James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (36 page)

“Go! Get out! I tell you that your husband is a dead man!”

She stumbled back, startled at this violence, and Razumovsky caught her; she heard Margaret squeak in alarm.

“Leave me, infidel whore!” the old man screamed. “How dare you defile the place of holiness by even the tread of your feet?”

“Really, I—”

“Come,” the prince said softly and drew her toward the gate. “There’s nothing more you can learn.”

“I daresay,” said Lydia, struggling between a sense of injury and a terrified desire to go back to the old storyteller, to try to learn more. There was something Ysidro hadn’t seen in the cemetery… Something that occurred after he’d gone? She looked back over her shoulder, to see the hakawati shair shouting his wrongs to the man selling beads, and though at this distance he was little more than a threshing puppet of dirty brown rags, she could tell he was pointing at her.

Sudden tears stung her eyes, born of weariness and frustration and the hurt of being criticized when she had done no wrong.

“Forgive him, madame.” It was the man in the yellow turban, waiting for them in the blue marble shadows of the colonnade beside the gate. He stepped down and bowed to them, though Lydia had the impression that he was a man of some importance here. “He is an old man and believes that those who do not dress or eat or speak as his parents did were created by some other God for purposes ill to mankind.”

Lydia
halted, peering up at him. Above the graying beard the dark eyes were bright and kind, and not as old as she had thought. His robes smelled of tobacco, cooking, and soap. “I’m sorry if I… if I said something wrong. I truly meant no harm.”

“He is a very frightened man, hamam, and frightened men are easily angered. He claims he is pursued by demons who live in this city, and he will not be alone, not even to sleep. He sleeps on the floor of the soup kitchen. Do not judge him harshly. They are real to him.”

“No,” Lydia said, remembering the abyssal darkness of the streets after nightfall. She had dreamed last night, in troubled sleep, of something that had passed the house, singing beneath the balcony in a high, thin, tuneless wailing that no one but she could hear. She had risen—or, later, she thought she had only dreamed of rising—and stumbled half blind to the heavy lattices that overhung the street, but she had seen nothing, or maybe just a stirring in the dark below. Margaret had rolled over and sighed in her sleep.

“He spoke of a… a gola, dwelling in the tomb of someone called Hasim al-Bayad.” She pronounced the words carefully, thanking heaven for ten years of James’ quiet emphasis on correct sounds.

The holy man frowned, puzzled a little, then said, “In the west of Africa—Morocco and Algiers—a gola is said to be a kind of female devil who dwells in desert places, with a goat’s feet and the face of a beautiful woman. She lures travelers from the road, drinks their blood and eats their flesh.”

“A woman.” Lydia repeated the words.

Anthea Farren. And she would know what had become of James.

He nodded. “Hasim al-Bayad was the imam of this mosque—” His small gesture seemed to touch the whole of the graceful, weightless stone that towered above them. “—many generations ago. A good man whose tomb was venerated in former times, though almost none seek it out now, for it lies some distance from the Adnanople Gate, away to the north of the main road. You may know it by the remains of an iron fence around it, though it is decayed almost to nothing; but the tomb still stands. But if you value your life, hatnam—if you value your soul—do not go to that place alone or after the sun has left the sky.”

Looking into those dark, worried eyes, it did not even strike Lydia as odd that he gave his warning to her rather than to the male who clearly took the role of her protector. She shook her head and said, “No, I won’t. I promise.” She turned to depart, taking Razumovsky’s arm again, then on impulse turned back.

“Is it permitted,” she asked hesitantly, “to… to buy prayers to help someone? Someone who’s in trouble? He’s not a Mohammedan,” she added apologetically and the man in the yellow turban smiled.

“There is no greater miracle in the world than rain,” he said. “And, as the Prophet Jesus pointed out, it falls on the heads of the just and the unjust alike. Give your alms to the next beggar that you meet. I will pray for your friend.”

“Thank you,” said Lydia.

Your husband is a dead man
. It was extremely difficult to make conversation with the prince on the way back to the carriage.

