"To save your own life?" he asked.
Brother Anthony's fingers continued to rove lightly over the back of his hand, as if feeling the armature of bone within flesh, or warming their coldness on the subcutaneous heat of blood. With his other hand he held Asher's little finger in a frail grip that Asher knew he could no more break than he could have pulled his hand from dried cement. "I had not fed-not truly fed-in months," the vampire whispered
anx- iously. "Rats-a horse-chickens. But I could feel my mind starting to go, my senses turn sluggish. I've tried-over and over I've tried. But each time I grow terrified. If I do not feed properly, drink of the deaths of men, I will grow stupid, grow slow. I cannot do that. After all these years, all these deaths, running from the Judgment,.. And each life I take in running is another to the tally that would fall upon me, did I die. So many-I used to keep count. But the hunger drove me to mad-ness. And I will never be forgiven."
"It is one of the tenets of faith," Asher said slowly, "that there is no s in, nothing, that God will not forgive, if the sinner is truly repentant."
"I can't be truly repentant," Brother Anthony whispered, "can I? I feed and go on feeding. I am stronger than all those who have sought to kill me. The hunger drives me to madness. The terror of what awaits me beyond the wall of death-I cannot face it. Maybe if I help those who will go there, if I make it easy for them to find their bones... If I help them they will speak for me. I have done what I can for them. They must. They must..." He drew Asher close to him-his breath reeked of blood, and, close-to, Asher saw that his robe was stiff with gore decades dried. He nodded toward Simon. "When he kills you," he whispered, "will you speak for me?"
"If you answer me three questions," Asher said, conscious of the framework of tales with which the ancient vampire would be familiar and trying desperately to frame mentally what he wanted to ask into three parts and good Latin. Thank God, he thought, they were speaking Church Latin, which was no more difficult than French.If this were Classical, the whole conversation would come to a standstill while I ar-ranged things in that damn inside-out order that Cicero used.
The Franciscan did not reply, but seemed only to be waiting, his thin fingers icy on Asher's hand. Simon, standing silently by, watched them both. Asher felt that he was keyed up. ready to intervene between them, though he himself sensed no danger from the little monk.
After a moment he asked, "Can you hunt by daylight?"
"I would not so offend the face of God. The night is mine; here below, all night is mine. I would never take the day above the ground to myself."
"Notwould you..." Asher began, exasperated, then realized that that might be counted as a second question and fell silent for a moment. Hundreds of questions leaped to mind and were discarded; he was aware that he had to go carefully, aware that the old vampire could vanish as silently, as easily, as he had appeared. He felt as he did when he watched Lydia feeding the sparrows in the New College quadrangle, coaxing them with infinite patience to take bread crumbs from her outstretched fingers. "Who were your contemporaries among the vam-pires?"
''Johannis Magnus," the old vampire whispered, "the Lady Eliza-beth; Jehanne Croualt, the horse tamer; Anne La Flamande, the Welsh minstrel who sang in the crypts of London; Tulloch the Scot, who was buried in the Holy Innocents. They have destroyed the Innocents. They carted the bones away. His they burned. The flesh shriveled off them in the noonday sun. That was in the days of the Terror, the days when men slew one another as we the Undead never dared to do."
"Yet there are those who swear they saw the Scot fifty years ago in Amsterdam," Ysidro murmured in English. He seemed to understand without comment why Asher had chosen that question to ask. "As for the others..."
Asher turned back to the old vampire. "Have you ever killed another vampire?"
Brother Anthony shrank back from him, covering his white face with skeletal white hands. "It is forbidden," he whispered desperately. "Thou shall not kill,' they say, and I have killed-killed over and over. I have tried to do good..."
"Have you ever killed another vampire?" Simon repeated softly, not moving, but Asher could feel the tension in him like overstretched wire.
