Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5) (6 page)

No, not a young man.  Anna.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“A little hung over.”

“You drank quite a lot.  Not that I blame you.  Stitches can be painful.”

“Will it leave an impressive scar?”

“Probably, yes.”

She moved to a spot on the bed and gave a pinched smile.  The half-open lids and creases on her face betrayed how little sleep she had gotten. 

“You were up all night,” I guessed.

“Not all night, only the portion of it where you were still bleeding.  Do you want me to check the wound?”

“No, and thank you.  I don’t even remember getting here.”

“You almost didn’t.  I nearly had to carry you, and I’m not quite strong enough to do that.  To an onlooker it probably looked as if you’d had too much to drink.”

Loose memories were kicking around in my head.  I sort of remembered getting back to the room, and I vaguely recalled getting the bottle to dull the pain I was expecting to have to deal with.  I had no memory of her stitching me up, although that was probably for the best.

“Well… thank you again.  You could have left me in that alley.”

She smiled, and let me take her hat off so I could see her hair fall down over her shoulders.  She’d arrived in the alley dressed as a boy, that I remembered.  No doubt her attire drew fewer questions when she later helped me up the stairs.

“I could have,” she said, “but I didn’t want you to die.”

I brushed her cheek with my fingers.  Soft, cool skin, tired eyes but no less appealing for it.  I don’t know what made me think it was okay to touch her like this, but she hadn’t stopped me.  Perhaps we’d grown closer while staving off my imminent demise than I actively remembered.  One way or another, something had changed between us, and it seemed like a good thing. 

Then I immediately ruined that good thing.

“I’m glad,” I said.  “Considering you used me as bait.”

She pulled away.  “I did not!”

“Of course you did.  It’s all right, I lived, but I’d like to know how much of what you told me yesterday was true.”

I think I must have put this together the night before.  It seemed like too much of a clever deduction to make just moments after regaining consciousness.  Regardless, I wasn’t wrong. 

She got up and walked to the window.  It offered a nice view of an unsavory neighborhood.  I doubted she found anything worth looking at, but it was better than facing me.

“That isn’t how it was,” she said.

“I think it must have been.  He had to have followed us all afternoon.  I never noticed him, but you did.  That’s why I was invited into your apartment in the first place.”

“No!  I never noticed him either… but I arrived at the conclusion over the wine.  I need to kill this man, and yesterday I… when I invited you to in, it was to trick him into showing himself.  I thought he
might
follow, because that’s what I would do.  He would want to know who gave my orders, and whether they came from the group in which he had insinuated himself or from elsewhere.  Without that information he wouldn’t know who to trust.  So when you left, I followed, but I had to hold back until he showed himself.”

I never noticed her following, but I was too busy focusing on him.  And he on me, no doubt.  “Did you catch him?”

“No.  I stopped to help you instead.”  She still couldn’t look at me. “It was stupid. 
I
was stupid.”

“Well that was very nice of you.”

She laughed, but mirthlessly.  “Nice, yes.  Very nice.  I lured you into the blade of a knife because I’m nice.  I have a debt, do you understand?  I have to kill this man to clear that debt, and I’ve failed twice now.”

I didn’t understand but she was on a roll and I wasn’t about to shut her up.   She’d moved from the window to pacing at the foot of the bed, still not looking at me.

“You were the solution!” she said. “But instead of letting things play out the exact way
I
set them up to play out, for some ridiculous reason that was the moment I picked to act like a girl, because I didn’t want the death of a complete stranger on me.  So I stopped and I helped you, and now not only have I not cleared my debt, my decision will likely throw this entire continent into war.  It was a
costly
choice.”

Anna’s pacing, which had become a sort of frantic back-and-forth exercise that made me want to get out of the bed and hold her still, came to a sudden, arresting stop right next to me.  She picked that moment to look me in the eye again, and I realized she’d been fighting back tears.

“I wouldn’t say we’re
complete
strangers,” I said.

“We met yesterday
.
”

“Fine, we’re nearly strangers, but… Look, I don’t understand any of this.”

“I know.”

She kissed me.  It happened so suddenly I didn’t do my very best to kiss back, which I felt bad about as soon as it was over.  It was soft, and passionate, and she smelled a little bit like cinnamon, and it made all the pain in my side go away and my head empty of rational thought.

Then it was over and she was slapping me across the face.  I enjoyed that more than I probably should have.

“Why’d you do that?” I asked. 

She ignored the question, or perhaps didn’t know whether I was talking about the slap or the kiss.  I wasn’t sure myself.

“Who
are
you?  Christoph isn’t your real name, I already know that.”

“Why can’t it be?”

“Because I asked you on five different occasions last evening and you gave me five different answers.  And none of them were Christoph.”

“Well all right, I have had a lot of names.”

“And you know nothing about the politics of the moment, that much is very obvious.”

“How many questions did you ask me last night?”

“Several.  I wanted to know what kind of man I rescued at the expense of the peace.”

I sort of felt sorry for her.  If she asked me things while I was half out of my mind from pain and drink, she probably got a whole lot of honest responses that made no sense.  I’ve had the sort of life that’s only logical when immortality is presupposed. 

“You use a series of false names, know your tradecraft, and can read the Swiss code.  All the evidence says you’re a spy, and I can’t trust you.  Yet I’m certain you are
not
a spy and equally certain I
can
trust you, and I don’t understand why that is.”

