were trussed up and thrown in the Reik. On his orders. This is an escalation of the feud. If a Fish is hooked, or a Hook drowned, it doesn't take a divining witch×no offence, Rosie×to tell you who's responsible.'

  'The sergeant is right, sir,' said Dibble. 'We all know Ibby the Fish in the Tavern Watch. A warrant was out for him in connection with the murders of Nosy the Cripple, Josten the Grabber and Dirk the Dirk.'

  'Don't think I'm convinced by all these ridiculous names,' said Bland. 'You make them up to suggest your squalid calling is glamorous.'

  Ophuls shrugged and made a pfui sound.

  'You're being paid×indeed, well-paid×to do a job,' Bland
insisted. 'Now get down in the gutter and scry.'

  She looked at Bland as if she were exceeding her brief and trying to divine something about him. Then, she made a decision.

  'Very well. Stand back, lads. I don't want your sins crowding in.'

  Everyone except Bland moved away sharply, giving Ophuls a clear circle around the dead man to work in.

  'You too, Temple Father.'

  He naturally hadn't assumed she included him.

  Arranging a muffler on the cobbles so she could kneel, Ophuls took off her mittens and rubbed her hands together.

  'Cold night,' she said. 'Have to get some feeling in.'

  She flexed her fingers and waved her hands hocus-pocus fashion over the corpse. She touched him, patting his jacket first and working towards the mess around his neck. Closing her eyes, she put her hands on the wound.

  Bland's skin crawled. There was something not human about scryers.

  The undead had a knack for knowing, too. This woman might not drink blood, but she'd bear watching. Better to be safe than sorry, and one could always apologise afterwards.

  'I sense a lot of drinking.'

  Munch snickered. Bland gave him a nasty look that shut him up. There was no room for levity when a vampire attack was being detected.

  'A lot of drinking. Bugman's Six-X. Enough to float a river-barge and addle a thaumaturgy professor. An enormously full bladder. A stagger into the alleyway behind Bruno's Brewhouse. A flash in the dark. Something sharp?'

  'Fangs?'

  She shook her head and let the corpse alone. 'A docker's hook, as used by the Hooks, the dockyard gang notoriously at war with the Fish, the dockyard gang to which the deceased was affiliated.'

  He didn't like her tone of voice. She was pulling her mittens back on.

  'You can't be certain.'

  'No one can be certain, Temple Father, but you hired a scryer so you could get closer to certain than you were. You have had my professional opinion. If you want some free advice on top of that, you should take my word as being as near certain as you're likely to get.'

  'Why is the corpse so pale? Indeed, bloodless?'

  She looked up at the moons and down at the dead face. For a moment she was quiet, seeing something.