Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  His arm circled her hips and he swung her down into the doorway with him.

  Inside in the tunnel, the fishy, ratty stink of the revenants mingled with the acrid whiff of carbolic soap. Lydia was aware that she was terrified and aware also that there was no time for it, and no turning back. And of course, no guarantee that Simon had ever passed this way …

  Palfrey slid down the cover of the lantern till it was barely a glimmer, and unholstered his own gun. From his tunic pocket he produced a silencer, which he screwed onto the barrel. Lydia observed he’d also brought the billhook from the car, hanging in a leather sheathe from his waist. As if any of that’s going to do any good …

  The tunnel was barely five feet in diameter, and went on for what felt like miles, though Jamie’s map had assured her it was not quite three-quarters of a mile from the well to the convent’s crypts. It dipped and rose, the low places sheeted with water, sometimes knee-deep, that stank like a sewer. A few yards before the end, it dropped off into what looked like another well, and another ladder of iron staples on a sort of pillar led up to what appeared to be the pierced cover of a drain.

  The smell from above was almost unbearable.

  Revenants.

  Lydia held her watch close to the lantern and saw that it was just before eight. The sun had set some forty-five minutes before. The Master of Prague had told her the revenants were awake and moving about well before full dark: some vampires were astir that early also, Don Simon among them, though they could not venture out into the deadly sunlight. Her heart pounding so that she felt nearly sick, she listened, but heard no sound.

  Palfrey moved her gently aside, slipping up the lantern-slide the tiniest crack, mounted the ladder and shifted the cover aside. Nothing attacked him, and the next moment he climbed through, and lowered one hand down to her.

  The room above had been a chapel; it was a storeroom now. Above the tops of crates (Lait en poudre and Legumes sec) the walls showed whitewash. To the right an archway had been barred across, and the lantern-gleam flashed on silver. Shapes stirred beyond. Chains clinked; Lydia saw the flash of reflective eyes. She heard Palfrey gasp and read the shock on his face, but gripped his wrist, bringing him back to himself. Touched her own lips. Not one sound …

  One of them, she thought, is poor Captain Rhinehardt’s cousin, who was captured because he wouldn’t leave his kinsman. Brain gone, soul gone, as casually as students in a biology laboratory would pith a frog.

  She wondered how she had ever considered Simon and his brothers and sisters in Undeath the worst monsters at large in Flanders.

  And in making those judgments, will I become a monster, too?

  She touched her companion’s elbow, moved softly toward the chapel’s shut door.

  A door opened somewhere beyond, and footsteps retreated on a stone floor. Echoes implied a corridor …

  ‘—tell her the equipment is ready,’ said Lemoine’s voice beyond the door. ‘And make her understand that we could not set it up in any other place.’

  ‘There’s still a little light in the sky,’ returned a woman’s voice. The footfalls paused upon the words, then started again, and died away.

  ‘You’re a fool if you think this will help you,’ said Don Simon Ysidro’s voice.

  Lydia shut the lantern-slide, opened the door a crack. There was indeed a short corridor beyond. Reflected light – the strong glare of electricity (They must have a generator somewhere) – flowed through a half-open door a few yards along, showing her the same ruinous medieval masonry, roughly plastered and whitewashed.

  ‘Oh, I think that remains to be seen.’ Dr Lemoine, standing in the doorway, turned and re-entered the room behind him as he spoke, a sort of keyed-up cheerfulness edging his voice. Lydia signed for Palfrey to follow, crept toward the lighted door.

  ‘If the Undead could increase their power by killing the Undead, they would have been preying upon one another for thousands of years.’ Don Simon’s whispering tones held nothing but a kind of tired patience, like a mother pointing out to a child that no matter how much that child wanted to fly, those cardboard wings would not do the job. ‘To drink the blood of another vampire only renders a vampire desperately and incurably sick—’

  ‘Ah, but she’s not going to drink your blood.’ Something in the room ahead clinked softly, metal on metal. ‘Only absorb your energies, at the instant of your death.’

  ‘The instant of my death,’ sighed Don Simon, ‘was in 1555.’

  ‘And how many deaths have you absorbed since then?’

  Lydia felt Palfrey halt, threw a quick look back and saw his face, in the reflected glow, transformed with protesting shock. This transmuted to unbelieving horror as they looked around the jamb of the door, to the room beyond.

