James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (18 page)

Asher shook his head. “I asked Ysidro last night. I've been trying to work that out, too—that half-hour or so of leeway. That's what's puzzling me. Ysidro was caught at dawn on the second morning of the Great Fire of 1666. He says the thinnest gray light before sunrise burned his face and hands as if he'd stuck them into a furnace—more than that, his arms, chest, and parts of his legs and back beneath his clothes were scarred and blistered as well. According to Lady Ernchester, it was nearly fifty years before the scars went away.”

“But they did go away,” Lydia murmured thoughtfully. “So vampire flesh does regenerate . . .” Her dark brows pulled even deeper, an edge of thought hardening her brown eyes, as if she looked past the piled whites and grays of the late-morning sky to some arcane laboratory of the mind beyond.

“Pseudoflesh, he called it,” Asher said.

“Interesting.” She reached up to unsnag a long strand of hair from the braided trim of her collar—Asher had to keep his hands firmly in his pockets to avoid helping her. “Because I got that lover's knot from Evelyn this morning. I've had a look at it and those vertebrae under my microscope, and they look—I'm not sure how to put it and I wish it were capable of greater magnification. The bone was pretty damaged, but the hair ... I'd like to be able to examine it at a subcellular level—and their flesh and blood, for that matter.”

Of course, Asher thought. He himself saw the vampires linguistically and historically, when he wasn't simply trying to think of ways to avoid having his throat cut by them; Lydia would see vampirism as a medical puzzle.

“Do you know how petrified wood comes about?” she asked, as they neared Marble Arch with its scattered trees and loafers and turned back the way they came, two solitary and anonymous figures in the wide, cleared spaces of the Park's brown lawns. “Or how fish and ferns and dinosaur bones are fossilized in the Cambrian sandstones? It's a process of replacement, cell by cell, of the organic by the inorganic. There's been a lot of research done lately on viruses, germs that are smaller than bacteria, so small we can't see them with a microscope—yet. Small enough to operate at a subcellular level. I've been reading Horace Blaydon's articles on viruses in the blood; he did a lot of work on it while I was studying with him. I'm wondering whether a vampire's immortality comes from some kind of cellular replacement or mutation —whether vampirism is in fact a virus or an interlocking syndrome of viruses that alter the very fabric of the cells. That would account for the extreme photosensitivity, the severe allergic reactions to things like silver and garlic and certain woods—why you'd have to fill the mouth with garlic to deaden the brain and stake the heart with one of those allergic woods to paralyze the cardiovascular system—why you'd have to separate the central nervous system . . .”

“And transmitted by blood contact.” Again he wondered tangentially why, in the face of such an overwhelming body of corresponding evidence, there was such paucity of belief. “All the legends speak of vampires' victims becoming vampires. The vampires themselves speak of 'getting' fledglings, but that's apparently a matter of choice. Ernchester said that Grippen would not have stood for anyone but himself making a new vampire, but Calvaire evidently had no trouble initiating Bully Joe Davies.”

“Initiating, but not training,” Lydia said thoughtfully. “Or—was it just a lack of training that made him clumsy enough for you to spot him? Do the psychic abilities that seem to be part of this viral syndrome only develop with time? How old were the vampires who were murdered?”

“Another interesting point,” Asher said. “Lotta had been a vampire since the mid-1700s; Hammersmith and King were younger, almost exactly one hundred years. Ysidro saw all of them made. I don't know about Calvaire. One of the many things,” he added dryly, “that we don't know about Calvaire.”

“Valentin Calvaire,” Ysidro murmured, settling back against the worn leather squabs of the hansom cab and tenting his long fingers like a stack of ivory spindles, reminding Asher somehow of a marmalade tomcat so old that its fur has gone nearly white. “Curious, how many trails seem to lead back to Valentin Calvaire.”

“He was the first victim—presumably,” Asher said. “At least the first victim killed in London; the only victim not from London; the only victim whose body we have never found. What do you know about him?”

“Less than I should like,” the vampire replied, his voice soft beneath the rattling clamor of the theater-going crowds in Drury Lane all about them. “He was, as I said, one of the Paris vampires—he came here to London eight months ago.”

“Why?”

“That was a topic which he never permitted to arise.”

