Darkness on His Bones

by Barbara Hambly

  She removed her spectacles and closed her eyes, to open them (it felt like) almost at once at the touch of a cold hand on hers.

  ‘Mistress?’

  ‘He’s in the chapel,’ she said, not knowing why: a fragment of a dream that disappeared like glass in clear water. She lay on the sofa, looking up into Ysidro’s yellow eyes.

  ‘Who is?’ And he asked the question too quickly.

  As if he already knew.

  ‘Who is?’ she repeated, even the memory of having spoken swallowed up.

  ‘You said, “He’s in the chapel.”’

  She shook her head, passed a hand across her face, not certain now who she’d been speaking of. The ebony clock on the mantel, elaborately carved as if it were part of a Poe story, showed it to be four thirty in the morning. It had read a quarter to one when she’d entered the room. She caught his sleeve. ‘They’ve arrested Jamie.’

  Ysidro looked wasted and emaciated, the scars on his face standing out like sword-cuts and his eyes sunk into bruises of fatigue. Despite the heat of the night he was wrapped in his black greatcoat, lank wisps of colorless hair hanging down on to his collar and his hands like a skeletal bird’s. She reached involuntarily to put her hand to his face and he drew back a little; she’d put on her silver chains again to go to Saint-Antoine’s, and had been too tired to take them off afterwards.

  Debilitated as he was, even at this distance they hurt him.

  ‘I know,’ he replied. ‘I have just come from there. Large policemen snore all around Ward B, awaiting your appearance and thinking themselves cunningly concealed behind screens. When dark falls again I shall seek him in the three prisons of the town. But you, Mistress, shall remain here. The hag that watches o’er the wards there spoke of you, and of him, spying for Germany – being part in fact of a ring of spies tasked to destroy the depots of supplies destined for the army, and to assassinate such gentlemen as Messires Poincaré and Gallieni.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’ Lydia sat up and rubbed her eyes. ‘I couldn’t pick President Poincaré out of a receiving-line and I haven’t the slightest idea who Monsieur Gallieni is.’

  ‘The general in charge of defending Paris. There is food in the kitchen, madame, but I am for bed. Yet I charge you, remain indoors and open neither door nor shutter. I doubt not that between them Mistress Hyacinthe and Schaumm can raise up a coterie of deluded Parisians to seek you as a German spy. There are some already, I dare say, dreaming this night of your wicked face and evil deeds. ’Twere an easy matter to convince them that you should be killed on sight rather than turned over to the police. Who is it you saw in the bone chapel?’

  ‘No one,’ said Lydia uncertainly. ‘That is … there was someone there. I know it. I – I don’t know who …’

  ‘You saw no one?’ Again he spoke too quickly.

  He knows who’s there.

  She shook her head.

  And fears him …

  She opened her lips to ask him, but fell asleep – vampires could do that to people – as if the ceiling had fallen in on her, and slept like a dead woman until far into the morning.

  ‘Where are you?’ Asher called out into the darkness of the chapel.

  He’d seen Lydia come in, seen the flash of her spectacles as she looked around her, the dark-lantern she carried held high. She must have come in through the catacomb from St Clare’s.

  Unlike the other dream-visions this one was clear and close, and as such filled him with terror. This was no second-hand recollection from Ysidro’s memories, glimpsed through dark window glass. He recognized the frock Lydia wore, the simple dark-gray dress of a working woman; she’d had it on when she’d visited him in the hospital.

  Get out of there, they’re watching for you. Waiting for you …

  ‘We will help you,’ he said, frantic enough to promise anything, ‘but tell me what you want!’

  I’m seeing this through his eyes; he must have been standing right by the altar.

  ‘Why didn’t you speak?’

  Lydia whirled, as if at a noise. Fled through the door …

  Damn it, don’t tell me you went there alone! If it was daytime Elysée’s hired guards would have instructions simply to lock up intruders, leave them there when they left the premises at night. At least at night there was a sporting chance that the vampires themselves would be out.

  Damn you, Don Simon, why didn’t you talk her out of it?

  If she comes to harm I really will kill you.

