Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

There were electric lights here, too, and soldiers armed with businesslike Enfields.

"It is probably best," he said, "that the master of this city not be spoken of in any terms until we are in Pera."

Another of Ysidro's gruff local henchmen awaited them in the square before the main Gare of Stamboul, this one a Greek- whom Ysidro addressed in Spanish-with the usual wagon and horses. Lydia had removed her glasses before leaving the train compartment, but the moment they were settled on the high seat and moving off through the tangle of drays, donkey carts, and foot passengers, she sneaked them back on, gazing around her in wonderment. At the foot of the square the dark waters of the Golden Horn flashed with the lights of ships moored there, and even at nearly two in the morning the lights of small boats could be seen plying between the Stamboul shore and the lamp-flecked hills of Pera on the other side.

Black streets swallowed them, and for a few minutes Lydia could no more than guess at the houses crowding above, balconies-sometimes entire upper stories- jutting overhead as if grabbing for airspace, here and there the low glimmer of lamps behind thick latticework. Cats' eyes flashed everywhere, and the smell of goats and dogs and human waste was like a curtain thick enough to be touched with the hand. Lamps in iron cages showed her the somber glory of a mosque half veiled in Stygian gloom as they passed through a square, a note of great age on the lighted threshold of a modern iron bridge.

On the bridges other side the houses were European-or Greek, with white walls like clotted cream in the moonlight. They wound their way uphill to a tree-grown public square lying beneath a splendid Italianate palace of pale golden stone.

"The British Embassy," came Ysidro's soft voice. "I trust you ladies will present yourselves to the Right Honorable Mr. Lowther in the morning. For many years the embassies have been the true power here."

As usual, Ysidro had wired ahead for lodgings, this time a pink-washed Greek- style house whose stone-flagged arch led into a court shaded by a massive pomegranate tree, staffed by three thickset Greek women, evidently a mother and two daughters, who smiled and replied "Parakalo-parakalo..." to everything Lydia said.

As at Belgrade, Sofia, and Adrianople, once Lydia's trunks and portmanteaus and hatboxes and baskets of herbs were carried upstairs, Ysidro climbed into the wagon once more and disappeared to some secret lodging of his own.

"You can't ask him to continue what he's doing."

Lydia turned, startled, the moss-green velvet of her dressing gown weighting her arms. Tomorrow she'd present herself, not only to the Right Honorable G. A. Lowther, but, armed with Mr. Halliwell's letters of introduction, to Sir Burnwell Clapham, the attache in charge of what were nebulously referred to as "affairs." It was entirely possible, she thought, that Jamie would be there, or Jamie would be somewhere close. Oh, yes, Dr. Asher. He arrived last week...

Please, she thought, shivering inside. Please...

Margaret stood awkwardly in the doorway of the single large bedroom the two women would share. As in Vienna, in Belgrade and Sofia, it was not by their choice- even had relations between them not been strained, Lydia would have preferred to be spared her companion's nocturnal sighs and mutterings in dreams.

But in no house had more than one bed been made up, nor could the servants anywhere be induced to do so. In the small connecting chamber, Lydia had already found the dismantled pieces of a massive four-poster that looked as if it had been ordered from Berlin at the height of the Gothic craze. Its sister ship filled most of this room, the bright pink-and-blue local work of its coverlet incongruously gay; the dressing table, mirrored armoire, and marble-topped washstand had clearly been ordered en suite, and though the room was large, with a bay projecting over the street, they gave it a cluttered feeling, jammed and awkward.

At least, thought Lydia, they weren't strewn with the porcelain knickknacks featured in their Belgrade lodgings, and the whitewashed plaster walls were free of garish oleographs of Orthodox saints.

She turned from the armoire, the robe still in her hands. "What?"

"You forbade him..." Margaret hesitated, and her wide blue eyes shifted as she sought another word. "You forbade him to hunt," she said at last. "As a condition of letting him travel with you, of letting him protect you." Her voice stammered and she twisted at her black-gloved hands. "Now that we've reached our destination, you really don't have any right to continue... to continue..."

Frozen in mid-motion, Lydia only stared at her, too shocked to speak.

Margaret, who had clearly hoped that she would say something and spare her the completion of her sentence-and in fact the completion of her own thought-trailed off uncertainly, and for a moment there was only the clutch and jerk of her breath. Then she burst out, "You don't understand him!"

"You keep saying that." Lydia crossed to the bed and dropped the robe beside the nightgown the maid had laid out, and began to unbutton her shirtwaist. The tiny pearl fastenings of the sleeves were awkward, but she'd dismissed the servant after she'd unpacked for them, and didn't know enough modern Greek to summon her back. She wondered what the servants had made of the silver knives and silver- loaded gun among the masses of petticoats, skirts, shirtwaists, lingerie, and dinner dresses-wondered, too, if she could communicate to them a request to purchase garlic, whitethorn, and wild rose on the morrow. Or as Ysidro's servants, would they refuse to obey such a request?

Margaret reached out and took her by the sleeve, her face bracketed with lines of distress deepened by the lamps' heavy shadows. "You can't forbid him to hunt!" she insisted desperately. "It isn't as if he... as if the people he... he takes..."

"You mean 'kills'?"

She flinched from the word but lashed back almost at once with, "It isn't as if they didn't deserve it!"

Lydia only stood for a time, her fingers still on the pearl buttons but her task forgotten. When she spoke, her voice was very quiet. "Did he tell you that?"

"I know it!" The governess was on the brink of tears. "Yes, he told me! I mean, I know- I mean, in the past-in past life-times-in dreams I've had about our former lives together... And don't tell me they're all lies," she veered away suddenly, "because I know they're not! I know you think they are, but they're really not! They're not!"

She flung herself in front of Lydia when Lydia tried to turn away, her face red, blotchy as if with the approach of tears. "You see, if a vampire doesn't... doesn't hunt to completion..."

She was still avoiding the word "kill."

"They feed on the energy, the life, the vital force!" she went on in a rush. "It's the life they take that gives their minds the powers they need to protect themselves!"

"You mean to kill other people?"

"You're starving him to death!" Margaret cried. "Robbing him of his powers to defend himself from danger, now, here, where the peril is the greatest! That's why vampires take so long to hunt, or at least why he takes so long to hunt, he told me, because he's hunting the streets of the city to find a thief, a murderer, a... a blackguard who deserves to die! You know the world is full of them. He's hunted that way for hundreds and hundreds of years! It's only from those kind of people that he takes the life he needs! And he's too honorable to go against his given word to you..."

"Did he ask you to speak to me?" Lydia's voice was as cold to her own ears as the silver on her neck.

"No." Margaret sniffled and wiped furiously at her eyes, fighting not to break down in front of this slender auburn and white reed of a girl, this spoiled heiress- beauty with her waist unbuttoned to show the heavy links of silver chain, row upon row of them, around the stem of her throat.