James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (46 page)

Asher remained where he was. The vampire’s footfalls made no sound on the dusty carpeted acres of the floor.

“I wasn’t sure this was an appropriate place to find you.” The echoes of Asher’s voice were solitary drips of water in the immensity of an underground cave. “But in the streets I felt unsafe, and there was a chance that the others—the fledglings—wouldn’t enter a place considered holy to them.”

“There is no reason why they should not.” He moved carefully, in obvious pain, though his face showed no expression; Asher knew that Ysidro was a little tougher than younger vampires with regard to silver but guessed Karolyi’s bullet had left an agonizing track of burns and blisters within.

He wondered who had dressed Ysidro’s wounds.

“Unless one has put up garlic or silver, or some other thing inimical to us around the entrances, there is no limitation upon what building we may go in. Neither crosses, nor crescents, nor horseshoes nailed with cold iron above the door forbid us any more than they forbid a living man, nor must we wait to be invited to cross a threshold we have not crossed before.”

Ysidro gestured, the black kid of his glove spiderlike against the white shirtsleeve.

“Though we do tend to avoid holy places. Not because God is there—for presumably God is everywhere, something men seem to forget in their battlefields, bedchambers, and boardrooms—but because man is there, and woman, without the defenses they erect to protect their minds from one another. The yielding up of their innermost dreams—love, and hatred for those different than they—charity and violence all mingled—makes a music which remains in such places even in their emptiness. Dreams lie thick here, like the smoke of incense; the smell of the blood that has been shed here seeps still from its stones. Many of us barely notice, but I find it—unpleasant.”

The silence returned, like the cloak of vampire powers: the turning aside of attention, the blinding of living eyes. All the things that someone like Ignace Karolyi—someone like Golge Kurt—would have sold to living men preparing to fight a war.

And might still, thought Asher wearily. And might still.

But that was something about which he could do no more. He should have known that, he reflected bitterly, before he got on the Paris train. He had known about it this time, stopped it this time… Plucked up a single weed, knowing already that the seeds were everywhere in the air, looking only for fertile soil.

“Thank you for looking after her.”

Ysidro turned his face away. “You have married a very foolish woman, James,” he said softly. “I would have looked after her better had I broken both her legs, to teach her to stay out of vampire nests, and sent her back to Oxford under care of a nurse. I did ill and stupidly, for we all go back home nursing our hurts, hers maybe the worst of all. And nothing here will change.”

“Which is as well,” Asher said, “considering what changes might have come had Golge Kurt become Master of Constantinople. We did win this time, you know.”

The colorless eyes touched him, rested on him, giving away nothing of their thoughts, then moved away. “This is not my affair. The dead are the dead.”

“You will miss her,” Asher said, “won’t you? Anthea.”

Ysidro looked aside without replying.

“I don’t think,” Asher said, “that she was sorry.”

He did not think the vampire would answer him, and for a long time he did not. Then he said, “She was. But I do not think she would have lasted long after he was gone.”

He had known her, thought Asher, for all of that two hundred and fifty years. Worlds were hidden in the stillness of the alabaster face, the pale, champagne-colored eyes. Questions forever unanswered.

“You didn’t kill the Potton girl, did you?”

Ysidro said nothing.

“It’s not something I’ll speak of to Lydia. There were other vampires in the city, maybe others besides those I saw in the House of Oleanders. I don’t know. If the laborers and mechanics and beggars put together Lydia’s inquiries with the house of Olumsiz Bey, there must have been vampires who became aware of you. Who waited for the servants to flee the sound of the riot. Who had, perhaps, met her eyes somewhere, sometime, and could command her in dreams to open the windows for them.”

“The girl was a fool,” Ysidro said. He glanced sidelong at Asher. “You may tell Mistress Asher I said that.”

“Many years ago,” Asher said, “when I was in Vienna, I loved a woman there, and she me. She was clever and had great integrity. I was a fool to speak to her after the second time, because I should have known where it would lead. But after the second time I met her, it was too late. When she began to guess that I was a spy sent to find military secrets that would hurt her country, probably kill her friends and family who were in the army, I… betrayed her. I stole her money and left town in ostentatious stealth with the most brainless and beautiful member of the demimonde I could convince to accompany me—knowing that Francoise would take her own rage, her own hurt, into account, and more than into account, and not look further into anything else that had to do with me. She was that kind of person. I did this not only to protect myself and my contacts, but so that she would cut from me cleanly, never regretting or thinking that what had been between us could ever be repaired.”

