Light erupted behind Iosef’s eyes and consumed everything: the cloud, the blood, the chapel, the world. Everything but Sophio’s voice, still whispering over and over again:
“Iosef, Iosef, Iosef.”
* * * *
“Brother?”
Iosef felt a hand strike him across the cheek, and he jerked awake. He sensed a shape hovering over him. Had he not recognized the voice as Luka’s, he would have struck out blindly, and that would have been unfortunate. But he shuddered violently as he held back his impulse of self-defense, and a few seconds later, his eyes focused on Luka’s face where it hovered over his.
“Luka,” Iosef said, exhaling.
“Ah, you live,” Luka replied.
“I do,” Iosef agreed. “What happened?”
“You collapsed,” Luka said. “One moment you were standing. When next I looked, you were on the floor. I did not see the cause. I was preoccupied with other concerns.” He nodded toward the corpses that lay near the bonfire.
“Of course.” Iosef frowned. He could not clearly remember what had happened to cause his unconsciousness. A head injury, perhaps. That was the most likely. “Still, no matter. I am recovered from whatever took me.”
Iosef accepted Luka’s hand and stood. He stretched and looked around. Von Steiersberg and his men were dead, their bodies scattered about the chapel. Iosef vaguely remembered strangling Von Steiersberg, but the memory was clouded and indistinct. Something about the memory made Iosef look toward the altar, expecting to see something he did not find. Instead, it was absence that proved the most intriguing.
The altar was empty and clean.
“Where is all the blood?” Iosef asked aloud.
“The blood?” Luka glanced at the altar and frowned. “Ah, I see. That is strange.”
Blood from Count Erdelyi had pooled on the floor, and a spattering of droplets from the late Stanislav dotted the stones all around, but the altar itself was untouched. A curiosity, but not one that Iosef had time to investigate.
“Where is the boy?” Iosef asked.
Luka pointed past the altar. Iosef advanced a few steps and saw Friedrich seated on the ground next to Stanislav’s body, cradling Erzsebet as she sobbed into his shoulder. Friedrich was silent, but his face, too, was wet with tears. He had bandaged his wounded forearm with a piece cut from his shirt, but having attended to his injury, he now seemed to have lost all concern for his own condition as he comforted his friend.
“And Varanus?”
“Did someone call my name?” Varanus asked from behind him.
Iosef turned and saw her approaching from the bonfire. It seemed that she had returned from her chase by the main door. Varanus’s dress was torn open in places, and it was covered in blood, but she did not seem troubled. Her wounds were closed, and she walked with a kind of meandering gait, like someone caught in a haze of intoxication. Perhaps the struggle with Julius had proved more taxing than expected. Iosef was suddenly reminded of his own ordeal in the bookstore, but if Varanus had been poisoned, it would soon pass.
“Are you well, Varanus?” Iosef asked, hurrying to meet her.
Varanus took his hand and looked into his eyes, smiling. “I am marvelous!” she answered. “I feel like I am floating on a cloud. A delicious cloud made of.…” A thought interrupted her and she suddenly asked, “Where is Alistair?”
“Friedrich!” Iosef called to the boy.
Friedrich and Erzsebet slowly stood, leaning on each other for support. Iosef was reminded of the great fragility of mortals. Even after Sophio’s death, he had managed to trek from the Kazakh Steppe to the Caucasus in order to warn the Shashavani before he finally succumbed to the wages of his grief. But then, mortals were mortal. That fact might be tiring, but it could not be helped.
“Mother?” Friedrich exclaimed. He hurried to meet her, his expression pale with horror. “Oh, God, Mother, the blood!”
“Hmm?” Varanus mused. She looked down at her dress and blinked a few times. “Oh, yes, of course.” She gave her son a very serious look and said, “It is not mine, I promise you.”
Friedrich sighed with relief. “Oh, thank God.”
In Svanish, Varanus said to Iosef, “It is my blood, actually.”
“Yes, I know,” Iosef murmured. “Is Julius dead?”
