Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  The kid was still holding pressure on his wound, hard enough to do it right: she could see the shapes of bone, glow-pale, under the skin of her knuckles as she pressed her hands down.

  “What’s – what’s happening?” Emily asked in a strengthless little voice. “What are they? Those things?”

  “People,” Greta told her. “With a grudge. They’re – here to help us. Thank you, by the way. You’re doing very well.”

  “He’s still breathing,” Emily said as if offering something up. Greta picked up Grisaille’s wrist, fingers resting over the pulse: there, slower now, steady but faint. His breath still came with the bubbling crackle of fluid movement; there was blood in there that would need to come up, but the seal was holding and his punctured lung could actually inflate.

  “I think he’s going to make it,” said Greta. “If any of us are. Emily – something’s going to happen soon and I’m not sure what it will be, which isn’t helpful, but – if we do get through this, I want you to come with us back to the surface. With Varney and St. Germain and Ruthven and I. Be part of our world, instead of this one.”

  Emily stared at her, eyes huge, dried mascara snail-trails down her cheeks looking like war paint; she was about to say something, she’d drawn a breath, and then all the world went suddenly, brilliantly white.

  This was magic, Greta knew, magic on a scale she’d never thought to imagine; the force of it was like a physical blow, like opening a furnace door and being knocked back by the heat, and the last thing Greta thought as the white swallowed her up entirely was, We tried: that has to mean something at the end of it all, that we tried.

  Varney could remember an experience not unlike this once before, in another hole under the earth, the previous autumn. That one had ended with an even more improbable situation than the walking dead.

  It had taken him very little time to observe, recognize, and assess the situation. After that peculiar and sharp kind of disturbance in the air, at least thirty dead people had decided to join the fray, and in doing so had tipped the balance sharply in their favor. He couldn’t use his left arm, and the pain of his injuries was at the sort of level where it was making him feel distractingly ill, but suddenly that wasn’t in itself a death knell.

  The means by which the ghosts had appeared, or taken on enough physical form to be of use against the aggressors, did not bother Varney as he waded back into the fray; what worried him was that he couldn’t see Greta anywhere. Had she managed to place the glass things and then sought safety somewhere else in the tunnels while the battle went on? Had one of the coven —

  And even as the mental image flashed across his vision, Greta dead at the hands of one of these creatures, all the world blanked out in a soundless explosion of brilliant white light, brighter than anything he’d ever seen, brighter than the thing under London last autumn at the end of it all, nothing but white and white and white and then —

  Varney felt himself slide. Instead of the terrible low-roofed chamber under the earth full of active carnage, he was in a different room, empty and dark; he was in a different room, flickering-pale with golden candle flames, the ceiling smudged carbon-black by God knew how many torches over the years; he wasn’t in a chamber at all but sealed in solid stone, crushed by it, pressing against him with tons of weight in every direction, an explosion of pain; back to the chamber decorated only with a few hangings, then the chamber with bones, then the chamber full of drunken carousing vampires —

  I’m lost in time, he thought to himself, his ribs creaking from the pressure of that stone even now: the stone not yet quarried that would become the chamber he stood in. This place is not sure what time it is, and I’m lost in it.

  Through the haze, he could make out someone reaching for his hand. Ruthven, Edmund Ruthven, covered in blood that probably wasn’t all his, white fingers with pointed nails, a solid grip in the middle of terrifying uncertainty. A moment later he felt Alceste St. Germain close a paw that turned into a hand around his own, warm with living heat, and – almost at once – a physical shock as Ruthven and St. Germain joined hands, the three of them closing a circle. They were together, a thing that existed, in the middle of wildly fluctuating temporal zones. They were real, against a universe that was suddenly and terribly unsure.

  And the brightness flared again and ate all of them, swallowed Varney, Ruthven, St. Germain, everything still there in the chamber, and he could feel all the times at once, not sequentially: the blank pressure of solid stone before ever man tunneled through it, and the miners, through the ages, and the explorers, and the engineers, and the cataphiles, and Corvin’s people. All times were one, overlaid on one another in a crushing dizzy flare of experience —

  — and Varney could feel the world being stretched, feel the shock of power thrown into it, the dazzling destructive arc flash of history rolled thin and folded back together again, laminated like a plastic wrapping back into its proper order, pressed back into place, welded shut with an unthinkable burst of energy —

  And reality slammed back again with vicious sharpness, bringing with it visceral awareness, pain, fatigue, fear. Varney was himself again, staggering back to lean against the wall of the chamber, gasping, aware that the remaining crowd of vampires was largely reduced to a collapsed confusion of terribly bent and bloodstained limbs; he had barely held on to consciousness himself, and presumably it had only been the combined strength of Ruthven and St. Germain that had held the three of them upright through the full force of the temporal flow.

  He could just about make out Greta’s pale hair across the room; she was lying facedown in a crumpled heap, and Varney had time to think, If she is dead, then everything will have been pointless, before he saw her shoulders move as she breathed. Nearby were the bodies of Grisaille and a very young vampire, both of whom seemed the worse for wear but still present.

