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ONE
Fog thened his stride, keeping close to the gray wooden wall of the workers’ barracks The s – grated in his nostrils, drowning those other smells that told him where he was: latrines, curry, chickensWhere is the fog co that night, if only he could find it The Molopo River never fogs like this
The ground underfoot jerked with the impact of artillery shells
He was in a part of Mafeking he’d never seen before, and he would have taken an oath he knew every block and street of that dusty -town Close to the slu workers lived, he could hear the: children and woht sky I have to get there I have to find
He couldn’t recall what or who he had to find this time
I have to stop them
He turned a corner, felt paves now he companies, the first-class stores where their ladies shopped for British fashions He wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there, it was nearly iloo scuttled by hi the world Fire in anearby showed Asher solistening strea blood
The breath sees Dear God, how many are dead? The coppery reek penetrated even the choke of the s as it flowed, ruby reflections in the flarueso the to the wall The screa harew thicker He could still s, but as the alleyway narrowed around hi This is London
I’ht hi could lie beyond the darkness All the things he had seen and done, in Africa during the fight against the Boers, in the Balkans, in China – in all those places where his Queen had sent hiave him no reason to think that whatever awaited hi life he’d seen blood flon streets like this, and not in singleribbons barely an inch wide
He turned a corner, his hand to the wall to guide him This was definitely London, a sainst the firelit bru pre-Wren church; the spire had been dah the holes There was a street laas variety – but its glass was broken, its fla on a rusted bracket, and its feeble light somehoed him that a lake of blood extended most of the way across the square
In the doorway of the tall and lightless house, Don Si for him
‘James’ The vampire’s habitual half-whisper still ca of the shells, the screa ‘We must speak’
Asher said, ‘Go to hell’
His eyes opened in the dark His face ashed in sweat and he was tre
Go to hell
He didn’t even need to hear what he knew Ysidro had replied to that remark, because he knew that the dream had been the vision of exactly that
Not the Boers shelling Mafeking Ger London He’d seen the stately Zeppelin airships, silent as clouds above Lake Constance, and the plans to convert theh explosives on cities He’d seen the stockpiles of weapons – those of the Germans, the Austrians, the French and the Russians and the Turks He’d seen the Kaiser’s ar down Unter den Linden, and the way the eyes of the Ger their unbeatable forces to carve themselves ‘our proper place’ in Europe and the world
The lake of blood was a puddle The strea
I have to get there I have to stop them I have to find
He made himself draw breath; made himself let it out For his superiors in the Depart to find, so that he – Jay – could stop whatever horror was next around the corner
But so that the Aret a few points ahead of the Germans, in that endless competition for who had the most powerful weaponry, the th
Why Ysidro?
Asher lay in the darkness, listening to the rain As if the deafening blasts of the artillery had been real – real tonight, not real twelve years ago – Lydia’s peaceful breathing seeainst his side like a child, her head on his shoulder, the thick braided silk of her long hair dark in the night light’s tiny glow; it was red as henna in the sun She had not resu love, in spite of the chill of the spring night, and around her bare throat glinted the links of the silver chain that she never took off
Because Ysidro is a vaain, fearing he would slide back into the drea he would see that slight for in the doorway beneath the lantern bracket; the thin face that had once been handso colorless hair, wispy as spider silk The curious, bleached-yellow eyes that caught reflection like a cat’s
Do I dream of him because Ysidro has killed – in the course of three hundred and fifty-plus years of hunting the living for sustenance – without rehtwo or three times over?
Asher’s hand moved to touch, above the points of his collarbone, his own chain The smooth silver links seee, secret dread As his fingers brushed the ular and carotid from ear to shoulder, as they marked his arms to the elbows
Because to my subconscious mind – as this Freud fellow in Vienna would say – Don Simon Christian Xavier Morado de la Cadeña-Ysidro represents Death?
Asher hoped so
He didn’t want to consider the alternative explanation thatPeninsula Night’s hus a ht he heard, in the scrim of trees that bordered the rice paddies
The not-quite-audible creak of felt boots on broken branches Voices breathing a dialect he only barely understood The vertiginous uneasiness at being unable to interpret those unspoken signals that he saw pass fro the day – impassive faces, non-coments of the fathomless culture that lay beneath the surface