Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  The gray brows pinched slightly over the broken aquiline of his nose. ‘For La Dame Blanche, the hunt is about cruelty. Many enjoy chasing a victim, the game of cat-and-mouse in the darkness: seeing a man piss himself with terror, hearing him squeak and plead at the touch of claws on his throat. The taste of his hope when he still thinks he can get away.’ The tiniest smile tugged one corner of his mustache.

  ‘For her the game is more elaborate. More personal. And the pleasure she takes in it has seemed always to me – for she left Prague, as most of us did, when the Prussians attacked under King Frederick – to come not from the kill itself, but from a sort of spite. As if every victim were the one who had done her ill. As if every kill were vengeance. I had many occasions to speak to her, when one of her “games”, as she liked to call them, would involve three or four members of the same family or a circle of friends, pursued over a time long enough for word of their misfortunes to spread. In a city barely a tenth the size of London, of older beliefs and different organization, this can cause serious danger to others of the nest.’

  ‘Did she ever try to command your fledglings, my lord?’

  His lips compressed in an anger that she hoped wasn’t directed at her. ‘She did.’

  ‘Forgive me, my lord—’ Lydia ducked her head and looked as humble as she could – ‘did it ever impress you that she would have taken command of the Prague nest, if she were able?’

  His deep, soft voice remained level. ‘There were times when I thought as much.’

  ‘Yet she never actually made an attempt to supplant you? Or began a conspiracy to have you killed?’

  ‘’Twould have been fairly easy to arrange,’ added Don Simon from the shadows. ‘In those days, much of Bohemia believed in the vampìr more certainly than they believed that the earth circles the sun.’

  ‘Not so easily as you might think,’ retorted Szgedny. ‘I had – as I still have – eyes and ears throughout the city, among the living as among the Undead. In any case, she did not.’

  ‘Did you ever ask yourself why?’ Lydia took another sip of tea.

  He sat for a time like a cat watching birds. When he said, ‘I did not,’ there was, instead of irritation in his deep voice (in so far as it displayed anything), a kind of curiosity at himself for this omission.

  ‘Because it sounds to me,’ said Lydia diffidently, ‘as if the Lady Francesca might be incapable of creating fledglings. And that’s what she thinks Lemoine can give her.’

  In his dressing-gown and his paisley shawl, before the faint warmth of the tiny hearth in the room at Whitsedge Court, Asher dreamed of the echoing vastness of the Liverpool Street Station. Streaming mobs of people, as he helped Aunt Faith and Mrs Flasket from the cab, paid the driver, mentally identified the man’s speech as originating from around Shepherd’s Bush; his ear caught the sing-song cry of the girls selling violets around one of the cast-iron pillars near the platform steps. Two girls and a woman, in the black of mourning … Beyond them, a worried little man (from Devon, by his accent) fussed with his Scots servant about the cat he carried in a basket …

  Faces in the crowd. The smell of smoke from a cockle vendor’s barrow and a child’s frightened wailing. Clouds of steam rolling from Platform One as the express from Norwich ground to a halt. A flicker of shadow, a characteristic movement near the bookseller’s – a ragged dark mackintosh …

  When he turned it was gone.

  Dreaming, he returned to the scene. Aunt Faith clung again to his arm – she was the only one of Lydia’s aunts who would treat him with more than chill civility – and prattled in her gentle voice of the letters she’d gotten from the family of one of the Halfdene footmen who’d come back, blind and crippled, from the Front, while his own attention moved like a gunsight, trying to identify that flicker of a half-familiar shape.

  Like spotting Lydia, or Dr Hoggett, or any of his scholastic colleagues at a great distance off in a crowd …

  Who was that?

  He knew, but the knowledge slipped away.

  And in his dream he remembered – not entirely illogically – Josetta Beyerly, when she’d let him off at his lodgings Tuesday night after their adventure in Brabazon Street. Exhausted and shivering a little with what he suspected was a low-running fever, he hadn’t waked until the cab had reached the door and then he’d been simply too tired to insist that they go round the corner so that he could slip in through the old mews that had been one of his reasons for choosing Faraday’s Private Hotel in the first place.

