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The jangle of keys at three in the morning announced the Dimber Damber. Owen Tunney sat up groggily and watched him pay off the the bleary-eyed Newgate warder, who closed and locked the door with a yawn.
"You are well?," the Dimber Damber asked, removing his cloak and sinking into a comfortable chair. "Certainly, you are comfortable?"
"I thank you," Owen said. The Dimber Damber leaned over and handed him a roll of parchment. Owen untied the ribbon holding it and read:
Tunney rubbed the sleep from his eyes and carefully re-rolled the parchment. "Notorious," he said. "Very nice. It does me fair." He passed it to the Dimber Damber, who grew serious.
"You're my trusted friend, Owen," he said. "My right hand, practically my child. I know you'll honor the Tawny Prince and your canting crew when you take the drop."
Tunney raised an eyebrow. "I shant cry peccavi, nor shall I wet myself, if that's what you mean. Perhaps you could send a runner with something fine for me to wear. To do justice to our crew."
The Dimber Damber nodded slowly. "Are you not afraid, Owen?"
Tunney laughed, but it was false. The Dimber Damber scratched his red-haired head and looked out the barred window. In the bright moonlight, his face was a rugged quilt of angular shadows. "No matter what happens, you will die," he said softly.
"I know that."
"I came to tell you a secret, Owen Tunney. To offer you something against my better judgement."
Owen drew himself upright in his prison bed and listened.
"A miserable blessing and a beautiful curse." He turned and stared into Owen's eyes, and the condemned man shuddered at the empty sadness they held.
"Immortality," the Dimber Damber said, looking at the floor. "Do you understand?"
The Dimber Damber had raised Owen; plucked him out of a Seven Dials gutter and groomed him as a successor. In twenty eight years Owen had seen much and guessed more. He had been waiting for this offer his entire life.
"I understand," he said, and slapped at a flea bite.
The Dimber Damber mournfully took Tunney's hand and turned it over. He examined the crushed flea and the tiny spot of blood on his palm. He seemed ready to weep.
Owen spent Friday evening in the company of Newgate's interminable Anglican priest, Cotton, who channelled his prolific energies into effecting a last-minute conversion of the Papist. Tunney sat in the shadows of his prison chamber, awash with new sensation. His heart had not beaten in two days. He had tasted the Mortal blood of a prostitute the Dimber Damber had procured for that purpose. In less than an hour he would hang.
"D'ye not hear me, son?" the priest implored. "I know how you criminals mock. You say that those awaiting their fate at Tyburn tree spend the day with Cotton in their ears. But d'ye not fear the certain damnation you'll face tonight?"
"I serve the Tawny Prince and I cannot wait," he said, smiling.
"A false God, may he be damned as well."
"A God nonetheless, and your obsequious curse is His blessing."
Cotton's face reddened and he pounded for the warder. "Then die alone, you miserable croppie," he hissed.
At twenty minutes to midnight a half dozen warders placed him in heavy irons for the journey to Tyburn. He and the guards piled into an open wagon and the driver set off at a gallop.
Tunney realized something was wrong at once.
"We're going the wrong way," he said.
"Thought you'd be pleased," a warder said, and they all laughed.
"Where are you taking me?"
A club jabbed viciously into his kidney, knocking him to the floor of the wagon. "Quiet, you piece of Irish shit," someone growled. As if on cue, the six warders set upon Tunney, bringing down a hail of sadistic blows and brutal kicks. Ribs cracked like gunshots. They didn't hold back.
His limp, manacled form was tossed into a jolly-boat in Southwark, where he was rowed out into the stinking, fog-soaked Thames. Tunney saw the word HILLSBOROUGH against a wall of oak - the side of a sailing ship - before being hauled aboard in a boson's chair.
Through pain-dulled eyes, Owen Tunney saw a hawser-strewn deck and a ring of leather boots surrounding him.
"This is he?" someone asked. A bearded man in a guernsey sweater crouched down, contemplatively smoking a clay pipe. "Lucky Irish. We missed our tide for you," he said.
Tunney motioned bleakly, indicating the ship, confusion.
"You're one sad-looking rum cully, Irish. I'd've thought the Newgate gentlemen had informed you. Twice lucky - by the King's Mercy you're not to take the twist. It's transportation for life instead, and old Hillsborough's done you the great favor of missing her tide."
Owen Tunney's mind went blank with horror as they dragged him into the forepeak.
A ship at sea is no place for a vampire....
Owen Tunney learned before HMS Hillsborough had left Hampton Roads to project his will, to fold his broken form unnoticed and unseen into the seams and shadows of the convict's hold. As the ancient ship worked its timbers loose in rolling channel swells, he simply existed - aware only of the dull sump of pain his body had become and the miasmic stench of his fellow lags, prostrate with seasickness, dysentery, and gaol fever. Above them at the barred companionway stood two marines with ducksfoot pistols.
