Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  It was – Asher reflected, as the suffocatingly overcrowded bus clattered its way out to Hackney that afternoon – one of his few reservations about Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales: the fact that Holmes, though repeatedly touted as a master of disguise, was also described in terms of being a man of distinctive appearance.

  But then, there was a streak of actor in many of the best agents, himself, he suspected, included. He stepped from the bus at Old Ford Road, glad of the stick that – with the flour in his hair and mustache, the long, grizzled side-whiskers that formed part of his little disguise kit, and a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles – contributed to the addition of twenty years to his age. And indeed he felt like a man in his sixties, as he hobbled his careful way across the Five Bells Bridge and then along the railroad right-of-way through that grubby world of empty fields and straggly market allotments. The hot rawness in his chest and the swiftness with which fatigue descended on him were whispered reminders of the previous week’s fever. Don’t mess about with this, Jimmy! Hoggett had insisted, the last time – just after Christmas, it had been – that Asher had been felled by low-grade fever, crippling fatigue and paroxysms of coughing. Once you’ve had pneumonia it lingers in your body for years …

  Like the infection that had been devouring poor Bert Mayo in that tiny back room on Brabazon Street: once contracted, there was nothing that could be done. He was, he knew, lucky.

  The most pneumonia would do was kill him.

  He reached the Dolphin public house at about three. It was the dead hour in business, before all the local mills and factories let out. The Dolphin was of the old style of public houses, literally a house, with beer and ale served in the front parlor and more private quarters in the back. The place was empty when Asher reached it and he presented himself as a Liverpudlian on the tramp, looking for some kind of easy work, having had pneumonia in the first days of the fighting. The landlady, with a husband and one son dead and another son still at the Front, was sympathetic, and Asher’s offer to ‘help with the washing-up’ to pay for a second glass of beer and a sandwich earned him a full account of the two mysterious heaps of dead rats (one Sunday and the next only yesterday), and the condition of the vagrant’s body found in the Lea Tuesday morning.

  ‘Myself, I think it was an accident at the railway workshops, or the mills up past Bully Fen,’ Mrs Farnum insisted, dipping hot water from the copper on the stove (the interview had moved into the kitchen) and spreading towels on all but a corner of the kitchen table. ‘They’re short of men there to work and they push them to all hours of the night – no, Mr Pritchard, I won’t have you lugging great buckets of water about, I know how that pneumonia sticks to a man’s bones!’ (I should introduce you to Hoggett …) ‘You just stand here by the sink and do the washing and I’ll bring the glasses up to you … My father worked in the Houldsworth Mill in Reddish and had his hand taken off and all the flesh skinned off his arm – clear down to the bone! – by the belt on a ring frame, and the company claimed he was drunk and it was his own fault, but when you’ve worked fifteen hours – let alone where you’d even get the liquor to get drunk on – you’re that tired, as the men are, working now, those that’re left—’

  But by the sound of it, once Asher had sifted through the long circumlocutions of her tale, the man had not been ripped up by machinery, but by a beast.

  ‘Looked like poor Dandy did, when that brute mastiff of Ted Clavering’s tore him up last Michaelmas two years …’

  A beast, he thought grimly, which had once been a man.

  The sightings in the fog by Mr Sawyer of Turnpike Row were both confirmed as well, and both between the so-called Channel Sea River (actually a drainage creek) and the equally narrow Waterworks River – both within a few hundred yards of the Blind King, Asher estimated – and had been accompanied by a smell. ‘I think that was the worst of it, you know,’ said the Widow Farnum. ‘Evil, that smell: fishy, and greasy, and ratty – not like nothing I’ve smelled before …’

  ‘You’ve smelled?’

