Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2)

Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2) Page 18

"I suspected my remark about how valuable you thought the information would yield results." Prince Razualmovsky slashed with his riding whip at the two curs sleeping on the marble steps. They slunk a few feet away and stretched out again in the dust of the plaza that had once been the Hippodrome, tongues lolling an incongruous raspberry against wolfish coats which, even without her eyeglasses, Lydia could tell were half worn away with mange.

Constantinople had more dogs-and, as she had seen last night, more cats-than any city she'd ever been in.

The animals seemed to operate on two different levels, as indeed, she reflected, they would have to. As Prince Razumovsky's carriage had worked carefully through the streets of the old city, where wooden Turkish houses appeared to sprout spontaneously from more ancient walls, the dogs had been everywhere, lying in the muck or against the walls of ochre or pink stucco. The cats had the overhanging balconies or shared the sills of heavily barred windows with potted geraniums, or lay on the walls and trellises of tiny cafes where Turkish men sipped tea and talked under stringy canopies of leafless vines.

"Someone always knows someone," the Russian continued, white teeth gleaming under tawny haystacks of mustache. "The good brass seller mentioned our questions to his friends at the cafe that night, or perhaps a beggar overheard us or the man selling baklava. One of them knew a street sweeper whose sister knew the hakawati shair by sight or had a cousin who'd heard one of the muezzins mention that a new hakawati shair had taken up residence in this place, or one of the neighborhood children mentioned it to another child... It was a Syrian boy who brought me the information."

"What did you pay him?" Lydia reached for the small reticule of silver mesh that hung at her waist. "I can't let you..."

"An entirely negligible sum." His Highness waved dismissively. "It will support his family for two months, doubtless-or buy one member of it two days' worth of opium, if that's their choice." He held out his hand to help her over the marble sill of the narrow door.

He had been treating her all morning as if she were made of cut glass, apparently under the impression that her haggard eyes and pallor were the result of a night of sleepless worry over her husband, not a night spent single- mindedly plowing through four and a half months' worth of the investor listings of the two biggest banks in the city.

There were more than a score of corporations and investors that seemed to fit the criteria. More people than a single vampire had guessed the way the wind was blowing back in July and started transferring funds into less vulnerable forms than real estate and gold. She wondered if it were possible to obtain the long- term banking records of the oldest banks-how long had there been banks in the empire, anyway?-or of property holders, to see whose lives went on for a suspiciously long time before they transferred their money to equally long-lived successors. The various names under which the palace chamberlain laundered money came up again and again in everyone's accounts- and given the general level of corruption in Constantinople, it was almost impossible to track how money appeared and disappeared.

By five in the morning Lydia had a dozen names-two of which Margaret had completely missed in the Deutsches Bank records-and Margaret had long since fallen asleep with her head on her arms.

Had she not reviewed the records, Lydia suspected she'd have had the night of sleepless worry in any event, so it was just as well she'd had work to occupy her.

"Are you sure this is all right?" Margaret asked, flushing an uncomfortable red.

"It isn't allowed, is it?"

"The courtyard is free to all," said Razumovsky. "But it would probably be best if you let me speak."

The Blue Mosque was one of the greatest in the city, a place where there were always people.

That, Lydia realized a moment later, was the point.

Razumovsky led them-Lydia burningly conscious of her Western gown and the gauzy excuse for a veil depending from her stylish hat-toward the north wall of the court, where wintry light fell upon the men along the colonnade: a bearded man in a turban selling small loops of bright-colored prayer beads on a blanket; another cross-legged behind what looked like a little desk, complete with brass inkwell, standish, and shaker of sand. There was the inevitable shoe-shine boy with his little brass-bound kit. Two men in rags, sitting near the small marble pavilion in the middle of the court fingering their beads, glared at the women as they passed, but neither spoke.

