“So you don’t believe Calvaire sought out this—this most ancient vampire in Paris.”
The fan snapped open again, indignant. Elysée’s eyes were on Hyacinthe, not on him. “I am the most ancient vampire in Paris, Monsieur le Professeur,” she said decidedly. “There is no other, nor has there been for many years. And en tout cas, you—and others—” her glance shot spitefully from Hyacinthe to Ysidro, who had somehow come around the divan to her side and within easy grasping range of Asher “—would do well to remember that the single law among vampires, the single law that all must obey, is that no vampire will kill another vampire. And no vampire…” Her eyes narrowed, moved to Asher, and then back to the slender, delicate Spaniard standing at her side. “… will do that which endangers other vampires by giving away their haunts, their habits, or the very fact of their existence, to humankind.”
Ysidro inclined his head, his pale hair falling forward over the gray velvet of his collar, like cobweb in the bonfire of gaslight and crystal. “Fear nothing, mistress. I do not forget.” His gloved hand closed like a manacle around Asher’s wrist, and he led him from the salon.
TWELVE
“SHE’S AFRAID,” Asher said, later. “Not that she didn’t have plenty of company,” he added, remembering the cold touch of Hyacinthe’s fingers on his throat. “Are all master vampires that nervous of their own power?”
“Not all.” Behind them, the rattle of the cab horse’s retreating hooves faded along the wood and asphalt of the street, dying away into the late-night hush. Down at the corner, voices could still be heard in a workingmen’s estaminet, but for the most part the district of Montrouge was silent. It was as different as possible from the crumbling elegance of Elysée’s hôtel or the rather grubby slum in which it stood. Here the street was lined with the tall, sooty, dun stone buildings so common to Paris, the shabby shops on the ground floors shuttered tight, the windows of the flats above likewise closed, dark save for a chink of light here and there in attics where servants still labored. Simon’s feet made no sound on the narrow asphalt footway. His voice might have been the night wind murmuring to itself in a dream.
“It varies from city to city, from person to person. Elysée has the disadvantage of being not that much older than her fledglings and of not having been vampire long herself when she became, in effect, Master of Paris. And she has not always been wise in her choice of fledglings.”
“Do you think Calvaire contacted the Vampire of the Innocents as part of a power play against Elysée?”
“I suspect that he tried.” Simon stopped in the midst of the row, before an anonymous door. The main entrance to the catacombs was on the Place Denfert-Rochereau, which would be uncomfortably full of traffic even at this hour—the rattle of carriages and fiacres on the boulevards was audible even on this silent street. The moon was gone. Above the cliff of buildings and chimneys behind them, the sky was the color of soot.
“Elysée is certainly convinced of it,” the Spaniard went on. “She was, you observed, most anxious that her fledglings—and particularly Hyacinthe, whom I guess to be not of her getting—disabuse themselves of any notion of doing the same. Did he exist at all, this Vampire of the Innocents, he would be vastly more powerful than Elysée—vastly more powerful than any of us.”
“A day stalker, in fact.”
Simon did not reply. For a long time the vampire stood as if abstracted in thought, and Asher wondered what the night sounded like to the vampire, whether those quick ears could pick up the breath of sleepers in the house beside which they stood or that queer, preternatural mind could sense the moving color of their dreams. At length the vampire signed to him, and Asher, after a swift glance up and down the deserted street, produced his picklocks from an inner pocket and went to work.
“The watchman is in the office at the other entrance,” the vampire murmured, the sound more in Asher’s mindthan his ears. “Doubtless asleep—we should remain undisturbed.”
The door gave under Asher’s cautious testing. He pocketed the picklocks and let Ysidro precede him into the cramped vestibule which was all there was above ground at this end of the catacombs. He heard the soft creak of a hinge, the muffled sounds of someone rifling a cupboard; then the scratch of a match. Ysidro had found a guard’s lantern. Asher stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
With its boot-scarred desk in front of the iron grille that closed off one end of the room, the place was barely large enough for the two of them to move about. The lantern stood on a corner of the desk, shedding eerie illumination across Ysidro’s long hands as he sorted through a ring of keys, skeletal and yet queerly beautiful in the isolation of the light. “So efficient, the French,” the vampire murmured. “Here is a map of the passages, but I suggest that you stay close to me.”
