Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  “Only once,” he said, “shortly before I left Spain. I never sent for it because it was a stiff and rather ugly effort—the Renaissance did not reach Madrid until many years later. Afterward—it is a very difficult thing, you understand, to paint portraits by candlelight.”

  They moved on—one dark turning, two.

  Then the lamplight flicked down a side tunnel and Asher stopped short. Simon, a step ahead of him, was backat his side before he was even conscious that the vampire had heard him; Ysidro was keeping, he realized, close watch upon him, as he had in the Hôtel Montadour.

  Silently, Asher took the lantern and pointed its beam away into the darkness, not certain he had seen what he thought he’d seen.

  He had.

  Simon glanced sidelong at him, fine-arched brows swooping down in disbelief. Asher shook his head, as baffled as he. After a moment’s uneasy pause, they moved on together into that narrow seam of rock and bone.

  Everywhere in the ossuary, the bones had been formed into neat walls, with the remainder heaped behind. But here those walls had been torn down. The bones lay scattered in a deep drift, like mounds of brittle kindling; in places along the walls the floor was waist deep. Asher heard them crunch beneath his feet, and, listening, beneath Simon’s as well—the first time he had ever been aware of the vampire making a sound when he walked. Then the floor was clear once more, and Asher blinked in astonishment at what lay beyond.

  “A demented workman?”

  Slowly Simon shook his head. “There is no soot on the ceiling,” he said. “It is a place the tourists never come—the guards, either. You see for yourself that ours were the first feet to break those bones.”

  “I’ve seen something of the kind in that Capuchin monastery in Rome, but…”

  The walls of the tunnel, from that point on, were lined entirely with pelvic bones. Lamplight and shadow glided over them as Asher and Ysidro moved on again, thousands of smooth, organic curves, like some perverted variety of orchid. They stacked the wall as high as the bones elsewhere, and over a yard deep on either side, pelvises and nothing but pelvises. In time they gave place to skulls, amournful audience of empty sockets, vanishing away into the dawnless night. In side tunnels, Asher caught glimpses of sheaves of ribs, like frozen wheat in the wind, cracked and crumbling nearly beyond recognition; scapulas like flat brown plates; drifts of vertebrae; and, beyond them, like tide-separated sand and gravel, finer dunes of finger bones, meticulously sized, smaller and smaller, back into the eternity of night. At the end of that tunnel was another altar, the third Asher had seen since entering the ossuary, small and starkly painted, its white patches gleaming like skulls in the gloom.

  Asher shook his head, and turned to Simon, baffled. “Why?”

  “It is something difficult to explain,” the vampire replied softly, “to a man of your century—or indeed, to any who lived after your so-called Age of Reason.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “I did once.”

  Asher bent down, and took a finger bone from the nearest heap; they drifted the walls of the tunnel just here like piles of grain in a granary. He turned it over in his fingers, unconsciously imitating Lydia’s examination of Lotta’s severed vertebra—small, delicate, efficient in its thin shank and bulbous joints, stripped of the fragile miracle of muscle and nerve that had made it responsive to a lover’s caress or the grip on the handle of a gun. He was turning to go, the bone still in his hand, when from the darkness he heard a whisper: Restitute.

  He froze.

  He could see nothing—only the shadows of the sheaved ribs behind and around him. He glanced at Simon, but the vampire’s eyes were darting from shadow to shadow, wide and shocked and seeking, evidently able to see nothing; moreover, it was clear he could not even locate the speaker with his mind.

  Return it, the voice had whispered in Latin, and in the same tongue Asher whispered, “Why?”

  He had thought Simon’s voice soft; he wasn’t certain whether he heard these words at all, only a murmur of Latin half within his own skull.

  “She will come looking for it.”

  “Who will?”

  “She whose it was. They will all come looking for them—skulls, ribs, toes, the little ear bones like the jewels of rings. The Trumpet will blow—they will all scramble to assemble themselves, to find their own bones, wrap them up in cloaks of ashes. And when they find them, they will climb all those stairs, each with his own bones. All save we.”

  Something changed in the darkness; Asher felt the hair of his nape lift as he realized that what he had taken for a heap of bones and shadow less than a yard away was the shape of a man. He felt Simon flinch, too—even with his preternatural senses, the vampire had been unable to see.

  The Latin voice whispered again, “All save we.”

  He wore what had probably been a monk’s robe once, rotted and falling to pieces over limbs scarcely less emaciated than the bones that surrounded them on all sides. He seemed bent with age, huddled like a frozen crone desperate for warmth; in the sunken, waxen flesh, the strangely glittering vampire eyes seemed huge, green as polar ice. His fangs were long and sharp against the delicate, hairless jaw. Through the open throat of the robe, Asher could see a crucifix, black with age and filth.

  Like the claw of a bird, one shaky hand pointed at Simon; the nails were long and broken. “We will hear the Trumpet far off,” the vampire whispered, “but we will not be able to go, you and I. We will continue undead, unjudged, and alone, after all the others are gone—we will never know what lies upon the other side. They may speakfor me—I hope they will understand why I have done this and speak for me…”

  Simon looked puzzled, but Asher said, “Before the Throne of God?”

  The old vampire turned those luminous green eyes on him, eager. “I have done what I can.”

  “What is your name?” Simon asked, falling into the heavily Spanish-accented Latin of his own early education.

  “Anthony,” the vampire whispered. “Brother Anthony of the Order of the Friars Minor. I stole this…” He touched his black habit—a chunk of it fell off in his hand. “Stole from the Benedictines in the Rue St. Jacques—stole and killed the man who wore it. I had to do it. It is damp here. Things rot quickly. I could not go abroad naked before the eyes of men and God. I had to kill him … You understand that I had to do it.”

  Then he was beside Asher, with no sense of time elapsed or of broken consciousness at all; the touch of his fingers was like the light pricking of insect feet as he removed the tiny bone from Asher’s grasp. Looking down into his face, Asher could see that Brother Anthony appeared no older than Simon or any of the other vampires did; it was only his posture and the whiteness of the long hair that straggled down over his bent shoulders that gave the queer, white, ageless face its look of senility.

  “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 anxiously. “Rats—a horse—chickens. But I could feel my mind starting to go, my senses turnsluggish. 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 madness. And I will never be forgiven.”

  “It is one of the tenets of faith,” Asher said slowly, “that there is no sin, nothing, that God will not forgive, if the sinner is truly repentant.”

  “I can’t be truly repentant,” Brother Anthony whispered, “ca
n 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 arranged 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 hewas 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.”

  “Not would 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 vampires?”

  “Johannis Magnus,” the old vampire whispered, “the Lady Elizabeth; 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 shalt 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 command 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 deserted vestibule, where Ysidro was fastidiously poking among the papers 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 thewiser; 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 shriveled 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’tseem 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 survived, he—or she—would be a day stalker, like Brother Anthony, toughened, as you said, against garlic and silver 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 boulevards. There was no way of telling how late it was, but leaden darkness now possessed even the most late-carousing of bistros, and the prostitutes 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 a
re plenty to begin on here, without going to London for the purpose. And if the killer is his contemporary, with thesame 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 unearthly 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 neighborhood. 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 London—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.”