02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2

by Barbara Hambly

  As he reached to take the cloak from Margaret's hand, Lydia saw that the gold ring he wore had slipped around his finger, turning so that the bezel faced inward to his palm, as rings do when the flesh shrinks away from them with cold, or age, or death.

  "As for me, I shall pursue Anthea and Charles as the Undead pursue, listening in the streets where the poor dwell and seeking those places where the living do not walk. If James is yet alive, as this Karolyi has said, it is because the Bey needs something of him, and at a guess it is as bait, either for Charles or for Anthea. Karolyi is still bargaining, offering what he has to sell-the support and alliance of his government in these uncertain times- while feeling for other advantages."

  "But why- " Lydia began helplessly, and Ysidro shook his head.

  "We move in a miasma, and not entirely that of the Bey's making," he said softly. "There is some other matter afoot here, beyond a possible challenger or interloper. Treason among the Bey's fledglings, perhaps, or an interloper not of the common run. We must each search as we can. It may be that as a physician you will recognize something concerning cold as it has to do with the Undead state, which even the Undead do not know. Later, like the knights of the grail meeting upon the road, we can exchange information and see if we can read, one for the other, what each vision signifies. Do not lose hope."

  "No," Lydia said, consciously steadying herself. "No. At least I know James is alive- if Karolyi was telling the truth. Though I did notice he was very careful not to say when he'd seen James. It might have been-well-days ago. But really, we can only do what we can do."

  "An observation worthy of the sages of Athens," the vampire said gravely and, holding out his hand, took her fingers in his. "A word in your ear."

  Conscious of Margaret's glare at her back, Lydia followed him out of the dining room, to the head of the stair.

  He stood with his back to the vigil light, so that only its reflection touched the points of cheeks and chin and made a spidery halo of his hair. In his enveloping cloak he looked like Death on its way to the opera; his hands were, she thought, not quite steady as he pulled on his gloves.

  "You have fathomed my secret," he said, the soft voice emerging from the dark, and upon it, like the trace of his antique inflection, Lydia detected the echo of a smile. "The blood of animals gives some nourishment, though it does not warm, and their deaths are useless to feed the hunger and the need of the mind. But it would not do to shock Margaret with the information that the dark hero of her Byronic fancies is currently living on the blood of dogs-and such dogs! As a physician, however, I knew the matter would consume you until you knew." Lydia laughed, the fear and tension she had felt since that morning in the bazaar loosening its hold. "I think you're just too vain to own to it." She smiled, and Ysidro paused, his hand on the rail of the stair.

  "Of course I am vain," he said. "All of the Undead are vain- too vain to admit that, like common men, we must die."

  He made a move to go, then turned back and took her hand again-carefully, so as not to come near the silver on her wrist- and raised it to his lips.

  As he vanished into the shadows of the stair, she said, "Be careful..."

  She didn't know whether he heard or not.

  Margaret shoved the papers she was reading quickly into her workbasket and returned to her chair as Lydia reentered the dining room. She kept her eyes downcast, but Lydia felt the sullenness of her silence, the resentment in the set of her narrow back in its ill-fitting cotton shirtwaist. She drew a pile of gray Deutsches Bank ledgers to her, but left pencil and foolscap to one side untouched.

  Determined not to have another argument with her, Lydia only asked, "You know what we're looking for?"

  "New corporations in July or August paid for in gold or by transfer of lands, sums transferred to another corporation or another bank monthly or quarterly." She recited Lydia's instructions like a schoolchild regurgitating some hated-and barely comprehended-lesson.

  "Look for a transfer to the second corporation, or to a new corporation, in the first week of October of ten thousand marks, or twelve thousand five hundred francs, and if you see either the Zwanzigstejahrhundert Abkuhlunggeselleschaft, or any of these names-" She pushed across to her the slip of paper she'd gotten from Razumovsky that afternoon, listing the four or five names under which the Sultan's chamberlain took bribes or laundered money. "-please flag it for me." "I understand," Margaret said with gruff impatience, and pulled the paper to her, but didn't even turn it right side up. Lydia half opened her mouth to remonstrate, then let it go. She guessed she'd have to go through whatever Margaret did again anyway, but if these ledgers had to be back in the morning, there was no time for either discussion or for Margaret to slam into the bedroom in a tantrum. She couldn't work through all of this alone.

