The Fifth House of the Heart (25 page)

Emily's head whirled. She hadn't realized until this moment just how much she
hadn't
believed her uncle was really on a vampire-­hunting mission. That there was a woman in the bed beside her sick with something unknown to modern medicine was not proof enough. So many things went misdiagnosed. During her watch over the woman, she had asked Rock why they didn't get her to a real doctor. Rock had shrugged and said, “Hospital's no good for what she got,” and moved along with his day. Then Emily had seen something that cemented the truth of the situation in her mind.

Because there, in the pretty bedroom with small blue flowers on the white wallpaper, Emily had noticed—sharing a doily with a carafe of water—the sharp wooden stake that lay on Nilu's bedside table.

“U
ncle Sax,” Emily said, and hugged him. He felt terribly old and tired. His eyes were hopeless when he looked at her, and his arms remained hanging at his sides.

“What were you thinking?” he said, and trudged toward the barn to greet Abingdon.

S
ax went to bed as soon as he possibly could. That left Paolo to explain to the group what had transpired in Germany that day. As Nilu was in Sax's bed for the duration, soaking the mattress with sour sweat, Sax moved himself out of the
maison
and into the cottage. The farm was now fully occupied: Rock, Paolo, and Emily had the remaining bedrooms in the big house, while Gheorghe and Sax had the two bedrooms in the cottage, Abingdon happily slept in his van (“If one of those blokes snores, my door is always open,” he pointed out to Emily, in case she couldn't sleep), and Min was bunked up in Château le Tétanos, the concrete fort up on top of the hill.

Sax lay in the bed beneath the low-beamed ceiling of the cottage's attic, and stared at the knots and fissures in the massive timbers. They reminded him of the cracks in the ugly rock upon which squatted Castle Mordstein.

Sleep would not come for Sax. He wished his brains would stop shouting at him, but there it was. Sleep seemed to have lost interest in him. He had gotten all these young people together, his beloved Emily had shown up out of the blue, they were saddled with a woman from the other side of the world who would soon be dead from vampire bite, and they had spent a fair amount of Vatican money. It was all for nothing.

Castle Mordstein could not be entered by stealth. His team could probably get helicopters with Roman assistance. Sax was sure the Pope would have his own fleet of them, and the Swiss Guards might dress up in fifteenth-century costumes but they were crack soldiers; they were bound to have fighter jets and tanks and all sorts of things. The problem was, you couldn't lower a bunch of men on ropes into a castle in the middle of Germany and have it go unnoticed, least of all by its occupants. The German authorities might even get interested. But a full-scale assault had never been his plan. Vampires were solitary creatures, and this one, from what Sax could gather, was alone, without its mate—probably brooding over his remains, as they liked to do.

Although if by chance it was the same vampire Min had seen spirit away the Russian fiend in Mumbai, all bets were off. The creature might have been assembling its own team, somehow. Rare as it was amongst vampires, highly monogamous as they were, she of Castle Mordstein might have taken a new lover. Particularly if she'd killed her old lover. In that case they were up against two of the beasts. But Min had told him what she'd done to Nilu's attacker. Sax had no reason to doubt the clinical description of the violence Min had performed on the creature; it was the longest speech she'd made since he met her,
delivered while she stood in the doorway of the bedroom looking at Nilu's feverish body.

Assuming Min's inventory of wounds was accurate, she'd left the Russian in a terrible state. So one powerful vampire and one weak vampire might be in the castle. That still fell within the outer limits of Sax's original plan. But he had imagined the fiend would be holed up in some more conventional fastness, such as a château or mansion. They liked their comfort and they preferred splendor. It was the usual thing for vampires to do, if they had their wits about them. The diseased ones, like the specimen Sax had dispatched during his midlife crisis, would live in whatever primitive conditions they found, as long as there was only one way in and out.

But here was a very clever vampire indeed, and it was living more like an eagle, hidden up there on its rock in the sky. One way in and out there, certainly. A postcard Sax had bought featured an aerial photograph of the place. A thin ridge of rock ran up to the summit of the cliff, and that ridge had been carved just flat enough on top for a cart track. On either side of the track was a plummet to oblivion of between three hundred and eight hundred feet in height; the entire peak of the rock was similarly defended by cliffs.