The man they sought occupied a worn carpet next to the bead sellers pitch. He was conversing with a thin, elderly man in a white robe and yellow turban, but looked up as Razumovsky drew near, and Lydia had an impression of a huge hooked nose and a tangle of dirty white beard, a green blob of turban, and, when she cast down her eyes, of grimy, horny feet with toenails like a bear's claws poking from beneath his robe. He was ragged, and his clothing smelled of filth and sweat; he gave off anger and distrust like a blast of heat in her face. "Qabih... qabih..." he muttered ferociously, glaring up at her and then past her at Margaret. "Qahbdt..." He averted his face then and added in hoarse French, "An unveiled woman is an abomination in the eyes of God."

"Maitre conteur." Lydia curtseyed deeply. "Please forgive me. Do you call me ill names because I wear the veil which my husband gave me to wear?" She touched the thin net veil of her green taffeta hat. "Do you blame me for wearing clothing, and dressing my hair, as my husband wishes to see me adorned?"

The man in the yellow turban had stepped tactfully away, leaving Lydia, Razumovsky, and Margaret alone with the old hakdwati shah. Lydia knelt on the worn marble paving of the mosque's court, reflecting that after journeying all the way from Oxford, the bottle-green skirt needed cleaning anyway. "And if my husband has disappeared," she went on, still in French, which the old man seemed to follow well enough, "and I know him to be in danger, am I impure for wanting to aid him?" Ysidro, she thought, should hear me now.

The black eyes glittered, chips of coal. She could see the dark line of downturned mouth amid the tangled beard, hear the anger in his voice when he replied, but she saw, in the set of his shoulders, the way he drew back from her and looked, for one fleeting instant, past Razumovsky to the courtyard gate, that he was afraid.

"You are the wife of the Ingileezee in the brown clothing, the man who asked all the questions about the Deathless Lord."

Lydia nodded. She wondered how close Razumovsky was standing behind her and how much he heard. "I am."

"He was a fool," snapped the old storyteller. "To seek the residence of Wafat Sahib is the act of a fool, and a fool's fate overtook him."

"Did you tell him?"

The old man looked away. "I told him nothing," he said sharply, and Lydia knew he was lying. James had probably offered him money. With feet like that, and the characteristic roughening of pellegra on the skin of his face, he was beyond a doubt desperately poor.

"It was my boy Izahk," the storyteller went on, too quickly. "A discreet boy; one I thought too clever to be seen. But when he did not come back that night, I knew he had done that which is forbidden: he had spoken of Wafat Sahib, and that lord is not a lord to tolerate such chatter." His black eyes narrowed, and his voice, almost a whisper to begin with, sank lower still, so that Lydia had to draw close, within reach of the gusts of breath that smelled of strong coffee and rotting teeth.

"Wafat Sahib, he has been lord in this city since my great-grandfather's time and before. He knows what is said of him in the streets, even by light of day. Even for the Ingileezee to ask me, to offer me money-which of course I did not touch," he added loudly, "made me afraid. So I came here, out of the sight of the men who serve him. Now they tell me the hortlak, the afrit, the gola, have been seen among the tombs outside the city, walking among the cypress trees by the tomb of Hasim al-Bayad, stopping travelers who walk late upon the road and killing them in the darkness."

Ysidro? wondered Lydia, recognizing one of the words as the Turkish for vampire.

Or had Ysidro in his search missed something, some clue? Been deceived by the concealing glamours of the vampire mind?

It was logical, she thought, for the challenger to Olumsiz Bey's power to haunt them, lying as they did outside the city walls. "Where is this tomb?" she asked, lowering her voice and hoping Razumovsky wasn't anywhere near.

"You are a fool!" The hakawati shah flung up his arms, coal-chip eyes blazing with sudden rage. "As your husband was a fool before you! Go away, and ask no more, lest his fate befall you as well!"

"I'm not going to go there at night-" Lydia began to protest reasonably, but the old man surged toward her, slashing with his clawed and knotted hands.

"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.

"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.