Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2)

Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2) Page 20

A curious thing for a vampire to keep. And so they were. Two silver keys, cut in exact replica of English Yales, even to the finger grips. Asher stared at them for a long time, as they shimmered in the concealed well in the red-tiled coffee room's floor.

Local work. Probably just enough admixture of bronze to keep them from bending in a lock. Reaching down, he weighed them in his hands. Even with gloves, a vampire would have difficulty holding them long enough to use. One as old as the master of the city might just manage, as he managed to hold the whitethorn of his halberd staff, to wear the thickly sheathed silver knife around his neck.

Asher's heart pounded hard as he slipped them into the pocket of his coat. As he pushed the tile cover back over the well, returned the black and white table to its place, the shadows of his single candle seemed to lean closer, silent with a terrible, listening silence in which the Master of Constantinople seemed to be standing just outside the door.

This was not the case, he knew. Olumsiz Bey was meeting that night with one of his men of business and had himself escorted Asher back to his gallery after supper and locked him in. "I apologize," the vampire said, "for my Zardalu last night. He is treacherous and insolent, like most of the palace eunuchs. He needed a good thrashing, to make him remember his love for me." The amber eyes narrowed as they studied Asher's face. In the ambiguous flicker of the pierced lamp the Master of Constantinople had seemed wrought entirely of amber, the dusky pallor of his flesh like copal, the many-pleated silken trousers and the tunic over them, the vest and the sash all warm shades of fire and honey and marigold, the fur-lined pelisse sewn with shining flecks of gold. The lump of amber swinging from his earlobe caught the light like an unnerving third eye.

"I trust you understand that he is a liar," Olumsiz Bey went on. "He never imparts information which is not aimed at starting prey."

"He's certainly told me a number of odd things about this house." Asher folded his arms, returned the orange gaze; even in his own mind the picklocks under the carpets did not exist. "Twice he's told me the way out." This was a lie, to see what the master would say. Olumsiz Bey's eyebrows bent in the middle like startled diacritical marks, and the hard mouth quirked in laughter.

"I observe you didn't go seeking. Sayyed wouldn't be difficult to overpower." "The way he told me was different the second time," Asher said. "I've heard them talk about the games they play with their prey, chasing them through the dark here; I've heard those poor young boys and girls screaming."

Another diacritical mark, this time in the corner of those colorless lips, and Asher thought, It was not his custom then, to have his prey brought him by the others. It was something recent.

Zardalu was right.

Something was holding him to this house.

Ernchester? he wondered now, working his way carefully around the walls of the Roman court, that he would not leave a trampling in the overgrown grass. It made no sense. Why send for Ernchester now, why not a year ago, or a hundred years ago? Why not in July, when the Sultan's regime was overthrown? If it was to ask his help against the interloper of whom Zardalu spoke, why keep him locked in the crypts? Starving, perhaps, in pain certainly-the moans were cries of the most hideous torment.

Revenge?

Asher shivered, feeling his way from pillar to pillar of the old porch, for he'd blown out his candle. The Bey's revenges would be long.

But long enough for him to summon the old earl from his moldering town house in London, from the slow crumbling of his life, back to the city where he'd spent eighteen months a living man? What ill turn would have warranted that, after almost two hundred fifty years?

And what did the interloper have to do with any of this?

What about the machine the Bey was having constructed? Or the ice Asher had seen, melting on the floor behind the silver bars?

It crossed his mind obliquely to wonder if the revenge was against Anthea, and not against Ernchester at all.

"He is not on this train," Anthea had said, coming back into his compartment while the flat lands of Hungary swept by in the darkness. That had been late the first night of the journey from Vienna. Exhausted, half sick with the coffee the porter had brought, his head aching and every clack of the well-sprung wheels reverberating as if slaved to some infernal machine inside his skull, Asher had watched her shed the long black-fringed shawl and put back the spotted gauze of veils. She seemed beautiful to him beyond words, staring at the molten ink of the window glass. The only light on the length of the Orient Express was theirs, and now and then it tossed threads of illusory fire on the wind-lashed weeds beside the track. Not even the moon remained in the sky.

