“You went to the cathedral?” Adrian Vale was standing in the middle of the kitchen of the safe flat in Leopoldstadt with his hands in his hair.
It was five in the morning.
He had come up from the Hidden City an hour ago with good news and found the window open and Magnus gone, and had spent forty-five frantic minutes searching the rooftops of the Second District before Magnus climbed back in through the same window with a half-healed cut along his ribs, smelling of silver and gunpowder and somebody else’s blood.
“I needed air,” said Magnus.
“You needed air.
You went to the tallest building in Vienna, which is also a cathedral, which is also, I’d like to point out, on every tourist postcard ever printed, and you sat on the roof of it like a gargoyle, and a Hellsing hunter climbed up and shot you.” “Twice.” “Twice!” Adrian turned to Noah, who was sitting at the kitchen table stitching the cut on Magnus’s ribs with silk thread and a curved needle and an expression of saintly patience.
“Noah.
Tell him.” “Hold still,” said Noah to Magnus.
“That’s not what I meant.” “I know what you meant.” Noah tied off a stitch.
“He’s alive.
She’s alive.
Nobody followed him back.
Lyra checked.” He glanced up.
“She is alive, isn’t she, son?” Magnus looked at the table.
“Yes.” “You could have killed her?” “Yes.” Noah went back to his stitching.
“Well, then,” he said mildly.
“Seems to me that’s the most interesting part of the story.” Adrian opened his mouth, and shut it, and looked at Magnus for a long moment with an expression that was hard to read.
Then he sighed, and dropped into a chair, and put his feet up on the table.
“Fine,” he said.
“Fine.
We’ll talk about it later.
At length.
With diagrams.” He pulled a folded square of heavy cream paper out of the pocket of his overcoat and tossed it onto the table in front of Magnus.
It was sealed with dark red wax, stamped with a design Magnus didn’t recognize: a gate, half open, with a key above it.
“The Warden says yes.
Tonight.
All three of you.” Silas, in the doorway in a borrowed dressing gown, let out a long breath.
Irina, behind him, clutched his arm.
“There are conditions,” Adrian went on.
“There are always conditions.
He wants to meet you himself.
In person.
That’s never happened, by the way.
In the forty years I’ve been going down there, the Warden has never met a new arrival personally.” He looked at Magnus.
“He’s very old, and very careful, and he’s spent two hundred years keeping that city alive.
Be polite.
Don’t do the thing.” “What thing?” “The thing where everyone wants to kneel.” Adrian rubbed his eyes.
“Just.
Try not to.” They went down at midnight.
There was no single entrance to the Hidden City.
There were dozens, Lyra said, scattered across the old districts of Vienna, and they changed, and most of them were only open on certain nights, and some of them could only be found by people who had already been told the way.
This one was in the crypt of St.
Michael’s Church, across the square from the Hofburg Palace: a door at the back of a dusty storeroom full of stacked chairs and broken candlesticks, behind which a narrow stone stair went down, and down, and down.
The crypt beneath St.
Michael’s was full of the dead.
Real ones.
Magnus had read about it, later: four thousand of them, buried here between the 1500s and the 1700s, in coffins stacked to the ceiling in long, low, vaulted rooms.
Many of the coffins had broken open over the centuries.
The dry, cold, still air had preserved the bodies inside, and they lay there in their burial clothes, mummified, brown and leathery and peaceful: wigged gentlemen and lace-capped ladies and, in one coffin near the stairs, a man in a red coat with his hands folded on his chest and a look on his withered face of mild, eternal surprise.
Irina stopped in front of him for a long time.
“I knew men like him,” she said softly.
Her voice was steadier now.
Every day it was steadier.
“In my village.
When I was a girl.
Officers.
They used to ride through on their horses.” She looked up at Magnus.
“How long have I been asleep?” Magnus didn’t know how to answer.
He took her hand instead, and they went on.
Beyond the crypt, the passages got older.
Brick gave way to rough-hewn stone, and stone to something older still: the foundations of the Roman fort of Vindobona, Lyra said, two thousand years old, buried under the city like the roots of a tree.
