Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

"It has been three weeks, you sputum of Shaitan's dog!" That any vampire, let alone one as old as Olumsiz Bey, should give way to rage at all was unheard of, and the passion that cracked in his deep voice was terrifying to hear. "Five days since the breakdown, and still no word of the man! I tell you there can be no more delays!"

"Peace, m'sieu," came a more muffled-and understandably nervous-reply. "The man will be back Wednesday. Wednesday is not so very long..."

Asher hesitated, torn, sensing that whatever could so enrage the Master of Constantinople must be of paramount importance, but knowing that if he were caught standing here-much less with picklocks and candles in his pockets-he was a dead man indeed. His every instinct told him to stay, but at least, he thought dryly, moving like a shadow away from the arch, if he's shouting at his engineer he isn't listening for me...

The mental image of the Bey as he had seen him other nights, sitting still on the divan of his pillared salon, silver weapon across his knees and orange eyes half shut while he listened to the teeming dreams of the city around him, was a disturbing one.

Even as we hear the footfalls of the workmen, Zardalu had said. At least as long as he walked above the ground, if the Bey listened for them, Asher knew he could hear his.

The way that leads to the old baths.

Fashions in building came and went, and the House of Oleanders was at least five old buildings fused into a monstrous maze of dark rooms and decaying memories, but, Asher knew, plumbing remains plumbing. The elaborate system of pipes and hypocausts that made Turkish baths-and before them, Roman-was not a thing to be relocated lightly or far.

We smell the naft, the alkol, the stinks of what he does...

His mind returned to the throat-catching sharpness of the air in the crypt. A room with a wooden floor, to the left across a courtyard where grass grows between stones like cannonballs. A second flight of steps after the first... He fingered the picklocks in his pocket and drifted through the House of Oleanders like a ghost.

The solitary gleam of his candle wavered over chambers hung with printed Chinese silks whose colors showed themselves briefly; over vaulting that flickered and shone with the unmistakable dusky bronze hue of gold in shadow. He passed through an octagonal chamber whose walls were sheathed, floor to ceiling, in red tile the exact color of ripe persimmons, containing only a black-and-white wooden coffee stand; an arch looked out on a court smaller than the room itself and so choked with oleander bushes that only the dim white shape of a single statue could be seen in their midst.

Near that place he found the room he sought: the small, rich chamber of painted walls and blue and yellow tiles whose bare wooden floor thumped familiarly underfoot. From it a door let into a courtyard, long and narrow and paved in blocks of worn stone the size of halfpenny loaves, through which brown grass and weeds thrust tall.

The moon had not risen. No light touched the windows in the low buildings that surrounded the court on two sides. Roman, thought Asher, identifying the heavy rounded arches, the broken fragments of marble facing and the thick, fluted columns. What looked like the rear wall of another han closed in the third side of the court-he could just see the edge of a dome against the midnight sky-the red and white stone walls of the Turkish house, the fourth.

Under the columned porch the blackness was profound. The smaller cobbling was uneven, familiar. Almost he felt he could quench the candle as he passed to the left, fifteen steps across the court and through the door, five steps and left again. It was difficult to see that doorway, where it stood in shadow, though it opened in the middle of a wall of faded frescoes-more oddly still, he lost control of his steps twice, passing it without being aware. Around him the darkness brooded, watching. It could, he knew, contain anything.

Or nothing, he told himself. Or nothing.

He descended the stair. Had he not remembered a second stairway, he would have turned back, for its entrance lay concealed in the niche formed by one of the shallow false archways in what turned out to be the tepidarium of the house's original Roman baths. A small room, faced with marble, its shallow pool long gone dry. The mosaics of the floor gleamed faintly in the moving light of Asher's candle: Byzantine, and like those of the octagonal vestibule, long ago defaced.

The second stair, as he recalled, was twice or three times the depth of the one above. If he met them now-the Bey's homecoming fledglings with their night's prey- there would be no possibility of escape.

He guessed the crypt below had been a prison, or a storage place for something more precious or more sinister than wine. The low brick groinings of the ceiling barely cleared his six-foot height, and the few rooms that opened to his right from the short passageway were tiny, sunk below the level of the floor, which was itself worn in a channel inches deep. The air-as he recalled and as Zardalu had remarked-was bitterly cold.

Dastgah. Scientific apparatus. There were Western scientific journals in the library dating back to the eighteenth century, treatises in Arabic from the days before the Moslem world had become a scientific backwater. Just exactly what was it, Asher wondered, that the Master of Constantinople was having his Western engineers build for him? That meant so much to him that its delay would rouse him to fury? That he hid from his own fledglings?

The penny-dip glow touched something dully reflective, lodged like a gleaming bone in the throat of a dark arch.

Here, he thought. The place the Bey kept hidden, veiled with his mind.

At the end of the abyssal corridor before him, Asher knew he would find that long stone stair, climbing to an outer door. But branching down to his left, his raised candle flame showed a grille of silver bars, behind which lay-what?

Or who?

Before him the tunnel extended like the bowel of night-to his left, behind the silver bars, Stygian velvet.

He wondered how much time he had left.

He had to know.

Cautiously, he moved down the short side branch.

His wan light winked on water pooled on the uneven stone floor. The corridor was extremely narrow, curving slightly; the silver bars, tarnished nearly black save around the lock where the bolt went into the stone, blocked it about ten feet from the convergence of the two passages. Beyond, Asher could make out two archways set in the left-hand wall. On one, at least, he caught the glint of a metal lock plate on a door. The smell of ammonia was overpowering; he had to fight not to cough.

They'd be coming back soon: Zardalu and the Baykus Kadine, and the others, bringing another victim to chase through the pitch-dark house until they cornered him, weeping and screaming...

Even locked in his upper room, Asher had heard the Armenian boy's voice for a long time.

He turned from the silver grating, back to the main corridor, and resumed his quest for the stair that led out.

There was a door, locked, that had to be it-like the doors above, he missed it two or three times, found it only by walking with his hand on the weeping stone of the wall, until what he had somehow taken three times for an angle of shadow resolved itself suddenly into an arch. This evidence of the power of the master vampire's mind he found extremely unnerving. They must have left the door open behind them that first night when they'd gone forth-or perhaps one had gone ahead of the others to open it for them.

In any case the lock was a Yale, new; a matter for a duplicate key, not a homemade shank of bronze wire.

Heart beating fast now with apprehension, he returned to the silver grille. That lock, at least, was of the old-fashioned kind, probably because the softer metal couldn't take the stress of the smaller wards. He angled the bronze wire carefully, knowing every scratch would show. Even the lugs and pins that held it to the stonework of the walls were silver.