The Latin voice whispered again, "All save we."
He wore what had probably been a monk's robe once, rotted and falling to pieces over limbs scarcely less emaciated than the bones that surrounded them on all sides. He seemed bent with age, huddled like a frozen crone desperate for warmth; in the sunken, waxen flesh, the strangely glittering vampire eyes seemed huge, green as polar ice. His fangs were long and sharp against the delicate, hairless jaw. Through the open throat of the robe, Asher could see a crucifix, black with age and filth.
Like the claw of a bird, one shaky hand pointed at Simon; the nails were long and broken. "We will hear the Trumpet far off," the vampire whispered, "but we will not be able to go, you and I. We will continue undead, unjudged, and alone, after all the others are gone-we will never know what lies upon the other side. They may speak for me-I hope they will understand why I have done this and speak for me..."
Simon looked puzzled, but Asher said, "Before the Throne of God?"
The old vampire turned those luminous green eyes on him, eager, "I have done what I can."
"What is your name?" Simon asked, falling into the heavily Spanish-accented Latin of his own early education.
"Anthony," the vampire whispered. "Brother Anthony of the Order of the Friars Minor. I stole this..." He touched his black habit-a chunk of it fell off in his hand. "Stole from the Benedictines in the Rue St. Jacques-stole and killed the man who wore it. I had to do it. It is damp here. Things rot quickly. I could not go abroad naked before the eyes of men and God. I had to kill him... You understand that I had to do it."
Then he was beside Asher, with no sense of time elapsed or of broken consciousness at all; the touch of his fingers was like the light pricking of insect feet as he removed the tiny bone from Asher's grasp. Looking down into his face, Asher could see that Brother Anthony appeared no older than Simon or any of the other vampires did; it was only his posture and the whiteness of the long hair that straggled down over his bent shoulders that gave the queer, white, ageless face its look of senil-ity.
"To save your own life?" he asked.
Brother Anthony's fingers continued to rove lightly over the back of his hand, as if feeling the armature of bone within flesh, or warming their coldness on the subcutaneous heat of blood. With his other hand he held Asher's little finger in a frail grip that Asher knew he could no more break than he could have pulled his hand from dried cement. "I had not fed-not truly fed-in months," the vampire whispered
anx- iously. "Rats-a horse-chickens. But I could feel my mind starting to go, my senses turn sluggish. I've tried-over and over I've tried. But each time I grow terrified. If I do not feed properly, drink of the deaths of men, I will grow stupid, grow slow. I cannot do that. After all these years, all these deaths, running from the Judgment,.. And each life I take in running is another to the tally that would fall upon me, did I die. So many-I used to keep count. But the hunger drove me to mad-ness. And I will never be forgiven."
"It is one of the tenets of faith," Asher said slowly, "that there is no s in, nothing, that God will not forgive, if the sinner is truly repentant."
"I can't be truly repentant," Brother Anthony whispered, "can I? I feed and go on feeding. I am stronger than all those who have sought to kill me. The hunger drives me to madness. The terror of what awaits me beyond the wall of death-I cannot face it. Maybe if I help those who will go there, if I make it easy for them to find their bones... If I help them they will speak for me. I have done what I can for them. They must. They must..." He drew Asher close to him-his breath reeked of blood, and, close-to, Asher saw that his robe was stiff with gore decades dried. He nodded toward Simon. "When he kills you," he whispered, "will you speak for me?"
"If you answer me three questions," Asher said, conscious of the framework of tales with which the ancient vampire would be familiar and trying desperately to frame mentally what he wanted to ask into three parts and good Latin. Thank God, he thought, they were speaking Church Latin, which was no more difficult than French.If this were Classical, the whole conversation would come to a standstill while I ar-ranged things in that damn inside-out order that Cicero used.
The Franciscan did not reply, but seemed only to be waiting, his thin fingers icy on Asher's hand. Simon, standing silently by, watched them both. Asher felt that he was keyed up. ready to intervene between them, though he himself sensed no danger from the little monk.
After a moment he asked, "Can you hunt by daylight?"
"I would not so offend the face of God. The night is mine; here below, all night is mine. I would never take the day above the ground to myself."
"Notwould you..." Asher began, exasperated, then realized that that might be counted as a second question and fell silent for a moment. Hundreds of questions leaped to mind and were discarded; he was aware that he had to go carefully, aware that the old vampire could vanish as silently, as easily, as he had appeared. He felt as he did when he watched Lydia feeding the sparrows in the New College quadrangle, coaxing them with infinite patience to take bread crumbs from her outstretched fingers. "Who were your contemporaries among the vam-pires?"
''Johannis Magnus," the old vampire whispered, "the Lady Eliza-beth; Jehanne Croualt, the horse tamer; Anne La Flamande, the Welsh minstrel who sang in the crypts of London; Tulloch the Scot, who was buried in the Holy Innocents. They have destroyed the Innocents. They carted the bones away. His they burned. The flesh shriveled off them in the noonday sun. That was in the days of the Terror, the days when men slew one another as we the Undead never dared to do."
"Yet there are those who swear they saw the Scot fifty years ago in Amsterdam," Ysidro murmured in English. He seemed to understand without comment why Asher had chosen that question to ask. "As for the others..."
Asher turned back to the old vampire. "Have you ever killed another vampire?"
Brother Anthony shrank back from him, covering his white face with skeletal white hands. "It is forbidden," he whispered desperately. "Thou shall not kill,' they say, and I have killed-killed over and over. I have tried to do good..."
"Have you ever killed another vampire?" Simon repeated softly, not moving, but Asher could feel the tension in him like overstretched wire.
The monk was backing away, his face still covered. Asher took a step after him, reaching out his hand to catch the rotting black sleeve. He understood then how the legends came about, that vampires can com-mand the mists and dissolve into them at will. There was, as before, not even a sense of his mind blanking, and not one of the brittle bones that hemmed them all around so much as shifted. He was simply standing, a shred of crumbling black cloth in his hand, staring at the shadowed tangle of bones and the shadowy altar beyond.
In his mind he heard a whisper, like the breath of a dream, "Speak for me. Tell God I did what I could. Speak for me, when he kills you..."
Thirteen
"Do you plan to kill me?" Asher closed the iron grille behind him, turned the heavy key, and followed Simon back into the de-serted vestibule, where Ysidro was fastidiously poking among the pa-pers of the desk. The vampire paused to regard him with dispassionate eyes, and, as so often with Ysidro, Asher found it impossible to divine whether he was contemplating the mortal state or simply wondering whether he felt peckish. In any case he did not answer.
Instead he asked, "What do you think of our Franciscan brother?"
"Other than that he's mad, you mean?" Asher removed a couple of wax tablets from his pocket, of the sort that he had habitually carried in his Foreign Office days, and methodically took impressions of all the keys on the ring. "I don't believe he's our culprit."