Then there was a section of tunnel that was new, startlingly new, concrete and steel, with a rusted sign in German on the wall.
ZIVILSCHUTZ.
Civil defense.
A nuclear shelter, built in the 1960s, Lyra said, for the government of Austria to hide in when the bombs came.
They never came.
The vampires had moved in sometime in the eighties.
Nobody upstairs had ever noticed.
And then, at the end of the concrete tunnel, there was a gate.
It was very old, and very large, and made of black iron, two great leaves set into an arch of carved stone.
It stood open.
On the arch above it, cut deep into the stone in letters a foot high, there were words.
Latin.
Magnus could read them now without trying.
NEMO HIC SERVUS.
NEMO HIC DOMINUS.
“No one here a slave,” Silas translated slowly, under his breath.
He had learned Latin from a priest, he said, in 1931, in a seminary he ran away from.
“No one here a master.” “The first law of the sanctuaries,” said Adrian.
“It was on every one of them, once.
Paris, Kraków, Venice, Prague.
This is the last one left with the words still on it.” And above the words, at the very top of the arch, there was a carving.
A dragon, coiled, with a crown on its head.
Someone had defaced it, long ago.
Chiseled the crown off.
Gouged the dragon’s face.
And someone else, later, had restored it, carefully, so that the crown was back, a little paler than the stone around it, a little cleaner, like a scar.
Magnus stood under it and looked up, and the second heart in his chest went tap, very softly.
Like a knock on a door.
Then Adrian said, “Come on,” and they went through the gate, and the passage turned a corner, and the world opened up.
He would remember the first sight of the Hidden City for the rest of his life.
It was a cavern.
That was the first thing.
But the word was too small.
It was a valley, an underground valley, so wide that the far side was lost in haze, so high that the roof vanished into darkness overhead.
The walls were stone, rough and layered and ancient, and they were alive: honeycombed with doors and windows and balconies, staircases cut into the rock, bridges strung between ledges, lit by ten thousand lights.
Gas lamps and candles and lanterns and strings of fairy lights and neon signs and the cold blue glow of LED panels, all mixed together, all glowing, rising up the walls in terraces like the lights of a city on a hillside at night.
And down the middle of the valley, black and fast and gleaming, ran a river.
“The Wien,” said Lyra, beside him.
She had come up quietly.
“The Vienna River.
The humans buried it a hundred and fifty years ago, put it in a tunnel under the streets, to stop the floods.
They don’t know that the tunnel goes on further than they built it.
That it comes down here.” She looked at the black water.
“Running water.
The dead don’t like to cross it.
Old instinct.
Nobody knows why.
So the founders built the city around it.
A moat.
Protection.” A little shrug.
“Also, it’s where the ashes go.” There were bridges across it, dozens of them, stone and iron and wood, crowded with people.
And on both banks of the river, and climbing up the walls on either side, and spilling down onto the valley floor in winding streets and crowded squares, was the city.
It was full of life.
That was what Magnus could not get over.
That was what he would try to explain to Silas later, and fail.
He had expected something like the Black Rose: a place of shadows and whispers and red lamps, of hunched shapes in corners.
He had expected to feel the cold, quick presences of a thousand vampires all around him, the way he had felt them in Prague, all turning toward him at once.
He felt them.
They were there.
There were thousands of them.
But they were busy.
There was a market.
A long winding street of stalls under the rock wall, crowded, noisy, lit by lanterns, selling everything.
Books and clothes and records and antiques.
Jewelry.
Knives.
Medicine.
A woman selling hand-knitted scarves.
A man selling old film posters.
A stall with a long glass counter like a delicatessen, with rows of dark red bottles in a chilled cabinet, each one with a handwritten label: A-positive, Bavarian, vintage 2024.
Deer, Styrian, wild.
Mixed bank, house blend.
Somebody was haggling over the price of a bottle of something labeled Horse — racing stock — very rare.
There was a café.
