02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2

by Barbara Hambly

  "And did he say I was not to question you?" Asher had studied Persian and enough Arabic to approximate the thick Osmanli they spoke and make himself understood.

  Zardalu's eyebrows tweaked into circumflexes of malicious delight, and his fangs gleamed in a smile. "Oh, what a clever Englis. Of course you may question us.

  Who are we but your fellow servants of the Deathless Lord?"

  "He said silence," Haralpos insisted. The dark Habib and the voluptuous and silent Russian girl, Pelageya, stirred uneasily. Asher knew of whom the janissary spoke and knew the others had a right to be uneasy. "He said to walk in silence, like the fog. Would we have this infidel cry out to be saved?"

  "Would it do me any good if I did?" countered Asher. He turned to Zardalu, whom he sensed to be the most dangerous of them, and asked him, "What dastgah is this?" The word meant a scientific apparatus, which could mean anything from an astrolabe to a chemical experiment.

  "How should I know that, Englis? The Deathless Lord has put up silver bars across the cellar which lies beneath the old baths that are no longer used. He has veiled the place with his mind, to keep us from thinking about it, even as he has veiled this entire city." The sweet alto voice sank lower, and as the vampire leaned close, his hair and clothing breathed patchouli and decay.

  "He has veiled the place, yet still we feel the cold of the ice that he has men bring in during the day for his experiments. We smell the naft, the alkol, the stinks of what he does... even as we hear the footfalls of the workmen, down below in the crypts, as we sleep. Does he think we do not?"

  "Come," Haralpos said impatiently. "Now." He reached out with the scarf, and Zardalu touched his wrist.

  "Our friend James has said-may we call you James, Englis?- that he knows better than to cry out. The Bey will surely punish us if he escapes, and so even an escape's attempt will mean-oh, not death-" His cold knuckle brushed the scars under Asher's ear. "-but surely some unpleasant experiences with tweezers, or water, or hot sand." The red nails clinched suddenly hard on the earlobe, cutting stronger and stronger like the grip of a machine, Asher gritting his teeth, shutting his eyes, forcing his mind away from the pain. Just when he thought the claws were about to tear away the flesh, Zardalu released him and smiled a fanged smile as he opened his eyes once more. "And he knows he will not escape."

  There was blood on Zardalu's nails. The vampire held Asher's gaze with his own as he licked them slowly clean.

  They led him out into an open gallery two floors above a courtyard paved in stone. An old han, or caravansary, Asher guessed as they descended the long flights of tiled steps. A solitary lamp burned in a wall niche at the bottom of the flight, outlining the arch of a short passageway that led through and down into an octagonal vestibule whose mosaic floors, though long defaced, still showed parts of Byzantine figures. He had crossed that vestibule yesterday afternoon, in the midst of the men who had surrounded him in an alley of the market district, a knife pressed to his back. They had said nothing to him, but had not needed to. The age of the place, as much as the absence of lamps from the niches and mirrors from the walls, had told him what house he had been brought to.

  Last night in the flickering lamplight of the upstairs chamber, Olumsiz Bey had said to him, "It is unfair to keep you utterly a prisoner, when my house has libraries and baths and amusements for an intelligent man." Asher had been lying on the divan then, bound hand and foot and more frightened than he had been in his life.

  "But the House of Oleanders is an ancient house, and a large house. There are rooms in which no lamp has been kindled for a great many years, and my children come and go freely in the dark." The Bey gestured to the fledglings with his right hand, coarse and square and covered with rings whose jewels had been carved long before the faceting of gems was devised. In his left he carried a weapon that Asher had not seen him set down, a halberd five and a half feet long whose naked eighteen-inch blade was wrought of shining silver, honed to a razor's keenness and backed along its spine with slanting teeth like a fish's ribs.

  "Thus I believe it best that Sayyed here go with you." The Deathless Lord's wave brought forward an impassive servant, one of the three who had kidnapped him yesterday. "I think," the Master of Constantinople had added, as the living servant drew a knife and cut away Asher's bonds, "that you will find he is your best friend."

  Asher understood. For several hours Sayyed had stood in the doorway of the library, watching him while he explored the inlaid cupboards and read the titles of the books within them- Arabic, German, Latin-by the light of a dozen lamps and candles. The servant made no comment when Asher had taken a volume of Procopius' Secret History and a bronze candlestick back to his room with him, and that was as much as Asher had sought to accomplish. The candlestick was ornamented with tendrils of vine wrought of bronze wire, which Asher had pried loose to work into picklocks as soon as the sun was up.

