James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (25 page)

Lydia heard nothing for a time, though she knew that Ysidro had not gone inside; and indeed, moments later, the dimmest crack of light showed when he opened the gate again and stood for a moment looking out. That slit vanished; he emerged into the courtyard like an errant ghost and crossed to her hiding place as if he had seen her all along.

“I could wish her to have reserved such theatrics for another place and time.”

“Yes.” Irritated as she had been with Margaret, her greatest anger still lay toward him. She folded her arms against the cold. “It’s a nuisance, isn’t it, when people decide to feel more than you’ve scheduled them to feel?”

“It is.” He might have been agreeing that today was Saturday. The moon was sinking; only the glow from the votives by the kitchen door showed her the garden before them. “Yet the dreams she dreams are not all of my making. And I admit I will feel safer to know that the two of you sleep in the one bed, which I trust you will hang about, as you did in Sofia and Belgrade, with those stinking weeds you have carried with you since Paris.”

The chilly breeze from the Asian hills stirred the last leaves high overhead. A stray breath of it flared the votive lights, showing her briefly Ysidro’s face, eyes darkened by shadow to skull-like sockets and cheekbones hollowed to bruises. Remembering what he had said about mirrors, Lydia wondered suddenly if he was actually thinning away before her to a wraith of ectoplasm and bone, or if what was thinning was simply his ability to make her believe that she saw him other than he truly was.

“The Galata slums at the base of the hill and the high streets of Pera with their embassies and their banks, they all smell of vampires.” The flame repeated itself, cold yellow crystal in his eyes. “Standing just now on the steps of the Yusek Kalderim, I stretched forth my mind across the Golden Horn, and the city lies under such miasma as I have never encountered before. The minds of vampires, the mind of the master, other minds… I can smell them, heft them like silk in my hand. But everything is blocked, shadowed, wreathed in illusion and deception, as if every card on the board were down-turned, and one had to wager all one had on a hand of three.”

He frowned and turned to look once more at the gate. Involuntarily Lydia stepped closer to him, her anger forgotten. “Are you sure? You’ve said yourself you aren’t as… as able to perceive…”

A wry line sketched itself in the corner of his mouth, the echo of a living man’s ironic smile. “A regret, mistress? A concern for the fact that you have asked me not to kill to preserve my own life, only to discover that such abstinence may prevent me from preserving yours?”

She studied his face a moment, trying to read something in the twin sulfur glints of his eyes. They were like a dragon’s in their hollows. “No,” she said. “A concern, maybe, but not a regret.”

“No,” he echoed softly. “A lady worthy to her bones.”

It was, she realized, the first time he had spoken to her of her stipulation.

Then he shook his head and looked back to the gate and the inky, pitch blackness that lay beyond.

“And Jamie?” She found she could barely speak his name. It was hard even to ask, for fear Ysidro would tell her what she had dreaded for days to hear.

His brow flinched, just barely, in a frown. “If he is here, he is not in Pera.” There was almost hesitation, an unwillingness in his voice. “If he sleeps on the Stamboul shore…” He shook his head. “No, my perceptions are impaired, but this is not a matter of degree. This—shadow, this—blurring that lies over the city… it is something that emanates from the vampires themselves. An obscurity, gathered to hide aught within it. A fog, as they say the Undead can summon…”

His smile had been—almost—a living man’s smile. The shadow in those dragon eyes was suddenly, fleetingly, a living man’s fear. “Tomorrow night will be soon enough to cross, to walk and listen in the darkness, to see what more can be descried at nearer quarters.” He drew his cloak more closely around him, a subconscious gesture, the white of his gloves against the dark wool like frost on black rock.

“But it is clear to me that something very strange is taking place in this city, and I had rather our romantic friend had not cried aloud, even in English, regarding hunting and killing and the drinking of blood. I think it best such things not be spoken of, not even here in Pera. Not even by light of day.”

The voices of the muezzins woke Asher: “There is no God but God; Mohammed is His Prophet…” He knew the words, but could not tease them from the somber roll of sound.

Arched windows had at one time opened all along the room, five times the length of its narrow width, but centuries ago these had been bricked shut. The windows in the drums of the five shallow domes above were, as far as he could ascertain, barred with silver, though it was hard to be sure. By day he heard no voices, no clip of donkey hooves or creak of wheels from below, and only occasionally and far off, the barking of Constantinople’s infamous dogs. Now and then the wind would bring him a street vendor’s cry in sawed-off Romaic Greek. Day or night, the closest sounds were the squawking of the seagulls and the yowl of cats.

