Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  Though Lydia – Asher was fairly sure – never spoke to anyone of his former life as one of Her Majesty’s Secret Servants, he guessed also that his wife’s concerns for him, particularly in the years since he’d become drawn into the affairs of the vampires, had communicated themselves to her friend. Josetta may well have developed suspicions that he wasn’t the retiring Oxford don that he appeared, though God knew what interpretation she’d put on his comings and goings. Exactly as he would have, had he been recruiting a political semi-radical for the Department for one of his networks abroad, he replied, ‘It’s just a matter of personal interest.’ With a raised eyebrow and a look that said, I know perfectly well you’re not fooled, Miss Beyerly.

  She returned his secret smile. ‘I’ll see what I can find. Dinner tonight at seven?’

  ‘Seven it is.’

  The Wolf and Child stood at the corner of Chalton Street and Matilda Court, three doors from Weekes and Sons, Importers of Fine Silk, where the unfortunate Harry had been employed. A woman passed Asher in the doorway of the long, wood-paneled taproom: her electric-blue jacket faded and four years out of style, with the telltale mark pressed into her left sleeve by the frame of a sewing machine. The taproom was as quiet today as it had been the previous morning, with only a couple of neighborhood men consuming a pint and a laborer’s lunch of bread and cheese. But the lunchers avoided one another’s eye, and there was worry in the face of the old man behind the bar as he watched the woman depart. ‘Y’ maun excuse us, sir,’ he said as he fetched the pint of mild that Asher ordered. ‘We’re a bit moithered just now. Our man didn’t show up to open—’

  Asher made a gesture of casual acceptance, though cold stabbed him behind the breastbone, and the shock worse because it was unattended by much surprise. ‘I’m in no lather.’ He kept his accent rural, Shropshire, as he had yesterday morning when speaking with Tim … ‘Hard lines on you, gaffer, him droppin’ his work on you, though. Must be a chore findin’ help with all these lads joinin’ up.’

  ‘Nay, Tim’s not one to scarper, think on. That was his missus just now—’ The old man nodded toward the door. ‘Never come ’ome las’ night, he didn’t, and poor Masie at her wits’ end over it. ’Tis not the same,’ he added worriedly, ‘since the start o’ this war.’

  No, thought Asher, laying his three-penny bit on the counter and looking thoughtfully toward the street, at least in part to conceal the anger that he knew was in his eyes. No, things are not the same.

  He dreamed that night of Pritchard Crowell, a man he hadn’t even thought of in nearly a decade.

  Crowell was something of a legend in the Department. Asher had worked with him only once. In Mesopotamia in the early nineties they’d scouted out opposition to Ottoman rule, and put together a network of sleeper agents in the Caucasus and in the desert country beyond Palmyra. The villagers often worked for German ‘archaeologists’ who coincidentally searched for their buried cities along proposed railway routes where troops might later be moved.

  He recalled a wiry small man in his fifties, dark-eyed and dark-haired and absolutely unobtrusive. A wrinkle-threaded face, a hawk-bill nose and a touch with picklocks that half the professional burglars in London might have envied, and a chilly ruthlessness which, at that time, Asher had sought to make his own. The job, and the job only, existed, and everything else, including one’s own survival, merely facilitated whatever one had been ordered to do.

  ‘We are weapons …’ Asher heard again that low voice – a middle-range tenor and like everything else about him, expressionless and unremarkable – against the Mixolydian wail of voices outside the inn at El Deir where they sat. Even through his dream he smelled the burnt languor of coffee, the stink of dust, camel dung, harsh tobacco and ras el hanout. ‘If one is in a fight for one’s life, one wouldn’t thank a knife that turned round in your hand and asked questions. One does what one has to, my lad, and forgets about it afterwards … Clean as you go, and don’t look back.’

  This applied, Asher recalled, to the members of one’s own network – one’s friends among the Bedu or on the Turkish Army supply staffs in Constantinople. They were warned (‘When feasible,’ Crowell had qualified, casually) that Higher Purposes might require them to be cut adrift. Asher remembered the occasion on which Crowell had let the population of an Armenian village which had sheltered them be massacred by the sultan’s tame bandits, rather than give them a warning which would have revealed that the Turkish Army codes had been broken.

