I watched her glide away. I couldn’t see her feet due to the length of her dress, so it was easy to imagine she wasn’t actually touching the ground. She moved so smoothly, it wasn’t a stretch.
I realized I was sort of staring, so I forced myself to look around the room for someone to engage, but this was the kind of party where everyone knew everyone else or knew of everyone else, and I wasn’t on either side of that spectrum. I’d already looked around to see if the Saxon duke I knew was there, but he didn’t appear to be in attendance. So instead, I held my ground, alone, near an empty buffet table, and wondered what kind of food might eventually show up on it.
Anna was wrong. There were plenty of really lovely women at the party, but none of them held up compared to her. I had checked. And I wished she were next to me so I could tell her that.
That was when I decided I was probably in a huge amount of trouble, because I was thinking like a lovesick child.
I could just leave, I thought. I’d told her everything I knew about her anarchist; there was really no reason for me to be there. Considering how rarely I involved myself in affairs of state, I no doubt already would have left, had the person asking me to attend not had deep brown eyes and a way of saying my name that made me think I had to change names immediately because I never wanted to hear anybody else say it.
As I said, I was in bad shape.
It was while I was dealing with this loves me/loves me not foolishness running through my head that I took note of a low murmur trickling through the crowd. Up to that point the ambient noise had been unfocused, the product of a hundred conversations happening out of order. But something had happened near the doors that shut down some of those conversations and introduced a new topic to the rest. I caught a name in the buzz.
Talleyrand.
Evidently, the Frenchman who wasn’t supposed to be in Vienna had gone from attending secret meetings to making a grand entrance in front of everyone. Points for drama, but possibly not a great negotiating tactic. But what did I know, I barely understood the issues being debated, and had no particular desire to learn more.
The crowd opened for the man, who I saw clearly for the first time only once he’d made it halfway to his apparent destination—Prince Metternich. Metternich looked not at all surprised to learn of Talleyrand’s arrival, but that might have been the only way to play the moment, politically and socially.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand was a pale man with a shock of long grey-white hair that didn’t entirely compensate for a creeping hairline. Despite a reputation as one of the shrewdest men in Europe, he looked neither wise nor formidable, although there was a determination to him that I could read very clearly, and perhaps that was enough for an effective negotiator.
He walked with a limp.
This bothered me, a little at first and more when I got close enough to hear his footsteps, because it was a familiar cadence.
I looked around, but Anna was nowhere to be seen and I didn’t know who else I could turn to, to ask: does Talleyrand have a limp? But I couldn’t ask a stranger this, for one obvious reason—supposedly the man himself was walking before me, and clearly he did.
I could have also asked Anna if his appearance was a surprise to her. She’d said nothing about Talleyrand coming to the party, but it was possible she didn’t know it was going to happen any more than I did. Surely Adrian, the man tasked with guarding the Frenchman, should have known to expect him here.
At any rate, the limp was identical to the one the anarchist had, and this seemed important. Either the Prime Minister of France was also a monster who tried to murder me in an alley, or that monster was impersonating Talleyrand, both on the streets a few nights earlier and at this very moment in front of a hundred of the most important people in Europe.
Or I was mistaken and this wasn’t the man I’d met in the alley at all. It was something important to be right about, because the Talleyrand in the room was only about twenty feet from a handful of monarchs.
I didn’t know what to do, but it seemed like letting the guy get close enough to stab royalty was a bad idea, so I did the either the dumbest or smartest thing I could think of: I stepped out of the crowd and directly in Talleyrand’s line of sight.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said quietly, seeking to step around while not bothering to look directly at my face. His head was down, addressing everyone’s feet as he passed.
“You don’t remember me?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, no, I meet so many…” then he really looked, and for a half-second I saw recognition. The face in front of me was unfamiliar, but I knew the eyes behind that face. And those eyes knew mine.
“You,” he said, freezing in his tracks. “You are dead. You should be dead.”
