The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

  “I have enemies who’ve sought to deny me the honor.” Agenor turned from the window. “Now”—his voice broke, and this show of emotion startled Beheim—“I no longer wish to participate. It’s a barbarous practice, though there’s no real harm done. One virtue of the blood is that the Golden never fails to pass judgment and so becomes part of the Family. However, in this instance, drained as she was, well…” He let the sentence lapse, and then, in a dispirited tone, added, “There’s no returning from that.”

  “Perhaps there is more to the Decanting than you realize,” Beheim said. “I don’t mean to seem impertinent, but as you’ve had no experience of it, perhaps…”

  “I’ve seen them after they’ve tasted the Golden,” Agenor said. “Believe me, there’s nothing transcendent about the experience. On the other hand, I have witnessed numerous Illuminations, and despite the fact that those who undergo the ritual have been condemned for crimes against the Family, there is an inherent nobility to the act. In the surrender of one’s life so as to answer questions concerning the future. I believe that the condemned understand this, that they must gain some profound joy from their sacrifice.”

  While he spoke these words, a distant, almost beatific look came over Agenor’s face, as if he were contemplating his own saintly immolation. Once again Beheim was unsettled by the old man’s erratic behavior, but he chose to ignore this and concentrate upon the more imminent problem. He took a seat on the edge of the bed, placed his hands flat on his knees, and studied the pattern on the patch of carpet between his feet.

  “What are you thinking?” Agenor asked.

  “I was wondering why anyone would risk such a crime.”

  “You of all people should understand the Golden’s allure.”

  Beheim ignored this reminder of his intemperate behavior. “I refuse to believe that anyone would have done this merely for a taste of blood.”

  “You may be overestimating some of our number. The de Czeges, for example.”

  “I doubt even the de Czeges are capable of committing a crime with so uncomplicated a motive. Perhaps to make a statement of some sort, perhaps as an act of rebellion. But not for blood alone.”

  “Well, I won’t argue. After all, it’s your job to decide the issue.” The older man crossed to the bed and rested a hand on Beheim’s shoulder. “And you’d best set to it at once. The Patriarch will not be able to hold everyone here for more than a few days.”

  Beheim nodded, yet felt no enthusiasm for the work, his fascination with the crime dimmed by an intimation of the difficulty of the task before him.

  “Perhaps I should not have volunteered you,” Agenor said.

  “No, no,” said Beheim, hastening to reassure him. “I’m—”

  Agenor commanded him to silence by holding up a hand. “For the sake of our friendship I should not have volunteered you. It may eventuate that by doing so I have sacrificed you, for you will meet with great danger, and though you have the Patriarch’s support, many will perceive your investigation as a gross indignity. And should you unmask the culprits, they will doubtless defend themselves to the death rather than undergo an Illumination. But there is far more at stake here than friendship.” He went a few paces into the center of the room and stood facing away from Beheim, hands clasped behind his back. “Should you succeed, you will gain tremendous influence with the Patriarch and those who have his ear. More influence than I could ever bring to bear. It’s possible this may be the event that turns the tide of opinion in our favor, that adds the one necessary voice to the chorus of reason so we will be able to guide the Family, to guarantee that it will thrive and consolidate its power. So”—he wheeled about—“I have done what I have done. But let me assure you, my friend. You do not stand alone. If you fall, I fall with you. I would not put your eternity in jeopardy without sharing the risk.”

  Beheim felt awkward and enfeebled, fully apprehending now the potential for disaster attaching to the case. “I will try to justify your confidence,” he said, but the words sounded empty to his own ears; then, in a shaky voice: “I scarcely know where to begin.” He came to his feet and rubbed a finger along his cheek. “With so many suspects, it will be impossible to interview them all in a few days.”

  “As to that,” Agenor said, “it’s possible to narrow the field. For one thing, I’ve formed an alliance only this evening that may bear fruit before long. And further I’ve taken the liberty of sending servants to every Family member, requesting they supply you with information concerning their movements. Some may refuse to comply out of arrogance, and some will lie rather than compromise a rendezvous or some other intimate matter. But for all our power, we are the most predictable of creatures, and I believe that certain of my cousins will surprise me with their candor. We may be able to eliminate a majority of our suspects in one fell swoop.”

