Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  Her companion, with his courtly manners, was a vampire. A creature from horror tales.

  This was nightmare.

  ‘Ah.’ A deep voice spoke from the darkness ‘C’est la belle rousse qui patrouille dans le camp.’ A lantern-slide was cracked. Lydia made out, in the black angle of the communication trench, the two men she’d seen last night who’d been talking in the ruined village to the woman in black. The taller, fairer man bent and kissed her hand, and even through her glove his lips were warm on her frozen fingers. He’s fed. Lydia knew it had been on some poor soldier who was dying in any case – quite possibly a German, whom she knew she was supposed to want dead (Or why else are you here?).

  I shouldn’t have anything to do with these people. Any of them …

  With the preternatural quickness of perception that many vampires possessed, the fair man must have read her thoughts in her face, because when she looked back up she saw understanding in his dark eyes, and pity for the dilemma in her heart.

  ‘We have asked ourselves, my friends and I, what it is that you seek with your lantern each night.’ His French lilted with an Italian intonation – Jamie would tell me exactly what part of Italy he comes from. ‘It is this woman, then? This dark-haired nurse—’

  ‘She’s a nurse?’

  His nose wrinkled in half-comic distaste. ‘She smells of carbolic and vinegar, Madame. Her dark cloak covered her dress, but the greatcoat she had underneath it was brown.’

  ‘She could have borrowed it,’ put in the slim dark youth behind his shoulder, whose face reminded Lydia of the statue of the degenerate Roman Emperor Heliogabalus in the Capitoline Museum of Rome. ‘Or stolen it. Or bought it from that slippery English clerk at Pont-Sainte-Félicité …’

  ‘And in fact,’ agreed Lydia, taking a deep breath to steady her nerves, ‘I can’t see what other woman would be wandering about so close to the front lines.’

  ‘Ten thousand pardons.’ Ysidro bowed. ‘Madame Doctor Asher, may I beg the favor of presenting to you Antonio Pentangeli, of the Most Serene Republic of Venice? And this is Basilio Occhipinti.’

  ‘Madama,’ murmured the dark vampire, and Antonio bowed again.

  ‘I kiss your hands and feet, beautiful lady. As for this dark-haired nurse, wherever she acquired her greatcoat, she called out to me in French, saying, I would speak to you. And when we said nothing – Basilio and I – she called again, You have nothing to fear. But I need to speak with those who hunt the night. I have a proposition, a partnership, to offer you.’

  Lydia said, ‘Drat it.’

  ‘Do not distress yourself, dear lady. Neither Basilio nor I – nor, I think, any of us who hunt the night in this appalling place – are so foolish as to think that such an offer from the living means anything but their desire to lure us into imprisonment and servitude. Don Simon will have spoken to you of the game of fox and geese that children play – and at which he himself cheats like a Greek – and it is true that it resembles the relations between the Living and the Dead. We – like the fox – have the power to easily kill any goose. But let the geese organize themselves to surround us, and it is we who die.’

  ‘Not all of your brethren,’ returned Lydia, ‘have the wisdom to realize it.’

  ‘What can the living offer us?’ Antonio Pentangeli spread his hands. Like most vampires he extended his mental powers of illusion so that Lydia had to look very carefully in order to notice his claws and fangs, and the fact that he did not breathe. ‘The moment the shooting began, both sides lost their power over us: the power to give us what we crave. They are like nursemaids trying to bribe a child with a peppermint, when that child stands knee-deep in a pile of sweets.’

  ‘Was that all she said?’ asked Lydia after a moment. ‘Just that? A proposition – a partnership?’

  ‘’Twas all we lingered to hear.’

  ‘Where was this? And what time?’

  ‘Between midnight and morning. The moon was on the wane, and rose late – two nights before the battle started at Neuve Chapelle. This was south of here, near – what is the name of that village, Basilio? Haut-le-Bois?’