A real one, with little round marble tables and bentwood chairs spilling out onto a cobbled square, and waiters in long white aprons, and old men reading newspapers on long wooden poles the way old men had read them in Vienna for two hundred years.
They were drinking dark red from coffee cups.
Two of them were playing chess.
Magnus stopped and watched them for so long that Adrian had to come back for him.
There were people sitting on the steps of a fountain, talking.
A young couple holding hands on a bridge, looking down at the black water.
A gaggle of fledglings, obviously new, all elbows and nervous laughter, being herded across a square by a tired-looking older vampire with a clipboard.
A cinema, with a hand-painted sign advertising a double bill of Nosferatu and The Princess Bride.
A ghoul, a free one, with the flat glassy eyes but a quick bright smile, selling bread from a bakery window, warm bread, to a line of humans.
Humans.
Magnus stopped again.
He stared.
There were humans here.
Not many.
A few dozen, maybe, that he could see.
But they were here, walking among the vampires, laughing with them, buying bread.
Not dazed, like the humans in the Black Rose.
Not bandaged.
Not afraid.
A middle-aged man in a sweater was arguing amiably with a vampire about football.
A young woman with a pram, an actual pram, with an actual human baby asleep in it, was chatting to the ghoul at the bakery.
“The Willing,” said Noah, at his elbow.
He had seen where Magnus was looking.
“That’s what they call themselves.
Humans who know.
Some of them are married to one of us.
Some of them are family, the grandchildren of somebody who was turned.
Some of them donate.
Most of them just live here, or visit, and keep the secret.
They come down from Vienna on the trains, the old ones that don’t run upstairs anymore.
They’re paid, if they give blood, and paid well, and they’re protected.
Nobody touches the Willing.
Not ever.” He paused.
“It’s the second law of the city.
After the one on the gate.” “How many?” “Humans?
About three hundred.
Our kind?” Noah considered.
“Nine thousand, give or take.
Ghouls, maybe fifteen hundred.
All free.” “How?” Magnus turned to him.
“How are the ghouls free?
They need blood.
Vampire blood.
And whoever’s blood they drink—” “Has a hook in them.
I know.” Noah nodded toward a building across the square, a tall, narrow, many-windowed thing carved into the rock wall, with a red cross painted over the door.
“That’s my clinic.
Behind it’s the Commons Bank.
Every vampire in the city who’s able gives a little, once a month.
A few drops.
It all goes in together.
Thousands of us, mixed.
The ghouls drink from that.” He smiled faintly.
“Turns out if you drink from everyone, you’re nobody’s.
The voices all cancel out.
Took us fifty years to figure that out.” Magnus looked at the clinic.
He looked at the free ghoul selling bread.
He looked at Silas, beside him, who was staring at the bakery with his mouth slightly open and tears running down his old face into his beard.
He could not speak.
The Warden lived at the top of the city.
You reached his house by a long stone staircase cut into the cavern wall, four hundred and twelve steps; Magnus counted them, without meaning to, and when he got to the end and realized the number, he stopped dead on the top step for a moment with a strange cold feeling down his back.
Then he went on.
At the top was a door, plain and black, and beyond it a house built into the rock: low rooms, bare stone walls, very little furniture, and books, everywhere, stacked on the floors and the tables and the windowsills.
It was cold.
It smelled of old paper and older dust.
The Warden was sitting in a chair by an unlit fireplace, with a blanket over his knees and a stick across his lap.
He was the oldest thing Magnus had ever seen.
Not in his face.
His face was a man’s of about sixty, lean and lined and clean-shaven, with close-cropped white hair and a long, severe, intelligent nose and deep-set eyes the faded blue of old denim.
But Magnus could feel it on him.
Through the blood-sense.
Through the second heart.
Through everything.
It came off him like the cold off a glacier, like the weight of a mountain: an age so vast it was almost a sound.
Five hundred years.
Six.
More.
Older than Veyr.
Older than Ferrante.
Much, much older than the Northerner.
Old enough, maybe, to remember.
“Konstantin Rauch,” said Adrian, with a formal little bow Magnus had never seen him make.
“Warden of the Sanctuary of Vienna.
