"This is not a wise thing, mistress."
Ysidro's voice was barely louder than a cat's tread in the dark behind her, but somehow it didn't startle her. It was as if, for the second or two before he spoke, she knew he was there. Turning, she saw him on the walkway, dressed, as the men at the palace reception had been dressed, in black morning coat and gray- striped trousers, colorless hair framing a dead man's face.
Her breath escaped in a shaky sigh. "Coming to Constantinople was not a wise thing," she said. "I wondered what you had in that trunk of yours. Did you bring a top hat as well?"
"It is where I can reach it, should I choose to enter the pavilion."
He stepped closer and took her hand, guiding her along the path above the sable pool. The light seemed to follow, like a fish in the depths. Cold as she was, his hand on her waist was colder.
"The sultans used to bring the ladies of the harem up this way, when they watched polo or archery from the kiosks on the terrace."
"Have you found any trace of her?"
"She did not pass you, then?" In the evenness of his voice she read his irritation. He knew whom she meant and what had happened. Then, "My concentration has been on other matters. It is difficult..."
The uninflected words might have been a complete sentence instead of a broken beginning, but Lydia knew what he stopped himself from saying to her. They stood for a moment face-to-face in the open door of another stair, with the lamp between them, as they had stood in the stairway of his London crypt. The blood- hued light made him more alien still, and she had the curious sensation that if she closed her eyes his features would shift and be no longer the face he was always so careful to show the living, but the face he turned away from mirrors in order not to see himself.
'"It's my doing." She wondered what else she could say. I'm sorry I asked you not to kill innocent strangers on the streets, in the train, in the corners of this palace?
In time he said, "No. My own, for supposing I could have my way without price. I will survive it."
Another silence. Lydia remembered Margaret's white breast the night before last when she'd torn open her bodice on the empty street. She had to ask, though she knew it was none of her business. "Are you drinking her blood?"
"It would do me no good," replied the light voice, but he seemed unsurprised by the question. "It is the death we need to feed the mind's power. At this point it were too easy to kill her, did I but taste of her blood."
I should be afraid of him.
And it was her doing.
"It is no easy thing," he went on, as if he had read her thought, "to see myself in the mirror of your honor. Let us hang a shawl before it, as I do the mirrors in my house, and deal with commonplaces as we find them. You're cold."
She realized, as he guided her up the long flight, that she was trembling.
She had no impression of him leaving her side after they reached the door at the top, but somehow he had a shawl in his hands, heavy silk with a hand like cream as he draped it around her shoulders. "This is not a safe place to walk." He stretched his fingers in the direction of the lamp and in some fashion snuffed the flame without touching it. They passed into a courtyard barely wider than a hall, stairways going up and down into impenetrable night. Dark lay like the seal of death, so that he had to guide her, his fingers tombstone marble through the thin kid of her glove and his.
"I saw her footmarks when I returned to the cistern stair," he said. "They were unclear, and I had to look on the walkway to be sure she had not passed that way going out." He paused and added something Lydia knew enough Spanish to identify. "You chose her because she was stupid," she reminded him softly. "Stupid and loyal. What she feels for you was your doing."
"It is one matter to follow a husband whom you know to be walking eyeless and unarmed into treachery." They passed into a chamber, crossed layers of dust- thick carpet and ascended a rickety stair to a balcony enclosed by lattice- down another stair and so out again. "You sought advice in the matter, recognizing your limitations, and his. It is another matter to pursue needlessly one to whom you will be naught but a liability, only to tell him what he already knows.
"This is no safe place, not for her to walk, nor for us to call out, nor to hold aloft lamps that she may see their light."
"This is the harem, isn't it?" The name conjured images hopelessly romantic to Lydia's mind, but the room they entered-and indeed, all the rooms along this lightless slit-even unfurnished, seemed poky and cramped in the filtered rays from some other wing of the building. The walls were plain plaster, unpainted, dirty and mildewed. The divans were lumpy and far lower than Lydia had pictured from storybooks, about the thickness of a good mattress. The carpets were threadbare, smelling of mice and rotted perfume.
