The Dreamthief's Daughter: A Tale of the Albino

  The next morning they didn’t come for me. They came for Feldmann. They understood how to test me. I was by no means sure I would not fail.

  When Feldmann returned he no longer had any teeth. His mouth was a weeping red wound and one of his eyes seemed permanently closed.

  “For God’s sake.” He spoke indistinctly, every movement of his face painful. “Don’t tell them where that sword is.”

  “Believe me,” I told him, “I don’t know where it is. But I wish with all my soul that I held it in my hands at this moment.”

  Small comfort to Feldmann. They took him again in the morning, while he screamed at them for the cowards they were, and they brought him back in the afternoon. Ribs were broken. Several fingers. A foot. He was breathing with difficulty, as if something pressed on his lungs.

  He told me not to give up. That they were not defeating us. They were not dividing us.

  Both Hellander and I were weeping as we did our best to ease his pain. But they took him again for a third day. And that night, with nothing left of him that had not been tortured, inside and out, he died in our arms. When I looked into Hellander’s eyes I saw that he was terrified. We knew exactly what they were doing. He guessed that he would be next.

  And then, even as Feldmann gave out his last, thin gasp of life, I looked beyond Hellander and saw, distinct yet vaguely insubstantial, my doppelgänger. That strange, cloaked albino whose eyes were mine.

  And for the first time I thought I heard him speak.

  “The sword,” he said.

  Hellander was looking away from me, looking to where the albino had stood. I asked him if he had seen anything. He shook his head. We laid Feldmann out on the flagstones and tried to say some useful service for him. But Hellander was wretched and I didn’t know how to help him.

  My dreams were of the white hare, of my doppelgänger in his hooded cape, of the lost black sword and of the young woman archer whom I had nicknamed Diana. No dragons or ornamented cities. No armies. No monsters. Just my own face staring at me, desperate to communicate something. And then the sword. I could almost feel it in my hands.

  Half-roused, I heard Hellander moving uncomfortably. I asked him if he was all right. He said that he was fine.

  In the morning I awoke to find his hanging body turning slowly in the air above Feldmann’s. He had found his means of escape as I slept.

  A full twenty-four hours passed before the guards removed the corpses from my cell.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Martial Music

  F ritzi and Franzi came for me a couple of days later. Without bothering to move me, they took out their blackjacks and beat me up on the spot. Fritzi and Franzi enjoyed their work and had become very expert at it, commenting on my responses, the reaction of my strange, pale body to their blows. The peculiar color of my bruises. They complained, however, that it was hard to get sounds out of me. A small problem they thought they would solve over time.

  Shortly after they left, I received a visit from Klosterheim, now an SS captain, who offered me something from a hip flask which I refused. I had no intention of helping him drug me.

  “A sequence of very unfortunate accidents, eh?” He looked around my cell. “You must find all this a bit depressing, Herr Count.”

  “Oh, it means I don’t have to mix too much with Nazis,” I said. “So I suppose I am at an advantage.”

  “Your notion of advantage is rather hard for me to grasp,” he said. “It seems to get you in this sort of predicament. How long did it take our SA boys to finish off your friend Feldmann? Of course, you could be a little fitter, a little younger. How long was it? Three days?”

  “Feldmann’s triumph?” I said. “Three days in which every word he had written about you was proven. You confirmed his judgment in every detail. You gave extra authority to everything he published. No writer can feel better than that.”

  “These are martyr’s victories, however. Intelligent men would call them meaningless.”

  “Only stupid men who believed themselves intelligent would call them that,” I said. “And we all know how ludicrous such strutting fellows are.” I was glad of his presence. My hatred of him took my mind off my injuries. “I’ll tell you now, Herr Captain, that I have no sword to give you and no cup, either. Whatever you believe, you are wrong. I will be happy to die with you believing otherwise, but I would not like others to die on my behalf. In your assumption of power, sir, you have also assumed responsibility, whether you like it or not. You can’t have one without the other. So I present you with your guilt.”

  I turned my back on him and he left immediately.

