James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (30 page)

“Afraid?” He smiled his chilly smile, manufactured, Lydia guessed, to cover the remainder of his anger. Still, the impact of it was startling, the echo of an astringent charm that had been the living man’s. “That I should find peril here beyond my capacity, from which you could save me?”

No expression, no inflection; he had been dead, Lydia recalled, a long time. But still she guessed the smallest twinkle of banter, far back in the sulfur-crystal eyes.

Margaret didn’t. She only hung her head and snuffled, and suffered Ysidro to take her arm and lead her through the maze to the perilous cistern stair, and thence back along the terrace where the harem ladies had gone to their lord. As they passed through a vast court above a terrace and pool, where shuttered windows hovered tier upon tier above their heads, Lydia thought she saw the glow of a lamp left under one of the ramshackle stairways, and made to turn aside.

“Leave it,” Ysidro said softly. “It will only draw those we have little desire to meet.”

Lydia
removed her spectacles again and folded the shawl inconspicuously in the cloakroom before reentenng the diplomat-crowded salon. She concentrated, through the remainder of the reception, on avoiding an encounter with the straight, graceful figure in the crimson uniform of the Hungarian Life Guards.

“You watch out for that Razumovsky, mind,” Lady Clapham said to her as they were getting into the carriages. “And watch that girl of yours.”

Startled, Lydia turned to regard Margaret, being helped by servants into the embassy coach. Soldiers clustered in the small square, torchlight throwing sharp flares on their rifles, for warning had come of sporadic fighting among the Armenians in Galata that might spread to Stamboul.

“I really don’t think we need worry,” she said. “I happen to know her heart is… otherwise engaged.” To someone, moreover, infinitely more dangerous than a Russian nobleman.

“I mean watch what she says.” Her Ladyship drew Lydia a little farther back into the darkness of the gate. The shadows of the soldiers wavered drunkenly across the vine-grown brick wall opposite, behind which the silent domes of the Aya Sofia slept in the dark.

“And what you say. Razumovsky isn’t a fool, and he knows perfectly well your husband didn’t come to Constantinople to interview storytellers. That treaty the King signed won’t cut much ice if the Czar sees a chance of getting a point ahead of us, either here or in India.”

Lydia
sighed, reassured her hostess and shook her head inwardly as she took Sir Burnwell’s hand to ascend to the coach. At least everyone in the world had cardiovascular systems and endocrine glands, and there wasn’t any argument over those. For a moment she thought longingly of the Radcliffe Infirmary, where things were safe and in their places—was
Pickering
keeping proper graphs of the long-term weight gain of those subjects? She had no idea what she’d tell the editors of the Journal of Internal Research about her article. I’m sorry, I had to go to Constantinople to rescue my husband from vampires.

But without Jamie…

She shook her head. She would find him.

She had to find him.

“What was it you were afraid of, in the seraglio?” Ysidro did not turn. Upon bringing the women back to the house on Rue Abydos, he had uncharacteristically made sure that Margaret got safely to bed, then gone to the floor below to sit in the parlor’s projecting bay, a sort of balcony that overlooked the front door. For nearly an hour Lydia had been aware of him there, as, still in her evening frock, she drank the aromatic tea Madame Potoneros brewed for her.

It was late, close to three. The near-riot in the Armenian quarter had forced a long detour through the market district to the old Mohammed
Bridge; even then, winding their way up the steep Rue Iskander, they could hear the distant cries, the breaking of glass, the shots. Sitting quiet between Margaret and Lady Clapham, Lydia had pulled her cloak closer and wondered if she’d ever feel warm again.

There was still no emphasis, no rise or fall, to his voice. “So you, like Margaret, suppose me to have been in peril? I thought better of you, mistress.”

“Well, I do know you’re perfectly capable of avoiding any twelve saber-wielding eunuchs out to protect the Sultan’s name from dishonor. So what were you afraid Margaret had encountered?” She thought it through, then asked, “Another vampire?”

He tilted his head a little. Late-risen moonlight edged his profile in watery milk. “Her name is Zenaida. I went to the seraglio to speak to her, before ever I knew Margaret had followed.”

