02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2

by Barbara Hambly

Asher knew he must escape or die. He'd been wakened hours earlier by gunshots in the streets, had lain listening as the sounds of horror-driven fury, the random ululation of violence, ebbed and then flared like the sullen quarreling of a drunkard who returns again and again to the wellsprings of his rage.

  It was deep in the night, probably not many hours until dawn, when he heard them coming toward the house. Even in the Tientsin riots, the worst he'd known, this was the hour when such things quieted. Something, someone, was stirring them up, rousing them anew when they flagged.

  And for the first time he could hear, among the confused buzzing shouts, words that he knew.

  Vlokslak. Hortolak. Ordog.

  They were coming to burn the House of Oleanders.

  The vampires will flee, he thought.

  Olumsiz Bey will kill me, rather than let me tell others what I've seen.

  The spotted light of the stairway lamp still outlined the open door.

  The thought of getting up appalled him. Just breathing was like being struck in the side with an ax. He rolled carefully off the divan and managed to get on his feet- achingly glad that a Turkish divan wasn't even as high as the average milking stool the floor icy under bare soles, cold breathing around his ankles and stirring the long cotton shirt that someone had put on him when they brought him upstairs. He found his clothes farther along the divan, and put them on sitting. The boots were the worst. His bandaged arm ached and the stab of his broken ribs left him breathless as he pulled them on, but he knew the streets of Constantinople and knew he'd need them.

  To his enormous surprise, he made it to the door on his feet. The house below was soundless. They'd probably break in on the other side, through the crypt where the ice was delivered. If he met them in the crypt, they'd quite possibly kill him out of hand before they realized he wasn't a vampire himself.

  Descending the stairs left him dizzy, but he didn't fall. The thing in the crypt hadn't been able to drink much of his blood, though a good deal had been lost. He felt desperately thirsty. Down in the courtyard the sound of the mob didn't penetrate, and it was hard to disregard the voice in the back of his mind that argued that he certainly had time to lie down on the nice, comfortable pavement and rest a little...

  He took the vigil lamp from its niche and continued. In the Turkish part of the house the mob's fury sounded closer, a heavy sea surge that would stop at nothing.

  The tiled room. The overgrown court. The Roman baths. The long stair and the stench of ammonia, of wet brick...

  Of decay.

  The leopard glimmer of the lamp suddenly outlined the dark form standing before him. The light gleamed in the citrine eyes and on the silver blade of the halberd, and Asher, leaning panting on the wall, knew he had lost.

  He hadn't even the strength to turn and flee; the Bey would pull him down like a staghound a crippled fawn. Throwing the lamp would buy him seconds, but...

  "God sent you," the vampire said softly. "Help me. I beg you."

  He stepped forward, holding out one hand with its steel talons and winking jewels. "The others have fled. I have to get him someplace where the mob will not find him, have to get enough ice there, that he will live through the night."

  In the corridor behind him, when Asher moved the lamp, he could see the wet diamond glint of ice where it showed through the oilskin in which it was wrapped. Masses of it, far more than a living man could carry. But even with a vampire's strength, he could not make it more wieldy. He couldn't carry it, and a body as well, up those twisting stairs.

  "Please," the Bey said. "After that you may do as you will. I have the keys to the outer doors, you are free to go. On my honor, by the Prophet I swear it. But help me get him to safety. Please."

  Asher set down the lamp. "Is he able to walk at all?"

  The Bey stepped forward, some of the terrible tension lifting from the set of his shoulders, the angle of his shaven head. His snake-colored eyes seemed suddenly old, filled with the weariness of uncounted years alone. "With support, I thmk. We weigh not so heavy as living flesh."

  Asher touched his arm, staying him as they edged between the ice blocks and the wall, to the silver bars that guarded the corridor to the crypts. The last time they were eye-to-eye had been here, with the Bey's claws lodged deep in his throat. Those wounds throbbed under a dressing of sticking plaster every time he spoke.

  "You know it's not going to do you any good." He spoke, not in triumph, but in a kind of matter-of-fact compassion, for the creature beyond the bars was clearly beyond hope even if, by some miracle, Ernchester or some other vampire could be found to complete his transformation to the vampire state.