Justiciar of the Night Courts.” He hesitated.
“Sir.
May I present—” “I know who he is.” The Warden’s voice was very quiet and very dry, like pages turning.
He did not take his eyes off Magnus.
He did not move at all.
“Leave us, please,” he said.
“All of you.
Adrian.
Doctor Graves.
Miss Belladonna.
Take the old ghoul and the lady with you.” Adrian looked at Magnus.
Magnus nodded.
One by one, the others went out, and the black door shut behind them, and Magnus was alone with the Warden of the Hidden City in the cold, book-crammed room.
For a long time, neither of them spoke.
Then the Warden took the stick from across his lap, and planted the end of it on the stone floor, and gripped it with both hands, and Magnus saw that the old man’s knuckles were white.
Saw that his arms were trembling.
Saw, with a slow, cold sinking, that his left knee was bending, very slightly, under the blanket, toward the floor.
And that he was fighting it with every ounce of five hundred years of strength.
“Please,” Magnus said quickly.
“Please don’t.
You don’t have to—” “I know I don’t have to.” The Warden’s voice was a hiss.
“That’s not the problem.
The problem is that I want to.” He held on to the stick.
Slowly, slowly, the knee straightened.
The trembling stopped.
He let out a long breath, and sat back in his chair, and looked at Magnus with those faded blue eyes, and for the first time there was something in them besides wariness.
It was grief.
Old, deep, vast grief, like the cavern below.
“I have smelled that blood once before,” said Konstantin Rauch.
“In 1891.
In a throne hall in the Carpathians, with snow on the windows, and thirty Lords at a long table, and a man at the head of it with gray eyes and an iron crown.” He paused.
“I was a judge in his Night Courts for three hundred years.
I wrote half the laws on that gate.
I stood beside his chair.” His mouth twisted.
“And I was not there, on the night they opened his gate for Van Helsing.
I was here, in Vienna, on the Crown’s business.
I have spent a hundred and twenty-nine years wondering whether, if I had been there, I could have stopped it.” Magnus didn’t know what to say.
“Adrian tells me you were a ghoul,” said the Warden.
“Of Cassian Veyr.” “Yes.” “And before that, a human.
In Hellsing’s hands.” “Yes.” “And now you carry his blood.
Not inherited.
Not descended.
His.
The thing itself.” The faded blue eyes did not blink.
“Do you know what that means, boy?” “No,” said Magnus honestly.
“Not really.
I know there’s something in my chest that isn’t mine.
I know it talks to me.
I know that when I drink from one of you, it gets stronger, and so do I.” He hesitated.
“I know people keep wanting to kneel, and I don’t know why, and I hate it.” The Warden looked at him for a long time.
“Good,” he said at last.
“Good?” “Good that you hate it.” The old man shifted in his chair, and winced.
“I knew him, you understand.
I knew him well.
He was the greatest of us.
He was also, for most of his long life, a monster.
He built this world out of fear and blood and patience, and he held it together with his own two hands, and the day he died, it fell apart, because he had never trusted anyone else to hold it.” He leaned forward.
“There are people in this city, in every city, who will hear what you are and want you to be him.
They will want a king.
They will want someone to put the old order back.
Some of them will want it so badly they will kneel to you before you have done a single thing to deserve it, and they will call it loyalty, and they will mean it.” His voice dropped.
“And there are others, out there, Lords, who will want you dead before you can become him.
Or want you in a cage so they can drink you, a little at a time, for a thousand years.” “I know about those.” “I’m sure you do.” The Warden settled back.
“So.
My conditions.
You may live here.
You and your two ghouls.
You will live with Adrian and his friends; they are reckless, but they are good, and I trust them.
You will not feed on humans in Vienna, above or below.
You will drink from the bank, like everyone else.
You will not use that,” a flick of the fingers at Magnus’s chest, “on anyone in my city.
Not the Command, not the shadows, not the blood.
You will not start fights.
You will not end them, if someone else starts one, without coming to me first.” A pause.
“And you will not tell anyone what you are.
