Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Can’t you see she has been through hell, man?’ Then, closer and more gently, ‘You’ll be all right, Madame Asher.’

  ‘Asher?’

  ‘Madame James Asher.’ By the sound of Lemoine’s voice he – and his companion – had taken a seat on the opposite cot. Very sensibly, Lydia thought, since it was pretty clear that the Arras road had been shelled again, and the ambulance-wagon bucked like a Wild West bronco. ‘Her husband lectures on folklore and linguistics at New College.’

  ‘Her husband—’ Mr Mackintosh’s soft, slightly nasal voice sounded amused – ‘worked for seventeen years for the Foreign Office, if it’s the same James Asher I worked with in ’93 in Mesopotamia. And her husband, so far as I could tell when I was back in London, knows perfectly well what’s going on in your research station, Colonel – which I think answers all those questions you had about how she’d gotten mixed up with the vampires. These days he works for the London nest.’

  Oh, damn …

  ‘I … She … What?’

  ‘This woman,’ sighed Mr Mackintosh patiently, ‘has been lying like Ananias. You didn’t even search her for picklocks, did you?’

  ‘Of course not! And in any case, there is no lock on the inside of that door.’

  Mackintosh sniffed. ‘I’d say then that the woman Meagher let her out – having killed that young idiot Strahan, the kill might easily have gone to her head. Or she had some idea of shoving Mrs Asher into the arms of that abomination chained in the lab, to test her own control over it, since that’s obviously been the plan from the moment Nurse Meagher figured out what you were doing with these things.’

  ‘Nurse Meagher has been selflessly loyal! Even after she … she was transformed …’

  ‘Cock. One of your prisoners was smuggled to London by a group of Irish gunrunners, with the intention – I should think – of holding him somewhere safe until Nurse Meagher figured out how these things can be controlled. I understand she’s also been pinching tissue, which is less conspicuous to send. I have no idea what instructions she sent about safety precautions but obviously her boys botched it, because the thing got away – something a detached hand wasn’t about to do. My friends at the FO got wind of it and asked me to bring it in—’

  ?? home side screening … Evidently Jamie was right …

  ‘Probably put two and two together with what they may have already guessed about your show here. Whether Asher – his name was Grant, when I worked with him – is also working for the Department or for someone else, including the Irish Brotherhood, I don’t know, but he clearly knows all about you. He’s in Amiens now. I lost track of him last night, but I’d suggest you send one of your young ladies to make sure of him. He killed three gunrunners and the revenant in London, and his vampire partner near as dammit killed me.’

  ‘Does anyone else know?’ Lemoine sounded utterly aghast. As well he might, thought Lydia, considering how much of a secret he thought this was.

  Jamie, she thought in the same moment. Jamie here …

  ‘God knows.’ Mr Mackintosh didn’t sound terribly concerned about it. ‘I’m only here to … assist … the Lady Gheric. But if I were you I’d finish that assessment of the Lady’s abilities to control your little pets quick smart, and put the whole thing on an official footing. Otherwise you’re going to find the entire circus taken away from you, and everyone shaking their fingers and telling you how naughty you were even to think of it. I’d also have a little chat with Nurse Meagher, as soon as she’s up. And not believe a single word she says.’

  Asher spent Friday in the cellar of a house in St Acheul, close enough to the old church there that he suspected the building’s third-century crypt was one of Szgedny’s daytime hiding places. The cellar was so jammed with sacks of wheat and sugar, flitches of bacon, packets of coffee, cans of petrol and boxes of cigarettes that there was barely room for a cot for Asher to doze on. His hosts – three of the biggest, toughest women he’d ever seen – cheerfully fetched him bread, cheese, pâté, tea and clean linen: ‘From which army would be your preference, sir?’

  Arriving in company with the Master of Prague shortly before dawn, he slept most of the day. If Lydia was in Amiens, he guessed that to hunt for her would only serve to give Crowell – if he was still in the town – time to find (and attempt to kill) him. Or, worse, would lead Crowell to Lydia. He studied again the Comte de Beaucailles’s descriptions of the old convent’s crypts, and with the aid of a prewar map of the Département du Nord, worked out the exact coordinates not only of the convent, but of the farthest extent of its crypts.

