The Count of the Living Death (The Chronicles of Hildigrim Blackbeard) Read Online Free Page A

week?” Blackbeard suggested. “Not that I advocate murder, of course…but as I said, someone will die, be it you or someone else.”
    “There’s no one, I couldn’t imagine—no, it’s ridiculous!” he spat. “I would never have someone killed in my place, not even a convicted—”
    An image flashed through his head and cut off the final word. A convicted criminal. Someone already sentenced to death, merely waiting the accursed day in the despair of a decrepit dungeon. Someone for whom death would be a blessed deliverance, especia, fnce, eslly given the manner of the execution (typically, beheading, but given the nature of his crimes, he might even expect a more prolonged demise). And there was such a person: his father’s bastard son…his half-brother, Ivan.
    “Half-brother?” Blackbeard repeated. “I wasn’t aware that your father had two sons.”
    “No, he wasn’t…that is, Ivan lived quite apart from us. I never knew him. I scarcely even knew he existed.”
    Ivan was the result of his father’s brief affair with a Russian dancer before his birth. His father never mentioned him, and indeed, Leopold only learned he had a ‘brother’ by accident. One evening, when he had accidentally fallen asleep under a table, his father and an advisor came in, arguing volubly about someone they referred to as “Ivan the Terrible.” Toward the end of the conversation, his father threw a saucer against the wall—which shattered—and shouted, “damn him, he’s no son of mine, may he drown in the seven seas! His mother bewitched me with her gypsy arts and rotted his brains with witchcraft! He’ll never be allowed in my presence.”
    Apparently, Ivan took this rejection personally. He became a notorious criminal and declared war on the entire kingdom. By the time of his capture, he was charged as an assassin, a spy, a cutpurse, a highwayman, and most unforgivably, an actor. When rumors of the trial reached Leopold’s ears the sentence had already been passed: death, without possibility of pardon, in two month’s time. It haunted him to think that this fellow—in blood, at least—was his brother. A brother he could never know. What was he like? And what might he have been like if his father had found some way to accept him?

    “I don’t understand…won’t his Death stop my Death? We all have a Death, don’t we?”

    “Of course, a wise question,” Blackbeard nodded. “I will attempt a spell to temporarily sever the two—he will be in a kind of limbo, between life and death. His Death will be unable to defend him.”
    “I see,” the Count nodded. “And when we open the box…will it be painful?”
    “Instantaneous,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “Won’t feel a thing. He’ll snuff out like a candle.”
    “In that case…would he do?”
    “Estranged or not, he is your brother. But do you know where he is?”
    “The Royal Dungeons, in the condemned quarters,” Leopold replied. “Can we get to him?”
    The sorcerer gave a slight groan, but nodded. Yes, it could be done. It probably shouldn’t be done, they would probably become wanted men themselves if they weren’t careful, but yes, he could arrange it.
    “I’ll get dressed,” Leopold nodded.

Chapter Eight
     
     
    Mary’s coach was stopped at the palace gates. Something about a quarantine, no one was allowed to leave or enter. Disguised, and unable to give her full name (which might have opened all doors and gates), she merely said she had urgent business with the Count and demanded entrance. The guards refused. The orders came from high up; she would simply hh stave to wait. In truth, they were terrified. Defying a direct order of Hildigrim Blackbeard would bring swift and terrible repercussions. Death, most likely. But there were many ways to go. They most feared a curse-transformation, which would change them into hideous, loathsome insects, leaving them to flail about helplessly until some greater beast ensnared them in its