Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  Their gazes locked, and held.

  Understanding one another.

  Meagher went on, ‘She planned to go to Paris. The master there’s weak, she said. A fool. Moreover, the Master of Paris is here, someplace on the Front.’

  ‘That’s what she said to me,’ returned Crowell. ‘That she and I would rule Paris, forever, between us. But as for laying my life into the hand of a woman I’ve just met two minutes ago …’

  ‘What choice do you have?’ Meagher stepped closer, sinking her voice though there was no one (except herself, Lydia noted nervously) to hear. ‘Whatever contamination she avoided in her blood, it’s in her brain now. If she made you vampire, it would pass to you. You’d be scratching in a corner eating rats and liking it inside a week. She said you were the best, Crowell: clever and strong and ruthless. With you, she said, she could rule half Europe.’

  ‘And she would rule me.’ Crowell’s voice was equally soft. ‘But I knew her. We knew each other, worked together, for long, long years. I knew what I’d be getting, as her … partner. And so I waited, while she sought for a way to overcome her barrenness, like a biblical matriarch rooting for mandrakes. But you …’

  The vampire smiled again, and shook her head. ‘What choice have you, mo grá? All those years of waiting …’ Her voice teased, as if savoring his bitterness. ‘And now ’tis gone, because of her impatience for it … Or was it yours? How many more years would you have waited? Could you have waited? How many more years before your own brain started to go, along with your eyesight and your bowels and the heat in your loins?’ Her fingers brushed his body as she spoke of it. ‘How many years till you were too weak to hold onto the hand she stretched out to you, to carry you across Death? She put you at that risk, remember, for the off-chance of having you be her servant and no other’s.’

  Crowell said nothing, and they stood like lovers, hesitating before a kiss from which each knows there will be no going back. But, Lydia noticed, his grip on her arm did not slacken one bit. Nor his grip on his revolver.

  ‘And when she comes back,’ whispered Meagher, ‘she’ll want you. She slapped me like a housemaid, only for looking hard at the bruises on her face, where her jaw’s growin’ out into a snout. She wants you for her own fledgling and if you don’t go to her of your own you know she’ll take you. Then the pair of you can sit and eat rats together.

  ‘This is your last chance.’ The vampire swayed closer to him, blue eyes glowing like sea jewels into his. ‘And you know it. Or do you know another vampire, whom you trust more than me?’

  ‘You’re something of a cailleach yourself,’ murmured Crowell, ‘acushla. Here?’

  ‘I’ve been through the whole of the vault. Even the strays and runaways are gone out; they won’t be back till near dawn. You’ll fall asleep for a few hours …’

  Her glance went to Lydia, and her smile widened.

  ‘And wake hungry.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  From the hillslope above the Arras road, James Asher could look east across to the ruined land where the French Second Army had driven back the Germans in January.

  He’d hiked these roads as a young man, tramping through Picardy during one of his vacations from Oxford, picking up strange old legends and half-forgotten words, tales of Celtic gods or of peasant girls who achieved good fortune from fairies by woodland wells. The well and grotto – the cuvé in question – at Sainte-Bride had long been sacred to the goddess who had later been adopted into the Catholic church as a saint, and Asher recalled the scene before him as it had been back in the early eighties: lush meadows dotted with black-and-white cattle, fields hip-deep in growing wheat. Lines of elms, an echo of the back lanes of Kent in his boyhood. Birdsong, and the whisper of wind.

  A ghastly wasteland of mud and shell-holes and caved-in trenches under the sickly moon. And – not clearly visible from the road that ran along the feet of these low hills – a hideous suggestion of movement in the abyssal shadows of those trenches.

  The Front lay three miles to the east, but the supply-routes to the firing line did not cross these lands. There had been no traffic on the road for hours. A glance at his watch showed Asher that it was a quarter to four. An hour until the first glimmerings of light.