The lags were fed salt horse and hard tack. They were allowed to mill about once a day in a great fenced pen near the bow, and this hour was his only time to calm the ravenous urgings that his hunger thrust upon him.
As they heeled to port to begin the first leg of the journey - across the Atlantic to Rio de Janiero - Tunney walked shakily past the marines and made his unseen way out of the convict hold. For the first time he hunted, finding a twelve-year-old midshipman alone and asleep in the cable tier. Tunney's hunger blinded him, and before he was sated the child was dead.
He buried himself in the depths of the ship, in the well, amid the basso profundo groaning of the oak and the foul, icy bilge water.
When they buried the midshipman, wrapped in sailcloth and weighted with shot, Tunney heard and felt the percussive splash through the hull. They descended together; spiralling to physical and metaphorical depths until the pressure became unbearable; the universe compressed to a single black point.
Tunney's memory faded and stretched. He remembered, in scattered shards, the agony of subsisting on rats. Bone-numbing cold, humid equatorial inferno. The unimagineable, eye-watering reek. The only high point, he would later recall, was that - being undead - he wasn't tormented by lice.
He sat motionless in the squalid bilge while the crew of HMS Hillborough loaded provisions in Rio, and again at Capetown. He was seized, mad, an animal. Tunny's Paddington Fair finery had long since rotted off his shrivelled, brine-encrusted body.
It was in the roaring forties, as the ship tacked among mountainous freezing seas, that his sickness first began to attenuate. By the time the battered convict transport limped into Sydney harbor, Owen Tunney had made the painful transition back to sanity, to the World. He hunted again before they dropped anchor, feeding this time with rapturous delight and gentle care.
He stood at last on the shore of Terra Australius, the very end of the World.
The night air was choked with the sounds and smells of that alien place.
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The squalid little penal colony crouched on the edge of the Parramatta river could not support him. It couldn't even support itself -- the lags and their keepers were slowly starving to death on half rations. Owen Tunney was like a stranger in a land where strangers were impossible.
He spent his first nights clinging to the settlement, shielded from the burning southern sun in limestone sea caves by day. Eventually he ranged further afield, walking the coast knee deep in the surf. He absorbed the sounds and smells of that strange antipodean universe. Sometimes he observed the tiny dramas of the colony. Occasionally he fed.
After perhaps a month, he returned to his cave to find it occupied.
It was perilously close to dawn. His first thought was that some dead thing had been washed in by the tide. Seeing an indistinct form curled in a corner, he poked it experimentally with a stick. A young woman, naked and very much alive, leapt to her feet.
She looked at him without fear and said, simply, "Rowra." Tunney understood at once that she knew what he was.
Her name was Ainoo, and she was an Iora Cadigal, part of a scattered tribe that roamed the bush and coast north of Sydney cove. The putrescence was indeed hers -- like all her people, Ainoo wore a pungent sheen of rancid fish oil to keep away the flies.
She led him deep into the bush that night, beneath a canopy of unfamiliar stars. Ainoo walked barefoot over razor-sharp spinifex grass and, at one point, grabbed a blacksnake by the tail and cracked it like a whip. Its head snapped off and she laughed with delight, eating the still-warm meat as they walked.
The Cadigal welcomed him with a mixture of stoicism and curiousity. They appraised him with measureless dignity, touching his pale dead skin and talking among themselves in hushed tones. The smallpox scars which peppered his face especially interested them. They were already from the disease even then, and his scars seemed to confirm his identity.
They called him Rowra and, once they had inspected Tunney and conferred, offered him a young man. They made it clear through pantomime that they understood his needs. There was to be no privacy -- but a moment of uncertainty was overcome by hunger and he fed amid a curious throng of Cadigal. The young man didn't seem to mind.
And so Owen Tunney, Irish forger, became the omnipotent ancestral demon Rowra. He travelled with the Cadigal and their neighbors -- Cameregal, Daruk, Tarawal -- every few months returning to Sydney, which he used as a sort of lending library. An officer of marines named Watkin Tench had had the good taste to bring along Cornielle in the original and translation, and Tunney spent his days teaching himself French under the Iora's crude bark shelters.
When the sun set he emerged and gently fed on willing victims. Tunney learned a few of the seemingly endless musical languages of the Iora tribes. He absorbed their myths, their rituals, the all-encompassing cosmology that guided them. He learned of the Dreamtime, and felt the horror of his curse when he realized that he was forever excluded from it. He admired their painting and learned their stories. They, in turn, patiently waited for him to save them.
Contact with the Europeans had been disastrous -- the Iora were being systematically decimated by smallpox, to which they had no immunity. They roamed further afield; the death toll was appalling. They began to wonder out loud when Rowra was going to act.
