Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2)

Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2) Page 12

"Do vampires not love?"

Ysidro looked up from tallying his points. Lydia had scored sixteen for eight through king in hearts, with the nine making up a quart; Ysidro, by not declaring a sequence in diamonds, had managed to win most of the tricks, including the last. It hadn't saved him.

They had spent the day among the ancient basilicas and rose farms of Adrianople, owing to Ysidro's flat refusal to travel during the hours of light. Now the rough hills of Thrace, through which they had creaked with maddening slowness all of last night, seemed, as far as Lydia could tell, to have evened out. The train was a good one, German built and fitted, but even this first-class car smelled of garlic, strong coffee, tobacco, and unwashed clothing. On the platforms of Sofia and Belgrade, Lydia had observed that the farther east one got, the more casual railway personnel seemed to be about the presence of livestock in passenger cars. At Adrianople, earlier in the evening, she'd seen a Bosniak family casually load two goats into the third-class carriage, the father holding the long-fleeced kid in his arms and stepping back politely to let a bearded Orthodox priest climb on ahead of him, while farther down the platform people passed crates of chickens in through the windows.

Aunt Lavinia had always said that travel was broadening. Lydia suspected this was not what she meant.

The noise in the other first-class compartments seemed to be lessening, though in the corridors the tobacco fug still lay thick. Miss Potton, after her usual stubborn struggle to play a game in which she had neither aptitude nor interest, had fallen into a doze at Ysidro's side. For nearly an hour the only words exchanged had concerned the lay of the cards and the trading of points, but Lydia suspected that the governess was as jealous of those as she was of other conversations Lydia and Ysidro had.

The wheels clacked steadily, like mechanical ram. Ysidro finished his tally, the steel nib of his pen scratching softly on the cheap yellow pad, the friction of his cuff on the tabletop a dry whisper against Margaret's stertorous breath and the occasional bursts of laughter or speech audible through the compartment wall.

It was a long time before Ysidro replied.

At length he said, "As humans understand it?"

"How do humans understand it?" Lydia gathered the cards, turned them in her hands. Living half by night-half in the sunken silences of darkness-had given her a small degree of understanding of something Ysidro had mentioned early on, that vampires' senses were far more sensitive than those of humans. With blackness pressing the window and gloom thick beyond the circle of the gas burner's solitary light, every sound, every sight, seemed portentous, fraught with meaning beyond the simpler shapes of day.

"You said back in Vienna that Ernchester was a rarity among vampires, because he is capable of love. I wondered what that actually meant."

"As with the living, among the Undead love means different things to different individuals." He turned his head, champagne-colored eyes resting briefly on the woman who snored beside him in her muddle of yarns. After a moment her head lolled more heavily and her breathing deepened still further; she slumped against him, and with a fastidious care he leaned her into the other corner of the seat. In the five days it had taken them to work their way south via local trains- for the Orient Express only left Vienna on Thursdays-through Buda-Pesth, Belgrade, Sofia, Adrianople, waiting sometimes for most of a day for the next train that departed after sunset-Lydia had been occasionally aware of the highly colored romantic dreams that illuminated Margaret Potton's sleep. In all of them Ysidro had been a vampire, outrageously Byronic in black leather and pearls, with daggers sticking out of his boots.

In all of them, love had been implicit. His professed, passionate love for her, bonding them, drawing her like a silver rope into love for him.

Whatever love is, Lydia added to herself. It would hardly do, at this point, for Margaret to hear any true opinion of Ysidro's on the ability of vampires to love.

"It is not unlikely, or even infrequent," Ysidro said, "for those who have the capacity to love others more than themselves to also have the will to make the transition from the living state to that of the Undead." The train jostled around a curve sharper than those found in northerly or westerly Europe. Ysidro put a gloved hand on Margaret's shoulder to keep her steady-perhaps to keep her from waking. He touched her carefully, even with gloves. His hands, Lydia knew, were cold as bone these days. She could tell when he had fed, and she knew he had not hunted in Vienna.