"Good." Asher set aside the book he'd been trying to read, a truly dreadful account of life and love in Nero's Rome; tried to set aside at the same time the stirring within him of protectiveness and desire. He kept his voice deliberately casual. "It means we've got every chance of reaching Constantinople before him. 'The Dead travel fast,' Goethe says-but few things travel faster than the Orient Express. If he left Vienna by any other route, even by another train the minute he got away from the sanitarium, he'll still be a day behind us. Would you know, when he enters the city?"

"I... don't know." She turned in her fingers the pearl buttons of her glove, a beautiful ghost in her blue and violet silk dress. He remembered the moonlight vampire girl in the woods outside the sanitarium and knew this dreadful warm surge of wanting for what it was-the lure to prey. Dimmer, more distant, almost certainly without her conscious volition, still it was there. He wanted her.

"I don't know what arrangement was made with this Olumsiz Bey," she went on after a moment. "I looked at the guidebook. There are smaller stations in the city before one reaches the main gate, and this... this Bey, this master... may have planned to meet him at one of them. I don't know whether it will be safe for me to watch the main gate through the night. Perhaps he will not enter the city by train at all. Charles never trusted trains, nor the Underground of London, never liked them and never rode them. And the city itself, its sounds and smells, will be... different."

She fell silent, her fingers in their lacy mitts resting still on the purple plush curtain, her brown eyes staring out into the night. Seeing the night with the night's own eyes.

"Even Paris is different from London," she said at length, as if speaking to herself. "In London I know it if a policeman takes an unfamiliar turning within two miles of any of our houses. I could find Charles did he sleep in the lowest subcellar, did he walk the most obscure back way, did he haunt the steeple of St. Paul's or the warehouses of Whitechapel-given time. Vienna was more different still, chaos, a game without rules. Constantinople..."

She shook her head, but in her voice Asher heard the tremor, not of fear, but of excitement, of joy.

"It's strange," she went on, her voice so low that it should have been barely audible. "I should be terrified. Outside of London I'm a snail dispossessed of its shell, a rabbit with all her earths stopped. And yet all I feel is delight. The lights on the Alexander Bridge in Paris, like being inside a star; all the voices and music and scents of Vienna, making me drunk as I walked along the Ring. I know I could be destroyed in seconds, but all I wanted to do was dance and laugh and take off my hat and swing it around by its veils, just to be... just to be somewhere else. Seeing something new, something wonderful that I'd never seen. I don't know if you can understand that."

"Maybe not fully," Asher said. "I've never been dead."

"That's what being alive is, isn't it?" She turned toward him and reached up to pull out the jet and steel pins that held her hat to the close-folded raven universe of her hair.

Asher nodded, understanding something else about her now, and the desire he felt was softened and transmuted to pity. "You never wanted to be a vampire, did you?"

She hesitated, the hat like a dark bouquet overflowing her hands. "Oh, I did," she said. "The sharpening, the deepening, the enriching of the senses... one drowns in the color of silk, or the scent of coffee, or the weeping of the fiddles in distant night. Or the smell of blood, of sweat, of human fear. It is all the universe, as it never is to mortals, except maybe to a small child. It is living. And I wanted more than anything else not to leave Charles, ever. Once I came into it, I wanted it, craved it as a drunkard craves brandy." Her lips quirked ruefully; pale, Asher noted automatically. After Anthea had released him from her coffin, they had rushed onto the train with only minutes to spare, and Anthea knew well that every passenger was rich and expected at the other end, every porter and waiter accounted for.

"I gather people become vampires because they want life; they want life that won't stop, won't even pale as life does for the old." She stroked the ostrich plumes of the hat, curling them around her fingers, her eyes not meeting his. "But to be dead is to become... static. And that is what we all become. We do not travel because it is dangerous. We wall ourselves into our houses, our crypts, our secret ways, because sleeping in the hours of daylight, we are as if drugged. We ring ourselves with locks and traps and things that we can control, and destroy those things that we cannot. We become dead. Journeying like this..." She shook her head once more. "All new things are peril, peril of death- and maybe peril of death is one definition of life. Sometimes I feel that I shall never return to London again."

Asher remembered Cramer, who would have been one of the best if only he'd had the chance.

