Tales of the Old World (69 page)

She laughed, picking up a fruit from the bowl and biting deep into it,
enjoying the taste of his fear. Thick juice, obscenely scarlet in colour, bled
out of the fruit as she ate it.

Giovanni studied the lines and contours of the painted face on the canvas in
front of him. A few brushstrokes, a subtle touch of shading, and he had added an
extra element of sardonic cruelty to the line of her smile.

The next night he returned to his cell at dawn to find a small tied leather
pouch sitting on his bed. He opened it, pouring out a quantity of powdered ash.
Puzzled, Giovanni ran his fingers through the stuff, finding it strangely
unpleasant to the touch. There was something amongst it. Giovanni gingerly
picked it up, discovering it to be a ring. He held it up, the light of the
rising sun catching the familiar emerald stone set upon it.

It seemed that Mariato no longer occupied the same position amongst his
mistress’ favours as he had once done.

Giovanni knew that their time together was coming to an end. Mannslieb hung
high in the night sky, almost full, and for the last few nights there had been
more activity than usual in the villa. He heard the sound of heavy boxes—earth-filled coffins, he supposed—being dragged up from the cellars and loaded
into wagons. He worked in daylight hours too now; foregoing sleep and working on
the painting alone in his cell, making changes so subtle that he doubted anyone
other than he would notice the difference. Adding new details and taking away
others. Revising. Reworking. Perfecting. He was haggard and gaunt, exhausted
from too little food and sleep, looking more like one of her pale ghoul-thing
servants than the portly florid-faced drunk who had been brought here just scant
weeks ago.

All that mattered now was the painting itself. The greatest work of his life,
that is what he had said he would have to produce, and that is what he had done.
After that, he discovered to his surprise, nothing else really mattered.

She sent for him the next night, with Mannslieb shining full-faced in the
night sky. The painting too, was now complete.

She stood looking at it. The room had been stripped almost bare, and the
easel that the canvas stood on was the most significant item left in it. There
were faint outlines on the walls where her portraits had hung.

“You are leaving?” he said, more in statement than question.

“We have many enemies, my kind. Not just the witch hunters with their silver
and fire. We wage war amongst ourselves, fighting over sovereignty of the night.
It has become too dangerous to remain here.”

She gestured towards the painting. “It is beautiful, master Gottio. I thank
you for your gift. What do you call it?”

“Unchanging Beauty,”
he answered, joining her to look at his
masterpiece. It showed her standing regally against a backdrop of palatial
splendour. Giovanni’s talent had captured all her cruel and terrible beauty as
the others before him had also done, but the real artistry was in the detail of
the trappings around her. Look closer and the eye was drawn to the tarnished
gold of the throne behind her, the subtle patterns of mildew creeping across the
wall tapestries, the broken pinnacles of the palace towers seen through the
window in the far background. It was a world where everything other than her was
subject to change and decay. Only she was unchanging. Only she was forever.

“Then my task here is done. I am free to leave now?” He looked at her, half
in hope, half in dread.

“I had thought to keep you here with me as an new diversion to replace poor
Mariato.” She looked at him, trying to gauge his reaction, toying with him yet
again.

“But, no, you would make a poor vampire, master Gottio,” she reassured him,
relishing one last taste of his fear. “There is something in our nature that
destroys any creative ability we may have had in our mortal lives, and I would
not deny the world the great works still within you. So, yes, you are free to
go.”

“And my reward?”

She gestured towards a small open casket nearby. Giovanni glanced at it,
silently toting up the value of the gold and precious stones it contained and
coming to a figure comparable with a minor merchant prince’s ransom. When he
looked back, she was holding a goblet of wine out to him.

“What is it?” he asked, suspecting one final cruel jest.

“A little wine mixed with a sleeping draught, the same one that Mariato tried
to lull you with. Call it a final precaution, for your own safety. When you
awaken, you will be safe and in familiar surroundings, I promise you. I could
compel you to drink it, but this way is easier.”