"It is unusual, however, for such a one to survive long after the deaths of those for whom they care. In many cases, friends or relatives constitute the vampire's early victims or fall prey to them in the course of the years. For those vampires who do not avail themselves of the convenience-and the odd comfort- of this resolution to immortality's riddle, there is often a sense of disorientation when family and lovers age and begin to die. In my experience those capable of loving seldom make successful vampires."

In the juddering glare of the gaslight, his face had the appearance of a skull in the ashy frame of his long hair; Lydia wondered whether he had always looked so or whether he had thinned and wasted in the past five days. Margaret stirred in her sleep, and Ysidro turned his face to look at her again, unreadable indifference in his gaze. There was long silence before he spoke again.

"You understand that having become vampire myself at the age of five-and-twenty, my experience of human love is... incomplete," he went on, as if the matter were not one for his concern. "In this case, what love actually means is that someone- one of the Constantinople vampires, or one who has been in contact with him or her-would know that a threat to harm Anthea-by human agency, perhaps, or with the understanding that if human means proved ineffective, vampire agents would not be far behind-would bring Charles to heel. The vampire mind is an endlessly subtle one, and Charles knows the extent of their abilities to manipulate circumstance. Even were Grippen willing to defend Anthea, defending against a sufficiently determined attack might lie beyond his powers. For his own safety, Charles would not care, but as Dryden said, we give hostages to fortune when we love."

He moved his hand, turning it as if revealing a hidden card. "I would guess that the sack of the house was an effort to take her hostage once he had departed, to prevent him changing his mind."

"But if the Sultan wants a vampire," Lydia said, puzzled, "and if he's been in touch with one in order to know about Ernchester in the first place, why go to the trouble? Aren't there plenty of vampires in Constantinople? At least from all the legends James hears, Greece and the Balkans have to be stiff with them." "Perhaps the vampire who spoke of Ernchester to Karolyi-or to the Sultan, if it was he who sent Karolyi-is now dead. We cannot know how long ago it was, and there have been upheavals in the city recently. Of a certainty, he-or she-would be dead, did the Master of Constantinople learn that there was a plot afoot to bring an interloper into his city. And it may be that whoever has sent for Ernchester feels that he would be more easily controlled than any under the sway of the Master of Constantinople. In this he would be correct."

Ysidro stretched a hand like gloved bones to part the window curtain. "Behold." It was not like Paris, not like Paris' glittering carpet of gaslights. Softer lights and fewer-amber, citrine, topaz, red as the juice of blood oranges- jeweled the long spine of hills that made the city and lay in spangles of isolate flame in the nearly unseen movement of the sea. The train swung around a great curve. A many-towered gate loomed in the darkness, archways strung with yellow electric lights that cast reflections on a tree-filled ditch and a massy wall stretching into the night. Lydia gasped in surprise- she'd heard of the walls of Constantinople but hadn't quite realized that the Byzantine ramparts would still be standing, watchtowers intact.

As the train slowed, the lights from its windows caught the black-glass combs of choppy sea beneath the railway embankment. Where the land curved, the old sea wall rose above the tracks, dark houses with outthrust upper floors growing from the ancient masonry like mushrooms from a riven oak.

Ysidro produced a gold pocket watch. "Twenty of one," he said approvingly. "Only two hours late. Excellent, for the Ottoman lands."

After coming into Sofia four and a half hours late, with the sky like wet slate and Margaret in hysterics as if she, not Ysidro, would be destroyed by the light of the dawn, Lydia could only be thankful. On that occasion, while the Sofia train lurched and stopped and started all through the shelterless hills of Thrace, Ysidro had grown quieter and, when he spoke, more incisive. Though Lydia did not know exactly how much light was necessary to trigger the photoreactive properties of the vampire flesh, she gathered that they had reached the Terminus Hotel in Sofia, and Ysidro had taken his usual leave of them, with only minutes to spare.

This had led to a furious and not very coherent scene with Margaret, in whose aftermath Lydia still felt embarrassed. The younger woman had accused Lydia of "not caring anything about" Ysidro, of "using people up like old dishes, and then throwing them away when they break." When Lydia had pointed out that at any time Ysidro could have retreated to his coffin trunk and trusted the girls to get him to safety, Margaret had screamed, "If you'd ever had anything to do with earning your own living, without having everything you ever wanted just handed to you on a silver plate, you'd have learned you can't treat people that way when they're trying to help you!"

