FIFTEEN
‘What happened in
Prague?’
‘Why is it that you
assume that anything did?’ Ysidro took his accustomed seat, across
from Asher, in the Royal Bavarian State Railway’s immaculate green
plush first-class seats, and withdrew from a pocket his deck of
cards. Saxony’s forests swallowed the lights of Dresden. The
vampire’s long fingers, with their pale strong claws like lacquered
ivory, shuffled and cut, shuffled and cut, like some delicate
machine, while his colorless eyes held Asher’s.
‘It seems to have
taken you three nights to make contact with the master
there.’
‘The vampires of
Prague are not like vampires elsewhere. The Master of Prague misses
no fledgling, has heard naught of any who has made it a habit these
three years to travel to Berlin. This means nothing,’ he added,
dealing out the cards between them. ‘Fire from Heaven might rain
upon Berlin and every other city in Germany, and the vampires of
Prague would make little of it. They are old.’
His mind on the
vampires of Prague, Asher didn’t see him move. But he seemed to
jerk awake after momentary sleep to find his left hand prisoned in
a cold grip like a machine. With a long nail, Ysidro moved Asher’s
sleeve up to show Dr Karlebach’s silver-studded leather band. ‘That
is new,’ he observed.
‘A toy. To keep me
awake if I need it.’ Not that it did me any
good a second ago, damn
him . . .
Ysidro’s grip
tightened warningly. ‘There is a shop in Prague that sells such
toys?’
‘There
is.’
He won’t break the bones, Asher told himself.
He can’t as long as he needs
me . . .
He kept his eyes on
the vampire’s, and his jaw ached with the effort not to cry out in
pain.
‘The vampires of
Prague,’ said Ysidro, ‘sought from me assurance as to when I would
kill you and your lady.’
His voice held steady
with excruciating effort, Asher said, ‘How do they know about
Lydia?’
‘They know of no man
who can be trusted to serve, who is not threatened through the
safety of his wife.’
He wanted to ask,
What assurance did you give? but knew
if he tried to speak he would probably scream.
Ysidro let go of his
hand. There was silence for a time, save for the clacking of the
train wheels, the light flutter of the cards as the vampire resumed
shuffling them, and Asher’s hoarse breath. ‘I do not keep you in
ignorance from malice, James,’ Ysidro said after a time, ‘but to
guard you from what would be your death.’
‘Were that entirely
so,’ Asher returned, a little surprised that he could speak at all,
‘you would content yourself with a verbal warning, now that we’re
nowhere near Prague.’ Across the little railway table, the
vampire’s face was expressionless. ‘Neither you nor I knows what’s
afoot or what’s involved with this . . . this
interloper in Petersburg, who might or might not be the same as the
interloper in Berlin. Neither you nor I know what piece of evidence
will unlock the puzzle. Nor do either of us know how high or how
deadly are the stakes. It may be that this interloper’s contact
with Benedict Theiss is only the tip of an iceberg, the visible
tenth of a danger more perilous and vast, which we have no concept
of . . . and may not ever see, if we continue to
hide facts from one another.’
That said, he at last
trusted himself to sit back a little and carefully flex his
fingers, which he was astonished to find able to move at
all.
‘Whatever it is,’ he
continued, ‘I think we both agree that whatever it was that Lady
Irene learned, no league between a vampire and any human government – whether that government is
part of the Triple Alliance or the Triple Entente or outside them
both like the Americans – can come to good.’
Ysidro nodded – what,
for him, was a nod.
‘I know about the
Others in Prague—’
‘You did not meet
them?’ Only the half beat of quickness gave away the Spaniard’s
concern.
‘Do you think I would
have survived a meeting?’
‘No.’ The pale brows
flexed, infinitesimally. ‘I don’t know. To the best of my knowledge
– or the knowledge of the vampires of Prague – they make no
bargains with men.’ He dealt the cards, gathered them up; dealt and
gathered again. ‘I take it you spoke with the Jew near the Spanish
Synagogue?’