She stretched out her hand to him, her face gravely beautiful. He knew that what the moonlight girl had tried to do to him in the dappled silence of the Vienna Woods, this woman had done to thousands of men in the streets and alleyways of London: made them love her, want her, need her, with a need that brought them mindless and damned into her arms. He remembered Fairport crying pitifully as the vampire women stripped him of his clothes, ripped at his veins in tiny, shredding cuts that would not kill immediately; drank his terror and his despair as well as his death. Fairport who had only wanted to live as normal men lived. And still he reached out and touched the long square fingers with his own. "Thank you for coming with me," she said quietly. "Thank you for... for seeing that I come to no harm."

I feel as if I shall never return to London again.

Standing alone in the darkness at the heart of the crypt, Asher felt the knife- twist fear in his heart, that he would never see Lydia again.

He had thought of her often in the long prison chamber, listening to the sunset wailing of the muezzins, the constant squabbling of the gulls, the wind-whisper flight of vampire feet in the labyrinths below. He was glad in an odd way that if it was to be so-if he was going to die in the House of the Oleanders-he hadn't known it that rainy morning when all he'd been looking forward to was the emotional harrowing of his cousin's funeral and the distasteful scenes of family greed sure to follow. He'd have been solemn then, he thought, and solemnity would have completely spoiled the pillow fight early on the morning of his departure, and the giggling tussle of lace and kisses and stray medical journals.

Seven years. It should have been longer. She'd probably track him to Vienna, but Anthea had smuggled them both onto the train. It was not possible that anyone from either Halliwell's Department, or the Stadtspoliz, or the Kundschafts Stelle, had seen them board. Thin, matter-of-fact, beautiful with a breathtaking marsh- fairy beauty which she herself had been forbidden to see... His soul ached, suddenly and desperately, with the need to see her one more time before he died. Only that, if nothing else were possible...

He wondered if, in tracing his contacts in the Austrian city, she would somehow meet Francoise.

The tarnished silver bars glimmered dully in the light of the single candle, cold even in the comforting yellow glow. Asher set the candle down carefully on a crossbar, its base protected by a circle of paper torn from a book to preclude telltale drips of wax while he worked carefully with the twisted bronze wires of the homemade picklock. It was hard to keep his hands steady, given the cold of the November night, the ice piled here in such quantities... the fear. The silence was a second darkness, and the smell of ammonia clutched his throat.

The silver hinges did not creak. He stepped into the low-roofed corridor, edged past the puddles of water, the sawdust and the straw.

Why ice? Absurdly, he remembered something the vampire Ysidro had once told him, about aging vampires suffering from cold. Surely all this wasn't just to make an old enemy uncomfortable? He wondered, if he freed Ernchester a second time, whether the vampire earl would escape with him at all, or whether he would, as he had in Vienna, simply let him free and cleave to the Turkish master who had summoned him.

Why?

The second door along the corridor, as Asher had already begun to suspect, opened into a cramped pitchy wilderness of coils and tubes and tanks, the harsh stink of ammonia like acid in the air. The weak firefly glow lined the words

ZWANZIGSTEJAHR-HUNDERT ABKUHLUNG GESEIXESCHAFT on a Crate.

Twentieth Century Refrigeration Company.

Freezer chests, a vacuum plant, hoses like obscene rubber entrails dangling.

Glass carboys of poisonous ammonia gas gleamed like monstrous eggs. Though the floor of the corridor was wet, there were no tracks in here, no straw, no sawdust. Having gone through the installation of a new furnace in one of the New College lecture halls, Asher guessed that some part or valve had broken, and had been sent for to Berlin. Five days since the breakdown, the Bey had screamed, and still no word... He closed the door, locked it, wiped the silver handle with his handkerchief. The second door's handle was like ice. The sound of the tumblers going over was that of hammers driving coffin nails, answered from within, as from the deeps of a tomb, by a profound, sickening groan.

The stench that rolled over Asher as he pushed the door inward almost physically blinded him. He shut his eyes, averted his face. Stupid... he thought the next moment. And then, If it's this bad when it's this cold in here... His breath was a cloud in the wan candle flare; the hoarfrost glistened on the stone walls, as did the ice that almost filled the crypt.

But all that was peripheral to the dark thing crawling toward him through the mess of half-frozen sawdust and straw on the floor-and to his understanding of what it was, and what it meant.

