Silent as a lean brown cat in the shadows as he moved after the retreating pair, Asher remembered why he'd left the Department. Once you accepted the necessity of what you did-whatever my country requires-you might hate yourself, but you followed.
The house was one of those anonymous stucco-fronted Parisian dwellings in a narrow lane whose character hadn't changed since the days of the Sun King. Doors and windows were shuttered fast. As Karolyi unlocked the door of a downstairs shop, Asher ghosted through an alley a few houses farther up, counted chimneys, watched roof lines, and slipped into a clotted, weed-grown yard. Light shone behind shutters on the second floor, casting enough of a glow to let him see the broken- down shed that had once housed a kitchen amid a foul litter of rain barrels, old planks, broken boxes. All around him other shuttered windows made glowing chinks and slits of brass. The muck underfoot dragged his boots, the air nearly as thick, smothering with the stench of privies and of something newly dead.
He left his valise beside a rain barrel, scrambled with infinite care to the shed's roof. Through a broken louver he watched Karolyi tie the woman to a rickety chair. She was laughing, her head lolling back. "You like it like this, eh, copain? You want me to fight you a little?"
"Igen." Karolyi had pulled off his gloves for the task, tossed his hat on the stained and sagging mattress of the bed. His face was as calmly pleasant as the face of a statue, his shoulders relaxed, as if he shed everything from him with the knowledge that whatever he did in the name of his country was acceptable and forgiven. There was genuine banter in his voice. "You fight, my little bird. See if it helps."
Beyond them Asher could see an enormous trunk that occupied all of one side of the room: leather, strapped and cornered with brass. It stood open, and the dim light of the oil lamp glinted on the metalwork, filled it with shadow, but Asher could see that there was a second, only slightly smaller trunk inside. The inner trunk could still easily have held a man.
A noise in the yard nearly stopped his heart; a hissing and a scuffle; rats fighting, he realized, leaning against the freezing brick wall. He remembered the smell of some dead thing near the shed.
When he looked back, Ernchester was in the room.
"You're late." By his voice Karolyi could have been speaking of a rendezvous for tea. "The train leaves the Gare de l'Est at seven-thirty. We've barely time to dispose of this little eclair before the carters arrive."
He stepped to the giggling woman, took the soiled lace of her collar and ripped her dress open to the waist. She wore a corset underneath but no chemise; breasts like loaves of fallen dough balanced precariously on top of the ridge of whalebone and canvas, nipples like big copper pennies. A cheap gilt chain glinted around her neck. She winked up at Ernchester, and with a flip of one knee tossed her skirts up over her lap. She wasn't wearing drawers, either. "You got time before your train, cheri!' She leaned her head back and made kisses at him with her painted mouth, then dissolved into giggles.
Ernchester looked down at her with no expression whatever. He seemed smaller than Asher remembered him, thin and nondescript in his old-fashioned clothing. Though no vampire Asher had ever met appeared physically older than the mid- thirties, Ernchester seemed somehow to have aged, even in the past year. It was nothing in his stance or his face; there was no gray in the close-cropped fair hair. But looking at him, Asher felt that he was seeing an empty glass, dry and coated with bitter dust.
"I've dined." He turned away.
"Oh, come on, p'tit," laughed the woman. "Ain't you got no taste for dessert?" Karolyi muttered disgustedly, "Sacree couilles"-not at the woman, but at the delay and the needless risks-and pulled a thin silk scarf from his coat pocket.
With deadly delicacy he crossed it into a loop and dropped it around the woman's neck. She gasped, squeaked as her breath was cut off. Her body heaved and flopped, stockinged legs threshing; she kicked off one of her shoes in the death struggle, and it struck the wall with a smack.
Asher turned his face away, pressed his cheek to the cold brick, sickened and knowing that he was a dead man if he tried to do a single thing to stop what was going on. He was aware that from the moment Karolyi had picked her up, he- Asher-had known that she was going to die.
He was aware, too, that the noises in the room-the scraping and bumping of the chair, the obscene sounds the woman made as life blubbed and spurted and popped from her body-would cover the sounds of his departure, so that he could reach the Gare de l'Est before they did and see what train was leaving at seven- thirty.
He had been in the Department too long, he thought, slipping silently down the rain gutter. He knew there was nothing he could do to save that woman. The attempt would cost him his life, and cost England, perhaps, untold lives if the Kaiser got the war he wanted...
Coward, he cursed himself. Coward, coward... They had always said that the most important thing was to get home with the information, whatever the cost to yourself or others. Honor was another luxury the Department couldn't afford. The clock struck seven, a reminder that time was short. Asher struck a pile of planking by the kitchen wall. Rats streamed in all directions in a hideous scurry of flying shadow, and there was the renewed stink of death.
He picked up his valise, but something made him turn and go back. Where the planks had fallen aside he could see a man's hand, palm upturned in a thin slat of light from the window far above.
I've dined, Ernchester had said.
Asher bent and moved the plank aside.
The face of the man pushed under the boards had already been gnawed; in any case, in the dense shadows it would have been impossible to tell who he was. But there was a silver chain around the plump wrist.
Three
"I have long deplored the manners of what fondly believes itself to be society these days." Lydia gasped as if she had been wakened by a freezing drench of water. The pale man took the sprayer weapon from her grasp with one hand and with the other pulled her to her feet, the strength of his fingers on her elbow such that she felt instinctively he could, had he so wished, have snapped the bone within the flesh. Past his shoulder she saw that the grille stood open, though she had been aware of no movement on the part of the dead man within the niche.
For some moments, she realized, in a rush of frightened shock, she had been aware of nothing at all.
He stood beside her now, thin and cold and utterly correct in his long white robe. His eyes, level with hers-for he was not a tall man-were a light, clear yellow, flecked with the brown-gray that wood turns when desiccated with age. He shoved her against the stone of the wall, and when he spoke, she could see the gleam of his fangs in the strangely reversed lamp glow.
"Not that proper manners, or genuine society, have existed in this country since the departure of the last of her true kings for France and the advent of that rabble of sausage-devouring German heretics and their hangers-on." There was no anger in his voice, nor wore his face any expression whatsoever, but his grip on her arm kept her pinned where she was. His hands were like marble-a dead man's hands.
He went on, "It has always been considered that a woman who sought a man out in his chamber while he slept did so at her peril."
James was in danger. Later on Lydia realized that only that fact gave her courage to speak. Her single encounter with Ysidro had been part and parcel of a greater jeopardy, and in that instance, she had known where she stood. This was different.