Ravensclaw (10 page)

“One is not.” He fixed his dead dark gaze on her. “Tell me everything that transpired, from the moment you arrived at Ravensclaw’s house until you left.”

Franny felt perspiration pop out on her brow. Not for the first time she wished she had been content to remain a simple seamstress instead of scheming to acquire her own  shop, where people could walk in and abuse her at will.
“Comment?”

“I’m waiting.” The slender man rose from his chair.

Franny was tempted to tell this fine gentleman that he could wait until hell froze over. One look at that cold face caused her to change her mind. Franny recounted, as best she could, her dealings with Emily Dinwiddie, Lady Alberta, and Ravensclaw.

“Ah, so,” he murmured. “It is as I had thought.

Franny thought she would happily forgo a commission, if only he would leave. Instead the slender man paused beside her chair.

She made as if to rise. He grasped her shoulder and held her in place. Franny stared at the flesh revealed between his gloves and the edge of his coat sleeve. Flesh that no longer looked entirely human. She tried to pull away.

Too late. She felt the ribbon slide around her throat. “Alas, Madame Fanchon,” said the slender man, as she clawed futilely at his fingers, “I find that you shan’t suit me, after all.”

Who keeps company with the wolf will learn to howl.

(Romanian proverb)

Edinburgh’s Royal Exchange, which boasted a fine piazza, was home to a custom-house and thirty-five shops, some with living-rooms above; ten other dwelling places; three coffee houses and now the Town Council, many of the merchants for whom the Exchange had been designed preferring to conduct their business elsewhere. The Exchange had been built on the steeply sloping site of several old closes and consequently stood four storeys high around the quadrangle which faced the High Street, while its north wall rose like a great grey cliff to the height of twelve.

Buried down around the Exchange cellars were remnants of streets that had been partially demolished during its construction, frozen in time since the seventeenth century. Derelict tenements and shops flanked the broken pavement. A tavern, a sawmaker’s establishment. Warrens of interconnecting rooms where entire families had once lived. A stockroom, its ceiling still hung with gruesome hooks.

Deserted though the close might be, it was not forsaken. The secret meeting place of the Breasla lay here, deep beneath the cobbled streets of the Royal Mile. One of the aftereffects of his condition being an ability to see cat-like in the dark, Val needed no lantern to light his way. He halted before a certain door, inserted a key.

Candles burned in ancient sconces set into the walls of the filthy cobwebbed room beyond, casting eerie light on the manacles hanging from the ceiling and the skeleton built upright into one of the stone walls, sights guaranteed to strike terror into the breast of any inebriate who ventured this far, as occasionally some sot did, after a night spent drinking Blue Ruin at one tavern or another, only to speedily return to the streets above with a garbled tale of unearthly screams and mysterious noises, ghostly specters of the plague victims who had been walled up here to die.

In the middle of the chamber stood a table of the sort more commonly found in an anatomist’s chamber. Val wondered if Cezar would next acquire fragments of limbs, strew intestines about like discarded party streamers, artistically arrange a few gaping skulls. 

By the table, Cezar waited, a dramatic figure clad in black, silver hair loose around his shoulders, beautiful features grim in the flickering candlelight, Ever-watchful Andrei stood a few paces to his left.

Val’s nostrils flared. The cloying smell of decaying flesh hung heavy in the air.

He moved closer. Cezar stepped to one side. On the table lay a corpse, pale and pallid, slashed and stabbed. Female. Past her first youth, judging by her breasts. From the working classes, judging by the condition of her hands and feet. Her head had been lopped off below the chin, leaving a rough stump. “I found this on the back doorstep,” Cezar said. “A pretty present, wouldn’t you say?”

“Or a pointed statement. It would seem that someone wishes us ill.”

“Not ‘us’, necessarily, although I am not aware of having made any new enemies of late.” Cezar gestured. Andrei flung a blanket over the mutilated body. “The beheading suggests a vampire slayer. However, there remains the fact that she has been drained of blood.”

“But not in the normal manner,” Val pointed out. “No teeth marks.”

“There wouldn’t be, would there?” asked Cezar. “If the miscreant didn’t want to be found out. But that doesn’t explain the missing head.”

“Or why it was left on our doorstep,” agreed Val. “If this was meant to be a message, it could have been made more clear.”

