Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘The captain of that ship is a courageous man,’ said Heller. ‘I’ve never really blamed the priest and the Levite, you know, for hastening away from the stricken traveler in the tale of the Good Samaritan. That’s the oldest trick in the book. Leave a dying man by the roadside as bait, and rob those who stop to help. That Samaritan was lucky he got away with his own life.’

  ‘It’s what most of the people in the First Class dining hall were saying this morning,’ said Lydia. ‘They’re probably right. And I’d probably tell them that the priest and the Levite went to Hell anyway, if my own daughter weren’t on board. Do you have children, Herr Heller?’

  ‘I did,’ said Heller. ‘He was killed in a mineshaft cave-in, because the company had skimped on the shoring in the tunnels. He was eight years old. That was when I became a Socialist.’

  Movement in the darkness.

  Asher checked his watch. It was eight o’clock, well after full dark. The barrage, which had begun late in the afternoon away to the northeast, seemed to be moving closer. Far off he could see activity around the casualty clearing station, lanterns barely visible through the tangle of orchard trees. He wondered if they were getting ready to clear out.

  Older vampires – Elysée, Asher knew, had become vampire around the year 1800 – were able to move about at the end of twilight: he hoped that pale flicker he had glimpsed was she. In the open motorcar, drawn up a few hundred yards from the clearing station among the tangle of disused trenches, he felt hopelessly exposed.

  He pulled the blanket around him, and waited.

  He’d left the clearing station while it was still light, to avoid suspicion, not to speak of the possibility that the commandant would get a reply to questions – if he’d wired them to Paris – that the Peugeot had been stolen. After jolting away on the shell-holed road he’d doubled back at Nesle, and pulled up to his present position at shortly before seven, where the ruins of one of old M’sieu Vouliers’s barns concealed the dim beam of his bullseye lantern from view.

  It would be safer, of course, to wait in the empty trenches that slashed the landscape to the west. The vampires would find him easily enough in either place, and if the enemy chose to shell the clearing station he would be far safer. But aside from the fact that the men in the front-line trenches were clearly using these secondary ones as latrines (rather than take a longer hike to the designated areas), the thought of the rats that swarmed the ditches and dugouts filled him with loathing. Even in the front-line trenches they were everywhere, barely bothering to get out of the way of the men who were forced to sleep, eat, and wait in those half-flooded muddy hell-pits for six weeks at a time. Last year – during his stint as a ‘listener’ – Asher had sometimes gone with bored soldiers on shooting expeditions to the less inhabited portions of the foul labyrinth. The thought of sitting down there in the darkness tonight was more than he cared to deal with.

  At least, he thought, this early in spring one didn’t have to deal with maggots wriggling on every surface as well.

  He tried not to think about the fact that he wasn’t going to have access to a newspaper until sometime tomorrow. Even if the ship was torpedoed the news wouldn’t be printed.

  Stop that. It was, as he’d seen in Paris, another way in which vampires hunted. The older ones could get your mind to drift, so you didn’t see them until it was too late.

  She’s fine. She’s safe …

  He shivered in the damp wind. Like a thousand other rendezvous. How many hundred nights spent waiting, for somebody to show up with information: a word, a name, a packet of letters or maps. Prague, Vienna, Constantinople, Tsingtao. The sour darkness of the marshland below the ruins of Nineveh. Wondering if he’d be quietly on a train the following morning with his information tucked into a hollowed walking stick or the lining of his luggage, or if something was going to go wrong, that would result in his death.

  Seventeen years of it, before he’d had enough.

  Before Africa …

  There. Movement again.

  He flexed his hand, which he had wrapped with the silver chains from his wrists. The silver would badly burn a younger vampire. Even Elysée, seasoned by the kills of a century, would be scorched and seared, forced to flee and seek healing in the energy released by a kill. He wondered if killing three and four times a night rendered even the young vampires, the fledglings, tougher than those he’d encountered in the days and the times of peace.

  It was the kind of question Lydia would have asked Ysidro, he thought.

  Don’t think about them …

  He snapped his mind back to full concentration in time to see two vampires about a yard from the car, visible in the sudden glare of an exploding shell a half-mile to the east.

