Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

Hands as cold and strong as machinery took hold of his arms, lifting and dragging him as if he were a bale of sticks. The smell of smoke seemed stronger outside, perhaps because his lungs were working again. He stumbled, trying to get his feet under him, and clutched at the shoulders that supported his arm. He felt them flinch.

Silver, he thought. The chain on his wrist would sting through Ernchester's coat.

The trunk lay just within the compound gate. It was still shut. Ernchester must have turned back the moment he'd dragged it out of range of the fire.

"She's asleep."

Asher raised his head, his brown hair hanging in his eyes, his face burning in the cold air under a film of sweat, soot, and grime. Ernchester knelt beside the trunk, one arm resting along its lid, the reflection of the flames imparting gory color to his narrow face, glittering in his close-cropped fair hair, his haunted, weary eyes.

"Drugged, I think," Ernchester went on softly. "That is... as well. Thank you."

Asher looked back across the gardens. The front part of the main house was in flames. The rear wing, where Fairport's office and his own rooms had been, was still intact. By the flaring light two bodies were clearly visible on the gravel paths.

He fumbled in his pocket for Fairport's keys, found two that would open the trunk's heavy latches. Ernchester touched his hand lightly as he would have opened the lid. "Not yet. The air will revive her, and I don't think I could stand that. I won't do that to her." The earl straightened his back, though he remained kneeling, one hand atop the other on the lid of the trunk. "Take her away from here. Go with her back to England. Take her out of this place. I beg you." He closed his eyes. "I beg you."

Firelight picked out the sudden lines around his eyes, the set of the thin lips- a face no one would notice, thought Asher, except that it was not a nineteenth-century face, much less one that belonged to this newborn era. The muscles, the speech, the expressions that had formed the mouth and chin and the set of the cheeks were all from some earlier time, and the years had not changed them.

"I can't repay you," he added softly. "I won't be seeing you, nor anyone known to you, ever again. I will owe you this favor, this boon, for all of time. But please make sure she gets home all right. Tell her-" His voice did not break but halted for a moment, almost as if he sought words. "Tell her that she is all that I ever wanted, and all that I ever had."

Then he raised first the outer lid, then the inner, to reveal the woman sleeping within.

The living dead, they had been called. By the fevered glare of the firelight she looked, indeed, both alive and dead: waxen, still, unbreathing, with her dark hair scattered about her, the linen of her gown not whiter than the flesh it covered. And beautiful, thought Asher. Beautiful beyond words.

Looking up, he saw Ernchester's face, without expression, as though all expression had grown too much to be supported under the weight of endless years, save for his eyes.

Ernchester bent a little to touch his wife's cheek, then leaned down to kiss her lips. To Asher he said, "She'll wake soon. Tell her that I love her. Always." Yellow light flared higher as flames ran along the roof of the main house. Asher turned, startled, in time to see a spindly figure move on the balcony, work and thrust itself to its feet, wobbling and off balance. Disheveled white hair caught the light, and the lenses of his spectacles made great rounds of burning amber as he turned his head. Staggering, Fairport began to descend the stairs. Asher shouldn't have been able to hear it under the roaring of the fire, but he did. Thin, silvery laughter, like the breaking of wafer-frail glass, and beneath that, the obscene toad-croak of a bass chuckle. They seemed to hover on the balcony, and on the stair, not quite touched by the fire's light, as if visibility were something to be put on or off at will, but at one point Asher thought that one of them wore a dress the color of web and moonlight. Fairport cried under the gag and fell, rolling down the stairs. They floated after him, half-seen migraine visions of alabaster faces, shining hands, eyes that caught the light as had those of the rats among the bones of St. Roche. At the foot of the steps he tried to get to his feet, falling heavily and trying again, and they ringed him, like porpoises playing, flickering shadows of a force he had entirely underestimated, following him as he scrabbled and heaved along the ground.

They let him get quite some distance before they began to feed. With a roar, the roof of the stables fell in, curtains of flame leaping higher, yellower, beating upon yet somehow failing to completely illuminate what was happening in the court. Then a deeper roar, like a battery of eight-inch guns, and the earth jarred underfoot as the kerosene went up. Beside Asher, Anthea cried out, "Charles!" and sat up suddenly, her brown eyes wide with terror. Asher caught her hand. Her gaze met his, clouded with old dreams. "The stones. The stones exploded with the heat." Then she flinched and turned her face away, and Asher realized that for a moment she had thought she was still in London, many years before, when the whole of that city burned.

She said again, "Charles," and when she looked at him then, her eyes were clear. "He's gone."

She started to rise, and he closed his hand hard on hers, draw-ing her back and knowing he had no way to hold her if she simply wrenched herself free. She could have broken his wrist, or his neck, with very little effort. She looked at him again, questioning and pleading, her black curls a cloud around her face and shoulders, the flame a soaked gold in her eyes.

"He told me to take you back to England," Asher said. "To see that you reached there safely. He said that he would not see me- and, I presume, you-again. He said that he loves you, always and forever."

In the courtyard the vampires had sunk down in a ring around Fairport, whose frantic noises had risen to a muffled crescendo, then ceased. Asher wondered what he'd do if Anthea vanished, as Ernchester had, flickering away like a ghost in the woods to seek him. He'd never make it back to Vienna.

For a moment he thought she would. Then she, too, glanced across at the dark shapes in the firelight. Just for a moment her pale tongue slipped out and brushed her lips.

But when she turned to him, her eyes were a woman's eyes. "Do you know where he's gone?"

"Thursday." Lydia stared blankly at the newspaper by the glare of the station lights. "Thursday night. We were still in Paris."

Margaret whispered, "Oh, my God," through hands pressed to her mouth.

"I thought... I thought I'd have a little more time to catch up with him. That things wouldn't happen so quickly."

Ysidro reappeared at their side, trailed by a laconic individual in a Slovak's baggy white britches who, at his command, loaded Ysidro's trunk and portmanteau, Margaret's satchel, and Lydia's voluminous possessions onto a trolley that he pushed away in the direction of the doors. The vampire tweaked the newspaper from Lydia's hands, and read.

DOCTOR PERISHES IN SANITARIUM FIRE Early yesterday evening the well-known sanitarium "Fruhlingzeit" burned to the ground in a conflagration of epic proportions, claiming the life of the man who had made it his life-work and monument. The body of the most distinguished English specialist in rejuvenatory medicine, Dr. Bedford Fairport, whose work has contributed to the comfort and healing of hundreds of men and women in Vienna over the past eighteen years, was found in the smoking ruins by police constables and firefighters in the early hours of Friday morning. According to the Vienna police, foul play is suspected.