Blood Maidens (5 page)

‘It’s readin’ all them newspapers.’ Hervieu laid a comforting, red-furred paw on Asher’s hand. ‘Of course the lot of ’em are barkin’ daft, but you’ll never convince ’em of it . . . and lied to or not, as long as the Germans are comin’ at us, for whatever reason, you know we’ll fight. So what can we do?’

Asher whispered, ‘What indeed?’ He grasped Hervieu’s hand. ‘Thank you.’

‘Anythin’ else I might need to know?’

‘Not that I can tell you right now.’

The bright-blue eyes looked sharply into his for a time, hearing the gaps in his information, but understanding as only the Crown’s Secret Servants could or did. ‘For King and Country, then.’

‘For King and Country.’ Asher sketched a salute at the older man, pulled his fur-lined hat close over his naked scalp, and stepped out of the frowsty little shop into the cold, silvery glitter of the street.

What can we do?
Asher stepped out of the way of a peddler like a giant ball of old clothes, who bore like a battle standard a pole bedecked with gaily-colored mittens. The words were the wheel on which Asher’s soul had been broken. Yet it was good to know that at least someone from the old Department knew he was in town – and would make enquiries if he didn’t report himself in. In an odd way, he felt himself again.

The distaste at traveling with Ysidro – at knowing who and what he was – shifted its perspective, though did not become any easier to understand. Did the fact that the vampire took his victims singly while the governments of Germany and England and France proposed to do so wholesale alter the sin of their deaths?

Or make partnership with this man more, or less, foul than partnership with the Foreign Office?

He didn’t know.

For King and Country
.

Asher hated the words.

FOUR

At seven Asher changed his shirt, donning beneath it the little forearm-sheathe he’d had made for him in China, though instead of the hideout knife he’d worn in those days, he equipped it with a silver letter-opener, sharpened carefully to as much of an edge and point as the soft metal would take. He found a café near the Engineering Academy that served a dinner of zakuski, borscht, and smoke-flavored caravan tea for a rouble. An old-style porcelain heating-stove blazed at one end of the little room, but near the windows it was like sitting outside on a sharp spring morning in Oxford – yet Asher chose one of the small tables there and watched the passers-by in the square before the Mikhailovsky Palace in the chilly evening light. Schoolgirls with long fair hair hanging out from beneath hats and scarves brushed elbows with the ragged women who worked in the sewing factories and cigarette factories and factories that made boots for the army. North of the river – what was locally called the Vyborg-side – and east of the handsome houses of St Petersburg’s eighteenth-century core, these factories ringed the city, turning out guns, battleships, uniforms, tents, and buttons for the biggest army in the world. Between, behind, around the factories lay the slums: the largest, the filthiest, and the poorest in Europe.

Asher wondered if they had changed as little as the city’s center had, in the seventeen years since he had been here last. Street after unpaved street of squalid tenements, the slums sprawled into what had been the countryside, the air above and the dirty snow underfoot reeking alike of coal smoke and sewage. Even here you could smell it.

And within that ring of squalor were all the offices of the government’s thousand petty bureaux – offices of the Church, offices of the regulation of each province, offices of the railroad and of Army procurement and of the regulation of schools and the regulation of finances and the regulation of Jews. Clerks in tight-buttoned coats shivered like Bob Cratchit as they scurried to catch trams, trailing banners of smoky breath. Students lurking along the pavement pushed crudely-printed handbills into their hands, for a rally or a revolution. Elderly men hawked hot pies, cups of tea, aprons, scissors, umbrellas, second-hand shoes. Gray-faced shadowy men from the Third Section took surreptitious notes on everything they saw.

Daylight dwindled. By ten it was dark, and Asher made his way to the chilly electric glitter of the Nevsky Prospect, which led towards the river.

‘I have spoke with the Master of Petersburg,’ stated Ysidro’s quiet voice at his elbow. ‘Neither he nor any of his fledglings has seen the Lady Irene since the full moon of February.’ His words laid no cloud of steam in the ghostly bluish light of the street lamps, and he spoke as if of a stranger.