He took it, raising it to his lips and drinking. She watched him intently as
he did so. The wine was excellent, as he expected, but mixed in with it, the
taste of something else, not any kind of potion or sleeping draught. Something
dark and rich, something that rose up to overwhelm his senses.

“An extra gift,” she said, seeing the reaction in his eyes. “With your
painting, you have given me a part of yourself. It only seemed fair that I give
you something equally valuable in return. Farewell, little mortal, I look
forward to seeing what uses you will put my gift to.”

She reached out with preternatural reflexes to catch him as he fell, as the
darkness rushed in to envelop his numbed senses…

He awoke in blinding daylight, crying out in pain as the unaccustomed
sunlight stabbed into his eyes. When he recovered, he realised that he was in
the pauper’s attic garret he called home. The precious casket lay on the floor
beside him.

It took him several hours to realise the nature of the additional gift she
had given him.

He sat inspecting his reflection in the small cracked looking glass he had
finally managed to find amongst the jumble of his possessions. Days ago he had
been a haggard wreck, now there was not a trace of the ordeal left upon him,
none of the exhaustion of the last few weeks. He looked and felt better than he
had in years. In fact…

Shallya’s mercy,
he thought, studying the reflection of his face in the
mirror.
I look ten years younger!

He thought of certain legends about her kind, about the gifts they granted to
their loyal mortal servants and about the restorative powers of…

Of vampire blood. Only the smallest portion, but he could feel it flowing in
his veins, feel her inside him. Her life-force added to his own. Had she done
this with the others, he wondered, and then he remembered that the da Venzio had
been reputed to have lived to over a century in age—blessed by the mercy
goddess, they said, in reward for the work he had done in her great temple in
Remas—and of how Bardovo had lived long enough to paint not just the portrait
of the Marco Columbo but also that of the legendary explorer’s merchant prince
great-grandson.

He wondered how long he, Giovanni Gottio, had, and about how he would put his
time to best use.

He looked around his squalid attic, seeing only the detritus of his former
miserable life: smashed wine bottles and pieces of cheap parchment torn up in
anger and thrown in crumpled balls across the room. He picked one up, smoothing
it out and recognising it as the abandoned portrait sketch of a local tavern
girl. The workmanship was poor and he could see why he had so quickly abandoned
the piece, but looking at it with fresh vision he could see possibilities in its
line and form that had not been there to him before.

He found his drawing board and pinned the parchment to it, sitting looking at
it in quiet contemplation. After a while, he searched amongst the debris on the
floor and found the broken end of a charcoal pencil.

And with it, he began to draw.

It was late and, given the hour, the draughty expanse of the orphanage’s
dining hall seemed hardly warmer than the wintry night outside. Yet despite
having been roused blearily from their beds, a dozen barefoot children filed
across the cold flagstone floor without complaint. Quiet and dutiful, they came
to where Sister Altruda stood with the visitors and formed a line facing them,
heads up and spines held straight like diminutive soldiers summoned to a parade
ground muster. Then, seeing one of the visitors step forward to inspect them,
twelve small faces grew bright with sudden hope—only for those hopes to be
abruptly dashed as, finishing her inspection, the young woman turned to Sister
Altruda to deliver a terse and crushing verdict. “No,” Frau Forst said, “none of
these will do.”

As one, twelve faces fell. Watching it, Sister Altruda felt a familiar
sadness to see twelve childish hearts hardened a little more against hope by the
pain of rejection. It could not be helped. As priestess to the goddess of mercy,
Sister Altruda’s own heart went out to them. But, as director of the Orphanage
of Our Lady Shallya of the Blessed Heart, she was a realist. Marienburg
manufactured so many unwanted children and if she could find even one a new home
tonight it would be a triumph. Though, given that her visitors had spent the
better part of an hour viewing dozens of children now without finding one to
please them, presently even that small victory seemed beyond her.

Sighing inwardly, Sister Altruda beckoned to the novitiate Saskia to lead the
children from the room. Then, summoning her most diplomatic tone, she turned to
her visitors once more.