It wasn’t that serious a wound, but I wasn’t going to say that. I didn’t say anything, actually, I just put a hand on the hilt of my sword.
We stood like that for a whole lot longer than I really liked. To anyone else, it looked as if a stranger had interrupted and threatened an important man that everyone knew, right in front of other important men. All the impostor had to do was play his role and eventually someone would use force to remove me. The only reason such a thing didn’t happen immediately, I suspected, was that there were no guards within the party itself. A common assumption in upper class gatherings of this sort was that all the people in attendance could be trusted to not be violent on the premises. It was actually a perfect place for an assassin who looked like the French Prime Minister.
I was still holding my breath. Many of the men there had swords of their own, and more than a few were soldiers. Wellington, for instance.
Happily, the impostor lost his nerve. Triggering a gasp of surprise from the crowd, the false Talleyrand spun around and ran.
“Stop him!” I shouted. That didn’t do any good, because again, nobody knew who I was and everyone thought they knew who he was. But I ran after him anyway, and my stitches were overjoyed about this, I promise you.
Anna met me halfway to the door. “It’s him?” she asked.
“No, I just enjoy chasing Frenchmen.”
“Adrian is trying to cut him off. How did you know?”
We got separated by all the people who were stubbornly refusing to get out of our way. I would have pulled my sword, but running with a sword is a good way to accidentally impale someone, all the more likely because a sword doesn’t have at all the same effect that shooting a gun in the air might under similar circumstances. We didn’t reunite until we were both in the hallway on the other side of the door.
“Left or right?” I asked. We heard a woman scream and commotion to the right, and took that to be an answer. We headed in that direction.
“He walked with the same limp the other night,” I said, in answer. “That was what made me stop him.”
“But Talleyrand has a game leg,” she said.
“Well it’s a good thing I didn’t know that, isn’t it?”
The interior of the Chancellery Wing outside of the ballroom was like an anthill if ants were somewhat larger and dug perfect right angles. Corridors upon corridors, stairs upon stairs, enough space for a thousand secret meetings, and a thousand places to hide. We couldn’t let him out of our sight or he’d be lost altogether. Especially for a creature than can change his outward appearance as totally as he could.
* * *
It’s called a rakshasa. They’re popular in Hindu mythology, where they turn up as shape-shifting evil creatures that eat humans and drink their blood, and can also fly, disappear, and probably do five or six other impossible things that definitely aren’t true.
Mankind likes to exaggerate. It’s a common affliction that has as much to do with the natural mythmaking consequences of oral tales told down generations as with a persistent belief—as a species—in magic. It’s how dragons, who were large, aggressive lizards, became fire-breathing monsters with the gift of flight. And how vampires can turn into a bat, werewolves can somehow trans
form into actual wolves, and demons are magical creatures from the pit of hell. None of that is true, as any vampire, werewolf or demon will tell you.
Actually, don’t talk to demons. They’re awful, terrible things.
Anyway. A rakshasa is a real creature, but not quite as tremendous a creature as the Hindus say. They don’t literally shape-shift, or rather, not entirely. I’d only met one before Vienna, and he wasn’t friendly, but he gave me the notion that most of their talent in impersonation comes from uncanny mimicry skills and a little stage makeup. They’re good enough to fool, say, a crowd of people who know a man by face and reputation, but not good enough to mislead a close friend or loved one.
This was the first time I’d met a rakshasa anarchist/assassin, but it seemed like a nice fit. Thief would also be a really good profession for them.
They weren’t mimics to be thieves or assassins, though. They did it to get into private spaces, because they liked to eat people. That part of the myth is accurate. It’s what those giant teeth are for.
* * *
“I see him!” Anna shouted, grabbing my arm to pull me through yet another hallway half-occupied by people. Constantly tripping over this duchess and that lord, duke or whatever was incredibly annoying, but having them there was also a little helpful. They all had that same was that Talleyrand that just ran past me? expression on their faces.
