Authors: Kerstin Gier
Oh, yes, too true. The plan. The plan seeing us as potential murder victims who would conveniently disappear into thin air.
“Wild horses aren’t dragging me down there, not while Rakoczy’s lying over that desk, stoned out of his mind,” I said firmly.
“Look, first, he’ll be back on his feet again by now, and second, at least five of
his men are waiting down there.” He put out his hand to me. “Come on, we must hurry. And there’s nothing to be afraid of; Alastair wouldn’t stand a chance against those Kurucs, even if he brought reinforcements with him. They can see in the dark like cats, and I’ve seen them do things with knives and swords that verge on magic.” He waited until I had put my hand in his, then smiled slightly, and
added, “And I’m still here as well.”
But before we’d even started, Lavinia appeared in the doorway, and with her—as breathless as she was—the First Secretary in his bright parrot plumage.
“Ah, here they are. Both of them,” said Lavinia. She looked remarkably fit for someone who had been fainting away just now, if not quite as beautiful as before. Streaks of reddened skin showed through the layer
of pale powder on her face. All that running up and down stairs must have made her break out in a sweat. There were spots of red on her plunging neckline too.
I was glad to see that Gideon didn’t even glance at her. “I know we’re late, Sir Alfred,” he said. “We were just on our way down.”
“That … won’t be necessary,” replied Alcott, gasping for air. “There’s been a little change of plan.”
He didn’t have to explain any further, because Lord Alastair came into the room after him, not in the least out of breath, but smiling unpleasantly.
“So we meet again,” he said. He was followed like a shadow by his ghostly black-clad ancestor, who instantly started uttering murderous threats. “May the unworthy die an unworthy death!” and so on. I’d nicknamed him Darth Vader when we last met, because
of his hoarse voice, and I envied everyone else present, who could neither see him nor hear him. His dead beetle-black eyes fixed on us with sheer hatred in them.
Gideon bowed his head. “Lord Alastair, what a surprise.”
“Just as I intended,” said Lord Alastair, smiling smugly. “A surprise is what I wanted to give you.”
Almost imperceptibly, Gideon steered me farther into the corner, so that
the desk was between us and the visitors, which didn’t make me feel much better, because it was a very fragile lady’s desk in the Rococo style. I’d rather it had been a good stout oak table.
“I understand you,” said Gideon politely.
I understood him too. The murder scene had obviously been simply shifted from the cellar to this pretty room, because the First Secretary was the traitor in the
ranks of the Guardians and Lavinia was a snake in the grass. Simple, really. Instead of shaking with fear, I suddenly felt more like giggling. This was just too much for one day!
“But I thought you’d have been a little more discriminating in your murder plans, after getting the lines of descent of the time travelers into your hands,” said Gideon.
Lord Alastair made a dismissive gesture. “The
family trees that the demon from the future brought us showed only that it is impossible to wipe out your lines of descent entirely,” he said. “I prefer the direct method.”
“Madame d’Urfé alone, the lady who lived at the court of the king of France, had so many descendants that it would take more than one human life to track them all down,” added the First Secretary. “Putting an end to you here
and now seems to me an absolute necessity. If you hadn’t defended yourself so ably in Hyde Park the other day, it would all be over and done with now.”
“What are you getting in return for this, Alcott?” asked Gideon, sounding as if he were really interested. “What can Lord Alastair offer you to make you break the Guardians’ oath and betray the Lodge?”
“Well, I—” Alcott obligingly began to tell
us, but Lord Alastair cut him short.
“A clear conscience! That’s what he gets in return. The certainty that the angels in heaven will praise his deeds is worth far more than gold. We must rid the earth of demonic monstrosities like you two, and God will thank us for shedding your blood.”
Sure, sure. Briefly I felt a spurt of hope that Lord Alastair just needed someone to listen to him. Maybe
he only wanted an appreciative audience to hear him talk about his religious delusions. But then Darth Vader hissed, “Your lives are forfeit, demons’ brood!” and I abandoned that idea again.
“So you think God would approve of the murder of an innocent girl? Interesting.” Gideon’s hand went to the inside pocket of his coat, and then he imperceptibly jumped.
