Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  Lemoine’s eyes flared wide. ‘Never!’ By the horror in his voice the idea – obvious to Lydia – had never crossed his mind. ‘These creatures – these monstrosities – will be used for one thing only! When we have achieved that victory, we shall ask you to destroy them – all of them!’

  ‘Oh, peace!’ She lifted one clawed hand. ‘’Tis your endeavor; I’m only your … condottiere. Your helper. You have paid me … amply.’ Smug satisfaction oozed like cream from her words. ‘I am in your debt, I am indeed, Colonel. And I am – agog – to see if in fact your supposition about how these things can be controlled is in fact correct.’

  ‘Tomorrow night?’ The voice of a man who is trying hard not to nag.

  ‘Tomorrow night.’

  ‘I don’t suppose—’

  And Lydia, incredulous, realized that the issue of whether or not someone in the government would want to keep a mob of tame revenants when the war was done had already dropped completely out of his thoughts. As if he truly imagined that saying Never and You must destroy them was going to be the end.

  As if the truly important thing – the only thing – was victory over the Germans, and not other uses to which such a horror might be put.

  He really is thinking no further than that.

  ‘No.’ The Lady smiled to take the sting out of the word, and reached with a forefinger – with its long, glass-like claw – to flick the surgeon’s cheek. Lydia saw – and she was positive the Lady saw as well – Lemoine stiffen, as if he would have twitched away from the contact, detesting the woman even as they bargained for the victory of France. ‘I will return tomorrow. Ah,’ she added, practically purring as she turned toward the laboratory door. ‘There’s our wandering girl!’

  Meagher stood in the doorway.

  She’d become a vampire.

  Lemoine turned his head, saw her, startled … then Francesca glanced at him, that eternal, pleased smile still broadening her lips, and he relaxed. ‘Would you finish up here, Nurse Meagher?’ he asked, and Lydia realized, shocked, He doesn’t see it. HE DOESN’T NOTICE.

  And he hasn’t noticed that she’s probably been missing since last night.

  No wonder Graf Szgedny, and poor Antonio, and Don Simon said she was strong …

  Lemoine left, probably, thought Lydia, to write up his notes. Francesca and Meagher stood looking at one another in the electric glare and stinking smoke of that charnel house crypt, the light of the dying flame playing across their faces.

  ‘Is it done?’ Meagher asked, as if she were no longer certain of her voice,

  ‘Well, he’s done, at any rate.’ The White Lady shrugged peerless shoulders. ‘As for whether I’ll be able to control the whole swarm of them … truly, it remains to be seen. I certainly feel no ill effects. But as for coming to Ireland with you …’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask you to.’ Meagher put up her hands, to push her black heavy hair from her face, then looked at them, turning them over in the light. Her nails had already grown out to claws. She opened her lips a little, ran her tongue over her fangs. ‘Thank you,’ she added. ‘I can … if you will but teach me how …’

  Francesca Gheric regarded her, hugely amused. Like an adult, thought Lydia, listening to a four-year-old’s plans to slay dragons or find buried treasure.

  Does Meagher really think she isn’t this woman’s slave now?

  Or that, having been deprived of the ability to make a fledgling for the whole of her Undead existence, Francesca’s going to let her new-wrought fledgling go?

  ‘In time,’ purred Francesca. ‘In time.’

  ‘When you do,’ said Meagher, her speech still a little fumbling, ‘perhaps we can – we should … The revenants are getting out, you see. I’ve counted them, and … I knew there were a few, hiding in the foundation vaults below the wine cellars, and the drainage passages. But now … I think they’re finding ways outside. Will we be able to … to summon them back?’

  The master vampire chuckled. ‘Old Stiff-Rump will have a seizure if we don’t, won’t he?’ She shrugged again. ‘They come back ere daybreak, you know. ’Tis where their hive is. In the meantime—’ She put out a hand, and stroked her fledgling’s cheek. ‘Let me look at you. My pretty, pretty child … You do know that our condition, our state, is one of perfection, don’t you? Physical perfection. The prime of life, if I may so term it. The prime of health.’ She reached up to finger the girl’s black, curling hair. ‘Your handsome soldier – whatever his name is – won’t be able to keep his hands off you when he gets here—’

  Meagher shook her head uncertainly, and stepped back from the caress. ‘It’s not … It’s not important what I look like.’