  She nodded with a grimace. ‘Near the old boarded-up pub out past the end of Carpenter’s Road. He’s lurkin’ around there, whoever he is – You can’t get anybody here on the street, nowadays, to walk out on the marsh at night. Even them as works in the phosphate plant, they’ll walk in groups back home …’

  In the late afternoon’s harsh chill Asher walked out along Carpenter’s Road itself, where it petered out into the Stratford Marsh, and hobbled as slowly as he dared along the railway embankment as if following the Great Eastern line northwest to the cluster of factories in Hackney Wick. Always look as if you’ve got good reason to be where you are had been the first thing he’d learned when working in the Department, and it was a caution he’d never forgotten. And the Blind King – sitting like a dropped brick in the midst of those brown wastes of clay and grass, now thinly filmed with the first of spring green – was the choice of a professional. You couldn’t get near it without being seen. But from the railway embankment, Asher identified the path leading to it which continued the roadbed of Carpenter’s Road, and noted that the straggly assortment of sheds around the original pub seemed to have been put into some kind of order. They all had doors, and the grass around the walls of the pub itself looked beaten-down, as if there’d been activity there in the two weeks since Bert Mayo had been dragged away from the upstairs room on Brabazon Street.

  Wind swept over the marshes, smelling of the estuary. A gull cried, rocking on black-tipped wings. Asher kept moving stolidly, leaning on his stick and prickling with the sensation of being watched – the awareness that the red-brick house wasn’t empty. The feeling pursued him, all the long trudge back to Hackney, and on his bus ride home.

  The negotiation with Colonel Stewart that evening was a long one, but Asher emerged from it at last with a temporary commission as Major, orders to report to General Finch in Flanders, an ambiguously-worded mandate to ‘undertake such independent investigations as will further the war effort, at his own sole discretion’, and a place on the Channel steamer Eleanor on the fifteenth. Stewart had wanted him to depart on Monday, but there remained the problem of the Blind King, and the thing that dwelt beneath it.

  For that, Asher guessed, he was going to need Grippen’s help.

  He took a circuitous route back to Warwick Place, dropping out of the last bus on Holland Walk amid a beery crowd of pub-goers and walking through the deserted, blacked-out, misty streets to the mews that served all the houses on that block. Since that afternoon on Stratford Marsh he had been plagued with the uneasy sense that Mr Mackintosh had picked up his trail again, though he had never been able to form a clear proof that this was or wasn’t so. It was probably this suspicion that saved him. As he counted doorways with his left hand he listened behind him and before him, mind sorting every drip and whisper of the night, and something made him turn even as a cosh cracked a terrific blow on his shoulder. The next second a man’s weight slammed him to the pavement and he barely got his hand up in time to catch a garrote slipped around his neck. It cut into his fingers as his attacker dragged it tight, cutting off Asher’s breath as he twisted to get some kind of purchase against his assailant.

  The man was an expert, grinding him into the pavement with elbows and knees as the silk line tightened. His fingers under the noose distributed the strain but didn’t alleviate the pressure; his ears were ringing and he was losing consciousness when he felt the man’s grip slack suddenly, greater weight crushing him at the same moment he gasped, and heard a man’s hoarse voice behind him curse.

  Only half-conscious, he felt rather than heard light footfalls fleeing, and his second gasp filled his nostrils with the stink of old blood and dirty clothing as he heard Grippen snarl, ‘Dogs spit your arse, whoreson!’ The Master of London continued in that vein for some minutes, using terms that even Asher – a trained etymologist – had never heard, while Asher lay face-down on the wet bricks, trying to breathe through a bruised throat and wishing he had a
notebook and pencil.

  At length he felt Grippen’s coat-skirt brush his hand and the vampire turned him roughly over. ‘Live you?’

  Asher started to reply, but could only cough, and the vampire dragged him to his feet.

  ‘’Twas the suck-arse clot that followed you to the park,’ said Grippen. ‘Hogs chew his lights— argh! Damn!’

  Asher lit a match (To hell with the blackout) and saw, to his startled alarm, the whole side of Grippen’s face was blistered, one eye welted almost shut and both blood and pus oozing from the skin. ‘What the—?’

  ‘The whoreson had silver – a chain of it wrapped round his fingers, or plated onto the back of a glove, devil burn him! Worms eat his—’

  ‘He had it ready?’ Asher offered him a clean handkerchief.

