Authors: Barbara Hambly

Blood Maidens (6 page)

In the drawing room, Ysidro opened the drawers of the baroque desk – a stupendous confection of ebony and mother-of-pearl – and turned one thin shoulder, very slightly, to block Asher’s view as he drew forth packets of letters. He went on, ‘I have since learned that there were vampires aplenty in Madrid, and in Toledo also, which was my home. I could as easily have been taken there, given my carelessness at walking abroad nights. Perhaps in Madrid and Toledo it was guessed that I should be missed.’

Past his shoulder Asher glimpsed the handwriting, a fine sixteenth-century court-hand. Packet after packet of letters, carefully bound in ribbons. Now and then Don Simon would glance at a date: April of 1835. November of 1860. Asher himself had not yet been born. He glimpsed his birthday, of the first year he’d been sent to that horrible school in York, the year his parents had died: like the scent of old patchouli unexpectedly encountered. Ysidro had been writing a letter on that night.

‘She was the wife of a diplomat, yes,’ went on the vampire, flipping open one drawer after another, like a man seeking some further prize. Smaller packs of letters, with addresses in different hands, he dropped on the corner of the desk for Asher to take: bills, invitations, a memorandum book, household expenses. ‘She was not happy in her marriage and so took a good deal of pleasure, I think, in making her husband the first among her victims. This is not uncommon. Nor is it uncommon to take – or to ask one’s master vampire to take – the bereaved husband or wife or lover as a fledgling also, under the mistaken impression that they will provide one with company in eternity.’

‘Mistaken?’ Asher stowed the correspondence in the pockets of his heavy black greatcoat, sat on the edge of the desk as Ysidro moved around the study’s rose-and-gilt Louis XVI paneling, tapping and probing for sliding panels or other secret caches. While he watched Don Simon, he kept an ear towards the stairway and the street. The last thing he needed was to be taken up by the Petersburg police for burglary.

‘The husband or wife or lover in question seldom truly wishes to become vampire.’ Ysidro finished his circuit of the room, glanced back over his shoulder as he picked up his lantern again by the door. ‘Usually they have not the will to survive the transition – the giving over of their soul, their consciousness, to the master vampire, to be held within the embrace of his mind –’ his long hand closed illustratively on itself, like some strange colorless plant devouring insect prey – ‘and returned to the body after the body’s death. Or else they simply do not make good vampires and get themselves killed very quickly. By that time –’ and his dry, soft whisper was dust falling in a room long closed – ‘the vampire who wished to bring them with him – or her – into Eternity has usually lost interest in them. Love might conquer Death, but it seldom transcends the selfishness necessary to accept killing others to prolong one’s own life.’

He passed through the door into the oval central hallway of the main floor, mounted the curving stairway to the dark bedrooms above.

A velvet-festooned cavern of a bedroom, then a dressing room nearly as large – cupboard after cypress cupboard, mirrors dimmed with frost. Ysidro opened them, one after another, checking shelves and corners. Still searching. And to judge by the places he looked, it was for something small.

All the gowns were this year’s style, subdued pinks and silvers succeeding the dim mauves and mosses of a few seasons past. Such detail was something else one learned in the Department, even if one had not the delirious privilege of being married to Lydia. The hats on the shelves were the newest monstrosities from Paris. The colors – as far as Asher could tell by lantern light – favored an English rose. ‘If she was going to the Crimea,’ he remarked, ‘she didn’t pack anything suitable to wear there, unless she had a completely separate summer wardrobe beyond what’s here. Will there be luggage in the box room upstairs?’

‘I misdoubt Golenischev gave the matter a thought.’

