Warhammer - [Genevieve 04] - Silver Nails

by Jack Yeovil (epub)

  'This is the way the dead look,' she said, closing the corpse's eyes with her fingertips. 'Empty and abandoned.'

  'At the Temple of Morr, we are quite familiar with the dead,' said Liesel. 'It is our duty to reverence the broken vessel to ease the path of the departing spirit. And to dispose of the vessel lest it be refilled by something unholy and unclean.'

  Ophuls stood up and wrapped her muffler around her neck.

  'If that's settled, Temple Father,' said Munch, 'you can do the job you're supposed to and cart Ibby away now. His gang-buddies have already forgotten him and won't claim the body, so it's up to you to get it off the cobbles.'

  Thanks to the Sanitation Bill, the temple had to be alerted about any sudden death. Bland had been keeping an eye out for suspect reports like this one. He knew how the body should be served.

  Bland wasn't ready to let go yet.

  'What did you see?' he asked Ophuls.

  'I beg your pardon, Temple Father?'

  'lust then. You scried something.'

  'Nothing important. Just the scrap of a life. It's odd what people think about when they're dying.'

  'Their families?'

  Bland thought of his dear wife and three lovely children.

  'Sometimes. Mostly it's stuff you can't understand. Personal things they couldn't explain even if you could ask them. And sometimes it's random, as if they wanted to be distracted from the business of dying. Ibby thought it had turned cold all of a sudden. How's that for a way to spend your final seconds? Grumbling about the weather?'

  Bland shook his head and raised a finger. 'You scry but you don't see. Think on what she said the dead man thought. 'It had turned cold all of a sudden.' Unnatural cold. They travel about inside their own evil clouds sometimes. They can become black fog or white mist and creep up on their victims. The undead. This proves×indeed, conclusively proves×what I've been saying all along. This was a vampire killing.'

  Ophuls began to say something, but he continued, silencing her.

  'They've been biding their time, waiting for a chance to strike at me. Ever since I showed my colours. They know I'm their enemy×indeed, their destroyer. This is the beginning of a war, a war between the living and the dead. It's the von Carstein days all over again. You'll all have to decide which side you're on and Morr help you if you go against the live and holy.'

  Dibble scratched his head under his helmet.

  Ophuls was frightened now, shrinking away from him. Good. What did she see? That he was right, of course.

  'The dead are dangerous. The Cult of Morr will take over now. Preiss, you know the procedure.'

  The tall cleric muscled through and stood over the dead man.

  'Don't think you'll be rising again to bedevil the living,' vowed Preiss.

  The cleric raised his staff and sank the sharpened end into the ribcage. Bland heard the point scrape cobbles. It was important to transfix the dead thing to the ground. Most people got it wrong and thought it was enough to sink a stake into the heart or spear the undead standing up. Impalement was merely a preliminary binding, fixing the monster×potential monster, in this case×to the holy earth. Preiss leant on his staff with all his weight, digging between the cobbles. It wasn't easy, which is why the cult had acolytes like Preiss, a former pupil of Hagedorn the wrestler, on hand.

  'That's disgusting,' whined Munch.

  'Disgusting,' snapped Bland. 'I'll tell you what's disgusting. A grave-rotted thirsty monster glutting itself fat on the blood of your lovely children or dear old grandma. That's what's disgusting.'

  'Leave it alone,' said Ophuls, quietly.

  'Not until the job's done.'

  'But it's an old wives' tale that all those killed by vampires rise as vampires themselves. Sire vampires turn their get by the Dark Kiss. That means they give their own altered blood to favoured victims as they drink from them.'

  'So you admit that this was a vampire killing?'

  Ophuls threw her hands up.

  'You can go now,' said Bland. 'Your part in this is over.'

  Liesel took Ophuls by the elbow and steered her away. 'Present your chit at the Temple of Morr after one o'clock tomorrow,' said the scribe-proclaimer, 'and your price will be met in full, less Imperial tax.'

  Preiss had Ibrahim Fleuchtweig fully skewered. He gave the nod to Braun, who came in with his silver-bladed axe and hacked off the corpse's head. It took a few blows and some sawing.

