Barbara Hambly - Those Who Hunt The Night

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THOSE WHO HUNT THE NIGHT

Barbara Hambly

[18 Jun 2001 - scanned for #bookz, proofread and released - v1]

• One

"Lydia?"

But even before the shadows of the stairwell swallowed the last echoes of his wife's name, James Asher

knew something was desperately wrong.

The house was silent, but it was not empty.

He stopped dead in the darkened front hall, listening. No sound came down the shadowy curve of the

stairs from above. No plump Ellen hurried through the baize-covered door at the back of the hall to take

her master's Oxford uniform of dark academic robe and mortarboard, and, by the seeping chill of the

autumn night that permeated the place, he could tell that no fires burned anywhere. He was usually not

conscious of the muted clatter of Mrs. Grimes in the kitchen, but its absence was as loud to his ears as

the clanging of a bell.

Six years ago, Asher's response would have been absolutely unhesitating-two steps back and out the

door, with a silent, deadly readiness that few of the other dons at New College would have associated

with their unassuming colleague. But Asher had for years been a secret player in what was

euphemistically termed the Great Game, innocuously collecting philological notes in British-occupied

Pretoria or among the Boers on the veldt, in the Kaiser's court in Berlin or the snowbound streets of St.

Petersburg. And though he'd turned his back on that Game, he knew from experience that it would never

completely turn its back on him.

Still, for a moment, he hesitated. For beyond a doubt, Lydia was somewhere in that house.

Then with barely a whisper of his billowing robe, Asher glided back over the threshold and into the raw

fog that shrouded even the front step. There was danger in the house, though he did not consciously feel

fear-only an ice-burn of anger that, whatever was going on, Lydia and the servants had been dragged

into it. If they've hurt her . . .

He didn't even know who they were, but a seventeen-year term of secret servitude to Queen-now King-

and Country had left him with an appalling plethora of possibilities.

Noiseless as the Isis mists that cloaked the town, he faded back across the cobbles of Holywell Street to

the shadowy brown bulk of the College wall and waited, listening. They-whoever "they" were in the

house-would have heard him. They would be waiting, too,

Lydia had once asked him-for she'd guessed, back in the days when she'd been a sixteen-year-old

schoolgirl playing croquet with her uncle's junior scholastic colleague on her father's vast lawns-how he

kept from being dropped upon in foreign parts: "I mean, when the balloon goes up and they find the

Secret Plans are gone or whatever, there you are."

He'd laughed and said, "Well, for one thing, no plans are ever gone- merely accurately copied. And as

for the rest, my best defense is always simply being the sort of person who wouldn't do that sort of

thing."

"You do that here." Those enormous, pansy-brown eyes had studied him from behind her steel-rimmed

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spectacles. Her thin, almost aggressive bookishness was at that time just beginning to melt into

fragile sensuality. With the young men who were even then beginning to take an

interest in her, she didn't wear the spectacles-she was an expert at blind croquet and guessing what was

on menus. But with him, it seemed, it was different. In her sensible cotton shirtwaist and blue-and-red

school tie, the changeable wind tangling her long red hair, she'd looked like a leggy marsh-fey

unsuccessfully trying to pass itself off as an English schoolgirl. "Is it difficult to go from being one to

being the other?"

He'd thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. "It's a bit like wearing your Sunday best," he'd

said, knowing even then that she'd understand what he meant. And she'd laughed, the sound bright with

delight as the April sunlight. He'd kept that laugh-as he'd kept the damp lift of morning fog from the

Cherwell meadows or the other-world sweetness of May morning voices drifting down from Magdalen

Tower like the far-off singing of angels-in the corner of his heart where he stored precious things as if

they were a boy's shoe-box hoard, to be taken out and looked at in China or the veldt when things were

bad. It had been some years before he'd realized that her laugh and the still sunlight shining like

carnelian on her hair were precious to him, not as symbols of the peaceful life of study and teaching,

where one played croquet with one's Dean's innocent niece, but because he was desperately in love with

this girl. The knowledge had nearly broken his heart.

