02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2

by Barbara Hambly

  "She is safe," he said, his voice very soft. "They have not been inside. My apologies for the water. The boiler is long cold."

  Lydia wondered what he heard of Margaret's breathing: the peaceful snuffling of sleep or the swift, thready pant of guilt and fear and feelings hideously torn? She looked across at the door bolt, but even had the glow of the single lamp been stronger, the violence of Ysidro's breaking in had shaken loose the hasp from the bar, and it was impossible to tell whether the bolt had been shot behind her when she'd gone out, or had merely somehow slipped.

  He put the cloak back from her arms, pulled the remains of the sleeve free with a single flick of his hand and reached into the basin for a sponge. The wounds were little more than scratches, but smarted horribly. Lydia flinched from the water, which was, as Ysidro had hinted, stone cold.

  "I saw the interloper," she said, gritting her teeth. To her own vast annoyance she had begun to tremble again and couldn't seem to stop. With grim effort she kept her voice steady. A woman in hysterics was the last thing either of them needed. Besides, he'd want the information quickly. "He's a Turk, I think, I... I didn't get a clear look. Here," she added suddenly, realizing how disturbing he must find the smell of blood, "I'll do that. There's some brandy in the pantry..." He'd brought napkins as well, but she was unable to bind up her own arms with them and had to wait till he returned after all.

  "There were two of them," she resumed, while he pinned the bandages, white fingers neat and swift and chill as the touch of death. "I think... I didn't see the other clearly but I don't think he was a Turk."

  "Was he vampire?"

  She hadn't thought of that. "I... I don't know."

  Their voices echoed strangely in the well of the hallway, shadows leaning over them, monstrous and upside down. Ysidro left again, carrying the basin and sponge. When he returned, he held a cup of tea cradled in his hands, the smell of it gently neutral, like sunlight on grass. "They... they called to me from the street... Or I thought someone called to me from the street. They said Jamie needed me."

  "I doubt there was ever anyone in the street," Ysidro said softly. "He will have felt your mind, a little, at the tomb, and with that little he could fool you about what you saw in darkness. You were right, the turbe of Al-Bayad was one of his sleeping places... He will have others."

  "But you found nothing of Anthea? Or Ernchester?"

  "Nothing." He went to the hall table and stood for a moment, holding his hand near the flame of the lamp there to warm it. The fire, moving in its little red- glass bowl, lent his fingers, his hair, the skull-like ridges of his no- longer-human face a mockery of sunburnt health.

  "Like him, she will change her sleeping place from night to night, and his glamour will work on her mind as well, hiding him from her, even as it hides her from the Master of Constantinople-and hides her from me. If your husband is alive at all, it is because the Master of Constantinople seeks to use him as bait to trap her, for he fears her, even as Grippen does."

  "Grippen?" said Lydia. "Isn't he her master, as he is Ernchester's?"

  "It is not unheard of, for fledgings to turn against those that get them." He turned his hand over. The light seemed to shine through his fingers like parchment, illuminating spidery bones. "It takes great strength, and great anger... but then, Anthea is strong. He has always distrusted her, as all masters distrust their get; and between Anthea and Grippen has always lain a most delicate balance of wariness, and power, and hate. I do not think he would have made her vampire had not he thought he would lose Charles when Anthea, still a mortal woman, died."

  "So they didn't... they weren't made vampires at the same time."

  "No. Charles was forty, Anthea thirty-three, when Grippen took Charles. Anthea was a widow for over thirty years. She had grown old when Charles finally came for her- or got Gnppen to come. She hated Gnppen for holding the dominance of a master over her, but she understood that it was the gate she had to walk through if she would be with Charles again. It is... a rather sad tale. Will you have more?"

  She shook her head. As he took the cup from her, she saw how his clothing hung on him, as if there were nothing inside it but bones. The turned-back cuffs of his shirt showed wrist bones knobbed like hazelnuts under milk-white skin. "Thank you," she said softly.

