Those Who Hunt the Night(33)

He felt a surge of gratitude toward the vampire of which he was almost ashamed—gratitude and surprise that Ysidro would have told him this.

“But you would never be able to go near her again,” the vampire went on. “The others would track you and destroy you, as one who knows too much. In so doing, they would undoubtedly find her as well.”

Asher glanced sourly at his companion. “And how do I know that won’t be the case in any event, when this affair is over?”

The vampire’s gaze had been unfathomable in the dim glow of the steamer’s deck lights, but Asher thought he heard a trace of unhuman amusement in his voice. “From that, too, I shall protect you. Do you not trust me, as I perforce trust you?”

As usual, he could not tell whether Ysidro was being ironic or not.

Long before the train had reached the Gare du Nord, Ysidro had left their compartment; Asher had not seen him anywhere in the station during the nuisance of customs in the Salle des Bagages, nor in the square or the streets outside. He was becoming used to this. The sky was already paling; he’d wired ahead to the Chambord, a small hotel in the Rue de la Harpe where he often stayed when in Paris in his Oxford persona, and they had rooms waiting for him. Entering the tiny lobby, with its fusty smells of cooking and its moldering Empire furnishings, it had troubled him that in all the years that he had known Paris, the city had been the abode of vampires. That was true of London as well, and he wondered if he would ever be able to return to the way in which he had once looked on the world.

Of course, early on in his career, he had lost the innocenceof looking on the world as the bright surface of a beautiful pond. His tamperings with the Foreign Office, with the shadow life of information, and the murky dramas into which the cursed Department had pitchforked him had taken care of that. But beneath his continual awareness of secrets, boltholes, and dangers, there was a new awareness, as if he had suddenly become cognizant, not only of the fish that swam beneath the surface of the pond, but of things utterly unimaginable that moved through the black mud at its bottom.

He had slept until late in the day in his small room up under the high bulge of the roof slates, then bathed and dressed in a thoughtful frame of mind. He had written to Lydia, assuring her of his safe arrival, and mailed the letter enclosed in another to one of his students who had agreed to forward anything for Miss Merridew. It would reach her a day late, but better that, he reasoned, than risk the vampires tracing her. After a light dinner in a café, he sought out the Place des Innocents, the square near the vast central markets of the city, where once the Church of the Holy Innocents and its notorious cemetery had stood.

There was nothing there now—a tree-lined place with a Renaissance fountain, hemmed in by the gray bulk of the Halles on one side and high, brown-fronted immeubles on three others. The vampire of the Holy Innocents had slept in the crypt, Ysidro had said—like Rhys the Minstrel, haunting the crypts of the old Church of St. Giles near the river until the town grew large enough around him so that its inhabitants became strangers to one another and did not notice one more white-faced stranger walking the night in their midst.

Standing now at Ysidro’s side, straining his ears to catch even the whisper of descending feet crossing the cobbled court beyond the door, he wondered if that crypt was still there, buried beneath the soil like the subcellar ofCalvaire’s house in Lambeth, forgotten to all save those who were interested in places proof against the light of day.

The vampires might know. That and other things. He had turned from the Place des Innocents, followed the Rue St. Denis toward the gray sheet of the river, shining between the dove-colored buildings of its banks. To them, this startlingly clean city, with its immaculate streets, its chestnut trees rusty with autumn, was only a topcoat of varnish on a dark swamp of memories, another city entirely.

He had stood for some time on the bank above the quays of the Seine, staring at the gray tangle of bridges upstream and down, the gothic forest of pinnacles that clustered on the Ile de la Cité and the square, dreaming towers of Notre Dame. And just beneath them, on the embankment, he had gazed consideringly at the massive iron grillworks that barred passers-by from the subterranean mazes of the Paris sewers.

“The sewers?” Elysée de Montadour wrinkled her long nose in a deliberate gesture of distaste, her diamonds winking in the blaze of the gaslight. “What vampire in his right mind would haunt them? Brrr!” She shivered affectedly. All her gestures, Asher observed, were theatrical, a conscious imitation of human mannerism rather than a reminiscence of its actual spontaneity, as if she had studied something not native to her. He found himself preferring Don Simon’s uncanny stillness—the Spanish vampire stood, gray-gloved hands resting like hunting cats on the curving Empire back of the lady’s divan, seeming by comparison more than ever immobile—petrified long ago, as Lydia had said, in ectoplasmic ivory.

