Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  You’re dying anyway, we have no time to save you …

  Shuttling desperately between her fluoroscope machine and the surgical tent where every trained hand was needed, she hadn’t even had time to go back and see that youth before he died.

  Tears that she hadn’t been able to shed closed her throat. More than anything else, she wanted to be with Jamie at this moment. To be back in Oxford and out of this place of stink and death and cold. I’m just tired, she told herself firmly. I’ll feel better when I’ve had some sleep …

  Don Simon Ysidro was a vampire. There had been times, in the eight years of their acquaintance, when she had hated him – for what he was, for what she knew that he did and had done in the centuries since his non-death. There had been times when she’d felt herself falling in love with him – despite her unswerving love for the tall, leathery Lecturer in Philology at New College, Oxford whom she had adored with the whole of her heart since the age of fourteen.

  But Jamie was back in Oxford, still recuperating, slowly, from the pneumonia that had nearly killed him in the first month of the war.

  And she was here, in the darkness, feeling the thready pale spider-silk of Ysidro’s long hair brush against her forehead, and hearing the guns.

  She said, ‘Someone else is out there looking for vampires.’

  ‘Are they, indeed?’

  The smell of latrines, of the hospital tents, of cook-tent smoke and makeshift stoves surrounded them like a fuggy embrace. Ysidro stooped and canvas brushed her face as they entered the nurses’ tent, a barely-visible bulk in the darkness. One of the VAD’s she shared with would be on the ward at this hour of the night; the other slept like an unwaking corpse. A tiny flicker of light as Ysidro kindled the lantern next to her bed showed her the vampire’s face, thin, aquiline, pale as white silk, framed in a loose mane of colorless hair and illuminated by eyes that had, in life, probably been hazel. They’d bleached now to a cold sulfurous yellow, faintly pleated with gray – he’d told her once that this ‘bleaching’ occasionally happened to vampires, no one quite knew why. The mental illusion that kept her from noticing his fangs also kept Sister Violet Brickwood from waking, not that the poor woman would stir, after twenty hours on her feet …

  Ysidro pulled Lydia’s shoes and stockings off her, and wrapped her feet in the blanket of her cot. Then he dipped water from the jerrycan in the corner and poured it into the kettle, which he placed on the heating-stove.

  ‘I saw her a week ago … no, longer …’ Lydia shook her head. ‘The second night we were here.’

  ‘Ah.’ She thought he did some mental calculation, placing the night in his mind.

  ‘After I finished setting up the fluoroscope room I walked the perimeter of the camp. When we were back at Givenchy – before the clearing station was moved here – I knew there were vampires all around the camp, every night. I’d glimpse them between the tents, and some of the men have seen them, too. They don’t know what they are.’

  ‘Did you look for me?’

  ‘I couldn’t imagine you’d let anyone see you.’

  A smile touched a corner of his mouth, turned his face suddenly human, a living man’s, and young. ‘You had the right of it, Mistress. Yet you did not make a practice of such patrols at Givenchy.’

  ‘Once I knew they were there, I didn’t really see the point.’ Lydia propped her spectacles again. ‘I mean, I knew they wouldn’t attack the nurses, or the surgeons, or really anyone but the dying. Why cause themselves problems when there are so many easier victims? That sounds horrible, but when I thought about it – and about how few of us there were to take care of the wounded and how terrible the casualties were – that was during the fighting at Ypres – I came to the conclusion that I could probably save more lives by getting a few hours more sleep, instead of chasing vampires whom I knew I’d never catch. I don’t …’ she stammered. ‘I don’t mean that, exactly, but …’

  ‘You chose rightly, lady.’ He held up a hand. ‘And you did a hero’s work at Givenchy, and here. I have watched you.’

  She brushed his compliment aside with tears of shame in her eyes.

