The Fifth House of the Heart (26 page)

He set up a gas burner with a wire rack above it and fetched out more chemicals and vessels, ready to begin the analysis.

“This would be easier in a laboratory, but it's not necessary. This is called assaying, and it's been going on since ever somebody figured out how to make a realistic-looking fake of silver or gold out of something cheap. Pony-fucking Mongols could do this—nothing personal, ma'am.” Abingdon winked at Min. “Anyway the steel core is easy enough. They would have mixed iron, charcoal, and glass, then cooked them up over a charcoal fire. Gives your steel lots of lovely carbon, that does. The vessels they used would have been crap sandy-
clay ceramic, it being that part of the world. The iron ore would have had some cobalt, some zinc, depending where it came from. Other impurities. But not much. I don't see how that would make the difference when it came to punching holes in vampires.”

Now Abingdon was decanting another liquid into the vial. It stank like horse urine and bleach. Abingdon cautioned Rock to stand back, as the enormous man was crowding in to see what was going on. “Nitric acid, mate. Burn a hole and stain you yellow at the same time. The old acid test, this. I've got sulfuric acid here, too. We could make a jolly batch of nitroglycerin.”

Sax felt faint. It came over him in a rush like the tide at Mont St. Michel. He leaned heavily on his cane, thinking it must only be the smell of chemicals, but the feeling didn't lift. It progressed to an unpleasant tingling in his hands and wrists, and his legs felt distant and numb. Perhaps he was having a heart attack. That would take care of having to march up to the vampire's front door and say hello.

Min was the only one who observed Sax's distress and she didn't remark upon it. She watched him for a few seconds beneath lowered eyelids, then turned back to the chemistry lesson.

S
ax tottered back to the house. He might just need to eat. Paolo was sitting in the kitchen, alone at the square table with the frayed white linen cloth. He was turning a coffee mug slowly in his hands, studying it, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

“Homesick for the old Holy Roman Empire?” Sax asked, and sat heavily beside him. He'd lost his own coffee cup somewhere.

“It is not easy to be apart from the life I know,” Paolo said. “Much is going on.”

“Much is going on in your well-shaped skull, or in the world?”

“Everywhere,” Paolo said, and sighed mournfully.

“You're not getting ill, I trust,” Sax said, after Paolo lapsed back into his mug-turning reverie.

“No,” Paolo said. “I think I am not.”

“Then you're worried about Nilu, upstairs? I asked Min about her. Apparently she's been in the Indian motion pictures. She's a dancer. They do these musical numbers in their movies, you know, very colorful, and whenever someone wants to make an emotional point, they start singing and dancing. It's a clever shorthand; it's a way of externalizing the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters. Falling in love, and so forth.”

Paolo said nothing. He had stopped rotating the mug and was now trying to line up the handle so it pointed straight at the sink faucet opposite. Sax decided to change the subject. He was out of his depth.

“I'm going back to bloody Germany,” Sax said. “With Masters Rock and Vladimirescu, and possibly Ms. Hee-Jin, if I can persuade her not to attempt to kill the vampire ahead of schedule. I haven't decided. The point is this: we have to do some reconnaissance. You will be here with Abingdon, Emily, and the ailing dancer above. I want you to develop, to the best of our existing information, a complete picture of Castle Mordstein. I want maps and elevations. I want the whole damn thing on a great big board when we get back. And most of all, I want you to use the power vested in you as a man of the Church and keeper of mortal souls and whatnot to fix a damn sharp eye on Abingdon and make sure, above all else, he doesn't lay a finger or anything similar on my niece. Am I clear?”

Paolo didn't respond. Sax backed up and tried again.

“Paolo, I'm going to write a list. Do what's on it. I'll be back in a couple of days.”

Now Paolo turned to Sax, hearing him, and his fine black brows developed squiggles of concern.

“You're leaving me here?” Paolo said.

“Yes,” Sax said.

“Please don't leave me here,” Paolo said, and gripped Sax's arm in both his hands.