  A few hours later Fritzi and Franzi arrived to carry on their experiments. When I passed out, I immediately had a vision of my doppelgänger. He was speaking urgently, but I still couldn’t hear him. Then he vanished and was replaced by the black sword, whose iron, now constantly washed with blood, bore the same runes but they were alive—scarlet.

  When I woke I was naked with no blanket on my bed. I understood at once that they meant to kill me. The standard method was to starve and expose a prisoner until they were too weak to withstand infection, usually pneumonia. They used it when you refused to die of a heart attack. Why this charade was perpetuated I was never sure. I guessed this “message” was a bluff. If they still thought I could lead them to the sword or the cup they set such store by, they wouldn’t kill me.

  In fact Major Hausleiter came to my cell himself at one point. He had Klosterheim with him. I think he attempted to reason with me, but he was so inarticulate he made no sense. Klosterheim reminded me that his patience was over and made some other villainous, ridiculous threat. What do you threaten the damned with? I was too weak to offer any significant retort. But I managed something like a smile with my broken mouth.

  I leaned forward, as if to whisper a secret, and watched with satisfaction as, drop by drop, my blood fell upon his perfect uniform. It took him a moment to realize what had happened. He pulled back in baffled disgust, pushing me away so that I fell to the floor.

  The door slammed and there was silence. Nobody else was being tortured tonight. When I tried to rise I saw another figure sitting on my bunk. My doppelgänger made a gesture and then seemed to fold downwards onto the bare mattress.

  I crawled to the bunk. My double had gone. But in his place was the Ravenbrand. My sword. The sword they all sought. I reached out to touch the familiar iron and as I did so it, too, vanished. Yet I knew I had imagined nothing. Somehow the sword would find me again.

  Not before Fritzi and Franzi had returned once more. Even as they beat me they discussed my staying power. They thought I could take one more “general physical” and then they would let me rest up for a day or two or they would probably lose me. Major von Minct was arriving later. He might have some ideas.

  As the door slammed and was locked, leaving me in darkness, I saw my doppelgänger clearly framed there. The figure almost glowed. Then it crossed to the bunk. I turned my head painfully, but the man was gone. I knew I was not hallucinating. I had a feeling that if I had the strength to get to my bed I would see the sword again.

  Somehow the thought drove me to find energy from nothing. Bit by bit I crawled to the bunk and this time my hand touched cold metal. The hilt of the Raven Sword. Fraction by fraction I worked my fingers until they had closed around the hilt. Perhaps this was a dying man’s delusion, but the metal felt solid enough. Even as my hand gripped it, the sword made a low crooning noise, one of welcome, like a cat purring. I was determined to hang on to it, not to let it vanish again, even though I had no strength to lift it.

  Strangely the metal seemed to warm, passing energy into my hands and wrists, giving me the means to raise myself up onto the bunk and lie with my body shielding the sword from anyone looking into the cell. There was a fresh vibrancy about the metal. As if the sword were actually alive. While this thought was disturbing, it did not seem as bizarre as it might have a few months earlier.

  I do not r
eally know if a day passed. My own head was full of images and stories. The sword had somehow infected me. It could have been later that night Franzi and Fritzi arrived. They had brought some prison clothes and were yelling at me to get up. They were taking me to see Major von Minct.

  I had been gathering my strength and praying for this moment. I had the sword gripped in both hands and as I turned I lifted the blade and threw my body weight behind it. The point caught short fat Franzi in the stomach and slid into him with frightening ease. He began to gulp. Behind him Fritzi was transfixed, unsure what was happening.

  Franzi screamed. It was a long, cold, anguished scream. When it stopped, I was standing on my feet, blocking Fritzi from reaching the door. He sobbed. Clearly something about me terrified him. Perhaps my sudden energy. I was full of an edgy, unnatural power. But I was glad of it. I had sucked Franzi’s lifestuff from him and drawn it into my own body. Disgusting as this idea might be, I considered it without emotion even as, with familiar skill, I knocked Fritzi’s bludgeon from his red, peasant hand and drove the point of my sword directly into his pumping heart. Blood gushed across the cell, covering my naked flesh.

  And I laughed at this and suddenly on my lips there formed an alien word. One I had heard only in my dreams. There were other words, but I did not recognize them.

