02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2

by Barbara Hambly

  He remembered again as he climbed the stairs to Fairport's office with quick silence- staying by the wall so the treads would not creak-why he had come to hate the Great Game.

  A lamp burned in the office-inconveniently, because one of the curtains was half open, and it meant careful maneuvering not to be seen from outside as he approached the desk on his hands and knees. He'd heard no one in this wing of the house. He had only minutes before they returned and started searching in earnest, and Ernchester was right in that he must, above all, release Anthea. While Karolyi had her, he had the vampire earl, whether or not the man was actually in his possession. The fact that Ernchester had jumped to the conclusion that the dreadful scream he heard had been hers told its own story. They are killers, he thought, in a kind of baffled rage at himself. Over the years Anthea has done to thousands of men what that woman nearly did to me. Why should I care?

  But all he remembered was the face of a woman in a portrait, plump, weary, gray- haired, in mourning for a husband who had died thirty years before. How can he be dead?

  Among the litter on the surface of the desk-Fairport, though not as bad as Lydia, was an untidy housekeeper-Asher recognized the folded copy of last Fridays Times. Beside it lay a yellow envelope containing two train tickets.

  Paris to Constantinople, by way of Vienna.

  Constantinople?

  A thought came to him. Isn't it enough that you've betrayed me, lied to me?

  Crouching on the floor beside the desk, he removed the handset from the telephone and cranked the Vienna exchange.

  "Here Vienna Central Telephone Exchange," came the operator's cheerful voice. "A very good evening to you, honored sir."

  "And a very good evening to you, honored madame," replied Asher, who knew that it never did anyone any good to try to hurry a Viennese telephone operator.

  "Would you be so kind as to connect me with Donizetti's cafe in the Herrengasse, and ask them to let me speak with the Herr Ober, please?"

  The floor vibrated with a door closing somewhere. Feet passed quickly along a downstairs hall. Seconds fell on him like shovelfuls of earth filling a grave.

  "Certainly, honored sir, it would give me great pleasure."

  He heard her voice, distantly engaged in formal greetings and elaborate social chat with someone at Donizetti's, asking at length for the honored Herr Ober, there is a most honored Herr who wishes to speak with him if his duties will allow him time, and, more closely, voices calling from the courtyard outside the windows. "... found nothing... someone there..." Minutes, he thought, and they would begin to search the house.

  "Ladislas Levkowitz at your service, honored sir."

  "Herr Ober Levkowitz, I realize it's a tremendous imposition on such a busy man as yourself, but would the British Herr Halliwell have arrived for dinner yet? Could you be so kind as to let him know that Herr Asher wishes to speak with him on a matter of some urgency? Many thanks..."

  Asher cradled the handset against his face, rose to his knees and with a swift glance at the window made a quick review of the rest of the desk. Three or four green- covered notebooks contained interviews with octogenarians in the Vienna region, and others much farther afield. A thick bundle of invoices for glassware and chemicals connected with experiments on the blood of these ancients proved, at a glance, that Fairport's expenses were far greater than the sanitarium's profits could possibly cover. In the back of a drawer was a thick wad of torn- open envelopes of the stationery of the Austrian Embassy in Constantinople, each containing a dated slip with amounts written on them-large amounts-and signed "Karolyi." The dates went back two years. There were half a dozen keys, none of which would fit a cylinder lock of the type on the silver lattice's door. A crowbar, he thought. There'd be one in the generator crypt if he could get to it.

  Dammit, he thought, stop chatting with the Herr Ober and come to the telephone...

  "Set the receiver back in the cradle, Asher."

  He turned his head. Fairport stood in the office doorway, a pistol in his gray- gloved hand.

  Nine

  Asher stroked a corner of his mustache. "I don't know," he said, "but I can guess. And my guess is: Constantinople."

  Asher didn't move. "I'll use it," Fairport warned. He came slowly into the room, circling wide to stay out of Asher's reach and keeping the pistol pointed, until he was close enough to the desk to stretch out his free hand and push down the cradle, breaking the connection.

