by Sarah Hoyt
Pieces of them, ragged and encrusted with dirt, flapped with their movements. But the blades they held shone bright and sharp.
Porthos leaned forward, spread his feet further apart bracing for better balance, and spared one brief look at Aramis. “To me of the king,” he shouted. Then, in a lower tone, “No one else is coming.”
“No musketeers in this part of town,” Aramis said. He sounded very calm. “We made sure of it. If we could toll the bells . . . If the churches were still ours. If anyone still knew what the bells meant, and if that chapel weren’t sure to be crawling with vampires.” He shrugged gallantly, his expression frozen and lost. “As it is we die here, my friend. We die here. It has been an honor, Monsieur du Vallon, my dear Porthos, to fight evil by your side.”
“Likewise, Chevalier d’Herblay, my dear Aramis,” Porthos said, his voice light and airy. His features settled in lines like granite.
Aramis made a sign of the cross mid-air, as though blessing Porthos.
“You said the bells . . .” d’Artagnan said. They thought they were going to die. They were going to die here. But I’m seventeen. I’m only seventeen.
The man who’d come to Paris to fight vampires and thought he had nothing else to live for heard his own inner wail and wanted to say it didn’t matter. He might in many ways still be a boy, but what did that have to say to his time of death? What in this time when death was victorious everywhere?
I’ve never been on a boat, I’ve never broken a horse. I’ve never kissed a woman. His throat closed, dry as dust. It was dry in the tomb. He’d not see another sunrise. But . . . I’m seventeen!
“What of the bells? What would the bells do?” The musketeers spoke in riddles. And it was not about him. It had never been about him. They’d kept other musketeers away from here—they’d not do that if they wanted to defend him. And they’d said the vampires were not the right type. As if they’d been expecting—waiting—another type of vampire.
D’Artagnan remembered his father’s stories, about calling musketeers—and those who fought vampires—with the sound of bells; about how bells—holy bells, blessed in the service of the church—made vampires uncomfortable. His father had ordered the bells tolled in the village church almost constantly. He said it kept his domain safe.
He raised his sword and looked over his shoulder, behind him, at the little ruined chapel. He was sure he could see a bell gleaming there atop the broken tower, the metal shining in the moonlight. “Will musketeers come to the bells?” he asked, his voice cracking and sounding terribly young. “Would they come to bells if we rang them?”
“There would be a chance, at least,” Aramis said. He looked over his shoulder, too, in the direction of d’Artagnan’s glance. “Oh, the bells still seem to be there. Perhaps too well embedded to be pulled off and broken. But we cannot ring them. No one can get to the bells. The chapel itself will be overflowing with vampires.”
“I have my sword. But would musketeers come?” d’Artagnan asked.
“Five years ago all would have,” Aramis said. “And there may still be musketeers who remember. We used to ring the bells of the church to ask for help when we couldn’t just yell—before the treaty turned all the churches over to the vampires and desecrated them.”
“The ones who remember would come,” Porthos said. “And others would follow. The patrols are not in this area, but . . . ”
“But—” Aramis said.
“I will ring the bells,” d’Artagnan said.
“Don’t be a fool,” Porthos said. He put a hand out to stay d’Artagnan. The vampires—advancing unhurriedly, inexorably—were now so close that their smell of must and dirt enveloped the three men. “The vampires have occupied every chapel, every church. There will be a dozen of the foreign ones in there, the ones who don’t have a position or a post in French society yet. They will boil out of there and make short work of you.”
D’Artagnan looked on the ranks of advancing corruption and rot, their figures moving stiffly, as no human ever had. “As well die there as here, then,” d’Artagnan said. “I shall go.”
Aramis looked sideways, favoring him with a grin that shaded from feral to amused. “Well,” he said. “En avant, then my friend. Go to the tower, Porthos and I will cover you as long as we can. It can’t be very long.”
As he spoke, the musketeers started slowly retreating in the direction of the tower, swords ready.