  ‘Oh, but it is, my sugarplum.’ Her voice turned warm and crooning. ‘We look as we always knew in our hearts that we look – as we look in our sweetest dreams. And we gain strength – we maintain our strength – by the kill. How are you going to get anyone to walk up a dark alley with you if you aren’t the prettiest thing he’s ever seen in his life? We maintain our ability to make the living see what we wish them to see, only by the lives we drink.’

  ‘I know that.’ The girl spoke unwillingly, as if bracing herself for a horror – like Lemoine facing the burning of that young German alive – that must be got through, to attain the goal. ‘And I will do whatever I need to do, pay whatever price needs be paid—’ The words stammered, learned by rote in another lifetime, and Francesca laughed again, and again patted Meagher’s cheek.

  ‘And so you shall, my blue-eyed angel. So you shall. But right now, how do you feel?’

  Meagher’s eyes met hers at last, and she whispered, ‘Hungry.’

  ‘I, also.’ Her smile turned dark, gleaming and terrible, and she put a caressing arm around her fledgling’s shoulders. ‘Let us go forth, then, sweet child. And I’ll teach you how to hunt.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Moving among the charred ruins of what had been a small French village, a willow pole in one hand like a blind man’s cane and a lantern, sheathed down to its tiniest thread of yellow light, in the other, Asher was aware of the Undead. Since the night in 1907 when he’d come home to find the household in near-coma slumber and Don Simon Ysidro sitting at his study desk, he had dealt with enough vampires to spot them in the darkness. There were techniques of mental focus that improved one’s chances, though this didn’t always help, and he had the bite scars to prove it. Revenants were abroad, and some at least shared their vampiric cousins’ ability to go unnoticed until they were almost on top of their victims.

  By what Grippen had told him in London, he guessed himself almost safe from the vampires here.

  But the reeking network of old trenches, gaping cellars and shell-craters – black as the abyssal pits of hell – could conceal any number of revenants.

  Still he walked, whispers of moonlight glimmering on the ruined land.

  If Lydia had received ‘special orders’ to go down to Amiens – and he guessed that Amiens wasn’t her actual destination – she was almost certainly with Don Simon Ysidro, and curiously, the thought brought him comfort. He had for years watched the relationship between his wife and the vampire and was virtually certain that Ysidro would not let harm come to her. ‘I will keep her safe,’ the pale vampire had said, on the night before Lydia’s departure for France: the night Asher had waked to see a light burning in the upstairs hallway of their house on Holyrood Street, and had gone down in his dressing-gown to investigate, nearly certain what he would find.

  He had been, at that time, barely three weeks recovered from his most recent relapse of pneumonia and had just begun to be up and about for a few hours a day, readying himself to begin teaching the Hilary term. The weather had turned cold at the start of November; the house was freezing. As Asher had expected, the vampire Ysidro had been sitting in Lydia’s green velvet chair before the banked ashes of the study grate.

  ‘Will you be going to France?’ Asher had asked him, wanting to hate him and not able to do so; and the vampire
had inclined his moonlight-colored head.

  ‘Look after her.’ It was as if they continued a conversation already begun, and the vampire nodded again.

  ‘I came here tonight on purpose, James, to reassure you that I would.’

  ‘Have you told her this?’

  Ysidro made the slight movement with his eyes that passed for a headshake, even as his nods were barely perceptible. ‘Best not. Yet I thought you would wish to know—’

  Movement in one of the half-caved-in trenches; a fugitive glint of the feeble moonlight in animal eyes. The scrabble of rats among the bricks of a fallen chimney. Beyond the shattered stumps of what had been an orchard, past the makeshift bridge, the ruined country swelled, plowed by shell-fire into a sodden wasteland of darkness, barbed wire and wrecked wagons, stinking of the carcasses of horses and mules. Asher stopped, heart beating hard. Then, after a moment, moved on.

  ‘Promenading oneself’, Ysidro called this. Vampires did it, when newly arrived in the territory of a nest not their own, to ask permission of the master vampire to hunt on his or her grounds. Vampires always knew who walked their domains of darkness. If they wanted to speak to you, they would.

