A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9), Fred Saberhagen [some good books to read TXT] 📗

a mustache, a red hat, and a few other items that must have been intended to constitute a disguise. But I was fatally familiar with that face—and I could have done much better at concealing my identity from him had our positions been reversed.

      I did not think that my brother had caught sight of me, and I hoped that he, absorbed in his enjoyment, would be completely unaware of my presence. It might be possible to take him by surprise…

      I felt I had once more to trust my survival to the lesser shade of hat and cloak—even though the lowering sun was beginning to come in under my hatbrim—to catch up with the man and get a better look at him.

      I invited Napoleon to come with me; I thought Radu would be less alarmed by the sight of a pair of unknown figures approaching than of one only. My brother would be thinking that I would almost certainly be coming after him alone. Also I had begun to be fascinated by this breathing major.

      But Bonaparte declined, saying brusquely that observation had become very difficult, and he had business elsewhere. We exchanged the informal salutes of a silent farewell, and he separated himself from me before I actually entered the palace.

      As I drew nearer, I moved along the fringe of the mob of victorious rioters. Some were holding pikes from which depended ragged bits of red uniforms and other, gorier trophies. Now I took note of how the walls of the palace had been scarred with musket balls and grapeshot.

      As I entered the building through a wide-open servants’ entrance, I was greeted by a loud crash of crockery in the huge kitchen adjoining.

      I poked in my head and looked around. Inside, everything had been turned topsy-turvy. Everyone was grabbing whatever he or she could manage to grab, some serious about gathering booty, others seeking only souvenirs.

      Looking down into the wine cellars I beheld a hundred soon-to-be-drunken revelers jostling and fighting with each other, each determined to have the first choice of the King’s best wine.

* * *

      Standing at the foot of the great staircase, I looked up at an unstained expanse of marble. It seemed strange to me then that this one area should be entirely free of death, and I have no explanation for it now.

      Pink cupids, secure in niches among their rosy clouds, looked down with wide, uncaring eyes from the high, plastered ceilings. Their expressions did not alter when now and then a new scream echoed from the mirrored walls.

      I moved on, pausing at intervals to look and listen, my feet despite vampirish reflexes occasionally slipping and sliding in a mixture of wine and blood which anointed the floors of tile and polished wood. Boldly I proceeded into the palace, and then strode through one suite of rooms after another.

      It was as true then as it is now, that when a man of robust appearance walks as if he had a right to be where he is, few are going to challenge him.

* * *

      The main hallway had been newly redecorated with blood, here and there still fresh enough to be bright red.

      Up the stairs and into the chapel. Here, as if they had been brought as offerings in some profaning black mass, the dead were piled. The air sang with hungry flies. Some indecipherable mess, oozing blood, had been dumped onto the high altar; in the rear, the organ had been smashed.

      No living soul besides myself was present. It seemed to me that I had entered one of those times and places on this earth where the existence of Hell is foreshadowed, as it were, beyond any reasonable doubt. And those are the very places and the times where one is well-advised to seek Radu.

      Here and there a few candles were simply burning in their holders, flames wavering no more than usual with drafts, their light glinting on a thousand facets of silver as if this were a dinner party. I wondered who had lighted these tapers and set them out, and wondered more that no serious fires had yet started.

      In the front of the chapel a well-dressed man was standing in the pulpit, blowing on a horn, and it took me a moment to realize that he was imitating the Angel of the Resurrection. In front of him had gathered a small applauding crowd.

      (Radu, where are you?)

      But my esteemed sibling was nowhere to be found.

      I looked and listened carefully. Some inner sense kept nagging me that Radu was not very far away. And in a long life I had learned that it was usually wise to trust my inner senses.

      Now and then some scream of special shrillness burst out loud enough to be heard above the background roar—in my experience, Hell is seldom silent. Fresh cries of agony burst forth when some poor wretch who had been hiding was discovered and dragged out to death.

      Two unarmed men—who yesterday, to judge by their clothing, had both been laborers—were fighting tooth and nail, sobbing and gasping in their rage, over a hoard of small coins spilled on the floor from God knew where. Might this trove have represented the eight-year-old Dauphin’s childish exercise in greed? Now neither of the robbers was able to pick up a single sou without the other striking it from his hand.

      Hundreds of vases, dishes, pieces of statuary, vast mirrors had been smashed to fragments. Half a dozen young girls, part of the invading mob, were haggling and quarreling over the remains of what might have been the Queen’s cosmetics.

      Their voices rose in fishwife clamor, and they seemed on the verge of hair-pulling and of blows.

      In rapid succession I visited the Council Room, and then the Billiard Room. It was the same story everywhere, some apartments ruined and deserted, others still crowded with the many bodies of the Mob, staying near one another as if they feared that separation could cost them their vital madness.

      In the dining room, one man,