Ysidro was silent for a long time, cold crystal eyes fixed on some middle distance, as if, through the walls, he could see out into the night, back to the London that had been his haunt and his home from his twenty-fifth—and last—year of human life.

“There was nothing ever between us, you know.”

“I know.” She hadn’t told him about the sonnets, but he had found them—including the torn one—in Miss Potton’s crochet basket. Asher’s own passion returned to him, yearning and illogical, for Anthea, and for the moonlight girl in the Vienna Woods who had later helped to empty Fairport’s veins. He remembered Lydia’s voice when she said, Simon… and recalled, too, the disillusioned agony of her tears.

She would recover, he knew. But the hurt ran deep.

The vampire shook his head. “Life is for the living, James. Death is for the dead. As for her attraction to me, it is our lure to be attractive. It is how we hunt. It means nothing.”

Asher thought about Anthea again, and knew that Ysidro lied.

Ysidro considered the matter in silence for a moment more, then went on, “As for Miss Potton, I cannot say that I wouldn’t have killed her, in the end, as Lydia expected me to. In truth I don’t think she would have minded. But I think it was a woman named Zenaida, a concubine who haunts the deserted areas of the old seraglio, abandoned now even by the palace servants. Zenaida saw her there—I think she may even have summoned her, using the illusion that I might wish her to follow me. Afterward I thought I saw her once or twice around the house on Rue Abydos, but by then my perceptions were not acute enough to be sure. Another reason I would keep Mistress Asher in ignorance of how this came about. She would take it as her own doing. I trust you have not left her alone.”

Asher shook his head. “She’s with Lady Clapham and Prince Razumovsky. I asked them to stay with her till I returned. I told them she has nightmares—not that Lydia has ever had a nightmare in her life.”

The defaced ivory mask relaxed, momentarily, into a smile.

“Will you be all right, returning home?”

“The Dead always find ways,” Ysidro said, “to get the living to serve them. Some, like the Deathless Lord, buy that service, or use hate, like Golge Kurt, or love. Sometimes the living don’t even know why they serve.”

Asher studied the narrow, enigmatic features, the rucked ruin of fresh and bloodless scars. Like Anthea, like Ernchester, Ysidro was a killer and would have been as deserving as they had the sunlight trapped and consumed him in that upper room. The fact that Ysidro had risked his curiously friable immortality to help him—to save Lydia—should have no bearing on that deserving. The fact that Ysidro had not killed Margaret Potton did not change the fact that he had killed someone else—possibly several others, if he had been as long fasting as Lydia had said—that same night.

“Sometimes they do.” He held out his hand to the vampire. “They know… but damned if they understand.”

Ysidro regarded his hand for a moment with an air of slightly startled offense, as if at a familiarity; then smiled, like a man remembering his own follies, and very quickly, with two cold fingers, returned the touch.

“In that they are not unique,” he said.

And he was gone, in a slight, quick blanking of attention that covered a soundless retreat. Asher found himself alone in the immense darkness of the ancient holy place, without so much as a flicker of motion among the dark pillars to show that any soul, living or dead, had passed that way.

Weary of dark, I asked to see the day,

And Jesus, jesting, to a mountain’s height

Upbore me, and spread before my sight

The Kingdoms of earth in morning’s bright array.

I saw a man betray two dames who wept;

Saw a mother cripple her child with love;

Saw priests flay Jews, their piety to prove,

And brother sell his brother while he slept.

A man gave up his dreams, a child to save.

A woman bound a beggar’s bleeding sores.

A youth pursued war’s summons to his grave

While th‘ king for whom he died gave gold to whores.

And all died frightened, weeping and in pain.

I left the mount, and sought the dark again.

At various times in her life, Barbara Hambly has been a high school teacher, a model, a waitress, a technical editor, a professional graduate student, an all-night clerk at a liquor store, and a karate instructor. Born in San Diego, she grew up in Southern California, with the exception of one high school semester spent in New South Wales, Australia. Her interest in fantasy began with reading The Wizard of Oz at an early age, and it has continued ever since.

She attended the University of California, Riverside, specializing in medieval history. In connection with this, she spent a year at the University of Bordeaux in the south of France and worked as a teaching and research assistant at UC Riverside, eventually earning a master’s degree in the subject. At the university, she also became involved in karate, making Black Belt in 1978 and competing in several national-level tournaments. She now lives in Los Angeles.