Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

"That may be part of Karolyi's plan." Stiffly and clumsily, Asher began to sponge with cold water at the blood in his coat, and Anthea said, "I'll do that," and took it from him. Now that the shock had worn off, he felt very tired, the pain in his side settling into a dull ache. He was glad to sit quietly on the room's overstuffed brocade settee.

"What he wants your husband for is less clear," he said after a time. "Maybe he wants your husband because he isn't a fledgling to some local master, here or someplace like Bulgaria or Greece. That's what I need to find out. It may be he wants your husband to make a fledgling who can be put to Karolyi's uses. But whatever he planned, he had to get your husband out of London because of Grippen."

"Yes," Anthea said softly. "Grippen would know."

She walked to the doorway between that chamber and the next, the movement of her shadow summoning vague blinks of light from the brass fittings of the trunk that filled most of the space not already occupied by the four-poster bed. Her hands, straying in the lace at her throat, were like lilies, ringed with solitary gold.

"When a master vampire begets a fledgling," Anthea said slowly, "he... he takes the fledgling's mind, the fledgling's consciousness and personality, into his own being, for the time it takes that... that fledgling's body to die. Once death is complete, once the... the changes to the vampire state have begun, then the master breathes that mind, that soul, back into the changing body once again. But not all of it. And what is breathed back is... stained. Altered. Just a little."

The marble profile remained averted, sienna eyes staring blankly into distance.

"No," she said. "He wouldn't use Charles in London. Grippen knows... everything.

And he has been watching us. Maybe waiting for his chance. I hate him." She shook her head, moved her shoulders as if to shed a weight of thought. "I have hated him since the first night Charles brought me to his house. Elysee de Montadour, the Master of Paris, is not so old or so powerful as Grippen, but she would sense it, I think, if a strange vampire came to Paris. Still, they could have gone to Rouen or Orleans to make their plans. The vampires of those cities perished in the confusions of the last German war. Such a journey would have been safer, would not have involved travel by day..."

"Do you know the vampires of Vienna?"

"No." She crossed to the window, spread back its teal-green velvet curtains, with their treble fringes of gold and tassels like double fists. "I feel them... feel their presence. As they feel mine, without being able at once to see where I am. They know I am here."

Her fingers traced the fringe, the fabric, drinking of the texture as they had drunk the shape and texture of the porcelain cup. The dim light from the street below edged and transformed her face into a song of gold planes and black.

"I feel... everything. This new city that seems to bleed music from its very stones... When I saw the men pursuing you, I'd been walking about the streets for nearly an hour, just glutting myself on new tastes, new smells, the voice of a river that isn't the Thames. All those new dreams and thoughts and sensations hammer around me and in me and at me. I feel as if every cobblestone has a diamond underneath it, and I want to run through the streets gathering them up like a greedy little girl."

The colorless lips curved in a half-wondering smile, and Asher remembered her watching the dancers in the cafe, drinking the smell of the coffee, the music of the waltz. "I know I'm in danger. I'm afraid, and I know I should be more afraid than I am. I could die in moments, just because I don't know the right place to hide, the right turning to take. But it's so beautiful."

She half wrapped the curtain around her, the lush color startling against her face, like a silver icon or a painting by Klimt.

"This is all so new to me, wonderful and strange. It's the first time, you understand, that I have left England. The first time since... since I became what I am... that I've been out of London. It's been nearly two hundred years, Dr. Asher. I traveled a little after I thought Ernchester was dead, visited a sister in the north. But in my mourning I had no taste for it and only wanted to return to what I knew. I mourned for a long time."

Asher had seen a portrait of her, done when she was over sixty in her mortal life. She'd put on weight, and her hair had grayed, and the raptor eyes that flashed copper in the rosy lamp flame had been dead, resigned, filled with a kind of hurt puzzlement, as if she had never ceased to ask, How can he be dead? In the painting she'd worn the broad gold band that gleamed now on her finger. "A vampire traveling is... horribly vulnerable."

"And yet you came."

She smiled, a human smile, the full, pale lips hiding the fangs. "I love him," she said. "To my last breath-and two centuries beyond."

Lady Ernchester had instructed the management of the hotel that she was not to be disturbed by chambermaids. She was an actress, she had said, and likely would be out most of the night, sleeping in the day. When she told Asher this, during a discussion of how words were pronounced in her early girlhood while she mended the slashes in his jacket and greatcoat, he closed his eyes briefly, imagining the concierge's reaction to this request.

But in fact when Asher later heard the chambermaids chatting in Czech and Hungarian in the corridor, none even tried the door.

Asher had tried to remain awake through the night, talking of philology and folklore with the vampire countess-her imitation of her nursemaid's Wessex dialect had been both hilarious and fascinating-but the ache of his wound, loss of blood, and exhaustion had claimed him. The voices of the chambermaids woke him in mid-morning, to find a heavy sunlight slanting through the chinks in the teal- colored curtains. He lay back on the settee again, trying to formulate an article in his mind- countryfolk of Anthea's day had pronounced the y or e at the end of such words as hande as a sort of aspiration, though they no longer spoke an e as a, and they would walk across a field rather than meet a pig in the road. But how on earth could he claim he'd had an interview with a contemporary of the Cavalier poets?

In time the voices of the chambermaids faded and the upper floor of the old palais fell silent. A heavy silence, broken only by the far-off clatter of a tram in the Schottenring and the distant threads of a hurdy-gurdy. He thought again of the woman sleeping, sealed within her double trunks, trusting his word that he would remain through the day and see that she came to no harm. Over the centuries she had killed... how many?

I wish you could have known us as we were.

Was all vampirism a craving to hold to the sweetness of a vanished youth, a desire not to have the good years, the dream years, slip away in the flowing stream of time?

I love him, she had said. I knew he could not be dead.

Who had loved the men, the women, the children whose lives she had traded for the continuance of her own?

He sighed and leaned the bridge of his nose on his knuckles, twisting at the problem again as a fish twists on a hook. She trusted him. And indeed, only through her could he hope to find Ernchester now, to keep him from selling his services to the Hapsburg Emperor, if he hadn't already. What had Karolyi offered him? Safety from Grippen? Why not tell Anthea, then? Why not bring her to Vienna with him?

Who had searched the house, who had known of Karolyi's plans, and for what had they been seeking? Who was Olumsiz Bey?

A transliteration for the Master of Vienna? Who might, after all, be Turkish himself. The whole area had been overrun as late as the mid-seventeenth century, and it was conceivable that the Undead in this most cosmopolitan of cities might not be Austrian-or even European-at all.