Genevieve 02 - Genevieve Undead

by Jack Yeovil

  A dangerous brute, to judge by the height and breadth of him and the size of his hairy-backed hands. Still, his face showed he had, at least once in his life, taken second prize in a fight.

  'Shush, Flaminea,' the old man told the woman. 'We've no choice'

  Several men of the company had swords out, as if expecting banditti or beastmen.

  Kloszowski noticed a pronounced family resemblance. Long noses, hollow eyes, distinct cheekbones. He was reminded of the phantom face in the blue light, and wondered whether perhaps they wouldn't be better off taking their chances with the storm.

  'See here,' said d'Amato, who seemed to inflate as he dried. 'You'll have to shelter us. I'm an important man in Miragliano. Ysidro d'Amato. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you. You'll be well rewarded.'

  The old man looked at d'Amato with contempt. 'I doubt if you could reward us, signor.'

  'Hah,' d'Amato said. 'I'm not without wealth.'

  'I am Schedoni Udolpho,' the old man said, 'the son of Melmoth Udolpho. This is a rich estate, weighed down with wealth beyond your imagination. You can have nothing we could want.'

  D'Amato stepped back, towards a fireplace the size of a stable where whole trees burned, and looked away. He seemed smaller with the fire behind him, and he was still clinging to his bag as if it contained his beating heart. With typical bourgeois sliminess, he'd been impressed by talk of 'wealth beyond your imagination.'

  Kloszowski remembered where he'd heard of d'Amato. Miragliano, a seaport built on a network of islands in a salt marsh, was a rich trading city, but it suffered from a lack of drinkable water. Fortunes had been made via water-caravans and canals, and d'Amato had been the leading water merchant in the city, carving out his own empire, forcing his competitors out of business. A year or so ago, he had achieved an almost total control over the city's fresh water, and been able to treble the price. The city fathers had protested, but had to give in and pay him.

  He had been a powerful man indeed. But then the Yellow Ague had come, and investigating scryers laid the blame on contaminated water. That explained why d'Amato was leaving home

  Schedoni signalled to the scarred hulk.

  'Zschokke,' he said. 'Bring more chairs, and mulled wine. Our guests are in danger of catching their deaths.'

  Kloszowski had stepped as close to the fire as he could and felt his clothes drying on him.

  Antonia had stripped her soaked shawl, and was raising thin skirts to toast her legs. Kloszowski noticed that at least one of the Udolpho clan was especially intrigued by the spectacle, the flabby old fellow with a cleric's skullcap and a lecher's look in his eye.

  Antonia laughed gaily, and did a few dance steps.

  'I'm a dancer sometimes,' she said. 'Not a very good one.'

  Her legs were shapely, with a dancer's muscles.

  'I used to be an actress too. Murdered by the end of Act One'

  She stuck her tongue out and hung her neck as if it were broken. Her blouse was soaked to her skin, leaving Kloszowski in no doubt as to her qualifications for the entertainment business.

  D'Amato swarmed around Antonia, making her drop her wet skirts to cover herself.

  'Sorry,' she said. 'Bought and paid for, that's me. The Water Wizard has exclusive rights to all performances.'

  She was remarkably cheerful, and d'Amato was obviously embarrassed by his plaything's boldness.

  'Harlotry is the path to Chaos and damnation,' said the shrivelled killjoy. 'This house was always plagued with harlots and loose women, with their painted cheeks and their sinful laughter. But they're all dead now, and I, righteous and ridiculous Flaminea, am still here. They used to laugh at me when I was a girl, and ask me if I was saving my body for the worms. But I'm alive, and they're not.'

  Kloszowski had Flaminea marked as a cheerless maniac straight away. She seemed to derive considerable enjoyment from contemplating the deaths of others, so she wasn't denying herself every earthly pleasure.

  The hulk found him a place at the table, next to a moustached gallant who couldn't hold his head properly.

  'I'm Pintaldi,' the young man said.

  'Aleksandr,' Kloszowski returned.

  Pintaldi reached for a candle, and brought it close. Kloszowski felt the heat on his face.

  'Fascinating stuff, flame,' he said. 'I've made a study of it. They're all wrong, you know. It's not hot, it's cold. And flames are pure, like sharp knives. They consume the evil, and leave the good. Flames are the fingers of the gods.'