  He shouted, ‘Show yourself!’

  But his dream had shifted, back to his own memories again. Memories of knowing he was being followed back across the footworn stones of the round vestibule, memories of fleeing through the catacomb: one door, two doors, three doors …

  Of knowing they were following him.

  Of guessing they’d be waiting for him by the doors of the church.

  Of calculating other ways of getting out of the building, of reaching the relative safety of lights and people. There was, he knew, a window in the storeroom in the tower from which it would be possible to reach the roof of the side-aisle. It was steep, and probably slick with moss, but if he could make it across to the buttress he could scramble down …

  The gleam of eyes in the darkness around him, closing in. He wrapped his silver wrist-chains around his hands …

  TWENTY

  Lydia woke at a quarter to ten, from uneasy dreams. Sometimes it was the old dream of searching through the big house on Russell Square in which she’d grown up, looking for her mother – the mother who’d suddenly grown so thin, just before she – Lydia, ten years old – had been abruptly informed that she was going to go stay with her Aunt Faith, and no, her mother was perfectly fine but wouldn’t be able to come see her for a little while …

  She had never seen her mother again, except once, when she’d sneaked down and looked at her in her coffin.

  But now – as frequently happened when she had the looking-for-mother dream – the rooms in the house kept changing: to her own bedroom on Holywell Street in Oxford, to Miranda’s nursery (but I don’t have a child, I’m only ten years old myself!), to that tall strange moldering dark house in the East End of London that she could sometimes find and sometimes couldn’t, where Ysidro slept when he was in England …

  Waking – creased and cramped and grubby from sleeping in her clothes – she tiptoed to the kitchen at the back of the house, tightly shuttered as were all rooms in that big square manoir of pink-washed stucco, and found there a copper of water steaming gently at the side of the stove and an old-fashioned tin bath set ready behind a screen. A skirt, shirtwaist, underthings, and petticoat lay folded on the pine table – giving her the impression of having stumbled into a fairy-tale, only she wasn’t sure whether it was Beauty and the Beast or Bluebeard – and she found butter and milk in the icebox, cheese, bread, and sausage in tin boxes on a shelf. The bread was fresh.

  She took a bath, washed her hair, and though her whole heart was screaming Jamie’s name she made herself have breakfast (‘If you faint from inanition I shall carry you to the curb and leave you there,’ Ysidro had told her last night), and she did feel much better afterwards. Tea, not coffee, which Lydia couldn’t have made drinkable to save her life (does he have Mrs Istabene – or whatever her name is – come up here, too?).

  Why would a Renaissance Spanish vampire ever need to learn to make tea?

  There is no chance – none – that you will learn where Jamie is, or HOW he is, or even if he’s still alive, until full dark, so you might as well explore the house.

  The shuttered windows (in most rooms reinforced with curtains of heavy velvet like those in the twisting passage that led to the bone chapel), though depressing, gave her a sense of safety. Her recollections of Jürgen Schaumm, and of Ellen lying in the kitchen doorway at Aunt Louise’s in a pool of blood, and of the handsome and not terribly bright Modeste Saint-Vrain, were enough to keep Lydia well away from even touching the shutters. She searched the house f
rom cellar to attics and found no trace of Ysidro’s coffin or of the vampire himself, though she had not the slightest doubt that there was a sub-cellar or a wine-vault somewhere whose door she was just temporarily not noticing no matter how hard she looked for it. She couldn’t even find the door in the cellar that led into the tunnels. She did find the vampire’s clothes in the attic, three trunks packed with exquisite neatness and containing, in addition to suits, shoes, gray silk ties, and endless quantities of immaculate white linen shirts, an assortment of toiletries whose variety would have shamed a London dandy and a dozen books in Spanish, Latin, and Greek.

  With them, she was interested to note, were three pamphlets by Constantine Angelus. So far as she could tell, they were not those that Jamie had bought.

  One of the few books in English was Gulliver’s Travels, and after she’d thoroughly inspected the house and found two ways besides the front door to get out of it in an emergency, this was what she read, on and off through the afternoon between naps. She slept a great deal. Though her dreams were troubled she understood that she needed the rest, and in any case was certain that she was safer sleeping here than she would be anywhere else.

