02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2

by Barbara Hambly

  "In wintertime, when dark falls by four, I often go on errands, to buy newspapers or books. I have a dressmaker who keeps open for me. Ernchester will sometimes stay all the night through in his study, reading, even on those nights when I go out later..."

  She stopped herself visibly from saying to hunt. But Asher saw it in the shift of her eyes. Her hands were icy against his bare flesh, and she worked quickly, holding the bindings in place with small bits of what little sticking plaster he'd had in the valise in case of emergencies. His blood dabbled her fingers, garish as paint on ivory. Cold breathed over his ribs from the bones within the crypt, chilling him further.

  She went on, her words swift, like a woman talking in the presence of a man whom she fears will seduce her. "He used to go out walking. I thought it was only that. So I went out again and, when I returned, found the place rifled, smelling of human tobacco and human sweat, and that was on the floor. I thought... I thought that he had been taken away."

  Her dark brows pinched together as she pinned the final bindings in place. "I would have known it, had he... had anything befallen."

  Asher remembered his dream. How can he be dead? she had asked. Did I walk up the stairs, would he not be waiting at the top?

  Even then she had known.

  "And you didn't go to Grippen?"

  Anthea shook her head. "Since last year-since the rift among us concerning you and your knowledge of us-there has been uneasiness among the Undead of London. Grippen has gotten other fledglings in place of those who were killed; has summoned to London older fledglings of his as well. Me, he never trusted.

  Indeed, I... until you spoke of the Austrian, I could not be sure that this was not of Grippen's doing. But for that reason I dared not go to Ysidro, either."

  She handed him one of the new shirts he had bought, then took the whiskey flask and stepped quickly away, pouring the liquor on her fingers and meticulously, repeatedly, almost obsessively wiped from them all trace of his blood. While she did this, he put on his shirt, resumed his tie, his jacket, his coat, moving slowly for his vision sometimes would suddenly gray, but she did not offer her help. In the dark of the crypt, rat shadows flickered among the bones.

  "At a certain distance I can feel my husband's mind. Sense his presence. I did not... I dared not wait." She raised her eyes to his. "Might he have gone to this Austrian because he was fleeing the Master of London?"

  "He might," said Asher. "But I suspect Grippen had nothing to do with it. Come." He picked up his valise. "Will you go with me for coffee?"

  They went to LaStanza's on the Graben, luminous with gas-light and bright with the pastel frocks of the dancers. Anthea had donned, over her cold white fingers, a widow's black lace house mitts, and produced from a corner of the crypt's vestibule a plumed hat bedighted with veils that further hid-and heightened by contrast-the whiteness of her flesh. She must have left it there, thought Asher, when she went to rescue him from his attackers in the alley. The scent of her hair on the silk had evidently been enough to keep the rats from coming anywhere near.

  "I have been afraid for Charles for years," she said after the Herr Ober took their orders. "Part of it was Danny being killed-the man who had been our servant since the days of the last King George. Burned up in the light of the sun. Some would say, a fit end for such as we." She glanced quickly at him, challenging, but Asher said nothing.

  "Part of it was the death of the city that he knew. Not all at once, as when the fire took it, but little by little, a building demolished here, a street torn up there that the Underground might pass beneath. A word or expression would fall out of use, or a composer die, whose work he loved. He used to go every night to concerts, listening with joy to the new men, to those light airs like clockwork flowers, and then the strength, the passion that came after..."

  A waiter brought them coffee: for her, "dark with skin"-one had to be specific when ordering coffee in Vienna -for him an einspanner, black coffee, whipped cream.

  "Is it passe now, the waltz?" She put back her veils and raised the cup to her lips, not drinking, but breathing deep of the bittersweet riches of the steam. On the dance floor women floated weightlessly to "Tales of the Vienna Woods," their gowns like lilies of saffron, rose, pale lettuce-green; the black clothing of the men a delineating bass note, the officers' uniforms jeweled flame.