  He switched on the car’s headlamps and brought up his silver-wrapped hand, but he’d already recognized Elysée’s fledgling Joël, fair-haired and pretty as a girl in the evening clothes he’d worn last night. The other, dressed in the uniform of a French colonel, was also fair – Elysée liked blonde men – but of a heroic handsomeness, as tall as Asher and broad of shoulder. Asher wondered if he’d stolen the uniform from one of his victims, or had purchased it from some venal stores clerk. It was clean, smart, and fitted him as if tailored.

  Asher saluted him, letting him see the coils of chain that gleamed around his hand.

  ‘Keep watch, Joël,’ the pseudo-colonel said, and the smaller vampire faded into the darkness.

  The ‘colonel’ regarded him in silence for a moment, and another explosion flashed sudden and sinister, reflected in his eyes.

  ‘You’ve spoken with Elysée?’ asked Asher politely, but did not offer his hand.

  The officer took a step nearer, wary. ‘Do you know where she is?’

  Asher shook his head. ‘Looking for you, I presume. She wasn’t pleased when she heard you’d made fledglings of your own – if you are indeed Augustin Malette.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And if what Joël says is true – that you’re planning to set yourself up as master of some other city – I assume you’ve been recruiting helpers to do it with.’

  The gold head nodded again in assent. ‘Paris has changed,’ said the vampire, in a hoarse baritone and an inflection Asher recognized as belonging to the lower-class neighborhoods of that city’s Right Bank. ‘Between the Boche and that swine Bonaparte gutting half the districts’ – by which Asher guessed he meant the third Napoleon, not the first – ‘there’s not a lot left of the city where I grew up. I should be just as happy to leave it.’

  ‘I know the feeling.’ Asher thought of the bombed-out ruin of the countryside around them. ‘Joël said that two of your fledglings had vanished?’

  Augustin Malette glanced over his shoulder, as if fearing to be overheard. ‘Yves and Miriyam,’ he said. ‘Captain Yves Galerien, pied-noir from Algeria. Miriyam was an ambulance driver, an Algerian Jewess. I took them both, in 1915, near Soissons. One of the Prague vampires, Petrus, told me – showed me – how one … what one does, to create a fledgling. To … to take, to hold, the soul of a victim in one’s own mind.’

  For an instant, his face convulsed with distaste.

  ‘And I take it Elysée never told you what happens when one of your fledglings dies?’

  ‘No. Miriyam … when she was … was killed, I felt it. Not what had happened to her, but the pain. Days of it. I knew it was she, but I couldn’t ask Elysée. The Graf – Graf Szgedny – said that not all masters feel it to that degree. Some feel nothing at all. But I’d seen …’

  He hesitated, looked around him again, searching the darkness.

  Quietly, Asher said, ‘Had you seen a man named Barvell, here among the trenches?’

  ‘Faugh.’ Then, after a long moment’s stillness, added, ‘What do you know about Barvell?’

  ‘What do you know?’

  Another silence. Augustin was still listening all around him, though Asher heard little beyond the distant pounding of the guns. Behind the arrogance in the vam
pire’s eyes, Asher read fear. He knew that Elysée de Montadour herself was ignorant of the deeper lore of the Undead state – and jealously guarded those elements of it that she did know. Keeping her fledglings ignorant in their turn was part of her control over them, and he guessed that this heroic-looking figure in the pale-blue uniform was seriously inexperienced in the simple logistics of being Undead.

  Of knowing what situations were perilous, and what were not.

  At length Augustin said, ‘He met me in the Boul’ Mich’, before the War. He knew who and what I was. Offered to buy me a drink, damn his cheek.’

  ‘And did he?’

  The man’s fangs gleamed in his ironic laugh. ‘An eleven-year-old whore, jaggered to the eyebrows. And you’ll laugh, Anglais – like that brainless witch Elysée laughed – when I tell you, I bunked it. I didn’t touch the little bint. He’d shot something in her arm – I saw the mark – but how was I to know it wasn’t silver nitrate? Or one of those other things everybody always whispers about, that’ll paralyze us, turn the blood in our veins to poison?’

