Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

But he had.

"When we complain," she went on, "it isn't really a complaint. When we weep, it isn't necessarily out of pain; and when we dance, it isn't always for joy. Yes isn't really yes, and no is seldom no, and the palaces you see mostly aren't really palaces, and everyone talks about everything except what really consumes their thoughts."

Her dark brows drew down over those bright green eyes as she considered him, skirting the brink of questions that she wasn't sure she wanted answered or even asked.

"We don't always know whether what we're seeing is real or a mask."

Asher's eyes had met hers, and he hadn't known what to reply.

I spoke to you last week to find out which of your young officer friends are deepest in debt.

I'm here to learn things that could get your armies defeated, your country disgraced, your friends and nephew killed.

I think I love you.

He wasn't sure just when that last had happened.

For a time they regarded one another without masks. Even now, looking back on it from the edge of dreaming, Asher didn't know what he would have said, had she asked him then.

But she smiled and put her mask back on, and held out her hand. "It's the 'Waltz of the Flowers,' " she said. "Do you dance?"

He had never been back to Vienna.

He pulled himself brutally from the edge of sleep. It was too early to sleep. The lights of Paris were barely behind them: St. Denis, Gagny, Vaires-sur-Marne spilled firefly glints into the indigo dark. Asher sipped the cafe noir he'd tipped the porter to bring to his private compartment-the compartment he'd managed to secure at the last possible moment, leaving himself again, he reflected dourly, with only five pounds in his pocket.

But on the Paris-Vienna Express it was imperative that he travel first class if he wanted access to the car where Karolyi and Ernchester would be. He knew himself incapable of remaining awake another night in second class. In first class he would be safer, less likely to be seen by either Ernchester or Karolyi. Karolyi.

Nothing here is as it seems to be.

That same Carnival evening he'd seen Karolyi surrender a dance with the most attractive heiress in Vienna that season to go outside and stop a carter from whipping his horse. Francoise's comment had been, "Laying it on a bit thick, no?" And, to Asher's raised brow: "You must have noticed he only does such things where others will see." Asher had noticed, but to his knowledge, no one else had, save Francoise.

He hadn't had time to telegraph Lydia. Nor Streatham, telling him Cramer was dead.

Streatham would have left his office at six anyway, Asher reflected sardonically, and wouldn't be back till twenty minutes past nine in the morning.

Dear God, had it only been that morning?

When he closed his eyes, he could see the brassy-haired prostitute, back arched like a bow above the seat of the chair, flopping and kicking her legs as her body gave up its life.

Could see the dark glitter of Cramer's blood where the rats had gnawed his face. He feared his dreams, but they drank him in, like water flowing down into darkness.

He thought, I've been in this room before. When have I been in this room? Beyond shrouded windows rain streamed down, sodden and heavy; if there had been furniture in the room once, all had been cleared, but for a table at one end.

Shawled with drippings, the guttered stumps of candles burned in tall holders, two at the head, two at the feet, and their light made daffodil thumbprints on the velvet pall that draped one end of the table like a thrown-back counterpane and winked in the jeweled leaves of a coronet set in the black cloth's midst. The dream had the taste of very distant memory, and he somehow knew that it was deep, deep in the night.

A woman lay on the yellow marble floor before the table, like a second pall dropped by a careless servitor, awkward in corsets and bum rolls and strange pennoncels of ribbon. Her hair was black, except where the candle flame breathed on it a cinnamon light. Its puffs and volutes, like those of her clothing, were in tangled disarray.

"Anthea." Another woman came down the room's length, passed within touching distance of Asher, or where Asher would have been had any of this ever really occurred. "Anthea, you must come to bed." Even drugged with sleep, Asher identified the longer vowels in come and bed, the elongated ou, and thought automatically, Late seventeenth century. This new woman also wore black. Against ebon lace cascading from high combs, her face seemed lifeless, her eyes swollen and red. " 'Tis long gone midnight, and the mourners away to their homes." She knelt in a sighing waterfall of back-draped skirts and touched the prone woman's arm.

"How can he be dead?" It was a deep voice for a woman's, low but very clear. There were no tears in it, only a tired wonderment, as if she really wanted to know. The odd thing was that Asher recognized it but remembered a modern pronunciation, unlike the one she used now.

"I don't... I don't feel as if he were. Did I walk up the stairs, would he not be waiting at the top?" A ribboned fontange snagged in her hair, tilted drunkenly as she raised her head, then slithered to the floor unheeded. Though he was at least twenty feet from her, Asher knew her eyes were the color of last autumn's oak leaves, matted at the bottom of a pool.

"I felt so, when my Andrew died." The other woman put a hand to Anthea's side to help her up. Anthea rose unsteadily, tall and wholly beautiful though her clothing was askew from lying on the floor. The flesh of her breasts rose in creamy mountains above the flattening of her bodice, and small shadows marked the paler line of her collarbone, the curves of her broad-set cheeks. "Believe me, my darling," said her friend, "he is dead."

Slowly, like a very old woman, Anthea stepped forward, reaching to touch the velvet pall where, Asher realized, a coffin had lain. Her voice was very small, like a child's. "I don't understand what they expect me to do without him." She turned and walked the length of the room, as if she did not see her friend who followed in her wake. Certainly she did not see Asher, though her black skirts brushed the tips of his boots and he smelled the musky blend of ambergris, funeral incense, and womanhood that sighed from her clothing. Her tall lace headdress lay on the floor where it had fallen, like a broken black rose.

Steffi, darling, you do realize how dreary you are when you're jealous?" Asher jolted awake, sunlight in his eyes, his neck stiff and the gentle, persistent rocking of the train still tapping in his bones. He slumped back into the corner of the seat again and listened as Steffi-whoever Steffi was-rumbled some reply in harsh Berlin hoche Deutsch as he and his baby-voiced Viennese girlfriend passed down the corridor outside, toward the restaurant car presumably. Asher reached up and switched off the still-burning electric lamp above his seat, then pressed the porcelain button to summon a porter. When he ordered shaving water-accompanied by a tip he couldn't well afford-Asher asked the time.

"It is five minutes past ten in the morning in Vienna, sir," said the man in Italian- accented French. "Ten minutes past nine in Paris. Myself, I should put local time at quarter of ten."

Asher, who had reset his watch to Paris time but had been too exhausted to wind it last night, set it again. "Have they done with serving breakfast?"

"They will have by the time m'sieu has finished shaving." The porter touched his cap. Venetian, Asher guessed. Dark, but with the extraordinary sensual beauty that even the crones of that ancient republic possessed like a birthright. "I could bring m'sieu a little something."

Asher handed him another silver two-franc piece, reflecting that porters on the Vienna Express would undoubtedly pocket anything from dollars to piastres. "You wouldn't happen to know whether the Hungarian gentleman who's traveling with the Englishman is still in the restaurant car, would you? Not," he added, holding up his hand, "that this matter need be mentioned to either of them."