Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  Asher was in the act of putting on his cap and didn’t pause or turn his head, simply brushed past the man who was a legend in the Department – the man who had supposedly died in 1895 – the man who had instructed him in the finer points of running networks ‘abroad’ – stepped out into Rue des Trois Cailloux, and ducked into the blackness of a shop doorway where he waited for ten minutes. When he was fairly certain that Crowell wasn’t going to emerge and follow him, he made his way – cautiously – to his lodgings, but wasn’t terribly surprised, an hour later, to move his blackout curtain aside and, after long waiting, glimpse against the darkness on the far side of the canal a flicker of movement, a suspicion of moon-glint on uniform buttons.

  Crowell had been in uniform at the mess.

  Pritchard Crowell.

  Why did it never occur to me years ago that the man had to be working with a vampire partner?

  Probably because I’m not insane, he reflected after a moment’s thought. It’s the sort of conclusion Millward would have leapt to immediately. When I knew the man – extricating himself from impossible situations, slipping past sentries and guards like a combination of Leatherstocking and Bulldog Drummond – I disbelieved in vampires, though I had studied their lore for years. And by the time I came to understand that the Undead were more than legends, Pritchard Crowell was – supposedly – dead.

  And I had rebuilt my life in Oxford.

  Is Crowell a vampire himself?

  A flicker of dark mackintosh in the corner of his eye, a shadow seen from the railway embankment on Stratford Marsh … A half-glimpsed figure on a bicycle on an Essex lane. Grippen would know.

  Or is that why Grippen tried to recruit me?

  He recalled the night Ysidro had recruited him, to search for the day-killer that was slaying the vampires of London in their coffins – after first drinking their blood – eight years ago: We need a man who can move about in the daylight. Twice since then, he’d encountered attempts by governments to recruit vampires, back in the days of that intricate chess game of information and preparation, before war had shattered all schemes.

  Crowell was working with a vampire. He’s been hiding, for twenty years, waiting … for what?

  Yet it’s HE who’s watching ME. It’s he who tried to kill me back in London. Not his vampire partner.

  What does that mean?

  Is he waiting, tonight, for a vampire partner to appear at his side, so that he can direct him or her up here to make sure of me?

  Or is he waiting for me to come out, so he can follow me to Lydia?

  Lydia, who’s the one who knows … whatever it was she and Ysidro had found out about Cuvé Sainte-Bride.

  Damn it …

  And of course, rooms in Amiens being scarce as hen’s teeth, he had been forced to take one in a building that had only one way out – a room that had only one window, so he couldn’t even take the expedient of leaving over the roof. Not that that was anything he wanted to try at the moment. Exhaustion made him feel as if he were wearing the lead-imbued apron Lydia had rigged up to protect her from the supposed danger of invisible rays from her fluoroscope; his lungs felt on fire and all he truly wanted was to lie down and sleep.

  Not possible, he told himself. He simply hadn’t the strength. Think of something else.

  A fingernail scratched at the door of his chamber. Like the gnawing of a mouse, barely to be heard.

  He slipped up the shade on his lantern the tiniest fraction, and crossed to the door.

  ‘Simon?’

  ‘A friend of his.’

  Asher unhooked the silver chain from around his wrist, wrapped it round the fingers of his right hand. Opened the door and stepped to the side, fast – though that, he knew, would make no difference against a vampire’s attack.

  The vampire standing in the dark of the attic corridor had the curious appearance of an old man. A seamed face framed with long gray hair; eyes that had probably once been dark gleamed on either side of a broken hook of a nose. Like most vampires at the Front (according to Lydia, anyway) he wore a uniform, this one French. But his face, like Ysidro’s, was not a twentieth-century face. Pale gloves hid the clawed hands, one of which he extended to Asher.

  ‘Permit me.’ His French was eighteenth-century, but kept slipping back to an older form. ‘I am the Graf Szgedny Aloyïs, of Prague.’ He stepped into the garret, like a Slavic god, and handed Asher a card. The address lay near the Charles Bridge in the Bohemian city, almost certainly an accommodation. ‘And you are the Anglus – the English – whom Simon has made his friend? From him I understand that you and I have another acquaintance in common, Solomon Karlebach, the Jew of Prague.’

