Ysidro replied blandly, "My friends and I." He half shut his eyes, and one by one the candles around the room began to go out.
He had spoken of a vampire's psychic powers-Asher had seen both Western mediums and Indian fakirs who could do much the same thing. Still, he picked up his lamp hastily and joined Ysidro by the door before the last of those firefly lights snuffed to extinction, leaving only darkness and the lingering fragrance of beeswax and smoke.
"Tell me about Danny King," he said, as they descended the stairs to the drawing room once again. "He was obviously a friend of Neddy's, if he fixed up his coffin for him. Was he a friend of Lotta and Calvaire's as well?"
"He was a friend to most of us," Ysidro said. "He had an unusually easygoing and amiable temperament for a vampire. He was an unedu-cated man-he had been a carriage groom, a 'tiger' they were called, to... during George IV's Regency for his father."
Asher found candles, and began lighting lamps and wall sconces in the vast drawing room as they had done upstairs. With the increased illumination, the clutter only appeared worse, mounds of music, of books, and of bundled journals scattered everywhere. Strewn among them were small bits of personal jewelry, stickpins and rings such as a man might wear, and literally scores of snuffboxes, most of them cov-ered with dust and filled with snuff dried to brown powder, whose smell stung Asher's nose.
"Where did he keep his things?" He turned back to the tambour desk in one corner, its top, like everything else in the room, a foot and a half thick in books, in this case the collected works of Bulwer-Lytton-by its appearance, well-thumbed, too. Asher shuddered. The solitary vam-pire's evenings must have hung heavy indeed.
"He did not have many."
"He couldn't have carried them round London in a carpetbag." Asher opened a drawer.
It was empty.
He brought the lamp down, ran his hand along the drawer's upper rim. There was dust on the first few inches, as if the drawer had been left ajar for years, but there was no dust in the bottom. He hunkered down to open the drawer below.
That, too, was empty. All the other drawers in the desk were.
"Had this been done when you and your friends found Hammer-smith's body?"
Ysidro drifted over to the desk, contemplated the empty drawers for a moment, then let his disinterested gaze float back over the clutter of music pieces, books, and journals that bulged from every other available receptacle in the room. He reached into a corner of a bottom drawer, drew out a fragment of what had clearly been a bill for a servants' agency, paid in full in 1837. "I don't know."
Asher remained where he was for a moment, then stood, picked up the lamp, and threaded his way between stacks of books to the fireplace. It was clear that it had once contained books, too-they were now heaped at random all around it. He knelt and ran his fingers over their covers. The dust that lay thinly over everything else was absent. The fireplace was heaped with ashes-fresh.
He glanced up at the vampire, who, though Asher had not seen him do so, had joined him by the cold hearth.
"Burned," he said quietly, looking up into that narrow, haughty face. "Not taken away and sorted through to trace other vampires or possible contacts. Burned." He got to his feet, feeling again the stir of frustrated anger in him, the annoyance with Ysidro and his invisible cronies. For a moment he had thought he'd seen puzzlement on that thin-boned face and in the pucker of the slanting brows, but if he had it was gone now. "Was this done at King's place also?"
"No."
"How do you know?"
"Because King did not keep such things," Ysidro replied smoothly. Asher started to retort, Then who kept them for him? and stopped himself. The dark eyes were fixed on his face now, watching, and he tried to keep the sudden cascade of inferences out of his expression.
More calmly he said, "It all comes back to Calvaire. It started with him, and he seems to have been a linchpin of some kind in this; I'm going to have to see his rooms,"
"No." As Asher opened his mouth to protest, Ysidro added, "That is as much for your protection as for ours, James. And in any case, he was not found in his rooms-in fact his body was not found at all."
"That doesn't mean he couldn't have been followed to them, taken away in his sleep, and killed."
Ysidro's eyes glinted angrily, but his voice remained absolutely level. "No one follows a vampire."
"Then why do you keep looking over your shoulder?" Disgusted, Asher picked up the lamp and strode through the mazes of books to-ward the door, the stairs, and the outer, saner world of the cold London night.
Six
A the British Museum Asher had his cab set him down and stood before the shut iron palings, listening to the rattle of wheels retreat away down Great Russell Street in the darkness. He knew this area of Bloomsbury the way a jack hare knew its burrows- alleys, mews, quiet squares, and pubs that had inconspicuous doors into back lanes and owners who didn't much mind who used them. It was one reason he'd chosen it.
The streets were relatively deserted, save for an occasional cab clat-tering its way to Euston or back from the theaters on Shaftesbury Ave -nue. He made his way swiftly down small turnings, across a mews behind Bedford Place and through a deep-shadowed lane between high homes whose sunken areaways formed an unbroken line of pits, like a protective moat, between pavement and rose-brick walls. He crossed Bruton Place and found the black slot of the alley that backed both it and Prince of Wales Colonnade. There in the moist and potholed dark-ness he halted, the stenches of a hundred garbage bins floating in the wet night air about him, and looked down the alley, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the dark.
The vampire was watching his window.
It took some moments for Asher to distinguish the dark angular shape against the blackness of the alley wall-had it possessed Ysidro's weird quality of stillness, he doubted he'd have ever been able to. But the vampire must have moved slightly, resolving what at first seemed to be paler patches on the bricks into an angular white face and big white hands, hands that picked uncomfortably at the ill-setting collar of a black coat. For a moment, Ysidro's words floated into Asher's mind: I am conscious of the smell of live blood.., You would do well to re-member it, if ever you find yourself in the company of other vampires than I...
To hell with it,he thought irritably, angry that they'd be following him, watching him. With Ysidro as my only source of information, I'm certainly never going to get anywhere. If I'm working for them, they jolly well can't kill me.
Yet,his mind added, as he began to walk down the alley.
The vampire swung around at his footstep. For a heart-shaking sec-ond, the creature's eyes caught the dim light, reflective as a cat's; Asher saw the gleam of the long teeth. A split instant before it would have charged to take him, he said, "Come here," in the tone that had always gotten the best results from Prussian farm hands, and it worked. The vampire checked, baffled, and then seemed to realize who he was.
He came shamblingly, without Ysidro's invisibility and without Ysidro's deadly grace, and Asher breathed again.
"And you are...?"
The vampire stopped a few feet from him, staring at him with glint-ing eyes under a narrow, craggy brow. "Bully Joe Davies is me name," he said, in an accent which Asher placed within half a mile of New Lambeth Cut. He licked his lips, showing his fangs disquietingly, a nervous gesture which, after Ysidro's poise, made him seem incredibly gauche. Truculently he added, "You cry out or make a noise and I'll suck you dry afore the cat can lick her ear."
Asher studied him for a moment with deliberate contempt. He was a man in his twenties, long-armed, raw-boned, and awkward-looking in a black suit that did not fit well-that hard little nut of a face would have looked more at home above the corduroy work pants and frieze jacket of a mill hand or docker. Black hair was slicked back under a five-shilling derby; there was blood under the uncut nails.