CHAPTER 5





“‘O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, so haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel’s granary is full, and the harvest’s done.’”

Ariadne closes her eyes, bites her lip, hugs Telemachus the Platypus close, trying to force Keats’s words into her brain. Finally she exhales, blowing a lock of tousled black hair farther out of place.

She finally looks down at the text, faded against yellowed and cracking pages that reek more than slightly of mildew. This is the 1939 edition, crumbling brown binding reinforced by masking tape. She had passed by all of the glossy, perma-bound editions the library had to offer until she spotted this one. The page that bore “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” with all of its small tears and discolorations, had clearly been loved, with all the beauty and devastation that love brought.

“‘I see a lily on thy brow, with anguish moist and fever dew, and on thy cheeks a fading rose, fast withereth too . . . .’”

Ariadne’s eyes keep wandering to the clock, counting, counting, until it is time to meet Andrei. She also sees the pile of books for class, the open document on her computer that needs to become a term paper by tomorrow at 9:00 A.M. None of it is real. His hand is real. His breath is real.

The phone rings and Ariadne jumps, memories of the sunrise splintering into sparks. Her jolt propels Telemachus across the room to land in a deep pile of unwashed laundry that is keeping her closet door ajar. She reaches for the phone, feeling a sting of fear as the volume of Keats lands on the floor, bouncing, shedding pages.

“Hello?”



*   *   *   *   *

 

“Ariadne.”

In the millisecond that the fingertips grazed Ariadne’s shoulder, she spun around and seized them in one lithe, gloved hand. She used the momentum to pull the arm behind them and pin it against its owner’s back, slamming him against the staircase banister hard enough to splinter the wood.

The foyer of the House on Eagle Hill was, for a change, deserted. The couches were empty, the television was off, the cistern lay dry. Liliane had convened a special council of the elders, and the neonates knew well enough to stay several rooms away. Ariadne stood guard outside the hall anyway, just in case someone decided to be stupid. She had been staring into the swirling colors of the paintings, seeking reassurance in the unchanging determination in the faces of St. Andrew’s tormentors, the perpetual agony of Proserpine’s attendants.

Now she was staring into Bourne’s startled, porcine eyes, at his scraggly black beard, at the tip of her blade as she pointed it at him with her free hand.

He broke into a grin. “Finally decided you wanted me in your arms, eh? Picked a damn fine time to realize it, what with the war and all, but hey, I’ll take some time out.”

He motioned with his free hand. “Right here on the floor, then? Or, lest you impugn my chivalry, there’s always the privacy of the porta-potty over in that construction site across the street.”

With a grunt of disgust and a shove, Ariadne let him go.

“Lost the mood?” Bourne feigned disappointment even as he rubbed his aching arm. “Was it something I said?”

Bourne made an exaggerated show of retrieving and dusting off his hunting hat, which had fallen when Ariadne spun him. “Why so prickly? Your mission last night was a success. We have ourselves a prisoner. Any news about Roarke’s hidey-hole?”

“Interrogation is Liliane’s job,” said Ariadne, stiffening. She knew what was coming. He wouldn’t miss the chance to deride her for it.

“Right. You just kill things. We’re all specialists these days. Is that it now?”

“And what’s your specialty?” Ariadne asked coolly, finally turning his way. “Hiding beneath your sire’s coattails?”

“Hey, I was out on a patrol, too, walking the beat as fast my poor fat legs could take me. But I didn’t run into any trouble. Looks like the party was all at your place. Shame about Hera, though.”

Ariadne did not flinch from his gaze. For the millionth time, she wondered how Hera’s murderer had managed to slip by her and what the black ashes of her corpse might signify. But Bourne’s words called her back. He hadn’t unleashed his worst yet. He was still building.

“Ding dong, the witch is dead. Well, technically we’re all dead, you know. Difference with Hera is, she won’t be getting up again tomorrow night.”

Ariadne stared daggers at him.

“But, hey,” Bourne went on, “let’s look at the numbers. Archibald’s clean-up crew said four rebel Licks dead, and that many mortals, too. Say, here’s a joke, Ariadne: What’s the difference between a trashed Lick and a trashed mortal?”

