The Brothers Cabal (12 page)

‘She certainly did,' agreed Horst. He grimaced slightly, a man finding a strawberry pip stuck between his teeth. He coughed once, then again more violently, and spat into his hand. He held his expectorate up between thumb and forefinger—more solid than one might expect, and slightly shiny. ‘Ah. A souvenir. A .32-calibre, I think. The other did me the decency of going straight through. So, yes. She shot me, and you can see the good it did her.'

‘Where is she?' repeated Devlin, low and threatening.

Horst tutted, a first-class passenger who has just discovered some ruffian in his train carriage. ‘I threw her out of the window. I heard a splash after a few seconds.' He rocked his head while he recollected the moment. ‘Quite a few seconds. You don't realise how high we are here until you throw somebody out of the window.'

And here he paused, and looked significantly at Devlin.

‘She still managed to shoot you.' Devlin's wolfishness was slightly in abeyance, the muzzle shortened, the hair less flowing. Horst hoped he wasn't going to change all the way back, since he was naked, and Horst had endured enough unpleasantness for one evening.

‘I was distracted by the commotion in the hall,' explained Horst, keeping his tone light and bantering enough to be profoundly insulting without being obviously so.

Horst was also playing for time a little. He was concentrating on regenerating the torn and friction-burnt skin of his hand where the rope had been wrapped around it, and where the length secured around the balustrades had argued with him for a second as he snapped it off. These tattered shreds of expensive silken climbing rope now lay under him on the chair. He hoped Alisha had shown enough aplomb under pressure to dump the bulk of the rope into the river, or he might find himself faced with some difficult questions as to its provenance. ‘That man Herman. Your travelling dog show seemed to come off second best there. Just as well m'Lady Misericorde was to hand with her shambling entourage or I might have had to deal with him, too.'

This barb landed, and Devlin's still very lupine ears folded back with anger. ‘He had silver bullets!'

Horst held up the bullet again, scratched at its side with his thumbnail, and showed the resulting gleam to Devlin. ‘So did my former maid. It didn't slow me down greatly.' He smiled complacently and, he gauged, infuriatingly. ‘I really must crack on and create some new vampires as we're obviously going to need them. Not too quickly, though. I'll be careful about who I choose for the honour. Don't want to let just anyone in, do we?'

This, at last, was too much for Devlin, who turned on his heel and stamped out all of a dudgeon. Horst was displeased that such was the state of his metamorphosis by this point that Devlin was showing very little tail and far too much buttock cleavage. ‘Don't forget to shut the door!' he called after the retreating werewolf. ‘I am temporarily without staff.'

The door slammed, and Horst—perhaps forgivably, perhaps not—laughed.

 

Chapter 5

IN WHICH HORST CLIMBS A WALL AND DISCOMFORTS A WEREWOLF

It took perhaps twenty minutes before it occurred to anyone that it might be a good idea to see if there was any trace of Alisha beneath Horst's window and, when they did, they neglected to bring along any of Devlin's gang of shapechangers who might have been able to find a scent. There was no body and no rope in evidence, and they accepted Horst's story without demur, two bullet wounds and a scowling vampire lord being sufficient to close that avenue of inquiry.

Horst changed his shirt and, his hand having already healed, he applied his will to knitting the chest wounds shut. It proved tiring and, although he was able to close them, they were a long way short of healed. He obviously needed more blood.

He made do with some gauze and surgical tape he found in a first aid box. The front wounds were easy enough, but the exit wound through his right lung proved awkward to get at and he spent a frustrating quarter of an hour puppeteering a dressing into position using far too much tape and the bathroom mirror. Not for the first time, he was relieved that the tale about vampires casting no reflection was—for his brand of bloodsucker at least—not true.

