02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2

by Barbara Hambly

  Lydia turned, startled, the moss-green velvet of her dressing gown weighting her arms. Tomorrow she'd present herself, not only to the Right Honorable G. A. Lowther, but, armed with Mr. Halliwell's letters of introduction, to Sir Burnwell Clapham, the attache in charge of what were nebulously referred to as "affairs." It was entirely possible, she thought, that Jamie would be there, or Jamie would be somewhere close. Oh, yes, Dr. Asher. He arrived last week...

  Please, she thought, shivering inside. Please...

  Margaret stood awkwardly in the doorway of the single large bedroom the two women would share. As in Vienna, in Belgrade and Sofia, it was not by their choice- even had relations between them not been strained, Lydia would have preferred to be spared her companion's nocturnal sighs and mutterings in dreams.

  But in no house had more than one bed been made up, nor could the servants anywhere be induced to do so. In the small connecting chamber, Lydia had already found the dismantled pieces of a massive four-poster that looked as if it had been ordered from Berlin at the height of the Gothic craze. Its sister ship filled most of this room, the bright pink-and-blue local work of its coverlet incongruously gay; the dressing table, mirrored armoire, and marble-topped washstand had clearly been ordered en suite, and though the room was large, with a bay projecting over the street, they gave it a cluttered feeling, jammed and awkward.

  At least, thought Lydia, they weren't strewn with the porcelain knickknacks featured in their Belgrade lodgings, and the whitewashed plaster walls were free of garish oleographs of Orthodox saints.

  She turned from the armoire, the robe still in her hands. "What?"

  "You forbade him..." Margaret hesitated, and her wide blue eyes shifted as she sought another word. "You forbade him to hunt," she said at last. "As a condition of letting him travel with you, of letting him protect you." Her voice stammered and she twisted at her black-gloved hands. "Now that we've reached our destination, you really don't have any right to continue... to continue..."

  Frozen in mid-motion, Lydia only stared at her, too shocked to speak.

  Margaret, who had clearly hoped that she would say something and spare her the completion of her sentence-and in fact the completion of her own thought-trailed off uncertainly, and for a moment there was only the clutch and jerk of her breath. Then she burst out, "You don't understand him!"

  "You keep saying that." Lydia crossed to the bed and dropped the robe beside the nightgown the maid had laid out, and began to unbutton her shirtwaist. The tiny pearl fastenings of the sleeves were awkward, but she'd dismissed the servant after she'd unpacked for them, and didn't know enough modern Greek to summon her back. She wondered what the servants had made of the silver knives and silver- loaded gun among the masses of petticoats, skirts, shirtwaists, lingerie, and dinner dresses-wondered, too, if she could communicate to them a request to purchase garlic, whitethorn, and wild rose on the morrow. Or as Ysidro's servants, would they refuse to obey such a request?

  Margaret reached out and took her by the sleeve, her face bracketed with lines of distress deepened by the lamps' heavy shadows. "You can't forbid him to hunt!" she insisted desperately. "It isn't as if he... as if the people he... he takes..."

  "You mean 'kills'?"

  She flinched from the word but lashed back almost at once with, "It isn't as if they didn't deserve it!"

  Lydia only stood for a time, her fingers still on the pearl buttons but her task forgotten. When she spoke, her voice was very quiet. "Did he tell you that?"

  "I know it!" The governess was on the brink of tears. "Yes, he told me! I mean, I know- I mean, in the past-in past life-times-in dreams I've had about our former lives together... And don't tell me they're all lies," she veered away suddenly, "because I know they're not! I know you think they are, but they're really not! They're not!"

  She flung herself in front of Lydia when Lydia tried to turn away, her face red, blotchy as if with the approach of tears. "You see, if a vampire doesn't... doesn't hunt to completion..."

  She was still avoiding the word "kill."

  "They feed on the energy, the life, the vital force!" she went on in a rush. "It's the life they take that gives their minds the powers they need to protect themselves!"

  "You mean to kill other people?"