In view of Ysidro's relations with Margaret, this had struck Lydia as so outrageous that she'd simply said, "Oh, stop behaving like an idiot," and had gone into the suite's single bedroom and closed the door. She'd been far too exhausted by her own fears to remain awake long, but during the few minutes she'd spent stripping off her outer clothing, petticoats, and corsets, she'd heard Margaret sobbing hysterically in the parlor. When she emerged, not much refreshed, hours later, it had been to see the governess sprawled unprettily on the sofa, face flushed, shirtwaist off, and corsets unlaced, sound asleep. They'd made up after a fashion, as traveling companions must, but their never- easy relations remained strained. Now Margaret mumbled, "You should have waked me sooner," when Lydia shook her.

"We're here. Constantinople." She didn't mention that Ysidro had done his best to keep the woman asleep.

Margaret pulled a comb out of her handbag and straightened her hair, with nervous glances at Ysidro as if he hadn't seen her in rumpled slumber for many nights. Only then did she turn to the window and say in disappointment, "Oh. You can't see anything."

Across tumbled onyx water a long curve of lights glimmered as if a congregation of shepherds had kindled watch fires on the point. Here and there, close to the tracks, reflected light showed a thumb smudge of honey-colored walls, but for the most part the city was dark. The high, dark backbone of the land was studded by minarets and domes under the gibbous moon's waning light: the embodiment of formless dreams, a dark suggestion of labyrinth hoarding darkness within. No, thought Lydia. You didn't see it. You drank it, and it left you filled with an indescribable sense of hunger, and loss, and grief.

"They called it the City of Walls," Ysidro said softly. "The City of Palaces. Like a Kipling treasure guarded by a cobra, they have fought over it, or feared it, for all the long centuries since the emperors departed from Rome. Not even those who won it, who dwelled in it, ever knew it all."

Like James looking at the towers of Oxford, thought Lydia, and calling them each by its name. Did he name in his heart each dome, each quartet of spires, against that lambent sky? "Were you ever here?" Margaret edged possessively closer to him, took his arm-though Lydia knew he hated to be touched-and looked into his face.

Ysidro smiled, for her. "Once," he said in a voice that promised her new dreams.

Over her head his eyes met Lydia's, enigmatic, and looked away.

The train chuffed to a stop at a small station beneath the beetling towers of an old fortress gate. Up close the ambience was anything but exotic. The station was Western, stuccoed and painted the same ochre hue so common in Vienna, and by the harsh electric lamps Lydia saw the grannies and goats, the gentlemen in red fezzes and black coats, the Greeks in full white pants and the Bulgarians with their crated chickens and straw suitcases, get on and off with the leisured air of those who know the train isn't going anywhere in a hurry. The stink of slums and tanneries was thick hereabouts, and there were, Lydia noticed, a lot of soldiers in the stations, clothed in modern khaki uniforms, nothing like the colorful warriors of tales.

"Those aren't the janissaries, are they?" she asked, and Ysidro's yellow eyes developed the smallest of twinkles, like a fugitive star, at the bottom of their cold, ironic depths. Despite the insectile thinness of his face and its white- silk pallor, he looked briefly human.

"The corps of the janissaries was abolished a century ago- massacred wholesale, in fact, by order of the Sultan Murad, who wished to establish a modern army. This past July that modern army returned the favor by deposing the current Sultan and converting him by force into the type of constitutional monarch fashionable among those who like to style themselves enlightened."

"You mean there isn't a Sultan anymore?" Margaret sounded like a child who has been told on the twenty-fourth of December that Father Christmas has been pensioned off to a villa in the south of France.

"July..." Lydia said thoughtfully. "The printer's deadline for my monograph on the effects of ultraviolet light on the hypothalamus was August fifteenth... And I never can remember whether they're on our side or Germany's. So it couldn't have been the Sultan who sent for Ernchester?"

