James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (33 page)

“Poor old Jacob comes away tearing out his hair and wishing he’d never heard of ammonia refrigerating plants.”

“Refrigerating?” Lydia inquired.

“Refrigerating?” Ysidro leaned back a little in his chair and drew the soft cashmere lap robe more closely around his shoulders. A reflex, thought Lydia, left over from the days when he had body heat to conserve. She wondered if the shivering reflex persisted. What would it be, she thought uneasily, to be conscious—unable to lose consciousness—in a body slowly consumed with the cold of death?

“Maybe he wants to keep blood in bottles?” suggested Margaret. “So he won’t have to… to take it from people?”

“If it’s the death of the victim rather than the blood itself that feeds the vampire, refrigerated blood would be useless,” Lydia replied, then wanted to bite out her tongue as Margaret flushed hotly and flashed an apologetic look to Ysidro, as if to say, Don’t pay attention to her, she doesn’t understand.

The vampire didn’t seem to have noticed either Lydia’s faux pas or Margaret’s reaction to the possible laceration of his feelings.

“It’s been tried,” he said calmly. “More for the sake of convenience than humanity, I admit. Refrigeration causes blood to clot and separate even more quickly. In any case, in a city as rife with dogs as Constantinople, I can scarce imagine anyone storing blood for purposes of mere physical nourishment.”

“You know, I wondered—” Lydia began, then cut herself off quickly, realizing her medical curiosity on the subject of whether Ysidro were feeding on nonhuman blood sources might be tactless in the extreme.

The yellow eyes touched hers, only for an instant, but awareness of her question, confusion, and self-deprecation all danced like an ironic star. But he only said, “I have not heard cold itself could injure the Undead, nor cause them to sleep on into the night. The vampires of St. Petersburg dwell in palaces left empty through the winter, while most of the court goes south to the Crimea, and they rise and hunt and sleep as usual. It is not an easy thing,” he added, turning to Lydia with that same remote amusement, “to be Undead during the time of the white nights. But in winter they walk abroad from three in the afternoon, and sleep does not weigh them down until eight or nine in the morning. They do not feel cold that would kill a living man, though it is true that the Master of Petersburg has spoken of removing permanently to the Crimea, which tells me that he has begun to tire, and so feel the pain of cold in his joints. Still…”

He turned his head a little, to contemplate the stacks of ledgers and papers heaped on the table around the oil lamps that Madame Potoneros had brought in at Lydia’s behest. An embassy clerk had delivered the material late that afternoon, with a note from Lady Clapham: I won’t ask what you want them for, my dear, only that if you learn anything we should know about, you’ll pass it along. The red are the Banque Ottomane; the gray, the Deutsches Bank. I’m afraid we’ll need them back in the morning. The we amused her, confirming as it did who was really running Intelligence—such as it was—in Constantinople.

“It will be a matter of interest to see how deep the fingers of the master of the city have gone into the flesh of the empire.”

“If it’s the Bey that we find.”

“Oh, it will be.” Ysidro rose and laid aside the lap robe, averting as he did so his face from the light. Margaret scurried away to fetch his cloak, as if she feared Lydia would usurp this task that she considered her right. “Money takes on a life of its own once it enters the veins of this body they call finance. All the masters of the great cities are aware of this and make sure they have great sums of it, not hidden, but disguised as something else. This is why they are masters. I would hazard that since July, with the army coup, the Bey has been transferring his assets from the old forms—hidden stocks of gold, investment in land—to the new. It is his protection against the interloper, if interloper there be, or against a rebellious fledgling. His protection against the upheavals of the living.”

“And his challenger won’t have the capital base yet.”

“I doubt it. Most fledglings do not realize the need for such invisible redoubts. They think immortality sufficient.”

As he reached to take the cloak from Margaret’s hand, Lydia saw that the gold ring he wore had slipped around his finger, turning so that the bezel faced inward to his palm, as rings do when the flesh shrinks away from them with cold, or age, or death.

“As for me, I shall pursue Anthea and Charles as the Undead pursue, listening in the streets where the poor dwell and seeking those places where the living do not walk. If James is yet alive, as this Karolyi has said, it is because the Bey needs something of him, and at a guess it is as bait, either for Charles or for Anthea. Karolyi is still bargaining, offering what he has to sell—the support and alliance of his government in these uncertain times— while feeling for other advantages.”