  “Even so,” Beheim said, “even if we eliminate all but ten, say, it will be a monumental chore to discover which of them is guilty. Our best hope is that the body will provide a telling clue.”

  “Then let me take you there at once.”

  “With all due respect, lord, while I greatly appreciate your assistance and will doubtless ask you to aid me during the course of the investigation, I would prefer to operate without anyone looking over my shoulder. I will be less distracted as a result.”

  Agenor inclined his head. “Very well. But I insist on being apprised of your progress…for your protection and my own.”

  “I’ll do my best to—”

  “No, you will keep me apprised, Michel. I demand it.”

  Though the old man’s instruction had been merely stern, Beheim could have sworn he detected desperation and a hint of pleading in the set of his face, and that perplexed him—never before had he seen Agenor so unsteady, even when under personal attack.

  “If there is more to this than you have told me,” Beheim said, “it is my right to hear it now.”

  Agenor’s patrician features tightened with anger, but only for an instant; then his flesh seemed to sag away from his skull, the long years of his unnatural life becoming suddenly apparent. He stared hollow-eyed at Beheim as if confused by what had been asked of him. At last he said once again, “I have done something.”

  Beheim waited for a disclosure, but none was forthcoming.

  “Yes?” he said. “You have done something?”

  Agenor’s head twitched, he blinked at Beheim, as if just awakened to his presence. “The alliance I spoke of…I felt I had to make it in order to give you some advantage, yet I cannot be sure whether it will in the end help or hinder you.” He let out an exhausted sigh. “We will have to wait and see.”

  “And the nature of this alliance?”

  “I would rather not reveal it at this time.”

  Beheim knew the hopelessness of pressing the issue. “I would ask that a number of servants be put at my personal disposal,” he said after a bit. “I will, of course, employ Giselle as my agent, but because of the scope of the investigation, I’ll need more help than she can supply.”

  “Whatever you wish.”

  Beheim came to his feet, still a bit weak in the knees, but beginning to feel something of the old eagerness for the chase that he had known during his days in Paris.

  “Remember what is at stake,” Agenor said. “No matter what you find, no matter how highly connected you discover the culprits to be, you must not falter in your resolve to bring the truth before the Patriarch.”

  “I’ll do everything in my power not to fail you.”

  “You cannot fail me,” said Agenor, clasping Beheim’s right hand with both of his and fixing him with a searching look. “I have already failed, I have lost the Patriarch’s ear. He considers me an old fool, a scribe with the delusions of a Cassandra. But you can compensate for my failures, Michel. It’s in your grasp to kindle victory from the ashes of my defeat. Do not fail yourself. That is my charge to you.”

  The body of the Golden lay naked and pitiful atop the easter
n turret of Castle Banat. The girl’s eyes were iced shut, and a cracked red glaze covered the blackish stones beside her. Mutilated, Agenor had said, but that word had not prepared Beheim for the savagery of the wounds. There was a ragged hole in the side of her neck large enough in which to insert a fist, and there was a similar wound in her belly. Lesser yet no less grievous wounds marred her face, breasts, and thighs. Though the body was frozen, Beheim could detect signs of lividity and rigor, which meant that she must have been killed during the waning hours of the previous night, a time during which it had been sufficiently warm to permit the inception of decay. Still, he was surprised that these processes were not further advanced. There must, he concluded, have been a cold snap during the day that had retarded them. Yet even if this was the case, it did not seem sufficient to explain the relative lack of decomposition. Perhaps there had only been a brief warming period just before dawn, and then the freezing cold had set in at first light. That would pass for a theory, but it likely could not be proved, as it was probable that none of the servants had ventured outside in daylight, all keeping close watch over their masters, guarding against treachery.

