Balfour and Meriwether in The Vampire of Kabul

CHAPTER THREE: Remnants of an Army

Dawn came behind a veil of low, grey cloud. The difference between darkness and day was only a greater wealth of detail in the worn faces and cold stone. The traffic thickened the streets, horses and carriages battling the night’s snowfall. The young man in Lord Carmichael’s offices looked at the great brass globe and the citations from the Queen as if he expected to wake from it all. Balfour smiled at him and extended a cup of rich-smelling, smoky tea. Samuel Brydon hesitated, ran a hand through hair still disarranged from the pillow, and accepted the cup. The men around him—men only, for the Czarina was elsewhere, preparing her part of the endeavor—waited patiently for the boy to answer the question.

“No, I’m quite sure Grands is dead. I was at his funeral. I remember it because it was on my tenth birthday,” he said. “Funny, isn’t it, how we’re such selfish beasts when we’re young. Mum lost her father, and all I could think was that it wasn’t fair I couldn’t have my cake. Really, though, you should ask her about it. She’ll know more than I do.”

Meriwether smiled, trying to keep the anxiety presently shaking him from affecting his demeanor.

“Alas, Westfield is a bit too long a journey for us at the moment. Time is of the essence and all that sort of thing. You have, I take it, had no visitations from your grandfather? Dreams or visions, perhaps?”

The young man laughed, and then seeing the grim faces of the men around him, sobered.

“No. Nothing like that. Is this…actually important?”

“Deadly so, I’m afraid. Did you know your grandfather well?”

“Well enough, I suppose. He seemed a decent sort of man. Prone to dark times, of course. Anyone would be who’d been through what he had. In the war, I mean.”

“Did he talk about Afghanistan often?” Lord Carmichael asked, smiling encouragement.

“Not as such, no,” the boy said. “He’d go back there every few years. Had friends there, he said. And he was very down on war in general. When Pa asked for my mother’s hand, the only condition was that Pa couldn’t take a career with the military.”

“That so?” Balfour rumbled.

“He’d be damned upset with me, I’m sure,” the boy said with a laugh.

“Joined up?” Balfour said.

“Haven’t yet, but I’m going to. Clerking hasn’t exactly worked out, you could say.”

The secretary knocked gently at the door and leaned in to catch Lord Carmichael’s eye.

“Your appointment with the Inspector has been postponed, sir,” he said. It was a code phrase. The time was right to move in. Lord Carmichael nodded and plucked the drawing from his waistcoat pocket. He considered it carefully, then held it out to the boy.

“Have you ever seen a medallion of this sort among your family’s possessions?”

The boy hesitated, frowned, and then slowly shook his head.

“No, sir,” he said. Balfour leaned toward him.

“Aryadaji,” he said. “Mean anything to you?”

“No. Should it?”

“Someone may approach you claiming some relationship to your grandfather,” Meriwether said. “He may particularly be haunting places that your grandfather may have known within London or its surroundings. If any such man approaches you, you must let us know immediately. He is quite dangerous.”

“Is he?” the boy squeaked.

“Yes,” Meriwether replied. “But don’t be too concerned. We are certain to have him captured by nightfall.” He paused, then in a lower voice: “We have a trap in place.”

“Well that… That’s good, then,” the boy said. “Something a bit queer about having one’s dead grandfather about, isn’t there?”

“Thank you for coming in, Mister Brydon,” Lord Carmichael said. “And I apologize again for the abrupt manner of our arrival.”

The boy rose, setting the cup of tea on the table with a clink and then wiping his hands on his trousers. For a moment, his eyes flickered toward the drawing of the silver medallion.

“No harm done,” he said. “Sorry I couldn’t help more.”

Lord Carmichael ushered him to the door, a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Not at all. You’ve been a great help. I’ll have a man see you home right away.”

The door closed behind the boy with a soft click. Balfour rose, scowling out the window at the street below. Meriwether sighed and stretched, his spine letting off a small volley.

“Not a particularly good liar, is he?” Lord Carmichael said.

“No,” said Meriwether. “And his failure to dissemble is entirely to our advantage, I think.”

The rear door swung open and the Czarina appeared. With her leathers replaced by a simple cotton dress, her feet covered with simple, working-class footwear, and her hair let down in bangs that almost covered her remarkable eyes, she might have been a young woman of London. She smiled at Lord Carmichael’s reaction and made a small curtsey.

“Not too bad, I hope, m’lords?” she said in an accent that would have passed for local.

“Disturbingly brilliant,” Lord Carmichael said.

“The boy is on his way,” Meriwether said. “He was, as we’d hoped, hiding something, and I hinted rather broadly that we know much more than we actually do. Once at his home, he will try to contact our Abdul Hassan.”

“But, having been questioned by yourselves, he shall be discreet,” the Czarina said, pulling a pair of spectacles from her sleeve and propping them on her nose. “He will be watching for the dark-coated arm of law, and overlook a pretty young thing like myself. I shall track him to his lair, signaling your men as I go. I’m aware of our plan, sir. And I am accustomed to being underestimated.”