  The interview with Olumsiz Bey was in his mind now, as Haralpos bound his eyes with the dirty scarf and he was guided along, bound and blind and surrounded by whispering voices of those the Bey had warned him to avoid. In his mind, too, was the silver weapon the Bey had carried, and what it meant that he carried it. Asher tried counting turns and footsteps, and concentrated on the feel of the ground underfoot. But as the Bey had said, the house was a large one and composed, from what little Asher had seen, of several old hans, minor palaces of Turk or Byzantine construction. They passed through two open courtyards-or one courtyard twice, for the brick underfoot felt the same-up and down steps, through a place where water splished thinly under his boots and another where loose boards rang hollowly, though only with his own tread despite the cold grip of hands on his elbows. It did him no good to count steps and turnings, for it seemed to him that he woke, like a sleepwalker, to find himself on his feet outside, with the stink of the Constantinople streets in his nostrils and the barking of the dogs louder in his ears. Eerily, he had no sense of the vampires around him. It was as if he walked alone, save that their hands were on his shoulders, his arms, his neck, and that now and then they spoke.

  "Can you see the Bey making such a one into one of us?" Haralpos' deep voice was close in his ear as they made their way down a steep street toward the sounds of the harbor. "An infidel who tinkers with machines? He has grown picky, the Deathless Lord. He has not brought one into our ranks since Tinnin came to grief."

  "Tinnin was a scholar," breathed a voice he recognized as belonging to the Baykus Kadme. "A Nubian philosophe, like those in Europe in those days, insolent even to kings... Ah, but sweet. Sweet. He knew the wherefore of those experiments, not just tinkering with the bits of metal and wire."

  "Perhaps our James knows the wherefore as well?" Zardalu purred. "Perhaps our Bey does not trust us?"

  Rising ground steep under his feet, then steps-somewhere seagulls yarked. The House of Oleanders lay a stone's throw from the government ministries on the shoulder of the Second Hill, but the market quarter between the Place d'Armes and the mosque of the Sultana Valide was one of the oldest and most tangled districts in the town. As in many Islamic cities, after the prayers of nightfall the inhabitants retreated to their houses and barred the doors; the Undead and their captive walked unopposed.

  "High time he trusted someone," Haralpos grumbled.

  "He didn't trust Zarifa, either," the Baykus Kadine said, her voice like weed stalks and bones. "Nor Shahar, and you saw what came to them. It is a deep game he plays, our Deathless Lord, and deeper now with this new little pet." Her nails, inch-long claws on those skinny child's hands, flicked his neck.

  One of them must have felt him listening, sensed his mind, for it seemed to him almost that someone blew drugged smoke into his thoughts, so he had to fight to remain even a little aware of his surroundings. His mind drifted, hazed with strange impressions and alien smells, but when it cleared, the salt tang of the sea and the mournful clang of ships' bells was gone, replaced by livelier chatter in the distance and the music of the Gypsy quarter. The
y were making for the walls.

  He told himself if they were going to kill him where the Bey could not see, they would surely have done so already.

  It didn't help.

  Steeper ground, ankle-breaking potholes and rock underfoot, and the occasional brush of broken stonework against his shoulders. Once, someone pressed a hand to his head, making him duck. Then cold sea wind, and the rustle of trees. When his eyes were unbound, he could make out all around him the pale shapes of funerary steles, like clustering finger bones in black blots of tree shadow, and the heavy loom of stone turbe tombs. The moon had not yet risen, but stars glimmered feebly, so he could barely glimpse the hueless bulk that reared behind him: old watchtowers, decaying ramparts, a fosse thick with weed and shadow and the ghosts of men who'd died defending the walls. Black on black, touched only by the frailest of lights, the city's hills offered domes and minarets to an iron sky.

