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EIGHT PERISH IN WAREHOUSE FIRE FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED [Froed the cotton warehouse of Moyle Co in Liverpool Street last night, clairants who are be-lieved to have taken shelter in the warehouse from the cold How-ever, police report the discovery of a small quantity of blood on the pave that soh all the bodies were too badly burned to provide definite clues All eight bodies were found cluether in the rear part of the warehouse, near where the fires started; there is no evidence that any of these unknown vagrants attees, and, in fact, police believe that all eight may have been dead of so strongly when first seen by watchton, who claims that he saw no indication of smoke or other trouble when he passed the warehouse earlier

No, Lydia thought cal to hidethe bodies, I&039;dat the appropriateas she set down the newspaper

Manchester Anonymous masses of factory workers, stevedores, and coal heavers, unmissed save by those who knew them and maybe not even then

She looked at the list she&039;don top of theJournal of Co she dared wait now,

She had pro until she had checked with hier She knew she was a child in a bog here, unable to tell the difference between a tuft that would bear her weight and one that was only a little greenery floating on the top of quicksand; she knew that the va The fear that she had lived with for weeks rose again in her, the fear of that guttural voice calling in her drea darkness, the fear she had felt in the cold fog of the court the night she had gone out to seek a vaht her to fearshe&039;d heard fro to see the Paris vampires, under the prob-lematical protection of Don Si to freeze it into sub silence But her heart whispered to her that they had no reason to keep hiood chance that, as Calvaire&039;s friends, theyto hide, not only from humans, but from vampire kin

I&039;ll wait oneto relax the steely hand that seemed to clutch at her throat froh Oxford it could have gotten delayed

She looked back at her list, which she had co beside it The vaes had killed seven-teen people in the last three days

Her fingers still unsteady, she took off her spectacles and set them aside, then lowered her head to her crossed arhted, not only with exhaus-tion, but with an uncaring lassitude of the spirit hich he was faical research trips His drea he was forgetting, so He was back in the van der Platz house in Pretoria, hunting for so He had to move swiftly because the family was due back, the fauest, a Bavarian professor only there to study linguistic absorption

But he had forgotten what it was that he hunted He only kneas vital, not only to the war between England and its recalcitrant colonials, but to his own life, to the lives of everyone dear to hiht, or a list-that was it, the list of the articles he&039;d published; they h thehtened, partly because he knew the van der Platzes, though Boers, were the kingpins of Gerence in Pre-toria and would not hesitate to turn him over to the commandos if they discovered he was not as he seemed, partly because he knew that behind one of those doors he opened and closed in such ai to find Jan, the sixteen-year-old son of the household and his friend, with the top of his head shot off

"I killed hiers touched his Against the di in its pale cloud of tonsure, green eyes gleaainst the sunken shadows of the skull-like head He had spoken in English, and in English a voice whispered back, "Killed thou this boy in anger, or for gain?"

He knew Brother Anthony had read his dreah how he knew this he was not sure

"It would have been better if I had," Asher replied softly "He ht have understood that But no" His

mouth twisted with the bitter taste of his oareness "I killed for policy, to protect the inforland with it, and return to learn more I did not want to be" He hesitated on the wordblown, an idiom the old monk would not understand, and then finished the phrase, " revealed as a spy"

What a eupheht was erased by that si No, he had not wanted to be revealed to these people who had trusted hi their trust as he&039;d have used a stolen bicycle, to be later abandoned to rust by the side of the road

"It is no longer lawful for me to absolve thee of this" Like broken wisps of straw, the thin fingers stroked at his hands; the green eyes looking into his were mad and haunted and filled with pain, but Asher had no fear of hi voice went on, "I, who cried against simoniac priests, venal priests, and priests who took bribes to forgive in advance the sins their patrons longed to commit-how can I expect God to hear the words of a ustine says that it is lawful for soldiers to kill in battle, and that those deaths will not be held against them before the throne of God"

"I was not a soldier," Asher said quietly "In battle, one shoots atat one It is self-defense, to protect one&039;s own life"

"To protect one&039;s own life," the vae, save that the sunken green eyes blinked "How ue that I did not choose to become what I am, but I did I chose it when the va wrist against my lips, and bade me drink, bade me seize the mind that I saw burn beforeme to live I chose then to live and not to die I chose then and I have chosen every night since"

Exhaustion lay over Asher like a leaded blanket-the conversation had the air of being no more than another part of his dream "Was there a reason?"

"No" The ainst the low ceiling, his shadow hung, huge and deforht on needle-like fangs as he spoke "Only that I loved life It was hout my days with the Minorites, the Little Brothers of St Francis I loved the body ere enjoined to despise, reveled in those little luxuries, those small comforts, which our teachers warned us to deny ourselves A warning well given, perhaps They said that such delight in the ephemera of matter would addict the soul And so it has done

"Perhaps it was that I did not want to confront God with the sin of luxuriousness on er remember And now I am burthened doith more murders than I can count I have slain ar blood which Dante the Italian saw in Hell, I will be subed to the last hairs upon ht hot blood fro his own existence And that is what I cannot face"

Susurrant and unreal, that voice followed hiain, and this ti on the stone banks of a cri to a bruised horizon in a black cavern that stretched farther than sight The suttural bubbling filled his ears Looking down, he could see in the tide pools the yellowish seru out of the blood, as it did in Lydia&039;s experimental dishes In the lake itself he could see them all: Grippen, Hyacinthe, Elysee, Anthea Farren with her crea in pain On the bank of that hellish lake walked Lydia in the trailing draperies of her ecru tea gown, a glass beaker in her hand, her hair falling in a rusty coil down her back and spectacles faintly stea down to dip up the blood froethon Asher tried to call to her, but she alking away, holding the beaker up to the light and exa the contents with her usual absorbed attention He tried to run toward her, but found he could notrooted to the broken black lava rock; looking back, he saw the bubbling red lake beginning to rise, the blood trickling toward hiulf him, like the vampires, for his sins

He opened his eyes and saw Ysidro, sitting near the candle reading the London Ti," the vam-pire said softly, when Asher told hi the daylight hours, then, whether or not he can tolerate the touch of the sun itself, though I suspect that he can And the silver lock on the door has been forced and replaced"

"He has to have come here somehow"

Ysidro folded the paper with a neat crackle, and set it aside "He may have used the sewers Perhaps he knew, from other years, that this was my house; perhaps he only followed uessed, when he saw ht here I have, needless to say, moved my resi-dence, now that Grippen and Elysee know of this place Do you feel strong enough to walk?"

Asher did, but even thein the basin of water Sirate-ful to return to his cot Later, after he&039;d rested, he asked for and got envelopes and paper In the course of the following day, he wrote two letters to Lydia, one addressed to her under her own name in Oxford, the other addressed to Miss Priscilla Merridew and enclosed, as his for note to one of his students He reassured her of his coe of irony at the phrase Things had to be truly serious, he re-flected, for him to consider helpless irounds for optireed to post them without dee would work, or at worst that he&039;d be able to get Lydia to some other residence before the Spaniard was able to return to Oxford and trace her down

He re ht to hi in schol-arly satisfaction as the vainal pronunciation, and slowly feeling his strength return He never saw Brother Anthony, except in queer, involuted dreams, but now and then the water pitcher in the cell would be refilled when he awoke The second afternoon, he woke to find two railway tickets propped against the candlestick, and his luggage stacked neatly at the foot of his cot With the tickets was a note, written on creamy new stationery in a sixteenth-century hand: Ca w you be ready to leave for London at sun-down?

Beneath this was a folded copy of the L ondonTimes, with the head-line MASSACRE IN LIMEHOUSE