Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

"So you don't believe Calvaire sought out this-this most ancient vampire in Paris."

The fan snapped open again, indignant. Elysee's eyes were on Hy-acinthe, not on him. "I am the most ancient vampire in Paris,Monsieur le Professeur," she said decidedly. "There is no other, nor has there been for many years. Anden tout cas, you-and others-" Her glance shot spitefully from Hyacinthe to Ysidro, who had somehow come around the divan to her side and within easy grasping range of Asher. "-would do well to remember that the single law among vampires, the single law that all must obey, is that no vampire will kill another vam-pire. And no vampire.. " Her eyes narrowed, moved to Asher, and then back to the slender, delicate Spaniard standing at her side. "... will do that which endangers other vampires by giving away their haunts, their habits, or the very fact of their existence, to human-kind."

Ysidro inclined his head, his pale hair falling forward over the gray velvet of his collar, like cobweb in the bonfire of gaslight and crystal. "Fear nothing, mistress. I do not forget." His gloved hand closed like a manacle around Asher's wrist, and he led him from the salon.

"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.