  Only Zardalu stood beside him, smiling a little. His old-fashioned clothing- pantaloons, tunic, pelisse of black velvet-glittered with jewels. "Now you will walk a little among the tombs, James, my friend, no?" Effortlessly the painted nails slit through the cords around his wrists. Under the rouge and the paint on his eyelids, all rendered to dark smudges by the night, the white face was like something from a horrible dream, equivocal and boneless as the rest of his body. He shook back his long hair, dressed in womanly curls, and earrings flashed wetly in it. "Parade yourself, as those Undead who find themselves in this city must, in politeness, parade themselves that the Deathless Lord may look on them and give them his leave or no to hunt. I hope," he added, with a corpse's widening grin, "that you understand the rules." "I think I do." Asher rubbed his wrists. Though smooth, the cord had been drawn tight and his swollen fingers were nearly numb. The thought of trying to make it back to the city walls, of playing hide-and-seek among the ruined passages of the abandoned towers with those who could see in midnight-black, had only to be framed to be discarded at once and utterly. Something flicked at his hair, like a sigh. He spun as if it had been the touch of a knife point, but there was nothing to be seen.

  Zardalu laughed, a soundless gapping of the rubber mouth. His fangs were long and pointed, like a wolf's.

  "So who are you in truth, Englis?" he asked softly. "And who is he whom the Bey thinks will risk himself to come to you? Since the waning of summer he has said, 'Find him and kill him.' Now he says, the one who comes to the Englis, bring that one to me."

  He gestured around him at the crumbling turbes, the steles with turbans-or stylized veils-carved on them leaning every which way, as if a giant child had randomly stuck a thousand thousand enormous matchsticks in the unkempt grass.

  "Are you his servant? Or is it some secret that you know?" The blanched eyes, dirty ice in the starlight, seemed for a time to be the eunuch's only reality, the rest of him a thing of smoke and dreams. Asher felt on his mind the narcotic pressure of the vampire's power, an almost impossible weight of sleep.

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Who is this interloper, Englis? And what has it to do with the dastgah and the silver bars that guard the way to the crypt?"

  With an effort, Asher pushed the soft cloudiness away. "If your master is going to punish you for asking," he said, "I think it would behoove me not to answer."

  Zardalu flung up his hands in an exaggerated mime of amusement, but his anger was palpable. "Behold the wise man!" he cried, soundless as the night wind. "Now all he needs is a little bell, like the goat they tie to summon the tiger."

  Asher felt the grip of his mind and tried to throw it off again, tried to follow where the tall vampire went, but could not. It was as if he woke suddenly again, standing alone in the frost among the rotting tombs.

  They were all there somewhere, he thought. Zardalu and Jamila Baykus; Haralpos and Habib and Pelageya: watching him. An ambush. A trap. Anthea had told him of the strange condition, a sort of mental spell she sensed over the city, that prevented her from feeling the presence of any other vampire-the work, she had said, frightened, of a great master or masters.

  As he walked cautiously among the tombs, groping where the somber cypresses blotted even the wan glow of the sky, he sought to absorb as much of this landscape as he could. Had Anthea fled their lodging after his disappearance to hide in such a place?

  Or had his encounter with the men of the Sultan's guard, who had picked him up in the courtyard of the Mosque of the Bajazid, been engineered to leave her unguarded?

  Then why kidnap him less than an hour after his release, before he had even returned to her? Why use him, as he was being used now, as bait?

  Was it for her, even, that the trap was set?

  He stopped to rest on the low flat tomb of some prince or noble, like a marble bench inscribed in flowing Arabic script and terminating in a narrow stele surmounted by the figure of a turban. The turban signified a man. The fact that it was depicted as tilted to one side meant the dead man had been strangled by the Sultan's order. The marble was starred white where bullets had struck it when the army came through here to their final battle with the Sultan's forces in July.

  And that final battle, he thought, had abruptly terminated whatever power Olumsiz Bey had held in the Sultan's court- almost certainly financial, since the entire country was in pawn. With Abdul Hamid's imprisonment in Yildiz while the Committee of Union and Progress thrashed out how to get a Parliament elected and bring the empire into the twentieth century from a standing start in the sixteenth, the Bey had needed to find someone else to send to England, to conduct Ernchester here.

  For whatever reason he wanted the earl here in the first place.

  Something moved among the black trees, but strain his eyes as he would, he could make out nothing. A rat or a fox-though if rats fled the smell of Anthea's hair upon her bonnet, it was unlikely they'd venture close to the silent watchers among the trees.

  He slipped off the tomb and moved on.

  Tombs clustered all the length of the land walls, from the seven-towered gate of the Yeni Koule to the mosque at Eyoub. People came here to pray in the daylight, but the turbe themselves were undisturbed.