  'You might have ruined a good evening's wine-bibbing,' said Munch, 'but I can't complain that the clerics of Morr don't lay on any entertainment. Ibby has been more thoroughly killed than any other corpse I've seen this month.'

  'It's not done yet,' Liesel told him. 'The Temple Father must perform a final rite.'

  Bland pulled on thick leather gauntlets. He picked up the startled-looking head, then stuffed its mouth with garlic taken from a pouch on his belt.

  'Unclean undead spirit, I cast thee out.'

  Liesel made a lightning sketch, preserving the moment of triumph.

  'Could you hold the head up higher, Temple Father? Get the light from the streetlamp. And could Brother Preiss step out of the way? There, that's perfect/

  By tomorrow, Liesel's sketch would be copied and posted all over the city. Woodcuts would be sent to all the broadsheets, and this time they would have to run the pictures. Until now, the campaign had consisted only of speeches and dull legal matters. This was news, and news was what the vulgar masses craved above all else.

  Everyone in the Empire would soon know that Antiochus Bland had personally prevented Ibrahim Fleuchtweig's rising from the dead as an unhallowed thing intent upon stalking the innocent. The Temple Father didn't care a jot for the glory of the deed, but he knew every holy campaign needed its leaders, its heroes. The people needed his example.

  When Liesel was done, he dropped the head and left final disposal×hauling the thing away in the cart and its immolation in the eternally-burning corpse fires of the temple×to Preiss and Braun.

  'That's another leech up the chimney, Temple Father,' said Liesel.

  Bland was proud of himself, proud of his cult, proud of his purpose.

  V

  Now she was cleaned up and dressed, Detlef thought the vampire looked even younger. Eva Savinien was tall: her 'Genevieve' costume made the real woman seem like Little Orphan Elsie dressed in a grown-up's gown. Genevieve fussed with the belt and raised the hemline above her ankles.

  'That's better,' she said. 'Now I don't have to wade.'

  Detlef knew he was scratching his bites.

  The fact that Genevieve was back was enormous. It could change anything, or mean nothing. He was tantalised, which was doubtless the point. In vampire terms, a ten-year absence might be the equivalent of him nipping out for a pouch of ready-rubbed from the tobacco merchant on Luitpoldstrasse and dawdling a bit in a cafe on the way back. Genevieve might move back in here for good and give in and marry him, but she might also disappear before the 'platz clock struck midnight and never think of him again.

  That wasn't fair. She thought of him, obviously.

  She was here.

  She moved swiftly about the room, doing that vampire act of shifting at speed between languid poses so that she seemed to vanish and appear all over the place. It was a habit of hers when she was excited. Or just-fed. She kept asking questions about mutual friends and acquaintances.

  'And young Prince Luitpold, how is he?'

  'Otherwise engaged for our first night, it seems. Tio Bland is listened to at the palace.'

  'That's their loss. I'd thought better of the boy.'

  'Not a boy any more. He looks like a juvenile lead.'

  'I hope they let him have some fun before marrying him off to Clothilde of Averheim.'

  'He's rather taken with Eva.'

  Genevieve laughed, like music. Detlef recalled she had never warmed to Eva Savinien. It was understandable: while possessed by something left behind by the Great Enchanter, Eva had tried to kill them both.
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br />   'Eva plays me, I gather.'

  'She's very good. Got over that whole brouhaha with the animus and the Trapdoor Daemon. She's undoubtedly the best you since, well, since you.'

  'I am retired from the stage. I had a very limited range. I could only play myself.'

  'That's the story with half the great stars of the theatre.'

  She settled in the chair that had been warmed by Temple Father Bland.

  Reality crept back. He had been dazzled a while by the delight of having her here. Now he remembered the danger.

  'Gene, you know it's not safe in the city for, ah, people like you.'

  'Bretonnian girls? That's not news. Our governesses tell us from infancy about the perils awaiting in Altdorf for innocent mademoiselles fresh off the barge.'

  'Vampires, Gene. This Clause 17 business'

  'Whose bloody silly idea was that? I tell you, if I'd signed a petition in favour of it I'd be utterly ashamed and prostrate with apology.'

