Balfour and Meriwether in The Vampire of Kabul

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.”