To Hold the Bridge

by Garth Nix

  Two medics came over to help me. Fortunately they were VET, not locals, so we didn’t waste time arguing about me going to the hospital, getting lots of drugs injected, having scans, etc. They fixed me up with a collar and cuff sling so my arm wasn’t dragging about the place, I said thank you, and they retired to their unmarked ambulance.

  Then I wandered over to where Jenny was sitting on the far side of the silver truck, her back against the rear wheel. She’d taken off her helmet and balaclava, letting her bobbed brown hair spring back out into shape. She looked about eighteen, maybe even younger, maybe a little older. A pretty young woman, her face made no worse by evidence of tears, though she was very pale.

  She jumped as I tapped a little rhythm on the side of the truck.

  ‘Oh … I thought … aren’t you meant to stay inside the … the cordon?’

  I hunkered down next to her.

  ‘Yeah, most of the time they enforce that, but it depends,’ I said. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Me? I’m … I’m okay. So you got them?’

  ‘We did,’ I confirmed. I didn’t mention Mike. She didn’t need to know that, not now.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry … I thought I would be braver. Only when the time came …’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t see how you can,’ she said. ‘I mean, you went in, and you said you fight vampires all the time. You must be incredibly brave.’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Bravery is about overcoming fear, not about not having it. There’s plenty I’m afraid of. Just not vampires.’

  ‘We fear the unknown,’ she said. ‘You must know a lot about vampires.’

  I nodded and moved my flight bag around to get more comfortable. It was still unzipped, but the sides were pushed together at the top.

  ‘How to fight them, I mean,’ she added. ‘Since no one really knows anything else. That’s the worst thing. When my sister was in … infected and then later, when she was … was killed, I really wanted to know, and there was no one to tell me anything.’

  ‘What did you want to know?’ I asked. I’ve always been prone to show off to pretty girls. If it isn’t surfing, it’s secret knowledge. Though sharing the secret knowledge only occurred in special cases, when I knew it would go no further.

  ‘Everything we don’t know,’ sighed Jenny. ‘What are they, really? Why have they suddenly appeared all over the place in the last ten years, when we all thought they were just … just made-up.’

  ‘They’re killing machines,’ I explained. ‘Bioengineered self-replicating guerrilla soldiers, dropped here kind of by mistake a long time ago. They’ve been in hiding mostly, waiting for a signal or other stimuli to activate. Certain frequencies of radiowaves will do it, and the growth of cell phone use …’

  ‘So what, vampires get irritated by cell phones?’

  A smile started to curl up one side of her mouth. I smiled too, and kept talking.

  ‘You see, way back when, there were these good aliens and these bad aliens, and there was a gigantic space battle—’

  Jenny started laughing.

  ‘Do you want me to do a personality test before I can hear the rest of the story?’

  ‘I think you’d pass,’ I said. I had tried to make her laugh, even though it was kind of true about the aliens and the space battle. Only there were just bad aliens and even worse aliens, and the vampires had been dropped on Earth by mistake. They had been meant for a world where the nights were very long.

  Jenny kept laughing and looked down, just for an instant. I moved at my highest speed – and she died laughing, the splinter working instantly on both the human nervous system and the twenty-four-hour-old infestation of vampire nanoware.

  We had lost the war, which was why I was there, cleaning up one of our mistakes. Why I would be on Earth for countless years to come.

  I felt glad to have my straightforward purpose, my assigned task. It is too easy to become involved with humans, to want more for them, to interfere with their lives. I didn’t want to make the boss’s mistake. I’m not human and I don’t want to become human or make them better people. I was just going to follow orders, keep cleaning out the infestation, and that was that.

  The bite was low on Jenny’s neck, almost at the shoulder. I showed it to the VET people and asked them to do the rest.

  I didn’t stay to watch. My arm hurt, and I could hear a girl laughing, somewhere deep within my head.

  The Heart of the City

  GERARD MACNEACAIL, LIEUTENANT IN THE Garde Écossaise of His Majesty King Henri IV of France, stamped his feet to warm them, his red-daubed, gilt-spurred boot heels smashing through a remnant sheet of ice that lay in the shadowed curve of the bastion, where he stood in an attempt to stay out of the way of the morning traffic that crowded the Pont Neuf.

