Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5)

The Immortal Chronicles
is an ongoing series of novellas written by Adam, the immortal narrator of
Immortal
,
Hellenic Immortal
and
Immortal at the Edge of the World
.

The Immortal Chronicles: Immortal At Sea (volume 1)

Adam's adventures on the high seas have taken him from the Mediterranean to the Barbary Coast, and if there's one thing he learned, it's that maybe the sea is trying to tell him to stay on dry land.

The Immortal Chronicles: Hard-Boiled Immortal (volume 2)

The year was 1942, there was a war on, and Adam was having a lot of trouble avoiding the attention of some important people. The kind of people with guns, and ways to make a fella disappear. He was caught somewhere between the mob and the government, and the only way out involved a red-haired dame he was pretty sure he couldn't trust.

The Immortal Chronicles: Immortal and the Madman (volume 3)

On a nice quiet trip to the English countryside to cope with the likelihood that he has gone a little insane, Adam meets a man who definitely has.  The madman’s name is John Corrigan, and he is convinced he’s going to die soon.

He could be right.  Because there’s trouble coming, and unless Adam can get his own head together in time, they may die together.

The Immortal Chronicles: Yuletide Immortal (volume 4)

When he’s in a funk, Adam the immortal man mostly just wants a place to drink and the occasional drinking buddy. When that buddy turns out to be Santa Claus, Adam is forced to face one of the biggest challenges of extremely long life: Christmas cheer. Will Santa break him out of his bad mood? Or will he be responsible for depressing the most positive man on the planet?

The Immortal Chronicles: Regency Immortal (volume 5)

Adam has accidentally stumbled upon an important period in history: Vienna in 1814. Mostly, he'd just like to continue to enjoy the local pubs, but that becomes impossible when he meets Anna, an intriguing woman with an unreasonable number of secrets and sharp objects.

Anna is hunting down a man who isn't exactly a man, and if Adam doesn't help her, all of Europe will suffer. If Adam
does
help, the cost may be his own life. It's not a fantastic set of options. Also, he's probably fallen in love with her, which just complicates everything.

Regency Immortal

I don’t know how I ended up in Vienna.

This happens more often than it probably should.  It’s fair to say I simply don’t recall what circumstances resulted in my being there because I’m talking about 1814, and that was a long time ago.  It’s equally reasonable to say that history is full of little gray periods in which nothing happened, nobody did anything, and everybody died quietly and unnoticed.  Furthermore, it’s entirely fair to assume that a man who has been alive for sixty-odd thousand years—hi, that’s me—is going to have a gap or two in his memory.

However, in my case I probably can’t remember because I had been drinking.

This is not to say there’s no merit to the “gray periods” argument, because that’s also sort of true.  If you want to know what it’s like living as long as I have, try and imagine the most bored you have ever been in your entire life.  Now imagine what it’s like to be
that
bored for entire centuries.

When you’ve reached that level of bored, there are going to be gaps in the record, where you can’t remember what happened because absolutely nothing
did
happen and your brain didn’t bother to record the minutia.  This is why it’s not all that hard to convince someone they could have been abducted by aliens and had their memories erased, because that explanation is much more interesting than the possibility their life was so incredibly boring their own brain wasn’t even paying attention.

Not that I’m saying there are aliens.  There probably aren’t.  I’ve never met one, though, and I’ve met an awful lot of weird things.

I’m digressing.  The point I wanted to make is that history, as a whole, was powerfully boring.  Sure, every few months something a little memorable can happen, and every couple of years there may be a genuinely exciting event.  Once or twice a generation, just to break things up, there’s an outbreak of abject terror, which is exciting only not in a really good way.  Like volcanoes, or Huns.  But mostly?  Dull and boring.  History is written about the exciting things, but life is mostly lived in the boring parts in-between.

Vienna in 1814 wasn’t one of the dull moments, because that was when a number of important people showed up to figure out how to divide Europe before someone started another war.  This happened all the time—war I mean—and would continue to happen after the congress was over, even when France ran out of Napoleons.  Every civilized collection of city-states goes through the same cycle that only ends when everyone gets together to discuss why it is they keep having wars if nobody is enjoying themselves, and they all agree to work on their anger management and megalomania, and then things are quiet for a while until they aren’t any more.  Repeat. 

But the congress was still a nice idea.  And as I said, there were a lot of important people in Vienna for this congress, which has nothing to do with my being there.  I know I’ve already said I don’t know how I ended up in Vienna, but I can state for a fact that my importance had nothing to do with it, because I’m not an important person.  Or, I should say, I’m not a publicly important person.  This is mostly by design.

