James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (6 page)

The woman stood, swaying, her fist in her mouth, blinking at the scene in stupefied horror. She made no move to flee, and Asher wondered if she were capable of it. When Karolyi had finished, he turned, taking her by the front of her jacket and pulling her to him again, and she sagged on his shoulder like one drunk or drugged. A little light from the cafe showed Asher the beggar’s blood, inky on the uneven pavement; the man’s breath was a wheezing, stertorous gasp.

Asher thought, He needs help. And then, If I go to the cafe for it, I’ll lose Karolyi.

Silent as a lean brown cat in the shadows as he moved after the retreating pair, Asher remembered why he’d left the Department. Once you accepted the necessity of what you did—whatever my country requires—you might hate yourself, but you followed.

The house was one of those anonymous stucco-fronted Parisian dwellings in a narrow lane whose character hadn’t changed since the days of the Sun King. Doors and windows were shuttered fast. As Karolyi unlocked the door of a downstairs shop, Asher ghosted through an alley a few houses farther up, counted chimneys, watched roof lines, and slipped into a clotted, weed-grown yard. Light shone behind shutters on the second floor, casting enough of a glow to let him see the broken-down shed that had once housed a kitchen amid a foul litter of rain barrels, old planks, broken boxes. All around him other shuttered windows made glowing chinks and slits of brass. The muck underfoot dragged his boots, the air nearly as thick, smothering with the stench of privies and of something newly dead.

He left his valise beside a rain barrel, scrambled with infinite care to the shed’s roof. Through a broken louver he watched Karolyi tie the woman to a rickety chair. She was laughing, her head lolling back. “You like it like this, eh, copain? You want me to fight you a little?”

“Igen.” Karolyi had pulled off his gloves for the task, tossed his hat on the stained and sagging mattress of the bed. His face was as calmly pleasant as the face of a statue, his shoulders relaxed, as if he shed everything from him with the knowledge that whatever he did in the name of his country was acceptable and forgiven. There was genuine banter in his voice. “You fight, my little bird. See if it helps.”

Beyond them Asher could see an enormous trunk that occupied all of one side of the room: leather, strapped and cornered with brass. It stood open, and the dim light of the oil lamp glinted on the metalwork, filled it with shadow, but Asher could see that there was a second, only slightly smaller trunk inside. The inner trunk could still easily have held a man.

A noise in the yard nearly stopped his heart; a hissing and a scuffle; rats fighting, he realized, leaning against the freezing brick wall. He remembered the smell of some dead thing near the shed.

When he looked back, Ernchester was in the room.

“You’re late.” By his voice Karolyi could have been speaking of a rendezvous for tea. “The train leaves the Gare de l’Est at seven-thirty. We’ve barely time to dispose of this little eclair before the carters arrive.”

He stepped to the giggling woman, took the soiled lace of her collar and ripped her dress open to the waist. She wore a corset underneath but no chemise; breasts like loaves of fallen dough balanced precariously on top of the ridge of whalebone and canvas, nipples like big copper pennies. A cheap gilt chain glinted around her neck. She winked up at Ernchester, and with a flip of one knee tossed her skirts up over her lap. She wasn’t wearing drawers, either.

“You got time before your train, cheri!‘ She leaned her head back and made kisses at him with her painted mouth, then dissolved into giggles.

Ernchester looked down at her with no expression whatever. He seemed smaller than Asher remembered him, thin and nondescript in his old-fashioned clothing. Though no vampire Asher had ever met appeared physically older than the mid-thirties, Ernchester seemed somehow to have aged, even in the past year. It was nothing in his stance or his face; there was no gray in the close-cropped fair hair. But looking at him, Asher felt that he was seeing an empty glass, dry and coated with bitter dust.

“I’ve dined.” He turned away.

“Oh, come on, p’tit,” laughed the woman. “Ain’t you got no taste for dessert?”

Karolyi muttered disgustedly, “Sacree couilles”—not at the woman, but at the delay and the needless risks—and pulled a thin silk scarf from his coat pocket. With deadly delicacy he crossed it into a loop and dropped it around the woman’s neck. She gasped, squeaked as her breath was cut off. Her body heaved and flopped, stockinged legs threshing; she kicked off one of her shoes in the death struggle, and it struck the wall with a smack.