  One does what one has to …

  The pragmatist in Asher’s soul had admired Crowell’s uncanny expertise in the sheer craft of spying – of getting into places, of winkling shards of information from men and women wholly committed to Britain’s enemies. He always had an astonishing plethora of information at his fingertips, and was eerily expert at slipping through shadows to escape and bring the ‘goods’, whatever they were upon any given occasion, back to Langham and the others at the Department. He was an uncannily brilliant guesser. The patriot in Asher had striven to emulate what he saw, both the cold virtuosity and the single-minded loyalty to his Queen. In his dream now, Asher saw him as he’d seen him in those days: clever, cold, unobtrusive and ruthless.

  Forget about it afterwards. Clean as you go.

  Someone paused for a moment in the doorway of the little meyhane where they sat: Asher caught the shadow out of the corner of his eye, and his glance went to the silver coffee pot on the low table between them to see who it was, so he would not be seen to turn. The man was gone before Asher made out the image in the round belly of the polished metal.

  But he thought it was Langham.

  And just as he woke he thought he smelled the fishy, greasy reek of the Others, that the visitor had left behind.

  Over supper, earlier in the evening, at Miss Beyerly’s club – mutton every bit as bad as Asher had suspected it would be – Josetta had told him that yes, she had heard rumor among the laborers who worked nights along Regent’s Canal, that there was a bludger afoot, mostly in the hours between midnight and three. So far he’d killed a whore and a seven-year-old pickpocket who’d been sleeping in a doorway and had, so the story went, eaten some of their flesh. Hungry Tom, he was called in the neighborhoods, or Tom the Ogre, though nobody had seen him nor knew whether his name was actually Tom or something else. The police were claiming that no such person existed.

  ‘The matter is in hand,’ Langham had said, with his sly little secret smile.

  Langham wants the thing ‘for King and country’. Asher knew it as he knew his own name. He may not know precisely what it is. Only that it can be used.

  And that its use will redound to his credit.

  Looking across the coffee table at Crowell in his dream – though Asher knew that in fact, after a lifetime of hair-breadth escapes and false rumors of demise Pritchard Crowell had succumbed to a lucky shot by a Bosnian merchant’s blunderbuss in 1899 – he thought, Crowell would have put Tim the publican out of the way.

  ‘Of course the police would rather that such a person doesn’t exist,’ had sniffed Josetta after dinner, stirring coffee like diesel oil in the old-fashioned gaslight of one of the club’s small parlors. ‘Both the victims are the sort of people the government has been pretending for years are criminals who deserve what they get, or who no longer live in the up-to-date London of the twentieth century … Certainly not worth avenging, with the cost of slaughtering Germans to be thought of. And there are no reliable witnesses …’

  Except Tim, thought Asher, in his dream of Mesopotamia. Tim, who saw the body of the creature’s most recent victim, in the fog of the alleyway behind the Wolf and Child.

  ‘It pays to be tidy,’ Crowell was saying to him, emphasizing the point with one tiny forefinger: he had hands like an eleven-year-old boy. His wrinkled eyelids puckered. ‘You never know who’s going to talk to whom; what blithering postman is going to remark to his friend who works in Army Intelligence some day, “Ach, that man who’s calling him
self Martin and drawing pictures of ships in the harbor, I knew him in Strasbourg three years ago when he was named Schmidt …” And then it will be you for the high jump, my lad, and the whole show we’ve set up here blown to kingdom come. And nobody would ever associate the disappearance of the local postman with some traveling artist who’d scarcely even met the man …’

  Clean as you go.

  Crowell might be gone, reflected Asher, waking in the darkness of his rented lodging. But Langham remained.

  He turned the dream over in his mind.

  And there were a dozen or a hundred fledgling Crowells in the wings, waiting to take his shape, and continue his business.

  After killing his young friend Jan van der Platz, Asher had quit the Department, when he’d realized that he was one of them.

  Then he smelled blood, quite close to him, and knew suddenly he was in mortal danger.

