Darkness on His Bones by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780106762
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2015-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

Dreams without light.

Fragments, like a broken window of stained glass, of the crowding houses of Paris, half-timbered and grime-dark with centuries of chimney soot, darker now with foggy nights through which only chinks and slivers of dim firelight struggled around bolted shutters. The smell of the river, of woodsmoke, of a hundred thousand overflowing privies and of black muck underfoot. Bells chimed, near and far, the churches of Paris praising God for another day survived, driving away the Devil for another abyssal night.

Asher made out, as at a very great distance, the white edge of a man’s plain linen collar, and the dead-white blur of a vampire’s face. A stiff brown beard, and the smell of blood on his clothing. He’d killed that night.

Ysidro drifted behind like a ghost.

Esdras de Colle. Asher saw his face when he stopped, turned, once, twice, as if he heard or felt or sensed the Spanish vampire’s presence. Watching and wary. He stepped into a shadow and disappeared. Simon, invisible also in the dark between two houses, moved not. Asher heard the scurrying slither of rats.

He wasn’t sure when Simon departed in another direction.

The dream repeated. Esdras de Colle crossed a triangular churchyard before a church with a stumpy tower, impossible to identify in the darkness. So many churches had been pulled down and rebuilt in the eighteenth century. He stopped as before, listening.

Simon in the darkness – Asher was aware of them both – motionless as the fog.

De Colle moved on. Simon passed like the shift of moonlight against the sooty beige-brown clay of the walls.

Under peaked blackness, thirty feet from the stumpy church, a door whispered on oiled hinges.

Another night, the wind sharp as frozen wire moaning through the black streets. Church bells ringing again, stars burning holes in the sky. De Colle looking about him as he blew through the twisting streets, suspicion in his ice-pale eyes, his harsh mouth. Simon above him on the steep roofs slippery with moss and soot. Through dirty window shutters Simon saw – Asher saw – a man and woman sleeping on a crude bedstead in a litter of grimy blankets, filthy old coats and skirts, with two or three children huddled for warmth. Though the chamber shouted poverty – a table and a bench, a small woodbox containing scant fuel – still a little altar had been fitted up with a cheap plaster image of the Virgin, swags of holy medals and pilgrim-shells, a crucifix and rosaries. The door opened and Esdras de Colle came in, a shadow in his dark clothing. With him was a young man in the plain dark garments favored by the Protestants, his face like a locked steel box.

‘You know what you’re asking of me, Gallard.’ De Colle’s voice would have been covered over completely by the whine of the wind across the roof, to any ears but those of another vampire and of that young man at his side. ‘I’ve told you what we are, and what we do.’

‘I have prayed over this, brother,’ replied the young man Gallard.

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