Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

"I saw her footmarks when I returned to the cistern stair," he said. "They were unclear, and I had to look on the walkway to be sure she had not passed that way going out." He paused and added something Lydia knew enough Spanish to identify. "You chose her because she was stupid," she reminded him softly. "Stupid and loyal. What she feels for you was your doing."

"It is one matter to follow a husband whom you know to be walking eyeless and unarmed into treachery." They passed into a chamber, crossed layers of dust- thick carpet and ascended a rickety stair to a balcony enclosed by lattice- down another stair and so out again. "You sought advice in the matter, recognizing your limitations, and his. It is another matter to pursue needlessly one to whom you will be naught but a liability, only to tell him what he already knows.

"This is no safe place, not for her to walk, nor for us to call out, nor to hold aloft lamps that she may see their light."

"This is the harem, isn't it?" The name conjured images hopelessly romantic to Lydia's mind, but the room they entered-and indeed, all the rooms along this lightless slit-even unfurnished, seemed poky and cramped in the filtered rays from some other wing of the building. The walls were plain plaster, unpainted, dirty and mildewed. The divans were lumpy and far lower than Lydia had pictured from storybooks, about the thickness of a good mattress. The carpets were threadbare, smelling of mice and rotted perfume.

"I thought the palace hasn't been used since the fifties."

"Not as the Sultan's residence." The voice might almost have been the exhalation of dust from the carpets underfoot. "It was the center of government until last July. But a part of the old seraglio is where he put women who belonged to his father or his grandfather, or girls who failed to please him. Here they dwell still, with their servants-fewer, but much as they used. In the heyday of this place they slept, four and five to a room, the ones who did not catch his fancy, seeing no one but the eunuchs and each other, seldom even seeing the sun."

In the almost dark she saw him touch the wall in passing. "They lived upon opium, many of them; opium and intrigue. The walls here sweat with their pettiness, their boredom, and their tears."

His eyelids lowered and he tilted his head, listening. "There," he whispered. He guided her with swift and weightless stride down a stair as steep as hell's abyss and so dark she couldn't see the steps thereof. Later on, safe in her own bed in Pera, Lydia wondered a little at her absolute trust in him, her willingness to step forward in utter darkness, propelled by his hand. Not, she thought, that Ysidro would have given her any choice.

Margaret stood in the midst of a large chamber that once had a sunken pool in its center, now only an oval of shell-edged shadow. Marble lattices covered the windows on three sides; a divan circled the chamber, and slanting squares of light no bigger than tea sandwiches strewed the dirty and mouse-ravaged cushions. The whole room choked of mildew.

She had no lamp in her hands now, as if she'd set it down somewhere and left it forgotten. In the checkered glow from the windows her face was blank; behind the thick lenses of her spectacles, her eyes were those of a sleepwalker.

She looked beautiful, as she had looked in her dreams.

Lydia found herself alone in the tiled entryway looking at Ysidro as he turned Margaret's head gently, so that he could see the exposed-and unmarked-whiteness of her throat.

"Margharita," the vampire whispered. The girl startled like one waking.

Then Margaret's breath drew in a hoarse gasp, and she flung herself on Ysidro, clutching him with desperate, grabby hands. The next second, past his shoulder, she saw Lydia, like some bespectacled, prosaic ghost with her train a cascade of lace over one kid-gloved arm, her shoulders draped in the faded web of an old silk shawl. Margaret backed quickly. "I... are you all right?" It wasn't to Lydia that she spoke.

"Indeed." The vampire inclined his head politely. "Less so than I had been, had I not come back to this place to seek you, however. It were foolish of you to follow me, Margharita, for your reputation's sake alone, and your safety's. And mine, and Mistress Asher's, too, coming to find you here. Now let us return, ere our absence causes remark; and I warn you, do not come after me thus again." His voice never rose above its usual even key, nor did its tone change one whit from the polite phrases of his accustomed speech, but Lydia cringed inside as if at sarcasm or curses. Margaret's cheeks flushed dark and she looked away, and for a moment Lydia had the impression she would have fled, plunging into the unknown labyrinth of the deeper harem, had not Ysidro laid an imperative hand on her arm. Her voice trembled as she looked back at him with tear-filled blue eyes. "I was only afraid..."

"Afraid?" He smiled his chilly smile, manufactured, Lydia guessed, to cover the remainder of his anger. Still, the impact of it was startling, the echo of an astringent charm that had been the living man's. "That I should find peril here beyond my capacity, from which you could save me?" No expression, no inflection; he had been dead, Lydia recalled, a long time. But still she guessed the smallest twinkle of banter, far back in the sulfur-crystal eyes.

Margaret didn't. She only hung her head and snuffled, and suffered Ysidro to take her arm and lead her through the maze to the perilous cistern stair, and thence back along the terrace where the harem ladies had gone to their lord. As they passed through a vast court above a terrace and pool, where shuttered windows hovered tier upon tier above their heads, Lydia thought she saw the glow of a lamp left under one of the ramshackle stairways, and made to turn aside. "Leave it," Ysidro said softly. "It will only draw those we have little desire to meet."

Lydia removed her spectacles again and folded the shawl inconspicuously in the cloakroom before reentenng the diplomat-crowded salon. She concentrated, through the remainder of the reception, on avoiding an encounter with the straight, graceful figure in the crimson uniform of the Hungarian Life Guards.

"You watch out for that Razumovsky, mind," Lady Clapham said to her as they were getting into the carriages. "And watch that girl of yours."

Startled, Lydia turned to regard Margaret, being helped by servants into the embassy coach. Soldiers clustered in the small square, torchlight throwing sharp flares on their rifles, for warning had come of sporadic fighting among the Armenians in Galata that might spread to Stamboul.

"I really don't think we need worry," she said. "I happen to know her heart is... otherwise engaged." To someone, moreover, infinitely more dangerous than a Russian nobleman.

"I mean watch what she says." Her Ladyship drew Lydia a little farther back into the darkness of the gate. The shadows of the soldiers wavered drunkenly across the vine- grown brick wall opposite, behind which the silent domes of the Aya Sofia slept in the dark.

"And what you say. Razumovsky isn't a fool, and he knows perfectly well your husband didn't come to Constantinople to interview storytellers. That treaty the King signed won't cut much ice if the Czar sees a chance of getting a point ahead of us, either here or in India."

Lydia sighed, reassured her hostess and shook her head inwardly as she took Sir Burnwell's hand to ascend to the coach. At least everyone in the world had cardiovascular systems and endocrine glands, and there wasn't any argument over those. For a moment she thought longingly of the Radcliffe Infirmary, where things were safe and in their places-was Pickering keeping proper graphs of the long- term weight gain of those subjects? She had no idea what she'd tell the editors of the Journal of Internal Research about her article. I'm sorry, I had to go to Constantinople to rescue my husband from vampires.