Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

As the train slowed, the lights from its windows caught the black-glass combs of choppy sea beneath the railway embankment. Where the land curved, the old sea wall rose above the tracks, dark houses with outthrust upper floors growing from the ancient masonry like mushrooms from a riven oak.

Ysidro produced a gold pocket watch. "Twenty of one," he said approvingly. "Only two hours late. Excellent, for the Ottoman lands."

After coming into Sofia four and a half hours late, with the sky like wet slate and Margaret in hysterics as if she, not Ysidro, would be destroyed by the light of the dawn, Lydia could only be thankful. On that occasion, while the Sofia train lurched and stopped and started all through the shelterless hills of Thrace, Ysidro had grown quieter and, when he spoke, more incisive. Though Lydia did not know exactly how much light was necessary to trigger the photoreactive properties of the vampire flesh, she gathered that they had reached the Terminus Hotel in Sofia, and Ysidro had taken his usual leave of them, with only minutes to spare.

This had led to a furious and not very coherent scene with Margaret, in whose aftermath Lydia still felt embarrassed. The younger woman had accused Lydia of "not caring anything about" Ysidro, of "using people up like old dishes, and then throwing them away when they break." When Lydia had pointed out that at any time Ysidro could have retreated to his coffin trunk and trusted the girls to get him to safety, Margaret had screamed, "If you'd ever had anything to do with earning your own living, without having everything you ever wanted just handed to you on a silver plate, you'd have learned you can't treat people that way when they're trying to help you!"

In view of Ysidro's relations with Margaret, this had struck Lydia as so outrageous that she'd simply said, "Oh, stop behaving like an idiot," and had gone into the suite's single bedroom and closed the door. She'd been far too exhausted by her own fears to remain awake long, but during the few minutes she'd spent stripping off her outer clothing, petticoats, and corsets, she'd heard Margaret sobbing hysterically in the parlor. When she emerged, not much refreshed, hours later, it had been to see the governess sprawled unprettily on the sofa, face flushed, shirtwaist off, and corsets unlaced, sound asleep. They'd made up after a fashion, as traveling companions must, but their never- easy relations remained strained. Now Margaret mumbled, "You should have waked me sooner," when Lydia shook her.

"We're here. Constantinople." She didn't mention that Ysidro had done his best to keep the woman asleep.

Margaret pulled a comb out of her handbag and straightened her hair, with nervous glances at Ysidro as if he hadn't seen her in rumpled slumber for many nights. Only then did she turn to the window and say in disappointment, "Oh. You can't see anything."

Across tumbled onyx water a long curve of lights glimmered as if a congregation of shepherds had kindled watch fires on the point. Here and there, close to the tracks, reflected light showed a thumb smudge of honey-colored walls, but for the most part the city was dark. The high, dark backbone of the land was studded by minarets and domes under the gibbous moon's waning light: the embodiment of formless dreams, a dark suggestion of labyrinth hoarding darkness within. No, thought Lydia. You didn't see it. You drank it, and it left you filled with an indescribable sense of hunger, and loss, and grief.

"They called it the City of Walls," Ysidro said softly. "The City of Palaces. Like a Kipling treasure guarded by a cobra, they have fought over it, or feared it, for all the long centuries since the emperors departed from Rome. Not even those who won it, who dwelled in it, ever knew it all."

Like James looking at the towers of Oxford, thought Lydia, and calling them each by its name. Did he name in his heart each dome, each quartet of spires, against that lambent sky? "Were you ever here?" Margaret edged possessively closer to him, took his arm-though Lydia knew he hated to be touched-and looked into his face.

Ysidro smiled, for her. "Once," he said in a voice that promised her new dreams.

Over her head his eyes met Lydia's, enigmatic, and looked away.

The train chuffed to a stop at a small station beneath the beetling towers of an old fortress gate. Up close the ambience was anything but exotic. The station was Western, stuccoed and painted the same ochre hue so common in Vienna, and by the harsh electric lamps Lydia saw the grannies and goats, the gentlemen in red fezzes and black coats, the Greeks in full white pants and the Bulgarians with their crated chickens and straw suitcases, get on and off with the leisured air of those who know the train isn't going anywhere in a hurry. The stink of slums and tanneries was thick hereabouts, and there were, Lydia noticed, a lot of soldiers in the stations, clothed in modern khaki uniforms, nothing like the colorful warriors of tales.

"Those aren't the janissaries, are they?" she asked, and Ysidro's yellow eyes developed the smallest of twinkles, like a fugitive star, at the bottom of their cold, ironic depths. Despite the insectile thinness of his face and its white- silk pallor, he looked briefly human.

"The corps of the janissaries was abolished a century ago- massacred wholesale, in fact, by order of the Sultan Murad, who wished to establish a modern army. This past July that modern army returned the favor by deposing the current Sultan and converting him by force into the type of constitutional monarch fashionable among those who like to style themselves enlightened."

"You mean there isn't a Sultan anymore?" Margaret sounded like a child who has been told on the twenty-fourth of December that Father Christmas has been pensioned off to a villa in the south of France.

"July..." Lydia said thoughtfully. "The printer's deadline for my monograph on the effects of ultraviolet light on the hypothalamus was August fifteenth... And I never can remember whether they're on our side or Germany's. So it couldn't have been the Sultan who sent for Ernchester?"

"It may well be," Ysidro said. "He is not without power, even yet. But if he thinks to regain it by bringing in a vampire whom he hopes to control, he reckons without the Master of Constantinople."

The train lurched and began its slow, rocking progress again, the city growing above them in thick accretions of shadow, lamps, and ancient walls shrouded in vine.

"Who is the Master of Constantinople?" Lydia asked quietly.

They were all three clustered by the windows of the compartment, looking out over the inky water toward the lights of Seraglio Point and the dim hills of Asia beyond.

"In my day it was not considered a wise thing to speak his name." Ysidro turned back to the table and gathered the cards. He fumbled, dropping them; Margaret sprang at once to help him but he'd retrieved them already, slipped them into the paper band that usually encircled the pack, secreted them in a pocket of his mouse- gray coat.

"He was a sorcerer in life, a title which could mean anything from a theoretical alchemist to a student of the properties of herbs. Certainly he was a poisoner, possibly an astronomer, though one does not always keep these things up. He wielded tremendous power, before and after his death, with the Viziers of the Sublime Porte. Legends said that certain of the sultans gifted him with prisoners, that he might feast upon their deaths, though considering the size of the beggar population of Constantinople, I do not find this at all likely or necessary. And as Juvenal says, 'Foolish is he who puts his trust in princes.' Personally, I wouldn't touch any edible offered me by any of the sultans."

Ysidro put out a hand again, to steady himself on the wall as the train swung around the rocky slope of a hill and lurched into another suburban station.