Rowra acted only days after watching Ainoo herself die, abandoned by her haggard band. He left them in the night and returned to Sydney, boarding the French merchant vessel L'Orient. Tunney paid for his passage with promissory notes he had forged by moonlight in the residence of His Excellency, Governor Arthur Phillip. Owing no allegiance to the English penal code, the crew of L'Orient asked no questions and made no official enquiries.
He signed the log O. ROWRA. Throughout the long passage to Mauritius, he dined alone.
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The Lusard brothers had been waiting on the Mahébourg dock, as if expecting him.
L'Orient glided into Grand Port bay under topsails beneath the same strange southern stars Tunney had grown to know so well. The salty tang of the Indian Ocean had long been replaced by the heady, suffused odors of the tropical shore -- lush, intoxicating greenery and damp earth.
Nestor and Emmanuel Lusard were dressed in the threadbare fashion of Paris five years gone, but to Tunney they were princes. "You must come with us," Nestor said simply. "Our man Emile will fetch your dunnage."
"I carry all that I have," Tunney said. The brothers looked at him curiously.
"Your French is very bad," Emmanuel said, smiling.
They took him into the hills, away from the silent and sleeping village. Their plantation house was new, but already dilapidated by the relentless tropical humidity. Heavy black velvet drapes had been tied back to invite the moonlight inside. The manor was suffused with the rich odor of rotting sugar cane stalks, which dotted the surrounding hillsides in great mounds.
"Now," Nestor said, inviting Tunney to sit in the dining room, "please avail yourself of our hospitality. Our home is yours. If you have any questions, Emmanuel and I are at your service."
Owen Tunney looked from one to the other. They looked remarkably alike -- tastefully pomaded black hair slicked back over dead skin, eyes alternately laughing and cruel, long delicate nervous hands emerging from tattered lace cuffs. They were interchangeable in voice and mannerism. "I do have one question," Tunney said quietly. Nestor bowed his head.
"Perhaps you could tell me what we are."
The brothers were still for a moment, puzzled. They glanced at each other, communicating subtle, fraternal thoughts through gesture and expression. Emmanuel spoke first.
"You don't know what you are?" he asked. Tunney shook his head slowly. "Well you're a ..." Emmanuel Lusard grasped for the right phrase. "You're a ..."
"You're a vampire," Nestor finished. And he smiled and cocked his head.
"You do not know who sired you? You were not taught?" Emmanuel asked, sitting down at the table and leaning across it.
"This" -- Tunney touched his heart -- "happened in London. My master ..."
"Your Sire."
"My Sire was a man named Ephesus Dubbs. He was the Dimber Damber of my canting crew, my mob. The All-Irish." Tunney saw that the brothers were perplexed.
"He taught you nothing?"
"There was no time."
Nestor paced in the shadows. "May I ask how you came to the Isle de France?"
"The story is impossibly long. Perhaps another time."
Both brothers nodded in agreement, appraising him and exchanging meaningful glances.
"We shall teach you, brother," Nestor said finally, theatrically. "Ours is a lonely existence, and your presence shall leaven that misery, if but slightly. You have proven your worth by the simple act of survival. You must be very strong indeed. L'Orient arrived from Van Diemen's land -- I shudder to think what you have been through."
"You must be consumed with Hunger," Emmanuel said with a smile. Tunney nodded wearily.
"It is so," Nestor said, clapping his hands once. "Then a proper welcome to Mauritius is in order."
A door opened and Emile, the brother's manservant, entered in footman's livery. The smooth planes of his African face were etched with age and a dullness Tunney could not place at first. He held a silk cord in one hand, which was attached to the waist of a naked Malagasy woman who shuffled behind him, head down.
Tunney started to rise, shocked, but Nestor held out a firm hand. "Stay a moment," he said.
Emile led the dazed woman to a chair and helped her sit down. His other hand held a goblet, which Emmanuel plucked from his unresisting fingers. With growing alarm, Tunney placed Emile's look. It was the same glassy expression he had seen among those Cadigal who had seen too much horror to endure -- lovers raped or shot like dogs, families ravaged by smallpox, the braying, stinking world of the white invaders.
"Let her alone," he said.
Emmanuel Lusard stood beside her and shook his head merrily.
His brother stroked Tunney's shoulder placatingly. "Of course it's a shock to see our way, our civilized way. I'm sure you've had to hunt to quench your thirst, no? But you know they feel no pain."
"I've never ... from a woman," Tunney said hoarsely. With mounting revulsion, he felt the Hunger surge as he spoke.
"Woman? Animal," Emmanuel said, running a fingernail along her carotid artery. "Mortals are nothing more than prey, sir. Sport. Sustenance. Let that be your first lesson." He punctuated his sentence with a violent jab, and gently pressed the goblet against her flesh as the blood flowed.
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The Lusard brothers were endlessly patient.
Owen Tunney cursed and rejected them at first, reverting to the ways he knew, living in the canebrakes and dwindling ebony forests. In time he returned with questions, which they answered with aplomb, inviting him each time to stay with them and learn more. Each time he vanished into the night.
