02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2

by Barbara Hambly

  The mental image of the Bey as he had seen him other nights, sitting still on the divan of his pillared salon, silver weapon across his knees and orange eyes half shut while he listened to the teeming dreams of the city around him, was a disturbing one.

  Even as we hear the footfalls of the workmen, Zardalu had said. At least as long as he walked above the ground, if the Bey listened for them, Asher knew he could hear his.

  The way that leads to the old baths.

  Fashions in building came and went, and the House of Oleanders was at least five old buildings fused into a monstrous maze of dark rooms and decaying memories, but, Asher knew, plumbing remains plumbing. The elaborate system of pipes and hypocausts that made Turkish baths-and before them, Roman-was not a thing to be relocated lightly or far.

  We smell the naft, the alkol, the stinks of what he does...

  His mind returned to the throat-catching sharpness of the air in the crypt. A room with a wooden floor, to the left across a courtyard where grass grows between stones like cannonballs. A second flight of steps after the first... He fingered the picklocks in his pocket and drifted through the House of Oleanders like a ghost.

  The solitary gleam of his candle wavered over chambers hung with printed Chinese silks whose colors showed themselves briefly; over vaulting that flickered and shone with the unmistakable dusky bronze hue of gold in shadow. He passed through an octagonal chamber whose walls were sheathed, floor to ceiling, in red tile the exact color of ripe persimmons, containing only a black-and-white wooden coffee stand; an arch looked out on a court smaller than the room itself and so choked with oleander bushes that only the dim white shape of a single statue could be seen in their midst.

  Near that place he found the room he sought: the small, rich chamber of painted walls and blue and yellow tiles whose bare wooden floor thumped familiarly underfoot. From it a door let into a courtyard, long and narrow and paved in blocks of worn stone the size of halfpenny loaves, through which brown grass and weeds thrust tall.

  The moon had not risen. No light touched the windows in the low buildings that surrounded the court on two sides. Roman, thought Asher, identifying the heavy rounded arches, the broken fragments of marble facing and the thick, fluted columns. What looked like the rear wall of another han closed in the third side of the court-he could just see the edge of a dome against the midnight sky-the red and white stone walls of the Turkish house, the fourth.

  Under the columned porch the blackness was profound. The smaller cobbling was uneven, familiar. Almost he felt he could quench the candle as he passed to the left, fifteen steps across the court and through the door, five steps and left again. It was difficult to see that doorway, where it stood in shadow, though it opened in the middle of a wall of faded frescoes-more oddly still, he lost control of his steps twice, passing it without being aware. Around him the darkness brooded, watching. It could, he knew, contain anything.

  Or nothing, he told himself. Or nothing.

  He descended the stair. Had he not remembered a second stairway, he would have turned back, for its entrance lay concealed in the niche formed by one of the shallow false archways in what turned out to be the tepidarium of the house's original Roman baths. A small room, faced with marble, its shallow pool long gone dry. The mosaics of the floor gleamed faintly in the moving light of Asher's candle: Byzantine, and like those of the octagonal vestibule, long ago defaced.

  The second stair, as he recalled, was twice or three times the depth of the one above. If he met them now-the Bey's homecoming fledglings with their night's prey- there would be no possibility of escape.

  He guessed the crypt below had been a prison, or a storage place for something more precious or more sinister than wine. The low brick groinings of the ceiling barely cleared his six-foot height, and the few rooms that opened to his right from the short passageway were tiny, sunk below the level of the floor, which was itself worn in a channel inches deep. The air-as he recalled and as Zardalu had remarked-was bitterly cold.

  Dastgah. Scientific apparatus. There were Western scientific journals in the library dating back to the eighteenth century, treatises in Arabic from the days before the Moslem world had become a scientific backwater. Just exactly what was it, Asher wondered, that the Master of Constantinople was having his Western engineers build for him? That meant so much to him that its delay would rouse him to fury? That he hid from his own fledglings?

  The penny-dip glow touched something dully reflective, lodged like a gleaming bone in the throat of a dark arch.