  'Very interesting,' said Kloszowski, taking a swallow of the wine Zschokke had decanted for him. It stung his throat, and warmed his belly.

  Flaminea glared at him as if he were molesting a child in her presence.

  'You are a cleric of Morr,' said a hairy-faced beast sitting near Old Melmoth. 'What are you doing out in the storm?'

  Kloszowski was befuddled for a moment, then remembered his borrowed robe.

  'Um, death is everywhere,' he said, holding up his stolen amulet.

  'The dead are everywhere,' said the hairy man. 'Especially here. Why, in this very hall the ghostly disembodied hands of the Strangling Steward frequently take shape, and fix about the throats of unwary guests.'

  D'Amato coughed, and spat out his wine.

  'Only those guilty of some grave crime need fear the Strangling Steward,' said the folklorist. 'He only visits the guilty.'

  'My apologies,' said Schedoni. 'We are an old family, and our blood has grown thin. Isolation has made us eccentric. You must think us strange company?'

  Everyone looked at Kloszowski, hollow eyes seeming to glow blue in the gloom. 'Oh no,' he said, 'you've been most hospitable. This certainly compares favourably with the last noble house in which I was a guest.'

  That much was true, although Kloszowski suspected Zschokke might share certain talents with Tancredi. All these aristocratic menages kept a pet killer.

  'You must stay the night,' Schedoni said. 'The house is large, and rooms can be found for you.'

  Kloszowski wondered how long he could maintain the deception. Since the great fog riots, his name had been a byword for insurrection. If he were to be revealed to the Udolpho clan as Prince Kloszowski, the revolutionist poet, he'd probably find himself defenestrated. And the far windows of the great hall overlooked the gorge below. It would be a fall of seven or eight hundred feet onto jagged rocks.

  Pintaldi had picked up the candelabrum now, and was holding his palm close to a flame.

  'See,' he said. 'It burns cold.'

  His skin was blackening, and there was a nasty, meaty smell.

  'Harlots will rot,' said Flaminea.

  Kloszowski looked across the table at the fair young girl. She had sat quietly, saying nothing, her eyes demurely cast down. She didn't have the Udolpho look, yet she was obviously part of this bizarre collection. Her lips were unrouged but deep red, and she had white, sharp teeth. She looked up, and caught his gaze. She seemed about sixteen, but her clear eyes were ancient.

  'Without harlots, where'd be the fun in the world?' said Antonia.

  Flaminea shook a bony fist at the dancer, and spat a chunk of gristle onto her plate. The woman had a fuzz of beard on her chin and her hair was scraggy grey. Dried out, Antonia was as healthy as a ripe apple, and made a distinct contrast with this withered crew.

  'I shall play the harpsichord,' said the dark girl sitting by the fat cleric. Schedoni nodded, and the girl got up, daintily walking across the hall to the instrument. She wore something long, black and clinging, like a stylish shroud. Kloszowski was feeling warm again, but somehow the cold was still settled in his bones.

  VII

  As Christabel played, Genevieve considered the outsiders. Something about them disturbed her. She saw Ambrosio's lips tighten as Antonia showed her legs. She felt the strange hostility between the cleric of Morr and the merchant of Miragliano. These men hadn't chosen to travel together. And both had things to hide.

  She imagined travelling, coaches crossing the Old World, from
Estalia to Bretonnia, from the Empire to Kislev. There were great cities×Parravon, Altdorf, Marienburg, Erengrad, Zhufbar×and unknown, far-distant countries×Cathay, Lustria, Nippon, the Dark Lands. She believed she had spent all her life at Udolpho, never leaving its walls, as much a prisoner as invalid Mathilda or the altered son Ravaglioli and Flaminea were rumoured to have penned in a cellar, fed only on human flesh.

  All she could remember was Udolpho, and she couldn't even remember much of that. There were huge gaps in her recollection. And yet, impressions of things she could never have known sometimes came to her.

  Christabel played strangely, letting her juicedreams seep through as she embroidered around the edges of a familiar piece. Her tangle of black hair flew back as she nodded her head in time to the savage music.

  The music disturbed Genevieve more. In her mind, she was a predator, tearing out the throats of her prey, her teeth sinking into flesh, delicious blood gushing into her mouth, trickling over her chin, flowing over her bosom.