  ‘Did Simon send you?’

  ‘I have not seen Simon since he escorted the most charming Madame Asher to visit me for the purpose of learning about the woman Francesca Gheric, who has now taken employment with this French madman, Lemoine. It is on that subject that I have sought you out, Anglus – that we must speak.’

  At Asher’s gesture he took the room’s single chair, and Asher seated himself on the end of the narrow bed, and unapologetically refastened the silver chain on his wrist. Szgedny’s odd, dust-gray eyes followed his movements, and one corner of the long gray mustaches lifted in an ironic half-smile. ‘Elysée de Montadour tells me you seek to destroy the things that breed in Cuvé Sainte-Bride. Evil is being done there – I see you try not to smile, to hear me say such a thing … An evil I do not fully understand. But Hieronymus, Master of Venice, tells me that three nights ago his fledgling Basilio Occhipinti perished, in horror and in flame – this he felt, he knew, as masters sometimes do feel the deaths of their get. Yet afterwards he said he felt the young man’s mind, his awareness, still stirring, in a way that he had never encountered before. As if thought and brain had been pulped, Hieronymus said, and yet the soul were trying to speak out of the bleeding mush.’

  Like Ysidro, the vampire showed little expression or change of tone in his deep voice, yet his eyes burned somberly. ‘Basilio and his lover, Antonio, slept in the crypt of a ruined church, ten miles from Cuvé Sainte-Bride.’

  ‘Mrs Asher wrote me of these two.’

  ‘But ere Hieronymus reached me with this tale, Antonio had come to me in great consternation saying Basilio had not returned to the crypt the night before. Yet, he said, he knew his friend was alive – if you will excuse my use of the term. After Hieronymus’s visit I sought for Antonio, for whom I cherish great respect, but could not find him. He had not taken the ambulance-wagon in which he usually hunts. Then, on this Wednesday past, Hieronymus came to me again saying he had experienced, the previous night, the same sensations concerning Antonio: first the horror of death by fire – only it was not death, exactly. Fragmented dribbles of his thought, his self, remained somewhere, weeping and screaming …’

  He shook his head, deeply troubled. ‘It is Sainte-Bride,’ he said at last. ‘The evil there. It is breeding these things, these revenants … And in my bones I feel that it has taken both Basilio and Antonio. This Lemoine – or rather his minion, the Irishwoman Tuathla – has sought for many weeks to find a vampire willing to work with him, willing to become his partner in some enterprise. It can be nothing but to give him a way to control the revenants whose numbers have grown so quickly of late.’

  Asher said, ‘I agree.’

  The vampire considered him beneath the long gray brows, as if waiting for him to add, But what has this to do with me?

  When he did not, Szgedny went on, ‘’Twas the White Lady who came forward at last and entered this man’s service. When your beautiful lady spoke of her to me, she surmised that the White Lady was incapable of getting fledglings. The reward, she surmised, that La Dame Blanche asked of Lemoine was that he find some way to alter her condition. To permit her to pass along her own condition to others: to beget fledglings of her blood.’

  ‘Slaves, you mean.’

  ‘Children are – or should be – slaves to their begetters. E’en the Comma
ndments so order it.’ The gray vampire inclined his head. ‘But this … This is an abomination. I am convinced she has drunk the lives of Basilio and Antonio – and indeed used those bleeding fragments of Basilio’s thought to call Antonio to her. Whether this will give her what she seeks—’

  Asher thought, Ah, with the sensation of seeing the pieces of a puzzle drop into place. No great cry of triumph, but an awareness of what had been before him, like a half-filled-in decryption of a cipher, all along.

  ‘Can she control the revenants?’

  ‘As I told your lady, I have never found it possible. But who knows what means this Lemoine has found?’

  ‘According to Mrs Asher, who has read his work, he has studied the vampire state for many years,’ said Asher thoughtfully. ‘And he had the chance to observe them in China, where for a short time a hive of them flourished near Peking.’