Now the years of scholarship, of rest, and of happiness fell off him like a shed University gown, and he

moved down the narrow street, circling the row of its flat-fronted brick houses toward the labyrinthine

tangle of the back lanes.

If anything had happened to her . . .

From the lane behind the houses he could see the gas burning in the window of his study, though

between the mists and the curtain lace he could distinguish nothing within. A carriage passed along

Holywell Street behind him, the strike of hooves and jingle of harness brasses loud in that narrow

corridor of cobbles and brick. From the weeping grayness of the garden, Asher could see the whole

broad kitchen, lit like a stage set. Only the jet over the stove was burning-even after dusk was well

settled, the wide windows let in a good deal of light. That put it no later than seven . . .

Put what? In spite of his chill and businesslike concentration, Asher grinned a little at the mental image

of himself storming his own home, like Roberts relieving Mafeking, to find a note saying, "Father ill,

gone to visit him, have given servants night off-Lydia."

Only, of course, his wife-and it still startled him to think that after everything, he had in fact succeeded

in winning Lydia as his wife-had as great an abhorrence as he did of confusion. She would never have

let Mrs. Grimes and the two maids, not to speak of Mick in the stables, leave for the night without

making some provision for his supper. Nor would she have done that or anything else without

dispatching a note to his study at the College, informing him of changed plans.

But Asher needed none of this train of logic, which flickered through his mind in fragments of a second,

to know all was not well. The years had taught him the smell of peril, and the house stank of it

Keeping to the tangle of vine that overgrew the garden wall, conscious of those darkened windows

overlooking him from above, he edged toward the kitchen door.

Most of the young men whom Asher tutored in philology, etymology, and comparative folklore at New

College-which had not, in fact, been new since the latter half of the fourteenth century-regarded their

mentor with the affectionate respect they would have accorded a slightly eccentric uncle. Asher played

to this image sheerly from force of habit -it had stood him in good stead abroad. He was a reasonably

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unobtrusive man, taller than he seemed at first glance and, as Lydia generally expressed it, brown:

brown hair, brown eyes, brown mustache, brown clothes, and brown mien. Without his University

gown, he looked, in fact, like a clerk, except for the sharpness of his eyes and the silence with which he

moved. It would have been coincidence, the undergraduates would have said, that he found the deepest

shadow in the dark and dew-soaked garden in which to stow his gown and mortarboard cap, the antique

uniform of Oxford scholarship which covered his anonymous tweeds. Certainly they would not have

said that he was the sort of man who could jemmy open a window with a knife, nor that he was the sort

of man who would carry such a weapon concealed in his boot.

The kitchen was utterly deserted, chilly, and smelling of the old-fashioned stone floor and of ashes long

grown cold. No steam floated above the hot-water reservoir of the stove-a new American thing of black

rococo iron which had cost nearly twenty-five dollars from a catalogue. The bland brightness of the

gaslight, winking on the stove's nickel-plated knobs, and the silver of toast racks, made the stillness in

the kitchen seem all the more ominous, like a smiling maniac with an ax behind his back.

Few of the dons at Oxford were familiar with the kitchen quarters of their own homes-many of them had

never penetrated past the swinging doors that separated the servants' portions of the house from those in

which the owners lived. Asher had made it his business to know not only the precise layout of the place-

he could have passed through it blindfolded without touching a single piece of furniture, as he could

indeed have passed through any room in the house or in his College- but to know exactly where

everything was kept. Knowing such things was hardly a conscious effort anymore, merely one of the

things he had picked up over the years and had never quite dared to put down. He found the drawer in

which Mrs. Grimes kept her carving knives-the hideout he kept in his boot was a small one, for

emergencies-then moved on to the archway just past the stove which separated kitchen from pantry, all

the while aware that someone, somewhere in the house, listened for his slightest footfall.

Mrs. Grimes, Ellen, and the girl Sylvie were all there. They sat around the table, a slumped tableau like

something from the Chamber of Horrors at Mme. Tussaud's, somehow shocking in the even, vaguely

flickering light from the steel fishtail burner by the stove. All they needed was a poison bottle on the

table between them, Asher thought with wry grimness, and a placard:

THE MAD POISONER STRIKES.

