The Hollow Prince

by Mark Teppo

  Table of Contents

  WOLVES, IN DARKNESS

  DEATH

  SEQUENCE

  UPON DRINKING A HALF GLASS OF THE OLDE SATURNINE TOADE

  THE SURGERY OF SELF

  THE LOST TECHNIQUE OF BLACKMAIL

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE COURT OF LIES

  PART TWO:

  THE HOLLOW PRINCE

  Mark Teppo

  FAIRWOOD PRESS

  Bonney Lake, WA

  The Hollow Prince is the second act of Mark Teppo's first collection, The Court of Lies. These six stories wander into strange cities—urban spaces where wolves live, where the sky bends back on itself, and where the back alleys hide dangerous remnants of old dreams. These are stories of liars, heartbreakers, and fabulists; the way they see the world is undoubtedly the way it truly is.

  Welcome back to the Court of Lies. The Hollow Prince is your guide, and you should not trust his disarming smile . . .

  THE HOLLOW PRINCE

  A Fairwood Press e-book

  September 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Mark Teppo

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Fairwood Press

  21528 104th Street Court East

  Bonney Lake, WA 98391

  www.fairwoodpress.com

  Cover illustration and design by Neal Von Flue

  First Fairwood Press Edition: October 2013

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-225-9

  Electronic Edition by Baen Books

  http://www.baen.com

  WOLVES, IN DARKNESS

  I.

  From darkness into light. That rushing panic as you remember how to breathe. Your skin, pricked by the points of a thousand needles. Your heart, a supercharged piston pounding in your chest. A vise, loosened one turn from its tight grip on your nuts. And then, finally, after a seeming eternity, the basal senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch. Yes, this is where you are.

  The body lay by the fireplace, head canted at a bad angle against the hearthstone. The stone was blacker than it should have been, even in the dim light of the room, and in a final, near palpable click, the disparate streams of sensory input married back into consciousness. The acrid, metallic scent; the Pavlovian response on the back of my tongue; the Chorus shivering up my spine like a string of Chinese firecrackers: blood. A lot of it.

  They hadn’t bothered binding me. Girard’s paralysis magick had been tight and effective. He had nailed me in the throat, and it had gone right down my back, deadening each vertebra like a cascade of falling dominos. And the other one—René, probably—had smothered me with a veil of darkness. It had been a good one-two punch: even though I knew something had been coming, I hadn’t been able to react.

  I wasn’t in the bar’s bathroom any longer. They had moved me while I had been blind and dumb to the world. I was in someone’s home, lying on an old area rug in the living room.

  Me, and the body.

  The Chorus—the captive energy of the old souls that haunted me—twisted at my mental command, flowing into my sight, and the shadows retreated. The color of the lake of blood became a gradient from black to red, supernaturally bright and vibrant across the gash in his throat. He was middle-aged, death adding a decade to his face, and his eyes were still open. Video. I told the Chorus to energize the surface of his eyeballs, highlighting the image frozen there.

  Streamers of pale fire. Sharp shine, like teeth. The rest was a blur.

  Someone banged on the front door of the house. Short, frantic raps; metal against wood. Like the sort you do when you’ve been waiting for a while, when you’ve been polite and no one has answered. “Pierre?” The voice was muffled, but the concern was clear.

  They’ve been knocking. The Chorus slithered along the far wall. The first knock had been what had woken me, summoning me back from the frozen limbo of Girard’s and René’s spells. Patience, starting to wear thin.

  I pushed up to my knees, and noticed how far the blood had spread. It was on my hands and shirt—my coat was gone—and when I touched the side of my head, I felt a stiff patch of hair. Dried enough to be like mud.

  “Pierre?” Insistent now. And more voices behind the first one. Exclamations and outbursts made into a wordless wave by the wall between us.

  Moonlight bled around the curtains of the single window, and distantly behind the swelling wave of panic rising outside the house, I heard the lonely howl of the wolf.

  And suddenly the last image on the dead man’s—Pierre’s—eyeball made sense.

  Loup garou.

  This was the game, then.

  I crab-walked over to the fireplace, detouring around the sprawled body. There was very little blood behind it; the natural slope of the floor had carried most of it toward the center of the room. The Chorus marked the dried spray on the nearby sofa, giving me a mental suggestion of how he had been killed.

  I had been brought here after the fact. My new footprints were the only marks in the large stain. They had dumped me on the edge of the rug so that the sluggish tide of the blood would soak me slowly.

  The stones in the fireplace were black with soot; Pierre had been using it for years, and hadn’t been too fastidious about keeping it clean. I shook the Chorus into my fingers and grabbed for a handful of ash.

  I had very little time and I needed an escape route. Something quick and dirty.

  My teeth started chattering. The sight and scent of all the blood was like throwing out a chum-line for a shark. The Chorus, thrashing against my Will.

  Something quick.

  I started sketching the outline of a circle, my magick energizing the ash so it hung in the air.

