James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (14 page)

So it wasn't automatic—not that Asher had ever believed that it was, of course. Even without Lydia's projection of the number of victims a single vampire might kill in the course of a century and a half, logic forbade that simple geometrical principle; the vampires kept on killing, but the world was not innundated with fledgling vampires.

There was something else involved, some deliberate process ... a process jealously guarded by the Master of London.

Grippen.

“A big toff”, the tobacconist's clerk had said. A hard boy, and never mind the boiled shirt.

Grippen's get, Bully Joe Davies had said. Grippen's slaves.

Was Ysidro? It was hard to picture that poised, pale head bending to anyone.

Yet there was so much that was being hidden: an iceberg beneath dark waters; wheels within invisible wheels; and the power struggles among the Undead,

He left the streaming traffic of Drury Lane, the jumbled brightness of Covent Garden behind him. Crossing the Strand again, he got a glimpse of the vast brooding dome of St. Paul's against the darkening bruise of the sky. The lanes were narrow here, lacing off in all directions, canyons of high brown buildings with pubs flaring like spilled jewel boxes at their corners. Somewhere he heard the insouciant clatter of buskers, and a woman's throaty laugh.

He passed Savoy Walk twice before identifying it—a cobbled passage, like so many in the Temple district, between two rows of buildings, not quite the width of his outstretched arms. It curved a dozen feet along, cutting out the lights from Salisbury Place. His own footsteps pierced the gloom in a moist whisper, for fog was rising from the nearby river.

The tiny passage widened to a little court, where the signs of small shops jutted out over the wet, bumpy stones—a pawnbroker's, a second-hand bookshop, a manufacturer of glass eyes. All were empty and dark, crouching beneath the tall gambreled silhouette of the house at the rear of the court, a jewel of interlaced brickwork and leaded glass, nearly black with soot. The lights of the populous districts to the north and east caught in the drifting fog to form a mephitic, dimly luminous backdrop behind a baroque jungle of slanting roofs and chimneys. The house, too, was dark; but as Asher walked toward it, a light went up in its long windows.

The steps were tall, soot-stained, and decorated with decaying lions in ochre stone. There was long stillness after the echoes of the door knocker died. Even listening closely, Asher heard no tread upon the floor.

But one leaf of the carved double door opened suddenly, framing against the dark honey of oil light the shape of a tall woman in ivory faille, her reddish-dark hair coiled thick above a face dry, smooth, and cold as white silk. By the glow of the many-paned lamps behind her, he could see the Undead glitter of her brown eyes.

“Mrs. Farren?” he said, using the family name of the Earls of Ernchester, and it surprised her into replying.

“Yes.” Then something changed in her eyes.

“Lady Ernchester?”

She didn't answer. He felt the touch of that sleepiness, that mental laziness of not paying attention, and forced it away; he saw in those glittering eyes that she felt that, too.

“My name is Dr. James Asher. I'd like to talk to you about Danny King.”

“Come in.”

She stepped back from the door, gestured him to a salon whose pilastered archway opened to the right of the hall. Her voice was low and very sweet, without seductiveness or artifice of any kind. As he followed her, Asher was acutely conscious of the thudding of his own heart. He wondered if she was, too.

The salon was large, perfectly orderly, but had a chilled air of long neglect. One dim oil lamp on the corner of a curlicued Baroque mantelpiece picked out the edges of the furnishings nearest it—graceful Hepplewhite chairs, the curve of a bow-front cabinet, and the claret-red gleam of carved mahogany in a thick archaic style. Asher wondered who would dust the place and brickbat that dingy front step, now that Danny King was dead.

Mrs. Farren said, “I've heard of you, Dr. Asher.” As in Ysidro's, there was neither commitment nor emotion in her voice. Standing before her in the small pool of lamplight, he could see the gleam of her protruding fangs, and the fact that, except when she spoke, the creamy thickness of her breasts did not rise or fall.

“My apologies for intruding,” he said, with a slight bow. “If you've heard of me you know I'm seeking information—and if you know Don Simon Ysidro, you probably know I'm not getting much. Was Daniel King your servant?”

