James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (37 page)

“This foreign machine, built by these infidels… What is it? Who is it that he keeps down there, groaning and crying out in the dark hours of the night?”

“Ask him.” It was impossible to keep his voice steady; the steel thumbs had found the nerves they sought, and Asher had to fight to keep his vision from graying to darkness, his mind from blanking with pain.

“I’m asking you.”

“I don’t know.”

The pressure lessened; Zardalu moved back a few inches, his hands remaining where they were. Asher was breathing hard, the sweat flowing cold down the sides of his face, though the night was chilly.

“But you’ve gone to look?”

Asher managed to shake his head, wondering if they had seen him, passing the archway last night, or smelled his blood. Wondering if they had told Olumsiz Bey. He doubted it. He doubted that he would be alive now, had the Master of Constantinople known.

Zardalu grinned like a rubber devil. “For a man who went about the town questioning storytellers about the houses of evil rumor, you show a disappointing lack of curiosity. Do you know that Olumsiz Bey keeps a set of silver keys in a recess in the floor beneath the coffee table in the room of the red tiles? No? A curious thing for a vampire to keep, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not something he could readily use,” Asher agreed. The Jamila Baykus moved, trying to draw him with her, and he braced his feet on the broken tiles. “Not something I would use at all. I do value my life.”

“Your life?” The blue eyes widened. The silvery vampire laughter shivered in the air. “Your life? Your life ends here in this court if I so wish.”

“You’d go against him?” Darkness swirled on the edges of his mind, blanking his attention, confusing his thoughts, as if he moved in a suffocating dream. Deliberately, he walled his mind against it, thought of nothing, pictured iron doors closing the darkness out, sunlight burning it away.

From far off he felt Zardalu’s hands shift up to his throat, heard the vampire say, “He’ll be displeased, but it won’t make you less dead, Englis…”

He thought they were dragging him, threw out his hand to catch at the arch as they drew him into the dust-smelling blindness of one of the old warehouse bays. It was like fighting in a dream, against a narcotic weight of nothingness that filled his mind. If he could only break free for a moment…

Then he was thrown aside, striking the wall as if someone had hammered him with a railroad tie, and his mind cleared like shattering glass. Against the reflected lamplight he saw Zardalu hurled sprawling, a bundle of sticks wrapped in a hundred pounds’ worth of sequined silk, and the Baykus Kadine backing away, mouth open, hissing, her eyes glittering rat-red. In a swirl of nacreous robes, Olumsiz Bey stood over the Circassian, the silver blade of his halberd cold as a fingernail moon. His bald head swung to and fro, like a savage dog’s.

There was blood on his mouth and on his clothing. Zardalu rolled lightly to his feet, face twisted into something Asher hadn’t seen outside a Museum of Horrors, fangs glittering in the stretched mouth. But the next moment the younger vampire flinched and turned away, hiding his face in his hands from the master vampire’s glare, and Asher felt—guessed—sensed peripherally the cutting agony of Olumsiz Bey’s will.

Zardalu made a sound, thin as water twisted out of a near-dry rag. His body bent and bent, knees buckling, hands spreading, fingers stretching, trying to cover his face as his arms came up like the arms of a fractured puppet.

Softly, the master vampire whispered, “Don’t be arrogant, little Apricot.” Asher, slumped against the stones of the inner wall, wasn’t even sure he heard the words spoken, could not have said what language they were in. Weightless as a giant cat Olumsiz Bey stepped toward the crumpled gaudy form of the eunuch, and the dim lamplight flicked on his outstretched talons, the graceful gesture of the halberd.

“Is this the little Apricot who wept in my arms when he gave up his life? The little Apricot who said to the slave masters, when they came to geld him…”

No
… It came out not even as a word, only a sound.

“I remember, you know.” The deep voice purled over the words, water over stones, and stronger than the stones. “You put all those memories into my hands, you put your mind, your desires—remember Parvin, your sister Parvin?—everything. And I still hold them.” He crouched over his fledgling, silver-blue robes settling over the gay, amorphous clouds of silk, the silver of the blade hovering over the bare, bent neck. It was impossible, thought Asher, that he should still hear the master vampire’s voice.