  And what could she say in any case?

  The dream returned to her, of Margaret waiting in the castle ruins for a horseman who never came. Was Ysidro unable even to project the dream memories of passion to her now, the melodramatic romances that held her to him? Was he, she wondered suddenly, unable to appear in them because in them he would be the skeletal, almost insectile creature who had spoken to her with his back to the light?

  If that was what vampires saw in mirrors, no wonder they avoided them, veiled them, kept them closed behind doors. If that was what the living eyes would perceive, no wonder the vampires caused the living to see-or remember seeing- nothing at all.

  All of the Undead are vain...

  "Kiria..." Stefania Potoneros appeared, hesitating, in the doorway and held out two stiff cream-colored envelopes.

  The first contained a note on the letterhead of the Zwanzigstejahrhundert

  Abkuhlunggeselleschaft-Berlin, London, and Constantinople-typed neatly in English and signed by a secretary.

  Mrs. Asher:

  We regret to inform you that Hen Jacob Zeittelstein is unable to make an appointment with you for this week, due to the fact that he is in Berlin at this time. When he returns to Constantinople on Wednesday next, he will of course be delighted to get in touch with you regarding a meeting.

  Sincerely,

  Avram Kostner

  Private secretary to Herr Zeittelstein

  Wednesday! thought Lydia, aghast. Two days from now until he was even in Constantinople, let alone when he'd have time to see her, answer her questions.

  Jamie could be dead by then...

  Jamie could be dead now.

  My dearest Madame , the other letter read, in an elaborately indecipherable French hand.

  It appears we have located the storyteller your husband sought. With your permission, my carriage shall arrive for you at ten tomorrow morning, though it would be well to be prepared to do some walking.

  Your most humble servant, Razumovsky

  "If I may be permitted to ask a question, effendi?" Asher turned his cheek to the slab where he lay, blinking the sweat from his eyes. In the still, dense heat of the tiny hararet-the chamber of the baths that the Romans would have called the calderium, or hot room-the shape of the Master of Constantinople, white as the marble that entirely formed the walls, seemed to emerge from and blend into the steam in a disconcerting fashion, so that half the time Asher was not entirely certain he could see him at all.

  "It is always permitted to ask, Scheherazade." The voice of Olumsiz Bey came out of the steamy twilight, and the red glow of the braziers in the corners made twin embers of his eyes. There was dreamy, heat-soaked amusement in the deep voice as he spoke the nickname, taken from Asher's curiosity about old words and ancient tales even in the face of his imprisonment and peril. "There would be no wisdom in the world, did men not ask."

  "What do you want with the Earl of Ernchester?"

  It was nearly midnight. With the early fall of winter dark, Zardalu and the other fledglings had taken Asher to an immense dry cistern, like a pillared cavern beneath the city, given him a tin lantern and sent him out in that endless forest of columns. "Behave as if you searched for
someone, Englis," whispered the eunuch, with his mocking smile. "Gaze about-so-put your hand to your heart, as if to calm the pangs of love." The others laughed, the thm, metallic shivering he had heard in Vienna, and faded into the darkness, leaving him alone.

  So he had walked, as he had walked in the cemeteries, holding the lantern high, and the shadows of the pillars reeled and shifted with the movement of the light. The columns themselves were of all girths: thin Ionic with rams' horn capitals, and heavy, unfluted Doric worn with the marks of water. The floor underfoot was hardened mud, silted up who knew how deep. Between them night lay thick, and the cold breaths of moving air told him the place had more than the one entry the vampires had used. He was thinking how fortunate it was that the candle within the lantern was protected by glass when the flame went out, as suddenly as if covered by a snuffer.

  Asher stepped back at once, putting his back to the nearest pillar and forcing closed his mind against the crushing numbness that bore down upon it. He reached for the pocket where he kept matches, wrapped in waxed silk, and his nostrils were filled with the smell of old blood and graveyard mold. A hand closed around his arm, as if the arm had been trapped in machinery; but before he could lash out with the lantern in his other hand, before he could move or think or cry out, the gripping hand was gone.