  ‘They must be stopped,’ said the vampire. ‘This Lemoine must be stopped. Say what you will, Anglus, of me and of my kindred – and yes, I know you have made a vow to destroy us, as your master Karlebach has vowed. But though the revenants hunt us in our crypts, through the brains of the rats that seek out our scent, in this you must aid us. For the sake of all the living, as well as the sake of the Undead, these things cannot be permitted to spread. Though they would kill us all, yet the harm that would come of making them your slaves – if you can do it – would be an ocean, a cataclysm, compared to what little harm we do when we hunt the night.’

  Asher closed his lips on the observation that ‘little harm’ was a generous way of looking at the matter. But he remembered that small band of furious Irishmen, who thought they had found an unstoppable weapon to make their land free. And Lemoine, who similarly believed that he had found a way to defeat the Germans before the war could shred away the willing manhood that had – in his eyes – made France great. And Langham who doubtless believed the same, when Crowell went to him with the information that such a useful creature had gotten itself loose and could be captured and put in British hands …

  In exchange for what?

  Protection? Another ‘letter of instruction’ like his own, to carry him here to France?

  And meanwhile each night brought closer the moment when a wounded man would be sent home from the Front, with the infection in his veins.

  He left the lantern on the corner of the dresser, and walked back to the window to peep out.

  Cloud had shifted across the moon, but even had the light been a little better, he doubted that he could have seen anything in the blackness below. ‘Is there anyone there?’

  Behind his shoulder, close enough to the back of his neck to make his flesh creep, Szgedny’s deep voice replied. ‘I see none.’

  Which doesn’t mean he isn’t somewhere near. And doesn’t mean that he won’t dog me tomorrow, if he thinks I’ll lead him to Lydia …

  ‘Aid us.’ The vampire’s hands rested on his shoulders. ‘Simon speaks of you as a man capable of such a feat.’

  ‘I hope I am,’ said Asher slowly. ‘But I will need your help.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The clink of a chain.

  The flat, grunting ‘Unnh …’ of a revenant – a creature, thought Lydia miserably, who had once been able to say things like Take care of Mother to a younger brother, or Whatever happens, I will hold you always in my heart to a weeping fiancée.

  For two hours she had heard the thing moving around in the laboratory on the end of its short chain. ‘Devil on you, you stupid gobshite,’ said Meagher disgustedly. ‘Ain’t you got brain enough to hear through dirt?’

  Lydia could have told her that any mental instruction that the White Lady might have given, in the ruined trenches just north of the old convent compound, would be unlikely to penetrate the depth of earth that surrounded the convent crypt, but didn’t. And in fact she wasn’t certain of this. Lying on her cot feigning sleep, she was profoundly curious as to whether Francesca’s commands to the rest of the group of revenants would be perceptible to an isolate chained in the lab.

  So far, to judge by Meagher’s sotto voce cursing, as she sat on a lab stool with a pocket watch in one hand and a notebook (time-synchronized commands?) in the other, it didn’t look promising.

  ‘Bitseach,’ added the Irishwoman, something Uncle Richard’s head groom had occasionally called Aunt Isobel’s high-strung mare.

  ‘Eleven,’ said Meagher. ‘Time for dinner, and let’s see if the raicleach upstairs can teach you some manners.’

  Lydia’s heart lurched within her, at the terror of last night’s ‘experiment’, but the next moment she heard the soft clang of a wire cage, and a rat’s frantic squeaking.

  Simon is out there somewhere, she thought desperately. Waiting for the moment to come in – please, God, don’t let Meagher start poking about and find the picklocks! – and with all the revenants out of the crypt, this one remains.

  And Meagher.

  A hoarse grunt from the revenant, and the rat’s squeals turned to shrieks. Meagher said, ‘Ah, you disgusting maggot!’ and there was a metallic rattle, as if she’d dropped the cage. The revenant howled, clashing its chain. If exposure to food had been scheduled for eleven, followed immediately by the command to desist from pursuing it, Lydia guessed that poor Gobshite had failed the test.

  Or Francesca had.

  And if that were so, and her control of the revenants wasn’t complete (Why not?), would they simply scatter in the trenches, rove the battlefields, until one of them managed to wound a man but not kill him? Wound him badly enough to return to England or Paris with the contagion growing in his veins …

  I have to get out.

  What would Jamie do?

  Poison them? Burn the place down? Blow the place up …?

