James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (38 page)

The illusion that behind those bleached, crystalline eyes still lurked a living man’s smile?

Don Simon Xavier Christian Morado de la Cadena-Ysidro had been dead since 1558.

She recalled the books on his parlor chest. A dead man might read medical journals, and mathematics texts, and volumes of logic. But would a dead man read the stories of Toad and Ratty and Mole? She took off her spectacles, leaned her forehead on her hands. And why should it matter to her whether he was dead inside or alive?

In the street below, the dogs began to bark.

Lydia
raised her head, startled, and looked at the clock. It was nearly three. Had she been asleep, she wondered, since Margaret’s huffy departure, or had she wakened from her first sleep later than she’d thought?

Below in the street, someone pounded on the outer gate.

“Hamam, hamam!” cried a voice, vaguely familiar, though she could not have said from where. “Hamam, it is your husband! Your husband!”

She jerked to her feet, ran to the window that overlooked the street. She pushed aside the chains of garlic and wild rose that hung there, unhooked the heavy lattice; down below she could see a cluster of dim shapes in a lantern’s blurry light.

“Where?”

“Your husband!” cried the man below. “Find you, he say.”

The hakdwati shair, she thought. The man in the yellow turban. Catching up the lamp from the table, she paused only long enough to snatch her silver knife as a precautionary measure and then ran downstairs. They’d want money, she thought, stepping through the door out into the carriageway. As the light of the lamp jostled huge shadows over the carriageway’s vaulted roof, she thought, Good heavens, they could be thieves for all I know…

She stood on tiptoe to slide back the cover of the judas in the main gate, and tried to hold the lamp so that light would illuminate the faces of those who stood outside.

There was no one in the street.

Behind her, the house door slammed.

Lydia
whirled, her breath stopping in her lungs—a glance showed her that both the main outer gate and the small postern were firmly locked and bolted. The silence seemed suddenly, dreadfully alive. She strode back toward the door, cold with terror, pulling the silver table knife from her belt…

The lamp in her hand went out.

Instinct more than anything else made her flatten at once to the wall. Shadow moved in the dark arch where the carriageway let into the little courtyard, where fallen pomegranate leaves made spots like dripped blood in the thin moonlight; she threw the lamp with all her force in that direction and heard it strike something soft, then shatter on the pavement. In that instant she flung herself to the door, yanked the handle, and felt the heavy jar of the bolt.

She whirled and slashed at the shadow that she felt more than saw suddenly beside her. She slashed, felt it give, turn before her. For an instant crushing pressure seized her wrist, a hand hideously strong closed over her throat, and with her mind swimming in a curious, hazy dream state she saw a face close to hers: smooth, full, olive-complected, fangs gleaming behind a thick mustache.

Then he cried, “Orospu!” and his hand jerked away, and she cut at his face again, knowing she couldn’t let him get near enough to take her by the elbow, the waist, someplace where she wasn’t wearing silver. She tried to scream, but it came out thick and tiny, like a child’s wailing in a dream; a vision flashed through her mind of letting him seize her, of wanting to feel those iron arms holding her, pressing her close to that iron chest.

She cut again at his face and cursed as hands seized her arms above the elbow, gasped out the worst word she’d ever heard from the grave diggers who brought bodies into the infirmary for dissection and felt the claws tear her arms, ripping through her sleeves. She kicked and slashed and cursed at the face that she saw now as if through the muzzy darkness of a dream.

There were two of them, she thought, blindly terrified, hacking and twisting against a grip like devil-inhabited stone. Two of them, two faces in the patchy moon shadows…

Then she was alone, leaning against the stuccoed wall with the knife shaking in her hand.

Her sleeves were torn, the blood shockingly hot against flesh that seemed to be getting colder by the minute.

I can’t go into shock, she thought, from what seemed like a great distance off. I can’t let myself…

“Madonna …” Darkness came out of the deeper dark behind her, though she hadn’t heard the gate open or close—a glint of eyes and the smoke of pale hair. Cold hands seized her arms, icy despite the frost that seemed to be spreading through her own flesh. She sobbed something, she didn’t know what, pressed her face to the damp wool of a cloak that smelled of dew and graveyards, as if its weight could save her from the fanged brown face that had come so close to hers.