  “Arioch!” I shrieked as I killed. “Arioch!”

  Still naked, with broken ribs and ruined face, with one leg which would hardly support my weight, with arms that seemed too thin to hold that great iron battle blade, I picked up Franzi’s keys and padded down the darkness of the corridor, unlocking the cell doors as I went. There was no resistance until I reached the guardroom at the far end of the passage. Here a few fat SA lads sat around drowsing off their beer. They only knew they were being killed as they awoke to feel my iron entering their bodies and somehow adding to the power which now raged through my veins, making me forget all pain, all broken bones. I screamed out that single name and within moments turned the room into a charnel house, with bodies and limbs scattered everywhere.

  Once the civilized man would have known revulsion, but that civilized man had been beaten out of me by the Nazis and all that was left was this raging, bloodthirsty, near-insensate revenging monster. I did not resist that monster. It wanted to kill. I let it kill. I think I was laughing. I think I called out for Gaynor to come and find me. I had the sword he wanted. Waiting for him.

  Behind me in the corridors, prisoners were emerging, clearly not sure if this was a trick of some kind. I flung them every key in the guardroom and made my way out into the night. Even as I reached the courtyard, lights began to come on in the castle. They heard unfamiliar screams and disturbing noises from the prison quarters. I loped like an old, wounded wolf across the compound towards the ranks of huts where the less fortunate prisoners were kept. Anything that threatened me or tried to shoot at me, I killed. The sword was a scythe which swept away wooden gates, barbed wire and men, all at once. I hacked down the wooden legs of a machine gun post and saw the thing collapse, bringing down the wire, making escape far easier. In no time at all I was at the huts, striking the padlocks and bolts off the doors.

  I don’t know how many Nazis I killed before every hut was opened and the prisoners, many of them still terrified, began to pour out. Up on the castle walls they had got a searchlight working and I heard the pop of their shots as they aimed into the prisoners, apparently at random. Then I saw a group of stripe-uniformed inmates swarm up the wall and reach the searchlight. Within seconds the compound was in darkness as other lights were smashed. I heard Major Hausleiter’s voice, crazed with a dozen different kinds of fear, yelling over the general melee.

  God knows what any of them made of me, holding a great leaf-bladed longsword in one ruined hand, with my bone-white skin covered in blood, my crimson eyes blazing with the ecstasy of unbridled vengeance as I called out an alien name.

  Arioch! Arioch!

  Whatever demon possessed me, it did not have my feelings about the sanctity of life. Had this monster always lain within me, waiting to be awakened? Or was it my doppelgänger, whom I confused with the sword itself, who drew such wild satisfaction from my unrelenting bloodletting?

  Machine gun fire now began to spatter around me. I ran with the other prisoners for the safety of the walls and huts. Some of the prisoners, who had clearly had experience of street fighting, quickly collected the weapons of the men I had killed. Soon shots were spitting back from the darkness and at least one machine gun was silenced.

  The prisoners had no need of me. Their leaders were well-disciplined and able to make quick decisions.

  With the camp now in total confusion, I went back into the castle and began to climb stairs, looking for Gaynor’s quarters.

  I had barely reached the second floor when ahead of me I met the same hooded huntress, whom I had seen earlier with Herr El, that mysterious “Diana” who had also appeared in my dreams. Her eyes, as usual, were hidden behind smoked glasses. Her pale hair was loose. She, like me, was an albino.

  “You have no time for Gaynor,” she said. “We must get away from here soon or it will be too late. They have a whole garrison of storm troopers in Sachsenburg village, and someone is bound to have got through on the telephone. Come, follow me. We have a car.”

  How had she got inside the prison? Had she brought me the sword? Or was it my doppelgänger? Did they work together? Was she my rescuer? Impressed by the White Rose’s powers, I obeyed her. I had already put myself at the society’s service and was prepared to follow their orders.

  Some of the battle lust was leaving me. But the strange, dark energy remained. I felt as if I had swallowed a powerful drug which could have destructive side effects. But I was careless of any consequences. I was at last taking revenge on the brutes who had already murdered so many innocents. I was not proud of the new emotions which raged through my body, but I did not reject them either.

