The Kindred of Darkness (21 page)

Another long silence, her attention seemingly absorbed in turning her cup in its saucer. Afternoon sunlight lengthened across the gold-rimmed café china, and at the next table a woman said, ‘To be honest, I didn't know who he was. At Jenny's house-parties, how
would
you know …?'

‘Is this the sort of thing you did when you were spying?' Lydia asked at last. ‘Put together lists of people you could use … people who may not have had any idea of who you really were or what you really wanted?'

‘This is precisely what we did.' He laid his hands over hers, met her eyes, as if steadying her across slippery ground. In her face he saw the revulsion that he himself had felt, at the deceits which comprised professional spying.
Seeing which men go about with chains on 'em already
, Grippen had said.
I just pick up the trailin' end
.

Ambush a man in an alley? Righty-o, guv
!

Haul an unconscious girl and a baby away from a house in the middle of the night? Sure thing!

Meet a lady in a green dress an' tell her about some stranger's finances? Not my funeral
.

For a moment Asher remembered the velvety green of the African veldt, and the people who'd trusted him, back during the war: people who'd assumed he was a German professor of linguistics, in Africa to study the kaffir dialects. People who'd shared their fears about their husbands and brothers, riding with the commandos … to a man who'd promptly reported to Lord Kitchener the location of those husbands and brothers. And who had then exclaimed and sympathized and comforted those farm women, when they'd wept for men killed or men transported away to hard labor in Ceylon …

All in a day's work, mate
.

‘You can't always choose your weapons in a war,' he said quietly. ‘Particularly not in a war that's fought in darkness and silence. Most of the time you have to pick people who won't ask questions, people who don't look farther than what they get out of it – whether what they get is money or protection or vengeance or the pride they feel in doing “what's right”, God help us. I did get Grippen to say he'd provide proof that Miranda and Nan are well. I don't doubt they are, but I want to see how long it takes for the proof to arrive. In the meantime, I …'

‘Don't.' Lydia laid her fingers to his lips. ‘I dreamed about him – about Zahorec – last night again. It was frightful tosh,' she added quickly. ‘But it's probably better that you tell me as little about your movements as you can.'

Exhausted as Asher was, he took a cab from the Metropole to Keppel Street, to have a look at the addresses Lydia had given him. The house Damien Zahorec owned there – however acquired – was, like most in the neighborhood, tall, brick, and fairly new by London standards, though like everything else in the city it was dark already with soot. An alleyway from Leader Street brought him around to the rear of the row, and showed him that as he had suspected, that house and the one in Marlborough Road backed on to a common yard, barely larger than the kitchen of his house in Oxford but shielded from view by a tall fence and a ramshackle shed.

Fence and shed – to judge by the cleanliness of the wood – had been erected since January.

And as far as he could judge, both houses lay near the course of the river Westbourne, whose bricked-in channel flowed deep beneath Dallaby House as well.

By this time he was dizzy, but knew that he had to finish his investigation in the same period of daylight. If Zahorec heard his footsteps outside one dwelling, he might just recognize them the following day outside another, and wonder if someone were showing interest in both.

The sensible thing to do would be to go immediately out to Woolwich and have a look at the house called Thamesmire, then return to the hotel and sleep.

Instead he hailed a cab. The instruction ‘Dean Street' got him a disgusted look at the quarter-mile fare and a
sotto voce
stream of Cockney imprecations as the driver climbed back on to his high seat. The neighborhood of the Inns of Court was primarily given over to solicitors' offices, but among those Georgian facades was one that bore the signboard:
Artemus Sophister, Books
. A small rack of battered volumes – Russian editions of Tacitus from the previous century with missing pages, von Junzt's
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
, and the autobiography of Aaron Burr – just outside the door seemed to offer proof of this assertion to doubters. Within, the shop was a maze of stacked boxes, piles of volumes, and bookshelves standing in front of other bookshelves with barely space for the proprietor to slither between.

