Stiletto (11 page)

My God, what kind of business are we getting ourselves into?
she thought weakly. Then she caught a wave of smell, strong enough to wash past her mask. There were minerals, strange compounds, and a trace of rot, but most of all, there was a strong presence of citrus. It hit her memory like a hammer, and she was suddenly terribly afraid.

“Does anyone else smell oranges?” said the Rook, sounding very perplexed.

No,
Odette thought in horror.
Oh God, no
. She looked to the graaf, who shook his head at her, commanding her to be silent.

They’ve followed us here.

Odette’s brain woke her up on schedule. She grimaced, and then, as memories of the previous evening presented themselves for inspection, she grimaced even more. The trip back from the crime scene to the hotel had been extremely uncomfortable, although Mrs. Woodhouse had managed to rustle up a slightly more reasonable vehicle. The three who had entered the crime scene had been obliged to discard their shoes after that horrible black liquid had engulfed their baggied feet and seeped through.

As a result, they had sat awkwardly in the back of a town car in their stockinged feet; their shoes had been shipped off to a special facility to be professionally destroyed. Odette and the graaf had been pointedly silent while the Rook spent most of the time on the phone, giving orders to hapless flunkies. After the Grafters were dropped off at the hotel, Odette had opened her mouth to say something, but the graaf had shaken his head.

“We’ll discuss it tomorrow,” he said, and they had gone to their rooms. Odette had drawn herself a bath, added various compounds, and watched as the water turned cloudily purple and gelatinous. Then she eased herself in, sank to the bottom, and fretted. Sleep hadn’t come easily, and now that she was awake, the problems didn’t seem any better. She curled up, hugged her knees, and brooded on how she’d come to be there.

*

Really, it was all the fault of that greedy bastard Carlos de Aragón de Gurrea, duke of Villahermosa.

In 1677, there was no Belgium. The lands that would eventually become Belgium were part of the Spanish Netherlands and were technically under the rule of Carlos II of Spain. Carlos the Deuce, however, delegated the responsibility of ruling them to a governor-general who lived in Brussels and tried not to lose any of the king’s territory to that canny buck Louis XIV of France.

At that time, the Wetenschappelijk Broederschap van Natuurkundigen was effectively a government agency in the Spanish Netherlands. The brotherhood had begun a couple of centuries earlier when two noblemen, Grootvader Ernst and his business partner and cousin Gerd, Count of Leeuwen, funded the efforts of some shabby alchemists. Said shabby alchemists had been unexpectedly, mind-blowingly successful in their efforts. The two noblemen had put money in, and unfathomably advanced biotechnology had come out.

In the beginning, the mission of the Broederschap had been simple research — pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, gaining a greater understanding of the glory of God’s creation (with an initial emphasis on replacing the leg Ernst had lost in a riding accident), and extending everybody’s life span to ensure there was enough time to get a
really
good
understanding. Ernst and Gerd, being responsible members of the nobility, had informed the government of the brotherhood’s work. The government had responded with the bureaucratic equivalent of some pocket money, an encouraging pat on the head, and an absentminded suggestion to run along and play, do.

Thus unencumbered by interference from the authorities, the Broederschap pursued their activities with an enthusiasm and focus almost as astounding as the results they produced. In a time without flush toilets, they unraveled the genome. In laboratories lined with hand-painted Delft tiles, men who bathed at most once a week cracked the secrets of immortality and developed surgical procedures that allowed them to twist the human form (and various other forms) into whatever shapes they pleased. Their work was based firmly on scientific principles and human intellect, but the results were nothing short of miraculous.

At which point, Ernst and Gerd decided all this could make them look very,
very
good to the government, and they finally wrote that status report they’d been putting off for decades.

