XXIX.

Alone in his room, Old Melmoth enjoyed the climax of tonight's plot. Fire was always satisfying, always purgative.

The armoured giant was good. He had been an excellent addition. One had escaped. But one was new. A fair exchange. The cast was the same size it had been at nightfall.

Broken Mathilda was back in her room, more altered than ever.

There was just drizzle outside now, and the first blotches of dawn in the sky.

Christabel was screaming as she burned, her wedding dress crumpling and crinkling, melting against her skin. And Tanja was hissing venom in Ambrosio's face, repaying him for his attentions.

Schedoni was cooked where he lay on his platter. Perhaps he could be eaten cold for breakfast. It would not be the first time human meat was served at the table of Udolpho.

He relaxed, and waited for sleep.

It would be interesting to see what happened with Montoni's map fragment. The Black Cygnet's curse had claimed many treasure hunters down through the years. Perhaps Flamineo should creep from his portrait more often, with his hunting dogs, and seek out a new dangerous game.

He had first made his spell in the library, pledging a portion of his soul to the dark powers on the condition that he never be bored again. His early life had been neither tragic nor comic, but merely boring. Now, he was a part of his beloved melodramas, constantly entertained by the dances of his scheming puppets. He drifted, but was brought back by a tiny sound. His door opening.

'Vathek?' he croaked. 'Valdemar?'

Two sets of footsteps, light and surrept.i.tious. His visitors didn't answer him.

He felt the tug of his bedclothes, as they climbed up onto his bed, forcing through his curtains. They were light, but he knew their fingernails and teeth would be sharp, and they would use them skilfully. He heard them giggling together, and felt their first touches. The curtain of his bed collapsed, falling to the floor.

'Melmoth,' he said, with love. 'Flora?'

It had been the final curtain.

PART THREE.

UNICORN IVORY.

I.

Tall, straight trees stood all around like the black bars of a cage. If Doremus looked up, he could barely see the blue-white tints of the sky through the foliage canopy of the Drak Wald forest.

Even at midday, it was advisable to travel these paths with a lantern. Advisable, that is, for the traveller. The huntsman had to forgo safety for fear his light would alarm his quarry.

Calmly, Graf Rudiger, his father, laid a hand on his shoulder to get his attention. He squeezed, pinching too hard, betraying his excitement. He jabbed his head towards the north-west.

Not turning too fast, Doremus looked in that direction, and caught the last of what his father had seen.

Points of reflected light. Like short silver daggers sc.r.a.ping bark.

His father tapped two fingers against Doremus' shoulder. Two animals.

The sparks of light were gone, but the beasts were still there. The breeze was from the north, and they would not get the hunters' scents in their nostrils.

His father silently pulled a long shaft from his quiver, and nocked it in his warbow. The weapon was longer than the reach of a tall man. Doremus watched Rudiger draw back the bowstring, the cords in his neck and arm standing out as the tension grew. The graf made a fist around the fletches of his arrow, and its sharp triangle rested against his knuckles.

Once, on a wager, Graf Rudiger von Unheimlich had stood for a full day with his bow drawn, and, at sunset, struck the bullseye. The friends against whom he had bet had barely managed an hour or so apiece with their bows drawn, and they had forfeited their weapons upon their loss. The trophies hung in the hunting lodge, elegant and expensive pieces of workmanship, finely inlaid and perfectly turned. Rudiger wouldn't have used such trinkets: he put his faith in a length of plain wood he'd hacked himself from a sapling, and in a craftsman who knew a bow was a tool for a killer, not an ornament for gentlemen.

The graf stalked towards the quarry, bent over, arrow pointed at the hard ground. The beasts' spoor was visible now, delicate hoofprints in the mossy, rocky soil of the forest floor. Even this late in the day, there was still frost. Beyond the length of a finger into the pebbly leaf-mulch, the earth was iron hard, frozen solid. Soon the snows would come and put an end to Graf Rudiger's sport.

Making an effort to keep his breathing quiet, Doremus took an arrow of his own and lined it up in his supple bow, pulling the string back two-thirds of the way, feeling a knot of shoulder-pain as he fought the catgut and wood. As everyone kept pointing out, Doremus von Unheimlich was not his father.

