Guilty Blood Page 4
My curiosity got the better of me once more. "Mr. Barttley?" I asked, disgusted and apprehensive.
Its rotten mouth flew open and the shrill asylum choir exploded forth. "Delightful! What a polite guest. Come in! Come in and visit. It's such a thrill to hear words again."
I held my ground. Accepting the invitation of a corpse seemed like a path fraught with webs of irony, and I wasn't prepared to bungle into them just yet.
"You're Barttley?" I repeated, cautiously.
"A scrap of him. A morsel of him. All that the mold didn't want. Yes, I was Oljid Barttley." His voice trailed off. For a moment a haze of nostalgia seemed to cloud the corpse's dull eyes, but the jaundiced orbs brooked little distraction to their manic rolling. I was quick to pounce, hoping to exploit a fleeting moment of lucidity.
"Someone told me you might know something about a corpse in Evercrown. Somebody buried with a dagger in his chest."
"You can't expect me to know just anybody. I used to know plenty of somebodies. But the problem is that after you die, even nobodies turn into some bodies." More shrill laughter. Damn—so much for that moment of lucidity.
"Yes. But someone special," I persisted over the cackling. "A body buried in the Venachdalia crypt. One with a gold and ruby dagger stuck in his chest."
"If I had a treasure like that, I'd put it in a chest too!" Even more hysterics. Why couldn't he have just moaned and lurched onto my knife? I could have been out of this stinking wreck by now.
I gave him his moment to cackle. Unfortunately, the dead seem to have a completely skewed sense of time to compliment their twisted sense of humor, and the corpse's tittering went on and on. I was preparing to leave the insane thing to jabber till its jaw fell off when its unnatural mirth started to sound like words once more.
"You… you found the prince," Barttley screeched through his glass-shattering glee.
"What?" I asked firmly, tiring of the lunatic corpse.
"The prince! Lieralt. The Lost Prince. You found where they stashed him. And what a perfect hiding spot! No one would look in a graveyard for a murder victim—especially not in the count's family tomb. And even if they did find him there, the backlash on the count would be delicious!" The dead man's hysterics got the better of him once more.
"Who is Lieralt?" I shouted, not willing to let Barttley get his full insane enjoyment out of what sounded like a very old joke.
"The prince! Your some body! Don't they teach you peasants anything?" With a dry scoff, the corpse pulled itself fully off the floor, trailing bursts of dusty gargling laughter. Its stiff limbs carried it unsteadily, like a legless man on crutches, teetering in cautious steps and half-controlled tumbles across the room to a pile of pulped tomes mostly hidden by dry brown vines. Rooting amid the parchment mash, Barttley recovered the back cover of what had obviously once been a sizable leather-bound volume, but was now nothing more than a few dozen torn pages clinging to a dismembered spine. Knife still in hand, I warily watched him make the arduous return trek of eight steps. Nearing the desk, he tumbled upon it like a drunk, tearing loose several more pages as he crushed the book's remains under his equally desiccated chest. Rearing up, he leafed through the crumbling collection as swiftly as his brittle finger bones allowed. Finally he jammed a claw-like yellow nail into a page, threatening to tear the abused parchment.
"Come learn something," Barttley said like a stodgy old professor, his wasted frame seemingly to inflate a bit with this new pompousness.
I edged closer, still wary, yet feeling a bit foolish for it at the same time. Had the dead man's insanity merely been an affectation to lure me close with some shred of trivia, I'd have been shocked and grimly impressed before meeting my end. At the same time, though, I wouldn't skip to the summons of a living lunatic, so I saw no reason to give a dead lunatic any more benefit of the doubt.
Craning my neck to peer at the page—and to remain far enough out of the corpse's reach to avoid his clutches should he grab for me—I looked upon a family tree, one sprawling, over-tall, knotting back on itself unnaturally and well in need of pruning. The surname at the bottom was "Odranti," the nation's ruling family.
"Lord Halboncrant had little interest in warnings."
