James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (34 page)

“They’re of concern to those who want to stay among the living.” Asher sat up, his brown hair hanging lank in his eyes, and the bathman Mustafa stepped back. Asher had guessed that the Bey’s living servants weren’t deaf, but he had never succeeded in getting more than a few words out of any of them. When they brought him food, when they placed clean clothing in his room or escorted him to the library or the baths, they watched him with the eerie impassivity of guard dogs, as wary as if he, not they, were the servant of the night. “Was it you who had Lady Ernchester’s rooms searched, after Ernchester had gone?”

“My instructions to Karolyi were to have her destroyed,” the Bey said shortly. His orange eyes, gaudy as aniline dye, glittered coldly. “The woman is his strength. A man need not be a sorcerer, or a reader of dreams, to have learned that in the course of a single conversation. In the eighteen months of his abiding here as a living man, there was not a day that he did not speak of her, nor a night when she was not in his dreams. When I heard that both had been made Undead, I thought it a foolish risk on the part of the Master of London, to have among his fledglings one with such power over his mind as she.”

“He disobeyed you, then.”

“Stupid Magyar, to think he could defeat the purposes of the Undead.” The Bey’s left hand caressed unthinkingly the silk bindings around the hilt of his silver weapon—thornwood, Asher guessed, the silk just sufficient to keep from discomfort a vampire as old as the Bey, who had toughened a little against some of the substances reactive to vampire flesh. Around his neck he wore a foot-long knife, sheathed in leather and lead. Asher guessed the blade within the sheath was silver as well. “Was it she who freed him in Vienna and killed those set to watch over his prison there?”

Asher shook his head. “It was the Vienna vampires. Karolyi had brought a victim for Ernchester to kill.”

“Fool.” The vampire turned his face aside, anger in his eyes. His lean body seemed almost completely without muscle, the hair of chest and armpits paled to a strange red-brown. Though the heat of the hararet had laid a film of condensation on the pallid skin, Asher could see not a drop of sweat. “The man is greedy, seeing only the path to his own power, and not that things are ordered as I have ordered them for reasons beyond his comprehension. And yours,” he added, looking back at him.

“Then why deal with him?”

“A man is a fool who casts away a plank in a shipwreck, Scheherazade. He is impertinent, to think that I would do as his Christian emperor bids. But power, and allies, are always needful in a difficult time.”

“And are the times so difficult?” Asher asked quietly. “Is that why you’re hunting Lady Ernchester so diligently? Not only to control the earl, but to keep her out of Karolyi’s hands? He’ll go to your fledglings, you know, if he hasn’t already.”

A drift of moving air stirred the steam. The curtain of embroidered leather that separated the hararet from the sogukluk, the warm room, lifted aside. The man Sayyed stood there, his head— shaven like the Bey’s—glistening with moisture.

“There is one to see you, Lord. A makanik.” Except for the last word, which was Persian, he spoke peasant Turkish, the longest sentence Asher had yet heard any of the living servants speak.

“You will excuse me.” The Master of Constantinople bowed deeply, turned to go, then, pausing, looked back.

“Do not concern yourself in the affairs of my children, Scheherazade,” the Bey said, and the giant ant seemed to watch Asher from its amber prison on the Bey’s ear. “This is not the course of a prudent man. Do not trust them. They will promise you things—escape from this place, safety from harm, even the kiss that brings eternal life. But it is all lies. They are all treacherous. They envy one another and envy the power each thinks the other might possess; and above all they envy me. But I am the master of the city. This city is mine, and all things in it.”

He held up his silver weapon, the blade flashing gently in the dull braziers’ gleam. “And do not concern yourself with Ernchester. That, too, is a course that will bring you only death.”

When he had gone, Asher stretched out on the table again, gingerly favoring the dressing over the knife wound on his ribs. It was healing well; Mustafa had changed the dressing, and now, as the man kneaded and pummeled his muscles into lassitude, Asher stretched out his right arm before him and looked at it in the dim light.

The heat had reddened the scars that tracked the vein from wrist to elbow, the scars left by the Paris vampires. Among them, the fresh dark blot of a bruise was printed like a blackening stain.