He came to know something of their story, a carefully sanitized version they provided for his edification. The clanless Lusard's exodus from Europe had occurred in 1725, under circumstances they did not relate. They had arrived on Mauritius, the Isle de France, and immediately established themselves on a large and prosperous sugar cane plantation outside Mahébourg. Their lifestyle was decadent and amoral; they fed at will and kept their slaves quiescent through terror and Domination.
Emmanuel laughingly related chopping a man's hand off with a machete as punishment for stealing some rum.
Tunney struggled with the things they taught him. He desperately wanted to belong; to feel community again, but the Lusards sickened him. Tunney had been raised in a grey world of thieves and prostitutes, but he had always had a sharply defined moral sense. On Mauritius, it screamed to him that Emmanuel and Nestor Lusard were wrong, and that he must not be tempted by the seductive lures of power and gluttony.
While the brother's were patient with their erstwhile student, they made it plain that he would never leave the Isle de France without their consent.
He used the Lusard's largesse to acquire a ramshackle foresters cottage. He fed among the French merchants in Mahébourg and aided the Lusard's slaves as best he could. Some among them came to realize what he was, and saw no distinction between him and the brothers. He knew that, given the chance, they would destroy all three -- and rightly so.
On a moonless spring night in 1810, Tunney stumbled upon a European sleeping among the cane brakes.
"Nom?" he questioned, holding a cane knife to the man's throat.
"Jean-Pierre Miette," he stammered in an accent clumsier than Tunney's own. "Miette, that's a laugh. What's an Englishman doing on Mauritius?" Tunney asked, in his native language. He put the knife away and helped the bewildered man to his feet with a gloved hand.
"You are an expatriate?" the man asked, brushing himself off. "You know of the war?"
Tunney nodded, and the Englishman, whose name was really James Wells, seemed to relax.
"To whom do you owe your allegiance?" Wells asked.
"His Majesty, of course." Tunney smiled in the darkness. "Whoever His Majesty may be. I have been abroad these last twenty years or more."
Wells laughed. "Farmer George still reigns, God bless him. But his son will be Regent soon, and he is by all measures a no-account prick."
In a flash of memory, Tunney remembered seeing the young George IV -- they were the same age, he and the Prince of Wales -- at Tyburn, attending the hanging of Lord Ferrer. It had been a good day for a wiry little pickpocket, a life and a death ago.
"You're here as a spy," Tunney said. Wells looked at his crumpled bedroll and nodded slowly. "You seek intelligence for an imminent invasion."
"I do," Wells said, "and I rely upon your patriotic nature. Pray do not molest me."
"Never. Our meeting is exceedingly fortunate. I have very specific needs," Tunney said, "owing to a peculiar sensitivity to light. An enclosed cabin where I will take all my meals. Quiet and introspection."
James Wells scratched the back of his neck and listened.
"Accomodate me with passage to England and I can easily provide you with all manner of valuable information about the French garrisons in Port Louis and Mahébourg."
"And the fleet," Wells whispered.
"Of course. I am known in both towns and can make discreet inquiries. You can promise to meet my terms?"
"Absolutely, Mr. ..."
"Tunney," he said. "Owen Tunney."
On the eve of the British invasion, Tunney had only one task left before his abrupt departure. It took him to the Lusard's slave quarters.
He told them there was to be an invasion; a general insurrection. Manor houses might be burned; slaves might rebel. The British abhorred slavery and would no doubt offer a general amnesty for crimes against the French aristocracy. He told them he was leaving Mauritius forever, that very night. But that their masters were not, and never would.
"Fire," he said as he left. "It must be fire."
Wells put him on a French sloop-rigged merchant ship, apologizing for sending him to Marsailles rather than London. Tunney forgave him, locked himself in his claustrophobic cabin, and closed the shutters against the first distant rumble of 40 pounders.
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It took them less than a day to find him wandering the gaslit boulevards of Paris.
Les Vampyrs Camarilla took him in as a lost childe. Upon hearing of his Embrace and subsequent travels, they honored the tradition of Hospitality and gently brought him into the fold. Tunney's tale of the demons of Mauritius -- and how he had escaped them -- brought him some small notoriety.
It was a whole new world to him, an endless whirl of politics and Society. Raised in the dismal rookeries of Seven Dials and Stepney, Tunney had only seen the flash life through the eyes of a Covent Garden pickpocket. Now he was thrust into the heart of it, meeting princes and clan leaders from across Europe, attending mortal balls, hunting amid the lush pickings of the Rue Pigalle.
In less than a year, he began to find the studied ease of Parisian Kindred life discordant. After so much suffering, it seemed as deeply wrong as the way of the depraved Lusard brothers of Mauritius. He began to drift away from his fellow Kindred, spending months without any contact at all. He filled his evenings with seminars at the Sorbonne and long, animated discussions in the cafes with students and revolutionaries. Tunney tried his hand at painting but gave up, heartsick, desperate for the pure light of the sun to illuminate his canvas.
