Darkness on His Bones

by Barbara Hambly

  No Undead intruder was going to come sneaking in by the back way without Elysée de Montadour knowing all about it.

  But Jamie came this way …

  Above the level of the grille a gallery circled the inside of the tower, which Lydia estimated to be some thirty feet in diameter. Presumably any guards who walked that gallery could look down and see her.

  Yes, here comes one now …

  She watched him from the shelter of the catacomb’s door. A tough-looking man with a paunch, a military haircut and a shotgun – why hasn’t he run off and joined the army like every other man in Paris? Perhaps he’s a socialist like M’sieu Greuze and the Duponts?

  Or is Elysée just paying him a LOT?

  He made a circuit of the gallery, loafing and bored, and disappeared.

  Lydia waited, counting the minutes on her watch, forcing herself to patience. The longer he’s gone, the better. But I have to know HOW long.

  She hoped poor Ysidro hadn’t fallen asleep in the sewer. How would I ever get him back to his hideout? Wherever THAT is.

  It was fifteen minutes before the guard appeared again.

  At the foot of the stair, opposite the door of the catacomb where she stood, was another door, the shape of its opening almost certainly original to the building of the tower. Heart in her throat, Lydia darted across the sunny ring of worn stone, counted the minutes it took her to pick its silver-plated lock. It’s like surgery. You have all the time in the world … there’s nobody’s life at stake.

  A velvet curtain hung immediately inside. Lydia pushed it aside to reveal another, a foot beyond.

  There’s nobody awake in there …

  Threads of light from her lantern showed her the stone walls of a gently descending passageway. Yet another curtain, a sharp turn, then a fourth. Gabrielle Batoux has to have built this part.

  She put aside the last curtain. Her light slid across the knobbed shapes of skulls on the walls. Femur-heads and scapulae glimmered like slick brown pebbles beneath the sea.

  She stepped inside, raised the light.

  The bone chapel was smaller than any of those beneath the Monastery of the Capuchins in Rome, barely twelve feet wide by perhaps thirty in length. As Father Martin had said, the altar wall and most of the long walls to her right and left consisted entirely of skulls, relieved by shallow niches for whole skeletons where in an ordinary church the statues of saints would have stood. Like saints the skeletons upheld the instruments of martyrdom, frightful implements of iron and wire, or dismantled segments of the rack. The altar under its arch of skulls was faced with ribs, like wave-combed beach sand. Amid patterns of vertebrae and phalanges on the ceiling, skulls grinned from pelvises, a mockery of conventional Renaissance putti faces framed in wings.

  A sarcophagus lay on a sort of dais at the opposite end of the chamber, flanked by thick stone pillars. Lydia’s guess was that it was where Elysée slept, but the stone lid was closed and even had she been able to do so without it slipping and alerting the guards, she would not have touched it. But she saw that the stone of the lid was carved in vague shapes of men and women, worn smooth by the passage of years.

  Was this room, too, immersed during the floods of 1910?

  Where did Elysée sleep during that inundation? And did she have to replace all those velvet curtains afterwards?

  And what happened to the workmen who did that job?

  Candlesticks stood in the niches beside the altar, crusted thick with winding-sheets of spent wax. For the rest, the altar was clear, and blotted all over with dark stains.

  She really MUST make her fledglings here.

  She thought of the handsome Modeste Saint-Vrain, and winced.

  Four square doors broke the skull wall behind the altar, reminding Lydia of the wall-safe her father had had in his study behind the very expensive (and very bad) painting of Achilles slaying Hector. Each was about two feet square, set in the wall at slightly above elbow height. Instead of the iron safe door at her father’s these were closed off with grilles of silver, tarnished black, in an older style than the grille that closed off the stairway in the tower. Through them the lantern beam caught a fugitive gleam of gold.