His hands, lying one atop the other on the window’s sill, seemed about to move, then subsided again into quiescence, the echo of some gesture pared away by time. “She has been there a long while, and no longer recalls the name of the Sultan for whom she was first bought in the markets of Smyrna. Perhaps she never knew it. Like most of the Sultan’s women, she was cunning but stupid, and uneducated as a peddler’s donkey. She told me many of the odalisques still think she is a living woman, some forgotten Sultan’s kadine!‘

“And you think she may know something about… about Ernchester? Or James?” He sat on an old chest that did service for a low table in the bay; she leaned against the corner of the wall. The windows were open behind their lattices, and listen as she would—she could not keep herself from doing so—she did not now hear any sound from the slums that lay all along the foot of the hill. Smoke still gritted in the air.

“That,” the vampire agreed quietly. “And other matters.”

He gazed for a few moments more in apparent disinterest through the carven screens to white walls and tile roofs. The City of Walls, with its minarets and domes, its markets and its filth, was no more than a great shoulder of tucked velvet across the water in the night.

Then the yellow mantis eyes shifted to hers. “My senses, my perceptions, my ability to touch the threads of thought and scent and heat which move upon a city’s air—these have suffered from lack of their proper feeding. Nonetheless I should be able to feel some of what takes place in the lives of night-walking things. If not from here, from the gatehouses of the palace where I stood tonight, from the hill of the Aya Sofia, where all the dreams of the city come together like light in a glass. And I do not.”

Lydia
pushed her spectacles up onto her nose. She’d taken off her gloves and her pearls, and the silver shone on her throat and wrists like looped links of ice. “And the last thing you needed was a couple of silly heroines to look after,” she said, rueful and shy.

His head moved again, once, and his eyes met hers with that brief flicker of human amusement. In the street below a dog barked, the gruff shrillness picked up in another alley, and another, as all that starveling horde felt called upon to comment and reply. Ysidro waited them out, listening as if he could distinguish some clue within the sound.

“I walked in Galata last night when I left you here,” he said in time. “I crossed the bridge to Stamboul and sought out the other quarters where the Armenians live, down seaward of the Burned Column and in the poorest quarters along the walls. It is there, you understand, that the vampires will hunt, among those whose deaths the Turks count as less than the scraps I feed my cats. The miasma was thick there, the sense of diverted attention, of watching through smoke, though the night was clear. It was like the veil we lay over human eyes and human minds, but the veil was of a different quality, a different texture, wrought to shield a different kind of mind.

“There is war between vampires in this city.”

Lydia
recalled the elaborate precautions in Ysidro’s London house—or one of his London houses—and it occurred to her that human incursion might not be the only threat against which he protected himself.

“You think one of the Master of Constantinople’s fledglings is… rebelling against him? Trying to overthrow him? And summoned, or blackmailed, Ernchester here to help him?”

“It could be that,” agreed Ysidro. “It can happen so, though as a rule a master as old as that of Constantinople will show more care in who he makes into his fledgling. Or a newcomer has arrived from the outside, in flight from his or her own master vampire, and seeks to take over mastery of Constantinople himself. This he will find no easy matter.”

“Ernchester?”

He made a conceding movement with his eyebrow that three hundred years ago might have been a shrug and a gesture. “In truth I find that a morsel hard to swallow, particularly given the fact that he must have known the master of the city in life. Yet war there is. Charles plays some part in it…”

“And since Karolyi knows about it,” Lydia said thoughtfully, “he’s going to try to make of it what he can. Would it have been he who was behind James‘… disappearance?”

“I think it likelier he engineered this incident with the palace guard.” Ysidro’s white hand moved upon the windowsill. “Behold the timing of it. He was taken up in the morning, when a living man would have the most time to question him or to act in his absence. He was taken up, too, outside the Grand Bazaar, where he is known to have been speaking to the tellers of tales. So his dwelling place was unknown. Karolyi did not reckon on James’ friendship with your golden barbarian, and he did not have time to get him into his own hand before he was released. I think,” he added, “that this Karolyi knows something of what is taking place, but not all. And I think that if it was his goal to get James into his hand, rather than simply to kill him, it was to find Anthea through him.”