  The slender vampire nodded, and after a moment, added, in a much thicker accent than his friend’s, ‘She spoke good French, nearly as good as your own, Madama. Yet with some accent.’

  ‘Could you tell what sort?’

  He shook his head. And indeed, reflected Lydia, one had to be very fluent indeed in a language to be able to tell whether a speaker had an accent, and where it might be from. (Damn Jamie … HE could probably do it …)

  ‘Would you do this for me?’ Lydia raised her eyes to Antonio Pentangeli’s face. A predator, she thought, her heart pounding. Who knows how many people he killed in Venice, since he himself was killed by its Master, and brought into the world of the Undead? ‘If you hear of this woman again – if you meet others who have been propositioned by her – might I beg it as a favor, that you tell Don Simon about it?’

  By Basilio Occhipinti’s grimace he found the idea of taking such trouble grotesque – like her Aunt Lavinnia would look, if one of the scullery maids asked her to pass along love notes to the butcher’s boy. But Antonio nodded, his dark eyes grave. ‘I will, bella donna.’

  ‘Antonio!’

  ‘Think, dear heart.’ The taller vampire laid his palm to Basilio’s cheek, but his eyes, Lydia observed in the lantern-light, were flat and cold, doll-like as a shark’s. ‘Whoever she is, the little nurse, she has some scheme in mind and we know not what it is. Whoever she finds to help her, it will be someone who wants something that isn’t blood. We don’t know what sort of bargain will be made.’

  He bent again over Lydia’s hand. ‘We shall keep our ears to the ground, Madame, like cowboys in an American dime novel, and will send you word of what we hear.’

  Then they were gone.

  They seemed to melt into the shadows, but Lydia was prosaically aware that in fact one or the other of them had simply used the same psychic aura that older vampires developed, to make her not notice them walking off down the communications trench, or scrambling inelegantly up its wall. Jamie practiced, diligently, keeping his mind focused when he was in the presence of the Undead, and could sometimes see them move. Lydia knew she should have done so also but had been simply too exhausted. In any case she knew Don Simon would not permit harm to befall her.

  Nevertheless she trembled as the Spanish vampire led her back along the trench in the direction of the motorcar, her head aching and her heart beating fast. They were vampires. Charming and polite and well-dressed …

  She recalled again the warmth of Antonio’s lips on her hand. Stolen warmth. Stolen life.

  Creatures of evil …

  Yesterday she’d received a letter from her Uncle Richard, which had mentioned in passing (after lamentations about the difficulty in obtaining coffee and petrol) that two of the footmen who had enlisted last September – men whom Lydia had known since childhood – had been killed at Festubert. A third – Ned – had been returned, blind and crippled, to his family, who would have to support him for the remainder of his life.

  So where lies the greater evil? She didn’t know.

  A thousand tales and warnings about supping with the Devil flooded to her tired mind, but she honestly couldn’t think of any way of quickly tracking this other night-prowling nurse who had a proposition, a partnership, to offer the Undead …

  And when she stumbled, there was Simon’s hand – cold as marble through his glove and the sleeves of her coat and frock – supporting her arm.

  Simon, whom Jamie had sworn he would kill, along with every other vampire who crossed his path …

  He stopped, swung around. ‘What’s—’

  A man flung himself down on them from the top of the trench. Lydia had an impression of uniform, but his head was bare. He was without rifle or pack, clutching a bayonet like a dagger. He slashed at her, seized her arm to drag her into the blow. She saw the gleam of reflective eyes, gasped at the fishy stench
of him as Simon yanked the man away from her, tried to twist the weapon from his hand. Instead the soldier pulled his arm free of the vampire’s grip – the grip that Lydia had seen bend steel – and flung Simon against the wall of the trench as if he’d been a child.

