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Those Who Hunt the Night(43)

By:Barbara Hambly


“I killed him,” he said as he opened his eyes.

Cold, fragile fingers touched his. Against the dimness of the low ceiling, he saw the thin white face floating in its pale cloud of tonsure, green eyes gleaming strangely against the sunken shadows of the skull-like head. He had spoken in English, and in English a voice whispered back, “Killed thou this boy in anger, or for gain?”

He knew Brother Anthony had read his dream, seen it like a cinematograph picture, though how he knew this he was not sure.

“It would have been better if I had,” Asher replied softly. “He might have understood that. But no.” His mouth twisted with the bitter taste of his own awareness. “I killed for policy, to protect the information I had learned, so I could get back to England with it, and return to learn more. I did not want to be…”He hesitated on the word blown, an idiom the old monk would not understand, and then finished the phrase, “ … revealed as a spy.”

What a euphemism, he thought, reflecting how much thought was erased by that simple change of wording. No, he had not wanted to be revealed to these people who had trusted him as a spy, who was using their trust as he’d have used a stolen bicycle, to be later abandoned to rust by the side of the road.

“It is no longer lawful for me to absolve thee of this.” Like broken wisps of straw, the thin fingers stroked at his hands; the green eyes looking into his were mad and haunted and filled with pain, but Asher had no fear of him, no sense of a lust for blood. The whispering voice went on,“I, who cried against simoniac priests, venal priests, and priests who took bribes to forgive in advance the sins their patrons longed to commit—how can I expect God to hear the words of a murderer-priest, a vampire-priest? Yet Saint Augustine says that it is lawful for soldiers to kill in battle, and that those deaths will not be held against them before the throne of God.”

“I was not a soldier,” Asher said quietly. “In battle, one shoots at men who are shooting at one. It is self-defense, to protect one’s own life.”

“To protect one’s own life,” the vampire echoed tiredly. The skull-face did not change, save that the sunken green eyes blinked. “How many have died to protect my life, my—immortality? I argue that I did not choose to become what I am, but I did. I chose it when the vampire that made me drank of my blood, forced his bleeding wrist against my lips, and bade me drink, bade me seize the mind that I saw burn before me in darkness like a flame, willing me to live. I chose then to live and not to die. I chose then and I have chosen every night since.”

Exhaustion lay over Asher like a leaded blanket—the conversation had the air of being no more than another part of his dream. “Was there a reason?”

“No.” The monk’s cold little hand did not move on his. Against the low ceiling, his shadow hung, huge and deformed, in the candlelight—the glint of its reflection caught on needlelike fangs as he spoke. “Only that I loved life. It was my sin from the beginning, my sin throughout my days with the Minorites, the Little Brothers of St. Francis. I loved the body we were enjoined to despise, reveled in those little luxuries, those small comforts, which our teachers warned us to deny ourselves. A warning well given, perhaps. They said that such delight in the ephemera of matter would addict the soul. And so it has done.

“Perhaps it was that I did not want to confront God withthe sin of luxuriousness on my conscience. I no longer remember. And now I am burthened down with more murders than I can count. I have slain armies, one man at a time; in the lake of boiling blood which Dante the Italian saw in Hell, I will be submerged to the last hairs upon my scalp. Truly a fit portion for one who has sought hot blood from the veins of the innocent to prolong his own existence. And that is what I cannot face.”

Susurrant and unreal, that voice followed him down into dreams again, and this time he found himself walking on the stone banks of a crimson lake, boiling and fuming to a bruised horizon in a black cavern that stretched farther than sight. The smell of the blood choked in his nostrils, and its thick, guttural bubbling filled his ears. Looking down, he could see in the tide pools the yellowish serum separating out of the blood, as it did in Lydia’s experimental dishes. In the lake itself he could see them all: Grippen, Hyacinthe, Elysée, Anthea Farren with her creamy breasts bare and splashed with gore, screaming in pain … On the bank of that hellish lake walked Lydia in the trailing draperies of her ecru tea gown, a glass beaker in her hand, her hair falling in a rusty coil down her back and spectacles faintly steamed with heat, bending down to dip up the blood from the churning Phlegethon. Asher tried to call to her, but she was walking away, holding the beaker up to the light and examining the contents with her usual absorbed attention. He tried to run toward her, but found he could not move, his feet seeming rooted to the broken black lava rock; looking back, he saw the bubbling red lake beginning to rise, the blood trickling toward him to engulf him, like the vampires, for his sins.