Only there was no bottle, no used teacups, no evidence in fact of anything eaten or drunk. The only thing

on the table at all was a bowl of half-shelled peas.

Studying the cook's thin form, the parlor maid's plump one, and the huddled shape of the tweeny, Asher

felt again that chill sensation of being listened for and known. All three women were alive, but he didn't

like the way they slept, like broken dolls, heedless of muscle cramp or balance.

He had been right, then.

The only other light on in the house was in his study, and that was where he kept his revolver, an

American Navy Colt stowed in the drawer of his desk; if one were a lecturer in philology, of course, one

couldn't keep a revolver in one's greatcoat pocket. The other dons would certainly talk.

He made his way up the back stairs from the kitchen. From its unobtrusive door at the far end of the hall

he could see no one waiting for him at the top of the front stairs, but that meant nothing. The door of the

upstairs parlor gaped like a dark mouth. From the study, a bar of dimmed gold light lay across the carpet

like a dropped scarf.

Conscious of the weight of his body on the floor, he moved a few steps forward, close to the wall. By

angling his head, he could see a wedge of the room beyond. The divan had been deliberately dragged

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around to a position in which it would be visible from the hall. Lydia lay on the worn green cushions,

her hair unraveled in a great pottery-red coil to the floor. On her breast her long, capable hand was

curled protectively around her spectacles, as if she'd taken them off to rest her eyes for a moment;

without them, her face looked thin and unprotected in sleep. Only the faint movement of her small

breasts beneath the smoky lace of a trailing tea gown showed him she lived at all.

The room was set up as a trap, he thought with the business portion of his mind. Someone waited inside

for him to go rushing in at first sight of her, as indeed his every instinct cried out to him to do . . .

"Come in, Dr. Asher," a quiet voice said from within that glowing amber chamber of books. "I am alone-

there is in fact no one else in the house. The young man who looks after your stables is asleep, as you

have found your women servants to be. I am seated at your desk, which is in its usual place, and I have

no intention of doing you harm tonight."

Spanish, the field agent in him noted-flawless and unaccented, but Spanish all the same-even as the

philologist pricked his ears at some odd, almost backcountry inflection to the English, a trace of isolative

a here and there, a barely aspirated e just flicking at the ends of some words . . .

He pushed open the door and stepped inside. The young man sitting at Asher's desk looked up from the

dismantled pieces of the revolver and inclined his head in greeting,

"Good evening," he said politely. "For reasons which shall shortly become obvious, let us pass the

formality of explanations and proceed to introductions."

It was only barely audible-the rounding of the ou in obvious and the stress shift in explanations-but it

sent alarm bells of sheer scholarly curiosity clanging in some half-closed lumber room of his mind. Can't

you stop thinking like a philologist even at a time like this . . . ?

The young man went on, "My name is Don Simon Xavier Christian Morado de la Cadena-Ysidro, and I

am what you call a vampire."

Asher said nothing. An unformed thought aborted itself, leaving white stillness behind. "Do you believe

me?"

Asher realized he was holding his intaken breath, and let it out. His glance sheered to Lydia's throat; his

folkloric studies of vampirism had included the cases of so-called "real" vampires, lunatics who had

sought to prolong their own twisted lives by drinking or bathing in the blood of young girls. Through the

tea gown's open collar he could see the white skin of her throat. No blood stained the fragile ecru of the

lace around it. Then his eyes went back to Ysidro, in whose soft tones he had heard the absolute

conviction of a madman. Yet, looking at that slender form behind his desk, he was conscious of a queer

creeping sensation of the skin on the back of his neck, an uneasy sense of having thought he was

descending a stair and, instead, stepping from the edge of a cliff . . .

The name was Spanish-the young man's bleached fairness might well hail from the northern provinces

where the Moors had never gone calling. Around the thin, high-nosed hidalgo face, his colorless hair

hung like spider silk, fine as cobweb and longer than men wore it these days. The eyes were scarcely

darker, a pale, yellowish amber, flecked here and there with pleats of faded brown or gray-eyes which

should have seemed catlike, but didn't. There was an odd luminosity to them, an unplaceable glittering

quality, even in the gaslight, that troubled Asher. Their very paleness, contrasting with the moleskin-soft

black velvet of the man's coat collar, pointed up the absolute pallor of the delicate features far more like

a corpse's than a living man's, save for their mobile softness.

