** Questions, questions, questions from all of you…and answers coming right up. You're in the home stretch now, so hang in there. **

18. Kindred Spirit

            Days passed in a flurry of messages between Ankh-Morpork and a certain clacks tower in Uberwald. The day after the capture of Klieg, Lord Vetinari was in a foul mood. The second day he was merely thoughtful. By the third he was nearly back to his old inscrutable self.

            When Klieg regained consciousness on the second day she was fed steak tartar. She spat it up and tried to break the shackles around her ankles. She was still too weak. The gag was in use at all times except meals.       

            Isabella was quick to get her promise to Pefka out of the way, a cup of fresh blood which he drank slowly, like a gourmet, his face reddening as he went, his fingers trembling until he fell out of his chair and lay senseless on the floor for several minutes. When he awakened he begged Isabella to consider, just consider, an arrangement with him. A whole cup was too much, but drops…drops would be enough. In exchange he could offer all manner of services, for whose quality several well-born ladies would vouch. She refused.

            The Patrician worked all day and well into the evening but after dinner he and Isabella found a quiet corner and talked. He talked about Uberwald and Margolotta in great detail; it was the first time he'd told any of it to anyone. He repeatedly used the term kindred spirit.

"It is possible to meet someone who helps us to become who we fundamentally are, or to test our idea of what that is, just as an armourer must temper iron in the fire before it gains its real strength," he said. "When I was a young man, I needed this testing. Margolotta provided it."

Isabella didn't mention that he'd done the same for her.

            When the conversation shifted to Vetinari's version of his time fifteen years ago with Isabella, he told her what he'd said to Vimes and Leonard, but refrained from adding any more details. In return, Isabella became evasive if the talk turned to marriage. The Patrician didn't push her.

            During the day she occupied her time doing drawings of whatever struck her. Crumbled and overgrown parts of the city walls, the old viaduct in Water Street. Once or twice Lord Vetinari made a request. She was out completing a sketch of a spice warehouse built in the Klatchian style when Lady Margolotta arrived in Ankh-Morpork.

            By coach. Vampires flying in was rather gauche, and frankly, unnecessary what with the advances in coach axles and shock absorption. The ride from Uberwald was almost what one might call comfortable and at least Margolotta could bring her own bed, a sleek black coffin strapped to the roof and covered with a tarp.

            Pro forma she went to the embassy first. Three hours later, Lord Vetinari was bending over her hand in an otherwise empty reception room at the Palace. Though his injuries made it slightly painful, he was smiling. He couldn't help it.

            "Welcome, milady."

            "So there you are at last." She surveyed the healing bruises on his face. "Lavinia vas not kind to you."

            "It's nothing compared to what she did to others."

            For a few moments they said nothing, merely gazed at each other. It was an examination of faces and registering of the changes the years had made, much like Vetinari had done with Isabella. In the end, he concluded that Margolotta had changed very little. Dark hair streaked with gray, delicate hands, a mouth always on the edge of a wry smile – they were the same. Despite her smoking habit she'd gained a bit of weight since she ended the all-human blood diet. She'd abandoned the narrow vampirish gowns she'd worn when Vetinari was, in these matters, little more than an impressionable boy. She now wore a sensible tweed skirt and matching waist jacket. She wore pearls and flat shoes and little bat-shaped earrings with tiny pearl eyes. She could have been a wealthy and stylish middle-aged head of a girls finishing school.

            They smiled at each other, and then, as if there had been an unspoken signal, the smiles faded.

            "I vould very much like to reminisce vith you but I think it vould be vise to talk to Lavinia first," she said. "How is she?"

            "Furious."

            "I guarantee she is not half as furious as I am. Please lead the vay."

            Klieg was not in the usual dank stone dungeon cell. She was in a dank iron dungeon cell, one built centuries ago by the enterprising Patrician called Loomis the Roaster, who wanted an entire room capable of roasting political enemies by laying a fire in the space under the iron floor. Lord Vetinari had never used it. The place wasn't sound proof.

            They found Klieg sitting up on her iron bunk, reading. The guards had allowed her to keep her copy of the "Vampire's Guide to Ankh-Morpork."

            At the sight of Margolotta, she pointed at Vetinari and made grunting noises through the gag in her mouth.

            Margolotta raised a questioning brow at Vetinari, who nodded. She undid the gag.

            "I am not impressed, milady," said Klieg. "He fought badly. I zought he vould at least try to hurt me. Only his vife-not-vife had ze courage!"

            Margolotta sighed. "There are many vays to fight, Lavinia. I've told you that many times."

