Bloodborn (28 page)

‘Did you kill him?’ she asked Gabriella.

‘I doubt it,’ the countess replied. ‘He has dropped back out of my reach.’ She smiled. ‘Still, he will think twice about following, I believe.’ She raised her voice. ‘Uwe! Slower now, but keep twisting the trail!’

‘Aye, mistress.’

Lotte and Ulrika closed the windows again and the three of them rode in silence for a few moments as Uwe turned the coach left and right and left through the tiny, winding streets of the slums. But then, into that silence came an unsettling noise. At first it sounded like the sea, heard from over a distant hill, then it sounded like the roar of battle, then like some wild orgiastic celebration, the howling of beastmen in the woods, drunk on rage and violence.

The coach jolted to an abrupt stop and Uwe’s voice came to them from above. ‘You’d better see this, mistress.’

Gabriella opened her window and Ulrika followed suit, looking ahead. They were in a narrow alley, deep in the shadow of tenements that rose five storeys high on either side of them, but twenty paces ahead was a more open street, and parading down it was a throng of maddened humanity.

Ulrika remembered seeing similar mobs when she had been in Praag during the siege – crowds whipped into fearful fury by street-corner firebrands who preached murder and mayhem against anyone who wasn’t with them. They seemed rabid with hate, roaring and shaking make-shift weapons over their heads.

‘Kill the vampires!’ they cried. ‘Burn the vampires!’

Ulrika winced as she saw that a quartet of them carried a half-naked girl on their shoulders, tied to a chair and horribly beaten. The rest pelted her with cobbles and muck and spit curses at her. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. At the same time, though she was loath to admit it, she felt a shameful rush of relief. If the mob thought they had caught their quarry, then perhaps they wouldn’t pay any attention to Gabriella’s coach. Then she saw that such a hope was a foolish fantasy. The mob was too voracious to be satisfied with a single victim.

As she watched, a handful of men pounced on a middle-aged woman trying to go the other way down the street. She struggled, but they pinned her down and pried open her mouth, looking at her teeth then, apparently disappointed at what they found, they left the woman lying there weeping and ran off in search of other prey.

Ulrika swallowed, trying to force down a lump of dread that filled her breast. Nuln had been waiting for this. The rumours of vampires had been the dry wood of a pyre, piling higher and higher in the public square over the last weeks, waiting patiently for someone to burn. Now that fool Captain Schenk, with his cry of ‘Vampire!’ had set the spark to the tinder, and the pyre was ablaze, but it was rapidly growing out of control. If it went unchecked, she feared all Nuln would burn.

‘We can’t stay here, mistress,’ called Uwe. ‘We have to get away.’

‘Aye,’ said Gabriella, thinking. ‘But to where, and how?’

‘Out of the city?’ asked Ulrika, hopefully.

Gabriella shook her head. ‘I must see Hermione again. I cannot imagine that she sent the witch hunters after us, but if she did, I must know. That would be a crime I could take to the queen.’ She raised her voice again. ‘Uwe. To the bridge. But keep to the side streets.’

‘Aye, mistress.’

Ulrika heard him hop down from his bench, and start guiding the horses around in a circle in the tight space.

‘Won’t the witch hunters be watching the bridge?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t there another?’

‘There is,’ said Gabriella. ‘But the island of the Iron Tower lies midway along it, and the Iron Tower is the witch hunters’ garrison. I am not brave enough for that, I’m afraid. We will just have to hope that we reach the main bridge before Schenk does.’

‘And if we do not?’ Ulrika asked.

Gabriella shook her head, then laughed, an edge of hysteria creeping into her voice. ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

They sat back in their seats and waited while Uwe backed the coach and made another quarter-turn, the howling of the mob still echoing into the alley. Ulrika prayed to her father’s gods that no one would look their way and decide they looked like potential victims. If they did, it would be over. They would be trapped and unable to run.

The countess tapped a nervous foot, her eyes shifting here and there as if chasing fractured thoughts. Then, a moment later, she seemed to grow calmer. She closed the louvres completely, then turned to Lotte, who sat silent and white-faced as she had through the whole chase, her hands knit together in her lap.

‘Lotte, my dear,’ said Gabriella. ‘I want to trade clothes with you. Take off your skirt and bodice.’

Lotte’s eyes widened. ‘Mistress?’

Gabriella smiled reassuringly and began to unlace her points. ‘Come now, darling. All will be well. Be a dear.’

‘Y-yes, mistress,’ the maid quavered. She began unhooking the eyes that held her neat grey top closed.

Ulrika looked from one to the other as what the countess was asking slowly dawned on her. She meant for Lotte to be mistaken for her if the mob caught them. She was going to give the girl up to the dogs, and Lotte was going along with it.

‘Mistress?’ she said uneasily.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Gabriella, shrugging out of her beaded velvet bodice. ‘I will provide for you if the need arises.’

Ulrika paused. That hadn’t been what she was going to ask. But what she would have said died on her lips as well. Arguing for the life of a blood slave was foolish. Nothing would change. She would only anger Gabriella and embarrass Lotte. And given a moment to think about it, she knew she too would happily sacrifice any number of maids to save Gabriella, or herself. They were only animals after all. It was just the premeditated coldness of it that made her wince. She did not like cruelty. When she had hunted with her father she had killed her deer quickly and cleanly. She did not like to see them twitch with pain, or be torn apart by the hounds.