  It would be, he guessed, a long night.

  His hostesses fetched him upstairs after dark, where a handsome staff-car waited in the little courtyard (‘From which army would be your preference, sir?’). ‘The Boche, he’s getting ready for a big push,’ one of them said to him, and offered him a cigar. ‘All up and down the line they’re saying so. We’ve given you an extra pistol – there in that box on the seat – a flask of coffee, some chocolate biscuits and two Mills bombs.’

  ‘It is as well to be prepared,’ added her sister kindly.

  Szgedny appeared shortly after that, paid off Mesdames and rode at Asher’s side as he drove back through the dark countryside, the hooded light of the headlamps barely flickering on the desolation of mud, torn-up railway tracks, broken carts, dead horses and bombed-out villages. Again and again the car was held up by lines of wagons, struggling through the mud. Asher tried both staying on the road (deep mud and the necessity of levers and duckboards to pry the wheels clear) and veering carefully off the road through the fields (deep mud and flooded shell-holes).

  It was nine o’clock before they reached Field Artillery Battery Number Twelve.

  ‘You sure about that, sir?’ The young captain in charge looked like he had neither slept nor shaved since Asher had conversed with him the day before – certainly not changed his clothing, possibly not eaten either. On the road outside the half-repaired cottage a shouting match had developed in the darkness between men driving wagon-loads of food and those offloading crates of ammunition; the guns sounded far off, a distant thunder broken by rifle-fire like lightning. ‘I’ve heard there’s some kind of Frenchie hospital station up there.’

  ‘Our men will be cleared out by morning.’ Asher touched his own orders – sole discretion, all and any assistance over some very formidable signatures – and the neat table of coordinates. ‘The Germans have been running their own show in the crypts, using the boffins there as a blind. Believe me, it’s devilish clever and I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. This is our only way to eradicate them.’

  It sounded gossamer-thin to him, but the captain frowned, looked from Asher to Szgedny. The vampire met his gaze, held his eyes quietly for a time. ‘I—’ the captain stammered. And then, as if remembering earlier orders, turned smartly back to Asher and saluted. ‘Of course, sir. Just at sunrise.’

  ‘Will you keep an eye on the place?’ said Asher, when he and the vampire stepped out into the night once more. ‘On the off-chance that the man who was waiting outside my lodgings in Amiens will appear and try to stop it? Which I wouldn’t put past him,’ he added, when Szgedny lifted his gray brows. ‘Crowell was always an uncannily good guesser. When he realizes I gave him the slip he may work out that my next move might be—’

  ‘Crowell?’ It was the closest Asher had seen to the Graf looking truly surprised.

  ‘You know the name?’

  ‘Dear me, yes. He went by others – Jourel was one, Grassheart another. Thirty years ago, forty years ago, he was very much La Dame Blanche’s minion, much as you are to Simon, and to others of the London nest. It amused her—’ And his own eyes glinted as Asher opened his mouth to protest that he worked neither for Ysidro nor Grippen.

  When, after all, Asher did not speak he went on, ‘I think she loved the game as a form of hunting, though she hadn’t the slightest interest in your Empire nor mine. Th
ere was a time when I wondered if she meant to make him vampire, to serve her. He would have been a dangerous one. So that was he?’ A corner of the Graf’s long mustache lifted in his one-sided grin.

  ‘Forty years ago.’ She must have been lurking somewhere in the background all the time we were in Mesopotamia.

  ‘He’s old now,’ observed Szgedny. ‘I begin to think your lady wife correct in her surmise that the White Lady’s bite is sterile. She can kill, but cannot give the semblance of life in death. Like those rare queen bees whose eggs produce only drones. Well, well …’

  ‘Will you watch for him?’

  ‘I can remain until an hour before first light. This young man will sleep before then—’ He nodded back to the captain’s rough shelter. ‘That I shall see to. Spent as he is, it should be no trouble. I will speak to his dreams a little, to hold by your orders with good will. By sunrise, all the revenants should be in the crypts. And where do you go?’

  For Asher had turned toward the staff-car again.

  ‘Cuvé Sainte-Bride. I suspect if I handed in a note at the front gate, when light is in the sky,’ he added, seeing the vampire’s silvery eyes widen, ‘that will give Lemoine and his staff just enough time to run for it, and to evacuate any uninfected prisoners. But it will be impossible for any of the Undead – or the Unliving, as you call them – to follow.’

