“Try applying for a government job in Ireland,” Asher grunted. “It still doesn’t explain why he’d have killed Calvaire’s associates in London.”
“If we find his lair,” the vampire said softly, “such matters may become more clear.”
Ahead of them, something white gleamed in the darkness—pillars? They drew closer, and the pale blurs resolved themselves into oblong patches whitewashed carefully onto the black-painted pillars of a gate. Surrounded by utter darkness, there was something terrifying about its stark simplicity—final, silent, twenty meters below street level, and carved of native rock. Above the lintel, black letters on a white ground spelled out the words:
STOP!
THIS IS THE EMPIRE OF THE DEAD.
Beyond the gate, the bones began.
The catacombs were the ossuary of Paris. All the ancient cemeteries within the confines of the city had been emptied into these rock-hewn galleries, the bones neatly ranged into horrible six-foot retaining walls built of tibias and skulls, with everything else dumped in a solid jumble behind, like firewood in a box. Brown and shiny, the bones stretched out of sight into the darkness of the branching galleries, the eye sockets of the courses of skulls seeming to turn with the lantern’s gliding light, an occasional bony jaw seeming to smile. Nobles decapitated in the Terror, streetsweepers,washerwomen,monks,Merovingiankings—they were all here somewhere, side by side in macabre democracy.
The Empire of the Dead indeed, Asher thought. They passed an altar, like the gates, painted simple black and white, a dim shape that seemed to shine out of the darkness. Before the bones were occasional placards, announcing from which cemetery these tumbled remains had been taken, or exhorting the viewer, in French or in Latin, to recall his own mortality and remember that all things were dust.
As an Englishman, Asher was conscious of a desire to pretend that this taste for the gruesome was a manifestation of some aspect of the French national character, but he knew full well that his own countrymen came here in droves. Following Simon as he wound farther and farther back through the narrow tunnels of the ossuary, pausing every now and then to mark the walls with numbered arrows to guide them back, he was conscious of the terrible fascination of the place, the morbid urge to muse, like Hamlet, on those anonymous relics of former ages.
But then, he wondered, to how many of those brown, weathered skulls could his companion have said, “I knew him well…”?
That train of thought led to others, and he asked, “Did you ever have your portrait painted?” The vampire’s glance touched the ranks of bones that heaped the walls in a head-high wainscot all around him, and he nodded, unsurprised.
“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.