  When she’d seen him to his door, and walked back down the shallow step to the cab, he’d thought, as her heels clicked on the flagway, I hope she’s keeping safe …

  He’d looked up and down the dark street before closing the door behind him, and had seen no one.

  ‘’Twould make sense,’ said Don Simon at length, ‘of her own master’s decision to make another her favorite in Strasbourg, lesser in strength by all accounts than the Lady. One does not bequeath one’s estates to a gelding.’

  For a long time Szgedny said nothing, but Lydia had the impression, almost, of hearing an abacus click behind those colorless eyes. ‘And ’twould make sense,’ he said at last, ‘of her anger. ’Twas clear as day she considered herself a law unto herself, and entitled to be master of Prague in my stead.’

  ‘And if Lemoine is working with the physical pathology of the Undead,’ Lydia continued, ‘which it sounds like he is doing, from what I’ve read of his work – she might well trade her assistance in controlling the Others for a cure for her own condition.’

  ‘Children trading pebbles by the seashore.’ The Graf’s nostrils flared in irritation. ‘A thousand imaginary ducats to pay for an imaginary horse. Best of luck to them both.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She saw Don Simon’s yellow eyes move sidelong, to touch the Graf’s snow-gray ones.

  ‘I at least am sure,’ returned the Master of Prague, ‘that the Lady Francesca is incapable of commanding the revenants. Three hundred years I have watched them, and my master before me. Years will go by – decades, sometimes – between sightings of them, beneath the bridges of the Vltava and on the river’s islands when the moon has set. But they are there, in the crypts beneath the old city, the forgotten cisterns and drains. The sub-cellars of the old town palaces and the ossuaries under churches ruined and built over and erased from the memory of the town. Never more than a few handfuls of them, living on rats in the darkness.

  ‘My master, Odo Magnus, tried to gain command over them, when first they began to appear. One of his fledglings made the attempt also, Odo believed in order to gain control of the city and to drive Odo out. Or else to kill him and those loyal to him – such schisms, lady—’ He inclined his head to Lydia – ‘are uncommon but by no means unheard of, among those who hunt the night. This fledgling ended by being torn to pieces and eaten by the Others, who will it seems devour anything.’

  ‘So we have observed,’ murmured Don Simon.

  ‘I have myself, like Odo before me, tried to control them as I control the minds of the living.’ Stirred to the point of forgetting his calm dignity, the Graf leaned forward, gestured with one powerful hand, and his French became harder to follow as it slid back into the language as he had first learned it, centuries before. ‘Looking into their eyes I saw naught: no mind, no memories, no dreams. Not even the most rudimentary sensations of hunger and fear by which one commands the actions of beasts. Meditating—’ He glanced at Don Simon, as if making sure that he understood whatever mental technique that was, that each had learned from his master to control the perceptions of men – ‘I could touch nothing of their thoughts, either singly or en masse. The effort only revealed my hiding place to them, and I was obliged to flee.’

  ‘And there’s no chance, my lord, that you were trying this too close to running water? You said they live in the channel of the river.’

  A wolf’s smile lifted one corner of the long mustaches again. ‘Clever little lady. I was in
land, well enough.’ The silvery eyes met hers, and Lydia glanced quickly aside. To meet a vampire’s eyes opened your own mind to the possibility of its tampering with your dreams. To the danger that one day it would summon you … and you would go.

  ‘And the fact that the Lady Francesca didn’t take the opportunity to enlist the Others herself, against you,’ she concluded, ‘seems to confirm that she probably couldn’t. If she dwelt in Prague for – how long?’

  ‘Seventy years, or thereabouts. And you are right, Madame.’ He sat back, like a bleached cobra recoiling upon its rock. ‘I doubt not that she made the attempt, more than once. She would have used them, if she could.’

  ‘But Dr Lemoine doesn’t know that.’

  ‘And if her goal be merely to get of him some cure for her incapacity,’ went on Don Simon, ‘I cannot see her taking any pains to make sure these things remain under control. Lemoine’s experiments are sufficiently irresponsible as they stand – God knows how they acquired the first of their revenants, upon which to found their efforts, though I can conceive several ways in which ’twere easily done. But Lemoine at least is a living man, with a living man’s loyalties to his own. So far as I can ascertain, the Lady Francesca has none.’

