Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

"Excuse me," Lydia said hastily. "I think I see Miss Potton and I really do need to... I'll be back in one moment..."

"Really? Where...?"

But she dodged away into the crowd.

Fortunately, a doorway connected that room and the other rear chamber of the suite. Lydia ducked through, wove her way to the door leading back into the main salon, and worked back with what speed she could-given a visual range of less than a yard, though the brilliance of the man's uniform helped in avoiding him- to the double door leading into the colonnade. The cold was sharp. Wishing she'd had time to fetch her cloak, Lydia hurried along the black and white cobbled pavement to the stairway passage in which she'd taken refuge with the prince, and gathered her point-lace train in hand to descend the sloping tunnel to the terrace beyond.

Once certain she was out of sight, she pulled her spectacles from her handbag and settled them on her nose.

What had been an impression of leafy blackness and swimming spots of color resolved itself suddenly into a sable wonderland of cypress and willow that sloped down to the indigo shimmer of the sea. Bare boughs or somber leaves were illuminated from below by a rainbow lace of colored lamps, which outlined paths and terraces like dim-burning jewels dropped on velvet.

To her left the lights traced terraces, stairways, the eaves of pale shut- windowed pavilions in a flickering web of ruby, azure, honey stars... and at the top of a flight of marble steps she saw one star was missing. A lamp had been taken.

Margaret. She didn't know why she was so sure. Gathering her train more firmly, she hastened along the terrace and up those pale steps to the gap in the line of lights.

A gem- latticed darkness of marble pavements and low box hedges spread out before her at the top, rimming deep stands of lawn and trees. The pavement led her around to the locked doors of the two pavilions overlooking the lower gardens.

Past the second pavilion's door a low arch of very old bricks pierced the wall, marble steps leading down again, through a vaulted tunnel, to the terraces below.

Had Margaret seen Ysidro in the gardens? Or only a shape she thought might be his?

She turned back to scan the colonnades, the elaborate pavilions above and behind her, but saw no movement there; neither was there any sight of the pale mousseline de soie dress in the semiwilderness of trees and long grass that lay between her and the sea. She pulled a handkerchief from her bag to shield her fingers from the heat, then picked up another lamp, the brass base beneath the bowl of ruby glass hot through both cloth and glove. One of the innumerable wild cats that lived in the half-deserted shrubberies stared at her for a moment, then poured itself away into the darkness.

What am I doing? wondered Lydia, half in disgust, as she descended the marble steps. Two minutes after the handsome Russian prince warns me "Don't investigate alone," I'm off like the heroine of a cheap thriller...

But something about the shadowy darkness of the palace, deserted once the activity around the kiosks had been left behind, filled her with fear for the sake of the younger woman. The sight of Karolyi had shaken her, and she did not think she dared either wait or go back.

The red light of the lamp caught in the curves of an iron lion posted in what had been flower beds. On a tangle of overgrown rosebush, Lydia glimpsed white threads where a petticoat hem had caught and been pulled free.

There was a door, hidden in the shadows of the three high vaults of ancient brick. It stood open. For a long time Lydia hesitated in the narrow aperture, one hand pressed to the stone jamb, the red-glowing lamp raised to look within.

The stagnant pool a few yards behind her seemed to breathe cold over her bare shoulders, an echo of the damp chill that lay before her in the dark.

Little did she know, quoted Lydia from the aforesaid cheap thriller, in an effort to push back the dread whispering at her heart, what horrors lay crouched in wait for her.

But it was only a stone stairway-used, she thought, but not recently, save for the wet tracks vaguely outlined on the upper step or two.

A woman's slippers.

Idiot, idiot, idiot. She wasn't sure if it was Miss Potton or herself to whom she referred.

At the bottom of the stairs, another open door, and a cavern vast and lost in shadows, where the ruby stain of her lamp smudged pillars, incredibly old, rising out of obsidian water to the brick vaulting of the ceiling low overhead. Of course, Lydia thought. All those pools in the gardens had to be watered from somewhere.

A walkway stretched along one side of the cistern, vanishing very quickly into darkness. Heart beating hard, hoping she'd find Margaret soon, she started along it.

"This is not a wise thing, mistress."

Ysidro's voice was barely louder than a cat's tread in the dark behind her, but somehow it didn't startle her. It was as if, for the second or two before he spoke, she knew he was there. Turning, she saw him on the walkway, dressed, as the men at the palace reception had been dressed, in black morning coat and gray- striped trousers, colorless hair framing a dead man's face.

Her breath escaped in a shaky sigh. "Coming to Constantinople was not a wise thing," she said. "I wondered what you had in that trunk of yours. Did you bring a top hat as well?"

"It is where I can reach it, should I choose to enter the pavilion."

He stepped closer and took her hand, guiding her along the path above the sable pool. The light seemed to follow, like a fish in the depths. Cold as she was, his hand on her waist was colder.

"The sultans used to bring the ladies of the harem up this way, when they watched polo or archery from the kiosks on the terrace."

"Have you found any trace of her?"

"She did not pass you, then?" In the evenness of his voice she read his irritation. He knew whom she meant and what had happened. Then, "My concentration has been on other matters. It is difficult..."

The uninflected words might have been a complete sentence instead of a broken beginning, but Lydia knew what he stopped himself from saying to her. They stood for a moment face-to-face in the open door of another stair, with the lamp between them, as they had stood in the stairway of his London crypt. The blood- hued light made him more alien still, and she had the curious sensation that if she closed her eyes his features would shift and be no longer the face he was always so careful to show the living, but the face he turned away from mirrors in order not to see himself.

'"It's my doing." She wondered what else she could say. I'm sorry I asked you not to kill innocent strangers on the streets, in the train, in the corners of this palace?

In time he said, "No. My own, for supposing I could have my way without price. I will survive it."

Another silence. Lydia remembered Margaret's white breast the night before last when she'd torn open her bodice on the empty street. She had to ask, though she knew it was none of her business. "Are you drinking her blood?"

"It would do me no good," replied the light voice, but he seemed unsurprised by the question. "It is the death we need to feed the mind's power. At this point it were too easy to kill her, did I but taste of her blood."

I should be afraid of him.

And it was her doing.

"It is no easy thing," he went on, as if he had read her thought, "to see myself in the mirror of your honor. Let us hang a shawl before it, as I do the mirrors in my house, and deal with commonplaces as we find them. You're cold."

She realized, as he guided her up the long flight, that she was trembling.

She had no impression of him leaving her side after they reached the door at the top, but somehow he had a shawl in his hands, heavy silk with a hand like cream as he draped it around her shoulders. "This is not a safe place to walk." He stretched his fingers in the direction of the lamp and in some fashion snuffed the flame without touching it. They passed into a courtyard barely wider than a hall, stairways going up and down into impenetrable night. Dark lay like the seal of death, so that he had to guide her, his fingers tombstone marble through the thin kid of her glove and his.