Blood Maidens

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This first world edition published 2010

in Great Britain and in the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Copyright © 2010 by Barbara Hambly.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Hambly, Barbara.

Blood maidens.

1. Vampires–Fiction. 2. Saint Petersburg (Russia)–

Fiction. 3. Russia–History–1904-1914–Fiction.

4. Horror tales.

I. Title

813.5′4-dc22

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-053-1   (ePub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6947-0   (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-280-2   (trade paper)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

For Gillyflower

Special thanks to the folks on my blog for their help and advice with research directions:

Mosswing, Moondagger, Dorianegrey, ann mcn, redrose, mizkit, and shakatany.

Couldn’t have done it without you.

ONE

Fog muffled the sound of screaming.

James Asher lengthened his stride, keeping close to the gray wooden wall of the workers’ barracks. The smell of churned dust and cordite – the smell of burning – grated in his nostrils, drowning those other smells that told him where he was: latrines, curry, chickens . . .
Where is the fog coming from?
The answer held the key to what was happening that night, if only he could find it.
The Molopo River never fogs like this
 . . .

The ground underfoot jerked with the impact of artillery shells.

He was in a part of Mafeking he’d never seen before, and he would have taken an oath he knew every block and street of that dusty mining-town. Close to the slums where the families of the Boralong workers lived, he could hear them screaming: children and women terrified by the rain of death from the night sky.
I have to get there. I have to find
 . . .

He couldn’t recall what or who he had to find this time.

I have to stop them
 . . .

He turned a corner, felt pavement underfoot. Tall brick buildings now hemmed him in: the offices of the mining companies, the first-class stores where their ladies shopped for British fashions. He wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there, it was nearly impossible to orient himself, but through the gritty gloom he saw buildings burning ahead. A lapdog scuttled by him, crying in terror. Another shell hit, closer, shaking the world. Fire in a window nearby showed Asher something on the pavement of the alley ahead of him: a thin glistening stream of flowing blood.

The breath seemed to lock in his lungs.
Dear God, how many are dead?
The coppery reek penetrated even the choke of the smoke. The blood lapped thickly against his boot toe, widening as it flowed, ruby reflections in the flame. He looked up the alleyway and saw gruesome little lakes among the fog-wet cobblestones, losing themselves in that inky canyon.

He followed, keeping to the wall. The screaming, and the earth-shaking hammer of the Boer artillery, swelled, then faded as the fog grew thicker. He could still smell the river and the smoke of the city burning, but as the alleyway narrowed around him he thought,
This isn’t Mafeking. This is London.

I’m dreaming
.

The reflection brought him no comfort. It only meant that anything could lie beyond the darkness. All the things he had seen and done, in Africa during the fight against the Boers, in the Balkans, in China – in all those places where his Queen had sent him in the course of twenty years’ clandestine service – gave him no reason to think that whatever awaited him would be anything but appalling.

In waking life he’d seen blood flow down streets like this, and not in single modest gleaming ribbons barely an inch wide.

He turned a corner, his hand to the wall to guide him. This was definitely London, a small square somewhere near the Tower and the docks. Against the firelit brume he could just make out the tower of a crumbling pre-Wren church; the spire had been damaged, and he dimly descried darker night through the holes. There was a street lamp – not the new electric, but the outmoded gas variety – but its glass was broken, its flame quenched. Before one of the houses a candle-lantern hung on a rusted bracket, and its feeble light somehow showed him that a lake of blood extended most of the way across the square.

In the doorway of the tall and lightless house, Don Simon Ysidro stood beneath the lantern, waiting for him.

‘James.’ The vampire’s habitual half-whisper still came to him, clearly audible above the falling of the shells, the screams of the dying. ‘We must speak.’

Asher said, ‘Go to hell.’

His eyes opened in the dark. His face was washed in sweat and he was trembling.

Go to hell
 . . .

He didn’t even need to hear what he knew Ysidro had replied to that remark, because he knew that the dream had been the vision of exactly that.