  He trained his binoculars on the two figures at the side of the road. A broad-shouldered man in the gray-blue uniform of a French officer, his left arm in a sling. A pale-haired woman in white, like a spirit in the moonlight. He saw her raise her arms, and the man looked out with his own field glasses, over the mud and the darkness.

  All along the line of one trench, shadowy forms emerged from the earth. As they shambled toward the road in a ragged line Asher saw movement around their feet, as if the earth squirmed, and he shivered at what he was pretty sure that was. In a way, he thought, Lemoine scarcely needed the revenants, if through them Francesca the White could achieve control over the rats. While he watched, one of the revenants stumbled, staggered and fell, entangled in the remains of the barbed wire that both sides had stretched across no man’s land. Like an insect caught in a spider’s web it thrashed, kicked, and the creatures nearest it swung around, converged, almost certainly at the smell of its blood. But at the roadside Francesca the White raised her hand, and the revenants turned away, and kept moving in the line of their march.

  Asher estimated the distance. A good half-mile – Can she operate out of line-of-sight?

  Can she see through their eyes? Their minds?

  Vampires could walk in the dreams of the living. Could, under certain circumstances, control their bodies, ride them like rented horses, see through their eyes, speak through their mouths. Single individuals, but what about the collective mind, formed of individual consciousnesses whose self-awareness was gone?

  A sound in the trees behind him. Momentary as a thought, the filthy smell that disappeared almost at once …

  So not all of them were down across the road. Some, at least, escaped her control. An effect of distance? Or was her control not absolute? Asher listened behind him, heard nothing. Nevertheless, he began to move down slope, to where he’d left the motorcar, concealed by the broken ruin of what had once been a farmhouse.

  He moved carefully, knowing he’d be visible to someone across the road in the flatlands, if they happened to look his way. The rise of land where he’d stood had commanded a view of the convent, on the next slope of ground. What little remained of the moon was sinking in the sky, and even shot to pieces and winter-barren, the woods would be pitch dark. He could only hope that Francesca the White and Dr Lemoine were too preoccupied with their observations – and their control – of the revenants to see him.

  How much of her mind does she need, to control them? he wondered. And how is Lemoine going to phrase this, in his report to the French High Command? ‘I have turned German prisoners into mindless monsters which I’m paying a vampire to control for us. They’re cheap to feed and don’t mind being killed and oh, by the way, be very careful about contact with good Frenchmen …’

  And how long is it going to be before we run out of prisoners and start looking for ‘volunteers’ in our own ranks? He could think of a couple of his scholastic colleagues – not to speak of Marcellus Langham, hungry for his promotion – who’d be perfectly happy to see ‘niggers’ from India or Algiers pushed into the ranks of mindless cannon fodder. Ah, well, ‘dulce et decorum est’ and all that, old boy …

  His mind briefly conjured the fifth year of the war, when the Germans had adopted the same method of fighting – and surely there’s a German vampire who wants something badly enough to strike the sort of bargain the White Lady struck – and no man’s land had spread across half the world, revenants mindlessly fighting revenants in the shell-cratered ruins of Paris, London, Berlin …

  The revenants broke from their line, and began to move toward the road.

  Damn it.

  He’d been seen.

  He left off the cautious smoothness of his walk and ran for the car, weakne
ss clutching his chest and limbs like a leaden shroud and terror searing him. Do NOT let yourself be caught, do NOT …

  He stumbled, scrambled up, dizzy and gasping – the foremost grabbed his arms and Asher shucked out of his greatcoat, turned, and fired his pistol point-blank between the creature’s eyes. The thing stumbled and Asher didn’t look back, knowing it would be on its feet and after him but blind. He reached the car with ten revenants from across the road lumbering toward him – two emerged from the woods behind the car: no thoroughfare in that direction, it would take too long to turn …

  He snatched up one of the Mills bombs and flung it at those in front, far too close to the front of the car but he was past caring; crammed himself behind the dashboard and felt the car jolt in the blast, fragments of steel (and of revenants) spattering against the vehicle’s sides. Now if only there’s enough left of the road to drive on …

  He came up from behind the dash, yanked the self-starter and got nothing. Half a dozen revenants were only yards away and even those that had been shattered by the blast were crawling in his direction. He turned with his pistol as those behind the car scrambled onto its back …

  Then they sprang off, as if the metal were hot.

