James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (21 page)

“Another argument,” Asher said, “for the fact that Calvaire knew him, it being less entertaining to watch the sufferings of those to whom we are unknown and indifferent.”

“Interesting.” Ysidro turned the ring he held this way and that, the candlelight shattering through its delicate facets to salt that alabaster face with a thousand points of colored fire. “The odd thing is that among vampires, there is a legend of an ancient vampire, so old and powerful that no one ever sees him anymore—so old that even other vampires cannot sense his passage. Even a hundred and fifty years ago, other vampires were avoiding his haunts. To them he was semifabulous, like a ghost. Traditions among them said that he had been a vampire since before the days of the Black Death.”

“And what were his haunts?” Asher asked, knowing already what the Spaniard would say.

The expressionless eyes raised from the glitter of the gem before them. “He slept—or was said to sleep—in the crypts below the charnels of the churchyard of the Holy Innocents, in Paris.”

“It is not the city that it was.” If there were nuances to that soft, light voice of bitterness, anger, or regret, it would have taken a vampire's hyperacute perceptions to read them—Asher himself heard none. Around him the closed cab jostled and swayed. When his elbow, raised where his hand, linked through the hanging strap, came in contact with the window, he felt through his coat sleeve the chill of the glass. The noises of the street came to him dimly: the clatter of wheels, on pavement of wood and asphalt, rebounding from the high brown walls of the immeubles, the occasional hoots of motorcars; the pungent cursing of the sidewalk vendors; and the gay, drifting frenzy of violin and accordion that spoke of some caf cone' in progress.

Blindfolded, he could see nothing, but the sounds of Paris were distinctive and as bright a kaleidoscope as its sights. No one, he thought, who had ever been here ever questioned how it was in this place that Impressionism came to be,

Ysidro's voice went on, “I have no sense of being at home here—this sterile, inorganic town where everything is thrice washed before and after anyone touches it. It is the same everywhere, of course, but in Paris it seems particularly ironic. They seem to have taken this man Pasteur very seriously.”

The noises changed; the crowd of vehicles around them seemed more dense, but the echoes of buildings were gone. Asher smelled the sewery stink of the river. A bridge, then—and judging by the length and the din of a small square and buildings halfway along, it could only be the Pont Neuf, a name which, like that of New College, Oxford, had not been accurate for a number of centuries. In a short time, they turned right, and continued in that direction. Asher calculated they were headed for the old Marais district, the one-time aristocratic neighborhoods that had not been badly damaged by either the Prussians, the Communards, or Baron Haussmann, but said nothing. If Ysidro chose to believe that blindfolding him would keep him in absolute ignorance of the whereabouts of the Paris vampires, he—and they—were welcome to do so.

He was uncomfortably aware that the Paris vampires had not even the threat of the day killer to reconcile them to the presence of a human in their midst.

“My most vivid memories of Paris are of its mud, of course,” the vampire went on quietly. “Everyone's were, who knew it then. It was astounding stuff, la boue de Paris—black and vile, like a species of oil. You could never eradicate either its stain or its smell. It clung to everything, and you could nose Paris six miles away in open country. In the days when every gentleman wore white silk stockings, it was pure hell.” The faintest hint of self-mockery crept into his voice, and Asher pictured that still and haughty face framed in the white of a court wig.

“The beggars all smelled of it, too,” Ysidro added. “Hunting in the poor quarters was always a nightmare. Now . . .” He paused, and there was a curious flex in that supple voice,

“It would take me a long time to relearn Paris. Everything has changed. It is strange territory to me now. I do not know its boltholes or hiding places; I no longer even speak the language properly. Every time I say ci instead of ce, je ne Vaime point instead of je ne V'aimepas, every time I say  je fhquel que chose instead of je
l'aifait, I mark myself as a stranger.”

“You only mark yourself as a foreigner who has learned French from a very old book,” Asher replied easily, “Have you ever talked to a Brahman in London for the first time? Or heard an American southerner speak of 'redding up a room'?” The cab stopped; under the silk scarf bound over his eyes, Asher could detect very little light and knew that the street itself was quite dark, particularly for a city as brightly illuminated as Paris. The place was quiet, too, save for the far-off noises of traffic in some nearby square—the Place de la Bastille at a guess— but the smell was the smell of poverty, of too many families sharing too few privies, of cheap cooking, and of dirt. The Marais, Asher knew, had declined drastically from the days when Louis XV had courted Jeanne Poisson through its candlelit salons.