"I thought the palace hasn't been used since the fifties."
"Not as the Sultan's residence." The voice might almost have been the exhalation of dust from the carpets underfoot. "It was the center of government until last July. But a part of the old seraglio is where he put women who belonged to his father or his grandfather, or girls who failed to please him. Here they dwell still, with their servants-fewer, but much as they used. In the heyday of this place they slept, four and five to a room, the ones who did not catch his fancy, seeing no one but the eunuchs and each other, seldom even seeing the sun."
In the almost dark she saw him touch the wall in passing. "They lived upon opium, many of them; opium and intrigue. The walls here sweat with their pettiness, their boredom, and their tears."
His eyelids lowered and he tilted his head, listening. "There," he whispered. He guided her with swift and weightless stride down a stair as steep as hell's abyss and so dark she couldn't see the steps thereof. Later on, safe in her own bed in Pera, Lydia wondered a little at her absolute trust in him, her willingness to step forward in utter darkness, propelled by his hand. Not, she thought, that Ysidro would have given her any choice.
Margaret stood in the midst of a large chamber that once had a sunken pool in its center, now only an oval of shell-edged shadow. Marble lattices covered the windows on three sides; a divan circled the chamber, and slanting squares of light no bigger than tea sandwiches strewed the dirty and mouse-ravaged cushions. The whole room choked of mildew.
She had no lamp in her hands now, as if she'd set it down somewhere and left it forgotten. In the checkered glow from the windows her face was blank; behind the thick lenses of her spectacles, her eyes were those of a sleepwalker.
She looked beautiful, as she had looked in her dreams.
Lydia found herself alone in the tiled entryway looking at Ysidro as he turned Margaret's head gently, so that he could see the exposed-and unmarked-whiteness of her throat.
"Margharita," the vampire whispered. The girl startled like one waking.
Then Margaret's breath drew in a hoarse gasp, and she flung herself on Ysidro, clutching him with desperate, grabby hands. The next second, past his shoulder, she saw Lydia, like some bespectacled, prosaic ghost with her train a cascade of lace over one kid-gloved arm, her shoulders draped in the faded web of an old silk shawl. Margaret backed quickly. "I... are you all right?" It wasn't to Lydia that she spoke.
"Indeed." The vampire inclined his head politely. "Less so than I had been, had I not come back to this place to seek you, however. It were foolish of you to follow me, Margharita, for your reputation's sake alone, and your safety's. And mine, and Mistress Asher's, too, coming to find you here. Now let us return, ere our absence causes remark; and I warn you, do not come after me thus again." His voice never rose above its usual even key, nor did its tone change one whit from the polite phrases of his accustomed speech, but Lydia cringed inside as if at sarcasm or curses. Margaret's cheeks flushed dark and she looked away, and for a moment Lydia had the impression she would have fled, plunging into the unknown labyrinth of the deeper harem, had not Ysidro laid an imperative hand on her arm. Her voice trembled as she looked back at him with tear-filled blue eyes. "I was only afra
id..."
"Afraid?" He smiled his chilly smile, manufactured, Lydia guessed, to cover the remainder of his anger. Still, the impact of it was startling, the echo of an astringent charm that had been the living man's. "That I should find peril here beyond my capacity, from which you could save me?" No expression, no inflection; he had been dead, Lydia recalled, a long time. But still she guessed the smallest twinkle of banter, far back in the sulfur-crystal eyes.
Margaret didn't. She only hung her head and snuffled, and suffered Ysidro to take her arm and lead her through the maze to the perilous cistern stair, and thence back along the terrace where the harem ladies had gone to their lord. As they passed through a vast court above a terrace and pool, where shuttered windows hovered tier upon tier above their heads, Lydia thought she saw the glow of a lamp left under one of the ramshackle stairways, and made to turn aside. "Leave it," Ysidro said softly. "It will only draw those we have little desire to meet."
Lydia removed her spectacles again and folded the shawl inconspicuously in the cloakroom before reentenng the diplomat-crowded salon. She concentrated, through the remainder of the reception, on avoiding an encounter with the straight, graceful figure in the crimson uniform of the Hungarian Life Guards.