  ‘Tell me one more thing, my lord, if you would,’ said Lydia, as Don Simon fetched her cloak and they prepared to leave. It was, by the exquisite goldwork clock, nearly ten, and for several minutes she had seen her escort listening carefully, for the sound of returning feet. By the look of the card tables, there was every chance the Graf’s fledglings would foregather in this room, or wonder why they were excluded from doing so.

  Whether their fear of her companion would keep the vampires at bay in a group she didn’t know, though she was aware that most vampires held Don Simon Ysidro in considerable awe. In any case, the thought of that many of the Undead knowing who she was, and what she looked like, and that she was tampering in their affairs, frightened her a good deal. They gossiped, Don Simon had said, like schoolgirls, and there was no guarantee that one or more of them weren’t bosom-bows with Francesca.

  ‘And what might that be, Madame?’ Graf Szgedny bent over her hand.

  ‘Has there ever been occasion on which a vampire has tried to make a fledgling of a revenant?’

  ‘The condition of these things is spread by the blood. I know of no vampire, no matter how inexperienced, who would take such risk.’

  ‘But so far as I understand it, at least, it is the death – the absorption of the mind at death – that is involved in the transformation to vampire, not the blood itself. Might a vampire take in whatever mind exists in the revenant, and return it to the creature’s body after it’s dead? And then control it, as a master vampire controls its fledgling?’

  ‘There must be an exchange of blood, lady. The blood is what transforms the living man into the vampire, once he has passed through death. The risk would be simply too great.’

  Lydia heard nothing, but Don Simon turned his head a little, then bowed deeply to the Graf. ‘That sounds like Elysée de Montadour’s voice, and those execrable fledglings of hers—’

  ‘Flee.’ Szgedny made a slight gesture, as though flicking water from his fingertips. ‘Your visit shall be as if it never occurred.’ For a moment – as sometimes happened with Don Simon’s – his face turned briefly human when he smiled. Tired – and amused, perhaps, at being able to step for a moment out of the society of the Undead and provide information to the quests of the living. But the cynical cruelty in his eyes remained.

  Asher returned to London on the Saturday afternoon train from Saffron Walden, though Aunt Faith chose to remain at the Court until Wednesday, with Mrs Flasket to bear her company. ‘I’m sorry you have to return,’ said the Dowager Lady Whitsedge, as she poured out tea for Asher in the bright sunlight at breakfast that morning. ‘Thursday night was the first time I’ve seen the poor old Comte so cheerful. I do quite worry about him, losing his home as he has, and his son and both of his grandsons. I think it quite took him back, to tell somebody about his home, and the way things were when he was a boy.’

  Once, on the four-mile drive to the station, Asher caught sight of a bicyclist following the Court’s pony-trap at a distance: too far to easily make out details of the rider under the striped shadows of the new-leafed trees. The man was wearing a shabby Fair Isle sweater rather than a mackintosh, but something in his outline, even at that distance, rang alarm bells in Asher’s mind.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Is all well, M’am?’

  Lydia looked up quickly from the corner of the makeshift table, which, in daytime (and through more nights than she cared to think about) served Eamon Dermott as a workbench. The tiny root cellar beneath the ruins behind the fluoroscope room was barely large enough for both it and the tin basin he used as a developing bath, its rafters so low that during the daytimes (and through more nights than Lydia cared to think about) she and her assistant had to duck and weave about, to avoid the films hanging as they dried.

  It was the only place in the clearing station where she knew she could work undisturbed.

  She turned Jamie’s letter face down beside her candle, and crossed to the door.

  VAD Violet Brickwood stood on the stair. Listening, Lydia heard no clamor of voices and motors in the camp, no rattle of the fluoroscope being moved in the building above.

  Only the guns.