Through the lattice the sky was the color of tiger lilies, the light momentarily a soft and fading salmon hue on the blue tiles that ringed the domes.

Asher did not face Mecca—though he’d deduced in what direction it lay—nor repeat the words intended by the muezzin, but sitting among the cushions and blankets of the divan, he prayed. He was very frightened.

The light in the room had deepened when he finished, bleeding away to shadow. Because of the domes, the room filled with darkness from the bottom up. In the center of the floor the rectangular, blue-tiled basin of what must have been a fountain or fish pool seemed fathoms deep in the gloom, a horror from which anything might emerge. Asher scratched a match that he took from his pocket, to light the wick of one of the few bronze lamps that still occupied the serried ranks of niches in the wall.

The glow did little to dispel the dreadful brooding dimness. He reached for his watch to wind it, as was his habit, but of course it had been taken, along with the silver chains that had protected his wrists and throat.

He dressed and washed, and stowed the bedding in which he’d slept in one of the room’s shallow cupboards, listening all the while to night fall within the silent house. In full dark—enough so that a white thread could not be distinguished from a black, as the Koran said—he heard the key turn in the old-fashioned lock.

He moved as far from the door as he could and deliberately willed his mind not to feel, not to succumb to the odd, lazy distraction of the vampire power. Still he did not see them enter the room. He had the vague impression that he had dreamed once about standing in a darkened gallery, watching a door inlaid with brass and ivory as it began to open…

But it seemed to him that one moment he was stepping back against a pillar, and the next, they were all around him, binding his wrists behind him with narrow silk cord. Their eyes in the lamplight were the eyes of rats, their flesh dead clay on his. They had not fed.

“So who are you, Englis?” asked the one who had been pointed out to him last night as Zardalu. Beardless, boneless as an empty stocking, he had red-painted fingernails and a Circassian’s bright blue eyes. “Yesternight I took you for one of the Bey’s mikaniki, and I thought, This is one he intends to make one of us, to look after this thing they make in the crypts, this dastgah.” His eyes slid sidelong at Asher under painted lids; and knowing they could hear it, Asher tried to calm the pounding of his heart.

“And now the Bey has given us other instructions concerning you. What are we to think?”

“You really think he’d join another to us for the sake of one of his experiments?” Jamila Baykus—the Baykus Kadine, she had been called, stick-thin with a strange, disheveled wildness that was somehow very like her namesake owl—put her head to one side and considered him with enormous demon eyes. Half her hair was braided or curled, dressed on jeweled combs, the rest hanging in a huge malt-colored tangle to her thighs. Pearls were caught in it, like shells glimpsed in a jetsam of kelp; she had a necklace of rat bones and diamonds around her throat. “Is that what you are, Englis?” The finger she reached up to touch the underside of his chin—for she was no taller than a twelve-year-old English girl—was like a twig brought in from out-of-doors, icy with the ice of the night.

“He said we weren’t to question him.” That was Haralpos, a one-eyed tough who had been a janissary. He held up a scarf, fine cotton, creased and filthy and patched with dark stains.

“And did he say I was not to question you?” Asher had studied Persian and enough Arabic to approximate the thick Osmanli they spoke and make himself understood.

Zardalu’s eyebrows tweaked into circumflexes of malicious delight, and his fangs gleamed in a smile. “Oh, what a clever Englis. Of course you may question us. Who are we but your fellow servants of the Deathless Lord?”

“He said silence,” Haralpos insisted. The dark Habib and the voluptuous and silent Russian girl, Pelageya, stirred uneasily. Asher knew of whom the janissary spoke and knew the others had a right to be uneasy. “He said to walk in silence, like the fog. Would we have this infidel cry out to be saved?”

“Would it do me any good if I did?” countered Asher. He turned to Zardalu, whom he sensed to be the most dangerous of them, and asked him, “What dastgah is this?” The word meant a scientific apparatus, which could mean anything from an astrolabe to a chemical experiment.

“How should I know that, Englis? The Deathless Lord has put up silver bars across the cellar which lies beneath the old baths that are no longer used. He has veiled the place with his mind, to keep us from thinking about it, even as he has veiled this entire city.” The sweet alto voice sank lower, and as the vampire leaned close, his hair and clothing breathed patchouli and decay.