She was unable to breathe, barely felt the cold, gloved hands that thrust her hair back from her face, touched her neck. “Are you hurt?”

The words had no meaning to her. She considered them from a great distance away, turning them—for she seemed to have all the time in the world—one way and another, like a rare bone. Was she hurt? she wondered. For a moment she floated weightless against him, conscious, it seemed, of the skeleton within his clothing, like Death in his winding sheet… conscious of almost nothing else. She heard him say her name, or thought she did, and looking up she saw, at some unbridgeable distance, the face of a living man.

He called her name again, and she gasped, shaken, disoriented, but alive once more, and stepped back quickly from him so that he had to catch her elbow to keep her from falling.

“I’m so sorry,” she managed to say. She looked around the courtyard. Everything seemed very distant and odd, as if nothing had anything to do with her. Shock, she diagnosed. The silver knife lay on the ground at her feet, the smashed lamp beneath the pomegranate tree. She wondered how much it would cost to replace. “I didn’t mean—”

“Are you hurt?”

Her blood gleamed all over his gloves from the talon rakes of her arms, but she knew he didn’t mean that. “No.”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded and felt her throat. She’d unbuttoned her high collar before she’d taken her nap, but the chains of silver were still there, close against the untouched skin. She bent to pick up the knife and nearly fell; he caught her in his arms as if she’d been a child, and with a single, vicious kick cracked the door bolt and carried her inside.

“You’re freezing.” He set her in a chair in the small downstairs hall; shut the door again and put a second chair under its latch to hold it. Then he turned back to her and wrapped her in the pall of his cloak. “And afraid.”

The fear she felt was only now coming into focus; she had not been conscious of much during the attack itself. She wondered why.

In the drift of light from the lamp on the landing he looked at his hands, gloved in leather and blood. With a quick gesture he tore the gloves off and threw them on the stairs, and vanished through the dark doorway into the kitchen. He came back a few moments later, coatless and carrying a pottery basin of water and another lamp, which Lydia found profoundly comforting. As he set the lamp on the hall table, he paused to listen at the foot of the stairs, and for some reason she remembered him, white-robed and barefoot, picking knacker’s meat from its paper for his cats.

“She is safe,” he said, his voice very soft. “They have not been inside. My apologies for the water. The boiler is long cold.”

Lydia
wondered what he heard of Margaret’s breathing: the peaceful snuffling of sleep or the swift, thready pant of guilt and fear and feelings hideously torn? She looked across at the door bolt, but even had the glow of the single lamp been stronger, the violence of Ysidro’s breaking in had shaken loose the hasp from the bar, and it was impossible to tell whether the bolt had been shot behind her when she’d gone out, or had merely somehow slipped.

He put the cloak back from her arms, pulled the remains of the sleeve free with a single flick of his hand and reached into the basin for a sponge. The wounds were little more than scratches, but smarted horribly. Lydia flinched from the water, which was, as Ysidro had hinted, stone cold.

“I saw the interloper,” she said, gritting her teeth. To her own vast annoyance she had begun to tremble again and couldn’t seem to stop. With grim effort she kept her voice steady. A woman in hysterics was the last thing either of them needed. Besides, he’d want the information quickly. “He’s a Turk, I think, I… I didn’t get a clear look. Here,” she added suddenly, realizing how disturbing he must find the smell of blood, “I’ll do that. There’s some brandy in the pantry…”

He’d brought napkins as well, but she was unable to bind up her own arms with them and had to wait till he returned after all.

“There were two of them,” she resumed, while he pinned the bandages, white fingers neat and swift and chill as the touch of death. “I think… I didn’t see the other clearly but I don’t think he was a Turk.”

“Was he vampire?”

She hadn’t thought of that. “I… I don’t know.”

Their voices echoed strangely in the well of the hallway, shadows leaning over them, monstrous and upside down. Ysidro left again, carrying the basin and sponge. When he returned, he held a cup of tea cradled in his hands, the smell of it gently neutral, like sunlight on grass. “They… they called to me from the street… Or I thought someone called to me from the street. They said Jamie needed me.”

