The Count of the Living Death (The Chronicles of Hildigrim Blackbeard) (7 page)

The servants repeated the news in every room, embellishing it with the art so particular to the oppressed, accustomed to murder and mayhem. By the time Ivan heard it, the Count had been ritually dismembered and his remains flung out the window; the sorcerer and his beloved were currently scouring the Countryside to pick up the pieces so they could return him to life with the help of Count Leopold III (his great-grandfather’s) ashes. Ivan knew much of the story was nonsense, but he also knew Hildigrim Blackbeard would do anything to save the Count’s life. How everyone loved him! For a moment, looking at the sobbing, crouched figure of Mary, he almost regretted his actions. But no more. The legacy of his father remained, a haunting reminder that he had been cast aside in favor of Leopold. But what made him less his son? The accident of the wrong mother?

Ivan had been ~ȼp widt here before, many years ago. His father had grudgingly invited him—in secret of course—for a brief meeting. He waited for hours in a small study while listening to his father’s voice booming from the next room. Finally, when his patience was almost spent, a servant arrived with a small package. Inside was a tidy sum of money with a short note that read: “Consider my debt paid in full. I only have one son.”
What am I, then
, he later asked his mother.
How do I breathe, eat, wake up in the morning? Am I a ghost? Can no one else see me—do I only exist in my own mind? Should I not have existed at all?

“Men are cruel and false—never more so when they’re in love,” she said, bitterly. “You remind him of his foolishness, all the more so because you act just like him. I got the best of him…and discarded the rest.”

They were kind words, but they never healed the wound. Outside his father’s door, crouching in the shadows, his heart failed him. The voice behind the door told a humorous story to a chorus of laughter. If only he could open that door and have the laughter embrace him, welcoming him home after a long absence.
My son—you’ve come home to me
! He returned home in shame, knowing that he could never fulfill his revenge; how could he kill the only person he truly loved?

His father, for all his hatred, had become his ideal. A promise of fatherhood that one day could be realized, perhaps on his deathbed when he repented his rashness. A single kind word could heal a lifetime of neglect. Just to hear him say it. His mother, on the other hand, said all too much. She loved him, naturally, but it was a sickly sort of love. As a child he reveled in it, but as he matured, he felt she used him as a whetstone, sharpening her misery until it shone in the dark. They spoke of nothing else. Always his father, his betrayal, his faithless companions. Blackbeard was a recurring subject. Even more than his father, she told stories of him…why the devil should he care about a conjuring half-wit? When he was older he realized she must have loved him, too; perhaps even more than his father. Something had happened between them, and like all the others, he had betrayed her. But how? She never quite said…but something she once said gave him pause.

“I wouldn’t let him take you from me, despite his claims. You were mine, and I told him as much. The conceited fool.”

What claims did Blackbeard have on
him
? The answers that gravitated around this question unnerved him, and shifted his hatred away from his half-brother to the evil sorcerer of legend. They would both die tonight.

As the hours ticked away, Ivan hid in a forgotten closet just above the armory. He listened to the hum of his body in the silence: the heart that raced, the eyes that twitched, the fingers that drummed, the teeth that clenched and bit his tongue.
Soon it will all be silenced. I will die just as surely as he will, as Count Leopold has already. I don’t fear the moment of death, I fear the nothingness that comes after. Nothing I have done will last; nothing will be recorded for others to read and admire. I might as well have not even existed. My father got exactly what he wanted: only one son.

At the first stroke of midnight, Ivan slipped into the shadows, scurrying down darkened hallways. No servants lingered in his path. His fingers gripped the Count’s sword, ready to drive it home, hoping the Red Monkshood disguised his plan. Though he secretly wondered if Blackbeard really
was
a sorcerer. He had a suspicion of magic in all its forms, especially since his mother fancied herself a sorcerrseaid…buer, too. Much of her so-called spells were parlor tricks and enchantments, more illusions than anything arcane. From his experience, only weapons and willpower exerted any true magic. Having the will to power and the means to enforce it was a proven equation. He now had both.

The door to the armory stood open, but only just. Through it, Ivan could see the sorcerer distractedly shaking a vial in preparation for some bogus spellcraft. There was nothing else in the room but a weather-beaten chest, perhaps the very chest that Leopold’s “death” was interred in. What rubbish.
And where was your death now, brother?
He silently opened the door a touch more and slinked through. Three steps brought him just behind Blackbeard, though the sorcerer continued on with his work, betraying no awareness of the intruder. One step more—a single thrust would do it. He took that step…waited for any clue, any hint of a trap…

He drove the sword through the sorcerer’s back. Blackbeard’s arms flung out and dropped the vial, which smashed against the floor. A thick, black smoke poured out and clouded his senses. He could faintly see the body crash to the floor and lie senseless. Ivan nudged the body with his foot, even stabbed it again for good measure. Nothing moved. The smoke soon blotted out the entire room. Ivan moved through the cloud, feeling for a familiar landmark to lead him out…but found nothing. He became increasingly disorientated, unable to tell if he was moving toward or away from the door. Panic set in, and he realized, desperately, that he had been tricked after all.

“Can you give me a hand?” a voice said, in the darkness. “I was just in the middle of something…”

Ivan swung his sword at the voice, slicing vainly through thin air. Blackbeard spoke again—now just behind him. He spun around to attack but again found nothing. The voice emerged beside him.

“How long do you plan to keep this up?”

Ivan stabbed at the blackness around him. He staggered forward, exhausted from the effort. The voice seemed right at his shoulder, but of course it might have been miles away.
Coward! Devil!
Ivan wanted to taunt him but the words stuck in his throat. He realized now the sorcerer would kill him without suffering a single blow in return.