  ‘There was no right choice,’ his soft voice insisted. ‘More men lie in the Moribund Ward, and in the trenches themselves, than would suffice to glut the greediest of the Undead, were there five times more of us here than there are. We have no need to trouble even those men who can be saved, ere you load them into the ambulance-wagons. Our business is with the dying. ’Tis not we, these days, who deal out death.’

  ‘I know.’ She took off her glasses to wipe her tears. ‘It doesn’t mean you aren’t monsters.’

  ‘The vileness of my condition is old news to me, lady.’ He measured cocoa from its tin (Where would a vampire learn to make cocoa?) into her mug, and stirred the hot water in. ‘I admit, ’tis not the future I envisioned for myself when I studied my catechism with the Christian Brothers in Toledo. Yet you have not told me how you came to resume your practice of walking the night?’

  ‘I just … wanted to get some idea of the local vampire population.’ The thick pottery was God’s blessing against her chilled hands. ‘Though I knew they’d followed the clearing station down here. But the second night, in the ruins of the village, I saw another woman, moving about like me with her lantern hooded. I thought she might have been a spy when first I saw her light – I suppose there are local women, who think the Germans ought to own this part of France, or even German women who’ve been slipped across the lines. I closed my lantern entirely and followed her, and it became pretty clear to me that she was doing exactly what I did the first night: she circled the camp at a distance, and checked the bombed-out German trenches. She – we – glimpsed vampires twice, and she stood off at a distance, fingering something she wore at her neck, a silver cross or something of the kind, I assume. She kept watch around the ward tents of the men especially. A spy wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘No.’ He settled himself on the foot of Nurse Danvers’s empty bed, folded slim hands around his knee.

  Lydia frowned across at him in the lantern-light. He was attired, as she’d surmised, in the trimly tailored uniform of a staff colonel in the British Expeditionary Force. ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘I have,’ returned Ysidro. ‘At all events I have seen a young woman with a lantern, stealing about the ruins of the village, and down in the abandoned trenches. This was ere the battle started: brunette, and smaller of stature than yourself, though broader in shoulder and hip. Her clothes were dark, and she might well have worn a silver crucifix about her neck – something silver, at all events.’

  Lydia touched the chains around her own throat again self-consciously: enough silver to burn a vampire’s mouth or hands, to give her a split-second in which to wrench free, to scream, to run …

  As if anyone could outrun the Undead.

  And unless the crucifix was of nearly-pure silver, it would have no more effect on a vampire than would any other pendant of similar metal content.

  ‘Did she speak to any of the vampires?’

  ‘Not that I have observed. She has not your familiarity with those who hunt the night, Mistress. She seeks, but cannot find. At least, ’twas so ere the casualties started coming in such numbers. Since the fighting started on the tenth I have not seen her.’

  ‘Have you any idea who she is?’

  He shook his head, or came as near to doing so as she had ever seen him, a slight motion more of his eyes than his head, as if in the centuries since his death he had lost interest in communication with the living. ‘Yet I saw none but yourself engaging in such behavior at Givenchy. And none of the vampires to whom I’ve spoken, either here or nearer the lines, have mentioned any like matter. I admit I have not joined the groups that go out into the trenches, or into no man’s land in the dead of the night. Peasants.’ The two smallest fingers of his right hand flicked in a gesture of concentrated scorn. ‘Without manners or conversation, most of them. I shall enquire.’

  ‘Th
ank you,’ said Lydia. ‘I appreciate it. I’d like very much to know if others – elsewhere along the Front, for instance – are also trying to … to meet, and speak with, vampires, or if this is just something, someone, local. I don’t expect, when the battle itself was going on, that the woman I saw could get away from wherever she was. Or possibly didn’t dare.’

  ‘Given the likelihood that one side or the other might break through the lines, or that shelling might commence anywhere at any time,’ remarked the vampire, taking the empty mug from her hands, ‘I myself would hesitate to venture far from shelter. I understand the Venetian nest foregathered in the chateau at present occupied by the Master of Prague and his fledglings, for a session of écarté which lasted through three nights.’