The monk was backing away, his face still covered. Asher took a step after him, reaching out his hand to catch the rotting black sleeve. He understood then how the legends came about, that vampires can com-mand the mists and dissolve into them at will. There was, as before, not even a sense of his mind blanking, and not one of the brittle bones that hemmed them all around so much as shifted. He was simply standing, a shred of crumbling black cloth in his hand, staring at the shadowed tangle of bones and the shadowy altar beyond.
In his mind he heard a whisper, like the breath of a dream, "Speak for me. Tell God I did what I could. Speak for me, when he kills you..."
Thirteen
"Do you plan to kill me?" Asher closed the iron grille behind him, turned the heavy key, and followed Simon back into the de-serted vestibule, where Ysidro was fastidiously poking among the pa-pers of the desk. The vampire paused to regard him with dispassionate eyes, and, as so often with Ysidro, Asher found it impossible to divine whether he was contemplating the mortal state or simply wondering whether he felt peckish. In any case he did not answer.
Instead he asked, "What do you think of our Franciscan brother?"
"Other than that he's mad, you mean?" Asher removed a couple of wax tablets from his pocket, of the sort that he had habitually carried in his Foreign Office days, and methodically took impressions of all the keys on the ring. "I don't believe he's our culprit."
"Because he's here instead of in London? Never think it. He is silent as the fall of dust, James; he could have followed us back to Paris, and I would never have been the wiser; could have overheard any of our conversations and preceded us..."
"In Latin?"
"In English, if he was friend to Rhys and to Tulloch the Scot. Most of us learn one another's languages, even as we keep abreast of the changes in the tongues of the lands where we dwell-conspicuousness is our death. The fact that he lives hidden in the catacombs does not mean he has not walked the streets of men unseen. He understands at least some of the changes that have taken place since the Fall of the Kings... And he claims, incidentally, to have seen Tulloch the Scot's flesh shriv-eled from his bones by the light of the noonday sun..."
"Meaning he was up and around by day?" Asher used his fingernail to pry the last key gingerly from the wax, thinking to himself that, if that were the case, the Minorite's assumption that Ysidro intended to murder him might be far from a random guess. "But you say yourself that the Scot was seen years later..
."
"I say that there are those who swear they saw him-as unreliable a contention as our religious friend's, if, like Anthony, Tulloch's abilities to pass unseen grew with time. There has been no reliable report of his presence since the days of the Terror-indeed, none for half a century before, but that means nothing."
Asher wiped the last telltale fragments of wax from the wards and replaced the key on its hook beside the grilled door. "And the others he named?"
"Two at least I know to be dead-three, if La Flamande is the same woman I knew during the wars over Picardy. I've never heard of Croualt..." He waited until Asher had opened the outer door, then turned down the lantern wick until its flame snuffed into darkness. Asher reflected with an inner grin that Ysidro's candle snuffing trick didn't seem to work too well with three-quarters of an inch of woven wick and a reservoir full of kerosene.
"So we have three-perhaps four, if you want to count Grippen and figure out some way he could have jiggered the daylight problem." He stepped through the outer door into the dark Rue Dareau.
"None of those he named has been seen or heard of for centuries." "That doesn't mean they haven't been hiding somewhere, as Brother Anthony has been hiding," Asher replied quietly. "If one of them sur-vived, he-or she-would be a day stalker, like Brother Anthony, toughened, as you said, against garlic and silve
r and other countermeasures."
"It also does not mean that Brother Anthony is not himself the killer."
"Do you believe he is?"
Ysidro's smile flickered briefly into existence. "No. But there are few other candidates for the role." Their footsteps echoed hollowly against the dingy walls of dark brick as they made their way north, through the crisscrossings of the empty back streets that led toward the wider boule-vards. There was no way of telling how late it was, but leaden darkness now possessed even the most late-carousing of bistros, and the prosti-tutes seemed to have sought their beds for good, " 'I have killed over and over,' he said, and also, 'I have tried to do good.' The killing of other vampires could be interpreted as a major effort in that direction. Is it not what you yourself plan to do, if you get the chance?"
