Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

Exhaustion lay over Asher like a leaded blanket-the conversation had the air of being no more than another part of his dream. "Was there a reason?"

"No." The monk's cold little hand did not move on his. Against the low ceiling, his shadow hung, huge and deformed, in the candlelight- the glint of its reflection caught on needle-like fangs as he spoke. "Only that I loved life. It was my sin from the beginning, my sin throughout my days with the Minorites, the Little Brothers of St. Francis. I loved the body we were enjoined to despise, reveled in those little luxuries, those small comforts, which our teachers warned us to deny ourselves. A warning well given, perhaps. They said that such delight in the ephemera of matter would addict the soul. And so it has done.

"Perhaps it was that I did not want to confront God with the sin of luxuriousness on my conscience. I no longer remember. And now I am burthened down with more murders than I can count. I have slain armies, one man at a time; in the lake of boiling blood which Dante the Italian saw in Hell, I will be submerged to the last hairs upon my scalp. Truly a fit portion for one who has sought hot blood from the veins of the innocent to prolong his own existence. And that is what I cannot face."

Susurrant and unreal, that voice followed him down into dreams again, and this time he found himself walking on the stone banks of a crimson lake, boiling and fuming to a bruised horizon in a black cavern that stretched farther than sight. The smell of the blood choked in his nostrils, and its thick, guttural bubbling filled his ears. Looking down, he could see in the tide pools the yellowish serum separating out of the blood, as it did in Lydia's experimental dishes. In the lake itself he could see them all: Grippen, Hyacinthe, Elysee, Anthea Farren with her creamy breasts bare and splashed with gore, screaming in pain... On the bank of that hellish lake walked Lydia in the trailing draperies of her ecru tea gown, a glass beaker in her hand, her hair falling in a rusty coil down her back and spectacles faintly steamed with

heat, bending down to dip up the blood from the churning Phlegethon. Asher tried to call to her, but she was walking away, holding the beaker up to the light and examining the contents with her usual absorbed attention. He tried to run toward her, but found he could not move, his feet seeming rooted to the broken black lava rock; looking back, he saw the bubbling red lake beginning to rise, the blood trickling toward him to engulf him, like the vampires, for his sins.

He opened his eyes and saw Ysidro, sitting near the candle reading the London Times, and knew that it was night. "Interesting," the vam-pire said softly, when Asher told him of his conversation with the old priest, "He is awake during the daylight hours, then, whether or not he can tolerate the touch of the sun itself, though I suspect that he can. And the silver lock on the door has been forced and replaced."

"He has to have come here somehow."

Ysidro folded the paper with a neat crackle, and set it aside. "He may have used the sewers. Perhaps he knew, from other years, that this was my house; perhaps he only followed me back here from the catacombs that first night and guessed, when he saw me fighting to save you, that I would want you brought here. I have, needless to say, moved my resi-dence, now that Grippen and Elysee know of this place... Do you feel strong enough to walk?"

Asher did, but even the minor effort of washing and shaving in the basin of water Simon had brought left him exhausted, and he was grate-ful to return to his cot. Later, after he'd rested, he asked for and got envelopes and paper. In the course of the following day, he wrote two letters to Lydia, one addressed to her under her own name in Oxford, the other addressed to Miss Priscilla Merridew and enclosed, as his former correspondence had been, in a forwarding note to one of his students. He reassured her of his comparative safety, though he felt a twinge of irony at the phrase. Things had to be truly serious, he re-flected, for him to consider helpless imprisonment in a cellar in the care of two vampires as grounds for optimism. Ysidro agreed to post them without demur-Asher could only hope that the rather simple camou-flage would work, or at worst that he'd be able to get Lydia to some other residence before the Spaniard was able to return to Oxford and trace her down.

He remained in the cellar another two days, sleeping mostly, reading the books and newspapers Simon brought to him or listening in schol-arly satisfaction as the vampire read Shakespeare to him in its original pronunciation, and slowly feeling his strength return. He never saw Brother Anthony, except in queer, involuted dreams, but now and then the water pitcher in the cell would be refilled when he awoke. The second afternoon, he woke to find two railway tickets propped against the candlestick, and his luggage stacked neatly at the foot of his cot. With the tickets was a note, written on creamy new stationery in a sixteenth-century hand: Ca w you be ready to leave for London at sun-down?

Beneath this was a folded copy of the L ondonTimes, with the head-line MASSACRE IN LIMEHOUSE.

Seven more people, mostly Chinese from the docks, had been killed.

Weak and shaky, Asher crawled from his cot and staggered to the bars. They were massively strong, forged to defeat even a vampire's superhuman strength-the silver padlock, which did not seem to have kept Brother Anthony out, still held the door. He leaned against the bars and said softly into the darkness, "Anthony? Brother Anthony, listen. We need you in London. We need your help. We can make the journey in a single night; we have provision for it if daylight overtakes us. You must come with us-you're the only one who can aid us, the only one who can track this killer, the only one who can aid human-kind. Please help us. Please."

But from the darkness came no sound.

"I'm not surprised," Simon remarked later, when Asher told him about it as the boat train steamed out of the Gare du Nord and into the thin mists of the evening. "It is difficult to tell how much he knows or guesses of what is going on-a great deal, if he followed us, as vampires often do, listening to our conversation from a distance. It may be that he considers the deaths of vampires only meet; and it may also be that he knows more of the matter than we do and will not speak the killer's name to us because he knows it himself. Among vampires friendships are rare, but not unheard of."

He unfurled the newspaper he had bought over his neat, bony knees and studied the headline with impassive eyes. "I mislike this, James," he said softly, and Asher leaned around to see. limehouse vampire, the headline screamed. police baffled. 'There was another series of killings two nights before that, in Manchester-the London papers did not carry it until the massacre today. A vampire could travel the dis-tance in a matter of hours-as indeed could a man. After a blood feast of nine people, no normal vampire would so much as look at another human being, even were it safe to do so, for a week at least. Few of us feed more than twice a night, and most not more than one in four or five -not upon humans, anyway. This..." The slender brows twitched together. "This troubles me."

"Have you run across it before?"

The slim hands creased the paper again and put it by, "Not person-ally, no. But Rhys spoke of something of the sort happening during the Plague. "He had been a vampire since before the Black Death...

"To those who drank the blood of the Plague's victims?"

Ysidro folded his hands upon his knee, slim and colorless in his gray suit, and did not look at Asher, "Oh, we all did that," he said evenly. "Rhys did during the Great Plague and took no ill; Grippen and I both did, during the last outbreak of the Plague in London in '65. One could not tell, you understand, whom the Plague would choose before dawn. One night, I drank of a woman's blood as she lay in her bed beside her husband; as I laid her back dead, I moved the sheets aside and saw him dead already, with the black boils just beginning in his armpits and groin. I fled into the streets and there Tulloch the Scot found me, vomit-ing my heart out, and asked me why I troubled with it. 'We are dead already,' he said. 'Fallen souls on whom Death has already had his will. What are these virgin fears?' "