There was a slight jogging as the vampire got out of the cab and the muted exchange of voices and, presumably, francs. Then a light, firm hand touched his arm, guiding him, and he heard the cab rattle away down the cobbles. “Do you speak Spanish any more at all?”

There was level pavement, then a step down, and a sense of close walls and cold shade—the doorway vestibule whose gates would open into the central court of one of the big old hotels particuliers. Beside him, very quiet, came Ysidro's voice: “I doubt I could even make myself understood in Madrid.”

“Have you never gone back there, then?”

In the ensuing moment of silence, Asher could almost see Ysidro's eyes resting on him with their calm, noncommittal gaze while the vampire sifted through all possible responses for the one which would give the least. “What would be the point?” he asked at last. “My people are, and have been since the Reconquista, suspicious and intolerant.” Asher realized with a small start that by my people he meant Spaniards, not vampires. “With the Inquisition probing every cellar for heretics and Jews, what chance would a vampire stand? It is possible in most circumstances to avoid the touch of silver, but such avoidance is, in civilized countries, not marked. Were it noticed in Spain in those days, it would have been fatal.”

Asher heard then a faint scratching, like the furtive scuffle of a mouse behind a wainscot, as the vampire scraped at the panels of the door with his nail, a sound which only other vampires would hear.

But other vampires, of course, would have detected their voices in the street.

He heard nothing within, but sensed feet floating weightlessly down the stair; his heart, it seemed, was thumping uncomfortably fast. “Do they know about me?” he asked.

They had taken the night mail by way of Calais. The porters had grumbled at the size and awkwardness of the huge leather-and-iron trunk that was ticketed as part of Asher's luggage, but had been surprised at its comparative lightness. “Wot you got in there, mate, bleedin' feathers?”

“I trust that all travel arrangements will go as we have made them,” Ysidro had commented, leaning on the Lord Warden's aft rail and watching the few twinkling lights on the Admiralty Pier fade into the thin soup of iron-colored mist. “But it never pays to take chances.”

He glanced beside him at Asher, whose mind had already recorded the slight flush of color in the white cheeks, the warmth in those cool fingers. Standing beside him, gloved hands on the rail and collar turned up against the raw cold of the night, Asher had been conscious of a vague disgust and alarm, not at the vampire, but at himself, for noting these signs as a mere deductive detail and not the certain evidence of some poor wretch's murder in a London slum. He had felt angry at himself and frustrated, as he had often been in his latter dealings with the Foreign Office, burdened with a sense of performing what was only marginally the lesser of two colossal wrongs.

The vampire's gaze had turned, as if he could still descry the dark shape of Dover's cliffs, invisible now in the west. “At the risk of sounding crude,” he had gone on carefully, “I would like to point out to you that at present I am the only one protecting you from Grippen and his cadre. Were you to destroy me, you might perhaps ensure your lady's safety for a season, for I am the only one who knows the terms of our agreement . . .”

Asher had started, relief loosening a knot of apprehension in his chest that had been with him, it seemed, so long that he had almost forgotten its origin.

With the possibility of a daylight-hunting vampire looming uneasily in his mind, he had not dared another meeting with Lydia, but it had been one of the hardest things he had ever done simply to take his leave of her by anonymous telegram. Ysidro, he presumed, would be able to protect him in Paris—if protecting him was in fact his intention—but he turned cold with dread at the thought of Lydia staying in London alone. Only the knowledge that she was enormously sensible and would wait, as ordered, to hear from him before undertaking anything remotely dangerous—the knowledge that she understood the situation— made it bearable and, then, bearable only in relative terms.

He felt a surge of gratitude toward the vampire of which he was almost ashamed—gratitude and surprise that Ysidro would have told him this.

“But you would never be able to go near her again,” the vampire went on. “The others would track you and destroy you, as one who knows too much. In so doing, they would undoubtedly find her as well.”

