‘Lay thy crest,’ growled a voice like chains stirred in a pot of blood. ‘An’ I wanted ye dead I’d have had the throat out o’ you ere this.’
Asher sat up in his narrow bed. He could see nothing in the darkness – the room’s shutters were fast – but he could smell where the vampire sat, and feel the weight of him on the side of the mattress. A stench of graveyard mold and dirty clothing.
Lionel Grippen.
The Master of London.
The weight shifted and a match scratched. As Grippen turned up the gas Asher saw the familiar form, tall and heavy-built, clothed in a frock coat ruinous with age and a waistcoat of Chinese silk spotted with old blood. Greasy black hair, thick as a horse’s tail, spilled from beneath the brim of a shallow-crowned beaver hat and framed a face fleshy and thick, a nightmare of centuries of uncaring murder.
The vampire flexed his hand a couple of times and dug a kerchief from his pocket, to wrap on over the burn the silver had left.
‘You’re seeking this revenant,’ said Grippen. ‘What’ve ye found?’
‘That someone’s screening his movements.’ If the master vampire’s aim was to hide the revenant himself, Asher was fairly certain Grippen would, indeed, have killed him – or had him killed by the living men in London whose debts he paid, whose affairs he protected, whose dreams he read and who followed his orders without asking who he was or why he wanted things done.
Two years ago, after Asher had killed most of the London nest, Grippen had broken up the ring of henchmen centered on the East End tavern called the Scythe. Asher guessed he’d put together another.
‘Germans, you think?’
‘There’s a nest of the things in Prague.’ Asher reached for the shawl he’d spread over his blankets and dragged it up around his shoulders, for the room, though stuffy, was bitterly cold. ‘It’s certainly a more effective way of destroying civilian morale even than Zeppelin raids. And it could be easily done, by infecting a man and bringing him across immediately, before he starts to transform. In a way I hope it’s that, rather than that the condition has developed spontaneously, for God only knows what reason—’
The vampire growled, with the first display Asher had ever seen from him, of uneasiness or fear. ‘That can’t happen, can it?’
‘So far as I can find out, nobody knows how these things first started. They spread through contamination of the blood, but the original source has to have developed it somehow. Which means, it can develop again.’
Grippen whispered, ‘God save us, then.’
‘I’ve been saying that for a long time,’ returned Asher. ‘However the thing came here, the Foreign Office – or men in the Foreign Office – are hunting it, not to destroy it, but to capture it … to use it for their own purposes. If that hadn’t been the case already I think my former chief, Langham, would have recruited me, instead of warning me off.’
‘Faugh! There’s the Quality for you.’
Asher couldn’t quarrel with him there. ‘When did you first see him? And where?’
‘Limehouse. Candlemas, thereabouts.’ His English had a flatness strongly reminiscent of American, even after three centuries; as a philologist Asher could not help his mind from marking it as Elizabethan. ‘Killed a newsboy that was sleepin’ rough. Tore him up somethin’ savage. Later I smelled him in the fog, near the hospital in St James Road, and I think he killed a whore in the Canal Road near the Kingsland Basin. Leastwise that’s what Gopsall tells me, that runs the Black Dog near there. I never actually seen the thing.’
‘And it killed a man in an alleyway behind Chalton Street, between King’s Cross and Euston, Monday night. The body disappeared. So did the only positive witness. If German agents were behind it, they’d publicize it. They’d see to it that its victims were found – and they might well see to it that its victims were more than prostitutes and homeless newsboys. The Department is covering its tracks.’
‘Faugh,’ said the vampire again. ‘And you look down on us, for killin’ a whore here and there. You’re not sayin’ they’re lettin’ the thing rove free?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Asher shook his head. ‘I think they’re hunting it – or someone in the Department is using the Department’s resources to hunt it, while keeping it quiet.’
‘For Christ’s sake, why?’
‘To avoid panic. And, I suspect, to capture the thing to see if we can use it ourselves … And the man who captured it would, of course, get a fat promotion and maybe a knighthood if it turns out to be useful.’
The vampire grimaced in disgust – not, Asher was certain, from any moral objection, but at the unworkable stupidity of the idea. Though susceptible to destruction by the light of the sun, the Others, Asher knew, moved about underground for a few hours longer than could vampires, who fell unwakeably asleep with the sun’s rising. Like their cousins the vampires they were tremendously strong, and would devour vampires in their coffins if they found them.