  Asher settled from kneeling to crouching again beside the desk, his legs gathered under him, the handset still dangling from his grip. "Even against one of your own countrymen?" It was the cant of the Great Game-honor on the playing fields of Eton and God Save the King. But the Game was one Fairport had been playing for years as well, and there was a chance he would still think in its terms. And Asher was curious about the terms in which he did think.

  "This matter goes beyond country, Asher," said Fairport softly. He backed a little, out of immediate arm's reach. "It's all you can think of, isn't it? All that sleek brute Ignace can think of. Like savages, both of you, tearing up volumes of Plato to stuff into cracks in the roof to keep the rain out. What we have found is the greatest revelation, the greatest discovery, in the history of mankind, and all he can think of is how such a man can be used in Macedonia and against the Russians in Bulgaria -and all you can think of is how to kill such a man, that the balance won't tip against you in the 'Great Game.' You don't understand. You refuse to understand."

  "I understand how much damage a man like that can do, if he allies himself with any government. And I understand the kind of fee a government would pay such a man."

  Fairport looked completely blank. Then, when Asher raised his brows, the old man flushed an unhealthy, blotchy pink. "Oh. Oh, that. I'm sure it's a condition that can be rectified with proper medical investigation... I've found astonishing virtue in yogurt as a food of longevity, and in Chinese ginseng. They won't always be drinkers of human blood..."

  "I'm sure that lacemaker Ernchester killed last night would be glad to hear it," Asher replied grimly, though some objective corner of his mind had to fight not to laugh at the image of Lionel Grippen, Master Vampire of London, supping on a dish of yogurt and ginseng tea. "And don't you think there might be vampires who're as fond of the taste of human death as they are of human blood?"

  The old man's mouth flinched. "That's the most revolting thing I've ever heard!

  They can't possibly be... No one in his senses could be. They'll welcome that liberation as much as any drunkard would welcome the liberation from drink. And in the meantime there are the physically and socially unfit-"

  "You mean traitors?" No other sounds in the house, though there was a dim clashing of shrubbery as someone passed by under the window. If he could disarm him without a shot being fired, there might still be time.

  Fairport drew himself up. "I am not a traitor," he said with dignity.

  Asher sighed in genuine disgust. "I never met a double agent who was."

  "I have never passed information along to Baron Karolyi which would hurt any of our contacts or our agents..."

  "How would you know?" Asher demanded tiredly. "You know nothing about politics, you barely read a newspaper, or at least you didn't when I was here. You don't think, if he can make a deal with vampires-if he can blackmail Ernchester into creating other vampires, fledglings loyal to the Austrian government- they won't eventually be used against us here? Or back at home?"

  "That won't happen!" Fairport cried. "I won't let it happen! Asher, Karolyi is only a means to an end. These petty politics, a handful of military secrets that are going to be useless in three years, they're a small price to pay for the knowledge, the learning, that will free man, finally, from the grip of age, and debility, and death!

  "Asher, look at me!" He gestured like a frustrated child with his miniature fist. "Look at me! I've been an old man since I was thirty-five! Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste..." He shook his head. "And every day for th
e past twenty years I have dealt with men who, like me, have felt that cold, awful terror of knowing their bodies are failing them. Men stumbling as they try to outrace the Pale Horse. I've tried everything, traveled to the far corners of the world, seeking out those who have conquered age-trying to find what it is that makes the body fail, that cripples us, blinds us, deafens us, renders us white-haired and flatulent and impotent and brittle."

  Behind his thick lenses the blue eyes glittered suddenly, and genuine venom seeped into his voice. "What it is that wears out some while others continue to gorge and rut and dance into their eighties, their-"

  Asher struck, thrusting off his long legs like lightning, smashing aside Fairport's gun hand at the same moment he drove a fist into the little man's chin. He struck with all he had, to carry him across the distance between them quicker than Fairport could react and shoot, and the impact hurled the professor back and to the floor, as if Asher had struck a child. There wasn't time to think or regret-in another moment Karolyi or one of the footmen might enter, and at that point Asher knew he would die. Karolyi, unlike Fairport, was not a man to justify or explain.