The vampire's tone was absolutely neutral, but Asher's mustache twitched as he detected the distaste in that chilly statement. Ysidro, he surmised with a hidden grin, had probably had very little use for M. Calvaire, ***

“I take it he was not of the nobility.”

“What passes for nobility in France these days,” Ysidro stated, with soft viciousness, “would not have been permitted to clear away the tables of those whose birth and style of breeding they so pitifully attempt to emulate. Anything resembling decent blood in that country was flushed down the gutters of the Place Louis-Quinze—excuse me, the Place de la Concorde—a hundred and seventeen years ago. What is left is the seed of those who fled or those who made themselves useful to that condottiere Napoleon. Scarcely what one would call honorable antecedents.”

After a moment's silence, he went on, “Yes, Calvaire claimed noble birth. It was precisely the sort of thing he would do.”

“How long had he been a vampire?”

Ysidro's dark eyes narrowed with thought. “My guess would be less than forty years,”

Asher raised his eyebrows in surprise. He had, he realized, subconsciously equated age with power among the vampires—it was to the two oldest vampires, Ysidro and Grippen, that the others bowed in fear. The younger ones—Bully Joe Davies and the Opera dancer Chloe—seemed weak, almost pathetic.

“Consider it,” Ysidro urged levelly. “Paris has been in a state of intermittent chaos since the fall of the Bourbon kings. Thirty-five years ago it underwent siege by the Prussians, shelling, riots, and government —if such it can be termed—by a rabble of rioters who formed a Commune and gave short shrift to anyone whom they suspected of treason—for which read, disagreement with their ideals. Vampires as a group rely largely upon a tranquil society to protect them. Wolves do not hunt in a burning forest.”

Just as well, Asher thought dourly. During the riots in the Shantung Province, he'd had enough to worry about without a red-eyed kuei creeping up on him in the burned ruins of the Lutheran mission where he'd been hiding. After a moment, he asked, “And how did Grippen react to Calvaire's coming here?”

Ysidro was silent for a time, while the cab jolted its way through the increasing crowds of traffic toward the Waterloo Bridge. Rain made a faint, brittle whispering sound on the hardened leather roof of the cab. It had begun again late in the afternoon, while Asher was in the Public Records Office in quest of property bought in the last eight months in Lambeth by either Valentin Calvaire, Chretien Sanglot, or, just possibly, Joseph Davies. Now the whole city smelled of moisture, ozone, the exhaust of motorcars, the dung of horses, and the salt-and-sewage pungency of the river.

“Not well,” he said at length. “You understand, we—vampires—find travel unnerving in the extreme. We are conservatives at heart; hence the myth that a vampire must rest within his native soil. Rather, he must always have a secure resting place, and such things are difficult to come by on the road. Calvaire had naturally heard of both Grippen and myself. When he arrived he—promenaded himself, I suppose you would say—and did not drink of human blood until he had been contacted by the master vampire of the city.”

“Grippen,” Asher said. “Not yourself.”

For the first time, he saw the flash of irritation, of anger, in the Spaniard's yellow eyes. But Ysidro only said mildly, “Even so.”

“Why?” he pressed,

Ysidro merely turned his head a little, haughtily contemplating the throngs on the crowded flagways from beneath the lowered lids of his eyes.

“I've heard of Grippen's cadre, Grippen's get,” Asher persisted. “Lord Ernchester, Anthea, Lotta, Chloe, Ned Hammersmith . . . Even though Danny King was the Farrens' servant, even though it was to them that he owed loyalty, it was Grippen who made him, 'at Charles' request and his own.' According to Anthea Farren, you were both made by the same master vampire at about the same time. Why is he the Master of London, and not yourself?”

The memory of Anthea's face returned to him, framed in the dark hair with its red streaks like henna. She had warned him, had pulled him out of Grippen's hold; she had held the enraged vampire back from killing him while he escaped. Yet she and her husband were also Grippen's get—as Bully Joe Davies had said, Grippen's slaves. Why slaves?

For a moment he thought Ysidro would maintain that disdainful alabaster silence. But without turning his head back, the vampire replied, “Perhaps because I do not care to trouble myself.” The familiar supercilious note was absent from his voice as he said it; he sounded, if anything, a little weary. Asher had the momentary sense of dealing, not with a vampire, but with the man whose occasional, oddly sweet smile flickered across those narrow features.

