A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9) by Fred Saberhagen (most read book in the world .TXT) 📗

in the city—which was, after all, a lot safer than trying to hunt down Vlad. He understood that fact much better than did any of the people he had sent out.

* * * * * *

      Endlessly fascinated by the Terror as it developed, the younger brother spent a great deal of time roaming about the city, usually after dark, dressed in sans-culotte costume.

      Wearing his carmagnole and his red woolen nightcap with a jaunty tricolor cockade pinned on one side, in perfect accord with the latest in popular fashion, he joined hundreds of others in haunting the Place de la Revolution, waiting for the next batch of executions.

      In such guise, he had taken a modest part, chiefly that of an encouraging observer, in the slaughter at the Palace of the Tuileries, in 1792; he never realized how narrowly he had escaped Vlad’s efforts to find him there.

* * *

      The sole survivor of Radu’s failed war party returned to the city, bringing his master the story of the disastrous attack upon his older brother. The survivor for some reason believed that his making a thorough report entitled him to a reward of gold, or at least forgiveness, for his part in the fiasco.

      When Radu was certain that he had extracted every bit of relevant information his informant could provide, he paid him instead in a different kind of coin. Then he made his own preparations to hurry to the scene of the reported combat.

* * *

      Packing up one of his portable caches of home earth in a convenient traveling bag, and saddling a horse, the younger Dracula started out. He had a hidden earth or two of his own in the area that he was bound for, but Vlad had been there and might have destroyed them. Radu intended to take no chances.

      Following with some difficulty the trail of his vanished posse, according to the best directions the unnerved survivor had been able to provide, he came in the course of two days to the rural site of the fight, a scene which had begun to regain its pastoral and peaceful character. Here the visitor from the city spent some time in observing closely the remaining marks on the ground and torn-up grass and shrubbery, reconstructing the event in his own mind. It appeared that the failed assassins had almost succeeded in killing Vlad before he could dig himself up out of his ravaged earth. There, certainly, was the ruined grave, with a lot of French dirt still scattered about, and the remnants of at least one breather’s body still lying where the crows and wild dogs had let them fall.

      Radu drove off the remaining scavengers, who dared to clamor their annoyance at him. He even considered refreshing himself with the blood of one of them. For some months now all the blood, all the nourishment he had ingested had been human. This rich diet sometimes began to pall a trifle through the very sameness of its luxury; but now, after thinking the matter over, he decided to hold out for some finer sustenance than wild dog.

      He was impressed anew, though not at all surprised, by the evidence of his brother’s ferocity and skill in combat. These were matters that the younger brother knew and appreciated better than anyone else who was still alive.

      With the experience of three hundred years to guide him, Radu had little difficulty interpreting a number of the surviving details of sign left by the fight. Scraping at the ground with a booted foot, he unearthed more rat-gnawed breather’s bones, the last remains of another of his servants.

      Served the fools right for bungling their job!

      Until this moment he had at least allowed himself to hope that his brother was truly dead. But he no longer thought that there was any chance of that. Logically, of course, there was still a chance that Vlad, injured and caught out in the open, had died of his wounds, or succumbed to the searing power of unshielded daylight.

* * *

      Radu had chosen a strong, phlegmatic mount, and he went riding languidly. Today it amused him to be brazenly aristocratic. Traveling by daylight under the shelter of a cloudy sky and broad-brimmed hat, he found and followed the trail left by his wounded brother in leaving the scene of the struggle.

      He rode past one vulture, and then another, who from their perches on high dead branches regarded the journeying vampire with the air of amused spectators. He tried to find his own amusement in the fact, but failed.

      One thing the cautious searcher knew he would not find was his brother’s corpse; the old, old nosferatu did not linger on in any earthly form once they had expired; their bodies tended to vanish, quickly and rather spectacularly.

* * *

      In good time the trail he was following brought him to a chateau, or manor, which now stood silent and deserted under the moon.

      For a time Radu sat motionless in his saddle, probing the scene before him with all his senses. Only a few days ago, this house had been someone’s dwelling, but now the subtle changes accompanying desertion had come over the place. Dismounting and walking forward, he found that he could enter almost without difficulty. Only a shadow of the habitation factor remained to slow him at the door, testifying to recent occupation.

      If his brother had found shelter anywhere, the odds were overwhelming that it was here.

* * *

      That feeling was soon confirmed when Radu sensed the presence of a vampire’s earth. Alluring, like the faint aroma of baked bread to a breather. Radu had not known about this hideaway of Vlad’s until now. There were no clues that a breather would have noticed, but undoubtedly there existed a flattened oval of Transylvanian soil under the paving of the floor in the oldest part of the house, beneath an odd irregular chamber now used only as a storeroom or shed.

      The hideaway was