by Ben Tripp
Sax fell asleep dreaming of it. First, before he would even mention his latest inspiration, they needed to get up close to the castle and study it, looking for some forgotten way to get in. If their reconnaissance turned up no possible route of assault, however, there was another way.
Sax had, some time back, thought of using human bait. If there was no other means to storm the castle, that might very well work.
But there was only one person Sax could use as a lure: it would have to be himself.
In that case, all he had to do was walk through Castle Mordstein’s front door.
There was frost on the ground.
Sax awoke the next morning and rose from bed less by act of will than by erosion. He resumed staring at the knotholes in the beams overhead, watching the square of sky framed in the roof window brighten, then, as if the sun sensed his mood, it grew steely and dim. Sax first allowed one of his thin white legs to dangle over the side of the bed, and then, after an interval, he threw back the covers on the upper half of his body. After further concentration of will, he was able to get his second foot beside the first, and then it was the work of only a few minutes or a quarter of an hour before he was sitting upright. By the time he had showered, shaved, and dressed to something like a reasonable standard for public appearances, then tottered on his cane to the big house, where the kitchen smelled like breakfast, the meal had been over for half an hour.
There was some coffee left. He poured a cup black and hot as a Macumbeiro Baitola. Back out in the barnyard he picked his way across cinder-hard earth with the frosted fields around, the whole world blanketed in a skin of glinting ice that coruscated like ground glass, the steaming coffee held before him a torch in the gloom, a source of heat rather than light.
In the barn, he found things were proceeding according to plan, if not the plan he had now constantly on his mind. In addition to the metalworking gear, Abingdon possessed a chemistry lab built into the bulkhead between the cab and cargo sections of his van; it was mostly small glass cylinders containing acids, as Sax recalled. There was an acid to dissolve everything.
In Sax’s pocket, he had a small buff envelope. This he gave to Abingdon after the morning’s greetings were exchanged. Everyone but Emily and Paolo was out there in the barn, staying warm by the forge, their breath pluming in the frosty air. Presumably the monk and the niece were tending to ailing Nilu; Sax had heard their voices upstairs in the big house. To the others, Abingdon was delivering an impromptu lecture on alchemy and what a lot of good science came out of it, if not the actual secret to turning lead into gold.
“I have the specimen, young man,” Sax said once the greetings were dispensed with. He handed Abingdon the envelope. Inside was a scrap of the silver from the hammer, Simon, that Sax had given to Emily. He’d cut it from an unobtrusive spot inside the eye through which the handle ought to pass. There was a rime of iron oxidization on one side of the silver, so he imagined there ought to be sufficient metallurgical data available from that to sort out the composition of the thing. Abingdon began his work with the chemicals, his little ceramic workbench set up on the fender of the van. It was essentially a sophisticated tea tray. The others were curious, and Sax wanted more time to think before he relayed his plan, so he explained what Abingdon was up to.
“That silver was amalgamated, if that’s the word I want,” Sax began.
“Only if it has mercury in it,” Abingdon remarked.
“Alloyed, then,” Sax amended, “assuming it is an alloy and not pure silver they used back during the twelfth century, when it was all the rage to go on crusades and sack Jerusalem and that sort of thing. Made there in the Holy Land. I cannot say what they would have used for fuel in those days, or the construction of the crucibles and whatnot they would have employed, so that bit is rather up to you, Abingdon.”
“No worries, dearest,” Abingdon said.
“Right,” Sax said, pleased despite himself. Someone called him dearest. “This specimen comes from one of the twelve hammers called the Apostles. I believe you, Min, have a copy of one of these hammers in your little ditty bag.”
“It doesn’t work,” she said, as if Sax had personally written the warranty.