  The laboratory was a small one. Lydia guessed that the straps that held Don Simon to a sort of steel gridiron at one end of the room must be plated inside with silver. Either that, or simple stress and exhaustion prevented him from using any illusion to conceal his true appearance: silk-white, skeletal. His own claws – his own fangs – were clearly visible from the doorway, as were the scars that ripped across his face and continued down onto his throat, to where the open neck of his shirt fell away from it, gouged by the Master of Constantinople six years ago, when Simon had saved her life.

  Beneath the grid on which he lay were arranged cylinders of oxyacetylene gas, their valves linked together so that a single switch (so far as she could tell) would ignite them all.

  Don Simon’s right arm was strapped close to his side; his left was extended to a small metal table – of the type Lydia was familiar with from the surgical tent – and likewise held by a strap at the wrist. The fingers of this hand Dr Lemoine grasped in his excitement, his voice almost trembling with eagerness. ‘Your death – their deaths – is what she needs. Not your blood.’ He nodded toward a couple of gleaming gallon jars on the floor, and a small array of scalpels on a nearby table. ‘We know that draining all the blood from your body wouldn’t kill you. But your death, your real death—’

  ‘Will gain you nothing. If alliance with the Lady Francesca is your goal, ’twill thwart you of it, for ’twill drive her mad—’

  ‘No,’ insisted Lemoine. ‘No, it will simply complete her transformation to the vampire state. Her power is incomplete, it has always been. Once we—’

  At that point Palfrey produced his revolver and shot Dr Lemoine in the back.

  Even equipped with a so-called silencer, the report was loud in the underground silence – Lydia wondered, as she strode into the little room, how many soldiers were in the crypts and if the weight of the earth and the tangle of the small rooms and chapels would stifle the sound. She’d already seen a small ring of keys on the table with the surgical equipment and snatched them up, Palfrey still standing in the doorway, as if hypnotized with shock, dismay, betrayal.

  Good, at least he won’t turn on the oxyacetylene himself in a fit of heroism …

  Would Jamie?

  She didn’t know.

  ‘There is a guard in the hall above,’ said Don Simon, as Lydia unlocked the straps. ‘’Twill take them a moment, but – cagafuego,’ he added, as the revenants in the nearby chamber began to howl.

  ‘Can they control rats?’ She caught his arm as he rolled off the gridiron, turned toward the door, which was still blocked by Palfrey, staring at him as if he could not believe what he saw.

  Don Simon’s wrists and forehead, Lydia noted automatically, were welted and bleeding where the straps had touched – a glance confirmed that, yes, the leather was sewn inside with silver plates.

  ‘You knew.’ Palfrey’s revolver pointed at both of them, perfectly steady though his whole body was trembling with shock. ‘Mrs Asher, you … you knew …’ The blue eyes turned pleadingly to Don Simon: pleading, anger, disbelief. ‘What are you?’

  Boots clattered on the stair, a man’s voice yelled, ‘Colonel Lemoine—?’

  And against the wall where he had collap
sed, Lemoine raised himself to one elbow, blood seeping across the left shoulder of his lab coat. ‘Spies!’ he gasped. ‘Germans!’

  Palfrey reacted automatically, ducking back to the door and firing into the passage; Don Simon grabbed Lydia’s arm, as she would have taken the moment to dodge past him. A gunshot in the passageway, unmuffled by a silencer, it rang like the crack of doom, and Palfrey buckled and collapsed. There was another unsilenced shot and Lemoine groped his own sidearm from its holster; Don Simon dragged Lydia out the door, stooped to snatch up Palfrey’s revolver and fire another shot at the guard – who lay, Lydia now saw, a dozen feet away in a spreading pool of blood.

  ‘Dressing,’ Don Simon ordered, ripping open Palfrey’s tunic. Lydia whipped her clasp knife from her pocket and cut a four-inch strip from the hem of her skirt (I couldn’t have done THAT if I’d been wearing trousers!). The vampire tore the tough linen into two pieces as if it had been paper, wadded up the larger piece over the bleeding hole in the young captain’s chest and used the shorter to bind it into place, with shouting and the thunder of feet sounding somewhere in the darkness of the stair. ‘Stay close.’