  She peeped out at him from under a curtain of drying hair.

  'You're teasing.'

  'You're scowling. Wind'll change and your face'll set.'

  'Not my face. I'm a master of disguise. You're the one who can't change her looks.'

  She made a vampire mask, flared eyebrows and fangs.

  'See, I'm a monster. Fit only to be ashes or under the ground.'

  Then she poked her tongue out.

  'You could have stayed in the forests, or gone back to that convent at the other end of the world. All this would have passed and you'd be safe again.'

  Suddenly, she was serious.

  'Detlef, I've had enough of hiding, of being safe. What if Glinka's moral crusade came back and all theatrical performances were prohibited? Do you think you'd be happy in a monastery waiting for it to pass? You know you'd organise plays in the back-rooms of inns and woodland clearings and anywhere you could gather an audience. If they sent you to the headsman for being an actor, you'd deliver a soliloquy from the block and wouldn't shut up for a full fifteen minutes after the axe had fallen. It's like that with me. I can't pretend I'm what I'm not.'

  'You weren't always a vampire.'

  'Like you weren't always an actor. I was a child once. Most of us were. Now I'm well I'm'

  'Genevieve Sandrine de Pointe du Lac Dieudonne.'

  'You remember all of it. Darling, you're the only one who does.'

  She was over the desk and in his lap. His mouth was on hers, carefully. He remembered how to kiss her without getting cut open.

  'You're still thirsty,' he whispered, 'not for beef tea.'

  'I can't ask you for that,' she said, suddenly sounding old.

  'You can't ask me to let you starve.'

  Her forehead wrinkled as he pulled his collar away from his neck.

  'Gene, bite me. You won't really have come back until you do.'

  She pulled away from him, wiped her hair out of her face and looked close into his eyes, running her fingernails across the furrows around his temples and into his hair. Her face was in shadow, but her eyes shone green as the southern sea.

  'You haven't changed,' she said.

  She pounced like a cat and her teeth slipped into his neck.

  He held her tight as his blood pulsed into her mouth, feeling her ribs with his elbows, his hands knotted in her hair.

  He told her he loved her. She murmured and he knew what she meant.

  VI

  Detlef's office wasn't a boudoir. Genevieve knew he wouldn't have a divan in there, he was fed up with jokes about eager young actresses and the casting couch. They would have to make do with his padded chair and the broad top of the desk.

  Without detaching her mouth from his rich throat, she slid out of her loose dress and helped him with his clothes. There was more of him than she remembered, and he complained about his back when she dragged him out of the chair, but nothing had changed between them.

  She couldn't keep her hands off him, though she had to be careful about her talons. It was too easy to get carried away.

  'This is the second most impressive organ of maleness I've got a hold on this evening,' she said.

  He looked at her oddly.

  'Wrong time for that story,' she admitted.

  'You can't expect me to let it lie at a time like this,' he said. 'Look at it from my position.'

  'I'm not naked flat on my back on a desk with a vampire nuzzling my throat.'

  Surprisingly, with the agility of his old stage heroes, Detlef heaved her off him and reversed their positions, pinning her like a wrestler. He carefully lowered himself onto her and started tickling the hollow of her own throat with his beard.

  'This torture continues until you talk, vampire wench.'

  She laughed and gave in. 'I had to climb the statue of Sigmar in the 'platz.'

  'Oh no, not the one with the enormous×'

  'Oh yes. That one.'

  'Holy hammer of Sigmar!'

  'Absolutely.'

  Then, with an ease that comes from practice, his own hammer struck her anvil.

  With his blood in her, she was stronger, faster, better. But it was his life that infused her, the peppery tang of everything that he was. When younger, he used to introduce himself as 'Detlef Sierck, genius'. Then, it had been a defence against criticism. Now, when he mostly passed himself off as a hack, it was true. She tasted the poetry he hadn't yet written.

  Most of the night passed. Detlef dozed between exertions, but she became more awake as moonlight shone in through the office window.

  'You've not said why you're here,' he murmured.

  'In Altdorf? In the Vargr Breughel?'

  'Both. Either.'

  'Don't be upset, but I came to see someone who isn't you.'

