The Zenda Vendetta (TimeWars 4)

“Damn it, Fritz, you remember tomorrow,” the king said, irately. “You start before I do, you must be more sparing by two hours than I. And I’ll have Cousin Rudolf to attend me.”

“We really cannot afford to overindulge tonight,” said Fritz to Finn, as if seeking his aid in calming down the king’s boisterous spirit. “The colonel and I leave here sharply at six tomorrow. We must ride down to Zenda and return with the guard of honor to fetch the king at eight, and then we all ride together to the station, where we take the train to Strelsau.”

“Hang that guard,” said Sapt, sourly.

“Now, now, it’s very civil of my brother to ask the honor for his regiment, wherever their sympathies may lie. I’ll not discuss politics tonight, Sapt. At any rate, Cousin Rudolf, you have no need of starting early, so you can join me while these two temperate chaps abstain. What, only two bottles, Josef? Out with you, fetch us two bottles more. Michael can’t drink all of it, you know.”

It was late when the king pushed back from the table with a belch to announce that he had drunk enough. The wine had been excellent, indeed, a welcome change from the poor claret at the inn. Finn had matched Rudolf glass for glass, so that he now felt relaxed, full, and pleasantly diverted. While the old woman, whose name Finn never learned, cleared away the table, Josef brought in a wicker-covered bottle that looked as though it had been aging in Michael’s cellar for quite some time.

“His Highness, the Duke of Strelsau, bade me to set this wine before the king when the king was weary of all other wines,” he said, as though he had rehearsed the speech, which undoubtedly he had. “He asked that you drink for the love that he bears his brother.”

“Well done, Black Michael!” said the king. “Hang him, he thinks to save the best for last, when my thirst has been abated. Well, out with the cork, Josef, my man.”

As Finn w

atched with disbelief, the king took the bottle, put it to his mouth and drained it without pausing for breath. Then he flung it into a corner of the room, winked at them, put his head down on the table and was snoring within seconds.

As easy as that, thought Finn. All through the meal and well into the night, he had wondered nervously which bottle or which dish had contained the drug that Michael was supposed to dope his brother with, never dreaming that it would be done in so obvious a manner. Obvious to someone who expected it, at any rate. He sighed with relief, grateful for the fact that now he would not have to inject himself with the adrenergen that would have kept him up all night, clawing at the ceiling, regardless of which drug Michael had used or how potent a dose he had selected. He could now enjoy his buzz and get a good night’s sleep without having to worry about that frightful nitro hammering through his brain or terrorists sneaking up on him in the middle of the night. The others were keeping watch outside with night scopes. It really wasn’t fair. He’d had a great meal and fine wine to drink and he’d be sleeping soundly in a warm bed while they shivered in the cold night air outside, staying awake to protect him.

Ah, well, life’s a bitch, he thought. He sincerely hoped it wouldn’t rain.

So much time spent in the bowels of Zenda Castle had made Drakov accustomed to darkness, so he was easily able to make out the shape of the Observer. He was so intent upon watching the hunting lodge that he was completely ignorant of Drakov’s presence a mere several yards away. Death stood right behind him, Drakov thought, almost within reach, and he didn’t even know it. He didn’t sense a thing. No subconscious realization made the hairs prickle on the back of his neck, no sensation as though someone had walked across his grave made him apprehensive, no sudden intuition made him spin around to face the danger.

They were all wrong, thought Drakov, all the poets and the storytellers who ever dwelt upon the darker side of human nature in their art. Death is not a melodrama. If anything, it is a pathetic one-act comedy that had been poorly written. The audience never laughs and by the time they realize that the play simply isn’t funny, it is already over.