  "I think so." He remembered dancing with Francoise. She'd been gawky as a scarecrow to look at but never missed a step, as light as a bluebell on a stem. "Not with people my age," he went on. "But the young and the smart are doing things like the foxtrot and the tango."

  "Tango." She savored the unfamiliar word. "It sounds like a New World fruit. Something whose juice would run down your chin. I shall have to learn it one day." Her eyes returned to the dancers, quickly, as if avoiding a thought. "The waltz was a scandal when first I learned it. And so I thought it, too." She laughed a little at herself. "Ernchester still enjoyed dancing in those days.

  Grippen mocked at us. For him all things are only to serve the kill. But we'd go to Almack's Assembly Rooms or to the great ton balls during the Season. He... was not always as you've seen him."

  "Did something change him?" His voice was low, under the music, but she heard, and past the wraiths of her veils her glance crossed his again. Then she looked away. "Time." She traced the ear-shaped curve of the cup's handle, a gesture that reminded him of Lydia when she had something worrying her. Her eyes did not meet his. "I wish you could have known him as he was. I wish you could have known us both."

  Silence lay between them, save for the music and the swirl of silk and slipper leather. "Do you read the Personals?" asked Asher, and the question startled her out of the reverie into which she had slipped. He started to reach down for the valise on the floor between their chairs, but the bite of his wound stopped him; he gestured to the newspaper visible in the bag's open mouth.

  "Or more to the point, does your husband?"

  "We all do." She leaned to withdraw the folded sheets. "We follow families, names, neighborhoods for years, sometimes decades. To us, chains of events are like the lives of Balzac's characters, or Dickens'. The nights are long."

  Asher unfolded the section and touched the advertisement he had seen.

  "Saturday's paper," he said. "His departure was arranged in advance. Umitsiz is Turkish for hopeless-a variant, I think, for Want-hope. Does Ernchester know Turkish?"

  "He was part of the legation King Charles sent to Constantinople, before we were married. He was away three years. To me it seemed eternity."

  A wry smile brushed her lips as she considered the irony of that, and she added, a little shyly, "It still does, you know, when I look back."

  Then she frowned and held the railway timetable beside the few short lines of type, as if comparing them. "But why?" she asked at last. "What could they have said to him-this Olumsiz Bey-to make him come here without a word to me? Even without Grippen's support, we have wealth and a place where we are safe. Men searched the house, yes, but it was night when they did so-they could not have overpowered him, even had he returned to find them. At night men are easy to elude. Charles knows London 's every cellar and bolt-hole. Even if he knew Vienna once, cities change with time, and those changes are perilous to those whose flesh the sun will destroy. What could he have been offered?"

  "I suspect the men were only agents of someone else." Asher folded both paper and timetable again. "Ysidro told me once that the Undead usually know when someone is seeking them. You know nothing, guessed nothing, of the men who searched the house?"

  She shook her head. "There had been no... no unknown faces seen too many times, no footfalls passing where none should be."

  "Which means that someone told them about the house."

  The waltz had finished. On the platform the orchestra was putting up its instruments. A woman, small and gray-haired and dumpy, laughed as her white- bearded gentleman friend swept her up into an extravagant cloak of golden fur. Anthea turned her head to
watch them, and in her eyes Asher saw an expression of almost sensual delight, a softening, as if she had drunk wine.

  Karolyi? Asher wondered. An attempt to make sure the earl's wife didn't stop him from coming? But would Karolyi have known of the power struggle between Anthea and Grippen that would rob them of the master vampire's support?

  Karolyi had certainly hired the toughs who attacked him tonight. They had probably followed him all day, waiting their chance. That meant he'd better pick the toughest-looking fiacre he could find and warn him of trouble once they got into the isolated lanes and vineyards of the Vienna Woods.

  The Ober appeared, Lady Ernchester's black cloak on his arm. putting it around her shoulders brought Asher a stab of momentary agony, and she turned quickly.

  "You're in pain." Her fingers were cold still, though she'd warmed them on the cup. "I'm sorry, I didn't think."

  "It just took me by surprise," he said. "I'll take you to your lodging."

