Written in the Blood Page 5

  ‘Sir, I know about Jani. You told me before. I was asking—’

  Szilárd cut him off with a raised hand, and suddenly Izsák knew that his uncle had been leading up to this, had been feeling his way towards the news he needed to deliver.

  When finally he began to speak, it seemed as if the man addressed himself rather than the boy. ‘It would be easy to blame the tanács for their actions,’ he said. ‘And in fact I do. But the council’s convinced it has no choice.’

  Izsák opened his mouth to speak, but again his uncle waved his words away.

  ‘The palace is involved now. You’ve been sheltered from this – tucked away in Gödöllö with your father – and rightly so. But we enjoy little goodwill in this city these days. The temperature here has plummeted.’ He poured himself another drink. ‘Some of us counselled that to live so openly among the populace would one day invite disaster. Too often has our presence here encouraged envy, distrust. Something like this happens and all that resentment boils over. They’ve demanded that an example is made.’

  ‘Of my father?’

  ‘You know that he saw . . . you know he saw the kirekesztett afterwards.’

  ‘They had a fight.’

  Szilárd nodded. ‘The Főnök had instructed your father. A direct command. He requested that József bring the kirekesztett to face trial.’

  ‘But he let him go.’

  ‘Your father knew how serious the situation was, and despite everything, he allowed the boy to walk out of there. Jani is on the kirekesztett’s trail, but the damage has been done.’

  ‘What will happen?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I really am.’ Szilárd stared into Izsák’s eyes. He picked up his glass, swirled the Pálinka into a whirlpool. ‘His blood will be laid to rest.’

  The boy blinked. He frowned at his uncle, deciding that he hadn’t understood. ‘My brother’s blood?’

  ‘Your father’s, Izsák. József’s.’

  ‘Surely—’

  Szilárd’s eyes were dark. ‘I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. I’ve loved your father like a brother since the day your mother introduced us. He’s a fine man. A fine man. Whatever you hear in the coming days, always remember that. He made a mistake, that’s all. A moment of weakness, yes, but still one brought about by love. At any other time, perhaps the Főnök could have shown leniency. But with the Crown involved, with the attention that’s been focused on this, with our own tanács clamouring for a show of steel, his hand’s been forced. The Főnök has no choice, Izsák. No choice.’

  The boy’s throat was so tight he could barely give breath to his question. ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  He nodded, a stiff jerk of the head. ‘Where will it happen?’

  ‘It’s best you don’t know that.’

  ‘Are you going?’

  ‘I must. For József, I must.’

  ‘Can’t I come with you? Stand by you?’

  ‘Oh, lad.’ Szilárd rested his elbows on the desk and planted his face in his palms. He stayed in that position for a full minute. The boy saw his shoulders shake once, twice. Finally the old bear smeared tears into his hair and scratched at his beard, blowing out his cheeks. ‘It’s a brave thing you ask. József would be proud. Is proud. But it’s no place for a boy; no place for a son. Something bad happens to a crowd when its blood is up. You would not be safe.’

  ‘Can I see him? Before?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, kicsikém.’

  The boy dropped his eyes to the floor. His throat felt like a fist clenched it, choking off his words.

  He hated himself for the question that clawed to the front of his mind just then, disgusted that he should think it even as he digested the horror of his uncle’s news.

  What will happen to me?

  After their meeting, Izsák wandered the house alone, touring its floors, searching for something – anything – to block out that monstrously selfish thought. In Szilárd’s library he pulled books from the shelves and stacked them in the middle of the floor, creating a tower that reached far above his head before it finally toppled. In another room he discovered, hidden in a drawer and wrapped in rags, a bundle of oiled déjnin knives, testing their sharpness by drawing the blades across his skin. In the wine cellar, he trailed his fingers over the necks of bottles at random until he found one with a pleasing shape and smashed it against the wall. Staring at the broken glass and the scarlet splashes on the brickwork, his stomach twisted with shame; he picked up all the pieces and hid them in an empty sack.

  Izsák encountered the servant on the staircase as he was seeking his room at the top of the house.

  The man was running a cloth over the dark wood of the banisters. ‘Orphan in the morning,’ he muttered.