“I'm going to need some things delivered,” Sax added, ignoring Paolo's entreaty. He rose to his feet and retrieved his cane. “I'll make a list of that as well. So many lists to make, so little time. You keep an eye on that eroto-maniacal swine Abingdon. I'd trust him with my life, you understand? But not for five minutes with a woman. And especially not my Emily.”

14

Germany

The castle stood against the sky like an iron spike driven through a sheet of steel. Sax shivered in the cold, his back against the reptile bark of a spruce tree. He stood between Rock and Gheorghe, both leaning against the tree to stabilize their hands; they were surveying the castle through binoculars armored with camouflaged rubber. There wasn't anything Sax needed to see—if they found an ingress that didn't involve the front door, it was good news. Otherwise, he had his suicidal plan to fall back on. What Gheorghe and Rock were looking for were subtle things that never would have occurred to Sax to seek, indications of where and how the castle was inhabited.

“There's a cable of some kind on the northwest corner,” Rock said. “It's anchored at the top and goes down to the rocks and then it's stapled, looks like, and I can't see where it goes from there.”

“Would it take the weight of a man?” Gheorghe said.

“Not mine,” Rock said. “There's something else on top of the tallest tower, the flat one with no roof. I can't see what it is. We're on the wrong side of the castle.”

Gheorghe pointed at something lower down in the structure. “You can easily see there is waste pipe there under edge of the stone where is the box that comes out,” he said.

Rock didn't see it, and Gheorghe picked up his clipboard and drew in red pen where the pipe was located on a simple drawing of the castle. Rock compared the drawing to the castle and then spotted the pipe.

“Looks recent,” Rock said. “Sewer pipe. Do vampires shit?”

It took Sax a second to realize Rock was speaking to him.

“You mean literally?” he said.

“Yeah. Would a vampire need to install a potty in its bedroom or anything?”

“They're like reptiles or birds,” Sax said. “They excrete waste, but only one kind. Out their, ah, bottoms.”

“They do not pissing?” Gheorghe said.

“Only out the back,” Sax said, and Gheorghe laughed his clacking laugh.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Gheorghe said.

They resumed their study of the castle.

By the time the sun was going down behind the clouds, they had made a circuit of the fortification that covered most of its exposure on the southern and eastern sides. Although the area was accessible to tourists, they took care to remain out of sight, keeping to the trees and rocks. Nobody would mistake them for sightseers. There were a few minor blind spots they hadn't been able to examine, but located in places of such terrifying inaccessibility that they'd be of no use in any case. Gheorghe made drawings from several angles. He'd added in red lines wherever there was some element to suggest a modern addition or inhabitation.

They had already seen a trend: the improvements were very carefully done, nearly invisible. This could be a matter of the structure's
landmark status; the authorities never wanted the character of such places changed, which was reasonable enough. But there was a hint of stealth about some of it. The drainpipe had been painted in alternating strokes of color to match the stone around it. There were a number of modern windows set deep into openings; the window frames had been painted dark gray, effectively rendering them invisible.

As the daylight faded, they discussed their results over ready-made sandwiches and beer from a local Spar supermarket, sitting in the camper van Sax had hired. They wouldn't be sleeping in it, but rather at a nearby motel; however, the van was good cover for their purposes. If anyone did notice them, and questioned their activities, then the van, sleeping bags, and hiking gear inside it would make it perfectly clear they were ordinary outdoors enthusiasts. Even Sax. He was an old, sedentary outdoors enthusiast.

The consensus was the lower floors of the castle were empty, mostly disused, while the upper floors showed signs of at least being properly weather sealed, if not inhabited. But although they waited and watched until late in the evening, no lights came on in any of the windows. There
was
light within the castle, but they couldn't see where it was coming from. It was somewhere inside the mass of turrets that jutted from the keep, shining up into the low clouds, throwing thin rims of light on the towers and roofs. It might have been some kind of mood lighting, a Make Our Castles Ominous-Looking program enacted by the German government, or it might have been shining from a big skylight or a series of spotlights. The effect was strange, however. There was not a single illuminated window in the outer walls.