  Somewhere close dogs howled.

  His personation of a goat in a tiger hunt lasted for what he calculated was almost two hours, judging by the moon's progress among the clouds. From the dark city the muezzins' final cries ascended, that deep, haunting wailing that is like no other sound on earth. In time, across the water, a church bell answered from Pera, small and clear.

  Was it Anthea they thought would appear? Or Ernchester?

  Or just possibly someone else?

  By what Zardalu had said, Asher wasn't sure they knew exactly who it was they expected to trap.

  Anthea, he thought, fly this place. Go away.

  Then Zardalu was walking toward him, across open ground with the ashen grass surging around his pantaloons. When he bound Asher's wrists again and wrapped the scarf over his eyes, his hands were warm.

  "You serve a heartless master," said the eunuch. "Or maybe by this time he's found himself another servant, clever or no. Did he promise you everlasting life, James? They all do, you know."

  "Even the Bey?"

  "Ah. An impudent infidel, no less."

  Asher could hear the smile in Zardalu's sweet whisper. "Just curious."

  When they passed the city walls this time, there was no sound in the streets, save the crying of the gulls. Zardalu kept one hand on Asher's elbow, the other on the back of his neck, and the smell of fresh blood and the reek of death drowned out both the smell of the muck underfoot and the vampire's perfume. Only when they were, Asher estimated, coming over the Second Hill again did he hear other voices and steps drawing near. A man mumbled, "Beloved... beautiful fairy..." in harsh-sounding Romaic Greek, and on the air, like the vapors of poisoned flowers, Asher heard the silvery flicker of vampire laughter.

  "She's found a treasure, our Pelageya," Zardalu's voice breathed in his ear.

  "How is
it, sagir sayyaP. Did you find a strong bullock to trap in your nets?"

  The Russian girl laughed, a soft, thick tickling that, in spite of himself and all he knew, went straight to his groin, as if the woman leaned naked in his arms.

  They stopped. There was the sound of a key in a lock, impossible to tell what kind of key-the man with them muttered drunkenly, swearing eternal love, promising feats of ecstasy that would have his newfound adored one crying out with gratitude, and all the while around him Asher heard the whisper of unholy mirth- Haralpos, Habib, the Baykus Kadine. Their voices were a fleeting susurration, now before, now behind, as he was guided through a doorway and down long uneven stairs, worn in the center and incredibly deep, to a place that smelled of water and stone.

  "That little beggar Habib's got won't be missed, but what of that bullock of yours? He looks well-fed."

  "And if he is? He's an Armenian, she found him in the Kara Geumruk. The Sultan is quicker to avenge Gypsies and Jews than such folk..."

  "But is he sober enough to give us sport?" Zardalu's drawling voice was petulant. "Well enough to steal sleeping beggar children for El-Malik, but after a night sitting in a graveyard, with only one wretched tramp sleeping behind a tomb, I want a little sport."

  "El- Malik entertains his infidel makaniki!" He could almost see the Russian girl's lazy shrug. "I can smell the coffee from the street. This one will waken enough."

  El- Malik. The master, the king. The Master Vampire of Constantinople. And while they were talking, a sharp turn at the bottom of the stairs, two of his own steps, and the brush of a curtain against his face, right turn, wildly uneven brick underfoot and the sudden throat-catching stink of ammonia and chemicals, and a blast of cold.

  And far off, inarticulate with agony and horror, muffled as if behind some barrier of wood and iron, the sound of a man's voice.

  "I came on one of the makaniki the other night, as I was returning early," Zardalu was relating lightly, turning, Asher thought, so that his hand slid from neck to shoulder. Had it not, he thought the vampire must have felt the prickle of the hairs at the sound of that horrible, distant despair. "A fat little infidel like an asure pudding, with spectacles on his nose, so... He backed against the wall by the rear gate, holding his little hammer out like this, staring around squeaking, 'Who is that there? I hear you... You cannot get away. Come show yourself and I will not hurt you...' " while the unfortunate Armenian youth mumbled endearments and Asher measured in his mind a narrow stair that wound around itself three times, then the echoes of some open room, and more stairs. Cobbly pavement of small stones underfoot, then of bigger ones, like cannonballs, in an open space where grass grew between blocks. Right, and a locked door...