"You watch out for that Razumovsky, mind," Lady Clapham said to her as they were getting into the carriages. "And watch that girl of yours."
Startled, Lydia turned to regard Margaret, being helped by servants into the embassy coach. Soldiers clustered in the small square, torchlight throwing sharp flares on their rifles, for warning had come of sporadic fighting among the Armenians in Galata that might spread to Stamboul.
"I really don't think we need worry," she said. "I happen to know her heart is... otherwise engaged." To someone, moreover, infinitely more dangerous than a Russian nobleman.
"I mean watch what she says." Her Ladyship drew Lydia a little farther back into the darkness of the gate. The shadows of the soldiers wavered drunkenly across the vine- grown brick wall opposite, behind which the silent domes of the Aya Sofia slept in the dark.
"And what you say. Razumovsky isn't a fool, and he knows perfectly well your husband didn't come to Constantinople to interview storytellers. That treaty the King signed won't cut much ice if the Czar sees a chance of getting a point ahead of us, either here or in India."
Lydia sighed, reassured her hostess and shook her head inwardly as she took Sir Burnwell's hand to ascend to the coach. At least everyone in the world had cardiovascular systems and endocrine glands, and there wasn't any argument over those. For a moment she thought longingly of the Radcliffe Infirmary, where things were safe and in their places-was Pickering keeping proper graphs of the long- term weight gain of those subjects? She had no idea what she'd tell the editors of the Journal of Internal Research about her article. I'm sorry, I had to go to Constantinople to rescue my husband from vampires.
But without Jamie...
She shook her head. She would find him.
She had to find him.
Fifteen
"What was it you were afraid of, in the seraglio?" Ysidro did not turn. Upon bringing the women back to the house on Rue Abydos, he had uncharacteristically made sure that Margaret got safely to bed, then gone to the floor below to sit in the parlor's projecting bay, a sort of balcony that overlooked the front door. For nearly an hour Lydia had been aware of him there, as, still in her evening frock, she drank the aromatic tea Madame Potoneros brewed for her.
It was late, close to three. The near-riot in the Armenian quarter had forced a long detour through the market district to the old Mohammed Bridge; even then, winding their way up the steep Rue Iskander, they could hear the distant cries, the breaking of glass, the shots. Sitting quiet between Margaret and Lady Clapham, Lydia had pulled her cloak closer and wondered if she'd ever feel warm again.
There was still no emphasis, no rise or fall, to his voice. "So you, like Margaret, suppose me to have been in peril? I thought better of you, mistress."
"Well, I do know you're perfectly capable of avoiding any twelve saber-wielding eunuchs out to protect the Sultan's name from dishonor. So what were you afraid Margaret had encountered?" She thought it through, then asked, "Another vampire?"
He tilted his head a little. Late-risen moonlight edged his profile in watery milk. "Her name is Zenaida. I went to the seraglio to speak to her, before ever I knew Margaret had followed."
His hands, lying one atop the other on the window's sill, seemed about to move, then subsided again into quiescence, the echo of some gesture pared away by time. "She has been there a long while, and no longer recalls the name of the Sultan for whom she was first bought in the markets of Smyrna. Perhaps she never knew it. Like most of the Sultan's women, she was cunning but stupid, and uneducated as a peddler's donkey. She told me many of the odalisques still think she is a living woman, some forgotten Sultan's kadine!'
"And you think she may know something about... about Ernchester? Or James?" He sat on an old chest that did service for a low table in the bay; she leaned against the corner of the wall. The windows were open behind their lattices, and listen as she would-she could not keep herself from doing so-she did not now hear any sound from the slums that lay all along the foot of the hill. Smoke still gritted in the air.
"That," the vampire agreed quietly. "And other matters."
He gazed for a few moments more in apparent disinterest through the carven screens to white walls and tile roofs. The City of Walls, with its minarets and domes, its markets and its filth, was no more than a great shoulder of tucked velvet across the water in the night.