            "But he…"

            The Patrician slipped out the door, slipped around the corner and slipped into a nice spot for eavesdropping. It was where Loomis the Roaster liked to listen to the roasting going on inside the room. Unfortunately there was no viewing window. The Patrician listened.

            "…and he is gullible," Klieg was saying. "I lie to him and he believes me. Did he see anyzing of you in me? Anyzing of him? Did it matter? He heard only a little lie and he believed. He should have killed me but he let me go." She smirked.

            "You should think about vhich vun of you is vearing shackles right now," said Margolotta.

            "Isabella protected him. She vas strong vhen he vas veak." Klieg drew a deep breath. "Ah…she smells so lovely, milady. Vait until you meet her."

            "I vonder who told you the Black Ribboners in Ankh-Morpork vould revolt. It vas a gross miscalculation on your part. I thought I taught you better than that."

            There was a pause.

            "Do not base your plans on the co-operation of the enemy, Lavinia. I taught you that too, didn't I?"

            "Yes, milady, but--"    

            "I taught you the vays of abstinence and the beauty of self-denial and vhen you failed you thought the reversal vould be permanent. Vhy couldn't you have tried again? Ve are all tempted but ve channel it into other areas. You know that. I vould have helped you again. Don't you believe that?"

            Another pause.

            "Yes, milady."

            "Yes. You believe it and yet you chose to vork against me."

            "I vill not deny myself anymore, milady. I am a vampire. I know vhat zat means."

            They began talking at once.

            "You still have no vision, Lavinia. The integration of vampires into the greater society can only happen if ve…"

            "Zere are no Blacks and Reds, zhere are only vampires and ve are all Red!"

            "…and the only vay to come out of the shadows and the cocoon of our castles and take control of our environment is to…"

            "Eat tomato soup and have sing songs?"

            "…refocus the natural craving into rational, organized action. Ve can…"

            "Vhy rational? Ve are not rational. Ve are vampires! Should ve deny our passion for ze chance to rule a piece of land? Vhy do ve have to change for zat? Vhy can't ve be vhat ve are?"

            "…be a community and not just predators alone on the hunt, controlled by our appetites instead of…"

            "Milady, VHY ARE YOU ASHAMED?"

            They fell silent.

            Lord Vetinari heard footsteps but not the rattle of chains. He assumed it was Margolotta pacing.

            "Do you understand at least that I vould not have given up this course even for an eternity vith him?" she said. "If you had brought him to Ubervald I vould not have consumed vun drop of his blood. I vould have apologized for your rudeness and sent him back. I vould have continued my vork. Vun drop is too many. You know that, don't you?"

            There was a long silence. Then footsteps again, the shifting of chains and a deep sigh.

            "Vhat shall I do vith you, my girl?" The words sounded muffled, as if Margolotta said them through cloth or hair. Lord Vetinari concluded she was embracing Klieg. "Do you vant to be saved, Lavinia?"

            "I do not need it, milady."

            "Proud to the end, hm?" There was another sigh, a long silence, then the soft sound of a kiss. Then the scrape of shoes on the iron again. "A foolish thing. Love. I am just foolish enough to talk to Havelock Vetinari to see if he is villing to spare you. The cost may be high."

**       

            Several things weren't sitting well with Sam Vimes.

            First, that the vampire Klieg was recuperating in the palace dungeon a week after her capture without answering yet for the murders.

            Second, that Lady Margolotta von Uberwald had spent the last few nights at the Palace in what his Palace sources (i.e. a few servants) called "intense negotiations" with the Patrician. Vimes wasn't a fool. He could put two and two together. Margolotta was negotiating for Klieg's freedom and the Patrician was hammering out a deal of some kind. As if any deal could bring justice to the families of the dead.

            Third, that Nobby Nobbs had decided to volunteer some information without getting paid for it.

            "All right, Nobby. What do you have?"

            They were up in Vimes' office at Pseudopolis Yard on a hot August day. People were actually swimming in the Ankh to keep cool. Or at least cutting comfortable little holes in the slow-moving sludge for a bit of a midday wallow.

            Corporal Nobbs shifted around in his seat.

            "Can I ask something first, sir?"

            Vimes nodded.

            "Don't get piqued at me for me not remembering this earlier." Nobby tapped his head. "The vampire business was gettin' to me, you know? I wasn't exactly concentratin' on other things."

            Vimes leaned forward, his elbows on his desk.

            "Spit it out, Nobby."

            "You promise you won't get cross?"

            "Nobby…"

            "It's just that…it's not like anybody cared there were crossbow bolts in the wreckage. I dumped 'em just like everything else."

