Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  Then he glanced across at her – he was taller than she by three or four inches – and made himself smile. ‘And you, Madame? I had heard the British Army refused to accept female surgeons—’

  ‘Well, they do. And even if they didn’t, I’m not a surgeon, you know. My research was on glandular secretions, so I just signed on just as a regular volunteer. But when Colonel St-Vire heard I knew how to operate a fluoroscope apparatus he had me reassigned to the unit and put me in charge of the x-ray photo`graphy, and they pull me into the surgical tent whenever they need to. I couldn’t remove a splinter on my own, but I do know how to administer anesthetic, and what all the equipment is for, and the sight of blood doesn’t bother me. Here,’ she added sadly, ‘that’s enough.’

  Every spare orderly and bearer, along with the ambulance drivers and the walking wounded, were streaming down to the river. In the horse-lines, the animals squealed and milled in panic. Lydia heard a motorbike roar away into the iron-gray morning, to get the Engineers from Headquarters. Now that the profile of the town was considerably flattened she could see the line of ambulance-wagons – both motorized and horse-drawn – lined up waiting on the far side of the river, while their drivers scrambled to pull free the men and horses from those who’d been hit on the bridge itself. The screams of dying mules mingled with the brutal roar of the guns.

  I was in that. Lydia felt a sort of distant, tired wonder at the fact. Simon and I. I tripped over a corpse, and the hands of other dead men were sticking through the walls where dugouts had collapsed …

  She thought she glimpsed Captain Palfrey in a group of mechanics, black with soot and mud and carrying beams from the ruins.

  ‘And Monsieur Asher?’ asked Lemoine gently.

  ‘In England.’ Lydia’s throat closed at the recollection of the misty train platform: the strength of his arms, the warmth of his body against the gray of that bitter morning. At the thought of Miranda at the nursery breakfast table, solemn with a goodbye that she thought was only for a day or two. (‘I’ll see you when I come home, darling …’) It was a moment before she could speak. ‘With our daughter. I try not to think of them, at times like these.’

  She turned, to go back into the charnel house of the tent.

  ‘And for that—’ Lemoine’s quiet voice turned grim, ‘the Boche deserve whatever we can do.’

  By eleven in the morning, when the surgeons finished the last of the desperate cases, the Royal Engineers arrived with planks, beams and struts to repair the bridge. Captain Calvert ordered Lydia back to her tent and to bed. She could see at least a dozen motor trucks, and twice as many other vehicles – horse-drawn farm carts, milk floats, staff-cars – waiting on the far bank and all overflowing with wounded. The drivers, and many of the walking wounded, waded out into the Lys to fasten beams to the broken foundations of the stone bridge’s arches. ‘When they’re done,’ said Violet Brickwood, falling into step with her, ‘they’ll all come across at once and it will be all harry in the surgery again. I hope somebody’s making the surgeons rest.’

  Once in their tent, Lydia lay down in her clothes and passed out as if she’d had a pipe of opium.

  And dreamed of the revenant. Dreamed of being tied to a pillar in that horrible lightless room in Peking, listening to the creatures – the yao-kuei – smashing through the doors and windows only feet away from her. Dreamed of whatever-his-name-was, that colleague of Jamie’s who’d been infected with the creatures’ blood, his eyes gleaming like a rat’s in the dark and his grip brutally strong on her arm, gasping Extraordinary. Never been here in my life but remember it … as the last of his mind dissolved into the dim hive of the revenants’ collective consciousness, as he touched her face with his bloody and reeking hand.

  Simon, she thought. Simon came and saved me …

  And through her dream she heard his voice, like silk chilled from winter midnight, Mistress …

  In her dream she was back on her cot in the nurses’ tent, Simon’s hand gentle on her shoulder, shaking her. She sat up, and threw herself into his arms, weeping: wanting Jamie, wanting Miranda, wanting to be back in Oxford researching pituitary secretions and wanting the world to be the way the world had always been. No shell-fire. No terror. No watching young men die under her very hands, no cold calm x-ray pictures of shrapnel lodged in organs that couldn’t be mended …

  She whispered, ‘I want Jamie …’

  The tent was silent. No camp noises, no gunfire. Just afternoon sunlight, indescribably sweet, filtering through the dirty white canvas, and the smell of grass and roses, which told her this was a dream. Don Simon, perched on the side of her cot, wore his colonel’s uniform, brass buttons winking in the light.

