There was silence as they looked at each other, then, across the coffin contents of ash and heat-split buttons, brown mortal eyes looking into immortal gold.
"How old," Asher asked at last, "is the oldest vampire in Europe?"
"Three hundred and fifty-two years," Ysidro responded softly, "give or take a few."
"You?"
A slight inclination of that strange, demon head. "To the best of my knowledge."
Asher got to his feet and hunted the cupboards until he found a brass lamp, which he lit from the gas, mildly cursing the inconvenience in Ciceronian Latin and wishing that electric torches were either small enough to carry easily about his person or reliable enough to warrant the nuisance of lugging them. A brief examination showed him no locks or hasps, though five of the keys he'd picked from the ashes were of the cheap padlock type. Perhaps Davies, like Calvaire, had several different safe houses. Ysidro followed him without a word as he crossed to the cellar steps. The stink of mold and wet earth rose about them like chokedamp as they descended.
"I thought the killer might be Grippen, you know," he said, and Ysidro nodded, absolutely unsurprised by the theory. "I suspect you did, too."
"The thought crossed my mind. It was why I sought out a mortal agent. This was not sheerly because I consider him a lout and a brute: he had good reason to wish Calvaire dead. Calvaire was a challenge to his authority. It was clear that Calvaire was trying to establish his own power here in London, even when none of us knew he was purchasing property, let alone creating a fledgling who would do his bidding. And Grippen is of the height to have made the marks upon Neddy Hammer-smith's windows."
They paused at the foot of the steps, Asher lifting the lamp nearly to the low ceiling beams to illuminate the cellar around them. Its glare smudged the dusty boards of a nearly empty coalbin in light and caught the fraying edges of translucent curtains of cobweb, thick with dust.
"Would he have harmed his own fledglings? Davies didn't think he would."
"Davies did not know Grippen." Ysidro paused for a long moment, a faint line flexing briefly between his ash-colored brows. "You must understand that the bond between a master vampire and the fledgling he creates is an incredibly strong one. It is not merely that, without the teaching of the master, the fledgling cannot hope to survive in a world where the veriest touch of sunlight will ignite every cell in his body-cannot hope even to make sense of the new world dinning and crying and burning into senses that suddenly gape like an open wound."
He spoke hesitantly now, not picking over what he would and would not tell, but struggling with things that in 350 years he had not told anyone. "In the making of the new vampire, their minds lock. The dying man's or woman's clings to that of one who has already passed through the experience of physical death. In a sense," he went on, not awkwardly but very slowly, like a demon trying to explain to the living what it is like to exist surrounded by the damned, "the fledgling must give his soul to the master, to hold for him while he-crosses over. I cannot explain it more nearly than that."
"A man must love his life very desperately," Asher said, after long silence, "to do that."
"It is easier to do than you think," Simon replied, "when you are feeling your own heart falter to a stop." Then he smiled, wry in the dim glow of the lamp but with that faint echo of an old charm, like a faded portrait of someone he had once been. "A drowning man seldom pushes a plank away, no matter who holds the other end. But you understand how absolute is the dominance established."
Queer and sharp to Asher's mind, like the Image in a dream, rose the vision of a slim, fair hidalgo in the
pearl- sewn black velvets of the Spanish court, his head lying back over the white hand of the thin little man who knelt beside him. Like a fragile spider, Anthea had said...
"Is that why you've never made a fledgling?"
Ysidro did not look at him. "Si, "he whispered, lapsing for an instant into the antique Spanish of his past. His eyes flicked back to Asher's, and the wry, sweet smile returned, "That, and other reasons. Master vampires distrust their fledglings, of course, for the resentment engen-dered by that dominance, that iron intimacy, is enormous. They distrust still more those who are not their fledglings, over whom they have no control. In any event to be vampire is to have an almost fanatic desire to command absolutely one's environment and everyone about one. For we are, as you have observed, oddly fragile creatures in our way, besides being necessarily selfish and strong-willed to begin with in order to survive the transition to the vampire state at all.
"So yes," he added, segueing abruptly back to the original topic of conversation, "I believe Grippen would kill his own fledglings, did he think they might be leaguing with another vampire to dispute his mas-tery, either from fondness for his rival, like Lotta, or weakness, like Neddy, or resentment; though Danny King might accept Grippen's dominance over himself, he hated Grippen for holding it over Charles and Anthea. Many things pointed to a vampire killing his own, and the logical candidate was Grippen. But there are two of them, as you said, and Grippen, like us all, is a creature of the night."
He paused for a moment, considering Asher sidelong from cold, pale eyes. Then he continued, "I believe this is what you seek?" His cold fingers took the lamp from Asher's hand, lifting it high as he stepped a short way into the cellar.
What Asher had taken for a shadow denser than the rest he now saw was a doorway, its lintel barely five feet in height, its thick oak door hanging open to reveal a throat of blackness beyond. The light picked out the shapes of old stonework, a medieval ceiling groin and the top of a worn spiral of stone steps.
"A merchant's house once stood on this ground," the vampire said, crossing the cellar with that odd, drifting walk, Asher at his heels. "Later it was an inn-the Goat and Compasses; originally, of course, it was 'God Encompasseth Us,' a pious motto painted above the door which did not save it from being burned by Cromwell's troops." He led the way carefully down the foot-hollowed twist of steps to the cellar that lay below-small, bare, and circular, containing nothing but the ruin of mildewed sacking, rats' nests, and four bricks, set in a coffin-shaped rectangle in the middle of the floor to keep whatever had once rested upon them up off the damp.
"London is full of such places," Ysidro continued, his voice the whisper of a bleached ghost in the muffling darkness. "Places where old priories, inns, or houses were burned, their foundations later built upon by men who knew nothing of the cellars beneath."
Asher walked to the bricks, studied their layout thoughtfully, then returned to hold the lantern close to the framing of the stair's narrow arch. Without a word, he ascended again, studying the walls carefully as he went. The door at the top, examined more thoroughly, had once been padlocked from the inside. The padlock remained closed-it was the hasp that had been ripped free of the wood.
"Why not a hasp on the outside as well, for when he was gone?"
"If he was gone," Ysidro said, "what purpose would it serve beyond telling an intruder that there might be some thing of value hidden there? An empty coffin is not a thing one steals easily."
Behind him in the stair, the vampire's soft-toned words continued to echo weirdly against the old stonework. "I have no doubt that this is one of the places where Calvaire slept, utterly beyond the reach of sunlight. Davies would have known of it and come here when he needed shelter,"
"Didn't help him much." Asher scratched a corner of his mustache, fished from his pocket the padlock keys he had taken from Bully Joe's ashes, and tried them in the lock. "It just made more work for his murderers, carrying his coffin up to the kitchen to ignite the body in the sunlight." The second key sprang the lock open-Asher noted it, re-turned it to his pocket, and moved a pace or two down the steps to reexamine the ancient stone wall at the turn of the stairs. "Calvaire was his master; it's clear he used Bully Joe's knowledge of the neighborhood to purchase the ground lease on the building, so, of course, Bully Joe would have keys." He frowned-even with the magnifying lens he took from his pocket, he did not find the thing he sought. "He said Calvaire was dead-he seemed pretty sure of it."