On average, important people don’t enjoy long lives.  Some of them don’t even survive their tribe’s first bad crop.  Since I don’t care to be blamed for things that are out of my control—blight, comets, plagues of locust, and so on—I strive to be unimportant.  I would rather be the guy in the back of the room that nobody knows the name of than the one at the front of the room taking responsibility for big decisions and leading people into battle.  Also, I’d rather not go into battle.

But despite being often unimportant, I do find myself in situations now and then that require me to do semi-important things.  Vienna was one of those times.  You can read all you want about the Congress and everything that was accomplished there.  What you won’t read about is the assassin who was in Vienna with the delegates.  The reason you won’t is that I was there to stop him.

Well, not just me.

*   *   *

Her name was Anna.  I never got a last name, but she may not have had one to give.  That was a pretty common thing for a long time.  If you didn’t have a title or some sort of highborn lineage you might have still had a family name, but nobody much cared what it was.  And a lot of the time it wasn’t even a name at all; it was whatever your dad did.  Thus, a world full of Smiths. 

I didn’t bother to invent last names to go with the first names I’d also invented, unless I was traveling in the kind of crowd that expected one, and then it was tricky.  I’ve invented entire royal bloodlines—and, on a couple of occasions, entire countries—just to get into decent parties, a trick that only works until someone does a little research.

Anna was beautiful and smart and just the right kind of dangerous to get me killed, which was often what I looked for in a woman, to be entirely honest.  The interesting ones are somehow almost always the ones who come with life-threatening risk on the side.  It keeps my life exciting, and might also explain why I have trust issues.

When I first saw her she didn’t look like someone who had no last name.  She was in a powder blue dress with bright white lacing, which in this particular part of town drew attention the way a newly blossomed flower would catch the eye in a bed of weeds.  If the outfit had been more threadbare and dirtier, she might have been mistaken for a prostitute; otherwise, the obvious conclusion was that she was an out-of-place noblewoman. 

I’m not saying that was what she was, I’m saying that was how she dressed.  Noblewomen tended to wear clean dresses, and sport a lot of layers.  About fifty years earlier, it was possible to tell how close a woman was to royalty by the number of layers one had to remove to see them naked.  I never undressed a queen, but based on what was involved in unclothing a lady-in-waiting I’m guessing doing so would require a skilled lock-pick, a small axe and a tremendous amount of patience.

Anna dressed like someone from court—the English court—and wore enough finery to make it plausible for her to have breathed the same air as a king somewhere along the way.  She had raven-black hair tied in a complicated set of knots that brought it down past her shoulders in a tight curl, and a dress that was off the shoulders –she had a wrap around them—and showed off an impressive bosom.

When I found her she was standing in an alley, looking deeply perplexed.  That perplexity had nothing to do with the dirt or the alley, or even the rough part of town where the dirt and the alley were located.  It also had nothing to do with the unwashed gentlemen milling about not far from her, looking as if they meant to either hire her for prostitutional duties or harm her in some more rapacious way for free.

I doubt I looked much better than those men in her eyes.  (Her eyes were a deep coffee brown, by the way.)  I had on nicer clothing than they did, but I’d been wearing them for a few days.  This wasn’t unusual—down at the peasantry level having more than a couple of outfits wasn’t too common—but I was actually traveling with a decent sum of funds and could afford to not be seen in the same coat over and over, provided I remembered to get back to the flat I was renting before I passed out, rather than after.  It had been a few days since that had happened.

She was out of breath, and her eyes were searching all of our faces and then the walls and the windows.  It was a cloudy day but visibility wasn’t too terrible because cities hadn’t invented pollution yet, so there were no hidden mysteries.  Whatever she was looking for, she couldn’t find it.

More importantly for her immediate wellbeing, she’d largely ignored the men nearby, up until the closest one decided to offer a lewd suggestion, the general gist being that perhaps what she was missing was located in his pants.  When she didn’t reply, he worked a little harder to get her attention by putting his hand on her shoulder, which was just a huge mistake.

“Remove your hand, sir,” she said.  There was an iron in her voice that should really have been enough of a warning to leave her alone.

It wasn’t enough, because the hand went from the shoulder down the front and on a misguided journey toward her cleavage.  He wasn’t going to be getting that far though, because a moment later she’d broken his wrist.