“The way the Kizlir Aga touched you, do you remember that? You were twelve, and you hated him, and yet your whole body responded…” His coarse hand fielded, easily, the vicious flail of Zardalu’s claws, and with the haft of the halberd he thrust him to the pavement again, pressing him down into the marble with it, straddling him, whispering, an act more terrible than love or rape, an act of dreadful possession as each memory, each feeling, each most secret terror and need was brought forth.

It gives a terrible power
, Ysidro had once told him, in that time-faded voice that denied that such a thing had ever happened to him, that anyone had ever held over his heart such hideous knowledge.

Zardalu had begun to make noises, and silently, sickened, Asher crept back through the shadows to climb at last the long stairs. Looking back, he saw in the lighted frame of the arched passage to the vestibule that the brutish Habib and his one-eyed janissary friend Haralpos were enacting a burlesque love scene with the corpse of the old woman they had brought for the Deathless Lord’s supper, to the screams of Pelageya’s and the Baykus’ laughter.

But it was the master vampire’s whispering, rather than the other and louder sounds, that seemed to follow Asher up the black stairs.

She dreamt of the old seraglio again, of wandering through its cramped, lightless cells with a ledger in one hand and a lantern in the other. One of the rooms had been filled with ice, and holding the lantern aloft, she had seen Jamie, frozen in a block of it, like a fly trapped in amber.

It should have been comical, absurd, but it wasn’t. His eyes were open, sunken like the eyes of the corpses the workhouse sent, and she saw blood on his neck, staining the open collar of his shirt. The ice flashed like blue diamonds when she raised her lantern, making his eyes seem to move, but she knew he was dead. Her heart twisted, slammed within her, hurting, hurting, knowing he was dead and that she’d have to go home alone.

It was her fault. She hadn’t come swiftly enough, been clever enough, been brave enough… She had failed to be adequate, as she had failed all her life. She propped the ledger against the block, trying desperately to find his name in it, but the cold in the room made her hands shake so badly she couldn’t read. He can’t be dead, she thought frantically, he can’t be. He’s frozen in the ice, but the ice will keep him alive…

She woke gasping, her hands and feet bitter cold, and heard, from the other room, Margaret saying, “You hadn’t found anything there, but she insisted on going anyway! As if she knew more about it than you did! Just because she’s got that horrid medical degree, and cuts up bodies, which makes me shudder just to think about, she thinks she knows everything! And she wouldn’t even stop when I turned my foot…”

Under the indignation of Margaret’s voice there was a brittleness that Lydia recognized as nervousness. Ysidro, she thought.

A moment later the vampire’s cool voice responded, “Well, she is worried about her husband, and perhaps that made her careless of your comforts, Margharita? You do not recall which cemetery this was? I would not wish to waken her.”

“Um… I can’t remember… We went in Prince Razumovsky’s carriage, after we visited this filthy mosque and she talked to a horrid old man. And anyway, if you didn’t see anything there when you went…”

Lydia fumbled her spectacles from the bed beside her, pushed back her hair and pulled her shawl about her shoulders as she emerged from the bedroom, rumpled, creased, and slightly disoriented, wondering what time it was.

Ysidro was on his feet at once, bowing. “Mistress.” The room smelled of lamb and onions. There was an empty plate of very fine red-glazed local ware, and horn-and-steel flatware. Crumbs and droplets at the other side of the table indicated that Margaret had made her meal.

Lydia
shook her head, saying, “Later, thank you,” when Ysidro moved toward the sideboard.

“Some wine, at least?”

But his own hand was too unsteady to hold the glass.

Margaret took it swiftly from him, poured the black-red fluid like blood in the brazen lamplight. Ysidro flicked aside the napkin from the basket on the table, tore a chunk from the bread inside. “Sop it in the wine,” he suggested, holding it out to her. “A jauntering slut I can abide, but a drunken jauntering slut, never.”

And Lydia gave him a quick, shaky grin.

He perched on a corner of the table. “Margharita informs me you passed an adventuresome day.”

Lydia
outlined to him the events of the Blue Mosque and the finding of the turbe and the cravat pin. “I had the most extraordinary sensation that he was there, listening,” she said. “I know you’ve said vampires sleep in the daytime and can’t be wakened, but… Would he have heard me—seen me—in dreams? Do vampires dream?”