  There was a kind of movement, a breathing rustle in the dark, and he pulled the matches from his pocket and lit one with a hand that shook. He was alone.

  "My dear Scheherazade." The voice was suddenly close. Asher blinked again in the steam, to see that the Master of Constantinople stood beside the marble table where he lay, naked, as was the Bey himself, but for a towel around his loins.

  "These are vampire matters, of no concern to the living. Indeed, I doubt the living would understand them."

  "They're of concern to those who want to stay among the living." Asher sat up, his brown hair hanging lank in his eyes, and the bathman Mustafa stepped back. Asher had guessed that the Bey's living servants weren't deaf, but he had never succeeded in getting more than a few words out of any of them. When they brought him food, when they placed clean clothing in his room or escorted him to the library or the baths, they watched him with the eerie impassivity of guard dogs, as wary as if he, not they, were the servant of the night. "Was it you who had Lady Ernchester's rooms searched, after Ernchester had gone?"

  "My instructions to Karolyi were to have her destroyed," the Bey said shortly. His orange eyes, gaudy as aniline dye, glittered coldly. "The woman is his strength. A man need not be a sorcerer, or a reader of dreams, to have learned that in the course of a single conversation. In the eighteen months of his abiding here as a living man, there was not a day that he did not speak of her, nor a night when she was not in his dreams. When I heard that both had been made Undead, I thought it a foolish risk on the part of the Master of London, to have among his fledglings one with such power over his mind as she."

  "He disobeyed you, then."

  "Stupid Magyar, to think he could defeat the purposes of the Undead." The Bey's left hand caressed unthinkingly the silk bindings around the hilt of his silver weapon- thornwood, Asher guessed, the silk just sufficient to keep from discomfort a vampire as old as the Bey, who had toughened a little against some of the substances reactive to vampire flesh. Around his neck he wore a foot-long knife, sheathed in leather and lead. Asher guessed the blade within the sheath was silver as well. "Was it she who freed him in Vienna and killed those set to watch over his prison there?"

  Asher shook his head. "It was the Vienna vampires. Karolyi had brought a victim for Ernchester to kill."

  "Fool." The vampire turned his face aside, anger in his eyes. His lean body seemed almost completely without muscle, the hair of chest and armpits paled to a strange red-brown. Though the heat of the hararet had laid a film of condensation on the pallid skin, Asher could see not a drop of sweat. "The man is greedy, seeing only the path to his own power, and not that things are ordered as I have ordered them for reasons beyond his comprehension. And yours," he added, looking back at him.

  "Then why deal with him?"

  "A man is a fool who casts away a plank in a shipwreck, Scheherazade. He is impertinent, to think that I would do as his Christian emperor bids. But power, and allies, are always needful in a difficult time."

  "And are the times so difficult?" Asher asked quietly. "Is that why you're hunting Lady Ernchester so diligently? Not only to control the earl, but to keep her out of Karolyi's hands? He'll go to your fledglings, you know, if he hasn't already."

  A drift of moving air stirred the steam. The curtain of embroidered leather that separated the hararet from the sogukluk, the warm room, lifted aside. The man Sayyed stood there, his head- shaven like the Bey's-glistening with moisture.

  "There is one to see you, Lord. A makanik." Except for the last word, which was Persian, he spoke peasant Turkish, the longest sentence Asher had yet heard any of the living servants speak.

  "You will excuse me." The Master of Constantinople bowed deeply, turned to go, then, pausing, looked back.

  "Do not concern yourself in the affairs of my children, Scheherazade," the Bey said, and the giant ant seemed to watch Asher from its amber prison on the Bey's ear. "This is not the course of a prudent man. Do not trust them. They will promise you things-escape from this place, safety from harm, even the kiss that brings eternal life. But it is all lies. They are all treacherous. They envy one another and envy the power each thinks the other might possess; and above all they envy me. But I am the master of the city. This city is mine, and all things in it."