"It may well be," Ysidro said. "He is not without power, even yet. But if he thinks to regain it by bringing in a vampire whom he hopes to control, he reckons without the Master of Constantinople."

The train lurched and began its slow, rocking progress again, the city growing above them in thick accretions of shadow, lamps, and ancient walls shrouded in vine.

"Who is the Master of Constantinople?" Lydia asked quietly.

They were all three clustered by the windows of the compartment, looking out over the inky water toward the lights of Seraglio Point and the dim hills of Asia beyond.

"In my day it was not considered a wise thing to speak his name." Ysidro turned back to the table and gathered the cards. He fumbled, dropping them; Margaret sprang at once to help him but he'd retrieved them already, slipped them into the paper band that usually encircled the pack, secreted them in a pocket of his mouse- gray coat.

"He was a sorcerer in life, a title which could mean anything from a theoretical alchemist to a student of the properties of herbs. Certainly he was a poisoner, possibly an astronomer, though one does not always keep these things up. He wielded tremendous power, before and after his death, with the Viziers of the Sublime Porte. Legends said that certain of the sultans gifted him with prisoners, that he might feast upon their deaths, though considering the size of the beggar population of Constantinople, I do not find this at all likely or necessary. And as Juvenal says, 'Foolish is he who puts his trust in princes.' Personally, I wouldn't touch any edible offered me by any of the sultans."

Ysidro put out a hand again, to steady himself on the wall as the train swung around the rocky slope of a hill and lurched into another suburban station.

There were electric lights here, too, and soldiers armed with businesslike Enfields.

"It is probably best," he said, "that the master of this city not be spoken of in any terms until we are in Pera."

Another of Ysidro's gruff local henchmen awaited them in the square before the main Gare of Stamboul, this one a Greek- whom Ysidro addressed in Spanish-with the usual wagon and horses. Lydia had removed her glasses before leaving the train compartment, but the moment they were settled on the high seat and moving off through the tangle of drays, donkey carts, and foot passengers, she sneaked them back on, gazing around her in wonderment. At the foot of the square the dark waters of the Golden Horn flashed with the lights of ships moored there, and even at nearly two in the morning the lights of small boats could be seen plying between the Stamboul shore and the lamp-flecked hills of Pera on the other side.

Black streets swallowed them, and for a few minutes Lydia could no more than guess at the houses crowding above, balconies-sometimes entire upper stories- jutting overhead as if grabbing for airspace, here and there the low glimmer of lamps behind thick latticework. Cats' eyes flashed everywhere, and the smell of goats and dogs and human waste was like a curtain thick enough to be touched with the hand. Lamps in iron cages showed her the somber glory of a mosque half veiled in Stygian gloom as they passed through a square, a note of great age on the lighted threshold of a modern iron bridge.

On the bridges other side the houses were European-or Greek, with white walls like clotted cream in the moonlight. They wound their way uphill to a tree-grown public square lying beneath a splendid Italianate palace of pale golden stone.

"The British Embassy," came Ysidro's soft voice. "I trust you ladies will present yourselves to the Right Honorable Mr. Lowther in the morning. For many years the embassies have been the true power here."

As usual, Ysidro had wired ahead for lodgings, this time a pink-washed Greek- style house whose stone-flagged arch led into a court shaded by a massive pomegranate tree, staffed by three thickset Greek women, evidently a mother and two daughters, who smiled and replied "Parakalo-parakalo..." to everything Lydia said.

As at Belgrade, Sofia, and Adrianople, once Lydia's trunks and portmanteaus and hatboxes and baskets of herbs were carried upstairs, Ysidro climbed into the wagon once more and disappeared to some secret lodging of his own.

"You can't ask him to continue what he's doing."

Lydia turned, startled, the moss-green velvet of her dressing gown weighting her arms. Tomorrow she'd present herself, not only to the Right Honorable G. A. Lowther, but, armed with Mr. Halliwell's letters of introduction, to Sir Burnwell Clapham, the attache in charge of what were nebulously referred to as "affairs." It was entirely possible, she thought, that Jamie would be there, or Jamie would be somewhere close. Oh, yes, Dr. Asher. He arrived last week...