From his own experiences in Germany and Russia, Asher knew how easy such a pallor was to fake,

particularly by gaslight. And it might simply be madness or drugs that glittered at him from those grave

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yellow eyes. Yet there was an eerie quality to Don Simon Ysidro, an immobility so total it was as if he

had been there behind the desk for hundreds of years, waiting . . .

As Asher knelt beside Lydia to feel her pulse, he kept his eyes on the Spaniard, sensing the danger in the

man. And even as his mind at last identified the underlying inflections of speech, he realized, with an

odd, sinking chill, whence that dreadful sense of stillness stemmed.

The tonal shift in a few of his word endings was characteristic of those areas which had been

linguistically isolated since the end of the sixteenth century.

And except when he spoke, Don Simon Ysidro did not appear to be breathing.

The carving knife still in his left hand, Asher got to his feet and said, "Come here."

Ysidro did not move. His slender hands remained exactly as they had been, dead white against the blued

steel of the dissected gun, but no more inert than the spider who awaits the slightest vibration of the

blundering fly.

"You understand, it is not always easy to conceal what we are, particularly if we have not fed," he

explained in his low, light voice. Heavy lids gave his eyes an almost sleepy expression, not quite

concealing cynicism and mockery, not quite concealing that odd gleam. "Up until ninety years ago, it

was a simple matter, for no one looks quite normal by candlelight. Now that they are lighting houses by

electricity, I know not what we shah" do."

Ysidro must have moved. The terrifying thing was that Asher did not see the man do it, was not-for a

span of what must have been several seconds-conscious of anything, as if he had literally slipped into a

trance on his feet. One second he was standing, knife in hand, between Lydia's sleeping form and the

desk where the slim intruder sat; the next, it seemed, he came to himself with a start to find the iciness of

Ysidro's fingers still chilling his hand, and the knife gone.

Shock and disorientation doused him like cold water. Don Simon tossed the knife onto the desk among

the scattered pieces of the useless revolver and turned back, with an ironic smile, to offer his bared wrist

to Asher.

Asher shook his head, his mouth dry. He'd faked his own death once, on a German archaeological

expedition to the Congo, by means of a tourniquet, and he'd seen fakirs in India who didn't even need

that. He backed away, absurdly turning over in his mind the eerie similarities of hundreds of legends

he'd uncovered in the genuinely scholarly half of his career, and walked to Lydia's desk.

It stood on the opposite side of the study from his own-in actual fact a Regency secretaire Lydia's

mother had once used for gilt-edged invitations and the delicately nuanced jugglings of seating

arrangements at dinners. It was jammed now with Lydia's appallingly untidy collection of books, notes,

and research on glands. Since she had taken her degree and begun research at the Radclyffe Infirmary,

Asher had been promising to get her a proper desk. In one slim compartment her stethoscope was coiled,

like an obscene snake of rubber and steel . . .

His hands were not quite steady as he replaced the stethoscope in its pigeonhole once more. He was

suddenly extremely conscious of the beat of the blood in his veins.

His voice remained level. "What do you want?"

"Help," the vampire said,

"What?" Asher stared at the vampire, he realized-seeing the dark amusement in Ysidro's eyes-like a fool.

His own mind still felt twisted out of true by what he had heard-or more properly by what he had

absolutely not heard-through the stethoscope, but the fact that the shadowy predator that lurked in the

legends of every culture he had ever studied did exist was in a way easier to believe than what that

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predator had just said.

The pale eyes held his. There was no shift in them, no expression; only a remote calm, centuries deep.

Ysidro was silent for a few moments as if considering how much of what he should explain. Then he

moved, a kind of weightless, leisurely drifting that, like Asher's habitual stride, was as noiseless as the

passage of shadow. He perched on a corner of the desk, long white hands folded on one well-tailored

gray knee, regarding Asher for a moment with his head a little on one side. There was something almost

hypnotic in that stillness, without nervous gesture, almost completely without movement, as if that had

all been rinsed from him by the passing moons of time.