  Years of scientific education notwithstanding, Lydia edged past the altar-rail with the sensation that she’d be struck dead if she touched the altar. Who was it in the Bible that happened to? She clearly recalled her governess telling her the story, and because it had been broad daylight in the nursery at the time Lydia had retorted that such events must have made it very difficult to find anyone willing to dust the Holy of Holies … a comment which had earned her a good hour of standing in a corner of the nursery nursing her smarting hand. In a pitch-black underground chapel being stared at by approximately seven hundred and fifty skulls – allowing seven inches by nine per skull and adding in the putti skulls on the ceiling – the matter appeared a little differently.

  On the other hand, does a chapel maintained by a vampire – who’s murdered eleven thousand eight hundred and something people, give or take a few dozen, not to speak of throwing Jamie off the church tower – count any more as consecrated ground?

  I’ll have to ask Father Martin …

  One of the reliquaries – Lydia pressed her face to the grille – was in the form of a foot, with ivory toenails and a sandal so crusted with gems that it was almost impossible to see that it was made of gold. Another was shaped like a huge heart, studded with cabochon rubies like immense droplets of oozing blood. In a third, box-shaped and faced with glass, Lydia could see a severed hand decorated with jeweled chains and gold nail-guards. The fourth, also roughly box-shaped and also glass-fronted, contained something veiled in white silk gauze.

  A stone?

  A glass orb containing the light of the Christmas star?

  If I pick the lock, will bells ring in the guardroom and the chapel flood with poison gas?

  Though Lydia suspected this was the sort of thing that happened only in stories recounted in the Strand Magazine, instinct kept her from the attempt. Besides, at well over half a pound per cubic inch she had serious doubts about being able to lift or carry the reliquary very far.

  I should at least …

  Something – like the faint whisper of clothing against stone, the tiniest trace of sound – made Lydia swing around, gasping, aware – aware to the marrow of her bones – that someone was watching her.

  That someone stood at her side. Someone who knew her name.

  There was no one.

  He’s here …

  She had no idea who ‘he’ was and it didn’t matter. He – someone – stood … in the darkness? In the shadows? In one of those statue niches pretending to be a skeleton?

  To the right of the altar.

  There was no one there.

  She had meant to search the chapel to see if there were any way whatsoever that Ysidro could cross the dim daylight of the vestibule.

  To find whatever it was that Jamie had been searching for, that Hyacinthe and her German spymaster had killed poor Tante Camille to keep her from talking about …

  That Elysée was afraid that Asher knew about …

  And find it, hopefully, in time to get Ysidro back to the safety of wherever he was hiding in Paris before he collapsed.

  But the conviction that she was not alone in the chapel, that there was someone else there (other than Elysée asleep in her coffin), someone watching her, drove her back to the door. She’d lost track of when the guard was going to be by. Do I have two minutes? Thirty seconds? If he raises an alarm will Ysidro come to try to rescue me and open that door and burn up in the sunlight?

  It took all her resolve to take the time to lock the chapel door before she darted back into the safety of the catacomb, trembling like a sapling in a gale and turning a dozen times to look behind her as she hastened along the narrow burial chamber (as if I could see one of THEM if they didn’t want me to … ).

  Panic almost choked her as she tapped – very softly – on the door of
the second catacomb chamber before opening it, but entering she saw no sign of ashes or fire.

  Creeping to the iron grille that covered the sewer-well she whispered, ‘Simon?’

  No reply.

  It took all her strength to wrest the grille up, and she flinched from the smell below and the furtive wet scurrying in the darkness. Nevertheless she lowered herself down and found him, about a hundred feet farther along the narrow tunnel, curled into a little ball of bones and hair, unwakeably asleep.

  Like far-off chips of glass catching light, Asher saw, as he sank into blackness and bone-breaking cold, the Spartan chamber of the Protestant Gallard again. Again he seemed to be looking through a window, the images clear though he felt as if he were a great way off. This time the young woman Dorcas slept in the bed, dark braids limp on the sheets, and Gallard in his nightshirt knelt on the floor before the fire. Before him, against him, Esdras de Colle knelt, one arm encircling the young man’s waist to hold him up. With the other hand he held Gallard’s thick fair hair, forcing his head back while he drank from the vein in his throat, spilled drips of blood now and then falling from his beard to spot Gallard’s shirtsleeve like blackish rubies. The sleeve was torn open, the arteries of the arm cut in three or four places, the wounds sucked white yet oozing still.