  He scooped up the gun, transferred Fairport's key ring from the old man's coat pocket to his own, pulled free the old man's four-in-hand and used it to bind his wrists behind him, then stuffed Fairport's handkerchief into his mouth for a gag. He took another moment to drag him behind the desk, keeping low still, out of the range of the windows... Really, he thought, half regretful, the man had always been out of his league...

  And smelled smoke.

  Gray smoke was rolling along the ceiling of the upstairs hall. Asher cursed. He would almost certainly be caught if he tried to get Fairport out of there, but there was nothing for it, and the man's halfhearted interference back at the pension in Vienna had almost certainly saved his life. He glanced out the long windows behind the desk, ascertained that there was no one visible in the gardens below, and kicked them open, dragging the little man out onto the balcony where the fresh air would revive him and he'd be able to hump himself down the outside stairs. Then he ducked back inside. Crimson reflections on the bare boughs showed him where two or three of the downstairs rooms were already in flames, and, even as he watched, he saw yellow light flare in the dark windows of the old stable building.

  Arson, thought Asher in alarm. Two places at once. Who the hell...? He flung himself down the stairs, Fairport's gun in hand, the smoke already tearing his eyes and eating at his lungs. Under the stucco the old house was mostly wood and would go fast. Downstairs the smoke was worse, the heat pounding on Asher's face and making him dizzy as he raced along the corridor to the scullery. As he ran he thought, If this is Karolyi's work, why let Fairport stay free? Or has Anthea somehow started this?

  The coachman's body lay in the scullery door. His eyes and mouth were both wide in a look of utter shock. His collar had been torn open, his shirt pulled back to reveal the hairy masses of neck and chest. Wounds bulged like tattered white mouths from ear to collarbone, but there was almost no blood.

  Asher felt as if his heart shrank and turned to ice in his chest.

  He crossed the scullery, looked swiftly out the rear door to the yard and saw what looked like another body in the shadows under the outside stair. Smoke seared his nostrils, weighted his rib cage. He couldn't tell if there was a smell of blood or not.

  Not Anthea. And not Ernchester.

  The others. The vampires of Vienna.

  The ones who had followed him here.

  Sweat was rolling down his face as he shoved back the shelving, ran down the stair into the cellars cool abyss. He struck a match as he thrust through the door at the bottom; Ernchester, pacing the silver cage like an animal, wheeled, his eyes flashing in the tiny speck of the flame. "They're here," he said hoarsely. "I feel them. The house-they've fired the house..."

  He flicked through the barred silver door the moment Asher had it open, twisting his body so as not to touch.

  "Anthea!"

  He started for the door, then turned back, catching Asher by the elbow in a grip that came close to breaking the bone. "Did you find her? She isn't in this house, I'd have known, I'd have felt her, read her dreams..."

  Asher recalled something Ysidro had said to him once, about being unable to sense the presence of people deep in cellars through the muffling weight of the earth.

  "She'll be in the crypt under the stable."

  Flame light poured down the stairs, bloody on the earl's face; a thin face and not particularly an aristocratic one, with an indefinable air of age despite the fact that, like Anthea, he appeared to be no more than thirty-five. Asher did notice, as they raced up the stairs into the choking inferno of the scullery, that at no time did sweat break from the smooth skin of the vampire's brow.

  Asher crossed the yard at a run, but the vampire earl was ahead of him, moving with an insectile, weightless speed, huge bounds like a gazelle. Ernchester stopped, however, in front of the burning stable, hands raised before his face and his blue-gray eyes sick with horror and shock.

  The earl followed him without question, however, circling the building to the rear, where the flames were less. Asher drove his boot through a cellar window, dropping into what had been a boiler room. The place smelled of dirt and damp brick, and the thin, sickly odor of kerosene that lifted the hair on Asher's neck. He dug another match from his pocket, scratched it on the wall behind him.

  There were barrels of the stuff, ranged along the wall beyond the hunched black monstrosity of the generator itself. He heard the earl whisper, "God's death!" behind him, and pointed toward what looked to be the door of a closet, nearly invisible in the shadows by the coal bin.