  MacNeacail was trying to be inconspicuous, an effort doomed to failure from the beginning. He was one of the tallest people in Paris, standing six foot four inches in his stockings, and his hair and beard were as bright as a burning hayrick, a legacy of his Scottish heritage, for all that he was of the fourth generation to serve a French king and had never even seen the Western Isles.

  In addition to his remarkable height and the brightness of his hair and beard, MacNeacail had incautiously opened his cloak, revealing to any curious onlooker that he wore the saffron-yellow doublet of the Scottish Guard, its upper sleeves slashed to show the cream shirt beneath; he had a sword on his right side and main gauche on his left, indicating that he was left-handed; and there were two pistols thrust through his belt. To cap off this imposing appearance, several angel-blessed charms in the shape of gold bees hung from the brim of his broad felt hat.

  ‘A monk,’ remarked his shorter, darker, more handsome, and better-proportioned companion, who was similarly attired but had not opened his cloak, as he felt that the winter sun had not sufficiently warmed the air and, though known for his bravery, was always concerned for his health. This was Armand de Vitray, a fellow lieutenant in the Scottish Guard, and a close companion. Like MacNeacail’s dead father, his own parent had been one of the guardsmen who had saved the King from the madman Ravaillac fifteen years earlier, an event commemorated by the bronze equestrian statue that rose out of the river on its own foundation and abutted the bridge some forty feet away, opposite the entrance to the Place Dauphine.

  ‘A monk astride a white horse, being led by a scarlet woman,’ continued De Vitray. There was a popular legend to the effect that if you stood on the Pont Neuf long enough, you would eventually see a monk, a white horse, and a prostitute – but not at the same time and certainly not traveling together, as appeared to be the case with this unlikely trio.

  ‘Abbé?’ MacNeacail asked the gray-clad ecclesiastical gentleman who was peering over the side to the waters of the Seine below, a small silver object that might be a pocket watch – a Nuremberg egg, perhaps – in his hand. ‘Is that significant?’

  The abbé, who was an incessantly cheerful Irish Jesuit priest by the name of Cathal Gallagher, turned swiftly around, tucking the silver object into the silk gauntlet cuff of his right glove. He peered through the crowd upon the bridge, gaze darting over the ox cart laden with something noisome, between the three mules carrying sacks of dye, and then without pause over the heads of many pedestrians of every stripe, quality, and persuasion, before fixing on this unusual embodiment of the popular myth.

  ‘Monk, white horse, whore,’ muttered Gallagher. ‘It must draw near … strange, I had thought there was a vibration upon the river … Shelalhael, are you here? Shelalhael?’

  The three in the bastion heard no answer, but Gallagher suddenly pointed, and MacNeacail and De Vitray saw the equestrian statue stamp its bronze foreleg twice, and the bee charms in the Scotsman’s hat gave a warning murmur. An angel was present, ready to work magic at the Irishman’s behest.

  ‘Warn your men,’ said Gallagher. ‘The monk, the woman, and the horse may be only a warning, an indication that
it comes.’

  ‘What … ah … exactly is it?’ asked De Vitray.

  Gallagher shook his head and shrugged, indicating that he knew but would not tell, which in anyone else would have driven De Vitray to issue an immediate challenge, priest or not, but Gallagher’s smile assuaged the insult. Besides, he was not only a priest, he was also the Duc de Sully’s agent, and Sully, despite the incessant plots against him, continued to be the chief minister and primary confidant of the King. Besides all that, Gallagher owed De Vitray twenty-seven écus lost playing lansquenet in the guardroom the night before.

  ‘Secrets,’ muttered De Vitray. ‘Always secrets. No one tells me anything. Do you know, MacNeacail?’