Then Don Simon said, "You are Dr. James Claudius Asher, author of Language and Concepts in Eastern

and Central Europe, Lecturer in Philology at New College, expert on languages and their permutations

in the folklore of countries from the Balkans to Port Arthur to Pretoria ..."

Asher did not for a moment believe it coincidence that Ysidro had named three of the trouble spots of

which the Foreign Office had been most desirous of obtaining maps.

"Surely, in that context, you must be familiar with the vampire."

"I am." Asher settled his weight on one curved arm of the divan where Lydia still lay, unmoving in her

unnatural sleep. He felt slightly unreal, but very calm now. Whatever was happening must be dealt with

on its own bizarre terms, rather than panicked over. "I don't know why I should be surprised," he went

on after a moment. "I've run across legends of vampires in every civilization from China to Mexico.

They crop up again and again-blood-drinking ghosts that live as long as they prey on the living. You get

them from ancient Greece, ancient Rome-though I remember the classical Roman ones were supposed to

bite off their victims' noses rather than drink their blood. Did they?"

"I do not know," Ysidro replied gravely, "having only become vampire myself in the Year of Our Lord

1555. I came to England in the train of his Majesty King Philip, you understand, when he came to marry

the English queen-I did not go home again. But personally, I cannot see why anyone would trouble to do

such a thing." Though his expression did not change, Asher had the momentary impression of

amusement glittering far back in those champagne-colored eyes.

"And as for the legends," the vampire went on, still oddly immobile, as if over the centuries he had

eventually grown weary of any extraneous gesture, "one hears of fairies everywhere also, yet neither you

nor I expect to encounter them at the bottom of the garden." Under the long, pale wisps of Ysidro's hair,

Asher could see the earlobes had once been pierced for earrings, and there was a ring of antique gold on

one of those long, white fingers. With his narrow lips closed, Ysidro's oversized canines-twice the length

of his other teeth-were hidden, but they glinted in the gaslight when he spoke.

"I want you to come with me tonight," he said after a brief pause during which Asher had the impression

of some final, inner debate which never touched the milky stillness of his calm. "It is now half past

seven-there is a train which goes to London at eight, and the station but the walk of minutes. It is

necessary that I speak with you, and it is probably safer that we do so in a moving vehicle away from the

hostages that the living surrender to fortune."

Asher looked down at Lydia, her hair scattered like red smoke over the creamy lace of her gown, her

fingers, where they rested over that light frame of wire and glass, stained with smears of ink. Even under

the circumstances, the incongruity of the tea gown's languorous draperies and the spectacles made him

smile. The combination was somehow very like Lydia, despite her occasionally stated preference for the

more strenuous forms of martyrdom over being seen wearing spectacles in public. She had never quite

forgotten the sting of her ugly-duckling days. She was writing a paper on glands. He knew she'd

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probably spent most of the morning at the infirmary's dissecting rooms and had been hurriedly

scribbling what she could after she'd come home and changed clothes while waiting for him to arrive.

He wondered what she'd make of Don Simon Ysidro and reflected that she'd probably produce a dental

mirror from somewhere about her person and demand that he open his mouth-wide.

He glanced back at Ysidro, oddly cheered by this mental image. "Safer for whom?"

"For me," the vampire replied smoothly. "For you. And for your lady. Do not mistake, James; it is truly

death that you smell, clinging to my coat sleeves. But had I intended to kill your lady or you, I would

already have done so. I have killed so many men. There is nothing you could do which could stop me."

Having once felt that disorienting moment of psychic blindness, Asher was ready for him, but still only

barely saw him move. His hand had not dropped the twenty inches or so that separated his fingers from

the hideout knife in his boot when he was flung backward across the head of the divan, in spite of his

effort to roll aside. Somehow both arms were wrenched behind him, the wrists pinned in a single grip of

steel and ice. The vampire's other hand was in his hair, cold against his scalp as it dragged his head back,

arching his spine down toward the floor. Though he was conscious of very little weight in the bony

limbs that forced his head back and still further back over nothing, he could get no leverage to struggle;

and in any case, he knew it was far too late. Silky lips brushed his throat above the line of the collar-

there was no sensation of breath.