  He made a move, as if he would take her hand, then stopped himself. For a long time their eyes held, and she thought, quite irrationally, There is something else to say.

  It was he who moved his face aside, still for a moment, then turning fully to look at the door. "I will remain here until it nears dawn, though I doubt he will be back. Tomorrow the bolt of the door can be repaired, and things placed about the doorsills and the windows that he cannot pass. I have no doubt he learned from Karolyi that you were here and wanted to put you under his influence-to force you to tell what Karolyi has been trying to persuade from you, did you but know it."

  Lydia shivered, thinking of the long climb to the bedroom. Even Margaret's presence in the bed beside her seemed welcome now.

  Ysidro put his head a little to one side, listening. "She sleeps now." He started to speak again, then didn't, as if he, like Lydia for the moment, did not wish to raise the issue of Margaret, and his use of Margaret, between them. There is something else, Lydia thought again as they stood together, looking at one another in the lamplight. But Ysidro turned away and settled himself in the chair she had occupied, folding his bony arms within the shirt that seemed too large for him. Lydia slipped the cloak from her shoulders, and when he took it, slowly climbed the stairs.

  As Ysidro had said, Margaret was asleep. She'd loosened her corsets and pulled the pins from her hair but still was dressed, as if she'd fallen asleep huddled wretchedly on top of the covers, and in the glow of the bedside lamp her face was taut with unhappy dreams. Lydia's hands shook as she unbuttoned her torn shirtwaist, for reaction was settling on her. She had no intention of turning out the lamp beside the bed, but it was too bright for easy sleep. As she walked around to it, she saw half a dozen sheets of paper on the floor around Margaret's basket of crocheted flowers.

  They were tumbled untidily, as if she had been reading them when sleep overcame her and they'd slid from the coverlet. When Lydia picked them up, she saw the handwriting, precise and black and, though the ink was clearly modern, nothing that had been seen since the days of Elizabeth.

  They were sonnets.

  About darkness. About mirrors. About roads untrodden stretching endlessly into night. One of them Margaret had ripped into quarters. Lydia had to lay it on the nightstand to fit its pieces together again.

  And she understood.

  Blood on marble-petals of a rose-

  Or copper-dark upon the lion's paw;

  Brightness and heat, like wine drunk red and raw.

  Wine vends dreams, but life in lifeblood flows.

  Thus warmth from flesh to flesh the blood imparts,

  A ruby heat reviving life and mind.

  Where can hunger better substance find than sanguine fire drawn from living hearts? I've seen a brightness dwells not in the veins- In thinking eyes, and smiles that shame despair. Color and heat beyond what blood contains- Rose and copper in cheek and lips and hair. But flesh that can't be warmed by such a fire To only blood and silence may aspire.

  The papers were creased, as if they'd been wadded small- hidden in the crochet basket, she thought, or in Margaret's carpetbag. She wondered at what point Margaret had found them and pocketed them for her own.

  She laid them back on the floor where they had been and turned down the light.

  Nineteen

  A curious thing for a vampire to keep. And so they were. Two silver keys, cut in exact replica of English Yales, even to the finger grips. Asher stared at them for a long time, as they shimmered in the concealed well in the red-tiled coffee room's floor.

  Local work. Probably just enough admixture of bronze to keep them from bending in a lock. Reaching down, he weighed them in his hands. Even
with gloves, a vampire would have difficulty holding them long enough to use. One as old as the master of the city might just manage, as he managed to hold the whitethorn of his halberd staff, to wear the thickly sheathed silver knife around his neck.

  Asher's heart pounded hard as he slipped them into the pocket of his coat. As he pushed the tile cover back over the well, returned the black and white table to its place, the shadows of his single candle seemed to lean closer, silent with a terrible, listening silence in which the Master of Constantinople seemed to be standing just outside the door.