Tunney had been considering ways to end his existence when he met the Princess Marina Petrushev. It was the spring of 1818. She was standing alone on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, forlornly contemplating the giant sun dial set into the street. They sensed each others presence and met formally, as Kindred; as Clan siblings. They stood for a long while side by side without words.
"A useless artifact to us," he said, finally.
"Not so," the Princess replied in Russian-inflected French. "On very clear nights, the full moon sometimes plays on the dial."
"It does not tell the time."
She looked up at him, her delicate, open face marked by a deep sadness. "But it is beautiful," she said.
They became friends and, in time, lovers. Tunney had not thought it possible -- he was too coarse, too low. She, who had never known want, felt exactly the same. Their love was no secret in that warren of internecine rivalry and gossip. Both feared the inevitable confrontation, for Marina Petrushev was Bound.
His name was Vicomte Eduard Poincarre, and he was a cruel and arrogant Toreador Ancilla. He had been permitted to seduce and Embrace the Princess -- "to preserve her beauty forever" -- as a reward for syncophantic loyalty. Poincarre was reviled among the Kindred for his casual and immoral attitude toward his progeny, but he was closely allied with the prince of Paris and few dared speak out against him.
Owen Tunney did not speak out against Poincarre, he simply set about finding a way to destroy him.
An elaborate tomb was commissioned in the newly-built Pere LeChaise cemetary. Its extravagant thanatopic arch was lit by gas lamps, and Tunney had arranged for the design to be modified to his specifications. When it was finished, he sent a footman with his card to Poincarre with P LECHAISE written on it, and a time. The Vicomte arrived alone and to the minute.
Tunney doffed his beaver hat and bowed. Poincarre laughed. "A needless formality, you mean to kill me. Surely you didn't think," he said, tapping a headstone with his silver-tipped cane, "that your sophomoric conspiracy would stay between the sheets?"
Tunney was silent.
"Surely you know better than to share the details of your murderous scheme with someone who is blood bound to the intended victim?"
Poincarre strolled over to the tomb and craned his neck, looking inside. "Or that such an unusual project -- and very clever, really, adding a valve to flood the crypt with gas and a touch-hole for a flame, very nasty -- wouldn't draw the attention of those who might alert the prince? No, you're young but obviously not that stupid. So what *was* your plan, Monsoir Tunney?"
Not a sound, not even a cricket, punctuated the bleak stillness of the moment.
"No answer? Well, perhaps I overestimated your faculties. I'll tell you, then, what *my* plan is, Tunney." Poincarre made a brief gesture with his hand and Marina emerged hesitantly from the shadows of Pere LeChaise. Her face was streaked with tears of blood.
A growing rage began to suddenly ebb inside Tunney. He felt very tired.
"You can have her," he said, taking her arm and drawing Marina close to him. "There are a thousand beautiful women in Paris, and, frankly, since Madamoiselle Petrushev met you she's been so -- dead."
Poincarre laughed at his joke and shoved Marina roughly across the distance that separated him from Tunney. "Have her," he said, "leave Paris at once, tonight. I have no pride but you have injured my reputation. And wherever you go, please have the courtesy to keep a room for me, on the off chance I might wish to take holiday and visit my Childe and Thrall."
It was August, 1830. They left Paris by the next train. In three weeks they were in St. Petersburg.
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They hunted in the shadow of a birch forest.
Andrei Linansk labored along the edge of the meadow through thigh-deep snow. The Prince was breaking a rough trail ahead, carrying his shotgun balanced in the crook of his left arm, tireless and silent. Linansk was struggling just to keep up. His hussar's leather boots crunched dreadfully in the hard, granular snow. It was eighteen below zero by the Celsius scale.
This moon, the Prince thought, is as good as daylight. I shall not miss the sun when I can have this moon.
"Rowra," Linansk panted in French, "a moment, sir. A word with you." The Prince stopped and waited for the fat hussar to join him. Linansk crouched with his hands resting on his thighs and caught his breath.
"I would never guess you were looking for game, Andrei Gavrilovich," the Prince said softly, "the way you announce your presence."
Linansk waved him off with a fur-mittened hand. "In this cold? And at night? Unheard of. Lunacy. What are we supposed to find out here, Prince? It's February. All the bears are snug and warm in their dens - enviable."
The Prince smiled at Linansk's consternation. "I've often shot twenty hare in an evening," he said, "and occasionally, I chance upon fellow rabbit hunters. They fall, too - foxes, sometimes wolves. The winter, Linansk, is surprisingly rich. This moon outshines the sun, and the animals understand that we do not hunt beneath it. They are taken by complete surprise."
The hussar rose and stomped in place, shivering. "As am I," he muttered in Russian.
Prince Rowra put a hand on Linansk's shoulder. "You are my guest, Andrei. I don't want to make you uncomfortable. We'll go back to the cottage."
