Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

They are treacherous... the Bey had said, the silver blade of his halberd gleaming in the smoldering half-light of the baths. They are treacherous.

His heart slamming blood in his ears, he edged his way along the buckled, puddled flagging next to the wall. A wet footprint here would condemn him to death. Straw and sawdust salted the corridor, making the going even more delicate, and the cold was arctic. He wondered if he would hear the fledglings returning. Wondered if he would know, should the Bey be watching him from out of the darkness with those leached-out ochre eyes.

"Ernchester," he whispered at the nearer of the two doors.

Both were locked. Hasps of silver, or more probably electroplated steel. Padlocks sheathed in silver, even to the bows. Silver solder dabbed over the screw heads. The locks were new-the rest, black with age in the candle's feeble light.

"Ernchester!" he whispered again. How much-how far- could the Deathless Lord hear? Not through earth, he thought. Not through this much stone. "It's Asher. Are you there? Anthea's free, she's here in Constantinople..."

He had almost said, Anthea's alive.

Listened.

Deep behind the heavy door he heard it: a groan, or a cry, that lifted the hair on his head-physical agony mingled with the blackest depth of despair. Hell, Asher thought. Such a sound you would hear if you put your ear to the keyhole of Hell.

"Can you hear rne? Can you understand?"

Only silence replied. His hand trembled, fumbled at the lock, half numb with cold but unsteady, also, with the knowledge that time was now very short...

"I'll come back for you," he promised hoarsely. "I'll get you out..." And I'll need your help, he added as a grim afterthought, to return the favor. A draft, a shift of air, and his heart stopped as if knifed with an icicle, then began beating fast and thin. Even in that first second, he pinched the candlewick, thanking God for the smell of the ammonia that would drown the smoke of a full-fledged conflagration, much less that of a single dip. That drowned, even from the Undead, the smell of his living blood.

From the dark of the corridor beyond the silver bars he heard stumbling footfalls, and a pleading breath, "My lord, be kind-be kind to a poor girl..."

At the edge of hearing, a tickle of obscene mirth.

"Oh, the lord you're going to will be kind." The voice might have been Zardalu's. "He is the kindest lord in the city, sweet and generous... you'll find him so, beautiful gazelle..."

In the utter blackness there was nothing to see, no way to know if they'd noticed the slight jar of the doorway in the silver bars-he'd pulled it to behind him, the hinges oiled and uncreaking...

He could only wait, desperately listening, wondering if the next thing to happen would be a cold touch on his neck. The staggering footsteps faded. He himself remained where he was for a long time, unmoving, dizzy with the ammonia stink and the cold that ate at his bones, before he felt his way along the wall to the bars, and so out into the corridor, wincing as the gate lock clicked behind him like the hammer of doom.

But none molested him. In time he felt his way back to the stair-painfully, endlessly, across the baths, thanking God that navigating in the dark was a skill he'd kept up from his spying days-and up to the grass-grown court, where the little light of the stars seemed bright to his eyes. As he crept through the courtyard, he heard the silvery clashing of vampire laughter from within the salon, and the young woman's voice pleading incoherently. It seemed to him, as he bolted his own door behind him and sank to his knees under a sudden wave of nervous shaking that the sound came to him still-that, and the moaning of the prisoner behind the crypt door.

It was a long time before he managed to get to his feet and stumble to the divan, where he lay shivering as if with killing fever until the muezzins of the Nouri Osmanie cried the late winter dawn.

"I suspected my remark about how valuable you thought the information would yield results." Prince Razualmovsky slashed with his riding whip at the two curs sleeping on the marble steps. They slunk a few feet away and stretched out again in the dust of the plaza that had once been the Hippodrome, tongues lolling an incongruous raspberry against wolfish coats which, even without her eyeglasses, Lydia could tell were half worn away with mange.

Constantinople had more dogs-and, as she had seen last night, more cats-than any city she'd ever been in.

The animals seemed to operate on two different levels, as indeed, she reflected, they would have to. As Prince Razumovsky's carriage had worked carefully through the streets of the old city, where wooden Turkish houses appeared to sprout spontaneously from more ancient walls, the dogs had been everywhere, lying in the muck or against the walls of ochre or pink stucco. The cats had the overhanging balconies or shared the sills of heavily barred windows with potted geraniums, or lay on the walls and trellises of tiny cafes where Turkish men sipped tea and talked under stringy canopies of leafless vines.

"Someone always knows someone," the Russian continued, white teeth gleaming under tawny haystacks of mustache. "The good brass seller mentioned our questions to his friends at the cafe that night, or perhaps a beggar overheard us or the man selling baklava. One of them knew a street sweeper whose sister knew the hakawati shair by sight or had a cousin who'd heard one of the muezzins mention that a new hakawati shair had taken up residence in this place, or one of the neighborhood children mentioned it to another child... It was a Syrian boy who brought me the information."

"What did you pay him?" Lydia reached for the small reticule of silver mesh that hung at her waist. "I can't let you..."

"An entirely negligible sum." His Highness waved dismissively. "It will support his family for two months, doubtless-or buy one member of it two days' worth of opium, if that's their choice." He held out his hand to help her over the marble sill of the narrow door.

He had been treating her all morning as if she were made of cut glass, apparently under the impression that her haggard eyes and pallor were the result of a night of sleepless worry over her husband, not a night spent single- mindedly plowing through four and a half months' worth of the investor listings of the two biggest banks in the city.

There were more than a score of corporations and investors that seemed to fit the criteria. More people than a single vampire had guessed the way the wind was blowing back in July and started transferring funds into less vulnerable forms than real estate and gold. She wondered if it were possible to obtain the long- term banking records of the oldest banks-how long had there been banks in the empire, anyway?-or of property holders, to see whose lives went on for a suspiciously long time before they transferred their money to equally long-lived successors. The various names under which the palace chamberlain laundered money came up again and again in everyone's accounts- and given the general level of corruption in Constantinople, it was almost impossible to track how money appeared and disappeared.

By five in the morning Lydia had a dozen names-two of which Margaret had completely missed in the Deutsches Bank records-and Margaret had long since fallen asleep with her head on her arms.

Had she not reviewed the records, Lydia suspected she'd have had the night of sleepless worry in any event, so it was just as well she'd had work to occupy her.

"Are you sure this is all right?" Margaret asked, flushing an uncomfortable red.

"It isn't allowed, is it?"

"The courtyard is free to all," said Razumovsky. "But it would probably be best if you let me speak."