Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  They were headed south on the Arras road.

  It is Lemoine …

  ‘What about Francesca Gheric?’

  ‘She dwelt in Strasbourg.’ Antonio’s dark eyes narrowed as he cast his memory back. ‘For years and years, when Arioso was master of that city. Arioso had a network of living servants over the whole of the countryside between Strasbourg and Nancy. Very clever with illusion and dreams, but all said the White Lady was the stronger vampire. She was the elder in any case, and he never could control his fledglings and was forever having trouble with them. I always thought that with little effort she could have taken control of that whole district. But she didn’t.’

  ‘Is that so odd?’

  ‘You would think so had you ever encountered Arioso.’ Don Simon folded his narrow, gloved hands.

  ‘He demanded absolute control over those he made vampire,’ explained Antonio. ‘And unfortunately he was drawn to people who lived untidy and dramatic lives. A non-entity himself, he loved the excitement, but then had not the strength to bend them to his will. The Strasbourg nest has always been a snake pit of internal feuds. Francesca quarreled constantly with Arioso, and had she made even a few fledglings she could have driven him and his from the city. But in the end it was she who left. She dwelt for many years in Prague. Later she had a palazzo in Venice, just across the Campo di San Silvestro from Basilio and myself.’

  Lydia reflected that should she ever have the opportunity to vacation in that city – or any city in Europe, for that matter – she would consult Don Simon first about potential neighbors.

  ‘Hieronymus – the Master of Venice – tolerated her but never trusted her. She wouldn’t obey him, either, but killed as she pleased. I know he feared she would contest his mastery.

  ‘She is not like Simon,’ Antonio added, seeing Lydia’s sidelong glance at the older vampire. ‘Simon has chosen to live like a shadow on the wall. I’m told he dwelt in Rome for two years before the nest there even knew of his presence. Francesca disobeys the masters of the cities where she dwells, forms cliques among their fledglings and networks of servants among the living – Hieronymus was forever killing them. But she would never move to take genuine power.’

  ‘Maybe she preferred just to be a troublemaker?’ Lydia recalled girls she’d gone to school with, and debutantes who had come ‘out’ in the same year as she, who simply delighted in malicious gossip and the stirring-up of trouble between friends, while seeming to lack, it appeared to her, genuine friends of their own.

  ‘She was made vampire by the Lady Chretienne,’ remarked Don Simon after a time. ‘A master who taught her fledglings the finer arts of the Undead state, and selected them with some care. At the time I encountered them during the Wars of Religion ‘twas my impression Chretienne intended Francesca to succeed her as master of that whole region. Then later she made Philip Berengar vampire, who succeeded her, and he made Arioso his fledgling and master of Strasbourg in his turn. I thought it curious, that La Dame Blanche, as Francesca was called, was bypassed. Now she seeks the help of this Lemoine, this “dabbler in blood and chemicals”. What know you of this Lemoine, lady?’

  ‘Only what I mentioned before.’ She shook her head. ‘That he’s with the French Sixth Army, and served in Algeria, Indochina, West Africa. He was in Peking in early 1912, where he might easily have heard of the revenants in the Western Hills.’

  ‘More than that, I think.’ A tiny line scratched itself between Simon’s colorless brows. ‘I have made a study of the vampire state over the years, and have read a good many articles on the composition and maladies of the blood.’

  On Lydia’s other side, Antonio Pentangeli shook his head, with an expression, attenuated as it was, that in a living man would have been an eyeball-rolling wave of exasperation. ‘Were you this much of a pedant as a living man, Simon? I keep abreast of the world, but I swear this for the truth, bella donna, he writes sonnets about the composition of blood! Never would I bore a beautiful lady into a lethargy by—’

  ‘Oh!’ interrupted Lydia, and then, realizing that up ahead of them, Francesca might be listening for sounds of pursuit, she whispered, ‘You think Colonel Lemoine might be Jules Lemoine, who wrote that article the year before last about viral mutations of red corpuscles?’

  ‘I confess I did not completely understand his argument,’ murmured Don Simon. ‘Yet something of the way he spoke of blood made me wonder if he had ever had occasion to study the blood of the Undead.’

