The Dark Arts of Blood (23 page)

He felt he was going mad. There was nothing to take his mind off the madness except work, however brutal the pain.

Halfway through class, accompanied by an agitated Thierry, Violette entered. Emil kept his eyes to the front and ignored her. To his amazement, she said nothing, only watched him. He could
feel
her gaze scorching him. But by the time class ended, she had vanished.

What was he to make of that?

He’d expected a scene, forceful insistence that he return to bed at once. Instead… nothing. Was she now refusing to acknowledge his existence? Perhaps he’d only imagined that she was there, watching.

“What the hell happened to you, my friend?” In the changing room, Mikhail slapped him so hard between the shoulder-blades that he nearly collapsed. “You want ice on that face. Makes the swelling go down. Ice worked for
me
after you knocked me down yesterday.”

“I apologise,” said Emil, his voice thick through his split lip.

“Looks like you got your come-uppance, or whatever the phrase is,” said the Russian. “No hard feelings, but that must have been a spectacular fight. Who won?”

“No one. Isn’t it all over the school, my… misadventure?”

Mikhail shrugged. “Speculation, that’s all. Lots of gossip. You want to tell me?”

“Not really,” Emil growled. “I got drunk. Some thugs set on me. That’s all. It was my own stupidity – which, as you see, I intend to put behind me as fast as possible.”

“Ah well. Shattered hearts make us all go crazy. Did you make peace with madame?”

“Violette is not speaking to me. She sends her mysterious friends after me instead. She doesn’t want me, yet she wants to control me? She cannot have it both ways!”

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong,” Mikhail said, low and confiding. “She keeps all of us where she wants us, under that steel thumb. Accept it, or kiss goodbye to your glittering career.”

“Not me,” Emil said under his breath. “She won’t break me.”

* * *

At dusk, Emil walked along the lake shore promenade towards the town centre. A cold breeze rolled off the mountains, but he barely felt it. He wore a heavy coat, and a hat pulled down over his eyes to disguise both his identity and his bruises.

His mind writhed and clawed, unable to be still. He was supposed to stay on ballet premises: to hell with that. Rest? Soldiers in the Great War had fought on and on in the trenches with far worse injuries than this. Violette spurned him… the knowledge cut his heart with a thousand knives of agony and humiliation, but if that’s what she wanted, he would spurn her in return.

He thought of her with Karl and Charlotte, staring down at him, haunting him like
streghe
, like spectral beings that pinned you down in the night and sucked out your life energy. Pretending to be human, thinking he hadn’t noticed their masquerade…

He intended to get drunk again. He couldn’t face the beer hall, but there was a big hotel by the water’s edge. The tables outside were lit with candles, hardly anyone there but a few tourists wrapped up in coats and hats, looking out over the water. A pleasure steamer chugged its way from one side of the lake to the other.

He sat down and ordered a bottle of schnapps. He’d drunk a third of it when a woman walked past him, stopped, and backed up to look at him.

“Hello again,” she said lightly.

He glowered at her from beneath the brim of his hat. The last thing he needed was a gushing devotee to see him in this sorry state. When he said nothing, she added, “You don’t remember me? Forgive me. I saw you in the
Bierkeller
last night, but… well, it was so crowded…”

She was wrong. He knew her at once. She was the dark-skinned beauty who’d kept catching his eye. Tonight she was wearing an olive-green coat trimmed with fur, a hat of the same colour. The brim flared slightly around her lovely face and the crown glittered with green crystals that caught every spark of candlelight. A woodland creature, all brown and green… Her German was perfect – better than his – with an accent that he presumed was of her homeland.

“I remember,” he said. “No place for a woman, or any civilised human being.”

“Those brutes did this to you?” Her voice was warm but not pitying. He liked that. “I saw you arguing with them – brave, though not a good idea – but I thought you had left…”

“They caught me outside.”

She took a seat opposite him. “Perhaps if I’d come to speak to you, it might never have happened.” She leaned her chin on her hand, looking up at him, foiling his attempt to hide his face beneath his hat brim. Her eyes shone with a mixture of regret and teasing good humour. “I’m Fadiya. Spelled F-a-d-i-y-a.”