  He held up his silver weapon, the blade flashing gently in the dull braziers' gleam. "And do not concern yourself with Ernchester. That, too, is a course that will bring you only death."

  When he had gone, Asher stretched out on the table again, gingerly favoring the dressing over the knife wound on his ribs. It was healing well; Mustafa had changed the dressing, and now, as the man kneaded and pummeled his muscles into lassitude, Asher stretched out his right arm before him and looked at it in the dim light.

  The heat had reddened the scars that tracked the vein from wrist to elbow, the scars left by the Paris vampires. Among them, the fresh dark blot of a bruise was printed like a blackening stain.

  Asher picked out the marks of fingers and thumb, remembering the hand that had crushed his arm in the dark of the cistern. The dressing pinching as he moved, he brought his other hand forward and laid it over the marks.

  The hand was bigger than his own.

  Ernchester's hands, he remembered, were small.

  The fledglings had returned to him almost at once, in the silence of the dry cistern, had blindfolded him and brought him back to the House of Oleanders without a word, as they had brought him back twice now in three days from those desolate places where Anthea might have hidden. They had blanked his mind as they came through the street, so that he returned to a kind of frightened and dizzy consciousness in the octagonal Byzantine vestibule that led to the Bey's salon.

  He was beginning to think that Zardalu had made a genuine mistake and let his mind be distracted while coming back into the house from that first expedition. Zardalu and the others had departed on their own hunt after returning Asher to the House of Oleanders, and were still gone when Asher dressed again in clean linen and secondhand gray trousers, red wool vest and a worn and slightly ill- fitting Stamboul coat. He made his way back along the corridors to his room with Sayyed padding silently behind. He knew that route now, and how the small palace of some Byzantine prince connected with one of the several hans that made up its wings. Twice he'd passed a doorway he guessed led into some late Roman crypt or church, and the painted room with the tiled dome in which he'd seen Karolyi was definitely Turkish.

  The courtyard of the old han was lighted with brass lamps hanging from the colonnade before what had been deep bays of warehouses downstairs. A single lamp burned in the niche at the end of the open gallery, two floors above. Lights burned,
too, in the Byzantine vestibule-Asher could see their reflection on the arched passageway.

  A makanik, to see the Deathless Lord.

  Something concerning that secret experiment, that strange crypt far beneath the house, stinking of oil and ammonia.

  Near the old baths, Zardalu had said.

  There were no clocks in the House of Oleanders, and the hours of darkness could be disorienting. Asher, who had a fairly good sense of time, estimated it was close to one in the morning as Sayyed turned the key in the lock and padded away, and guessed he had an hour or two in which he'd be relatively safe. Do not concern yourself with Ernchester, the Bey had said. But he was still bargaining with Karolyi.

  Except for the dry basin in the center, the long floor was a faded moss bank of carpet, four and five layers thick. Among these carpets he had concealed the picklocks he made.

  He fetched them now.

  The bronze candlestick, which he kept quite openly beside his small pile of books in one of the inlaid wall cupboards, had provided him not only with wire for picklocks, but with a number of candles as well. These he slipped now into the pocket of his coat. The lock was a very old single-tumbler Banham, probably the best obtainable when put in, but that had been more than a hundred years ago. As he descended the stairs to the courtyard, he heard the voice of the Bey shouting in the salon and stopped, startled, by the vestibule passageway to listen.

  "It has been three weeks, you sputum of Shaitan's dog!" That any vampire, let alone one as old as Olumsiz Bey, should give way to rage at all was unheard of, and the passion that cracked in his deep voice was terrifying to hear. "Five days since the breakdown, and still no word of the man! I tell you there can be no more delays!"

  "Peace, m'sieu," came a more muffled-and understandably nervous-reply. "The man will be back Wednesday. Wednesday is not so very long..."

  Asher hesitated, torn, sensing that whatever could so enrage the Master of Constantinople must be of paramount importance, but knowing that if he were caught standing here-much less with picklocks and candles in his pockets-he was a dead man indeed. His every instinct told him to stay, but at least, he thought dryly, moving like a shadow away from the arch, if he's shouting at his engineer he isn't listening for me...