  ‘Give it to me,’ Gallard whispered. ‘I beg – I beg … You said you would give me the vampire life …’

  De Colle drew his head back a little and smiled, loving – Asher could see this in his eyes – to hear the words ‘I beg’. ‘Did I say that?’ he taunted.

  ‘You swore—’

  ‘And you swore you would do anything. I wonder if you meant it?’

  Gallard was fighting to breathe, fighting to keep his fluttering eyelids from dropping closed. ‘Dear God, don’t play with me!’

  ‘You’re telling me what to do now?’ De Colle grinned, bloody-mouthed like a feeding wolf. ‘That doesn’t sound like the man who swore he’d obey me.’

  ‘No, I – I’m sorry – I didn’t mean it …’ The young man was weeping now, weeping in terror as he felt his emptying heart labor to keep going. ‘I will obey. In all things I will obey.’

  The vampire shook his head in deep regret. ‘You don’t sound like a man who means it.’

  He drank again, and Gallard wept and begged as his blood and his life seeped away. Only at the last de Colle laid him on the hearth, and with his long nails ripped open his own sleeve and the flesh of his arm beneath it, and laid the bleeding wound at Gallard’s lips. The young man sobbed and sucked at the blood like a starving baby, begging forgiveness of his new master, stammering thanks, while de Colle chuckled with contempt.

  Then he gathered Gallard up in his arms again, pressed his lips to the other man’s, and with the slowest possible deliberation, a millimeter at a time, used his long nails to open the arteries of Gallard’s throat.

  And as he saw, in another dream-fragment, the spire of St Lambert’s Cathedral once more against the smoke-roiled sunset sky, Asher thought, Liège.

  Constantine Angelus was also the Master of Liège.

  NINETEEN

  ‘Madame!’

  It was the sweeper Fantine.

  Shivering with exhaustion, Lydia stopped on the sidewalk halfway between the doors of the hospital and where Greuze had left his cab on the Rue Chaligny.

  It was full dark. Asher had been unguarded for nearly two hours. She forced herself to sound calm, gave the woman a friendly smile, and said, ‘Hello, Fantine. I’m afraid I can’t talk, I have to—’

  ‘Madame, the police come looking for you.’ She stepped in front of Lydia, blocking her attempt to resume her course toward the hospital.

  Oh God, Jamie …

  She headed Lydia off again as she would have run for the door.

  ‘The police arrest M’sieu Asher.’ The woman frowned, deeply troubled by this turn of events. ‘They took him away. They say he’s a spy – that you’re a spy, too. You aren’t, though, are you, madame?’

  Lydia could only stare at her, too shocked to speak.

  The last time Asher had been accused of being a spy – which of course he had been for much of his life – had resulted in his diving headlong through a window of the Grand Hotel des Wagons-Lits in Peking and spending a week hiding with Chinese gangsters, but that obviously wasn’t an option now. Schaumm, she thought. Or the Paris nest. Good heavens, in a prison infirmary it’s only a matter of time before one of the vampires gets to him!

  ‘You’re not a spy, are you, madame?’ Fantine’s face creased with concern. ‘Spies are wicked and evil. But you’re good to me. You speak to me as if I were a regular lady.’

  Lydia fished in her mind for any remark she’d ever made to the woman besides a friendly Good day, Fantine.

  How nasty did Thérèse Sabatier have to be for that to shine in comparison?

  ‘Not a bit of it!’ Greuze slapped a five-franc piece into the sweeper’s hand, closed the hard fingers around it. ‘It’s a plot by the real spies. Merci, madame! Tell no one!’

  Fantine shook her head vigorously.

  ‘You haven’t seen us.’ As the sweeper went through a whole vocabulary of childhood signs of loyalty and silence, Greuze took Lydia’s elbow and walked her quickly back around the corner to his cab.