  A tulle of fog suffused the gaslight on the Graben to dim haloes, blurred the swags and statues of the facades. Here and there a window still glowed, where maids, having unlaced their mistresses, brushed their hair and handed them nightdresses and prayer books, now locked up jewels or brushed dirt from slippers, or laid final fires for the morrow before creeping to cold beds themselves. The air was ice, the leafless trees friezes of unreadable runes passed by only a few final, home-hurrying shadows.

  "Dr. Asher."

  He paused in his stride and saw, again, her face turned half away from him in confusion.

  "I know no honest woman asks a man to come back to her rooms with her, to stay with her the night." Her fingers stirred at the buttons on his sleeve. "And I understand that it's the stuff of farce for me even to care about such conventions. Old habits die harder than you think. But... will you do this?"

  She raised her eyes to his as she spoke. Oddly, Asher felt no sense of danger.

  He remembered how carefully she had wiped the blood from her fingers and the stammer of her nervousness that hurried to fill the silences of the dark crypt. It crossed his mind to wonder if she had inhaled so deeply of the coffee to cover from herself the smell of his blood.

  Yet he had no sense that she was influencing his mind, laying upon it the vampires glamour that blinded victims to their danger. Which might only mean, he thought, that she was very, very good at what she did.

  Into his hesitation, she continued, "Save for one thing only, traveling alone on that train was the most terrifying thing I've ever done." They moved on along the wide street, two isolated figures in the thickening brume. Beside them the Plague Pillar ascended in an astonishment of cherubs, saints, and clouds, white in gaslight and shadow. "I only just reached the hotel room in Paris in time, and I was terrified that sleep-the unbreakable sleep of the Undead-would overcome me where I stood in the street. They must have thought me a madwoman, hurrying the porters to take my trunks into my room and then pushing them all out and locking and double-locking the doors. And even when I was alone, the fear near overwhelmed me. How could I know that I'd wake with the setting of the sun again and not burn up screaming through some chambermaid's prying or greed?" Her step quickened and her hand tightened on his arm, the memory of that terror making her fingers, for a moment, crushing iron.

  "And it was worse, shipping the trunk the following night," she went on.

  "Sending myself like a parcel, falling asleep to the rocking of the train, trusting to fate. Not knowing if I'd ever wake. They say we don't wake, should our darkness be violated by sunlight-that we burn up in sleep. But who knows?"

  Under the veils her face was calm, but there was a flaw in her voice, and she drew her cloak close about her, as if even her Undead flesh felt the cold. "None of us are ever there, to see it happen to another. Even in utter blackness, the sun submerges our minds. Sometimes we hear and know what happens about us, but we do not wake."

  They reached the door of her hotel, a splendid mansion whose lower stories comprised the palatial residence of some wealthy family, but whose marble stair led to a far humbler lobby on the upper floor.

  Anthea paused in the columned shadows of the entryway. "A year ago Ysidro hired you- forced you-to be his servant. To do for him in daylight what he himself was unable to do. And you did it honorably."

  His breath mingled whitely with the fog that had floated through the outer gate behind them. Her words had produced no such clouding. "I had no choice."

  "We all have choice." Her gaze met his in the dim light from the chandelier of crystal and gilt. "I can only ask you. Stay with me in the room until the sun sets again. Please."

  Lydia had once calculated how many human beings the average vampire killed in a century. If he were the man he once had been, Asher thought, he would have said yes, then later thrown open the trunk lid and let the sun reduce such a murderess to dust.

  Perhaps because she had saved his life, he would only have said no.

  The clock on St. Stephen's was striking two, and like courtiers repeating a sovereign's joke, clocks on churches and monasteries throughout the Altstadt took up the chime. He would be alone, awake, with this woman for hours before she would be with him, alone and sleeping, trusting him as he must trust her.

  If it weren't all a trap, to get him to a place where he could not call for help.

  But surely the crypt had been that.

  He told himself it was because he needed to find Ernchester, something he could not do without a vampires help. But he knew that wasn't true.