Asher turned his face away, pressed his cheek to the cold brick, sickened and knowing that he was a dead man if he tried to do a single thing to stop what was going on. He was aware that from the moment Karolyi had picked her up, he—Asher—had known that she was going to die.

He was aware, too, that the noises in the room—the scraping and bumping of the chair, the obscene sounds the woman made as life blubbed and spurted and popped from her body—would cover the sounds of his departure, so that he could reach the Gare de l’Est before they did and see what train was leaving at seven-thirty.

He had been in the Department too long, he thought, slipping silently down the rain gutter. He knew there was nothing he could do to save that woman. The attempt would cost him his life, and cost England, perhaps, untold lives if the Kaiser got the war he wanted…

Coward
, he cursed himself. Coward, coward… They had always said that the most important thing was to get home with the information, whatever the cost to yourself or others. Honor was another luxury the Department couldn’t afford.

The clock struck seven, a reminder that time was short. Asher struck a pile of planking by the kitchen wall. Rats streamed in all directions in a hideous scurry of flying shadow, and there was the renewed stink of death.

He picked up his valise, but something made him turn and go back. Where the planks had fallen aside he could see a man’s hand, palm upturned in a thin slat of light from the window far above.

I’ve dined
, Ernchester had said.

Asher bent and moved the plank aside.

The face of the man pushed under the boards had already been gnawed; in any case, in the dense shadows it would have been impossible to tell who he was. But there was a silver chain around the plump wrist.

“I have long deplored the manners of what fondly believes itself to be society these days.” Lydia gasped as if she had been wakened by a freezing drench of water. The pale man took the sprayer weapon from her grasp with one hand and with the other pulled her to her feet, the strength of his fingers on her elbow such that she felt instinctively he could, had he so wished, have snapped the bone within the flesh. Past his shoulder she saw that the grille stood open, though she had been aware of no movement on the part of the dead man within the niche.

For some moments, she realized, in a rush of frightened shock, she had been aware of nothing at all.

He stood beside her now, thin and cold and utterly correct in his long white robe. His eyes, level with hers—for he was not a tall man—were a light, clear yellow, flecked with the brown-gray that wood turns when desiccated with age.

He shoved her against the stone of the wall, and when he spoke, she could see the gleam of his fangs in the strangely reversed lamp glow.

“Not that proper manners, or genuine society, have existed in this country since the departure of the last of her true kings for France and the advent of that rabble of sausage-devouring German heretics and their hangers-on.” There was no anger in his voice, nor wore his face any expression whatsoever, but his grip on her arm kept her pinned where she was. His hands were like marble—a dead man’s hands.

He went on, “It has always been considered that a woman who sought a man out in his chamber while he slept did so at her peril.”

James was in danger. Later on Lydia realized that only that fact gave her courage to speak. Her single encounter with Ysidro had been part and parcel of a greater jeopardy, and in that instance, she had known where she stood. This was different.

“I had to speak to you. I came in the daylight so the others wouldn’t know.”

He released her arm, but standing in the confines of the narrow stair, it was as if they embraced. She noted that no heat came from his body, and save for the very faint reek of old blood in the folds of his shroud, no smell. Except when he spoke, his body made no sound whatsoever, neither of breath nor of movement. All these data she observed, while aware that no analysis of them came anywhere near describing what he was like.

She pushed up her spectacles. “Lord Ysidro—Don Simon—I think my husband is in trouble. I need your advice.”

“Your husband, mistress, has had all the boon and gift I could make him, and more, in the breath of life that still passes his lips.” The sulfur eyes regarded her, remote and chill. Not catlike, nor snakelike, nor like any beast’s, but neither were they a man’s eyes. Even his lashes were white, like his hair. “And a second time will I fill his hands with undeserved treasure, when I let you walk from this house.”

“The Earl of Ernchester is selling his services to a foreign government.”

Don Simon Ysidro’s expression did not alter. Indeed, his face, still as the peeled ivory statue of some forgotten god, had shown neither anger nor scorn, as if over the years the flesh had settled to a final resting place on the delicate substructure of skull. Nor had his voice risen over the soft level that was almost, but not quite, a monotone, and all the more terrifying for that. Don Simon Xavier Christian Morado de la Cadena-Ysidro was the only vampire Lydia had met. She wondered if others were like him.