But like the smile, that evanescent glimmer of resignation, of a vanished humanness, was gone—like the things one thinks one sees by starlight. Ysidro's voice became again as neutral as his coloring, as if even the holding of opinions had become meaningless to him over the years. “And it would be a trouble, as well as a certain amount of peril, to challenge Grippen's authority. I personally do not care to disrupt my existence by stooping to fight with a peon such as he. Calvaire was evidently not so fastidious. He swore allegiance to Grippen, but it is clear that he never intended to submit himself to our medical friend's authority ...”

“Medical?” Asher's voice was sharp, and Ysidro looked at him once more with all his old chilly disinterest.

“Lionel Grippen was a Doctor of Medicine and accounted very learned in his time, though, considering the practices of the day, this was not praising him to the skies. For a few decades past his initiation to the vampire state, he kept up with medical practice. Now he reads the journals, curses, and hurls them across the room, enraged that they no longer speak of anything with which he is familiar. Though I understand,” he added, “that it has been nearly two centuries since he has done even that.”

“Has he, indeed?” Asher stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “You wouldn't know if he still has any of his old kit?”

“I doubt the originals still exist, though he would know where and how to obtain more.” The vampire regarded him now with interest, his head tipped a little to one side, his long, colorless hair blowing against the fragile cheekbones with the movement of the night. “Interesting,” Asher said. “Here, cabby! Pull up!” The man drew rein, cursing as he edged his horse out of the stream of traffic pouring off the Waterloo Bridge. Foot traffic was heavy here as well. Ysidro slipped from the cab and vanished at once into the jostling shapes beneath the blaze of the bridge's lights. At Asher's command, the cabby started forward again, grumbling at care-for-nothing toff fares, and proceeded to the chaos of cabs, carts, omnibuses, and pedestrians surrounding the half-constructed sprawl of Waterloo Station, a Dantesque vision of brick, gaslight, scaffolding, and smoke. As the cab jostled through the porridge of vehicles, Asher pulled off his gloves and drew from his ulster pocket a thick package. lambert's, said the modest label, with a discreet crest.

With chilled fingers, he drew out two silver chains like the one he wore around his neck beneath his starched and respectable collar. It was tricky fastening the small clips around his wrists; but, for obvious reasons, it had been impossible to solicit Ysidro's help. He tugged his shirt cuffs down over them and pulled his gloves back on, for the night was cold as well as wet; there was another shape in the tissue wrappings, narrow, like a child's arm bone. He freed it and held it to the rain-streaming light—a sterling silver letter opener in the shape of an ornamental dagger. Having only bought it that afternoon, he had had no time to whet it and doubted in any case that the blade would hold much of an edge, but the point was certainly sharp enough to pierce flesh. Like a Scotsman's skean dhu it had no guard. It fit neatly into his boot.

He paid off the cab in front of the station. The man grunted, cracked his whip over his jaded old screw of a horse, and vanished as surely as the vampire had into the teeming mob.

For a time, Asher stood in the open space of light and noise before the station, hearing the screeches of the trains, the hiss of steam, and the voices of thousands of travelers shouting, and feeling the rumble of the engines through the ground under his feet. Weariness made him feel slightly disoriented, for he had waited for Bully Joe Davies in the alley behind Prince of Wales Colonnade for hours after his return from Ernchester House, and had risen to meet Lydia at the Park after only a few hours' sleep. He had meant to nap during the day; but, between Chancery Lane and Lambert's in Bond Street, the rainy afternoon had slipped too quickly away.

Now he felt chilled and weary, trying to recall when he had last slept through the night. A woman jostled past him, unseeing; as he watched her too-bright plaid dress retreat across the square to the platform, he remembered the blonde woman with the two children on the train from Oxford and shivered.

In the field—“abroad,” as he and his colleagues politely termed those places where they were licensed to steal and kill—the train station was God's own gift to agents, particularly one as vast as Waterloo, even with half its platforms still under construction: a thousand ways to bolt and so absolutely impersonal that you might brush shoulders with your own brother on the platform and never raise your eyes. Beyond question it was one of the hunting grounds of the vampire.