James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (16 page)

Her step quickened and her hand tightened on his arm, the memory of that terror making her fingers, for a moment, crushing iron.

“And it was worse, shipping the trunk the following night,” she went on. “Sending myself like a parcel, falling asleep to the rocking of the train, trusting to fate. Not knowing if I’d ever wake. They say we don’t wake, should our darkness be violated by sunlight—that we burn up in sleep. But who knows?” Under the veils her face was calm, but there was a flaw in her voice, and she drew her cloak close about her, as if even her Undead flesh felt the cold. “None of us are ever there, to see it happen to another. Even in utter blackness, the sun submerges our minds. Sometimes we hear and know what happens about us, but we do not wake.”

They reached the door of her hotel, a splendid mansion whose lower stories comprised the palatial residence of some wealthy family, but whose marble stair led to a far humbler lobby on the upper floor.

Anthea paused in the columned shadows of the entryway. “A year ago Ysidro hired you—forced you—to be his servant. To do for him in daylight what he himself was unable to do. And you did it honorably.”

His breath mingled whitely with the fog that had floated through the outer gate behind them. Her words had produced no such clouding. “I had no choice.”

“We all have choice.” Her gaze met his in the dim light from the chandelier of crystal and gilt. “I can only ask you. Stay with me in the room until the sun sets again. Please.”

Lydia
had once calculated how many human beings the average vampire killed in a century. If he were the man he once had been, Asher thought, he would have said yes, then later thrown open the trunk lid and let the sun reduce such a murderess to dust.

Perhaps because she had saved his life, he would only have said no.

The clock on St. Stephen’s was striking two, and like courtiers repeating a sovereign’s joke, clocks on churches and monasteries throughout the Altstadt took up the chime. He would be alone, awake, with this woman for hours before she would be with him, alone and sleeping, trusting him as he must trust her.

If it weren’t all a trap, to get him to a place where he could not call for help.

But surely the crypt had been that.

He told himself it was because he needed to find Ernchester, something he could not do without a vampires help. But he knew that wasn’t true.

“Very well,” he said.

“He ceased to care at all, about anything, fifty, maybe sixty years ago.” Anthea removed her hat, and despite the renewed slash of pain in his side, Asher helped her off with her cloak and the jacket beneath it. Her frock was Norwich silk, its ruffles glittering with star fields of jet. “Music, watching people—not for prey but just for the curiosity about how they live their lives—it all meant less and less to him. Like that fairy book that came out a few years ago, where a man’s limbs are replaced, one by one, by magic with limbs of tin, until suddenly he realizes he has no heart and is no longer a man.” She passed her gloved hand across her eyes, the smooth skin of the lids pinching at the memory of pain.

“You’re thinking that all those fifty, sixty years, when his life meant less and less to him, still he prolonged it by killing two and sometimes three men a week. There are things that can’t… be explained. It’s easier than you think, to fall into… habits.”

“I’m not thinking anything.” He remembered Jan van der Platz’s blood on the barn wall, the shocked hurt in the boy’s eyes just before Asher pulled the trigger.

She lighted the lamp on the heavy table. Asher wondered if she had been aware of the brassy-haired prostitute’s death agonies, and it occurred to him that this woman had probably seen worse. Maybe done worse herself. The small chamber, copiously decorated with swathes of peacock feathers and dried flowers and smelling vaguely of carpets, had not even been fitted with gas, much less electricity. The topaz light made the vampire’s face more human, lent color to her cheeks and a kind of life to her eyes, and brought forth cinnabar glints in her hair. Asher remembered again his vision of her lying on the floor of what he realized now was the old Ernchester town house in Savoy Walk, the house where first he had met this woman—where she had saved him from the Master of London’s wrath.

“I’m sorry to have provoked this division,” he said. “To have robbed you of whatever support Grippen would give.”

She shook her head. “It’s been decades coming. Maybe centuries. He wanted Charles—and the houses and land that would give him a system of bolt-holes. We had no living child, and there are ways of manipulating even entailed property, to keep a good part of what you own. Grippen lost much in the Great Fire, and afterward the city was greatly changed. I kept the property tied up in trusts, so Grippen couldn’t own them outright. But it was only a matter of time before he would come to an end of needing Charles. Vampires do not kill vampires, but… I suspect in any case he would not have helped.