Absorbed in his search, Ysidro did not turn. Seemingly out of nowhere, it crossed Asher’s mind that there might be a photograph of Lady Eaton in the bedroom and he went to look – later he could not imagine he could have been that stupid. As he crossed the dark chamber to the dressing table beyond the bed something in the air oppressed him: not a smell, but a sense of suffocation that made him pull his scarf from his throat despite the cold. Even so that sense of heaviness did not leave him, but grew. Not giddiness, but—

A cold hand clamped over his mouth and jerked his head back, while another ripped his collar aside; the grip that closed over his arms was like a machine in its strength. Had the vampires that closed in around him been less greedy – or less determined to teach Ysidro a lesson – he knew they could have slit his throat with their claws and left him dead on Lady Eaton’s pastel Axminster carpet in less time than it would take for Ysidro to know what had happened . . .

But they wanted to feed.

And Asher had walked into vampire nests before.

He jerked his hand hard, dropping into his palm the silver blade from its arm-sheathe, and struck backward with it into the vampire who held him from behind, even as he felt the cold touch of an icy forehead against his jaw. A woman screamed in pain. The triple and quadruple coils of silver chain around his throat under his collar were enough to burn any vampire’s lips and hands. For a blurred second he fought to keep his mind clear, and he twisted – more by instinct than by thought – against the grip on his elbows as it loosened. Someone struck him across the face with a violence that nearly broke his neck, and he slashed again with the knife, knowing the unhuman speed of his attackers—

‘Drop him!’ Ysidro’s voice was a silver whip.

Asher hit the floor, too stunned for a moment to breathe.

‘Get back.’

They stepped aside, shadows in the crooked reflection of his fallen lantern, eyes like animals shining out of the dark. Asher managed to get onto one knee and set the lantern upright – no sense in bringing the St Petersburg Fire Brigade to complicate matters. He pressed his hand to his throat, then pulled off his glove and did so again. Attack, defense, release had occupied seconds. It was only now that he began to shake.

‘And did Count Golenischev neglect to mention my visit this evening?’ asked Ysidro in his deadly-soft voice.

‘Golenischev can go fuck himself,’ retorted a young man in a rough jacket. He wore a straggly beard and the rather nautical-looking cap of a student, and he held his hand pressed in agony to a bloody stab-wound in his thigh. Ysidro had spoken in French, but the student had snapped his reply in the proletarian Russian of the factories and the streets.

There were three of them. One – a woman of the same student type, short and thickset with a mouth like an iron trap – turned towards the dark door at the far side of the room, and Ysidro said, ‘Stay.’ He neither raised his voice nor moved, but she turned back, as if he had laid one of those steel hands on her shoulder. Asher could see where the silver of his neck chains had welted her lips. Her eyes mirrored the lantern light. Asher had never seen such an expression of sour hate.

Even with his life hanging in the balance, Asher couldn’t imagine either her or the student being invited to a party at the house of the highest aristocrats in Russia.

The other girl with them might have been though. She was tall and slim and fragile-looking, with fair hair coiled on the top of her head like a dancer and a dancer’s way of holding herself. It was she who said, ‘Golenischev has no command over us,’ and there was shaky defiance rather than confidence in her voice.

Ysidro said nothing for a time, only regarded them with that cold calm. The male student almost shouted, ‘Golenischev is an aristocratic pig, a bourgeoisie fat-cat who lives from the sweat of the working man.’

Asher was tempted to inquire when had been the last time the young man had either worked or lifted a hand to assist the Revolution, but didn’t. Nor did he dare move a finger towards the sharpened silver letter-opener, which lay on the blood-daubed carpet a yard away.

‘I take it,’ said Ysidro at last, ‘that there are two masters in Petersburg?’

‘There are not.’

Asher had heard nothing in the house below, but in the dark of the doorway he saw gleaming eyes and the blur of faces untouched by sun. He knew which of the four newcomers had to be Count Golenischev, for the man had the calm arrogance of one who has ruled over the lives of peasants on his estates from infancy.
There is little the Kaiser can offer the master vampire of any city
. This man clearly considered the lives that he traded for his own survival his due – and had, just as clearly, been made vampire by his own master, as Ysidro had said, for his money and connections rather than his brains – a criterion he seemed to have used to select his own fledglings in his turn. Three more of them followed Golenischev into the room like hunting dogs.