Please, she thought, shivering inside. Please...

Margaret stood awkwardly in the doorway of the single large bedroom the two women would share. As in Vienna, in Belgrade and Sofia, it was not by their choice- even had relations between them not been strained, Lydia would have preferred to be spared her companion's nocturnal sighs and mutterings in dreams.

But in no house had more than one bed been made up, nor could the servants anywhere be induced to do so. In the small connecting chamber, Lydia had already found the dismantled pieces of a massive four-poster that looked as if it had been ordered from Berlin at the height of the Gothic craze. Its sister ship filled most of this room, the bright pink-and-blue local work of its coverlet incongruously gay; the dressing table, mirrored armoire, and marble-topped washstand had clearly been ordered en suite, and though the room was large, with a bay projecting over the street, they gave it a cluttered feeling, jammed and awkward.

At least, thought Lydia, they weren't strewn with the porcelain knickknacks featured in their Belgrade lodgings, and the whitewashed plaster walls were free of garish oleographs of Orthodox saints.

She turned from the armoire, the robe still in her hands. "What?"

"You forbade him..." Margaret hesitated, and her wide blue eyes shifted as she sought another word. "You forbade him to hunt," she said at last. "As a condition of letting him travel with you, of letting him protect you." Her voice stammered and she twisted at her black-gloved hands. "Now that we've reached our destination, you really don't have any right to continue... to continue..."

Frozen in mid-motion, Lydia only stared at her, too shocked to speak.

Margaret, who had clearly hoped that she would say something and spare her the completion of her sentence-and in fact the completion of her own thought-trailed off uncertainly, and for a moment there was only the clutch and jerk of her breath. Then she burst out, "You don't understand him!"

"You keep saying that." Lydia crossed to the bed and dropped the robe beside the nightgown the maid had laid out, and began to unbutton her shirtwaist. The tiny pearl fastenings of the sleeves were awkward, but she'd dismissed the servant after she'd unpacked for them, and didn't know enough modern Greek to summon her back. She wondered what the servants had made of the silver knives and silver- loaded gun among the masses of petticoats, skirts, shirtwaists, lingerie, and dinner dresses-wondered, too, if she could communicate to them a request to purchase garlic, whitethorn, and wild rose on the morrow. Or as Ysidro's servants, would they refuse to obey such a request?

Margaret reached out and took her by the sleeve, her face bracketed with lines of distress deepened by the lamps' heavy shadows. "You can't forbid him to hunt!" she insisted desperately. "It isn't as if he... as if the people he... he takes..."

"You mean 'kills'?"

She flinched from the word but lashed back almost at once with, "It isn't as if they didn't deserve it!"

Lydia only stood for a time, her fingers still on the pearl buttons but her task forgotten. When she spoke, her voice was very quiet. "Did he tell you that?"

"I know it!" The governess was on the brink of tears. "Yes, he told me! I mean, I know- I mean, in the past-in past life-times-in dreams I've had about our former lives together... And don't tell me they're all lies," she veered away suddenly, "because I know they're not! I know you think they are, but they're really not! They're not!"

She flung herself in front of Lydia when Lydia tried to turn away, her face red, blotchy as if with the approach of tears. "You see, if a vampire doesn't... doesn't hunt to completion..."

She was still avoiding the word "kill."

"They feed on the energy, the life, the vital force!" she went on in a rush. "It's the life they take that gives their minds the powers they need to protect themselves!"

"You mean to kill other people?"

"You're starving him to death!" Margaret cried. "Robbing him of his powers to defend himself from danger, now, here, where the peril is the greatest! That's why vampires take so long to hunt, or at least why he takes so long to hunt, he told me, because he's hunting the streets of the city to find a thief, a murderer, a... a blackguard who deserves to die! You know the world is full of them. He's hunted that way for hundreds and hundreds of years! It's only from those kind of people that he takes the life he needs! And he's too honorable to go against his given word to you..."