He had finally come to it.

Bourne leaned in close to her. She could feel his spittle land on her face. “A mortal leaves a corpse.”

Ariadne forced herself to stay still. Any violence out here would disrupt the elders’ meeting, and Silas was among them.

“Four dead mortals.” He circled around her. “Ooh! And I forgot. One half-dead, paralyzed one. White girl from the suburbs. The kind of victim the police would actually care about. Archie had himself quite the little meltdown. He’s kind of cute when he tantrums.”

Ariadne closed her eyes, balled her fists, felt her nails dig deep into her palms.

Bourne chuckled, adjusting his cap. “The Ravens will be working overtime for a week. No, I don’t imagine Liliane will be too happy about this little botch. Of course, she’ll forgive anything her ‘Silent Knife’ does. Or will she?”

Ariadne struggled, and failed, to keep the iron lid clasped on the memories of her first nights in Liliane’s court. The Prince’s voice spilled out, catechizing the sireless refugee Ariadne had been.

“Know what thou art, child,” Liliane said. “Only in New Jerusalem will such creatures as you be safe.”

Safe from what? A much younger Ariadne had found out the night she accidentally drained an old wino to death. She’d torn half the man’s neck open in her frenzy, and his corpse lay splayed at her feet.

Brain muddled and uncertain, she had called Liliane for help, and the Prince had come.

“Since the dawn of creation,” Liliane had said calmly as she drove spikes through an astonished Ariadne’s arms and ankles, nailing her to a nearby fence, “God has told the race of Man what do to with monsters.”

The whiskey in the blood she had drunk weighed down Ariadne’s every organ, dulling her responses as she protested, tried to break free. When she discovered she couldn’t, she’d begged Liliane not to leave her. The sun would be rising in a matter of minutes.

“Not to fear, dear one,” said the Prince as she skulked off into the shadows. “I’ve called the constabularies. They’ll surely help you.”

The police arrived, to be certain. They found a dead drunk lying prone beneath a blood-soaked woman staked to a fence. They vomited at the sight of it, at the sight of her. Ariadne had felt a giant piece of her mortal self fall off and die right there.

Then her shame fled in the face of terror. They would look at the man’s neck, look at her bloody, frothing mouth, and know. She’d imagined the revulsion in their expressions turning to rage, seeing herself reflected in their eyes for what she was. There wouldn’t be an arrest, a trial, or any other crutches of the modern civilized world. They would fall back on instincts passed down from the days of the cave and the hunt. They would slay the demon in their midst.

With a roar, Ariadne had found the strength to tear herself loose, sweeping past the frazzled cops and off into the morning dusk, desperate to seek shelter before God Himself unleashed His wrath with the morning sun. Ariadne learned how to clean up her messes after that. Later, she learned not to make messes to begin with.

Tonight, she had left a mess.

Hera was dead. But the more Ariadne searched herself for grief, for regret over her loss, the more she kept finding only embarrassment.

Bourne moved in close. “This isn’t like you, Ariadne. You’re never this sloppy.”

“Go to hell.”

“We’re already there, sweetie. Of course, I can forgive you for not realizing it, only ten years deceased. In my day, no ten-years-dead babe in arms earned a title such as Sheriff, but hey, the times are a-changing. Hmm, I bet you’re too young to know that reference.

“The times can a-change right back, too,” he whispered, tongue dancing across the fold of her ear, “if you’re not careful.”

With a cry of rage Ariadne hurled him back to the ground. An instant later, her foot was on his throat, her sword at his chest, right above his heart.

Bourne coughed. “Déjà vu all over again. How many times have we been in this position?”

Ariadne’s eyes narrowed, but neither her foot nor her blade wavered.

Bourne’s voice shook only slightly. “This is where I tell you that, if you kill me, it’ll be the excuse Silas has been waiting for.”

She pushed the tip of the blade into his neck. A thin ooze of Vitae bubbled out. “Maybe this is the excuse the Prince has been waiting for to finally cut that old buzzard loose,” said Ariadne. “Ever thought of that?”