  Breath catching in his throat, Izsák stopped on the stair and turned. He saw the servant bend closer to the wood, as if examining it for blemishes. The question spilled out of him before he had a chance to think. ‘What did you say?’

  When the servant lifted his head, Izsák saw that no hosszú élet eyes confronted him; these were unremarkable, a dusty blue.

  The man’s face was hard and bitter – sharp angles, thin lips, pocked skin. His body seemed twisted somehow, as if his spine had warped as it had grown. One of his legs bowed out at the knee, longer than its twin.

  ‘Some people sayin’ this is how the end starts,’ he said. The words were thick in his mouth, as if forced past a swollen tongue. ‘Some people sayin’ you goin’ a be rounded up, driven out. All of you. Some people sayin’ they’ve had enough of Long Lives and their ways. That you can’t be trusted no more.’

  ‘Who’s saying that?’

  Wary, the servant’s eyes flicked up and down the stairs. ‘Not me, of course. I wouldn’t say nothin’ like that. I seen how dangerous you are. That girl, the one your brother took, she seen it, too. Not much help to her, though, was it?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  The man straightened as best he could. ‘What do I want? I don’t want nothin’ much. But some people do. Some people want to know that what they’re looking at is what it is. That it won’t do them no harm. Some people sayin’ your time has come.’ The servant glanced over his shoulder again, before drawing closer. ‘Some people sayin’ you’re all goin’ to burn.’

  His face cracked into a grin, flashing brown teeth.

  Izsák flinched, tripped against a step. Scrambling up the last few stairs on hands and knees, he ran along the hall, hearing the man’s wheezing laugh bounce off the walls. Wrenching open his guestroom door, he dived inside and slammed it behind him. He glanced around: canopy bed; wardrobe; writing desk. A single high-backed chair. Two leaded windows, looking down on to the Danube’s waters. On the floor, an empty bedpan.

  Why had he trapped himself? He was alone here, marooned at the top of the house, far away from Szilárd and the servants two floors below. From this room there was no escape should his tormentor decide to follow. No key sat in the door’s lock. If only he had kept one of the déjnin knives. If only he had pocketed one of the glass shards from the cellar.

  And what would you have done with them?

  From the hallway came a creak as the servant arrived at the top of the staircase.

  Izsák hiccupped. The back of his throat burned with bile. He pressed his spine against the door, braced the tips of his boots against the floorboards.

  He looked across the room at the cupboard. Far too heavy to move. Even if he had the strength, he had no time to heave it into position.

  Rap-scuff.

  The sound of the servant limping along the hall, dragging his game leg.

  Rap-scuff. Rap-scuff.

  Izsák opened his mouth to cry out, but his voice had left him. He breathed in half-sobs.

  Rap-scuff.

  Other side of the door now. Right outside.

  The doorknob jangled. An experimental nudge of the wood against his spine. Izsák opened his arms and flattened his palms against the wall.

>   He heard a breathy whistling, and it took him a moment to realise that it was the sound of air rushing in and out of the man’s nostrils. So close.

  Izsák shifted his position, pressing his shoulder into the door. He splayed his feet. Perhaps, locked in position that way, he might keep the door closed a fraction longer should the man attempt to burst inside.

  The keyhole was just to the right of his head, a lozenge of empty space. Swallowing the bile in his throat, Izsák moved his head towards it. He placed his eye over the hole.

  And saw another eye staring in at him.

  A rasping voice floated through the crack between door and jamb. ‘Some people sayin’ they goin’ a take your papa up to the Citadella in the morning. That the palace wants it done right, with witnesses. Not hidden, the way you usually does things. Some people sayin’ they goin’ a bleed him out, right there. And let the woman who got raped watch it happen. Some people sayin’ there’s goin’ a be celebratin’ after. Drinking and dancing. This is just the first, them people say. The first one, what starts everything that follows. A sign to the rest of us faithful. Of the burnin’ to come.’

  ‘Please,’ Izsák whispered. ‘Please stop.’ He couldn’t wrench his head away, couldn’t tear himself from the sight of that terrible blue eye. He knew that if this ghoul tried to force the door open, he would collapse to the floor, would curl himself into a ball and screw up his eyes and wait for whatever followed. He was too terrified to do anything else.

