The Golden (16 page)

He was tempted
to convict her of betrayal, but there was as yet too little real
evidence to draw a final conclusion. He needed time to let the mud
settle from the waters and let the hard facts sift down. Yes, that
was exactly what he needed. Time, and an implausible amount of luck.

After more than
two hours of running, ducking into shadows, they reached a yawning
tunnel above whose entrance was inscribed an intricate graffiti of
nymphs being raped by satyrs, flung onto their hands and knees, and
mounted from behind, their mouths twisted, hands outflung, as if
somewhere in the darkness beyond lay salvation. Beheim, overborne by
a weariness less physical than spiritual, shared their longing for
surcease. Beneath the drawing were scrawled lewd comments in German
and French and Hungarian, many of which contained words unfamiliar to
him. He had the irrational urge to let this be his final place, to
stand there and translate each and every phrase, deducing nouns from
verbs and vice versa, and composing of them an obscene ode, an
epitaph charged with moral sickness.

There was a
thick silence, the damp smell of sunless waters and rotting stone. He
could see scarcely a dozen feet ahead, but straining his ears, he
made out the beating of hearts nearby: two mortals in hiding some
fifteen or twenty yards away. Males, he decided, judging by their
odor. Either servants, advance elements of a pursuing force, or—and
this he thought more probable—refugees who had once served the
Family and had abandoned their hopes of life immortal. The notion
that he had become like them, a cowering outcast, sparked feelings of
shame and outrage, and glancing at Giselle, who hovered patiently
beside him, vulnerable looking with her hair come all unpinned, he
experienced a flash of resentment. How could he have let himself be
swayed by such a creature? If he had not fled, he might have been
able to convince the Patriarch that he was the victim of deception;
he should have stayed and demanded a confrontation with Alexandra.

And with Roland
Agenor.

Especially with
Agenor.

That old
villain’s touch was everywhere in the scheme of his undoing.
Oh, he was likely innocent. Innocent of murder, at any rate. But Lady
Dolores had made a telling point: Agenor might well be using him to
turn the Golden’s death to his advantage. What Beheim had taken
for paternal solicitude and noble motive might merely have been the
formal dress of a cunning stratagem, and he damned himself for not
having recognized that altruism such as Agenor pretended to espouse
was a virtue alien to the Family, that few favors done were not
freighted with duplicity, no kindness untainted by greed or some
other form of perversity. Agenor’s pose of an ancient grown to
ruddy wisdom through centuries of academic solitude doubtless masked
appetites as feral and conscienceless as those of the de Czeges.

Agenor and
Alexandra, Alexandra and Agenor.

Did that axis
hinge upon some crucial fact, something that might bear upon the
investigation?

Impossible to
say.

He had lost
everything and learned nothing.

Beheim’s
despair planed away into anger, and his anger grew so profound, so
liberating, he began to feel that he was soaring high above the bleak
plain of his thought, no longer grounded in the rational concerns
that had provoked it. And in that furious flight, distanced from all
gentler considerations, it seemed that he had at last completed the
arc of his being, embraced the lineaments of an inky, sharp-winged
soul, and inhabited it fully. He thought he sensed a thousand vital
potentials that a moment before he might have found loathsome, yet
now appeared intriguing and inviting, promising new styles of
dominance, fresh angles from which to approach the problem of
forever. It was exhilarating, this knowledge. Intoxicating. His heart
pumped with the robust rhythm of one just fed, and in his mind’s
eye—or perhaps it was no inner vision, but a product of the
walls of the moment breaking down and permitting him a view of some
netherworld through a ragged breach in the stones of Castle Banat—he
saw vague figures gathering round him: slim, darkly clad men and
women with pale skin and lustrous eyes. They drifted toward him with
the processional slowness of creatures in a dream, wreathed in
streamers of mist. Frightened, he sought to will them away, and when
they did not disperse, he grew even more afraid; but then he realized
that these were the hosts of the Agenor branch, both the living and
the dead assembled in a place of witness, there yet not there, an
immaterial splinter of each drawn to attend the ceremony of this, his
enlightenment. He seemed to hear their names in his blood, a hushed
droning like the shadow of a song, music that filled and enriched him
like darkness thickening in a crypt; he could feel the specific force
of their presences, a thicket of energies as intricate as fern
shadow; and from all this, steeped in those spiritual pressures, he
derived a fresh appreciation of his history.