"This. This here!" The corpse prodded the page, leaving a score amid a cluster of names with dates from just over a century ago: "Prince Knoldaman Odranti, 4537–4604" then, reaching beyond him, "Lieralt Odranti, 4577–4604" and "Queen Maraet Odranti, 4584–4658." Below Maraet the line stretched and diverged in raucous tangles. Lieralt, however, proved a dead branch.
"So the prince and his son died together?" I guessed. The tangled affairs of the aristocracy had never been of much interest to me, despite my own family name.
"What a pleasant little package that would make, all wrapped up with ribbon for Harvest Feast," he mocked, looking at me without blinking. It was difficult to read whatever rancid emotions still lingered behind his moldy features, but hate is a hard sentiment to miss.
"Murdered, then? Or should I start guessing all the ways royals might die?"
"Murdered indeed, like most would-be princes," he said in a hissed chuckle. "But that's the irony. This one didn't want to be prince, he wanted to be common."
"What's the point of murdering him, then? If he didn't want the crown, why not just foist it off to his sister and be done with it?"
"That wasn't good enough. It wasn't just that he didn't want the crown, he wanted to break the crown. Not only didn't he want to be prince, he didn't want there to even be a prince."
"What? Why wouldn't he want that?" I instantly realized the ridiculousness of my question, having lived my entire life under the rule of impotent counts and princes. "I mean, why wouldn't he want to rule?"
"Some people are leaders, some people are dreamers," Barttley explained whimsically. "And some people have dreams and try to lead people into them, but they usually turn out to be nightmares when they realize no one else wants to live in their dreams"
I was catching on. "No prince means no princess. So then his sister had him murdered?"
Barttley gaped, his smoldering eyes squinting at me. "What a grim place the world's become if that's what you expect of family."
Apparently I wasn't catching on. My unamused glower prodded him on.
"No prince doesn't just mean no princesses; it means no counts, no court, no nobility, nothing. It means generations of titles, properties, favors, allowances go down in a burning wreck. Utter chaos!" The corpse threw up his claws for effect, sending up a cloud of flaking skin and startling me enough to leap back. If he had actually been lashing out at me, I would have been just a moment too late. Grinding my jaw and suppressing a frustrated shout, I glared at him. The scabby remains of lips pulled back, displaying a jagged row of mismatched black and yellow teeth. There was a joke here, and he seemed too pleased to know I was in on it.
"So, they murdered him," he finished matter-of-factly, punctuating the sentence with a mirthful croak.
"The nobles?" I clarified. He nodded stiffly. "And threw his body in the Venachdalia family mausoleum?"
"So you say. No one ever knew. It was some business in its day. Everyone put on quite the show of being distraught and vowing justice. All the best sleuths and seers and whatnot went on the trail, but the culprits never turned up." He leaned toward me conspiratorially, continuing in a hoarse whisper. "The truth of the matter, though, is that they were all in on it. The best investigators were paid to find out what happened, but then were paid even more to turn around and go home. Very few people ever knew who the actual murderers were, or how Leiralt was killed, but everyone knew he had to die, and in the end were quietly relieved that someone had gone and done it. Except for Maraet, that is."
"The princess." I followed cautiously and was ignored.
"Without ever seeking the court's advice, she had the church do what they could. The bishop of Ardis took the task on himself, promising to call the prince's spirit back from the Lady's grasp. He tried. And he fa
iled." Something about a disappointed priest obviously tickled the dead man, his new cackle nastier than all the times before.
This was starting to sound like some folk story. If anyone knew something about the dead and bringing them back or putting them down, it was the clergy of Pharasma. "How's that even possible?" I said, not bothering to keep the incredulity out of my voice.
"That's the best part," he snickered. "Nearly no one ever knew. And then after the tears and veils there was a new queen with a crown on her head and things were as they always were. Leiralt became the Lost Prince, just another royal mystery—just another story for the taproom."
"Nearly no one?" I asked. He was baiting me with this and his mention of "murderers," but for the moment I was content to indulge the withered wreck.