“Yes.” She nodded once. Unlike Ysidro, though her voice was absolutely neutral, there was a world of brightness, of watchfulness, of feeling in her large, golden-brown eyes. “He was my husband's,” she added after a moment, and inwardly Asher sighed with relief—he'd been afraid for a moment that all vampires were as utterly uncommunicative as Don Simon. “His carriage-groom—a tiger, they used to call them. That was during our last . . .” She hunted for the word for a moment, dark brows flinching slightly together, and suddenly seemed infinitely more human. “Our last period of being of the world, I suppose you could say. We had a number of servants. In those days such extravagant eccentricities as barring a whole wing of the house and leading an utterly nocturnal existence were more accepted by servants than they are now. But Danny guessed.”

She stood with her back to the mantelpiece, her hands clasped lightly before her slender waist, in an attitude regal and slightly archaic, like a stiffly painted Restoration portrait. In life, Asher guessed, she had been a little plump, but that was all smoothed away now, like any trace of archaism in her speech. Her gown with its flared tulip skirt was modern, but the baroque pearls she wore in her ears could only have been so extravagantly set in the days of the last of the Stuart kings.

When she moved, it had the same unexpectedness Ysidro's movements did, that momentary inattention, and then finding her at his side. But she only said, “I suppose now that he's gone, it's I who must take your coat . . .”

“Did you make him a vampire?”

“No.” She hesitated a moment in the act of laying ulster, hat, and scarf on a nearby sideboard, her eyes moving from his, then back. “Grippen did that, at our request—and Danny's. Danny was very devoted to Charles—my husband.”

“Could you have?”

“Is that question pertinent?” she inquired levelly. “Or just curiosity?”

“The answer is that we would not have,” a voice spoke from the shadows, and Asher turned swiftly, having heard no creak from the floorboards that had murmured beneath his own weight. The man who stood there, face white as chalk in the gloom, seemed more like a ghost than a human being—thinnish, medium height, and with an indefinable air about him of shabbiness, of age, as if one would expect to see cobwebs caught in his short-cropped light-brown hair. “Not without Lionel's permission.”

“Lionel?”

“Grippen.” The vampire shook his head, as if the name tasted flat and old upon his tongue. There was a weariness to his movements, a slowness, like age that had not yet reached his face. Glancing swiftly back at Mrs. Farren, Asher saw her eyes on this newcomer filled with concern.

“He never would have stood for it,” the vampire explained. “He would have driven poor Danny out of every hole and corner within a year. He's very jealous that way.” He held out one thin hand, said, “I'm Ernchester,” in a voice that echoed the resonance of that vanished title.

Asher, who had gained a certain amount of familiarity with the Earls of Ernchester from his afternoon's researches, guessed: “Lord Charles Farren, third Earl of Ernchester?”

A faint smile brushed that white, square-jawed face, and for a moment there was a flicker of animation in the dead eyes. He inclined his head. “I fear I don't look much like the portrait,” he said. Any number of portraits of ancient gentlemen lurked on the gloomy salon walls, too obscured with time and shadow to be even remotely recognizable. But Asher reasoned that, since the third Earl of Ernchester had died in 1682, and any portrait would have been two-thirds devoted to an elaborate periwig, it scarcely mattered. And, in fact, the third Earl of Ernchester had not died. Asher frowned, trying to recall the name of the Countess, and with the curious perspicacity of vampires Mrs. Farren said, “Anthea.” She stepped over beside her husband and guided him to a chair near the cold hearth; in her brown eyes was still that wariness, that concern when she looked at him and that watchful enmity when she regarded Asher. Asher saw the way Ernchester moved when he took his seat— with the same economy of movement he had seen in Ysidro, and indeed in Lady Anthea, but without life.

“Did Danny sleep here?” he asked, and it was Anthea who replied, “Only very occasionally.” She straightened up and walked back to the hearth; it was a relief to Asher not to have to fight to see them move, as he did with Ysidro.

“And I take it it wasn't here that you found his body?” From the comer of his eye Asher was conscious of Ernchester looking away, resting his brow on his hand in a gesture that hid his face. It came as a shock to him that the Earl felt grief, and he saw anger for that, too—a protective anger—in Anthea Barren's brown eyes.

“If it had been,” she replied coolly, “you may be sure that the killer would have dispatched the both of us as well.”

