Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  Lydia reflected on the lines of communication – cabin stewards, barbers, dining-room staff … and thence to the valets and maids. They all ate together, and passed gossip from one to another, and thence, back to their employers. ‘Captain Palfrey might not be … well, there might not be a great deal of furniture in his attic,’ she admitted. ‘But he has the kindness, and the simple decency, to refuse to serve you, if he knew what you were.’

  ‘’Tis more than that, Lady.’ Don Simon’s fingers were cold within the pearl-colored kid of his glove as he took her hand. ‘He is a soldier, and, I think, hath the soul of a hero. ’Twere not beyond possible that, in the anger of disillusion and the outrage at these killings – for how would anyone believe that there are two vampires aboard one vessel? – he would turn upon me and kill me. And he might well think it appropriate to kill you as well.’

  She hadn’t thought of that, and after the first shocked, he wouldn’t! anger flashed through her. Though his expression didn’t change she knew he saw it: anger at him, for putting her in the position of being accomplice – accessory after the fact – to his murders. And to murders that weren’t his.

  ‘I need a henchman, Mistress,’ he finished quietly. ‘You – and Miss Miranda – need a protector. And will the more so, should this vampire – or vampires – get ashore in New York, and oblige us to track him there.’

  He was right, of course. He must have seen the indignation in her eyes, for he went on, with the faint flicker of a human smile, ‘Fear not, Lady. There is too much in this that we cannot know or control, for me to refuse my help on shipboard simply to stay you from killing me. The situation on this vessel grows hourly more volatile, to say nothing of the danger that lies –’ his gesture took in the blackness of the invisible sea – ‘separated from us by no more than a curtain, perhaps. I will do what I can. But to touch the dreams of those to whom I have never spoken – those whose eyes I have not met – takes time. I need a door, an entry of some kind, into the deep realm of dreams. With time, at the hour of midnight, I can—’

  He broke off, turning his head, then touched Lydia’s elbow and led her down the flight of steps toward the fore deck well, out of sight of the promenade above.

  A moment later Lydia heard Princess Gromyko’s honey-dark voice: ‘And, Lady Mountjoy, I swear my poor Izora was white as a ghost when she told me this! She dreads this evening’s revelations, she says, but because of what the shining figure told her, she knows she must find out! She says, only in the company of the true believers, and protected by the strength of their inner light—’

  ‘I knew it!’ boomed Aunt Louise’s voice. ‘What time will the séance begin?’

  ‘Your idea?’ murmured Don Simon’s voice in Lydia’s ear, as the two women went into Aunt Louise’s suite. ‘Very good!’

  ‘I’ve managed to get two hypodermic syringes from the infirmary,’ said Lydia. ‘I told Dr Liggatt that the ones I use for injections of vitamins, and for a paregoric solution for neuralgia, were broken. Dr Barvell should have brewed enough antivenin by this time, to take you through to New York, and a day or two beyond until he can get his laboratory set up there. Depending on how much he’s made, I hope to be able to take enough from each ampoule for a few injections for you, without the loss being obvious.’

  Rather like Georg Heller, she thought, stealing one cigarette from each of Vodusek’s stolen packets, lest the thief realize his hiding place had been rumbled.

  ‘It will buy us time, should we need it. If I can, I’ll take small amounts of the chemicals he has as well, to make more …’

  She bit off the words, once we get to New York.

  Do I let him go ashore? Knowing what he is?

  Do I help him? Knowing what he is?

  She didn’t know, so she only went on, ‘I’ve already told Ellen – who thinks we’re hunting German spies – to gather up as many small jars as she can, for whatever I can pinch. And if I have time I’ll search Mr Cochran’s stateroom and luggage again, now that I have a better idea what I’m looking for. If you’ll stand watch on the promenade …’

  ‘I shall, Lady.’ The vampire listened for a moment, then led her up the steps to the sheltered walkway again. ‘I misdoubt that time shall vex you tonight. Cochran gave orders this morning – and sleep though we might in our coffins, we the Undead can hear what goes on near us – to Kimball and his attendant lubbers, that they should sufficiently impair the engines of this craft, so as to slow its progress toward America and permit him more time for his search.