Bourne looked Ariadne up and down. “You know, I think this time, you just might do it. And you’re in enough trouble for one evening.” He smiled crookedly. “Truce?”

The blade dug deeper.

“Okay!” Bourne’s voice scraped. “I’ll get you into the meeting. How’s that?”

Ariadne paused. Then she withdrew the sword a centimeter.

“Liliane’s private council?” she asked warily.

“Um, I don’t know what’s in Grand Ballroom C, but I’m pretty sure that Liliane’s is the only meeting worth mentioning tonight.”

“Only elders are permitted. Only the Primogen.”

“Of whom my pappy, as we’ve discussed ad nauseum, is one.”

“He lets you attend?”

“Ooh, you’re so sexy when you’re jealous. Besides, why wouldn’t he? I’ve been dead nine decades now, give or take a few months. Frankly, I find it a little reassuring that Liliane hasn’t let you skip all the required steps to earning your spurs.”

The blade re-entered his throat. “Hey! Hey! Bad mood tonight?”

Ariadne kept the blade where it was. “I didn’t ask to rise as far as I did in just ten years, Bourne. I didn’t ask to have no lineage, to have some anonymous sire abandon me. But if you haven’t noticed, lineage or no lineage, I’ve been single-handedly winning this war for all of you. I’ve earned the respect of every Kindred who wields a blade or a gun in Liliane’s service. If the elders refuse to realize that, it’s their problem.”

“The elders will never realize it,” Bourne’s strangled voice managed to croak, “because they’re a bunch of bloated pusbags whose power depends upon not realizing it.”

“Even your sire?”

“Especially him!”

She pulled the blade back, and Bourne started laughing.

“What?” Ariadne snapped.

“Your face. What I’ll never get over, Ariadne, is how surprised you always seem. You don’t know me nearly as well as you think you do.”

“I don’t want to know you any better. And what makes you think that I want to be in that room with them?”

Bourne laughed harder. “Oh, love. Stick to the battlefield. You’ve got no skills at all in the Danse.”

“I’m still here, aren’t I? And I’m about to enter a meeting of Liliane’s private council, or so you promised.”

“That you are.” Bourne stumbled to his feet, making a great production out of dusting himself off again, of rubbing his throat. “Just remember, this is what you wanted. Don’t blame the messenger for what you see and hear.”

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

True to his word, a knock from Bourne opened the door to the council chamber. Bourne whispered something in the house-steward’s ear and he ushered the two of them in silently. No one in the chamber looked up as they entered, but Ariadne wasn’t surprised when she saw what had captured their attention.

Prince Liliane had brought out the box.

Dressed in an immaculate white pants suit, hair coiled elegantly, the Prince circled slowly within the bounds of the cluster of elders. The council chamber was a symphony in red, from the carpets to the wall hangings. Ivory friezes from Paradise Lost ringed the top of the room, cherubs gazing with glazed expressions of joy and goodwill down at the room’s occupants: well-dressed men and women in black, and the Prince in white at their center. They all stood as perfectly still as the characters in the frieze above them. Liliane’s was the only motion in the room.

The Prince wrapped her manicured nails around the lever on top of the box. Today, a hapless rat was its unlucky tenant. It was a fat, hairy old thing, gray with festering pink patches that spoke either of mange or lost fights for dominance with its younger fellows.

The irony was not lost on Ariadne, surrounded as she was by the elders. Of the Kindred gathered, only she and Bourne were less than a century old.

Everyone’s eyes were focused on the large stone table in the room’s center, around which they had formed their semicircle. Liliane stood by one end, and the prisoner Ariadne had captured the previous night lay sprawled across the other.

The rebel looked young, a teenager perhaps at the time of his Embrace, which, unlike Archibald’s, couldn’t have been too long ago. Only a real neonate would be stupid enough to hurl obscenities at a Prince. Then again, spread eagle, with his arms and legs staked to the table, maybe he felt he had nothing to lose.

He was wrong.