Staring down into the face-into what was left of the face-he knew everything, everything except where Ernchester was, and even that he could begin to guess. Then his breath was shut off under the crushing grip of a fleshy hand, and he was swept backward through the door with such force that he felt his feet leave the floor. He barely had time to pull his head forward when he struck the corridor wall, not thrown into it, as Olumsiz Bey had hurled him before, but slammed against the stonework with such force as to break ribs. He cried out-he thought he cried out-as the bones knifed him within, his mind suffocated under darkness, breath driven from him and unable to return. He struck the wall a second time, pain lancing his left shoulder blade as if he'd been struck by an ax, and all the while a voice screamed at him, screamed curses in Persian and Arabic and Turkish, incomprehensible through his mounting desperation to breathe...

He didn't know what language, he thought the voice was shouting, "Is this what you wanted? Is this what you sought?" and the hand twisted his head, the pressure on the spine intolerable, the icy water on the floor drenching him as he lay in it. "Is this what you wished to see?"

But he could see nothing, the candle having fallen to the wet floor of the crypt; nothing except, in his mind's eyes, the livid face of the thing in the crypt. Claws slit his sleeve open, shoulder to hem, while a knee ground in his back and the terrible weight pinned him to the stone, his neck bones cracking under the vindictive twist of Olumsiz Bey's hand. His arm was torn open to the wrist, blood burning hot on the sudden cold of his flesh, and all the while the smell grew around him, mounting and horrible, waves of it, while something fell squishily against the wall nearby, dragged with a horrible, thick groaning through the pools on the floor. Something fumbled at his arm, slick and glutinous around the sharpness of teeth; he heard the vampire whisper, "Drink. Drink, my kitten, my child, my beloved... drink..."

Something that felt like a hand-or what had once been a hand-groped along his arm for a steadying hold.

Then with a retching noise the thing pulled away, rolled, crawled, with horrible sounds, back toward the door of its crypt and began to vomit. Asher thought later it was the release of the twisting pressure on his neck and backbone as Olumsiz Bey left him, as much as anything else, that finally let him faint.

He didn't think he was unconscious more than a minute or two; the jabbing pain of a tourniquet on his arm brought him back to the same inky darkness, the icy water seeping through his clothing to icy flesh, the sinking weakness of blood loss. His own blood, coppery in his nostrils, was the least horrible thing he smelled.

The cold was marginally less. The crypt door was closed.

Softly, his body aching with the careful ration of his breath, he said, "So that's why you wanted Ernchester."

"You know nothing of these things." The master's voice came shrill, slivered thin through constricted throat, constricted lungs.

His hands dragged the tourniquet as if he would use it to cut off the arm he bound.

"I know you're fighting an interloper on your territory. I know you don't trust those of your fledglings you have left... and I know now that you've lost the ability to make more."

The nails tightened on his arms, tearing again the numb flesh.

"That's it, isn't it? You haven't been able to make a fledgling for years. Only six vampires, for one of the biggest cities in Europe? Where the government doesn't even care if you kill, so long as it's Armenians and Jews and the poor? Even your fledglings were beginning to comment that you were growing choosy about getting others to replace those who'd been destroyed.

"But when the interloper came, you had to make the attempt. And when you saw it wouldn't work-that you could hold the fledgling's mind alive through physical death but couldn't transmit the physical syndrome of vampirism to the body-you used your contacts with the old Sultan's allies to send for the one vampire you knew you could control, the one you knew whose fledglings would be yours, under your power..."

The hand closed around his neck again, not strangling this time, the clawed nails hooking like wolf's teeth under the bundle of nerve and tendon and blood vessels below his ear. The hard knee pressed, bracing, on his chest, like the small, blunt end of a ram. Very softly, Olumsiz Bey said, "I... could... kill you..."

"If you didn't need me for bait," he said, barely able to whisper against the dig of the claws. "Bait to trap Anthea, and bait to trap the earl. If Ernchester isn't with the interloper already."

The hand released his throat. Wet silk passed over his bare arm, the side of his face, as the vampire stood. Then Olumsiz Bey kicked him, like the deliberate blow of a hammer, again and again like a man smashing rocks, and in a very short time Asher fainted again.