  ‘I do not wish to know,’ said MacNeacail. He took off his hat and waved it three times above his head. Throughout the crowd, along both stretches of the bridge, hats waved back in response. The number of people on the bridge was so great that this coordinated movement appeared to attract little attention, but immediately afterward, the pace of movement to either bank noticeably increased, and several itinerant booksellers toward the middle of the main span began to hurriedly pack their wares. One particularly perspicacious fellow – most likely a survivor of the religious wars and so finely attuned to trouble – didn’t even bother to pack up, but immediately swung his tall basket onto his back, tucked several loose volumes under his arm, and loped away at a pace considerably faster than a normal walk.

  MacNeacail carefully repositioned his hat so that it would not fall over his face should fighting commence – as had once occurred, to his eternal embarrassment – and loosened his sword. De Vitray pushed back his cloak and immediately coughed, wincing as he did so, as if struck by a sudden pleurisy.

  Gallagher looked up at the windows of the house opposite, on the southwest corner of the Place Dauphine. No one else heard Shelalhael speak, but the angel’s voice was clear inside the Irishman’s head, sharp as a needle to the brain.

  The garret window, on the right-hand side. A match is applied to a gun.

  ‘Stand before us!’ shouted Gallagher, and he saw his companion angel manifest itself in the air above the bridge, just as a small cannon fired from an upper window. White smoke billowed out, and there was the sound of hail upon shingles as two handfuls of old nails and broken iron spattered ineffectually against the angel’s folded wings; or as most of those on the bridge saw it, simply fell short and rained down without effect upon the eastern parapet, as if discharged with insufficient powder.

  For a few seconds, all was still, as if everyone on the bridge was held in thrall till the last echo of the cannon’s boom should fade. After those few seconds, the quiet was replaced by a hubbub of urgent noise and activity.

  ‘Guards!’ shouted MacNeacail, pointing up at the house with his sword. ‘Seize that cannon!’

  ‘Keep De Lartigue and Despreaux,’ muttered De Vitray, as if to the air. He didn’t look at MacNeacail, but kept his gaze upon the populace of the bridge, most of whom were now in sudden flight to either bank or onto the Île de la Cité.

  ‘Ah, De Lartigue and Despreaux!’ called MacNeacail. ‘Stay, if you will.’

  Two guardsmen struggled toward him, beating a path through the terrified crowd with their sword-hilts, while the remaining dozen charged across the bridge to throw themselves in a fevered assault upon the bronze-studded door of the house in question, which opened a moment before the full weight of the soldiers could be brought to bear upon it. The two foremost fell inside and were promptly trampled by their fellows.

  Amid the shouting, the screams of the panicked, and the general riot, it was noticeable that apart from the guardsmen, there were two distinct groups of travelers upon the bridge who did not take to their heels. The first of these was the trio of the monk, the white horse, and the flaxen-wigged prostitute, who had continued their steady way along the bridge, going against the tide of fleeing pickpockets, dog-barbers, peddlers, toothpullers, and less immediately identifiable Parisians, which flowed south.

  The second, some hundred paces behind this trio, was an ox-drawn conveyance that plodded on its way, its driver unfazed by the fact that he alone of all the various drivers on the bridge had not only chosen to stay with his cart, but to keep driving it. His team of four oxen was also unusual, in that they maintained their pace with equanimity, unlike the various horses, donkeys, and palanquin bearers who had either joined the rout or, in the case of the animals not free to do so, were kicking, rearing, and shrieking in their traces.

  ‘Is that the cart?’ asked MacNeacail cautiously. ‘Its load is much as described.’

  He referred to the description given to them some hours before, in the dark before dawn, by the Duc de Sully in the anteroom adjoining the King’s bedchamber. Though he had not expected it to be drawn by oxen, the box upon the cart was at least sixteen feet long and six feet high, and it was curiously narrow, so that it did resemble an overlarge coffin. Apart from the driver’s seat, the cart was shrouded in rough sackcloth that had been daubed here and there with mud, which to some might look as if the contents were agricultural, but to MacNeacail smacked of an ineffectual attempt at subterfuge.

  ‘Yes … ,’ replied Gallagher distractedly. He had a terrible headache, the result of getting his angel to perform a significant feat of magic, and he could feel a faint trickle of blood from his nose running down the back of his throat. It was difficult to concentrate, and he could no longer feel a strong connection to Shelalhael. ‘I have to sit down.’