  From the last of these slumbers she woke to find Ysidro at the kitchen table, a wilderness of maps and notes spread out before him.

  ‘James is in La Santé prison.’ He rose and went to the gas-ring on the counter – the stove was the old wood-burning variety – to prepare coffee for her. ‘A vile place: I have visited charnel-houses cleaner than their infirmary. If ’twas the intent of Schaumm and Hyacinthe to kill him in the prison they overreached themselves. He is well watched, and will be tried by court-martial within days, the guards say. Myself, I doubt it.’ The long fingers operated the iron coffee-mill with deft speed, and measured the grounds into the pot. ‘The man I spoke to said that he is not well.’

  With a calm that surprised herself Lydia asked, ‘What can we do?’

  By the glare of the kitchen gas-jets Ysidro still looked far from well himself. Though the night was warm he was periodically racked by shivers. She could tell he’d fed – at the prison? – and hated herself for having the familiarity to know this. But the attempt to investigate the Hôtel Batoux by daylight had clearly been almost too much for him.

  ‘Naught, tonight. Nor yet tomorrow. Save only that I spun the superintendent of the night watch there a tale of crafty Germans and the possibility that they will try to murder James in his bed to keep their foul secrets safe – laying it on, as your schoolboys have it, with a trowel. ’Twill make it harder for us to abstract him from the place, but will, I hope, keep him safer there until such time as I—cagafuego!’ he added, as he fumbled in bringing the milk out of the icebox, and dropped it in an explosion of glass to the floor.

  Lydia sprang forward, thrust him gently aside – he’d caught the edge of the table for balance – and squatted to gather up the larger fragments of the bottle neatly from the mess.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t think – no, Simon, I said sit down. I’ll get this. I didn’t realize this potion you took has such a devastating effect.’

  ‘’Tis sometimes guesswork, how much of what to put into it. And, ’tis a year since I made it last, and a century ere that. Emeric used it often, and so knew how to control the quantities to within the weight of a poppy-seed. Cauchemar was ever trying to get from him the formula for it – the proper formula, for there were a dozen. And trying to get other things.’ Ysidro sank down on to the bench at one side of the big table, and watched – with obvious discomfort – as Lydia swept up the remaining glass and mopped the floor with a towel.

  ‘Did Emeric and Cauchemar ever use it to try to break into Angelus’s house to search for the Facinum? There is something there in the bone chapel, by the way,’ she added, coming back to the bench. ‘At least, there are four reliquaries in sort of grilled cupboards behind the altar. And as I said …’ She hesitated, groping for the words to frame what she had felt there in the darkness. ‘I had a sense of something – someone – being there, watching me, even though I saw no one. It may just have been because Elysée was sleeping there, if she was sleeping there – the coffin was closed … I take it Emeric the alchemist was loyal to Angelus. You’d said they were friends.’

  ‘They were – or had been,’ replied Ysidro. ‘What he was, was a member of the so-called Reformed Faith, and as such would not have given Cauchemar a map to find water if both were dying of thirst.’

  ‘They really took that seriously?’ Lydia recalled Filomène du Plessis, the only Catholic girl at Madame Chappedelaine’s Select Academy in Switzerland, and the way the other girls would whisper about her when her aunt and uncle – who lived in Geneva near the school – would come every Sunday to take the little girl to Mass. Remembered the rumors that went around about Catholics worshipping the saints and having to obey whatever the Pope told them, so you couldn’t trust them. Remembered all the whispering when word got out that Madame Oberholtzer’s academy on the other side of town had actually accepted a Jewish girl.

  The colorless eyebrows flexed.

  ‘I mean,’ said Lydia, ‘you were all … vampires were all …’

  ‘Damned?’ Ysidro’s expression did not change. ‘God forbid our Hell should be sullied with heretics. ’Twas all Constantine could do, to keep open war from breaking out between the two faiths and destroying us all.’

