Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘This’ll make the voices shut up, Bert,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll make the rats go away.’

  ‘Rats’ll never go away.’ Slowly, Bert began to circle toward the door. ‘Crawl in an’ out o’ me skull-bones whilst I sleep. I hear their squeakin’ an’ it sounds like words.’

  ‘This’ll shut ’em up. Guaranteed.’ How many revenants constitute a hive mind? Is he controlled by the colony – good God! – that this Lemoine is growing in France, or by Hungry Tom out in the fog of the canal? Or – Jesus! – is his mind controlled by the rats, rather than the other way around, given that they outnumber him?

  He held out the bottle. ‘Drink it,’ he offered. ‘You’ll be the better for it.’

  Bert’s lips pulled back from the bloodied mess of fangs and he lunged at Asher, clawed hands outstretched. Asher yelled ‘Door!’ and, thank God, Josetta had the wits to slam it without any wailed vacillation about I can’t shut you in there with it …! If he knew Josetta she had one sturdy shoulder braced against its panels, not that that would do any good—

  He flung himself at the window, ripped down the wadded blankets, and hurled them over Bert’s head as Bert reached him. The stricken man was strong, but it was still human strength, the strength of a man of sixty who’s worked hard all his life, not the hideous abnatural strength of mutated cell tissue and altered muscle. Asher rolled him in the blankets, shouted ‘Josetta!’ and she was in the room, striding to help him—

  ‘Asher, there’s—’

  Feet thundered in the stairwell. Men slammed into the room, half a dozen of them, as Asher grappled with the blanket-wrapped thing that had been Bert Mayo. Three of the men – laborers smelling of sweat and beer and very cheap tobacco – grabbed Bert and wrapped him still tighter in the blankets, and in the same instant one of the men seized Asher’s arms from behind, pulled him out of the fray, and held him while another whipped from his pocket a weighted rubber sap.

  ‘Get him outta here,’ commanded the sixth man, who held Josetta’s arms behind her – Asher automatically placed his accent within a few miles of Cork, like his round Celtic face and the thick shoulders in their meal-colored jumper. ‘These two—’

  That was as far as he got. Josetta stomped hard on the man’s instep, dropped her weight, twisted in his shock-loosened grip and gouged for his eyes. In the same moment Asher kicked the man with the sap in front of him, performed the same classic stomp-drop-twist on his own captor before smashing him across the face with the laudanum bottle, grabbed Josetta’s wrist – it did not appear to be the time to ask questions – and used the pillow round his fist to smash open the window. There was a shed outside – there was always a shed, in tiny houses like this one – and he swung Josetta out the window and dropped out after her himself, into a yard the size of a dining-room table and choked with rubbish. He pulled Josetta into the outhouse and closed the door. Through its tiny judas he saw two of the men drop through the window, dash to the rear fence of the yard and scramble over it: the logical direction of pursuit.

  They stood together, in black and stinking darkness, for nearly ten minutes, long after the house itself grew silent and still.

  No light returned to the windows of its kitchen. No one opened its rear door.

  Josetta made not a sound, though he could hear her breathing fast and hard and could feel her trembling where her body pressed his.

  He himself was shaking, as if his legs would crumple if he tried to walk.

  Hirelings of whoever it was – that flickering shadow that he’d thought he’d glimpsed in Charlotte Street? The bewhiskered and bespectacled ‘rat in an overcoat’ that Grippen had seen? Bert Mayo’s pals in the Irish Brotherhood, concerned that Katie had taken a stranger into the house? (And God knows what was hidden up in the attic …) The local Brotherhood of Light Fingers, if the enterprising Bert was in fact a fence as well as a gunrunner?

  Dear God, what were they going to do if Bert tore into them with those bloodied teeth?

  The matter is in hand, Langham had said, with a twinkle and a smile.

  In time Asher slipped out of the outhouse, crept shakily across the yard – it was now pitch-black – and listened at the back door of the house.

  Nothing.

