‘It does.’ There was something in his expressionless voice that made Lydia certain that the vampire Hyacinthe – and in fact any of the Paris nest – would think twice before going up against this slender gentleman in his trim gray suit. ‘I assure you, James, your lady will be safe beneath my roof. Safer than you are—’ his yellow glance touched the window – ‘beneath this one.’
After Lydia’s departure, Asher drifted again into feverish sleep. A year ago he had warned Ysidro that he would no longer abide or endure the odd partnership – close enough at times to border on friendship – that for the past seven years had existed between himself and the vampire. From what felt like an enormous distance he saw himself and Ysidro together by lantern-light in a dream he’d had of African twilight, and reflected that it didn’t seem to matter to the vampire what he, James Asher, could abide or endure.
And the past few days had brought home to him that his own commitment to what was right – to the deserts justly due to this pale predator – wouldn’t stand the test of expediency either.
And Ysidro knew it. Had known it from their first meeting.
Had he walked in my dreams and known that of me, before we met? Was that how he chose me as his tool?
He’d come back, a hundred times, from ‘abroad’, in the days of his service to the Queen, loathing himself and the things that he had done. Loathing his calm readiness to kill total strangers, his undoubted facility for theft, fraud, lies, and the betrayal of those ‘enemy’ civilians who’d trusted the man they’d thought he was. Like poisoned magic, the words ‘for Queen and country’ had always drawn him back. And the knowledge that he was good at what he did.
Thus he recognized that he was apparently perfectly willing to form a partnership with Don Simon Ysidro – knowing full well what Ysidro was and did – if those he, James Asher, personally loved were in danger.
He had done far worse, for goals less vital and true.
What does that make me?
He didn’t know, and his head hurt too much to think.
In his dream he stood in his study in Oxford, holding the letter he’d received from Rebbe Karlebach. The paper was blank. He turned it over and found it blank on the other side, though curiously he could see the blots and marks of his old mentor’s handwriting through the paper. The sheet was definitely written on – just never on the side facing him.
When he went to his desk, where the Book of the Kindred of Darkness lay open, it was the same. The age-stained brown pages were blank. When he turned them he could glimpse the ‘lettre de somme’ printing on other pages but, open it where he would, it was always to pages that were blank.
The Facinum has to be in here somewhere, he thought. I have to have missed it.
He went to the bookshelf, found there the much later 1637 Latin edition of that same work that had been in Karlebach’s house (and indeed, in crossing the study to the bookshelf he found he had gone from his own house in Oxford to Karlebach’s musty-smelling, heavily curtained cubbyhole in Prague), and opened it.
Ysidro is wrong. There is something in the bone chapel. François de Montadour knew it. Elysée knows it. Something that will change the course of the war. Something that will unleash the German armies on all of France, on Belgium, on England.
Something …
I knew what it was.
He remembered Elysée’s drawing-room, on his first encounter with the Paris nest, in the Saint-Germain mansion that had been her husband’s. Remembered the gold silk wallpaper, and theatrically beautiful vampires playing cards by thousandfold candlelight. Hyacinthe standing so close behind him that he could smell her perfume, her long nails brushing the skin of his neck.
Beautiful, as all the members of the Paris nest were beautiful.
Or was that only because vampires could appear beautiful to their victims?
Karlebach’s copy of the book was blank, too.
In the center of one page he found a paragraph that was common to most – though not all – of the book’s various printings:
Seldom do the Undead entrust the living with the knowledge of who and what they truly are … and seldom do the dead employ a living servant for more than five years before killing him and all members of his family, to protect their secret.
But what, Asher wondered, is their secret?
‘Jesu Mary, sir, I thought you’d come to grief sure!’ The young man (was he here a moment ago?) sprang to his feet from a seat by the fire (there wasn’t a fire burning … and why is the hearth different from the one in Karlebach’s house?) as Simon entered the study (what’s Ysidro doing in Karlebach’s study? But it wasn’t Karlebach’s at all, though just as crammed with books and just as tiny … ).
