Blood Ritual

by Sarah Rayne

  Horror replaced the curiosity on the girl’s face and she broke away, running crouched low to the ground like a fleeing hare. Dorko and Illona pounced, knocking her to the ground and dragging her back to the coach, her arms twisted painfully behind her back. They stood waiting, breathing hard from the exertion, and only then did Elizabeth step down, treading daintily over the frosted ground, her velvet and fur boots hardly making a sound, her eyes fixed on the shivering victim.

  ‘Strip her clothes from her.’

  Dorko and Illona exchanged uneasy glances. This was a new direction; the Lady had never wanted this before. They hesitated.

  ‘Strip her!’

  And of course you did not question the Lady’s orders, not even when you were her most trusted servants. The girl stood helplessly while they tore the thin, shabby clothes from her, crying and begging for release. Her skin was marbled with cold and her lips and fingernails were blue. Illona fired several torches from the coach’s box lanterns, and thrust them into the ground to create a circle of fire and light, but Dorko held firmly on to the writhing prisoner. The torches burned up and the girl turned longing eyes towards them, struggling to reach the small warmth, but Dorko’s thick, muscular fingers bit into her flesh and she was helpless.

  Elizabeth circled the girl, her eyes never leaving the white, trembling body. Round and round . . . The flames illuminated her to eerie life, the thick dark fur cloaks stark against the snow. Her little triangular face was white inside the thick hood, and for a moment it was as if a great, black-eyed, human-faced wolf had reared up to stand erect, and was padding around its cornered victim. The girl’s eyes were glazed, and Dorko and Illona nodded to one another. The Lady had tranced the girl, as a snake tranced a rabbit. They’d seen it happen before. With the forming of the thought Elizabeth moved, bounding forward, knocking the girl to the ground, pinning her arms down and biting and clawing at her flesh. A few drops of blood splashed on to the snow and Elizabeth sprang back at once, her eyes glittering with triumph, her hair working loose from the hood and spilling over her face. Dorko moved back, twisting the girl’s arms half up her back again, smiling as the creature yelped in pain.

  ‘The creature turns faint,’ said Elizabeth, softly. ‘Revive her.’ And then, her eyes slewing round to where the two women and the coachmen stood, ‘Do it,’ she said sharply. ‘Oiled paper. You know where. She is not to miss a single second of the agony.’ And then to the girl, ‘You would hate to miss it, wouldn’t you, my dear?’ she said, and incredibly there was affection and concern in her tone. ‘You must not miss any of it.’

  The oiled paper flared up and Illona stood waiting. Elizabeth reached out, forced the girl’s thighs apart with her gloved hands.

  ‘Wider, my dear, wider . . .’

  The girl fell to her knees and Dorko jerked her head back by the hair. Elizabeth tore off her gloves and plunged her uncovered hand between the girl’s thighs, white soft skin against rough peasant. There was a moment when her questing fingers curved upwards, stroking the girl’s body intimately. The girl shuddered in revulsion and fought to break free, but Dorko held her firmly. Elizabeth’s expression held the concentrating pleasure of one intent on sexual release and, without looking round, she held out her free hand for the burning paper.

  Illona handed it to her silently, and Elizabeth held it aloft for a moment. Then, slowly and deliberately, she brought it down between the girl’s legs, and thrust upwards. There was the brief sickening stench of flesh and hair singeing, and the girl screamed and beat wildly at her captor. Elizabeth drew away, laughing exultantly, casting the charred paper into the snow.

  ‘Gag the creature!’ she cried. ‘Muffle the screams! Quickly! Good. And now the razors. Bleed her on to the snow! Do it!’

  Dorko and Illona, surer of their ground now, pulled the girl to her feet and set to work, using the thin, glinting blades, opening the veins at throat and wrist. The blood began to flow at once, and the girl fought, biting against the rough cloth gag that Illona had twisted into her mouth.

  Elizabeth threw herself down at the girl’s feet, the black cloak stark and dramatic against the snow, the front flung open to show that beneath it she was naked. The blood was sliding over the girl’s white limbs to drip on to the Countess’s body, and her eyes were filmed. When she reached up to smear the blood into her skin, she did so with slow languor.