  The yard of the house behind the Mayos was tidier, when Asher clambered over its fence. By the feel of the dirt underfoot, and the way plants brushed his groping hands, he guessed the neighbors had a garden (and wouldn’t thank his pursuers for trampling it). He went back and fetched Josetta, offered her help (which she turned down indignantly) over the fence, and over three more, moving laterally parallel to (he calculated) Ellesmere Street, the next street over from Brabazon, before finding a house that sounded vacant. With a mental apology to its tenants he broke the kitchen window, and let himself and Josetta through kitchen and hallway and out at last into Ellesmere Street indeed.

  Since no cabs ever cruised anywhere near the grimy purlieus of Brabazon Street – and the busses had long since ceased running – they had a walk of nearly a mile to the cluster of pubs around the East India Docks where such a thing could finally, by chance, be obtained.

  Lying awake in the darkness, Lydia thought about blood.

  She’d dreamed about it, as she often did, especially since her expedition – nearly a week ago now – to Cuvé Sainte-Bride. In her dream she’d seen the vampire Francesca Gheric attempting to flee from the convent of Cuvé Sainte-Bride, getting caught on the barbed wire that half-filled the trenches which surrounded it like a toothed steel moat, trying to tear herself loose from the barbs. (These were longer and far more thickly wound on military wire, Captain Calvert had told her, than they were on the mere stuff that Americans used to pen their cattle.) ‘We are flesh and bone, lady,’ Don Simon had said, and in Lydia’s dream Francesca had struggled, tearing both flesh and bone in an attempt to get out of the trench before the heaving gray tide of rats reached her.

  Blood had glistened on the steel barbs and, standing on the brink of the trench, Lydia had tried to figure out how she was going to obtain a sample of that blood.

  She’d eventually decided that the best way was to have Don Simon transform himself into a bat and go fetch some for her, and they were in the midst of a rather convoluted argument about whether or not this was possible (‘Were it possible for a vampire to transform into a bat, Mistress, the Lady Francesca would not now be in the difficult situation that she is …’) when she woke.

  Why did I want her blood? She frowned over the question.

  I’ve already SEEN vampire blood under a microscope. Simon had donated some a few years ago, and had been as curious as she herself, to compare it with the blood of the living.

  She had written up her findings, and had handled the sample with the greatest of care, well aware that if the vampire state were in fact connected with some unknown virus – and were related to the hideous pathology of the Others – no chances could be risked of contamination. When finished with her study (which had taken place by gaslight) she had set the sample outdoors, and had been queasily disturbed to see it spontaneously catch fire, and burn up at the first touch of morning sun.

  So why did I want HER blood?

  A thought, like the echo of her now-fading dream, came at once: Because the blood is the answer.

  But she had no idea what that meant.

  By the sound of the camp it was three or four in the morning. The guns were stilled; there wasn’t even the grind of motors from the road, or the hollow rumble of lorries on the makeshift wooden bridge. No sound had yet begun from the camp kitchen, nor was there smell of smoke. In the pitch-dark tent Lydia heard the stealthy scrabble of rats, and bit her lips to keep from screaming: in four months of living daily with the vermin she had never lost her terror of them. She should, by all rights, be sunk in the sleep of exhaustion – keeping company with vampires, on top of her duties in the fluoroscope tent (And if we have another quiet day tomorrow I’ll take the apparatus apart and give it the cleaning it needs …), meant sh
e was constantly short of sleep. Thank goodness Colonel St-Vire insists on the surgical crews getting all the sleep they need during the quiet times …

  When she closed her eyes she felt as far from sleep as she was from a hot bath or Mrs Grimes’s batter-cakes. But she saw, as if it were printed on her eyelids, the dreamworld moonlight glistening on Francesca Gheric’s blood, dripping from the twisted spikes.

  Saw Don Simon’s blood under her microscope, the altered, queerly elongated corpuscles motionless and cold.

  Her favorite sport was to kill her lover in the act, said Antonio’s beautiful, velvety whisper.

  And her own hesitant voice, Some vampires do retain a capacity for love …

  She was still awake when first daylight outlined the tent-seams, and above the wasteland of blood-soaked mud and tangled wire, the guns began to pound.