“Dead and delicious,” came the reply. Then Varanus reverted to German and touched her son’s cheek. “Oh, but Alistair, you’re not hurt, are you? Those bruises!”
“I am unharmed, Mother, I swear it,” Friedrich protested. As he spoke, Erzsebet joined the group and, shuddering, wrapped her arms around him, like one trying to hide from the world. Friedrich held her and gently brushed her hair. He looked back at the others and asked, “What are we to do now?”
“Hide the bodies?” Luka suggested.
Iosef exhaled. “No, that is an unnecessary exercise. We could put them in the fire, but truly I am more inclined to leave them as they are, to be discovered in their full regalia.”
“Why?” Varanus asked, tilting her head with pronounced interested.
“Because then the family will have great reason to conceal the whole thing,” Iosef said. “They will not want a proper investigation lest details of this peculiar witchery become revealed.”
“Do you think the family is also a part of this?” Luka asked.
Iosef looked at Erzsebet and smiled. The girl drew back and quickly looked away.
“I suspect that Friedrich’s friend knows the answer to that,” he mused.
“What do you mean?” Friedrich demanded, looking at Erzsebet and then back at Iosef.
“Her father was one of them,” Iosef explained, “and he clearly expected her to play a role in all of this.”
“Now look here!” Friedrich snapped, rushing to Erzsebet’s defense.
“Alistair, hold your tongue,” Varanus told him sternly.
“Hold my…? Now look here—”
“It is not important,” Iosef interrupted. “We do not have time for such a conversation now. It will wait until we are in Prague, safely away from this place and any association our presence might create should we be discovered.”
“You wish to simply leave, brother?” Luka asked. He sounded disappointed, which did not surprise Iosef. “That is, if the family is complicit too.…”
“We came to kill Julius and to rescue the girl,” Iosef reminded him. “Our work done, I wish to be away from this place before sunrise and before anyone can investigate the sound of gunfire.”
“What about Stanislav?” Erzsebet asked softly.
“What about him? He is dead,” Varanus remarked. “We cannot rescue him now.”
“We leave him, obviously,” Iosef said.
“What?” Friedrich cried. “No!”
The boy’s impertinence tickled Iosef’s ire, but he calmed himself. Instead, he simply asked, “Do you propose to carry your friend’s corpse all the way to Prague? Do you think that, perhaps, might raise a few suspicions?”
“Well…I…” Friedrich stammered.
Erzsebet blinked a few times to dispel her tears. “He is right,” she said, her voice shaking. “We cannot take him home for burial. He is dead and he must be left here and it is all my fault!”
“No, no, no, not your fault,” Friedrich murmured and held her tightly as she cried into his shoulder.
With the boy and the girl thankfully distracted, Iosef returned to the immediate concern: how to return home without being either identified or connected with the deaths.
“Shall I fetch the wagon?” Luka asked.
“It’s probably safest if we walk to it,” Varanus noted, though her attention was elsewhere. She was gazing off into the distance beyond the altar.
“True,” Iosef said. “I prefer not to trouble the horse in the dark any more than is necessary. We must ask
it to go a long way.”
“Königsberg is not so far,” Luka reminded.
“We are not going to Königsberg,” Iosef told him. “Consider: a group of strangers arrive in the city the same night that Julius von Raabe is killed, and then that same group departs the following day? No, better we disappear and are forgotten. We will take the wagon west and return to Prague via a different railway from a different city.”
“Prudent,” Luka agreed. “And we should obtain some new clothes before we are seen too much in public. Blood and holes do not make inconspicuous clothing.”
Varanus blinked a few times and lifted her skirt slightly to study it. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “I thought it looked rather nice.”
“Are you certain you are feeling yourself, Varanus?” Iosef asked.
“Why, I have never felt better,” Varanus replied. She took Iosef hands and grinned at him in a manner that gave Iosef an uncomfortable turn. “And I can tell you truly, My Lord, I think that I should very much like to feel this way again. You must try it!”