“Is this what you were looking for?”
asked the First Secretary maliciously. He reached into the pocket of his own lemon-yellow coat and brought out a small black pistol, holding it up in his fingertips. “Undoubtedly some diabolical weapon from the future, am I right?” He looked at Lord Alastair for approval. “I asked our seductive friend Lady Lavinia to search you thoroughly for such weapons, time traveler.”
Lavinia cast Gideon
a guilty smile, and for a moment, he looked as if he could have kicked himself. Understandably, because the pistol would have saved us. Men with swords stood no chance against a Smith & Wesson automatic. I wished the treacherous Alcott would accidentally pull the trigger and shoot himself in the foot. The noise of the shot might also be heard in the ballroom—or then again, it might not.
However,
Alcott put the pistol back into his pocket, and my heart sank.
“Surprised, are you? I thought of everything. I knew that dear Lady Lavinia had gambling debts,” said Alcott in a conversational tone. Like most villains, he evidently longed to have his cunning admired. I thought his long face was rather ratlike. “Debts for large sums of money that she could no longer, as usual, pay off by showing
… er,
generosity
to her creditors.” Here he laughed in a slimy way. “You must forgive me, my lady, for not being especially interested in those services of yours. But this wipes out your debts.”
Lavinia didn’t look particularly pleased. “I’m so sorry—I had no other choice,” she said to Gideon, but he didn’t appear to be listening to her at all. I thought it more likely that he was wondering how
fast he could get to the fireplace and snatch one of the sabers off the wall above it before Lord Alastair ran him through with his sword. Following his eyes, I came to the conclusion that he didn’t have much chance of success, unless he’d forgotten to let me know that he was really Superman. The fireplace was too far away, and moreover, Lord Alastair, who never took his eyes off Gideon, was standing
much closer to it.
“This is all very well,” I said slowly, playing for time, “but you’ve reckoned without the count.”
Alcott laughed. “I suppose you mean without Rakoczy?” He rubbed his hands. “Well, his special … let’s call them preferences will make him unable to do his duty tonight, don’t you agree?” He was all puffed up with pride. “His liking for intoxicating substances made him easy prey,
if you know what I mean.”
“But Rakoczy isn’t alone,” I said. “His Kurucs are keeping watch on every move we make.”
Slightly unsettled, Alcott looked briefly at Lord Alastair and then laughed again. “Oh, yes, and where are those Kurucs of yours now?”
Down in the cellar, presumably.
“Waiting in the shadows,” I murmured in as menacing a tone as I could manage. “Ready to strike at any time. And
they can do things with their swords and knives that verge on magic.”
But unfortunately Alcott wasn’t to be intimidated. He made a few nasty remarks about Rakoczy and his Kurucs, praising himself all over again for his brilliant planning and his even more brilliant change of plan. “I’m afraid our clever friend the count will wait for you and his Black Leopard in vain today,” he said, turning
to Gideon. “Why not ask me what plans I have for
him
?”
But Gideon had obviously lost any interest in Alcott’s boasting. He said nothing. Lord Alastair seemed to have had enough of the First Secretary’s time-wasting babbling as well. He wanted to get down to business. “You had better go away,” he impatiently told Lady Lavinia, drawing his sword and pointing it at her.
So now came the crunch.
“And I always thought you were a man of honor and wouldn’t fight a duel with an unarmed opponent,” said Gideon.
“I am indeed a man of honor—but you are a demon. I am not going to fight a duel with you, I’m going to slaughter you,” said Lord Alastair coldly.
Lady Lavinia let out a stifled sound of horror. “I didn’t want this,” she whispered, looking in Gideon’s direction.
No, sure.
Now
she had
scruples! You silly cow, fall down in another faint, why don’t you?
“Get her out of here, I said!” For once, Lord Alastair took the words out of my mouth. He let his sword whistle through the air, trying out the blade.
“Of course—this is no sight for a lady.” Alcott bundled Lavinia out into the corridor. “Close the door, and make sure no one tries to get in.”
“But—”
“I haven’t given you back
your IOUs yet,” hissed Alcott. “If I say so, the bailiffs will come to your house tomorrow, and then it won’t be your house anymore for quite some time.”