  The girl’s waxen hands were posed in clawlike attitudes, her mouth open in a silent scream. No hint of her freshness and beauty remained, apart from the sheen of her blond hair and the faint tantalizing scent of blood that arose from the stains painting the turret stones. Whoever had done this, Beheim thought, would have been bathed in blood. And despite Agenor’s conjecture that several people had been involved, in Beheim’s opinion there could have been only one murderer. This sort of violent excess demanded the intimate circumstance of the sexual act, it spoke to an ultimately private sinfulness. He had never known killers acting in concert—vulnerable to the shame of witness, even that of an accomplice—to be so uninhibited in their slaughter.

  Closing his eyes, calling into play the mental skills that had been in part responsible for his meteoric rise with the Paris police, he merged with the past, using all the telltales, all the tiny bits of evidence and atmospheric constants, to empathize with the murderer, to intuit his state of mind and how it had been to kill, to return to the moment of the crime, to the turret the way it had been the previous morning. A bloated yellow moon hung in the east above the mounded hills that surrounded the castle, illuminating impenetrable thickets and short, squat oaks with dwarfish branches, creating deep bays of shadow in the folds of the earth. Winded silence. Then the turret door creaking open, and a dark figure, a man—or perhaps it had not been a man! Beheim thought for an instant that he sensed the male shape of the murderer’s hunger, the muscularity of his madness, but then a hint of something, a delicacy of movement, a hesitancy, made him think otherwise. Yet for the sake of conjecture, he dubbed the murderer a man. Tall. A tall man leading the girl out into the chilly air. Her pale hair feathered in the breeze. Her filmy nightdress molded to breasts and abdomen and columned thighs. Her expression was dazed, her movements somnambulistic. She felt nothing of the cold, under the potent compulsion of the vampire’s stare. The murderer turned her to face him, then bent to her neck and drank. Her head lolled; crescents of white showed beneath her half-lowered lids. After a long moment the vampire lifted his head, his mouth crimsoned, supporting the girl with one arm. The taste of the blood had dizzied him. Never such a maddening flavor, such a surge of heady ecstasy. He could not help but drink again, and soon ecstasy became a red, raw need, a primitive exultation. It was as if a hole had opened in his mind, a tunnel from which poured a flood of debased, animal desires. Soon he was no longer drinking, he was tearing at the frail tissues with his fangs, seeking to mine the source of the fiery pleasure that was consuming his intellect, his soul, wanting only to dig and claw and rend until he could kiss the open artery and drain it of its perfect yield. The girl fell, and he fell atop her, a black humped shape leeched to her spasming body. He tore at her belly, her cheek, he bit and snapped without aim or comprehension of anatomy, ripping away at the fleshy walls imprisoning the bloody narcotic juice. And…

  Something was wrong.

  A bright terror pervaded his thoughts. He glanced up. The moon was burning, burning, a blazing monstrosity that appeared faceted one second, then rippling as if seen through a film of heat haze. The sky had gone a poisoned color, and the entire world glowed as if irradiated by an unearthly force. The blood affecting his vision, he decided. It must be the blood, the drunkenness. Or could it be something else? He thought it might be something more than the blood, but he couldn’t remember. Then he saw what he had done to the girl.

  Revulsion warred with a sense of pride in his power, his feral rule. He felt dizzy…not the exhilarating dizziness of moments before, but sick and vague and besotted. Everything was too bright. Blood glistening like a slick flow of lava across the stones, light steaming up from the spills, the puddles, from cracks between the stones. A wave of nausea overwhelmed him, and he staggered to his feet. It was all wrong somehow, what he had done, what he felt and saw, everything was wrong. Too much light, light exploding in his skull, streaming from his eyes, from the girl’s wounds, from the slashed meat of her breasts, bloody light piercing upward to stain him with guilt, to taint all his life. A hot fluid rose in his gorge, and he gagged. His stomach emptied redly. There was a weird singing in his head, a screeching like fingernails raked across slate. He tried to stop his ears, but could not muffle the sound, and, disoriented, frightened—of what, he did not know—dripping reddened bile from his chin, his heart hammering, he fled into the darkness of the castle…