‘Ippo,’ said the Count to the student. ‘You will beg Monsieur Ysidro’s pardon.’ He looked young – no vampire Asher had ever seen appeared more than forty – and as suave and soigné as a Frenchman in his well-cut London suit. ‘You, also, Marya, Olyusha—’

‘I spit on Monsieur Ysidro!’ proclaimed the student. ‘And I spit on you.’

For a moment Golenischev only stood looking at the fledgling, anger blazing in his pale-blue eyes, and his beautiful lips in their gold frame of Prince Albert twisted with fury. Then – with a violent motion, as if dragged by some unseen hand – the student Ippo dropped to his knees, then to all fours. Sobbing curses, he crawled forward and lay on his belly to kiss Ysidro’s boot. The three fledglings who had come in with Golenischev only watched this humiliation, but there was something deadly in their silence, volatile anger shimmering on the edge of open defiance. As silently as humanly possible, Asher edged away from the remaining two rebels. If any of the newcomers joined their rebellion – if the situation snapped suddenly out of control, as situations had a way of doing – the rebels probably wouldn’t strike either the Count or Ysidro . . . but they would certainly turn on him.

And as his back touched the wainscot of the wall behind him, he felt the panel sink slightly and shift.

The two women repeated Ippo’s performance, the dancer Olyusha weeping with anger, the student Marya screaming obscenities and thrashing her head back and forth like an unwilling dog on a chain. Ysidro watched them both without even an expression of boredom, as if nothing in the human world touched him any longer. Perhaps, thought Asher, it did not – though he wondered if the Lady Irene Eaton’s master had ever forced her through a performance like this. And whether she had written to Ysidro about it.

‘You would like to bite him, wouldn’t you, Marya?’ mocked Golenischev. ‘Ah, look at her! What a face, eh? Go bite Ippo, Marya. Go on.’ Her face demonic, the woman crawled inch by inch to the student –
had they been lovers?
Asher wondered – seized Ippo by the ears and began to tear and worry at his face and hands with her teeth.

‘Bourgeoisie scum!’ Ippo screamed at the Count. ‘Lackey of the ruling classes—’

‘Don’t give us that “ruling classes” drivel, Ippoliton Nikolaivitch.’ One of the fledglings who had followed Golenischev into the bedroom spoke up, a stooped man with a face of ground-in sourness. ‘You care no more these days about the workers than I care about the Russian Empire anymore. I think the last time I saw you at a Party meeting you killed a shop girl as she came out and went down an alley on her way home.’

‘Now hear me,’ said Count Golenischev, when the last of the three rebels had done their homage and knelt, heads to the floor, in the near darkness of the failing lantern-light. In a single move – the terrifying movement of a vampire, that blanks the mind until the cold grip falls – the Count was beside Asher, catching his arm and pulling him to his feet like a policeman manhandling a beggar child. ‘Your friend Prince Dargomyzhsky cannot protect you, and when I catch that wretched traitor I will show you just how powerless he is. If you touch this man –’ he pushed Asher a little towards them – ‘if any harm comes to him – you will find out just what that traitor’s protection is worth. I have given my word as a nobleman of the Empire that it shall be so.’ He inclined his head graciously to Ysidro, then thrust Asher in his direction with a force that – had Asher not been determined and ready for something of the kind – would have thrown him to his knees.

The Count turned back to the culprits, Asher already forgotten – a side issue in what was clearly an ongoing contest of wills. ‘Whatever the Prince has told you, you three are mine. And if you need that proved again –’ he stepped forward to chuck the furious Marya under the chin, to flick his claw-like nails over Ippo’s torn and gory face – ‘I will be most happy to oblige.’

Asher woke – suddenly and with the sensation of having fainted, though he knew this was not the case – standing outdoors in the bitter night alone.

FIVE