“Emil.” In normal circumstances he would have kissed her hand, made some flirtatious gesture, but he wasn’t in the mood. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “You know why they set on me?”

“Every community has its troublemakers. It’s never a good idea to argue with them.”

“That was my first mistake. Then they decided to punish me for what I do.”

“Why, what do you do?” She sounded innocently puzzled.

“You don’t know who I am?”

“No. Should I?”

He thought,
Thank goodness. Someone with no ideas about me!
“Only if you go to the ballet,” he said.

“I don’t,” she said bluntly. “I like jazz music. Not the terrible stuff they were playing in the
Bierkeller
. That was torture to the ears.”

He smiled. “Then, no, there’s no reason for you to recognise me. I don’t know what you were doing in that dreadful place.”

“Oh, I like to try every kind of local culture: never again. My dress was ruined with beer stains.” She pulled a face, smiled again. “But you were saying, those idiots knew that you dance with the ballet? Why would that make them angry?”

“Because they assume it means I prefer my own gender: a defect that entitles them to beat me like a rat in a sack.”

“Do you?” Her lips parted, forming an O of disappointment. “Like other men, I mean?”

“No. I very much prefer women. But that was none of their damned business.”

“You do look dreadfully miserable, Emil.” She brushed strands of hair out of his eyes with suede-gloved fingers. “May I try to cheer you up? I am a good listener.”

What could he say to her? That his life had fallen apart, that he couldn’t go home because three unhuman spectres waited there for him, determined to control his every move until he had no will left of his own? How could he explain the exquisite agony of loving Violette?

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Nothing matters. I have nowhere to go, nothing to do.”

“Oh yes, you do.” Smiling, she pointed at the hotel behind him.
Hotel Blauensee
. He looked up at the painted, timbered facade with its quirky roof. “I have a room in there. Shall we go inside?”

He was too startled to answer, too drunk to refuse. When he said nothing, she laughed and took his hand. “Listen, there’s a jazz band playing in the lounge. A
good
band. It’s very dark and cosy, no one will see your bruises…”

“I’m a dreadful sight.”

“You’re a beautiful sight,” she said. “I want to dance. You know how to dance, don’t you?”

* * *

Bruno breathed a quiet sigh of relief to himself. He’d passed the test: publicly declared his support for Herr Reiniger and Wolfgang without even knowing that their leader was watching and filming, and played his part in humiliating the arrogant, effeminate ballet dancer. All in all, it had been a good evening.

He liked such brutal, everyday business.

The esoteric side made him uneasy. As Godric Reiniger let the last of his
Eidgenossen
group into the upstairs meeting chamber and locked the doors, Bruno felt a shiver of claustrophobia. The twenty-nine men arranged themselves into three loose, concentric circles gathered around Reiniger. Wolfgang went around the circles putting a plain blue cloak over each man’s shoulders. The cloaks had been hand-sewn by Gudrun and embroidered with a small white symbol on the left shoulder: a skull inside a maze.

Godric, who fancied himself an artist, was designing a simplified version to become their party insignia. They were not yet
officially
a political movement. Officially, they were part of Reiniger’s film crew. But the chosen men of the inner circle were all aware of their leader’s great project: the Alpine Dawn Swiss Democratic Nationalist Party.

Everyone agreed it was a pleasingly grand title.

Each man held a sacred
sikin
knife – except Bruno, who was in disgrace for losing his.

He was in the outermost ring, feeling safe from Reiniger’s scrutiny there. Wolfgang gave his shoulder a squeeze as he put the cloak on him, as if to reassure him,
Everything will be all right.

Bruno wasn’t sure why he’d been admitted to the secret circle, except for his utter dedication to Reiniger’s dreams, and the fact that Wolfgang Notz liked him. He was no intellectual – but nor were most of the men here.

Godric was the one who did all the thinking. From his followers, he needed seamless agreement, loyalty and muscle.

They were Reiniger’s embryonic army. For now they helped him make newsreels and movies to promote his ideals. One day, they would help him form a government.

Godric opened the meeting as usual with the
Alpsegen
, the traditional Alpine prayer sung by shepherds to protect their flocks against all danger. The men joined in, their voices creating an eerie Gregorian-style chant.