“I’ll be able to see the light for some distance,” Asher pointed out, taking the thumbed and grubby chart.
Ysidro paused in the act of unlocking the grille. “That isn’t what I mean.”
They descended the stair, narrow and spiraling endlessly down into the darkness.
“Do you believe he is really here, then?” Asher asked softly, his hands pressed to the stone of wall and centerpost to keep his balance on the perilous wedges of the steps. “That he is still here at all?”
“It is the logical place. As Elysée pointed out, the sewers are perpetually damp. Whereas we are not subject to the normal ills of the body, when a vampire begins to grow old—to give up—he does begin to suffer from joint ache. Some of the very old vampires I knew here in Paris, Louis du Bellière-Fontages and Marie-Therèse de St. Arouac,did. Louis had been a courtier of Henri the Third, one of his lace-trimmed tigresses—I knew him for years. I don’t think he ever got used to the way the Sun King tamed the nobility. Les fruits de Limoges, he called them—china fruit, gloss without juice. But the fact is that he was afraid, passing himself off at Versailles. He was growing old, old and tired, when I saw him last; his joints hurt him, and going outside his own hôtel frightened him. He was hunting less and less, living on beef blood and stolen chickens and the odd Black Mass baby. I was not surprised when I heard he had been found and killed.”
“When was that?”
“During one of the witchcraft scandals of the Sun King’s reign.” Simon halted at the bottom of the stairs, listening to the darkness, turning his head this way and that.
“If the killer we’re looking for exists,” Asher murmured, and the echoes picked up his voice as if all the dead sleeping in the dark whispered back at him, “he’ll be in London still.”
Ysidro shook his head, a gesture so slight it was barely perceptible. “I think you are right.” His voice was like the touch of wind among the ancient tunnels. “I feel no presence here,” he breathed. “Nothing—human, vampire, ghost. Only a muted resonance from the bones themselves.” He held the lantern aloft, and the gold light glistened on damp stone walls, wet pebbles, and mud underfoot, dying away in the intensity of the subterranean gloom. “Nevertheless, follow close. The galleries cross and branch—it is easy to lose one’s way.”
Like spectres in a nightmare, they moved on into the darkness.
For an endless time, they traversed the bare galleries of the ancient gypsum mines beneath Montrouge, black tunnels hewn of living rock whose walls seemed to press suffocatingly upon them, and whose ceiling, stained with the soot of tourists’ candles, brushed the top of Asher’s head as he followed Ysidro’s fragile silhouette into the abyss.
Now and then they passed pillars, shoring up the vast weight of the earth to prevent subsidence of the streets above, and the sight of them caused Asher’s too-quick imagination to flirt with what it would be like, should the ceiling collapse and trap him here. In other places, the lamplight glanced over the black squares of branching passageways, dark as no darkness above the ground could be, or flashed across the water of wells, mere inches beneath the level of their feet.
And in all that realm of the dead, Asher thought, he was the only living man. The man who walked beside him, who listened so intently to that darkness, had not been alive for three and a half centuries; the man whose lair they sought had been dead for nearly six.
If indeed he had ever existed at all.
Who was the ghost that the dead believed in?
“Apparently there have been no killings of the Paris vampires.” The echoes traded the remark back and forth among themselves down the branching corridors; Asher was uncomfortably reminded of the peeping croak of the chorus of frogs said to guard the way to Hell. “Why would he have gone after Calvaire?”
“Perhaps Calvaire told him too much.” Ysidro paused to make a chalk arrow on the wall, then walked on. “Calvaire wanted to become a master vampire. If he spoke to the Vampire of the Innocents at all, perhaps he offended him or roused in him a resolve to prevent Calvaire from gaining the power he sought; perhaps Calvaire had some other scheme afoot besides power alone. We do not know when Calvaire spoke to him. He might have fled Paris because of him, rather than because he had been thwarted by Elysée. And it may be something entirely different—the fact thatCalvaire was a Protestant heretic, for instance. A hundred years ago, I would never have employed you myself, had I suspected you of adherence to that heresy, no matter how well qualified you were.”