The Kindred of Darkness (25 page)

Then with eye-blink speed the Master of London was on Penelope, wrenching her by the hair until she screamed, shaking her as a mastiff would a cat. ‘Stinking drab, I'll teach you t'obey! Louse-ridden stale! Touch him, would you, filthy punk?' He flung her at Geoff. ‘God's bowels! Clear off, the lot of you dirty paillards!'

Asher rolled over, aware that he breathed but with the sense that the air he gasped contained no oxygen. Grippen and his fledglings seemed far off in the dark mist, and he saw another shadow approaching him, barely visible as it coalesced from the night.

The pale whisper of a face … It may have been a hallucination. It was gone in the next heartbeat, and Grippen dragged him to his feet, shoved him against the back of the motor car to prop him up. ‘What cock-brained humor did you take in your skull, man, paddin' about in the dark like a moonling?'

‘I came in daylight.' He nodded toward the house and the wall, though he was glad of the motor car to hold on to. ‘The house is one of Zahorec's lairs. The man who kept me here past dusk is in the garden, dead.' His legs shook, and he wondered if he could convince Grippen to call him a cab.

Probably not
…

‘You been inside?' Grippen released his shoulder – he nearly fell – and looked back at the dark house with narrowed eyes.

‘It was close to dark. I feared he'd be waking already, though if he was here,' he added, ‘I think he'd have come out, when they started on that poor bastard Wirt.'

‘Any of them go inside?'

‘I didn't see. They surrounded us the instant it was dark, so they may have come from there for all I know.'

The vampire's fang gleamed as he raised his lip in a snarl. Then he nodded toward the black thickets. ‘And what'd the American want, that he'd keep you talking till fall of night?'

‘Much what you ask. Had I been inside, and what had I found there? I told him no, and nothing, and he wouldn't believe me. He had a pistol, much good it did him. He said he'd followed me from Millward's.'

‘Did he, then?' The Master of London looked around him, at the dark road, the crumbling wall and rampant trees. ‘Came from there, did they? Waitin' on him, ungrateful hedge-pigs.' He pushed Asher back against the car's bonnet again and turned toward the house, and in the darkness Asher felt more than heard something like the rustle of moth wings. The fledglings, watching from the mist.

Maybe something else as well.

Waiting for Grippen to turn his back.

To go to the house, to search it for something that he might not even know what it looked like, through who knew how many lightless, bricked-up rooms …

Somewhere he heard Mrs Raleigh make a throaty sigh, like a lioness purring.

Evidently Grippen heard it, too, for he whirled and bellowed, ‘God rot the pack of you! Touch this man and I'll have your guts for garters!'

But he hesitated.

‘He has at least two other houses in town,' said Asher, ‘where he could keep – his
things
…'

Grippen regarded him, head tilted at the unspoken hint.

‘Mrs Raleigh asked whether it was true, that Zahorec can free fledglings of their Master's hold. And asked me what I knew of it.'

‘And what'd you tell her?'

‘That I knew nothing. She said Zahorec claims that the Devil taught him how to free them.'

So if you leave them alone here and they search the house, they won't know they're looking for a book
…

He willed Grippen to understand. Whether he succeeded – or whether the Master Vampire figured that out for himself – Asher didn't know. But Grippen snarled, ‘That's cock.' He stepped back, raised his thick voice to a shout. ‘There's no Devil and no saints either, and banker's brach and his sniveling suck-arse lordship Vauxhill and those other two, they're
mine
! My blood in their veins, their last breaths breathed into my mouth, their toad-spotted little souls here …' He shut his fist, as if upon those souls, like a handful of beans in his palm. ‘A fledgling can no more not be his Master's than you cannot be your father's get. 'Tis what you are, flesh and blood and marrow! Get in.'

He pulled open the door of the motor car, shoved Asher inside. ‘You look like skimmed whey. Where can I take you?'

‘Moscow Road.'