Owing to the prince’s consular duties that afternoon, it was not possible, he said, for him to accompany Lydia and Margaret on a tour of the cemeteries, but he insisted that they take the carriage and the footmen: “The silly louts would only sit around playing dominoes at some cafe in the Place d’Armes all afternoon while I’m dealing with the transport minister,” he said, sipping his tea over lunch. “You ladies might as well have the use of them, provided you come back for me when you’ve finished.”

Lunch meant the restaurant at the railway station, looking out through elaborately pillared window arches to the unkempt grass of the square. Not elegant, but the only European cuisine available without crossing the bridge to Pera again, and Margaret flatly refused to have anything to do with stuffed grape leaves or skewered bits of lamb. Lydia protested a little at the prince’s generosity, then thanked him profusely, laying both her kid-gloved hands on his wrist and wishing she looked prettier. Her eyes still felt swollen and tender despite that morning’s applications of ice. Her aunt Lavinia’s sovereign remedy had always been leeches— applied by the disapproving Aunt Harriet or by Lydia herself, who had even at that age had no qualms about touching the things—but Lydia, though trained in their application, had learned too much about germ theory in the past few years to feel easy now about such an expedient. Certainly too much to want to apply anything purchased in Constantinople, no matter who warranted it “clean.”

And she’d look even worse, she thought, once she got her spectacles on. Just as well Razumovsky couldn’t accompany them on the next phase of her quest.

As the holy man had warned, the tomb of the imam Al-Bayad lay a goodish distance north of the dust-choked road that ran toward the hills of Thrace, and Lydia had to pick her way carefully among the bizarre, stunted forest of spiky tombstones, Margaret and one of His Highness’ sturdy footmen in her wake. She was glad of the footman. Closer to the gate she had seen individuals or small groups of the devout, almost always clothed in the traditional Turkish garb of pantaloons, tunic, and turban, kneeling by the low-roofed stone turbes among the weeds, but this far out, among the rough stands of cypress and bare-limbed plane trees, there was no sign of people at all. Only the headstones, thrusting up through the weeds like splintered bones from a messy compound fracture. Even the dirt underfoot was mixed with chips and fragments.

Margaret complained constantly of the uneven footing, the dreariness of the locale, and the uselessness of the mission. “Ysidro said he’d seen nothing here,” she protested, stopping for the tenth time to ostentatiously rub a “twisted” ankle, which Lydia knew wouldn’t have borne her weight if actually twisted. “Ysidro ought to know.”

Maybe, thought Lydia. But Ysidro had said himself that his perceptions were not what they had been. Moreover, there was always a chance that the vampire glamour was stronger than he had counted on, and subtler, masking its own existence, as it had masked her awareness of Ysidro’s house in London as she walked past it three times before she finally saw it. Whether she found anything at Al-Bayad’s tomb today or not, she would tell him of the place and let him take a closer look.

Against the changing hues of the sky, the tall domes of the city gleamed; the silence here away from the road, instead of seeming peaceful, oppressed her with an air of waiting, of listening. The short autumn day was already beginning to fade.

I’ve seen your husband… Karolyi had said.

If he’d been telling the truth.

And the hakdwati shair. Your husband is a dead man.

There’d been a note from Karolyi this morning, asking to take her to lunch. Of course, Lady Clapham would see no reason not to tell him where she was staying. She wondered if she should go, to see what else she could learn from him, but all her instincts cried out to her to stay as far from the man as she could. She was a novice, unable to best him in the game he’d played for years.

But what if Zeittelstein doesn’t come back tomorrow
? she thought, faint and helpless. What if what he tells me is no help? The sense of holding her husband’s life in her hands, of not knowing if any action of hers would save or damn him, was hideous. Maybe if she were very careful with Karolyi…

A man called out to her, far off, near the road. With her spectacles on he was jewel-clear, waving his arms in warning, but he would not approach.

She looked ahead again and saw the grayish-white square of the turbe, surrounded with a few grisly fragments of rusted fence.

Weeds grew thick around the marble, whispering conspiratorially in the wind. As she approached, the smell of blood came to her, thin but rank; cold as it was, flies buzzed up in a swarm from a nearly black stain on a broken grave slab nearby.

Lydia
shivered. It might, she supposed, only have been a dog’s. Margaret cried, “Oh! How disgusting!” and Nikolai the footman said, “Madame, is come away. Is no good here. No good.”

