02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2

by Barbara Hambly

  I feel as if I shall never return to London again.

  Standing alone in the darkness at the heart of the crypt, Asher felt the knife- twist fear in his heart, that he would never see Lydia again.

  He had thought of her often in the long prison chamber, listening to the sunset wailing of the muezzins, the constant squabbling of the gulls, the wind-whisper flight of vampire feet in the labyrinths below. He was glad in an odd way that if it was to be so-if he was going to die in the House of the Oleanders-he hadn't known it that rainy morning when all he'd been looking forward to was the emotional harrowing of his cousin's funeral and the distasteful scenes of family greed sure to follow. He'd have been solemn then, he thought, and solemnity would have completely spoiled the pillow fight early on the morning of his departure, and the giggling tussle of lace and kisses and stray medical journals.

  Seven years. It should have been longer. She'd probably track him to Vienna, but Anthea had smuggled them both onto the train. It was not possible that anyone from either Halliwell's Department, or the Stadtspoliz, or the Kundschafts Stelle, had seen them board. Thin, matter-of-fact, beautiful with a breathtaking marsh- fairy beauty which she herself had been forbidden to see... His soul ached, suddenly and desperately, with the need to see her one more time before he died. Only that, if nothing else were possible...

  He wondered if, in tracing his contacts in the Austrian city, she would somehow meet Francoise.

  The tarnished silver bars glimmered dully in the light of the single candle, cold even in the comforting yellow glow. Asher set the candle down carefully on a crossbar, its base protected by a circle of paper torn from a book to preclude telltale drips of wax while he worked carefully with the twisted bronze wires of the homemade picklock. It was hard to keep his hands steady, given the cold of the November night, the ice piled here in such quantities... the fear. The silence was a second darkness, and the smell of ammonia clutched his throat.

  The silver hinges did not creak. He stepped into the low-roofed corridor, edged past the puddles of water, the sawdust and the straw.

  Why ice? Absurdly, he remembered something the vampire Ysidro had once told him, about aging vampires suffering from cold. Surely all this wasn't just to make an old enemy uncomfortable? He wondered, if he freed Ernchester a second time, whether the vampire earl would escape with him at all, or whether he would, as he had in Vienna, simply let him free and cleave to the Turkish master who had summoned him.

  Why?

  The second door along the corridor, as Asher had already begun to suspect, opened into a cramped pitchy wilderness of coils and tubes and tanks, the harsh stink of ammonia like acid in the air. The weak firefly glow lined the words

  ZWANZIGSTEJAHR-HUNDERT ABKUHLUNG GESEIXESCHAFT on a Crate.

  Twentieth Century Refrigeration Company.

  Freezer chests, a vacuum plant, hoses like obscene rubber entrails dangling.

  Glass carboys of poisonous ammonia gas gleamed like monstrous eggs. Though the floor of the corridor was wet, there were no tracks in here, no straw, no sawdust. Having gone through the installation of a new furnace in one of the New College lecture halls, Asher guessed that some part or valve had broken, and had been sent for to Berlin. Five days since the breakdown, the Bey had screamed, and still no word... He closed the door, locked it, wiped the silver handle with his handkerchief. The second door's handle was like ice. The sound of the tumblers going over was that of hammers driving coffin nails, answered from within, as from the deeps of a tomb, by a profound, sickening groan.

  The stench that rolled over Asher as he pushed the door inward almost physically blinded him. He shut his eyes, averted his face. Stupid... he thought the next moment. And then, If it's this bad when it's this cold in here... His breath was a cloud in the wan candle flare; the hoarfrost glistened on the stone walls, as did the ice that almost filled the crypt.

  But all that was peripheral to the dark thing crawling toward him through the mess of half-frozen sawdust and straw on the floor-and to his understanding of what it was, and what it meant.