“Yes and no,” replied Ysidro, holding out his hand for the pin. “Sleep is only a term that we use for what happens to us when the sun is in the sky; I do not know another. Dreaming…” He paused, then shook his head, very slightly, and turned the tiny gold griffin over in his hands.

“I doubt not that you have found one of the sleeping places of the intruder, the newcomer,” he said after a time. “And havine sensed you in his sleep, I misdoubt he will ever rest in that tomb again. Still, it is worth the visiting, to see perhaps what I have missed. There is a great strength to him, and it is not at all unlikely that he could turn my mind, my perceptions, away from him… And it goes without saying that any place he dominates with his presence at night, Anthea will avoid. It is no chance thing that he haunts the cemeteries, that any coming or going from the city would pass him and be in danger of coming under his sway. Anthea, at least, coming in by train with your husband, would have sensed his presence and taken care to avoid him. Charles…” He shook his head.

“He plays a dangerous game, this Karolyi.” He slipped the griffin pin into the pocket of his waistcoat and stood to fetch a pot of honey from the sideboard and set it for her next to the bread. “He still does not understand what it is that he courts. Does he think to take this interloper back to Vienna and introduce him to that stodgy mediocrity in the Hofburg? The Master of Vienna will surely destroy him, as he attempted to destroy Ernchester. Or does he think to make him Master of Constantinople, forge an alliance here?”

“Could he do that?” she asked, surprised.

“He may, could he find the master’s hiding place.” The sparse brows pinched together, and his eyes went to the pile of notes and pencils on the other side of the table lamps. “And what did your search reveal?”

“That a lot of wealthy old Turks who’d had their money in gold and land all had the same idea around July of this year.” She sighed ruefully and pushed her glasses up onto her nose. “I’ve got a tremendous list of companies that all came into being at the same time and don’t seem to have any reason to exist. Besides, I know from Herr Hindi that the Bey paid for his refrigeration unit in cash.”

“True enough.” Ysidro lifted the lid of the honey pot, brought up a spoonful, and let it run down again in a column of shining amber. “Yet at short notice he would have used a bank draft. I believe a ticket on the Orient Express is twenty pounds? Another two pounds to London, plus the costs of hotels and meals… maybe a total of sixty pounds? Find a draft of that, to someone of Hungarian name. Even incognito, a noble will usually take one of his lesser titles. Karolyi’s are Leukovina, Feketelo, and Mariaswalther, if I recall my genealogies aright. My guess is he will have used one of those.” Ysidro covered the honey again and stood; Margaret sprang up to fetch his cloak, which lay like a dense black winding sheet over a nearby chair.

She asked brightly, “Will you be back tonight?”

Ysidro seemed to settle into stillness, considering her with eyes that looked, in the lamplight, as gold as the honey. “My errand should take me no great time.” He pulled on his gloves and held out one hand to Lydia. “It is true that the Dead travel fast.”

It was still impossible to see him leave a room.

“Frankly, I’ve always wondered how they do,” remarked Lydia, spooning honey onto a chunk of bread. “And considering the fuss he made about traveling in the daytime…”

But the slamming of the bedroom door was her only answer.

For a moment Lydia considered knocking and asking what real or fancied slight Margaret suffered from now. But it would only provoke another tantrum, another spate of incoherent romanticism about the eternal bond carried across lifetimes, and she felt simply too weary to go through with it. Margaret had coolly refused Lydia’s offer yesterday of instruction in the intricacies of cosmetic art. Lydia was still unsure whether she was being blamed for Ysidro’s absence from Margaret’s dreams, for finding clues where Ysidro had missed them, or for some other offense entirely.

And indeed, she thought with a stirring of old anger, it was Ysidro’s fault as much as Margaret’s. More, in fact, for originating the whole silly vaudeville of romance and need and lies. She put from herself in disgust the concern she had been feeling for him and ladled lamb and stuffed aubergines onto her plate, cursing Ysidro tiredly for his command that for safety the girls share bedroom and bed. It was not anything she was looking forward to tonight.

The meal made her feel better. She spread out her papers again, jotting down the names Ysidro had mentioned and seeking them among the lists of drafts drawn at the end of October, but it was difficult to keep her mind on her work. She was angry at Ysidro and, she realized, hurt. Disillusioned. But what illusion had she held, she wondered, that she felt robbed of it now?