  ‘What did they play for?’ A dreadful question to ask an Undead multiple murderer, but she really did want to know. ‘I mean, do you play for money? Do you have money? The Bank of France froze all withdrawals at the start of the fighting.’

  Ysidro looked down his highbred nose. ‘One of the first lessons one learns, Mistress, when one becomes vampire, is never to let oneself be caught without money.’ He came back to her cot-side and drew the blankets up over her. ‘The second lesson one learns is how to obtain it – anywhere, and under nearly any circumstances. Those who do not learn such lessons in general do not survive. Thus under ordinary conditions, money means very little to the Undead. The gamblers at the chateau played, I understand, for credit-vowels, much like the surgeons and the orderlies play here. Had I known you sought information regarding this enterprising vampire-seeker I would have arranged to attend: such gatherings are clearing houses for gossip, and do not take place often.’

  He tucked the blankets in around her, for the tent, though stuffy-smelling, was deeply cold. ‘Sleep now,’ he ordered, took her spectacles from her hand and placed them on the up-ended packing crate at her side. ‘Morn will come soon enough.’

  I shouldn’t take comfort in his presence, she thought. He’s going to leave here and go straight across to the Moribund Ward …

  I shouldn’t feel glad to know that he’s near.

  She stopped herself from catching at his hand, and only asked, ‘Where were you? I mean, why weren’t you playing cards and trading gossip—? The Master of Prague has a chateau? HERE?’

  ‘You would expect him perhaps to sleep in a dugout?’ One eyebrow lifted, and through a haze of myopia she saw again – or imagined – that his face for a moment became the face of the man he had been, almost three hundred and sixty years ago. And then, more quietly, ‘I was watching over you, Mistress.’

  And where were YOU sleeping? During the shelling, and the confusion, and the constantly shifting dangers, any one of which could trap a vampire aboveground when the first light of dawn would ignite his flesh and engulf him in flame …

  Instead she asked, ‘Do you know what this woman wants?’

  ‘I expect—’ he turned down the lantern – ‘nothing good.’

  TWO

  Colonel Stewart shut the buff folder on his desk with a little hiss of annoyance, and scowled across at James Asher as if what he’d read there were all Asher’s fault. ‘Damn medicos won’t clear you for service till you can run three times round Piccadilly Circus and shin up the Monument with a rope. Got no idea there’s a war on and we need every man.’

  Asher suspected that the damn medicos, up to their hairlines in shattered and dying men, were as cognizant of the war as Stewart was and were seeing it a damn sight closer. But he only returned, ‘I can’t say I’m surprised. Or entirely disappointed. Just coming down here knocked me out. I’d hoped to go back up to Oxford tonight and I’m staying in town instead.’

  ‘You look perfectly fit to me,’ grumbled the colonel, rising to show Asher from his office. ‘Damnit, man, you’d only be sitting in a cell with a lot of Jerries listening to ’em talk! How hard can it be?’

  Asher, who’d had three relapses of pneumonia since his return to Oxford in September – after nearly dying of it in Paris – reflected that the last thing his lungs needed was to be surrounded by forty German prisoners of war, all coughing themselves blue. He made noises of commiseration, shook hands and promised to notify the War Office the minute he was fully recovered, and descended the steps of the rambling labyrinth on Whitehall feeling as if he’d personally swum the Channel after battling half a regiment of Roman gladiators, single-handed and armed with a golf club.

  Definitely in no shape to deal with Paddington station and two hours standing in the corridor of an overcrowded railway car, much less a trip to the Front.