  Here, he thought. The place the Bey kept hidden, veiled with his mind.

  At the end of the abyssal corridor before him, Asher knew he would find that long stone stair, climbing to an outer door. But branching down to his left, his raised candle flame showed a grille of silver bars, behind which lay-what?

  Or who?

  Before him the tunnel extended like the bowel of night-to his left, behind the silver bars, Stygian velvet.

  He wondered how much time he had left.

  He had to know.

  Cautiously, he moved down the short side branch.

  His wan light winked on water pooled on the uneven stone floor. The corridor was extremely narrow, curving slightly; the silver bars, tarnished nearly black save around the lock where the bolt went into the stone, blocked it about ten feet from the convergence of the two passages. Beyond, Asher could make out two archways set in the left-hand wall. On one, at least, he caught the glint of a metal lock plate on a door. The smell of ammonia was overpowering; he had to fight not to cough.

  They'd be coming back soon: Zardalu and the Baykus Kadine, and the others, bringing another victim to chase through the pitch-dark house until they cornered him, weeping and screaming...

  Even locked in his upper room, Asher had heard the Armenian boy's voice for a long time.

  He turned from the silver grating, back to the main corridor, and resumed his quest for the stair that led out.

  There was a door, locked, that had to be it-like the doors above, he missed it two or three times, found it only by walking with his hand on the weeping stone of the wall, until what he had somehow taken three times for an angle of shadow resolved itself suddenly into an arch. This evidence of the power of the master vampire's mind he found extremely unnerving. They must have left the door open behind them that first night when they'd gone forth-or perhaps one had gone ahead of the others to open it for them.

  In any case the lock was a Yale, new; a matter for a duplicate key, not a homemade shank of bronze wire.

  Heart beating fast now with apprehension, he returned to the silver grille. That lock, at least, was of the old-fashioned kind, probably because the softer metal couldn't take the stress of the smaller wards. He angled the bronze wire carefully, knowing every scratch would show. Even the lugs and pins that held it to the stonework of the walls were silver.

  They are treacherous... the Bey had said, the silver blade of his halberd gleaming in the smoldering half-light of the baths. They are treacherous.

  His heart slamming blood in his ears, he edged his way along the buckled, puddled flagging next to the wall. A wet footprint here would condemn him to death. Straw and sawdust salted the corridor, making the going even more delicate, and the cold was arctic. He wondered if he would hear the fledglings returning. Wondered if he would know, should the Bey be watching him from out of the darkness with those leached-out ochre eyes.

  "Ernchester," he whispered at the nearer of the two doors.

  Both were locked. Hasps of silver, or more probably electroplated steel. Padlocks sheathed in silver, even to the bows. Silver solder dabbed over the screw heads. The locks were new-the rest, black with age in the candle's feeble light.

  "Ernchester!" he whispered again. How much-how far- could the Deathless Lord hear? Not through earth, he thought. Not through this much stone. "It's Asher. Are you there? Anthea's free, she's here in Constantinople..."

  He had almost said, Anthea's alive.r />
  Listened.

  Deep behind the heavy door he heard it: a groan, or a cry, that lifted the hair on his head-physical agony mingled with the blackest depth of despair. Hell, Asher thought. Such a sound you would hear if you put your ear to the keyhole of Hell.

  "Can you hear rne? Can you understand?"

  Only silence replied. His hand trembled, fumbled at the lock, half numb with cold but unsteady, also, with the knowledge that time was now very short...

  "I'll come back for you," he promised hoarsely. "I'll get you out..." And I'll need your help, he added as a grim afterthought, to return the favor. A draft, a shift of air, and his heart stopped as if knifed with an icicle, then began beating fast and thin. Even in that first second, he pinched the candlewick, thanking God for the smell of the ammonia that would drown the smoke of a full-fledged conflagration, much less that of a single dip. That drowned, even from the Undead, the smell of his living blood.

  From the dark of the corridor beyond the silver bars he heard stumbling footfalls, and a pleading breath, "My lord, be kind-be kind to a poor girl..."