  ‘I have a constitutional dislike of losing those who serve me,’ he had said to her once, and with a single swift movement scooped the taller man up over his shoulder as he rose. Lydia picked up Palfrey’s revolver, reached back into the laboratory behind her to switch off the electric light there – Lemoine was on his feet, stumbling towards the door. She heard him crash into something as she caught Don Simon’s hand in her own free one. In pitch darkness she followed the vampire at a run down the uneven corridor back to the chapel-cum-storeroom, while the guards shouted and bumbled in the stair.

  She felt rather than saw when they passed through the door into the chapel, and heard the revenants howling and baying in their cell, and the clash of their chains. (Do they chain them to keep them from eating one another?) Now and then one of them yelled a German word. Iron scraped – the cover of the drain. She groped for the staples on the wall, dropped down into the darkness, and the ice-cold fingers closed around hers again.

  ‘Thank you, Mistress. She’ll be in the hunt—’

  No need to ask who ‘she’ was.

  ‘We’ve a motorcar on the other side of the ridge, up the lane about two miles from the chapel with the lilacs. Did you try that way in first?’

  ‘I guessed ’twould have been a target for artillery.’ They were striding along the uneven passageway, Lydia stumbling where the floor dipped, cold, smelly water freezing her feet where the way was flooded. ‘Is there a rope?’

  ‘Only near the top. There was nothing to tie it to.’

  The vampire swore again. ‘Mine I left in the farmhouse, rather than have any man find it hanging down the well. ’Twill be but minutes to fetch it—’

  Lydia thought of trying to leap from the threshold of the little doorway in the well’s side, up to the first broken stub of iron, and shuddered. Even hanging onto the vampire’s neck or shoulders had only to be thought of, to be discarded – vampires didn’t weigh much, but she knew the double weight would crumble the rusted remains of the metal. ‘All right. How badly is Captain Palfrey hurt?’

  ‘’Tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door,’ the vampire quoted grimly. ‘Can I but bring him to help, ’twill be well.’

  Lydia shivered, recalling the young man’s horrified face. You knew …

  She said no more, but kept hold of the vampire’s hand, and in time smelled the contaminated water of the well ahead of them, and the wet pong of moss on its stones. She listened desperately to the silence behind them, trying to determine if she could hear footsteps or not. And wondered whether anyone there would be smart enough to deduce that they’d have to escape via the well, and be waiting for them at the top.

  Or didn’t they know about the well?

  And did Simon shut the drain-cover in the chapel—?

  He stopped, and she felt him put Palfrey down. Holding Lydia’s hand, he signed her to kneel, then led her, feeling the floor, to the edge of the doorway, to show her where it lay. Then he kissed her hand and released it, and she felt the sleeve of his shirt brush her cheek as he stood. There was the faintest whisper of scratching as he jumped – she was glad there was no light, for she didn’t even like to picture it – and, presumably, seized the broken nubbins of iron above and to the right of the doorway, for she didn’t hear a splash. A moment later the faint pitter of dislodged stone fragments falling into the water.

  She crawled back to Palfrey, took his hand. It was cold with shock. She put the back of her wrist against his lips, and felt the warm thread of breath. His pulse, when she felt it a moment later, was fast and thready: He HAS to be got to help …

  ‘You knew,’ he had said.

  And how will I explain to him that vampires can bend and ensorcel human perceptions? Particularly the very old, very skilled vampires like Simon? How will I explain – how will I make him believe – that all those times he thinks he met Simon by daylight, all those ‘impressions’ he had of reading mention of him in his father’s letters – were only thoughts implanted in his dreams?

  EVERYTHING – resigning from the Guards, and coming here to France, and leaving poor Miss Bellingham – EVERYTHING was based upon a lie. Everything he undertook was only because Don Simon needed someone to work for him in the daylight hours.

  Her hand tightened involuntarily on Palfrey’s, and – a little to her surprise – she felt the pressure feebly returned.

  She listened into the darkness of the tunnel behind them, seeking again for the rattle of soldiers’ boots, the creak of belt leather. How much do the guards know? How many of them are there? And do THEY know the kind of thing Lemoine is up to, with his enslavement of German prisoners who are stripped of their own minds?

  Do they know how deadly it is to come into any contact with these things that might result in blood transfer? Do they—?