Asher glanced sourly at his companion. “And how do I know that won't be the case in any event, when this affair is over?”

The vampire's gaze had been unfathomable in the dim glow of the steamer's deck lights, but Asher thought he heard a trace of unhuman amusement in his voice. “From that, too, I shall protect you. Do you not trust me, as I perforce trust you?”

As usual, he could not tell whether Ysidro was being ironic or not.

Long before the train had reached the Gare du Nord, Ysidro had left their compartment; Asher had not seen him anywhere in the station during the nuisance of customs in the Salle des Bagages, nor in the square or the streets outside. He was becoming used to this. The sky was already paling; he'd wired ahead to the Chambord, a small hotel in the Rue de la Harpe where he often stayed when in Paris in his Oxford persona, and they had rooms waiting for him. Entering the tiny lobby, with its fusty smells of cooking and its moldering Empire furnishings, it had troubled him that in all the years that he had known Paris, the city had been the abode of vampires. That was true of London as well, and he wondered if he would ever be able to return to the way in which he had once looked on the world.

Of course, early on in his career, he had lost the innocence of looking on the world as the bright surface of a beautiful pond. His tamperings with the Foreign Office, with the shadow life of information, and the murky dramas into which the cursed Department had pitchforked him had taken care of that. But beneath his continual awareness of secrets, boltholes, and dangers, there was a new awareness, as if he had suddenly become cognizant, not only of the fish that swam beneath the surface of the pond, but of things utterly unimaginable that moved through the black mud at its bottom.

He had slept until late in the day in his small room up under the high bulge of the roof slates, then bathed and dressed in a thoughtful frame of mind. He had written to Lydia, assuring her of his safe arrival, and mailed the letter enclosed in another to one of his students who had agreed to forward anything for Miss Merridew. It would reach her a day late, but better that, he reasoned, than risk the vampires tracing her. After a light dinner in a cafe, he sought out the Place des Innocents, the square near the vast central markets of the city, where once the Church of the Holy Innocents and its notorious cemetery had stood.

There was nothing there now—a tree-lined place with a Renaissance fountain, hemmed in by the gray bulk of the Holies on one side and high, brown-fronted immeubles on three others. The vampire of the Holy Innocents had slept in the crypt, Ysidro had said—like Rhys the Minstrel, haunting the crypts of the old Church of St. Giles near the river until the town grew large enough around him so that its inhabitants became strangers to one another and did not notice one more white-faced stranger walking the night in their midst.

Standing now at Ysidro's side, straining his ears to catch even the whisper of descending feet crossing the cobbled court beyond the door, he wondered if that crypt was still there, buried beneath the soil like the subcellar of Calvaire's house in Lambeth, forgotten to all save those who were interested in places proof against the light of day.

The vampires might know. That and other things. He had turned from the Place des Innocents, followed the Rue St. Denis toward the gray sheet of the river, shining between the dove-colored buildings of its banks. To them, this startlingly clean city, with its immaculate streets, its chestnut trees rusty with autumn, was only a topcoat of varnish on a dark swamp of memories, another city entirely.

He had stood for some time on the bank above the quays of the Seine, staring at the gray tangle of bridges upstream and down, the gothic forest of pinnacles that clustered on the lie de la Cite and the square, dreaming towers of Notre Dame. And just beneath them, on the embankment, he had gazed consideringly at the massive iron grillworks that barred passers-by from the subterranean mazes of the Paris sewers.

“The sewers?” Elysee de Montadour wrinkled her long nose in a deliberate gesture of distaste, her diamonds winking in the blaze of the gaslight. “What vampire in his right mind would haunt them? Hm?” She shivered affectedly. All her gestures, Asher observed, were theatrical, a conscious imitation of human mannerism rather than a reminiscence of its actual spontaneity, as if she had studied something not native to her. He found himself preferring Don Simon's uncanny stillness—the Spanish vampire stood, gray-gloved hands resting like hunting cats on the curving Empire back of the lady's divan, seeming by comparison more than ever immobile—petrified long ago, as Lydia had said, in ectoplasmic ivory.