“Learn, young one.” Liliane’s pale blue eyes worked up and down her captive’s young body. “Learn that God made every creature with a purpose. Even you.”

She bent down, placed the box at the end of the table by the captive’s feet. The box had two compartments, separated by a divider. One held the rat, while the other looked to be filled with a solid block of some black substance. There was a small lever on the side of the box that Liliane gently released. The rat snapped to attention, watching the divider between its compartment and the neighboring one lift. The solid block of black burst, becoming a cloud that sprayed into the rat’s section.

“These driver ants, for example. Solenopsis Invicta. God made them the hygienic custodians of this sullied world, returning it, tree by tree, corpse by corpse, to its former state of grace. Female, every one of them.”

Between eye-blinks, the ant-cloud covered the rat. The rodent spasmed and leapt under its black blanket . . . or perhaps the movement was merely a result of the swarm’s momentum as it poured in to fill the empty space. If the rat shrieked, the sound was lost beneath the shroud of insects.

“Driver ants are blind, guided only by Divine Providence. They poke and prod until they find an opening. Failing that . . . they create one.”

After a few minutes, the rat’s struggles ceased. Its form sagged, became indistinct save for a few jagged protrusions that might have been bone.

The captive was not unaffected. His eyes remained fixed on the box. Kindred didn’t sweat, but Ariadne had long since learned to read their body language. The rebel knew full well what was about to happen.

“I am going to teach you what your traitorous sire should have.” Liliane spoke not with malice, but with the sad concern of a disappointed parent. “Our durability as Kindred is not a gift from God, but His curse, the chief use of which is to teach us the meaning of humility. We can suffer as no mortal can.”

She maneuvered the box until one end pointed toward the rebel’s foot, and, with a swift motion followed by the eyes of everyone in the room, flicked the lever again, releasing the outer door.

The ants cascaded out in a widening column, crossing the inches between the box and the rebel’s legs. Some of them scattered or went astray, only to veer back unerringly toward the captive, as if they all knew their mission.

The rebel pulled and craned his neck in an attempt to watch as the ants ensconced his feet, moved toward his ankles, as if seeing the act would give him some power over it.

He began to scream. Everyone else watched in silence. Memories of Ariadne’s own initiation rites, locked away in mental vaults of iron, slowly slipped from their prisons. She recalled all too vividly what Liliane had made her watch, made her undergo. . . .

Irrelevant! The woman she had been on that slab, more terrified of her own new powers than of the ants, had been consumed. Ariadne was now the Silent Knife, and even if she could not entirely banish fear, she had at least banished pity.

Minutes passed. By the time the ants climbed to the rebel’s knees, he had screamed his throat raw, pleading to tell them anything they wanted to know.

Later, when the ants cleared his thighs, Liliane smiled. The moment those red lips spread across her face, the ants froze in their march, heeding her silent call. They began to recede, leaving rows of exposed muscle fiber, the occasional scrap of tumescent skin, and a few squares of denim in their wake.

They marched obediently back into the box. Liliane cupped her hands, scooping any strays and outliers from the swarm gently back inside. No insect so much as twitched until Liliane closed the lid with a deft, dainty motion of her hands.

Between dry sobs, the rebel revealed each of Roarke’s hideouts, their defenses, the names of the Kindred and kine dwelling there.

Ariadne saw the elders watching with fascination and even glee on their ancient faces, most likely imagining Roarke, their traitorous former Seneschal, on the table instead. None looked more eager than Bourne’s sire, Silas.

Silas certainly did look like an elder. Although Liliane was reputed to be four hundred years old, a century older than Silas, she had been Embraced in early middle age and on occasion still laughed like a teenager. Silas, on the other hand—with his wrinkled skin, bleary eyes, hooked nose, and faded Victorian three-piece suit—looked like a wizened villain from a Charles Dickens novel. A few tufts of white hair clung stubbornly to his head.

As tempting as it was to laugh at Silas, no one ever did. Not more than once, anyway. An aura of dread hung around the man’s shoulders like a musty overcoat, even as he toddled along with his oddly hunched gait. A Labrador retriever, as gaunt and spindly as Silas himself, accompanied him, its eyes filled with humanlike malevolence.