Not the Boers shelling Mafeking. Germans bombing London. He’d seen the stately Zeppelin airships, silent as clouds above Lake Constance, and the plans to convert them to aerial transports to dump high explosives on cities. He’d seen the stockpiles of weapons – those of the Germans, the Austrians, the French and the Russians and the Turks. He’d seen the Kaiser’s armies on review, rank after gray goose-stepping rank marching down Unter den Linden, and the way the eyes of the German officers had glittered at the thought of leading their unbeatable forces to carve themselves ‘our proper place’ in Europe and the world.

The lake of blood was a puddle. The stream, only the drip of a pinprick, compared to what was coming.

I have to get there. I have to stop them. I have to find
 . . .

He made himself draw breath; made himself let it out. For his superiors in the Department, there was always one last thing to find, so that he – James Asher, New College Lecturer of Philology – could stop whatever horror was next around the corner . . .

But somehow it always turned out to be just something that the Army thought it needed to get a few points ahead of the Germans, in that endless competition for who had the most powerful weaponry, the most enormous battleships, the most terrifying strength.

Why Ysidro?

Asher lay in the darkness, listening to the rain. As if the deafening blasts of the artillery had been real – real tonight, not real twelve years ago – Lydia’s peaceful breathing seemed loud in the stillness. She lay curled against his side like a child, her head on his shoulder, the thick braided silk of her long hair dark in the night light’s tiny glow; it was red as henna in the sun. She had not resumed her nightdress after making love, in spite of the chill of the spring night, and around her bare throat glinted the links of the silver chain that she never took off.

Because Ysidro is a vampire?

Asher dared not shut his eyes again, fearing he would slide back into the dream at the point at which he’d jerked free. Fearing he would see that slight form again, standing in the doorway beneath the lantern bracket; the thin face that had once been handsome, the long colorless hair, wispy as spider silk. The curious, bleached-yellow eyes that caught reflection like a cat’s.

Do I dream of him because Ysidro has killed
– in the course of three hundred and fifty-plus years of hunting the living for sustenance –
without remorse and without hesitation probably enough men, women, and children to populate Mafeking two or three times over?

Asher’s hand moved to touch, above the points of his collarbone, his own chain. The smooth silver links seemed to bind him – and Lydia – to secret knowledge, secret dread. As his fingers brushed the metal they also touched the scars that tracked his jugular and carotid from ear to shoulder, as they marked his arms to the elbows.

Because to my subconscious mind – as this Freud fellow in Vienna would say – Don Simon Christian Xavier Morado de la Cadeña-Ysidro represents Death?

Asher hoped so.

He didn’t want to consider the alternative explanation that might be true.

Wanwei Village. The Shantung Peninsula. Night’s humidity a stifling cloak; thrumming cicadas and croaking frogs a mask for those other sounds he thought he heard, in the scrim of trees that bordered the rice paddies.

The not-quite-audible creak of felt boots on broken branches. Voices breathing a dialect he only barely understood. The vertiginous uneasiness at being unable to interpret those unspoken signals that he saw pass from peasant to peasant during the day – impassive faces, non-committal bows – because he understood only isolated fragments of the fathomless culture that lay beneath the surface.

The Germans who were building a naval compound in Tsingtao thought he was a German and would shoot him out of hand if it came to their attention that he wasn’t. But outside the compound it didn’t matter if he was German or English or American or French.

He was
fan quai
, a Long-Nose devil. With the fall of darkness, those silent, dutiful peasants rose as one, to close in on a lone foreigner like sharks.

Wanwei village had been deserted for years. The largest of the two-room huts still had the shutters to its windows, though the roof was half gone. Barred moonlight through the rafters showed him the cold brick platform that had been the stove, some broken baskets and jars. Everything smelled of mold and rats’ mess . . . and blood.

He was dreaming again.

Asher looked around him, knowing how the actual night in 1898 had ended and not wanting to go through it again. In moments – he knew – the shadows of men would appear above the rafters: local adherents of the Society of Harmonious Fists, dedicated to the elimination of the whites who had raped the Chinese way of life, sold them drugs at gunpoint, insulted their faith and their families and now sought to carve up their country in the name of Christianity and progressive civilities of modern trade. If he could find some way to get out over the hut’s rear wall before they came . . .