  A younger man – and on that cold March night, though not quite fifty Asher felt like a septuagenarian at least – would have leapt at the chance, if not for glory then because his beautiful young wife, Lydia, was also at the Front. But seventeen years on Her Majesty’s Secret Service had cured Asher once and for all of any possible craving for glory, and of even a moment’s belief that if such a thing as glory existed (something he had always very much doubted) it could be achieved in war. And though he would without hesitation – even at his age (or the age which he felt) – have re-swum the Channel and fought those hypothetical Roman gladiators a second time with his seven iron in the hopes of even an hour in Lydia’s astonishing company, he was sufficiently familiar with the workings of the War Office to know that were he to volunteer to gather information from captured German prisoners, he would undoubtedly be assigned to do so in Serbia, not Flanders. (Lydia’s letters were censored but before her departure last November they had worked out a dot code, so he knew she was in Pont-Sainte-Félicité, near Neuve Chapelle.)

  Whitehall was nearly dark. The pavement was thick with foot traffic from the government offices, though it was close to seven. Asher’s years of sneaking in and out of foreign countries with information about naval emplacements, border fortifications and orders for new weaponry had given him a permanent watchfulness of all those around him, an awareness of faces and details of dress which, in Berlin or Vienna, could mean the difference between making it back to his hotel safely and being found dead in a storm drain. Thus, despite the swift-thickening twilight, he was very much aware that most of the men hastening to catch the 7:10 from Charing Cross had white or grizzled hair beneath their Homburg hats, and that the home-going crowd – thinner by half than it had been the year before – was at least a third female. Women and older men moved to take up the positions of men at the Front.

  Or of the men who’d gone to the Front six months ago and were already dead.

  Buildings loomed against the cinder sky like a black necropolis. Since January, when German Zeppelins had rained bombs on coastal towns, the government’s orders to black out windows and streetlamps had assumed a new seriousness – Asher had read recently of a movement afoot to drain the Serpentine and the lake in St James’s Park, lest the glitter of moonlight on their waters serve as a guide to the night raiders. Though the traffic – both motorcars and horse-drawn – was far lighter these days, Trafalgar Square was a nightmare of jostling dark shapes swimming through the gloom, and had Asher not known the place like the back of his hand he would not have been able to locate the Underground station. Below ground the lights were bright, but the crowds were such – reduced bus service and an almost total absence of cabs more than made up for the shortage of men in city offices – that Asher had a long wait for a train to Bloomsbury.

  By the time he reached the small lodging house near Euston Station his head was swimming with fatigue. He had already telegraphed Mrs Grimes – the cook back at the Oxford house – that he wouldn’t be home, and briefly toyed with the notion of sending a second wire to bid Miranda a special good-night. At three, and with her mother now gone, his daughter set great store by good-night kisses, even by remote proxy. But the extreme likelihood that the Oxford Post Office wouldn’t deliver the greeting until the following morning put the idea from his mind, and he ascended five flights of stairs to what had been the servants’ quarters of the t
all, narrow house – rooms of any kind were another thing extremely difficult to come by in London in the spring of 1915 – and dropped onto the cot in the penitential little chamber without undressing.

  This turned out to be a fortunate circumstance, because twenty minutes later the landlady’s daughter thumped loudly on the door with the news that a message had come from the War Office, and it looked to be important.

  It was from Colonel Stewart, begging him to return. Sir Collin Hayward of Intelligence was on his way to Paris first thing in the morning, but having heard that Asher was in town, wanted very much to speak to him about assisting in the vetting and training of agents to be sent to the Continent.

  Asher roundly cursed both Stewart and Sir Collin, but resumed his coat, tightened his tie (which he hadn’t taken off – tired as he was, he assumed he’d have slept in it), and made his way downstairs and back to the Underground.

  He spent the next three and a half hours in conference with Sir Collin, who, to do him justice, looked like he hadn’t had more than a few hours’ sleep in the past week.

  Then because of a breakdown on the Northern line – it was past midnight, and the Underground nearly empty – Asher had to take the Piccadilly line and walk back to Grafton Place from King’s Cross. And, owing to the completely unlighted condition of the streets, and a moderately thick fog which had settled over the city, he found himself, uncharacteristically, lost.