He opened his eyes and saw Ysidro, sitting near the candle reading the London Times, and knew that it was night. “Interesting,” the vampire said softly, when Asher told him of his conversation with the old priest. “He isawake during the daylight hours, then, whether or not he can tolerate the touch of the sun itself, though I suspect that he can. And the silver lock on the door has been forced and replaced.”

“He has to have come here somehow.”

Ysidro folded the paper with a neat crackle, and set it aside. “He may have used the sewers. Perhaps he knew, from other years, that this was my house; perhaps he only followed me back here from the catacombs that first night and guessed, when he saw me fighting to save you, that I would want you brought here. I have, needless to say, moved my residence, now that Grippen and Elysée know of this place … Do you feel strong enough to walk?”

Asher did, but even the minor effort of washing and shaving in the basin of water Simon had brought left him exhausted, and he was grateful to return to his cot. Later, after he’d rested, he asked for and got envelopes and paper. In the course of the following day, he wrote two letters to Lydia, one addressed to her under her own name in Oxford, the other addressed to Miss Priscilla Merridew and enclosed, as his former correspondence had been, in a forwarding note to one of his students. He reassured her of his comparative safety, though he felt a twinge of irony at the phrase. Things had to be truly serious, he reflected, for him to consider helpless imprisonment in a cellar in the care of two vampires as grounds for optimism. Ysidro agreed to post them without demur—Asher could only hope that the rather simple camouflage would work, or at worst that he’d be able to get Lydia to some other residence before the Spaniard was able to return to Oxford and trace her down.

He remained in the cellar another two days, sleeping mostly, reading the books and newspapers Simon brought to him or listening in scholarly satisfaction as the vampire read Shakespeare to him in its original pronunciation, andslowly feeling his strength return. He never saw Brother Anthony, except in queer, involuted dreams, but now and then the water pitcher in the cell would be refilled when he awoke.

The second afternoon, he woke to find two railway tickets propped against the candlestick, and his luggage stacked neatly at the foot of his cot. With the tickets was a note, written on creamy new stationery in a sixteenth-century hand: Can you be ready to leave for London at sundown?

Beneath this was a folded copy of the London Times, with the headline MASSACRE IN LIMEHOUSE.

Seven more people, mostly Chinese from the docks, had been killed.

Weak and shaky, Asher crawled from his cot and staggered to the bars. They were massively strong, forged to defeat even a vampire’s superhuman strength—the silver padlock, which did not seem to have kept Brother Anthony out, still held the door. He leaned against the bars and said softly into the darkness, “Anthony? Brother Anthony, listen. We need you in London. We need your help. We can make the journey in a single night; we have provision for it if daylight overtakes us. You must come with us—you’re the only one who can aid us, the only one who can track this killer, the only one who can aid humankind. Please help us. Please.”

But from the darkness came no sound.

“I’m not surprised,” Simon remarked later, when Asher told him about it as the boat train steamed out of the Gare du Nord and into the thin mists of the evening. “It is difficult to tell how much he knows or guesses of what is going on—a great deal, if he followed us, as vampires often do, listening to our conversation from a distance. It may be that he considers the deaths of vampires only meet; and itmay also be that he knows more of the matter than we do and will not speak the killer’s name to us because he knows it himself. Among vampires friendships are rare, but not unheard of.”

He unfurled the newspaper he had bought over his neat, bony knees and studied the headline with impassive eyes. “I mislike this, James,” he said softly, and Asher leaned around to see. LIMEHOUSE VAMPIRE, the headline screamed. POLICE BAFFLED. “There was another series of killings two nights before that, in Manchester—the London papers did not carry it until the massacre today. A vampire could travel the distance in a matter of hours—as indeed could a man. After a blood feast of nine people, no normal vampire would so much as look at another human being, even were it safe to do so, for a week at least. Few of us feed more than twice a night, and most not more than one in four or five—not upon humans, anyway. This…”The slender brows twitched together. “This troubles me.”