Lydia
walked up and put her hands on the tomb.

There were fresh scratches on the stone around the heavy lid, bright marble chips lying in the long weeds. Kneeling, she peered at a stain just beneath the lid’s edge, hidden under the mass of marble; she thought it, too, was blackened blood.

But all of those things came to her like afterthoughts. As soon as she touched the marble, she knew.

He is here
, she thought. The marble was cold under her fingertips. He is here. If she stood still, if she listened, if she closed her eyes, breathed slow, opened her mind, she could hear him…

She stepped swiftly back, almost colliding with Margaret, who had come up behind her, saying something—she realized she had been listening so deeply that she hadn’t heard what.

We usually have warning of their suspicions
, Ysidro had once told James, on the subject of would-be vampire hunters. We see them poking about…

She wondered now whether he had meant during the night hours, or by day, when the vampire lay sunk in deathly sleep.

Did vampires dream?

“I said, can we go now?” Margaret repeated sulkily. “If Ysidro didn’t see anything here…”

A thought flashed through Lydia’s mind—she knew not from where—of a dark face lying in darkness, not very far away. Of sleep that wasn’t really sleep.

Of someone, or something, that knew her name in its dreams.

“Yes,” she said quickly. “Let’s go.”

As she was turning away, a glint of red caught her eye, lying in the long grass. She didn’t want to go near the tomb again, but she forced herself and saw that the weeds along this side of it had been trampled. In the grayish dust she found the track of a man’s hard-edged Western shoe.

Fairly fresh, she thought. Curiously fresh, for a place that had recently acquired the reputation as the haunt of hortlak.

Kneeling in the dusty weeds, she cast about for more tracks and saw the bright thing that had drawn her attention a moment ago.

It was a man’s cravat pin, fashioned in the shape of a griffin, with a single blood-ruby eye.

“My dearest Asher Sahib.” A shadow materialized in the archway in front of him, nearly invisible in the darkness of the old hern’s court; an angular silhouette, and the gleam of far too many jewels. At the same moment, as Asher stopped, his heart tightening in his chest, arms slipped around his waist from behind, the thin hard body of Jamila Baykus pressing against his back, like the steel triggering mechanism of some lethal trap. The stench of blood in her jeweled hair mingled with the wash of Zardalu’s patchouli.

“You left our party precipitously.”

“I have a weak stomach.”

“Tcha.” The eunuch made the word almost a caress. “Pity for a beautiful young man like the one last week, maybe, or for that little beggar girl, who I admit was pretty… But that ugly old grandmother? I swear to you she was still complaining over being cheated out of two piastres’ worth of olives in the market. Now, how can you pity that?”

Asher turned his face aside and moved to go, but the arms around his waist, thin as a child’s, held him. He knew no amount of struggle would break their grip.

Zardalu stepped forward into the colonnade, laid his hands on Asher’s shoulders. Under their painted lids, the long eyes glittered in the distant glint of the lamp by the stairs. There was no other light in the court, and Sayyed, who had as usual been dogging Asher’s steps, had vanished at the first sound of Zardalu’s voice. “Olumsiz Bey hasn’t been out of the compound,” the eunuch said softly, in the vampire whisper no louder than the whisper of a silk curtain on an—almost—windless night. “Has he?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is the eighth night that he’s had us bring him his kill.” Tiny breasts, sharp hipbones moved against his buttocks and back, the Baykus Kadine rising to tiptoe so that the movement of her lips stirred against the back of his neck. They were warm. “These other vampires—”

“What other vampires?”

“It is scarcely any affair of the living,” Zardalu murmured, drawing close, “what other vampires. The woman we seek in the tombs and the cisterns—the man we are told to look for…”

“What man? Since when?”

“Does it matter since when?” The blue eyes glittered strangely in the reflected light. “I see that it does. Why does it matter? What does it tell you, clever one? Why does he fear them? The Malik of Stamboul, the Wafat Sahib, the Deathless Lord who has ruled this city… He could crush them like fleas under his thumbnail. So.” The long hands tightened over Asher’s shoulders, the pressure of the thumbs like a geared wheel bearing on the collarbone; Asher shut his teeth hard against the blinding stab of pain, kept his eyes on the vampire’s before him.