The young man – tall, red-haired, and clothed in good brown wool, doublet and Venetian breeches – fell on one knee before the vampire and reached to kiss his hand.
‘Get up, Tim. I have already pointed out to you that I’m not the Holy Father and this ring isn’t a sacred relic.’
And Tim grinned, and scrambled gawkily to his feet. ‘Did you find him, lord?’
‘I did.’ Cobwebs and dust smutched the black velvet of his doublet. Asher thought he looked drawn and ill. Tim evidently thought so, too. He took the vampire by one elbow and put his other hand, big and red and bony, on his shoulder to steer him to the chair by the fire, and Simon went, tamely as an exhausted child, Simon Ysidro who seldom – as far as Asher had seen – let anyone touch him …
‘Are you all right, sir? Did you – did you do the deed?’ Tim reached for the poker to turn the log, then looked back worriedly at his master’s face. ‘How would a vampire go about killing another vampire anyway, sir? I mean, to drive a stake through his heart you’d have to come on him by day when he’s asleep, but then you’re asleep as well …’
‘One would lure him into an alleyway with a choice piece of prey whose sins are begging to be punished.’ Simon’s slender fingers touched the corner of his mouth, where a sharp-edged mounting on Brother Esdras de Colle’s ox-horn had torn his lip. ‘And come on him from behind with two or three like-minded heretic vampires, and force down his throat a philter that numbs him like a poisoned fish.’
He pressed his hands together hard, to still their trembling. ‘Then one drags him to the top of the nearest high hill outside the city – with one’s tame heretic priest reciting psalms all the way – and leaves him where the morning light will find him …’
‘My lord!’ Tim fell on his knees before him, seized his hands, stared up into his face, hazel eyes wide with shock. ‘They never—’
‘’Tis well, my good Tim.’ Simon disengaged one hand, stroked his servant’s hair as a man would stroke a dog, like rusty silk in the firelight. ‘Behold me unhurt. ’Tis well. The Master of this town has forbidden vampire to harm vampire, saying – indeed with truth – that we are all of us damned together.’ He turned his face aside and stared for a time into the hearth, as if it were a tiny chink in the wall of Hell through which he could glimpse his punishment.
As though he could read his master’s thoughts, Tim’s hands tightened over the vampire’s. ‘And this Father Jeffrey of yours, he wouldn’t … he wouldn’t give you shriving? Like they do soldiers before battle, sir? If any deserves it, ’tis yourself.’
‘He can’t. This Cardinal of his, Cardinal Montevierde, perhaps could – he speaks for the Holy Father in Rome – but he will not. Not until I have proven myself wholly God’s servant. Wholly willing to accomplish God’s bidding, with unstinting heart.’
‘But if you die in the attempt, sir—’ Still kneeling before him, Tim pressed his forehead to Simon’s hand again. ‘If the Master of this town kills you for disobeying his command … is he a heretic? The Master? He has to be, doesn’t he, sir, if he’d take a heretic’s side?’
‘I know not what he is.’ Simon stroked Tim’s hair again. ‘I should send you home, my friend. I think the water is going to be very deep here. We may neither of us have the strength to rea
ch its farther side. I’d not condemn your wife to widowhood, nor your child to grow up fatherless.’
‘You can bloody well try, sir.’ Tim stood up, and looked down at the vampire with a crooked grin. ‘I’d have no wife, nor no child neither, if ’twere not for you. And you’d have to pour your witch-festering Protestant fish-poison philter down my throat to get me on a boat back to England, and then I’d still find a way to come and help you. So don’t talk cock. You going out again tonight, sir?’
‘I must.’
Tim angled his head, like a dog confronted by an incongruity.
‘If I am to find a way to kill Esdras de Colle, against the Lord of Paris’s command … I must.’
FOURTEEN
When Tim had left the study, Simon Ysidro turned his head and regarded Asher with ophidian eyes. ‘What are you doing here, James?’
‘I haven’t the smallest idea.’ Asher glanced at the book still open in his hand: Seldom do the dead employ a living servant for more than five years …
He wondered how long Tim had lived past 1602.
