Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

He could barely see them in the dark between the buildings, but broke for where he thought they weren't. Someone clutched the skirts of his greatcoat but couldn't hold. He fled, stumbling, bruised his shoulder on the stone of a corner, fell where his foot caught a pothole in the broken pavement. He caught himself against a wall and pain seared his side again, and he realized that one of them had had a knife.

He turned down what he thought was a lane back to the Seitzergasse, but the dirty glow from a window high and to his right showed him a blank wall. He pressed himself back into a corner where the shadows were darkest, reached to whip the knife from his boot as panting and footfalls echoed loud in the narrow space before him and he saw the blur of what might have been faces and the glint of edged steel.

Then a hand like the mechanical jaws of a trap caught him above the elbow, and another, corpse-cold and strong as death, covered his mouth. He was dragged backward, down, into damp cold that smelled of wet stone, earth, and rats, and the dim arch of paler darkness blinked from existence as the door was kicked shut.

The smell of Patou perfume filled his nostrils, covering a dim exhalation of putrefying blood.

A woman's voice said in his ear, "Don't cry out."

Asher was silent. Even if the silver protected the big veins of his throat and wrists, a vampire could still break his neck, and he knew what was in the darkness beside him.

The hands left his arm and face. He listened, wondering how many of them there were.

There was no sound of breath, of course. After a moment a silvery rustling, like infinitely thin metal fragments rubbing against each other. A woman's taffeta petticoat.

He thought, She spoke English.

Then the scratch of a match.

He blinked against the needle-bright golden light that suddenly outlined a colorless hand, a papery white face, and touched with cinnamon threads the black mass of framing hair. Brown eyes met his, reflective vampire eyes, but still the color of brown leaves at the bottom of a winter pond.

It was, he realized, Anthea Farren, Countess of Ernchester.

"I do not understand the how of it," Ysidro said.

He had taken off his gloves to deal the cards, and now he held up his hand, slender and white with long fingers like the spindles for bobbin lace. Lydia observed again the quasi-onychogryphosis of the fingernails and the fact that the musculature showed no abnormal development, though she had seen this man wrench apart iron bars.

"It's my theory that it is a virus, or more probably a complex of several viruses." Lydia sorted her cards: ace, king, ten, eight, and seven of hearts; queen, jack, seven, and ten of spades. Almost no clubs-a nine-queen and jack of diamonds. Darkness fleeted past the train windows. Around them the first-class carriage had slipped slowly into silence.

"Because the cells of the flesh are themselves altered?"

She paused, a little surprised that the vampire knew what a virus was, then remembered all those medical journals in his house. Playing cards, and conversation, had insensibly lessened her fear of him-she wondered if he had chosen the absorption of a new game for that reason, or simply because, like her aunt Lavinia, he wanted a partner for the journey.

"It's one way of accounting for the extreme sensitivity of the flesh to things like silver and certain herbs," she said after a moment. "Not to mention photocombustion."

"Do we really need to talk about this?" Margaret squirmed uncomfortably, never lifting her gaze from the flying crochet needle and the lacy snowflakes of antimacassars overflowing the workbasket on her lap. After two or three tries at learning picquet, Margaret had retreated to her needlework, fighting to remain awake so as not to be left out of Ysidro's conversation, though she had very little to add. Into the discussion of railway travel, the finer points of picquet, the mathematical odds involved in card play and the structure of music- which Ysidro understood on a level very different from Lydia 's superficial acquaintance-Margaret had interjected periodic observations that she hadn't been out of England before or that she had read of this or that monument or notable sight in a travel book or Lord Byron's memoirs.

She had tried two or three times to deflect the talk from the physical state of vampirism, but when she spoke now, her voice was low, as if she wanted to register a complaint that she didn't actually want the others to hear. Silly, thought Lydia, considering the fact that Ysidro could tell people apart by their breathing.

The vampire moved two cards in his hand, removed three and laid them facedown near the stock, replacing them in his hand with three others. "It may sound odd, but to this day I do not understand what happened to my flesh the night I was taken, in a churchyard near the river, as I was coming home from my mistress... I always had mistresses in those days. Girls south of the river, who cared not that I was a Spaniard of the consort's entourage."

He lifted the corners of two other cards and replaced them in the stock without change of expression.

"I believe that this condition is two separate matters: the matter of the flesh, which preserves the body, not as it is at the moment of death, but as it is in the mind, molding even those who are taken old back into the shape of their living prime; and the matter of the mind, which sharpens and strengthens both the will and the senses, and gives us power over the wills, and the senses, of the living."

Lydia discarded her club and two diamonds, drew another club-the eight-the ace of spades, and the queen of hearts. After four or five games in which Ysidro had systematically bested her, she was beginning to get the hang of the game, a complicated manipulation of points in which she could almost always deduce more or less what Ysidro had in his hand, though as yet the information did her little good. As a teacher, he had endless patience, gentle without being in the slightest bit kind. He had dealt with Margaret's total absence of card sense and her inability to follow or remember rules with a matter-of-factness that had, oddly enough, almost driven the governess to tears. "It is the blood that feeds the flesh," Ysidro said. "We can- and do, at need-live upon the blood of animals, or blood taken from the living without need of their death. But it is the death that feeds the powers of our minds. Without the kill, we find our abilities fading, the cloak of our illusion wearing threadbare, our skill at turning aside the minds of the living shredding away. Without those skills we cannot send the living mind to sleep or make others see what they do not see, or bring them walking up streets they would not ordinarily tread in moments of what feels, to them, to be absentmindedness." Margaret said nothing, but her needle jabbed fast among the flowery lacework in her hands.

He gathered his cards. "Those, by the by, are our only powers, Mr. Stoker's interesting speculations aside. Personally, I have always wondered how one could transform oneself into a bat or a rat. Though lighter in weight than a living man, I am still of far greater bulk than such a creature. But in the speculations of this man Einstein I have found considerable food for thought." "Do you cast a reflection in mirrors?" Lydia had noticed upon coming into the compartment that a scarf-one of Margaret's, presumably, blue with enormous red and yellow roses printed on it-had been draped over the small mirror, and the curtains drawn tightly over the dark window glass.

She recalled her own ghostly image in Ysidro's huge Venetian mirror draped with black lace.

"We do." Ysidro made his discard. "The laws of physics do not alter themselves for either our help or our confusion. Many of us avoid mirrors simply because of the concentration of silver upon their backs. Even at a distance, in some it causes an itch. But chiefly, mirrors show us as we truly are, naked of the illusions that we wear in the eyes of all the living. Thus we avoid them, for though we can still cast a glamour over the mind of a victim who glimpses us in reflection, the victim will usually be troubled-unaccountably, to him-by what he sees or thinks he sees. We are not over fond of the experience ourselves. Four for quart in spades, ten high."