  ‘He was too goddam occupied wi’ skraggin’ you, wasn’t he, to go diggin’ about for it in his pockets!’

  ‘In other words,’ said Asher, ‘he knew he might be dealing with a vampire?’

  Grippen was silent for a moment, daubing his injuries and thinking that over. Then he said, ‘’Od’s cock.’

  Asher said, ‘Yes,’ quite softly, with the sense of things coming together in his mind: glimpses, like the fleeting sense of a familiar outline half-seen from the corner of his eye, that slowly coalesced into a half-recognized form.

  ‘Will you come with me?’ he added after a moment. ‘I’ve found the revenants – and something tells me they’ll be moved elsewhere by tomorrow, and all this looking will have to start again. I think it’s best we deal with them – and the man who’s seeking them – tonight.’

  The protesting squawk of chickens rattled in the misty night. A man cursed: Asher placed his vowels within ten miles of Cork.

  Teague.

  After a moment the faintest creak from the dark ahead of him spoke of a shed door opening. He hoped to Heaven that Grippen was listening behind them, around them, in the salt-smelling blackness for the squishy tread of feet, sniffing for the fishy, rat-piss foulness of their quarry. But like the vampire, he knew that the Others could, upon occasion, conceal their stink and their sound and their presence, until they were on top of their prey.

  In a voice that living ears wouldn’t have picked up, even had the listener stood – as Grippen stood now – shoulder-to-shoulder with him at the foot of the railway embankment, Asher breathed, ‘How many in the house?’

  And that bass rumble softer than a gnat’s whine murmured back, ‘Four above stairs. If the thing’s in the cellar no man’ll be down with him. I wouldn’t be. I smell smoke an’ beer.’

  Enough thready moonlight pierced the mists to show Asher the vampire’s turned head, and the distant, grimy mustard seed of lamplight leaked from the house’s shutters caught a reflection in his half-shut eyes. Asher knew what he was doing.

  Two years ago, in the spring of 1913, Grippen had stood thus in the alleyway behind Asher’s own house on Holyrood Street in Oxford, and had put the household to sleep, so that he could walk in and steal Asher’s child. Even retrieving Miranda, safe and unharmed, had not shaken Asher’s resolve, taken at that time, that he would kill them: Grippen, Don Simon, the London nest. Every soul of the cursed Undead who crossed his path.

  And here he was at Grippen’s side, watching him do the thing that the old vampires, the skilled vampires, the vampires who had absorbed thousands of lives over hundreds of years, could do.

  He heard the man Teague, in the shed, mutter, ‘Jaysus …’ in a voice thick with sleep. Then long silence, broken, in time, by the soft, slithering bump of his body sliding to the floor from whatever bench or box he’d sat down on when drowsiness overcame him. The chickens continued to squawk frantically, desperately, and on the still air Asher caught the faintest whiff of blood.

  Grippen said, ‘He’s all yours, Jimmy.’ Taking Asher by the elbow, the vampire led him toward the shed, not to risk even the faintest flicker of lantern-light on the marsh until they were within the shed itself. As they approached it, Grippen rumbled, ‘You given further thought to my offer?’

  To become vampire.

  To acquire just precisely those qualities that would be most useful to a spy: the mental power over other men’s perceptions, the ability to turn their eyes aside, to cause them to think you looked like someone who belonged where they glimpsed you. In time, to bend their dreams so that they were sure they’d met you before and that you were trustworthy.

  To become a thing of illusion and shadow, apart from the world and its pain.

  Abilities and qualities he had worked for years to acquire. He had sought to perfect them in himself, having seen them in Pritchard Crowell. ‘I’ve given it thought, yes.’

  He edged up the slide on the lantern as they entered the shed, showing two chickens, tied by their feet at the back. Blood made dark splotches on their white feathers. To Undead senses, the smell would permeate the fog for miles. The beam of his light traced wires from their bound legs up the corners of the rear wall and across the rafters of the small loft that covered half the shed’s width, to a mechanism that would drop a steel grille, like a portcullis, down over the door. He could see where coins had been welded onto the steel, enough silver to burn the hands of a vampire – or a revenant.