            Vimes sat bolt upright in his chair. His mind spun back fifteen years to the carriage accident on Pseudopolis Road. Crossbow bolts? He didn't remember any crossbow bolts. But back then, he'd just begun his love affair with whiskey and had had a hard time remembering his address.

            "You sure, Nobby? Absolutely sure?"

            "Found one all in where the carriage wheel was spun off. You remember? That wheel was a piece away from the tree where the carriage went…" Nobby loudly smacked his hands together. "I remember that. And there was another one too but it was up the way a bit. Up the road."

            "There were two crossbow bolts at the scene. Just two?"

            "Far as I could count, yeah. Maybe there was more under the snow but it's not like I was lookin' for 'em."

            "Lying bastard!" shouted Vimes.

            Nobby jumped in his chair.

            "Not you, Nobby. You haven't talked to anyone else about this, have you?"

            "Just Fred. He said he remembered the bolts too."

            "Go tell him not to mention it to anybody else. You don't either, right?"

            Vimes was shaking his head. He'd fallen for it. The sob story of Isabella refusing to marry Vetinari and going off to Pseudopolis by choice. A victim of a tragic accident. Sure, there was highway robbery on many of the country roads back then but never so close to the city. Besides, no highwaymen murdered if they didn't have to, and they certainly never carried away the victims afterward.

            Problem was, Vimes didn't know what to do about all this. There weren't any files. There was no record the accident ever happened. There weren't any witnesses. All he had was the conviction – grounded in the old copper's gut -- that Lord Vetinari had something to do with crossbow bolts being shot at the carriage of his girlfriend (or whoever she was at the time) just when she was trying to get out of the city.

            And the bastard had used sympathy to get Vimes off the trail. That was the worst of it. Well, that he'd fallen for it. That was the worst.

            He leaned back in his chair and chewed his cigar angrily and considered what he could do to get at the truth.

**

            Chimes.

            One, two, three.

            The darkness outside signalled that the three in this case was in the morning.

            When a hand reached out of the dark and gently shook Isabella's shoulder in her bed she woke instantly despite the early hour. She slept only fitfully anyway, never deep, never satisfying. Her dreams were vivid and starred her children. Ten times a night she awakened and ten times she wondered where she was. The iconograph under her pillow told her the truth.

            There was no candle, no light whatsoever. Only a voice.

            "I'm sorry to disturb you."

            The Patrician's voice.

            She sat up.

            "What's happened?"

            "Lady Margolotta wishes to meet you. It is a request. You may refuse if you wish."

            "What time is it?"

            "Early. A prudent time to leave the city."

            Isabella reached out blindly in the darkness and snagged his hand. He had her dressing gown.

            In the hallway she caught her reflection in a mirror and frowned at the wild mass of her hair but the Patrician refused to let her go back for a brush. Time was of the essence.

            When she stepped into the little chamber near the door to the hubwards courtyard, Vetinari stayed outside. He had already said all he wanted to Margolotta. For now.

            Half of their negotiations had been reminiscing about the few intense weeks they'd spent together in his youth. And a good deal was about what happened soon after he left Uberwald. A child had appeared in Margolotta's life, a girl whose family had apparently been extinguished in a highway robbery in a snowy mountain pass. The little thing had stumbled up to Margolotta's castle thin, frozen, hungry. For food. She was human then. There was a time when a 3-year-old girl was a delicacy to Margolotta but she'd already begun, after Vetinari left, to think hard about her appetites. Besides, it was something of a miracle that the child had survived the forest, snow, cold and wolves.

            The girl was given a vampire name and was raised as something of a daughter and, secretly, as a test of Margolotta's restraint. The isolation of the castle meant that only an Igor or two knew about the little Lavinia. Margolotta told no one about her. Visitors didn't see her until quite a bit later when she was older and educated and angry enough to go out and find a vampire who would convert her to the species of Milady against Milady's wishes. She lived that life until Margolotta convinced her to make the Great Experiment with her. Abstinence. It worked until six months ago when Lavinia succumbed to temptation and chose to leave Margolotta's castle to decide what she wanted to do. What side she really wished to be on, Red or Black.

            In the hubwards chamber at the Palace, Lady Margolotta was alone. She didn't say anything at first, only stared at Isabella and breathed slowly, her face flushed. She fumbled around in her jacket pocket for her cigarette holder and finally got everything in order, Black Scopani, fire, smoke. She inhaled the fumes with relief.

            "Lavinia didn't exaggerate," she said. "Pardon my habit." She attempted to wave the smoke out of Isabella's general direction. "I am sorry to have Lord Vetinari drag you out of your bed, but I did vant to meet you. Your story is fascinating."

