Rudiger stepped around a tree, and stood still, straightening up. Doremus advanced to stand at his shoulder.
They saw the quarry.
There had been a subsidence in the last fifty years, bringing down several of the trees. They lay, broken but still alive, branches shot out in odd directions, and the hollow had filled with still rainwater. This part of the forest was full of subsidences, where the old dwarf tunnels had fallen through. The ground was as dangerous as any creature of the wilds. The pool was still, covered with ice as thin as parchment, dappled with red-brown leaves.
At the other side of the pool, where the ice was broken, the quarry stood, heads dipped to drink, horns trailing in the water.
Behind them, someone drew audible breath at the sight. Balthus' bedmate. The girl would be cursed.
As one, the unicorns looked up, eyes alert, horns pointed at the hunting party.
It was a frozen moment. Doremus would remember every detail of that fragment of a second. The unicorn horns, sparkling from the water, shining like new-polished metal. The steam from the beasts' flanks. Clouded amber eyes, bright with intelligence. The shadows of the twisted branches of the fallen trees. The croak of the greentoads at the pool's edge.
The unicorns were stallions, slender and small as young thoroughbreds, white with the characteristic black flecks of their tribe in the matted hair of their beards and underbellies.
Graf Rudiger's arrow was in flight before the girl had finished her noisy inhalation. And it was speared into his kill's eye before Doremus had his aim. Rudiger's unicorn neighed and thrashed as the arrowhead emerged from the back of his head, and reared up.
The shock of death came fast, blood pouring out of its eyes and nostrils.
Doremus' unicorn was turned and away before his arrow was released and, as he let go the fletches, he had to bring up his left hand to adjust the aim.
The arrow flew wonkily from his hand, and he felt a burning up and down his arm.
'Good shot, Dorrie,' blurted Otho, clapping his agonised shoulder. Doremus winced, and tried not to let his pain show.
The unicorn was almost out of sight before the arrow found him. It slid past his flanks, carving a red runnel in his white hide, and bit deep beneath his ribs.
It should be a heart-shot.
Doremus' unicorn stumbled and fell, but got up again. Blood gouted from his wound.
The animal screamed, emptying his lungs.
'A kill,' Count Magnus said, nodding approval.
Doremus could not believe it. From the moment he had chosen his arrow, he had been sure he would miss. He usually did. In wonder, he looked to his father. The Graf Rudiger's heavy brows were knit, and his face was dark.
'But not a clean kill,' he said.
Doremus' unicorn staggered on, vanishing between trees.
'He won't get far,' Balthus said. 'We can track him.'
Everyone was looking to Rudiger, waiting for his verdict.
Grimly, he stepped over the crest of the subsidence, choosing his footmarks well among the leaf-encrusted floor-vines. His bow was slung on his back again, and he had his dwarf-forged hunting knife out now. The von Unheimlich fortune was one of the greatest in the Empire, but, beside his bow, this knife was the graf's most prized possession.
They all followed the master huntsman, edging around the still pool to the fallen beast.
'A shame it was only a stallion,' Count Magnus said. 'Otherwise, it would have been a fine trophy.'
His father grunted, and Doremus remembered the hunters' lore that he had been made to learn by rote as a child. The unicorn horn his great-grandfather had brought to the von Unheimlich lodge was from a mare. Only unicorn mares made trophies.
Rudiger's unicorn was already beginning to putrify, suppurating brown patches spreading on his hide like the rot on a bruised apple. Unicorn males did not last long after the kill.
'You'll soon have your arrow back, Rudiger,' Count Magnus said. 'That's something.'
Rudiger was on his knees by his kill, prodding with his knife. The animal was truly dead. As they watched, the rot spread, and the stinking hide collapsed in on the crumbling skeleton. The remaining eye shrivelled, and plopped through its socket. Maggots writhed in the remains, as if the carcass were days dead.
'That's amazing,' Otho said, making a face at the smell.
'It's the nature of the beast,' Balthus explained. 'There's some magic in their make-up. Unicorns live well beyond their time, and when death catches up with them, so does decay.'