  ‘’Twill come to nothing,’ he added, as Lydia’s eyes flared in alarm. ‘He catechized the five of them on the best way to set about it. As the owner of steamships and railroads himself, he has a nice understanding of the workings of such machines, and I doubt not that ’twas he who had the Marconi room disabled. But from their conversation as his Merrie Men departed ’twas clear they have no more notion of what he meant than they have of how to make pastry crust. Nor, I think, will they find it possible to even get at the ship’s engines unobserved. Yet they will be all the night in trying.’

  He stopped with her, just outside the door of Aunt Louise’s suite. ‘Thank you, Mistress.’ The voices of the princess and Lydia’s aunt came clearly through the panels; they sounded occupied for a good while yet. ‘I know you would kill me, ere you let me be carried ashore as Cochran’s slave. I daresay, ere you would let me go ashore in America at all.’

  In the cool electric light his yellow eyes seemed nearly colorless, gazing into hers.

  Helplessly, she said, ‘Yes. Yes, I would.’ She thought that saying the words would hurt, but it didn’t, and afterwards, she felt a kind of peace. She knew he’d guessed, of course, but felt glad in a way that it was in the open between them.

  ‘I should rather that power lay in your hand, Lady, than in his.’ He took her hand in both of his, and kissed her palm.

  ‘And I shall protect you, and your child, through the remainder of the voyage,’ he went on, ‘and as far beyond it as may be needful. We know not yet what this American will do to protect my … counterpart … here on board, nor what steps he will consider appropriate once we reach land.’

  And seeing, perhaps, the tears in her eyes, as much of exhaustion and uncertainty as grief, he added gently, ‘Where there is life, there is hope, Mistress. And though my life is done, yet the gates of Hell have not yet clanged shut behind me.’

  Then he was gone.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Hands unsteady with shock, Asher dug in his pockets for the matches and candle-ends he always carried. The flash outside seemed to have been the last hurrah for the barrage. By the noise of the Vickers guns, and the shouting of the men, the Germans were trying to rush the trench, perhaps a hundred yards to the east.

  Had the Peugeot survived, he wondered? And if so, would he be able to retrieve it before Augustin and Joël commandeered it to head back to Paris?

  Damn Augustin, he thought. He’s a fool if he thinks he can make a deal with Barvell without being enslaved himself, so it’s just as well Barvell’s out of the country.

  He wondered if the man had a confederate in Paris.

  The candle flare showed Asher his coat floating in the three inches of water that flooded the dugout floor. A rat had scrambled up onto it, that bared its teeth at him and fled when Asher poked the flame at it. He was freezing cold, but the heavy wool was soaked, and even trying to carry it, he guessed, would soak the rest of him and chill him still more.

  Reluctantly, he sloshed toward the dugout entrance.

  Eyes flashed in the blackness outside.

  They could see in darkness and they knew he was there. He took two strides back to the corner, knowing it would do him little good. Three of them …

  Then Augustin cannoned into the dugout as if shot from a catapult, nearly falling over the broken-down chair. He was clutching the side of his face, welted and burned from the silver on Asher’s hand, and with the poison of the metal, and the stress of pain, he
had lost his powers of illusion. His face was the face of a demon, skin stretched thin across bone. His eyes, when he saw Asher, flashed with animal hatred and he strode toward him, fangs gleaming.

  ‘Be still.’

  The voice from the entryway stopped Augustin in his tracks. Still holding his cheek, he stood hunched, trembling with agony, as a tall old man ducked his way in. Joël trailed meekly behind.

  Vampires, Asher knew, look as they wish to look, save when they were hurt, as Augustin was hurt. Vampires taken into the world of the Undead in their prime, continued to look – as Augustin had looked – like young men and women, heedless of the centuries that might well have passed over their heads. They looked, Asher sometimes thought, the way they looked to themselves in their own dreams. The way they existed in their own minds: beautiful, strong, and young.

  He had only encountered two vampires whose illusory image was that of age: faces seamed and wrinkled, hair gray, hands spotted.

  One of these had been the Master of Peking, the ancient lord of the Chinese vampires.

