Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [48]
‘Von Klatka, impale him.’
Von Klatka and Gorcha took a foreleg each and hoisted the Bachelor Equerry up on to their shoulders, his legs dangling, trousers soaked with blood. He was reverting to his original shape. The Carpathians settled His Lordship on the first point and he sank belly-first on to it. His clothes ripped as he was penetrated, and a gush of hot blood and shit squirted down the wooden pole as his weight speared him. The stake, insufficiently banked, tilted and nearly fell. Gorcha and von Klatka held the stake steady, a workman piling cobbles into the hole, until it could stand by itself.
They were showing mercy. If the stake-end were rounded rather than sharpened, death could take up to a week, the victim’s organs displaced rather than punctured. The Bachelor Equerry would die as soon as the point breached his heart.
Kostaki looked about. Mackenzie was leaning against a wall, regurgitating his last meal. He had done the same long ago, when he first saw Prince Dracula deal with his enemies in the fashion that earned him his nickname.
The assembled inverts saw what was happening to the Bachelor Equerry, and panicked. They had to be penned with swords. Several boys escaped, darting under Carpathian arms. Kostaki did not mind if a few scattered to the winds. The purpose of this raid was to catch the patrons of Number 19, Cleveland Street, not the unfortunates pressed into service there. One man, wearing the vestiges of canonical vestments, was on his knees praying loudly, a Christian martyr. A face-painted youth stood haughty with folded arms, gilded nakedness like imperial robes, outstaring his persecutors.
‘Good grief,’ said a well-dressed passerby to his new-born wife, ‘that man’s a member of my club.’
Mackenzie was hysterical now, slapping the inverts, excoriating them in Scots. A bewhiskered man in the red tunic of some high-ranking officer pressed a pistol into Mackenzie’s hand and begged to be decently shot as was his right. The policeman emptied the gun into the air and threw it away, spitting after it.
A knot of three new-born youths huddled together, shivering in ladies’ night-dresses, hissing through dainty fangs. Their faces were smooth, their bodies womanish. Kostaki was reminded of Prince Dracula’s concubines.
Mackenzie got himself under control and started properly to supervise his men. He presented the captives with death warrants; already filled out, but with blanks for their names. This business had to be done legally.
‘Masterful sir,’ wheedled a voice. It was Orlando. ‘Sir, if I might make so bold as to mention, there is one who has escaped your justice. An important personage is to be found in a secret inner chamber, taking his gross pleasure with two poor lads stolen off the streets.’
Kostaki looked down on the hunched footman. Under his powder, his skin was pock-marked with disease.
‘If accommodation were to be made, sir, I might see a way to assisting you, sir, in the execution of your, if I might say, sacred duty to his worshipful highness the Prince Consort, God bless him and keep him in his palace, sir.’
The warm young man’s throat swelled with blood. Kostaki had not dealt with his own needs tonight. He grabbed Orlando by the neck and exerted pressure with his thumb.
‘Out with it, worm!’
He had to relax his grip to allow the little man to speak.
‘Behind the stairs, masterful sir, there’s a secret door. And I’m the only one as knows the secret.’
Kostaki let him go and pushed him across the road.
‘Sir, the one I speak of is a powerful individual, masterful sir, and I doubt if even you could subdue him by yourself.’
Kostaki detached Gorcha and a burly new-born police sergeant from the impaling party. The next of the inverts were being lifted up to their stakes. The dying yells must be audible throughout the city. In Buckingham Palace, Prince Dracula would be raising a goblet of virgin wine to the enforcement of his edict.
Orlando scurried ratlike