Aramis shook his head, as if answering something, then clicked his tongue perhaps in answer to some internal struggle. With a sigh, he reached in his sleeve and handed d’Artagnan a small cloth pouch exquisitely stitched together and monogrammed with an embroidered R and H. “Take this. It’s filled with blessed salt. It will confuse the vampires and dazzle them and give you, for a little while, the advantage of them. Just fling it ahead of you. It is by no means a magical shield, and you’ll still have the odds grossly against you, but it might make it possible for you to survive long enough to ring the bells.”
“But . . .” d’Artagnan said. He wanted to ask if he had a weapon with such amazing powers why he had not used it before.
Aramis answered with a smile of mingled exasperation and sweetness, one of the most unusual expressions that d’Artagnan had ever seen, and said only, “If we survive I will explain all. Now go. You must make sure you kill every vampire before they understand why they’re so confused. You have my word: if we live, you will receive your explanation.”
“If,” Porthos said, disdainfully.
D’Artagnan understood nothing. Was this all a mad dream? One of those in which common objects acquire momentous significance? One where ordinary events seemed distorted and changed?
But dream or not, he would ring the bells. Dream or not, d’Artagnan wouldn’t die without fighting for his life, without trying to give himself and the musketeers a chance at survival.
I’ve never kissed a woman, he thought, as he lopped toward the tower. I’ve never touched a woman.
He poured some of the salt into his hand. He could hear blade striking against blade at his back. He remembered Aramis saying, It cannot be for very long.
The chapel had been very small indeed and, judging by the tile embedded on the wall next to the door, it had been dedicated to the archangel Gabriel. A meek, square building with a narrow tower next to it that could hardly hold more than two people at a time—it now smelled evil and filthy. The interior that had once, doubtless, been lit by blessed candles and filled with the sound of holy words, was now a dank hole stinking of blood and rotting flesh.
Past the arched doorway, all was darkness and shadows. Yet something moved in the gloom. Vampires. Only vampires lived in desecrated churches.
D’Artagnan threw the salt ahead of him, so hard he felt his shoulder wrench. In the absolute darkness within the chapel, it seemed to him as though the scattering grains formed bright trails midair, shining with a light of their own .
They fell with sizzling sounds . . .
There were cries, screams, and little flares of yellow-blue-red light, like fireworks.
D’Artagnan counted five voices, imagined there were others and, wrapping his cloak tight around his left arm, plunged into the darkness swinging his sword left and right.
Nocturnal Pollution
ATHOS stood naked in a corner of the kitchen—where a hole in the washing sink allowed wastewater to drain outside—pouring water over himself. He’d retied his hair to keep it out of the way. Taking water from one of the three enormous pails Grimaud bought from water carriers every other day, he’d filled a clay jar with cold water then tipped it over his head, letting it run down his naked body.
Shivering, he grabbed the small bar of soap Grimaud kept by the sink and, soaping his hands, rubbed the foam all over his body. He’d removed his bandages, to find his wounds almost healed. And yet the soap stung his skin, as if it were abraded. He’d removed his shirt and thrown it in a corner of the room. He’d rinse it too, later. Better that than to have
Grimaud know . . .
A clean shirt, which had been hard enough to find in the clothes press—since Grimaud laid out Athos’ clothing every morning—was draped across one of the kitchen stools.
He shivered as he threw another jar of water over his naked body and watched the soapy water flow down the drain. The shiver was half for the cold, and half for the scratch across his arm—blood red and fresh. The scratch made by Charlotte’s fingernails in trying to stop his hand.
Were it not for that, he would think that it had all been a dream—that the mad events of the last twenty-four hours and his being changed into a vampire had lessened his ability to control his animal side. That, in fact, what he’d indulged in had been no more than nocturnal pollution.
But the fresh scratch gave it all the lie, and conspired with what he knew in his heart and soul to be true. He’d denied her victory by blunting his craving, by closing his mental ears to her call with his sudden pleasure. By barring the door and locking it, he had taken away the sword with which she would have pried into his soul.