“We’re not here to discuss my death, Ivan. It was yours, if you will recall, that brought us here.”

“Then kill me,” he muttered. “Either way, the Count is dead. My father has no son.”

“Nonsense; your father has two sons, both of them living.”

“Wrong, I killed him myself—watched him die in that woman’s arms. Even magic can’t change that.”

“On the contrary, it’s magic that contradicts it. Your brother can’t die until we open this box.”

“My
brother
,” Ivan scoffed. “In what way could we ever be called brothers? We shared nothing. And he wants me to share—no, to simply hand over my life! My death!”

“Your life for a peaceful death; a worthwhile bargain,” Blackbeard said, emerging from the fog. “We all have selfish motives, Ivan. But you had nothing to lose.”

“Yes,
you
call it nothing, who have been the cause of so much death!” Ivan shouted.

He impulsively slashed at the sorcerer, but the sword shattered into pieces against his head. Ivan dropped the blade in wide-eyed disbelief. This was no trickster’s illusion or carnival stagecraft. Hildigrim Blackbeard was the very thing his mother warned him against: a man of profound and unspeakable power who had to be killed at all costs.

“And what of you?” Blackbeard asked, approaching him. “You seem rather unsentimental about murder. Did your mother teach you that?”

“My mother taught me about you,” he rasped.

“A pitiful education. Hatred is not enough, nor is revenge. Yes, I could tell you about her, things you can’t begin to imagine. The very things she didn’t want you to know.”

“You know nothing!” he shouted, terror in his heart.

“I know she used me,” he said, pushing him against a wall. “I was a book she wanted to read, nothing more. She craved the entire library.”

“Lies! You abandoned her!”

“Abandoned her—my prize pupil? The woman I planned to make my apprentice? You do realize women are forbidden to learn the arts…but I was willing to defy the Order.”

Ivan pushed him away and fled for the exit, but the fog thickened and disorientated him. Wherever he went he found himself running toward Blackbeard, whose gargoyle-like presence peered at him through the ages. Of course, Ivan knew his mother exaggerated, perhaps even lied to him about her past. But if she had even lied about
him
...the grand structure of his revenge would crumble brick by brick. Everything would lie in ruins.

“Are you willing to listen? Or has she only taught you to be a coward…to skulk around like a thief in the night?”

The implication stung. Choking down his impulse to run, to scream, to rip off his lying face, he listened. And word by word, it all fell into place; not lies or a grand scheme of deceit, but the simple, unremarkable truth.

“Her motives, I soon learned, were impure,” Blackbeard explained. “She didn’t want to study magic…to her it was a means to power. Her chief ambition was to ensnare men and learn their secrets. I told her she didn’t need magic for that; I told her she could have any man in the kingdom.”

“What about my father?” Ivan finally asked. “How did she—”

“She wanted him from the first,” he continued. “After various attempts, she asked me to help. Mind you, I adored the girl, but I hoped that she would merely entrance him as a kind of sport. So I agreed to act as a go-between. I introduced her as someone far more important than she was…and she did the rest.”

“Did he love her?”

“Yes, I think he did. They had a grand romance. But she followed a predictable pattern; her eye wernmznRent elsewhere, and he caught her doing or planning something. He threw her out and she came back to me…with you. Of course, you weren’t born yet, but she could no longer hide the fact.”

“I don’t understand…she told me all this, but the accent was always on you,” Ivan said. “
You
refused to teach her,
you
betrayed her to the Count,
you
refused to take us in. Why did she hate you so much?”

“Because I expected so much more of her,” he said, dryly. “But she had her own ideas; within a month she ran off with the Duke of Something-Or-Other, taking you and my books of magic. It took me weeks to track her down—she was preparing to flee the country. I gave her a choice: she could keep the books in exchange for you. I didn’t need the books—most of which she couldn’t read, anyway—but I did need an apprentice. She owed me that.”

Ivan waited, speechless, for her answer. He instinctively recalled the words offered many years ago, divorced from their original context:
I wouldn’t let him take you from me, despite his claims. You were mine, and I told him as much. The conceited fool
.

“She cried, pleaded, and abused me horribly. She didn’t want to abandon you…but she seemed equally devoted to the books. Finally, she suggested a compromise.”

Again, Ivan was speechless yet desperate for her response.

“I could have you for a year. If, in a year’s time, she had not learned to read the spells in the book, she would return them. However, on the off-chance she learned to read a hundred dialects of obscure magical cant, the boy was mine and I could apprentice him to the devil for all she cared.”

“She…she left me? To you?”

“I’ll never forget her parting words,” Blackbeard said, meeting his eyes. “They were simply,
good-bye, and may the pair of you be damned
.”

Ivan no longer doubted his words. He could hear his mother behind it, every phrase and accent. That loving voice that called him her own, her darling, her love…it poisoned him. He could almost taste the hatred as she spoke of her past, that insidious fairy-tale told to him night after night to torment his sleep. And he believed every word.

“I don’t remember you…any of this,” he said.

“No, you wouldn’t remember. It was before your first year. Your mother left with the Duke (whom she soon abandoned in turn) and made her way to Russia to decipher the books. I began raising you as my own…I was prepared to teach you everything.”

It’s lies, all lies
, he tried to tell to himself. But that was still her, speaking through him, twisting his thoughts. She would never let him believe it. What he felt himself was difficult to explain. Betrayal and anger, certainly, but also regret, even longing. How different his life might have been growing up as Blackbeard’s apprentice. A loving father willing to teach him his secrets, instead of turning him into one. So why had he given him back? Even if his mother returned, how could he simply abandon him, knowing who she was? Blackbeard guessed his question and responded,