Nice to see you’ve figured it out.
‘Figured what out?’ Mark took a wary step along the marble coping. If they were talking, he might be permitted to move closer to the bridge and safe passage across the dangerous water.
The Gloriette. It’s a nice touch; don’t you think? Although I prefer it there on the hill behind Schonbrunn. It’s too humid in here.
‘I don’t get it,’ Mark said. ‘What’s your point?’
Your trip to Vienna, my friend. Think back; think hard. You’re focusing on the wrong things… again. Forget Jody Calloway’s tits; they were never much to speak of, anyway.
Mark slid along the coping side of the nearest column, careful to avoid slipping into the water. It was dark, and he wasn’t supposed to move when it was dark, but as long as they were talking, the snake might leave him alone. ‘A detail? I’m supposed to remember some detail from a spring break trip when I was fifteen – and then what, I get to go free? Or maybe make it across this puddle? Fuck you, chief, I’ll take my chances wi-’
The snake bit him, then bit him again.
Mark winced, wanting to run, but knowing it would be worse if he did. He shouted and swore, rooting around in the muck, waiting for his fingers to pass over the snake’s slippery body.
It bit his wrist. Mark howled in shock more than pain, but at least now he had it. It tried to strike him and slither free at the same time, but Mark would have none of it. He slid his free hand along the wriggling body until he reached the tail, which he clenched it in his fist, then he spun the creature like a bolo, faster and faster, until he snapped the snake like a bullwhip against the column, breaking its bones and paralysing it. He repeated the action until he felt it go entirely limp. It splattered against the stone with a wet splashing sound.
Finally sure it was dead, Mark tossed it away. It landed with a rustle in a patch of ferns.
Mark couldn’t feel the poison working, but he’d been bitten three times, and he was worried that he might die, if he could die in here. While the mutant tadpoles with their bulbous tumours and the monster serpents that had pursued them all seemed benign, he understood that the coral snake had been real – it was real enough to die, and therefore real enough for its venom to be deadly.
Happier now? The voice was amused. It laughed and said, I’m not doing this to you, Mark.
‘Yes, right, I know, it’s all me. I put the bridge there, I conjured up the snake, and I went back to high school for the Hapsburg family Gloriette.’
Exactly. And you’re so worried about me, all the time, me, me, me and what’s happening with me. You’re focusing on the wrong things, Mark; you need to think back – it’s your favourite way of solving problems, isn’t it? I know it’s how you figured out that worthless bastard Lessek was trying to tell you something about your family and Jones Beach and all that rubbish about your father and his beer. And I know it’s how you alleviate stress. Well, Mark, here’s a dilemma for you: I’ve been honest. I’ve told you that you’re doing this to yourself, and I’ve said, at least once, that I preferred you in the dark, in the first room. You recall that room, don’t you?
‘Yes,’ Mark said, feeling for the twin puncture marks on his wrist and trying to squeeze as much blood from them as possible, hoping he might also squeeze out a bit of the venom.
And you don’t want to go back in there.
‘No,’ Mark said, ‘it was worse in there.’ He pulled up his jeans and tried to squeeze the bites on his leg as well. It was difficult to assess how well it was working so he decided to try tightening his belt around his calf as a sort of tourniquet; it might stem the flow of venom around his body, buying him a few valuable minutes in which to reach the top of the rise and the blue sky. Everything would be fine if he could just reach that clearing.
So I will be honest with you again. I cannot keep you in there if you choose to be out here. How do you like them mangos, my boy?
‘It’s apples, dickhead.’
You eat what you like, and leave me alone.
‘So, what now?’
You deal with your new dilemma.
‘And what’s that? Vienna?’ Mark tugged his belt a bit tighter; his wrist and lower leg throbbed. ‘What am I supposed to remember?’
Not remember; infer.
‘Oh, grand,’ Mark said. ‘And what happens in the interim, while I’m here in the dark, inside a four-hundred-year-old Austrian gazebo, inferring something from a trip I took fourteen years ago when all the German I could manage was “How is the soup today?” – are you going to send more snakes, or are you content to watch while the venom already in my blood kills me or drives me mad or makes me piss mango juice?’
That would be a neat trick.
‘Again-’
Enough insults. It was irritated now. You’re forgetting again, Mark – great lords, but you didn’t strike me as this stupid. I expected more from you, truly. You’re as stupid as Nerak.
‘Well, I can be disappointing.’
Everything is coming from you. The only snakes, homicidal killers, venereal diseases, whatever, are those you bring in here. I have nothing to do with that.
Mark didn’t know why, but he wanted to believe that was true. ‘I won’t invite any more snakes in here to bite me, and I won’t give myself crabs, but if I do get bit again, I’m blaming you, sh-’ Now back to work.
The lights flickered again, just long enough for Mark to see the coral snake, its head torn open and its body twisted into knots, slithering out from beneath the ferns to resume its post between Mark’s feet. When the lights faded again, Mark screamed.
‘So what is this place?’ Steven tethered Gilmour’s horse to the sturdiest post left upright on the porch. He walked along the warped boards, looking uninterestedly through the broken windows. The packed earth of the road was now a strip of frozen mud and snow. ‘It must have been someplace important to have a three-storey building. Although I don’t suppose anyone has been here in a long time.’ They were alone and hadn’t encountered anyone riding down from the grassy meadow south of the village.
‘Most of my life, anyway.’ Gilmour leaned in through one of the windows, then backed out quickly, peeling invisible cobwebs off his face.
Steven wandered onto the road, knocking off an icicle as he passed. It slid across the mud. ‘This is another university, isn’t it? I get the same sort of feeling as the last one – although I’m pleased that there don’t seem to be any acid-clouds or starving almor here. That definitely gets this place an extra star in the Barron’s Guidebook to Eldarni Colleges.’
‘Good guess.’
Steven continued, ‘And judging by the general disrepair, I’d guess that this was one of the first schools our friend Prince Marek closed after meeting Nerak back in the day.’
Gilmour leaned against a post and blew a smoke ring. ‘Marek Whitward was a pleasant young man, one of the nicest of the Remonds, and it was quite tragic about him and Nerak – but don’t let me interrupt. Please, go on.’
‘If this university is like those back home, I’d wager that stone building over there with the collapsed roof is the library – but I don’t expect we’ll find any books in there today.’ He pointed to an even larger, sprawling structure, standing at the centre of what might once have been the university common.
‘Correct again, Steven,’ Gilmour said. ‘Any surviving manuscripts would have been taken to Welstar Palace, or destroyed, but we haven’t come here for books.’
‘All right, you have my attention. Why then have we come out of our way to visit a derelict, abandoned and obviously off-limits former institution of higher education?’
The old Larion Senator wearing the chubby soldier’s body smiled, the same boyish grin Steven had seen on both of Gilmour’s previous hosts. ‘I need to look for something, something that’s been missing in Eldarn for some time.’ He started towards a set of double wooden doors, one of which hung crookedly by a single hinge.