by Jack Yeovil
This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery.
It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending.
Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.
At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms.
Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities.
And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl-Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.
But these are far from civilised times.
Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war.
In the towering World’s Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault.
Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes.
There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land.
And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods.
As the time of battle draws ever near, the Empire needs heroes like never before.
GENEVIEVE UNDEAD
Book Two of the Genevieve Saga
Jack Yeovil
When he lost his love, his grief was gall,
In his heart he wanted to leave it all,
And lose his self in the forests tall,
But he answered instead his country's call'
Tom Blackburn and George Bruns,
'The Ballad of Davy Crockett'
PART ONE
STAGE BLOOD
I
He had a name once, but hadn't heard it spoken in years. Sometimes, it was hard to remember what it had been. Even he thought of himself as the Trapdoor Daemon. When they dared speak of him, that was what the company of the Vargr Breughel called their ghost.
He had been haunting this building for years enough to know its secret byways. After springing the catch of the hidden trapdoor, he eased himself into Box Seven, first dangling by strong tentacles, then dropping the last inches to the familiar carpet. Tonight was the premiere of The Strange History of Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida, originally by the Kislevite dramatist V.I. Tiodorov, now adapted by the Vargr Breughel's genius-in-residence, Detlef Sierck.
The Trapdoor Daemon knew Tiodorov's hoary melodrama from earlier translations, and wondered how Detlef would bring life back to it. He'd taken an interest in rehearsals, particularly in the progress of his protégée, Eva Savinien, but had deliberately refrained from seeing the piece all through until tonight. When the curtain came down on the fifth act, the ghost would decide whether to give the play his blessing or his curse.
He was recognized as the permanent and non-paying licensee of Box Seven, and he was invoked whenever a production went well or ill. The success of A Farce of the Fog was laid to his approval of the comedy, and the disastrous series of accidents that plagued the never-premiered revival of Manfred von Diehl's Strange Flower were also set at his door. Some had glimpsed him, and a good many more fancied they had. A theatre was not a proper theatre without a ghost. And there were always old stage-hands and character actors eager to pass on stories to frighten the little chorines and apprentices who passed through the Vargr Breughel Memorial Playhouse.
Even Detlef Sierck, actor-manager of the Vargr Breughel company occasionally spoke with affection of him, and continued the custom of previous managements by having an offering placed in Box Seven on the first night of any production.
Actually, for the ghost things were much improved since Detlef took over the house. When the theatre had been the Beloved of Shallya and specialised in under-patronised but uplifting religious dramas, the offerings had been of incense and a live kid. Now, reflecting an earthier, more popular approach, the offering took the form of a large trencher of meats and vegetables prepared by the skilled company chef, with a couple of bottles of Bretonnian wine thrown in.
The Trapdoor Daemon wondered if Detlef instinctively understood his needs were far more those of a physical being than a disembodied spirit.
Eating was difficult without hands, but the years had forced him to become used to his ruff of muscular appendages, and he was able to work the morsels up from the trencher towards the sucking, beaked hole of his mouth with something approaching dexterity. He had uncorked the first bottle with a quick constriction, and took frequent swigs at a vintage that must have been laid down around the year of his birth. He brushed away that thought×his former life seemed less real now than the fictions which paraded before him every evening×and settled his bulk into the nest of broken chairs and cushions adapted to his shape, awaiting the curtain. He sensed the excitement of the first night crowd and, from the darkness of Box Seven, saw the glitter of jewels and silks down below. A Detlef Sierck premiere was an occasion in Altdorf for the court to come out and parade.
The Trapdoor Daemon understood the Emperor himself was not present×since his experience at the fortress of Drachenfels, Karl-Franz disliked the theatre in general and Detlef Sierck's theatre in particular×but that Prince Luitpold was occupying the Imperial box. Many of the finest and foremost of the Empire would be in the house, as intent on being seen as on seeing the play. The critics were in their corner, quills bristling and inkpots ready. Wealthy merchants packed the stalls, looking up at the assembled courtiers and aristocrats in the circle who, in their turn, looked to the Imperial connections in the private boxes.
A dignified explosion of clapping greeted the orchestra as Felix Hubermann, the conductor, led his musicians in the Imperial national anthem, 'Hail to the House of the Second Wilhelm.' The ghost resisted the impulse to flap his appendages together in a schlumphing approximation of applause. In the Imperial box, the future emperor appeared and graciously accepted the admiration of his future subjects. Prince Luitpold was a handsome boy on the point of becoming a handsome young man. His companion for the evening was handsome too, although the Trapdoor Daemon knew she was not young. Genevieve Dieudonne, dressed far more simply than the brocaded and lace-swathed Luitpold, appeared to be a girl of some sixteen summers, but it was well-known that Detlef Sierck's mistress was actually in her six hundred and sixty-eighth year.