“But why—” Lydia began helplessly, and Ysidro shook his head.

“We move in a miasma, and not entirely that of the Bey’s making,” he said softly. “There is some other matter afoot here, beyond a possible challenger or interloper. Treason among the Bey’s fledglings, perhaps, or an interloper not of the common run. We must each search as we can. It may be that as a physician you will recognize something concerning cold as it has to do with the Undead state, which even the Undead do not know. Later, like the knights of the grail meeting upon the road, we can exchange information and see if we can read, one for the other, what each vision signifies. Do not lose hope.”

“No,” Lydia said, consciously steadying herself. “No. At least I know James is alive—if Karolyi was telling the truth. Though I did notice he was very careful not to say when he’d seen James. It might have been—well—days ago. But really, we can only do what we can do.”

“An observation worthy of the sages of Athens,” the vampire said gravely and, holding out his hand, took her fingers in his. “A word in your ear.”

Conscious of Margaret’s glare at her back, Lydia followed him out of the dining room, to the head of the stair.

He stood with his back to the vigil light, so that only its reflection touched the points of cheeks and chin and made a spidery halo of his hair. In his enveloping cloak he looked like Death on its way to the opera; his hands were, she thought, not quite steady as he pulled on his gloves.

“You have fathomed my secret,” he said, the soft voice emerging from the dark, and upon it, like the trace of his antique inflection, Lydia detected the echo of a smile. “The blood of animals gives some nourishment, though it does not warm, and their deaths are useless to feed the hunger and the need of the mind. But it would not do to shock Margaret with the information that the dark hero of her Byronic fancies is currently living on the blood of dogs—and such dogs! As a physician, however, I knew the matter would consume you until you knew.”

Lydia
laughed, the fear and tension she had felt since that morning in the bazaar loosening its hold. “I think you’re just too vain to own to it.” She smiled, and Ysidro paused, his hand on the rail of the stair.

“Of course I am vain,” he said. “All of the Undead are vain— too vain to admit that, like common men, we must die.”

He made a move to go, then turned back and took her hand again—carefully, so as not to come near the silver on her wrist— and raised it to his lips.

As he vanished into the shadows of the stair, she said, “Be careful…”

She didn’t know whether he heard or not.

Margaret shoved the papers she was reading quickly into her workbasket and returned to her chair as Lydia reentered the dining room. She kept her eyes downcast, but Lydia felt the sullenness of her silence, the resentment in the set of her narrow back in its ill-fitting cotton shirtwaist. She drew a pile of gray Deutsches Bank ledgers to her, but left pencil and foolscap to one side untouched.

Determined not to have another argument with her, Lydia only asked, “You know what we’re looking for?”

“New corporations in July or August paid for in gold or by transfer of lands, sums transferred to another corporation or another bank monthly or quarterly.” She recited Lydia’s instructions like a schoolchild regurgitating some hated—and barely comprehended—lesson.

“Look for a transfer to the second corporation, or to a new corporation, in the first week of October of ten thousand marks, or twelve thousand five hundred francs, and if you see either the Zwanzigstejahrhundert Abkuhlunggeselleschaft, or any of these names—” She pushed across to her the slip of paper she’d gotten from Razumovsky that afternoon, listing the four or five names under which the Sultan’s chamberlain took bribes or laundered money. “—please flag it for me.”

“I understand,” Margaret said with gruff impatience, and pulled the paper to her, but didn’t even turn it right side up. Lydia half opened her mouth to remonstrate, then let it go. She guessed she’d have to go through whatever Margaret did again anyway, but if these ledgers had to be back in the morning, there was no time for either discussion or for Margaret to slam into the bedroom in a tantrum. She couldn’t work through all of this alone.

And what could she say in any case?

The dream returned to her, of Margaret waiting in the castle ruins for a horseman who never came. Was Ysidro unable even to project the dream memories of passion to her now, the melodramatic romances that held her to him? Was he, she wondered suddenly, unable to appear in them because in them he would be the skeletal, almost insectile creature who had spoken to her with his back to the light?

