Dialects and accents were Asher’s hobby and delight – his business, these days, as a Lecturer in Philology. His trained ear identified the schoolroom French of the British and Russians, the slurry Parisian of the French ambassador and his wife. Over in a corner he heard German: a harsh Berliner accent, and a countrified Saxon. Yes, there was Colonel von Mehren, whom he recognized from his earlier visit. Is he still the Kaiser’s Military Commissioner? And with him old Eichorn, Chief Translator at the German Legation, who didn’t seem to have aged a day. Von Mehren wouldn’t associate Asher’s current unobtrusive brown mustache and unassuming bearing with his previous incarnation as the shaggy, grumpy Professor Gellar from Heidelberg. No danger there. But Asher had always suspected that Eichorn – one of the long-time ‘China hands’ immersed in the language and culture – was running an information network for the Abteilung.
Keep clear of him . . .
Still no sign of Sir Grant Hobart in the crowded parlor. At six feet two, Asher’s old Oxford acquaintance was difficult to miss. Asher followed Ysidro behind the velvet curtains into the embrasure of the parlor’s bow window, the cold blackness of a bare garden on the other side of the glass. Naked trees fidgeted in the wind that swept from the Gobi desert, dry as the fawn-colored dust which was a part of living in Peking. Like the house, the garden was a brave pretense that living in China wasn’t really so terribly different from being in England: the ‘stiff upper lip’ at its most defiant.
‘I think you will find the Kuo Min-tang deep in error when they seek to give the men of China a vote, Sir Allyn,’ proclaimed a voice just beyond the concealing drapes. Asher raised his brows as he recognized the speaker as the ‘provisional’ President of the new-formed Republic itself: the head of the largest faction of its Army. Yuan Shi-k’ai, stout and gorgeously attired in a Western uniform thick with bullion, watched the faces of the diplomats around him with cold black eyes. ‘The people of China need a strong hand on the rein, as a spirited horse is only happy when it feels its rider dominate it. Without a strong man in power, only disaster can follow.’
Sir Allyn Eddington made the non-committal agreement expected of a host. A few feet off in the crowd Asher heard Sir Grant’s name and craned to look: a slim woman in a very girlish white dress had caught Lady Myra Eddington by the arm – Asher could see the resemblance in their faces. She had asked, ‘What does Sir Grant say?’
Lady Eddington replied soothingly, ‘He promised Ricky would be here, Holly darling. That’s all he can reasonably do.’
‘It’s an insult!’ Holly Eddington’s sharp cheekbones reddened. ‘It’s our own engagement party—’
‘Dearest,’ her mother said with a sigh, and she laid a kid-gloved hand on the young woman’s shoulder. ‘You know what Richard is. I’ll tell Cheng to let us know when he arrives, but beyond that, pestering Sir Grant about his son isn’t going to get us anywhere.’
She nodded toward the far corner of the room as she spoke, and at the same moment Asher heard Sir Grant Hobart’s unmistakable voice bray, ‘Poppycock!’
The crowd shifted, and Asher saw his quarry in conversation with two German officers whom Asher didn’t recognize and a Japanese Colonel whom he did: a stout, diminutive, and heavily bespectacled little nobleman named Mizukami, who fourteen years ago had been the Meiji Emperor’s military attaché to the German Army in Shantung.
Not the time to go over and ask a favor. Even had Asher not just encountered the one person – living or dead – who could tell him what he needed to know about the shocking thing that had brought him thirteen thousand sea miles to this farthest corner of Britain’s influence, the newly-born Republic of China.
In the shadows of those wine-hued curtains, the vampire’s eyes caught the glare of the parlor’s electric lights, reflective as a cat’s. Asher slid his hand into his breast pocket, found the article he had clipped from last August’s Journal of Oriental Medicine. He had reread it a hundred times on the six-week voyage on the Royal Charlotte and still hoped it wasn’t true.
‘Last year in Prague you spoke to me of the nest of creatures there, undead things that weren’t vampires,’ he said. ‘The Others, you called them then.’
Ysidro’s assent was a motion of his eyelids that if he’d been a living man would have been a nod. There was nothing dead, or static, about the vampire’s stillness: it was as if after three hundred and fifty years he had become infinitely wearied of intercourse with the living world.
‘Did you ever see them?’
‘Once. Like the vampire, they can make themselves extremely difficult to see.’ The vampire’s gentle whisper still held the faintest traces of the sixteenth-century Castilian that had been his native tongue. It was typical of Ysidro, Asher reflected, that the girl at the piano – now rendering a very beautiful version of Schubert’s ‘Serenade’ – hadn’t noticed either the vampire’s fangs when he spoke, or the fact that his nails were long, shiny, thick and sharp as claws. Such was the nature of the vampire’s psychic power.
She probably also didn’t notice that he wasn’t breathing.
‘Difficult even for vampires?’
Another flicker of assent. ‘Nor can our minds affect their perceptions, as they do those of the living. This may be partly because the Others haunt the islands of the river in Prague, hiding beneath its bridges to take advantage of our – incapacity –’ he seemed to sidestep an admission of weakness with aloof distaste – ‘with regard to running water.’
‘Which they don’t share?’
‘No. I did not, you understand, venture close to them.’ Ysidro drew on his gloves, gray French kid, and smoothed the silk-fine leather over his long fingers. ‘They devour vampires as they devour the living and, indeed, anything else they can catch.’
‘You said then that they were to be found only in Prague.’
‘So the Master of Prague told me. So too did I hear from the Masters of Berlin and Warsaw. Those of Augsburg, and Moscow, and of other cities, had never even heard of such creatures.’
‘Yet now they’ve turned up here.’
A small line, like the trace of a fine-pointed pen, appeared for a moment near one corner of Ysidro’s lips, then vanished.
‘What else did the Master of Prague tell you?’
‘Only what I then told you. That they first appeared in the days of the great plague, five centuries and a half ago. That they conceal themselves in the crypts and tunnels that honeycomb the ancient part of the town. They seem to reproduce themselves as vampire reproduce, through contamination of blood, though apparently without the phenomenon of death through which the vampire pass. The Others are not physically undead: merely very, very difficult to kill.’
‘Do they age and die?’
‘This the Master of Prague did not know.’ The vampire turned his head sharply, as if at some sound beyond the windows, though the only thing Asher could hear above the chatter of the crowd in the room was the keening of the wind.
He’s nervous, Asher thought, interested.
No. He’s afraid.
‘So far as Master of Prague can tell –’ Ysidro recovered smoothly – ‘the Others have a sort of consciousness, yet do not seem to retain that individuality which makes me Simon and you James. They move like herding beasts or fish in a school. Like the vampire, they seem to be destroyed by the rays of the sun, though the process takes much longer, and they seem to have the same adverse reaction to such substances as silver and whitethorn and garlic. Like the vampire, while they retain the physical organs of generation these appear to be otiose. Did not this old Jew, this professor of yours with whom you traveled to China, know these things?’