A heroine of the Empire yet something of an embarrassment, she didn't look entirely comfortable in the Imperial presence, and tried to keep in the shadows while the prince waved to the crowd. Across the auditorium, the ghost caught the sharp glint of red in her eyes, and wondered if her nightsight could pierce the darkness that sweated like squid's ink from his pores. If the vampire girl saw him, she didn't betray anything. She was probably too nervous of her position to pay any attention to him. Heroine or not, a vampire's position in human society is precarious. Too many remembered the centuries Kislev suffered under Tsarina Kattarin.
Also in the Prince's party was Mornan Tybalt, grey-faced and self-made keeper of the Imperial counting house, and Graf Rudiger von Unheimlich, hard-hearted and forceful patron of the League of Karl-Franz, a to-the-death defender of aristocratic privilege. They were known to hate each other with a poisonous fervour, the upstart Tybalt having the temerity to believe that ability and intellect were more important qualifications for high office than breeding, lineage and a title, while the pure-blooded huntsman von Unheimlich maintained that all Tybalt's policies had brought to the Empire was riot and upheaval. The Trapdoor Daemon fancied that neither the Chancellor nor the Graf would have much attention for t
he play, each fuming at the imperially-ordained need not to attempt physical violence upon the other in the course of the evening.
The house settled, and the prince took his chair. It was time for the drama. The ghost adjusted his position, and fixed his attention on the opening curtains. Beyond the red velvet was darkness. Hubermann held a flute to his lips, and played a strange, high melody. Then the limelights flared, and the audience was transported to another century, another country.
The action of Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida was set in pre-Kattarin Kislev, and concerned a humble cleric of Shallya who, under the influence of a magic potion, transforms into another person entirely, a prodigy of evil. In the first scene, Zhiekhill was debating good and evil with his philosopher brother, as the darkness gathered outside the temple, seeping in between the stately columns.
It was easy to see what attracted Detlef Sierck, as adaptor and actor, to the Tiodorov story. The dual role was a challenge beyond anything the performer had done before. And the subject was an obvious development of the macabre vein that had been creeping lately into the playwright's work. Even the comedy of A Farce of the Fog had found room for a throat-slitting imp and much talk of the hypocrisy of supposedly good men. Critics traced Detlef's dark obsessions back to the famously interrupted premiere of his work Drachenfels, during which the actor had faced and bested not a stage monster but the Great Enchanter himself, Constant Drachenfels. Detlef had tackled that experience face-on in The Treachery of Oswald, in which he had taken the role of the possessed Laszlo Lowenstein, and now he was returning to the hurt inside him, nagging again at the themes of duality, treachery and the existence of a monstrous world underneath the ordinary.
His brother gone, Zhiekhill was locked up in his chapel, fussing with the bubbling liquids that combined to make his potion. Detlef, intent on delaying the expected, was playing the scene with a comic touch, as if Zhiekhill weren't quite aware what he was doing. In his recent works, Detlef's view of evil was changing, as if he were coming to believe it was not an external thing, like Drachenfels usurping the body of Lowenstein, but a canker that came from within, like the treachery forming in the heart of Oswald, or the murderous, lecherous, spiteful Chaida straining to escape from the confines of the pious, devout, kindly Zhiekhill.
On the stage, the potion was ready. Detlef-as-Zhiekhill drained it, and Hubermann's eerie tune began again as the influence of the magic took hold. Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida forced the Trapdoor Daemon to consider things he would rather forget. As Chaida first appeared, with Detlef performing marvels of stage magic and facial contortion to suggest the violent transformation, he remembered his own former shape, and the Tzeentch-born changes that slowly overcame him. When, at the point Detlef-as-Chaida was strangling Zhiekhill's brother, the monster was pulled back inside the cleric and Zhiekhill, chastened and shaking, stood revealed before the philosopher, the ghost was slapped by the realization that this would never happen to him. Zhiekhill and Chaida might be in an eternal struggle, neither ever gaining complete control, but he was forever and for good or ill the Trapdoor Daemon. He would never revert to his old self.
Then the drama caught him again, and he was tugged from his own thoughts, gripped by the way Detlef retold the tale. In Tiodorov, the two sides of the protagonist were reflected by the two women associated with them, Zhiekhill with his virtuous wife and Chaida with a brazen slut of the streets. Detlef had taken this tired cliché and replaced the stick figures with human beings.
Sonja Zhiekhill, played by Illona Horvathy, was a restless, passionate woman, bored enough with her husband to take a young cossack as a lover and attracted, despite herself, to the twisted and dangerous Mr. Chaida. While Nita, the harlot, was played by Eva Savinien as a lost child, willing to endure the brutal treatment of Chaida because the monster at least pays her some attention.
The murder scene drew gasps from the auditorium, and the ghost knew Detlef would, in order to increase the clamour for tickets, spread around a rumour that ladies fainted by the dozen. While Detlef's Chaida might be a triumph of the stage, the most chilling depiction of pure evil he had ever seen, there was no doubt that the revelation of the play was Eva Savinien's tragic Nita. In A Farce of the Fog, Eva had taken and transformed the dullest of parts×the faithful maidservant×and this was her first chance to graduate to anything like a leading role. Eva's glowing performance made the ghost's chest swell wet with pride, for she was currently his special interest.