And yet . . . his wife had been there, in his room. Charlotte had been there in body as well as in spirit. She had come bearing pleasure and pain, or pain hiding beneath pleasure, or perhaps—a pleasurable attack, a sweetened death.
He had defeated her this one time, but it might easily have gone the other way. He knew it as well as he knew his own name, or knew he still loved his treacherous wife.
“Monsieur le Comte!”
The voice made him look up from the water circling down the drain hole to the entranceway of the kitchen where Grimaud stood, a single candle in a clay candlestick in one hand and in the other—
Athos felt his lips twitch and didn’t know if he was going to laugh and cry. All he could manage was, in a thickened voice: “I don’t believe the stake will be needed quite yet, Grimaud. As you see, I am still myself.”
Grimaud let the short, sharpened stick fall from his hand to clatter onto the floor with a hollow sound.
“Good thought, though,” Athos said as his mind resolved the dilemma on the side of laughter. “Good thought, and it might have saved your life.” It was, on the whole, a relief that his old servant, his friend who had almost raised him, should be wary enough to fear the vampire he’d become; smart enough to carry a stake when searching the house in the middle of the night. It was what he should do. If Athos wasn’t sure how long he could trust himself—how long he could hold against the onslaught of Charlotte’s efforts to take over his mind—why should Grimaud trust him?
Better to know that should he fail, someone he could count on stood ready to stop him before he could kill.
“Monsieur,” Grimaud said, a third time, running his broad calloused hand through his grizzled hair. “I didn’t mean to . . . That is . . . I heard the clatter in your room, as if you . . . as if you had lost your way.” He was looking wide-eyed at Athos, as well he should.
What will he think has come over me, to stand here, naked, over the kitchen drain, washing myself from the scarce water in the kitchen.
“If you’d told me you wished a bath,” Grimaud said, his voice somewhat dry. “I could have drawn water from the well in the yard. It is not good enough to drink, but it is quite good enough to wash with. I could have warmed you a pot of it and brought out the hip bath.”
Athos shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, making his face like stone against the embarrassment clouding his mind. “Well, as you see I am done,” he said, and set down the jar, and then reached for the towel he’d laid beside the shirt. “This way I do not have to wet my hair. Besides I did not wish to wake you in the middle of the night.”
He dried himself briskly, the towel, like his sheet, feeling oddly rough against his skin. Then he draped it across the kitchen stool, and slipped his shirt on, tying the neck and the sleeves with meticulous care, as if he were not about to use this as a nightshirt. As if he were preparing himself, in fact, to go out and keep a formal appointment.
Grimaud dove in to rescue the towel, which was in danger of sliding from the stool to the dirty floor, and, clutching it to himself as if he’d just saved something precious, looked up at Athos, “Monsieur! I’ve known you since you were a child. If there’s anything . . . if you find yourself . . . ” He seemed to be himself as ill-at-ease as Athos, and couldn’t quite bring himself to speak frankly. Instead, he forcefully expelled air through his nose, and said, in a peevish tone—as if Athos had still been a small child roaming through the fields of his father’s domain, climbing trees, and coming in with his clothes muddy and torn: “There is no call for you to do foolish things. You could have rung for me and I would more than gladly have arranged a bath for you. You needn’t be stumbling around in the middle of the night trying to look after yourself.” His gaze reproached Athos, and he spoke in a low, protesting voice. “It is not fit, M’sieur. Not for someone of your quality.”
Athos said only, lightly, “It is no matter.” He was half amused and half touched at Grimaud’s concern for his dignity. He thought he could not now go in search of sheets to change his bed, so he spoke in a voice as abstracted and casual as he could make it. “There is . . . the matter of my sheets.”
Grimaud, who’d been ready to leave the kitchen, turned back and looked at Athos For just a moment it looked as if he would ask what sheets, but then he nodded. “Yes, M’sieur. I’ll see to them. I’ll get some from the linen press right away.”
