A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (best reads .TXT) 📗

      Maule did not answer.

      “What are we going to do with him, then?” Joe wanted to know.

* * *

      Angie, struggling against what felt like terminal exhaustion, had retreated to the only chair currently upright in the room, and let herself sink into it.

      And then she realized that she could not really rest. Not yet.

      Pulling herself slowly to her feet, she left the room, unnoticed by any of the men. Moving as in a daze, without much conscious emotion, she stooped in the bedroom hallway to pick up from the floor a large, sharp, convenient wooden splinter.

      In Maule’s bedroom she somehow found the strength to tug the dresser out a little distance from the wall. The secret compartment opened easily. There were the jars. She found the proper one. Not likely that she would forget what it looked like.

* * *

      Back in the living room, the debate was still going on.

      “Again you will spare my life, I suppose,” said Borgia in a less strangled voice. He had been allowed to shift his position slightly, and was now lying more on his right side and shoulder than on his face. One arm was still bent up beside his back. “Because of your damned honor. I suppose you can discover some way to imprison me again. And then in two hundred years, or a hundred, or whenever I can, I will be coming after you again.”

      “Perhaps,” said Maule.

      “No perhaps. There is no doubt about it.”

      “I thought,” said Maule, as though the words constituted some kind of explanation, “that Spain would be your native soil.”

      “At this date I am not likely to accept apologies.”

      “Nor am I likely to offer any.”

      None of the men were aware of Angie’s immediate presence until she was very close. None of them paid much attention to her even then. Not until she had whipped out the long, poisoned splinter from behind her back and thrust it, hard, up under Borgia’s ribs, aiming for his vampire’s heart.

Chapter Nineteen

      Feeling doubly repulsed by the behavior of Duke Cesare and the blackened and hideous spectacle of his father’s body, I hastened to distance myself from the Vatican through which, for some eleven years, they had sought to dominate the world. Rome in general agreed with me in being ready to see the last of the Borgias; Alexander’s death was celebrated in a general wave of rejoicing. At the same time, out in the farms and villages of the Romagna, many mourned the impending fall from power of his son, the young man who had given their towns the best government they could remember.

      As for myself, I rejoiced in my new freedom. Indeed it was freedom in a degree that I had never yet experienced; that night marked the first time since the beginning of my life as a vampire that I felt myself under no obligation, either to the Borgias or to that even grimmer master called Revenge.

      Of course my liberty was not perfect; I suppose that in this world no one’s ever is. In my case the sharpest boundary was drawn by the beautiful Lucrezia, for whom my love was undiminished. She had not accepted my explanation as to why I had severed relations with her brother in his hour of great need; but I convinced myself that if I were to go about the matter properly, she could eventually be made to understand. Though devoted to Cesare, she understood as clearly as anyone that he really was a treacherous scoundrel.

      Before leaving Rome I had one more opportunity to speak to Madonna in the underground complex where we had met on my most recent return to Rome. The murdered bear was gone now, but ropes and chains still hung from the ceiling, as if in readiness for some other creature to take its place.

      At the time of our final meeting in that chamber, days had passed since Alexander’s death, but Lucrezia was reluctant to start back for Ferrara as long as her beloved brother’s life, health, and fortune still hung so perilously in the balance.

      I presented myself before her, and we began a conversation that quickly turned into an argument. Madonna Lucrezia declared, with great spirit and passion, that dear Cesare at this moment needed all the help that everyone could give him, and I was a scoundrel for choosing this time to leave his service. I in turn described the way in which her brother had mortally insulted me, and assured the lady that if he were not her brother, he would even now be sharing in the funeral rites, such as they were, of Alexander.

      To vindicate myself in Lucrezia’s eyes, I justified, in legalistic detail, my reasoned refusal to take part in the ordered cleaning-out of her father’s treasury, the thievery of money that, as everyone admitted, belonged to the Church. As far as I was concerned, their father might have stolen freely from the Church he was sworn to protect, and Cesare might continue to do so, if he considered such actions compatible with the Borgia honor—but theft of any kind has always been utterly repugnant to the honor of Drakulya, and that the contemplated thievery was sacrilegious only made the matter considerably worse.

      I asked Lucrezia whether she had never heard of my reputation as a ruler, of the thousands—the numbers grew with the stories, from year to year—of impaled bodies of bandits that lined my highways? Her reply—something to the effect that if I could impale all those people, why should I draw back at a little pilfering in a good cause?— showed her failure to grasp the true moral principles involved.

      It argues much for the closeness of our relationship that, after we had such a discussion, we were still on speaking terms. I of course volunteered to escort Lucrezia safely home to Ferrara, Word had reached her in Rome that her husband had come home from one of his artillery outings rather sooner than expected, and was complaining of