  He half expected the same rage that, earlier in the night, had almost killed him, but the Bey only shook his head.

  "If he can get through the night," he murmured. "If he can last through another day... The... transformation... of the flesh, when it takes place, is little short of miraculous. I have seen sere and aged crones return to the beauty of their girlhood once they have the power of the vampire mind. The flesh returns to the form that is in the mind. And in any case," he added, still more quietly, "though what you say may be true, I cannot leave him. He is... dear to me."

  The body that the Bey brought forth from the crypt was wrapped in a sort of shroud of oiled silk, with oilskins on top of that. Still it stank, a limp and filthy thing in the tall vampire's arms, its wet black curls glistening between the bandages, its dangling fingers dripping brownish fluid. Asher flinched back from it, remembering the slimy lips mumbling at his arm, as the Bey set it on its feet beside him; his shoulders cringed from the limp arm the Bey laid over them. Then the bandaged head lolled, like a drunken man's, and the livid eyelids, almost black in the gloom, rose to show dark eyes flooded with agony, horror, and dumb pleading for relief.

  The thing lived.

  "He was beautiful," whispered Olumsiz Bey. He bent, gathering the corners of the oilcloth around the ice. He had laid down his silver halberd to carry the thing from the crypt, the first time Asher had seen him let it out of his hand. Now he slipped it through the knot of the oilskins, the haft where he could grip it at once. There must have been several hundred pounds of ice, but he lifted it easily, for it was only the awkwardness of it that had prevented him from bearing both it and the boy leaning, weaving drunkenly, on his shoulders. At close range the smell was suffocating, and he tried not to think about the consistency of the arm that held so desperately to his neck. He himself, with his cracked ribs sawing like broken bamboo within him, could barely keep his feet.

  "Beautiful," the Bey said, "and more beautiful still in his heart. He was ardent as fire, my Kahlil. A young warrior, and loyal to me to the bottom of his soul." It was as if he heard Asher's thought, And you repaid him thus? But Asher did not speak it, so there was no anger in the vampire's quiet reply.

  "He would have been one of my living servants, here in this house. This was what I had planned." The shouting of the mob was very near, the sky above the tall Turkish roof-usually so dark-smoldering with the flare of torches. Smoke and rage burned the air.

  "This was hard for me. I wanted to make him as I am, to keep him by me in his glorious youth forever. But I knew this was no longer possible for me. Fifty, sixty years ago, in the days of Abdul Mezid, when my friend Tinnin was killed, I tried to make a fledgling. Though that youth's mind stayed alive, a burning flame in mine through the death of his body, when I returned that flame to the flesh, there was no change, no alteration in the flesh itself. The fledgling rotted as he lay until in mercy I struck off his head. This had happened... once, maybe twice before to me, long ago. But afterward all was well. This time-after Tinnin- the power did not return."

  He laughed soundlessly, bitterly, a tall figure in robes mottled like a tiger's in the shifting light. The jewels he wore threw back fire from the reddish glare of the sky, echoes of it catching in the ice he carried like some monstrous, Sisyphean gem loaded onto him by hilarious gods.

  "I tried thr
ee, perhaps four times since that time, and I knew there was little chance of bringing Kahlil across to the vampire state. And I knew this was God's mockery of me: that having found the one I could trust, the one who could help me, I had squandered my gift of dark immortality on such as Zardalu and the Baykus Kadine, and that cobweb witch Zenaida who hides in the old harem, only because I needed those I could command to do my bidding.

  "And then the interloper came."

  The stairs from the old bans court were the worst. Where it had been silent, now the shouting was clearly audible, and drifts of smoke swirled harsh in the air. Asher abandoned the lamp to its niche again, his own injuries stabbing him as he struggled to help the shrouded form up the long flights, the Bey at his heels with the huge, unwieldy burden of dripping ice.