  A white flicker in the bitter night.

  The glint of eyes.

  Asher kept walking, old instinct forbidding him to let any adversary know that he was capable of detecting them. He even made himself start when she laid a soft little clawed hand on his arm and said, ‘James!’ in a pleased voice.

  ‘Madame.’ He bowed. Lydia had told him she thought she had seen this woman, among the many who haunted the vicinity of the hospitals behind the lines. ‘A long way from Paris.’

  Her French was modern, though it slipped now and then into the old-fashioned idiom of Napoleonic times. Moonlight made her green eyes nearly transparent. Scorning disguise, she wore a simple white dress, her black hair loosed about her shoulders in thick curls. Blood and mud spattered her hem and her sleeves, but this he only noticed later. It seemed to disappear from his consciousness as he spoke to her, even as he was only intermittently aware of her claws and fangs. She appeared to him to be the most beautiful, most desirable woman he had ever seen.

  ‘Dare I surmise you have come out in the hopes of a rendezvous?’

  Elysée de Montadour was insatiably curious and vampires were the worst gossips in the world. She’d have accosted him if he’d had a whitethorn stake in one hand and a silver crucifix in the other.

  ‘The merest recollection of your name in one of my wife’s letters was enough to bring me forth.’

  ‘Brave soul.’ The next moment, the green eyes narrowed. ‘As for your wife, she’s gone off with Don Simon … and when you meet her again, tell her for me that spectacles never improve a woman’s appearance! Outré!’ She gave a theatrical shiver. ‘Like a great bug! Not that I mean to disparage—’

  Of course you do, you witch. ‘No, no …’

  ‘Purely for her own good, as woman to woman—’

  ‘Of course.’ He kissed her hand. Warm. Even in the wasted moonlight there showed a flicker of color in her cheeks. ‘Do you know where they’ve gone? The surgeons tell me she had orders for Amiens.’

  She made a sly little moue. ‘Maybe after they left Cuvé Sainte-Bride, they did. I hear that’s where Simon was seen, five nights ago, Johanna tells me … You know Johanna Falknerin, that horrid harpy from Berlin?’

  ‘We’ve met.’ Asher had no desire to encounter the hawk-nosed Rhineland vampire – or indeed any of the Berlin nest – again.

  ‘Dreadful woman! And tells tales …’ Elysée shook her head. ‘And speaks French like a goat! One can barely understand a word she says, not that one would wish to … Disgusting. But she says she saw Simon emerge from Cuvé Sainte-Bride with his minion – I presume your pretty little wife – and go off in a motorcar. So they may well have gone to Amiens for all I know.’

  She shrugged, the gesture extravagant, as if playing to some far balcony packed with admirers. ‘So they’re not back yet? Only to be expected. Simon is the most extraordinary creature in his taste for the company of the living.’

  ‘What about the revenants?’

  She startled, swung about and swept the shapeless landscape with those darkness-piercing eyes. ‘The Boche,’ she said softly. ‘Only cabbage-eaters, gone off their heads … They have to be, don’t they? Oh, I know about those awful things that are supposed to exist in Prague, but how could they get here? Even the Germans can’t be such fools as to—’

  ‘I doubt there’s anything,’ returned Asher, softly and from the bottom of his heart, ‘that either side in this wretched war would consider too foolish to contemplate. Have you seen them?’

  ‘Not close.’ She drew nearer to him, like a frightened woman seeking comfort in a male embrace; Asher retreated a step. Her glance flickered at him, half-reproachful, half-amused. ‘And not near here. South, five, perhaps six miles, towards Arras. I saw one the night before last, shambling among the shell-holes in the moonlight. Looking for wounded, I suppose. And I have seen the bodies of the wounded they have found and fed upon. Last night I came on – I don’t know, I suppose one had got himself caught in barbed wire, and the flesh burned away off his bones when the sun came up. But it could have been a living man, you know, caught too close to a bomb-blast.’

  ‘It could.’

