Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

They stopped, suddenly, in a room with a bare wooden floor. By their silence Asher knew why.

"Nothing?" The voice was brown velvet, roses, and gold.

By the shift of Zardalu's grip, Asher knew that he bowed. "Nothing, Lord."

In his blindness he heard the dense rustle of silk, but only when it was close enough that he could smell coffee, incense, ammonia... blood.

"Yet you have done passing well. Habib, my sweet, is that sarigi burtna for me? What a dirty little thing she is. And ah, Pelageya..." Asher could almost see him bow, and there was a momentary scuffle, the swish of clothing and a stifled grunt of terror as the young man suddenly, belatedly, realized that he stood in the presence of smiling death.

A hand like animate steel brushed the side of Asher's face, almost in a caress. The scarf was slipped aside. Eyes that had once been coffee-dark but had been bleached, by a trick of the vampire state, to a garish and unnatural orange blinked into his by the glow of oil lamps close overhead.

Olumsiz Bey stepped back.

He was as tall as Asher-six feet-and nearly as thin, but his shoulders stooped, giving the narrow, hairless head an uptilted angle like a tortoise's. The nose was an ax blade such as might have hewed the lipless mouth into existence with a single stroke, but it was not an unhandsome face. In one ear he wore a huge chunk of amber, as orange as his eyes, in which an ant was trapped, so big that Asher could see the curve of its serrated jaws; one almost expected to see other insects locked in the frozen prisons of his real eyes as well.

"It is probably well," Olumsiz Bey said to him in the flowery Osmanli of the court, "that you return to your chamber now, Scheherazade, and remain there for the balance of the night. The tales we will tell tonight are not for the ears of the living."

Asher's eyes went past him to the fledglings, grouped closely now around a husky young man with a prominent nose and dark, thickly curling hair. The young man was staring around him, growing horror struggling against wine and whatever glamours Pelageya had laid upon his mind, taking in the rich garden of blue and yellow tiles in the hall and the way darkness waited in every corner. Asher took it in, too, printing it in his mind...Habib, a coarse and powerful vampire who seemed to be special friends with Haralpos, carried, as Asher had deduced, a sleeping beggar girl of twelve or so, holding her against his shoulder as if she were an infant.

"Sayyed has already taken food thither for you," the Master of Constantinople went on. "And books-if you will pardon my presumption in choosing them for you- to beguile with old legends the passing of the night. There will be... a little sport here." His smile had a flex, a curve to it, like a reflex that his eyes had long ago forgotten or had never known. He gestured with his right hand, for his left never loosened its hold on his silver-bladed weapon, which glittered whitely in the many-hued glow of the bronze lamps overhead.

The eyes of the fledglings threw back that glow, cats waiting to be fed.

The Armenian boy made a little noise of terror and tried to pull his arms free of Pelageya's grip and Haralpos', but he could not. Asher smelled urine as the boy pissed himself. He would give them the run they wanted, Asher thought bitterly, through all the dark galleries of that accursed house.

And all the while he repeated silently to himself, A cobbled courtyard beyond this place, smaller cobbles, right through a door, across a hall, down a narrow stair and then another twice as deep...

The place of silver bars, where Zardalu said the dastgah was, smelling of chemicals...

And a voice that screamed its despair to the dark.

There was only one person he could think of whom the Bey would hold prisoner behind silver bars.

"My children forget themselves sometimes in their chase."

He jerked his mind back-the Bey must not guess his abstraction.

"Yes, I really think it best if you remain in your chamber, and if any call out to you, save me alone, I suggest that you do not answer. My darling..."

The Bey's jeweled right hand caressed Zardalu's cheek.

There was an impassive flicker behind the sapphire eyes, nothing more.

"I will take this one back to his chamber. Have Habib bring the child to my own room." He held up the scarf that had covered Asher's eyes, extended it to his fledgling once more. "Be so good as to conduct my other guest of this evening back to the usual meeting place. Remember, I will know it if the slightest ill befalls him. Indeed, I shall know it if you so much as speak to him, as you did to this one, and he to you." The smile again, cold as his grip. "And I will not be pleased. Is this understood?"

Zardalu bowed again, bending his long boneless form so that his black curls fell forward over his shoulder and swept the wooden planks of the floor. "This is understood, Lord."

"Come." Olumsiz Bey beckoned to someone who had stood all this time in the gloom of the room's inner doorway, and switched to German, perfectly contemporary and without accent or inflection. "This man will take you outside. I guarantee that you need not fear him."

"I have no fear within your house, or anywhere that I walk, under your protection, my lord." Ignace Karolyi stepped from the darkness, his light brown Saville Row suit as incongruous in that setting as a khaki-uniformed Tommy with an Enfield would have been at Marathon. He stopped before Asher for a moment, regarding him with sudden, narrowed speculation in his wide-set brown eyes. Then he turned back to Olumsiz Bey and bowed.

"I trust that I am forgiven, my lord, and that terms between us can still be reached?"

The Bey regarded him with strange eyes, holding his silver weapon before him, the edge glittering in the light. "This remains to be seen. As all things do, it rests in the hand of God."

"I don't see why he can't come with us." Margaret Potton stepped down from the embassy carriage at Lydia's heels, and, trailed by a Greek footman, hurried in the wake of the formidable Lady Clapham, a tall, thin, horse-faced individual whom Lydia had guessed at once to be the headwoman of the British diplomatic community in Pera. "You could introduce him as your cousin. When you told Sir Burnwell that you had a cousin here in Constantinople, I thought it was a good idea."

"I told him that in case we have to produce Ysidro in an emergency," Lydia replied, patient and somewhat bemused, but without anger. "I don't think a diplomatic reception at the palace qualifies." Ahead of them, half glimpsed between strolling ladies in tulip-skirted ensembles and coal-scuttle hats that would not have been out of place in Paris or Vienna, Lady Clapham paused in the doorway of Mademoiselle Ursule's and looked back for her two charges. Lydia almost expected her to snap, Step along, girls, spit-spot...

"I don't know," Margaret said. "I think it would be nice for him."

Lydia shook her head but was spared further discussion by conjunction, in the doorway of the boutique, with her guide and hostess for the shopping trip and the modiste herself, a middle-aged and firmly corseted Belgian woman who apprehended instantly the difference between Lydia's two-hundred-guinea, Alice- blue raw silk and Margaret's outdated brown wool, but varied not a whit the warmth of her smiles of greeting to both. It did cross Lydia's mind, as Lady Clapham explained to Mile. Ursule what they'd come for, that Ysidro might have some difficulty these days in passing himself off as a living man.

Margaret was staggered at the news that it was for her benefit, not for Lydia's, that they had made the excursion to the fashionable European shopping quarter along the Grand Rue. "Silly goose," Lady Clapham declared, not unkindly, as the governess turned pink with pleasure. "Of course you'll accompany Mrs. Asher tonight, and you certainly can't wear what you have on."