Asher picked out the marks of fingers and thumb, remembering the hand that had crushed his arm in the dark of the cistern. The dressing pinching as he moved, he brought his other hand forward and laid it over the marks.

The hand was bigger than his own.

Ernchester’s hands, he remembered, were small.

The fledglings had returned to him almost at once, in the silence of the dry cistern, had blindfolded him and brought him back to the House of Oleanders without a word, as they had brought him back twice now in three days from those desolate places where Anthea might have hidden. They had blanked his mind as they came through the street, so that he returned to a kind of frightened and dizzy consciousness in the octagonal Byzantine vestibule that led to the Bey’s salon.

He was beginning to think that Zardalu had made a genuine mistake and let his mind be distracted while coming back into the house from that first expedition.

Zardalu and the others had departed on their own hunt after returning Asher to the House of Oleanders, and were still gone when Asher dressed again in clean linen and secondhand gray trousers, red wool vest and a worn and slightly ill-fitting Stamboul coat. He made his way back along the corridors to his room with Sayyed padding silently behind. He knew that route now, and how the small palace of some Byzantine prince connected with one of the several hans that made up its wings. Twice he’d passed a doorway he guessed led into some late Roman crypt or church, and the painted room with the tiled dome in which he’d seen Karolyi was definitely Turkish.

The courtyard of the old han was lighted with brass lamps hanging from the colonnade before what had been deep bays of warehouses downstairs. A single lamp burned in the niche at the end of the open gallery, two floors above. Lights burned, too, in the Byzantine vestibule—Asher could see their reflection on the arched passageway.

A makanik, to see the Deathless Lord.

Something concerning that secret experiment, that strange crypt far beneath the house, stinking of oil and ammonia.

Near the old baths, Zardalu had said.

There were no clocks in the House of Oleanders, and the hours of darkness could be disorienting. Asher, who had a fairly good sense of time, estimated it was close to one in the morning as Sayyed turned the key in the lock and padded away, and guessed he had an hour or two in which he’d be relatively safe.

Do not concern yourself with Ernchester
, the Bey had said. But he was still bargaining with Karolyi.

Except for the dry basin in the center, the long floor was a faded moss bank of carpet, four and five layers thick. Among these carpets he had concealed the picklocks he made.

He fetched them now.

The bronze candlestick, which he kept quite openly beside his small pile of books in one of the inlaid wall cupboards, had provided him not only with wire for picklocks, but with a number of candles as well. These he slipped now into the pocket of his coat. The lock was a very old single-tumbler Banham, probably the best obtainable when put in, but that had been more than a hundred years ago. As he descended the stairs to the courtyard, he heard the voice of the Bey shouting in the salon and stopped, startled, by the vestibule passageway to listen.

“It has been three weeks, you sputum of Shaitan’s dog!” That any vampire, let alone one as old as Olumsiz Bey, should give way to rage at all was unheard of, and the passion that cracked in his deep voice was terrifying to hear. “Five days since the breakdown, and still no word of the man! I tell you there can be no more delays!”

“Peace, m’sieu,” came a more muffled—and understandably nervous—reply. “The man will be back Wednesday. Wednesday is not so very long…”

Asher hesitated, torn, sensing that whatever could so enrage the Master of Constantinople must be of paramount importance, but knowing that if he were caught standing here—much less with picklocks and candles in his pockets—he was a dead man indeed. His every instinct told him to stay, but at least, he thought dryly, moving like a shadow away from the arch, if he’s shouting at his engineer he isn’t listening for me…

The mental image of the Bey as he had seen him other nights, sitting still on the divan of his pillared salon, silver weapon across his knees and orange eyes half shut while he listened to the teeming dreams of the city around him, was a disturbing one.

Even as we hear the footfalls of the workmen
, Zardalu had said. At least as long as he walked above the ground, if the Bey listened for them, Asher knew he could hear his.

The way that leads to the old baths.

Fashions in building came and went, and the House of Oleanders was at least five old buildings fused into a monstrous maze of dark rooms and decaying memories, but, Asher knew, plumbing remains plumbing. The elaborate system of pipes and hypocausts that made Turkish baths—and before them, Roman—was not a thing to be relocated lightly or far.