“He has veiled the place, yet still we feel the cold of the ice that he has men bring in during the day for his experiments. We smell the naft, the alkol, the stinks of what he does… even as we hear the footfalls of the workmen, down below in the crypts, as we sleep. Does he think we do not?”

“Come,” Haralpos said impatiently. “Now.” He reached out with the scarf, and Zardalu touched his wrist.

“Our friend James has said—may we call you James, Englis?— that he knows better than to cry out. The Bey will surely punish us if he escapes, and so even an escape’s attempt will mean—oh, not death—” His cold knuckle brushed the scars under Asher’s ear. “—but surely some unpleasant experiences with tweezers, or water, or hot sand.” The red nails clinched suddenly hard on the earlobe, cutting stronger and stronger like the grip of a machine, Asher gritting his teeth, shutting his eyes, forcing his mind away from the pain. Just when he thought the claws were about to tear away the flesh, Zardalu released him and smiled a fanged smile as he opened his eyes once more. “And he knows he will not escape.”

There was blood on Zardalu’s nails. The vampire held Asher’s gaze with his own as he licked them slowly clean.

They led him out into an open gallery two floors above a courtyard paved in stone. An old han, or caravansary, Asher guessed as they descended the long flights of tiled steps. A solitary lamp burned in a wall niche at the bottom of the flight, outlining the arch of a short passageway that led through and down into an octagonal vestibule whose mosaic floors, though long defaced, still showed parts of Byzantine figures. He had crossed that vestibule yesterday afternoon, in the midst of the men who had surrounded him in an alley of the market district, a knife pressed to his back. They had said nothing to him, but had not needed to. The age of the place, as much as the absence of lamps from the niches and mirrors from the walls, had told him what house he had been brought to.

Last night in the flickering lamplight of the upstairs chamber, Olumsiz Bey had said to him, “It is unfair to keep you utterly a prisoner, when my house has libraries and baths and amusements for an intelligent man.” Asher had been lying on the divan then, bound hand and foot and more frightened than he had been in his life.

“But the House of Oleanders is an ancient house, and a large house. There are rooms in which no lamp has been kindled for a great many years, and my children come and go freely in the dark.” The Bey gestured to the fledglings with his right hand, coarse and square and covered with rings whose jewels had been carved long before the faceting of gems was devised. In his left he carried a weapon that Asher had not seen him set down, a halberd five and a half feet long whose naked eighteen-inch blade was wrought of shining silver, honed to a razor’s keenness and backed along its spine with slanting teeth like a fish’s ribs.

“Thus I believe it best that Sayyed here go with you.” The Deathless Lord’s wave brought forward an impassive servant, one of the three who had kidnapped him yesterday. “I think,” the Master of Constantinople had added, as the living servant drew a knife and cut away Asher’s bonds, “that you will find he is your best friend.”

Asher understood. For several hours Sayyed had stood in the doorway of the library, watching him while he explored the inlaid cupboards and read the titles of the books within them— Arabic, German, Latin—by the light of a dozen lamps and candles. The servant made no comment when Asher had taken a volume of Procopius’ Secret History and a bronze candlestick back to his room with him, and that was as much as Asher had sought to accomplish. The candlestick was ornamented with tendrils of vine wrought of bronze wire, which Asher had pried loose to work into picklocks as soon as the sun was up.

The interview with Olumsiz Bey was in his mind now, as Haralpos bound his eyes with the dirty scarf and he was guided along, bound and blind and surrounded by whispering voices of those the Bey had warned him to avoid. In his mind, too, was the silver weapon the Bey had carried, and what it meant that he carried it.

Asher tried counting turns and footsteps, and concentrated on the feel of the ground underfoot. But as the Bey had said, the house was a large one and composed, from what little Asher had seen, of several old hans, minor palaces of Turk or Byzantine construction. They passed through two open courtyards—or one courtyard twice, for the brick underfoot felt the same—up and down steps, through a place where water splished thinly under his boots and another where loose boards rang hollowly, though only with his own tread despite the cold grip of hands on his elbows. It did him no good to count steps and turnings, for it seemed to him that he woke, like a sleepwalker, to find himself on his feet outside, with the stink of the Constantinople streets in his nostrils and the barking of the dogs louder in his ears. Eerily, he had no sense of the vampires around him. It was as if he walked alone, save that their hands were on his shoulders, his arms, his neck, and that now and then they spoke.