‘If I’m going to encounter vampires and their servants in my dreams, I’d like to arrange to speak to Johanot of Valladolid. Or Constantine Angelus.’
‘Why Constantine?’ Ysidro sat up. Already he had lost the more human mannerisms he had displayed earlier in the dream. Save for the Elizabethan clothing he was precisely as Asher knew him in London, poised and expressionless, as if he had never shuddered with remembered terror, or bowed his head to one he hoped would save his soul from Hell. ‘You spent a great deal of time and money seeking out his tracts.’
‘I saw him,’ said Asher hesitantly. ‘A tall man? Black hair, longer than yours, over his shoulders and down his back; straight nose, narrow tip. Gray eyes, broad shoulders. Square chin …’
‘’Tis impossible that you could have seen him. He died in 1603. Died in fact, in truth. The Hôtel Batoux wasn’t even built then.’
‘I saw him in the bone chapel. I dreamed of it—’
‘As you dream now. He is dead, James. He never set foot in the Hôtel Batoux in his life.’ As if he heard the sharpness of his own speech, Ysidro folded his hands again and returned his gaze to the fire.
‘I was seeking something in the Hôtel Batoux,’ said Asher. ‘And I was seeking information about Angelus. Are you sure about this Facinum that this Raimund claimed he had? Facinum – from facere, to make … To make what?’
‘’Tis only the Latin for “talisman”. No such thing existed.’
Asher was silent, and let the vampire reflect upon the fact of his own anger. Ysidro’s expression did not alter, but Asher could feel it – as if he saw the turn of that bird-like head, the lowering of the slender shoulders – when he relaxed.
‘Can you take me there?’ he asked at length. ‘To Constantine’s rooms?’
That brought Ysidro’s gaze away from the miniature Hell of the hearth.
‘This is the manipulation of dreams that you were taught to practice, isn’t it?’ Asher’s gesture took in the book-lined study around them. ‘You told me – when we first met – that you had but to look into a person’s eyes, to speak to them later in their dreams. To bring them to you, though it be from the ends of the earth, you said. To enter your consciousness into theirs, the same way your master – Rhys the Minstrel of London – took your consciousness into his own brain when the physical tissues of your brain died and began to reconstitute as vampiric flesh. An alteration at a cellular level, Lydia postulates.’
‘She and I have spoken of this.’ Ysidro straightened the ruffles at his wrists with a movement of one nail, like a glassy claw, as he rose from his chair. ‘She has said, when the cells of the brain have finished their alteration, only then does the master breathe back the soul, the consciousness, the memories of the fledgling into them.’
‘And can another vampire – not your master – have this power over you?’ He remembered Angelus looking down into Simon’s eyes, in the crypt below the church of Saint-Pierre. Seeing all he had seen in life. Knowing all he had known.
Ysidro looked aside. ‘Some can.’
‘Could Angelus?’
The vampire did not reply.
‘You’ve said to me also,’ Asher went on, ‘that this … this interpenetration of the master’s mind with the fledgling’s is why the master holds such power over those he creates. Because a part of them – a part of their minds, their souls – remains in his.’
Ysidro nodded, like the single shift of a grass-stalk stirred by a raven’s wing-beat.
‘Because I think this is why I’m … I’m seeing things that happened to you. This is what Angelus took from your thoughts.’
‘That is not possible.’
‘Can you take me to his rooms? As you knew them, as they exist now in your mind.’ Asher set down the Book of the Kindred of Darkness on Karlebach’s library table and tightened around his middle the sash of his dressing-gown, which was what he’d been wearing at the start of this dream, as he’d stood in his own study in Holywell Street. ‘You knew them well?’ he added, as Ysidro opened a small door to one side of the fireplace which had not been there moments before.
Asher had to duck his head to pass beneath its lintel.
‘Few better,’ replied the vampire. Like ghosts, Asher saw them sitting across the small hearth from one another: Constantine Angelus in the black cassock of a priest, Simon Ysidro physically identical to the vampire who stood at Asher’s side. But in his movements and expression, and the intensity of his words, this other Simon, this younger Simon, seemed infinitely closer to his living self.