The pale girl tutted to herself, face blank. It could not be pleasant for her to see such a thing, to know this must eventually be her lot.
Rudiger put his knife away, and scooped up a handful of the unicorn's cooling blood. He held it up to Doremus' face.
'Drink,' he said.
Doremus wanted to back away, but knew he could not.
'You must take something from the kill. Every kill makes you stronger.'
Doremus looked to Count Magnus, who smiled. Despite the bright red mess a wildcat had made of his face, he was a kindly-looking man, who often seemed more willing than his own father to overlook Doremus' supposed weaknesses and failures.
'Go on, my boy,' Magnus said. 'It'll put iron in your bones, fire in your heart. Libertines in Middenheim swear by the potency of unicorn blood. You'll partake of the virility of the stallion. You will sire many fine sons.'
His courage stiffened, Doremus shoved his face into his father's hands and swallowed some of the thick red liquid. It tasted of nothing in particular. A little disappointed, he did not feel a change.
'Make a man of you,' Rudiger said, rubbing his hands clean.
Doremus looked around, wondering if he were seeing more clearly. The guide had said there was some magic in the make-up of the beast. Perhaps the blood did have its properties.
'We must follow the wounded stallion,' Balthus said. 'He mustn't be allowed to reach the mare of the tribe.'
Rudiger said nothing.
Suddenly, Doremus wanted to be sick. His stomach heaved, but he kept it down.
For an instant, he saw his companions as if they wore masks, masks reflecting their true natures. Otho had the jowly face of a pig, Balthus the wet snout of a dog, the girl a polished and pretty skull, Magnus the smooth and handsome face of the young man he had been.
He turned to look at his father, but the vision passed, and he saw the graf as he always did, iron features giving away nothing. Perhaps there had been magic in the blood.
The unicorn was just a sack of bone fragments now, flat against the forest floor, leaking away essence. Otho prodded the corpse with his foot, and opened a gash in the hide, through which belched a bubble of foul air and yellow liquid.
'Euurgh,' Otho said, with an exaggerated grimace. 'Smells like a dwarf wrestler's loinstrap.'
Rudiger took his arrow from the unicorn's head, breaking it through the papery skull. He considered the shaft for a moment, then snapped it in two and dropped the pieces onto the messy carcass.
'What about the horn?' Otho said, making a grab for it. 'Isn't there silver in a unicorn's horn?'
The horn powdered in his grip, the traces of silver glittering amid the white pulpy ash.
'A little, Master Waernicke,' Magnus explained. 'It goes with the magic. Not enough to be worth anything.'
Doremus noticed that the girl was staying well away from the kill. Her kind didn't care for blessed silver. She had a fair face and shape, but he couldn't forget the skull he had seen.
Balthus was on edge, eager to continue.
'If the wounded beast gets to his tribe, the mare will know what we've done. The whole tribe will be warned. That could be dangerous for us.'
Rudiger shrugged. 'Fair enough. We're dangerous for them.'
The graf was not concerned. After a kill, he was always distracted, triumph followed by irritability. Doremus recognized that he was the same way after he had been with a woman. No matter how wonderful it was, it was never up to
the anticipation. Rudiger kept his trophies dutifully, but Doremus wondered if they were only reminders of his disappointment. The lodge was full of magnificent horns and heads and pelts and wings, but they might just as well be handfuls of dust for all his father cared for them.
It was the moment of the kill that was all to the graf, the moment when he was the power of life and death. That was his fulfilment.
'You bagged a beast, Dorrie,' Otho blustered. 'Bloody well done. That merits a good few hoists of the ale jar, my friend. You'll have a special place at the table in the League of Karl-Franz from now on. We'll down you a good few toasts before the term's end.'
'Balthus,' said Rudiger, in a dangerously even tone.
The forest guide turned to pay attention to his master. His mistress stood a little behind him, quivering a little.
'In future, have your vampire whore keep quiet or leave her behind. You understand?'
'Yes, excellency,' Balthus said.
'Now,' the graf said, 'day is done. The hunting has been good. We shall return to the lodge.'
'Yes, excellency.'
* * * * *
* * *
II
Vampire whore.
Genevieve had been called worse.