  He slumped to the pavement and reached into his doublet to draw out a silver-chased flask of eau de vie.

  MacNeacail looked down at Gallagher and frowned. While it was true that practitioners of angelic magic were extremely useful to have around, as for example when being fired upon from ambush, they had a regrettable tendency to fall over after they had worked what to him seemed to be only minor miracles. But then he had not seen the angel’s protective wings, only the fall of shot.

  ‘De Vitray and Despreaux,’ said MacNeacail. ‘You stop the oxcart. De Lartigue, we shall speak with this monk and his … attendant.’

  MacNeacail strode out as he spoke, his sword still in hand, and struck a pose in the center of the bridge, curling his rather thin moustache as an afterthought. De Lartigue stood beside him, with a pistol held ready, the lock pulled back.

  ‘Stop!’ called out MacNeacail when the woman was some ten feet distant. But she did not stop, and though her blond wig was capacious and partly shielded her face, he noted that the one eye he could see was fixed on the far end of the bridge, and she seemed unaware that he stood in her way.

  ‘Stop, in the name of the King!’ commanded MacNeacail again, when the whore was almost upon him, but she walked on, and even when he pushed his hand against her shoulder, she still kept trying to walk forward, her slippered feet tracing the same steps over and over again.

  ‘She sleeps,’ said the monk, and he threw back his hood.

  Both MacNeacail and De Lartigue retreated a step. The monk’s eyes were silver and shone with an unearthly light, the feared and awful sign that indicated he was more than a common practitioner of angelic magic, much more – that he had entered into the closest possible bond with an angelic being, an angelic being who was not an entity of the first or second hierarchies, but of at least the third.

  MacNeacail bowed clumsily, since he was still holding the woman back with one hand. He had no doubt that this was the man they had been sent to meet, with orders to escort him and whatever he had brought into the city, wherever he wished to go. He was sure of this, even though no mention had been made that the fellow was a monk. However, MacNeacail was used to following directives from the King or his right-hand man, the Duc de Sully, that were intentionally roundabout and thus could be easily denied or laughed away as the mistake of a well-intentioned but youthful officer.

  ‘But I am not always a monk,’ said the man. ‘I might have chosen to appear in a different guise.’

  He smiled thinly,
at some private joke, then continued, ‘So no one could have told you to expect a monk.’

  MacNeacail felt a slight pain in his forehead, and his bee charms buzzed. He blinked rapidly, like an owl, or a prematurely awakened lackey, which was supposedly a method of preventing one’s thoughts being read, while still continuing to see, which was preferable in the current case to the more foolproof method of screwing your eyes shut and looking the other way.

  The pain lessened and the bees fell silent.

  ‘Come, let us proceed,’ said the monk.

  MacNeacail let his arm fall and stepped aside so that the woman could continue her somnambulic stroll. As she did so, her overlarge wig slipped a little to one side, and MacNeacail got a good look at her face.

  ‘Irene Amytzantarants!’ he exclaimed, gazing at her perfect, olive-skinned, oval face. She was one of the ladies-in-waiting to Helen Palaeologus, the niece of the Byzantine Emperor, who had married the Dauphin Louis three years previously. Though Louis still lived with his mother at the Luxembourg Palace, he and the Dauphine Helen were frequent visitors to the Louvre, and MacNeacail had been conducting inconclusive flirtations with several of the ladies-in-waiting, including Irene, who was herself a noblewoman of high distinction in the vast empire of the Greeks.

  ‘A noblewoman, certainly, but also an agent of Constantine,’ said the monk. ‘She found me at Etampes last night and sought to divert me from my course.’

  MacNeacail frowned but didn’t bother to blink, as there seemed little point in trying to resist. Now he had a nasty, vertical headache that was forcing its way from the back of his head out through his right eye.

  ‘Where do you want—’ MacNeacail started to ask, but he had to stop as the bees on his hat vibrated so much they began to bounce and clang against one another, reacting far more vigorously than they would to the simple act of mind-reading.

  ‘Ventre gris!’ swore the monk, and he twisted around on his horse to look behind him. ‘Protect the cart!’