Asher set down the newspaper beside his midday breakfast of crois-sant and coffee, feeling cold to his bones. Nine!
What had Simon said? After a long fast, the time always comes when the craving sets in and will not be denied-
Nine.
He felt sick.
It wasn't the London vampires. That much he knew. They had to live in London-Grippen, the Farrens, Chloe. But a strange vampire, hiding from them in London, might indeed be traceable through his kills, by those who knew what to look for. He had lain hidden as long as he could, fasting and silently murdering.
He glanced at the date. It was this morning's paper. Last night, when he and Simon had been stalking Anthony in the darkness of the cata-combs, the murderer had struck again. This time it was not vampires who were his victims, but humans.
Admittedly, he thought, glancing down the article, not particularly important humans-the women were all listed as "variety actresses," seamstresses, or simply, "young women." Given the area in which they were found and given the hour they were killed, there was no real doubt as to their true professions. But it made their murders no less atrocious; and it made the lives of everyone else in London no more secure.
They had not cried out. Horribly, the thin, dreamy face of the woman on the train returned to him, the way her hand had fumbled willingly at her collar buttons, the glazed somnambulance of her eyes. He remem-bered Lydia's red hair, gleaming in the dim radiance of the gas lamps, and his palms grew cold.
No! he told himself firmly. She knows the danger-she's sensible enough to stay indoors, close to
people, at night...
That knowledge did not help.
He raised his head, staring sightlessly at the traffic jostling past the cafe where he sat. The thin mist of early dawn had burned away into a crisp, brittle sunlight, like crystal on the sepia buildings across the street and the India-ink traceries of the bare trees. The boulevardiers were out for a stroll, reveling in the last fine weather of autumn-leisured gentlemen in well-tailored blazers, men of letters, self-proclaimed wits andartistes. Open-topped carriages rolled past on their way to the Bois de Boulogne, affording glimpses of the elegant matrons of the Pa ri sgratin or of expensively dressed sin-the "eight-spring luxury models" of the demimonde.
Asher saw none of it. He wondered where Simon might be found. Elysee de Montadour's hotel was, he was virtually certain, somewhere in the Marais; he supposed that given a day in which to search through the building records, he could locate the place. But there was no guar-antee that Ysidro was sleeping there-somehow he doubted that slim, enigmatic hidalgo would put himself anywhere near the power of Elysee and her cicisbeos-and his visit to Ernchester House had taught him the folly of entering vampire nests alone. And in any case, what he wanted now most to know was something which could only be ascer-tained while the sun was in the sky.
He felt absently in his pocket for the wax tablets and wondered what time the guards at the catacombs had their dinner.
One of the advantages of working for the Foreign Office, Asher had found, had been a nodding acquaintance with the fringes of the under-world in a dozen cities across Europe. His Oxford colleagues would have been considerably startled had they realized how easily their unas-suming Lecturer in Philology could have obtained any number of strange services, from burglary to murder to "nameless vices"-most of which had perfectly good names, in Latin, at least. In spite of the fact that England and France were the closest of allies, he had in the past had cause to need keys cut in a hurry in Paris with no questions asked and, on this occasion, he knew precisely where to go.
As it was neither the first nor the third Saturday of the month, he had little fear of meeting parties of tourists at the catacombs or the large numbers of guards that the Office of Directory and Treasury considered necessary to herd them through. The catacombs would be staffed by one or at most two old pensioners of the State, and, though the dinner hour was long over by the time Asher reached Montrouge, with the aid of luck and human nature, they might be together gossiping instead of keeping watch at both entrances.
And why should they watch? The doors were locked, and who in their right mind would wish to break into the Empire of the Dead?
Luck and human nature seemed to be in full operation that afternoon when Asher reached the inconspicuous back door of the catacombs through which they had entered last night. It was locked. Although a sign instructed him to apply for information in the Place Denfert-Ro-chereau several streets away, still he thumped for several seconds on the door.
Only silence greeted him, which was as he had hoped. The keys Jacques la Puce had made for him that afternoon worked perfectly- even on this quiet street, picking the lock would have been noticed by someone. He slipped inside, appropriated another tin lantern, and made his way down the stair, locking the grille again behind him. It was just past three in the afternoon; these days darkness was complete by about six. If nothing else, he thought, he might ascertain whether vampires past a certain age were free of
the leaden trance of the daylight hours. Beyond that...
He didn't know. As a mortal it was laughable to think he could locate Brother Anthony in the haunted maze. But it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that his presence there, alone and unprotected, might pique the ancient friar's curiosity and draw him out of hiding, as it had done last night.
After a long inner debate he had left his silver chains back at his hotel, since in all probability they would afford him no protection should Brother Anthony turn against him, and might very well be con-strued as a gesture of bad faith. In last night's case it had been merely manners-like carrying a gun to a wedding reception, Ysidro had said; Asher hadn't mentioned that he'd done that upon occasion. But he was uncertain how much Brother Anthony would sense, and it was vital that he speak to the old man this afternoon.
Six hundred years, he thought, as the first of Ysidro's chalked arrows came into the wavery circle of the lantern's light. The last of the Capets had been on the throne when Anthony had first refused to die-when he had made the decision to accept immortality upon any terms. Asher wondered whether the monk had been hiding all that time, or whether he had been driven gradually to it and to madness, living among the corpses in the crypts of the Holy Innocents.
His breath puffed in faint smoke in the glow of the lamp; it was cold in the endless galleries. The only sounds were the soft scrunching of wet pebbles underfoot and the occasional creak of the lantern's handle. It had been unnerving to come here last night, with Ysidro as protection, even though at that time they had expected to encounter no one. It was terrifying now, absolutely alone with the darkness under the earth wait-ing just beyond the glow of the lamp. Oddly enough, Asher's fears turned less upon the vampire he sought and more upon the occasional, illogical fits of dread that the roof should cave in and bury him alive in the darkness.