Bloodforged (22 page)

‘What about the sites of the fires?’ Ulrika asked as they stopped, defeated, in the middle of the ruins. ‘The jeweller’s place and the warehouse?’

Stefan shook his head. ‘The trail will be even more buried there. The bucket brigades, the gawkers and looters, the watch, all will have come and gone. We will never find the right scent among them.’ He cursed. ‘The villains have done an admirable job of disappearing.’

Ulrika nodded and sighed. ‘Perhaps we can follow rumours of vanished girls.’

Stefan grunted with displeasure and turned away. ‘There
must
be a quicker way. It is only three days until Mannslieb is full.’ He frowned, then swung back to Ulrika, looking at her from under his long black locks. ‘You say you are sworn to protect Praag. Was it your home, then, in life?’

Ulrika shook her head. ‘I spent last autumn and winter here, during the siege, but it is not my home. I am from the northern oblast.’

‘A pity,’ he said. ‘I had hoped you might know someone here with knowledge of this cult – rumours at least. There are always whispers, suspicions people dare not speak aloud.’ He looked up at her. ‘You have no former acquaintances that could be beguiled into telling what they knew? You don’t know any chekist agents? Or perhaps some female friend? Women are always great collectors of gossip.’

Ulrika scowled at this casual slur, then put it aside and returned to the question. Who did she know here from before her death? Max Schreiber immediately came to mind, as well as her cousin Enrik, who was after all only the Duke of Praag himself, but she dismissed them as quickly as she thought of them. She had already decided she would never see Max again, and revealing herself to Enrik would be suicide. Besides, she doubted they knew anything. If they did, the cult would have already been destroyed.

‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I have one or two old acquaintances here, but they would not be of use to you. Nothing but soldiers and foreigners.’

‘Are you positive?’ he asked.

Ulrika nodded, wishing she had a better answer for him. His idea was a good one. Finding someone with an ear to the ground made more sense then prowling the streets hoping to stumble upon the cultists by accident. But she really knew few people here, and no one who would know enough to make them worth turning over to Stefan’s tender ministrations. She certainly didn’t know any of Stefan’s ‘gossiping women’. She had never associated with the sort of ladies who whispered secrets to each other in parlours.

She paused, chuckling.

That wasn’t precisely true. She had recently joined a sisterhood of such women – the Lahmians. Their entire empire was founded on the collection of secrets. They gained influence by learning them, and holding them over the heads of the powerful. They employed armies of seductresses, skilled at pillow talk, who won whispers from generals and lords and kings. They made slaves of men who then told them all that went on within the guildhalls and the court. If there were rumours to be heard, her ‘sisters’ would have heard them.

Ulrika smiled at Stefan. ‘I know who to ask,’ she said.

The vampire raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’

‘Boyarina Evgena Boradin. There will be no greater hoarder of secrets in Praag.’

Stefan’s face went cold and still. ‘Never,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ Ulrika asked.

‘I told you,’ said Stefan. ‘They attacked me when I went to them. They attacked you. You would get nothing from them but a dagger in the heart.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Ulrika, thinking. ‘The boyarina gave me three choices – swear fealty to her, leave Praag, or die. It is only when I refused the first two that she chose the third for me. If I was to return to her and agree to join her sisterhood, I think she would stay her hand.’

‘And you believe she would then answer questions from you?’ asked Stefan, sneering. ‘You would be the lowest of her servants. She would tell you to know your place.’

‘I will make answering my questions a condition of my agreeing to serve her,’ said Ulrika, lifting her chin.

Stefan laughed. ‘She will accept no conditions from you, girl. I certainly would not.’

‘Then perhaps I can convince her the threat of the cult is real. If I go with head bowed, I might be able to buy myself a moment to plead my case.’

‘You will buy yourself a swift death,’ said Stefan. ‘I will not allow it. You will not throw away the life you owe me so foolishly.’

‘Have you a better plan?’ Ulrika asked. ‘A better source for rumour? As you said, we have three nights.’

Stefan turned away again, shaking his head, but after a moment he sighed. ‘I will not come with you. And you would do well not to mention my name.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE DRAGON’S DEN

Ulrika glanced nervously up at the dark windows and verdigrised domes of Boyarina Evgena’s crumbling mansion as she climbed its cracked granite steps. It was the evening after the night of fruitless searching, and she wished now she hadn’t argued so hard for this meeting, or that Stefan hadn’t given in so quickly. He had almost convinced her to give it up. Had he made one more salvo of logic, her enthusiasm would have collapsed and she would have agreed to try something else. Now it was too late. She was committed. Stefan was waiting for her at the Blue Jug to hear how she had progressed – if she lived to tell.

She had spent much of the intervening day awake in the darkness of the bakery cellar, sewing the rips in her black doublet and breeches and brushing out the dried blood and dirt. She had polished her boots and her sword as well, and trimmed off the singed ends of her hair, entirely by feel, for she could of course not see herself in a mirror. She hoped she hadn’t made a lopsided mess of it.

When the sun had at last dropped behind the western walls, she had dressed and followed the directions Stefan had given her to Evgena’s mansion, a rambling sandstone pile lumping up like a baroque carbuncle out of a sprawling, overgrown garden. Now she stood before it.

Her hand hesitated as she reached for the rusted iron knocker in the centre of the heavy wooden door. Stefan had undoubtedly been right. She could expect to receive nothing from the Lahmians but the point of a blade. Raiza would be beyond that door – Raiza, upon whom she had dropped a wall when last they met. It would be a miracle if she was given even a second to speak, but there was no going back now.

