A man's hacking, tubercular cough snapped him out of sleep with cold sweat on his face. Whirling, clawing at his pocket for the revolver he recalled a split-second later Ysidro had taken, he saw it was just a stableman, ambling back from a privy at the end of the mews. A dog barked. Lights were on in one or two of the coachmen's rooms above the stables. The smell of dawn was in the air.
Heart pounding, breath coming fast with interrupted sleep, Asher fumbled for his watch.
By the reflected radiance of those few lanterns now burning in coach house and cottage windows, he saw it was nearly five. Beside him on the hay, Simon's black cloak still lay like a sleeping animal. Small and cold, something tightened down inside of him. It was, of course, possible that the vampire had simply abandoned Asher and the cloak and gone to ground somewhere when he sensed the far-off approach of the day.
Asher did not for a moment believe this. Dread sank through him like a swallow of poison. Dawn was getting close.
Over the years, Asher had picked up a fine selection of curses in twelve living and four dead languages, including Basque and Finno-Ugric. He repeated them all as he slid the ulster from his shoulders, left it draped like a corpse over the hay, and slipped through the close, dark warmth of the stable and into Blaydon's back garden.
Exhaustion was fighting the screaming of every nerve in his body as he stood for a moment knee-deep in sodden weeds, looking up at that silent house. He wondered if it was imagination, or if there was the faintest glow of light in the dark sky and if the few outbuildings, the glass-paned extension that comprised
the kitchen, and the dripping, naked tree seemed clearer than they had? He was straining with spent nerves and clouded senses to catch sight of the invisible, to pick up footfalls which even to vampires were inaudible, to be aware of what-ever it was he sensed, drifting like the passage of a diffuse shadow through the darkness of the mews behind him.
How much daylight could a vampire of Simon's age stand? How long before his flesh would ignite like a torch?
The silver knife in his left hand, he slipped toward the looming black wall of the house.
There was a street lamp nearby, and enough light filtered down for him to make out that the kitchen was deserted, as was the breakfast room whose window looked out onto the garden. The cellar had two windows, just at ground level; they were closed, but not barred or even latched. The hackles prickled on his neck at the mere thought of going into that house.
He stepped back into the yard, looking up at the first-floor windows above. Even from here, he thought that the one over the kitchen was barred.
He was shivering all over now, the predawn darkness seeming to press on him with whispering threat. Like Hyacinthe, he thought, who could summon him to open his barred retreat to her, though the sane part of his mind knew she would kill him when he did. But there was no time, now, to do anything else.
Empty crates, dark with dampness and bearing the stenciled names of various purveyors of scientific equipment, had been stacked near the kitchen door. Cursing in the remoter Slav tongues, Asher hooked his good hand around a drain pipe and used the crates to help himself up to the windows above.
The nearer window, open a slit at top and bottom, showed him the dark shapes of a workbench and the glint of glass; from it drifted a fetid reek which repulsed him, a whiff of chemicals underlain by the stink of organic rot. Beneath the barred window was only an ornamental ledge, and he exercised a number of plain Anglo-Saxon monosyllables as he disengaged his broken hand from its sling and hooked the tips of his swollen fingers over the grimy brickwork to edge himself along. At least, he thought wryly, this was one place where heknew the ancient vampire, the Plague vampire-if Plague it was-couldn't sneak up on him from behind. It was small comfort.
The room behind the bars was very small, an extension, like the kitchen below it, added onto the house after its original construction, and bare save for a single coffin in its center. The glow from the mews nearby dimly showed the coffin itself closed. Asher couldn't be sure in the dark-moreover there was a pane of glass between his face and the bars-but he thought the bars themselves had a silvery gleam in the faint twilight of coming dawn.
In twenty minutes it was going to be too late to do anything.
Worn out, Asher leaned his forehead against the wet glass. More than he had ever done, even in the darkness of the Paris alley with Grippen's teeth in his throat, he wished he was back in Oxford, in bed with Lydia, with nothing more to look forward to than buttered eggs for breakfast and another day of dealing with undergraduate inanities. Whether Hor-ace Blaydon was in the house or not-and he might have been in the cellar, waiting-there was no telling where the vampire was.
But even as the thought went through Asher's mind, he was easing himself back along the slimy ledge to the laboratory window. He, at least, could combat the thing with silver, something Ysidro was ironi-cally helpless to do. But that, of course, was the reason the vampire had employed him in the first place.
His heart beat quicker at the thought of Lydia. The hostages thatmortals give to fortune, Ysidro had said of the red-haired girl then lying deathlike in their unnaturally silent house.
The laboratory window yielded silently to his gentle touch. Did the ancient vampire report home for the day? Was that, in fact, its coffin, protected from the other vampires by the silver bars on the window, as Asher had been protected in Paris by the silver lock on the door? But in that case, why avoid the daylight?
It crossed his mind, as he eased himself through the window into the dark laboratory, to wonder how much Dennis knew about what was going on, and if he could somehow turn that young man's raging energy and love for Lydia to good account. It was unlikely that Blaydon's partner was holding him hostage somewhere-physically to hold some-one prisoner required a great deal of time, care, and energy, as Ysidro undoubtedly knew. Asher could probably find Dennis at his rooms at the Guards' Club... The thought lasted rather less time than a rip-ple on a very small pond. Though he doubted Blaydon had informed his son of what was going on, it was only because the pathologist was shrewd enough to realize that Dennis' stupid impulsiveness would make him a useless ally for either side.
The smell in the laboratory was foul, with an under-reek of rotting blood. Gritting his teeth, Asher lifted his right hand back into its damp and filth-splotched sling with his left. He felt his way around the wall, where the floor would be less likely to creak, his fingers gliding over the surfaces of tables, chairs, and cabinets. The door at the far side of the room opened without a sound.
So far, so good. If the vampire was here, watching him in visibly from the darkness, this was all useless, of course; the pounding of his heart alone sounded loud enough for even mortal ears to hear. But he did not know whether the creature was here, and on his silence his life and Ysidro's might depend.
How much time? he wondered. How much light?
The door of that small room over the kitchen was reinforced with steel and massively bolted from the outside. The bolt made the faintest of whispered clicks as he eased it over. Beyond, in the wan glow of the street lamp somewhere outside, the room lay bare and empty, except for the closed coffin.
Arizona Landscape with Apaches, he thought, remembering the old Indian-fighter's sketch. He took a deep breath and strode swiftly, si-lently, across to the coffin's side.
The sky beyond the barred window was distinctly lighter than it had been. They'd have to run for cover, he thought-after three hundred and fifty years, Ysidro would doubtless know every bolthole in Lon-don