  Don Simon Ysidro, as was his wont, had rented for himself a small house in Montmartre, like a country manoir from the days when the hill had been a rural village. It stood on a stairway off the Rue Lepic, only a few streets above the house on the Rue Caulaincourt where he had installed Lydia two days previously, and their cellars connected through the old gypsum-mine tunnels that riddled the hill. Rather to her own surprise, Lydia had been able to drag and carry the vampire up through the well-like manhole that morning and into the central chamber of the old catacomb to lay him in one of the old coffins, confirming her earlier suspicions that whatever it was that was transmitted through vampire blood – presumably a virus such as those Chamberland, Pasteur and Mayer had investigated – it changed the cells of the body itself to some substance both stronger and less dense than living flesh.

  She had been unable to lift the stone lid that she’d found among the detritus along the catacomb wall, and had to content herself with remaining at Ysidro’s side through the remainder of the day. She’d sneaked out once to help herself to candles from the church storeroom, and a second time to steal paper and a pen in order to make notes about what she’d seen beyond the catacomb door and her speculations concerning tissue transformation with regard to cellular composition in the early stages of the vampire state.

  She had earnestly hoped that Ysidro’s consumption of whatever it was he’d drunk to remain awake wouldn’t cause him to oversleep come nightfall. He looked – as she held the candle over his face where he lay in the borrowed coffin – well and truly dead.

  But he woke just after ten, and seemed so ill that Lydia had insisted on seeing him back to his own rented quarters off the Rue Lepic. On the drive there he had insisted that Greuze stop at a café for sandwiches and soup, which he bullied Lydia into eating once they’d reached Lydia’s sanctuary on the Rue Caulaincourt. She had then half-supported him up through the mine tunnels from her cellar to his, and returned – her heart in her throat in the clammy dark of the mine – to her own house again, where they had left Greuze and his cab waiting outside. The result was that it was nearly midnight before she’d stepped out of the cab on the Rue Chaligny and encountered Fantine Boue twenty feet from the door of the Hôpital Saint-Antoine.

  Do Schaumm – and the Paris vampires – know about the manoir on the Rue Lepic?

  In Greuze’s cab on the way from the church Ysidro had given her the key to his own hideout, an astonishing piece of trust considering Asher’s stated intention of killing whatever vampires crossed his path. Returning after Fantine’s warning, she’d had the driver leave her in the Rue Lepic and had climbed the stair straight to Ysidro’s door: dangerous, but the thought of another walk through th
e mine tunnels, at this hour, was more than she could bear.

  Ysidro was gone when she got there. Hunting. Lydia felt sick with horror and self-loathing. Sitting beside him in the catacomb through the endless hours of the day, she had known that it would come to this: that the wakefulness he’d purchased with Emeric Jambicque’s philter, the wakefulness he’d needed to assist her, had brought with it crushing debilitation that could only be counteracted, later, by a kill.

  Or several kills.

  With half the Paris police scrambling into army uniforms and dashing to the Belgian frontier, it would be as easy for him as stealing apples from a vendor’s stall.

  Protecting Jamie – making sure he wouldn’t be left alone in the night – cost someone in Paris their life. Lydia sank down on the worn brown velvet of the sofa – the old town-house was furnished like her grandparents’ country place in Hampshire, part-way between a Regency salon and a Victorian rectory – and took off her glasses to press her palms to her eyes, as if to blot out what she couldn’t bear to see.

  Murderer. Monster.

  He would risk his life for me …

  She blocked from her mind the words she could not – COULD NOT – phrase, and thought instead, I shouldn’t feel about him what I do.

  Jamie.

  New pain and new terror flooded in.

  Where would they take him?

  How well will he be guarded, particularly at night?

  What kind of hearing are they going to give these spy charges, and what kind of evidence is there, and can I even get anyone at the embassy to listen to me?

  The newspaper on the table bore the latest headlines: the German armies had begun bombarding the forts around Liège. They must have brought their big guns up.

  She knew she should take the opportunity to investigate the rest of Ysidro’s house – she’d only seen the cellar and the kitchen before going to the hospital. At least I need to make sure that cellar door is locked. I will look around, she promised, in just a moment.