Then the lips touched his skin in a mocking kiss, and the next instant he was free.

He was moving even as he sensed the pressure slack from his spine, not even thinking that Ysidro could

kill him, but only aware of Lydia's danger. But by the time he was on his feet again, his knife in his

hand, Ysidro was back behind the desk, unruffled and immobile, as if he had never moved. Asher

blinked and shook his head, aware there'd been another of those moments of induced trance, but not sure

where it had been.

The fine strands of Ysidro's hair snagged at his velvet collar as he tipped his head a little to one side.

There was no mockery in his topaz eyes. "I could have had you both in the time it takes to prove to you

that I choose otherwise," he said in his soft voice. "I-we-need your help, and it is best that I explain it to

you on the way to London and away from this girl for whom you would undertake another fit of

pointless chivalry. Believe me, James, I am the least dangerous thing with which you-or she-may have to

contend. The train departs at eight, and it is many years since public transportation has awaited the

convenience of persons of breeding. Will you come?"

• Two

It was perhaps ten minutes' walk along Holywell Street to the train station. Alone in the clinging veils of

the September fog, Asher was conscious of a wish that the distance were three or four times as great. He

felt in need of time to think.

On his very doorstep, Ysidro had vanished, fading effortlessly away into the mists. Asher had fought to

keep his concentration on the vampire during what he was virtually certain was a momentary blanking

of his consciousness, but hadn't succeeded. Little wonder legend attributed to vampires the ability to

dissolve into fog and moonbeams, to slither through keyholes or under doors. In a way, that would have

been easier to understand.

It was the ultimate tool of the hunter-or the spy.

The night was cold, the fog wet and heavy in his lungs-not the black, killer fog of London, but the

peculiarly moist, dripping, Oxford variety, which made the whole town seem slightly shaggy with moss

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and greenness and age. To his left as he emerged into Broad Street, the sculpted busts around the

Sheldonian Theater seemed to watch him pass, a dim assemblage of ghosts; the dome of the theater itself

was lost in the fog beyond. Was Ysidro moving among those ghosts somewhere, he wondered, leaving

no footprint on the wet granite of the pavernent?

Or was he somewhere behind Asher in the fog, trailing silently, watching to see whether his unwilling

agent would double back and return home?

Asher knew it would do him no good if he did. His conscious mind might still revolt at the notion that he

had spent the last half hour conversing with a live vampire-an oxymoron if ever I heard one, he reflected

wryly-but the difference, if one existed, was at this point academic.

He had been in deadly danger tonight. That he did not doubt.

As for Lydia . . .

He had absolutely no reason to believe Don Simon's claim to be alone. Asher had considered demanding

to search the house before he left, but realized it would be a useless gesture. Even a mortal accomplice

could have stood hidden in the fog in the garden, let alone one capable of willing mortal eyes to pass

him by. He had contented himself with lighting the fires laid in the study fireplace and the kitchen stove,

so that the servants would not wake in cold-as wake they would, Ysidro had assured him, within an hour

of their departure.

And at all events, Ysidro knew where Asher lived. If the vampire were watching him, there was no

chance of returning to the house and getting Lydia to safety before they were intercepted.

And-another academic point-what precisely constituted safety?

Asher shoved his gloved hands deeper into the pockets of the baggy brown ulster he had donned and

mentally reviewed everything he had ever learned about vampires.

That they were the dead who infinitely prolonged their lives by drinking the blood of the living seemed

to be the one point never in dispute, bitten-off noses in Rome notwithstanding. From Odysseus' first

interview with the shades, there was so little divergence from that central theme that Asher was-

intellectually, at least-mildly astounded at his own disbelief before he had pressed the stethoscope to that

thin, hard ribcage under the dark silk of the vest, and had heard . . . nothing. His researches in folklore

had taken him from China to Mexico to the Australian bush, and there was virtually no tongue which

had not yielded some equivalent of that word, vampire.