“Who is this Karolyi?” She took off her mitts, and her long nails glinted oddly in the lamplight.

While she plucked the jewel-headed pins from her hair, Asher told her about his early acquaintance with Karolyi in Vienna. “He’s continued in the diplomatic corps, I understand. Young men of his class do, with only minimal qualifications. I know he’s been responsible for the deaths of at least two of our agents over the last ten years, but it’s never been proven.”

“How would he have known about my husband?” She paused, brush in hand. “He may be ruthless, yes, clever and dangerous, but it would not have told him how to find a London vampire. Only another vampire could have done that. And why would he have chosen a London vampire to… to bring here? The masters among the Undead are jealous of their territories. They do not tolerate vampires who are not their fledglings and subservient to their wills. Ernchester knows this.”

“That may be part of Karolyi’s plan.” Stiffly and clumsily, Asher began to sponge with cold water at the blood in his coat, and Anthea said, “I’ll do that,” and took it from him. Now that the shock had worn off, he felt very tired, the pain in his side settling into a dull ache. He was glad to sit quietly on the room’s overstuffed brocade settee.

“What he wants your husband for is less clear,” he said after a time. “Maybe he wants your husband because he isn’t a fledgling to some local master, here or someplace like Bulgaria or Greece. That’s what I need to find out. It may be he wants your husband to make a fledgling who can be put to Karolyi’s uses. But whatever he planned, he had to get your husband out of London because of Grippen.”

“Yes,” Anthea said softly. “Grippen would know.”

She walked to the doorway between that chamber and the next, the movement of her shadow summoning vague blinks of light from the brass fittings of the trunk that filled most of the space not already occupied by the four-poster bed. Her hands, straying in the lace at her throat, were like lilies, ringed with solitary gold.

“When a master vampire begets a fledgling,” Anthea said slowly, “he… he takes the fledgling’s mind, the fledgling’s consciousness and personality, into his own being, for the time it takes that… that fledgling’s body to die. Once death is complete, once the… the changes to the vampire state have begun, then the master breathes that mind, that soul, back into the changing body once again. But not all of it. And what is breathed back is… stained. Altered. Just a little.”

The marble profile remained averted, sienna eyes staring blankly into distance.

“No,” she said. “He wouldn’t use Charles in London. Grippen knows… everything. And he has been watching us. Maybe waiting for his chance. I hate him.”

She shook her head, moved her shoulders as if to shed a weight of thought. “I have hated him since the first night Charles brought me to his house. Elysee de Montadour, the Master of Paris, is not so old or so powerful as Grippen, but she would sense it, I think, if a strange vampire came to Paris. Still, they could have gone to Rouen or Orleans to make their plans. The vampires of those cities perished in the confusions of the last German war. Such a journey would have been safer, would not have involved travel by day…”

“Do you know the vampires of Vienna?”

“No.” She crossed to the window, spread back its teal-green velvet curtains, with their treble fringes of gold and tassels like double fists. “I feel them… feel their presence. As they feel mine, without being able at once to see where I am. They know I am here.”

Her fingers traced the fringe, the fabric, drinking of the texture as they had drunk the shape and texture of the porcelain cup. The dim light from the street below edged and transformed her face into a song of gold planes and black.

“I feel… everything. This new city that seems to bleed music from its very stones… When I saw the men pursuing you, I’d been walking about the streets for nearly an hour, just glutting myself on new tastes, new smells, the voice of a river that isn’t the Thames. All those new dreams and thoughts and sensations hammer around me and in me and at me. I feel as if every cobblestone has a diamond underneath it, and I want to run through the streets gathering them up like a greedy little girl.”

The colorless lips curved in a half-wondering smile, and Asher remembered her watching the dancers in the cafe, drinking the smell of the coffee, the music of the waltz. “I know I’m in danger. I’m afraid, and I know I should be more afraid than I am. I could die in moments, just because I don’t know the right place to hide, the right turning to take. But it’s so beautiful.”