  "Very well," he said.

  "He ceased to care at all, about anything, fifty, maybe sixty years ago." Anthea removed her hat, and despite the renewed slash of pain in his side, Asher helped her off with her cloak and the jacket beneath it. Her frock was Norwich silk, its ruffles glittering with star fields of jet. "Music, watching people-not for prey but just for the curiosity about how they live their lives-it all meant less and less to him. Like that fairy book that came out a few years ago, where a man's limbs are replaced, one by one, by magic with limbs of tin, until suddenly he realizes he has no heart and is no longer a man." She passed her gloved hand across her eyes, the smooth skin of the lids pinching at the memory of pain.

  "You're thinking that all those fifty, sixty years, when his life meant less and less to him, still he prolonged it by killing two and sometimes three men a week. There are things that can't... be explained. It's easier than you think, to fall into... habits."

  "I'm not thinking anything." He remembered Jan van der Platz's blood on the barn wall, the shocked hurt in the boy's eyes just before Asher pulled the trigger.

  She lighted the lamp on the heavy table. Asher wondered if she had been aware of the brassy-haired prostitute's death agonies, and it occurred to him that this woman had probably seen worse. Maybe done worse herself. The small chamber, copiously decorated with swathes of peacock feathers and dried flowers and smelling vaguely of carpets, had not even been fitted with gas, much less electricity. The topaz light made the vampire's face more human, lent color to her cheeks and a kind of life to her eyes, and brought forth cinnabar glints in her hair. Asher remembered again his vision of her lying on the floor of what he realized now was the old Ernchester town house in Savoy Walk, the house where first he had met this woman-where she had saved him from the Master of London's wrath.

  "I'm sorry to have provoked this division," he said. "To have robbed you of whatever support Grippen would give."

  She shook her head. "It's been decades coming. Maybe centuries. He wanted Charles- and the houses and land that would give him a system of bolt-holes. We had no living child, and there are ways of manipulating even entailed property, to keep a good part of what you own. Grippen lost much in the Great Fire, and afterward the city was greatly changed. I kept the property tied up in trusts, so Grippen couldn't own them outright. But it was only a matter of time before he would come to an end of needing Charles. Vampires do not kill vampires, but... I suspect in any case he would not have
helped.

  "Who is this Karolyi?" She took off her mitts, and her long nails glinted oddly in the lamplight.

  While she plucked the jewel-headed pins from her hair, Asher told her about his

  early acquaintance with Karolyi in Vienna. "He's continued in the diplomatic corps, I understand. Young men of his class do, with only minimal qualifications. I know he's been responsible for the deaths of at least two of our agents over the last ten years, but it's never been proven."

  "How would he have known about my husband?" She paused, brush in hand. "He may be ruthless, yes, clever and dangerous, but it would not have told him how to find a London vampire. Only another vampire could have done that. And why would he have chosen a London vampire to... to bring here? The masters among the Undead are jealous of their territories. They do not tolerate vampires who are not their fledglings and subservient to their wills. Ernchester knows this."

  "That may be part of Karolyi's plan." Stiffly and clumsily, Asher began to sponge with cold water at the blood in his coat, and Anthea said, "I'll do that," and took it from him. Now that the shock had worn off, he felt very tired, the pain in his side settling into a dull ache. He was glad to sit quietly on the room's overstuffed brocade settee.

  "What he wants your husband for is less clear," he said after a time. "Maybe he wants your husband because he isn't a fledgling to some local master, here or someplace like Bulgaria or Greece. That's what I need to find out. It may be he wants your husband to make a fledgling who can be put to Karolyi's uses. But whatever he planned, he had to get your husband out of London because of Grippen."

  "Yes," Anthea said softly. "Grippen would know."

  She walked to the doorway between that chamber and the next, the movement of her shadow summoning vague blinks of light from the brass fittings of the trunk that filled most of the space not already occupied by the four-poster bed. Her hands, straying in the lace at her throat, were like lilies, ringed with solitary gold.