  ‘Orphan in the morning,’ gloated the voice. ‘You got your uncle a while longer. But they won’t let you stay with him. Oh, no. And once you’re on your own . . .’

  The eye disappeared. The crippled servant slammed his weight against the wood. Izsák screamed, scrambling across the room to the window.

  The door rolled open, a toothless maw, revealing nothing but an empty hallway and the rap-scuff rap-scuff rap-scuff of the servant’s feet as he slouched back towards the stairs.

  Later, much later, lying in darkness in the canopy bed with the covers pulled up around his throat, Izsák thought of his father. And, even though he knew he shouldn’t, he thought of Lukács . . . or Jakab, as he’d now been renamed.

  It didn’t seem possible that his brother could have done what everyone was saying. It had always been Jani who had frightened Izsák the most: Jani with his quick temper and quick fists.

  Jakab had been a little strange, a little distant, but he had been mocked ruthlessly for most of his life: first by his older brother, later by those who came to visit the house in Gödöllö, and later still by the hosszú életek ladies he met at the végzet. Such unending abuse, Izsák thought, must leave its mark.

  Jakab was out there, tonight, somewhere in the world. Like Izsák, he was alone too. And, locked up in an even darker place, their father. The Balázs family, scattered and broken. Izsák could not think on that for long. He knew his old life was over and that this – the press of his palms against the walls of his room, the taste of bile in his throat, the itch of the servant’s eye on his skin – was all that was left, but he ached for his life back at home nonetheless, ached for the return of his brothers, his father.

  At some point, exhausted, while considering all that he had lost, Izsák found sleep. He woke once in the night, ripped from a dream where he was tied to a plank in a rotting cellar and teeth were biting him, gnawing on the flesh of his arms, his cheeks, his calves.

  He snapped his eyes open, mouth parched, feeling the room slide around him. Just as Izsák remembered where he was, and what he was, and what they had all become, he heard the excited rasp of breathing close by his ear, the whistling of air through swollen sinuses, and smelled the sweet-sour stench of rotten gums. A pressure lay on his chest. Someone holding him against the mattress.

  He clenched his eyes shut. Balled his fists.

  ‘Not long now,’ whispered the stiff and twisted creature who had intercepted him on the stairs. The servant’s face was so close that his lips wetted the boy’s ear when they moved. ‘Your father in the morning. Then your rapist brother. Then your older brother. Then your uncle. Who does that leave, Izsák? Who?’

  The pressure on his chest slackened. Now he felt a cold finger touch his neck. It moved, drawing a line across his throat. ‘All dead soon, little one. All the Long Lives burned in a pile. Bones and ashes. Bones and ashes. Then we take back our city.’

  ‘Miksa!’ A woman’s voice, from the doorway. ‘Come away from there.’

  Izsák opened his eyes and squinted across the room. Szilárd’s cook stood by the door, her red face and hanging chins illuminated by the lamp she held before her. When her eyes met his, he saw no warmth there; she appraised him like a mortician examining a cadaver.

  The cook switched her attention to the crippled servant bent over the bed. ‘There’ll be a time,’ she said. ‘It isn’t now. Come away.’

  Dropping his head, hissing with frustration, the ghoul bared his teeth. He scraped across the floor to join the cook. Together, they stared at him in the smoky light, then moved away along the hall.

  Izsák lay rigid, tears sliding down his cheeks, listening to the rap-scuff of the servant’s feet as the man dragged himself to the staircase.

  Heart juddering so violently he feared it might tear itself loose, he climbed out of the bed, padded across the floorboards and eased the door shut. He dressed quickly in the darkness, only daring to light a candle once he had pulled on his boots. Opening the cupboard, he looked down at the collection of belongings he had brought from Gödöllö: a few clothes, a small suitcase, a box of metal soldiers, a silver hairbrush that had belonged to his mother.