For the first time Horst was beginning to see that the true weakness of a vampire is not all the business with bursting into flame in direct sunlight, inconvenient though it may be. Nor was it a vulnerability to stakes through the heart as, when one pauses to really think about it, that's rather a vulnerability of all animals. Astonishing yet true. Running water did not hinder him, nor did holy water or garlic cause him any great dismay beyond ‘Oh, I'm wet' and ‘Oh, that's quite smelly'. In short, being a vampire was not nearly as unpleasant as it might have been but for the one great weakness that was the reliance on human blood.

Horst had experimented with the blood of other animals, but quite apart from the inconvenience of stalking a sleeping horse or cow and the difficulty of penetrating horsehair or cowhide with fangs that aren't all that long really, the result did not warrant the trouble. Their blood was foul, and offered little sustenance. Human vampires had evolved or been created—depending on which authority one listened to—to predate on humans only. It was a nuisance, but there it was. A very great nuisance.

He had been able to work around it in his previous existence. The life of a travelling vaudevillian with a carnival moving around the countryside had been ideal. He had taken a little here, a little there, gently erasing memories of his semi-willing donors, women all, leaving just a pleasant and pleasurable reminiscence of some feverish canoodling with a tall, handsome man in the shadows behind the Ghost Train. Not having a carnival to hand, he was at a loss as to how to refill his veins without resorting to the kindnesses of the
Ministerium Tenebrae
. To do so would exacerbate the vulnerability that already troubled him. They would smile and bow and fetch him some blood from somewhere. From someone. Who knew what horrors they were perfectly delighted to commit on his behalf in the castle dungeons? However they did it, he would ultimately be responsible.

Possible alternatives, however, seemed little better. He could haunt the corridors and take, as was his wont, a little here and a little there, endangering no one. Yet this was not a regimen he could practise for long before he was leaving everyone around the place looking terribly anaemic. Another alternative …

He finished dressing and went out of his apartments. His path took him by the hall in which Herman had mounted his last stand and Horst paused to look down at the site of the little battle. It was predictably and, Horst found, dispiritingly clean. No sign of Herman's blood and brains, nor the blood of the werewolf whom he had slain, nor of grave mould from Lady Misericorde's platoon of walking dead. The cleaning staff here were clearly efficient, thorough, and unsurprised by such things.

Thinking of the shambling, implacable horde of revenants put him once again in mind of his brother, Johannes, and the acidic disdain in which he held such things. Apparently it was relatively easy to create zombies of that ilk, but they were so mindless and divorced from the truly living that Johannes regarded them as a frippery, a silly trick to impress the peasantry. It was plain that Lady Misericorde held no such foibles. She was an impure creature in so many ways.

Horst found his breathing had deepened and shook himself from a reverie that was loitering on the outskirts of luridness.

He pushed himself away from the railing and wandered off with no great intention of going anywhere especially. The corridors were not anonymous, littered with distinctive bric-a-brac that made navigation easy. A suit of armour with a helmet visored with a bear's likeness here, an occasional table decorated with a vase of only slightly dusty silk flowers there. He wandered past them all, unconsciously noting them, but otherwise steeped in thought and a growing hunger.

After some ten minutes, the unending artificiality of his surroundings began to wear on him and he sought the open air. This he gained through a door into an unoccupied suite of rooms less imposing yet more impressive than his own. Here the ceiling was at a slightly more human height although still high, with delicate renderings in blue and white set into the plaster. It all seemed very grandiose and, given the number of visitors of one hue or another that the castle was currently enjoying, a little odd that it was vacant. He walked silently amid the furniture, all of it bulky and anonymous beneath dust sheets. Still, it had what he most desired at that moment, a wide set of windows opening onto a balcony three times the size of the one in his chambers.