If that was what vampires saw in mirrors, no wonder they avoided them, veiled them, kept them closed behind doors. If that was what the living eyes would perceive, no wonder the vampires caused the living to see—or remember seeing—nothing at all.

All of the Undead are vain…

“Kiria …” Stefania Potoneros appeared, hesitating, in the doorway and held out two stiff cream-colored envelopes.

The first contained a note on the letterhead of the Zwanzigstejahrhundert Abkuhlunggeselleschaft—Berlin, London, and Constantinople—typed neatly in English and signed by a secretary.

Mrs. Asher:

We regret to inform you that Hen Jacob Zeittelstein is unable to make an appointment with you for this week, due to the fact that he is in Berlin at this time. When he returns to Constantinople on Wednesday next, he will of course be delighted to get in touch with you regarding a meeting.

Sincerely,

Avram Kostner

Private secretary to Herr Zeittelstein

Wednesday! thought Lydia, aghast. Two days from now until he was even in
Constantinople, let alone when he’d have time to see her, answer her questions. Jamie could be dead by then…

Jamie could be dead now.

My dearest Madame
, the other letter read, in an elaborately indecipherable French hand.

It appears we have located the storyteller your husband sought. With your permission, my carriage shall arrive for you at ten tomorrow morning, though it would be well to be prepared to do some walking.

Your most humble servant, Razumovsky

“If I may be permitted to ask a question, effendi?” Asher turned his cheek to the slab where he lay, blinking the sweat from his eyes. In the still, dense heat of the tiny hararet—the chamber of the baths that the Romans would have called the calderium, or hot room—the shape of the Master of Constantinople, white as the marble that entirely formed the walls, seemed to emerge from and blend into the steam in a disconcerting fashion, so that half the time Asher was not entirely certain he could see him at all.

“It is always permitted to ask, Scheherazade.” The voice of Olumsiz Bey came out of the steamy twilight, and the red glow of the braziers in the corners made twin embers of his eyes. There was dreamy, heat-soaked amusement in the deep voice as he spoke the nickname, taken from Asher’s curiosity about old words and ancient tales even in the face of his imprisonment and peril. “There would be no wisdom in the world, did men not ask.”

“What do you want with the Earl of Ernchester?”

It was nearly midnight. With the early fall of winter dark, Zardalu and the other fledglings had taken Asher to an immense dry cistern, like a pillared cavern beneath the city, given him a tin lantern and sent him out in that endless forest of columns. “Behave as if you searched for someone, Englis,” whispered the eunuch, with his mocking smile. “Gaze about—so—put your hand to your heart, as if to calm the pangs of love.” The others laughed, the thm, metallic shivering he had heard in Vienna, and faded into the darkness, leaving him alone.

So he had walked, as he had walked in the cemeteries, holding the lantern high, and the shadows of the pillars reeled and shifted with the movement of the light. The columns themselves were of all girths: thin Ionic with rams’ horn capitals, and heavy, unfluted Doric worn with the marks of water. The floor underfoot was hardened mud, silted up who knew how deep. Between them night lay thick, and the cold breaths of moving air told him the place had more than the one entry the vampires had used. He was thinking how fortunate it was that the candle within the lantern was protected by glass when the flame went out, as suddenly as if covered by a snuffer.

Asher stepped back at once, putting his back to the nearest pillar and forcing closed his mind against the crushing numbness that bore down upon it. He reached for the pocket where he kept matches, wrapped in waxed silk, and his nostrils were filled with the smell of old blood and graveyard mold. A hand closed around his arm, as if the arm had been trapped in machinery; but before he could lash out with the lantern in his other hand, before he could move or think or cry out, the gripping hand was gone.

There was a kind of movement, a breathing rustle in the dark, and he pulled the matches from his pocket and lit one with a hand that shook.

He was alone.

“My dear Scheherazade.” The voice was suddenly close. Asher blinked again in the steam, to see that the Master of Constantinople stood beside the marble table where he lay, naked, as was the Bey himself, but for a towel around his loins. “These are vampire matters, of no concern to the living. Indeed, I doubt the living would understand them.”