  ‘What happened to that man?’ Josetta’s whisper barely carried over the rattle of the cab’s iron tires on the brick streets of the Limehouse. ‘His face …’

  ‘Don’t speak of it.’ Now that Asher was sitting down and more or less warm and in no immediate danger of being killed or worse, waves of exhaustion threatened to drown him. ‘Not to anyone. For your life, Miss Beyerly; I’m not joking …’

  ‘For my life?’ At least she didn’t laugh. The moon had set, and the blackness of the blacked-out streets was absolute. God alone knew how the cab driver – the only one to be found in the Wise Child, and arguably not sober – saw to steer … Maybe he has a sober horse …

  ‘I don’t know who is behind this,’ he said wearily. ‘It may be that our government brought those things – that infection – to England as a plan to win the war … as a cheap alternative to conscription. To get men to fight who won’t ask questions, who won’t even know what they’re doing or why.’

  He heard the harsh draw of her breath. At least, he reflected, having battled Parliament for years over votes for women, she wouldn’t automatically assume that the government a) was always right, or b) knew what it was doing.

  ‘Or it may be someone who wants to spread chaos and panic here, so that we can’t produce enough food or munitions to effectively keep an army in the field. And I suspect we’d do it to the Germans quick enough. It may be someone who wants to raise a private army, for their own purposes. Someone who knows they’ll be outnumbered and outgunned by the police …’

  ‘I know one of the men,’ said Josetta quietly. ‘One of those who took the thing away, I mean. I’ve seen him at the settlement house. His name’s Teague, he’s part of the Irish Volunteers. Someone told me he’s one of the men who’s buying guns from the Germans and smuggling them into Ireland.’

  Asher heard the hesitant note in her voice, the admission of the secret she was breaking, and shut his mouth hard on his first, embittered exclamation. With Irish independence tabled ‘until the war is over’, – and, worse, used like a hostage to lever Ireland into accepting forced conscription – he could understand the anger of those who had waited for years for a political solution to Ireland’s self-rule. The fact that armed militias had formed among the Protestants, who didn’t want to be governed by the Catholic majority – and were also smuggling guns in from Germany to arm themselves – and the Catholics, who in the face of violence in the countryside, were responding in kind, did not help the situation any.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly. ‘Whoever is behind this – and there’s no reason to think this Teague is working for one side or the other in particular – please remember that we have no idea who is passing along information to whom. If you value your life, tell no one about what happened tonight. The last man who was a witness to the existence of these things vanished without a trace on the sixteenth of March. Promise me.’

  She gripped his hand as if to emphasize what she was about to say, but he was unconscious before her words were spoken.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Is the offer still open,’ inquired Lydia, ‘for me to pay a call on the Master of Prague?’

  Don Simon regarded her for a moment with raised brows. Had he been like any of the men she worked with – both here in Pont-Sainte-Félicité and in fact back in Oxford – he would probably have greeted this volte-face with And this is the woman who thinks we’re monsters? and similar chaffering, but this was evidently another of the things he’d outgrown (or gotten tired of) in three-plus centuries of being Undead. He merely inclined his head and replied, ‘Graf Szgedny will be honored and flattered, lady. Am I correct in my guess that this concerns the Lady Francesca and her bargain – whatever it may be – with Dr Lemoine? Then might I suggest that the visit itself be kept secret?

  ‘E’en in the best of times,’ he added, when Lydia almost protested that she’d never in any case mention to Captain Calvert that she was going to tea with a vampire, ‘the Undead are frightful gossips. With eternity before us and little enough of each night required for hunting, I do not see how it could be otherwise, given the human material of which the vampire is formed. Caution warns me against bringing your inquiries to the Lady Francesca’s attention.’

  ‘I think that’s wise.’ Lydia glanced back over her shoulder at the lights of the clearing station. The purposeful bustle among the tents would soon die down. Another day was done. A few dozen men had been brought in – even when there was no ‘push’ on, constant sniperfire took its toll. Shells were always falling, sometimes close enough to the front-line trenches to blow men into fragments on their way back from the latrines. Trench foot, pneumonia, hideous and fast-spreading sepsis from the smallest of cuts …

  When things grew quiet, did poor Brodie’s bean sí still walk among the tents? (And is there a German equivalent, over on the other side of no man’s land? I’m sure Jamie would know …)

  ‘What about Antonio and Basilio?’ she asked worriedly. ‘They know I’m asking questions. And they’re friends – or at least neighbors – of Lady Francesca.’