Some private part of Ariadne had always whispered to her that she would one day become like Liliane: elegant, refined, deadliness wrapped in silks. But what if her destiny was to become some gnarled thing like Silas or his hound?

“Silas fancies himself next in line for Seneschal,” Bourne had explained to her as he led her to the meeting. “And the rising tide lifts all boats, eh? Hrm, you’re too young to know that line, either. But it’d be neat, eh? Imagine all the favors I could call in then. I’d be an even more useful man to know.”

Ariadne hadn’t replied; it seemed obvious Liliane didn’t want another Seneschal. Otherwise, wouldn’t she have replaced Roarke already? After all, his betrayal was over a month old.

By now the rebel had given Liliane all she wanted, and he watched with fearful expectation for her to finish what she had started.

“Look ye not so afraid, child.” Liliane stroked his trembling cheek with her palm. “For we are a merciful Prince, and true to our word. We said you could go if you told us everything, and you did.”

The Prince turned her deep blue eyes Ariadne’s way. Ariadne thought she was used to the eternal cold inside her, but the sight of the Prince could always make the temperature drop a few degrees inside her chest. Surely Liliane would chastise her for her unauthorized presence!

But the Prince merely smiled and motioned to the table. Ariadne figured it out. She stepped forward and, one by one, grasped and ripped the stakes out from the stone, just as she had originally wedged them there, through the prisoner’s flesh and bone, when she’d first brought him to the room.

She then helped him rise to his shaky feet, the bones half-exposed, and guided him in a hobble across the red-carpeted floor to the giant brass door, where the Paradise Lost friezes all converged. The rebel shook Ariadne off and, beneath Lucifer’s temptation of Eve, flipped the finger to the assembled Primogen.

“Roarke’s going to kill every one of you rotting old bastards,” he rasped out. “The next time I come through this door, I’ll be swinging a torch. You’re all gonna burn!”

He then staggered his way up the stairs to freedom.

The show had ended. The elders dispersed, whispering, already beginning to plot. Bourne stayed just long enough to creep over to Ariadne.

“So, how long do you think?”

“What?”

“How long until he gets what’s coming?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come on, girl. I’ve known Liliane since your granddad was messing his diapers. She never just lets someone go. You’re the Sheriff. You must have seen her do this kind of thing before.”

Should she tell him? Ariadne shrugged. What did it matter?

“Eggs,” she said softly. “They carried eggs. They got up to his waist, which means they used the appropriate orifice to get inside, to lay them inside his body. He’ll have just enough time to make it back to Roarke and the other rebels before they hatch and eat him from the inside out.”

“Yummy.” Bourne licked his lips. “Got to hand it to our lady—she’s creative. Here I was thinking stakes, sunlight, and decapitation were pretty much your basic menu of choices. But there she goes and figures out another option. Bravo.”

Liliane turned, and Bourne’s already ash-pale skin seemed to whiten under her gaze. But the Prince stared right past him.

“Come here, our Silent Knife.”

Bourne withdrew to meld with the elders. Insanely, Ariadne began wishing he had stayed. She stepped forward tentatively, apologies all ready for being where she shouldn’t have been.

“Ah, pretty one.” Liliane stroked Ariadne’s hair. “What a pleasant surprise to have you join us tonight. Our wayward bird, wrapped in love, rewarding us with all we ever ask.”

“I owe you a debt beyond measure, my lady.”

The words seemed to come out of Ariadne’s mouth of their own volition, but she didn’t disagree with them. Ten years ago, the same night Andrei’s words—his soft voice, apologetic, damnably unhateable—had torn her as if she had been made of cobwebs, a shape bearing fangs had come out of the darkness to murder her body. Her soul—Andrei had taken care of that first.

Even though she had been within dashing distance of a police call box, she hadn’t even made a move toward the red button. As if disappointed by her acquiescence, or perhaps finding her as unworthy as Andrei had, her assailant vanished after the deed. Ariadne had awoken hours later to wander alone, starving, terrified by the thing she had become . . . until Liliane had found her and taken her in.