The others fell in behind the pair. Otho Waernicke, under special orders not to blunder around like a boar and give the hunters away, was moving carefully, meaty arms tucked around his belly, checking under every footstep for treacherous twigs or slippery patches.

Old Count Magnus Sch.e.l.lerup, the last of the soldiers the former Emperor Luitpold had called his Invincibles, was flashing his thin-lipped skull's grin, the scars that made a tangle of one cheek reddening as the hot blood of the chase flushed his face. The only concessions he made to the pa.s.sing years were the many-layered furs which made a hunchback of him. Magnus might complain about his old bones, but he could keep up with men forty years his junior on a forced march. Balthus, the thick-bearded guide, and his slender night companion, were the rear guard, along to pick up the pieces. The girl clung to her man like a leech. If Doremus thought about her, he had to suppress a shudder of distaste.

He watched his father. These brief moments were what he lived for, as he neared his prey, when the danger was at its height, when there could be no foreknowledge of the equality of the contest. Count Magnus was the same, hanging back only out of deference for the graf, but consumed with a l.u.s.t for the honourable kill. Doremus had had it explained to him from the cradle, listened to the stories of trophies won and lost, and still it meant nothing to him really.

A muscle in his arm was twitching, and he felt the bowstring biting into his fingers as if it were razor-edged.

'It's no good if you don't bleed,' his father had told him. 'You have to carve a groove in your flesh just as you carve a notch in your bow. Your weapon is a part of you, just as, when the time comes, you are a part of it.'

To fight the pain, Doremus made it worse. He pulled further, drawing the arrowhead to the circle of his thumb and forefinger, its points scratching the flesh-webbing of his hand. The tendons of his shoulder and elbow flared, and he bit his teeth together, hard.

He hoped his father was proud of him. The Graf Rudiger did not look behind him, knowing his son wouldn't dare fail.

Rudiger stepped around a tree, and stood still, straightening up. Doremus advanced to stand at his shoulder.

They saw the quarry.

There had been a subsidence in the last fifty years, bringing down several of the trees. They lay, broken but still alive, branches shot out in odd directions, and the hollow had filled with still rainwater. This part of the forest was full of subsidences, where the old dwarf tunnels had fallen through. The ground was as dangerous as any creature of the wilds. The pool was still, covered with ice as thin as parchment, dappled with red-brown leaves.

At the other side of the pool, where the ice was broken, the quarry stood, heads dipped to drink, horns trailing in the water.

Behind them, someone drew audible breath at the sight. Balthus' bedmate. The girl would be cursed.

As one, the unicorns looked up, eyes alert, horns pointed at the hunting party.

It was a frozen moment. Doremus would remember every detail of that fragment of a second. The unicorn horns, sparkling from the water, shining like new-polished metal. The steam from the beasts' flanks. Clouded amber eyes, bright with intelligence. The shadows of the twisted branches of the fallen trees. The croak of the greentoads at the pool's edge.

The unicorns were stallions, slender and small as young thoroughbreds, white with the characteristic black flecks of their tribe in the matted hair of their beards and underbellies.

Graf Rudiger's arrow was in flight before the girl had finished her noisy inhalation. And it was speared into his kill's eye before Doremus had his aim. Rudiger's unicorn neighed and thrashed as the arrowhead emerged from the back of his head, and reared up.

The shock of death came fast, blood pouring out of its eyes and nostrils.

Doremus' unicorn was turned and away before his arrow was released and, as he let go the fletches, he had to bring up his left hand to adjust the aim.

The arrow flew wonkily from his hand, and he felt a burning up and down his arm.

'Good shot, Dorrie,' blurted Otho, clapping his agonised shoulder. Doremus winced, and tried not to let his pain show.

The unicorn was almost out of sight before the arrow found him. It slid past his flanks, carving a red runnel in his white hide, and bit deep beneath his ribs.

It should be a heart-shot.

Doremus' unicorn stumbled and fell, but got up again. Blood gouted from his wound.

The animal screamed, emptying his lungs.

'A kill,' Count Magnus said, nodding approval.

Doremus could not believe it. From the moment he had chosen his arrow, he had been sure he would miss. He usually did. In wonder, he looked to his father. The Graf Rudiger's heavy brows were knit, and his face was dark.

'But not a clean kill,' he said.

Doremus' unicorn staggered on, vanishing between trees.