That shut Lavinia up. Alcott bolted the door, turned to us, and took a dagger out of his coat pocket, rather a delicate model. I ought to have been feeling terrified, but somehow the fear wouldn’t really set in. Probably because the whole thing
seemed to me downright absurd. Unreal. Like a clip from a film.
And surely we’d be traveling back any moment now?
“How much time is there still to go?” I whispered to Gideon.
“Too much,” he said, through gritted teeth.
Alcott’s rat face wore a look of cheerful excitement. “I’ll deal with the girl,” he said, positively bubbling over with his thirst for action. “You deal with the boy. But be
careful—he’s cunning, and he’s quick.”
Lord Alastair just snorted scornfully.
Since Gideon still seemed to be eyeing up the sabers so tantalizingly out of reach and his whole body was tense with concentration, I looked around for an alternative weapon. On the spur of the moment, I picked up one of the upholstered chairs and pointed its fragile legs at Alcott.
For some reason, he thought that
amusing. He just grinned even more murderously than before and slowly advanced on me. Well, one thing was for sure: whatever his motives, he wasn’t about to have a clear conscience ever again in this life.
Lord Alastair was also coming closer.
And then everything happened at once.
“Stay right there,” Gideon called to me, as he overturned the delicate little desk and, with a kick, sent it slithering
over the polished wooden floorboards toward Lord Alastair. At almost the same time, he tore one of the heavy candleholder brackets off the wall and flung it with all his might at the First Secretary. It hit Sir Alfred on the head with a nasty sound, and he dropped to the floor like a stone. Gideon didn’t wait to see if his throw had been on target. While the bracket was still in the air,
he had dived for the collection of sabers on the wall. In his own turn, Lord Alastair had stepped aside to avoid the desk skidding his way, but instead of preventing Gideon from snatching a saber off the wall, he took a few quick steps toward me. All this had happened in the time it takes to blink an eye, and I hardly had time to raise the chair I was holding, with the firm intention of smashing it
down over Lord Alastair’s head, before he was lunging at me with his sword.
The blade passed through my dress and ran far into me under the left side of my rib cage. Before I could really grasp what had happened, Lord Alastair withdrew his sword again, uttered a cry of triumph, and spun around to meet Gideon, pointing the sword at him. The end of the blade was red with my blood.
The pain got
to me a second later. Like a puppet with its strings cut, I fell forward on my knees and instinctively put my hand to my breast. I heard Gideon shout my name; I saw him wrench two sabers at once off the wall, swinging them above his head like a samurai warrior. Meanwhile I finally dropped to the ground, and the back of my head didn’t even hit the floorboards too hard (a wig like the one I was wearing
came in useful). Then, as if by magic, the pain went away. For a moment, I stared at nothing, astonished. Then I was hovering in the air, weightless, bodiless, rising higher and higher in space, up to the stucco decoration on the ceiling. Little golden m0tes of dust danced around me in the candlelight. It was almost as if I had turned into one of them.
I saw myself lying far below, eyes wide
open, struggling for air. A bloodstain was slowly spreading over the dark blue silk of my dress. The color quickly drained out of my face until my skin was as white as my wig. I watched in surprise as my eyelids quivered and then closed.
But the part of me hovering in the air could still see everything that was going on:
I saw the First Secretary lying motionless beside the candleholder bracket.
He was bleeding from a large wound in his temple.
I saw Gideon, white with anger, rushing toward Alastair. His lordship retreated to the doorway, parrying Gideon’s saber thrusts with his own sword, but after only a few seconds, Gideon had driven him into a corner of the room.
I saw the two of them fighting a fierce duel, although from up where I was floating, the clash of their blades was muted.
His lordship feinted and then tried to lunge under Gideon’s left arm, but Gideon saw through his intention, and at almost the same moment, his blade pierced Lord Alastair’s unguarded right upper arm. Alastair looked at his adversary incredulously and then his expression distorted into a silent scream. His fingers opened, and his sword fell to the floor with a clatter: Gideon had pinned his arm
to the wall. Stuck like that, he began hissing furious curses, in spite of the pain he must have been feeling.
Gideon turned away without giving him another glance and flung himself down on the floor beside me. That’s to say, beside my body—I myself was still hovering around in the air, feeling useless.