  At the same moment those in the road before him stopped, and turned away. As if he’d suddenly become invisible, or someone had blown a magic whistle.

  They started to stride off down the road, in the direction of Cuvé Sainte-Bride.

  Asher looked back, automatically, toward where Francesca had stood beside the road, some fifty yards from the car, pale in the moonlight. She was still there, Lemoine grasping her arm – Asher heard him shout something at her but could not make out words. He saw the woman pull against the Frenchman’s grip, with a curious, swaying movement that reminded him eerily of the revenants themselves. Lemoine jerked his hand towards Asher – Asking something? Ordering something?

  Francesca lunged at him, twisting her arm free and seizing the officer around the neck. Lemoine was taller than she, and built like an old-time warrior; still she twisted and shook, in a single, vicious gesture, and Asher saw the colonel’s body spasm and his knees buckle, and knew she’d broken his neck.

  Then she was running across the road in a swirl of white: ivory gown, pale hair flowing like a cloak. She moved with the curious light swiftness, faster than any human speed, which the vampires usually hid from living eyes, and the remaining half-dozen revenants stampeded around her.

  The roar of a motorcycle made him swing around… .

  Chest burning, knees shaking with exhaustion, Asher was too flattened with weariness even to feel surprise at the sight of Don Simon Ysidro on a dispatch rider’s 550 Model-H Triumph. ‘Get on,’ said the vampire.

  Asher obeyed, though Ysidro showed no sign of turning the bike around and evidently proposed to head straight past the last of the revenants. ‘Where’s Lydia?’

  ‘She has to be at the convent. I felt no trace of her when I woke—’ They were already careening up the road, weaving past the gore-littered crater left by the Mills bomb, gaining on the revenants – ‘but she’s not at the clearing station—’

  Asher didn’t ask what the hell Lydia had been doing at Cuvé Sainte-Bride in the first place, when Ysidro and his ‘mignonne’, as Elysée had said, had been reported getting clear of the place …

  Unless he has another living assistant that he was seen leaving with …

  They swept past the revenants. Francesca had outdistanced them, and was now nowhere in sight.

  ‘They’re going to shell it out of existence at sunrise.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ysidro. ‘Then we’ll have to hurry.’

  When Meagher came down the narrow stair again Lydia knew it must be shortly before first light.

  The small lamp by the stair arch had gone out: Lydia knew they burned for about six hours on one filling, but had no way of knowing how long it had been kindled before the man Crowell had dragged her down to the vaults. Sick horror filled her at the thought that the larger lantern at her side would go out before Crowell woke, leaving her to listen in the darkness.

  For revenants. For Crowell. For rats.

  For death …

  Oh, Miranda, I’m sorry! Jamie, I’m so sorry …

  They’d left her handcuffed to the chair while they’d gone upstairs again, to fetch down a cot and a chain. Lydia thought, given time, she could have done something to break the chair – which was a common, wooden kitchen chair – before Crowell woke, but they’d fixed the handcuffs to the chain and the chain around one of the squat Romanesque pillars that held up the groined roof, and she knew there was no getting out of that.

  Meagher had drunk Crowell’s blood, and he, dying, hers, as she’d laid him down on the cot a few feet from Lydia. Then Meagher had smiled, and with the old man’s blood on her lips had come over and given Lydia a playful kiss, enjoying her dread, before disappearing up the stair into the darkness. Lydia had wiped the blood off on her shoulder the moment the vampire was gone.

  Then for several hours – as nearly as Lydia could estimate it – she had alternately pulled and twisted at the handcuffs, to utterly no avail, and had watched, with a deep interest that at times overcame her dread, the changes passing over Crowell’s dead body.