Artemus Sophister himself hadn't changed much since Asher had gone to his lectures at Oxford, tiny and grubby with his unkempt hair trailing down his back and his pale blue eyes blinking from behind massive spectacles, smoking what was probably his fortieth cigarette of the day – every book Asher had ever purchased from him had reeked of tobacco – while he perused a crumbling volume in Arabic. He looked up when Asher entered and his eyes widened with pleasure. ‘Asher! Good to see you, man … It's been, oh, what, five years?'

‘All of that.' Asher clasped the nicotine-stained claws.

‘Still at your travels? Heard you'd gone to St Petersburg … Find anything interesting?'

Sophister meant,
any interesting books
, so Asher didn't trouble him with either the beauties of the city or the horrifying inefficiencies of the Secret Police, to say nothing of the St Petersburg nest of vampires. ‘I had barely time to look around me.'

‘A waste,' sighed the bookseller. ‘A sheer waste. A true scholar never ceases the quest for knowledge.
Sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munia tenere, edita dictrina sapientum templa serena
… When I went to Paris last summer, I dare say another man might have frittered away his time at such places as the Opera and that other place – what's it called? – the place with all the paintings. And that time-waster would have missed – completely missed! – come here and have a look at what I found there …'

He caught Asher's sleeve, hustled him to one of the boxes beside his overflowing desk, where books resided in an explosion of straw.
If he drops his cigarette
, Asher reflected,
the whole place will go up
…

‘The
Encyclopedia Donkaniara
! All volumes of it … And the 1674 Geneva printing of the
Pantofla Decretorum
! Only missing two signatures … Now here – here … wait a moment … No, over here … Isn't it beautiful?' He hefted the crumbling brown volume in his hand. ‘
Bishops' Antidotes for Aphrodisiacs
! Just
sitting
in a barrow on the Right Bank!
Tempus edax rerum
…'

‘Tell me,' said Asher, ‘about the
Book of the Kindred of Darkness
.'

Behind the spectacles the pale eyes widened. ‘Why do you ask?'

‘Has someone else asked you for one recently?'

The bookseller emitted a thin giggle, like the call of some unknown bird. ‘You might say so. You don't think this shop is always this frightful, do you?' He gestured around him.

Asher bit back a self-evident
Yes
(the place didn't look a bit different than it had five years previously, and was in fact tidier than Sophister's rooms had been when he'd been a Lecturer at King's College) and asked instead, ‘What happened?'

‘It was that American.' He poked at Asher with a twig of a finger. ‘No one can tell me differently.'

‘Armistead?'

‘You know about him, then?'

‘I know he bought a copy of the book in Paris. In fact he bought Saint-Hilaire's whole library—'

‘Trash.' The bookseller waved dismissively. ‘The most shocking rubbish.
Tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes et aegro in corde senescit
. Anybody could sell the man anything – I did myself, a frightful mash-up of old signatures stitched together with a forged preface that was supposedly Temesvar's
On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess
… I'd be surprised if his copy of
Kindred
was genuine.'

‘Did Armistead buy one from you?'

‘Armistead attempted to
steal
one from me,' retorted Sophister bitterly. ‘The man's a complete thug.
Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes emollit mores
…'

‘I should think he's wealthy enough to buy whatever book he wants.'

‘It's what
he
thinks also.' With the stump of one cigarette still dangling out of his thin gray moustaches – Sophister's unkempt Prince Albert only increased his resemblance to a senescent goat – the bookseller pulled a tobacco pouch and papers from his shirt pocket, and began to roll another. ‘I'd had an order for the book from another client back in November, a Romanian nobleman living in Florence. But the fellow put about a guinea down on it and then never kept up the payments. It's the seventeenth-century Prague printing – the genuine one, not the 1835 forgery, missing the title page and the last signature. I have the forgery also: the so-called introduction by Nostradamus is written in completely modern French, and they didn't get the binding right.
Dixeris egrege notum si callida verbum reddiderit iunctura novum
… Where was I?'

‘Armistead.'