“Do you ever hunt in them?” Though none of the other vampires in the long, gold-papered salon came near them, he was conscious of the light run of their voices behindhim, as they played cards with spectral speed and deftness or chatted with the half-murmuring whisper of the wind. Seated in a spindly Louis XVI chair opposite Elysée, he knew they were watching him and listening as only vampires could listen, like so many suave and mocking sharks lying just beneath the surface of water, whose shore he could never hope to reach in time. In one corner of the salon, a tall girl whose dark shoulders rose like bronze above a gown of oyster-colored satin played the piano—Tchaikovsky, but with a queer, dark curl to it, a sensuousness and syncopation, like music trickling from behind a mirror that looked into Hell.

“Foi, and subject myself to the rheumatism?” Elysée laughed, a cold and tinkling sound without mirth, and made a great play with her swan’s-down fan.

“And for what, enfin?” One of the graceful young men who made up her coterie of fledglings lounged over to the end of her divan. This one was brown-haired, his blue eyes bright against rounded and beautiful features; Asher wondered if Elysée had made them all vampires for their looks. Like all of the half dozen or so of Elysée’s cadre, he was dressed in the height of fashion, his jet black evening clothes meticulously tailored, contrasting sharply with the white of his shirt and of the flesh above. “A sewer sweeper, whom one must kill without conversation and hide, like a dog burying carrion? Where is the fun in that?” His fangs gleamed as he grinned down at Asher.

Elysée shrugged alabaster shoulders above a dark green gown. “In any case, their superintendents count the sweepers very carefully when they go down, and when they come up. And they are canaille, as Serge says, and no fun in the hunt.” She smiled briefly, dreamy delight in her green eyes with their terrible vampire glitter, like a greedy girl savoring the taste of forbidden liqueur. “Alors, there are eight hundred miles of sewers down there. He wouldwither up like a prune, this Great, Terrible, Ancient Vampire of Paris whom no one has ever seen…”

“What about the catacombs?” Simon asked softly, disregarding the mockery in her voice. A curious silence lifted into the room like an indrawn breath. The piano stilled.

“We all been there, sure.” The dark girl rose from the instrument’s bench, moved across the room with a deliberate, lounging slowness that somehow partook of the same eerie weightlessness that comprised the other vampires’ speed. Instinctively Asher forced himself to concentrate on watching her, sensing that if he did not, she would be all but invisible in the movement of his eye. They had been speaking French—Ysidro’s, as he had said, not only old-fashioned but with an occasional queer childish singsong quality to its pronunciation—but this girl spoke English, with a liquid American drawl. In spite of the almost unbearable lentitudinousness of her movements, she was behind him before he was ready for it, her tiny hand molding its way idly across his shoulders, as if memorizing the contours of them through the cloth of his coat. “They keep count there, too, of workers and visitors. You hid there, didn’t you, Elysée, during the siege?”

There was just a touch of malice in her voice, like the artfully accidental stab of a pin, and Elysée’s green eyes flickered at the reminder of what must have been an undignified flight from the rioting Communards. “And who would not have?” she demanded after a moment. “I took refuge there during the Terror as well, with Henriette du Caens. They weren’t ossuaries then, you know—just old quarries in the feet of Montrouge, stretching away into darkness. Bien sûr, Henriette used to say she thought there might be—something else—there. But I never saw nor heard anything.” There was a touch of defiance in her voice.

“But you were a fledgling then,” Simon replied in his soft voice, “were you not?”

“Fledgling or not, I was not blind.” She tapped half-irritably, half-playfully at his knuckles with her fan—when the ivory sticks came down Simon’s gloved fingers were no longer beneath them, though Asher did not see the hand move. She turned back to Asher, a handsome woman if not pretty, with the face and body of a woman in her prime and eyes that had long since ceased to be human. She shrugged.