Asher glanced sharply across at him, but met only matter-of-fact inquiry in those cool, strange eyes. Instead of replying, he said, "If he wanted to slay his own kind, there are plenty to begin on here, without going to London for the purpose. And if the killer is his contemporary, with the same alterations of powers, Brother Anthony may be our only hope of tracking him."
"If he will." They crossed a street. Asher had a momentary sense of movement in the noisome blackness of an alley to their right and the mutter of voices as the local toughs wisely decided not to molest this particular pair of passers-by. "And if, given that you can coax him from the earth to which he has gone, he consents to assist us and not ally himself with the killer."
Asher shivered, remembering how the little monk had seemed to melt from the darkness, the cold tickle of those frail fingers on his hand, and their unbreakable strength. He knew what his own reaction would be to a mortal man who allied himself with vampires. Perhaps it was best after all to let sleeping dogs lie.
They passed through a darkened square whose fountain sounded un-earthly loud in the stillness, turned into the Boulevard St. Michel. Even that great artery was virtually empty. The chestnut trees that lined it rustled overhead like a dim woods, their leaves lying in soggy drifts along the walls of the great hospitals
which clustered in that neighbor-hood. The electric street lamps threw too-bright halos, making the gloom seem all the more dense. Now and then, a passing fiacre broke the eerie silence with the sharp tap of hooves, but that was all. The night was still and cold; Asher pulled his scarf more closely around his throat and huddled deep into the folds of his ulster.
Presently he asked, "If there is a strange vampire operating in Lon-don-be it Tulloch the Scot, even Rhys himself, or some other-might we not trace it through unexplained kills? Would a vampire that ancient have to kill as often?"
"Any city on earth," Don Simon replied austerely, "gives forth such spate of unexplained kills of its own, through disease, cold, filth, and uncaring, that it were difficult to trace a single vampire's poor efforts, As for needing blood less frequently-or needing, rather, the life, the death cry of the mind to feed the powers of the mind on which our very survival depends-that I do not know,"
He paused for a moment on the pavement, A whisper of straying wind moved in his dark cloak and lifted the pale hair from his collar, For a moment, it seemed as if he himself would drift onto it like a vast gray leaf. Then he walked on.
"It is not merely that we are dependent on the nourishment of the blood, James, and the psychic feed of the passing of the soul. Many of us are addicted to them. Some suffer this to greater or lesser degree, and some, in fact, take great pleasure in the addiction. Lotta used to prolong her fasts from the ultimate kill as much as possible, to sweeten them when they came, but it is a dangerous practice. In some, the craving rises almost to madness. It can make us hasty or careless, and in all things concerning us, carelessness is death."
They were nearing the miniature maze of streets near the river where the Hotel Chambord stood; the cold smell of the Seine hung in the air, and already, down the cobbled side streets, the milk sellers were about. Asher studied sidelong the delicate profile, the white, hooked nose and loose thickness of colorless hair.
"You haven't relaxed in three hundred and fifty years," he said softly, "have you?"
"No."
"Do you relax when you sleep?"
The vampire did not look at him. "I do not know. We all learn too late that sleep is not the same as it was."
"Do you dream?"
Ysidro paused, and again Asher had the impression he was on the point of being lifted and whirled away by the faint stirring of the wind. A faint flex line of a bitter smile touched the white silk of the skin, then smoothed away. "Yes," Simon said expressionlessly. "I dream. But they are not like human dreams."
Asher wondered whether, when Simon sought whatever lair he had made for himself in Paris, he would dream of Brother Anthony, sorting bones in the dark.
Then suddenly he was alone. Somewhere in the back of his mind he had the sensation of having once dreamed, himself, about a slim, cloaked form walking away toward the whitish mists of the Seine, but that was all.
SAVAGE MURDERS IN LONDON THE RIPPER STALKS AGAIN?