But if she were to be serious about not killing Graf Rudiger von Unheimlich, it would have helped if he wasn't such a bastard.
After three days at the von Unheimlich hunting lodge, Genevieve had to admit the graf appeared to incarnate all the vices which Prince Kloszowski claimed were endemic among the aristocracy.
He treated his son like a broken-spirited dog, his mistress like a slow-witted servant and his servants like the frosty leaf-mould they had to spend so much time scraping from the soles of his highly-polished hunting boots. With the fuzzy close-to-the-skull haircut typical of the noblemen of this northern region of the Empire and an assortment of supposedly glamorous scars all over his face and arms×and, presumably, the rest of him×he looked like a weathered granite statue that had once been of a handsome young man and was now due for replacement.
And he murdered for sport.
In her time, she had met many people who richly deserved killing. Since her time encompassed six hundred and sixty-nine years, most of them were dead, of violence, disease or old age. Some were dead by her own hand.
But she was not a murderer for hire. No matter what Mornan Tybalt thought as he sat in the Imperial palace in Altdorf, moving people around like chesspieces, tugging the strings of his many puppets.
Puppet, that was a new entry for her collection of professions. And assassin?
Perhaps she would have been better off staying with poor Detlef? It would have been some years before time overcame him and left her stranded with her eternal youth, carrying another grandfather-aged lover through his final years.
She was still quite fond of him, even.
But she had left Detlef and Altdorf. Journeying to Tilea, she had become caught up in the intrigues of Udolpho, and been extricated only through the intervention of Aleksandr Kloszowski. Then, she had accompanied the revolutionist and his current mistress, Antonia, back to the Empire, travelling with them for the lack of other companions.
She had debated politics with the revolutionist, pitting her cool, cautious experience against his fiery, self-delighted idealism.
That association had been her mistake, the first hook that Tybalt had needed to catch her. She hoped Kloszowski was in Altdorf now, plotting the downfall of the Empire, and, especially, the ruination of the scheming and one-thumbed keeper of the Imperial counting house.
In the cramped quarters she was sharing with Balthus, she stripped out of her hunting clothes×tight leathers over linen×and chose one of the three dresses she was allowed. It was simple, white and coarse. Unlike everyone else in the lodge, she didn't need furs or fire after nightfall. Cold meant nothing to her.
Recently, as the full moons shrank for the last time this year, she was becoming more sensitive. She hadn't had blood for over two months. Kloszowski had let her bleed him one night, when Antonia was distracted, and there had been a young wall guard in Middenheim. Since then, nothing, no one.
Her teeth hurt, and she kept biting her tongue. The taste of her own blood was just a reminder of what she was missing. She must feed, soon.
She looked at Balthus, who was at his devotions before the shrine of Taal by his bed. Her partner-in-crime, Tybalt's puppet had broad shoulders and a thick pelt over his muscled chest and arms. He might be weak in spirit, but he had strength of body. There would be something in his blood, if not the tang of the truly strong then at least enough flavoured substance to quench her red thirst for a while.
No. She was forced to share enough intimacy with the forest guide. She did not want to extend their acquaintance. She had too many blood ties, tugging at her memory.
Blood ties. Detlef, Sing Toy, Kloszowski, Marianne, Sergei Bukharin. And the dead ones, so many dead: Chandagnac, Pepin, Francois Feyder, Triesault, Columbina, Master Po, Bloody Kattarin, Chinghiz, Rosalba, Faragut, Vukotich, Oswald. All wounds, still bleeding.
From the slit window, she could see the slopes descending towards the Marienburg-Middenheim road, the major path through these trackless woods. A rapid little stream, ice-flecked, ran past the lodge, providing it with pure water, carrying the sewage away.
Kloszowski would have made a poem of that stream, coming pristine to the house of the aristocrat, flowing away thick with shit.
With his blood, she had taken some of his opinions. He was right, things must change. But she, of all people, knew they never did.
Balthus didn't speak to her when they were alone, or even much when they were with the others. She was supposed to be his mistress, but he wasn't much for play-acting. By some peculiar turn, that made the imposture a lot more convincing than it would have been if he had always fawned over her and pestered her with public advances.