This suggested the castle was only being used, or lived in, at its inner core.

The lower castle, at the foot of the cliff, enjoyed a decorative lighting scheme of blue and green up-lights on the castle proper, and oblique lighting to rake the grounds and pop the forms and textures of
the scenery into relief. The effect was what the travel books would call “magical,” especially taken in context of the frowning cliff that leapt up above the castle with its freight of stone at the summit needling the belly of the clouds.

They had parked the camper on a forest road that ran along the ridge opposite the castle, so Sax and the others could see down inside the defensive walls as the employees, numbering half a dozen or so, closed the visitor center down. It was early evening when they switched on the atmospheric lighting, an hour later when the last tourist vehicle rolled out of the parking lot, and an engulfing black night surrounded the castle when the employees switched off the interior lights and closed the front and back gates. They scattered to their cars in the small employee parking lot next to the access road Paolo had discovered.

A significant moment punctuated this part of the vigil. Rock had been watching the employees file through the back gate with his binoculars when he said, “Man, there's a fine redhead down there.”

Sax urgently grabbed at his binoculars, but by the time he had them focused and figured out how to aim them in the correct direction, she was concealed inside a sporty late-model BMW that contrasted with the older, more staid cars driven by the other employees. Gheorghe had made some remark about Sax's sudden interest in girls, then laughed,
ha ha ha ha
, like a rusty water pump. Sax shoved the binoculars back into the cleft between Rock's immense pectoral muscles, then scrambled clumsily over the top of the ridge, cursing and snagging his clothes on branches, to watch the headlights from the various cars wend their way through the forest valley beneath the cliff.

The BMW turned off in the opposite direction at the fork Paolo had seen. The headlights rose up onto the hillside at the foot of the cliff, zigzagging around hairpin bends, and then the car's taillights
replaced the headlights and it disappeared between two eminences of rock higher up on the slopes.

“Did you see where that car went?” Sax asked.

“All we gotta do is follow the road,” Rock said. “You want to do that tonight?”

Sax considered giving up for now. The road would still be there when they got back, after all, and they could stay up late the next night following a good long sleep-in. He was exhausted all the time now, Sax was sorry to observe. His old body just didn't have what it took. The enthusiasm in his brain, the leaping excitement, even the constant trickle of fear that ran through him like ice water from melting snow at the thought of his Very Bad Plan, while they energized his mind, could not keep his body going.

“I'm getting very bloody old,” Sax said out loud, which was another sign he was getting very bloody old. He hadn't meant to speak. “This redhead,” he added, changing the subject, “she was attractive?”

“I mean it was a long way off, but yeah,” Rock said.

“I'm concerned she might be one of the vampire's familiars.”

“I'll keep an eye out for her.”

“I'll keep out my pecker for her,” Gheorghe said, and laughed, and then, when Rock failed to join in, he added, “You know is pecker, right? Is a word you use for the
pula
. The Johnson? Hahahahaha.”

Still nobody laughed.

W
hile they waited for a suitably late hour, Rock and Gheorghe discussed possible points of entry into the castle. They sat up front, Sax lying on the bench seat in back. Sax had not yet told anyone what his real plan was, so the rest of the team was working under the assumption that they would have to mount some kind of ingenious burglary-style assault on the fortifications. He hoped they'd find a way. Then he
could forget his awful plan. He called the farm on his mobile phone to check in.

“Are you staying warm, Uncle Sax?” Emily asked.

“Yes yes yes. Has Abingdon tried anything with you?”

“You mean like mating?”

“If you must put it thus.”

“Yes he has, Uncle Sax.”

“And?”

“And he hasn't succeeded. Anyway, what business is it of yours? You have enough to worry about. What I'm worried about is this woman Nilu. She's terribly sick. She needs some kind of medical attention right away.”

There was something in her tone of voice that sounded like apology. Sax started with that. “Why do I have the feeling you've already dragged a doctor into this?”