  Lydia ran, stumbling in icy water and broken duckboards – There has to be a ladder somewhere …

  But the soldier was fast. Hands gripped her waist, the reek of him clogged her throat; as she tried to wrench free she glimpsed the slimy glister of a fanged, deformed mouth gaping to bite. Then the man jerked, head falling forward, and Lydia yanked free as the filthy stink of her attacker’s flesh was drowned in the sharp stench of splattering blood. Ysidro raised the entrenching-tool with which he’d struck the soldier’s neck for another blow.

  She sprang clear as Simon chopped down again with the metal blade, but soldier was still trying to rise, still trying to come at her. The third blow severed the head.

  The body continued to crawl.

  Methodically, Simon chopped with the pointed end of the tool into the spine – with all the horrific force of a vampire’s preternatural strength – severing it, Lydia estimated, just below the first thoracic, and again below the first lumbar, vertebrae. The arms and legs were still moving as Simon caught her hand and dragged her along the trench. He kept firm hold of the bloodied entrenching-tool.

  There might be others.

  She knew from experience that they hunted in packs.

  FOUR

  ‘It was a yao-kuei, wasn’t it?’ Lydia whispered the name by which she’d first seen the revenants, three years previously in Peking. She pulled her tent-mate Nurse Danvers’s greatcoat more tightly around her nightdress and dressing gown. Despite the small oil-stove beside which she sat, the tent was freezing. ‘Jamie says draugar is the Icelandic word for creatures like that.’

  ‘James would know such matters.’ Don Simon brought her another cup of cocoa, as he had last night. There were times that Lydia felt the whole clearing station lived on cocoa.

  Nurse Danvers had been coming off her rounds when Lydia returned, had helped her wash off all trace of her attacker’s blood and had reaffirmed that Lydia had no cuts or scratches through which that blood could possibly have entered her system. The moment she’d finished this chore she had inexplicably (to her, at least) sunk down, fully dressed, on her own cot and dropped into Sleeping-Beauty-like slumber. Lydia had just been tucking a blanket over her when Don Simon had appeared, silently, at her side.

  ‘I find it distressing,’ the vampire went on, ‘that the Scandinavians would require a word for, as you say, “creatures like that”. Yet neither Antonio nor Basilio – nor indeed, any of the Undead to whom I have spoken, on either side of No Man’s Land – have mentioned seeing these Others.’

  Lydia set the cup on the tent’s wooden floor beside her cot, frowning. ‘You’re right.’ A moment before, her revulsion at the thing that had attacked her, had consumed her – the deeper terror that she might somehow have been infected by the revenant’s blood, that her own body might distort into a misshapen horror while her mind disappeared into the collective semi-consciousness of the brutes . Now that revulsion vanished before the puzzle of where this particular revenant had come from.

  ‘I haven’t heard the men in the wards speak of them, either,’ she added. ‘And they do speak of the vampires.’

  She frowned, remembering poor Brodie (He goes to hospital in Calais tomorrow, I’ll have to bid him good luck before he leaves …). She glanced across at Don Simon, warming his thin hands before the stove. She assumed he’d also examined his own flesh for any possibility of transfer of blood, in the three-quarters of an hour since he’d set her down outside the dim lights of the camp. Did he make poor Captain Palfrey check his back? How did he explain matters to that well-meaning young man?

  She wondered if Palfrey could see, as she did, the glassy claws that the vampire state caused to grow in place of the fingernails. If Simon had used the psychic skill of the Undead to block from the young man’s mind the huge scars that crossed the left side of his face and neck, where the talons of the Master vampire of Constantinople had raked him in a struggle, five years before, to save Lydia’s life.

  She herself couldn’t always see them.

  She went on, ‘My assistant, Mr Dermott, tells me some of the men say they’ve seen a ghost ambulance-wagon, or ghost stretcher-bearers …’

  ‘That’s Antonio and Basilio.’ Don Simon’s slight gesture was a dismissal. ‘They often hunt in an ambulance-wagon.’

  Lydia turned her face away, for a moment too shaken to speak. Tears flooded her eyes in spite of the fact that she knew, as he had said, that they preyed only on those dying already …

  I should hate them all. I should hate HIM.

