“Anyway, it’s fine,” he said. “I’m quite all right. Er. Lethbridge sent me home, though.”
Greta finished scribbling and pushed several blue prescription slips across the table, still scowling. “There. That’s three months’ worth. And good for Lethbridge. I might revise my opinion of him if he goes on showing that level of common sense. You’re going to eat something nourishing and then you are going straight home and …”
She paused and ran a hand through her hair. “You don’t have much heat there, do you?”
“Oh, of course I do. It’s just that most of it escapes up the holes in the ceiling where they didn’t seal it round the drainpipes and goes to heat my upstairs neighbor’s flat instead.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Greta, despairingly. “What else? Have you got to crawl up the steps over broken glass both ways while carrying weights in your teeth?”
Fastitocalon laughed—and it was a testament to the powers of modern medicine that the laughter didn’t turn into another hacking fit. “Broken glass? Oh, we would’ve killed for broken glass when I was young,” he said in a terrible Yorkshire accent.
“Luxury,” said Greta, and this time both of them burst out laughing.
Not so far away at all, in a small room lit with brilliant blue, a naked man-shaped thing knelt, head bowed. Its skin was an angry red that looked dark purple in this light, blotched and shiny with blisters. It was moving very slightly, swaying back and forth with the rhythm of the beating of its heart. Dancing, jumping shadow-shapes played over a concrete floor and metal walls that curved in a low arch overhead. The air stank of ozone: the smell of bright energy, of lightning storms.
The object before which it knelt was squatting in a cabinet like a malevolent deep-sea creature, alien, tentacular, glowing: filled with moving, flickering blue light. Within a thick glass vessel a glaring blue-white spark danced, far too bright to see clearly, accompanied by a strange atonal humming that was both awful and hypnotic.
Distantly, over that humming, footsteps approached; distantly the thing registered that it had heard them. They did not matter at the moment, nothing mattered, not when there was the light to look at, the light, the blue light.
“Every thing that may abide the fire,” said a voice, replacing the footsteps in its awareness, “shall go through the fire, and be made clean; the flame shall burn up their wickedness.”
Slowly it woke into a higher level of consciousness, swimming upward from dark stillness lit only by that blue. It stood with effort, and where it had knelt there was a mark, a stain of fluids soaked into the concrete floor.
It turned toward the voice, still dazzled with blue light, unable to see what it was facing: another man-shaped thing, this one clothed in the coarse brown habit of a Benedictine brother, its own shiny pink and white scars concealed from sight. Beneath the hood there was another gleam of blue: twin blue pinpoints of light.
“In the fire thou shalt be purified, as silver tried in a furnace of earth,” the newcomer said.
There was a pause before the thing remembered speech and how it worked. “I am … purified,” it said, slowly. Its voice was cracked, uneven, as it gave the ritual reply. “My sins are burned with fire.”
The hooded monk inclined his head, once: a nod, or a bow. “Behold, thine iniquity is passed from thee, and I will clothe thee with raiment; let the high praises of God be in thy mouth, and the holy sword of the Lord God in thy hand.”
“Praised be God,” said the thing, completing the ritual, and its knees began to buckle with the unaccustomed strain of standing upright after so long on the ground. The monk caught it easily, lifted it in his arms like a child. There was a soft series of wet little percussions as fresh blisters broke, dragged across the monk’s rough-woven habit, and the thing moaned. Everything was dark, with moving stars.
“Take comfort,” said the monk, and turned, and bore it away into the darkness. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see light in the darkness, walk the paths of night without fear. You shall see with new eyes. You have a purpose.”
Only now did the thing realize that the little bursts and sparks of light all around it were not from the tunnel they were passing through. It blinked, and each blink was agony, and it could not see. The blue light had burned away its sight, ablated tissue and nerve and vein, sunk the sun behind the horizon for ever.
Then the monk’s words began to make sense. New eyes.
A new sight with which to see a cleaner world.
CHAPTER 3
Ruthven set the kettle on a burner and lit it with a blue pop of gas. “Really, it’s no trouble at all,” he said. “I’ve got so many rooms in this place that never get used. Sir Francis could probably do with some company, anyway; he seems to be a thoroughly melancholy sort.”
Fastitocalon was leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, resolve crumbling by the minute. Of course he didn’t need the wretched vampire’s charity, he could get on perfectly well by himself, he’d been getting on perfectly well by himself for the past several hundred years, but … it was awfully comfortable in here. Really very comfortable indeed. And he thought that Greta just might have had a point with her insistence that he must not get chilled. He’d argued with her most of the way here on the tube and he was now feeling rather short on arguments.
“You’re wavering, aren’t you,” Ruthven said, and smiled: wry and sympathetic. His teeth were very white and very even, the upper canines ever so slightly longer than a human’s. “Sit down, for heaven’s sake, and stop arguing with yourself.”
“I’m not wavering,” Fastitocalon murmured, but he did sit down at the big scrubbed-pine kitchen table, rubbing at his aching chest. “I’m a melancholy sort as well, come to think of it. I might make him worse. What happened, anyway? Greta didn’t actually talk much about the whole episode, except to say that she’d been up all night; she was mostly too busy telling me off.”
The vampire leaned back against the counter, arms folded. “He was stabbed. By persons unknown, with a weapon unlike any I’ve seen before—which reminds me, where the hell is Cranswell? He said he’d be here this evening with some useful reference books, but it’s getting on for six o’clock and there’s no sign of him.” A strand of glossy black hair escaped its mooring and drooped over his forehead, and he pushed it away with an irritable little flick. The gesture was theatrical, Fastitocalon reflected, if unconsciously so. Come to think of it, Ruthven did have the exaggerated black-and-white looks of a silent-film actor.