  ‘And he was in Peking in 1912,’ finished Lydia. ‘He might have actually encountered the revenants, or someone who had fallen victim to one. He did say when we lunched together on Monday, that he never passed up an opportunity to study the pathologies of the local people, wherever he was stationed.’

  The staff-car picked up speed as the road improved and the hammering of the guns faded a little to the east. For long periods now, stands of trees bordered the road, unshattered by shell-fire, and in the darkness she smelled the green scents of early spring. When she opened her mouth to speak again Don Simon gestured her quiet: the drone of a pursuing engine could be lost in the noise of one’s own motor, but even the quietest of living voices might easily register to Undead ears. They had passed the turning to Haut-le-Bois some time ago, and in the weak moonlight the low swell of hills that sheltered that clearing station lifted a little against the western sky. Lydia had no idea how long it was until dawn, or if, and where, her three companions had a safe place to go to ground at first light.

  Evil mingled with good, she thought, looking from Antonio’s craggy profile to Don Simon’s aloof, half-averted face. But can’t that be said of all human beings? I should hate them for what they are, for what they do.

  But at least, she thought, they believed her, and would understand the significance of the fact that it was Lemoine who was kidnapping German prisoners of war.

  Men who weren’t severely wounded, but who legitimately could be restrained. Men who had no power to protest, and no one to protest to. Whose disappearance would be greeted with a shrug: They must have got the papers mixed up …

  Like petrol and cigarettes and morphia.

  Basilio switched off the engine, and let the car glide to a stop. Silence lay on the land, save for the intermittent boom of the guns. We must have swung east again, or the Front curved west …

  Antonio climbed out over the door (So there won’t be the sound of it opening, in the stillness of the night?) and held up his hands for her; Don Simon lifted her over, with the casualness of a man picking up a kitten. Basilio remained where he was, and Antonio touched his hand where it lay on the car door, lightly, as they walked away.

  Distantly, Lydia heard an engine start up again. ‘A gate,’ Antonio murmured, leaning close. ‘Guards. French.’

  Leaving the road, they climbed a hill’s shoulder that gave a view onto the next rise of ground. In ancient times a wide-spread cluster of gray buildings had covered that rise, half of them in ruins now and the whole area studded with French Army tents and a half-dozen rough-built huts. A deep ditch surrounded the whole, fenced on both sides with a hedge of barbed wire.

  Old trench works, Lydia thought. The dark slots went right up the slope behind the buildings, and she could see where the woods that surrounded the place had been cut back to let the ‘moat’ completely encircle the place.

  Those buildings that remained whole, though simply built of gray stone, had the look of profound age.

  Don Simon’s voice was barely louder than the rustle of the leaves. ‘The nunnery of Cuvé Sainte-Bride.’

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘Only the name on maps. ’Twas naught to speak of, even when I was in France years ago.’

  A few tents glowed from lantern-light within. A window in one of the huts brightened, then dimmed as a shadow crossed it. Breeze brought the smell of latrines and cooking-fires, stinks familiar from the clearing station. And another smell that lifted the hair on Lydia’s neck.

  Her hand closed
hard on Don Simon’s fingers.

  ‘Best be gone.’ His whisper brushed her ear. ‘She’ll come out soon, if she’s any wits at all. Dawn’s coming, and we’re twenty miles from Pont-Sainte-Félicité. We shall convey you home, lady, unless you’d wish a few hours’ sleep at the chateau of the Master of Prague. You’ll be granted little enough rest at your camp.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lydia. ‘I’ll take my chances at the clearing station.’ She already had a headache from lack of sleep, but the thought of calmly bedding down in a vampire nest – though she knew to the marrow of her bones that Don Simon’s influence would keep her as safe – was more than she wished to contemplate.

  Both vampires bowed, like courtiers of some bygone world, and guided her back toward the car.

