Guilty Blood (5 page)

Although the complaints of the long untrod flooring countered any attempt at stealth, I gingerly made my way down the narrow hall. When the flickering light fell upon my boots I stood before a solid oaken door, its lower portion carved halfway through by endlessly repeated clawing. Could the dog corpse have been a guard imprisoning Mr. Barttley? Or even some roaming monstrosity that had found like decay within the manor, trapping its careless owner within? Such seemed improbable, but I'd witnessed more than my fair share of improbabilities in the past few hours. With good manners seeming a distant and potentially a dangerous liability in this ruin, I gripping the door handle and shouldered my way into the lit room without knocking.

Dozens of eyes pinned me in place, and for a startled moment I though it'd walked into some sort of ambush. A grotesque perfume unlike the wet must that permeated the rest of the house washed over me, the malodorous twin of the stench that exploded from the kicked dog corpse. Once this room had been a library, though a leaky ceiling had ruined whole shelves and rotted out parts of the flooring, pitching much of the collection to the floor. The trove had included more than just books, with tarnished figurines, the chipped busts of stern scholars, and stranger objets d'art scattered amid the shelves, upon the floor, and lolling crookedly upon the walls. Yet there were new additions, inexpert taxidermies and morbid folk art worked in palettes of fur, flesh, and viscera, nailed upon exposed walls and suspended from toppled shelves by the weight of heavy albums. It was their eyes, the hollow gazes of rats and snakes and caught pigeons by the dozens, that had transfixed me and the smell of their decay—many of which had been rotting for months or more—that offended my senses.

I staggered back into the hall in disgust, trying to steal a half-clear breath. At first I mistook the noise for the grating of something being drug in short unsteady bouts across the splintering wood floor. Then the hiss exploded in insane intensity, filling the room, echoing down the hall, spilling through the manor's cracked timbers in a riot of shrill, maniac cackling.

The mad cackle sliced through the rotting manor, shrill like the shriek of a rusty hinge, but one without a wall to halt its opening scream. The tooth-needling whine rose and tittered, unleashing some insane hilarity, stretching on and on rather than reaching a crescendo. A chorus of nails on slate would have been more welcome.

That first impression remained throughout and long after the meeting.

The combination of razor-edged noise and the reek of animal rot had forced me back from the open door, a one-two punch to the head and gut that momentarily disoriented me and knocked me to the brink of retching. A quick clench of my eyes and gorge brought me back to myself. Straightening, I turned back into the room to face the source of the noise.

Were the library the manor's mind, it would certainly be an appropriate one for this rotten, broken-backed body. The remnants of a shattered skylight admitted a gray haze, but also copious leaves, invading ivy coils, and mold-ringed rainwater puddles. The bookcases lining the walls gaped. What few shelves weren't snapped or sagging bore pointlessly few volumes, the majority being strewn upon the floor or reduced to pulp and loose pages by weather and pointless destruction. Everywhere else were the ruins of a once noble collection, with scholarly busts, high-backed reading chairs, and the curiosities of forgotten studies wrecked and dashed haphazardly about the room.

But none of this was the source of the room's reek. Instead, the grotesquely tempting sweetness of rotting flesh spilled from horrible dissections nailed upon rotten walls and shelves repurposed as splintered frames. Pigeons, rats, snakes, and less identifiable base creatures hung blasphemously naked, their insides rearranged, recombined, or removed at the insane whim of some probing sadist. I had no more than a moment to sneer my disgust and seek the object of my instant loathing before, like some hellish genie, the source of that deranged laugh jolted up from the floor to sprawl upon a cluttered table, in doing so sending dozens of battered tomes to finally loose their muddy pages across the floor.

After the encounter with that horrible dog-thing, some part of me expected to find Mr. Barttley dead. As usual, my pessimism didn't disappoint. What I hadn't anticipated was just how lively a corpse he would be. For the second time that day I was silently screaming curses to myself, wondering if the living even outnumbered the wandering dead in this damnable city.

Regardless of the answer, I wasn't about to switch from one side to the other today. My knife reassuringly solid in my white-knuckled grip, I prepared to test my reflexes against those of the corpse, ready to stick the thing and dash out of the manor should it prove as senselessly ravenous as its rotting pet.

With some effort it peeled itself from the table, listing awkwardly as it took me in, volleys of that lunatic noise blaring from the snaggle-toothed remains of its face.

"Oh ho ho! A ripe one! Too long since we've had a guest—a real guest," the dead thing cackled. Rigor locked its jaw in place, causing it to toss its head with every word, nodding like a frantic puppet. Its words were an obscene coo, like a cruel child trying to lull a small animal with its tone even as it promised tortures. "Is it a talking one? Or do its sounds hide inside?"

My curiosity got the better of me once more. "Mr. Barttley?" I asked, disgusted and apprehensive.

Its rotten mouth flew open and the shrill asylum choir exploded forth. "Delightful! What a polite guest. Come in! Come in and visit. It's such a thrill to hear words again."

I held my ground. Accepting the invitation of a corpse seemed like a path fraught with webs of irony, and I wasn't prepared to bungle into them just yet.

"You're Barttley?" I repeated, cautiously.

"A scrap of him. A morsel of him. All that the mold didn't want. Yes, I was Oljid Barttley." His voice trailed off. For a moment a haze of nostalgia seemed to cloud the corpse's dull eyes, but the jaundiced orbs brooked little distraction to their manic rolling. I was quick to pounce, hoping to exploit a fleeting moment of lucidity.