The report raised a few skeptical eyebrows in Antwerp, but after the government scoured the books and realized that, yes, they actually had funded a scientific brotherhood of scientists a while back, a minor bureaucrat was dispatched to check in on this obscure little group. Upon presenting himself at the gate of the nearest Broederschap facility, he was cheerfully welcomed, given a beverage, and shown around the place. His hosts assured him that they were not sorcerers and that everything he was seeing was the result of natural philosophy and thus perfectly aligned with God’s will. He returned to his office with his acne all cleaned up, his piles a mere memory, and a troublesome allergy to gluten scrubbed from his system. The brotherhood’s executives had sensibly kept the existence of the immortality project to themselves, but the military potential of their work was apparent to even the least visionary of quill-pushers.

Once he’d overcome his astonishment and nausea, the bureaucrat wrote up a detailed report and submitted it to his superior. His superior reviewed the report, asked his subordinate if he was feeling quite well in the head, and then passed the report to
his
superior, who took it immediately to the governor-general, one Carlos de Aragón de Gurrea, duke of Villahermosa.

The governor-general was delicately informed that, tucked away in a forgotten corner of his government, there appeared to be the ultimate weapon. The Most Excellent Lord (the honorific to which the duke was entitled as a grandee of Spain) reviewed the paperwork, looked incredulously at the drawings he’d been provided, poured himself a glass of Malaga sack, and had a think.

He
could
report these developments to his lord and master, the king. That would be the proper thing to do, bureaucratically speaking. But His Majesty Carlos II, king of Spain; duke of Milan, Lothier, Brabant, Limburg, and Luxembourg; count of Flanders, Hainaut, and Namur; and count palatine of Burgundy, the anointed sovereign to whom the governor-general owed his sworn allegiance, was, not to put too fine a point on it, completely fucking useless. Indeed, he was so inbred that he could barely function as a human being, let alone as a king.

Carlos II’s ancestors had been marrying their close relations for so many generations that the scion of the line suffered from uncountable intellectual and physical disabilities and indeed was technically his own cousin, his own cousin once removed, and his own second cousin. All of his eight great-grandparents were descendants of the same couple, and his mother had been his father’s niece, making his grandmother also his aunt.

For all that he was really qualified only to sit quietly, blink, and then expire, Carlos II
did
happen to possess a rather extensive kingdom, including a huge overseas empire. It was the kind of empire a governor-general might seize if he possessed drive, clarity of vision, faith in himself, and access to an unstoppable army.

So the governor-general very carefully did not pass word back to Spain about what had been unearthed and instead drafted a memo to Ernst and Gerd. In a time of verbosity and poetry, it was quite to the point. The memo stated that it was the will of the government (by which he meant himself) that the existence of the Broederschap remain a secret from the general public and that they turn their attention to creating a military force capable of conquering any nation on earth. If they accomplished this, the rewards for their work would be suitably and unbelievably lavish.

Ernst and Gerd were a little surprised that they weren’t immediately invited to Madrid to receive the kingdom’s highest honors or at least asked to see if they couldn’t do something about the king’s multiple disorders, but they shrugged. The promise of unbelievably lavish (if somewhat vague) rewards was sufficient incentive.

Overnight, the Broederschap’s priorities shifted from general research to offensive applications. They were tasked with producing soldiers who could shrug off musket balls (or cannonballs, for that matter) without breaking stride. Soldiers who could build an empire.

The scientists set to work with a will. They had, of course, already done some exploration in this arena. The brotherhood’s estates were guarded by the world’s most terrifying watchdogs, and any ruffian who laid hands on one of their modified guards would have
really
regretted it — in the few moments before he was torn into little pieces. However, now the project consumed all their attention. The governor-general provided men, the sort of men who were willing to go under the knife, and the saw, and the chisel, and then spend several days in a sarcophagus of slime in exchange for might and future wealth. A general was appointed, a professional killer from outside the Broederschap whose loyalty to the governor-general was unquestioned and who had been promised unbelievably lavish rewards of his own.

In their workshops, Ernst and Gerd’s fleshwrights created troops who would be unstoppable.