  This was not the case, he knew. Olumsiz Bey was meeting that night with one of his men of business and had himself escorted Asher back to his gallery after supper and locked him in. "I apologize," the vampire said, "for my Zardalu last night. He is treacherous and insolent, like most of the palace eunuchs. He needed a good thrashing, to make him remember his love for me." The amber eyes narrowed as they studied Asher's face. In the ambiguous flicker of the pierced lamp the Master of Constantinople had seemed wrought entirely of amber, the dusky pallor of his flesh like copal, the many-pleated silken trousers and the tunic over them, the vest and the sash all warm shades of fire and honey and marigold, the fur-lined pelisse sewn with shining flecks of gold. The lump of amber swinging from his earlobe caught the light like an unnerving third eye.

  "I trust you understand that he is a liar," Olumsiz Bey went on. "He never imparts information which is not aimed at starting prey."

  "He's certainly told me a number of odd things about this house." Asher folded his arms, returned the orange gaze; even in his own mind the picklocks under the carpets did not exist. "Twice he's told me the way out." This was a lie, to see what the master would say. Olumsiz Bey's eyebrows bent in the middle like startled diacritical marks, and the hard mouth quirked in laughter.

  "I observe you didn't go seeking. Sayyed wouldn't be difficult to overpower." "The way he told me was different the second time," Asher said. "I've heard them talk about the games they play with their prey, chasing them through the dark here; I've heard those poor young boys and girls screaming."

  Another diacritical mark, this time in the corner of those colorless lips, and Asher thought, It was not his custom then, to have his prey brought him by the others. It was something recent.

  Zardalu was right.

  Something was holding him to this house.

  Ernchester? he wondered now, working his way carefully around the walls of the Roman court, that he would not leave a trampling in the overgrown grass. It made no sense. Why send for Ernchester now, why not a year ago, or a hundred years ago? Why not in July, when the Sultan's regime was overthrown? If it was to ask his help against the interloper of whom Zardalu spoke, why keep him locked in the crypts? Starving, perhaps, in pain certainly-the moans were cries of the most hideous torment.

  Revenge?

  Asher shivered, feeling his way from pillar to pillar of the old porch, for he'd blown out his candle. The Bey's revenges would be long.

  But long enough for him to summon the old earl from his moldering town house in London, from the slow crumbling of his life, back to the city where he'd spent eighteen months a living man? What ill turn would have warranted that, after almost two hundred fifty years?

  And what did the interloper have to do with any of this?

  What about the machine the Bey was having constructed? Or the ice Asher had seen, melting on the floor behind the silver bars?

  It crossed his mind obliquely to wonder if the revenge was against Anthea, and not against Ernchester at all.

  "He is not on this train," Anthea had said, coming back into his compartment while the flat lands of Hungary swept by in the darkness. That had been late the first night of the journey from Vienna. Exhausted, half sick with the coffee the porter had brought, his head aching and every clack of the well-sprung wheels reverberating as if slaved to some infernal machine inside his skull, Asher had watched her shed the long black-fringed shawl and put back the spotted gauze of veils. She seemed beautiful to him beyond words, staring at the molten ink of the window glass. The only light on the length of the Orient Express was theirs, and now and then it tossed threads of illusory fire on the wind-lashed weeds beside the track. Not even the moon remained in the sky.

  "Good." Asher set aside the book he'd been trying to read, a truly dreadful account of life and love in Nero's Rome; tried to set aside at the same time the stirring within him of protectiveness and desire. He kept his voice deliberately casual. "It means we've got every chance of reaching Constantinople before him. 'The Dead travel fast,' Goethe says-but few things travel faster than the Orient Express. If he left Vienna by any other route, even by another train the minute he got away from the sanitarium, he'll still be a day behind us. Would you know, when he enters the city?"

  "I... don't know." She turned in her fingers the pearl buttons of her glove, a beautiful ghost in her blue and violet silk dress. He remembered the moonlight vampire girl in the woods outside the sanitarium and knew this dreadful warm surge of wanting for what it was-the lure to prey. Dimmer, more distant, almost certainly without her conscious volition, still it was there. He wanted her.