  He was fully awake again. She'd known that would sting.

  'There's someone else?'

  'Not like that. Believe me, there's no one else like you. Strange as it seems, you come along only once in even a lifetime like mine. I've come to see another vampire. A very important one.'

  'Here?'

  He looked around, shivering.

  'Uh-huh,' she said. 'Under your own roof, passing for alive.'

  'Impossible!'

  He got off the desk and began pulling on his trews. She whipped into the dress. Vampire swiftness took the drudgery out of all those dozens of little hooks and buttons. She was dressed before he could get to his smock, and helped him into it like a mother with a baby.

  'It's that Sylvanian scene-shifter, isn't it?' blurted Detlef.

  'No, no, Renastic isn't the vampire who sent for me.'

  They weren't alone in the room. Genevieve wasn't sure when the other had crept in. For modesty's sake, she hoped it had only been within the last few minutes.

  'It's about time, granddaughter-in-darkness,' said the high, familiar voice.

  Genevieve looked at a shadowed corner and there she was. Her little face was silvered in the moonlight.

  'Elsie?' blurted Detlef, aghast. 'Little Orphan Elsie?'

  'I'd best make an introduction,' said Genevieve. 'This is the sire of my sire, the Lady Melissa d'Acques. She's an elder, one of the senior vampires of the Known World.'

  'You're t-t-twelve,' sputtered Detlef. 'That's what you said. And you lost your parents in a coach accident.'

  'I'm well over eleven hundred, actually. And I did lose my parents in a coach accident, only it happened a very long time ago. I've quite got over it. Most important things happened long enough ago for me to get over them. But I'm fed up with all the fetching and carrying you and that goat Fritz have had me do these last weeks, while I was waiting for my dear grand-get to arrive. It's sheer exploitation of child labour, that's what it is.'

  Detlef lay back down on the desk and covered his eyes.

  'I don't know why he's so upset,' said Lady Melissa. 'I let you love-bats have enough canoodling-time together before pushing in so we can get on with the matter for which I summoned you.'

  'I'm dreaming,' he said. '
This isn't happening.'

  'Don't mind him,' Genevieve told Lady Melissa. 'He's a genius. You have to make allowances.'

  'We didn't have geniuses in my day.'

  Detlef groaned.

  Genevieve swept the very old lady up in her arms and danced her around the room like a real little girl. Lady Melissa was all right if you could get her to smile and be playful for a while. When she was serious, people tended to die.

  'I've missed you too, grand-mama,' she said, kissing Lady Melissa's cold cheek.

  VII

  'We missed you at the last gathering,' the Lady Melissa told her grand-get. 'Elder vampires from all over the Known World were represented at the Convent of Eternal Night and Solace.'

  The girl had the decency to look a touch guilty. Her fat human pet was merely puzzled. Melissa knew it was rarely much use explaining anything to shortlivers. In this case, she would probably have to spell it out letter by letter: a daywalking serf was sadly going to be a necessity.

  'I was travelling, grand-mama. I didn't receive my invitation until it was too late.'

  She knew better than to credit that, but didn't mind.

  'I can't blame you, child. There's nothing more boring than a gathering of elder vampires. Believe me, I've suffered enough of them in my centuries. All those long grey faces and ragged black cloaks. The stag-at-rut jousts as two old fools get in a squabble about some mortal morsel. You hear the same stories over and over. Mostly, yarns about how we didn't really lose the Undead Wars blah blah blah and are just biding our time before we emerge from our mountain fastnesses and take up rightful positions as rulers of humanity blah blah blah fountains of virgin blood as our right delivered up by the unworthy blah blah blah enough to make you stuff your ears with wax and spend a century sulking in a tomb hoping the prattle will end.'

  Sierck was still looking strangely at her. She bugged her eyes out back at him and he flinched.

  'Pity the poor little orphan, sirrah,' she said in her squeaky, whiny Elsie voice. All these supposed theatre folk around and no one had seen through her. 'I've had to chase rats, you know. This hasn't been easy for me.'

  'I'm terribly sorry, ah, my lady.'

  'And well you might be, shortlife. But you're just a blood-cow. You'll be gone in a few years.'