When it was done, all raised their hands in the three-fingered salute that symbolised the unity of all the Swiss cantons.

“Lucerne was once, all too briefly, our seat of government,” said Godric. “One day, it shall be so again. May it please God that the
Confoederatio Helvetica
shall be governed from this very spot.”

“
Amen
,” they all responded.

“My comrades of the oath: you’ve each been entrusted with a
sikin
knife, unearthed by my father at a sacred site in the desert, a site so ancient that its origins remain unknown.” Reiniger’s voice was thin and hard, like a blade, a contrast to Wolfgang’s cheerful, earthy tone. “Fate delivered the cache into our hands. The very Soul of the Universe favours our enterprise. Let us summon the spirit of William Tell, our national hero, and of Berchtold, leader of the Wild Hunt, and of Woden, god of the mountains, and of Zruvan…”

Godric’s mouth always made a little sour twitch on the last name. Bruno had no idea why he spoke it at all, since it wasn’t Swiss, but he accepted it as part of the esoteric business that only Godric understood. “…Zruvan, Lord of Immortals, Soul of the Universe, to watch over our ritual tonight.”

“
Hail, Lord of Immortals
,” the men echoed. Godric switched from Christian to Pagan invocation without blinking. His only true belief was in the individual’s own strength: that was his teaching. All gods were there to serve man.

“However, one of our knives is lost,” Reiniger continued. “Until it’s recovered, can the thirty function as twenty-nine? Will one missing piece make the whole structure collapse? I believe not. I believe our combined willpower can bridge the gap. Each one of you in turn has received the blood-initiation in order to give his power to the group. A painful but heroic ordeal, no?”

The
Eidgenossen
murmured agreement.

“Now, to compensate for the loss of the
sikin
, a deeper sacrifice is needed. This will serve a triple purpose: to intensify the power, to act as a chastisement and to warn against future carelessness.”

Reiniger stared straight at Bruno. He pointed his dagger at him, then turned his wrist to point at his own feet, instructing Bruno to approach the centre of the circle.

He obeyed, sweating.

“Sir, what is this?” he whispered. “I thought I’d proved my loyalty.”

“Do not argue with me.” Reiniger’s eyes were specks of blue ice behind his glasses. “Lie down on your back. Wolfgang, expose his chest.”

Bruno obeyed. The marble floor felt chilly through his clothes. He looked up with wide, pleading eyes as Reiniger’s deputy undid his shirt buttons and spread open the garment. He was wearing a vest, which Wolfgang simply slit with his own knife. His glance in response to Bruno’s silent plea was apologetic but firm, merciless.

“We see the scars of initiation on this recruit’s chest,” said Reiniger. “Thirty intersecting cuts forming the sacred Eyes of the Soul. I want each of you to reopen the cut you made, one at a time, in the same order. I trust you to remember?”

The group murmured that they did. Bruno could smell their sweat now. They were almost as frightened as he was. Also, unlike him, aroused.

“This time, go deep,” said Reiniger. “As deep as you like. Don’t mind his cries. This is his punishment for losing his knife. In payment, his sacrifice will fill us with strength. Watch carefully. If you lose the sacred
sikin
entrusted to you – this will be you.”

“No,” Bruno mouthed as Wolfgang leaned down to make the first cut: a concave arc across the top of his ribcage.

“Hush,” said Wolfgang, barely audible. “Take your punishment in silence. You’re giving your life for the good of the group.” Then he mouthed, “
I’m sorry
.”

Tears ran down Bruno’s face, but he didn’t make another sound. At first it only stung. He remembered his initiation – just like this, but with the blades barely nicking the skin. It had hurt like the devil. Never dreamed he’d have to go through it again. As each man loomed over him, one by one, he felt their blades go deeper, re-carving the sign into his flesh. He saw their panting, excited faces. The pain built slowly, savage, burning. His breathing was high and fast. He felt hot fluid trickling down his chest, smelled his own blood.

Power was building in the air, hot and flowing like lava. He lay giddy and breathless with agony, aware of his heart pumping out his life on to the floor.

Last, Godric Reiniger thrust his knife into Bruno’s belly and ripped it from left to right.

“Thirty cuts,” he panted, and pressed his own dagger into Bruno’s hand. “Make the last one yourself.”