  At the edge of hearing, a tickle of obscene mirth.

  "Oh, the lord you're going to will be kind." The voice might have been Zardalu's. "He is the kindest lord in the city, sweet and generous... you'll find him so, beautiful gazelle..."

  In the utter blackness there was nothing to see, no way to know if they'd noticed the slight jar of the doorway in the silver bars-he'd pulled it to behind him, the hinges oiled and uncreaking...

  He could only wait, desperately listening, wondering if the next thing to happen would be a cold touch on his neck. The staggering footsteps faded. He himself remained where he was for a long time, unmoving, dizzy with the ammonia stink and the cold that ate at his bones, before he felt his way along the wall to the bars, and so out into the corridor, wincing as the gate lock clicked behind him like the hammer of doom.

  But none molested him. In time he felt his way back to the stair-painfully, endlessly, across the baths, thanking God that navigating in the dark was a skill he'd kept up from his spying days-and up to the grass-grown court, where the little light of the stars seemed bright to his eyes. As he crept through the courtyard, he heard the silvery clashing of vampire laughter from within the salon, and the young woman's voice pleading incoherently. It seemed to him, as he bolted his own door behind him and sank to his knees under a sudden wave of nervous shaking that the sound came to him still-that, and the moaning of the prisoner behind the crypt door.

  It was a long time before he managed to get to his feet and stumble to the divan, where he lay shivering as if with killing fever until the muezzins of the Nouri Osmanie cried the late winter dawn.

  Seventeen

  "I suspected my remark about how valuable you thought the information would yield results." Prince Razualmovsky slashed with his riding whip at the two curs sleeping on the marble steps. They slunk a few feet away and stretched out again in the dust of the plaza that had once been the Hippodrome, tongues lolling an incongruous raspberry against wolfish coats which, even without her eyeglasses, Lydia could tell were half worn away with mange.

  Constantinople had more dogs-and, as she had seen last night, more cats-than any city she'd ever been in.

  The animals seemed to operate on two different levels, as indeed, she reflected, they would have to. As Prince Razumovsky's carriage had worked carefully through the streets of the old city, where wooden Turkish houses appeared to sprout spontaneously from more ancient walls, the dogs had been everywhere, lying in the muck or against the walls of ochre or pink stucco. The cats had the overhanging balconies or shared the sills of heavily barred windows with potted geraniums, or lay on the walls and trellises of tiny cafes where Turkish men sipped tea and talked under stringy canopies of leafless vines.

  "Someone always knows someone," the Russian continued, white teeth gleaming under tawny haystacks of mustache. "The good brass seller mentioned our questions to his friends at the cafe that night, or perhaps a beggar overheard us or the man selling baklava. One of them knew a street sweeper whose sister knew the hakawati shair by sight or had a cousin who'd heard one of the muezzins mention that a new hakawati shair had taken up residence in this place, or one of the neighborhood children mentioned it to another child... It was a Syrian boy who brought me the information."

  "What did you pay him?" Lydia reached for the small reticule of silver mesh that hung at her waist. "I can't let you..."

  "An entirely negligible sum." His Highness waved dismissively. "It will support his family for two months, doubtless-or buy one member of it two days' worth of opium, if that's their choice." He held out his hand to help her over the marble sill of the narrow door.

  He had been treating her all morning as if she were made of cut glass, apparently under the impression that her haggard eyes and pallor were the result of a night of sleepless worry over her husband, not a night spent single- mindedly plowing through four and a half months' worth of the investor listings of the two biggest banks in the city.

  There were more than a score of corporations and investors that seemed to fit the criteria. More people than a single vampire had guessed the way the wind was blowing back in July and started transferring funds into less vulnerable forms than real estate and gold. She wondered if it were possible to obtain the long- term banking records of the oldest banks-how long had there been banks in the empire, anyway?-or of property holders, to see whose lives went on for a suspiciously long time before they transferred their money to equally long-lived successors. The various names under which the palace chamberlain laundered money came up again and again in everyone's accounts- and given the general level of corruption in Constantinople, it was almost impossible to track how money appeared and disappeared.