Poison, Iosef confirmed to himself. There can be no doubt.
But at least that would pass soon enough, even if she had been subjected to a greater dose of the substance than Iosef had suffered in the shop. However virulent, all toxins eventually left the Living. Eventually.
“Thank you, no, Varanus,” Iosef said to her. “Perhaps another time.”
“Mmm,” Varanus agreed. Still smiling, she glanced toward the altar, and her expression became puzzled. “Wasn’t there blood on the altar?”
“There was and yet now it is gone,” Iosef answered. “My curiosity would bid me stay and examine it fully to determine the cause, but my good sense counsels otherwise. Better to escape now and return later, in smaller company.”
“Sensible,” Varanus agreed.
A thought occurred to Iosef and he asked, “Varanus, where is Julius’s body?”
“In the great hall,” Varanus replied, pointing toward the door. “Why?”
“Because I suspect he has something on his person that I wish to retrieve,” Iosef told her. “It was the reason for our coming to Prague in the first place, so it would be foolish to leave here without it.”
* * * *
Iosef arrived in the great hall, finding his way by the light of a torch. He would meet the others at the castle gate shortly, but first he intended to retrieve Julius’s amulet. It would have been his had Hoffmann not died before Iosef could take possession of it. He would now correct that error.
The hall was dark as pitch as Iosef entered, darker than he remembered from their arrival. Glancing upward, Iosef realized that he could no longer see the stars. It was like a stain of ink spilled across the sky.
Julius lay in the center of the room, surrounded by blood. It had pooled around his head and shoulders like a dull crimson halo. More blood had been splattered across the floor stones all around, spilled by violence and likely not from him. Iosef knelt and smelled one of the drying clusters. It belonged to Varanus. That was not surprising given the state of Varanus’s clothes. She had fought Julius, and he had wounded her time and time again before she finally bested him.
It was strange to think of the Living being almost undone by mortals, but again Iosef remembered the fight in the bookstore. Only three mortals had managed to very nearly kill him. Julius must have used the same toxin on Varanus that his men had used on Iosef.
The sacrificial knife lay next to Julius, also covered in blood. Iosef picked it up and sniffed at it cautiously. He smelled both Varanus and Julius, but no discernable poison. Still, that meant nothing. The toxin might be odorless, or it might have been wiped clean by its successive uses.
Iosef looked at Julius and saw traces of joy in his lifeless eyes and a grin on his unmoving lips. Despite all reason, he had died happily, even while being bled to death. And Varanus had drunk deeply of her enemy. What little blood remained had formed the peculiar near-perfect circle around Julius’s head, but there was little of that. Otherwise, the corpse was completely bloodless. Varanus had drunk her fill and more, until nothing remained.
She must have been severely injured in the fight to have needed so much blood.
But there were more important matters to consider. Iosef reached into Julius’s robe and began searching for the amulet. It was impossible that Julius would not have it with him during the ceremony, being so plainly a devoted follower of his imagined god. And indeed, it was there, concealed in a pocket just over Julius’s heart.
How sentimental, Iosef thought.
As he reached for the amulet, his torch flickered in the breeze, and the chaos of the feeble firelight made it seem that the shadows were closing in around him. He touched the amulet’s metal, and he heard the wind whisper his name.
Iosef.
Iosef froze and closed his eyes. It had been a long and harrowing two days. But it was foolishness to let the superstitions of his enemies cloud his own judgment. Wind was wind, fire was fire, and shadows were shadows.
He took Julius’s amulet and tucked it into his coat pocket, where it rested next to its twin. Iosef stood and walked from the hall as the shadows parted before him.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Now then,” Iosef said to Erzsebet, as he sat in the chair across from her, “I would like you to tell me, in your own time and in your own words, about your family’s cult.”
The girl fidgeted and stared at the sitting room wallpaper as she nervously played with her fingertips. Iosef gave her a smile that he meant to be reassuring but which might not have been so. It was an unaccustomed expression, especially in recent years.
