Vienna

A Bite in the Dark

Dinner at Palais Kinsky that evening was a quiet, grieving thing, two seats conspicuously empty at the table. It was Freddy Cavendish who broke the silence, arriving with the news as gently as he could manage: Colonel Moreau had been found dead, and Varrio was in the hands of the Polizeidirektion. The Colonel’s absence, until that moment merely worrying, settled into the room as something permanent.

Varrio, meanwhile, sat in a barred room on the second floor of police headquarters, his stitched thigh throbbing, passing the time tapping a wooden cup against the window bars until he found one loose in its mortar. Captain Vogel — sharp-featured, his uniform pressed to a theatrical sheen — came to interrogate him, confirmed the Colonel was dead, and pressed on his connections to the Montferrand household and on names like Charles Vandorf and Herr Adler. Varrio gave him nothing but street-thugs and romantic intrigue, and Vogel left him locked in when word came that the Viscount had arrived below. Adrien and Freddy had indeed come to the station, but the desk sergeant blew his whistle the moment Adrien tried the stairs, and waiting alone was plainly not going to be enough. Freddy thought of a friend: Dr Leopold Fischbein, reliably found at the Goldener Hirsch two streets off, halfway through his second bottle. The moment he heard the shape of Varrio’s detention, something sharp surfaced beneath the wine — he took up hat and cane and swept into the Polizeidirektion like weather, demanding the detention register, quoting Austrian civil procedure at full volume until Vogel had no ground left to stand on and was made to march Varrio down the stairs and release him. Varrio emerged limping and bloodstained, his hair improbably immaculate. Adrien recognised Vogel at once as the man who had whispered to Baron von Kaunitz at the Imperial reception — the Brotherhood’s mole, confirmed — and Fischbein cheerfully offered to file a complaint against him, pro bono, for the pleasure of it.

Back at Palais Kinsky, Thomas had dragged a companion to the window to count the watchers: one in a doorway, one by a pastry shop, and a third at an apartment window opposite with a rifle, all of them dressed in the academic manner of the Brotherhood of the Open Measure. The party began packing in earnest. When the men returned with Varrio, the group gathered privately, and Varrio told them what he had withheld from the police: the Colonel had not died at the hands of street thugs, but of creatures — inhuman things he could barely describe. In the weight of that, Charlotte quietly told the other women that she meant to retire from this work once the mission was done; the evening had taken more than she had left to give.

The night did not let them rest. Freddy woke to a bone-deep cold and a vibration just below hearing — the same thrum he had felt beneath the Mozart at the reception — and saw at his window a faceless shape crawling down the wall, frost blooming on the stone in its wake. He roused Pemberton, and together they watched a barbed tail unfurl and lance through Charlotte’s window below. Glass shattered; the room dropped to a killing cold; a winged, faceless horror with oily whale-dark skin slid through. Georgiana, drawing on the Revelations of Glaaki, named it at once — a Nightgaunt, a thing of the dreamlands that served Nodens and abducted those who had drawn the wrong attention. Its talons raked Charlotte down before she could move, leaving her bleeding and unconscious. Emma fired her pistol point-blank into its faceless head; the ball glanced off, and the creature turned, gathered her into its arms, and folded its wings around her like a cloak. Georgiana cut at its legs and back, drawing a piercing shriek, as it began to drag Emma toward the broken window through the spreading pool of Charlotte’s blood.

The men came down the stairs and through the locked door in a crash of splintering wood — and Varrio, faced with the same kind of horror that had killed the Colonel, collapsed senseless to the carpet. Freddy’s shot did little. Thomas charged straight for Emma, hauled her from the creature’s grasp, and put himself between her and it. Then Emma, her arms still free inside the terrible embrace, lunged and bit into its neck, tore away a chunk of inky flesh and spat it across the room. The Nightgaunt shrieked and stumbled, dropping her into Georgiana, and as Varrio came to and scrambled for his weapons, Adrien drove his sword into the thing and pinned it to the wall, where its wings went slack and it sagged and began to dissolve into a spreading slick of black goo.

In the aftermath Emma staunched Charlotte’s wounds, Adrien sent his coachman Charles galloping for Lord Harcourt, and Freddy and Pemberton climbed to the frost-touched roof and found nothing. To the rumpled police inspector who arrived, the party offered a night terror and a sleepwalk into a window, and he accepted it without question; a doctor stitched Charlotte, and the concierge moved the ladies to a fresh suite, leaving the old room to its broken glass and blood-dark floor. As dawn came up on the eighth, the three Brotherhood watchers were still at their posts. Two notes arrived from Harcourt: the first that Trautmannsdorff was in custody and forthcoming, and that the organ was nearing completion; the second offering condolences, confirming the Colonel’s remains had been taken to the Josephinum, and naming Major Constantin Thurner as their contact at that evening’s masquerade — a Hussar in a red dolman and plumed headdress who would signal recognition by requesting a dance. The party loaded their luggage to be ready to move at a moment’s notice, and Freddy sent Pemberton out to find them somewhere safer to sleep.