  *

  “The town’s benefactor.” Bento noticed my appraisal of the grease-stained oil painting behind the bar. “Colonel-Major Louis-Henri Béchenaux de Mouleydier. A Grumbler in Napoleon’s Old Guard. Never promoted to general, and he survived Waterloo. The very definition of ‘righteous bastard.’” He laughed, and brushed back the ever-present lock of black hair falling over his eyes.

  They were all pretty, but he was the one who paid the most attention to recent fashion trends. Antoine had the zenlike magnetism of the inscrutable. The twins, Henri and Girard, cultivated the lazy and unwashed look that somehow spelled S-E-X; and René overpaid at every opportunity he could, simply so everyone would know how little a fistful of Euros meant to him.

  The indolent, rapacious, and charismatic next generation of the Watchers. Plus one: me. I was the scrappy little mongrel brought along for fun. The fool to the crown princes, the naïve foundling who doesn’t realize he has been sacrificed to wolves.

  We were all Journeymen, early-stage initiates on the path of the Weave. We were aware enough to be Witnesses, and had demonstrated our aptitude and mastery of some of the magickal arts. We were young enough, dumb enough, and knowledgeable enough to think we knew something about the world.

  René, for all his financial flush, had been the last to take the mantle of Journeyman, and we were celebrating. A two-car caravan, southeast out of Paris, a couple of hours into the mountains and forests of the Rhône-Alpes, to a little village that barely registered on the GPS in Antoine’s car.

  “Béchenaux, eh? They named the town after him?” I asked.

  Bento nodded, his fingers drumming on the worn tabletop. “Yeah. You saw the ruins on the way in? Used to be a little keep. He had the townspeople build it for him. This far into the mountains, the
y still believed. Saw Béchenaux as a war hero, even though there was backlash against the Republic following Louis XVIII’s return. Béchenaux, as the stories go, was one of the Old Guard who didn’t retreat when La Haye Sainte fell, but—” Bento shrugged, his lips creasing into a knowing grin. “—somehow he survived. Even when all the others were slaughtered at the farm, at La Belle Alliance.”

  “Walked away from a prisoners’ camp near Waterloo,” Henri interjected. “While the English were busy celebrating and slapping each other on the back, the Colonel-Major quietly killed three men and—” He made a motion with his hand, like a bird gliding on a draft of rising air. “—Gone. Just like that.”

  “Magickal, huh?” I said. “Just like that.”

  “Anyway,” Bento continued. “Béchenaux settled in this area, and stayed off the radar for a few years. However, ultimately he found ‘retirement’ . . . constricting. If he’d been alive six hundred years earlier, he’d just have taken a crusade. But, without that option, he found a different outlet for his . . . aggressive moods.”

  “He built a dungeon,” Henri said. “Under his castle. Hollowed out the whole side of the hill. Goes on forever down there.”

  “I bet it gets real spooky,” I said.

  Henri exchanged a glance with Bento, and they both laughed. The Chorus shivered along the edges of my back teeth, filling my mouth with that hot electric taste of blood and wire.

  This place wasn’t a random stop. They’d been here before.

  A random jaunt away from the Watchful eyes of our masters had seemed like a good way to celebrate our initiation into the outer circle of the Inner Mysteries, but I was starting to wonder if there wasn’t an ulterior motive behind our little adventure.

  Raising my own beer—a bitter maibock, brewed locally—I used the stein as an excuse to look around. Where are the others?

  I spotted Antoine’s blond hair on the other side of the room. He was listening to a pair of women who were trying to impress upon him that they weren’t clueless local girls. They were worldly, these two, and one of them was trying to do something with her foot under the table to demonstrate that fact. A Thai foot massage, or some such thing. Antoine seemed oblivious. But not to me. He caught me looking, and a violet light twinkled in the corner of his left eye.

  “Do you know who he put in his dungeon?” Bento asked.

  “Who?” I put the stein down, still looking. Henri’s brother, Girard, and René were unaccounted for. I tried to recall when I had seen them last. When we had arrived . . . but after that . . .

  “During the last decade of his life,” Bento said, “Béchenaux dedicated himself to hunting werewolves.”

  II.

  The men outside Pierre’s house had some incentive, hearing the howling echo of the wolf, and they gave up on being polite. The jamb in the door frame splintered the second time someone kicked at the door, and on the third try, wood separated. A piece of metal sang off the floor, and the door panel ricocheted off the outer wall as the hinges held. Four men barreled into the narrow living room.

  None of them had given much thought as to how they were going to keep the door closed if there was, indeed, a werewolf outside. Now that they had just kicked it in.

  The sight of their dead friend pushed that concern even further out of their minds.

  Hiding behind the spider web of one of Solomon’s illusions, I shivered as the Chorus tasted their emotional energies. I had better control of them now, but it was still a struggle, especially when I was under duress. Distracted by little things like blood on my shoes, like being set up for a murder charge, like being abandoned in a town filled with the ghosts of old mythologies.

  Werewolves. Soul-eaters. Skin-walkers. Things that go bump in the night.

  Two of the men approached the sprawled body. One of them spotted my tracks, and grabbed the sleeve of the other man. “There.” One of the others had peeked, seen more than his imagination allowed for, and was puking in the corner of the room. The fourth was back by the door, trying to put some distance between himself and the dead man, but unable to leave the room. His lizard brain wouldn’t let him.