‘I did,’ said Asher.
‘He told me to kill you without delay. He told me also that, like
you, he has never heard of vampires generating spontaneously. And
yet they – and you – and the Others – must have originated
somehow.’
‘The Others are a
variety of vampire,’ said Ysidro, ‘in that, according to the Master
of Prague, the first of them were made as vampires are made. This
was five hundred years ago, in the time of the Great Plague. But
whether the Plague had aught to do with this matter is not written,
perhaps never known. The vampires of Prague have long tried to
destroy these creatures. They were humans once, these things – like
the vampire, the transformation seems to render the organs of
generation otiose. But in all the years of observing them, the
vampires of Prague have not seen how this condition is transmitted.
They do not appear particularly human.
‘I had wished,’ the
vampire went on, with a slight hesitation in his whispery voice,
‘to have spoken with Mistress Lydia of these things. ’Twould have
been useful, to hear her opinion as to whether this agent of the
blood, as she deems it, which transmits the vampire state from
master to fledgling, can undergo mutation and create a sport or
changeling unlike its progenitor. The matter would interest her
vastly, I think.’
‘Perhaps too much,’
said Asher, with a wry twist to his mouth.
In his companion’s
eye he saw Ysidro’s amused recognition of exactly what risks Lydia
was likely to run in pursuit of such knowledge. ‘You have reason.’
And, somewhere in the back of those sulfurous pupils, Asher thought
he saw regret as well.
‘In any case,’
pursued Asher, ‘we know the . . . the agent,
whatever it is, of vampirism in the blood does mutate. When Horace
Blaydon tried to create a serum that would make an artificial
vampire, it turned his son into a monster. Whether that was because
he did not understand something in the process that turns a human
into a vampire—’
‘More than likely,’
murmured Ysidro. ‘We do not ourselves understand it. Oh, we know
how it is, that a man or a woman becomes physically vampire,’ he
added, in response to Asher’s raised brows. ‘And we know what must
be done to preserve the fledgling’s soul and keep the life from
winking out during that process. We know that the blood of humans
or animals will sustain vampire flesh, but that only the paroxysm
of energy released by human death will renew our abilities to
manipulate the human mind. But why this should be, and by what
mechanism we drink that death and turn it into powers of our own –
how it is, that without the kill, we cannot hunt, nor defend
ourselves from those who hunt us – these things are hid from us.
Even as it is hid from you, why it is that humans love, and die
inside without loving.’
His hands grew still
and he pressed the palms together, long fingers extended like a
parody of prayer, and rested his lips against them, yellow eyes
momentarily dreaming . . . Of
what? wondered Asher.
Of the friend whose
capacity for loving he had once treasured, ninety years
ago?
Or only of whoever it
was – in Dresden or Prague or Berlin, whore or bootblack or
back-alley drunkard – whose life he had most recently drawn to feed
the energies of his own wary mind?
Every kill he makes henceforth will be upon your
head . . .
Three mornings had
come and three sunsets had bled away to darkness, and Asher was no
closer to any decision about his traveling companion – whose life
rested in his hands with every sun that rose – than he had been in
St Petersburg or Oxford or back in London four years
ago.
They need the living, Karlebach had said.
They often
do . . .
You HAVE become the servant to one of them, haven’t
you?
Had Ysidro guessed,
four years ago after Horace Blaydon’s death, that he might need a
servant again?
‘So whoever our
interloper is,’ Asher said at last, ‘he – or she – isn’t from
Prague . . . and apparently couldn’t be one of the
Others. And I presume is not from Dresden either?’
‘They are a parcel of
provincials in Dresden,’ retorted Ysidro. ‘I doubt there is one
among them who could find St Petersburg on a map.’ He gathered up
his cards again.
By morning, when the
train pulled into the München Hauptbahnhof, the bruises on Asher’s
hand, left by the vampire’s fingers, had turned nearly
black.