  By five in the morning Lydia had a dozen names-two of which Margaret had completely missed in the Deutsches Bank records-and Margaret had long since fallen asleep with her head on her arms.

  Had she not reviewed the records, Lydia suspected she'd have had the night of sleepless worry in any event, so it was just as well she'd had work to occupy her.

  "Are you sure this is all right?" Margaret asked, flushing an uncomfortable red.

  "It isn't allowed, is it?"

  "The courtyard is free to all," said Razumovsky. "But it would probably be best if you let me speak."

  The Blue Mosque was one of the greatest in the city, a place where there were always people.

  That, Lydia realized a moment later, was the point.

  Razumovsky led them-Lydia burningly conscious of her Western gown and the gauzy excuse for a veil depending from her stylish hat-toward the north wall of the court, where wintry light fell upon the men along the colonnade: a bearded man in a turban selling small loops of bright-colored prayer beads on a blanket; another cross-legged behind what looked like a little desk, complete with brass inkwell, standish, and shaker of sand. There was the inevitable shoe-shine boy with his little brass-bound kit. Two men in rags, sitting near the small marble pavilion in the middle of the court fingering their beads, glared at the women as they passed, but neither spoke.

  The man they sought occupied a worn carpet next to the bead sellers pitch. He was conversing with a thin, elderly man in a white robe and yellow turban, but looked up as Razumovsky drew near, and Lydia had an impression of a huge hooked nose and a tangle of dirty white beard, a green blob of turban, and, when she cast down her eyes, of grimy, horny feet with toenails like a bear's claws poking from beneath his robe. He was ragged, and his clothing smelled of filth and sweat; he gave off anger and distrust like a blast of heat in her face. "Qabih... qabih..." he muttered ferociously, glaring up at her and then past her at Margaret. "Qahbdt..." He averted his face then and added in hoarse French, "An unveiled woman is an abomination in the eyes of God."

  "Maitre conteur." Lydia curtseyed deeply. "Please forgive me. Do you call me ill names because I wear the veil which my husband gave me to wear?" She touched the thi
n net veil of her green taffeta hat. "Do you blame me for wearing clothing, and dressing my hair, as my husband wishes to see me adorned?"

  The man in the yellow turban had stepped tactfully away, leaving Lydia, Razumovsky, and Margaret alone with the old hakdwati shah. Lydia knelt on the worn marble paving of the mosque's court, reflecting that after journeying all the way from Oxford, the bottle-green skirt needed cleaning anyway. "And if my husband has disappeared," she went on, still in French, which the old man seemed to follow well enough, "and I know him to be in danger, am I impure for wanting to aid him?" Ysidro, she thought, should hear me now.

  The black eyes glittered, chips of coal. She could see the dark line of downturned mouth amid the tangled beard, hear the anger in his voice when he replied, but she saw, in the set of his shoulders, the way he drew back from her and looked, for one fleeting instant, past Razumovsky to the courtyard gate, that he was afraid.

  "You are the wife of the Ingileezee in the brown clothing, the man who asked all the questions about the Deathless Lord."

  Lydia nodded. She wondered how close Razumovsky was standing behind her and how much he heard. "I am."

  "He was a fool," snapped the old storyteller. "To seek the residence of Wafat Sahib is the act of a fool, and a fool's fate overtook him."

  "Did you tell him?"

  The old man looked away. "I told him nothing," he said sharply, and Lydia knew he was lying. James had probably offered him money. With feet like that, and the characteristic roughening of pellegra on the skin of his face, he was beyond a doubt desperately poor.

  "It was my boy Izahk," the storyteller went on, too quickly. "A discreet boy; one I thought too clever to be seen. But when he did not come back that night, I knew he had done that which is forbidden: he had spoken of Wafat Sahib, and that lord is not a lord to tolerate such chatter." His black eyes narrowed, and his voice, almost a whisper to begin with, sank lower still, so that Lydia had to draw close, within reach of the gusts of breath that smelled of strong coffee and rotting teeth.