  His eyes didn’t settle, as the eyes of corpses do after about thirty minutes. In between bouts of digging and scratching and scraping at the chain where the handcuffs were attached (and which she could not quite reach owing to the chain’s tautness around the pillar), she tried to see whether Crowell was developing hypostasis on his shoulders, buttocks and the back of his head. Probably not, she thought. And of course he won’t develop rigor either, even in this cold. She wished the light was better, and that she could examine him more closely. (And while I’m wishing, I wish that I could run away …) His face had gone the horrible, bleached, waxy yellow of a corpse’s face, and his mouth had dropped slightly open.

  His mind, Lydia was well aware – while wondering what that was actually like – was alive, tucked in some corner of Meagher’s consciousness.

  Some part of it would always stay there.

  There’s got to be SOME way out of here …

  Does Simon know about this sub-crypt? She didn’t know. I don’t see how he could. While he’s awake the revenants have been down here, and when they’re asleep, he’s asleep.

  Because they are of the same order of being. Unliving and Undead. Terrifyingly similar …

  Now and then she’d lash with her foot at exploring rats, but she noticed that the rats – which, she had observed in the clearing station, were very quick to ascertain when a human being was helpless – went nowhere near the vampire.

  In time, even the waxed leather of her stout shoes grew wet, and her feet got numb from cold.

  Miranda, she thought, and to her mind came again her last sight of her child, by the nursery fire. Smiling, thinking her mother was only going down to London for a day. Oh, my poor baby, I hope Jamie gives you all the love I would have done …

  Then Meagher was there, standing on the edge of the lantern-light at the bottom of the stair.

  She gave Lydia a smile and stroked her cheek as she passed; her hand, Lydia observed, was warm. She’d fed, either out in no man’s land or in the trenches, scavenging the deaths so freely harvested by war. Looking back at Crowell as Meagher crossed to his cot, Lydia observed that the wrinkles had all but disappeared from his face, and that his hair had darkened, from white to a deep, sable brown. A young man’s face. The nails on his childlike hands had become glassy and thick, lengthened to half an inch or so beyond the fingertips. In his half-open mouth Lydia glimpsed the fangs. Meagher stood for a moment looking down at him, smiling, and her smile wasn’t one of tenderness.

  It was a smile of triumph. Of pleasure, and the anticipation of pleasure to come.

  He was the best, according to Francesca. The living man who would make a very, very good vampire. Lydia had the uncomfortable feeling she’d met other
s who fit that description – her stepmother leaped to mind. What had Meagher said? Smart, strong and ruthless …

  Appetite that cares about nothing but itself.

  Francesca had worked with Crowell, for years, evidently, in something of the same way Simon had worked with her and Jamie … Is that what Simon would say of Jamie? Is that what he’d see in him?

  Exhausted, terrified, it was hard to tell, or to think clearly.

  You’ll wake hungry …

  Meagher knelt in the shallow water at Crowell’s side, and bent over him, her black hair framing his face as she pressed her lips to his. Lydia shivered, but couldn’t look away. Couldn’t mentally keep herself from taking notes. For some reason she thought of the vampire-hunter Osric Millward – He’d want to know this kind of thing …

  And I’ll need to tell Jamie …

  But I won’t be seeing Jamie again, ever. Or Simon. Or my child …

  Crowell’s hand twitched, and Meagher covered it with her own. His whole body shivered, and he pulled his hand free, grasped her arm, clung to her for an instant. Their lips still locked, as she released back into him the consciousness, the soul, that she’d carried in her own mind while his body died.

  Released it back … but not all of it. She kept part of it within herself.

  Then Crowell turned his head, as if denying that his first instinct had been to seek protection, and opened his eyes. They caught the lantern’s reflection, like a cat’s.

  Lydia thought she should probably pray for her own soul but couldn’t come up with any words.

  ‘Pritchard?’ said Meagher softly, and his hand returned to her arm, stroking this time. ‘Mo chroí …’