He bit his lip. Then, answering her anger and not her words, “I'm sorry.”

Some of the tension seemed to slack in her strong frame, and the anger left her eyes. She, too, answered not his words. “It was foolish of you to come here,” she said. “Ysidro can be maddening, but, believe me, if he has kept things from you, it is because there is ground that it is perilous for a living man to tread.”

“That may be,” Asher said. “But as long as he has a pistol to my head—as long as someone I love will suffer for it if I don't find this killer—he's not going to be able to have it both ways. I want to be shut of this business quickly—before he finds where I've hidden away the woman whose life is in hostage to him, before the killer realizes he has a day hunter on his trail, learns who I am, and tracks down this woman also—before I get any deeper entangled into the side of this affair that isn't my business. But I can't do that unless I have more information than Ysidro's willing to give.”

She considered him for a long moment, her head a little tilted, as if with the glossy weight of her dark hair. “He is—a very old vampire,” she said after a time. “He is cautious, like an old snake in a hole; he errs on the side of caution, maybe. Maybe it's because he doesn't really care much about anything.”

It was odd to hear her speak of Ysidro as “old,” for the Spaniard had the queerly graceful air of a young man, almost a boy. It was Ernchester, thought Asher, with his oddly dead motions and his weary eyes, who seemed old. Asher glanced back at the chair where the Earl had sat, but the vampire was no longer there. Asher could not recall just when he had vanished. It was early evening, he remembered, and neither of his hosts had fed. But somehow, speaking to this quiet and beautiful woman who had been dead long before he was born, he could not fear her.

He wondered if that were because she meant him no harm, or because she was using some subtle variation of the mental glamour of the vampire on him, as Ysidro had tried to do on the train. Ysidro's words about “other vampires than I” lingered unnervingly in his thoughts.

After a long pause, Anthea went on, "I'm not sure whether he or Grippen is the elder—they were both made about the same time, by the same master. Rhys the White, that was. A minstrel, who was master vampire of London—oh, years, years.

“You understand that it was never usual for a commoner to survive as a vampire until cities began to get large enough for deaths to be invisible,” she added after a moment. “Only the landed had money and a place to be secure during the days when we sleep. Simon tells me that even in his time, London was like a small market town.” She smiled a little, her teeth white against a lip full but pale as wax. "And I suppose you'd think the London I grew up in paltry—we used to pick catkins in the marshes where Liverpool Station now stands.

“It was the nobles who could sustain their security, who could hunt far enough afield—who could live on the blood of cattle and deer, if need be, to prevent suspicion from falling on themselves. But one cannot live for too long on the blood of animals. One cannot go too long without the kill. One grows—dull. Stupid. Weary. All things begin to seem very pointless. And out of that dullness, it is very easy to be trapped and killed.”

She raised her eyes to his, folding her hands—soft and large and strong enough, he knew, to break his neck—over one another, her rings gleaming coldly. “That sounds vile, doesn't it? But that blunting of mind—that laxing of the concentration—is death to a vampire, whom the rising sun will reduce to ashes. Do you think us vile?”

“I think that what you are is vile,” Asher said evenly. “Does that matter to you?”

Her eyes left his again, to consider the pearls and moonstones of her ring. “If it mattered all that greatly I suppose I would have died years ago.” Another woman might have shrugged—he only sensed her setting the thought aside with some attenuated shift of musculature he did not quite see, before her eyes returned to his. “Of course Rhys was gone by the time Charles and I became what we are. He lived in the crypts below the old Church of St. Giles, haunting the waterfronts for sailors at night. He made his money playing in taverns, in Eastcheap and the Steelyard—the German Hansa merchants loved him. Simon tells me his touch upon the lute could bring tears to your eyes. That's where Simon met him, a thin, little, white-haired man, Simon says, so fragile to look at, like a little spider in strange garb two centuries out of date. There was a great frenzy of witch-killing in the days of old King James, and those in London who survived it perished in the Fire, all save Grippen and Simon. God knows where they found to sleep, in the days the fire burned.”

“But you weren't made until after the fire?” It was ancient history to him, like the Fall of Rome; the woodcuts of that monster conflagration that had devoured London in 1666.