‘I’ve been warned off. Unless the condition has somehow developed spontaneously – which I pray to God isn’t the case – this creature was brought to this country and somehow got loose, which tells me that whoever brought it here has no idea what they’re dealing with.’
Grippen snarled again. ‘So what do we do?’
Asher stifled the surge of anger at we from a walking corpse that had drunk the blood of the living, that had used their deaths to fuel its unholy powers, for over three hundred years. A creature that had kidnapped his child two years ago. Though he had recovered Miranda safe he had sworn to kill it, and all those like it …
I am no more part of WE with you than I am with Langham …
But, of course, he was.
That was why he was angry.
The revenants were a plague a thousand times worse than the vampire, for they multiplied without conscious volition. And they could not be negotiated with.
The contagion of their being had to be extirpated before it spread.
And whomever it was who had brought one to England – for whatever purpose – had to be found. And destroyed.
He was aware that Grippen was watching him with cynical amusement. In addition to smelling his blood, the vampire had felt that flush of heat that had gone through him and knew – from centuries of observing humankind – exactly what emotion had kindled it.
‘How large a network do you command in London these days?’ asked Asher after a moment. ‘How many observers can you call on?’
‘Pah.’ The vampire scowled, a horrible sight. ‘Damnéd war. Run by a damnéd crew of rabbit-sucking pimps. Half the men in London have turned their backs on their families and homes, to go slaughter cabbage-eaters in Flanders muck, and for why? Because of lies these pribbling whoresons have conjured about country and King, making a man ashamed to tell ’em he’d rather not go die so England can keep its grip on a passle of colonies oversea!’
‘Instead of sending them dreams in their sleep about how worthy of trust you are? And how they owe you their lives …’
Grippen jabbed a clawed finger at him. ‘None o’ your backchat! You whored for ’em yourself, by what Simon tells me. And pimped others to give you what help you sought.’
‘I did,’ replied Asher quietly. ‘I did indeed. I apologize for my words.’
‘Hmph. What help d’you seek? ’Tis mostly women and street brats I command these days, and Papist Irish who refuse to sign up ’cause they’re too busy runnin’ guns from the Germans to the Irish Volunteers. Scum.’ The vampire shrugged, as if he spoke of roaches on the wall.
‘I’m surprised to see you here,’ remarked Asher, changing the subject, rubbing his wrist where the vampire’s grip, however fleeting, had driven the silver links hard into the flesh. ‘I thought all the vampires were at the Front.’
‘And so they be.’ Grippen seated himself again on the edge of the bed. Nearby in the darkness the bells of St Pancras chimed two, and even with the shutters and curtains tightly closed the night smelled of dank fog and the soot of trains. ‘The more fools they and bad cess to the lot of ’em, swillin’ like piggins at a trough. Those that’re masters of the cities they rule’ll find their error, when they come back to find some upstart’s moved in on Paris or Munich or Rome and set up housekeepin’ … I thought I’d stay here and watch my patch. And a damn good thing, with this clammy wight that should be in its grave prowlin’ about spreadin’ its contagion. Fine homecomin’ that’d be, to get back and find London eye-deep in the things. Has that sneaking Papist whoreson—’
Meaning, Asher knew, Don Simon Ysidro.
‘—got anythin’ to say of it?’
Asher shook his head, and the vampire’s eyes glinted, as if he guessed where Ysidro was and why.
But Grippen kept his peace, and after a moment Asher said, ‘Find out if you can where this thing has been sighted or smelled, where rumor has placed it. If it’s staying by the canal it can come and go through fog, and through the sewer outfalls. You say you learned of it first six weeks ago – find if there’s any word of sightings before that. And keep your ear cocked for word that anyone else is seeking it, or that any who’ve seen it have disappeared.’
‘There’s enough disappear in this city without help of revenants, or them as seeks ’em. Christ, you think vampires could dwell anyplace where the poor was kept track of? Where’ll I find you?’