  When night was fully come after his encounter with Millward, Asher took a cab from his hotel in Pembridge Place to Paddington Station, purchased a return ticket for Bristol, packaged up his Burberry and hat in the gents’ room and paid a porter there to quietly mail them back to Oxford for him. Then he donned the cap he’d had in his Burberry pocket, and slipped down the stairway to the Underground, watching the platform behind him as he stepped at the last minute onto the train for Hammersmith. At Shepherd’s Bush Market he got out – again leaving it till the last moment, and still feeling somewhere in the back of his thoughts the prickling wariness that had touched him outside of Millward’s – and took the omnibus for the East India Dock, switching to a cab in Oxford Street and backtracking along the Edgware Road until he came – at almost midnight – to Regent’s Park.

  His meeting with Grippen wasn’t until tomorrow night, but he guessed the Master of London knew perfectly well where he was.

  Freezing damp rose from the grass as he followed the graveled path toward the boating lake. At this hour the stillness was such that he could listen behind him for the telltale scrunch of a stealthy foot on gravel, the wet squish of someone treading last autumn’s dying leaves.

  He heard nothing, and didn’t think he’d seen that whisper of shadow, that itchy hint of a half-recognized silhouette, since the Underground station.

  But he heard nothing – not a thing – in the moments before a heavy hand closed on his shoulder and he smelled stale blood and foulness. ‘Mr Scragger?’

  ‘Mr Graves.’

  Grippen seemed to form himself out of shadows, congealed darkness in an old-fashioned greatcoat. ‘Who’s your friend?’

  ‘He still with me?’

  ‘Narh.’ Even as a scarce-heard whisper the vampire’s voice was harsh as lava rock. ‘I turned him aside in Commercial Road. He’ll not be back.’

  ‘You get a look at him?’

  ‘Dark coat. Great nose. Winkers and spinach. He was across the street.’

  Glasses and a beard, Asher knew, could also be easily wadded into a Burberry pocket. He’d done it himself, more times than he could count. ‘Short? Small?’

  ‘A rat in an overcoat. Know him?’

  Asher hesitated, then shook his head. ‘If you see him again, let me know. I want to know who put him on me.’ Although he had a strong suspicion that he knew already.

  The vampire made a sound like a dog snarling. ‘Crafty cove. I’ll swear he saw me, and not many as can do that. You figure him for a beak?’

  ‘Could be,’ said Asher. ‘He’s working for someone, and I think he’s looking for the same thing we are. So chances are good we’ll meet him again.’

  They turned north, to where Regent’s Canal bordered the park’s wooded fringes in its West End guise.

  ‘Aye,’ rumbled Grippen. ‘I’ll have a word wi’ him then, and see what he’s got to say for himself.’

  They followed the canal into the maze of locks and bridges among the railroad yards, surreal tangles of sidings, sheds, coal bunkers and basins. Moving slowly and without light, Grippen sniffed, probing the darkness with those dark gleaming eyes. Asher listened, and watched for movement within the blackout abysses around them. It was like picking one’s way through sightless and jagged Hell.

  At one point, near the horrible old workhouse of St Pancras, when they stopped to let Asher rest, he passed along in a whisper what he’d gleaned from Millward’s obsessive collection of newspaper clippings: that the revenant seldom strayed far from the canal, and that in the two months it had been at large in London it had killed only half a dozen times. ‘It may be living on rats.’ Asher perched himself on the bollard of a half-sunk wharf across from the vast blackness of the Midland Railroad goods yard, and wished as he shivered that he hadn’t sent his Burberry away. ‘The Others have a collective mind – like a hive of bees – but how much mind a single one of them has, away from its nest, I’d be curious to know. Or how far away it can be, and still be under their influence. The nests of them that I encountered in China could summon and command rats to defend their hiding places, or to swarm an intruder … or presumably, to let themselves be caught and devoured.’

  ‘Don’t speak ill of it,’ rumbled Grippen. ‘We drink rat blood, at need. It’s hot and it’s red, and it’s living – aye, and there’s a little dark sparkle to it of fire, like the fire of a man’s death, or a woman’s. Many’s the vampire that’s lived on rats, if he found himself where the living were suspicious, or too few to kill without drawin’ down attention. Wolves we can call sometimes, too, and foxes, though precious few o’ them you’ll find about these days. Aye, and bats, like that silly caitiff Stoker wrote. Small use they are, though, save to flush a quarry from hidin’ with a good scare.