Each soldier was unique, a bespoke warrior equipped with living armaments. The troops were designed to operate in all conditions and to withstand all known weapons. Above all, they were designed to terrify, with all the artistry and cunning that the Broederschap could muster. An army of nightmares, led by a monstrous general whose new modifications gave him the appearance of having crawled out of hell.

This was strength that positively cried out to be used (especially after the labor of creating them had been so incredibly expensive), but the Grafters were still cautious, and, above all, they were scientists. They needed a proving ground, a contained area in which to test their strength. And so the Broederschap turned its eyes across the North Sea to the British Isles, with the avaricious blessing of Carlos de Aragón de Gurrea, who saw this as the ideal place from which to launch a conquest.

In 1677, the army of the Wetenschappelijk Broederschap van Natuurkundigen marched out of the waters of the British Channel onto the shores of the Isle of Wight. Van Suchtlen and de Leeuwen were present, but only as observers — it had been made very clear to them that the general appointed by Carlos de Aragón de Gurrea was in command. And so, mounted on creatures that might once have been horses, the cousins observed as the invading warriors brushed away the musket fire of the English soldiers stationed there. Then, at a signal from their commander, the Grafter troops briskly slaughtered their opponents and set about conquering the island. Against such an army, no earthly force could stand.

It turned out, however, that the British Isles possessed some forces that were decidedly unearthly.

The first the invaders knew of these forces was a man who stood in the middle of the road as they marched to Newport. A hunchback, empty-handed, barefoot, and clothed in crude homespun, he watched their approach not with fear but rather with pursed lips and an unflinching gaze. He held up a hand as they drew near, and the general at the head of the column called for a halt.

“Move aside,” growled the general.

“I am here to deliver an ultimatum,” said the hunchback. “If you cease your advance, you may live. This invasion is over.”

“Vermoord hem,”
said the general.
Murder him.
The two huge soldiers flanking the general stepped forward. One carried serrated swords coated with venom that seeped down the jagged blades from glands in his hands. The other had a carapace like a beetle’s and bore a giant war hammer covered in the same poisonous substance.

The hunchback stepped back and clenched his fists, and a curious thrumming reverberated through the air. Midstride, the two monstrous fighters fell to their knees and clutched at their stomachs. Before the stupefied gaze of their comrades, their torsos began to crumple in on themselves. The soldiers screamed briefly before their voices strangled off into nauseating wet gurgles. The chitin on one and the steel armor on the other cracked and were retracted into their bodies as they collapsed. No one made a sound as the two were compressed. What remained were two rough nuggets of flesh and armor, each about the size of a human head.

“So, you s —” began the man.

“Maak hem af!”
shouted the general, and the rest of the troops rushed forward. The hunchback was swiftly engulfed and cut down.

Later, after they’d set up camp, eager Broederschap alchemists dissected the man’s corpse and, much to their bewilderment, found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Every element of his frame was bog standard, unremarkable. His brain was not particularly interesting. His blood was tediously unoriginal. There were certainly no signs he’d received any modifications such as the Grafters had performed. Even his spine, they reported disappointedly, was textbook for a hunchback.

When they gingerly chiseled open the dense little ingots that had once been two of their comrades, the alchemists could not find anything to explain why the men had suddenly imploded. There were no chemicals, toxins, or mechanics. It appeared that every fiber of the warriors’ bodies had suddenly felt the need to occupy the same space. That evening, when they made a report to Ernst, Gerd, and the general, the scholars gave a long, awkward description before calling the whole event “an inexplicable phenomenon.”

“And what does that mean?” asked the general.

“It means they don’t know what happened,” said Gerd sourly.

“But how can they not know? What if there are more?”

“It is troubling.” Ernst shrugged. “But one thing we do know is that they can die.”

That night, there were more inexplicable phenomena. As a group of soldiers warmed themselves around a fire, the flames suddenly flared up and then
leapt
from the wood. They enveloped a warrior and could not be smothered or extinguished until he had died through a combination of burns and strangulation.