Blood Maidens Read Online Free PDF Page B

them or die. And to everyone who points out that a war between our coalition and their coalition is going to be Armageddon – like no war ever seen before – we get only, Well, we must protect our interests abroad , and – God help us – Dem Deutschen gehört die Welt  . . . The world belongs to Germans . It’s the Germans who’ve said, We want territory even if it belongs to foreigners, so that we may shape the future according to our needs , but it might as well have been Asquith and those imbeciles in Parliament. War makes mankind strong , and God save us from a world without the manly training of combat ! And if you want peace – or talk about how to avoid this manly training – you’re a Socialist or a degenerate, or in German pay. Sorry,’ he added, shaking his head. ‘Coming through France and Germany always affects me—’
    ‘It’s readin’ all them newspapers.’ Hervieu laid a comforting, red-furred paw on Asher’s hand. ‘Of course the lot of ’em are barkin’ daft, but you’ll never convince ’em of it . . . and lied to or not, as long as the Germans are comin’ at us, for whatever reason, you know we’ll fight. So what can we do?’
    Asher whispered, ‘What indeed?’ He grasped Hervieu’s hand. ‘Thank you.’
    ‘Anythin’ else I might need to know?’
    ‘Not that I can tell you right now.’
    The bright-blue eyes looked sharply into his for a time, hearing the gaps in his information, but understanding as only the Crown’s Secret Servants could or did. ‘For King and Country, then.’
    ‘For King and Country.’ Asher sketched a salute at the older man, pulled his fur-lined hat close over his naked scalp, and stepped out of the frowsty little shop into the cold, silvery glitter of the street.
    What can we do? Asher stepped out of the way of a peddler like a giant ball of old clothes, who bore like a battle standard a pole bedecked with gaily-colored mittens. The words were the wheel on which Asher’s soul had been broken. Yet it was good to know that at least someone from the old Department knew he was in town – and would make enquiries if he didn’t report himself in. In an odd way, he felt himself again.
    The distaste at traveling with Ysidro – at knowing who and what he was – shifted its perspective, though did not become any easier to understand. Did the fact that the vampire took his victims singly while the governments of Germany and England and France proposed to do so wholesale alter the sin of their deaths?
    Or make partnership with this man more, or less, foul than partnership with the Foreign Office?
    He didn’t know.
    For King and Country .
    Asher hated the words.

FOUR
    At seven Asher changed his shirt, donning beneath it the little forearm-sheathe he’d had made for him in China, though instead of the hideout knife he’d worn in those days, he equipped it with a silver letter-opener, sharpened carefully to as much of an edge and point as the soft metal would take. He found a café near the Engineering Academy that served a dinner of zakuski, borscht, and smoke-flavored caravan tea for a rouble. An old-style porcelain heating-stove blazed at one end of the little room, but near the windows it was like sitting outside on a sharp spring morning in Oxford – yet Asher chose one of the small tables there and watched the passers-by in the square before the Mikhailovsky Palace in the chilly evening light. Schoolgirls with long fair hair hanging out from beneath hats and scarves brushed elbows with the ragged women who worked in the sewing factories and cigarette factories and factories that made boots for the army. North of the river – what was locally called the Vyborg-side – and east of the handsome houses of St Petersburg’s eighteenth-century core, these factories ringed the city, turning out guns, battleships, uniforms, tents, and buttons for the biggest army in the world. Between, behind, around the factories lay the slums: the largest, the