  Staring down into the face-into what was left of the face-he knew everything, everything except where Ernchester was, and even that he could begin to guess. Then his breath was shut off under the crushing grip of a fleshy hand, and he was swept backward through the door with such force that he felt his feet leave the floor. He barely had time to pull his head forward when he struck the corridor wall, not thrown into it, as Olumsiz Bey had hurled him before, but slammed against the stonework with such force as to break ribs. He cried out-he thought he cried out-as the bones knifed him within, his mind suffocated under darkness, breath driven from him and unable to return. He struck the wall a second time, pain lancing his left shoulder blade as if he'd been struck by an ax, and all the while a voice screamed at him, screamed curses in Persian and Arabic and Turkish, incomprehensible through his mounting desperation to breathe...

  He didn't know what language, he thought the voice was shouting, "Is this what you wanted? Is this what you sought?" and the hand twisted his head, the pressure on the spine intolerable, the icy water on the floor drenching him as he lay in it. "Is this what you wished to see?"

  But he could see nothing, the candle having fallen to the wet floor of the crypt; nothing except, in his mind's eyes, the livid face of the thing in the crypt. Claws slit his sleeve open, shoulder to hem, while a knee ground in his back and the terrible weight pinned him to the stone, his neck bones cracking under the vindictive twist of Olumsiz Bey's hand. His arm was torn open to the wrist, blood burning hot on the sudden cold of his flesh, and all the while the smell grew around him, mounting and horrible, waves of it, while something fell squishily against the wall nearby, dragged with a horrible, thick groaning through the pools on the floor. Something fumbled at his arm, slick and glutinous around the sharpness of teeth; he heard the vampire whisper, "Drink. Drink, my kitten, my child, my beloved... drink..."

  Something that felt like a hand-or what had once been a hand-groped along his arm for a steadying hold.

  Then with a retching noise the thing pulled away, rolled, crawled, with horrible sounds, back toward the door of its crypt and began to vomit. Asher thought later it was the release of the twisting pressure on his neck and backbone as Olumsiz Bey left him, as much as anything else, that finally let him faint.

  He didn't think he was unconscious more than a minute or two; the jabbing pain of a tourniquet on his arm brought him back to the same inky darkness, the icy water seeping through his clothing to icy flesh, the sinking weakness of blood loss. His own blood, coppery in his nostrils, was the least horrible thing he smelled.

  The cold was marginally less. The crypt door was closed.

  Softly, his body aching with the careful ration of his breath, he said, "So that's why you wanted Ernchester."

  "You know nothing of these things." The master's voice came shrill, slivered thin through constricted throat, constricted lungs.

  His hands dragged the tourniquet as if he would use it to cut off the arm he bound.

  "I know you're fighting an interloper on your territory. I know you don't trust those of your fledglings you have left... and I know now that you've lost the ability to make more."

  The nails tightened on his arms, tearing again the numb flesh.

  "That's it, isn't it? You haven't been able to make a fledgling for years. Only six vampires, for one of the biggest cities in Europe? Where the government doesn't even care if you kill, so long as it's Armenians and Jews and the poor? Even your fledglings were beginning to comment that you were growing choosy about getting others to replace those who'd been destroyed.

  "But when the interloper came, you had to make the attempt. And when you saw it wouldn't work-that you could hold the fledgling's mind alive through physical death but couldn't transmit the physical syndrome of vampirism to the body-you used your contacts with the old Sultan's allies to send for the one vampire you knew you could control, the one you knew whose fledgli
ngs would be yours, under your power..."

  The hand closed around his neck again, not strangling this time, the clawed nails hooking like wolf's teeth under the bundle of nerve and tendon and blood vessels below his ear. The hard knee pressed, bracing, on his chest, like the small, blunt end of a ram. Very softly, Olumsiz Bey said, "I... could... kill you..."

  "If you didn't need me for bait," he said, barely able to whisper against the dig of the claws. "Bait to trap Anthea, and bait to trap the earl. If Ernchester isn't with the interloper already."

  The hand released his throat. Wet silk passed over his bare arm, the side of his face, as the vampire stood. Then Olumsiz Bey kicked him, like the deliberate blow of a hammer, again and again like a man smashing rocks, and in a very short time Asher fainted again.