  Her nails had become sharp, and her teeth shifted in her mouth, the enamel reshaping

  There were other dream memories, crowding in. Faces, names, places, events. Things she could never have known, she experienced. She remembered a crowd attacked by invisible forces, and the kiss of a dark, handsome man who had changed her. She remembered a queenly woman, her face and arms red with blood, dressed in the costume of an earlier age. She remembered an iron bracelet and a chain, tying her to a rough-faced man, and a night in an inn. She remembered twice venturing into a castle to face a Great Enchanter. She remembered a theatre and a striking actor, and her flight from him, from his city. She remembered a thing with the body of a sea-creature and the eyes of a man. All these things were more than dreams, and yet they did not fit with the life Genevieve knew she had lived, a quiet, secluded, forgotten life in this castle.

  Christabel's shoulders heaved, and sweat fell from her face.

  Flaminea grunted from time to time. Music was sinful in her mind, and she rejected her daughter's talent. Sometimes, Christabel killed her mother, choking the life out of her with a silken scarf, or battering her with a stone torn out of the walls of the house.

  Sometimes, when Flaminea worked up a righteous frenzy, it was the other way around, and she would denounce her daughter as a witch, standing by smugly while the villagers dragged her to the stake and Pintaldi lovingly nurtured the bonfire.

  The cleric of Morr was looking at her. He was a foreigner, and didn't strike her as being a real cleric. Even Ambrosio had something about him that suggested holy orders, no matter how many times his hands reached into skirts or bodices. Aleksandr was not the type to bow to any god, or to any man.

  Was it just that he was too good-looking to be a celibate of Morr?

  His hood was down, and his throat was exposed. She saw the delicate blue vein threading up into his unkempt, still-wet beard, and imagined she could detect its pulse by sight.

  Genevieve licked her lips with a rough tongue.

  VIII

  This was a strange brood, Antonia Marsillach thought to herself, and no mistake. For the millionth time, she wondered whether it wouldn't have been cleverer to stay in Miragliano and throw herself on the mercy of the city fathers. She'd had nothing to do with Ysidro's damned poison water, and suspected he was only taking her away with him to his luxury bolt-hole in Bretonnia because she knew a lot about the careless way he'd pursued personal profit at the expense of public safety. She should have turned the hog in and petitioned for a reward instead of sticking by him. He was no use anyway, never had been. Even when things were going well, he'd been more interested in the counting house than the bedroom. She should go back to the stage, and try to get out of the chorus and into a featured spot. She could act better than some, dance better than most, and the customers always liked to look at her legs. She was still young. She wanted some fun.

  And here she was surrounded by refugees from the kind of melodrama the city fathers had banned from the Miragliano playhouse as overly morbid and liable to incite public disorder. Before the ban, she'd been in them all, shaking herself during the prologues and getting murdered during the first acts of Brithan Cragg's Ystareth; or: The Plague Daemon and Orfeo's Tall Tale; or: The Doom of Zaragoz, Detlef Sierck's The Treachery of Oswald and The Strange History of Dr. Zhiekill and Mr. Chaida, Ferring the Balladeer's incredibly violent Brave Konrad and the Skull-Face Slaughterer, Bruno Malvoisin's obscene Seduced by Slaaneshi; or: The Baneful Lusts of Diogo Briesach. Those plays had dark and stormy nights, and weary travellers forced to stay the night, and puritanical harridans, and family curses, and secret passages, and much-altered wills, and ghouls, goblins and ghostliness.

  And here she was in one again, promoted from the chorus to a featured role. She'd have to watch herself before the first act curtain.

  The witch pounding the harpsichord was competing with the thunder and lightning, while the aunt who hated harlots was foaming at the mouth with righteous hysteria, and the cleric of Ranald was sneaking looks at her cleavage whenever he thought he was unobserved. Schedoni seemed courteous enough, but Antonia wasn't convinced he was still alive. She suspected he might be a wired-together corpse used as a ventriloquist's dummy by the scarred butler. She looked around the great hall, wondering where the entrances to the secret passages were.

  Ravaglioli, the harridan's husband, was still eating, while everyone else was paying attention to his dark daughter. He was a noisy, messy eater, and food fragments were scattered about his place at the table.