Then the yellow mantis eyes shifted to hers. "My senses, my perceptions, my ability to touch the threads of thought and scent and heat which move upon a city's air-these have suffered from lack of their proper feeding. Nonetheless I should be able to feel some of what takes place in the lives of night-walking things. If not from here, from the gatehouses of the palace where I stood tonight, from the hill of the Aya Sofia, where all the dreams of the city come together like light in a glass. And I do not."
Lydia pushed her spectacles up onto her nose. She'd taken off her gloves and her pearls, and the silver shone on her throat and wrists like looped links of ice.
"And the last thing you needed was a couple of silly heroines to look after," she said, rueful and shy.
His head moved again, once, and his eyes met hers with that brief flicker of human amusement. In the street below a dog barked, the gruff shrillness picked up in another alley, and another, as all that starveling horde felt called upon to comment and reply. Ysidro waited them out, listening as if he could distinguish some clue within the sound.
"I walked in Galata last night when I left you here," he said in time. "I crossed the bridge to Stamboul and sought out the other quarters where the Armenians live, down seaward of the Burned Column and in the poorest quarters along the walls. It is there, you understand, that the vampires will hunt, among those whose deaths the Turks count as less than the scraps I feed my cats. The miasma was thick there, the sense of diverted attention, of watching through smoke, though the night was clear. It was like the veil we lay over human eyes and human minds, but the veil was of a different quality, a different texture, wrought to shield a different kind of mind.
"There is war between vampires in this city."
Lydia recalled the elaborate precautions in Ysidro's London house-or one of his London houses-and it occurred to her that human incursion might not be the only threat against which he protected himself.
"You think one of the Master of Constantinople's fledglings is... rebelling against him? Trying to overthrow him? And summoned, or blackmailed, Ernchester here to help him?"
"It could be that," agreed Ysidro. "It can happen so, though as a rule a master as old as that of Constantinople will show more care in who he makes into his fledgling. Or a newcomer has arrived from the outside, in flight from his or her own master vampire, and seeks to take over mastery of Constantinople himself.
This he will find no easy matter."
"Ernchester?"
He made a conceding movement with his eyebrow that three hundred years ago might have been a shrug and a gesture. "In truth I find that a morsel hard to swallow, particularly given the fact that he must have known the master of the city in life. Yet war there is. Charles plays some part in it..."
"And since Karolyi knows about it," Lydia said thoughtfully, "he's going to try to make of it what he can. Would it have been he who was behind James'... disappearance?"
"I think it likelier he engineered this incident with the palace guard."
Ysidro's white hand moved upon the windowsill. "Behold the timing of it. He was taken up in the morning, when a living man would have the most time to question him or to act in his absence. He was taken up, too, outside the Grand Bazaar, where he is known to have been speaking to the tellers of tales. So his dwelling place was unknown. Karolyi did not reckon on James' friendship with your golden barbarian, and he did not have time to get him into his own hand before he was released. I think," he added, "that this Karolyi knows something of what is taking place, but not all. And I think that if it was his goal to get James into his hand, rather than simply to kill him, it was to find Anthea through him."
"So they were still together."
"So it appears." His hand moved in the shadows again, and Lydia saw that he had wrapped a thick cashmere lap robe over his morning coat, as if to ward off the chill of the autumn night. "In two nights' wanderings I have found no sign of Anthea hunting, and Zenaida has seen nothing of a strange woman in her own quest for midnight blood. This could mean that Anthea is in hiding somewhere, or that she has been taken, either by Karolyi or by the Bey, the master of the city... or by this adversary, be he rebel fledgling or interloper. And where Charles may be..." He shook his head.
"It is an ancient city, and very great. Veiled as it is-and Zenaida says this mist or illusion settled upon it shortly after the gunfire and riots of the army coup, not that she had the smallest knowledge or interest in the Sultan's overthrow-there are an infinity of places to hide. Zenaida says that she knows not where the Bey is, nor knows she of any other vampire. She says that she does not mind, never having cared for the dominance of the Bey."
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