The best you could hope for at any point around the castle perimeter was to fall sixty or seventy feet, survive with shattered bones on some ledge on the cliff face, and die of exposure a few hours later. The castle had been so thoroughly expanded out over the summit of the mountain that there was, furthermore, no small margin to creep along, looking for a climbing route up the masonry; in most places, the walls actually overhung the rock beneath it.

There might be secret passages. Sax was sure there would be. Vampires loved that sort of thing, and the knights of the thirteenth century wouldn't have settled up on a crag like that without leaving themselves an escape hatch somewhere below. But he didn't anticipate they would
find it. There might be a cave or tunnel entrance inside the lower castle or by the river somewhere, even submerged beneath the water. It could take years to search the whole mountain. And the vampire wouldn't merely stand by and wait for them. It would respond to the threat of human curiosity, the trait of mortal men that had killed more vampires than bravery.

Sax tried and failed to clear his mind. He wondered what Gheor­ghe thought of all this. That young criminal knew vampires existed, but he might never have come up against one as formidable as this. Sax could hear the Romanian in the next bedroom rolling around, thumping his pillows. He probably wasn't used to a good bed. Or he might himself have been sleepless, torn between the desire to steal Sax's silverware and run for it, and his interest in seeing where this mission led.

Sax studied the beams and tried not to think about vampires and castles that couldn't be invaded, but the impossibility of a stealth approach to the place taunted him. His plan, his entire scheme, revolved around recruiting a few people who were very good at sneaking and killing. Find an undefended window, a faulty latch somewhere, slip inside the grand old house in dark of night, locate and destroy the vampire, and by dawn have half the furniture out on the lawn waiting for the removal company to come and truck it all away, that overpriced clucking ormolu clock included. As it turned out, they would need siege engines, aerial support, mountaineers, and a good deal more courage and ingenuity than Sax had found in himself over the decades.

On top of everything else, Sax brooded, he was afflicted with gas, probably from the German cabbage at lunch. As the flatus wafted around the room, he wondered if that might be an approach: gas the castle from below. Fire canisters of nerve gas up in through the few windows of the main keep and kill or stun whoever was inside. Then they could raid the place from the narrow road that led up the ridge,
no need for climbing cliffs and so forth. Straight up the cart track to the top and in through the front gates. Although gas wouldn't necessarily work on creatures that breathe only once per minute. If you wanted to kill a vampire, it typically had to be done face-to-face.

Then a glimmer of understanding shone out in the darkness of Sax's brain. He had an idea.

It was a stupid, bad, awful, wretched idea.

It taunted him, turning cartwheels and jabbering at the edge of his conscious mind, like an ape just outside the ring of firelight in some prehistoric contest between proto-man and his simian relatives. He shied rocks at the idea to make it go away, but it would not. At last, exhausted, Sax allowed himself to acknowledge the inspiration. He invited it into the firelight. He looked the thing over. It was just as terrible as he had thought. Better to pack everything (and everyone) up and go home, leaving his slain night watchman unavenged, his clock unreturned, his latest fortune unmade, his reputation lost. The monster could continue its filthy work and someday, in the blink of an eye in vampire time, Sax would die, and he would not have done the one good deed he was called upon to do. The monster would never know nor care.

Sax fell asleep dreaming of it. First, before he would even mention his latest inspiration, they needed to get up close to the castle and study it, looking for some forgotten way to get in. If their reconnaissance turned up no possible route of assault, however, there
was
another way.

Sax had, some time back, thought of using human bait. If there was no other means to storm the castle, that might very well work.

But there was only one person Sax could use as a lure: it would have to be himself.

In that case, all he had to do was walk through Castle Mordstein's front door.

T
here was frost on the ground.