"Nonsense!" Linansk pulled away and stepped purposefully into the heavy snow.
"To the top of the hill at most, Andrei Gavrilovich. But do try to walk quietly."
The Prince and Linansk each shot a hare before reaching the crest of the hill. The physical exertion, which warmed him, coupled with his sporting success, improved the hussars spirits. The hill, which had been Prince Rowra's unconscious objective, was the highest point of the estate. It commanded a magnificent view east and west.
"You can see those nearer lights?" the Prince asked, looking west. Linansk nodded, occupied with searching under his fur wraps for a flask of vodka. "That is Svardenskoy'e, with Sevrnaya Kazna obscured by the forest beyond. In this light I can just make out Yekaterinaburg. Do you see it?"
Linansk scanned the horizon and shook his head. "I can't see any of that, Prince," he said. "You astonish me."
Rowra grinned and wrenched the vodka flask from Linansk's hands, taking a swig for forms sake, regretting his clumsy mistake. "Then I won't point out Dzhankoy'e and the Urals behind us," he said, and they both laughed.
"And what is that light?" the hussar asked. He had turned and was facing east.
The Prince knew instantly what the light was. It was an inconstant, blurry orange glow on a broad hillock a days walk distant. It was his manor house burning to the ground, and he knew with an awful wrenching certainty that Marina Petrushevskaya was burning with it.
He set off at once for the cottage - the sledge, horses - in a methodical, leaping run through the high snow. They had walked for hours from the little hunting cottage, which was itself an hours hard riding from the house.
He arrived only moments before Grisha, his peasant overseer, galloped up on a foaming horse. A brace of wheellock pistols were stuffed in the belt that secured his furs. "My Prince!" he cried in Ukrainian, weeping. He did not dismount.
"Grisha, ya ne rozumiyu," Rowra said. I do not understand.
The old peasant was sobbing uncontrollably. His exhausted, steaming horse pawed listlessly at the snow.
"Grisha - druzhyna? Druzhyna?" The wife.
The wife, Grisha indicated, was dead. Marina Petrushevskaya was dead. Rowra grabbed the overseer's knee and forced him to look into his eyes. "How, Grisha?"
"What does it matter?"
"It matters. How?"
"The fire!" the old man sobbed.
Prince Rowra felt the loss, but the full impact of the blow was deferred by force of will. She was dead, Finally Dead. He gently helped Grisha dismount, told him to start a fire, and tended to the horse. Inside the cottage, Grisha gratefully accepted some Kvass and drank it greedily. There would be no vodka for him tonight - not if either of them were to see another sunset.
"Why?" he asked.
"News came from the village Zemstovo this afternoon - a telegraph to Yekaterinaburg and then a special messenger - General Rostovzov has died, and the Council of State, my God, they've passed the law."
The General had been the last stumbling block in St. Petersburg. The Council of State had, by sweeping decree, emancipated Russia's twenty million serfs overnight.
Grisha stared into the fire. "They've come for you, Prince. They call you Shalvachna, the Ukrainian pigs."
Vampire.
Oddly, Rowra didn't feel afraid. He was calm and lucid and, he thought, at peace.
"I left Captain Linansk atop the hill beyond Bulashova's meadow. Fetch him and take him to Dzhankoy'e at once."
The Prince looked into Grisha's ancient, wet eyes and felt compassion stir like the rustle of long-dead leaves. "Grisha," he said, "you've served me faithfully these many years, and your only reward shall be abandonment." He hurriedly scrawled a note with charcoal on parchment, addressed to Linansk, charging him with Grisha's care until further notice. It was, Rowra indicated, a debt of honor he would endeavor to repay. He kissed Grisha on both cheeks - the old man started at the icy touch, which came from something more unnatural than the bitter cold - and galloped off on one of the sledge horses.
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The village Zemstovo had not tried to stop some of the more free-thinking new citizens from looting a Svardenskoy'e merchant and distributing his ale and vodka to the cheering mob. Like an out of control machine lubricated with alcohol, they set off toward the Rowra manor house intent on destroying the monsters that dwelt there.
Princess Marina Petrushevskaya Rowra would have escaped, had not the household serfs turned on her with hatred the moment word came whispered to them - freedom. She died the Final Death with a stake through her heart as the sitting room collapsed around her, tortured by the Rotshreck, praying for Owen to return and save her.
The Prince arrived as the fires dissipated; a blackened skeleton crumbled to ash as the peasants celebrated, dancing in the flame's heat. He heard the word ripple through the crowd - *shalvachna* - and the merriment ceased, and moonlight glinted off one hundred knives. Rowra had time to think about what he was doing, but hadn't reached any conclusions. When the moment came he fought and lost. They beat him with torches, cut him to pieces, ran over his head with a four-wheeled taranta, and buried his corpse in the earth beside the ruins, softened by the inferno, absurdly devoid of snow in the teeth of winter. Join your vampire bitch in hell, they said, and spat upon his grave. Dobry Vecher, foreigner, they said. Good evening to you.