  His eyes flew open to darkness and a cold hand crushed down over his mouth, almost smothering him, while another had him by the wrist even as he snatched for the knife under his pillow.

  The hand released its grip an instant later and Asher heard a curse of pain, and knew that his assailant had been burned by the chains of silver he wore.

  Vampire …

  SIX

  Lydia didn’t even stop at her tent, just went straight on to the fluoroscope chamber and was setting up the apparatus when Captain Calvert barged in looking for her. ‘Good, you’ve heard, then— Good God, woman, where’ve you been?’ was his only comment on her muddy and disheveled state, and he was out the door and into the surgical tent before she drew breath to reply. ‘Brickwood, I’m devastated but I’m going to have to ask you to stay,’ his voice went on as his steps retreated across the tent. ‘Go in and wake up Danvers, would you? Matron, can you get me …?’

  The tidal wave of wounded didn’t slacken for another thirty-six hours. The Germans had hit the line hard, over a front of two miles: first came the men wounded in the preliminary shelling, then the thousands who’d been mowed down, like standing wheat before a reaper’s scythe, as they’d scrambled up out of the trench to meet the onrushing line of the enemy. The situation was not helped when four German shells landed on the village of Pont-Sainte-Félicité itself, turning the marketplace to rubble and killing two orderlies. Colonel St-Vire wired furiously up and down the line for more surgeons, more nurses and more orderlies, and later Thursday morning Lydia found herself administering chloroform at the tables of surgeons she’d never seen before, Captain Glover from the First Lancashire and Captain Bryce-Bayington who looked young enough to be one of Jamie’s students back in Oxford. Matron – Sister Flavia – came as close to cursing as Lydia had ever heard her do over the three extra nurses who arrived (‘Nurses! I shouldn’t hire a one of them to make tea for a proper nurse!’), and just before the Germans started shelling Pont-Sainte-Félicité a second time – as Lydia was on her way out of the fluoroscope tent – Lydia recognized one of the new nurses as the young woman she’d seen in the trenches last night, bending over the corpse of the revenant.

  The young woman who had tossed a grenade at the corpse, either to destroy it or because she’d seen Lydia and Don Simon.

  The young woman who was looking for a vampire with a partnership to offer you …

  For a moment Lydia only stood in startled surprise. But there was no mistaking the wide forehead, the sturdy shape of the shoulders, the dark widow’s peak and snub nose. And like her own, she noted, this younger girl’s blue-and-white VAD uniform was blotched and splattered with mud – She must have been bundled straight into a truck and ordered to come here just as she got back to … to wherever it is she’s assigned, with …

  With what?

  The revenant’s blood? One of its still-flexing hands?

  Then Burke bellowed from within the surgical tent ‘Asher! Where t’ bloody ’ell’s them snaps?’ and Lydia dashed to his side with the films that she had been taking between filling in as an assistant in the surgery. A few minutes later she glimpsed Captain Palfrey helping the orderlies carry men in from the pre-operative tent, working alongside the Indian motor-mechanics and the cook. Then German shells hit the village again, close enough that fragments of brick and wood clattered like rain on the canvas walls of the tent.

  She sponged the other woman from her mind.

  She worked on into the night, existing on hot tea and the biscuits Danvers’s grandfather had sent her yesterday, which her tent-mate gamely divided among the surgical staff. It occurred to her that she ought to be terrified, when a shell struck particularly close, but she found that associating with vampires for the past eight years had had the salutary effect of making her less inclined to panic: I can run away screaming anytime I want, which wasn’t the case when I was dealing with that horrid Rumanian count or whatever he was in Scotland … and if I get killed here, nobody else is likely to suffer.

  James was safe, wherever he was.

  Miranda was safe back in Oxford.

  These men need help.

  She stepped out once, around two in the morning of the nineteenth, and thought she glimpsed the pale shape of Don Simon, standing in the doorway of what was left of the town church across the green from the surgical tent, like the Angel of Death in his trim brown uniform. To make sure he’s on hand if I need rescuing, if one of those shells hits? Or just waiting for the next man to be moved into the Moribund Ward?

  How many others of them are around, where I can’t see them?