"Did he ask you to speak to me?" Lydia's voice was as cold to her own ears as the silver on her neck.

"No." Margaret sniffled and wiped furiously at her eyes, fighting not to break down in front of this slender auburn and white reed of a girl, this spoiled heiress- beauty with her waist unbuttoned to show the heavy links of silver chain, row upon row of them, around the stem of her throat.

"But I can see!" she sobbed. "Every day I can see. You beat him at cards all the time now..."

"I've had a week of continuous practice," Lydia pointed out.

"You could never beat him if he weren't fighting to keep the other powers of his mind intact! To preserve himself..."

"Thank you very much." Head aching with weariness-for it was close to three in the morning-Lydia stepped around her. It was true that Ysidro had grown very gaunt- true, too, that a week ago he would never have dropped the cards, never would even have allowed the girls to see him gather them.

He could not mask things from them as he had. Or was he saving his strength for other matters?

"Margaret, do we need to talk about this now? I'm tired, you're tired, I suspect you don't mean everything you're saying-"

"How can you be so blind!" Margaret went on frantically, unheeding, following her back to the bed. "Can't you see? He can't turn people's minds aside in the train stations like he used to, or listen down the train cars, reading their dreams..."

Lydia's overwrought temper snapped. "Or put little scenes of dancing the waltz- which wasn't even invented in the sixteenth century-into yours? I'm sorry," she said immediately, as Margaret burst into a storm of tears at this brutally accurate accusation. "I shouldn't have said that..."

"You don't understand!" Margaret shouted wildly. "You don't understand him! All you care about is finding your boring old stick of a husband and helping him play spies, and you can't see the great-souled, noble, lonely, tragic hero you're destroying!"

She blundered from the room like a bee trying to get out of a potting shed. Lydia heard the banister creak as she stumbled against it, heard the running judder of her footsteps descend the two long, C-shaped flights of stairs.

"Margaret!" She grabbed her spectacles from the dressing table and ran after her, catching handfuls of taffeta skirt to race down the steps, the tile of them cold under her stockinged feet. Below her she heard the door bang, and she followed, appalled, into the covered carriageway in time to see the heavy outer gate swing shut on its hinges.

"Margaret!" Through her concern she thought obliquely, Well, that does it for this pair of stockings-even in the relatively clean suburb of Pera the streets were nothing to explore unshod. Two small sconces illuminated the courtyard behind her, and the candle before a saint's icon in a niche flecked the underside of the carriageway's brick vault with wavering light. Past the gate the street was like a cave a thousand feet beneath the earth.

Lydia stopped on the threshold, as if that abyssal dark were a chasm gaping before her feet.

Margaret gasped somewhere, and there was a suggestion of movement, pale in blackness. The shred of moonlight picked out a white face, like a skull's, a scrap of spiderweb hair. A moment later Lydia's eyes, adjusting, made out the white hands, holding Margaret by the wrists. Margaret threw herself wordlessly to his chest, clutching and weeping.

Ysidro must have spoken, so softly Lydia did not hear. Lydia herself had been exasperated to the slapping point with Margaret's clinging, mooning, and silent reproaches, but she had never seen the vampire anything but patient and understanding with the woman he had made his slave. Of course he understood her, thought Lydia bitterly, watching as Ysidro bent his head to listen to some muffled, hysterical rant; watching Margaret's skinny hands grab at his sleeves, his shoulders, the long folds of his cloak. If he hadn't understood her, he couldn't have baited the trap.

Illuminated only by the frail gleam from the window above, they seemed figures in a distant stage show, almost like a dream. Margaret flung back her head, gazing up into Ysidro's face, then with a passionate gesture she ripped open her shirtwaist, baring her throat and her white, soft-fleshed bosom. "Take me!"

Lydia heard her gasp. "Even unto death, if that is what you need!"

What Ysidro replied Lydia didn't know. But she saw him draw the edges of Margaret's shirtwaist together, put his hands on her shoulders, speaking quietly as she bowed her head. When he began to guide her back along the lane to the gate once more, Lydia retreated soundlessly into the courtyard, concealing herself in the dense shadows of the pomegranate tree, so that Margaret would be spared the embarrassment of knowing that the encounter had been observed. For a moment they stood framed in the carriageway's arch. Ysidro must have said something else, for Lydia saw Margaret nod and push up her eyeglasses to mop her cheeks. Then the door shut behind her as she went in.