  Does HE dream of afternoon sunlight and the smell of roses, lying in his coffin in the daytime hours?

  His grip on her was strong and reassuring, the slender shoulder and steel-hard arm within the sleeve as real as anything she had ever felt. His face, in its frame of cobweb-pale hair, was the face of the living man he’d once been, save for the eyes.

  His hand stroked her hair. ‘Would you have me set him before you?’

  She wiped her eyes. In her dream, though she wasn’t wearing her glasses, she saw perfectly well. ‘It wouldn’t be the same,’ she said. ‘I mean, I should know it was just a picture … a very, very accurate one, since you can walk in his dreams, the way you walk in mine … The way you’re walking in mine right this minute.’

  ‘’Tis the best I can give you, lady.’ He moved to put his hand to her cheek and then, as if he had seen the horror of her nightmare, drew it back with the gesture unmade. ‘I would fain do more, were it in my power.’

  He is in my mind, thought Lydia. Right at this moment. Asleep in his coffin, wherever it’s hidden …

  This is how he convinced that poor imbecile Captain Palfrey of his bona fides. I’ll bet Palfrey’s positive he’s seen Don Simon by daylight, positive that he showed him unimpeachable proofs of the genuineness of this Secret Department of his … Positive of God knows what else! All because at some point Simon looked into his eyes, and later walked in his dreams – as she knew the old and skillful among the vampires could do – and convinced him that these things really happened. That those dreams were real memories.

  I really should hate him.

  But he was an old, old friend, and there was infinite comfort in the strength of his arms.

  ‘I just want things to be the way they used to be,’ she said at length. ‘Living in Oxford, I mean, with Jamie and Miranda, and the worst one would see in the newspapers would be bunfights about who actually reached the South Pole first. I know it can’t be that way again.’ She sat up a little, and Don Simon handed her a perfectly clean white linen handkerchief, to blow her nose. ‘I just – this is so hard.’

  ‘Did you not weep for the dying,’ replied the vampire in his soft voice, ‘and fear for your life, and curse the stupid uselessness of it all – did you not pray that the world will somehow heal before your daughter grows to be aware of its horrors – you would be no more human than the fools and monsters that let this war begin. I have had centuries of watching war and stupidity, Mistress, and they grow no better, I am sorry to say. Your courage is the wine of hope to the men you work with, as well as to those you save. To James as well, I think, and to your child. It keeps their hearts beating. I am sorry you are in pain.’

  She wrapped her hand around his, pretending (I shouldn’t …) for a time that he was the living man he had been …

  Although goodness knows as a living man he was probably a bigoted Catholic and a friend of the Grand Inquisitor and an enemy of England and a firm believer in the humoral theory of medicine. He probably beat his valet, too.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said simply, and raised her head from his shoulder. ‘I’ve seen the woman – the one who was hunting the vampires, and looking for the revenant last night. She’s one of the extra VADs who came in last night, her name is Smith – Tuathla Smith, I think … Oh, bother,’ sh
e added, as the tent-flap opened and Matron came in, and suddenly the light changed and Don Simon was gone and the sound of shelling, though no longer close enough to shake the ground, pounded the air with a constant, terrible roar. She heard men shouting above the grinding roar of a fleet of motors …

  Lydia sat up, and fumbled for her glasses, on the plank floor beside the cot. By the light it was about four in the afternoon. For one moment she recalled that she’d dreamed about roses … roses and sunlight … then she picked up her much-creased cap from beside the pillow, pinned it on, and said, ‘How many of them are there? Should I go to surgery, or the fluoroscope room?’

  ‘Fluoroscope.’ Matron spoke over her shoulder as she leaned over Violet’s cot. ‘Come on, Miss Brickwood, they’ve got the bridge fixed and the ambulances are coming in. There’s tea in the mess tent, and sandwiches,’ she added, as Lydia ducked through the flap.