As if he had not come eighteen hundred miles, at risk of his life, to learn her fate.

‘And the man she saw at the Obolenskys’, before she disappeared?’

‘Count Golenischev – the Master of Petersburg – was certain that none of his fledglings would have the poor taste to do anything with a jumped-up German tradesman but drink his blood, if that, nor the temerity to attend a ball at the Obolenskys’ or anywhere else without him – Golenischev – at their side. And he knew of no living man or woman, he said, with whom she associated, as the Undead sometimes do. Like us all, she was a watcher in the shadows.’

‘Do you believe him?’

Ysidro considered the matter. ‘I do not disbelieve,’ he said at length. ‘There is very little, you understand, that the Kaiser or any other monarch can offer a vampire master that it would be safe for that master to accept, and he seemed ready enough to tell me what he knew. I did not say ’twas a scientist or a doctor that we sought.’

‘Have we permission to visit her residence?’

‘We have.’ With a gray-gloved fastidious finger, Ysidro touched the lap robe in the smelly little box of the cab they hailed, but forbore to take advantage of it. Asher suspected that the same would have been true even had the vampire not been impervious to the freezing night.

‘When she had been missing a week,’ Ysidro went on, slipping one narrow shoulder from beneath the strap of his heavy satchel, ‘Golenischev broke into her house, but found, he said, no trace of violence or misfortune or indeed of anything amiss. He holds it more probable that she has simply gone to the Crimea, as many of the Petersburg nobility do, both living and Undead.’

‘But he does not know this for certain?’

‘No.’

‘She is not his fledgling then either?’

‘The Lady Irene was something of an outsider here.’ Ysidro’s yellow gaze rested on the distance beyond the frost-rimmed window-glass, as if it could follow those shadowy forms that hurried, late and shivering, along the wide thoroughfare. ‘She came to Russia after the defeat of Napoleon and was made vampire by the former master of this city, who had the misfortune to perish while in the Crimea some sixty years ago. The peasantry there are more primitive than the inhabitants of Petersburg or Moscow, and more ready to act upon their suspicions.’ He did not sound particularly grieved at this circumstance.

‘Some masters will feel it, when a fledgling is destroyed,’ he went on after a moment, and his voice, thought Asher, hesitated fractionally over the words. ‘Not all; certainly Grippen does not. And Golenischev is young in his domination of this city and was chosen by his own master for his money and connections rather than his brains. The Lady Irene, though the elder, never challenged him for supremacy. Nor has she had the temerity to make fledglings of her own.’

‘As you have never challenged Grippen for mastery of London?’

The yellow eyes regarded him for a moment behind straight white lashes, then moved: a dismissal. ‘Grippen is a Protestant.’ The contempt in his voice implied that this explained everything –
or anything
, reflected Asher, exasperated. That question settled, Ysidro went on, ‘The Petersburg nest is in any case not a large one, owing to the awkwardness of there being two months of the year wherein it is impossible to hunt, and two more in which one hunts at one’s peril. Here we are.’

They stepped from the cab in a handsome street of town houses and small town-palaces, not far, Asher judged, from Ysidro’s own temporary residence. A row of town houses graced one side of the street, as in a London court; on the other side, a couple of small free-standing villas stood in their own walled gardens. Lamps burned in a porter’s lodge at the far end of the way. The others stood dark.

The vampire shouldered his satchel, crossed the pavement to the end house of the row, and drew from his coat pocket a modern brass Yale key. The house was set high above what seemed to be a shallow basement, owing – Asher guessed – to Petersburg’s marshy water-table. The steps ascending were marble, alternating black and pink. A woman passed on the pavement, huddled in the skimpy and faded clothing of the poor, and looked up as Asher happened to turn his head. He saw her make the horned sign for the aversion of evil, followed up quickly with the Sign of the Cross. She was still crossing herself as she hastened away.