“Not just any doctor, Uncle Sax. This one is from the Vatican. Or next to the Vatican. Paolo was trying to explain his sort of enclave thing isn't actually on Vatican property—it's across the street or something? He's very sweet, you know. Paolo's like a—well, like a saint, as they say. He's been feeding Nilu ice cubes for hours now, just to keep her hydrated.”

“Yes yes yes yes yes. What about the doctor,” Sax said, his impatience growing rapidly.

“Well, he's one of the same brethren or brothers or what have you as Paolo is, from the same sect. He's a vampire doctor. I mean, he treats vampire victims. He'll be here any minute now.”

Sax considered the ramifications of this. The more involvement the Church had, the more of the spoils of war they could claim. They would get a bigger piece of the action, which meant a smaller piece for Sax—which, if he was going to risk everything and die, hardly seemed appropriate.

But then again, if the castle was impregnable, it hardly mattered, did it? He wasn't going to get anything at all, and neither was the Vatican. So the joke was on them. Much as the joke would probably be on Sax when the vampire tore him apart and it turned out there really were pearly gates in the clouds and Saint Whatsisname at the concierge's desk sent him down the back staircase to hell with a pitchfork up his bum.

“Uncle Sax? Are you still there?”

“Make sure Min tells the doctor everything she knows about the vampire that bit the girl, will you? And make sure Paolo doesn't try to get Nilu back to his hospice place, wherever that is, because Min won't put up with it. The last thing I need is a fight amongst ourselves.”

“Understood. How's it going there?” Emily asked. Somehow the way her voice brightened, the hint of admiration in it that Sax found so alarming, made him hesitate. He wanted to tell her the thing might be impossible, regardless of whether anybody stole his stupid old clock or killed his night watchman. People got murdered all the time. Just as senselessly. He had the whole argument laid out. But it was like so much burned newspaper in his mouth. The words were gone.

“It's going quite well,” Sax said.

He got off the phone as quickly as he could.

S
ax would not have thought he could sleep in the cold van, lying with a sleeping bag thrown over him, knees hooked up, one arm twisted around behind his head for a pillow. But he fell into a doze without knowing it, and dreamed of the castle, and the redhead, and Rock chasing first her, then Sax, along the battlements with the sheer cliff below them, stark naked, a purple-black
pula
the size of a moray eel projecting from his groin, Gheorghe's laughter,
Hahahahaha
, in his ear.

When Sax awoke, the van was moving, jolting along the forest road, heading down the ridge toward the castle grounds. It was midnight.

“We could not get you to awake,” Gheorghe said when Sax came up between the front seats for a cup of coffee from a flask.

“I'm old, that's why,” Sax said, scalding his mouth.

“Man, I hope I got your kind of snap when I'm old,” Rock said, and clapped Sax on the shoulder with a hand the size of a tractor seat. “Hell,” he added, “I hope I'm around next week.”

A
t Sax's direction, Rock turned onto the narrow way that led along behind the lower fortifications. They took the fork of the road partway up the hill, along the same route the BMW had taken. There was no indication it was a private road, and the surface was blacktopped and in reasonable condition. They were certainly within the grounds of the castle, but the camping gear provided a plausible excuse for being there, if they were apprehended by the police. Sax found he was rehearsing what he would say to the authorities in his head.
These are my sons
, he would explain, introducing his companions.
Different mothers.

Rock steered the van across the grass of the fields by the road and parked it beneath the trees, well out of sight. It was not obviously concealed, merely hidden; that was the effect they wanted. Gheorghe decamped immediately and stood in the dark, testing Sax's fancy set of night-vision goggles. Rock hauled out his backpack, relaced his boots, and wished Sax luck while he waited for them to return. He warned Sax to turn on the heat once in a while so they didn't return in the morning to find him frozen to death.

“Should we synchronize our watches or anything?” Sax asked, suddenly realizing he didn't want to be alone. The nose of the van faced
the lower castle, and up above the windshield in the dark sky was the upper castle on its crag. Sax didn't want to look at them.

“One minute this side or that side of the hour won't make any difference,” Rock said, and again clamped his massive hand on Sax's shoulder. “We volunteered for this, man. Whatever happens next, remember we chose to do this.”