“Yes, I know it doesn’t work,” Sax said testily. Homicidal maniacs were not just dangerous; they were tiresome. “Please listen, young lady. Whatever happened to your Confucian sense of deference to the older authority figure? It’s a disgrace. Now, the reason these modern hammers don’t work has got to be something to do with the metal. Everything else has been tried. Exploding tips, stainless steel, platinum, great wicked knives that spring out of the sides—disgusting things. Sometimes they kill the vampire and sometimes they don’t. Usually they do not, which isn’t a suitable outcome for anyone involved. Vampire blood is highly reactive and full of all sorts of nastiness, so it’s bound to get fizzing with the right ingredients thrown in; that’s the way I see it. That ingredient must be in the silver of these old hammers. Which is where Abingdon comes in.”
“Just one of the places I come in, but it will do for a start,” Abingdon said, swishing the piece of silver around in a slender flask. The liquid it was swirling in stank of industrial smoke. “There’s two variables, really. What’s in the silver, and what’s in the iron. Three variables, if you include the idea that they might have dipped these fuckers in poison. But what I’m doing here is to get this bit of metal to come apart into its constituent elements. Then we can get things sorted.”
He set up a gas burner with a wire rack above it and fetched out more chemicals and vessels, ready to begin the analysis.
“This would be easier in a laboratory, but it’s not necessary. This is called assaying, and it’s been going on since ever somebody figured out how to make a realistic-looking fake of silver or gold out of something cheap. Pony-fucking Mongols could do this—nothing personal, ma’am.” Abingdon winked at Min. “Anyway the steel core is easy enough. They would have mixed iron, charcoal, and glass, then cooked them up over a charcoal fire. Gives your steel lots of lovely carbon, that does. The vessels they used would have been crap sandy-clay ceramic, it being that part of the world. The iron ore would have had some cobalt, some zinc, depending where it came from. Other impurities. But not much. I don’t see how that would make the difference when it came to punching holes in vampires.”
Now Abingdon was decanting another liquid into the vial. It stank like horse urine and bleach. Abingdon cautioned Rock to stand back, as the enormous man was crowding in to see what was going on. “Nitric acid, mate. Burn a hole and stain you yellow at the same time. The old acid test, this. I’ve got sulfuric acid here, too. We could make a jolly batch of nitroglycerin.”
Sax felt faint. It came over him in a rush like the tide at Mont St. Michel. He leaned heavily on his cane, thinking it must only be the smell of chemicals, but the feeling didn’t lift. It progressed to an unpleasant tingling in his hands and wrists, and his legs felt distant and numb. Perhaps he was having a heart attack. That would take care of having to march up to the vampire’s front door and say hello.
Min was the only one who observed Sax’s distress and she didn’t remark upon it. She watched him for a few seconds beneath lowered eyelids, then turned back to the chemistry lesson.
Sax tottered back to the house. He might just need to eat. Paolo was sitting in the kitchen, alone at the square table with the frayed white linen cloth. He was turning a coffee mug slowly in his hands, studying it, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
“Homesick for the old Holy Roman Empire?” Sax asked, and sat heavily beside him. He’d lost his own coffee cup somewhere.
“It is not easy to be apart from the life I know,” Paolo said. “Much is going on.”
“Much is going on in your well-shaped skull, or in the world?”
“Everywhere,” Paolo said, and sighed mournfully.
“You’re not getting ill, I trust,” Sax sa
id, after Paolo lapsed back into his mug-turning reverie.
“No,” Paolo said. “I think I am not.”
“Then you’re worried about Nilu, upstairs? I asked Min about her. Apparently she’s been in the Indian motion pictures. She’s a dancer. They do these musical numbers in their movies, you know, very colorful, and whenever someone wants to make an emotional point, they start singing and dancing. It’s a clever shorthand; it’s a way of externalizing the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters. Falling in love, and so forth.”
Paolo said nothing. He had stopped rotating the mug and was now trying to line up the handle so it pointed straight at the sink faucet opposite. Sax decided to change the subject. He was out of his depth.