“It is we who owe you,” said the Prince, moving closer. “Thanks to your blades, Roarke has lost many of his rabble. We now know where to find the rest. Because of you, we can end this insurrection and resume our path to creating New Jerusalem.”

Then she withdrew only slightly, gazed around the room—ice-blue eyes taking stock of each of the assembled figures. “Yet there is ever a cost. Our own number has diminished.”

Hera. Ariadne steeled herself. This was the beginning. Bourne had started here, too. Hera’s loss was regrettable, from a tactical standpoint, even if Ariadne couldn’t seem to find the emotion to mourn the woman herself.

But Ariadne’s carelessness in leaving the bodies, the threat that mistake posed to the Masquerade—Hera’s own sire had nearly destroyed her for far less. Ariadne suddenly wondered if Bourne’s bringing her here had been planned all along, a public humiliation to ruin the reputation of an upstart Sheriff.

Ariadne began the defense she had been preparing ever since the incident. “Milady, I know some mistakes were made, and I accept responsibility for—”

“Ssh.”

Liliane’s lips were now millimeters from Ariadne’s own. The Prince’s presence was a scent that reached in through the nose to throttle the brain. Ariadne was sure that Liliane would only have to exhale and she would shatter into a billion shards of glass.

The Prince whispered conspiratorially: “Our Ravens have attended to their duties. Whatever else happened, let it form one more scar upon Roarke’s traitorous hide.” Then she kissed Ariadne gently, with lips so cold they burned.

Liliane raised her voice so the assemblage could hear. “What Roarke has spurned, you shall be given. You have been our Knife. Now you shall be our Hand, as well.”

Ariadne’s trance shattered. “M-Me, milady? Your Hand?”

The cold red eyes of the elders all focused into a ring around her. None of the Primogen exchanged even a whisper. They didn’t have to. Murder didn’t need a voice.

“Yes. We hereby dub thee Seneschal. You shall act as our voice on the Hunt, bringing the Holy Word to those thrice-cursed ingrate rebels.”

Liliane smiled broadly, clasping her hands together in either applause or prayer; Ariadne couldn’t tell which. No one joined her in the gesture.

“Delightful poetry!” said the Prince. “The instrument of Roarke’s destruction shall take his place at my side. Go, now, and lead the Hunt!”

Ariadne bowed, swore and re-swore her service, acting out the motions she had learned long ago. But dread crept and metastasized within her. Seneschal? Only Kindred centuries in age held that kind of title.

A ruffling under Silas’s coat sleeves betrayed his wringing hands. The Labrador by his side shuddered, its stomach shivering rapidly.

Yet Liliane beamed so proudly, salving Ariadne with the infinite warmth of a mother-sister-teacher. The newly made Seneschal felt her whole world collapse into a fervent desire to please her Prince.

You’ve earned this, Ariadne told herself. Haven’t you done whatever she’s asked, killed whoever she’s asked, risked yourself while all the elders sat with spindled fingers, plotting?

The assemblage filtered out of the room, joined the crowd of neonates already assembled around the cistern for the unity ritual. Everyone linked hands in a circle around the basin in the dining room. This time, the hand Liliane held at her right side was Ariadne’s.

Ariadne heard Hera’s scream echoing her mind. She resisted the urge to snap around to look.

“As we are united by God’s love,” Liliane was saying, “so shall we be united by our blood.”

The scream continued in Ariadne’s ears, now in her own voice. It was the same scream she had made the night Andrei had left her.

Liliane’s fangs bit into Ariadne’s wrist. Her thoughts smeared mercifully into oblivion. Blood flowed into the basin.

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 

DAVID NURENBERG, PhD, is a teacher, freelance writer, and social activist who lives in the Boston area. His credits with White Wolf include writing for the Vampire: The Requiem, Scion, and Exalted lines. His nonfiction has appeared in the Boston Globe, Newsweek, USA Today, and Multicultural Review, as well as many lesser-known papers, ’zines, and blogs. Silent Knife is his first novel published by a major press. His favorite animal is the wombat.