Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

"But I can see!" she sobbed. "Every day I can see. You beat him at cards all the time now..."

"I've had a week of continuous practice," Lydia pointed out.

"You could never beat him if he weren't fighting to keep the other powers of his mind intact! To preserve himself..."

"Thank you very much." Head aching with weariness-for it was close to three in the morning-Lydia stepped around her. It was true that Ysidro had grown very gaunt- true, too, that a week ago he would never have dropped the cards, never would even have allowed the girls to see him gather them.

He could not mask things from them as he had. Or was he saving his strength for other matters?

"Margaret, do we need to talk about this now? I'm tired, you're tired, I suspect you don't mean everything you're saying-"

"How can you be so blind!" Margaret went on frantically, unheeding, following her back to the bed. "Can't you see? He can't turn people's minds aside in the train stations like he used to, or listen down the train cars, reading their dreams..."

Lydia's overwrought temper snapped. "Or put little scenes of dancing the waltz- which wasn't even invented in the sixteenth century-into yours? I'm sorry," she said immediately, as Margaret burst into a storm of tears at this brutally accurate accusation. "I shouldn't have said that..."

"You don't understand!" Margaret shouted wildly. "You don't understand him! All you care about is finding your boring old stick of a husband and helping him play spies, and you can't see the great-souled, noble, lonely, tragic hero you're destroying!"

She blundered from the room like a bee trying to get out of a potting shed. Lydia heard the banister creak as she stumbled against it, heard the running judder of her footsteps descend the two long, C-shaped flights of stairs.

"Margaret!" She grabbed her spectacles from the dressing table and ran after her, catching handfuls of taffeta skirt to race down the steps, the tile of them cold under her stockinged feet. Below her she heard the door bang, and she followed, appalled, into the covered carriageway in time to see the heavy outer gate swing shut on its hinges.

"Margaret!" Through her concern she thought obliquely, Well, that does it for this pair of stockings-even in the relatively clean suburb of Pera the streets were nothing to explore unshod. Two small sconces illuminated the courtyard behind her, and the candle before a saint's icon in a niche flecked the underside of the carriageway's brick vault with wavering light. Past the gate the street was like a cave a thousand feet beneath the earth.

Lydia stopped on the threshold, as if that abyssal dark were a chasm gaping before her feet.

Margaret gasped somewhere, and there was a suggestion of movement, pale in blackness. The shred of moonlight picked out a white face, like a skull's, a scrap of spiderweb hair. A moment later Lydia's eyes, adjusting, made out the white hands, holding Margaret by the wrists. Margaret threw herself wordlessly to his chest, clutching and weeping.

Ysidro must have spoken, so softly Lydia did not hear. Lydia herself had been exasperated to the slapping point with Margaret's clinging, mooning, and silent reproaches, but she had never seen the vampire anything but patient and understanding with the woman he had made his slave. Of course he understood her, thought Lydia bitterly, watching as Ysidro bent his head to listen to some muffled, hysterical rant; watching Margaret's skinny hands grab at his sleeves, his shoulders, the long folds of his cloak. If he hadn't understood her, he couldn't have baited the trap.

Illuminated only by the frail gleam from the window above, they seemed figures in a distant stage show, almost like a dream. Margaret flung back her head, gazing up into Ysidro's face, then with a passionate gesture she ripped open her shirtwaist, baring her throat and her white, soft-fleshed bosom. "Take me!"

Lydia heard her gasp. "Even unto death, if that is what you need!"

What Ysidro replied Lydia didn't know. But she saw him draw the edges of Margaret's shirtwaist together, put his hands on her shoulders, speaking quietly as she bowed her head. When he began to guide her back along the lane to the gate once more, Lydia retreated soundlessly into the courtyard, concealing herself in the dense shadows of the pomegranate tree, so that Margaret would be spared the embarrassment of knowing that the encounter had been observed. For a moment they stood framed in the carriageway's arch. Ysidro must have said something else, for Lydia saw Margaret nod and push up her eyeglasses to mop her cheeks. Then the door shut behind her as she went in.

Lydia heard nothing for a time, though she knew that Ysidro had not gone inside; and indeed, moments later, the dimmest crack of light showed when he opened the gate again and stood for a moment looking out. That slit vanished; he emerged into the courtyard like an errant ghost and crossed to her hiding place as if he had seen her all along.

"I could wish her to have reserved such theatrics for another place and time." "Yes." Irritated as she had been with Margaret, her greatest anger still lay toward him. She folded her arms against the cold. "It's a nuisance, isn't it, when people decide to feel more than you've scheduled them to feel?" "It is." He might have been agreeing that today was Saturday. The moon was sinking; only the glow from the votives by the kitchen door showed her the garden before them. "Yet the dreams she dreams are not all of my making. And I admit I will feel safer to know that the two of you sleep in the one bed, which I trust you will hang about, as you did in Sofia and Belgrade, with those stinking weeds you have carried with you since Paris."

The chilly breeze from the Asian hills stirred the last leaves high overhead. A stray breath of it flared the votive lights, showing her briefly Ysidro's face, eyes darkened by shadow to skull-like sockets and cheekbones hollowed to bruises. Remembering what he had said about mirrors, Lydia wondered suddenly if he was actually thinning away before her to a wraith of ectoplasm and bone, or if what was thinning was simply his ability to make her believe that she saw him other than he truly was.

"The Galata slums at the base of the hill and the high streets of Pera with their embassies and their banks, they all smell of vampires." The flame repeated itself, cold yellow crystal in his eyes. "Standing just now on the steps of the Yusek Kalderim, I stretched forth my mind across the Golden Horn, and the city lies under such miasma as I have never encountered before. The minds of vampires, the mind of the master, other minds... I can smell them, heft them like silk in my hand. But everything is blocked, shadowed, wreathed in illusion and deception, as if every card on the board were down-turned, and one had to wager all one had on a hand of three."

He frowned and turned to look once more at the gate. Involuntarily Lydia stepped closer to him, her anger forgotten. "Are you sure? You've said yourself you aren't as... as able to perceive..."

A wry line sketched itself in the corner of his mouth, the echo of a living man's ironic smile. "A regret, mistress? A concern for the fact that you have asked me not to kill to preserve my own life, only to discover that such abstinence may prevent me from preserving yours?"

She studied his face a moment, trying to read something in the twin sulfur glints of his eyes. They were like a dragon's in their hollows. "No," she said. "A concern, maybe, but not a regret."

"No," he echoed softly. "A lady worthy to her bones."

It was, she realized, the first time he had spoken to her of her stipulation.

Then he shook his head and looked back to the gate and the inky, pitch blackness that lay beyond.

"And Jamie?" She found she could barely speak his name. It was hard even to ask, for fear Ysidro would tell her what she had dreaded for days to hear. His brow flinched, just barely, in a frown. "If he is here, he is not in Pera." There was almost hesitation, an unwillingness in his voice. "If he sleeps on the Stamboul shore..." He shook his head. "No, my perceptions are impaired, but this is not a matter of degree. This-shadow, this-blurring that lies over the city... it is something that emanates from the vampires themselves. An obscurity, gathered to hide aught within it. A fog, as they say the Undead can summon..."