‘Ah, yes. I told Armistead I was honor-bound to inform Count Bessenyei that I had another purchaser for the book – for which I was asking a hundred and seventy-five pounds – and spang, on the money, two nights later the shop was broken into and ransacked.' He caught Asher's arm, led him to the back premises, where a number of very old volumes lay open upon a table and where the glass panes of the lockable bookshelves that ringed the walls had all been broken. ‘With special attention paid, you will observe, to the incunabula. They passed up the Arentino, so obviously they were in quest of something specific—'

Asher noticed that his old friend hadn't yet got around to sweeping up the broken glass.

‘And you think Armistead was behind it? Did he get the book?'

‘Heavens, no! The really valuable stuff I keep elsewhere at night.' The older man puffed on his new cigarette to kindle it at the end of the old. ‘But it was obviously a ploy to push me into selling immediately. He offered me three hundred guineas.' Sophister made a long arm for a faded volume at the far end of the table. ‘Armistead had already paid some frightful sum in Rome for the Aubrey translation – six hundred and fifty guineas, I think it was, and half the signatures missing.'

He opened the stained calf binding. The title page was indeed missing, but inside the front cover someone had written in faded ink:

Liber Gente Tenebrarum
.

Johanot Vallisoletos
.

Prague – 1687

‘Not bad for something that was supposed to be a hoax to begin with.'

Asher carefully turned a page, studied the graceful ‘lettre de somme' type and the corrupt, idiosyncratic Latin.
Know you then that the things called vampire were known and abominated among the Romans, and dwelled in the cities of their empire, even unto Narbo in Gaul, and Lutetia, though farther north they did not go
…

‘Who was John of Valladolid?'

The bookseller shrugged. ‘Supposedly a student in Prague in the latter part of the fourteenth century, who made a bargain with the vampires in that city … You're familiar with the conceit of the book? That the Undead live in rookeries, rather like penguins, under the command of a sort of Chief Vampire? Rather ingenious … Yes, well, John of Valladolid was a Spanish student who claimed to have been a servant of the Chief Vampire – someone has to deal with the tradesmen during the daylight hours, I should imagine. You're the folklorist, Asher. You'd know better than I.'

‘The edition I read – the Geneva text of 1637 – contained nothing about the author. My old teacher Karlebach in Prague had it, as well as the nineteenth-century forgery. They were substantially different—'

‘Oh, heavens, yes! The book is notorious. Nearly every edition differs wildly from every other, and some vampire expert or other – was it old Millward over in Bayswater? Frightful bore on the subject …
Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti se puero
… Stingy, too. Anyway, he told me that most of the so-called “formulae” in it go clean against every vampire legend in folklore.'

‘The ones in the Geneva text certainly do,' Asher agreed thoughtfully. ‘And the Latin was seventeenth century, nothing like what they used in the Middle Ages. It screamed
fraud
. I'd heard there was an older text—'

‘Several!'

‘—but I'd never seen it.'

He turned another page and blinked, almost shocked. Had this paragraph been in either of Karlebach's books?

The Master of London is Rhys, that was minstrel to the Dukes of Burgundy before the Plague that devastated the whole of the world. He was made vampire by the lady Chretienne de la Tour Mirabeau, who also came out of the Realm of Burgundy in the reign of Edward Longshanks, the first of her kind to dwell in London
…

He couldn't recall.

He scanned the corrupt Latin, thickly mingled with sixteenth-century vernacular Czech.

The hold of the Master Vampire over those whom he has begotten is absolute, and cannot be comprehended by those who have not had experience of its strength. For to such of the living as will drink of a vampire's blood, when they die, the Master Vampire will take their souls into his mouth, and there hold them until his victim dies. With death the body changes into the flesh of a vampire, and into this new-changed flesh the Master will breathe the soul again. Yet a part of his victim's soul he keeps
…

The formula for breaking the hold of the Master upon the fledgling, Asher noted, didn't look like what he remembered from the Geneva text … and in any case he doubted whether that concoction of herbs and mercury would do anything but make whoever took it thoroughly sick. And as for the instructions for making a tincture of silver, yew leaves, and the urine of a black dog, which would permit a vampire to step out into sunlight unharmed …