“It must be my charm.”

She laughed.  “You’re not without charm, but I’m not some fainting damsel, either.”

“I have noticed.  And I’ve been a spy, once or twice.  Just not recently.  I’m more of a freelance merchant at the moment.”

“Those words are meaningless together.”

“How about wealthy drunk?”

“Better.”

“The ‘Swiss code’.  You can read the Romansh dialect, can’t you?”

“Of course I can.  That letter was meant for me.”

“Then who… oh, of course.  No wonder you need to kill this man.  You were supposed to do that in the garden. 
He
was the messenger.”

I should have figured this out earlier, perhaps.  Like, around the time I was standing in a flowerbed and looking at a murder scene where no blood was shed.  Or when I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out a letter whose contents she didn’t find all that shocking.  If I’d known she was the executioner-to-be and not the victim-that-wasn’t, I might have realized she was stalling until the sun went down.

“Maybe you should decide to trust me enough to explain what’s actually going on so I can help you in a way that doesn’t involve my being sent out as bait,” I said.

She laughed, but in a less charming sort of way.  “I have no reason to tell you anything.  You’re useless to me with that wound, and in honesty I should already kill you for what you’ve learned.  That’s how it was supposed to happen, do you understand?  You saw the letter, and even if you didn’t understand the contents, you could
read the words
.  As soon as you proved that I couldn’t allow you to live.  That’s why this all made so much sense!  Use you to draw him out, wait for him to dispatch you for me, and then kill him and the realm is saved, and
please
stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“I just said I put you at risk on purpose and you look like you want me to kiss you again.”

“Well, I do.”

She sighed.

“You should get out of Vienna,” she said.  “As soon as you can.  Your life is in danger.”

“From you?”

“Possibly.  If not at my hand, then because of me.  I work for people who are considerably more ruthless.  They will never allow you to keep breathing.”

“These are the people you owe this debt to?”

“It’s not my debt, but yes.  It belongs to my family.  They saved a life, but if the debt remains unpaid they’ll rescind it.  And now I’ve added your life to that equation.  So.  Please leave Vienna.”

“I think you’re wrong.  I can help you.”

“How do you mean to do that?”

“Did you see the knife he stabbed me with?”

Anna blinked a couple of times.  “Yes.  I have it here.  I thought it was interesting.”

“It is.”

She retrieved it from a corner table and placed it on the bed. 

The knife had a handle that was shaped like an H, a logical design because it was meant to be held in the fist and used in a punching motion.  I hadn’t seen one in years.

“It’s called a Katar,” I said.  “From India.  It’s how I figured out what you’re actually facing.  But before I prove I’m actually useful here, why don’t you tell me why the man who used it has to die?”

She nodded, slowly.  This was progress.

“Have you ever heard the name Talleyrand?”

*   *   *

Hofburg Palace is the kind of man-made structure that makes me a little uncomfortable.  It’s vast.  I have seen vastness of all sorts before—the Romans excelled at it, especially the Byzantine edition of them—but most of the time complexity is traded out.  A coliseum, for instance, is a giant building, but one with a lot of empty space in it.  The Hagia Sofia in Constantinople (please don’t make me call it Istanbul) is giant and somewhat complex, but that complexity is mostly for visual effect, not utilitarian functionality. 

But Hofburg Palace, along with a dozen other buildings across Europe and Asia, crosses that line between awe-inspiring and disturbing.  I look at these places and think perhaps humanity has done something wrong if we legitimately have a need for something so artificially complicated.  I also wonder—especially when I end up in a long conversation about politics, which is thankfully not often—if spaces like this are built to address a need, or if they create one.  Do we manufacture spaces for secret meetings, or do secret meetings happen because we designed the space for them and don’t know what else to do? 

I’m also of the opinion that political problems can be solved by putting the right people in the same large room.  I’ve shared this theory with a number of persons, throughout history, with more political savvy than I have, and all of them have told me it’s preposterous because of the complexity of the issues involved.  So it was a surprise to learn that this was more or less exactly the premise of the congress: get all the people together and hash everything out.  They just weren’t doing it in one big room.  No plenary council meetings, no big central anything, just a bunch of back-room get-togethers.  I couldn’t decide if it was a brilliant idea or the exact opposite of that.

Anna and I weren’t heading to Hofburg Palace for one of those meetings.  We were going to a party. 

It had been three days since she’d stitched me up, and in that time I’d recovered enough to walk around without wincing.  Running was a challenge, but I could stand straight and not give the appearance that I’d recently been stabbed, and that was important, because I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself at the party to which I wasn’t technically invited.  With any luck at all, I’d be able to move around without reopening the stitches; I was in my best suit, and blood is really hard to get out of a good suit.

I also wasn’t healed enough to experience a carriage ride without some pain.  This was in a time when the choices of road were dirt or cobblestone, and neither was all that great when combined with a non-rubberized carriage wheel.  Every bump was a reminder that I should have stayed in bed.

“You look pale,” Anna said quietly.  She was sitting beside me as the coach made its way through the downtown.

“I’m in a little pain, but I’m okay,” I said.  “Don’t worry.”

“I’m worried only that you look so sickly we will be unable to enter.”

“How sweet of you.”

She gripped my hand gently.  “I
am
sorry about the pain.  But we have larger concerns.”

“Nobody will notice how pale I am if I’m standing next to you.  I could show up in my breeches.”