We smell the naft, the alkol, the stinks of what he does…

His mind returned to the throat-catching sharpness of the air in the crypt. A room with a wooden floor, to the left across a courtyard where grass grows between stones like cannonballs. A second flight of steps after the first…

He fingered the picklocks in his pocket and drifted through the House of Oleanders like a ghost.

The solitary gleam of his candle wavered over chambers hung with printed Chinese silks whose colors showed themselves briefly; over vaulting that flickered and shone with the unmistakable dusky bronze hue of gold in shadow. He passed through an octagonal chamber whose walls were sheathed, floor to ceiling, in red tile the exact color of ripe persimmons, containing only a black-and-white wooden coffee stand; an arch looked out on a court smaller than the room itself and so choked with oleander bushes that only the dim white shape of a single statue could be seen in their midst.

Near that place he found the room he sought: the small, rich chamber of painted walls and blue and yellow tiles whose bare wooden floor thumped familiarly underfoot. From it a door let into a courtyard, long and narrow and paved in blocks of worn stone the size of halfpenny loaves, through which brown grass and weeds thrust tall.

The moon had not risen. No light touched the windows in the low buildings that surrounded the court on two sides. Roman, thought Asher, identifying the heavy rounded arches, the broken fragments of marble facing and the thick, fluted columns. What looked like the rear wall of another han closed in the third side of the court—he could just see the edge of a dome against the midnight sky—the red and white stone walls of the Turkish house, the fourth.

Under the columned porch the blackness was profound. The smaller cobbling was uneven, familiar. Almost he felt he could quench the candle as he passed to the left, fifteen steps across the court and through the door, five steps and left again. It was difficult to see that doorway, where it stood in shadow, though it opened in the middle of a wall of faded frescoes—more oddly still, he lost control of his steps twice, passing it without being aware. Around him the darkness brooded, watching. It could, he knew, contain anything.

Or nothing, he told himself. Or nothing.

He descended the stair. Had he not remembered a second stairway, he would have turned back, for its entrance lay concealed in the niche formed by one of the shallow false archways in what turned out to be the tepidarium of the house’s original Roman baths. A small room, faced with marble, its shallow pool long gone dry. The mosaics of the floor gleamed faintly in the moving light of Asher’s candle: Byzantine, and like those of the octagonal vestibule, long ago defaced.

The second stair, as he recalled, was twice or three times the depth of the one above. If he met them now—the Bey’s homecoming fledglings with their night’s prey—there would be no possibility of escape.

He guessed the crypt below had been a prison, or a storage place for something more precious or more sinister than wine. The low brick groinings of the ceiling barely cleared his six-foot height, and the few rooms that opened to his right from the short passageway were tiny, sunk below the level of the floor, which was itself worn in a channel inches deep. The air—as he recalled and as Zardalu had remarked—was bitterly cold.

Dastgah
. Scientific apparatus. There were Western scientific journals in the library dating back to the eighteenth century, treatises in Arabic from the days before the Moslem world had become a scientific backwater. Just exactly what was it, Asher wondered, that the Master of Constantinople was having his Western engineers build for him? That meant so much to him that its delay would rouse him to fury? That he hid from his own fledglings?

The penny-dip glow touched something dully reflective, lodged like a gleaming bone in the throat of a dark arch.

Here, he thought. The place the Bey kept hidden, veiled with his mind.

At the end of the abyssal corridor before him, Asher knew he would find that long stone stair, climbing to an outer door. But branching down to his left, his raised candle flame showed a grille of silver bars, behind which lay—what?

Or who?

Before him the tunnel extended like the bowel of night—to his left, behind the silver bars, Stygian velvet.

He wondered how much time he had left.

He had to know.

Cautiously, he moved down the short side branch.

His wan light winked on water pooled on the uneven stone floor. The corridor was extremely narrow, curving slightly; the silver bars, tarnished nearly black save around the lock where the bolt went into the stone, blocked it about ten feet from the convergence of the two passages. Beyond, Asher could make out two archways set in the left-hand wall. On one, at least, he caught the glint of a metal lock plate on a door. The smell of ammonia was overpowering; he had to fight not to cough.