“Must we do this?” asked the one called Zoya. Both she and Friedrich had insisted on being present for the interview, and as their presence seemed to calm Erzsebet, Iosef had allowed it. Still, he did not like how crowded the sitting room had become as a result. If they proved an impediment, he would have them removed without a second thought.
“Yes,” Iosef answered coldly.
There was a lengthy pause as Zoya waited for more, perhaps expecting an explanation that neither she nor the boy had the right to demand.
“Oh,” she finally said. Turning her attention to Erzsebet, she put her arm around the girl and told her, “You do not have to do this, you know.”“She does,” Iosef corrected.
“You cannot force her to speak if she isn’t ready, Iosef,” Friedrich insisted.
To be addressed in such familiar terms by the boy made Iosef bristle, but at least it was his proper name. Ten years earlier in London, Friedrich had repeatedly mispronounced it as “Joseph”, so this was some improvement.
“Come now, Friedrich,” Iosef replied, smiling a little more, “surely the correct term is ‘Father’, as your mother and I are married. My son.”
Now it was Friedrich’s turn the bristle, which Iosef allowed himself to enjoy. But he was surprised when Friedrich did not lose his temper. The boy simply nodded politely and said:
“Of course, Father.” But tact and politeness were not to be interpreted as passivity. “You cannot force her to answer your questions if she is unready or unwilling to speak.”
“I marched to the far side of Poland to rescue her from her father, Friedrich,” Iosef answered sternly. “I risked my life against armed men to free her from a pagan ritual that she clearly understood.” He turned his gaze toward Erzsebet and said, “I am quite within my rights to demand an explanation, especially while she remains hidden from her enemies in my house.”
Erzsebet looked away from the wallpaper and met Iosef’s eyes. She nodded slowly. “He is right, Friedrich,” she murmured. She took a deep breath and looked at Iosef again. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything, of course,” Iosef told her.
There was a moment of hesitation as Erzsebet gathered her thoughts. “My family belongs to a…a society that believes i
n the existence of a god older than any recorded religion. It has been known by many names. You might have heard it called the Dark Faun or the Black Goat. My father said that when the Slavs discovered the god, they called it the ‘Horned Serpent’ and tried to banish it to the underworld, but in the end they could not escape its reach: the faithful of the Horned Serpent simply chose the Slavs’ own god Veles and worshipped their master under that name. My father said that this has been done in every faith and in every tongue. Even he did not know how many of us there are, all worshipping the same god through different guises all across the world.”
“Have you ever met followers of a different guise?” Iosef asked.
“No,” Erzsebet admitted, sounding embarrassed. Perhaps she realized how far-fetched the tale was; though, having been told it since childhood, she had no doubt accepted the story as true. “I only ever met members of our own society. The Von Steiersbergs, the Von Raabes, the Petrescus—”
“I would like a full list of the names you remember,” Iosef told her, “but we will come to that later.”
“There were not many…that I recall,” Erzsebet said evasively, her gaze again shifting away from him and to the walls, hovering somewhere in the vicinity of a darkened corner where there was nothing to trouble her.
“As many as you remember,” Iosef insisted. “But later.” He paused. “When were you inducted into the…society?”
As that was the term she had used, he used it as well rather than the dismissive title of ‘cult’. This seemed to calm her slightly, and she answered with only a little uncertainty.
“I am told I was inducted as soon as I was born,” Erzsebet told him. “Something like a baptism, but I do not remember it.”
“A baptism?”
Erzsebet nodded a little. “So that the god might know me, even before I could take the vow of faith.”
“Vow of faith?” Iosef asked, intrigued.
Erzsebet shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself, staring at the corner again. Zoya hugged the girl tightly and whispered in her ear, trying to sooth her.
“We will address details of ritual later,” Iosef said in his reassuring voice. Preferably when there were no extraneous distractions. “But there was an induction ritual?”
A Sojourn in Bohemia Page 28