"Someone told me you might know something about a corpse in Evercrown. Somebody buried with a dagger in his chest."

"You can't expect me to know just anybody. I used to know plenty of somebodies. But the problem is that after you die, even nobodies turn into some bodies." More shrill laughter. Damn—so much for that moment of lucidity.

"Yes. But someone special," I persisted over the cackling. "A body buried in the Venachdalia crypt. One with a gold and ruby dagger stuck in his chest."

"If I had a treasure like that, I'd put it in a chest too!" Even more hysterics. Why couldn't he have just moaned and lurched onto my knife? I could have been out of this stinking wreck by now.

I gave him his moment to cackle. Unfortunately, the dead seem to have a completely skewed sense of time to compliment their twisted sense of humor, and the corpse's tittering went on and on. I was preparing to leave the insane thing to jabber till its jaw fell off when its unnatural mirth started to sound like words once more.

"You… you found the prince," Barttley screeched through his glass-shattering glee.

"What?" I asked firmly, tiring of the lunatic corpse.

"The prince! Lieralt. The Lost Prince. You found where they stashed him. And what a perfect hiding spot! No one would look in a graveyard for a murder victim—especially not in the count's family tomb. And even if they did find him there, the backlash on the count would be delicious!" The dead man's hysterics got the better of him once more.

"Who is Lieralt?" I shouted, not willing to let Barttley get his full insane enjoyment out of what sounded like a very old joke.

"The prince! Your some body! Don't they teach you peasants anything?" With a dry scoff, the corpse pulled itself fully off the floor, trailing bursts of dusty gargling laughter. Its stiff limbs carried it unsteadily, like a legless man on crutches, teetering in cautious steps and half-controlled tumbles across the room to a pile of pulped tomes mostly hidden by dry brown vines. Rooting amid the parchment mash, Barttley recovered the back cover of what had obviously once been a sizable leather-bound volume, but was now nothing more than a few dozen torn pages clinging to a dismembered spine. Knife still in hand, I warily watched him make the arduous return trek of eight steps. Nearing the desk, he tumbled upon it like a drunk, tearing loose several more pages as he crushed the book's remains under his equally desiccated chest. Rearing up, he leafed through the crumbling collection as swiftly as his brittle finger bones allowed. Finally he jammed a claw-like yellow nail into a page, threatening to tear the abused parchment.

"Come learn something," Barttley said like a stodgy old professor, his wasted frame seemingly to inflate a bit with this new pompousness.

I edged closer, still wary, yet feeling a bit foolish for it at the same time. Had the dead man's insanity merely been an affectation to lure me close with some shred of trivia, I'd have been shocked and grimly impressed before meeting my end. At the same time, though, I wouldn't skip to the summons of a living lunatic, so I saw no reason to give a dead lunatic any more benefit of the doubt.

Craning my neck to peer at the page—and to remain far enough out of the corpse's reach to avoid his clutches should he grab for me—I looked upon a family tree, one sprawling, over-tall, knotting back on itself unnaturally and well in need of pruning. The surname at the bottom was "Odranti," the nation's ruling family.

"Lord Halboncrant had little interest in warnings."

"This. This here!" The corpse prodded the page, leaving a score amid a cluster of names with dates from just over a century ago: "Prince Knoldaman Odranti, 4537–4604" then, reaching beyond him, "Lieralt Odranti, 4577–4604" and "Queen Maraet Odranti, 4584–4658." Below Maraet the line stretched and diverged in raucous tangles. Lieralt, however, proved a dead branch.

"So the prince and his son died together?" I guessed. The tangled affairs of the aristocracy had never been of much interest to me, despite my own family name.

"What a pleasant little package that would make, all wrapped up with ribbon for Harvest Feast," he mocked, looking at me without blinking. It was difficult to read whatever rancid emotions still lingered behind his moldy features, but hate is a hard sentiment to miss.

"Murdered, then? Or should I start guessing all the ways royals might die?"

"Murdered indeed, like most would-be princes," he said in a hissed chuckle. "But that's the irony. This one didn't want to be prince, he wanted to be common."

"What's the point of murdering him, then? If he didn't want the crown, why not just foist it off to his sister and be done with it?"

"That wasn't good enough. It wasn't just that he didn't want the crown, he wanted to break the crown. Not only didn't he want to be prince, he didn't want there to even be a prince."

"What? Why wouldn't he want that?" I instantly realized the ridiculousness of my question, having lived my entire life under the rule of impotent counts and princes. "I mean, why wouldn't he want to rule?"

"Some people are leaders, some people are dreamers," Barttley explained whimsically. "And some people have dreams and try to lead people into them, but they usually turn out to be nightmares when they realize no one else wants to live in their dreams"

I was catching on. "No prince means no princess. So then his sister had him murdered?"

Barttley gaped, his smoldering eyes squinting at me. "What a grim place the world's become if that's what you expect of family."

Apparently I wasn't catching on. My unamused glower prodded him on.

"No prince doesn't just mean no princesses; it means no counts, no court, no nobility, nothing. It means generations of titles, properties, favors, allowances go down in a burning wreck. Utter chaos!" The corpse threw up his claws for effect, sending up a cloud of flaking skin and startling me enough to leap back. If he had actually been lashing out at me, I would have been just a moment too late. Grinding my jaw and suppressing a frustrated shout, I glared at him. The scabby remains of lips pulled back, displaying a jagged row of mismatched black and yellow teeth. There was a joke here, and he seemed too pleased to know I was in on it.