The impostor was running well for a fellow who should have a game leg, really. It was nice to see; it meant I’d probably picked the right guy. I wasn’t running nearly as well by comparison, because I was pretty sure my stitches had torn and I was bleeding on my suit.
Fortunately, the chase didn’t last much past that realization. Adrian had somehow managed to flank us by way of a parallel corridor, which enabled him to be in the right place when the rakshasa turned a corner. The Swiss bodyguard executed a clean tackle, rolled over the impostor and to his feet. By the time the false Talleyrand regained his footing all three of us were there with blades out.
The rakshasa stood with his own knife out—another katar—spinning and hissing and lunging at us, like an animal cornered, which he sort of was.
“It’s uncanny,” Adrian muttered. “I stood by Talleyrand’s side for two weeks and I would swear to you this was he.”
“Perhaps I am him,” the rakshasa hissed. “Perhaps I have always been him, and the real man was never in Vienna. Perhaps I am the real Talleyrand, the only Talleyrand who ever was. Perhaps.”
“Perhaps not,” I said. “You ran; he wouldn’t have.”
He hissed again.
Rakshasas can be a little snakelike, and like only a few other creatures, it’s hard to imagine one of them turning out to be a nice guy with a regular job. It’s the eating people thing, mostly. That’s hard to get past.
“Who do you work with, monster?” Adrian asked. “How many are you? What was your mission?”
Adrian was a big, burly man who—no matter what Anna had to say—looked a lot more handsome than me. He had a Nordic blond shock of hair and stood taller than most, making the sword in his hand look smaller than it actually was. He was the sort of person most men would confess everything to immediately, to avoid whatever wrath he might be capable of unleashing.
The rakshasa largely ignored him. The creature was facing two men with swords and a woman with two throwing knives, and all he had to defend himself was a katar and his teeth. The teeth were pretty impressive, but not as impressive as a sword might have been. He seemed to be stuck deciding which of us represented the weakest link, and may have been ignoring Adrian because he didn’t look like the weakest anything. Surrender didn’t appear to be one of the options the impostor was considering, and he wasn’t about to answer anything. He had his own questions.
“What are you?” he asked me. I was caught off-guard.
“You’re asking me? Do you have no mirrors at your disposal? I’m sorry to say the wound you gave wasn’t mortal. You missed.”
“That is untrue, sir. All my wounds are mortal. I will show you.”
It was only a quick wrist flick, the same sort of motion a discus-thrower might make at their release point. It was to throw the katar. Since those aren’t weighted to be thrown, the attack was awkward. Effective still, but not terribly accurate. The clever part was that he targeted Anna.
I did something historically stupid, and it was the exact thing the rakshasa had anticipated: I threw myself in the way of the blade.
Under different circumstances I might have trusted her to dodge the clumsy assault. The knife throw was telegraphed. Anybody paying attention would have been able to step aside, even someone without the kind of training needed to handle people throwing sharp things. But it was Anna, and more than that, I realized just before the blade was in the air exactly what the rakshasa meant by all his wounds being mortal.
The katar found a home in my left buttocks, which is not an impressive place to get a scar, in case you ever wondered.
Anna had been in the act of responding to his attack when I made my awkward rescue attempt. She still released her own knife, and thankfully not into any part of my body. It hit the wall behind the rakshaka.
Then, of course, I was on top of her and with a knife in my butt, and neither of us was in a position to do anything other than lie there. It was the opening the impostor was looking for.
He probably would have escaped then, except his plan required Adrian to be slower than he was, and holding a shorter sword than he had. The rakshaka didn’t get more than a couple of steps—heading for the space I had vacated in my foolhardiness— before the Swiss was on him. A second after that, the creature’s head was bouncing on the floor. Thankfully, beheading kills most monsters.
“What are you doing?” Anna exclaimed.
“Saving your life?”