  His mouth twitched at the recollection. ‘Serge called me coward, to turn down a kill, and a sweet little tasty kill like that one. You should have took the child and the man, too, while he was getting himself happy at the sight of her death. That’s all he wanted, he said. But it wasn’t.’

  ‘You know that?’

  ‘I know.’ He turned his head sharply at some noise below the range of Asher’s hearing. Then he stepped close, eyes like fire in the headlamps’ reflected glare. Asher raised his silver-wrapped hand warningly, but the vampire came within arms’ length of the car, his face suddenly like a demon’s. ‘If you’re working for her, Anglais—’

  Asher shook his head. ‘She deserted me here last night, after coming out with me from Paris. I think she thought she could follow Joël to you. You know what Barvell was looking for, when he spoke to you in Paris? Why he captured, and killed, two of your fledglings, the two least experienced and weakest vampires in this section of the Front? Has anyone else along the Front made fledglings?’

  Augustin shook his head. ‘The masters keep a tight rein on things,’ he said. ‘Damn them. Damn Szgedny, and that spidery old spook Hieronymus of Venice. They’ve warned us all – as if there wasn’t enough and to spare for everyone and a thousand more. Bastards, every one of them, and Elysée the Queen Witch and stupid as a cobblestone to boot.’

  ‘Did you tell her about Barvell?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did Barvell offer to help you against her?’

  The gleaming eyes narrowed, suspicion in every line of that godlike face. ‘What do you know of it? Who’ve you been talking to?’

  ‘No one,’ said Asher. ‘It sticks out a mile. What do you offer a whore, or a beggar, to walk down a dark alleyway with you? Money. What do you offer a drunkard? A bottle. He offered you what he guessed you’d follow: freedom from your master. He knows enough about vampires, to promise that.’

  A fang glinted, with the lifting of the vampire’s lip.

  ‘Did he speak to you again?’

  ‘He wrote me twice. Second time, I had to give up a perfectly good ’commodation address, for fear he’d be watching the place and follow me. God only knows how he found out where I got my letters. I didn’t know what he wanted, but he wanted something … And it was pretty clear he knew about us. Merde,’ he added, turning his glance to the east. ‘Here they come.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  The roar of the guns suddenly redoubled to the east, and the open car shuddered with the shaking of the ground. Beneath the artillery chattered the staccato of defenders’ machine guns; the Germans, presumably, had crept close to the British lines and were now readying a charge. Asher reached for the Peugeot’s self-starter and flinched as a shell screamed overhead and struck to the west of them. Before Asher could breathe or blink Augustin sprang to the car’s running board, grabbed Asher’s coat, and dragged him out.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ he added, as Asher brought up his silver-wrapped hand. ‘Get under cover!’

  The vampire thrust him in the direction of the nearest trench.

  As he did so another shell landed to the west of the car, closer than the one before. The next second a hit obliterated the Vouliers’ barn – in which Asher had napped one hot August afternoon thirty years previously – and Asher plunged, slithering, down the mucky side of one of the caved-in trenches, in which Joël had already taken refuge. When another explosion bleached the sky above them he saw rats streaming along the bottom of the trench on either side of the wide band of muddy water that flooded it. Clods and filth rained down, and the three men – living and undead – huddled into what had been a sleeping dugout for shelter.

  ‘This way.’ Augustin took his upper arm, dragged him toward a zigzagged, narrow communications trench that had at one time led back toward the rear. Asher stumbled after him, flattening against the wall every time a shell struck near. The vampire’s keener hearing seemed able to distinguish between the genuinely dangerous trajectories, and the simple near-misses, so they made good time. At length they ducked into another dugout, this one almost a proper room (and we’d better not take a hit above us), flooded ankle-deep, shored up with the broken beams of some farmhouse or shed, and still containing the tattered, rat-stinking remains of a couple of mattresses and a broken Louis XVI chair.

  Between flashes of the explosions above them, the room was pitch black.

  After a time, Augustin whispered, ‘What is it that he wants? This Barvell …’

  ‘You didn’t try to find that out?’ inquired Asher softly. ‘In May of 1913?’