Following the
incorporation of the Kingdom of Bavaria into the German Reich –
after the mysterious death of its penultimate Wittelsbach monarch
and the hasty incarceration of that unfortunate young man’s
brother, both mad as bedbugs – the city of Munich was, for all
intents and purposes, as dangerous to Asher as Berlin. He spent
Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of April, reading newspapers and pacing
the small baroque town house that Ysidro had taken on a narrow
court off Sebastiens Platz, and, to judge by the train tickets he
found there on his return the following morning, Ysidro had had no
information from the local master. Asher duly summoned a cab and
porters, loaded up Ysidro’s many trunks, and took the noon train
for Nürnberg.
The sun was westering
over the old university town when the train arrived. By the time
Asher had installed the luggage and coffin trunk in the cellar deep
beneath the half-timbered town house to which his papers directed
him, the shadows were long in the cobbled streets. He found his own
residence, a pension on the other side
of the river in the shadow of an ancient church tower, and listened
to the bells of the town at intervals through the night. Nürnberg
had something to it of the shadowed atmosphere of Prague: an uneasy
sense of gothic secrets and occult studies that Asher would have
unhesitatingly pooh-poohed before he had met
Ysidro . . . or spoken to Solomon
Karlebach.
Most of the vampires
he had met had been creatures of the last few centuries,
fascinating to him as an historian of folklore and as a linguist –
if terrifying – but human: the links that bound them to their
former humanness plain to see. The single vampire survivor from the
Middle Ages that he had encountered had been mad – how long could a
human mind remain sane, in the circumstances imposed by the vampire
state?
He wasn’t sure, and
he didn’t think Ysidro would give him a straight answer on the
subject.
That vampires became
more acute, and more powerful, with age was another disturbing
reflection, and as he crossed the bridge to the house on the Untere
Kraemersgasse in the gray twilight of pre-dawn he was prey to the
uneasy sensation of walking into a trap. The train to Frankfurt
would leave at seven. No vampire could survive the dove-colored
dawn-light that filled the streets at five, but who knew at what
hour they slept in their coffins?
The fact that upon
his arrival at Ysidro’s rented nest he found, not train tickets,
but a note from Ysidro, saying, There are
others with whom I must speak, did not improve his mood. The
newspapers he had read through yesterday’s long afternoon were
filled with speculations about the delicate balances of power
between the ancient empires of Austria and Russia and the new Reich
of Germany: Serbian states demanding independence from their
Austrian rulers, German populations insisting upon reunion with the
German Homeland, the Russians threatening the Austrians on behalf
of their Slavic Serbian brethren . . . Can’t the Undead, even, keep themselves out of factional
fights?
He spent the ensuing
day back at his pension beside the old church tower, organizing his
memoranda about every house where Ysidro had stayed – the baroque
town-palace in Warsaw, the fifteenth-century crypt at Prague, and
the current half-timbered house on the Ludwigstrasse – and mailed
it to himself, care of his bank in Oxford. During his days with the
Department, he’d maintained his own private list of safe houses –
and rentals, the owners of which would ask no questions – in every
city in Europe. At a guess, though, Ysidro had more money at his
disposal than the Department ever had.
The following morning
at seven, he – and presumably the coffined Ysidro, though he and
the Spanish vampire were careful not to meet in any city where the
Undead had their dwelling places – were on the train for Frankfurt.
After twenty-four hours in that city – noon on the twenty-ninth of
April – they moved on to Köln on the Rhine: once a Free City of the
Empire, then French, and now, to the vengeful fury of every
red-blooded Frenchman living, German again.
And coming into the
old stone house in the Ältstadt on Monday morning, Asher found on
the harpsichord there a stack of envelopes, torn open and empty of
letters, all bearing the address of Petronilla Ehrenberg,
Heilege-Ursulasgasse, Neuehrenfeld . . . a village
on the outskirts of Köln.
All were from someone
named Colonel Sergius von Brühlsbuttel, of Charlottenstrasse, in
Berlin.
Beside the envelopes
lay a pair of train tickets. Asher sighed.
‘It would have to be
Berlin.’