  Beheim came alert to discover that he was gripping the turret wall, gazing out at the Carpathian hills, at—to his considerable surprise—a smallish silvery moon quite different from the bloated yellow monstrosity he had imagined. He had an apprehension of someone standing behind him, but on wheeling about, he found only the body of the Golden…though the air remained thick with presence. He savored that presence, hoping to isolate its particulars, certain it was a mental track left by the murderer, a clue as tangible as a bloodstain or a boot mark; but it faded quickly, and he was unable to gain any further knowledge. He tried to assemble his various impressions of the murderer into a portrait, but the figure in his mind’s eye remained as featureless as a silhouette cut from black paper. Likely a man. An arrogant sort, yet with a fair degree of conscience. Drunk to the point of hallucination on the blood of the Golden. Driven to murder, then shamed to nausea and flight. That was all.

  He knelt to examine the body. A fragment of black thread caught beneath a broken fingernail was the only evidence it yielded. Hardly telling. What man among the gathering had not been wearing black? Steeling himself, Beheim shifted the body. The flesh had frozen to the stones and made a horrid sucking noise as it was lifted away. There was very little of interest hidden beneath it. More blood, and scraps of the ripped nightdress. He inspected the scraps, but having no microscope, he was unable to learn anything from them. Feeling helpless, frustrated, he got to his feet and began moving cautiously about, peering at the moonlit stones. Once he had thoroughly explored the illuminated portion of the turret, he got down onto his hands and knees and searched the shadows alongside the wall, probing the cracks with his fingernails. He had covered nearly half of the area when he spotted a shard of broken glass. Not far away lay more splinters and pieces of glass, among them the neck of a small bottle to which a silver cap was affixed. It was, he realized on closer inspection, an extremely old bottle, likely an antique, and judging from the size, it had probably held perfume. A fanciful capital letter was engraved upon the cap, but time had worn it almost completely away, leaving only a flourish intact, and Beheim could not determine what the letter had been. U or N, perhaps. Possibly a V. He turned the cap over and over in his hand, then pocketed it and continued his search. But there were no further discoveries.

  Three clues. The bottle cap, the blood—somewhere in the castle would be hidden bloodstained evening clothes—and the fact that the culprit had been a man. Not much of a basi
s upon which to begin an investigation. Beheim knew he would need luck…luck and a great deal of hard work, most of that to be accomplished by the Family’s servants. He would set them to searching for the bloody clothing at once, and to seeking the owner of the bottle cap; he would study the results of Agenor’s initiative concerning the whereabouts of Family members during the early hours of the morning.

  But what could he set himself to do?

  There was something troubling about his re-creation of the crime…something about the hallucination in particular. The way the moon had looked. Now that he thought about it, he recalled that the moon on the previous morning had resembled this evening’s moon: small, silvery, and just past full. And yet to the murderer it had appeared bloated and huge. Perhaps he suffered from an affliction of the eye. Or perhaps he had been drunk before tasting the Golden, and thus already subject to perceptual distortions.

  Both possibilities, he decided, were worth looking into.

  Once again he examined the silver bottle cap. It was unlikely that the girl had been carrying it—there were no pockets in her nightdress. But what would the murderer have been doing with a bottle of perfume? Beheim sniffed the cap. A scent clung to it, though not of perfume. A harsh acidic odor. Medicine of some sort? A drug with which he had overcome the Golden’s companion? Yet why would he have bothered to use drugs when he possessed a natural aptitude for swaying mortals to his will? And where was the companion? Likely crumpled in some crevice below the castle, flung there from a high window. More servants would be needed to search the hillsides; with all the sheer drops and ravines hard by, the body might have come to rest some distance from the castle walls. But the bottle, now. What could it have contained? Beheim rubbed the ball of his thumb across the remnants of the engraved letter, coming more and more to feel that the answer to this question would illuminate all other questions. Of course it was possible the bottle had nothing to do with the murder, that it had been lying there for some time before the Golden and the murderer had put in their appearance…though not for long, otherwise there would have been no odor. But he did not believe this to be so. The silver cap seemed to hold a vibration, a residual tremor of the violence that had occurred upon the turret.