“To save your own life?” he asked.
Brother Anthony’s fingers continued to rove lightly over the back of his hand, as if feeling the armature of bone within flesh, or warming their coldness on the subcutaneous heat of blood. With his other hand he held Asher’s little finger in a frail grip that Asher knew he could no more break than he could have pulled his hand from dried cement. “I had not fed—not truly fed—in months,” the vampire whispered anxiously. “Rats—a horse—chickens. But I could feel my mind starting to go, my senses turnsluggish. I’ve tried—over and over I’ve tried. But each time I grow terrified. If I do not feed properly, drink of the deaths of men, I will grow stupid, grow slow. I cannot do that. After all these years, all these deaths, running from the Judgment … And each life I take in running is another to the tally that would fall upon me, did I die. So many—I used to keep count. But the hunger drove me to madness. And I will never be forgiven.”
“It is one of the tenets of faith,” Asher said slowly, “that there is no sin, nothing, that God will not forgive, if the sinner is truly repentant.”
“I can’t be truly repentant,” Brother Anthony whispered, “can I? I feed and go on feeding. I am stronger than all those who have sought to kill me. The hunger drives me to madness. The terror of what awaits me beyond the wall of death—I cannot face it. Maybe if I help those who will go there, if I make it easy for them to find their bones… If I help them they will speak for me. I have done what I can for them. They must. They must…” He drew Asher close to him—his breath reeked of blood, and, close-to, Asher saw that his robe was stiff with gore decades dried. He nodded toward Simon. “When he kills you,” he whispered, “will you speak for me?”
“If you answer me three questions,” Asher said, conscious of the framework of tales with which the ancient vampire would be familiar and trying desperately to frame mentally what he wanted to ask into three parts and good Latin. Thank God, he thought, they were speaking Church Latin, which was no more difficult than French. If this were Classical, the whole conversation would come to a standstill while I arranged things in that damn inside-out order that Cicero used.
The Franciscan did not reply, but seemed only to be waiting, his thin fingers icy on Asher’s hand. Simon, standing silently by, watched them both. Asher felt that hewas keyed up, ready to intervene between them, though he himself sensed no danger from the little monk.
After a moment he asked, “Can you hunt by daylight?”
“I would not so offend the face of God. The night is mine; here below, all night is mine. I would never take the day above the ground to myself.”
“Not would you…” Asher began, exasperated, then realized that that might be counted as a second question and fell silent for a moment. Hundreds of questions leaped to mind and were discarded; he was aware that he had to go carefully, aware that the old vampire could vanish as silently, as easily, as he had appeared. He felt as he did when he watched Lydia feeding the sparrows in the New College quadrangle, coaxing them with infinite patience to take bread crumbs from her outstretched fingers. “Who were your contemporaries among the vampires?”
“Johannis Magnus,” the old vampire whispered, “the Lady Elizabeth; Jehanne Croualt, the horse tamer; Anne La Flamande, the Welsh minstrel who sang in the crypts of London; Tulloch the Scot, who was buried in the Holy Innocents. They have destroyed the Innocents. They carted the bones away. His they burned. The flesh shriveled off them in the noonday sun. That was in the days of the Terror, the days when men slew one another as we the Undead never dared to do.”
“Yet there are those who swear they saw the Scot fifty years ago in Amsterdam,” Ysidro murmured in English. He seemed to understand without comment why Asher had chosen that question to ask. “As for the others…”
Asher turned back to the old vampire. “Have you ever killed another vampire?”
Brother Anthony shrank back from him, covering his white face with skeletal white hands. “It is forbidden,” he whispered desperately. “‘Thou shalt not kill,’ they say,and I have killed—killed over and over. I have tried to do good…”
“Have you ever killed another vampire?” Simon repeated softly, not moving, but Asher could feel the tension in him like overstretched wire.