“Come upstairs.”

He handed her back her weapon and led the way, lamp upraised to shed light on the damp stone stairs. His feet beneath the hem of his shroudlike woolen robe were bare. Though Lydia’s breath clouded gold in the lamplight, the owner of the nameless house seemed to feel nothing of the cold.

Four cats somehow materialized in the scullery, miawing to be fed, though Lydia observed that none came within arm’s reach of the vampire. Ysidro set the lamp on the table and touched a spill to the flame. Though he was extremely difficult to see when he moved, Lydia had impressions, like frozen images from a dream, of white hands cupping light above the curved glass chimney and carrying it to the fishtail burners above the stove; of dense gold outlining the slight hook of the nose, the long chin and trace of shadow at the corner of his mouth. He opened the icebox, addressed the cats in Spanish and put meat and milk down for them. Then he stepped away from their dishes. Only then did they come close to eat.

“Where did you hear this?” He held a chair while she sat, then perched a flank on the corner of the table. His English was flawless, save for the faintest touch of a Castilian lisp, and the occasional oddly bent inflection that Lydia knew would have conveyed volumes to James. In the set of Ysidro’s shoulders, the way he held his head, she saw the echo of a long-vanished doublet and stiffened ruff.

She held out to him the telegram she had received Monday morning from the Gare du Nord. “Ignace Karolyi is—”

“I know who Ignace Karolyi is.” His voice still held no very great interest, as if all emotion had long been worn away by the sheer abrasion of passing time. Indeed, in stillness, Lydia had the odd impression that he had been sitting so on the corner of the table for years, perhaps centuries.

The vampire turned the paper in ivory fingers, raised it to his nostrils, then touched it, very gently, first to his cheekbone, then to his lower lip. “A Hungarian boyar and, like your husband at one time, a man who cherishes the honor of service to his empire above personal honor, though perhaps Hungarians as a rule do not consider truth and loyalty as the English do. A diplomat, and a spy.”

“I didn’t know then about Karolyi,” Lydia said. Some of her panic was passing—at least he appeared willing to listen to what she said. “I mean, only what James says in his wire. But I recognized his name. I found it in one of the lists I made a year ago, when I was trying to track down medical doctors I suspected of contacts with vampires. I was making notes of every name I found in any article. This one was in an article about Dr. Bedford Fairport.”

He tilted his head a little, like an albinistic bird. “The man who seeks to have men live forever.”

“You’ve heard of him, then.” Reading over the long series of articles last night, she hadn’t thought of Fairport’s work on the changes wrought in brain and blood and glandular chemistry over time in exactly that light—she doubted that Fairport himself would see it that way. But suddenly she knew that Ysidro was right.

“This was one of his early articles,” she went on slowly. “Back in ‘eighty-six or ’eighty-seven, when he first went to Austria to study those Styrian peasants who live to be a hundred and ten. He mentions that the private sanitarium he was given charge of is owned by the Karolyi family, and that it was Ignace Karolyi who made the arrangements. He mentions Karolyi in the next article as a financial contributor who made research possible. And then Karolyi vanishes. In fact, all reference to Fairport’s funding vanishes. It’s never mentioned again. I checked.”

“It astounds me that I did not read that myself.” Ysidro sounded not the slightest astounded. “But I subscribe to a good many journals, as I daresay you saw.”

Lydia
blushed. What had seemed, at the time, to be the necessary investigation of a vampire’s lair became trespass in a gentleman’s house. “I’m sorry,” she stammered, but he vouchsafed no reply.

Instead his finger moved in the direction of the sprayer. “And what is this?”

“Oh.” Lydia took the sticking plaster from her pocket and recapped the nozzle. “It’s full of silver nitrate solution. One can buy it in any chandlery. I—well, James once mentioned that vampires sometimes slept several to a house. I didn’t know what I might meet, you see.”

She was afraid he would mock her, since, upon consideration, the weapon would certainly have been difficult to deploy quickly enough to do her any good. She had learned to deal with mockery from an early age over her medical studies, but this was a matter from which she could not simply walk away.