  For the next fourteen hours Lydia alternated between working the fluoroscope and assisting whichever of the three surgeons needed help: dripping chloroform with a steady hand, retracting the edges of wounds so that shards of metal could be fished out, clamping off blood vessels and stitching shut flesh and organs so that Captain Calvert or Captain Burke or Colonel Lemoine could get on with the next man. Well after sunrise on the following day – the twentieth – the last of the urgent cases was finished, though the hammering of the German guns had eased many hours before. A dozen of the last group in the ambulances were German prisoners, muttering confusedly: Haben wir gewonnen?

  Lemoine retorted, in the same tongue, ‘You have lost – as you will lose all in the end.’

  But Captain Burke only patted his patient’s hand and said, ‘Nowt t’worry reet now, lad,’ as Lydia signed the orderlies to carry the shattered man into the fluoroscope room to see where the shrapnel was buried.

  When they were finished at last Colonel St-Vire ordered the whole surgical staff, save for himself, to their tents: ‘And I’d better not see one of your faces for the next eight hours, understand? I hear we held the line and pushed Jerry back. It’ll be awhile before they try again.’

  ‘Sir, can you tell the neighbors to keep it down?’ Captain Calvert pointed east, in the direction of the Front and the thunder of the guns. ‘I can’t see how I’m to get my beauty rest with that frightful din going on …’

  ‘’Ud take more’n eight hours’ kip, think on, to render – hrrm! – some people beautiful …’

  Lydia returned to her tent without the slightest thought for Miss Smith, lay down again, and was asleep within moments, dreaming of arteries and kidneys, of pancreatic ducts and lobules, with a sensation of walking in some wonderful garden without anyone’s life being at stake, only to view these wonders at her leisure.

  When she woke up, and washed (finally!) and brushed her hair and had bacon and porridge and tea in the mess tent, and felt herself again (‘Be ready to be on at six, Dr Asher …’), she went to the ward tent in quest of the little dark-haired volunteer with the heart-shaped face.

  And found that she was gone. Nor was there any sign of the red-haired, freckled soldier she’d sat beside, though two men recalled seeing them (‘She bust out weepin’ like a babe, M’am, an’ cried out his name … Danny? Davy? Harry? Su’thin’ like that.’) While Lydia had been sleeping, trucks and ambulances had been departing steadily, carrying the most stable of the men back to the base hospital at Calais. Hundreds had already gone.

  Matron – unsurprisingly – had barely had time to scribble down the names of the men as they were brought in, and the nature of their wounds. She thought the extra volunteers had come in from the Friends’ ambulance station at Neuve Chapelle, and possibly – she wasn’t sure – from the base hospital.

  There was no Nurse Smith listed anywhere.

  SEVEN

  ‘Lay thy crest,’ growled a voice like chains stirred in a pot of blood. ‘An’ I wanted ye dead I’d have had the throat out o’ you ere this.’

  Asher sat up in his narrow bed. He could see nothing in the darkness – the room’s shutters were fast – but he could smell where the vampire sat, and feel the weight of him on the side of the mattress. A stench of graveyard mold and dirty clothing.

  Lionel Grippen.

  The Master of London.

  The weight shifted and a match scratched. As Grippen turned up the gas Asher saw the familiar form, tall and heavy-built, clothed in a frock coat ruinous with age and a waistcoat of Chinese silk spotted with old blood. Greasy black hair, thick as a horse’s tail, spilled from beneath the brim of a shallow-crowned beaver hat and framed a face fleshy and thick, a nightmare of centuries of uncaring murder.

  The vampire flexed his hand a couple of times and dug a kerchief from his pocket, to wrap on over the burn the silver had left.

  ‘You’re seeking this revenant,’ said Grippen. ‘What’ve ye found?’

  ‘That someone’s screening his movements.’ If the master vampire’s aim was to hide the revenant himself, Asher was fairly certain Grippen would, indeed, have killed him – or had him killed by the living men in London whose debts he paid, whose affairs he protected, whose dreams he read and who followed his orders without asking who he was or why he wanted things done.

  Two years ago, after Asher had killed most of the London nest, Grippen had broken up the ring of henchmen centered on the East End tavern called the Scythe. Asher guessed he’d put together another.