  ‘Sweet . . . The sweetest thing you would ever know . . .’ The words were so soft that the two women barely caught them. They stayed where they were, holding the girl upright until at last the flow slowed and the Lady stood up and wrapped the thick cloak about her body again.

  Incredibly, the girl was not quite dead. Her skin was marbled and bruised where they had slit her veins, but there was a flicker of life in her. She had fallen to the ground now, but her hands scrabbled weakly at the ground, as if she were trying to crawl away.

  ‘Fetch the water!’ cried Elizabeth. ‘Break the ice in the ditches and bring the water up. Fetch ewers from the coach and douse the remaining fires, for the creature fought and she ran from me, and she is trying to run from me now!’ She stamped her feet on the ground. ‘She still lives!’ she screamed. ‘Subdue her! Freeze her where she lies!’

  Dorko was no longer young, and Illona was growing slow and heavy, and catching the fleeing girl earlier had taken a toll of them both. But it would have been suicide to disobey any one of the Lady’s orders and so, panting and wheezing, they fetched from the coach the earthenware pitchers without which the Lady never travelled, and plunged into the ditches at the sides of the roads, stamping on the thick, dirty ice to break it.

  The girl revived slightly as the icy ditch-water poured over her; she moaned and her eyes rolled up showing a thin line of white.

  ‘Again!’ screeched Elizabeth, huddled back in her furs. ‘Stand her upright! Douse her until she is solid! A human icicle!’

  It took several pitchers and it took more trips to and from the ditch than they found easy. But at length the girl was frozen solid, a thin human stalagmite rearing up out of the snowy ground, her features eerily visible through the transparent ice covering, the gag torn aside showing her lips stretched into a soundless scream. Dorko and Illona carried her to the ditch and flung her down. The snow would cover her and it would be spring before the thaw set in and she was found.

  The Lady’s hungers had been assuaged once again, and no one had caught them.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  As night closed about Crnprag, Catherine lay on the narrow bed, unable to sleep, watching the woman the guards had called the Collector. The woman intrigued Catherine. She was clearly mad, but there was something beneath the madness that was intelligent and shrewd. And why had there been that flare of recognition when she saw Catherine?

  The guards had gone out, locking the door behind them, and Catherine thought that just as the woman had not heard the guards come in, she had not heard them leave. Because she was too deeply entrenched in whatever form of madness held her? And then: no! thought Catherine, suddenly understanding. Because they are beneath her notice.

  CrnPrag was shrouded in silence now and, through the tiny, high-up windows, the sky had taken on a velvety blackness. I am shut inside Stefan’s nightmare asylum, thought Catherine, and it is midnight, when creatures who fear the daylight wake and prowl, and when things that feed on the darkness stir and lift their heads to sniff the air . . . The woman called the Collector slipped down from her bed and padded silently across to Catherine, and the eerie images vanished at once.

  ‘You permit?’ She pointed to the bed with an abrupt, questioning gesture, and Catherine sat up.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You are awake?’

  ‘Yes.’ Catherine studied her. ‘I could not sleep,’ she said. ‘I should be glad of a – a friend to talk to.’ Was this the right tone to adopt? Gentle and ordinary. She thought it was.

  The woman glanced over her shoulder in the darting, glancing way Catherine had marked e
arlier. ‘They can’t hear us at night,’ she said, and Catherine felt the hairs prickle on the back of her neck.

  ‘“They”?’ The images returned: invisible daemons and beasts that gibbered on the outer edge of the poor mad thing’s vision, unguessed-at by the sane, but nonetheless there.

  But the woman said, in a perfectly sensible voice, ‘The guards. They listen, you see. They listen and then use what they hear against us.’

  This was all perfectly sane, and Catherine said, ‘I understand. Have you . . .’ She paused and then said, ‘Have you something to talk to me about?’

  ‘I’m not mad,’ said the woman, and there was the fierce intensity about her that Catherine had felt before. She said, carefully:

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wanted you to know that.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘It’s only that I was in his embrace. And no one ever emerges from his embrace with a sound mind.’