  The ash of my magick circle was starting to spark. It wasn’t going to last more than a few seconds.

  The two men in front weren’t distressed enough. They had seen things like this before. They wouldn’t be as easy to panic. The Chorus made a suggestion, painted it in broad, crimson strokes across my vision. I squeezed them, letting the energy of their need drip into an elongated teardrop of force. I wrapped it with a film of Will, and tossed it into the fireplace.

  One of the pair pulled a gun from his jacket pocket, a stubby and functional handgun. The sort that saw regular use and was all the more dependable for it. As my circle of misdirection began to fail, he had sensed something, and when the ash sparked into nothingness, he registered my presence before his eyes completely saw me. The gun came up.

  I moved, ducking and weaving toward the door, putting myself in line with his puking friend, who was only now getting his vomiting under control.

  His partner shouted something, alerting the guy at the door, who started to turn.

  The teardrop of force in the fireplace exploded, throwing a twisting plume of ash and smoke into the room.

  The gun went off, and something sizzled across the top of my shoulder, taking a tiny chunk with it. The Chorus reacted from the bite of the bullet, more than I expected. The back of my tongue stung as if I had just tried to swallow nettles.

  Silver. He actually had silver bullets.

  I lit the Chorus as I hit the guy at the door. His eyes went wide, and his hands came up in an old—and completely instinctive—reaction, adopting a gesture of prayer. I was incandescent, boiling out of a storm of black smoke, and the Chorus touched every childhood terror, every imaginary bogeyman haunting his dreams. I was exactly what he feared to find in the silvered light of the full moon.

  I knocked him over, leaving him with nothing more than a livid impression of fantastic folklore, and bolted down the street. Looking for the shadows. Trying to put some distance between myself and the room with the dead man, before anyone could really notice how much of his blood was on me.

  *

  I met my first flesh-eater in the Czech Republic, several years earlier, while doing research on Franz Bardon’s Hermeticism. He hadn’t been part of the thread I had followed into the city, but the Chorus had a way of tangling me with others—circumstance and accident put me on his path. Six students had gone missing from Masaryk University over the last five months, nothing notable in and of itself—students take time off to earn more money to afford tuition all the time—but the local newspaper was starting to find a pattern that spelled “serial killer.” The Chorus, liking that interpretation, became incredibly vocal about finding him.

  Finally, I had relented and spent a week or so tracing the threads of the missing students. Without the supernatural aid of the Chorus, I probably wouldn’t have found the monster responsible, and he’d be doing his private little game with young co-eds still. But the Chorus was too infatuated with the depravity of his spirit to let go, and eventually I made contact.

  I followed him one night, away from the center of Brno. Up into the surrounding hills. He had an isolated cabin, an abandoned farmhouse on a patch of scrub land that hadn’t yielded any useful crop in a generation or more. He had built himself a bit of a laboratory inside the dilapidated farmhouse (more ramshackle on the outside than in, as I discovered).

  He’d made a mess of the first co-ed, having little more than a first-year med student’s knowledge of phlebotomy and gross anatomy. He had done a little better on the second and third, started to figure out a system for the next two, and by the time he had snatched the sixth, he had self-learned some of the techniques used by the kosher butchers in the city.

  He still dismembered them later. Scattering the pieces made it harder for the local police, and he was starting to get a taste for his work. Not the actual flesh yet
—that still made him sick—but the psychological aspect of what he was doing was starting to give him power.

  I watched him eat. There was ritual there already, in the way he prepared the meat. Each piece carefully wrapped in nondescript brown paper and stored in a freezer. The blood in beer bottles as if it were nothing more than a batch of home-brew. It made him violently ill, drinking the blood, but it didn’t deter him. He was under the influence of a brain fever, caught up in the desire to devour the life energy of another, but having absolutely no idea how to go about doing it. He couldn’t stop. Not now.

  The Chorus thought he was the perfect sort of diseased fucker, filled with passionate excess that would give them strength for their eternal quest to overpower me. They goaded me into confronting him, and for several days afterward, I was as sick as he had been, fighting off the same overpowering fear that had dominated his thoughts.

  The Central European myth of the werewolf was a metaphor for possession. We saw those feverish with fell influences as being under the control of demonic spirits; we saw them consumed with a lust for the blood and flesh of their fellow men, and it was easier to imagine them as possessed by bestial desires. They weren’t like us. They couldn’t be like us. We had to imagine them as feral creatures who stalked their prey from the shadows, who become involuntary slaves to their passions under the lunatic moon, because to view them otherwise was to admit how possible it was for any of us to fall into madness.

  And there were some who could not bear the idea at all, who were terrified that the grasp we had on sanity was so tenuous—so easily distorted and transformed into a cannibalistic passion. These men became crusaders of a different sort. Witch Hunters. Inquisitors. The Red Fist. Wipe the diseased and the dispossessed from the face of the earth, was their mantra. Purify those who show the signs of aberrance and madness. Cleanse the world of evil thoughts, wherever they may lurk.