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.’