“I’m going back to bloody Germany,” Sax said. “With Masters Rock and Vladimirescu, and possibly Ms. Hee-Jin, if I can persuade her not to attempt to kill the vampire ahead of schedule. I haven’t decided. The point is this: we have to do some reconnaissance. You will be here with Abingdon, Emily, and the ailing dancer above. I want you to develop, to the best of our existing information, a complete picture of Castle Mordstein. I want maps and elevations. I want the whole damn thing on a great big board when we get back. And most of all, I want you to use the power vested in you as a man of the Church and keeper of mortal souls and whatnot to fix a damn sharp eye on Abingdon and make sure, above all else, he doesn’t lay a finger or anything similar on my niece. Am I clear?”
Paolo didn’t respond. Sax backed up and tried again.
“Paolo, I’m going to write a list. Do what’s on it. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”
Now Paolo turned to Sax, hearing him, and his fine black brows developed squiggles of concern.
“You’re leaving me here?” Paolo said.
“Yes,” Sax said.
“Please don’t leave me here,” Paolo said, and gripped Sax’s arm in both his hands.
“I’m going to need some things delivered,” Sax added, ignoring Paolo’s entreaty. He rose to his feet and retrieved his cane. “I’ll make a list of that as well. So many lists to make, so little time. You keep an eye on that eroto-maniacal swine Abingdon. I’d trust him with my life, you understand? But not for five minutes with a woman. And especially not my Emily.”
14
* * *
Germany
The castle stood against the sky like an iron spike driven through a sheet of steel. Sax shivered in the cold, his back against the reptile bark of a spruce tree. He stood between Rock and Gheorghe, both leaning against the tree to stabilize their hands; they were surveying the castle through binoculars armored with camouflaged rubber. There wasn’t anything Sax needed to see—if they found an ingress that didn’t involve the front door, it was good news. Otherwise, he had his suicidal plan to fall back on. What Gheorghe and Rock were looking for were subtle things that never would have occurred to Sax to seek, indications of where and how the castle was inhabited.
“There’s a cable of some kind on the northwest corner,” Rock said. “It’s anchored at the top and goes down to the rocks and then it’s stapled, looks like, and I can’t see where it goes from there.”
“Would it take the weight of a man?” Gheorghe said.
“Not mine,” Rock said. “There’s something else on top of the tallest tower, the flat one with no roof. I can’t see what it is. We’re on the wrong side of the castle.”
Gheorghe pointed at something lower down in the structure. “You can easily see there is waste pipe there under edge of the stone where is the box that comes out,” he said.
Rock didn’t see it, and Gheorghe picked up his clipboard and drew in red pen where the pipe was located on a simple drawing of the castle. Rock compared the drawing to the castle and then spotted the pipe.
“Looks recent,” Rock said. “Sewer pipe. Do vampires shit?”
It took Sax a second to realize Rock was speaking to him.
“You mean literally?” he said.
“Yeah. Would a vampire need to install a potty in its bedroom or anything?”
“They’re like reptiles or birds,” Sax said. “They excrete waste, but only one kind. Out their, ah, bottoms.”
“They do not pissing?” Gheorghe said.
“Only out the back,” Sax said, and Gheorghe laughed his clacking laugh.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Gheorghe said.
They resumed their study of the castle.
By the time the sun was going down behind the clouds, they had made a circuit of the fortification that covered most of its exposure on the southern and eastern sides. Although the area was accessible to tourists, they took care to remain out of sight, keeping to the trees and rocks. Nobody would mistake them for sightseers. There were a few minor blind spots they hadn’t been able to examine, but located in places of such terrifying inaccessibility that they’d be of no use in any case. Gheorghe made drawings from several angles. He’d added in red lines wherever there was some element to suggest a modern addition or inhabitation.