"We Barttleys have always had an interest in magic. When old Prince Knoldaman died, I was studying with a mystic who called himself Kirrahjah and claimed to be from Qadria—even though he spoke with a Chelish accent. Although foremost a showman and quite popular in Ardis at the time, he did truly know something about the arcane. I was there when the messenger first came with a bag of platinum and a request to solve a very strange puzzle: how to cut short a man's life and any life he might have thereafter. Kirrahjah mused on this for many nights, and then I didn't see him for nearly a month. Soon after the prince was killed, and I knew my mentor was involved. It took many years to be sure, but I finally found my proof." Barttley tried to nod proudly, an absurd lurching of his too stiff neck.
"After Kirrahjah's death, I bought all of his possessions and papers—many of which I still keep in my library today." He gestured around him to the ridiculous wreckage. Had Kirrahjah's papers truly held any secrets they were long lost.
"The old wizard had grown poor in his dotage, but worse, forgetful. Among his works I found four names—names that could have made him the richest man in Ardis had he remembered who they were: Ferendri, Geirais, Halboncrant, and Troidais, four of the oldest and most esteemed families in the city. They'd paid Kirrahjah to find a way to kill an unwanted prince and keep him dead, and he found a way—and he didn't. The old charlatan was never as skilled as his performances led most to believe, so there was no way he could actually do what his patrons asked. At the same time, he was a greedy coot, and the first bag of coins came with the promise of more of the same. So he conned them in a way only a better wizard would be able to reveal—and he knew they didn't have a better wizard. He created a dagger, and made it as grim and fabulous as only a showman could. I only saw the sketches, but I'm sure the murderers were quite delighted with his work. Truly, it was a weapon to kill a prince. But that's all it would do. Souls are sturdy things, you see—just look at me!" he spread his arms wide in a momentary burst of cackles.
"Kirrahjah couldn't conceive of a way to actually destroy a soul, but he was clever enough to trap one. So that's what he built: a cage for a soul. A cage shaped like a dagger. That way, when the prince was slain, his spirit would be locked into the dagger and nothing, not even the bishop of Ardis's magic, could call him back from the Boneyard, because he wouldn't be there. Clever fool!"
For the past day I'd been beset by dread: of the rotting thing in front of me, of a patchwork dog, and especially the murderous spirit I'd unleashed on Ardis. Now, I found myself actually starting to pity it.
"Then the spectre is the spirit of this Prince Leiralt," I mused absently, "and we set him free."
As soon as I looked upon Barttley's face I realized my mistake.
"You unleashed the Lost Prince's spirit. Then you have Kirrahjah's dagger!" A greed beyond death replaced the hate in the dead man's eyes. "I must have it! You must give it to me!" The corpse was scrabbling across the table toward me, eyes locked on my knife, broken yellow nails stretching out for me.
The damnable thing was faster than I'd expected, and again I lurched away too late. One of Barttley's dead gray hands had wrapped around the knife's blade and he was trying to wrestle it away from me, mistaking the crude dockworker's tool for his former mentor's masterpiece. I heaved back, but the corpse was far stronger than I had imagined his atrophied frame would have made possible. A black ichor—not quite blood, but more of a running clot—oozed down the blade, over the hilt, and, to my revulsion, beneath my grip. I could feel my hand slipping, yielding to the dead man's wrenching, but I'd be damned if I was going to be without a weapon in the corpse's lair. Jamming the ball of my left hand against the pommel, I shifted my momentum and thrust the blade directly into the corpse's grip. The half-sharp knife tore through the flimsy gray flesh, slamming the twitching claw back, pinning it to Barttley's hollow chest.
The blow had brought me intimately close to the dead thing, so when he screamed, he did so directly into my face, the full foulness of his decomposed bowels breaking over me along with the terrible, breathless noise. The dead man's scream was somehow even more profane that his laughter, a sound of agony that seemed to come from beyond bodily pain. Forcing the knife deeper, I met Barrtley's furious gaze, but there was more than hatred of the living in those dead orbs. A noxious yellow flame burned within, an unnatural light that swiftly filled the corpse's eyes and exploded forth, filling my vision and consuming the library around me. Blind, my head echoing with the scream of a damned soul, I felt a gut-wrenching vertigo, and then all went silent.