  Twenty

  "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God." The voice of the muezzin pierced the sodden fog of Asher's dreams like golden wire. "Come to prayer. Come to prayer."

  Anthea, Asher thought, trying to surface, then slid back into velvet chasms of unconsciousness. He could see her on the train, her profile a milky coastline against the windows obsidian sea. "Ernchester has never trusted trains," she said, and then her pale face, her white hands, turned to the marble bones of the grave steles beyond the Adrianople Gate, the dark of her dress and hair to the black cold of night.

  Through brittle moonlight he saw a man walking, small and stooped in his old- fashioned clothing, but moving from gravestone to gravestone with the flitting lightness of the vampire. In the open ground he stopped, like an indrawn breath. Asher felt the presence of the shadow without seeing it, but in his dreaming it seemed to him that he smelled again the rank mixture of blood and mold that had overwhelmed him in the darkness of the dry cistern. Ernchester moved, turning as if to flee, but as he turned, the shadow was before him. The air stirred with vampire laughter.

  Do you think his favor is now off this man, and he is ours?

  The voice slipped into the dimming scenes of his dream, as if the wind had said it, but he knew what it was. He fought, panicked, to wake, struggling back out of the abyss.

  "Did he want him dead, he'd be dead, not here," grumbled the voice that he recognized as one-eyed Haralpos.

  "Wake him," the Baykus Kadine giggled. "Wake him up and ask."

  Wake up! he screamed at himself. Wake up, they're all around your bed! Sleep was a black velvet pillow over his face. Maybe his body realized that if he woke, he'd hurt.

  "Maybe he should be kissed," Pelageya said in her deep voice, "like the damsel in tower?" Something that might have been fingernails trailed across the bare skin of his chest.

  The whispering blurred, blended. He thought he saw the dim golden outline of the open door to the corridor outside, the subaqueous flicker of the pierced brass lamps, but he could not see the vampires around him at all. Only the red glint of their eyes.

  "Maybe he knows where the Bey has gone?"

  "What makes you think he might?"

  "Someone had to bring him here..."

  "We have to find him..."

  "And tell him what?" Zardalu demanded scornfully. "That some worthless Armenian dog has been found with his throat slit?"

  "Bled..."

  "In a church..."

  "The man was a priest..."

  "Then he deserved it, whoever did it to him."

  "He wasn't the only one. There was the old fig seller in the Koum Kapou..."

  "He is getting insolent, our Shadow Wolf." Zardalu spoke the name in Turkish, Golge Kurt, the words harsh and guttural in the flow of his court Osmanli. "Now our Bey must come out of this foolish hiding, must walk the nights again and stop crouching here with his dastgah and his almanya infidels..."

  "And if he doesn't?"

  "That kind of murder is stupid, senseless, leaving his kills to be fallen over. No wonder the Bey has told us to find this intruder Golge Kurt, to kill him..."

  "What do you expect of a peasant who thinks he's a soldier because some other jumped- up peasant has put a gun in his hands?"

  "We must find the Bey..."

  "... find him..."

  He didn't know if they'd ever really been there. It seemed to him that he woke with a kind of start to find the chamber empty. The door still stood open, outlined in gold, and against the plastered walls the patterned spots of the lamp still wavered like an insubstantial scarf.

  You know nothing of this matter, Olumsiz Bey had said.

  And Charles, I love her unto death, and beyond.

  He thought he knew where Olumsiz Bey could be found, and his heart turned over, sickened with shock and pity.

  "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God." The voice of the muezzin echoed dimly through the window lattices, as the ridiculously overdone grandeur of the Constantinople sunset bled to death in the west.

  She could barely keep her hands steady, so it wasn't easy to achieve a proper symmetry of her coiffure. And in any case, thought Lydia, keeping her mind on what she was doing as if it were a dissection-with a kind of cool, inquiring deliberation-in any case her hair had never taken the fashionable curls necessary for a coiffure a la grecque. In her current mental state she'd be lucky if she didn't singe half of it off with the curling irons.

  She was trying not to look at the envelope marked with the Hapsburg crest, lying on the table beside her.