‘Of the four of them you'd think there'd be one with the brains to see you can't trust a lying Papist prating of the Devil and freedom, whatever freedom is that they talk of … Couldn't pick it out of a basket of apples!' He reached in through the door, set the throttle and advanced the spark. ‘And no more loyalty than snipes in a bush—'

‘Four?' Asher turned his head as Grippen, after jerking the crank, darted into the driver's seat with eerie speed to adjust the choke. ‘There were five.'

‘
Five?
' The vampire's mouth settled into a heavy line. ‘You're sure?'

Asher wasn't. The shadow beside the motor car, the gleam of eyes … The note of fear in Mrs Raleigh's voice:
Who is that?

He was still trying to put together the memories when he woke, as if from a trance, on a bench in London Bridge station, with a train guard standing over him asking worriedly, ‘You all right, sir?'

The clock between the platforms read nearly midnight. Asher felt cold to his marrow and nearly sick with exhaustion …
Of course
, he thought.
Even in a motor car, Grippen can't cross running water of his own volition
.

He probably took the train from here himself
.

As he boarded the Hampstead line to get across the river, Asher caught a glimpse, far down the platform, of a tall cloaked shape in the shadow near the stair, but it was gone when he blinked. He watched for it when he stumbled off in Queen's Square, but saw it no more.

O
wing to the inability of the Un-dead to walk abroad in daylight (save when they employ such elixirs as will permit of it, at grave risk to themselves lest the effects wear off untimely), vampires employ the liv-ing to do their bidding. Some they hire outright with divers bribes and rewards. Others, they lure by appearing to them in dreams in the guise of those they honor and love, or sometimes (heaping sin upon sin in the eyes of God) in the shape of angels or saints, and command them to tasks, for the sake of those for whom they care, or for the salvation of their souls. Seldom do the Undead entrust the living with the knowledge of who and what they truly are, lest their revul-sion at working for the dead, or their honor as men, or their care for their own souls, at length overcome them and turn them against their evil masters; and seldom do the dead employ a living servant for more than five years, before kill-ing him and all members of his family, to protect their se-cret
.

Asher double-checked the patristic Latin against a lexicon Sophister had lent him, and compared it with the similar – but much shorter – passage in the Paris edition. That version – supposedly a retranslation of the lost 1510 text – he had almost concluded was a complete forgery, but his study of it through the morning had yielded a half-dozen passages that felt genuine, including the ‘genealogy' of the London nest.

The Latin was fifteenth-century, very unlike that of the Geneva text.

He leaned the bridge of his nose on his knuckles, closed his eyes against the sunlight that filtered through the cat-clawed muslin curtains.

We're still alive
.

Upon his return to Porton's last night he'd left a telegram with the desk clerk telling Lydia where he was, and that he was well, a condition which still surprised him. He'd also informed the clerk that his wife would be arriving sometime the following morning, which hadn't prevented the man from giving him a glare of severe disapproval when, at ten-thirty, he'd shown Lydia into the room.
I've a lady here SAYS she's your wife, sir
…

For a time, Asher and Lydia had simply clung together in the armchair beside the room's little fireplace, like shipwrecked mariners who had somehow survived to drag themselves on to an island beach.
We're still alive
.

He'd read over Nan Wellit's note while Lydia unpacked a kettle, a tea caddy, a Spode teapot, two cups, two saucers, spoons, marmalade, sugar, and a packet of Mrs Grimes' batter-muffins (complete with a small pickle jar containing butter) from one of the two enormous carpet-bags she'd brought with her. (Light traveling, for Lydia. God knew what was in the other one.) He'd observed the smoothness of the young nursery maid's careful printing: block letters resting neatly on the lines, o's and a's shaped as they were in her infrequent notes to Lydia or Mrs Brock.
She's not in immediate terror or pain. She's had enough sleep
.

And she had her wits about her enough to put in markers:
fresh milk, birdsong, quiet, train
. Code-words:
We're in the country near a railway-line
.