Not yet.
Not until we know more.” “Adrian knows.
Lyra.
Noah.” “Adrian knows you killed a Lord and made his ghouls bow.
Lyra suspects.
Noah doesn’t care.” A faint, dry flicker of something that might, in a younger face, have been a smile.
“Let us keep it that way, for now.
Hellsing is in my city tonight because of you.
The Duchess of the Blood will be in it soon, I expect, or her people.
If either of them learns exactly what you carry, there will be war.
And this city,” he gestured at the window, at the ten thousand lights below, “is what dies in wars.” Magnus looked out of the window.
He could see the whole of the Hidden City from here.
The river.
The bridges.
The market, still crowded, the café with its chess players, the cinema, the bakery with its line of humans and the free ghoul smiling behind the counter.
The terraces of light climbing the cavern walls.
He could hear it, faintly, rising up toward him: voices and music and laughter, and nine thousand slow hearts, and three hundred quick ones, all beating together.
Somewhere nobody owns anybody.
“I agree,” he said.
“To all of it.” The Warden looked at him for one more long moment.
Then he nodded, slowly, and picked up a book from the table beside him, and opened it, and that was all.
It was a dismissal.
Magnus was at the door when the old man spoke again.
“Boy.” He turned.
The Warden was not looking at him.
He was looking at the book in his lap, but he was not reading it.
His long, lined, severe face was very still.
“He would have been glad,” said Konstantin Rauch quietly.
“That it was someone who had been a slave.
He was a hostage himself, you know, as a boy.
He never forgot what it was to be owned.” He turned a page.
“He forgot a great many other things.
But never that.” The Circle’s house was a wine cellar.
It had been, once.
A Habsburg wine cellar, cut into the cavern wall on the far side of the river, three levels of vaulted rooms that had once held twenty thousand bottles of the Emperor’s Tokaji.
Now it held a kitchen with a huge battered table, and a living room full of mismatched sofas, and Lyra’s computers, banks of them, humming in a back room behind a door with a sign on it that said KNOCK OR DIE.
And bedrooms, a warren of them, up and down narrow stone stairs.
“This is yours,” said Adrian, opening a door on the top level.
It was small.
It had a bed, a real bed, with clean white sheets and a heavy wool blanket.
It had a chair, and a little table, and a lamp, and a shelf of books that someone had obviously chosen, quickly, that afternoon: a battered paperback of The Count of Monte Cristo, a book of chess problems, an atlas.
And it had a window, a real one, cut through the rock, that looked out over the river and the bridges and the ten thousand lights.
Magnus stood in the doorway and looked at it and did not move.
“Silas is next door,” Adrian said.
“Irina’s across the hall.
Noah’s on the floor below, and Lyra’s in the cellar with her machines, and I’m—” He waved vaguely.
“Somewhere.
Usually in the kitchen.
The fridge is full.
The bathroom’s down the hall.
The hot water takes a while.” He paused.
Then, quite suddenly, all the brightness went out of him, and he looked very young, and very tired, and very old, all at once.
“Magnus.
I’m sorry.
About Petra.
I didn’t say it properly before.
I’m sorry we were late.” Magnus didn’t trust himself to answer.
He nodded.
Adrian nodded back.
He seemed to understand.
He put a hand on Magnus’s shoulder, briefly, and squeezed, and went back down the stairs.
Magnus closed the door.
He sat down on the edge of the bed.
It gave under him, soft and springy.
He touched the sheet.
It was cotton, and it smelled of soap.
He had not slept in a bed since Site Seven.
Before that, he had not slept in a bed that was his since he was sixteen, in a foster home in Stockport, the last one, the one where they had told him on his birthday that he would have to leave in two years and he should start thinking about where he’d go.
He lay down.
He pulled the wool blanket over himself, all the way to his chin.
He lay on his back and looked at the stone ceiling, and listened to the city through the window: the river, and the voices, and the music, and the hearts.
And for the first time since the night he killed Cassian Veyr, the voice in his blood said nothing at all.
Magnus closed his eyes, and slept.