  "Through there. We have a few minutes. The fire's just caught."

  The door was locked. Ernchester ripped the entire mechanism-lock plate, handle, bolt- free of the wood without visible effort and threw it clanging to the brick floor, then vanished like a moth in the darkness.

  Asher had been in the crypt many times. Like the subcellar beneath the scullery, Fairport used it to conceal people who weren't supposed to be in Vienna or who had to leave the town in a hurry. Because of its remoteness from the main house- and the patients who usually resided there-it had also been used for meetings, if instructions had to be passed along with minimum risk of being seen.

  He'd felt his way halfway down the boxed-in stairway when yellow light glowed at the bottom. Through the doorway he saw Ernchester setting on the table a newly lighted oil lamp and turning back to the coffin trunk that filled half of the room.

  "She's in here," the earl said softly and knelt beside the trunk. He passed his hands along the lid, pressed his cheek to the leather. His eyes closed. The flesh around them rumpled and compressed, like an old man's. Then he moved his head and looked up over his shoulder at Asher, standing in the doorway. "Can you take an end?"

  It was awkward, getting the trunk around the corners of the stair. Even in the few minutes they had been in the crypt, the air in the boiler room had heated, and the smoke there was growing thick. Like the house, the stable was wood, the roof and walls went up like tinder. When they dragged and manhandled the trunk upstairs, they found the ground floor suffocatingly hot, filled with blinding smoke under a vicious rain of cinder and sparks. Asher coughed, gasping for breath, his grip on the trunk slipping. As his knees gave under him, he wondered suddenly what chemicals Fairport had in the laboratories here and what fumes they might be adding to the miasma of smoke.

  He tried to get to his feet, and fell.

  Above the roaring of the fire overhead he heard the scratch of the trunk's brass- bound corners as Ernchester-unbreathing, undead, desperate to save his wife at all costs-dragged it toward the door and safety.

  Black unconsciousness rolled over Asher like a wave. He tried to stand, then realized that the air was a little cooler down near the floor. Inhaling was like trying to breathe kerosene. Kerosene, he thought dizzily. When the roof goes, it'll take the floor with it, and th
e whole place will turn into a furnace... The thought that he'd probably be killed by the falling roof before the kerosene scattered the building over half an acre of the Vienna Woods was not much of a comfort. At one point he thought he was crawling, but a moment later realized he was lying with his cheek to the superheating linoleum of the floor, a fallen cinder burning the back of his left hand.

  Hands as cold and strong as machinery took hold of his arms, lifting and dragging him as if he were a bale of sticks. The smell of smoke seemed stronger outside, perhaps because his lungs were working again. He stumbled, trying to get his feet under him, and clutched at the shoulders that supported his arm. He felt them flinch.

  Silver, he thought. The chain on his wrist would sting through Ernchester's coat.

  The trunk lay just within the compound gate. It was still shut. Ernchester must have turned back the moment he'd dragged it out of range of the fire.

  "She's asleep."

  Asher raised his head, his brown hair hanging in his eyes, his face burning in the cold air under a film of sweat, soot, and grime. Ernchester knelt beside the trunk, one arm resting along its lid, the reflection of the flames imparting gory color to his narrow face, glittering in his close-cropped fair hair, his haunted, weary eyes.

  "Drugged, I think," Ernchester went on softly. "That is... as well. Thank you."

  Asher looked back across the gardens. The front part of the main house was in flames. The rear wing, where Fairport's office and his own rooms had been, was still intact. By the flaring light two bodies were clearly visible on the gravel paths.

  He fumbled in his pocket for Fairport's keys, found two that would open the trunk's heavy latches. Ernchester touched his hand lightly as he would have opened the lid. "Not yet. The air will revive her, and I don't think I could stand that. I won't do that to her." The earl straightened his back, though he remained kneeling, one hand atop the other on the lid of the trunk. "Take her away from here. Go with her back to England. Take her out of this place. I beg you." He closed his eyes. "I beg you."