  "I don't know what arrangement was made with this Olumsiz Bey," she went on after a moment. "I looked at the guidebook. There are smaller stations in the city before one reaches the main gate, and this... this Bey, this master... may have planned to meet him at one of them. I don't know whether it will be safe for me to watch the main gate through the night. Perhaps he will not enter the city by train at all. Charles never trusted trains, nor the Underground of London, never liked them and never rode them. And the city itself, its sounds and smells, will be... different."

  She fell silent, her fingers in their lacy mitts resting still on the purple plush curtain, her brown eyes staring out into the night. Seeing the night with the night's own eyes.

  "Even Paris is different from London," she said at length, as if speaking to herself. "In London I know it if a policeman takes an unfamiliar turning within two miles of any of our houses. I could find Charles did he sleep in the lowest subcellar, did he walk the most obscure back way, did he haunt the steeple of St. Paul's or the warehouses of Whitechapel-given time. Vienna was more different still, chaos, a game without rules. Constantinople..."

  She shook her head, but in her voice Asher heard the tremor, not of fear, but of excitement, of joy.

  "It's strange," she went on, her voice so low that it should have been barely audible. "I should be terrified. Outside of London I'm a snail dispossessed of its shell, a rabbit with all her earths stopped. And yet all I feel is delight. The lights on the Alexander Bridge in Paris, like being inside a star; all the voices and music and scents of Vienna, making me drunk as I walked along the Ring. I know I could be destroyed in seconds, but all I wanted to do was dance and laugh and take off my hat and swing it around by its veils, just to be... just to be somewhere else. Seeing something new, something wonderful that I'd never seen. I don't know if you can understand that."

  "Maybe not fully," Asher said. "I've never been dead."

  "That's what being alive is, isn't it?" She turned toward him and reached up to pull out the jet and steel pins that held her hat to the close-folded raven universe of her hair.

  Asher nodded, understanding something else about her now, and the desire he felt was softened and transmuted to pity. "You never wanted to be a vampire, did you?"

  She hesitated, the hat like a dark bouquet overflowing her hands. "Oh, I did," she said. "The sharpening, the deepening, the enriching of the senses... one drowns in the color of silk, or the scent of coffee, or the weeping of the fiddles in distant night. Or the smell of blood, of sweat, of human fear. It is all the universe, as it never is to mortals, except maybe to a small child. It is living. And I wanted more than anything else not to leave Charles, ever. Once I came into it, I wanted it, craved it as a drunkard craves brandy." Her lips quirked ruefully; pale, Asher noted automatically. After Anthea had rele
ased him from her coffin, they had rushed onto the train with only minutes to spare, and Anthea knew well that every passenger was rich and expected at the other end, every porter and waiter accounted for.

  "I gather people become vampires because they want life; they want life that won't stop, won't even pale as life does for the old." She stroked the ostrich plumes of the hat, curling them around her fingers, her eyes not meeting his. "But to be dead is to become... static. And that is what we all become. We do not travel because it is dangerous. We wall ourselves into our houses, our crypts, our secret ways, because sleeping in the hours of daylight, we are as if drugged. We ring ourselves with locks and traps and things that we can control, and destroy those things that we cannot. We become dead. Journeying like this..." She shook her head once more. "All new things are peril, peril of death- and maybe peril of death is one definition of life. Sometimes I feel that I shall never return to London again."

  Asher remembered Cramer, who would have been one of the best if only he'd had the chance.

  She stretched out her hand to him, her face gravely beautiful. He knew that what the moonlight girl had tried to do to him in the dappled silence of the Vienna Woods, this woman had done to thousands of men in the streets and alleyways of London: made them love her, want her, need her, with a need that brought them mindless and damned into her arms. He remembered Fairport crying pitifully as the vampire women stripped him of his clothes, ripped at his veins in tiny, shredding cuts that would not kill immediately; drank his terror and his despair as well as his death. Fairport who had only wanted to live as normal men lived. And still he reached out and touched the long square fingers with his own. "Thank you for coming with me," she said quietly. "Thank you for... for seeing that I come to no harm."