Ysidro closed the door behind them. Unshuttered vestibule windows let through a daub of reflection from the gas lamps on the pavement as the vampire produced two small bullseye lanterns and a box of matches. ‘Would the Lady Irene not have shuttered the windows if she were going to the Crimea?’ Asher inquired as he followed Don Simon into the hall.

‘Given the numbers of the poor in Petersburg – curse or no curse—’

Asher hadn’t thought the vampire had noticed the woman on the street.

‘—I would assume she would have taken such a precaution. Irene was most assiduous in the protection of her property, particularly of her jewels.’ The vampire shut the slide on his lantern and held it low, careless of the beam of its light, but Asher raised his, so that the narrow shaft of brightness gleamed across a suggestion of porphyry inlay, colored marbles, gilded atlantes along the wall. Oriental carpets scattered the floor: Persian and Turkish and Aubusson stacked one on the other, so that the exquisite Chippendale furniture seemed to wade hock-deep in the colored pile. The drawn curtains were moss-colored velvet, tasseled and corded with plum and gold. A silver samovar the size of a steam-engine boiler caught the light, its surface thinly frosted.

‘And what are the chances that it was the Count himself that Lady Irene saw at the Obolenskys’?’

‘Slender.’ Ysidro crossed the hall, passed through the dining room that opened from it. A mahogany table that could have seated fifty. Flowers only a day or two old: she must have some arrangement with day servants that had not been cancelled. ‘He was at a masked ball at the opera that night, he says, with two of his fledglings – who might also have been lying, ’tis true. Yet something in the way he spoke of Germans – whom he holds in contempt, as many Russians so sapiently do – sounded genuine.’

Evidently, the day help’s ministrations didn’t extend to the kitchen quarters. These had been disused for decades, every shelf and cupboard bare. The front of the house was for show, Asher thought, or perhaps to satisfy the desire of its inhabitant for an echo of what it had been to be human. There was a boiler, and coal enough that My Lady could bathe. ‘There is little, as I said, that the Kaiser can offer a master vampire, particularly of a city like Petersburg, where the slums are vast and neither the government nor the owners of the factories themselves inquire what becomes of the poor.’ Asher’s footfalls echoed like the drip of far-off water. Like Virgil’s in the
Inferno
, Ysidro’s weightless tread left no mark upon the silence. ‘The Russians of the countryside believe in the vampire. Here in town, they are told that there is no such thing, and indeed they have learned that to complain is to bring oneself to the attention of the Third Section, which is never a good idea.’

He led the way down the stairs from the kitchen. Lantern held high, Asher followed, though he did not expect to see anything but a hidden chamber and an empty coffin – the first things the Master of Petersburg would have checked, notwithstanding his certainty of an early departure for the Crimea.

Estimating the dimensions of the basement by those of the house above – something one did a lot of, working for the Department – Asher guessed where a chamber had been walled off it even before Ysidro went to the entrance, which was concealed behind stacked boxes that it took a vampire’s preternatural strength to shift. When Ysidro pushed them aside – they had frozen to the floor, owing to the swampy dampness of the semi-subterranean room – and unlocked the narrow door they covered, the coffin was seen to be open and empty when the lantern beams pierced the utter darkness of the bricked-shut room.

No sign of burning or of blood on the extravagant white satin of the lining. Nothing in the room, save the ice that sheeted the floor bricks. No surprises and no information, though Ysidro stood for a time, running his hand along the satin, as if he would have asked a question of the darkness, or looked for some message written upon it.

Then he turned and soundlessly left the room.

Asher followed. ‘Was Lady Eaton the wife of a diplomat? Or simply an unfortunate traveler, such as yourself?’ Ysidro’s sidelong glance reflected the lantern light like a cat’s. ‘I don’t imagine,’ Asher went on, ‘that when you left Madrid in 1555 to attend your King’s wedding to the Queen of England, you counted on meeting a vampire in London and finding yourself obliged to remain there for the next several centuries.’

‘No.’ The tiniest ghost of an expression – wry? half-amused? – pressed itself like a needle scratch into one corner of the vampire’s lips, and the shadow that had settled on him as he stood beside the coffin seemed to retreat. ‘No, I did not.’