She pushed out from underneath. Realizing I had a knife in me, I chose to remain on the floor, on my stomach. Adrian helped her to her feet and then knelt down beside me to take a look at the knife.
“Don’t move,” he said gently, as if I needed to hear this. Considering Anna had been trying to keep me a secret, his reaction to my involvement seemed pretty positive.
“Such a clumsy attack, I could have avoided it,” Anna insisted.
I think I embarrassed her by behaving in a manner resembling chivalry. In hindsight, it was just as likely she was embarrassed at my having done this in front of Adrian, the man who had sent her the rakshasa for execution in the first place. She was supposed to be able to handle herself.
Again, this was hindsight. In the moment, I was sort of annoyed.
“You might have avoided it, but I couldn’t risk that,” I said.
“Why not?” she asked. “Do you think I can’t tolerate a cut? I can—”
“Not from this kind of knife,” I interrupted.
“Hold still, I’m going to pull it out so we can move you,” Adrian said.
“Be very careful with the blade,” I said to him. “It’s poisoned.”
Anna gasped.
“Don’t worry,” I added. “The last one he stabbed me with was poisoned too. I’ll be fine.”
* * *
I ended up in a room with a bed. It wasn’t the room where all my stuff was, in the seedy part of town, and it wasn’t Anna’s room. It might have belonged to Adrian, but after the incident at Hofburg I didn’t see him again, so I couldn’t ask.
Piecing together what happened right after I was wounded is a little tough, because a lot of people got deeply involved very quickly. Adrian had a team of cohorts that all seemed to be doubling as members of the service staff: footmen, drivers, aides, kitchen staff, and so on. They were on the scene and acting with the sort of efficiency that made it clear this was not the first time they’d been called upon to dispose of a body quickly and discreetly.
I wasn’t the body being disposed of, thank goodness. That belonged to the rakshasa. I could understand perfectly why they didn’t want him lying around any longer than necessary,
both because this was not the sort of place where dead bodies should be expected and because he still looked a lot like Talleyrand. Not as much in death as when alive, but enough to raise questions. It wasn’t as if nobody saw us chasing him around, either.
I couldn’t walk all too well. I tried hopping toward the exit, but that tended to make me bleed more—in two places since my stitches had definitely opened up—so they decided to put one man on either side and carry me out.
We left through what may have been a large window. It wasn’t the front door, certainly, and I don’t know how many other entrances were options, but there didn’t seem to be anyone near this exit so I’m thinking it might have been a window. I can’t remember. Whatever it was, soon I was in the back of a carriage and hating the bumps in the street twice as much as I had when we rode in to the party.
Worse, Anna wasn’t with me. In the bustle to get me out and the fake Talleyrand mopped up, she and I had been separated.
The carriage ultimately took me to the room and the bed, where I did some more bleeding, and got some more stitches—this time from a surgeon—and drank some more to dull the pain. Bleeding, cheap whiskey, and stab wounds is how I remember Vienna now, which could be why I haven’t visited since.
Anna came by after a few days. She was dressed simply, as a common woman rather than as noblewoman or a young man. As with every version of her, the description common didn’t come near explaining how amazing she looked.
I was really happy to see her. I nearly jumped out of the bed, but my stitches might have had a complaint or two about that.
“How do you feel?” she asked. It was evening. The window shades were drawn and the only light was from a candle. The flame danced in her eyes.
“Well enough. It’ll be a while before I ride a horse again, but I’ll survive it. Where have you been?”
Aside from the surgeon and the housemaid who brought me food and emptied the chamber pot, I had only been visited by serious men I didn’t know and who didn’t introduce themselves. These men turned up on three separate occasions to ask how I was feeling. At first I assumed the organization I had accidentally aligned myself with was actively concerned with my health due to my self-evident heroics, but now I was beginning to think otherwise. These were not happy, grateful men. Confused, displeased, and possibly constipated was how I would describe their demeanor.
Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5) Page 6