Drakov felt a touch of sadness as he saw that the Observer was little more than a boy. The miracle drug treatments of Falcon’s time made physical appearances deceptive, as in his own case, but there were other indicators of the fellow’s youthfulness-the tension in his bearing, the restlessness which made him shift position constantly, the subtle yet telling sounds he made despite his efforts at not making any noise. He was like a small boy out on his first hunting trip with an old veteran, spending his first night in a hunting stand. The old hunter, experienced and calm, knew to blend in with the silence of the forest; he knew how to relax into complete motionlessness. The small boy was too excited, too inexperienced to appreciate such subtleties. Despite all his best efforts, he moved too much, unable to synchronize his heartbeat with the gentle sighing of the wind. He would think that he was being quiet, but the tiny sounds he made, almost inaudible to him, would be like claps of thunder to the forest animals. The old hunter, of course, would know this, but he would say nothing. He would know that there would be no game on such a night, with such a green companion. The object of the lesson would be to give the boy an opportunity to learn to wait. In time, the boy would learn. But this boy would never have the time.

Drakov, the old hunter, wondered why it was that artists always attempted to poeticize death and violence. Death was merely final, finality in itself, and real violence was sudden, terrible, and often totally incomprehensible. It wasn’t death that was poetic, he thought as he watched his young victim with a mournful gaze, it was survival. That was something few artists ever understood. The Russians understood it. Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, especially Tolstoy. The Russian loves to suffer, Drakov thought, because he has never known another state, and so he has embraced the only state he knows. Wistfully, he thought that the soul of a Russian peasant was a lovely thing, simple and innocent and pure.

“It is from the soil of Russia,” his mother had once told him in Siberia, “watered by the tears of all of those who’ve suffered, that the flower of the new world will one day spring.”

“And what if that flower turns out to be a weed?” he had asked her, already a cynic at the age of fourteen, never imagining just how prophetic his words would turn out to be.

“Then that weed will be watered by those self-same tears of suffering,” his mother said. “One must suffer before one can know redemption.”

If that was true, thought Drakov, then his mother had been redeemed many times over. But he was not certain it was true. He was not certain that one could be redeemed. Another writer, an American-who else? — had written that Byronic melancholy was the opium of the intellectuals and the last refuge of little minds. No doubt Falcon would agree. She never had the time to grieve, as she had so simply and mercilessly put it, for all the souls who fell by the wayside. Reluctantly, he took out his laser and aimed it at his victim’s head. He hesitated.

The beam flash would undoubtedly alert the others, who were neither as young nor as inexperienced as this one. He transferred the laser to his left hand and moved forward slowly, silently, closing the distance between them. He raised his right arm and brought the edge of his right hand down hard on the back of the young man’s neck, just below the point at which the spine met the base of the skull.

He heard a voice cry out as he struck and he spun instinctively, firing blindly with his left hand and hitting the chronoplate remote with his right. Even as he fired, he felt a searing pain lance along his side and the next thing he knew, he was back in the turret atop the keep of Zenda Castle, collapsing to the floor and grimacing with pain. He had not been the only hunter on the stalk. Just before he had clocked out, he had caught a brief glimpse of a dark shape silhouetted against the moonlight. And, irrationally, in that brief instant he had known exactly who it was.

4

A bucketful of stinging cold water brought Finn sputtering to his feet, ready to commit murder. “God damn it!” he shouted, but Sapt pushed him back down onto the bed, ducking under his wild punch easily.

“Stay yourself, man,” the old officer said, sharply. “I tried every other means of waking you and you would not budge. It’s five o’clock.”

“Five o’clock!” said Finn, still not fully cognizant.

“Rassendyll,” said Fritz von Tarlenheim, taking him by the arm. “Look here.”

Rudolf Elphberg was stretched out full length upon the floor, completely drenched. It appeared that they had thrown at least four times as much water on him as they had on Finn and still he slept. Sapt moved over to him and gave him a sharp slap in the face, hard enough to make Finn wince.

“Wake up, Your damned useless Majesty!” he said. “Hang him, he drank three times what either of you did,” Sapt said, eyeing both Finn and von Tarlenheim with fury. “And damn me all to hell for sitting there and letting him! This is a fine muddle!”

“We’ve spent half an hour on him,” von Tarlenheim said with exasperation.

Finn knelt down and felt the king’s pulse. It was quite slow.