  Not many, she reflected, with shells still striking the village …

  Bearers passed her, carrying a man from the drop-off point by the road into the pre-operative ward. I’d better get back.

  When she looked again the vampire was gone, if indeed he ever had been there. She was sufficiently tired now that she wasn’t certain of what she saw.

  At least the surgeons got to sleep most of last night.

  The next time she emerged, toward dawn (‘There’s tea in the mess tent,’ Captain Calvert had said, ‘and you will go and have a cup and sit down for ten minutes’), she passed the door of the clearing tent, the flap tied open so that bearers could carry men in. She saw the little dark-haired nurse kneeling beside one of the cots, her arms around the shoulders of a man who lay there, freckles starring like spattered ink in his waxen face and covered with mud and blood.

  ‘You’re alive!’ the young woman cried, covering the man’s hands with kisses as he raised them to touch her hair. ‘Dear God, I thought I’d never see you again—’

  ‘Tuathla,’ he murmured. ‘Well you know there’s no Jerry livin’ that’s yet forged the gun that’ll shoot the shell that’ll end my love for you, mo chroí, so don’t you be thinkin’ it.’

  ‘Miss Smith!’ Matron materialized like a ghost from the dense gloom of the lantern-lit ward. ‘If you will kindly come over here and lend us the assistance you presumably volunteered to give to your country—’

  The dark-haired nurse scrambled to her feet. ‘Yes, M’am. Of course, M’am.’

  Educated English. Little trace of the graceful Irish drawl that lilted her red-haired lover’s speech. Miss Smith … Tuathla Smith … or was tuathla some kind of County Liffey endearment? Lydia’s mind seemed to be turning things over very slowly, and she started as a firm hand took her elbow and Captain Calvert said, ‘I told you to get into the mess tent and sit down for ten minutes, Dr Asher. Bearers are still coming in and we’re in for a long morning of it.’

  She and the captain were still in the mess tent – Captain Calvert turning to give orders to Trent, the head bearer, to marshal the walking wounded to help carry from the drop-off point – when a shattering explosion sounded from the direction of the river, and not only fragments of dirt and stone rained on the clearing station, but water, as if it had been flung from buckets. Instants later Storeman Pratt raced in, white-faced – the stores tent stood only a dozen feet from the stream – and cried, ‘Bugger it, Captain, Jerry’s blown the bloody bridge!’

&nbs
p; Calvert said something worthy of neither an officer nor a gentleman and sprang to his feet. The surgeon at the other end of the table – a saturnine French Colonel pulled in from God knew where – cursed quietly in his native language and added, ‘What they’ve been after all along, en effet. To cut the medical help off from the lines.’

  ‘Finish your tea,’ ordered Calvert, as Lydia began to rise. ‘You, too, Colonel Lemoine, sir. Be back in the tent in fifteen minutes. The men can rig a causeway out of the rubble … God knows we’ve got plenty of that,’ and went tearing off in quest of Colonel St-Vire.

  ‘At least now they’ve got it,’ added Dr Lemoine – Lydia tried to remember what the collar insignia on his pale-blue greatcoat denoted – ‘let us hope they leave off wasting shells on men already incapable of harming them, and let us get on with our business. Before last year,’ he went on, holding aside the tent-flap for Lydia to pass through before him, ‘I gave thirty years of my life to my country’s army. But as I learned more and more about the monstrous “improvements” in weaponry I always wondered in my heart: how can we loose such horrors upon living men? Shells that can reduce men – men with wives and children – to blots of jam from five miles away. Airships to drop bombs on women and children minding their own business in their own homes. Battleships to bar food and medicines from our enemy’s country, so that all will starve together – old men, women, children.’

  In the dust-choked morning haze Lydia saw his jaw work with fury and pain.

  ‘And yet I swear to you, Madame, when I see such things as they do – shelling the hospitals where the wounded lie, torpedoing passenger ships when they know full well that the innocent will perish – I think nothing is too savage to do to them in retaliation. No action of ours is too horrible, if it but makes them throw up their hands and cry, I quit!’

  His dark brows pulled together, a handsome man of about Jamie’s age, with gray flecks in his pencil mustache and the features of a sorrowing king.