  Marrow freezing, waves of chills consuming him, Asher fought to surface from the darkness. But the darkness pulled him down, like water. Filled his lungs so that he fought for every breath, knowing that any breath might be his last, that the water might at any second prove stronger than his ability to fight his way upward …

  In the darkness he heard a scream.

  Then another, and somewhere the thick roar of flame and the stench of flesh charring. Echoes of pain. He had killed vampires and he knew that even sunk in the paralysis of their day-sleep, even with their hearts impaled with a hawthorn stake and their veins injected with silver nitrate, when dragged into the sunlight they screamed as they died.

  And sometimes the masters who had made them – sunk also in their day-sleep – screamed too in the prison of their coffins, feeling the flames themselves and unable to wake.

  ‘But the truth of the matter was, Cauchemar would not have allied himself with Emeric in such a search even had they been united in their faith. Any object which promised mastery over the Paris nest would give such power only to one. Not both.’

  ‘I will not have it!’ Trembling, Angelus turned from the light of the fire, faced Simon across the book-lined study. Through the windows Asher could see the dreary Paris rain catching the candlelight, could feel in his bones the deep chill of winter as he had felt it in Gallard’s tiny room, in the Mestalliers’ attic.

  Simon replied, carefully expressionless, ‘’Tis little loss.’

  ‘The man was my get.’

  ‘He turned against you—’

  ‘He did not!’ The taller vampire strode to him, caught his pearled sleeves in the crushing grip of exasperation, almost shook him. ‘Cannot I make you understand, Simon? We cannot be Catholic, we cannot be Protestant, no more than the poor living can who try to make sense of their lives which are, God knows, sufficiently complicated …’

  And like an echo Asher saw them again, the woman burned by the mob and lying naked and sobbing in the mud, the two priests washing the face of the third in the sacked ruin of their church. The monks, and the Daughters of Providence, are in God’s hands, Father Jeffrey’s voice murmured …

  ‘I watched them go to war with one another. I watched them tear this city apart. Were you in France thirty years ago, Simon, when the Queen and the Catholic League stirred up the faithful to massacre their Protestant neighbors? Common shopkeepers, men with sons and daughters of their own, would slit the throats of children whom they had known since babyhood, telling themselves that this was “all right” because the parents of those children – not
even the children themselves! – had made the choice to believe that bread and wine are exactly what they look and smell like – bread and wine – and not the product of some Platonic miracles of essences and accidents that they do not even understand!’

  The firelight turned Angelus’s eyes to lakes of flame in the gloom. ‘We kill. I kill, you kill … we kill because that is how we are made. We deceived ourselves into thinking that we had the right to live, for whatever reasons we gave ourselves … Or some because the smell of mortal blood drives them into frenzy and literally takes their minds away in that moment, in the moment of the kill, as the smell of brandy takes away the mind of a drunkard.

  ‘We cannot start fighting amongst ourselves, Simon. You have a servant, de Colle has mortal men faithful to him, aye, and women too … I have those whose dreams I walk in, whose thoughts I nudge in one direction or another. Whose debts I pay and whose favors I sometimes ask, to do this deed or that for me in daylight. They as well as we will suffer if we start a war among ourselves.’

  He stared into Simon’s eyes, and the younger vampire returned the gaze with a deliberate blankness, as if shutting a door. ‘How can you be sure the men who killed de Colle were guided by a vampire?’

  Angelus waved the question aside. ‘De Colle was crafty. He had been vampire for a century, he knew the old ways, the old skills to guard himself. He had living servants who watched his houses, he had a dozen ways in and out of any one of them. Even with things as they are in this city, he would have known if a living man sought him. He would have heard his footfall, even in his sleep. Recognized it if it passed a second time. He would have known a face glimpsed in a crowd … glimpsed again where it should not be, and a third time, maybe too soon after the second. Only a vampire could have known where he lay. Was it you?’

  ‘One of the others may have betrayed him,’ replied Simon. ‘Or his fledgling may have led someone to him—’

  ‘Fledgling?’ The master vampire’s brows shot together, deflected from his concern by wary anger.