  "You're starving him to death!" Margaret cried. "Robbing him of his powers to defend himself from danger, now, here, where the peril is the greatest! That's why vampires take so long to hunt, or at least why he takes so long to hunt, he told me, because he's hunting the streets of the city to find a thief, a murderer, a... a blackguard who deserves to die! You know the world is full of them. He's hunted that way for hundreds and hundreds of years! It's only from those kind of people that he takes the life he needs! And he's too honorable to go against his given word to you..."

  "Did he ask you to speak to me?" Lydia's voice was as cold to her own ears as the silver on her neck.

  "No." Margaret sniffled and wiped furiously at her eyes, fighting not to break down in front of this slender auburn and white reed of a girl, this spoiled heiress- beauty with her waist unbuttoned to show the heavy links of silver chain, row upon row of them, around the stem of her throat.

  "But I can see!" she sobbed. "Every day I can see. You beat him at cards all the time now..."

  "I've had a week of continuous practice," Lydia pointed out.

  "You could never beat him if he weren't fighting to keep the other powers of his mind intact! To preserve himself..."

  "Thank you very much." Head aching with weariness-for it was close to three in the morning-Lydia stepped around her. It was true that Ysidro had grown very gaunt- true, too, that a week ago he would never have dropped the cards, never would even have allowed the girls to see him gather them.

  He could not mask things from them as he had. Or was he saving his strength for other matters?

  "Margaret, do we need to talk about this now? I'm tired, you're tired, I suspect you don't mean everything you're saying-"

  "How can you be so blind!" Margaret went on frantically, unheeding, following her back to the bed. "Can't you see? He can't turn people's minds aside in the train stations like he used to, or listen down the train cars, reading their dreams..."

  Lydia's overwrought temper snapped. "Or put little scenes of dancing the waltz- which wasn't even invented in the sixteenth century-into yours? I'm sorry," she said immediately, as Margaret burst into a storm of tears at this brutally accurate accusation. "I shouldn't have said that..."

  "You don't understand!" Margaret shouted wildly. "You don't understand him! All you care about is finding your boring old stick of a husband and helping him play spies, and you can't see the great-souled, noble, lonely, tragic hero you're destroying!"

  She blundered from the room like a bee trying to get out of a potting shed. Lydia heard the banister creak as she stumbled against it, heard the running judder of her footsteps descend the two long, C-shaped flights of stairs.

  "Margaret!" She grabbed her spectacles from the dressing table and ran after her, catching handfuls of taffeta skirt to race down the steps, the tile of them cold under her stockinged feet. Below her she heard the door bang, and she followed, appalled, into the covered carriageway in time to see the heavy outer gate swing shut on its hinges.

  "Margaret!" Through her concern she thought obliquely, Well, that does it for this pair of stockings-even in the relatively clean suburb of Pera the streets were nothing to explore unshod. Two small sconces illuminated the courtyard behind her, and the candle before a saint's icon in a niche flecked the underside of the carriageway's brick vault with wavering light. Past the gate the street was like a cave a thousand feet beneath the earth.

  Lydia stopped on the threshold, as if that abyssal dark were a chasm gaping before her feet.

  Margaret gasped somewhere, and there was a suggestion of movement, pale in blackness. The shred of moonlight picked out a white face, like a skull's, a scrap of spiderweb hair. A moment later Lydia's eyes, adjusting
, made out the white hands, holding Margaret by the wrists. Margaret threw herself wordlessly to his chest, clutching and weeping.

  Ysidro must have spoken, so softly Lydia did not hear. Lydia herself had been exasperated to the slapping point with Margaret's clinging, mooning, and silent reproaches, but she had never seen the vampire anything but patient and understanding with the woman he had made his slave. Of course he understood her, thought Lydia bitterly, watching as Ysidro bent his head to listen to some muffled, hysterical rant; watching Margaret's skinny hands grab at his sleeves, his shoulders, the long folds of his cloak. If he hadn't understood her, he couldn't have baited the trap.

  Illuminated only by the frail gleam from the window above, they seemed figures in a distant stage show, almost like a dream. Margaret flung back her head, gazing up into Ysidro's face, then with a passionate gesture she ripped open her shirtwaist, baring her throat and her white, soft-fleshed bosom. "Take me!"