The fact that they had not destroyed him was a revelation. Had they hurled his broken body into the smouldering embers instead of making sport with a mock funeral, it would have been the Final Death. The peasants had made his decision for him.
Owen Rowra - no longer a Prince, barely more than a wounded animal - somehow crawled out of the earth before it became a frozen tomb. He found shelter from the sun in the empty stable. They had stolen the horses. The vodka-tinged blood of an ex-serf too drunk to stand, left behind in the bed of a hay rick, gave him the strength to heal the worst of his wounds and stagger into the forest.
The next ten years were something of a blur. Later, he would remember moving steadily east as if following a vision. The demon spirit Rowra again to the Evenk and Yukaghir natives of Siberia, a force of nature, scrabbling after the rising sun like a fiery talisman, away from Europe and the company of men.
He stopped moving east when he came to the water, and realized with a start that he was staring at the impassive rolling plain of the North Pacific ocean. Rowra looked at his hands - the matted and rotting furs that covered his body - and wept tears of blood.
A few weeks later, under a moon as bright as the fatal one so far removed in time and space but so close to his dead heart, he walked into Vladivostok, and rejoined the World.
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"He does his best work when he's ..." Jeanne Hebuterne nodded apologetically toward her lover's motionless form on the bed. The Montparnasse loft they shared was a study in squalor; empty wine bottles competed for space with the ruins of canvasses he had shredded in rage. A thick cloud of hashish smoke hung in the air.
Owen Rowra didn't hear her. He was lost in a half-finished nude on an easel.
"Is this you?" he said, finally. Jeanne blushed and nodded. "You inspire him."
"He is like this sometimes, but if you met him at the Rotonde you'd laugh and laugh. He's very social. I'm really very sorry about this."
Jeanne was perhaps nineteen and radiant, with chestnut hair and penetrating blue eyes. She was wearing a tattered yellow sweater and, even in the chaos of the loft, held herself with touching dignity.
"You needn't be sorry," Rowra said, "I've seen what I came here for. Your Amadeo is a genius. I'll talk to Zborowski and make some arrangements."
She brightened and began clearing the table. "You'll stay for supper?"
"I regret that I cannot," Rowra said.
"Not even tea, Monsoir Rowra?"
"Not even tea, Jeanne." She often appeared to escort her drunken lover home from the cafes, and it was common practice in Montparnasse to refer to her as Madame Modigliani. Rowra found this awkward, and settled for calling her Jeanne.
His return to Paris had been uneventful. Vicomte Eduard Poincarre chose not to challenge him, something Owen secretly longed for, and he was received by the prince and elders with distant courtesy.
Rowra haunted the Rotonde and the Dome, spending long, satisfying evenings among the artists and students as he had with their grandparents 100 years earlier. He met Picasso, and deeply offended him with his views on the Spanish Monarchy. Rowra supported and admired Moise Kisling and Chaim Soutine, taking the role of a wealthy patron of the new school. But his heart was with Modigliani, whose austere and wrenching portraits seemed to resonate within him. His nudes were so frankly sensual, so erotic, that Rowra could almost feel his dead heart beat again.
He visited Modigliani often, bringing money and suppies; offering encouragement. These visits held a special delight when Jeanne Hebuterne was present. Although he refused to admit it, he had fallen in love with her. His genuine admiration for Amadeo only compounded his confusion.
Rowra had vowed never to love again, not in all eternity. The very thought was painful; it brought back images of the fire and the ensuing oblivion. I would rather be destroyed, he told himself, than love another.
She came to him one night in tears, distraught. Jeanne invited herself into his dark, book-filled flat and sobbed her wretched tale to him. Amadeo had taken a lover; an Englishwoman named Hastings. Jeanne had given him a daughter, sacrificed her future, and endured the hatred of her Catholic family. He had betrayed her for a poet and a debutante.
Rowra closed his eyes in a paroxysm of despair. More than anything in the world, he wanted to comfort her, to hold her, to give her what measure of peace he could.
He wanted to be human again.
Instead, he stood looking at a painting -- a portrait of Jeanne in better times, Jeanne glowing with beauty and confidence, leaning out of the canvas to devour him -- and said quietly, "It is swift as a shadow, short as any dream/ Brief as the lightning in the collied night that, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth/ And ere man hath a chance to say 'behold!' the jaws of darkness do devour it up/So quick do bright things come to confusion."
"What?" Jeanne choked, still crying bitterly.
"I'm a fool, Jeanne. I'm so sorry."
"Hold me, Rowra."
He opened his eyes and she was achingly alive before him. He could feel the heat of her across the room. "I regret," he said, his own voice ragged with emotion, "that I cannot."