  The vampire’s brow clouded. ‘They will be far more inclined to clap you in irons—’

  ‘It’s a risk I’ll take. Don’t fear that I’ll go there a moment before there’s enough light in the sky to destroy a vampire,’ he added, seeing thought and suspicion flicker across the Graf’s face. ‘I must – we must – see those things destroyed. But I won’t have the innocent destroyed with them.’

  ‘I would hardly describe this Lemoine as innocent.’

  ‘His guards are. Without Francesca Gheric, and the revenants themselves, Lemoine can do no harm.’

  Szgedny’s eyes narrowed. For a moment Asher wondered if the vampire had enough power of illusion to kill him in front of half the men of the battery and every mule-driver in the British Expeditionary Force. But the Master of Prague only gestured toward the black east, and the red flashes of fire over no man’s land: ‘He can do no harm until the next thing he thinks up; or someone else thinks up. There are no innocent in this war, Professor. Not Lemoine, not me, not you.’

  That night Mr Jourel – which was what Dr Lemoine called Mr Mackintosh, though Lydia suspected that wasn’t his real name either – came and took Lydia from her cell at gunpoint, and led her to a smaller room deeper in the crypts. Deeper underground, she thought, and more thickly insulated by the weight of the earth: So Simon won’t know I’m still down here? (Does he guess that Simon’s still hiding somewhere in the crypts?) Or so Francesca won’t know?

  As Jourel was leading her from the laboratory he paused in the doorway, and Lydia needed no threat from his gun, to stand quiet beside him. The first of the revenants bound for the surface passed them, stinking to heaven and walking without looking around them, or seeming to notice their surroundings. Those Lydia had seen elsewhere – in the crypts, in the Peking mines, or, horribly, in the laboratory two nights ago – had moved with a peculiarly shuffling gait, heads swinging from side to side, nostrils flaring as they sniffed for prey.

  These weren’t looking for prey – or for anything. They had almost the movement of marching men.

  Francesca Gheric walked among them. Her awareness sharpened by years of discreet cosmetic use, Lydia noticed the White Lady’s carefully powdered cheeks and chin, through which faint bruises still showed, where the shape of her face was beginning to alter. The Lady’s head had begun to have that slight characteristic side-to-side movement, and once or twice she could not keep herself from picking at her own collarbone and wrists.

  And more than anything else, there was an indefinable change: in her posture, in her step, in her eyes.

  Maybe if she hadn’t been among the revenants, it would have been less obvious.

  Lydia counted twelve revenants, each an ambulatory reservoir of further infection.

  There had been thirteen in the long crypt.

  Lemoine followed, notebook in hand. He was making notes as he walked, keeping a sharp eye on his charges, so that he – no more than had Francesca – didn’t see his guest and Lydia, standing in the laboratory door. Jourel’s childlike left hand, resting on Lydia’s shoulder, tightened slightly and she wondered if Lemoine knew she’d been taken from her cell and what the old man beside her would do if she cried out.

  But the thought of what the revenants might do if Francesca’s concentration on them broke closed her throat. Without a sound she watched them pass along the corridor and ascend the stair into darkness.

  The lower level of the crypts, entered through a winding stair at the far end of the reeking chamber in which the revenants had been kept chained, was flooded a few inches deep in water that reeked of soured decay. A small lantern hung at the bottom of the stair, its light just sufficient to show her rats: living ones crawling along the stonework, chewed carcasses littering the stair and bobbing in the dirty water. Thirty feet away, among the squat arches of the convent’s deepest foundations, a chair stood ready, with a larger lantern on a goods box beside it and two pairs of handcuffs locked, one on either side, to the chair’s frame. Lydia wondered in panic if she could kick Jourel and flee, but she knew from the stink, and the floating carrion, that revenants hid here.

  He’s going to ask me about Jamie …

  She hadn’t seen Meagher with Francesca and Lemoine, and wondered when she’d put in an appearance. Was Meagher still asleep? It was early. Did Francesca, like the revenants, now wake a little earlier than sunset?

  They can’t kill me. Lemoine will be furious.