∗ ∗ ∗
Something incredibly large struck me, something wet and cold. I blinked and tried to clear my head. The realizations came gradually. I was on the ground. Mud was oozing between my fingers. A whippoorwill was rambling nearby, with the sound of water farther away. I hadn't been struck then, I'd fallen. But, the manor—how?
Kneeling, I looked around. I was outside the house, sprawled on its marshy, furniture-strewn lawn. I didn't think I'd blacked out. It was something Barttley did, some defense after I'd stabbed him. That sickly light had somehow magically flung me outside. Well enough for me. It seemed that the cordial part of my visit with the dead man had ended, and I wasn't eager to think of how our scrape might have ended otherwise. There were also other matters at hand.
"Leiralt," I murmured, testing the name. Somewhere out there was the spirit of a murdered prince, alive—or something like that—after a century of who knows what hell. Thinking back, it had been we who had attacked upon seeing the apparition. Could he have merely been defending himself? And when he killed Garmand…
Ferendri. Garmand Ferendri. Leiralt had said his last name. Had the prince mistaken Garmand for one of his killers?
The questions rushed past me, and I wasn't about to find their answers crouching in the mud, waiting for Barttley to chase after me. The dead man's recollections had left me with far more questions than I'd had before I'd come. Now I had a ghost to find, and I had a few leads on where he might be.
∗ ∗ ∗
"Just a moment more, Lord Halboncrant!" I tried to explain, doing my best to ignore the glares of the affronted house staff and the bluster of the corpulent nobleman who refused to hear how his life might be at risk. I'd had to make claims to get past the stodgy butler, claims he'd taken to his master as promises, and now that I'd thrice explained my deception and true reason for intruding I was suddenly—bafflingly—unwelcome.
"I've no times for jokes, girl. On your way, or I'll call for the guard." He dismissed me with a wave of his hand, which in turn set most of his upper frame waggling. The butler took an insistent step forward, wielding his disapproval like a pike.
"Your life is at risk!" I said as plainly as I could, not for the first time. "If you'd only listen for a moment I—"
"I'm quite sure I know better than some street trollop whether or not my life is in jeopardy. I don't know what you think you've heard or what reward you think you'll swindle with your lies, but you'll have to find some other mark. Ginieus Halboncrant is no dupe. Now good night!" He turned his attention to the butler. "Collis, see her out now. And we will discuss this later."
Nodding his obedience, the butler took another step
toward me, guiding me with his gestures back toward the entryway. He was already gesturing for a footman to open the heavy front doors, as if at any moment he might pick me up by my coat and heave me though like a sailor offloading his bundle. My quick glower dissuaded any parting indignity he might have tried as an attempt to get back into his master's good graces.
In the next moment, I was past the barred outer fence surrounding the Halboncrants' overwrought townhome, the metallic echo of the slammed gate the only immediate sound on the dark avenue.
It had taken me the better part of the afternoon to sate my curiosities and eventually seek out Lord Halboncrant. I only passed through the city on my return from Merridweigh Gardens, knotting up my courage and returning to Evercrown Cemetery—by way of the road and front gate this time. The grave tenders paid me absolutely no mind, leaving me to suspect that our decision not to enter through the main road the night previous had been grossly overcautious. I found the Venachdalia mausoleum easily in the afternoon light, and in perfect repair—the door closed and without a sign of our disturbance or the other tragedies I knew had happened within. The great stone door was still unlocked, though. With a few bolstering breaths I had them open and was back inside.
"The squalor of an Ardis alley was no place for this creature."
It was just how I'd left it. The charred bones and ashes of a dozen counts scarred the mausoleum floor, the cold body of Sayn the boatman among them. Garmand was there too, a look of wide-eyed terror frozen on features that looked withered and wasted, as though he hadn't just died, but had every spark of vitality drawn from him. I looked away quickly. What wasn't there was both an immediate relief and a new mystery. Liscena, Garmand's sister, who had found the body with the remarkable dagger, was nowhere to be seen. Neither was that dreadful weapon. But most obviously, neither was the spectre of what might be Prince Leiralt. In the dust, the few flakes of his tattered corpse remained, crumbled to near nothingness with the spirit loosed from its rotten confines.