  The other stood in the flooded dugout before him, from whom even the rats fled in terror.

  The Graf Szgedny Aloyïs Corvinus, the Master of Prague. Silver eyes, silver hair, and a face like a thousand-year-old Nordic god.

  ‘Anglus.’ He made no move. Like Ysidro, he had settled into the stillness that lies beyond life. But about him hung an atmosphere of animal brutality, cold, calculating, and absolutely unconcerned with the living or the dead. A brain that lived on after the soul was gone.

  ‘I hoped to find you, ere you fell victim to the intrigues of the Paris nest. What is this rumor I hear, of a man in Paris who has a means to bend the Undead to his will?’

  ‘The man’s name is Barvell.’ Asher replied in the old-fashioned High German in which he had been addressed. ‘He’s a fake nerve doctor, or at least he was before the War. A student, as I understand, of occult lore. He’s come up with some method – chemical, I think – to incapacitate and enslave vampires. I have reason to believe he’s done so with Don Simon Ysidro, and is taking him to America in the service of an American millionaire named Cochran.’

  Something altered in the dead eyes, a far-off steely glint. ‘Cochran,’ said the Graf. ‘The owner of the Roterberg Steel mills. The Berlin vampires would go there during strikes, knowing they could kill workers without anyone asking questions.’

  ‘That’s him.’ Asher had the sensation of talking to a sentient cobra.

  ‘And this Barvell is his servant?’

  ‘Barvell may have presented the scheme to Cochran, and asked for financial backing. Or Cochran may have heard of his work, and sought him out. Either way, it’s Cochran who pays the bills and calls the tune now.’

  The cold eyes went to Augustin, and he switched to an archaic, eighteenth-century French. ‘I heard you say that you were acquainted with this Barvell?’

  ‘We … We had met, my lord.’ Augustin’s reply came out as a stammer. Elysée had made Augustin vampire, and supposedly held command over her fledgling’s will and mind – though Asher wondered what the outcome of a contest of wills would be, between them. But few vampires in Europe would go up against the Graf.

  ‘And did he,’ inquired Asher quietly, ‘offer to give you the means to dispose of Elysée de Montadour, if you would meet him in some quiet place?’

  The wounded vampire looked sulkily around his fingers at Asher. ‘When he came back in 1913, he said he would make me Master of Paris. I didn’t go,’ he added. ‘The man’s offer smelled, a mile away. I’m not an idiot.’

  Szgedny neither moved nor spoke, but something in his silence implied that he disbelieved this last assertion.

  ‘And was it at that point,’ pursued Asher quietly, ‘that you burgled his flat?’

  The Graf tilted his head a little in Augustin’s direction. The golden vampire answered that movement rather than Asher’s question. ‘Only to see if the man bore watching. There was a laboratory there, blood and bones and the skulls of children and animals. Clothing, in a box in a cupboard, the sort of thing you see poor children wear, the ones who sleep in doorways and in the Metro stations. A pile of newspapers, like a newsboy would have been selling. A box of cheap candy, like you’d use to lure a kid.’ He shrugged. ‘Nasty.’

  The Graf said nothing.

  ‘You didn’t happen to steal his notes, did you?’

  Augustin’s head snapped around at Asher’s question, and his fang glinted in a snarl. ‘Why would I do that? I told you they were just chemical muck.’

  ‘Did you?’ inquired the Graf.

  ‘Course not.’ Augustin’s eyes shifted.

  Asher didn’t even see the Graf move. Neither, apparently, did Augustin, because even with a vampire’s preternatural senses, with the uncanny speed of the Undead, the golden vampire was still standing there, mouth open in shock, when the Master of Prague was beside him, one huge hand gripping his neck. With the other hand Szgedny had Asher’s right arm in an unbreakable grip, drawing him forward bodily, his silver-wrapped hand extended like a weapon: like a burning poker, aimed at Augustin’s eyes.

  Augustin screamed, twisted, tried once to strike at the Graf and then shrieked louder and buckled at the knees as the older vampire’s single-handed grip on his spine tightened. ‘I did! I did! I have them!’

  The Graf released Augustin’s neck, and tossed Asher aside like a discarded stick. ‘At your flat?’

