Warhammer - [Genevieve 04] - Silver Nails by Jack Yeovil (epub)

Author:Jack Yeovil (epub)
Format: epub

THE IBBY THE FISH FACTOR

I

It was the worst kind of sunset. The sky, red to the west, churned with cloud the angry colour of fresh-spilled blood. Even squat statues cast shadows as long as temple steeples. Passersby were fringed incarnadine in the dying sun. At the eastern end of Konigplatz was the colossal building that housed Altdorf's law courts and the headsman's offices: its thousand leaded windows caught the last light and flashed vivid, painful orange into her sensitive eyes.

As the dark crept across the 'platz, her vampire senses quickened. Mites and motes dancing in the summer evening caught her attention. Genevieve could distinguish each and every speck×dust or insect×and chart its random course. The background chatter of city noise rose like an orchestra tuning up, and she could make out words spoken in anger or affection across the square. The calls of birds pecking each other over scraps of food and the cries of competing proclaimers became an assault on her ears. Despite her need to pass as ordinary, nightfall brought her to full life, pricking the red thirst she must not slake. Sharpening nails cramped inside her too-tight velvet gloves, curling in on themselves like hooks. She ground her teeth, trying to keep her lips demurely clamped over swelling, razor-edged fangs.

Her eyes hurt most. She saw too many ghosts in the last light of day.

This season, with Clause 17 proclaimed all over the capital of the Empire, it wasn't a good idea to wear smoked glasses on the streets.

Let alone affect a red-lined black cloak, sleep in a coffin, neglect to cast a reflection, shapeshift into a bat or wolf, flinch from an icon, or ask for six hundred and seventy-six candles on her birthday cake.

Or smile too sharply.

Genevieve had never been a cloaks-and-coffins sort of vampire. She couldn't transform into anything except an angrier, sharper-toothed and clawed version of her regular self. She could bear garlic, a useful trait in a person forced occasionally to subsist on the blood of Tileans who bathe their food in the stuff. Her conscience was clear enough that holy emblems held no horror for her.

But sunlight made her eyes ache. Enough of it would start her skin peeling.

And she needed to drink warm human blood quite often. That was never going to make her popular. This summer, with Antiochus Bland's Sanitation Bill posted all over this part of the Empire, it was also an invitation to be guest of honour at a corpse-burning party.

At the city gates this afternoon, Genevieve had pointedly been asked to kiss a blessed amulet by a bored watchman who didn't take the trouble to clean the baubles between uses. Symbols of Shallya, Verena, Ulric and Sigmar were available. Just ahead of her in the queue, a fastidious merchant cringed at being handed a Sigmarite hammer still glistening with the slobber of a sickly farmer's boy. The silk-seller, unfortunate enough to have eyebrows that met suspiciously over his nose, was hauled out of the line by a couple of black-robed clerics of Morr and put to the Question.

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