  ‘I spoke to them when we parted Thursday evening. Antonio at least shares my alarm at the Lady’s meddling in human affairs: such involvements never end well. Then again, merely the suggestion that someone is experimenting with the Others – let alone producing them – is enough to incline them to my will. The Others shock and repel us as much as they do you, lady. Perhaps more so, for those of us who are aware of them at all recognize a kinship … and fear the further connections that may exist. Do not look to them for aid in this matter, but at least they will keep their silence.’

  Shouting near the bridge, and the rumble of engines. ‘Bother,’ said Lydia. ‘I’d hoped it would be a quiet night …’ Not noisy enough for a push. A local attack …

  ‘I must go.’

  He bowed over her hand. ‘Until tomorrow, then, Mistress. ’Twere best we pay our call early, while the rest are out. I shall send John in the afternoon with papers, and come for you when darkness falls. ’Tis a dozen miles.’

  ‘I’ll be ready. You haven’t heard—’ She paused, half-turning back from the lights of the camp. ‘You haven’t heard anything concerning Jamie, have you? Mrs Grimes wrote that he’d gone down to London. The last I heard from him was that one of these … these things … is in London itself.’

  The startled widening of his eyes was the greatest display of shock she’d ever seen from him. But all he said was, ‘Is it so, indeed?’

  ‘That means that either someone was infected here – one of Lemoine’s assistants, perhaps, or one of those poor prisoners who escaped – and developed the condition when he got to London. Or else someone shipped or carried one of Lemoine’s subjects to Britain, and it escaped.’

  ‘Or that the vector of the infection is asymptomatic, and does not manifest the physical changes of the condition himself.’ Don Simon folded his arms, and leaned one slender shoulder against the corner of the smashed-in wooden hut that stood between the last of the disused German trenches and the first houses of the village. From its shadow Lydia knew they were nearly invisible to the hurrying figures in the camp. ‘Rath
er like that woman Mary Mallon, who spread typhoid a few years ago in America …’

  Lydia shivered, and pulled her greatcoat more tightly around her body. ‘I’ve asked Jamie to send me whatever information he has. If I know Jamie …’

  She looked aside, unable to go on.

  ‘I do indeed know James,’ returned the vampire. ‘Thus I feel sure that when you do receive a reply to your reports of these creatures – and recall that any letter of yours to him must be forwarded from Oxford – ’twill contain the words Do NOT pursue this matter. Lionel is in London still.’ He named the Master vampire of London. ‘But to attempt to touch his dreams in quest of what he may know of this is like playing the lute before a rooting pig. If you will it, Mistress, I shall seek out James’s dreams in the depths of the night, and at least endeavor to learn if he is well.’

  Then he was gone, as if he could – as the legends said – dislimn into mist, and melt away.

  Feeling rather like the corpse at a funeral in morning dress better suited to London than to Wendens Ambo, James Asher stepped from the first-class railway carriage and handed his companions out, reflecting for the hundredth time on the usefulness of ‘connection’ with the aristocracy. The son of a Church of England rector, he’d always been aware that the folk up at the ‘big house’ at Wychford had the power to make life easy or difficult for his parents and sister – interference which Sir Boniface’s family seemed to regard as part of ‘keeping them in their place’. Four years at Oxford in close proximity to the scions of nobility hadn’t much improved his opinion of the breed. But he had discovered at Oxford that the purpose of Oxford was as much to meet people as to actually learn anything. One could learn as much or as little as one chose, depending on the ability of one’s parents to keep one there. (Or, in Asher’s case, one’s diligence at any number of tutoring jobs.) But being in Balliol or Merton or King’s would be, ever after, a passport to a degree of acquaintance, rather like sharing a seat in a lifeboat with total strangers.