The monk was backing away, his face still covered. Asher took a step after him, reaching out his hand to catch the rotting black sleeve. He understood then how the legends came about, that vampires can command the mists and dissolve into them at will. There was, as before, not even a sense of his mind blanking, and not one of the brittle bones that hemmed them all around so much as shifted. He was simply standing, a shred of crumbling black cloth in his hand, staring at the shadowed tangle of bones and the shadowy altar beyond.
In his mind he heard a whisper, like the breath of a dream. “Speak for me. Tell God I did what I could. Speak for me, when he kills you …”
THIRTEEN
“DO YOU PLAN to kill me?” Asher closed the iron grille behind him, turned the heavy key, and followed Simon back into the deserted vestibule, where Ysidro was fastidiously poking among the papers of the desk. The vampire paused to regard him with dispassionate eyes, and, as so often with Ysidro, Asher found it impossible to divine whether he was contemplating the mortal state or simply wondering whether he felt peckish. In any case he did not answer.
Instead he asked, “What do you think of our Franciscan brother?”
“Other than that he’s mad, you mean?” Asher removed a couple of wax tablets from his pocket, of the sort that he had habitually carried in his Foreign Office days, and methodically took impressions of all the keys on the ring. “I don’t believe he’s our culprit.”
“Because he’s here instead of in London? Never think it. He is silent as the fall of dust, James; he could have followed us back to Paris, and I would never have been thewiser; could have overheard any of our conversations and preceded us…”
“In Latin?”
“In English, if he was friend to Rhys and to Tulloch the Scot. Most of us learn one another’s languages, even as we keep abreast of the changes in the tongues of the lands where we dwell—conspicuousness is our death. The fact that he lives hidden in the catacombs does not mean he has not walked the streets of men unseen. He understands at least some of the changes that have taken place since the Fall of the Kings … And he claims, incidentally, to have seen Tulloch the Scot’s flesh shriveled from his bones by the light of the noonday sun…”
“Meaning he was up and around by day?” Asher used his fingernail to pry the last key gingerly from the wax, thinking to himself that, if that were the case, the Minorite’s assumption that Ysidro intended to murder him might be far from a random guess. “But you say yourself that the Scot was seen years later…”
“I say that there are those who swear they saw him—as unreliable a contention as our religious friend’s, if, like Anthony, Tulloch’s abilities to pass unseen grew with time. There has been no reliable report of his presence since the days of the Terror—indeed, none for half a century before, but that means nothing.”
Asher wiped the last telltale fragments of wax from the wards and replaced the key on its hook beside the grilled door. “And the others he named?”
“Two at least I know to be dead—three, if La Flamande is the same woman I knew during the wars over Picardy. I’ve never heard of Croualt…” He waited until Asher had opened the outer door, then turned down the lantern wick until its flame snuffed into darkness. Asher reflected with an inner grin that Ysidro’s candle snuffing trick didn’tseem to work too well with three-quarters of an inch of woven wick and a reservoir full of kerosene.
“So we have three—perhaps four, if you want to count Grippen and figure out some way he could have jiggered the daylight problem.” He stepped through the outer door into the dark Rue Dareau.
“None of those he named has been seen or heard of for centuries.”
“That doesn’t mean they haven’t been hiding somewhere, as Brother Anthony has been hiding,” Asher replied quietly. “If one of them survived, he—or she—would be a day stalker, like Brother Anthony, toughened, as you said, against garlic and silver and other countermeasures.”
“It also does not mean that Brother Anthony is not himself the killer.”
“Do you believe he is?”
Ysidro’s smile flickered briefly into existence. “No. But there are few other candidates for the role.” Their footsteps echoed hollowly against the dingy walls of dark brick as they made their way north, through the crisscrossings of the empty back streets that led toward the wider boulevards. There was no way of telling how late it was, but leaden darkness now possessed even the most late-carousing of bistros, and the prostitutes seemed to have sought their beds for good. “‘I have killed over and over,’ he said, and also, ‘I have tried to do good.’ The killing of other vampires could be interpreted as a major effort in that direction. Is it not what you yourself plan to do, if you get the chance?”