Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  The revenant jerked its chain, groaned and howled, smelling the blood. Lydia flinched when the young soldier started to convulse, as the blood drained from his heart and organs. His hands flailed helplessly; Meagher’s dark head bent low over him as he slipped to the floor. A final spasm arched his back like a landed fish and he made a thin, protesting noise, and went limp.

  Meagher sat back on her heels, her head tilted back, mouth glistening with gore. Lydia reached her cot in a soundless rush and lay down, her back to the door, and took care to breathe deeply, mimicking the rhythms of sleep. Whether the vampire came to the judas or not, Lydia didn’t know – and she breathed a thousand thanks for the silver plating on the lock and bars. But she heard Meagher laugh, the thick chuckle of sated lust.

  Count down from sixty ten times …

  Fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven …

  A clash of chain, and the revenant’s howling moan, followed by thick noises that could only be tearing flesh.

  Meagher had shoved Joey’s body into its reach.

  … fifty-six, fifty-five, fifty-four …

  ‘Mistress …’

  She rolled off the cot and was by the door as Simon, in shirtsleeves as he had been in her dream, his hands wrapped in three laboratory towels and clumsy as a drunken man’s, bent gingerly to the silvered lock.

  ‘Watch behind me—’

  The door was open behind him, into the blackness of the corridor. There wasn’t the slightest hope that she would hear the approach of either Meagher or Francesca before it was too late for Simon to flee, but she watched nevertheless.

  Has he been hiding down here … for how long? If there were escaped revenants still wandering in the crypts – and how far do the crypts extend? – they must sleep in the daytime, as he did, but the risk was hideous … Not to speak of the rats …

  Was that a sound in the corridor?

  The lock clicked. Doubling and trebling the towels around his hand, Simon pulled the padlock loose and Lydia plunged out, and into his arms. The revenant howled again, poor Joey’s blood covering its hands and chin. Simon steered her, not in the direction of the round chamber where the well was (They must have blocked it after Simon’s escape …) but further up the corridor, to a narrow door and a stair that led down, barely wider than Lydia’s shoulders. The darkness stank of rats, excrement, decaying flesh and the fishy reek of the revenants; cold water slopped and squished under their feet. Simon held her right hand in his, his left arm around her waist, guiding her in absolute blackness.

  ‘They’re in the vaults of the foundations,’ he murmured in her ear. ‘Half a dozen. They move in a group, and seem to have disregarded the Lady’s summons to their brethren to go out to military exercises this evening—’

  ‘Meagher says – Meagher told Joey—’

  ‘The young gentleman whose liver Corporal Schultz was devouring back in the laboratory?’

  ‘Meagher told him Francesca is beginning to – to be absorbed into the mind of the revenants. That may be the reason …’

  ‘Is she, indeed?’ He stopped, placed her hands on what felt like a pillar some eighteen inches in diameter, then gripped her waist in a firm hold. ‘Pardon me while I execute a gavotte of joy. Keep your hands on the pillar, just as they are, while I lift you. You should feel handholds and footholds. There’s a loft about five feet above the first of the footholds. Watch your head as you go through the trapdoor. The loft contains bones, but there’s room to sit and to lie. Hop-la!’

  He boosted her up as if she’d been a bunch of daisies. Lydia felt the holes in the pillar, scrambled up, as he had said, and felt the rough wood of a square trap around her, then damp wooden flooring as she pulled herself through. Her hand encountered something hard that rolled when she touched it: a human skull. She slid herself out of the way of the trap and the next moment Don Simon’s sleeve brushed her as he came up through.

  ‘Bone loft.’ Lydia heard the slight grit of a cover being slipped over the trap. ‘I judge ’twas formerly used for the store of food. The roof of the natural cavern is but a few feet above our heads, were we to stand. The wine vault was below us.’

  ‘Is the way out through the well blocked?’

  ‘With a great tangle of barbed wire. From the wine vault beneath us, a passage leads—’

  ‘What about poor Captain Palfrey?’