  Asher, guessing what would happen next, caught the Graf’s sleeve – with his left hand, his right being numb from the force of the grip that had crushed his arm. ‘Dominus,’ he said quickly.

  Eyes like gray ball bearings met his.

  ‘Let me see the notes.’

  The eyes shifted, dismissing the request. A wave of sleepiness crushed Asher’s mind like the onset of poison gas.

  ‘My lord, you will be in danger as well.’ The unbearable weight lifted, as if it had never been. Breathless, Asher went on, ‘Don Simon is already his slave. Do you think a man like Cochran will stop there? Do you think Barvell – or Cochran himself – would stop at selling this method, whatever it is, if the price is right?’

  Szgedny made no reply, but Asher thought the shadow at the corner of those immobile lips darkened, just slightly, as a vicious dog’s lip will move before it lunges.

  ‘My wife is on the ship that is carrying them to America. I have, literally, no idea what conditions she faces there or what she can do to help him, if anything. But there’s a good chance that she will be able to interpret Barvell’s notes – extrapolate from them – even if they are from an earlier stage of his research. Don Simon will work with her, if he can be freed, if this process can be stayed or reversed. Will you let me wire a copy of these notes to her in America, to be there for her when she arrives?’

  ‘This from a man who has sworn to kill vampires, whenever their paths might cross?’ The Graf had taken his hand from Augustin’s neck, but the younger vampire lay face down in the filthy water on the dugout floor, like a drowned man, unmoving and unregarded. In the flicker of the candle flame, which Asher had dropped on one of the dugout’s shelves, the elder vampire’s gaze seemed fixed and unmoving as that of a statue.

  ‘The man who four years ago killed all the vampires of the London nest as they lay in their sleep? Who, I am told, killed half a dozen maiden vampires in St Petersburg, new-fledged younglings who had drunk no human blood – dragged them forth into sunlight and watched their bodies burn? What will this wife of yours do with this grimoire when she gets it? Enslave Simon in her turn? What will you do with these spells, once you have read them, and sent them across the sea?’

  ‘That I do not know,’ returned Asher. ‘I know not what they are, nor what can be done with them. They won’t be in finished form. You have commanded men.’ It was a guess, but something in the way the old man held himself told Asher that this was true. ‘You know that more information is always better than less information. My wife may not be able to even reach
Don Simon until they are ashore in America. Cochran almost certainly has men at arms aboard ship. I hear her voice in the darkness,’ he said, desperate that the vampire should understand. ‘If I can throw her a weapon across the chasm which separates us, this is what I want to do. I have no idea how to use this weapon myself.’

  ‘Do you not?’

  The words seemed to come to Asher from a great distance away. He wasn’t even sure they’d been spoken aloud. For an instant a part of his mind wondered if – as he had feared Szgedny would – the old vampire had covered his perceptions with a mist of sleepiness and had departed, unseen. Yet he was cloudily aware, through dreamlike haze, that the Graf stood directly before him, clawed hands framing Asher’s face – as those of Serge had two nights ago – as he looked into his eyes.

  And as the very old vampires could do, Asher was aware that the Graf was looking through his thought, through his recollections and memories, and on into Lydia’s mind, Lydia’s thought. Aware of her and her surroundings, though she was yet waking. Far off, Asher thought he could glimpse her, at a dressing table in a luxurious room squinting short-sightedly at her reflection in a mirror as she applied mascaro and kohl to her eyes without the aid of her glasses, red hair shining from brushing in the cheerful glow of electric lights. But aware of her thoughts and memories and fears as well …

  She looked around her quickly, then passed a hand over her brow. I’m just tired … He could almost hear her saying it. Knowing something, not knowing what.

  For a moment Asher struggled against suffocation, as if he were drowning in deep water. Voices seemed to come to the edges of his hearing, crying far-off. A taste of something, intense heat like a drink of brandy, deep in his heart.

  He understood, with a fathom’s-deep grief, that the Graf’s power to do this – to see into Lydia’s mind through Asher’s – drank like a root from the lives he’d taken. The voices he heard were theirs. Hundreds – thousands – killed across the years.