  A child, he thought, desperately weary. They turned a child.

  St. Germain crossed the chamber and knelt down beside the three of them, still in two-legged form, and Varney had rarely felt so grateful to have somebody else taking charge of a situation. “Is it over?” he asked, aware of his own voice shaking.

  Ruthven pushed back his hair. “No,” he said. “Yet all’s not done; yet keep the French the field, and this part I have to finish on my own.”

  “What —” Varney began, but the question died half-born as he watched Ruthven step over a tangled mess of limbs and reach down to haul someone bodily from the heap. And lift him off the floor, one hand around a blood-slick throat. Whoever it was had lost his shirt somewhere along the line. Blood-soaked black hair caked the pale face.

  Corvin, Varney thought. That must be Corvin.

  Half-conscious, the vampire scrabbled at Ruthven’s wrist, choking, and then seemed to realize all of a sudden who was holding him. A change came over his face – still twisted, almost unrecognizable underneath blood and dirt – and Varney thought he actually looked happy. Or something close to satisfied.

  “… it’s you,” Corvin rasped, clutching at the wrist of the hand that held him. “Finally. It’s you – I’ve – waited for this for so long —”

  Varney wondered if he knew exactly what kind of danger he was in. The platinum fang set with a ruby glittered behind Corvin’s torn lips, bent at an angle. “Don’t you remember me?” he asked Ruthven almost plaintively.

  The air seemed to thicken, crystallizing around them, as if something crucial was about to happen. No one else was currently bearing witness to this particular endgame; it was Varney alone who watched the awful little smile on Corvin’s face tilt and slide off completely, to be replaced with a drowning kind of horror as Ruthven’s own expression failed to change at all.

  “Do I remember you?” Ruthven repeated, as if tasting the words. “Let me think about that – it’s been a while —”

  Corvin squirmed in his grip, choking, tried to say something, couldn’t draw enough breath. “No,” Ruthven told him after a deliberately drawn-out pause,
his voice even. “I really can’t say that I do; I have no idea who on God’s earth you might be, and I’m afraid that I don’t actually care.”

  Before Varney had time to register what was happening, he turned – still holding Corvin off the ground – and swung the dangling vampire like a sack of discarded clothing, hard, against the wall.

  There was a small but horrible sound that Varney knew he would hear in his dreams much more clearly than he’d like, and Ruthven dropped what was left of Corvin in a heap. The shape of his skull had been radically altered, flattened on one side, and his eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling.

  St. Germain had risen to his feet while Ruthven was occupied, and the expression he wore made Varney wonder if Ruthven himself was going to be next in line; but the light in the werewolf’s lamp-yellow eyes died out and he slumped a little, with a sigh. “Killing that one was my prerogative,” he said. “I claimed the right.”

  “Terribly sorry,” Ruthven said. “But it really was my job; I should have done it properly the first time I encountered that specimen, back in the nineties.” He wiped his hands on his trousers. “Would have saved everyone a lot of time and effort and trauma. There’s a few others left alive —”

  “Not for long,” said St. Germain. “I’m not having them come back, either. Doing this once is bad enough; I’m not planning on doing it again.” He bent over the tangle of bodies on the floor, and Varney looked away.

  “I can’t fault the level of efficiency,” said Ruthven. “Can you walk, do you think?”

  The question was directed at Varney, who was leaning against the wall. The words were matter-of-fact, but the tone of voice belied how deadly sick he must be feeling. Varney blinked hard, pulling himself together. “Yes,” he said, “I believe so.”

  “Splendid. Let’s collect our people and get the hell out of here. I’d set fire to the place on the way out, but we’ve done enough damage to your city’s infrastructure already, Alceste.”

  “I don’t think we need an underground conflagration to finish off the day,” said St. Germain, and sighed, straightening up with his hands on his hips, apparently finished handing out coups de grâce. Beyond him Greta was beginning to stir, and Varney let go of the wall and crossed the chamber to her, stepping over bodies.

  With only one usable arm, it was both painful and awkward to lift Greta into his lap, but there was so much generalized pain sloshing around Varney’s consciousness at the moment that it didn’t seem to matter much – and the discomfort faded completely behind a spike of ice-clear gladness when she opened her eyes.

  “Is it over?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Varney said. “I think so, anyway. You did it. You brought the things to the places where they had to go.”

  Greta sat up, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment, and leaned against Varney. “Yes, eventually, once the ghosts showed up and made that possible – where are they anyway? Did they split the scene along with all the terrifying visions?”

  Varney looked around. There were no spectral manifestations present, or at least none he could detect. That they’d been motivated by some kind of profound emotion, he didn’t doubt; that the deaths of all the vampires who had colonized these catacombs had released them seemed to logically follow. There was a strange, unfamiliar sense of peace in the air down here. Of spells wound up.