Sax awoke the next morning and rose from bed less by act of will than by erosion. He resumed staring at the knotholes in the beams overhead, watching the square of sky framed in the roof window brighten, then, as if the sun sensed his mood, it grew steely and dim. Sax first allowed one of his thin white legs to dangle over the side of the bed, and then, after an interval, he threw back the covers on the upper half of his body. After further concentration of will, he was able to get his second foot beside the first, and then it was the work of only a few minutes or a quarter of an hour before he was sitting upright. By the time he had showered, shaved, and dressed to something like a reasonable standard for public appearances, then tottered on his cane to the big house, where the kitchen smelled like breakfast, the meal had been over for half an hour.

There was some coffee left. He poured a cup black and hot as a
Macumbeiro Baitola
. Back out in the barnyard he picked his way across cinder-hard earth with the frosted fields around, the whole world blanketed in a skin of glinting ice that coruscated like ground glass, the steaming coffee held before him a torch in the gloom, a source of heat rather than light.

In the barn, he found things were proceeding according to plan, if not the plan he had now constantly on his mind. In addition to the metalworking gear, Abingdon possessed a chemistry lab built into the bulkhead between the cab and cargo sections of his van; it was mostly small glass cylinders containing acids, as Sax recalled. There was an acid to dissolve everything.

In Sax's pocket, he had a small buff envelope. This he gave to Abingdon after the morning's greetings were exchanged. Everyone but Emily and Paolo was out there in the barn, staying warm by the forge, their breath pluming in the frosty air. Presumably the monk
and the niece were tending to ailing Nilu; Sax had heard their voices upstairs in the big house. To the others, Abingdon was delivering an impromptu lecture on alchemy and what a lot of good science came out of it, if not the actual secret to turning lead into gold.

“I have the specimen, young man,” Sax said once the greetings were dispensed with. He handed Abingdon the envelope. Inside was a scrap of the silver from the hammer, Simon, that Sax had given to Emily. He'd cut it from an unobtrusive spot inside the eye through which the handle ought to pass. There was a rime of iron oxidization on one side of the silver, so he imagined there ought to be sufficient metallurgical data available from that to sort out the composition of the thing. Abingdon began his work with the chemicals, his little ceramic workbench set up on the fender of the van. It was essentially a sophisticated tea tray. The others were curious, and Sax wanted more time to think before he relayed his plan, so he explained what Abingdon was up to.

“That silver was amalgamated, if that's the word I want,” Sax began.

“Only if it has mercury in it,” Abingdon remarked.

“Alloyed, then,” Sax amended, “assuming it is an alloy and not pure silver they used back during the twelfth century, when it was all the rage to go on crusades and sack Jerusalem and that sort of thing. Made there in the Holy Land. I cannot say what they would have used for fuel in those days, or the construction of the crucibles and whatnot they would have employed, so that bit is rather up to you, Abingdon.”

“No worries, dearest,” Abingdon said.

“Right,” Sax said, pleased despite himself.
Someone
called him dearest. “This specimen comes from one of the twelve hammers called the Apostles. I believe you, Min, have a copy of one of these hammers in your little ditty bag.”

“It doesn't work,” she said, as if Sax had personally written the
warranty.

“Yes, I know it doesn't work,” Sax said testily. Homicidal maniacs were not just dangerous; they were tiresome. “Please listen, young lady. Whatever happened to your Confucian sense of deference to the older authority figure? It's a disgrace. Now, the reason these modern hammers don't work has got to be something to do with the metal. Everything else has been tried. Exploding tips, stainless steel, platinum, great wicked knives that spring out of the sides—disgusting things. Sometimes they kill the vampire and sometimes they don't. Usually they do not, which isn't a suitable outcome for anyone involved. Vampire blood is highly reactive and full of all sorts of nastiness, so it's bound to get fizzing with the right ingredients thrown in; that's the way I see it. That ingredient must be in the silver of these old hammers. Which is where Abingdon comes in.”

“Just one of the places I come in, but it will do for a start,” Abingdon said, swishing the piece of silver around in a slender flask. The liquid it was swirling in stank of industrial smoke. “There's two variables, really. What's in the silver, and what's in the iron. Three variables, if you include the idea that they might have dipped these fuckers in poison. But what I'm doing here is to get this bit of metal to come apart into its constituent elements. Then we can get things sorted.”