Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

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..."

"Do you plan to kill me?" Asher closed the iron grille behind him, turned the heavy key, and followed Simon back into the de-serted vestibule, where Ysidro was fastidiously poking among the pa-pers of the desk. The vampire paused to regard him with dispassionate eyes, and, as so often with Ysidro, Asher found it impossible to divine whether he was contemplating the mortal state or simply wondering whether he felt peckish. In any case he did not answer.

Instead he asked, "What do you think of our Franciscan brother?"

"Other than that he's mad, you mean?" Asher removed a couple of wax tablets from his pocket, of the sort that he had habitually carried in his Foreign Office days, and methodically took impressions of all the keys on the ring. "I don't believe he's our culprit."

"Because he's here instead of in London? Never think it. He is silent as the fall of dust, James; he could have followed us back to Paris, and I would never have been the wiser; could have overheard any of our conversations and preceded us..."

"In Latin?"

"In English, if he was friend to Rhys and to Tulloch the Scot. Most of us learn one another's languages, even as we keep abreast of the changes in the tongues of the lands where we dwell-conspicuousness is our death. The fact that he lives hidden in the catacombs does not mean he has not walked the streets of men unseen. He understands at least some of the changes that have taken place since the Fall of the Kings... And he claims, incidentally, to have seen Tulloch the Scot's flesh shriv-eled from his bones by the light of the noonday sun..."

"Meaning he was up and around by day?" Asher used his fingernail to pry the last key gingerly from the wax, thinking to himself that, if that were the case, the Minorite's assumption that Ysidro intended to murder him might be far from a random guess. "But you say yourself that the Scot was seen years later..

."

"I say that there are those who swear they saw him-as unreliable a contention as our religious friend's, if, like Anthony, Tulloch's abilities to pass unseen grew with time. There has been no reliable report of his presence since the days of the Terror-indeed, none for half a century before, but that means nothing."

Asher wiped the last telltale fragments of wax from the wards and replaced the key on its hook beside the grilled door. "And the others he named?"

"Two at least I know to be dead-three, if La Flamande is the same woman I knew during the wars over Picardy. I've never heard of Croualt..." He waited until Asher had opened the outer door, then turned down the lantern wick until its flame snuffed into darkness. Asher reflected with an inner grin that Ysidro's candle snuffing trick didn't seem to work too well with three-quarters of an inch of woven wick and a reservoir full of kerosene.

"So we have three-perhaps four, if you want to count Grippen and figure out some way he could have jiggered the daylight problem." He stepped through the outer door into the dark Rue Dareau.

"None of those he named has been seen or heard of for centuries." "That doesn't mean they haven't been hiding somewhere, as Brother Anthony has been hiding," Asher replied quietly. "If one of them sur-vived, he-or she-would be a day stalker, like Brother Anthony, toughened, as you said, against garlic and silver and other countermeasures."

"It also does not mean that Brother Anthony is not himself the killer."

"Do you believe he is?"

Ysidro's smile flickered briefly into existence. "No. But there are few other candidates for the role." Their footsteps echoed hollowly against the dingy walls of dark brick as they made their way north, through the crisscrossings of the empty back streets that led toward the wider boule-vards. There was no way of telling how late it was, but leaden darkness now possessed even the most late-carousing of bistros, and the prosti-tutes seemed to have sought their beds for good, " 'I have killed over and over,' he said, and also, 'I have tried to do good.' The killing of other vampires could be interpreted as a major effort in that direction. Is it not what you yourself plan to do, if you get the chance?"

Asher glanced sharply across at him, but met only matter-of-fact inquiry in those cool, strange eyes. Instead of replying, he said, "If he wanted to slay his own kind, there are plenty to begin on here, without going to London for the purpose. And if the killer is his contemporary, with the same alterations of powers, Brother Anthony may be our only hope of tracking him."

"If he will." They crossed a street. Asher had a momentary sense of movement in the noisome blackness of an alley to their right and the mutter of voices as the local toughs wisely decided not to molest this particular pair of passers-by. "And if, given that you can coax him from the earth to which he has gone, he consents to assist us and not ally himself with the killer."

Asher shivered, remembering how the little monk had seemed to melt from the darkness, the cold tickle of those frail fingers on his hand, and their unbreakable strength. He knew what his own reaction would be to a mortal man who allied himself with vampires. Perhaps it was best after all to let sleeping dogs lie.

They passed through a darkened square whose fountain sounded un-earthly loud in the stillness, turned into the Boulevard St. Michel. Even that great artery was virtually empty. The chestnut trees that lined it rustled overhead like a dim woods, their leaves lying in soggy drifts along the walls of the great hospitals

which clustered in that neighbor-hood. The electric street lamps threw too-bright halos, making the gloom seem all the more dense. Now and then, a passing fiacre broke the eerie silence with the sharp tap of hooves, but that was all. The night was still and cold; Asher pulled his scarf more closely around his throat and huddled deep into the folds of his ulster.

Presently he asked, "If there is a strange vampire operating in Lon-don-be it Tulloch the Scot, even Rhys himself, or some other-might we not trace it through unexplained kills? Would a vampire that ancient have to kill as often?"

"Any city on earth," Don Simon replied austerely, "gives forth such spate of unexplained kills of its own, through disease, cold, filth, and uncaring, that it were difficult to trace a single vampire's poor efforts, As for needing blood less frequently-or needing, rather, the life, the death cry of the mind to feed the powers of the mind on which our very survival depends-that I do not know,"

He paused for a moment on the pavement, A whisper of straying wind moved in his dark cloak and lifted the pale hair from his collar, For a moment, it seemed as if he himself would drift onto it like a vast gray leaf. Then he walked on.

"It is not merely that we are dependent on the nourishment of the blood, James, and the psychic feed of the passing of the soul. Many of us are addicted to them. Some suffer this to greater or lesser degree, and some, in fact, take great pleasure in the addiction. Lotta used to prolong her fasts from the ultimate kill as much as possible, to sweeten them when they came, but it is a dangerous practice. In some, the craving rises almost to madness. It can make us hasty or careless, and in all things concerning us, carelessness is death."