“I doubt there was ever anyone in the street,” Ysidro said softly. “He will have felt your mind, a little, at the tomb, and with that little he could fool you about what you saw in darkness. You were right, the turbe of Al-Bayad was one of his sleeping places… He will have others.”

“But you found nothing of Anthea? Or Ernchester?”

“Nothing.” He went to the hall table and stood for a moment, holding his hand near the flame of the lamp there to warm it. The fire, moving in its little red-glass bowl, lent his fingers, his hair, the skull-like ridges of his no-longer-human face a mockery of sunburnt health.

“Like him, she will change her sleeping place from night to night, and his glamour will work on her mind as well, hiding him from her, even as it hides her from the Master of Constantinople—and hides her from me. If your husband is alive at all, it is because the Master of Constantinople seeks to use him as bait to trap her, for he fears her, even as Grippen does.”

“Grippen?” said Lydia. “Isn’t he her master, as he is Ernchester’s?”

“It is not unheard of, for fledgings to turn against those that get them.”

He turned his hand over. The light seemed to shine through his fingers like parchment, illuminating spidery bones. “It takes great strength, and great anger… but then, Anthea is strong. He has always distrusted her, as all masters distrust their get; and between Anthea and Grippen has always lain a most delicate balance of wariness, and power, and hate. I do not think he would have made her vampire had not he thought he would lose Charles when Anthea, still a mortal woman, died.”

“So they didn’t… they weren’t made vampires at the same time.”

“No. Charles was forty, Anthea thirty-three, when Grippen took Charles. Anthea was a widow for over thirty years. She had grown old when Charles finally came for her—or got Gnppen to come. She hated Gnppen for holding the dominance of a master over her, but she understood that it was the gate she had to walk through if she would be with Charles again. It is… a rather sad tale. Will you have more?”

She shook her head. As he took the cup from her, she saw how his clothing hung on him, as if there were nothing inside it but bones. The turned-back cuffs of his shirt showed wrist bones knobbed like hazelnuts under milk-white skin.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

He made a move, as if he would take her hand, then stopped himself. For a long time their eyes held, and she thought, quite irrationally, There is something else to say.

It was he who moved his face aside, still for a moment, then turning fully to look at the door. “I will remain here until it nears dawn, though I doubt he will be back. Tomorrow the bolt of the door can be repaired, and things placed about the doorsills and the windows that he cannot pass. I have no doubt he learned from Karolyi that you were here and wanted to put you under his influence—to force you to tell what Karolyi has been trying to persuade from you, did you but know it.”

Lydia
shivered, thinking of the long climb to the bedroom. Even Margaret’s presence in the bed beside her seemed welcome now.

Ysidro put his head a little to one side, listening. “She sleeps now.” He started to speak again, then didn’t, as if he, like Lydia for the moment, did not wish to raise the issue of Margaret, and his use of Margaret, between them.

There is something else
, Lydia thought again as they stood together, looking at one another in the lamplight. But Ysidro turned away and settled himself in the chair she had occupied, folding his bony arms within the shirt that seemed too large for him. Lydia slipped the cloak from her shoulders, and when he took it, slowly climbed the stairs.

As Ysidro had said, Margaret was asleep. She’d loosened her corsets and pulled the pins from her hair but still was dressed, as if she’d fallen asleep huddled wretchedly on top of the covers, and in the glow of the bedside lamp her face was taut with unhappy dreams. Lydia’s hands shook as she unbuttoned her torn shirtwaist, for reaction was settling on her. She had no intention of turning out the lamp beside the bed, but it was too bright for easy sleep. As she walked around to it, she saw half a dozen sheets of paper on the floor around Margaret’s basket of crocheted flowers.

They were tumbled untidily, as if she had been reading them when sleep overcame her and they’d slid from the coverlet. When Lydia picked them up, she saw the handwriting, precise and black and, though the ink was clearly modern, nothing that had been seen since the days of Elizabeth.

They were sonnets.

About darkness. About mirrors. About roads untrodden stretching endlessly into night. One of them Margaret had ripped into quarters. Lydia had to lay it on the nightstand to fit its pieces together again.