Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

"You are different from all these others," she heard him say, in the curtained embrasure of a palace window, the sound of violins like fragile perfume amid the talk and laughter of dancers. Palace of Versailles, Lydia guessed vaguely from the cut of Ysidro's plum-colored silk coat. "How sick I have grown of them, through all eternity. I had not thought to find a woman like you." He raised the girl's hand to his lips.

"We have known one another, loved one another, down through endless time." He wrapped the girl in the dense velvet weight of his cloak as they stood alone in winter-locked woodlands, moonlight shiny on a meringue of snow beyond the barred shadows of the copse in which they stood. The girl's hair was disheveled, her gown torn, and Lydia knew that Ysidro had rescued her from some peril, and that the bodies of dead men lay out of sight in the gully by a winter-silent stream. Lydia 's own feet were cold in shoes wet with slush as she stood behind a tree with the wet weight of her skirt sticking to her ankles. "Do you not remember?" The girl in brown-it was the same brown dress as before, with the puffed sleeves and wide collar ten years behind current mode-whispered, "I remember, Simon. I remember... everything," and their mouths met in the zebra moonlight.

No! cried Lydia, and though her breath swirled in a diamond cloud, she could produce no sound. He's lying to you! He's going to kill you! Horrified, she fought to run toward them, but black thorns caught her skirts, held her back. She tried to pull free, and the branches cracked beneath her fingers like dried insects. She woke to find herself clutching the bony fragments of hawthorn twig that lay on her pillow.

Lydia took the two o'clock tram for Paris. Even after that strange farrago of romantic interludes by moonlight faded from her dreams, she kept waking with the icy sense that a slender shadow with yellow eyes waited just outside her door. By the time she was awake, bathed, laced, dressed, packed, powdered, perfumed, made-up, and had fixed her hair-no small accomplishment without a maid-and considered herself fit to be viewed by the public, she had missed both the morning trains. Never again, she thought, will I stay at an inconspicuous hotel just to avoid questions from my family. She reached Paris shortly after nine that night, missing the train to Vienna by an hour and a half-it left from another station in any case-and registered, travel-weary and aching, at the Hotel St. Petersbourg that Thomas Cook and Sons had obligingly contacted on her behalf the day before.

Paris, at least, she knew from her days of debutante shopping and educational sightseeing, and later from medical conferences. Her French was good, and she understood how to handle herself in this milieu. Perhaps, she reflected, the journey would be easier than she feared, as long as she took everything methodically, one step at a time, like a complicated dissection or a series of analyses of unknown secretions.

Again she slept badly, her dreams filled with the dark-haired girl in brown and Don Simon Ysidro rescuing each other from the cardinal's guards and trading kisses on the sands of moon-soaked Moroccan deserts. Waking in the darkness, comforter drawn up to her chin, she stared at the slits of reflected streetlamp outlining the shutters and listened to the voices of the cafe down in the street below, wondering where James was and if he was all right. Milk wagons were creaking in the streets when she finally slept.

The Vienna Express didn't leave until seven-thirty that evening, so there was plenty of time, not only to pack and dress properly and have the hotel maid fix her hair, but to do a little shopping at the Magasins du Printemps, which lay just down the street.

She was buttering a croissant in the almost empty dining room and speculating about the pathology of Don Simon Ysidro's fingernails-clearly there had been an organic change of some kind, so the physical side of the vampire syndrome did not involve complete cellular stasis-when she heard the solitary waiter murmur, "B'njour, m'mselle," and glanced up to see another woman enter the room. Even at this distance and without her spectacles, Lydia deduced this woman to be harmless: tallish and slightly stooped, she moved with the uncertainty of one who feels herself to be half a foreigner even in her own country, let alone in a land where she doesn't speak the language.

The next second she frowned, wondering why she thought she recognized her. There was something familiar about her, and as the woman drew near and came a little more into focus, Lydia realized what it was.

She was wearing a brown dress with the puffed sleeves and wide collar fashionable in the nineties.

Lydia set down her coffee cup.

"Mrs. Asher?" The woman stopped beside her table, fidgeting her hands in mended gloves, a look of anxiety in her blue eyes. She was about twenty-three, much more awkward than she'd been in the dreams, and, like Lydia when Lydia knew nobody would see her, wore eyeglasses. "Don Simon told me I'd find you here."

A waltz from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet had been popular in Vienna the year Asher spent in and out of that city. Closing his eyes to the lulling rock of the train, Asher could hear it again, drawing in its colored wake the bright glimmer of gaslight in the Cafe New York on the Opernring during Carnival season, the sparkle of snow on the pavements, the slurry patter of French and Italian and Viennese German all around. Court gossip and psychoanalysis, music and politics and whose wife was betraying whom. Thirteen years later it was still as clear as yesterday.

Young matrons in their masks and costumes questing nervously for unspecified excitement. Uniformed officers, gay in swords and spurs and braid.

Francoise.

"Nothing here is as it seems," she had said the night he walked with her to the cafe after a St. Valentine's Ball given by her brother; and that, at least, he had known was true about himself.

She was a thin-faced woman of his own age, his own height; though to be thirty- five and almost six feet tall, and of a strong cast of feature, had always been something only considered attractive in men. Her brother was a director of the biggest bank in Vienna and owned farms, vineyards, blocks of flats in the Seventh District. His wife, the second daughter of a baron, had been trying for years to marry Francoise off in diplomatic circles.

Asher wondered if she had ever married. Had ever trusted another man.

"People pass the days away in cafes like this, sipping coffee, reading the feuilletons, watching the world go by." She moved one shoulder in a graceful shrug, her smile rueful and a little sad. She was a biscuit-colored woman, but the emeralds in her ear-rings caught sparkling echoes in her eyes. "Outsiders think it's all very relaxed, very gemutlich, but it's really because most of the people here live in one-room apartments, they and their families together, and they can't stand the smell of cooking and dirty diapers and the arguing of their children. So they come here and look leisured and carefree because that is exactly what they are not.

"We here in Vienna have a hundred separate degrees of nobility and bureaucrats, titles and order and neatness and rules, and underneath, the Slovenes and Serbs and Czechs and Moldavians and Muslims are all clamoring to have their own nations, their own schools, their own languages, their own crowns. They bomb and shoot and riot and scheme with the Russians and the British and whoever else they think will help them break free."

Her big hands in long gloves of ivory kid darted, as if forming illustrative patterns that Asher could not see. He had first encountered her at a Twelfth Night ball in his guise as a professor of folklore. Folklore was always popular in Vienna, the more bizarre the better, and in exchange for arcana on Japanese werewolves and Chinese milkweed fairies, Asher had met a number of the aforesaid Serbs and Czechs and Moldavians and was beginning to find out just who they were scheming with on the subject of riots, bombs, and freedom from Austrian control. He hadn't really needed to seek out Francoise a second time.