  The vampire cursed, unimaginatively. ‘Some muck. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.’

  ‘He’s come up with a way to subdue vampires to his will,’ said Asher quietly. ‘Did he tell you that? Something chemical, I’m guessing, from what’s left in his laboratory. Some way to make them his slaves. And I’m guessing that he knew that every vampire in Europe would be here, at the Front, and that it was here that he could find subjects to try it out on. When did your fledglings disappear? Yves, and Miriyam?’

  ‘November,’ said the vampire. ‘And yes, I thought I saw him – glimpsed him – in a convoy, a week after Miriyam’s death. I knew he was back in Paris, but I didn’t think—’

  ‘Why else would he have returned? He already knew about the Paris nest, probably more than any of you realized.’ Asher shrugged. ‘He’d have guessed you’d be somewhere in this area of the Front, close to Paris, to territory you know. He’d have guessed you’d have made fledglings.’

  ‘And he was telling the truth?’ Augustin’s voice sounded suddenly thoughtful in the darkness, and his hand tightened on Asher’s arm. ‘He can enslave the Undead. Any undead? You know this of him?’

  ‘I know this. He’s in the pay of an American, a millionaire. I don’t know if the man’s an agent of someone else, or working on his own.’

  ‘Where is he now?’ asked the vampire. ‘This Barvell?’

  ‘On his way to America. And I don’t think there’d be much chance of making a deal with him. More likely you’d be enslaved yourself. He—’

  ‘You let me be the judge of that.’ Another shell struck outside, farther off this time, and in the brief gleam Asher saw the calculating look in Augustin’s narrowed eyes. ‘This method of his, of enslaving vampires to his will – it is … science, you say? It can be used by anyone?’

  Because Augustin was young and ignorant in his powers, Asher felt the vampire’s clumsy attempt to turn his thoughts aside before he struck. He dodged, shucked himself out of his greatcoat, and even as the claws raked at the side of his neck, slapped with the silver wrapped around his hand. He felt it connect with flesh and heard Augustin scream. Joël, he recalled, was near the dugout’s entry: he flattened back against the earth wall behind him, hand raised, ready for a second attack – if it’s both of them I may be able to slip past …

  A whisper of sound – clo
thing. He swung in that direction with his hand, then flung himself back into a corner of the cramped earthen room. A hand caught his neck in the darkness and released him at once – he was still wearing treble chains of silver around his throat – and he heard a hoarse, sobbing scream of rage.

  Then silence, for what felt like ten minutes but was actually, he thought later, about ninety seconds.

  The dugout shook under the force of another explosion and harsh light flared outside.

  The room before him was empty.

  It was ten o’clock before Lydia could escape from the protracted ritual of First Class dinner. Nearly everyone at the table – and the other tables as well, so far as Lydia could overhear – was still preoccupied with the ship’s malfunctioning wireless. Indeed, most seemed considerably more indignant about the absence of stock market news than about the possibility of a torpedo attack. Certainly no one seemed concerned with the fate of the crews of the Cumberland or the Baldwin.

  Don Simon, impeccable in evening dress, was waiting for her on the private promenade outside Aunt Louise’s suite.

  ‘Is it possible for you to listen for submarines,’ Lydia asked him, ‘the way I’ve seen you listen for peoples’ dreams? Trace the crew somehow by their dreams? Or does the sea deaden your perception the way earth does?’

  ‘At midnight.’ The vampire considered, his eyes on the inky blackness that lay beyond the promenade’s lights. His skeletal face was haggard, as if even with Barvell’s periodic treatments some deep pain threatened to consume him.

  ‘T’would be at the expense of missing speech with our good Captain Palfrey, and I mislike letting him go so long without actual converse with me. ’Tis true I chose the young man for his stupidity – aye –’ he raised a gloved hand against Lydia’s indignation – ‘’twas the act of a cynic and an evildoer, and an insult to a good and well-meaning young man. Yet a man of such mental acuity as yourself, or our James, would long ere this have spotted the discrepancies in my story. Few on board,’ he added softly, ‘will not at least know that there was a riot below-decks last night, sparked by rumor of a vampire on the ship.’