Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

There was nothing there now-a tree-lined place with a Renaissance fountain, hemmed in by the gray bulk of theHolies on one side and high, brown-frontedimmeubles on three others. The vampire of the Holy Innocents had slept in the crypt, Ysidro had said-like Rhys the Minstrel, haunting the crypts of the old Church of St. Giles near the river until the town grew large enough around him so that its inhabit-ants became strangers to one another and did not notice one more white-faced stranger walking the night in their midst.

Standing now at Ysidro's side, straining his ears to catch even the whisper of descending feet crossing the cobbled court beyond the door, he wondered if that crypt was still there, buried beneath the soil like the subcellar of Calvaire's house in Lambeth, forgotten to all save those who were interested in places proof against the light of day.

The vampires might know. That and other things. He had turned from the Place des Innocents, followed the Rue St. Denis toward the gray sheet of the river, shining between the dove-colored buildings of its

banks. To them, this startlingly clean city, with its immaculate streets, its chestnut trees rusty with autumn, was only a topcoat of varnish on a dark swamp of memories, another city entirely.

He had stood for some time on the bank above the quays of the Seine, staring at the gray tangle of bridges upstream and down, the gothic forest of pinnacles that clustered on the lie de la Cite and the square, dreaming towers of Notre Dame. And just beneath them, on the em-bankment, he had gazed consideringly at the massive iron grillworks that barred passers-by from the subterranean mazes of the Paris sewers.

"The sewers?" Elysee de Montadour wrinkled her long nose in a delib-erate gesture of distaste, her diamonds winking in the blaze of the gas-light. "What vampire in his right mind would haunt them? Hm?" She shivered affectedly. All her gestures, Asher observed, were theatrical, a conscious imitation of human mannerism rather than a reminiscence of its actual spontaneity, as if she had studied something not native to her. He found himself preferring Don Simon's uncanny stillness-the Span-ish vampire stood, gray-gloved hands resting like hunting cats on the curving Empire back of the lady's divan, seeming by comparison more than ever immobile-petrified long ago, as Lydia had said, in ectoplasmic ivory.

"Do you ever hunt in them?" Though none of the other vampires in the long, gold-papered salon came near them, he was conscious of the light run of their voices behind him, as they played cards with spectral speed and deftness or chatted with the half-murmuring whisper of the wind. Seated in a spindly Louis XVI chair opposite Elysee, he knew they were watching him and listening as only vampires could listen, like so many suave and mocking sharks lying just beneath the surface of water, whose shore he could never hope to reach in time. In one corner of the salon, a tall girl whose dark shoulders rose like bronze above a gown of oyster-colored satin played the piano-Tchaikovsky, but with a queer, dark curl to it, a sensuousness and syncopation, like music trick-ling from behind a mirror that looked into Hell.

"Fah, and subject myself to the rheumatism?" Elysee laughed, a cold and tinkling sound without mirth, and made a great play with her swan's-down fan.

"And for what,enfint?" One of the graceful young men who made up her coterie of fledglings lounged over to the end of her divan. This one was brown-haired, his blue eyes bright against rounded and beautiful features; Asher wondered if Elysee had made them all vampires for their looks. Like all of the half dozen or so of Elysee's cadre, he was dressed in the height of fashion, his jet black evening clothes meticu-lously tailored, contrasting sharply with the white of his shirt and of the flesh above. "A sewer sweeper, whom one must kill without conversa-tion and hide, like a dog burying carrion? Where is the fun in that?" His fangs gleamed as he grinned down at Asher.

Elysee shrugged alabaster shoulders above a dark green gown. "In any case, their superintendents count the sweepers very carefully when they go down, and when they come up. And they arecanaille, as Serge says, and no fun in the hunt." She smiled briefly, dreamy delight in her green eyes with their terrible vampire glitter, like a greedy girl savoring the taste of forbidden liqueur. "Alors, there are eight hundred miles of sewers down there. He would wither up like a prune, this Great, Terri-ble, Ancient Vampire of Paris whom no one has ever seen..."

"What about the catacombs?" Simon asked softly, disregarding the mockery in her voice. A curious silence lifted into the room like an indrawn breath. The piano stilled.

"We all been there, sure." The dark girl rose from the instrument's bench, moved across the room with a deliberate, lounging slowness that somehow partook of the same eerie weightlessness that comprised the other vampires' speed. Instinctively Asher forced himself to concentrate on watching her, sensing that if he did not, she would be all but invisible in the movement of his eye. They had been speaking

French- Ysidro's, as he had said, not only old-fashioned but with an occasional queer childish singsong quality to its pronunciation-but this girl spoke En-glish, with a liquid American drawl. In spite of the almost unbearable lentitudinousness of her movements, she was behind him before he was ready for it, her tiny hand molding its way idly across his shoulders, as if memorizing the contours of them through the cloth of his coat. "They keep count there, too, of workers and visitors. You hid there, didn't you, Elysee, during the siege?"

There was just a touch of malice in her voice, like the artfully acci-dental stab of a pin, and Elysee's green eyes flickered at the reminder of what must have been an undignified flight from the rioting Com-munards. "And who would not have?" she demanded after a moment. "I took refuge there during the Terror as well, with Henriette du Caens. They weren't ossuaries then, you know-just old quarries in the feet of Montrouge, stretching away into darkness.i?/ e " stir, Henriette used to say she thought there might be-something else-there. But I never saw nor heard anything." There was a touch of defiance in her voice.

"But you were a fledgling then," Simon replied in his soft voice, "were you not?"

"Fledgling or not, I was not blind." She tapped half-irritably, half-playfully at his knuckles with her fan-when the ivory sticks came down Simon's gloved fingers were no longer beneath them, though Asher did not see the hand move. She turned back to Asher, a hand-some woman if not pretty, with the face and body of a woman in her prime and eyes that had long since ceased to be human. She shrugged. "Eh Men, that was long ago. And toward the end Henriette feared everything. Francois and 1 had to hunt for her, among the mobs that roamed the city by night; we brought them to her there. Aye, and risked our lives, when wearing the wrong color of kerchief could set them all baying 'Jla lanterne' like the pack of scurvy hounds they were! Fran-gois de Montadour was the original owner of thishostel, you under-stand." Her wave, wrist properly leading, was airy and formal, like a painting by David; the white plumes nodded in her hair. There were a dozen huge candelabra burning as well as the gas jets along walls and ceiling-the light caught in the glittering festoons of crystal lusters, in the long mirrors that ranged one wall, and in the black glass of the twelve-foot windows along the other, all thrown back in an unholy halo around her.

"He, Henriette, and I were the only ones to escape the Terror, and even Frangois did not, in the end, escape. After it was over..." She shrugged again, a gesture designed to show off the whiteness of her shoulders. Behind him, Asher could feel the dark American girl move closer to his chair, her body touching his back, her hands resting on his shoulders, the cold of them seeming to radiate against his flesh.