Ulrika squared her shoulders and rapped three times with the knocker, then stepped back. Knowing Lahmians as she did, she was certain she was already being spied upon, so she did her best to look calm and demure, and kept her hands away from her weapons.

After a long wait the door opened, and an ermine-clad giant of a man with a great, square-cut white beard looked down at her. If she had seen him in other circumstances Ulrika would have mistaken him for the king of some eastern land, but he was apparently nothing but Evgena’s majordomo.

‘Yes?’ he said, and there was more contempt in that single syllable than in all Stefan’s casual insults combined.

‘Ulrika Magdova Straghov to see Boyarina Evgena,’ Ulrika said, bowing crisply. ‘I have reconsidered her offer.’

‘I shall enquire,’ said the majordomo, and closed the door in her face.

Ulrika clenched her jaw at this rudeness, but maintained her calm, sure she was still being observed. Finally, after long enough that her knees had begun to ache from standing to attention, the door opened again and the mountain of dignity bowed her in.

Ulrika flinched as she stepped past him into the entry hall, for two huge black bears loomed on either side of the door, their massive paws raised and jaws agape. Fortunately, before she made any move to draw and defend herself, she saw they were stuffed and mounted on marble pedestals, lifelike masterworks of the taxidermist’s art, though sadly bedecked by cobwebs about the ears and muzzles. She breathed a sigh of relief and grinned sheepishly to herself. That would have been embarrassing.

‘Your sword,’ said the majordomo, impassively.

Ulrika unbuckled her sword belt. She had expected this. Evgena would never let her into her presence armed. She handed the sword belt to the majordomo, and he put it in a small closet, then motioned her forwards.

‘This way,’ he said.

As Ulrika followed him across the dusty, cavernous hall, a hundred glittering eyes seemed to follow her, for the bears that flanked the door were not alone. In every corner, and on every wall, more cobweb-mantled animals crouched – silent wolves mounted on wooden bases, hawks and eagles frozen in the act of landing on gnarled branches, pouncing wild cats on top of decorative tables, even a wild boar, snarling and at bay beside an enormous Cathay vase.

And the zoo of trophies continued as they passed into a corridor – kites and owls and ospreys, their shoulders thick with dust, looking down upon her like a disapproving jury. The whole house seemed a menagerie of the dead, a tomb of the hunted. Ulrika swallowed, wondering if there was any special significance that they were all predators. There wasn’t a deer or rabbit or pheasant among them. Had Evgena killed them all? If she had, it had been long ago. They looked as old and shabby as the house.

After a few more turns, and a dozen more frozen beasts, the massive majordomo opened a panelled door, then stepped in and bowed Ulrika in after him. The room was the colour of dried blood, with walls of faded crimson brocade, tall, thickly draped windows, heavy, dark-wood furniture and an enormous basalt fireplace that looked as if it hadn’t seen a fire in five hundred years. There were no hunting trophies here, but the four men-at-arms in sober uniforms who stood at attention against the side walls looked as if they might have been stuffed, for all the expression they showed.

‘Madam Magdova, mistress,’ said the majordomo, bowing to the centre of the room.

‘Thank you, Severin,’ said Boyarina Evgena. ‘You may retire.’

The vampiress sat ramrod-straight on a low divan, her piercing eyes staring unwaveringly at Ulrika as the majordomo bowed out and closed the door. She was dressed in an ancient dress of maroon velvet trimmed with sable, and thick coils of black hair were piled high on her cadaverous head. A closed fan was gripped in her right hand like a queen might hold her sceptre.

To her left, tiny Galiana curled like an alert cat in a high-backed overstuffed chair that threatened to swallow her whole. She wore black satin and a long black wig, and was pretending to read a book, but her eyes darted everywhere but the page. The family portrait was completed by the grim Raiza, looking entirely recovered from her burial under the wall of the collapsed tenement, who stood at Evgena’s left shoulder in a long coat and high-collared black Kossar tunic embroidered with gold, one hand on the pommel of her sabre and her blonde hair pulled back in a severe queue. Of the three, only she looked untouched by time – a young hawk among decrepit crows.

‘You save us the trouble of finding you, girl,’ said Evgena. ‘Now tell me why I should not order Raiza to kill you here and now, as she would dearly love to do.’

Ulrika pursed her lips. She had been given her opportunity to speak. She had better make it good. She bowed deeply before looking Evgena in the eye again.

‘I have come to pledge myself to you, as I should have from the first,’ she said. ‘And also to warn you of a danger.’

The boyarina raised a disdainful painted eyebrow. ‘Is this about the cults again? Are you going to lecture me once more about caring for my flock?’

‘No,’ said Ulrika. ‘You were right. It was not my place to tell you how to treat those you live amongst. The warning is however about the cults, and your own safety.’

Evgena laughed like the rattling of dead leaves. ‘Have I not told you they are no threat? I have seen a hundred cults rise and fall in my time here. They destroy themselves or the chekist burn them. They are no concern of ours.’

‘But what if this cult is different?’ asked Ulrika. ‘I have fought them. They have powerful warlocks among them, and wealth and resources behind them. They have allied themselves with some Slaaneshi war queen from the Wastes, perhaps this Sirena Amberhair who I have heard lurks in the hills to the north, and they mean to cause an “awakening” that will allow them to turn Praag over to her on the night when Mannslieb is next full. That is three nights from now.’

‘And in four nights we will all be waking in our beds as usual, because nothing will have happened,’ said Evgena, gesturing with her fan. ‘Now, let us talk of you swearing loyalty to me. This other subject begins to bore me.’