If the linen press was, as Athos—who’d never paid much close attention to such matters thought—the big armoire just outside the kitchen, and if, as he supposed, Grimaud was as zealous for the linen as for everything else, this would involve a careful evaluation of mended sheets versus merely worn ones, and of the various qualities of cloth that might be allowed on a count’s bed even in these reduced times. What Athos could do till the servant had settled on the proper sheets was beyond him. He was fairly sure if he should strip his own bed, he would be rewarded with a look more of reproach than anger from Grimaud.
Partly as self-punishment, he decided he would have more broth. He had no more than turned to look for it, when he heard Grimaud’s voice from the stairway. “It is in the pot, M’sieur, at the back of the banked fire in the hearth. To keep warm. I’ll make sure there is always some broth for you there. Should I come and—”
“No,” Athos said, firmly, refraining—but just barely—from clicking his tongue in annoyance. “I do still remember how to fill cups.”
Though it turned out he didn’t, at least not when it involved reaching into the hearth and past the uncomfortable warmth of the banked cinders and helping himself from a pot he could not hope to lift, not with his bare hands, at least, since it was still hot. He supposed there was a ladle somewhere. In fact, he remembered such instruments—one of finely carved wood and another of brass—but he could not hope to guess where Grimaud had put them. They were not hanging from the walls nor—as Athos thought in amusement at his own exasperation—dancing in the air before his eyes.
In the end he settled for dipping a crockery mug into the warm liquid, and filling it. Some broth dripped across the flagstones as he crossed the kitchen to sit on the stool to sip, but he thought that Grimaud would never notice it before it had dried. Athos felt like a naughty child slipping a treat from under his guardian’s eye.
Only the broth was no treat. It still tasted like foul ditch water. He had just finished the cup and was contemplating a second—not sure even his sins deserved that much punishment—when he heard the bells toll.
At first he thought it was a dream, a hallucination—something his overwrought mind had conjured up out of the trials and toils of the last day and night. And the night before, for that matter.
They sounded, then faded, then sounded again, a will-o’-the-wisp sound, something that was there, yet wasn’t—something that hadn’t been heard in Paris for . . . oh, at least four years. Not since his majesty—frightened of his powerful and unholy minister his royal powe
rs surrendered to him in all but word—had given the cardinal a treaty that closed every church, so that even the last vestiges of holiness might be destroyed in this poor kingdom.
And yet the bells sounded, silvery bright through the darkness. They sounded as though tolled by an inexperienced hand, since the rhythm was neither funeral nor joyful, but oscillated between the two sounding, repetitive and urgent, like nothing so much as . . . A shout for help.
Athos was on his feet, before he knew what he was doing. His bare feet hit the flagstones of the kitchen in an increasingly faster rhythm. Walking, jogging, running. He passed the armoire in the hall and Grimaud was not there. Athos called out as he ran up the staircase, “Grimaud!”
And then again, in alarm, as—had the wind shifted direction or was Athos being tormented by a ghost of holiness?—the bells became audible again, louder, perfectly clear, “Grimaud!”
Grimaud appeared at the top of the stairs, coming from Athos’ room. He had the dirty sheets clutched in his hands—,and for just a moment Athos thought he was going to ask Athos why he was shouting. But then he noted Grimaud was pale and his eyes were wide, his whole expression that of someone hearing something impossible.
Athos leaned against the banister that ran up the wall on the left of the stairway. “Do you hear them?” he asked; it was no more than a whisper.
Grimaud nodded, his mouth opening then closing. In what was for him an almost unspeakable sacrilege, he flung the sheets down, against the wall, not in whatever sacrosanct hideaway he put clothes to be sent to the laundresses. “It’s musketeers, M’sieur,” he said. “Someone is in trouble.”
And though it made no sense, though it was far more likely it was the vampires who now occupied the churches and chapels, the truth was that the bloodsuckers seemed to have almost as much dread of the bells as of the cross, and even when they destroyed them, they sent Judas goats climbing up the towers to break them. It was as though the metal of the bells were imbued with holiness and, thus, the sound dreadful to damned ears.