had to keep his hands firmly in his pockets to avoid helping her. "Because I got that lover's knot from Evelyn this morning. I've had a look at it and those vertebrae under my microscope, and they look-I'm not sure how to put it and I wish it were capable of greater magnification. The bone was pretty damaged, but the hair... I'd like to be able to examine it at a subcellular level-and their flesh and blood, for that matter."
Of course, Asher thought. He himself saw the vampires linguistically and historically, when he wasn't simply trying to think of ways to avoid having his throat cut by them; Lydia would see vampirism as a medical puzzle.
"Do you know how petrified wood comes about?" she asked, as they neared Marble Arch with its scattered trees and loafers and turned back the way they came, two solitary and anonymous figures in the wide, cleared spaces of the Park's brown lawns. "Or how fish and ferns and dinosaur bones are fossilized in the Cambrian sandstones? It's a process of replacement, cell by cell, of the organic by the inorganic. There's been a lot of research done lately on viruses, germs that are smaller than bacteria, so small we can't see them with a microscope-yet. Small enough to operate at a subcellular level. I've been reading Horace Blaydon's articles on viruses in the blood; he did a lot of work on it while I was studying with him. I'm wondering whether a vampire's immortality comes from some kind of cellular replacement or mutation -whether vampirism is in fact a virus or an interlocking syndrome of viruses that alter the very fabric of the cells. That would account for the extreme photosensitivity, the severe allergic reactions to things like sil-ver and garlic and certain woods-why you'd have to fill the mouth with garlic to deaden the brain and stake the heart with one of those allergic woods to paralyze the cardiovascular system-why you'd have to separate the central nervous system..."
"And transmitted by blood contact." Again he wondered tangentially why, in the face of such an overwhelming body of corresponding evi-dence, there was such paucity of belief. "All the legends speak of vam-pires' victims becoming vampires. The vampires themselves speak of 'getting' fledglings, but that's apparently a matter of choice. Ernchester said that Grippen would not have stood for anyone but himself making a new vampire, but Calvaire evidently had no trouble initiating Bully Joe Davies."
"Initiating, but not training," Lydia said thoughtfully. "Or- wasit just a lack of training that made him clumsy enough for you to spot him? Do the psychic abilities that seem to be part of this viral syndrome only develop with time? How old were the vampires who were mur-dered?"
"Another interesting point," Asher said. "Lotta had been a vampire since the mid-1700s; Hammersmith and King were younger, almost exactly one hundred years. Ysidro saw all of them made. I don't know about Calvaire. One of the many things," he added dryly, "that we don't know about Calvaire."
"Valentin Calvaire," Ysidro murmured, settling back against the worn leather squabs of the hansom cab and tenting his long fingers like a stack of ivory spindles, reminding Asher somehow of a marmalade tomcat so old that its fur has gone nearly white. "Curious, how many trails seem to lead back to Valentin Calvaire."
"He was the first victim-presumably," Asher said. "At least the first victim killed in London; the only victim notfrom London; the only victim whose body we have never found. What do you know about him?"
"Less than I should like," the vampire replied, his voice soft beneath the rattling clamor of the theater-going crowds in Drury Lane all about them. "He was, as I said, one of the Paris vampires-he
came here to London eight months ago."
"Why?"
"That was a topic which he never permitted to arise."
The vampire's tone was absolutely neutral, but Asher's mustache twitched as he detected the distaste in that chilly statement. Ysidro, he surmised with a hidden grin, had probably had very little use for M. Calvaire, ***
"I take it he was not of the nobility."
"What passes for nobility in France these days," Ysidro stated, with soft viciousness, "would not have been permitted to clear away the tables of those whose birth and style of breeding they so pitifully at-tempt to emulate. Anything resembling decent blood in that country was flushed down the gutters of the Place Louis-Quinze-excuse me, the Place de la Concorde-a hundred and seventeen years ago. What is left is the seed of those who fled or those who made themselves useful to thatcondotfiere Napoleon. Scarcely what one would call honorable antecedents."
After a moment's silence, he went on, "Yes, Calvaire claimed noble birth. It was precisely the sort of thing he would do."
"How long had he been a vampire?"
Ysidro's dark eyes narrowed with thought. "My guess would be less than forty years,"
Asher raised his eyebrows in surprise. He had, he realized, subcon-sciously equated age with power among the vampires-it was to the two oldest vampires, Ysidro and Grippen, that the others bowed in fear. The younger ones-Bully Joe Davies and the Opera dancer Chloe-seemed weak, almost pathetic.
"Consider it," Ysidro urged levelly. "Paris has been in a state of intermittent chaos since the fall of the Bourbon kings. Thirty-five years ago it underwent siege by the Prussians, shelling, riots, and government -if such it can be termed-by a rabble of rioters who formed a Com-mune and gave short shrift to anyone whom they suspected of treason-for which read, disagreement with their ideals. Vampires as a group rely largely upon a tranquil society to protect them. Wolves do not hunt in a burning forest."
Just as well, Asher thought dourly. During the riots in the Shantung Province, he'd had enough to worry about without a red-eyed kuei creeping up on him in the burned ruins of the Lutheran mission where he'd been hiding. After a moment, he asked, "And how did Grippen react to Calvaire's coming here?"
Ysidro was silent for a time, while the cab jolted its way through the increasing crowds of traffic toward the Waterloo Bridge. Rain made a faint, brittle whispering sound on the hardened leather roof of the cab. It had begun again late in the afternoon, while Asher was in the Public Records Office in quest of property bought in the last eight months in Lambeth by either Valentin Calvaire, Chretien Sanglot, or, just possibly, Joseph Davies. Now the whole city smelled of moisture, ozone, the exhaust of motorcars, the dung of horses, and the salt-and-sewage pungency of the river.
"Not well," he said at length. "You understand, we-vampires-find travel unnerving in the extreme. We are conservatives at heart; hence the myth that a vampire must rest within his native soil. Rather, he must always have a secure resting place, and such things are difficult to come by on the road. Calvaire had naturally heard of both Grippen and myself. When he arrived he-promenaded himself, I suppose you
would say-and did not drink of human blood until he had been con-tacted by the master vampire of the city."
"Grippen," Asher said. "Not yourself."
For the first time, he saw the flash of irritation, of anger, in the Spaniard's yellow eyes. But Ysidro only said mildly, "Even so."
"Why?" he pressed,
Ysidro merely turned his head a little, haughtily contemplating the throngs on the crowded flagways from beneath the lowered lids of his eyes.
"I've heard of Grippen's cadre, Grippen's get," Asher persisted. "Lord Ernchester, Anthea, Lotta, Chloe, Ned Hammersmith... Even though Danny King was the Farrens' servant, even though it was to them that he owed loyalty, it was Grippen who made him, 'at Charles' request andhis own.' According to Anthea Farren, you were both made by the same master vampire at about the same time. Why is he the Master of London, and not yourself?"
The memory of Anthea's face returned to him, framed in the dark hair with its red streaks like henna. She had warned him, had pulled him out of Grippen's hold; she had held the enraged vampire back from killing him while he escaped. Yet she and her husband were also Grippen's get-as Bully Joe Davies had said, Grippen's slaves. Why slaves?