Around that central truth, however, lay such a morass of legend about how to deal with vampires that he

felt a momentary spasm of irritation at the scholars who had never troubled to codify such knowledge.

He made a mental note to do so, provided Ysidro hadn't simply invited him to London for dinner with a

few friends. Naturally, he reflected wryly, there wasn't a greengrocer open at this hour, and he would

look fairly foolish investigating back-garden vegetable patches for garlic en route to the station . . .

totally aside from missing his train. And given the general standard of British cookery, searching for

garlic would be a futile task at best.

His ironic smile faded as he paused on the Hythe Bridge, looking down at the water, like slate the color

of glass and smudged with the lights of Fisher Row, whose wet gray walls seemed to rise straight out of

the stream. Garlic was said to be a protection against the Undead, as were ash, whitethorn, wolfsbane,

and a startling salad of other herbs, few of which Asher would have recognized had he found them by

the road. But the Undead were also said to be unable to cross running water, which Ysidro had

obviously done on his way from the station-or had he come up from London to Oxford by train?

A crucifix allegedly protected its wearer from the vampire's bite- some tales specified a silver crucifix,

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and Asher's practical mind inquired at once: How high a silver content? But like tales of the Catholic

Limbo, that theory left vast numbers of ancient and modern Chinese, Aztecs, ancient Greeks, Australian

bushmen, and Hawaiian Islanders, to name only a few, at an unfair disadvantage. Or did ancient Greek

vampires fear other sacred things? And how, in that case, had unconverted pagan vampires in the first

century A.D. reacted to Christians frantically waving the symbols of their faith at them to protect

themselves from having their blood drunk or their noses bitten off? Not much vincere in hoc signo, he

mused ironically, turning his steps past the Crystal Palace absurdity of the old London and Northwestern

station and along the Botley Road to the more prosaic soot-stained brick of the Great Western station a

hundred yards beyond.

He was now not alone in the fog-shrouded roadbed between the nameless brick pits and sheds that

railway stations seemed to litter spontaneously about themselves. Other dark forms were hastening from

the lights of the one station to the lights of the other, struggling with heavy valises or striding blithely

along in front of brass-buttoned porters whose breath swirled away to mingle with the dark vapors

around hem. From the direction of the London and Northwestern station, a train whistle groaned

dismally, followed by the lugubrious hissing of steam; Asher glanced back toward the vast, arched

greenhouse of the station and saw Don Simon walking, with oddly weightless stride, at his elbow.

The vampire held out a train ticket in his black-gloved hand. "It is only right that I provide your

expenses," he said in his soft voice, "if you are to be in my service."

Asher pushed aside the ends of his scarf-a woolly gray thing knitted for him by the mother of one of his

wilder pupils-and tucked the little slip of pasteboard into his waistcoat pocket. "Is that what it is?" They

climbed the shallow ramp to the platform. In the harsh glare of the gaslights, Ysidro's face looked white

and queer, the delicate swoop of the eyebrows standing out against pale hair and paler skin, the eyes like

sulfur and honey. A woman sitting on a bench with two sleepy little girls glanced up curiously, as if she

sensed something amiss. Don Simon smiled into her eyes, and she quickly looked away.

The vampire's smile vanished as swiftly as it had been put on; In any case, it had never reached his eyes.

Like every other gesture or expression about him, his smile had an odd, minimal air, almost like a

caricaturist's line, though Asher had from it a sudden impression of an antique sweetness, the faded-out

shape of what it once had been. For a moment more Ysidro studied the averted profile and the silvery-

fair heads of the two children pressed against the woman's shabby serge shoulders. Then his glance

returned to Asher's.

"From the time Francis Walsingham started running his agents in Geneva and Amsterdam to find out

about King Philip's invasion of England, your secret service has had its links with the scholars," he said

quietly. The antique inflection to his speech, like its faint Castilian lisp, was barely discernible.

"Scholarship, religion, philosophy-they were killing matters in those days, and at that time I was still

close enough to my human habits of thought to be concerned about the outcome of the invasion. And

too, it was still respectable among scholars to be a warrior, and among warriors to be a scholar, which it

is no longer, as I'm sure you know."