  Don Simon watched her face without expression, a pale shape in the dark of the tent.

  How can he be both things to me? Both friend and monster?

  She was well aware how meticulously careful he was, never to let her or Jamie see him kill. And it works, she thought despairingly. If we don’t SEE it, part of our minds can pretend it isn’t happening.

  Good heavens, maybe we DID see something of the kind and he made us forget it. Can he DO that?

  She wouldn’t put it past him.

  She tasted over on her tongue the words, trying them out. I don’t want your protection. I don’t want you watching over me. I want you to go away.

  She guessed that he wouldn’t. I’ll just never see him at it again … or maybe now and then, a glimpse from the corner of my eye … ‘We need to go back there.’ She looked back at him once again in the dim glow of the stove. ‘Now, before first light destroys its flesh. Jamie says sunlight doesn’t burn them as quickly as it does vampires, but it will crumble their flesh and their bones to dust. Is that true?’

  ‘It is, Mistress.’

  ‘Then I need one to study. The blood on my frock is too mixed up with mud to examine clearly, even with Major Overstreet’s microscope. And I should talk to men in that part of the trenches.’ She opened her locker at the foot of her bunk and brought out her spare uniform (I’ll need to talk to Storeman Pratt tomorrow about another one – I am NOT putting the bloodied one on again no matter HOW many times it’s boiled!). ‘Someone else must have seen it. We can at least get some idea of what direction it was coming from. Or, if it was German … Even if there were others with it, they’ll have moved on by this time …’

  ‘It shall be as you command.’

  He vanished – or seemed to vanish, momentarily blocking her perception of his movement. Shuddering in the cold, Lydia dressed herself again quickly (And God bless the woman who invented the brassiere!) and gathered up the bloodied, mud-slathered garments in an old pillowcase. Handling them gingerly, she took a few minutes to cut swatches from the least-contaminated bloodstains, which she stowed in a candy tin at the bottom of her locker. By the time she checked her watch and buttoned on Danvers’s borrowed greatcoat, and slipped from the tent with the incinerator-bound pillowcase clutched at arms-length in one hand, it was quarter past two.

  Lydia recognized – vaguely – the place where the staff-car lurched to a stop. The damp night, though windless, was very cold, the far-off crashing of the guns to the north like metallic thunder. The effects of the cocoa were wearing off and Lydia felt tired to death and chilled to the marrow of her bones. She leaned forward to the front seat to glimpse Captain Palfrey’s wristwatch – her own was the old-fashioned kind, pinned to her breast under a layer of greatcoat – and saw that it was past three.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ she whispered to Don Simon. First light would be in two hours. She estimated it was nearly two muddy, slogging miles from where they halted – in a welter of shell-holes and barbed wire – to the communication trench where they had been attacked.

  ‘John has orders to return you safely to the clearing station, should circumstances separate me from you.’ He took her hand in his own gloved one and led her toward th
e remains of the reserve trench, the glow of the shuttered lantern he carried swinging again across the glisten of mud, shattered steel and the red spark of rat eyes in the dark. As they descended the ladder once again she hoped Simon’s sense of smell was more discerning than her own in the quagmire of stench: rotting flesh, old blood, cordite, feces, smoke … A whole pack of revenants could be just around the bend of the trench and I’d never smell them.

  The communications trenches were dug in a series of angles to protect against blast, resulting in the sense of being trapped in a wet, filthy labyrinth. On the walls of the trench boards had been roughly fastened, arrows drawn in chalk or paint with directions written above: 1st Scots, 2nd Lancs, or, simply and more prosaically, Rear. Bogs … Without them, Lydia couldn’t imagine how anyone could traverse this maze of head-high walls, zigzagged defiles and caved-in dugouts.

  She found herself clinging to Don Simon’s hand.

  ‘Did you see his uniform?’ she asked. ‘Whether he was British or German? If these things are multiplying in the German trenches …’