Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

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.