  Not that she needed to. She knew every word of the few lines written inside.

  If you would save your husband's life, meet me at the Burned Column at 3:00 today. One close to you is a servant of the Bey-tell no one, but do not fail or your husband will be dead before dawn. Trust me. Karolyi.

  Trust me.

  Lydia had seen the Burned Column two days ago, when Razumovsky had detoured past it after the excursion to the bazaar. It stood-a massive monument of Byzantine porphyry, its bronze horseman blackened by ancient smoke-in the center of the old market district, a labyrinth of courtyards, alleys, warehouses, and crumbling, disused baths in the most ancient part of the city.

  It was exactly the place she would choose for a kidnapping, if the victim were to be snatched up and quietly chloroformed. When the note arrived that morning, her immediate thought had been, What on earth does he take me for? He must have realized, she thought, that she would be of no use to him, and was in a position to interfere with his plans.

  The certainty that she was right hadn't made it any easier, during tea with Lady Clapham, to listen to the embassy clock strike three.

  And if Herr Jacob Zeittelstein wasn't at the reception of Herr Hindi's Turkish partner tonight-if he hadn't returned from Berlin as expected that afternoon-she didn't know what she would do.

  It was Wednesday night. James had been missing for a week. She closed her eyes, her hands trembling so much that she had to lower them, the iron cooling in her grip. Dear God, let me find him, she prayed. Dear God, show me another clue if this one fails...

  Ice, she thought immediately. She seemed to hear Razumovsky saying, above the clamor of the Grand Bazaar, Someone always knows...

  If Herr Zeittelstein had gone to Berlin to fetch a piece for the refrigeration plant, it stood to reason Olumsiz Bey would be buying ice. It might take a few days to trace...

  I can't afford a few days! she thought despairingly. Jamie can't afford a few days!

  There was a noise behind her. She opened her eyes with a start, the distorted panic of too little sleep flooding her...

  Margaret stood reflected in the mirror, hesitating in the doorway behind her, blinking in the latticed sunset light.

  Lydia's stomach contracted in rage and dread. Not before a party, she thought despairingly. I don't think I can take another scene...

  She pushed up her glasses and turned in her chair. Her red hair spilled, an untidy river, down her milky shoulders. She knew she should say something neutral, unargumentative: Hello, Margaret, or, Did you find what you were shopping for this morning? The governess had been gone when Lydia woke
up. But she felt too tired to frame the words. She only looked, and Margaret occupied herself for a few minutes straightening the lace on the edge of her house mitt as if it were the most important task of the day.

  Then Margaret looked up. "Mrs. Asher-Lydia-I'm... I'm sorry."

  From the time she was five years old, Lydia had been trained to smile and say, It's all right. Her upper arms were crisscrossed with sticking plaster and dressings. She'd told Dr. Manzetti-and Lady Clapham, who'd recommended the physician and gone to him with her that morning-that she'd been attacked by dogs. Against the sharp points of her collarbone, the knobs of her wrists, the silver chains that had saved her life felt heavy and cold.

  She couldn't even ask, Why?

  The sonnet she'd found had told her that.

  She had lain awake thinking for a good part of the night, and found that the memory of those lines still made her heart beat swift and heavy with an emotion she couldn't define. Nothing at all like she felt for James. All her fear of Ysidro had returned, in strangely transmuted waves. Nothing at all like what she knew, or had ever known.

  Grief- stricken, silent, Margaret gazed at her with tears in her blue eyes. Lydia felt the anger within her ease.

  "You're afraid for him," she said carefully, "and you want to help him. You're afraid that he will die because of the promises he made to me."

  Margaret turned brilliant, blotchy red, and looked down at her gloves again; tears crawled slowly from beneath her heavy eyeglasses. This woman had tried to kill her, thought Lydia wearily. Why was she sparing her?

  She knew the answer to that, too. Because Margaret had locked the door behind her, not only for the sake of the sonnet, but because she was Lydia Willoughby, heiress; because of all the sonnets no one ever wrote to the Margaret Pottons of the world.