Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 12

"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 working m en'sestaminet, but for the most part the district of Montrouge was silent. It was as different as possible from the crumbling elegance of Elysee'shostel 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. Elysee 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, Mas-ter of Paris. And she has not always been wise in her choice of fledg-lings."

"Do you think Calvaire contacted the Vampire of the Innocents as part of a power play against Elysee?"

"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 boule-vards 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.

"Elysee 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 benot 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 Elysee-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 ab-stracted 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, preternatu-ral 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 mind than his ears. "Doubtless asleep-we should remain undisturbed."

The door gave under Asher's cautious testing. He pocketed the pick-locks 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, shed-ding 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 Elysee pointed out, the sewers are perpetu-ally 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 Belliere-Fontages and Marie-Therese 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 ownhostel 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 whis-pered 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 them-selves." He held the lantern aloft, and the gold light glistened on damp stone walls, wet pebbles, and mud underfoot, dying away in the inten-sity of the subterranean gloom. "Nevertheless, follow close. The gal-leries 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 ceil-ing, 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 Elysee. And it may be something entirely different-the fact that Calvaire was a Protestant heretic, for instance. A hundred years ago, I would never have employed you my-self, had I suspected you of adherence to that heresy, no matter how well qualified you were."

"Try applying for a government job in Ireland," Asher grunted. "It still doesn't explain why he'd have killed Calvaire's associates in Lon-don."

"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, street sweepers, washerwomen, monks, Merovingian kings- 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 dun 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 country-men 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 mor-bid urge to muse, like Hamlet, on those anonymous relics of former ages.

But then, he wondered, to how many of those brown, weathered s kul lscould 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 back at 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 Hotel 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, a mournful 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 exami-nation 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, evi-dently 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 speak for 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 senil-ity.

"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 turn sluggish. 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 mad-ness. And I will never be forgiven."

"It is one of the tenets of faith," Asher said slowly, "that there is no s in, 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 ar-ranged 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 he was 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."

"Notwould 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 vam-pires?"

"Johannis Magnus," the old vampire whispered, "the Lady Eliza-beth; 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 shall 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 com-mand 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..."