  “Presumably,” said St. Germain. “Is it safe to move him?” He nodded at the limp form of Grisaille, and Varney could feel the change in Greta as she slipped back into her professional mode – and regretted it, because a moment later she sat up properly and climbed out of his lap to examine her patient.

  On Grisaille’s other side, the young vampire moaned faintly, beginning to come around. Varney felt that stab of vicious protectiveness again – they’d turned a child – and he was briefly jealous of Ruthven for having been the one to end Corvin once and for all.

  Not now, he thought. At least they could make sure the girl had the necessary guidance and training she was going to need, even if they could not undo the harm that had been done to her; she would have support, and that was better than nothing.

  “Yeah,” Greta said after a brief interlude, sitting back on her heels beside Corvin’s erstwhile lieutenant, wiping blood on the legs of her jeans. “We can move him. He’s going to need a while to recover from this, but he’s going to recover: he’s begun to heal. I wasn’t sure for a while there. But he needs a lot of work, and I don’t have any of my stuff with me in this country —”

  “We’ll get you anything you need,” said Ruthven rather quickly, and St. Germain nodded.

  “In that case, let’s get moving,” she said. “All of us. Emily as well. And Varney – I think I have an idea for what you might consider doing with that country estate of yours, although possibly it’s a conversation that can wait for now; and if I never ever have to go into any underground tunnels ever again in my entire life, it really will be too bloody soon.”

  At the instant when Fastitocalon had taken the entire force of their built-up energy and bent it, with his mind, his influence, taken it from a rapidly circling current to a focused beam, drawn off all that gathered and amplified energy and brought it to bear all at once, through the target outlined by his markers, on the wound in the prime material plane – at that moment Brightside had thought desperately, It’s not going to be enough, the four of us, even with this place acting as a giant metaphysical maser, the damage is too great, I didn’t know how bad it was, I didn’t want to know.

  He’d known that Fastitocalon could hear his thoughts, and hadn’t cared in the blazing white-hot sense of energy pouring through him, of being a conduit, a part of something so very much larger than himself. It had been both a passive flowing-through and an active pushing, focusing all his mental force on Fastitocalon, feeling it drawn and taken and balanced and tuned through the five-point circle of the collimators to a brilliant and precise shape that could draw together and laminate the torn edges of reality. Brightside had felt the load on their circuit as he made that contact, power faltering for a fraction of a second and then surging as Fastitocalon adjusted his control – felt time change around him, felt himself outside of time completely, translated into a neighboring plane – and had felt his own self beginning to craze and crack around the edges under the ongoing drain. He had no idea how long it went on: minutes, decades, time had lost all meaning —

  And then it snapped off, that load gone all at once, a ringing absence where the power had been, and Brightside’s mind was his own again: their circle was still joined, he could feel the others through the fizz and static of aftershocks, and was exhaustedly glad to note that Crepusculus’s mindtouch was still as strong as ever. But as they wound it down, drawing back their individual energies from the melded force Fastitocalon had guided, Brightside was astonished to discover that it wasn’t just the four of them: that somewhere along the line, others had joined the circle, become a part of this, others who had not been among the dead they’d raised on Fastitocalon’s command. He only realized it when they peeled off one by one, leaving the collective with a murmured word or two; and he was amazed to see who exactly had been aiding them.

  Thank God that’s over, said a weary American voice he immediately recognized: he’d heard it last singing, The crystal ship is being filled, a thousand girls, a thousand thrills. Then a woman’s voice, French, just as weary and beautifully raw around the edges, and another young man’s, speaking in French with a Polish accent, and half a dozen others – and a drawling, bone-dry voice Brightside would never be able to forget telling him, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics.

  I thought you had better things to do than muck around with the shape of reality, Brightside said, sounding just as exhausted in his own mind.

  Whenever other people agree with me, said Oscar Wilde, I feel as if I must be wrong. Don’t get any wild ideas, psychopomp: I enjoy it where I am.

  Wouldn’t dream of it, Brightside said, and the voice of Wilde fade
d on a ghost of laughter. He was the last of them: Brightside was alone with his three colleagues, and a weight of exhaustion he had not felt since the killing fields of Vietnam and Cambodia.

  Is that it? said Irazek shakily. Are we done?

  Thank you, gentlemen. Fastitocalon, sounding just as weary as the rest of them but still surprisingly in control. I think we have it. I appreciate your assistance, all of you.

  What happens now? Irazek wanted to know.

  Now we go home, what’s left of us. Irazek, I will escort you.

  You don’t need us anymore? That was Crepusculus.

  Not at the moment. You’ve done very well and I’m extremely grateful for your help. That would not have worked, I think, without your ghost-transference skills.

  All in a day’s work, right, Brightside? Crepusculus asked.

  Oh, entirely, he said —

  And the group channel cut off completely, as Fastitocalon let go of their hands. The silence in his head rang strangely, after so long plugged into his neighbors.