Igor walked past Agnes, lisping nastily under his breath.
Vlad caught up with Agnes as she strode towards the table, and she was slightly glad because she didn't know what she'd do when she got there.
'You must go,' he panted. 'I wouldn't have let him hurt you, of course, but Father can get... testy.'
'Not without Granny.'
A faint voice in her head said: Leave... me...
That wasn't me, Perdita volunteered. I think that was her.
Agnes stared at the prone body. Granny Weatherwax looked a lot smaller when she was unconscious.
'Would you like to stay to dinner?' said the Count.
'You're going to... after all this talk, you're going to... suck her blood?'
'We are vampires, Miss Nitt. It's a vampire thing. A little... sacrament, shall we say.'
'How can you? She's an old lady!'
He spun round and was suddenly standing too dose to her.
'The idea of a younger aperitif is attractive, believe me,' he said. 'But Vlad would sulk. Anyway, blood develops... character, just like your old wines. She won't be killed. Not as such. At her time of life I should welcome a little immortality.' ;My great-uncle,' said Vlad. 'The last... incumbent.'
'What's the sash and star he's wearing?' said Agnes. She could hear the sounds of the mob, far off but growing louder.
'The Order of Gvot. He built our family home. Don'tgonearthe Castle, we call it. I don't know whether you've heard of it?'
'It's a strange name.'
'Oh, he used to laugh about it. The local coachmen used to warn visitors, you see. "Don't go near the castle," they'd say. "Even if it means spending a night up a tree, never go up there to the castle," they'd tell people. "Whatever you do, don't set foot in that castle." He said it was marvellous publicity. Sometimes he had every bedroom full by 9 p.m. and people would be hammering on the door to get in. Travellers would go miles out of their way to see what all the fuss was about. We won't see his like again, with any luck. He did rather play to the crowd, I'm afraid. Rose from the grave so often that he had a coffin with a revolving lid. Ah... Aunt Carmilla...'
Agnes stared at a very severe woman in a figure-hugging black dress and deep-plum lipstick.
'She was said to bathe in the blood of up to two hundred virgins at a time,' Vlad said. 'I don't believe that. Use more than eighty virgins and even quite a large bath will overflow, Lacrimosa tells me.'
'These little details are important,' said Agnes, buoyed up by the excitement of terror. 'And, of course, it is so hard to find the soap.'
'Killed by a mob, I'm afraid.'
'People can be so ungrateful.'
'And this...' the light passed along the hall '... is my grandfather...'
A bald head. Dark-rimmed, staring eyes. Two teeth like needles, two ears like batwings, fingernails that hadn't been trimmed for years...
'But half the picture's just bare canvas,' said Agnes.
'The family story is that old Magyrato got hungry,' said Vlad. 'A very direct approach to things, my grandfather. See the reddish-brown stains just here? Very much in the old style. And here... well, some distant ancestor, that's all I know.'
This picture was mostly dark varnish. There was a suggestion of a beak on a hunched figure.
Vlad turned away, quickly. 'We've come a long way, of course,' he said. 'Evolution, Father says.'
'They look very... powerful,' said Agnes.
'Oh, yes. So very powerful, and yet so very, very dumb,' said Vlad. 'My father thinks stupidity is somehow built into vampirism, as if the desire for fresh blood is linked to being as thick as a plank: Father is a very unusual vampire. He and Mother raised us... differently.'