  Beside an old milking stool at one side of the shed the man Teague lay: Asher recognized him from the confused struggle in Brabazon Street. A heavy pug chin and a broken nose, the tight, nearly lipless mouth sagging open like a child’s in stuporous sleep.

  Asher climbed to the loft and found rope there. Rope, and a dozen long crates labeled Ludwig-Loewe, one of the largest arms manufacturers in Berlin.

  Grippen stood just outside the shed door, barely more than a shadow. Asher guessed that if the grille had fallen and trapped them both inside the rickety roof wouldn’t have held out against the vampire’s strength. But wariness was the core of the vampire’s soul – they understood themselves to be both predator and prey.

  He dragged Teague to one of the supports that held up the loft, tied his hands together and then sat him up against the beam and tied him to it, in such a way that he could cut him free, and drag him from the shed, without loosing his bonds. He roped his ankles together as well – the man didn’t stir – then crossed to the terrible shadow by the door. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Narh. But you don’t always hear ’em. Or smell ’em, much as they stink.’

  Nerves prickling with watchfulness, Asher shut the lantern, slung the remainder of the rope over his shoulder, and followed Grippen to the shut-up pub itself. Unlike the Dolphin, the Blind King had been purpose-built as a pub, with a large taproom facing the road and kitchen, storeroom and private parlor behind. The four men dead asleep in the parlor, with drinks before them on the table and cigars smoldering in a cracked Queensware dish, were those who’d helped drag poor Bert Mayo from his daughter’s house on Brabazon Street – it had for years been part of Asher’s business to remember even faces glimpsed once and under trying circumstances.

  Even through the dusty fetor of a building shut up for decades, and the heavy odor of cigar smoke, the smell of the revenant stained the air. Asher found the cellar door in the kitchen, re-enforced with makeshift metal, and triple-locked. His ear to its panels, he could hear a kind of groaning bleat down below.

  Not just ‘a revenant’, he thought. Not just ‘one of those things’. A man named Bert Mayo, whose daughter loved him enough to take care of him and shelter him though what was happening to him terrified her.

  Every one of the revenants started out human.

  As did, he reminded himself, every one of the vampires.

  Grippen came in and listened, too, then looked around the kitchen by the light of Asher’s lantern, and grunted. ‘Whoreson cullions.’ He nodded toward the crates stacked around the walls, more long boxes of rifles, and smaller metal containers of ammunition, likewise bearing the mark of German manufacture. ‘The Papists, is it, taking the chance of this greater war to rise up ’gainst the King?’
<
br />   ‘It could actually be either side,’ returned Asher quietly. ‘Either those who seek to free Ireland from English domination, or those who don’t want to be ruled by a Catholic majority. Who want Ireland to continue as a part of a greater Empire. And are willing to stamp out anything they consider rebellion.’

  ‘I’ve no quarrel wi’ killin’ Papists.’ Grippen’s fangs glinted in the shadows, and he shrugged. ‘Either way ’tis naught to me. But they’re fools an’ worse than fools if they think making revenants’ll gain ’em anything. As well loose a cage full of wolves and tigers onto a battlefield. They’ll kill your enemy, sure, but devour as many of your own in doin’ it.’

  ‘They think they have someone who can control them,’ said Asher. ‘For the sake of humanity I hope they’re wrong. Does the name Francesca Gheric mean anything to you?’

  ‘The White Lady?’ The piggy dark eyes narrowed. ‘What of her? A troublemaker in every city she’s dwelt in, I hear tell, but when all’s said she’s proved no great threat to any.’

  They passed through the taproom on their way out, the four men lying, bound hand and foot by Grippen, on the floor. ‘When I give the word,’ Asher added, ‘get these men out of here. Is the revenant in the cellar chained?’ He found he couldn’t use Bert Mayo’s name.