One of his own agents in Berlin couldn't have done better.

‘I'm meeting Cece's maid again at noon,' Lydia had informed him, as she'd handed him his tea. ‘And Simon's B of E recruit this afternoon at six. So by tonight we should have a complete list of Zahorec's properties. Aunt Isobel is barely speaking to me for backing out of the theater this evening. Rumor has it that negotiations for Armistead's settlement on Cece have run aground and the whole match may be called off, and she's frantic to learn the details, and of course it wouldn't be proper for Emily to inquire. But I think we'd both do well to be out of London tonight. Shall I meet you at the train?'

Asher, who had waked a dozen times during what remained of the night thinking he heard Blackie Wirt screaming in the darkness, had nodded. Now in the stuffy, cat-smelling room above the bookshop, he wondered if Grippen had driven back to Thamesmire last night to dispose of Wirt's body.

He'd have to. Nothing would bring the notice of the police more quickly than the discovery of a mutilated corpse in a suburban garden
…

And a tiny corner of his mind smiled at the thought of Lionel Grippen, born in the reign of Henry VIII, piloting a motor car through the streets of south London like a demon on hashish.

Even the prospect of bringing the police down on Damien Zahorec's lair wouldn't outweigh the risk of public notice. Of calling it to the attention of enough people to matter, that vampires existed or might exist. A fox cannot prevail against an infinite number of geese.

As Asher had suspected, Sophister's chamber contained copies of
Le Temps
,
Le Petit Journal
and
L'Intransigeant
dating back to the previous December (and probably to the Franco-Prussian War, for that matter). No mention of unusual murders in Paris had been made in any of these prior to Christmas. But after that holiday, all carried mention of disappearances in the poorer districts of St Antoine and the Left Bank, and of bodies found – mostly whores, factory workers, and late-walking students – in the Seine.

Zahorec reached Paris on December 16th. Nine days of staying quiet, feeding carefully, as he had in Italy.

Whatever changed, it changed in Paris
.

Asher turned back to the yellowed volume, wondering if the answer lay there and if he'd recognize it if it did.

That was in the Paris text but not in the Prague version. The supposedly medieval French used the modern word
armée
rather than the more ancient
pooir
… Did that make it a forgery? And if it was a forgery, did that make it untrue?

In the Prague version it said,
The strength of the vampire lies in the disbelief of the living, as much as in their strength and the glamour they cast.

Asher turned the stiff pages, not daring to let himself think about his daughter, and where she might be. He recalled a colleague in Vienna who had urged him to kill a woman he knew in that city, because he had returned from a secret errand to find three telegrams from her under the door of his lodgings. He had not been supposed to be away at that time, and even if he came up with excuses why he hadn't answered, the seed of doubt had been sown.

‘You can't even let 'em stand next to somebody who knew you in some other city, by some other name,' the colleague had said. ‘Because somebody, sometime is going to say,
Oh, yeah, that feller … only his name wasn't Grant
…' And then they're going to ask themselves
why
your name was Grant in Geneva and Hoffner in Vienna, and whatever answer they come up with, it won't be good.'

The thought of Lydia, patiently watching Cece Armistead, waiting for the vampire's shadow to pass, turned him cold with dread.

Particularly if the mining baron were seeking a vampire for his own purposes. Even if Zahorec wouldn't involve himself in a partnership with a living man, Asher wouldn't have been willing to bet on the caution of the four fledglings who had cornered him last night.

Not to bet his life. Or Lydia's life, or Miranda's.

As Sophister had warned him, the room above the bookshop was frightful, stuffy and reeking of soured milk, unwashed clothing, stale cigarette smoke and cat. Old newspapers, books and fragments of books clogged every corner, heaped promiscuously with shirts, tea towels, bills, invoices, folders of unattached pages, and dirty plates. Through a half-open door a hallway could be glimpsed – choked both sides with collected sets of Dickens and bundles of detached signatures – and past that a bedroom similarly piled.