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

      Though my vampirism ought to have been obvious enough to any of my colleagues, I did not necessarily consider myself slighted by the fact of being challenged—it was part of an old and honored ritual. I had an ample supply of passwords, in many languages.

      For several minutes I had already been aware of my brother’s presence in the small group ahead. From where I now stood, I could hear six beating hearts but only one set of breathing lungs.

      Shortly before I entered the room—a chapel long-profaned, though only recently abandoned by its breathing owners, located a level or two above the ground floor of the ruined castle—with all my senses tuned to full alertness, I became aware that the breathing lungs were small organs working shallowly and rapidly. Their owner was at the far end of the chamber, behind some angle of stonework and as yet invisible to me.

      I gave the password almost absentmindedly, without making an issue of the challenge. My attention and my thoughts were now focused almost exclusively on my brother.

      Each of us solemnly assured the other that he was looking well.

      As I made my entrance, the group of five or six vampires, men and women, young and old, was deep in discussion; this came to an abrupt halt, and I suspected its subject would be likely to affect me directly. I did not need to hear much to know that Radu was actively attempting to enlist their aid in his war against his brother.

      A silence fell.

      Quietly I entered the darkened room, and Constantia, rather proudly as I thought, introduced me to the small handful of those who had known me only as a name. I was glad to see my old companion—in her breathing days my lover—present at this gathering, though I knew better than to depend on her for any support in a crisis. The former gypsy girl was in fact one of the senior members of this group, though she looked as young and beautiful as ever.

      Constantia had come to the meeting dressed up in a long gown of rich fabric that had certainly never belonged to peasant girl or sans-culotte. She wore it with a natural grace.

      She alone among those present, besides Radu, could testify absolutely to my true identity. She had in fact been present at my first emergence from my first grave—another story I have told elsewhere.

      “Vlad Dracula, Prince of Wallachia.”

      All the group save Radu and Constantia were strangers to me. I had the feeling of one who had neglected his social obligations and fallen out of touch. Constantia introduced the others, one by one, and I bowed slightly at each name. They were of a wide range of ages, and some bore names I recognized. It was not exactly the sort of gathering I had been hoping for; there were none I would have chosen for my associates.

      To Radu I remarked: “You appear to have rested well since our last meeting. Did you enjoy a satisfying sleep?”

      “I feel quite refreshed, thank you,” Radu responded. “Quite energetic.”

      “Would it be impolite of me to inquire how all this energy is going to be employed?”

      The stone-arched room before me was high and narrow, not big enough to accommodate many more than the lord of the manor and his immediate family at their devotions. Though partially roofless, on that night it was by breathers’ standards very dark, which mattered little, because none of those on hand for the meeting needed much light to see. In that old room, redolent of remembered prayers, the very walls still reeking faintly of old incense, the eyes of a breathing human would have picked out only ghosts of illumination entering by the tall windows, where only fragments of stained glass still remained, making an irregular rim and corners.

      Down in the empty cellars and across the occasionally moonlit floors of the old house, rats and mice went scurrying here and there, going about their murine business, accepting vampires as one more fact of life, no more and no less incomprehensible to mice than so many breathing farmers, or tax-collectors, would have been. And spiders, progressing in their eight-fold strides so swift and light that even I needed to strain my ears to pick them up.

      And there, standing in the midst of the little gathering, was my beautiful, beautiful brother, beautifully dressed for the meeting in silks and furs, in the style of a century long gone. As our eyes met at last, Radu stood silent for a moment, trying to be aristocratically impassive, and almost succeeding—but I could see that he was afraid.

      Was he on that evening a little taller than I, or a little shorter? I find it difficult to remember. In the course of his adult life, Radu has been both. As usual, more slender. Quite young in appearance, as always. Almost always. I sometimes think that Radu would rather die than let himself be seen in public with an aged face, gray hair, or wrinkled, sagging skin at his throat and on the backs of his hands. In vampires these phenomena tend to come and go, largely dependent on the vagaries of diet, and to me they are generally matters of indifference.

      In this company of our peers—if that is the right word for them—neither of us felt quite secure enough to move decisively against the other.

      Radu faced me solemnly. “Vlad, we have been enemies long enough.”

      I took time to gather my thoughts before replying. “What do you propose?”

      “We are brothers, after all. I have sworn an oath to give you no more cause to hate me.”

      “You? Have sworn?”

      “Upon our father’s grave,” he proclaimed in a clear, convincing voice, meanwhile raising his right hand. “There is nothing that I hold more sacred.”

      “Bah! I doubt that you even know where it is.”

      He looked nobly sad. Chagrined at this rebuff, but still determined to make himself my friend. “I suppose it’s only to be expected that you would