Uwe got the coach turned about at last, and they moved off down the alley to begin their careful side-winding through the slums, always being sure that the mob was not about to cross their path. Ulrika felt like they were caught in some sort of human flood, and were seeking high ground and easy fords across a dangerous river. The panic had spread throughout all the neighbourhoods south of the river, and people seemed to be using the excuse of the vampire hunt for any mischief they could imagine. Shop fronts were being smashed in and looting was rampant. Peering out through the slatted window, Ulrika saw men rolling kegs of beer ahead of them and laughing. Others were dragging old women out of houses and flinging them in the mud, and everywhere was the sweet pork stink of burning flesh.

As they passed a pyre that burned in the middle of a grimy area of forges and manufactories, Ulrika snarled, transferring some of her anger at Gabriella’s cold-blooded actions to the villains who had set a pair of men on fire, bound together as if they were embracing. She shivered. Today was a day to hide away if you were odd or beautiful or did not often mix with your fellows. The outcasts were burning in Nuln, branded vampires as a matter of convenience. It made her want to leap out of the coach and butcher the mobs to the last cowardly man and finger-pointing woman.

A street later the change of clothes had been completed, and Gabriella was dressed in Lotte’s prim uniform and Lotte wore Gabriella’s rich bodice and beaded skirts. Neither looked quite convincing in their parts. Gabriella’s eyes were too sharp and aware to be those of a demure maid, and Lotte’s were too wide and frightened to be those of an imperturbable aristocrat, but Ulrika doubted the mob would look at their faces.

She glanced down at her own beautiful dresses, and Gabriella’s earlier words finally sank home. How would the countess provide for her? What could she do to save her, dressed as she was? A chill ran down her spine as a thought came to her. Perhaps Gabriella had only been soothing her as she had Lotte. Perhaps she meant to throw her to the dogs as well.

The coach slowed and stopped again. All three of them looked up, nervous.

‘We are coming to the Brukestrasse, mistress,’ came Uwe’s voice. ‘The bridge is only two streets north, but there is a… a crowd.’

Gabriella bit her lip. ‘Go forward on foot and look for witch hunters on the bridge, then report back to me.’

‘Aye, mistress.’

They heard Uwe climb down and trot off down the street. Ulrika’s jaw clenched as she looked out through the half-closed louvres. Men stood in the doors of the workshops, watching ne’er-do-wells running by towards the fun. So far no one had paid any notice of the coach, but all it would take was a single glance, and if they were discovered before Uwe returned they would be dead – oarless in the flood with the burning light of the sun all around them like a sea of flame.

The seconds crawled by. They could hear shouting and screaming and laughing from the Brukestrasse – the mob at their horrible work. Ulrika wondered if Schenk had any remorse about stirring up the populace as he had. The old witch hunter adage was ‘better ten innocent men die than one creature of darkness live’. Well, she was certain that more than ten innocent men had died today, and she doubted Schenk had caught any creatures of darkness – at least not yet.

Quick steps came back to the coach and Uwe stepped up on the running board to speak through the louvres. ‘I’m sorry, mistress,’ he said, out of breath. ‘There are four witch hunters at the bridge, and the area around it is filled with troublemakers.’

Gabriella nodded, her eyes dark. ‘Then I suppose we must try the Iron Bridge after all. Turn about.’

‘Aye, mistress.’

They heard him climb back up to his bench and then flick the reins at the horses. The coach rumbled forwards and started to arc around in the narrow street but, just as they were sideways to traffic, Ulrika heard shouts and laughing and running boots coming towards them from the direction they wanted to go. She looked through the louvres.

Five young men in apprentices’ smocks were sprinting down the street with iron pokers and spit forks in their hands, laughing and looking back over their shoulders. A burly man in a smith’s leather apron was puffing behind them, shouting at them to stop.

‘Give them things back!’ he cried. ‘Y’didn’t pay for ’em!’

The young men jeered at him and thumbed their noses.

‘We need ’em to hunt vampires!’ a blond one shouted. ‘You’re not going to stop us hunting vampires, are you?’

They turned back to find Gabriella’s coach in their way.

‘Move that snob-wagon!’ shouted the blond boy.

‘Out of the way,’ cried another.

‘Sorry, lads,’ said Uwe. ‘Street’s blocked that way. Just trying to turn around.’

‘Well, y’picked a good time for it, Ranald curse ye.’

Ulrika heard thuds and gruntings and the whickering of the horses as the boys ran around the back and the front of the coach. Then one of them hopped up on the running board, laughing, and tried to poke his fingers through the window slats.

‘Who y’hiding in there, anyway?’ he said. ‘Is she pretty?’

Ulrika instinctively slapped at his fingers, then shut the louvres with a snap as he jerked back.

‘Hoy!’ the boy cried, and she heard him backing away. ‘Snooty bitch!’

‘Come on, Dortman!’ called one of his friends. ‘Yer laggin’.’

‘But she hit me!’ he cried, running off. ‘She closed the window and…’ His voice trailed off and his footsteps slowed, then suddenly sped up again. ‘Hey, lads! Wait a moment!’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EXPLOSION AND AFTERMATH

‘Merde,’ said Gabriella, and closed her eyes. Then, ‘Uwe! Away! Quickly!’

‘Aye, mistress.’

The whip cracked again and the horses pulled the coach through its arc faster, but not fast enough. Too quickly, the boys’ footsteps came running back, and more with them. Ulrika’s heart sank.

‘She closed the window, I tell you!’ the one called Dortman was shouting. ‘She closed out the sun!’

‘The coach from the inn was black, weren’t it?’ asked another voice.

‘Aye,’ said a third. ‘And they never found it!’

‘Hoy, coachman!’ shouted the blond boy. ‘Hold on a minute!’

Uwe whipped up the horses and the coach lurched ahead, gaining speed. The boys responded like hounds that have flushed the fox. They bayed and hallooed, and called to everyone else on the street.