  There was a sudden silence. Catherine was strongly aware of CrnPrag’s silent isolation, of the isolation of herself and the Collector. If she attacked me, what would happen? Would the guards hear if I screamed? But she said, still using the same gentle voice,’ “He”?’ and the woman paused, frowning, as if marshalling her thoughts. Catherine again had the impression of a strong and powerful mind buried fathoms deep under the dementia.

  ‘Imagine a tall old house, very ramshackle, the windows blind or empty, weeds growing up through the pavements.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘And when you go inside, everything is decayed and rotting.’ For a moment, unmistakable madness showed in the woman’s eyes, and she rocked to and fro. ‘Everything dying, everything crumbling.’ And then her eyes cleared, and she sat up a little straighter. ‘It’s where he dwells,’ she said, half to herself. ‘He is lying on an old iron bedstead, his eyes on the door, waiting for me.’

  ‘“He”?’ said Catherine again, and waited.

  ‘Madness,’ said the woman, a slurry note of exaltation in her voice. ‘He wears a deep slouch hat that hides his eyes, and a long swirling cloak that smells of old, dried blood. And his hands are huge, they’re great huge hands that reach for you, and great swollen knuckles that fasten about your mind . . .’ She rocked to and fro again, and Catherine, torn between pity and repulsion, waited. Presently, the woman said, ‘He rears up from the bed when you enter, exactly as a child fears that the discarded dressing gown on the chair in its bedroom might suddenly rear up.’ Her eyes glazed. ‘And he smothers you with his blood-smelling embrace, and he breathes his tainted breath into your mouth . . .’ She broke off again. ‘And then he pushes you on to the bed and parts his cloak and puts himself into you.’ She glanced at Catherine. ‘You understand what I mean, little sister?’

  ‘I – yes.’

  ‘And when his seed has filled you, then you have his taint for ever. For ever and ever and ever and—’ The frenzy soared in her voice again, and Catherine flinched.

  Without warning, the woman darted across to her own bed, scrabbling impatiently beneath the pillow. Her eyes were shining and, as the pillow slipped unheeded to the floor, she held up a thick, smeary jam-jar. The cold moonlight slithered over it, showing greasy marks and grisly brownish smudges. Catherine remembered that concentrated snatch at some helpless wriggling insect on the wall earlier, and shuddered.

  The woman had padded back across the bare floor, making no sound, and resumed her seat on the edge of Catherine’s bed, holding the jar against her breast and crooning over it. She stared down into the repulsive contents, and then thrust the fingers of her left hand inside, scooping up several of the trapped spiders and cramming them into her mouth. There was a terrible moment when her cheeks bulged and her jaw worked and when she threw back her head, her eyes bolting. Catherine saw her throat ripple, and nausea clutched the base of her stomach.

  And then the woman turned her huge brown-ringed eyes on Catherine, and held out the jar, and although Catherine’s mind flinched with horror, she felt her hands move of their own volition. The jar was in her hands, repulsively warm, filled with scuttling life – oh God, what now? she thought.

  ‘It is filled with life,’ said the woman, and Catherine jumped and felt her skin crawl. ‘Life and blood,’ she said. ‘You understand. You know about it.’ You have shared it, said her expression.

  Catherine said in a whisper, ‘The blood . . .’

  ‘The blood has never failed us yet.’ She indicated the jar and without warning she began to sing a mad little tune that lifted the hairs on Catherine’s neck.

  ‘The blood . . . never failed me yet, never failed me yet,

  It lifts me from the dead.

  Never failed me yet, Never failed me yet,

  Though I’m dead I’m alive . . .’

  Elizabeth, thought Catherine, staring. That is Elizabeth’s song, that is what she used to sing all those years ago when she was knocking at the gates of my mind, when she was slithering through the chinks in the wall. That is how she has always sounded. Elizabeth is looking at me from out of this creature’s ravaged eyes.

  Of course she is mad, thought Catherine. Of course she is. But this is the blood-hunger of Elizabeth at the lowest, most primeval level. She glanced down at the jar’s contents and shuddered. Spiders and a few spiny-backed creatures. Beetles? Oh God. But she gave the jar back and said in a gentle voice, ‘I would not deprive you—’

  ‘I can get more.’