  ‘Germans, you think?’

  ‘There’s a nest of the things in Prague.’ Asher reached for the shawl he’d spread over his blankets and dragged it up around his shoulders, for the room, though stuffy, was bitterly cold. ‘It’s certainly a more effective way of destroying civilian morale even than Zeppelin raids. And it could be easily done, by infecting a man and bringing him across immediately, before he starts to transform. In a way I hope it’s that, rather than that the condition has developed spontaneously, for God only knows what reason—’

  The vampire growled, with the first display Asher had ever seen from him, of uneasiness or fear. ‘That can’t happen, can it?’

  ‘So far as I can find out, nobody knows how these things first started. They spread through contamination of the blood, but the original source has to have developed it somehow. Which means, it can develop again.’

  Grippen whispered, ‘God save us, then.’

  ‘I’ve been saying that for a long time,’ returned Asher. ‘However the thing came here, the Foreign Office – or men in the Foreign Office – are hunting it, not to destroy it, but to capture it … to use it for their own purposes. If that hadn’t been the case already I think my former chief, Langham, would have recruited me, instead of warning me off.’

  ‘Faugh! There’s the Quality for you.’

  Asher couldn’t quarrel with him there. ‘When did you first see him? And where?’

  ‘Limehouse. Candlemas, thereabouts.’ His English had a flatness strongly reminiscent of American, even after three centuries; as a philologist Asher could not help his mind from marking it as Elizabethan. ‘Killed a newsboy that was sleepin’ rough. Tore him up somethin’ savage. Later I smelled him in the fog, near the hospital in St James Road, and I think he killed a whore in the Canal Road near the Kingsland Basin. Leastwise that’s what Gopsall tells me, that runs the Black Dog near there. I never actually seen the thing.’

  ‘And it killed a man in an alleyway behind Chalton Street, between King’s Cross and Euston, Monday night. The body disappeared. So did the only positive witness. If German agents were behind it, they’d publicize it. They’d see to it that its victims were found – and they might well see to it that its victims were more than prostitutes and homeless newsboys. The Department is covering its tracks.’

  ‘Faugh,’ said the vampire again. ‘And you look down on us, for killin’ a whore here and there. You’re not sayin’ they’re lettin’ the thing rove free?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Asher shook his head. ‘I think they’re hunting it – or someone in the
Department is using the Department’s resources to hunt it, while keeping it quiet.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, why?’

  ‘To avoid panic. And, I suspect, to capture the thing to see if we can use it ourselves … And the man who captured it would, of course, get a fat promotion and maybe a knighthood if it turns out to be useful.’

  The vampire grimaced in disgust – not, Asher was certain, from any moral objection, but at the unworkable stupidity of the idea. Though susceptible to destruction by the light of the sun, the Others, Asher knew, moved about underground for a few hours longer than could vampires, who fell unwakeably asleep with the sun’s rising. Like their cousins the vampires they were tremendously strong, and would devour vampires in their coffins if they found them.

  ‘I’ve been warned off. Unless the condition has somehow developed spontaneously – which I pray to God isn’t the case – this creature was brought to this country and somehow got loose, which tells me that whoever brought it here has no idea what they’re dealing with.’

  Grippen snarled again. ‘So what do we do?’

  Asher stifled the surge of anger at we from a walking corpse that had drunk the blood of the living, that had used their deaths to fuel its unholy powers, for over three hundred years. A creature that had kidnapped his child two years ago. Though he had recovered Miranda safe he had sworn to kill it, and all those like it …

  I am no more part of WE with you than I am with Langham …

  But, of course, he was.

  That was why he was angry.

  The revenants were a plague a thousand times worse than the vampire, for they multiplied without conscious volition. And they could not be negotiated with.

  The contagion of their being had to be extirpated before it spread.

  And whomever it was who had brought one to England – for whatever purpose – had to be found. And destroyed.

  He was aware that Grippen was watching him with cynical amusement. In addition to smelling his blood, the vampire had felt that flush of heat that had gone through him and knew – from centuries of observing humankind – exactly what emotion had kindled it.