  ‘Tuathla!’ The voice outside was a hoarse cry. Lydia heard the legs of the stool scrape, and risked the vampire’s distracted attention to roll to her feet and cross the tiny cell in one long stride. A soldier stood in the lab doorway, staring into the room – yes, the revenant was standing over the torn-apart cage, greedily devouring the rat – and Meagher had sprung down from her chair …

  I know him …

  It was the freckled soldier Meagher had been bending over in the pre-op tent, on the night of the big push.

  ‘Joey—!’

  He won’t be able to keep his hands off you, Francesca had predicted.

  Joey’s eyes were stretched wide, seeing her for what she was – changed, Undead, vampire – and trapped, aghast, fascinated, literally enchanted by what he saw. He whispered, ‘Dear God in Heaven …’

  Meagher crossed to him, slid her arms around his waist – he was over six feet tall and her head barely topped his breastbone – and as if against his will he bent to receive her kiss. Lydia heard him groan, in ecstasy and grief.

  ‘You did it,’ he breathed, separating his mouth from hers at last. ‘Oh, mo stór, mo chroí, I never thought … I prayed and hoped another way could be found. For freedom … for Ireland …’

  He shook his head, stunned, and Meagher put one small hand up to stroke his red-brown hair from his brow. ‘Goose,’ she murmured. ‘Silly lamb.’

  ‘And is it true?’ He pulled himself together with an effort. ‘This creature … She can control these things? You’ve found a way? A way you can learn now? I got word from Teague in London, they got the thing again, got it chained up good now, with silver as you said. Is there anythin’ I can—?’

  She said, ‘Poo,’ and waved her hand. ‘Teague’s a fool. And Francesca’s a bigger one.’

  He put up his hand to her cheek, but she turned away with a shrug.

  ‘To do this,’ he whispered, tears in his voice. ‘To make yourself into such a creature, for the sake of our country … When can you—?’

  ‘Don’t be an imbecile,’ Meagher snapped. ‘I’m not going to do anything of the kind. To spend my time with those things?’ She nodded toward the revenant, tugging at its chain and reaching now and then toward Joey, whose
face convulsed with pity at the sight of it. Dirty, bestial, blood-smeared and stinking, it still wore the remains of a German uniform, a dim reminder that it had once been a man. ‘Even if I could do it, without goin’ mad myself—’

  ‘Goin’ mad?’

  The girl laughed shortly. ‘Isn’t that a joke on her, with all her petting ways, and speaking to me as if I was a child? And her just hugging herself, that she can bid these things come and go: it’s enough to make a cat laugh. She took one of those things into her mind, mo chroí, so she could get a grip on the minds of them all. And now it’s their minds that are getting a grip on hers. I can see it in her eyes.’

  She looked back at him, twinkling with delight, and saw the look on his face as Lydia saw it in the glare of the laboratory lights: heartbroken, disappointed, shocked, crushed.

  ‘But what are we to do?’ he stammered. ‘There must be some way you can get control of these things, without … without riskin’ of yourself. Are you sure? Teague’s got the creature, and others can be made from it: and the thing’s hand you sent along! We can’t let this go now! We’re so close! We can’t let what you’ve done – my darling, my darling, how you’ve become – we can’t let it go all for nothing …’

  ‘Goose.’ She stretched out her arms to him, and Lydia saw the change in his face as desire swamped all his horror, all his desperation at the shattering of their long-held plan – a desire whose insane intensity confused him all the more. Her husky voice was a caress as she stepped close to him, wound her arms once more around his waist. ‘Silly goose.’

  She put her palm to the side of his face, stroking ear and cheek and neck. Then with a flick she brought her hand down, and with her claw-like nails slit the veins of his throat.

  Joey Strahan stepped back with a gasp but Meagher had him fast. Lydia saw him thrusting, struggling with all his strength to break her grip. She sprang up on him, literally climbed him so that her mouth could fasten on the squirting artery, and he sobbed and cried incoherent pleas and prayers as his strength gave out and he fell to his knees. Meagher dropped with him, his hair locked in one hand and the other arm still round his waist, ignoring the blows he rained on her back – by the time he realized he had to strike with all his strength, Lydia guessed that his strength was half gone.