Lydia heard nothing for a time, though she knew that Ysidro had not gone inside; and indeed, moments later, the dimmest crack of light showed when he opened the gate again and stood for a moment looking out. That slit vanished; he emerged into the courtyard like an errant ghost and crossed to her hiding place as if he had seen her all along.

"I could wish her to have reserved such theatrics for another place and time." "Yes." Irritated as she had been with Margaret, her greatest anger still lay toward him. She folded her arms against the cold. "It's a nuisance, isn't it, when people decide to feel more than you've scheduled them to feel?" "It is." He might have been agreeing that today was Saturday. The moon was sinking; only the glow from the votives by the kitchen door showed her the garden before them. "Yet the dreams she dreams are not all of my making. And I admit I will feel safer to know that the two of you sleep in the one bed, which I trust you will hang about, as you did in Sofia and Belgrade, with those stinking weeds you have carried with you since Paris."

The chilly breeze from the Asian hills stirred the last leaves high overhead. A stray breath of it flared the votive lights, showing her briefly Ysidro's face, eyes darkened by shadow to skull-like sockets and cheekbones hollowed to bruises. Remembering what he had said about mirrors, Lydia wondered suddenly if he was actually thinning away before her to a wraith of ectoplasm and bone, or if what was thinning was simply his ability to make her believe that she saw him other than he truly was.

"The Galata slums at the base of the hill and the high streets of Pera with their embassies and their banks, they all smell of vampires." The flame repeated itself, cold yellow crystal in his eyes. "Standing just now on the steps of the Yusek Kalderim, I stretched forth my mind across the Golden Horn, and the city lies under such miasma as I have never encountered before. The minds of vampires, the mind of the master, other minds... I can smell them, heft them like silk in my hand. But everything is blocked, shadowed, wreathed in illusion and deception, as if every card on the board were down-turned, and one had to wager all one had on a hand of three."

He frowned and turned to look once more at the gate. Involuntarily Lydia stepped closer to him, her anger forgotten. "Are you sure? You've said yourself you aren't as... as able to perceive..."

A wry line sketched itself in the corner of his mouth, the echo of a living man's ironic smile. "A regret, mistress? A concern for the fact that you have asked me not to kill to preserve my own life, only to discover that such abstinence may prevent me from preserving yours?"

She studied his face a moment, trying to read something in the twin sulfur glints of his eyes. They were like a dragon's in their hollows. "No," she said. "A concern, maybe, but not a regret."

"No," he echoed softly. "A lady worthy to her bones."

It was, she realized, the first time he had spoken to her of her stipulation.

Then he shook his head and looked back to the gate and the inky, pitch blackness that lay beyond.

"And Jamie?" She found she could barely speak his name. It was hard even to ask, for fear Ysidro would tell her what she had dreaded for days to hear. His brow flinched, just barely, in a frown. "If he is here, he is not in Pera." There was almost hesitation, an unwillingness in his voice. "If he sleeps on the Stamboul shore..." He shook his head. "No, my perceptions are impaired, but this is not a matter of degree. This-shadow, this-blurring that lies over the city... it is something that emanates from the vampires themselves. An obscurity, gathered to hide aught within it. A fog, as they say the Undead can summon..."

His smile had been-almost-a living man's smile. The shadow in those dragon eyes was suddenly, fleetingly, a living man's fear. "Tomorrow night will be soon enough to cross, to walk and listen in the darkness, to see what more can be descried at nearer quarters." He drew his cloak more closely around him, a subconscious gesture, the white of his gloves against the dark wool like frost on black rock.

"But it is clear to me that something very strange is taking place in this city, and I had rather our romantic friend had not cried aloud, even in English, regarding hunting and killing and the drinking of blood. I think it best such things not be spoken of, not even here in Pera. Not even by light of day."