‘But what is death?’ that younger Simon was saying, and leaned closer to the Master of Paris, as if he would seize those dark sleeves and shake the answer from him. ‘And what is life? And what, physically, happened to us, that our lungs no longer fill with air save when we speak, that our bodies excrete no waste, that neither our hair nor our nails grow, that our loins are cold.’
‘This I know not, my friend.’ As it had been on the top of Montmartre hill, Constantine’s voice was deep and gentle, like the wind over open sea. ‘When the living kill one of us, invariably they make sure of the death with fire, so that I have never had the opportunity to examine twice-dead flesh. I have read that when a vampire dies its flesh quickly transforms to dust, yet this I do not know of my own knowledge. And men may write anything … even write that the damned may be saved if they but endow the Church with sufficient money to gain the approval of the Holy Father. A cheap argument,’ he added immediately, with a sudden, very human grin, as Simon bristled all over with indignation. ‘Worthy of a cheap pamphleteer. Forgive me, dear friend.’ He made a salaam of deep obeisance. ‘Let us consider instead the life of animals, or the life of plants, to take it to a form more simple yet …’
‘He was a great scholar.’ The real Ysidro – the present-day Ysidro, clothed though he was in the scuffed black velvet of Elizabeth’s reign – led the way into the chamber, which was generously proportioned and lined with shelves of books in the manner that Lydia had told Asher was typical of every room in Ysidro’s tall London house … only far more tidy.
‘I have often felt regret that Mistress Asher had not the opportunity to discuss these matters with Constantine, nor with Rhys the White who made me vampire, and who had an even greater curiosity than I do concerning the vampire state.’
Neither the young Simon nor Constantine Angelus turned to look at them, as Asher and Ysidro passed within half a foot of the hearth where the two vampires sat in conversation. Like Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past, Asher reflected. These are but the shadows of the things that have been …
He wondered if Ysidro had read A Christmas Carol.
‘When all was said, he was a man rooted deeply in a different age. Constantine studied with every physician in Paris who would teach him, and made the journey regularly to Flanders – where he was Master of half a dozen cities – to watch the anatomists dissect cadavers, and to o
bserve their experiments with lenses and mirrors and light.’
He led the way into a room beyond the study, a larger chamber which Asher guessed ran most of the length of a good-sized city house. Its ceiling slanted up sharply to a maze of cruck-work and raftering from which a couple of iron rings depended on chains, set about with candles, though probably too few to illuminate much. The windows, at the ends of gables and dormers of varying sizes, were for the most part tightly shuttered, but Asher knew that vampires were capable of reading and working in total darkness. The only light in the room came from a small forge about halfway along, its embers glowing red and, on the opposite wall of the workroom, a sort of cooking range where a bubbling pot gave off a smell of slowly dissolving meat.
‘Few vampires retain the living curiosity about the world to pursue studies as he did.’ Hands clasped lightly behind his back, Ysidro followed Asher around the long room, as Asher studied the contents of the shelves, opened the cabinets to examine the shells of conch and nautilus, the animal skulls and ostrich eggs, the sand-scoured bottles of ancient Egyptian glass and the bits of crystal and amber. The shutters of one dormer were open, and on a table before the window a telescope pointed to the black sky over the roofs of Paris, luminous with stars to the horizon.
‘For this reason I think he took to me, as I to him. The nights are long, and in a city of four hundred thousand – even in those days of inexplicable illnesses – a dozen vampires must hunt with caution. The poor died every night, of cold or of starvation, and as ever the hospitals were easy pickings … yet in those days men believed in the vexations of the Undead. We hunted seldom. Sometimes the others – Ivo, Gabrielle, Raimund, Zaffira – would go far into the countryside to make their kills, barely coming back before morning light.
‘For them, their talk was all of hunting, as men long celibate will dream of women. More so, indeed, for compared to the impact of absorbing the energy of another’s death, mere coition is but a pallid reflection, a child’s penny whistle after a Bach fugue.’
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