Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

They played cards until long past midnight, as the lights of Nancy flashed past the window and then the Vosges rose under their starless shawls of cloud. Still fascinated but nodding with weariness, Lydia finally returned to her own compartment, but, as she had feared, could not sleep. A little light strayed through the curtain from the corridor, a comfort, like the elephant-shaped veilleuse that had burned in her room when she was a child. Once, a shadow passed that light, and she lay awake for some time, imagining Ysidro drifting like a soundless specter along the train, sampling the dreams of the lady with the little dog, of the pair of brothers who'd asked to share the dinner table in the restaurant car with Lydia and Margaret, of the conductor in his chair and the kitchen boys in their bunks, like a connoisseur tasting different vintages of wine.

She wondered what Margaret and Ysidro had to say to one another in the course of the night.

"Have you seen him?"

Lady Ernchester tilted her stub of candle to spill a few drops of wax onto the stonework of an elbow-high niche, then propped the light upright in it. The flame steadied and broadened, touching first her face with its deceptive warmth, then the stiff, sad features of a small stone image of the Queen of Heaven in the niche itself, fouled with rat droppings and the trails of slugs. The light penetrated farther, to show them in a sort of vestibule at the foot of the crooked stairs down which Anthea had led him. The walls and ceiling groins of brick and stone had lost most of their covering plaster, and earth floor filled the air with a raw exhalation of damp. Opposite them a door into another chamber had been bricked shut, but not the long windows on either side. Looking through, Asher could see that the room, far deeper and higher than the one in which he stood, was filled with human bones.

He leaned against the wall, the pain in his side suddenly turning his knees to water. When he pressed his hand under his coat, he felt the hot soak of blood.

"You're hurt..."

She stepped forward and caught his arm; her hand pulled back and he staggered, for her fingers had accidentally brushed the silver chains where they ran under the cuff of his shirt. For a moment they stood looking at one another in the candle's wavering light.

"Wait here for me," she said. He heard the rustle of her petticoats but did not see her depart.

He sank down onto the windowsill, leaning against the rusted iron bars. His head swam, but losing consciousness was something he dared not do. The bones behind him rose in heaped mountains, losing themselves in a distance of utter night. A faint scratching clatter: movement among the piled skulls, and the glint of tiny eyes.

A plague crypt, he thought. Easily as large as the one under the cathedral, though probably deeper in the earth. In the faint glow of the candle the bones were as brown and shiny as ocean stones.

Get thee to my lady's chamber, thought Asher dizzily. Tell her that though she paint an inch thick, to this end will she come...

Unless, of course, she chooses not to die.

For some reason Lydia came into his mind, and he shut his eyes. To this end will she come...

"Here." A hand touched his shoulder, swiftly withdrawn. She stood at his side again, his valise in her hand. "Take off your coat."

The attacker's knife had slit the heavy wool and the lighter tweed of the jacket and waistcoat beneath. Shirt and waistcoat had absorbed most of the blood; had he not been wearing the greatcoat, he would probably have been killed. As it was, the wound, though painful, was superficial-he could move his arm, though he knew it would stiffen, and his breathing was unimpaired.

With an exertion that left him light-headed, he stripped to the waist, the air shockingly cold against his skin. He remained seated in the embrasure while she moved away from him, to the opposite side of the vestibule under the Virgin's niche, where she tore the bloodied shirt into neat pieces as if the tough linen had been cigarette paper. As she worked, she spoke in the quick, jerky voice of one who seeks to preserve herself from what silence might bring.

"Have you seen him?" she asked again.

"I saw him at Charing Cross Station," he replied, "talking with a man I knew to work for the Kundschafts Stelle, the Austrian secret service."

She glanced up, eyes flaring wide with shock. They were the color of mahogany but no more human than a raptor bird's. In the small saffron light her lips were colorless as the pallor of her flesh, pallor somehow mitigated-or explained-by the mourning black of her clothing. Her hair, upswept into the style Lydia called a Gibson Girl, seemed to flow out of the darkness of her clothing, garnet- tipped pins gleaming in it like droplets of blood.

"Talking with someone?"

"Why does that surprise you?"

"I had thought..." She hesitated, looking at him for a moment; then, as if not daring to linger on the dark glitter of blood on his side, her unhuman eyes returned to her work. "Our house was searched, you see. Ransacked by men while I was out." From the reticule at her waist she withdrew a square of yellow paper, folded small, and crossed the room to hand it to him with bloodstained fingers, then moved quickly back away. "That was on the floor when I came back."

Asher unfolded it. It was a railway timetable. Sunday night's seven-thirty boat- train was circled; a strong European hand had added, in the margin, Vienna Express.

"He was gone by the time I came back that night," said Anthea, digging in his valise for the small flask of whiskey there. She soaked an unbloodied fragment of shirt in it, braced herself almost imperceptibly before stepping near enough to touch him again. Asher raised his arms against the top of the window in which he sat, that the silver on his wrists might not come into accidental contact with her ungloved hands. The whiskey stung coldly in the wound, the smell of it almost covering the raw whiff of the blood.

"In wintertime, when dark falls by four, I often go on errands, to buy newspapers or books. I have a dressmaker who keeps open for me. Ernchester will sometimes stay all the night through in his study, reading, even on those nights when I go out later..."

She stopped herself visibly from saying to hunt. But Asher saw it in the shift of her eyes. Her hands were icy against his bare flesh, and she worked quickly, holding the bindings in place with small bits of what little sticking plaster he'd had in the valise in case of emergencies. His blood dabbled her fingers, garish as paint on ivory. Cold breathed over his ribs from the bones within the crypt, chilling him further.

She went on, her words swift, like a woman talking in the presence of a man whom she fears will seduce her. "He used to go out walking. I thought it was only that. So I went out again and, when I returned, found the place rifled, smelling of human tobacco and human sweat, and that was on the floor. I thought... I thought that he had been taken away."

Her dark brows pinched together as she pinned the final bindings in place. "I would have known it, had he... had anything befallen."

Asher remembered his dream. How can he be dead? she had asked. Did I walk up the stairs, would he not be waiting at the top?

Even then she had known.

"And you didn't go to Grippen?"

Anthea shook her head. "Since last year-since the rift among us concerning you and your knowledge of us-there has been uneasiness among the Undead of London. Grippen has gotten other fledglings in place of those who were killed; has summoned to London older fledglings of his as well. Me, he never trusted.

Indeed, I... until you spoke of the Austrian, I could not be sure that this was not of Grippen's doing. But for that reason I dared not go to Ysidro, either."