            "I'd think so too if it was happening to someone else."

            "Of course."

            The smoke swirled around the little room. Isabella tried to hold her breath.

            "Ve must leave qvite soon so I vill skip the small talk. May I ask you a rather personal qvestion?"

            Isabella nodded.

            "Vhat is it like to be married to him?"

            At first Isabella wanted to give a pat answer, a "fine," some sort of signal that she wasn't going to talk about that kind of thing with her. But there was a moment of lines crossing, this world, the one Isabella knew with her husband and children, the one where Lady Margolotta was a correspondent of 13 years. Friendship of a sort, long distance. That had been half the shock she'd felt at reading the coded clacks message. The possibility that Margolotta had exchanged letters with her for years without mentioning she was raising her husband's child. Lavinia had lied, but that didn't mean that perhaps it wasn't a lie in the world Isabella knew. She was still uneasy about that.

            "You need not answer," said Margolotta. "I vas merely curious."        

            "It's all right. I'd be curious too if I were you. I suppose being married to him is," she shrugged, "lonely."

            "Vas it alvays so?"

            Isabella loosened her dressing gown and pointed at just below her right shoulder, looked down, startled, and pointed to her left shoulder, where the gonne scar was.

            "I was shot first, actually. I never got a plausible answer why Dr. Cruces would target both of us, but that's how it happened. After I was shot, Havelock was leaning over me and I remember the look on his face so clearly; I never thought he was capable of showing that kind of shock and fear. It was real terror. I don't know that he'd ever experienced anything like it before. I blacked out right before the next shot hit him."

            She tightened the sash of her dressing gown again.

            "That was the last time we went out in the same carriage or showed ourselves together in public. Two years ago. Then there was the poisoning last year. Since then we've rarely eaten meals together. We had separate bedrooms all along but I hardly ever slept in mine until Havelock fell sick and ordered me to stay out of his room. He's never allowed me to return. My office was moved to another part of the Palace and we started communicating mostly through clerks. Now the children see him only three times a week at scheduled times and when I want to see him alone I have to make an appointment." She spoke matter-of-factly, in the same tone she might have used to explain the structural problems in a building.

            "It is a natural reaction to vant to protect you."

            Margolotta let her cigarette burn without smoking it and listened intently to the silence. She didn't hear anything from where she'd directed her ear, to the other side of the chamber wall where they both knew the Patrician was listening.

            "I asked him a month ago if he wanted a divorce," said Isabella. "Can you guess what he said? He said: 'Only if there's no alternative.'"

            "It sounds like he is looking for vun."

            "Not hard enough. It's taken too long already."

            Margolotta searched around for a place to drop her spent cigarette and settled for a potted plant in the corner.

            "Thank you for your frankness," she said. "I only knew him a short time, but long enough not to have expected you to tell me a happy story. I sincerely hope things change for the better," she paused, "vun vay or another. I vill look forward to hearing how the mystery is resolved. Oh, and I do apologize for the hair. Tasteless but necessary."

            "The hair?"

            Isabella would be the first to admit she wasn't looking her best at the moment but she didn't expect Margolotta to say anything about it. She patted her tangles.

            "No, no!" Margolotta reached into her jacket pocket for a small gold container that looked like a pill box. "Lord Vetinari didn't ask first? For shame!"

            She pulled the lid off the box. Inside was a thick coil of dark hair.

            Isabella started combing her fingers through her hair looking for the part that had been cut. She thought she found it at the nape of her neck.

            "He didn't," she said flatly.

            "It vas part of our deal. You see, for some vampires there are vorse things than a final death. And the most effective tortures are subtle." Margolotta frowned as she closed up the box. "Lavinia vill learn to control herself. She vill learn denial. It is a part of her punishment. Believe me, it vill be much more effective than nailing her to the Deosil Gate."

            "What does Ankh-Morpork get in exchange for a bit of my hair and letting Lavinia go?"

            "For the next tventy years, the city vill not lack for certain natural resources over vhich I have some small control."

            "The families of the dead get nothing?"

            "Ve have made arrangements for them as vell. Deep down, his lordship is a decent sort."

            As Margolotta turned to go, Isabella grasped her arm.

            "What is the one thing that all rulers want?"

            "I vill tell you vhat it is not: Immortality. Some rulers may vish it but not him. He refused it vunce before. Lavinia knew that but didn't believe he vould refuse again now that he's experiencing the inconveniences of age." Margolotta nicked her head toward the chamber door. "Like him, you must vait for the answer. You vould have known a veek ago if it vasn't for some trouble on the roads. Alas, trouble is everyvhere, isn't it?"