Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

Karolyi and Ernchester were walking up the corridor, Karolyi speaking with eloquent gestures of his white-gloved hands, Ernchester expressionless, very small and thin beside him.

"It does not do, you understand, to spend the entire journey in one's compartment. For one thing, the porters gossip."

"I see no reason why the prattle of groundlings touches us." Ernchester's voice was so low as to be almost inaudible, and Asher wondered why the elongated ou and open- ended ea rang so familiar in his ear. Who had he heard recently, he wondered, speaking with that archaic inflection? "There is nothing in this 'train' "-he spoke the word as if it were foreign to him-"of interest to me. If, as you say, we shall be in Vienna some days..."

They passed beyond his hearing. Asher found his watch, angled it to the slit of incoming light. It was a few minutes past six-thirty, Vienna time. Karolyi must have just released Ernchester from the baggage car, once more replacing a seal with a duplicate. It was the subtle touch of the vampire's mind on all those in the car that he had felt in his sleep. Outside Asher's window the Alps glimmered eerie blue under the stars.

He dressed swiftly and stole down the corridor, listening for voices in the other compartments. Silence reigned. Most of them, he guessed, were already at dinner. The lock on Karolyi's compartment yielded readily to the wire tools he'd constructed from the innards of donkey and bear. He searched deftly, thoroughly, though he knew Karolyi wasn't a man to leave information lying around. No notebooks, no letters, no addresses. A great deal of money in the valise, which Asher opened after carefully inspecting its lock and frame for bits of hair, wood chips, or gum; he abstracted two hundred florins in notes and also two of the dozen or so duplicate baggage-room seals.

Under the false bottom Asher found ten small boxes of wax and wood, which contained impressions of keys, probably to the baggage car-possibly to all baggage cars in use on the line. Asher pocketed them and replaced the clothing. By the time Karolyi noticed they were gone, they'd be off the train.

The valise also contained two folded Personals sections of the London Times from successive dates, and these he dared not take away with him. Time was passing swiftly; he didn't have time to scan them, knowing that there would be no mark on the advertisement. He made a note of the dates, folded them as they had been, and replaced the valise above the velvet seat.

A traveler's chess set stood on the table, its men neatly ranked for a game. Ernchester's old-fashioned, fiddlebacked greatcoat hung near the door beside Karolyi's wide-skirted one; Asher checked the pockets quickly, wondering where the vampire would stay once they reached Vienna.

Back in his own compartment again, he rang for the porter, ordered dinner brought to him, adding with a wink and a couple of francs that he was indisposed. "You wouldn't have the English Times on board, would you?" "Certamente, sir," Giuseppe said, drawing himself up indignantly. "All the newspapers we have for our first-class passengers, of the latest editions." "How about last Saturday's? Last Friday's, too, if possible?"

"Hmm. That I don't know, m'sieu. I shall ask, shall look about the porters' rooms..."

"Discreetly," Asher said. "You don't need to bring me the whole thing. Just the Personals." He raised one eyebrow and tilted his head wisely, and the porter bustled away with the air of one who sees himself an experienced international intrigant.

And perhaps he was, thought Asher. In his position he'd have the opportunity. In any case Giuseppe returned with a much-battered copy of Saturday evening's Personals, retrieved from the porters' lavatory, and Asher spent the next half hour scanning it for whatever message had arranged the meeting between the vampire and the Hungarian.

Olumsiz Bey-Front

steps of British Museum, 7.-Umitsiz

Asher had to read it twice before he realized it was what he sought.

Olumsiz was Turkish for deathless-or perhaps undead. Umitsiz, for hopeless-or perhaps for the British form of the name Wanthope, the collateral name of the Earls of Ernchester, one of several under which Charles Farren had many years ago willed property to himself.

Curious. Why Turkish? Asher folded the paper, slipped it into his valise. Deathless Lord. Without Hope. Want-Hope. Wanthope. Deathless Lord...

Quite clearly Ernchester and Karolyi wanted to conceal their transactions. That would fit, if the other London vampires-who must surely read the Personals, nights being long for the Undead-frowned on an alliance. Would Grippen, the Master Vampire of London, know Turkish? Ysidro would, thought Asher, oddly uneasy at the memory of that bleached Spanish hidalgo who had, against the wishes of all the other London vampires, first sought his help. The Ottoman Empire had been a formidable power in the sixteenth century. It was conceivable that Ysidro, a courtier and sometime scholar, would know some of its ancient tongue. Conceivable, too, that the earl would. Certainly likelier than, for instance, Hungarian, which in that era had been the language of barbarians and herders, people without power in the West. Any of the other London vampires would almost certainly know German or French.

A Viennese or Hungarian vampire who had been made in the sixteenth or seventeenth century would very probably know the tongue of the armies that had repeatedly overrun his land.

Asher looked at the top of the paper again. Saturday, October 31-and no copy of Friday's paper. What, he wondered, had the summons said that made Ernchester so anxious to conceal his movements from the other London vampires, including his wife?

Who was it who called himself the Deathless Lord?

Even at ten in the evening the Vienna Bahnhof was the swarming center of the comings and goings of an empire. Stepping quickly from the train before it had even come to a complete halt, striding along the platform to mingle with the crowd, Asher felt the stab of homecoming-nostalgia, the pain of remembering. There was no city in the world quite like Vienna.

There were backcountry Jews in black caftans, tallis, and side curls being resolutely ignored by their frock-coated Germanic Reform co-religionists, Hungarian csikos in high boots and baggy trousers, a tattered rainbow of Gypsies. There were the Viennese themselves, ladies bundled in linen traveling coats and veils to guard against smuts, brilliantly uniformed men who might have been Lancers or postmen, children clinging to black-clothed governesses, and students in bright-colored caps. French, Italian, singsong Viennese German as unlike as possible from the tongue of Berlin blended with Czech, Romanian, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian...

The air was redolent with coffee.

Vienna.

Illogically, as he made for the stand where the fiacres would be ranked-where Ernchester and Karolyi would head the moment the customs officials were through with their luggage-Asher found himself holding his breath, fearing that somehow, impossibly, he would meet Francoise.

He had dreamed about her, in his uneasy sleep that afternoon; a dream threaded with waltzes. She was walking along the Schottenring, past the marble and stucco and gilt of the great blocks of flats, through the crystal light of a spring evening. She looked not as she had looked thirteen years ago, but as she must look now, her hair almost completely gray, and lean as certain cats get as they age; rather like a cat in a gray walking suit tabbied with black lace.

I'm sorry, Francoise.

As he watched her, he had been piercingly aware of the ornate bronze gratings in the walls at sidewalk level, brushed by the gunmetal taffeta of her skirt. There was movement in the darkness, he realized, movement beneath the pavement under her feet; whispering in the shadows, eyes in the dark. Waiting only for the coming of night.