A series of shocking crimes rocked London last night when nine people-six women and three men-were brutally murdered in the Whitechapel and Limehouse districts of London between the hours of midnight and four in the morning. The first of the bodies, that of variety actress Sally Shore, was found by dustmen in the alley behind the Limehouse Road. She had been much bruised and cut about, so savagely that, when found, her body was almost com-pletely drained of blood. The eight other victims, found in various places in the neighborhood, were in a similar condition. Police remarked upon the fact that in no instance were screams or cries for help heard and upon the fact that, though the bodies were nearly drained of blood, very little was found at the scenes, leading them to believe that the murders took place elsewhere and the bodies were transported to the places where they were found...
Asher set down the newspaper beside his midday breakfast of crois-sant and coffee, feeling cold to his bones. Nine!
What had Simon said? After a long fast, the time always comes when the craving sets in and will not be denied-
Nine.
He felt sick.
It wasn't the London vampires. That much he knew. They had to live in London-Grippen, the Farrens, Chloe. But a strange vampire, hiding from them in London, might indeed be traceable through his kills, by those who knew what to look for. He had lain hidden as long as he could, fasting and silently murdering.
He glanced at the date. It was this morning's paper. Last night, when he and Simon had been stalking Anthony in the darkness of the cata-combs, the murderer had struck again. This time it was not vampires who were his victims, but humans.
Admittedly, he thought, glancing down the article, not particularly important humans-the women were all listed as "variety actresses," seamstresses, or simply, "young women." Given the area in which they were found and given the hour they were killed, there was no real doubt as to their true professions. But it made their murders no less atrocious; and it made the lives of everyone else in London no more secure.
They had not cried out. Horribly, the thin, dreamy face of the woman on the train returned to him, the way her hand had fumbled willingly at her collar buttons, the glazed somnambulance of her eyes. He remem-bered Lydia's red hair, gleaming in the dim radiance of the gas lamps, and his palms grew cold.
No! he told himself firmly. She knows the danger-she's sensible enough to stay indoors, close to
people, at night...
That knowledge did not help.
He raised his head, staring sightlessly at the traffic jostling past the cafe where he sat. The thin mist of early dawn had burned away into a crisp, brittle sunlight, like crystal on the sepia buildings across the street and the India-ink traceries of the bare trees. The boulevardiers were out for a stroll, reveling in the last fine weather of autumn-leisured gentlemen in well-tailored blazers, men of letters, self-proclaimed wits andartistes. Open-topped carriages rolled past on th
eir way to the Bois de Boulogne, affording glimpses of the elegant matrons of the Pa ri sgratin or of expensively dressed sin-the "eight-spring luxury models" of the demimonde.
Asher saw none of it. He wondered where Simon might be found. Elysee de Montadour's hotel was, he was virtually certain, somewhere in the Marais; he supposed that given a day in which to search through the building records, he could locate the place. But there was no guar-antee that Ysidro was sleeping there-somehow he doubted that slim, enigmatic hidalgo would put himself anywhere near the power of Elysee and her cicisbeos-and his visit to Ernchester House had taught him the folly of entering vampire nests alone. And in any case, what he wanted now most to know was something which could only be ascer-tained while the sun was in the sky.
He felt absently in his pocket for the wax tablets and wondered what time the guards at the catacombs had their dinner.
One of the advantages of working for the Foreign Office, Asher had found, had been a nodding acquaintance with the fringes of the under-world in a dozen cities across Europe. His Oxford colleagues would have been considerably startled had they realized how easily their unas-suming Lecturer in Philology could have obtained any number of strange services, from burglary to murder to "nameless vices"-most of which had perfectly good names, in Latin, at least. In spite of the fact that England and France were the closest of allies, he had in the past had cause to need keys cut in a hurry in Paris with no questions asked and, on this occasion, he knew precisely where to go.
As it was neither the first nor the third Saturday of the month, he had little fear of meeting parties of tourists at the catacombs or the large numbers of guards that the Office of Directory and Treasury considered necessary to herd them through. The catacombs would be staffed by one or at most two old pensioners of the State, and, though the dinner hour was long over by the time Asher reached Montrouge, with the aid of luck and human nature, they might be together gossiping instead of keeping watch at both entrances.
01 Those Who Hunt The Night ja-1 Page 19