  ‘I brought him up out of the well and stanched his wound as best I might. I then put him in the motorcar, which I left at the edge of the camp, where he would be found. And I told those that loitered about the Moribund Ward, to stay away from the car and tell the others so as well. ’Twas near dawn then. I returned here the following night to find the tunnel from the well already blocked.’

  ‘And you’ve been here since?’

  ‘Where else would I be, lady? Hush,’ he added softly, as she threw her arms around him again. ‘Hush, lady. James will call me out, should harm befall you – or should you go on clinging to me in this fashion.’ But his hands grasped hers, strong and cold. ‘Listen to me now. ’Tis deep night still, and the Others still wander the crypts, in such force that ’twere peril to try to get out through the old chapel above the Arras road. There are sufficient among them that they can summon and control rats, at least some of the time.’

  One hand let go of hers, and a moment later two candles, and a brass tube that rattled with the dry sound of matches, were put into hers.

  ‘At daybreak I shall sleep. Wait a little time after that – for the Others move about longer than we – then climb down from here. From the pillar you can move in any direction and soon or late will find the wall of the wine vault. Follow this until you come to what was the great door of this place; the door itself is gone, and the stair beyond nearly filled in with rubble. You can climb past the rubble, squeezing against the wall to your right. ’Tis a short climb to another crypt, in whose floor you’ll find a trap with an iron grille over it, an old drainage conduit. ’Tis wet and nasty, but leads to the caved-in crypt of the chapel, at a distance of something over a mile. Do not wait for me. Make your way back to Pont-Sainte-Félicité as quickly as you might. If James wrote two weeks ago that he was seeking military clearances to come here he might well be at the clearing station now. Tell him all and see if he can come upon a way to destroy this place utterly. Knowing James—’ she heard the slight, chilly smile in his voice – ‘I place great faith in his ability to do so.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ breathed Lydia. ‘Jamie’s very good at that sort of thing. But you—’

  He put fingers like Death’s over her lips. ‘I’ve no intention of making a martyr of myself for the good of humankind. There are other ways yet, out of this place. Now tell me of what this Irlandésita had to say of our fair Francesca … and speak soft. The Undead cannot hear so clearly through the weight of earth as they can in the night overhead, yet their ears are sharp.’

  In an undervoice she related all that had taken place in the laboratory that night, not only Meagher’s words to Joey, when she had casually turned her back on the scheme for which, it seemed, they had both come to the Front, but the fact that Francesca’s signals to the revenants under her control had evidently not worked on the creature chained in the lab. ‘It might just be the thickness of the earth, as you say,’ she whispered. ‘Or the distance – I don’t know where exactly they’ve taken the revenants for this test. But if what Meagher said is true, and Francesca is becoming absorbed into their minds, from taking the mind of that single revenant into hers … Would one of her fledglings be able to sense this?’

  ‘Without a doubt. No master vampire I’ve ever heard of has made the attempt, to take the mind of one of the Others – with or without the pollution of their blood. I am indeed curious as to whether this pollution of the mind – the influence of the hive of the revenants themselves – will spread from Francesca’s to Meagher’s, through that link alone.’

  ‘How horrible!’

  ‘Horrible indeed,’ murmured the vampire, ‘if the mind
and strengths of the Undead come to be added to the hive. As Graf Szgedny told you, we who walk the night conscious and aware know surprisingly little of our unspeakable cousins. If either of us be so fortunate as to emerge from these crypts undevoured, we must add this information to that store of knowledge concerning the Undead – and the Unliving. As for Mistress Meagher, it surprises me not that after going to the pains of sending one of these things to her rebel compatriots in Ireland she would abandon the whole scheme, once she became vampire herself. ’Tis what most vampires do.’

  ‘Forget the things they loved?’

  ‘Lose their capacity to love.’ There was long silence, and when he spoke again his voice seemed barely louder than the scratch of an insect’s foot passing over bone.