Noticing her when she first came to the company, he had exerted his influence to help her along. Eva's triumph was also his. Her Nita quite outshone Illona Horvathy's higher-billed heroine, and the Trapdoor Daemon wondered whether there was anything of Genevieve Dieudonne in Detlef's writing of the part.
The scene was the low dive behind the temple of Shallya, where Chaida makes his lodging, and Chaida was trying to get rid of Nita. Earlier, he had arranged an assignation here with Sonja, believing his seduction of the wife he still believes virtuous will signify an utter triumph over the Zhiekhill half of his soul. The argument that led to murder was over the pettiest of things, a pair of shoes without which Nita refuses to go out into the snow-thick streets of Kislev. Gradually, a little fire came into Nita's complaints and, for the first time, she tried to stand up to her brutish protector. Finally, almost as an afterthought, Chaida struck the girl down with a mailed glove, landing a blow of such force that a splash of blood erupted from her skull like juice from a crushed orange.
Stage blood flew.
Then came the climax, as the young Kislevite cossack, played by the athletic and dynamic Reinhardt Jessner, having tracked Chaida down from his earlier crimes, bursts into the fiend's lodgings, accompanied by Zhiekhill's wife and brother, and puts an end to the monster during a swordfight. The Trapdoor Daemon had seen Detlef and Reinhardt duel before, at the climax of The Treachery of Oswald, but this was a far more impressive display. The combat went so far beyond performance he was sure some real enmity must exist between them. Offstage, Reinhardt was married to Illona Horvathy, to whom Detlef had made love in the company's last three productions. Also, Reinhardt was being hailed as the new matinee idol of the playhouse. His attractions for the young women of Altdorf were growing even as those of his genius employer diminished somewhat, although diminishing was certainly not what Detlef's stomach was doing with passing years of good food and better wine.
Detlef and Reinhardt fought in the persons of Chaida and the cossack, hacking away at each other until their faces were criss-crossed with bloody lines, and the stage set was a shambles. Slashing a curtain exposed the hastily-stuffed-away corpse of Nita, and Sonja Zhiekhill fainted in her brother-in-law's arms. Not a breath was let out in the auditorium. In Tiodorov's original, Chaida was defeated when Zhiekhill at last managed to exert himself and the monster dropped his sword. Skewered by the cossack's blade, Chaida turned back into Zhiekhill in death, declaiming in a dying speech that he had learned his lesson, that mortals should not tamper with the affairs of the Gods. Detlef had changed it around completely. At the point when the transformation began, the cossack made his death thrust, and Chaida parried it, striking with his killing glove and crushing the young hero's throat.
There was a shocked reaction in the house to this reversal of expectations. It had been Zhiekhill who had killed his wife's lover, not Chaida. This wasn't the story of the division between good and evil in a man's soul, but of an evil that drives out even the good. Throughout the third act, the ghost realized, Detlef had been blurring the differentiation between Zhiekhill and Chaida. Now, at the end, they were indistinguishable. He didn't need the potion anymore. In a cruel final touch, Zhiekhill gave his bloody sword to his wife, of whose corruption he approves, and encouraged her to taste further the delights of evil by killing Zhiekhill's brother. Sonja, needing no potion to unloose the monster inside her, complied. With corpses all around, Zhiekhill then took his wife to Chaida's bed, and the curtain fell.
For a long moment, there was a stunned silence
from the audience.
The ghost wondered how they would react. Looking across the dark, he saw again the red points of Genevieve's eyes, and wondered what emotion was hidden in them. Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida was hard to like, but it was undoubtedly Detlef Sierck's dark masterpiece. No one who saw it would ever forget it, no matter how much they might wish to.
The applause began, and grew to a deafening storm. The Trapdoor Daemon joined his clamour with the rest.
II
The future emperor had been impressed with the play. Genevieve knew that would please Detlef. Elsewhere at the party, there was heated debate about the merits of The Strange History of Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida. Mornan Tybalt, the thin-nosed Chancellor, quietly expressed extreme disapproval, while Graf Rudiger had apparently yawned throughout and glumly didn't see what all the fuss was about.
Two critics were on the point of blows, one proclaiming the piece an immortal masterpiece, the other reaching into the stable for his metaphors.
Guglielmo Pentangeli, Detlef's business manager and former cellmate, was happy, predicting that whatever a person might think of Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida, it would be impossible to venture out in society in the next year without having formed an opinion. And to form an opinion, it would be necessary to procure a ticket.
Genevieve felt watched, as she had all evening, but no one talked to her about the play. That was to be expected. She was in a peculiar position, connected with Detlef and yet not with his work. Some might think it impolite to express an opinion to her or to solicit her own. She felt strange anyway, distanced from the play she'd seen, not quite able to connect it with the man whose bed she shared×if rarely using it at the same time he did×or else able to understand too well the sparks in Detlef that made him at once Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida. Recently, Detlef had been darkening inside.