  "Golge Kurt," said the Bey's soft voice, almost as if it were in his ear, while beneath the bandages Kahlil made soft, broken noises of pain. "The Shadow Wolf. God knows where he came from, or how he came to be vampire. Some Greek witch, no doubt, whom he later escaped... But he is a Turk of the new Turks, this upland peasantry that they've given guns and delusions of rule. I saw him first just after the coup, when all the city was in confusion. He had made a fledgling already- as easy as spitting-to challenge my power. I killed the fledgling-but I could not kill him. And after that I had no choice."

  They reached the long upper chamber. Asher sank, hand pressed to his side, onto the divan, the wrapped and shrouded living corpse beside him. While the Bey unfurled his oilskin to let the ice clatter down, filling the dry tiles of the fish pool, Kahlil, instead of lying on the divan, remained sitting beside Asher, clinging to him, as if frantic for the comfort of a living touch. Stinking, rotting, horrible within the bandages, but Asher could not thrust him away.

  The Bey came back, tenderly lifted the boy's body and carried it to the ice. Watching them in the juddering orange flare of the lamps around the walls, Asher wondered bitterly how many men fell back on that phrase, I had no choice, when it came to what they wanted-even when it did that to those they loved.

  Ernchester, when he had killed Cramer.

  Karolyi, certainly, if he thought at all.

  He himself.

  Olumsiz Bey knelt on the steps of the basin, holding the putrefying bundle that had been the boy's hand.

  "So you tried to make him vampire," Asher said quietly. "Even though you knew."

  The Bey nodded, once.

  "And when you saw that though his mind survived, his body was beginning to rot, you sent for Ernchester."

  "I could rule him," the Bey said simply. "I knew him. I knew he was weak. He could get fledglings but had not the strength to command them. Once away from that woman of his-"

  "Who loves him," Asher said. "Who cares for him, as you care for Kahlil."

  The Bey did not even look up at that, didn't take his eyes from his friend; only shook his head, a heavy, animal gesture, impatient and puzzled, as if he truly did not understand what Asher said. "Women don't love. Not like men. Not like a man loves one who is the son he would have chosen out of all souls in the Universe. No love is like that."

  No, thought Asher. A vampire to the end, even to the nature of his love.

  The Bey did not even pause to speculate, to justify. His love was unique, and because it was-and because it was his-that justified all. He went on, "But without the Sultan's power, I had to find what help I could. A savage, Karolyi, for all his civilized manners. A Magyar Hun. I think he had already begun to guess at what I was before I sent for his help. I think he had already wondered what use he-in the name of his country-could make of the Undead."

  He leaned over to touch the forehead of the boy who lay now unmoving in his bed of ice. The great uneven blocks were old, dried and cleared and slick; they caught the feeble ember light like monster diamonds, faceting it to a wild rainbow over the walls, as if from a bier of jewels.

  "I was able to hold Golge Kurt at bay for a time-I think ail would have been well, had not Karolyi chosen to make what he could of the chance, to try to force Ernchester into the service of his country." His eyes, in their dark hollows, were dying coals of some old rage. "Country. We the Undead at least were human once. Our sins are human sin. Magnified a million times, but human. These countries, these nations-they are not human. They care not what they use, so long as it serves them. They care not what they do, and their sins are far beyond ours, literally of a different nature. You have served them. Karolyi told me that, Karolyi who is hollow inside, nothing inside, because this 'country' requires that he be nothing. You know."

  "Yes," Asher said, remembering again. "I know."

  He shook his head. "And so Karolyi delayed. And Golge Kurt was able to gain a little more territory, to learn a little more of the city. I fear that when Ernchester tried to come into the city to obey my summons, he was met by Golge Kurt and made a prisoner, and a slave. I thought that if I could trap the woman through you, I could draw Ernchester to me... Or at the worst, use her to make Kahlil whole. But it did not come about. And now it is finished."

  Shouts rang in the courtyard, echoing from distant regions of the house. In the windows that ringed each shallow dome, the sky was red, like a cloth used to mop blood. The Bey reached in his robe, threw something to Asher that caught a spangle of the light as it flew. It was a key.

  "Go," he said. "First light is not far off. They'll be gone before then, and they will not come here. They will not even realize there is a stairway, though they stand at its foot looking up. Such is still my power." After a moment's thought he took the halberd and slid it across the floor to him, the silver blade flashing.