  ‘Love, as I understand it, is founded in hope, and in the faith that one’s soul can at length be at peace in the embrace of another soul. For the damned, there is neither hope nor faith – nor any reason not simply to take one’s pleasure in the kill, which is what gives pleasure to the highest degree.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ said Lydia, remembering Basilio, screaming his friend’s name.

  ‘No,’ returned the vampire. ‘Not all.’

  Light drifted from below, lantern-glow almost painfully bright after hours of utter darkness. Lydia saw that indeed she and Don Simon were in a sort of loft built over what could have been storage space below. Francesca said, ‘Brainless putain,’ and Lemoine, ‘It matters not whose doing this was. What we must do is find her, before she encounters revenants down here—’

  ‘I thought there were no revenants down here,’ jibed Meagher.

  ‘In the event that there are,’ amended Lemoine quickly. ‘And it may be that there are some that have broken free.’

  Lydia worked her way, flat to the floor and soundlessly pushing herself with her toes, to the edge of the loft, and looking down, saw that thin spots had developed in the White Lady’s shimmering primrose hair. The color of the hair itself had faded, streaked with the hue of dust. Through it the scalp showed rough and slightly warty. By the way Francesca’s hands moved, restlessly fingering her jaw and her elbows, Lydia guessed that physical changes were beginning to overtake her as well.

  We look as we always know in our hearts that we look – as we look in our own sweetest dreams.

  And her dreams were being devoured, as she had devoured the souls of how many thousands over the centuries …

  She can still use her skills of illusion to keep Lemoine from noticing – maybe even to keep Meagher from seeing changes. Maybe she’s still telling HERSELF that what she feels is only her imagination. Or some effect of controlling the revenants that doesn’t really matter.

  Her hand closed around Simon’s, as the lantern-light bobbed back the way they’d come, up the narrow stair to the corridor outside the lab. After a short time, Lydia heard the wet splish of shuffling footfalls, and smelled revenants, moving through the chamber below.

  When Don Simon fell asleep, his hand still in hers, Lydia estimated that it must be close to six in the morning, but dared not strike even the light of a single match to check. Revenants had come into the chamber below, and for a time Lydia had heard the shriek and squeal of the rats they summoned to their hands, and the horrible noises of the revenants feeding. I’ll have to tell Jamie that there seem to be TWO hives down here, one under Francesca’s control, and one independent.

  Bother! I don’t suppose I’ll EVER get access to Colonel Lemoine’s notes, to see how that might have come about … Maybe one is the German prisoners and the other is guards they might have infected? Or soldiers from the front-line trenches? Have the lines moved while I’ve been down here? They were only a few miles away …

  And what do the uninfected guards up top think about all this? What do they think is going on?

  The noises below died away. Lydia began to count.

  When she reached sixty for what she hoped was the sixtieth time – she got distracted, retracing Simon’s instructions and what she remembered about the road back to Pont-Sainte-Félicité – she lit a candle, opened the heavy trapdoor, and peered down to make sure there wasn’t a revenant sleeping directly at the bottom of the pillar. Then she turned back, and took a long look at Simon, lying on his back with his neck pillowed on a femur, a great heap of brown bones rising behind him: skulls, pelvises, long bones, with ribs and vertebrae scattered about him like dried flowers. His face was peaceful, a young man’s face, white eyelashes lying on the fine-grained white skin of his cheek like a child’s.

  He chose to be what he is.

  If he hadn’t, I would never have met him.

  Or have met the thing he’s become.

  She propped her spectacles more firmly onto her nose, blew out the candle, and first climbed – then slid – down the pillar.

  At the bottom she lit the candle again (I do NOT want to trip over a revenant …!) and made her careful way around the wall. She found, as Simon had said, an archway and the first two shallow steps of a wide stairway whose next step was buried in rubble. The narrow space to the right of the rubble was barely visible, even at close inspection, and thin as she was, scarcely admitted her body. Had she not had the vampire’s assurance that it was indeed the way which led to the surface she would not have dared to squeeze herself in, for fear of getting stuck further in. But even when it narrowed to a crawl space, she could see the faint movement of her candle flame with the current of air, and this kept her going.