  She propped her glasses on her nose. ‘I’m well. I just—’

  The young volunteer’s glance went past her shoulder, to the papers that strewed the table. ‘I couldn’t help seeing, M’am, that that nice Captain Palfrey brought you that letter today. I hope it’s nothing amiss with your husband, or your little girl?’ The earnest brown eyes returned to Lydia’s face in the lantern-light, seeking – Lydia realized – the marks of grief. ‘I’ll sometimes go read my letters in the stores tent,’ the girl added. ‘If they’re from my sister, about Mama, I mean. I just … Please don’t think I’m meaning to pry, but you’ve been down here a long while. I just hoped you were all right.’

  Lydia smiled, and gave the younger girl an impulsive hug. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘All is well. There’s nothing amiss.’

  Except for a MONSTROUS scheme to dissolve the souls from out of men’s brains, that their bodies may be enslaved because the governments find they’re running out of good Frenchmen or good Englishmen or good Russians to kill.

  Lydia returned to Dermott’s worktable as Violet’s shoes patted gently up the stair again, and stared at the letter.

  It was on the stationery of Whitsedge Court (What on EARTH is Jamie doing there?) and ran to many pages – It must have taken him HOURS to write it all! – so that the minuscule dots, blots and pinpricks wouldn’t be obvious as a code. Even though the letter had been sent to Don Simon’s accommodation address in Paris, Jamie didn’t trust anyone. The letter before this one, which she’d received through regular (censored) Army channels, had contained the terse warning ??? home team screening, after the alarming information that there was a second revenant at large in London.

  ??? home team screening.

  Monsters. She closed her eyes, leaned her forehead on her knuckles. The King’s own government – or at least the Department that worked for them – was hiding the existence of those things she had encountered in China. Protecting them.

  How that was worse than simply killing those poor Germans she wasn’t sure, but it turned her stomach.

  And chilled the blood in her veins.

  A quick scratch on the door behind her. A whispered voice. ‘Mistress?’

  She turned in her chair and managed a half-smile. ‘Well, you were right,’ she said, as Don Simon slipped into the tiny cellar, closed the door without a sound. ‘Jamie does indeed say Do NOT investigate this yourself.’ She held out the decryption to him, her hand shaking with exhaustion. ‘He suggests you do it.’

  ‘Does he?’

  The vampire scanned it. Four possible entrances to the sub-crypts and drains ben
eath the convent of Cuvé Sainte-Bride. Heaven only knew where Jamie had acquired the rough map, which according to the plain text of the letter was her Aunt Faith’s house in Little Bookham (Aunt Faith had no such thing and had been Aunt Louise’s pensioner for decades). One entrance was in the ruins of a chapel near lilac trees; another, thirty feet down the side of a well in a farmyard a mile from the Amiens road. And Heaven only knew if any of the four would still be usable.

  ‘He says he’s coming here himself, as soon as he can get the military clearances he needs.’ She tried to keep her voice calm and decisive. The labored shakiness of Jamie’s handwriting had told its own story. Don’t do it. You’ll kill yourself …

  ‘Does he?’ The vampire’s pale brows lifted.

  ‘It would help things,’ said Lydia hesitantly. ‘Speed things, if we knew at least whether those entrances are still open or not, or how dangerous they are. Obviously they’re difficult of access, since none of the other Undead have spoken of revenants wandering about the back roads and battlefields—’

  ‘Yet one at least got through.’ Don Simon refolded the decryption, drew it thoughtfully through his long fingers. ‘Whether that was one of ten, or one of fifty, we know not – nor yet why our Nurse Smith would have risked her life getting a sample of its blood or its flesh, when she has access to ample at Sainte-Bride. Curious.’ His glance shifted sidelong to her. ‘If I read this description aright – and the map also, though ’tis clearly not to scale – the crypts and catacombs beneath the convent at its height extend far beyond the walls as they currently stand, and presumably beneath the trenches that surround it. And given the habit which the living have, of judging situations to be “under control” when they very much desire them to be, ’twould little surprise me if one or more of these things is hiding in the far corners of these crypts, unbeknownst to this Lemoine.’

  ‘Which would mean—’ Lydia regarded him somberly by the candle’s flickering light – ‘that it’s only a matter of time before they start to multiply beyond the convent walls. And once they start to spread …’