They had already seen a trend: the improvements were very carefully done, nearly invisible. This could be a matter of the structure’s landmark status; the authorities never wanted the character of such places changed, which was reasonable enough. But there was a hint of stealth about some of it. The drainpipe had been painted in alternating strokes of color to match the stone around it. There were a number of modern windows set deep into openings; the window frames had been painted dark gray, effectively rendering them invisible.
As the daylight faded, they discussed their results over ready-made sandwiches and beer from a local Spar supermarket, sitting in the camper van Sax had hired. They wouldn’t be sleeping in it, but rather at a nearby motel; however, the van was good cover for their purposes. If anyone did notice them, and questioned their activities, then the van, sleeping bags, and hiking gear inside it would make it perfectly clear they were ordinary outdoors enthusiasts. Even Sax. He was an old, sedentary outdoors enthusiast.
The consensus was the lower floors of the castle were empty, mostly disused, while the upper floors showed signs of at least being properly weather sealed, if not inhabited. But although they waited and watched until late in the evening, no lights came on in any of the windows. There was light within the castle, but they couldn’t see where it was coming from. It was somewhere inside the mass of turrets that jutted from the keep, shining up into the low clouds, throwing thin rims of light on the towers and roofs. It might have been some kind of mood lighting, a Make Our Castles Ominous-Looking program enacted by the German government, or it might have been shining from a big skylight or a series of spotlights. The effect was strange, however. There was not a single illuminated window in the outer walls.
This suggested the castle was only being used, or lived in, at its inner core.
The lower castle, at the foot of the cliff, enjoyed a decorative lighting scheme of blue and green up-lights on the castle proper, and oblique lighting to rake the grounds and pop the forms and textures of the scenery into relief. The effect was what the travel books would call “magical,” especially taken in context of the frowning cliff that leapt up above the castle with its freight of stone at the summit needling the belly of the clouds.
They had parked the camper on a forest road that ran along the ridge opposite the castle, so Sax and the others could see down inside the defensive walls as the employees, numbering half a dozen or so, closed the visitor center down. It was early evening when they switched on the atmospheric lighting, an hour later when the last tourist vehicle rolled out of the parking lot, and an engulfing black night surrounded the castle when the employees switched off the interior lights and closed the front and back gates. They scattered to their cars in the small employee parking lot next to the access road Paolo had discovered.
A significant moment punctuated this part of the vigil. Rock had been watching the employees file t
hrough the back gate with his binoculars when he said, “Man, there’s a fine redhead down there.”
Sax urgently grabbed at his binoculars, but by the time he had them focused and figured out how to aim them in the correct direction, she was concealed inside a sporty late-model BMW that contrasted with the older, more staid cars driven by the other employees. Gheorghe had made some remark about Sax’s sudden interest in girls, then laughed, ha ha ha ha, like a rusty water pump. Sax shoved the binoculars back into the cleft between Rock’s immense pectoral muscles, then scrambled clumsily over the top of the ridge, cursing and snagging his clothes on branches, to watch the headlights from the various cars wend their way through the forest valley beneath the cliff.
The BMW turned off in the opposite direction at the fork Paolo had seen. The headlights rose up onto the hillside at the foot of the cliff, zigzagging around hairpin bends, and then the car’s taillights replaced the headlights and it disappeared between two eminences of rock higher up on the slopes.
“Did you see where that car went?” Sax asked.
“All we gotta do is follow the road,” Rock said. “You want to do that tonight?”
Sax considered giving up for now. The road would still be there when they got back, after all, and they could stay up late the next night following a good long sleep-in. He was exhausted all the time now, Sax was sorry to observe. His old body just didn’t have what it took. The enthusiasm in his brain, the leaping excitement, even the constant trickle of fear that ran through him like ice water from melting snow at the thought of his Very Bad Plan, while they energized his mind, could not keep his body going.
“I’m getting very bloody old,” Sax said out loud, which was another sign he was getting very bloody old. He hadn’t meant to speak. “This redhead,” he added, changing the subject, “she was attractive?”