These decaying
villains with ruptured chests and stitched-shut eyes; these manly
young beasts with their elegant manners and glinting teeth; these
women with fanged smiles whose combination of beauty and unhealthy
vigor was a lash to the senses—they all shared, he realized,
much more than the specific strain of a blood infection, for that
infection was the crucible from which a great harmony was being
forged. As they crowded close, closer, their features growing
increasingly distinct, he identified several of his acquaintances
among them: Danielle Hinault, her chestnut hair piled high; Monroe
Seaforth, the American financier; Claude St. Cyrille, Paul Widowes,
and Andrew McKechnie, three men—like him—relatively new
to the Family. And there was old Agenor himself. His shock of hair,
like a white flame, struck Beheim—contrary to his previous
assessment of his mentor’s character—as reflecting a
whiteness of spirit. Not an actual virtue. Virtue was too limiting a
term. It was more a purity of intent, an absolute clarity of purpose
that Agenor had transmitted to each of them, a signifying quality
that would attach to all their deeds. The treasure of his blood,
their chemical birthright. Beheim began to know himself as a figure
in a centuries-long tradition, its heir and—more
pertinently—its implement, his essential purpose being to
assist in the completion of a scheme whose ultimate goal was clear
not even to Agenor, but was an imprint of the blood, a cellular
labyrinth whose ornate patterns they were foreordained to duplicate
with their schemes and violent actions. He could almost envision its
eventual result, and he could almost make out those of the
branch—some yet unborn, others living yet unjudged—who
would one day fashion its final structures. Perhaps, he thought, he
would be among them, for the grand design was nearing completion.
That much was apparent, a wisdom of his blood. And it was, he
understood, his
blood
that was truly wise, not his mind or his
soul. Just as that red juice was moved along the passages of his
veins by the beating of a heart, so he himself was moved along the
passages of the design by the workings of some mystic engine, its
true nature obscured by time and the exigencies of mutant biology.
Yet he could hear it churning in the song of his blood (oh, the Lady
Dolores had been right about that; it was a song he had not heard
till now, and now that he had heard it, he knew it plainly for what
it was). And he imagined he could see the embodiment of the melody
shining like a beacon in the black sky of his solitude, a simple
device such as a cross or an ankh, yet emblematic of a deeper passion
and a more fundamental truth.

As if their
function had been merely to shepherd him toward this peak of
understanding, the shades of the Agenor branch began to recede,
undulating like the shadows of flames; their droning song rose like a
steamy perfume, imposing upon him an awareness of great destiny and
enormous truth and infinite belonging. He felt drugged and delirious.
It was as if after having been lost for years in an enchanted wood,
he had suddenly grown to the stature of a giant and was now capable
of overlooking the treetops and orienting himself amid the Family’s
arcane metaphysical geography. He had the urge to shout, to roar his
exultation; but a sense of calm potency washed over him, an emotion
that had the richness of a cathedral silence. All of this might be,
he thought, merely another dark symptom, an acceleration of the fever
that possessed the Family, and thus might signal a slackening of good
judgment rather than an evolution of awareness. Yet though he feared
this to be the case, he could not reject the feeling, for it recast
his confidence, allowing him to disregard the hopelessness of the
situation and to concentrate upon what he might achieve.

Giselle made a
frail noise, but Beheim was too involved with his own purposes to pay
her heed. He stepped forward into the tunnel, imagining the shadows
fitting about him like a cape, and held out his arms to the darkness
beyond. The hearts of the two men in hiding beat faster. To see one
of their former masters so close at hand must, Beheim thought, have
returned to them all the fearful allure of their former service.

“Come here
to me,” he said. “You will not be harmed, I swear it.”

One set of
footsteps retreated, but before Beheim could set out in pursuit, a
rusty, quavering voice called out, “Have mercy upon me, lord! I
am weaponless against you!”