  Something brushed her face.

  She realized her thoughts had been wandering an instant before she smelled blood and cold hands seized her around the waist and throat.

  A woman screamed, cursed, in the blackness beside her – silver burning a vampire’s hands …

  Lydia tried to wrench free and fell over Palfrey’s body, cried out in pain as those steel hands grabbed her again, around the waist and by the hair, this time, and a woman’s voice hissed in her ear, ‘Rogneux puteresse!’

  She was dragged away into the tunnel’s reeking darkness.

  SEVENTEEN

  Asher knew the place when Millward described it, a vast zone of waste ground beyond London’s East End, where drab dockside merged with marshes, gorse and woodland. Rough land blotched around its edges by turpentine works, phosphate plants, varnish factories and sewer outfalls, before one came to the market gardens of Stratford and West Ham. Brown with factory waste, the River Lea and assorted creeks and cuts wound their way toward the Thames, and the bodies of vagrants and outcasts turned up periodically in the dirty margins of those streams, unmourned and not much regarded by the Metropolitan Police.

  ‘There’s a pub about two hundred yards from where Carpenter’s Road ends in the marsh,’ said Millward. They had retreated to the Reading Room’s vestibule, with its garish recruiting posters, and the intermittent comings and goings of scholars, journalists, students and cranks. ‘A stone’s throw from the waterworks reservoir …’

  ‘The Blind King.’ Asher saw the grimy red-brick box in his mind: nailed-up shutters, padlocked door. The ground was marshy but the steps up to the door, and the narrow window slits at ground level, told him there was a cellar of sorts beneath it. ‘It’s been shut up for years.’

  ‘Well, the police found a body near the outfall embankment Tuesday morning. Donnie and I went out there—’ Millward nodded back toward the Reading Room – ‘when we heard about the state in which it was found. A man we met there spoke of some boys playing along the City Mill Creek and in the marshes finding rats …
You said these things can control rats? Dozens of them, torn to pieces and partially eaten, they said, lying all of a … all of a heap, as if they’d been dumped from a basket. He said it wasn’t dogs.’

  The vampire-hunter’s silver-shot brows tugged together, oblivious to a tweed-clothed woman who was trying to get past him with her arms full of notebooks. Millward always planted himself in the center of any room.

  ‘He said he’d seen rats after a ratting, and it was nothing like. Nothing like anything he’d seen. And a man who lives in Turnpike Row said he’d seen a thing, twice, in the fog, late at night, a thing like what you described.’

  Asher spread out his ordnance map against the wall and located the Blind King, and then Turnpike Row, City Mill Creek and the embankment of the outfall. His recollection of that end of Hackney Marsh included no other buildings nearby isolated enough to permit concealing any creature that size in a cellar.

  ‘Good man.’ He folded his map, gripped the former scholar’s shoulder. ‘It sounds as if one of them’s being kept there and is feeding itself on rats. The other may be lurking near. Any sense that anyone else thinks it might be the Blind King?’

  Millward considered the matter, and Asher guessed he had pursued enquiries no further. Guessed that with his instinctive upper-class reticence, it hadn’t even occurred to Millward to go down to the nearest pub on Carpenter’s Road – the Dolphin – and further his researches. But he only shook his head, and didn’t – as many people did when faced with such a question – elaborate or surmise: ‘I wouldn’t know, no.’

  ‘Good man,’ Asher said again. ‘I’ll go have a look at the place this afternoon.’

  ‘Will you need help?’

  ‘Probably later, yes, thank you. At the moment I think one man will be less obvious than two.’ And particularly, Asher mused as he listened and mentally sorted through the rest of Millward’s researches and newspaper cuttings from the past five days, if one of those two was as striking in appearance as the handsome raven-and-silver vampire-hunter. Nor did Millward possess the professional spy’s quality of what Asher mentally termed unvisibility: the trick of blending into a crowd, of making himself look like nobody of importance. All his colleagues in the Department had had it, whether they were dressed as dons or coal-heavers. Pritchard Crowell, he recalled, could ‘doze off’ so convincingly that village chiefs of police had been known to interview local informers in his presence, and never be able to give a description of ‘that fellow in the corner’ when the informers (or in one case the village chief of police) later turned up dead.