  Jamie, PLEASE be at the clearing station when I get there …

  She tried to calculate the days since Francesca had caught her in the tunnel by the well. Jamie’s letter from Whitsedge Court had been dated the second of April. How long would it take him to convince the Army to give him transport to France? And if he was assigned to go to some specific place far from Flanders, how long would it take him to wangle his way out of it, acquire a motorcar (I HOPE he isn’t going to cadge a ride on a train!) and reach Pont-Sainte-Félicité …

  I should have left a message for him …

  Oh, God, what if they start shelling the chapel again before I get out?

  The blackness around her opened out. The dank air smelled of rats and death and revenants, but more faintly; she saw none in the low crypt into which she wriggled from the caved-in doorway. It took all her strength to wrestle the iron grille from the drain in the floor, and the stink of the old passageway beneath – it was ankle-deep in water, and too low even to stand in upright – made her queasy.

  The thought of encountering a revenant down there was enough to make her understand, to the marrow of her bones, why Don Simon had put off the escape until daylight.

  ‘There are other ways yet, out of this place,’ he had said.

  She wondered whether he’d been telling the truth.

  Something over a mile, he had said. The thought was horrible, but there was no going back. She tucked her skirt more firmly up under her belt, lowered herself down and dragged the grille back into place.

  The last five yards were the worst. The tunnel had been caved in, choked with rubble and mud; had she been attempting the escape by night Lydia wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have simply put her head down and wept. But the candle flame still leaned toward the scraped, narrow crack in the mess, and, more glorious still, pallid daylight leaked through, so Lydia simply shoved her head and shoulders into the gap between two boulders, and began to wriggle and push her way. She was conscious that the stones around her were actually stones, not earth. They’d been cut. Once she even saw the broken remains of a carven saint’s face.

  The daylight was almost painful.

  The smell of the fresh air, when she crawled forth from a hole in the steep bank of rubble that rimmed what seemed like an enormous shell-crater, made her want to fall to her knees and weep.

  She had emerged at the bottom of what seemed to be a cellar, whose vaulted roof had been shattered. Fragments of stonework littered the brick floor, and a huge spill of rubble hid the whole of o
ne end of the chamber. Clambering up this, with much slipping and backsliding, she reached a second crypt, above which, she saw, rose the remains of the church itself. It was the same chapel near the lilacs she and Palfrey had visited – How many days ago was it? – and had ruled out as impossible.

  Exhausted, shaking and dizzy with thirst, she scrambled up a half-ruined stair to the pounded remains of the chapel itself, and from there into a caved-in labyrinth of trenches and sandbag walls. Just get to the road, she thought. SOMEBODY should be along, and I’ll come up with some tale to get a lift back to the clearing station.

  German spies? Black-marketeers? She glanced down at her clothing, gray with mud and torn from two long crawls through rubble: I came to be buried in a caved-in dugout and have no recollection of how I got there …

  An ambulance-wagon came rattling from the direction of Arras and Lydia stepped out and waved. Colonel Simon and I were on our way back from Amiens and were attacked last night by a German reconnaissance party …

  The ambulance-wagon pulled up and a slender man in a dark mackintosh sprang from the cab: civilian trousers and shoes. At the same moment two French soldiers leaped from the back, hurried toward her. They had almost reached her when Lydia realized that the vehicle was a long-chassis Sunbeam.

  Oh, damn …!

  The civilian produced a pistol and even if he hadn’t, Lydia knew she simply hadn’t the strength to run away. She staggered, put one hand to her forehead, and collapsed in what she earnestly hoped was a convincing faint.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘She’s shamming,’ said the little man in the mackintosh as the ambulance-wagon lurched into gear. Even with her eyes shut Lydia could tell he bent over her, and she caught the whiff of smelling-salts as he uncorked the bottle of them. By the nearness of Lemoine’s voice, the colonel pulled the little civilian away from her cot.