  But Lemoine isn’t here NOW.

  But when they reached the bottom of the steps, Jourel pushed her back against one of the niter-crusted archways, turned her roughly to face him and demanded, ‘What’s happened to Francesca?’

  ‘She took the mind – the soul – of an infected man into her own.’ Lydia was astonished at how calm her own voice sounded. ‘That’s how she’s controlling the revenants. It’s how she gained access to the … the group-mind, I suppose you’d call it. Control of the revenants was the price Lemoine asked, you see, to help her make fledglings. But now it’s starting to control her.’

  ‘You’re lying. She’d never have touched the blood of those things.’

  ‘She didn’t.’ Lydia tried to sound matter-of-fact, as if there were no gun digging into her left seventh rib. ‘She absorbed its soul without drinking its blood, at the moment of its death. I was there. They burned it up in acetylene flame, the same as they did the two vampires whose deaths – whose souls – she absorbed, in order to let her make fledglings in the first place.’

  His bead-black eyes narrowed, though the lined features remained expressionless – as Jamie could go expressionless when he was thinking – in the dim glow of the smaller lantern near by them. ‘You know a great deal about it, young lady.’

  ‘Well, as you said yourself,’ she pointed out reasonably, ‘my husband and I have been dealing with the London vampires for the past eight years. Think about it,’ she added. ‘Vampires look how they think they looked in life. That’s why most of them look young, you know. But it seems to work both ways now. She’s starting to think she looks like a revenant. She is becoming one in her own mind. Becoming what they are: appetite, with the mind that controls it eaten away. And maybe the minds of the two vampires she devoured are still alive, after a fashion, within hers. Alive and welcoming the revenants in, as a way of destroying her. Maybe that’s why vampires don’t devour their own kind. She didn’t drink their blood, either. Ask Meagher,’ she began to add, but her captor’s eyes had shifted past her, gazing into the blackness of the sub-crypt.

  In a voice hoarse with rage he whispered, ‘Bitch.’

  His hand tightened painfully over Lydia’s
arm and the barrel of his pistol pressed into her side. But it was not of her, she realized, that he spoke.

  ‘Stupid, lying bitch. All these years of waiting—’

  The black eyes snapped back to her and he said, ‘What does your husband know of this?’

  Nothing, not a thing …

  How much can he reasonably have learned?

  ‘He knows about the revenants,’ she said, hoping she still sounded as if she weren’t making this up as she went along. ‘I don’t know whether he knows about this place or not.’ Has this man deciphered my letters to Jamie? ‘He knows Lemoine has been using German prisoners—’

  ‘How did you know how to get inside here?’

  ‘Don Simon – one of the vampires – showed me.’

  ‘Who is your husband working for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lydia simply. ‘I haven’t been home since November.’

  ‘How did—?’ He turned his head sharply at a noise. Movement in the blackness of the crypt and the faint, almost soundless whisper of stirred water. Then eyes gleamed in the lantern-light. Lydia’s heart was in her throat at the thought of a revenant, but it was Tuathla Meagher, her nurse’s uniform damp and dirty now but her face deathlessly beautiful, framed in the blackness of her hair.

  Jourel shook Lydia roughly, demanded, ‘Is what this bitch says true? About Francesca?’

  ‘You’ve noticed, have you?’ The jewel-blue eyes smiled briefly, amused, into Lydia’s, like a child speaking to a puppy. Then her glance returned to the old man. ‘And noticed a great deal more than that, I see. You must be Crowell. I’m Meagher. She’s spoken of you.’

  ‘Has she, now?’ Jourel – Crowell, and Lydia hoped that actually was his name – gave a single, snickering laugh. ‘The one who was going to raise an army of revenants and free Ireland?’

  Meagher waved her hand, like a coquette dismissing the recollections of a schoolroom passion. ‘Guilty as charged, my lord.’ Lydia remembered poor freckled Joey, whispering of freedom for their homeland. ‘I calculate – at the rate she’s deteriorating – it’s going to be about two more days before she loses the ability to keep Lemoine from seeing anything’s wrong. Another beyond that for her mind to disappear. Nasty cailleach … I’d have left last night,’ she added, with the sidelong, alluring grin she’d given poor Joey, ‘but I heard you were coming.’