  ‘Why do you take them?’

  ‘For the blood.’ The woman snatched the jar back, hugging it to her.

  ‘How do you know about the blood?’ said Catherine. ‘Tell me how you know?’ She fixed the woman with her eyes, willing her to answer and, after a moment, the woman lifted her head and looked directly at Catherine. Her lower lip was smudged with traces of black, but her eyes were clear.

  ‘In the same way that you know, little sister,’ she said, in the gentle modulated voice that was so shockingly at odds with her appearance. ‘It was handed down to me. From my grandmother and her grandmother, and back and back and back . . . From the One who started it.’

  Catherine said in a whisper, ‘Elizabeth.’

  ‘The secret was handed down and down and down—’ The madness was flaring again, and Catherine glanced uneasily at the door. Ought she to shout for help? ‘Until it reached me. Down and down and down and down—’ Red pinpoints of light showed in the woman’s eyes.

  ‘I’m not mad,’ she said, and Catherine heard the soaring note of frenzy and backed away. ‘They think I’m mad.’ She reached out and grabbed at Catherine’s hand with cold, bony fingers. ‘I’m not mad,’ she said and now her voice was hoarse and filled with desperate entreaty. ‘It was because he caught me – Madness with his blood-draggled cloak and his huge-knuckled hands . . . When he pushes inside you, he is barbed like an arrow so that your womb tears . . .’ Her grip on Catherine’s hand tightened. ‘Tell them I’m not mad,’ she said. ‘Tell them, tell them—’

  ‘Yes. All right.’ Catherine forced herself to grip the cold hand. ‘Will you tell me your name?’ she said. ‘Perhaps we can be friends . . .’

  The dark eyes regarded her. Then, ‘Orsolya,’ said the woman, and grinned suddenly. Her teeth were smeared with brown spider-blood. ‘My name is Orsolya.’

  Catherine stared at the poor mad thing, her mind in turmoil. She had almost forgotten her surroundings and, in any case, they had ceased to matter. At some distance, she was aware of hearing people running in the corridors outside, and shouts of command, as if an important guest might have arrived at CrnPrag.

  But Catherine was reaching for Elizabeth as she had never reached before now, scraping at the inner skin of her mind for the knowledge she had absorbed – almost by osmosis – over the years.

  Elizabeth was dead; she had died four centuries ago, and if she walked the world today, then she walked it in Catherine’s mind and in Catherine’s body. The poor ravaged creature in the narrow bed was not Elizabeth.

 
But Elizabeth had had children.

  For many years she had tried to resist childbearing; she had hated the idea of her body being used and she had detested being regarded as a brood-mare. But tradition demanded and necessity required that she give Ferencz an heir and, in the end, after years of gulping down Dorko’s loathsome potions, four children had been born: a daughter called Anna and a son called Pál. And some years afterwards, two more girls.

  Anna had been the eldest: ‘A daughter!’ Ferencz had said, blusteringly hiding his disappointment. ‘Well, Lady, we will soon get ourselves a son.’ But Pál had not been born until almost ten years afterwards. It was from one of those two, Anna or Pál – Catherine did not know which and it did not matter – that the Family traced its descent.

  Anna and Pál had married conventionally and well: Anna to the Hungarian Count, Miklos Zrinyi and Pál to a daughter of the Forgachs, one of Hungary’s leading families. Pál had become Grand Officer of the County of Eisenburg, and it had been on to him that most of Elizabeth’s lands and wealth had finally devolved. Anna’s husband had been rich in his own right and a member of the old Hungarian nobility. So much for Elizabeth’s two older children. What about the other two? Catherine knew hardly anything about the youngest girl, only that she had married young and left Csejthe. She did not know how she even knew this, unless it was in the way she knew everything else about Elizabeth. She did not know the youngest girl’s name, or the name of her husband.

  But she knew the name of the middle one, the one born after Anna and Pál. She had been named for Ferencz’s mother.

  Orsolya.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Four children had been more than sufficient. Elizabeth had hated every minute of the entire process, from the conception when the loathsome seed lodged in her body, through the swollen, sick indignities of the gestation months, to the final hours of tearing agony when the child fought its way out.