“I’m sure you are,” Meriwether said, appreciating her implicit dig at him.

“I’m off, then,” she said. “The hunt calls.”

The door closed behind her, and Balfour spun the great brass globe, the oceans of the world glimmering in the sunlight. His expression was peevish.

“The hunt calls,” he said in an unconvincing falsetto. “Hate the way she always says that. Bloody affected.”

Lord Carmichael leaned against his desk, drew a cigar from the humidor presented him by the Pope, and lit it thoughtfully.

“I do wonder, boys,” he said. “What do you plan to do once you’ve found him again? The three of you were thoroughly trounced last night. What’s changed?”

“First, we have seen our man in action. He requires flame and his opium powder. Should we deprive him of these, our chances improve at once. Also, we’ve ascertained that the fumes from those are lighter than air, and can be defeated by dropping to one’s knees. And…”

“And?” Lord Carmichael said.

“Artyadaji is a demon of the night,” Meriwether said, tapping at the sketch of the eerie medallion. “We’ll take him by daylight, when the spirit is weakest. And we offer no quarter. I have the sense that failure now means failure forever. There will be no third opportunity.”

For three long hours, they waited, every tick of the clock an eternity. When at last the Czarina’s message came, they leapt to the waiting carriage and sped through the snow-choked streets. The grin behind Balfour’s wide mustache promised violence, as did Meriwether’s calm. They stopped two streets away, finishing the journey by foot for fear of alerting the prey.

The warehouses sat against the grey Thames, ancient timbers blackened by time and soot. Rats watched them pass, black eyes incurious and challenging. The Czarina stepped out briefly from the mouth of an alleyway, nodded to them, and stepped back. Walking casually, they joined her. The building was three stories high, old stone at the water’s edge. The voice of the river was a behemoth breathing softly, gentle and deafening at the same time.

“They’re both within,” she called into Meriwether’s ear. “I’ve found a way to the top. We can enter through the roof and work our way down.”

Meriwether nodded and gestured to Balfour. The Czarina led them to a narrow space where age and weather had eaten away at the mortar between stones. She pulled off her shoes, tying the laces together and draping them across her shoulders. On toes and fingertips, she began scaling the sheer wall. Their path led around the corner and out over the water. Soon, the great wooden doors that would have allowed a barge entrance were directly beneath them, crusted with ice and snow.

They achieved the rooftop, forty feet above the alleyway and chill gray flow. A path through the snow marked the Czarina’s previous explorations, and the black, wooden trapdoor, its hinges forced, that let them slip inside. The attic space had been used for storage with little regard to the strength of the beams. Huge cast iron wheels and chains that had once raised cargo now lay rusted and abandoned. The evidence of a generation of pigeons left the air pungent and unpleasant. The Empress of the Russias squatted down, pulled back on her shoes, and drew her weapons from beneath her dress.

“How far did you get?” Balfour whispered, pulling wool socks back over blue-toed feet.

“Far enough,” she said. “Come quickly.”

An ancient wooden stairway so narrow Balfour had to turn his shoulders to fit switch-backed down into darkness. Silently, they descended. The sulfurous stench of cheap coal began to taint the air. The wooden stair widened and gave over to stone. The Czarina paused on a landing beside a half-opened door, holding up her delicate, pale hand still gripping a pistol. A moment later, they heard it as well: voices.

The platform on which they found themselves looked down over a wide expanse of water. Where in the busy days of summer a half dozen barges might stand together, only a single, spare craft stood at anchor, rough and weathered, little better than a raft. The cranes above it seemed to threaten to sink it more than to relive its burdens. And at the quayside, sitting by a brazier of red-and-gold coals, the boy Samuel Brydon and the weathered husk of what had in life been William Brydon.

“…reach the sea, much less Gibraltar,” the young man said.

“The coast will be enough,” the wizard replied. His voice was deep and resonant and borne down by the weight of ages. “If I can reach the coast, I can reach the continent. If I can reach the continent, I can reach the east. There are caves in the Gul Koh mountains that no man in the great nations has breached. I will rest there.”

“You don’t have to go alone.”

Balfour touched the Czarina’s elbow and nodded toward the armature of a crane that passed over their shadow-dark platform. She traced it with her eyes and nodded.

“Yes, I must. The lands north of the Zhod valley are no place for us. Not now, and not for generations. The bargain I struck on that deathly road was no betrayal of England. The task I have been called back to accomplish is no treason.”

Balfour cupped his hands, bracing himself. The Czarina put her foot on his laced fingers. Quiet as a spring wind, he lifted her up to the armature’s edge. Meriwether crept to the platform’s edge, judging with narrowed eyes the distance between wizard and boat, boy and man, brazier and black, cold water.

“If you say so, Grands.”