“You must understand,” she said, “there are hundreds of children here.
Perhaps if we were to discuss more fully your criteria in choosing the child you
wish to adopt, we might speed the selection.”

“Criteria?” Frau Forst replied, as though vaguely bewildered by the term.
“There are no criteria, sister. It is simply a matter of finding a child my
husband and I can love as our own. A child we can share our lives with. We will
know him when we see him. Isn’t that right, Gunther?”

Behind her, Herr Forst gave a single silent nod. They made a strange couple.
Frau Forst seemed no more than twenty-odd years of age: a vivacious butterfly of
a girl shrouded in colourful silks and velvet furs. A woman whose prettiness, to
Sister Altruda’s eyes, was only slightly marred by an over-enthusiastic
application of rouge to her lips. In contrast, her husband looked more than
twenty years her senior. Trim and well-preserved perhaps, with broad shoulders
and none of the heaviness of waist common to men of his years and position. But
his dark hair and well-groomed beard were flecked with streaks of grey, while
his shrewd, quiet eyes spoke of a man who had seen enough of life to always be
wary.

A moth to his wife’s butterfly, Herr Forst dressed in sombre greys and
blacks, his only ornament an amulet on a heavy gold chain around his neck
announcing his membership in one of Marienburg’s innumerable mercantile orders.
Given their disparities, Sister Altruda could not help but suspect that Frau
Forst had come here on a whim, intent on choosing herself a trophy child in the
same manner as her husband had evidently chosen himself a trophy wife. Still, it
was none of her concern. Whatever their motives, she did not doubt that any
child would be happier living with the Forsts than in the dreary and overcrowded
confines of the orphanage. And besides, the good character of Herr Forst himself
was beyond question.

Where others who might consider themselves among the “great-and-good” of
Marienburg seemed content to let the city’s flotsam children be condemned to the
streets, over the last five years Gunther Forst had been the orphanage’s single
most generous private benefactor. He had his eccentricities though and if after
five years of distant benevolence he had come to adopt a child outside the
orphanage’s usual hours of business then so be it. Sister Altruda would no more
reject a reasonable request from Herr Forst than she would the High Priestess in
Couronne. No matter how difficult Frau Forst was to please, no matter how
nebulous her requirements or exacting her standards, her position as the wife of
Gunther Forst placed her beyond reproach. If need be, Sister Altruda would rouse
every child in the orphanage and spend the next six hours trooping them past
Frau Forst until she found one that pleased her.

Though, given how late it was already, she sincerely hoped it would not come
to that.

Hearing the door open once more, Sister Altruda turned to see Saskia leading
another group of a dozen children into the room. Lining up as the others had
before them, the children waited patiently as Frau Forst stepped forward to
examine them. This time though, instead of glancing briefly over the line, Frau
Forst paused two-thirds of the way along to gaze down at a sandy-haired boy of
about eight whose features seemed almost angelic in their perfection.
Guilelessly, the boy lifted his own eyes to stare back and for long moments the
woman and the child stood there with eyes locked as though entranced—only for
the spell to be broken as, abruptly, Herr Forst cleared his throat. Hearing it,
Frau Forst turned to look at her husband for a moment, before turning back to
the silent boy before her.

“And what is your name, my little prince?” she cooed at him.

“The boy does not speak,” Sister Altruda said.

“He is mute, then?” Frau Forst asked, raising a quizzical eyebrow towards
her.

“No. We examined him when he was brought here and could find no sign of any
physical defect. It may be that some shock has caused him to temporarily lose
the ability to speak. It is difficult to say. He was found wandering the streets
some days ago and we know nothing of his background. Given time, we can only
hope his voice returns to him.”

“I see,” Frau Forst said, turning to coo at the boy once more. “If you ask
me, my little prince, all you need is a nice loving home. A warm, safe place
with toys and dogs and all the things a boy could want. Why, once you come home
with us, I’m sure we’ll have you talking ten-to-the-dozen in no time.”