  I followed the hooded woman back into the melee of the compound towards the main gate. The guards were already dead. The huntress stopped to pull her arrows from their corpses as she unlocked the gates and led me through, just as the emergency lighting system began to flicker on. Now the freed prisoners flooded towards the gates and rushed past us into the night. At least some of them would not die nameless, painful and undignified deaths.

  As we reached the open roadway, I heard a motor bellow into life. Headlights came on and I heard three short notes on a horn. My huntress led me towards the big car. A handsome man of about forty, wearing a dark uniform I couldn’t identify, saluted from behind the steering wheel. He was already driving forward as we climbed in beside him. He spoke good German with a distinctly English accent. It seemed the British Secret Service was already in Germany. “Honored to meet you, dear Count. I’m Captain Oswald Bastable, LTA, at your service. Business has improved in this region lately. We’ve got some clothes for you in the back, but we’ll have to stop later. The schedule’s looking a bit tight at the moment.” He turned to my companion. “He means to bring them to Morn.”

  A few shots spat up dirt around us and at least one bullet struck the car.

  My battle rage was passing now and I looked down at my ruined body, realizing that I was a mass of blood and bruises. Stark naked. With a bloody longsword in the broken fingers of my right hand. I must have been a nightmarish sight. I tried to thank the Englishman, but was thrown back in my seat as with her famous roar the powerful Duesenberg bore us rapidly along a country road, straight towards a mass of approaching headlights. No doubt these were the storm troopers from Sachsenburg town.

  Captain Bastable seemed unperturbed. He was slipping Nazi armbands on his sleeves. “You’d better act as if you’re knocked out,” he said to me. As the first truck approached, he slowed down and waved a commanding hand from the car. He gave the Hitler salute and spoke rapidly to the driver, telling him to be careful. Prisoners were escaping. They had taken many guards captive and forced them to wear prison stripes
before turning them loose into the countryside. There was every chance that if they shot at a man without being sure who he was, they could be killing one of their own.

  This preposterous story would create considerable confusion and probably save a few prisoners’ lives. Saying he had urgent business in Berlin, Bastable convinced the storm troopers, who were rarely the brightest individuals, and they roared off into the night.

  Bastable kept up his own high speed for several hours, until we were climbing a narrow road between masses of dark pines. I was reminded of the Harz Mountains where I had often hiked as a boy. At last I saw a sign for Magdeburg. Thirty kilometers. Sachsenburg lay, of course, to the east of Magdeburg, which was north of the Harz. Another sign at a crossroads. Halberstadt, Magdeburg and Berlin one way, Bad Harzburg, Hildesheim and Hanover the other. We took the Hanover road but, before Hildesheim, Bastable drove into a series of narrow, winding lanes, switching off his car’s lights and slowing down. He was buying time, he hoped.

  Eventually he stopped near a brook with wide shallow sides where I could easily climb down and wash myself thoroughly in the icy water. Cold as I was, I felt purified and dried myself with the towels Bastable had provided. I hesitated a little when I realized that the clothes he had brought for me were my own, but of the kind one wore for hunting, even down to the knee-high leather boots, tweed breeches and a three-eared cap—what they call a deerstalker in England—which I fastened under my chin. I must have looked like a whiteface clown posing as a country gentleman, but the cap covered my white hair and I could be less readily identified by anyone who had been given a description of us. I pulled on the stout jacket and was ready for anything. Psychologically, the clothes made me feel much better. I wasn’t too sure they would look as good with a longsword as with a twelve-bore, but perhaps if I wrapped the sword in something it would be less incongruous.

  Bastable had the manner and appearance of an experienced soldier. He was reading a map when I came back and shaking his head. “Every bloody town begins with an ‘H’ around here,” he complained. “I get them mixed up. I think I should have taken a right at Holzminden. Or was it Höxter? Anyway, it looks as if I overshot my turning. We seem to be halfway to Hamm. It’ll be daylight fairly soon and I want to get this car out of sight. We have friends in Detmold and in Lemgo. I think we can make it to Lemgo before dawn.”