  ‘Ye’ve never thought of it yoursel’?’ he added after a moment, with a sidelong glance at Asher.

  ‘Thought of what?’

  ‘Livin’ forever.’

  The silence lasted a long time after that. Asher found himself curiously unsurprised by the question.

  And – he noted this with abstract interest – not in the least offended that the question had been put to him.

  He supposed the proper reaction would be How dare you think I would even for a moment entertain such a notion? though he couldn’t think of a single one of his former colleagues in the Department who would have made such a reply, either. Or who would have meant it, if they had spoken the words.

  When at length Grippen spoke again his voice was soft, like a monster’s purr. ‘Never tell me you haven’t wondered, what it’d be like not to get old? Rots you, don’t it, that you’ve had to ask to stop and breathe a bit like a spavined horse after but a mile along the canal? That for all you know, you may never get back the strength you had five years ago? That you may always have that pain in your chest, that weakness in your legs? I need a fledgling, Asher. A good one, a strong one, that’s got a brain in his skull; that knows this city and this land as I know ’em. That knows mankind as I know ’em.’

  ‘If you need a fledgling,’ Asher reminded him, ‘it’s because I killed yours.’

  Grippen waved the objection aside. ‘You was in a flame, and frighted for your brat. Think on it,’ he urged softly. ‘You get used to drinkin’ blood, that’s nuthin’. And what ’tis like to take a soul … Ahh, the heat of it, and the glory of it … And I know you miss it.’

  Asher looked sharply sidelong at him.

  ‘Huntin’ as you used. The life in darkness, the life beyond the wall. You wouldn’t have spied all those years for that cold little snirp of a queen, if it hadn’t been in your blood, to see how you could move through the world whilst stayin’ outside of it. Teachin’ whey-faced rich-boys that Englishmen used to say “fall” when they meant “autumn”, an’ “ah” when they meant “ay” – tcha! An’ havin’ tea with them lack-wits at your college.’ The dark eyes narrowed. ‘’Tis no life for a man and you know it.’

  The big hand closed, thick black-furred fingers, tipped with inch-long claws pale and slick as glass. ‘We could hold London, the two of us.’

  ‘And you would hold me,’ returned Asher quietly. ‘Having given you my soul, to guide it through the body’s death and transformation, yo
u would keep a piece of it, always. If nothing else, I don’t want you to have a piece of my soul. I’ve seen the Master of St Petersburg make one of his fledglings kiss my feet, and Don Simon Ysidro force a fledgling he’d made to remain outdoors as the sun came up. It’s not a power I’d hand to anyone on this earth, let alone one who’s lived by murder for three hundred and fifty years.’

  ‘Well, that’s the trick, i’n’t it?’ The vampire’s grin was a horrible thing to see. ‘You pay for what you get. And who knows but that I might run afoul of your little friend Millward some night and wake up with a stake through my heart? Then you’d be Master of London. Why not?’

  Why not?

  Asher rose from the bollard, not refreshed but at least able to continue; knowing they had the whole of the night yet to walk.

  ‘If I change my mind,’ he said, ‘you shall be the first to know.’

  ‘We have to go back there, you know,’ said Lydia, when Don Simon helped her back into the staff-car. ‘I mean, I think we all know what’s going on there, and what Colonel Lemoine wants Francesca’s help with, though I can’t see that he’s going to get it. As far as I know, no vampire can control the minds of the Others unless he – or she – has actually been infected with their blood.’ She shivered at the recollection of the thing she’d discovered in that hidden vault in Peking, lying like a gruesome worm, laughing insanely in the dark. ‘And what could Lemoine offer her that would get her to take that kind of a risk?’

  ‘Lemoine,’ murmured Antonio, ‘or whoever is behind him.’ He shrugged, and glanced over his shoulder – he was in the front seat now beside Basilio – and by the sound of his voice Lydia could tell that the whole matter was to him no more than a means to while away the night. He’d probably taken two lives before he and Don Simon ever came to her tent, when in other times he’d have spent the whole of the night hunting.