She half wrapped the curtain around her, the lush color startling against her face, like a silver icon or a painting by Klimt.

“This is all so new to me, wonderful and strange. It’s the first time, you understand, that I have left England. The first time since… since I became what I am… that I’ve been out of London. It’s been nearly two hundred years, Dr. Asher. I traveled a little after I thought Ernchester was dead, visited a sister in the north. But in my mourning I had no taste for it and only wanted to return to what I knew. I mourned for a long time.”

Asher had seen a portrait of her, done when she was over sixty in her mortal life. She’d put on weight, and her hair had grayed, and the raptor eyes that flashed copper in the rosy lamp flame had been dead, resigned, filled with a kind of hurt puzzlement, as if she had never ceased to ask, How can he be dead? In the painting she’d worn the broad gold band that gleamed now on her finger.

“A vampire traveling is… horribly vulnerable.”

“And yet you came.”

She smiled, a human smile, the full, pale lips hiding the fangs. “I love him,” she said. “To my last breath—and two centuries beyond.”

Lady Ernchester had instructed the management of the hotel that she was not to be disturbed by chambermaids. She was an actress, she had said, and likely would be out most of the night, sleeping in the day. When she told Asher this, during a discussion of how words were pronounced in her early girlhood while she mended the slashes in his jacket and greatcoat, he closed his eyes briefly, imagining the concierge’s reaction to this request.

But in fact when Asher later heard the chambermaids chatting in Czech and Hungarian in the corridor, none even tried the door.

Asher had tried to remain awake through the night, talking of philology and folklore with the vampire countess—her imitation of her nursemaid’s Wessex dialect had been both hilarious and fascinating—but the ache of his wound, loss of blood, and exhaustion had claimed him. The voices of the chambermaids woke him in mid-morning, to find a heavy sunlight slanting through the chinks in the teal-colored curtains. He lay back on the settee again, trying to formulate an article in his mind— countryfolk of Anthea’s day had pronounced the y or e at the end of such words as hande as a sort of aspiration, though they no longer spoke an e as a, and they would walk across a field rather than meet a pig in the road. But how on earth could he claim he’d had an interview with a contemporary of the Cavalier poets?

In time the voices of the chambermaids faded and the upper floor of the old palais fell silent. A heavy silence, broken only by the far-off clatter of a tram in the Schottenring and the distant threads of a hurdy-gurdy. He thought again of the woman sleeping, sealed within her double trunks, trusting his word that he would remain through the day and see that she came to no harm. Over the centuries she had killed… how many?

I wish you could have known us as we were.

Was all vampirism a craving to hold to the sweetness of a vanished youth, a desire not to have the good years, the dream years, slip away in the flowing stream of time?

I love him, she had said. I knew he could not be dead.

Who had loved the men, the women, the children whose lives she had traded for the continuance of her own?

He sighed and leaned the bridge of his nose on his knuckles, twisting at the problem again as a fish twists on a hook. She trusted him. And indeed, only through her could he hope to find Ernchester now, to keep him from selling his services to the Hapsburg Emperor, if he hadn’t already. What had Karolyi offered him? Safety from Grippen? Why not tell Anthea, then? Why not bring her to Vienna with him?

Who had searched the house, who had known of Karolyi’s plans, and for what had they been seeking? Who was Olumsiz Bey?

A transliteration for the Master of Vienna? Who might, after all, be Turkish himself. The whole area had been overrun as late as the mid-seventeenth century, and it was conceivable that the Undead in this most cosmopolitan of cities might not be Austrian—or even European—at all.

And what, above all, was he going to do when he did find Ernchester. Kill him?

He knew already that he would never sleep easy again if he didn’t kill Anthea as well.

With a soft, oiled click, a key turned in the lock. Asher’s mind fumbled tiredly for the Hungarian for This room is not to be disturbed as he rose and crossed to the door, which opened to reveal Bedford Fairport.

“Asher!” The little man blinked in surprise and adjusted his spectacles as if Asher were some trick refraction of the light. “What on earth… ?”