“ ‘When opponents are at ease, agitate them’. Sun Tzu.” Andrei’s voice was hoarse, his throat damaged by the same weapon that had slashed his face.

“I suspect,” mused Cezar, “that may be the point.”

Val frowned. “You believe a
vampir
did this?” Though their kind were civilized on the surface only, and frequently fought among themselves, and jostled constantly for position in the hierarchy of the clan, only in case of extreme emergency did a member of the Edinburgh Breasla kill. This was wholly due to Cezar, who had held dominance for a long time.
Use sense when indulging your nature; don’t flaunt what you are in public places; never overindulge or get careless; appreciate the gift of life; never let the Darkness enslave your will.

Cezar stepped away from the table. “I’m not sure what I believe.” Andrei remained behind, standing guard. He was Cezar’s Locotenent, a onetime member of the Order of the Dragon, soldiers who had protected the lands of Eastern Europe from the Turks. Andrei, Cezar and Val all three had fought alongside Constantin Brâncoveanu, and seen him beheaded at Mogosoaia. Had been present at the Walachian Vespers, when Michael the Brave summoned his creditors to his palace and had them massacred. Would never forget St. Bartholomew’s Day 1459, when Vlad ordered thirty thousand of the merchants and
boyars
of Brasov impaled.

La dracu!
Val hated politics.

Nevertheless, he owed Cezar his allegiance, and would do so even were Cezar not Stapan. They had roamed the forests of their youth together in search of food and shelter, on guard against the malicious fairies that were said to dwell in the reeds of marshy streams, and the werewolves that supposedly haunted the narrow mountain valleys, and the witches that flew over upland pastures on moonlit nights.

Cezar raised an elegant hand. “It was unlucky to encounter a strange dog first thing in the morning. If someone passed a priest, or an elderly woman with an empty pail, he dared not speak to either of them or he’d have bad luck that day. What are you keeping from me,
camarad
?”

Val strolled around the room, paused to survey the skeletal wall decoration. “The d’Auvergne athame has resurfaced. I wonder if it may have something to do with your uninvited guest.”

“That accursed athame. You said it had been lost.”

“So I did. However, I admit to having been a trifle distracted at the time. It turns out the Dinwiddies have had the thing all along.”

Cezar remained silent for a moment. He had an intimate acquaintance with the d’Auvergne athame. It had once been stuck in his back, which was how Val had come into possession of the thing. “Miss Dinwiddie intrigues me,” he said, at length.

Val had expected that she might, which was why he hadn’t mentioned the athame sooner. “Miss Dinwiddie knows about us. Not us, specifically, or at least not you, but that our kind exists.”

“She knows what you are? How?”

“I admitted it.” Val derived a perverse pleasure from seeing his old friend rendered speechless. “There was no reason not to; I’m on her blasted list. Too, Lisbet had upset her, you see.”

Cezar looked as if perhaps he saw too much. Before he could comment, Val added, “Miss Dinwiddie then informed me that she would be upset by whoever she pleased whenever she pleased and I was not to tell her what to do.”

“Val—”

“Emily would like to know how I became what I am. She doesn’t think it is because I led a wicked life. She doesn’t wish to infer that I
did
lead a wicked life, however. On the other hand, she doesn’t imagine that I died a virgin. I particularly liked the suggestion that a dog jumped over my corpse.”

Cezar’s lips twitched. Even Andrei’s harsh features grew momentarily less grim. “What did you tell her?”

“That I became what I am by choice.”

“And then I hope you’re going to tell me that you rearranged her memories. After she gasped and shrieked. Or sank into a dead faint.”

“
Then
she asked if I could drink from other vampires, or from animals, or if I must confine myself to human blood. How often I had to hunt. Where I preferred to bite someone.” Val smiled, remembering. “And if my eyes turned red. After which she apologized for being so
pushing,
but explained that I was her first supersensible creature and there were many things she wished to know.”

Cezar’s faint amusement faded. “Has it occurred to you that you may be mistaken in Miss Dinwiddie?”

“Constantly. To what do you refer?”

“Professor Dinwiddie not only invented an amphibious horse-drawn vehicle and an automaton that could play a flute, he duplicated the Everlasting Light of Trithemius, and had remarkable success in extracting metals from fruit. Lead from bladderwrack, as I recall. Mercury from Irish moss. Folly, to underestimate his daughter. She may be playing a deep game.”