Modigliani died the following January, consumed at last by tuberculosis. They had affected a reconciliation and Jeanne, pregnant with their second child, was at his side until the end. Her grief at his death was overwhelming.
Rowra had at once offered his unused tomb in Pere Lachaise, which had held nothing but the dust of failure and disgrace for a century.
Jeanne did not attend the funeral; nor did Rowra.
A scattering of Kindred held their own informal ceremony at dusk, mostly Toreador Neonates who had recognized the artist's brilliance. Rowra greeted them discreetly after Modigliani had been interred.
"He was a great man," Rowra said.
"Oh, yes," a young Toreador named Theophile said, smiling broadly.
"Why the smile?"
Theophile shrugged. "Funerals always cheer me up, Rowra. Attending them reinforces my own ... uniqueness. I find them most amusing."
"That will change soon enough," Rowra growled, turning to walk away.
"Oh, Rowra," Theophile called. He turned to face the Neonate. "I know you're very wise, having lived such a very long time, and I'm sure you've taken steps to prevent this tragedy from being ... compounded."
"What do you mean?"
Theophile turned to the other Kindred, who all seemed amused by some private joke. "I mean, for aught that I could ever see/ Could ever hear by play or history/ The course of true love never did run smooth. Did it, Rowra?"
"Jeanne," he said, and broke into a run.
Theophile and his friends laughed and laughed.
The Hebuterne mansion was surrounded by crowds of the curious. Rowra shoved his way through and was blocked by a frowning gendarme at the door.
One look, and the door was opened for him.
Jeanne lay in the foyer, incongruously folded into a dirty wheelbarrow. Her nightshirt, which covered her pregnant belly, was stained with soil and greenery. Her long, graceful neck was broken.
"Terrible, Monsoir, out her window" a servant whispered, "suicide."
On her left middle finger was Eduard Poincarre's signet ring.
X-Authentication-Warning: bigdog.fred.net: majordom set sender to owner-granite using -f Date: Wed, 16 Jul 1997 16:44:32 -0700 (PDT) X-Sender: umiak@mail.eskimo.com Mime-Version: 1.0 To: Granite@fred.net From: umiak@eskimo.com Subject: 1943 Sender: owner-granite Precedence: bulk Reply-To: granite@fred.net
There was a moment of stunning clarity, of connected-ness, when the two men made eye contact over the thin black barrel of the Mauser automatic pistol.
My God, Rowra thought, he can't be over fifteen.
The bullet passed through his neck from point blank range, searing his face with powder burns and knocking him into the wall. Hydrostatic shock created a gaping, jagged exit wound. It was a lethal shot.
Rowra cupped his neck in one hand and watched his would-be assassin skid around the wet cobblestone corner. A single white rose lay in the gutter.
The Ventrue Sheuller, who wore the uniform of an SS Sturmbannfuhrer out of habit and vanity, examined the grisly wound and growled in disgust.
"You killed him, of course."
Owen Rowra shook his head and winced.
"Mercy is a sickness that all Kindred periodically weather," Sheuller said.
"'Tis mightiest in the mightiest."
"Don't quote Shakespeare at me, you embarassing Toreador," Sheuller hissed. "The White Rose must be destroyed, disbanded, eliminated. If you feel so much *compassion*, reflect that our methods are rapid and painless. When the SS catches them, they'll be impaled on meat hooks."
Rowra stared out the window at broad, deserted Alexanderplatz. "I'm starting to realize that we should not be involved in this," he said quietly.
"Your joking. The Thousand Year Reich is the greatest step forward for our kind in history. It is as critical a movement as the domestication of livestock was among mortals."
Rowra had heard it all before. "Humans are not cattle," he said.
"The difference being ..." Sheuller left the question hanging.
Rowra turned to face Sheuller. "The soul," he said.
"And what, pray tell, is that?"
"Immortal."
"So you and I, we have souls?"
Rowra nodded wearily.
"And shall we be judged?"
"I think we already have been," he said quietly.
Scheuller paced back and forth in agitation.
"I know you've spent much of your time among the Slavs, so I'll make this very simple: we are *predators*, Rowra. They are *prey*. The National Socialists, with our help, will create a just - and merciful - new order for humanity. They'll rule the world for us, Rowra. How can some pathetic untermensch with a pistol and a flower shake your enthusiasm for that?"
Rowra returned to the window. "He showed more courage than I have ever seen," he said.
"You're weak," Scheuller spat venemously. "You've made the classic Toreador mistake of thinking you're still human. You can delude yourself, but the world you live in does not reward mercy, and any soul you have is as dead as you are. Good night."
He slammed the door behind him, and Rowra listened to the receding echo of his jackboots on the cobbles below.
"Consider this," he mused absently to himself, "that in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation; we do pray for mercy, and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy."
He resolved to leave Berlin at once, and a familiar urge compelled him east, toward the exhausted Wehrmacht front lines and the lethal dawn.
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