The doors out onto the balcony were unlocked and the handles moved easily beneath his hands as he opened them and stepped out into the coolness of the night air. He looked up at first, at the almost clear sky, the harshly glittering stars only occasionally occluded by dashing rags of high cloud. A gibbous moon hung over the scene, soaking the world in an unhealthy blue-white glow. Then Horst looked down and was surprised to find the city below spread out before him. The river ran narrow here—no more than thirty feet across—and was crossed a little to his left by a covered stone bridge that finished in a drawbridge. This, he noted, was up. Beyond it lay a great square that must have been impressive when occupied by a crowd, or a market, or even when empty. Now, however, it was home to a shantytown of sorts. He looked down at the few figures wandering hither and yon, and the fires that glowed in front of some of the lean-tos and caravans that made up this temporary addition to the permanent fibre of the city.

Not
that
permanent, Horst had to admit to himself as he looked at the buildings that bordered that square on three sides. Several seemed to have been abandoned to squatters and looters, holes poked in the rooves by ridge-walking thieves and the actions of unmitigated weather. It was a sad sight. When it was all in repair it would have been as pretty as a picture on a box of reasonably expensive biscuits, he was sure. To see it dying, the ribs poking through the skin, was horrible. Those poor people down there, living hand to mouth in the ruins of their lives.

He watched a young woman carrying a bucket to the municipal pump. That, at least, was still working. She hung the bucket over the nozzle and started pushing down hard on the pump handle. He could hear the water rushing in short, energetic bursts into the waiting steel. Those poor people. He could see her back curve in the moonlight as she put her weight into it. Those poor, poor people. He could almost hear her heart rate increasing, could almost hear how her pulse hammered. Those poor, poor, vulnerable people …

Horst closed his eyes and carefully released his grip on the balcony rail. The words Alisha had spoken to him barely an hour before echoed in his head. When the
Ministerium
were sure that they could trust him, they'd let him loose on the town to feed, and to recruit. It wasn't that they could think such a thing appalled him now. Not nearly so much as how reasonable it all sounded to him at that hungry moment.

He clenched the rail again until he could feel flakes of paint crackling from it. A marred coat of paint seemed a small price to pay for a moment's stillness inside him.

Across the night air, he could hear distant cries from the city, laughter, even some music, and this calmed him. Human durability, the knack of being able to make merry amid the ruins, was heartening and, although he didn't realise it then, reminded him that these were not herd animals to be hunted. Once, he had not been so very different from them.

He could hear an argument going on, too, and in his meditative state he did not understand immediately that it was not wafting up from the fragrant stews of the city below, but rather from the castle above. He leaned out a little and looked upwards. Across the castle's frontage, some fifty yards away and a floor further up, a window stood open, and through it he could make out the voices of the
Ministerium Tenebrae
. They did not sound angry nearly so much as worried, perhaps even a shade panicked. It was not the image they had gone to such lengths to portray earlier, as efficient, emotionless, and rational. Surely a couple of spies in their midst had not caused such disarray, he wondered. Especially given that, to their imperfect knowledge, both were dead. So, why the raised voices?

He closed his eyes and focussed his senses, but the light wind blew their words away but for the occasional snatch of speech. ‘Inconceivable,' he heard. ‘Loyalties lie.' ‘Procedures.' It was provocative to his curiosity, and for once his curiosity and his self-interest were perfectly aligned.

The castle was the best maintained of all the buildings he could see, but it was old and the stonework was rendered imperfect by the actions of time and climate. A human with the privilege of walking in daylight without igniting like a perambulatory Roman candle would rightly have regarded the ascent and traverse of such a distance without climbing gear as a ridiculously dangerous undertaking. Horst, by contrast, had his shoes, socks, and jacket off in a twinkling and was already making a slow but steady assault on the wall. While he might not be able to transform into a bat or a large black dog, Horst thought to himself as he made a diagonal beeline across the curtain wall, he at least had the remarkable climbing ability ascribed to some vampires. This was a revelation to him, as he had never previously known cause requiring him to impersonate a great gecko. Now that the talent was revealed, it was actually rather fun. Possibly not as much fun as turning into a bat, but one takes amusement where one finds it.