Darkness on His Bones

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘What is it, Simon?’ the old man asked gently. ‘You’ve served the Faith in a small matter, and done extraordinarily well. Do you doubt that we will give you every assistance? You shall command what you need: servants, gold, authorizations—’

  ‘I want none of those things,’ returned Simon. ‘I want … my soul. I want the blessing of the Holy Father.’

  ‘And you shall have it!’ He clasped Simon’s hands. ‘Every step you take, every deed of service you do, is one step closer …’

  The vampire drew back. ‘Is that then what this is about? My “deeds”? My “service”? You asked me to kill an enemy. I did it; it was the price, you said, of my soul. But then it wasn’t: I had to kill a man who was almost a stranger to me.’

  ‘A heretic,’ Father Jeffrey reminded him. ‘You’ve been killing heretics for years. And a murderer.’

  ‘As I am a murderer. And that was to be the price of my salvation. Only it wasn’t. You asked me to kill my friend.’

  ‘He also was a heretic, Simon. His writings were pernicious.’

  ‘He was not a heretic. He never embraced the so-called Reformed Faith. He only asked questions. And still that wasn’t enough. So I must ask you, Jeffrey … and I must ask you to tell the truth. When will it be enough? How are the murders that you ask me to commit different from the murders for which my soul stands condemned? How is the Duc de Rohan, whom I don’t even know, different from those I’ve killed simply to survive? To feed my appetite that is a part of this condition—’

  ‘The condition which you accepted. Freely, of your own will, and for your own benefit.’

  Simon only stood looking at him, grief and anger and bafflement slowly crystallizing to cold nothingness in his yellow eyes.

  ‘Simon,’ urged the priest. ‘To achieve salvation, we must accept what we are told by those who understand these things better than we do. It is sufficient only that we trust, and obey.’

  He reached out his hand to him again, but Simon drew back, like a ghost in the blackness of the hall.

  Gently – sadly – Father Jeffrey said, ‘You cannot ask these questions, Simon. You must have faith.’

  Ysidro closed his eyes for a moment; seeing what? Asher wondered. Constantine Angelus lying on the floor of his study? The pre-dawn flush in the gray sky above Montmartre hill? Tim Quodling’s face, not bloodless and twisted with pain but grinning brightly in the firelight as he set out a game of draughts?

  ‘Wilt bless me, Jeffrey,’ he asked, very quietly, ‘as you used to do?’

  Father Jeffrey looked away. Knowing, Asher supposed, that he should say, You know I cannot, and yet unable to bring out the words. Knowing, like the Pope in the Tannehauser legend, that a soul sent into the darkness does not come back, and with no amount of seeking can he ever be found.

  When he looked up, with words on his lips, Ysidro was gone.