  "You may meet one of them still," he added. "If it is Golge Kurt, kill him. Not for me. He is a man of the new breed who will try to buy power from whatever country he thinks will give it him. And he will buy it with any terms they ask. He is like your Karolyi. I only wanted one fledgling. They will want hundreds, loyal to their service. And what will come of that I do not wish to think."

  He shook his heavy head, turned back to the boy in the ice. His voice was so low as to be almost inaudible, like the murmur of a fading ghost. "And-thank you, Scheherazade. Thank you for your help."

  Asher stood in the doorway for a moment, leaning on the silver halberd, shivering, for he had stripped off his death-stinking coat and only the piercing cold prevented him from shedding his shirt as well.

  How many had the Bey killed? wondered Asher, looking at the bowed form in its golden robes beside the pathetic, shrouded figure on its jeweled pyre of ice. As many as a war, certainly. Karolyi would justify himself the same way-as he, Asher, had justified himself, time and again. At the time he may even have been right.

  Painfully, clinging to the halberd for support, Asher made his way down the long stairs.

  In the courtyard the noise was louder, echoing from the archway that led to the Byzantine house. Shouts, and the crash of precious things breaking, the thud of running feet. Smoke rolled in, burning his eyes and catching in the light-too much, too strong, for torches. Some part of the house was in flames.

  Legs shaking, Asher leaned on the column at the foot of the stair and wondered if he had enough strength left to make it down the colonnade, across the overgrown court, through the crypts...

  And home, he thought.

  If Golge Kurt became Master of Constantinople-and Asher knew it lay beyond his strength, now, to stop him-it was only a matter of time before Karolyi, or some Young Turk just as eager for his country's triumph, convinced him to become a weapon of the state.

  And then a new age would come indeed.

  He would tell Clapham, though he knew Clapham wouldn't believe. Even the redoubtable Lady Clapham would think his ravings delirium. One had to be born to it, raised in it, as Karolyi had been, to believe quickly... quickly enough.

  Razumovsky would believe, and Razumovsky would help him home... but Razumovsky would make a deal with Karolyi for what he could get. Bulgaria for you-India for us.

  And
the infection would spread.

  Something dark rushed through the archway into the court, making straight for the stair. It paused before him, dark eyes flaring in the lamplight, and Asher realized, tardily, who it was. Tall for a Turk, with a Turk's black hair and scimitar nose, a feral bristle of mustache... the eyes were indeed the eyes of a wolf. All this he saw in less than a second; Asher didn't even have time to raise the halberd from its position as a crutch to that of a weapon when the vampire struck him aside, the impact with the wall like a sword in his side.

  Breath left him and wouldn't return, and when he opened his eyes again the vampire was partway up the stairs, lithe and silent as a lion in his torn khaki rags.

  Asher thought, grimly, I have to pursue... but knew he was incapable of catching him, of moving more than a step or so without agony...

  And Golge Kurt was not alone. Asher had seen vampires run-eerily weightless and without a sound-and knew the second dark form that streamed in like smoke and bones was a vampire as well. Even before he realized it was Ysidro-Ysidro?-the vampire of London, gaunt and starved and ghastly, fell upon Golge Kurt like a silent falcon with a talon-rip at his throat that would have ex-sanguinated him had he not, impossibly, heard and turned at the last instant to meet the attack.

  The two closed, fell, locked together on the steps, ripping at one another with clawlike nails, and seconds later a third vampire emerged from the dark, sprang up the steps. Him Asher knew at once, though in a strange way he seemed to have changed even more than Ysidro. When they last had spoken, by the flame light of the burning sanitarium in the Vienna Woods, Ernchester, if torn by indecision and grief, at least had been his own man. Now his face was empty, faded as the rags of his old black coat and filthy trousers, his blue eyes pieces of dirty glass. He caught Ysidro by the arms, dragging him back from the silent, slashing tangle on the steps, and held him while Golge Kurt whipped a long soldier's knife from his belt. Ysidro took one cut across the chest before he kicked the blade aside, another across the face as he slid bonelessly free of Ernchester's grip...