He shouted out in pain and fell over, which just drew more attention.  It also didn’t do anything to dissuade the men whose wrists hadn’t been broken yet.  That in itself showed an amazingly poor self-preservation instinct, because the effort she expended to break bone was not at all extensive, and it’s not easy to do that.  I can do it, but I’ve had a lot longer to practice.

“Now why did you do that to my friend?” said the next nearest gentleman, who was neither a gentleman nor a friend to the injured man so far as I could tell.

“That wasn’t nice,” agreed a third man.  “You should try to be nicer.”

I was nearby, emerging from a different alley only a few paces away.  (I was in the alley for reasons involving my bladder.  The streets were dirt and we had no toilets—I swear to you this was normal.)  If there hadn’t been any rape-minded men wandering by, I expect I would have concocted some excuse to engage the lovely noblewoman in the wrong end of town all on my own.  The slowly assembling mob presented a much better excuse, however.

I had a sword with me, which was just a happy coincidence, as I didn’t always travel around town with it on my hip.  It was a good sword, the kind that convinces people not to give the owner an excuse to use it.  So a few second after the third man spoke, my sword was resting on his shoulder.  This caused him to freeze, which is what blades do to people whose necks they touch.

“
I
think you good fellows should return to your tavern,” I said.  “I’m sure they miss you there.”

Anna, who had widened her stance as much as her dress and boots allowed, knees bent and in a defensive crouch, looked at me with something less than love in her eyes.  “I can protect myself,” she said.  Her hand—which I had taken to be holding her dress out of the mud—was actually fingering the hilt of a knife sewn into one of the layers of her skirts.

“I’m sorry, would you like to kill them yourself?” I asked.  “Gentlemen, do you care which of us kills you?”

“Seems to me, sir, this has been a misunderstanding,” said the one with the blade on his neck.  His able-limbed companion was already backpedaling while the one with the broken wrist was getting to his feet and thinking that going through life left-handed was preferable to not surviving the day.

“I’m certain you’re right,” I said.  “Why don’t you walk away from the lady and discuss it amongst yourselves.”

I lowered the sword and waited to see if anybody was foolish enough to see how good I was with it.  I happened to be very good with it, so it was always a little disappointing when nobody challenged me. Honestly, the first time I held this sword there was a better-than-even chance I’d get to use it on a bunch of pirates.  Who knew that was going to end up being my best chance at really swinging the thing?  I mean, none of these guys even
had
a sword.  It was depressing.  I miss the fifteen-hundreds.

Anyway, the area cleared out pretty quickly.  There were still a couple of dangerous-looking malingerers at the edge of my vision, but none of them looked like they were prepared to take on a swordsman.  Unfortunately.

“I told you I didn’t need your help,” Anna growled, showing me the blade.

“Yes, I heard you, and that’s a really impressive little dagger, but my sword was a more peaceful resolution and it’s hard to get blood out of a petticoat.  Why don’t you put it away?”

“
You
are still here,” she pointed out.  And indeed, she had an excellent point.  My sword and I were far more dangerous to her than any of the men she’d been prepared to dispatch.  I’m sorry if that sounds like I’m bragging.

“Of course.  My apologies.”  I slid the sword back into its sheath.  She didn’t do the same with her knife.  “Now before I leave you to your sharp little blade and whatever mob those ruffians are no doubt organizing at the pub up the street, I wonder if you want to tell me who you’re looking for?  Mind, I am in no way suggesting you
need
my help, but if you
want
it, I’m completely free of other engagements.”

“What makes you think I’m looking for anybody?”

“If you were looking for a
thing
you have failing eyesight, as there are no things in this part of the city.  There’s only mud and squalor and men like the one you explained the fragility of wrists to.  You’re after a someone, and unless it’s me—in which case I’m very flattered and it’s a pleasure making your acquaintance—you’ve failed in locating them.”

Briefly, and only briefly, something that looked like amusement colored her eyes.   Then it was gone.  “Why would you help me?” she asked.

“Because you’re very pretty, and I’m very foolish. I’m also useful, and currently sober.  You could do worse.”

“In this part of town, I’m sure I could do
much
worse.”  She put the knife away, which was about the closest thing to a handshake I could expect to get under the circumstances. 

“I’m looking for a… murderer,” she said.  “I chased him here, and then he was gone.  I think… sir you will find this absurd.”

“I might,” I agreed.  “Say it anyway.”

She blushed, which added a dimension to her features that was unreasonably appealing.  A small gang of threatening men didn’t raise her heart rate in the slightest, but the idea of saying something I might think was crazy raised her color.  This was an unusual woman.