  Lydia heard her gasp. "Even unto death, if that is what you need!"

  What Ysidro replied Lydia didn't know. But she saw him draw the edges of Margaret's shirtwaist together, put his hands on her shoulders, speaking quietly as she bowed her head. When he began to guide her back along the lane to the gate once more, Lydia retreated soundlessly into the courtyard, concealing herself in the dense shadows of the pomegranate tree, so that Margaret would be spared the embarrassment of knowing that the encounter had been observed. For a moment they stood framed in the carriageway's arch. Ysidro must have said something else, for Lydia saw Margaret nod and push up her eyeglasses to mop her cheeks. Then the door shut behind her as she went in.

  Lydia heard nothing for a time, though she knew that Ysidro had not gone inside; and indeed, moments later, the dimmest crack of light showed when he opened the gate again and stood for a moment looking out. That slit vanished; he emerged into the courtyard like an errant ghost and crossed to her hiding place as if he had seen her all along.

  "I could wish her to have reserved such theatrics for another place and time." "Yes." Irritated as she had been with Margaret, her greatest anger still lay toward him. She folded her arms against the cold. "It's a nuisance, isn't it, when people decide to feel more than you've scheduled them to feel?" "It is." He might have been agreeing that today was Saturday. The moon was sinking; only the glow from the votives by the kitchen door showed her the garden before them. "Yet the dreams she dreams are not all of my making. And I admit I will feel safer to know that the two of you sleep in the one bed, which I trust you will hang about, as you did in Sofia and Belgrade, with those stinking weeds you have carried with you since Paris."

  The chilly breeze from the Asian hills stirred the last leaves high overhead. A stray breath of it flared the votive lights, showing her briefly Ysidro's face, eyes darkened by shadow to skull-like sockets and cheekbones hollowed to bruises. Remembering what he had said about mirrors, Lydia wondered suddenly if he was actually thinning away before her to a wraith of ectoplasm and bone, or if what was thinning was simply his ability to make her believe that she saw him other than he truly was.

  "The Galata slums at the base of the hill and the high streets of Pera with their embassies and their banks, they all smell of vampires." The flame repeated itself, cold yellow crystal in his eyes. "Standing just now on the steps of the Yusek Kalderim, I stretched forth my mind across the Golden Horn, and the city lies under such miasma as I have never encountered before. The minds of vampires, the mind of the master, other minds... I can smell them, heft them like silk in my hand. But everything is blocked, shadowed, wreathed in illusion and deception, as if every card on the board were down-turned, and one had to wager all one had on a hand of three."

  He frowned and turned to look once more at the gate. Involuntarily Lydia stepped closer to him, her anger forgotten. "Are you sure? You've said yourself you aren't as... as able to perceive..."

  A wry line sketched itself in the corner of his mouth, the echo of a living man's ironic smile. "A regret, mistress? A concern for the fact that you have asked me not to kill to preserve my own life, only to discover that such abstinence may prevent me from preserving yours?"

  She studied his face a moment, trying to read something in the twin sulfur glints of his eyes. They were like a dragon's in their hollows. "No," she said. "A concern, maybe, but not a regret."

  "No," he echoed softly. "A lady worthy to her bones."

  It was, she realized, the first time he had spoken to her of her stipulation.

  Then he shook his head and looked back to the gate and the inky, pitch blackness that lay beyond.

  "And Jamie?" She found she could barely speak his name. It was hard even to ask, for fear Ysidro would tell her what she had dreaded for days to hear. His brow flinched, just barely, in a frown. "If he is here, he is not in Pera." There was almost hesitation, an unwillingness in his voice. "If he sleeps on the Stamboul shore..." He shook his head. "No, my perceptions are impaired, but this is not a matter of degree. This-shadow, this-blurring that lies over the city... it is something that emanates from the vampires themselves. An obscurity, gathered to hide aught within it. A fog, as they say the Undead can summon..."

  His smile had been-almost-a living man's smile. The shadow in those dragon eyes was suddenly, fleetingly, a living man's fear. "Tomorrow night will be soon enough to cross, to walk and listen in the darkness, to see what more can be descried at nearer quarters." He drew his cloak more closely around him, a subconscious gesture, the white of his gloves against the dark wool like frost on black rock.