Asher's old colleague, the Warden of Brasenose, sprang to mind, tutting disapprovingly over some

minor Balkan flare-up in the course of which Asher had nearly lost his life, while Asher, cozily

consuming scones on the other side of the hearth, had nodded agreement that no, h'rm, England had no

business meddling in European politics, damned ungentlemanly, hrmph, mphf. He suppressed his smile,

unwilling to give this slender young man anything, and kept silent. He leaned his shoulders against the

sooty brick of the station wall, folded his arms, and waited.

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After a moment Ysidro went on, "My solicitor-a young man, and agreeable to meet with his clients at

late hours if they so desire-did mention that, when he worked in the Foreign Office, there was talk of at

least one don at Oxford and several at Cambridge who 'did good work,' as the euphemism goes. This

was years ago, but I remembered it, out of habit, and of interest in things secret. When I had need of an-

agent-it was no great matter to track you down by the simple expedient of comparing the areas about

which papers were published and their probable research dates with times and places of diplomatic

unease. It still left the field rather wide, but the only Fellow younger than yourself who might possibly

have fit the criteria of time and place would have difficulty passing himself off as anything other than an

obese and myopic rabbit . . ."

"Singletary of Queens," sighed Asher. "Yes, he was researching in Pretoria at the same time I was,

trying to prove the degeneracy of the African brain by comparative anatomy. The silly bleater still

doesn't know how close he came to getting us both killed."

That slight, ironic line flicked into existence at the corner of Ysidro's thin mouth, then vanished at once.

The train came puffing in, steam roiling out to blend with the fog, while vague forms hurried onto the

platform to meet it. A girl with a face like a pound of dough sprang from a third-class carriage as it

slowed, into the arms of a podgy young man in a shop clerk's worn old coat, and they embraced with the

delighted fervor of a knight welcoming his princess bride. A mob of undergraduates came boiling out of

the waiting room, noisily bidding good-by to a furiously embarrassed old don whom Asher recognized

as the Classics lecturer of St. John's. Linking then: arms, they began to carol "Till We Meet Again" in

chorus, holding then- boaters over their hearts. Asher did not like the way his companion turned his

head, studying them with expressionless yellow eyes as if memorizing every lineament of each rosy

face. Too like a cook, he thought, watching lambs play at a spring fair.

"The war was my last job," Asher went on after a moment, drawing Ysidro's glance once more to him as

they crossed the platform. "I became-unsuitably friendly with some people in Pretoria, including a boy I

later had to kill. They call it the Great Game, but it's neither. I came back here, got married, and

incorporated the results into a paper on linguistic borrowings from aboriginal tongues." He shrugged, his

face now as expressionless as the vampire's. "A lecturer's salary isn't a great deal, but at least I can drink

with my friends without wondering if what they're telling me is the truth."

"You are fortunate," the vampire said softly. He paused, then continued, "I have taken a first-class

compartment for us-at this time of night, we should have it to ourselves. I will join you there after the

train leaves the station."

Oh, will you? Asher thought, his right eyebrow quirking up and his every instinct and curiosity coming

suddenly alert as the vampire moved off down the platform with a lithe, disquieting stride, his dark

Inverness cloak flaring behind him. Thoughtfully, Asher sought out their compartment, divested himself

of bowler and scarf, and watched the comings and goings on the platform with great interest until the

train moved away.

The cloudy halo of the platform lights dropped behind them; a scattering of brick buildings and signal

gantries flipped past in the foggy dark. He saw the gleam of lights, like an ironic omen, on the ancient

markers of the old graveyard, then on the brown sheet-silk of the river as they passed over the bridge.

The darkness of the countryside took them.

Asher settled back against the worn red plush as the compartment door slid open and Ysidro entered,

slim and strange as some Egyptian cat-god, his fair, cobweb-fine hair all sprinkled with points of

dampness in the jolting flicker of the gas jet overhead. With a graceful movement, he shrugged out of

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Barbara Hambly - Those Who Hunt The Night

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