‘I’m going up to Oxford in the morning.’ The thought of the train journey made his bones creak like an overladen bridge, but if he were to stay in London for any time there were things he wanted to fetch, to say nothing of seeing Miranda. ‘I should be back Sunday, I’ll be staying—’
He paused on the words, as Langham’s jowly face and watery, penetrant eyes flashed across his thoughts and he remembered what his old master Pritchard Crowell had taught him, about making things look like accidents. The wicked flee where none pursueth, Holy Writ (and Asher’s pious and long-deceased father) declared … and, frequently, Asher had found, the same could be said of the deranged. Yet it was a truism in the Department, particularly ‘abroad’, that in some circumstances it was better to flee and be thought deranged (or wicked) than to stop and be picked up by the opposition and shot as a spy.
In other circumstances, of course, flight could be just what the opposition was waiting for you to do.
‘I’ll put an advert in The Times,’ he said. ‘You still go by the name of Graves?’
The vampire’s smile widened unpleasantly. ‘That’s me.’
‘Mine’ll be under the name of Scragger.’
‘Dr Asher, M’am.’ Eamon Dermott laid aside the film plate and turned to Lydia as she came into the fluoroscope tent, still puzzling over Matron’s notes and the absence of Nurse Smith. The murmur of voices and clink of metal on china drifted faintly through the wall from the surgical tent, but held nothing of the frantic note of the ‘big push’ of yesterday and the day before. Down by the river, the Engineers were nearly finished clearing debris to start properly repairing the bridge. This evening, Lydia guessed, would be what Captain Calvert called ‘cleanup’.
Men whose wounds could wait a little. Men who wouldn’t die from not being seen to at once.
Outside, vehicles of all sorts were still leaving for the base hospital at Calais with wounded. Constant in the distance, the thunder of the guns continued.
‘These orders you had from Captain Palfrey Thursday night …’
Oh, drat it! Lydia pushed her spectacles up more firmly onto the bridge of her nose and tried to look like Miranda did when questioned about the disappearance of sugar from the sugar bowl … Oh, that? They merely wanted to consult me about training in the use of the fluoroscope …
‘Yes?’
‘Did it have anythin’ to do with taking German prisoners away?’
‘German prisoners?’
Dermott nodded. He was a stocky young man a few years Lydia’s junior, a Quaker who’d worked in his father’s photography studio and assisted the local doctor in his North Wales village. ‘Yes, M’am. I know ’tis not my place to be askin’ questions, but some of the prisoners— That is, I speak a bit of German. And one of the prisoners said this mornin’ as how both here and at the Front when they was captured, there was an officer separatin’ out some of the men, puttin’ ’em in a truck and away they’d go. He said he was captured with his cousin, and looked to see him here, but instead it was this same thing. A half-dozen men separated out from the rest and took away, M’am. And he asked me, was this usual, and how would he get in touch with his cousin again? He was a lawyer, see, this German, and had spent some time in England. He said it wasn’t anything the British would do.’
‘It’s certainly nothing I’ve ever heard about.’ Lydia frowned. ‘Not with the wounded, at any rate. Seriously wounded?’
‘No, M’am. Mostly walking wounded, he said. I did ask Captain Calvert about it, M’am, and he said he’d never heard of it neither, not here nor anywhere else, but if the officer had papers for it – which he did – it must be pukka. But it didn’t seem quite right to me still, and I thought about this Captain Palfrey that came the other night with papers for you, and you going off as you did … Well, there might be other things going on that even gentlemen like Captain Calvert aren’t told about. But I was only asking, and I wouldn’t wish to cause trouble.’
‘No,’ said Lydia thoughtfully. ‘No, it’s nothing I’ve heard of, Mr Dermott. Captain Palfrey was simply relaying a request for me to consult about training in the use of the fluoroscope.’
The vampires Antonio and Basilio, driving their ambulance-wagon all along the trench lines? A shiver went through her: anger, helplessness, frustration. Had some other enterprising ghouls, braver than the rest, started a delivery service for the convenience of those Undead who didn’t want to risk getting that close to the Front?
How easy it was, to prey on the helpless. The wounded, and prisoners …
She closed her eyes for a moment, sickened. Every vampire in Europe is here. Feeding at will. Killing at will.
And nobody notices.
In the momentary silence, the crashing of the guns sounded very loud.
And why would they notice?
She looked at Dermott again. ‘Could I speak with this man?’