  "But it is clear to me that something very strange is taking place in this city, and I had rather our romantic friend had not cried aloud, even in English, regarding hunting and killing and the drinking of blood. I think it best such things not be spoken of, not even here in Pera. Not even by light of day."

  Twelve

  The voices of the muezzins woke Asher: "There is no God but God; Mohammed is His Prophet..." He knew the words, but could not tease them from the somber roll of sound.

  Arched windows had at one time opened all along the room, five times the length of its narrow width, but centuries ago these had been bricked shut. The windows in the drums of the five shallow domes above were, as far as he could ascertain, barred with silver, though it was hard to be sure. By day he heard no voices, no clip of donkey hooves or creak of wheels from below, and only occasionally and far off, the barking of Constantinople's infamous dogs. Now and then the wind would bring him a street vendor's cry in sawed-off Romaic Greek. Day or night, the closest sounds were the squawking of the seagulls and the yowl of cats.

  Through the lattice the sky was the color of tiger lilies, the light momentarily a soft and fading salmon hue on the blue tiles that ringed the domes.

  Asher did not face Mecca-though he'd deduced in what direction it lay-nor repeat the words intended by the muezzin, but sitting among the cushions and blankets of the divan, he prayed. He was very frightened.

  The light in the room had deepened when he finished, bleeding away to shadow.

  Because of the domes, the room filled with darkness from the bottom up. In the center of the floor the rectangular, blue-tiled basin of what must have been a fountain or fish pool seemed fathoms deep in the gloom, a horror from which anything might emerge. Asher scratched a match that he took from his pocket, to light the wick of one of the few bronze lamps that still occupied the serried ranks of niches in the wall.

  The glow did little to dispel the dreadful brooding dimness. He reached for his watch to wind it, as was his habit, but of course it had been taken, along with the silver chains that had protected his wrists and throat.

  He dressed and washed, and stowed the bedding in which he'd slept in one of the room's shallow cupboards, listening all the while to night fall within the silent house. In full dark-enough so that a white thread could not be distinguished from a black, as the Koran said-he heard the key turn in the old- fashioned lock.

  He moved as far from the door as he could a
nd deliberately willed his mind not to feel, not to succumb to the odd, lazy distraction of the vampire power. Still he did not see them enter the room. He had the vague impression that he had dreamed once about standing in a darkened gallery, watching a door inlaid with brass and ivory as it began to open...

  But it seemed to him that one moment he was stepping back against a pillar, and the next, they were all around him, binding his wrists behind him with narrow silk cord. Their eyes in the lamplight were the eyes of rats, their flesh dead clay on his. They had not fed.

  "So who are you, Englis?" asked the one who had been pointed out to him last night as Zardalu. Beardless, boneless as an empty stocking, he had red-painted fingernails and a Circassian's bright blue eyes. "Yesternight I took you for one of the Bey's mikaniki, and I thought, This is one he intends to make one of us, to look after this thing they make in the crypts, this dastgah." His eyes slid sidelong at Asher under painted lids; and knowing they could hear it, Asher tried to calm the pounding of his heart.

  "And now the Bey has given us other instructions concerning you. What are we to think?"

  "You really think he'd join another to us for the sake of one of his experiments?" Jamila Baykus-the Baykus Kadine, she had been called, stick-thin with a strange, disheveled wildness that was somehow very like her namesake owl- put her head to one side and considered him with enormous demon eyes. Half her hair was braided or curled, dressed on jeweled combs, the rest hanging in a huge malt-colored tangle to her thighs. Pearls were caught in it, like shells glimpsed in a jetsam of kelp; she had a necklace of rat bones and diamonds around her throat. "Is that what you are, Englis?" The finger she reached up to touch the underside of his chin-for she was no taller than a twelve-year-old English girl-was like a twig brought in from out-of-doors, icy with the ice of the night.

  "He said we weren't to question him." That was Haralpos, a one-eyed tough who had been a janissary. He held up a scarf, fine cotton, creased and filthy and patched with dark stains.