  Antonia was tired, and looking forwards to a big, warm, fresh-laundered bed without Ysidro d'Amato in it.

  They had brought out Estalian sherry, and it was doing her good inside. Her clothes had dried on her body, and she relished the thought of peeling them off, and towelling herself down. Maybe she could find skilled hands to help her with that. Aleksandr seemed likely enough, and Father Ambrosio would doubtless be keen to volunteer his services.

  She wasn't that wonderful as a dancer. But she had other skills. She could always find a comfortable place somewhere. She always had. Zschokke poured her some more sherry. She was feeling quite tipsy.

  Ravaglioli scooped a spoonful of some flavoured gruel into his mouth. Antonia wasn't sure whether it was savory or sweet. He gulped it down with a slurp, and reached out for more.

  Then, he paused, and his cheeks ballooned, as if he had bitten into a whole pepper. His face reddened, and the veins in his temples throbbed purple. Tears leaked from his eyes, and slipped into the cracks of his swelling cheeks.

  He slapped the table with both hands, his full spoon splattering gruel around him. Christabel continued to play, but everyone else looked at the suffering man.

  Ravaglioli held his throat, and seemed to be struggling, trying to swallow something.

  'What is it?' asked Schedoni.

  Ravaglioli shook his head, and stood up. His throat apple was bobbing, and he was breathing uneasily. His eyes were wide open, bloodshot, and panicked.

  'It's justice,' snarled Flaminea. 'That's what it is.'

  Zschokke tried to help the man, holding him upright, giving him a goblet of water.

  Ravaglioli looked worse than the poisoned plenipotentiary, in Sendak Mittell's Lustrian Vengeance; or: 'I Will Eat Their Offal!,' when he was told that the deathbane-laced tripes he had just eaten were pulled from his beloved grandmother while she was still alive.

  He pushed the servant away, but poured the water into his mouth, sucking vigorously. He gulped, and the blockage in his throat went down towards his stomach. He drained the rest of the water, and reached for the sherry, laughing.

  'What was it?' Schedoni asked.

  Ravaglioli shrugged and smiled, wiping the spittle off his chin. 'It felt like a little metal ball. I've no idea what it was doing in the gruel, or what it could have been. It was coated with something sticky.'

  Then he grabbed his stomach as a spasm hit him.

  'It hurts'

  Ravaglioli
began shaking, as if lapsing into a fit. He held the edge of the table, and grit his teeth.

  'Burning inside it's growing hot'

  Suddenly, he bent backwards, his spine audibly snapping against the chair rest. His swelling stomach burst through the hooks of his doublet, and was exposed.

  Christabel stopped playing, and turned on her stool to look at the commotion her father was causing.

  Zschokke backed away from the flailing man, and several people moved their chairs to give Ravaglioli room. His eyes were showing only white. His stomach was distended like a pregnant woman's, about to deliver triplets. Red stretchlines were appearing in the skin. The man was groaning, and there were noises inside him, breaking and tearing noises.

  Antonia couldn't look away.

  With a sulphurous bang, Ravaglioli's stomach exploded. Gobbets rained around him, and his chair collapsed.

  A wisp of blue smoke curled out of the gaping hole in his midriff.

  Somebody screamed, and screamed, and screamed

  and Antonia realized it was her.

  IX

  That had been disgusting!

  Kloszowski wiped his sleeve with a napkin, and watched everyone panic. D'Amato quieted Antonia down with a slightly overenthusiastic slap, and the dancer sat back, appalled.

  A bald fellow with bow-legs, who'd been sitting near Schedoni, scuttled over, dusty coat-tails trailing the floor, and examined the corpse of Signor Ravaglioli, prodding around the edges of his yawning stomach wound with a bony finger.

  'Hmmmn,' he said. 'This man is dead.'

  Obviously this was a physician of some insight.

  'Some explosive device, I suspect,' the doctor added. 'Designed to react to the inside of a human stomach'

  He took a fork, and poked around inside the mess.

  'Ah yes,' he said, holding up a small shiny scrap of something. 'Here's a fragment.'

  'Thank you, Dr. Valdemar,' said Schedoni. 'Zschokke, have this mess cleared away and then bring us coffee.'

  Kloszowski got up and thumped the table. Cutlery rattled. Ambrosio stopped his still-full wine goblet from falling over.