  Izsák slipped the hairbrush into the pocket of his coat. He added a single metal soldier. From under his pillow he retrieved a leather purse of coins. He blew out the candle, shook off the molten wax and tucked the stub into another pocket. Tiptoeing back to the door, he paused there, listening for any clue that would indicate his visitors had returned. He wanted to bend to the keyhole and check that the passageway was clear, but it was too dark to see, and he was too frightened by the idea of that pale blue eye blinking at him from the other side.

  Hand on the knob, Izsák eased the door open. Cool air pressed at him. He stepped into the hall, finding with his boot the narrow rug that would smother the sound of his footfalls. Keeping inside its border, he moved towards the stairs, shoulders bunched, arms stretched out before him.

  At the top of the staircase his hand found the smooth wood of the banister. Izsák remembered the ghoul polishing it, thought he could feel the residue the creature had left, greasy beneath his fingers. He knew it was his imagination, but he couldn’t dismiss it.

  The second stair creaked under his weight. The fifth. The ninth.

  Down to the first-floor landing. A stained-glass window rippled with the moon-cast reflections of the Danube, ghostly greens and blues. Below the window, a side table displayed a model of a river schooner. He skirted it, wary of tangling himself in its rigging and dragging it to the floor. Down the next flight. Another step groaned, an empty stomach sound in the stillness. Creeping down the final set of stairs, Izsák halted in the ground-floor hall.

  Somewhere, a clock ticked: Szilárd’s study. A pop of collapsing embers from the cook’s fire at the back of the house. He should take some food. But the possibility of meeting the woman again, now that she had revealed her intentions, was too dreadful to contemplate. Instead he turned right and slipped into the room where he had discovered the déjnin knives. Navigating by touch, he found the drawer and slid it open, wincing at the squeak of its wooden runners. He felt inside for the bundle of rags, removed one of the blades and returned to the entrance hall, tucking the knife into his belt.

  Szilárd’s study lay to his right, its door hanging wide. Someone had extinguished the candles of the gilt girandoles on the desk; the room was draped in shadow. He knew he would find writing paper and one of Szilárd’s fountain pens in the desk’s drawers. Perhaps he should write his unc
le an explanation of what he’d seen: the house wasn’t safe; the staff were on the brink of revolt.

  His uncle had always treated his servants well, with far more affection than Izsák’s father had shown his own household. What had changed?

  Everything’s changed. Everything. It’s not just this house that isn’t safe. Nowhere is.

  He should leave a note. But what could he say? He wasn’t thinking clearly enough to pen more than a hysterical sentence or two. Anything he wrote would read like the paranoid scribbling of a child, yet could he abandon the one man who had offered him sanctuary, without leaving a warning of what was coming?

  Somewhere above, a floorboard squealed. Izsák stiffened. He felt his bowels flutter. When he heard someone stirring deeper inside the house, he lost his grip on the last tattered edges of his self-control. He lunged for the front door and snatched at the handle.

  The door rattled against its deadbolts, monstrously loud. Crying out, feeling for the cold metal runners, he snapped the bolts free, yanked the door open and fled outside.

  Down the steps. Across the moonlit courtyard. Towards the arched entrance gates.

  They were locked.

  Izsák gripped the bars. He shook them in frustration, sick with fear. Glancing over his shoulder, he peered up at the house. Its blank windows stared back at him.

  The gates rose a full twelve feet, topped by spikes like sharpened arrowheads. Izsák hauled himself up, finding footholds in the latticework. They swayed back and forth, hinges screaming. He lost his footing, nearly fell. Wrapped his limbs around the bars.

  Over the top. You have to go over the top.

  How many people must he have woken by now? The servants would be pulling on clothes, grabbing cudgels. They’d assume he was a thief. Perhaps they would recognise him before they attacked. Perhaps they would split his skull regardless.

  He heard a shout from inside the house, a window being raised. Wanted to close his eyes and freeze. Moaned and pulled himself higher instead. Rolled over the arrowheads at the top of the gate. Sliced his hand. Gashed his stomach.

  And then he was on the other side, swinging free in the moonlight. A shape appeared in the doorway. It clutched something, long and slim. Izsák knew what it was. He opened his fingers and let go of the bars. Felt himself falling. The road rushed up and slapped him. His elbow cracked on stone.