'He won't get far,' Balthus said. 'We can track him.'

Everyone was looking to Rudiger, waiting for his verdict.

Grimly, he stepped over the crest of the subsidence, choosing his footmarks well among the leaf-encrusted floor-vines. His bow was slung on his back again, and he had his dwarf-forged hunting knife out now. The von Unheimlich fortune was one of the greatest in the Empire, but, beside his bow, this knife was the graf's most prized possession.

They all followed the master huntsman, edging around the still pool to the fallen beast.

'A shame it was only a stallion,' Count Magnus said. 'Otherwise, it would have been a fine trophy.'

His father grunted, and Doremus remembered the hunters' lore that he had been made to learn by rote as a child. The unicorn horn his great-grandfather had brought to the von Unheimlich lodge was from a mare. Only unicorn mares made trophies.

Rudiger's unicorn was already beginning to putrify, suppurating brown patches spreading on his hide like the rot on a bruised apple. Unicorn males did not last long after the kill.

'You'll soon have your arrow back, Rudiger,' Count Magnus said. 'That's something.'

Rudiger was on his knees by his kill, prodding with his knife. The animal was truly dead. As they watched, the rot spread, and the stinking hide collapsed in on the crumbling skeleton. The remaining eye shrivelled, and plopped through its socket. Maggots writhed in the remains, as if the carca.s.s were days dead.

'That's amazing,' Otho said, making a face at the smell.

'It's the nature of the beast,' Balthus explained. 'There's some magic in their make-up. Unicorns live well beyond their time, and when death catches up with them, so does decay.'

The pale girl tutted to herself, face blank. It could not be pleasant for her to see such a thing, to know this must eventually be her lot.

Rudiger put his knife away, and scooped up a handful of the unicorn's cooling blood. He held it up to Doremus' face.

'Drink,' he said.

Doremus wanted to back away, but knew he could not.

'You must take something from the kill. Every kill makes you stronger.'

Doremus looked to Count Magnus, who smiled. Despite the bright red mess a wildcat had made of his face, he was a kindly-looking man, who often seemed more willing than his own father to overlook Doremus' supposed weaknesses and failures.

'Go on, my boy,' Magnus said. 'It'll put iron in your bones, fire in your heart. Libertines in Middenheim swear by the potency of unicorn blood. You'll partake of the virility of the stallion. You will sire many fine sons.'

His courage stiffened, Doremus shoved his face into his father's hands and swallowed some of the thick red liquid. It tasted of nothing in particular. A little disappointed, he did not feel a change.

'Make a man of you,' Rudiger said, rubbing his hands clean.

Doremus looked around, wondering if he were seeing more clearly. The guide had said there was some magic in the make-up of the beast. Perhaps the blood did have its properties.

'We must follow the wounded stallion,' Balthus said. 'He mustn't be allowed to reach the mare of the tribe.'

Rudiger said nothing.

Suddenly, Doremus wanted to be sick. His stomach heaved, but he kept it down.

For an instant, he saw his companions as if they wore masks, masks reflecting their true natures. Otho had the jowly face of a pig, Balthus the wet snout of a dog, the girl a polished and pretty skull, Magnus the smooth and handsome face of the young man he had been.

He turned to look at his father, but the vision pa.s.sed, and he saw the graf as he always did, iron features giving away nothing. Perhaps there had been magic in the blood.

The unicorn was just a sack of bone fragments now, flat against the forest floor, leaking away essence. Otho prodded the corpse with his foot, and opened a gash in the hide, through which belched a bubble of foul air and yellow liquid.

'Euurgh,' Otho said, with an exaggerated grimace. 'Smells like a dwarf wrestler's loinstrap.'

Rudiger took his arrow from the unicorn's head, breaking it through the papery skull. He considered the shaft for a moment, then snapped it in two and dropped the pieces onto the messy carca.s.s.

'What about the horn?' Otho said, making a grab for it. 'Isn't there silver in a unicorn's horn?'

The horn powdered in his grip, the traces of silver glittering amid the white pulpy ash.

'A little, Master Waernicke,' Magnus explained. 'It goes with the magic. Not enough to be worth anything.'

Doremus noticed that the girl was staying well away from the kill. Her kind didn't care for blessed silver. She had a fair face and shape, but he couldn't forget the skull he had seen.