She was sensitive enough to pick up any suspicions, had there been any. The puppet-assassin had passed the first test.
Graf Rudiger was too arrogant to think himself vulnerable. He travelled with no men-at-arms. If he remembered Genevieve as the mistress of Detlef Sierck, he gave no sign of his recognition. He had been at the first night of Detlef's Strange History of Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida, but gave no indication that he had then noticed the vampire.
It had been a week after she had parted from Kloszowski and Antonia. She had been drawn to Middenheim, the City of the White Wolf, needing the distraction of people around her, needing to satisfy her red thirst.
She had found the wall guard and shared herself with him, taking as her due a measure of his blood. He had gone cross-eyed with pleasure as she lapped at the pool of his throat.
Then the watchmen had come for her and taken her, naked under a blanket, to an inn in the better part of the city where she had been sat in a darkened room, tied to a chair.
She broke the ropes after a minute or so of straining, but it was too late. The puppet master arrived, and commenced their interview.
She had seen the olive-skinned Tybalt at the Imperial court, trotting around behind Karl-Franz in his grey robes. She had followed his attempts to impose a levy of two gold crowns annually on all able-bodied citizens of the Empire. Known popularly as the thumb tax, this had led, two years earlier, to a series of riots and uprisings during which Tybalt himself had suffered the loss of a thumb. Despite the injury, he had emerged from the riots with an increased measure of power and influence.
His principle rival for the Emperor's ear had been Mikael Hasselstein, lector of the cult of Sigmar, but Hasselstein had been grievously hurt by some scandal and retired to a contemplative order. He had also been at the first night of Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida, grimly protesting. Lipless, humourless, pock-marked and balding, the righteous Tybalt frightened Genevieve more than most servants of the Chaos gods. Coldly devoted to the House of the Second Wilhelm, Tybalt had the makings of a tyrant. And underneath his patriotic fervour and the
network of new legislation, Tybalt was at the centre of a web of intrigue and duplicity, his puppets tied to his own standard rather than that of the Emperor, his activities beyond the reach of any legal authority.
Of course, the minister had enemies. Enemies like the Graf Rudiger von Unheimlich.
In that darkened room, Mornan Tybalt, one hand a bandaged paw, had given her a choice. If she refused to do his bidding, then he would bring her to trial, charged with being a confederate of the notorious revolutionist Kloszowski. She would be implicated in a tangle of plots against Karl-Franz and the Empire. Her past association with the well-remembered and ill-regarded von Konigswald family would tell against her, and, as Tybalt reminded her, no one really liked or trusted her deathless kind. She would be lucky to be beheaded with a silver blade and be remembered as the inspiration for Detlef Sierck's To My Unchanging Lady sonnets. Tybalt would press for a harsher punishment, silver-shackled life imprisonment in the depths of Mundsen Keep, each endless day identical to the next for as long as the persistent spark remained in her unaging, undead body. But if she became his puppet and carried through his plan, she could go free
Had she followed her instincts, she would have torn out the Minister's scrawny throat. At least that way she would have earned her punishments. But he had another hook: Detlef. Tybalt promised that if she did not enter his service, he'd use his considerable influence to have the Vargr Breughel Memorial Playhouse closed down, and to prosecute various suits against the playwright. Tybalt insinuated it would be easy to break Detlef who, lately, was not the man he had been. Genevieve carried enough guilt over Detlef, and knew she couldn't be the cause of further hurt to him.
Tybalt did not need to explain the situation between him and the graf. It was well-known. Tybalt was the son of a palace clerk, who had risen through the ranks through his wits and determination, and blackmail, extortion and duplicity. He had about him similar men, colourless toilers without breeding or lineage, quill-scratching achievers who insinuated themselves into the workings of the Empire and became indispensable. Tybalt and his like had never wielded a sword in battle or taken the trouble to acquire the manners expected of the court. They dressed in a uniform drab grey as a protest against the highly-coloured fopperies of those thin-blooded aristocrats they saw as parasitical hangers-on.
Warhammer - [Genevieve 02] - Genevieve Undead Page 18