  ‘These things …’ Elysée looked over her shoulder again, her beautiful face taut with dread. ‘I have heard – from the Prague vampires, I have heard – that they devour the Undead in their coffins. That they live in the sewers, and the crypts below old churches … I have thought of fleeing back to Paris, but what if these things come to Paris? What if they make their nests there, like rats, like wood beetles that no one can ever quite root out? Who among us would be safe?’

  ‘Are there any of you, left in Paris?’

  She waved, as if to chase away a subject unpleasing to her. ‘There isn’t a city in Europe, where we who hunt the night linger. The cities are full of soldiers, and spies, and people looking for spies, and for what sort of pickings? And my boys – dear boys …’ She smiled at the mention of her nest of fledglings, chosen – in Ysidro’s opinion – for their looks rather than their brains. ‘On their own, without me, they’d get themselves killed inside a week.’

  ‘And is there another man,’ Asher asked, ‘a day ago, maybe two, who has promenaded himself as I did? A smallish man, and slender? Large nose, gray hair, dark eyes? Possibly – probably – in uniform?’

  The delicate brows puckered, and again she shook her head. ‘None save you and your wife, and that little fool of an Irish nurse … Whom I haven’t seen, now that I consider it, in weeks … Did she ever meet with the Undead, do you know? Did the pretty Lydia encounter her?’

  ‘I sincerely hope not.’

  ‘And this man—’ Elysée, who had once been an actress, made a mime of mocking a man with a large nose. ‘He too is seeking us? La, so popular as we have become … Is he a friend of this Irish poule?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ replied Asher. ‘But I suspect they have acquaintances in common.’

  In the deep of her dreams, Lydia heard the lock click.

  Simon, she thought. Simon came back for me …

  She struggled to shake off sleep, to surface from a black well fathoms deep. Why can’t I wake up? I sleep so badly in this place …

  To the very walls, the blanket on her cot, clung the stink of charred flesh.

  I shouldn’t be asleep anyway. It’s night. It’s dangerous to sleep at night. But if Simon just unlocked the door of my cell, it HAS to be night.

  It can’t be Simon, the lock is silver …

  Fear jolted her awake. A bar of the laboratory’s electric glare fell across her face. The cell door stood open, about an inch.

  Beyond it, the laboratory was tomb-silent. Even the constant, distant groaning and yowling of the revenants in the crypt was stilled.

  Simon?

  Lydia got cautiously to her feet. S
he was still dressed – It IS still night, I DIDN’T go to bed. Heart hammering, she tiptoed to the door and looked through the judas.

  Nothing. The lab was empty. The burning-grille, steel-bright where Lemoine had scrubbed it that afternoon, gleamed under the harsh string of bulbs. The door to the corridor stood open, like this one, an inch or so.

  This is a trap.

  She knew it to the marrow of her bones.

  But what kind of a trap? They’ve already GOT me.

  A trap for Simon? She remembered Basilio screaming as the flames poured over him. Remembered Antonio crying in that thundering bass voice, ‘Oh, God, oh God, have mercy on me, a sinner …’ The look of shuddering ecstasy on Francesca’s face.

  DON’T GO NEAR THAT DOOR.

  Slowly, the gap in the outer door widened, and the reek of the revenants flowed into the lab.

  Oh, dear God …

  Even before the door opened sufficiently to reveal them Lydia knew they were there, and they were. She ducked back into her cell, looked desperately for some way to lock it from the inside – there was neither keyhole nor handle on that side of the door, and the door itself opened outward. Slowly the things shuffled into the lab, half-crouched and unbelievably hideous in the too-bright glare of the electric lights. Faces still bruised where the jaws had grown forward, mouths bloody from the unaccustomed length of new tusks. Eyes blank. The nostrils of their deformed noses flared, sniffing; heads thick with matted, uncut hair swinging back and forth; the remains of their uniforms stinking of bodily waste unregarded.

  (Why on earth don’t they die of their own infections? They must after a time … CAN they die in this state?)

  At the same time the other half of her mind screamed in panic NO! NO! as they suddenly turned, sniffing, toward the cell door.

  NO!

  Get past them? The door was narrow and there were four of them in the lab.

  The cell was barely six feet by ten. I can use the cot as a shield …

  She unfastened the silver chains from her wrists, wrapped them around her hands. How badly will that amount of silver burn revenants? Enough to let me get past them?