Like an image
surfacing from a black pool, a thin, angular figure with tangles of
iron-colored hair and a prophet’s matted beard, wearing a
hooded robe bleached to an indefinite gray, came haltingly forward
from the dark recesses of the tunnel. Beneath the brush of whiskers
was a hollowed, haggard face, but Beheim saw that the man was not
old, as his stooped posture and seamed countenance indicated, only
ill-used. The small, closely set eyes were an icy blue, lending an
impression of canniness to his features; the neck was unwithered, and
the squarish hands callused, powerful looking. Beheim could smell the
fearful toxins in his blood, yet he also sensed that the man’s
fear did not run deep, that his cowering attitude was at least in
part an attempt to hide feelings of contempt.

“Tell me
your name,” Beheim said.

The man stopped
an arm’s length away, averted his eyes, his left shoulder
drooping as if preparing to receive a blow. “Vlad, lord,”
he said, and then, continuing in a chatty and altogether incongruous
tone, “My name is Vlad. Yet I am no impaler as was my
namesake.” An unsound laugh that went too high and cracked.
“No, no, not at all. An unhappy coincidence, nothing more.”

“Lucky for
me, eh?” said Beheim, and gave Giselle an amused glance,
eliciting from her a wan smile. “Where is your companion,
Vlad?”

“Lord, he
was afraid. In awe of your magnificence. He could not stand before
you.”

“And
you . . . you are not afraid?”

“Oh, but I
am, lord. I am terrified. My blood”—he pressed a hand to
his chest, striking a dramatic attitude—“runs cold. But I
am practiced at fear. I have learned to be a witness to my urges, not
their slave.” His eyes darted toward Giselle, lingered a
moment; then he returned his gaze to the worn stones at his feet.

“Truly,
that is a practiced answer,” Beheim said blithely. “I
suppose I believe you.”

For the briefest
of instants Vlad met his gaze, and Beheim had a sense both of the
unstable process of the man’s thoughts and of the consolidated
principle of his loathing, the product of years spent slinking
through the dark, shunning the brilliant presences who ruled the
upper reaches of his stone universe, lusting for a power that would
never be his.

“I have
heard,” Beheim said, “that you who dwell here below know
all the secret ways of Banat.”

“Perhaps
not all,” said Vlad. “Some we know.”

“I have
heard, too, that you travel freely to every part of the castle.”

Vlad inclined
his head in a slight nod.

“Even to
the Patriarch’s chamber?”

“Even
there, lord.”

“Excellent!
I would have you lead me to the Patriarch at once.”

Vlad hesitated.
“You will forgive me, lord, but I must be so bold as to
inquire, why do you wish to travel secret paths rather than seeking
an audience directly?”

“That is
not your concern.”

The man gave
forth with an unsteady humming noise, like the drone of a drunken
bee, and nodded rapidly, as if in agreement with some inner urgency.
“It is evident, lord, that you have fallen into disfavor, or
else you would not be asking for guidance. This being so, I would be
a fool if I did not seek a reward for my service.”

“Your
reward,” Beheim said, barely able to hold his temper in check,
“will be to survive this encounter.”

“For many
that would be more than sufficient,” said Vlad, sounding ever
more assured despite his subservient pose. “But as for myself,
lord, I am plagued with many fears. Death is only one of them, and
life”—he gave a dismayed laugh—“life is
sweet, but its sweetness has grown of late unsatisfying.” He
looked straight at Beheim; his bony, bewhiskered face, gemmed with
those glittering eyes, appeared fierce and ratlike; the pink tip of
his tongue poked out. “Give me the woman. Your beautiful,
beautiful lady. Give her to me, and I will lead you to the
Patriarch.”

Giselle moved
behind Beheim, her hand going to his shoulder, and Beheim laughed
coldly.

“Hear me,
lord!” Vlad retreated a pace, yet maintained a certain poise,
like—Beheim thought—a mongoose withdrawing briefly from
the fray to judge a cobra’s weariness. “What will it harm
you to make this promise? I realize that your word when given to such
as I cannot be your bond. Promise her to me. Then, if it suits you,
you may retract your promise. And after I have led you to the
Patriarch, you may punish me for my impudence.”