As might Cezar himself. Val glanced at the anatomical table. “Miss Dinwiddie is more interested in natural marvels than in alchemy. She hopes to meet a water kelpie while she’s here in Edinburgh.” He paused before he added, “There are other items missing from the Society’s vaults.”

“Miss Dinwiddie confided in you freely, knowing what you are.”

“Emily is a very practical young woman. She needs my help.”

The violet eyes narrowed. “Miss Dinwiddie claimed you are an old friend of the family. Does she know how truly she spoke?”

“No. And I don’t intend to explain.”

“What are you doing, Val?”

“Protecting our interests.” Val met his Stapan’s gaze. “There is
a possibility that she may be influencing my mind.”

Cezar raised an eyebrow. “You are
vampir.
You should be influencing hers.”

Val snorted. “Emily is not easily influenced. She can close her mind to me. If we’re touching, unless I deliberately block her, she can read my memories. I should be able to hear her thoughts. She should
not
be able to hear mine.”

“You like her,” Andrei observed.

Val shrugged off the suggestion. “It is of little consequence whether I like her or no. Miss Dinwiddie is prone to rush in where angels dare not tread. Too, there is the matter of St. Cuthbert’s knucklebone.” He gestured toward the shrouded body. “What is to be done with this one? Who was she, do you know?”

Cezar approached the table. “I do. She is one Madame Fanchon, whom you had recently at your house. I believe I will invest in one of those patented spring-closure coffins outfitted with cast-iron straps. I would not care for the anatomists to get hold of this particular corpse.”

Such an event was all-too-likely, in the normal course of things. Resurrectionists haunted the city’s cemeteries, bent on providing surgeons and medical students fresh corpses to study and dissect by fair means and foul, thereby giving rise to public outrage, the Scots preferring their dear departed to arrive in heaven in an unkenand condition, as opposed to missing one or several body parts. Grieving families sometimes went so far as to pour vitriol and quicklime into the coffins of their loved ones to render the corpses unfit, which rather begged the question of arriving in heaven in one piece.

But, Franny? Why Franny? Had he brought her into this?

Whatever ‘this’ was?

Cezar interrupted Val’s reflections. “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“If Miss Dinwiddie has the d’Auvergne athame in her possession, she can do a great deal more than push you from her mind.
”

A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree,

the more you beat them the better they be.

(Romanian proverb)

As structures in Edinburgh’s Old Town climbed higher, their foundations sank deeper into the soft sandstone. The steep slopes on either side of the High Street had enabled builders to dig sideways into the ridge, building underground levels at depths not possible elsewhere. The foundations of the tenements resembled rabbit warrens, levels of cellars built one above the other, a cold, damp maze of tunnels and underground chambers teeming with beggars and criminals and other societal outcasts. Not to mention rats. Water for cooking and washing was carried by hand down the same winding tunnels into which the residents threw their household waste.

Jamie was familiar with the Old Town, having been left as a babe on the doorstep of the Orphan’s Hospital in the shadow of Calton Hill. He didn’t think it proper he was guiding Miss Emily through these crowded streets. Not that anything about Ravensclaw’s household was proper. Jamie had squirmed down enough chimneys to realize that. “It’s no’ right,” he repeated. “A young lady like yersef shoulna be daverin’ aboot the Old Town alone.”

Emily eyed him with exasperation. “So you have said, several times! Must I point out again that I am hardly alone? You are with me, and Drogo is with both of us, which is hardly a blessing, but he refused to be left behind. Moreover, we aren’t davering. You are going to show me where Michael went.”

Jamie kicked at a piece of broken cobblestone. Drogo, tongue lolling, leaned against her thigh. “Och, weil. Nae need t’ be abstrakulous. I should hae gi’n him a cuddy lug.”

Emily could only guess what a ‘cuddy lug’ might be. She caught her companion’s shoulder and gave him a good shake. “No you should not! Listen to me, Jamie. I told you Mr. Ross may have something of mine. In truth, he may have stolen several somethings. He is not the gentleman he seems.” She didn’t bother to explain that the pilfered items weren’t hers but belonged to the Society, and were meant in time to pass to her descendants, although Emily’s papa may have been a trifle optimistic on that score.