“So they were still together.”

“So it appears.” His hand moved in the shadows again, and Lydia saw that he had wrapped a thick cashmere lap robe over his morning coat, as if to ward off the chill of the autumn night. “In two nights’ wanderings I have found no sign of Anthea hunting, and Zenaida has seen nothing of a strange woman in her own quest for midnight blood. This could mean that Anthea is in hiding somewhere, or that she has been taken, either by Karolyi or by the Bey, the master of the city… or by this adversary, be he rebel fledgling or interloper. And where Charles may be…” He shook his head.

“It is an ancient city, and very great. Veiled as it is—and Zenaida says this mist or illusion settled upon it shortly after the gunfire and riots of the army coup, not that she had the smallest knowledge or interest in the Sultan’s overthrow—there are an infinity of places to hide. Zenaida says that she knows not where the Bey is, nor knows she of any other vampire. She says that she does not mind, never having cared for the dominance of the Bey.”

Lydia
gazed in silence for a time into the night beyond the lattices, the moon-soaked city and the silver-flecked waters that lay between. At last she said, “And she knew nothing… would know nothing… of Jamie?”

Ysidro made no reply.

My master told me to show you the place, the boy had said.

“Would it help to find the hiding place of the master of the city?”

He gave her a glance of inscrutable irony, as if to say, As you found mine? “He will have many, you know. In a war among vampires, he will be moving his sleeping place nightly.”

“I understand,” Lydia said. “But it will give us a starting place, and if we find out what we can find out, clues lead to other clues. About Anthea or Ernchester, or… or Jamie.”

“Always provided Jamie is not lying with a cut throat at the bottom of the harbor.”

“If I were willing to accept that without further investigation,” retorted Lydia, “I might as well go back to London.”

He inclined his head, though whether in mockery or apology she did not know.

“Anyway,” she went on after a moment, “I obviously don’t have Jamie’s training in questioning storytellers, aside from not speaking any… is it Turkish they speak here?”

“Turkish and Greek in the streets. Arabic among the scholars, Osmanli at the Sultan’s court.”

“Since there doesn’t seem to be any central depot of records, I think I’m going to have to have tea with German businessmen and ask them about native clients, and try to spot some kind of oddity in payment. My German isn’t wonderful, but last night most of them seemed to speak very good French. I wonder if I can get on the good side of someone at the Banque Ottomane? Or the German Orient Bank?”

She straightened her shoulders, the words themselves giving her courage; she spoke as if sorting a hand of cards, seeing what she had and what she needed. “Extensive use of middlemen and corporations that don’t seem to have any raison d’etre beyond paying the bills of one or two households; payment in gold or credit rather than silver; clients who either never appear at all or only appear after dark. That sort of thing. The purchase of housing that has some kind of multilevel cellars or that’s built over old crypts, like that cistern we passed through. Maybe corporate credit funneled through the palace with instructions not to check too closely into bona fides?”

She fell silent, watching his face, which was without expression. His silence lay on her heart like plates of lead.

Then he said, “Did we but find one of his bolt-holes, it could be watched. Not a safe occupation, even with the illusion which veils this city, but as you say, clues lead to other clues, and it is clear to me that more than finding Charles, more than finding Anthea, it is necessary to learn what is happening in this city. If Karolyi is here, there is still bargaining going on.”

Behind them the mantelpiece clock chimed four; seagulls cried in the darkness outside. Ysidro went on, “You have catalogued already those things I will alter in my own arrangements, when I gain London once more. Quest among your German businessmen for word of purchase of either a great quantity of silver bars or silver-plated bars. If there is war among the vampires of this city—if the master of the city seeks to summon and imprison Ernchester—he will need a place to put him. And seek also,” he added, “for someone using the roundabout financial methods of which you speak to purchase and install modern central heating in one or more old houses.”

“Central heating?” The absurd picture rose to her mind of the cloaked and sinister West End stage Dracula deep in conversation with Herr Hindi about soft-coal hummers and double-heating, self-feeding base-burner anthracite models, only ninety-seven marks plus shipping costs…