“I do. We see the east as our chessboard. We think the men who live in those dread places are pawns. They aren’t. If by this action, I have kept the British Empire from a fresh war in those hills, then I will die again as a patriot. And no greater wisdom could ever be offered the Muscovites than to look away from the Afghan tribes. The power that lives there will never win against us, but neither shall it lose.”

“But is there no honor in trying?” the boy asked.

Meriwether drew his service revolvers. The soft hush of knives unsheathed reached his ears.

“Is there? It’s the honor of ignorance, then.”

“Are the soldiers there so mighty?” There was anger in the boy’s voice. Contempt even.

“Some are. And some are cowards. Some are men of peace born in the wrong place and time. They are men. That’s what I’m saying, and they have their wisdoms as we have ours. It’s only our shortness of sight that makes us think they don’t. That they somehow belong to us. Like goats.”

Above wizard and boy, the Czarina appeared, a light spot in the gloom. William Brydon or Abdul Hassan or Artyadaji was so wrapped up in his lecture, she might have been no more than a dove.

“We can spill their blood in our great game, Samuel, but it won’t nourish us. We can fight our battles on their field, but—”

With a shout, the Czarina leaped from the crane, her arms wide. Had she been another woman, Balfour and Meriwether might have feared for her, but as the wizard’s attention snapped upward, they were in motion, racing toward the brazier. The wizard grabbed at his robe. The Czarina landed on the cold stone, rolling as gracefully as a dancer, and coming up with her pistol at the ready. The old man threw a leather sack onto the fire as the Czarina fired. Her bullet tore a hank of dark flesh from the wizard’s temple, but no blood flowed from it, and he did not fall. Samuel Brydon shrieked.

Evil green smoke began to rise from the coals. Meriwether reached the brazier first. It was larger than it had appeared from the platform, thick and black and hot as a stove. He set his shoulder to it, ignoring pain and the smell of burning skin, and pushed. A lungful of the evil gas started him coughing, and where the boat had been, a huge, nacreous beast now rose from the dark water, tentacles slipping against each other in mindless glee. He closed his eyes and pushed.

The Czarina fired again as the wizard rushed at her, a silver dagger in his hand. The bullet blew off part of his neck, but he did not falter. With a single stroke, he knocked her from her feet and towered above her, blade high. The silver medallion glowed with its own baleful light, the ruby blazing with a deep internal brightness matching the blood-red eyes. The terrible hiss of steam—hot metal thrown in cold water—failed to distract him.

She did not see the thrown knife. It seemed to appear in the wizard’s breast from nowhere, splitting the silver medallion and piercing the long-still heart. The ruby fell from its setting and shattered on the stone. The wizard let out a sudden, despairing cry and collapsed on the ground beside the Czarina, a desiccated corpse. She struggled to her feet as Balfour stepped close. In the distance, Samuel Brydon fled screaming toward the waiting hands of Scotland Yard. At the water’s edge, Meriwether retched and held his eyes against the visions that plagued him, his shoulder and neck a single angry scorch mark.

Balfour retrieved his blade from the dead man’s chest.

“Well. That ends that,” the Czarina said. “Do you suppose his magics died with him? Or are your queen and my husband lost forever?”

“Don’t know,” he grunted. “We’ll see.”

“Either way, I owe you my life now.”

“Y’do.”

For a moment, their gazes rested on each other. Balfour drew his knives in the same moment the Czarina raised her pistol. The bullet grazed his skull, setting his world ringing like a church bell, and his blade bit into the flesh of her arm. Her foot shot forward, taking him in the belly. He fell back and she retreated. Blood flowed down her side, crimson soaking her dress. Her eyes were bright and mad and insatiable.

“The hunt calls!” she said, then turned, took half a dozen steps, and dove into the icy water.

Balfour lay back, his hand pressed to his wounded head. Some time later—a minute, an hour—Meriwether crawled up beside him. They lay on the stone, the chill seeping into their bones.

“Well,” said Balfour.

“Yes,” said Meriwether.

“You should have shot her when you had the chance.”

“Next time,” Meriwether said. “Next time.”

They tell me that after the Bolsheviks rose up, she fought a campaign of assassination and sabotage. I can well believe it. But by the evidence of my own eyes, she lives now in retired leisure in the Denmark of her youth. She or someone quite like her. With her, one can never be certain.

I picture her reading of this new Afghan adventure and thinking of me and of my old friend Balfour. I hear her laughing, if only within the confines of my memory. Nostalgia, is that? Regret? But what is one man’s youth against the great spread of history. No, I will drink my tea and turn away from the old days, however much I feel their loss. Instead I will take comfort in the fact that the great game has ended. With communism devouring the greatness that was the Russian Empire, Britain - however much wounded by the Great War - is left as the only great power in the world. And so it follows that this next Afghan war must necessarily be the final example of its species. With no great enemy glowering at us from across its borders, there will no longer be a call to battle in those barren fields, and the tribes of those ragged hills will at last be granted peace.