Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

The Blue Mosque was one of the greatest in the city, a place where there were always people.

That, Lydia realized a moment later, was the point.

Razumovsky led them-Lydia burningly conscious of her Western gown and the gauzy excuse for a veil depending from her stylish hat-toward the north wall of the court, where wintry light fell upon the men along the colonnade: a bearded man in a turban selling small loops of bright-colored prayer beads on a blanket; another cross-legged behind what looked like a little desk, complete with brass inkwell, standish, and shaker of sand. There was the inevitable shoe-shine boy with his little brass-bound kit. Two men in rags, sitting near the small marble pavilion in the middle of the court fingering their beads, glared at the women as they passed, but neither spoke.

The man they sought occupied a worn carpet next to the bead sellers pitch. He was conversing with a thin, elderly man in a white robe and yellow turban, but looked up as Razumovsky drew near, and Lydia had an impression of a huge hooked nose and a tangle of dirty white beard, a green blob of turban, and, when she cast down her eyes, of grimy, horny feet with toenails like a bear's claws poking from beneath his robe. He was ragged, and his clothing smelled of filth and sweat; he gave off anger and distrust like a blast of heat in her face. "Qabih... qabih..." he muttered ferociously, glaring up at her and then past her at Margaret. "Qahbdt..." He averted his face then and added in hoarse French, "An unveiled woman is an abomination in the eyes of God."

"Maitre conteur." Lydia curtseyed deeply. "Please forgive me. Do you call me ill names because I wear the veil which my husband gave me to wear?" She touched the thin net veil of her green taffeta hat. "Do you blame me for wearing clothing, and dressing my hair, as my husband wishes to see me adorned?"

The man in the yellow turban had stepped tactfully away, leaving Lydia, Razumovsky, and Margaret alone with the old hakdwati shah. Lydia knelt on the worn marble paving of the mosque's court, reflecting that after journeying all the way from Oxford, the bottle-green skirt needed cleaning anyway. "And if my husband has disappeared," she went on, still in French, which the old man seemed to follow well enough, "and I know him to be in danger, am I impure for wanting to aid him?" Ysidro, she thought, should hear me now.

The black eyes glittered, chips of coal. She could see the dark line of downturned mouth amid the tangled beard, hear the anger in his voice when he replied, but she saw, in the set of his shoulders, the way he drew back from her and looked, for one fleeting instant, past Razumovsky to the courtyard gate, that he was afraid.

"You are the wife of the Ingileezee in the brown clothing, the man who asked all the questions about the Deathless Lord."

Lydia nodded. She wondered how close Razumovsky was standing behind her and how much he heard. "I am."

"He was a fool," snapped the old storyteller. "To seek the residence of Wafat Sahib is the act of a fool, and a fool's fate overtook him."

"Did you tell him?"

The old man looked away. "I told him nothing," he said sharply, and Lydia knew he was lying. James had probably offered him money. With feet like that, and the characteristic roughening of pellegra on the skin of his face, he was beyond a doubt desperately poor.

"It was my boy Izahk," the storyteller went on, too quickly. "A discreet boy; one I thought too clever to be seen. But when he did not come back that night, I knew he had done that which is forbidden: he had spoken of Wafat Sahib, and that lord is not a lord to tolerate such chatter." His black eyes narrowed, and his voice, almost a whisper to begin with, sank lower still, so that Lydia had to draw close, within reach of the gusts of breath that smelled of strong coffee and rotting teeth.

"Wafat Sahib, he has been lord in this city since my great-grandfather's time and before. He knows what is said of him in the streets, even by light of day. Even for the Ingileezee to ask me, to offer me money-which of course I did not touch," he added loudly, "made me afraid. So I came here, out of the sight of the men who serve him. Now they tell me the hortlak, the afrit, the gola, have been seen among the tombs outside the city, walking among the cypress trees by the tomb of Hasim al-Bayad, stopping travelers who walk late upon the road and killing them in the darkness."

Ysidro? wondered Lydia, recognizing one of the words as the Turkish for vampire.

Or had Ysidro in his search missed something, some clue? Been deceived by the concealing glamours of the vampire mind?

It was logical, she thought, for the challenger to Olumsiz Bey's power to haunt them, lying as they did outside the city walls. "Where is this tomb?" she asked, lowering her voice and hoping Razumovsky wasn't anywhere near.

"You are a fool!" The hakawati shah flung up his arms, coal-chip eyes blazing with sudden rage. "As your husband was a fool before you! Go away, and ask no more, lest his fate befall you as well!"

"I'm not going to go there at night-" Lydia began to protest reasonably, but the old man surged toward her, slashing with his clawed and knotted hands.

"Go! Get out! I tell you that your husband is a dead man!"

She stumbled back, startled at this violence, and Razumovsky caught her; she heard Margaret squeak in alarm.

"Leave me, infidel whore!" the old man screamed. "How dare you defile the place of holiness by even the tread of your feet?"

"Really, I-"

"Come," the prince said softly and drew her toward the gate. "There's nothing more you can learn."

"I daresay," said Lydia, struggling between a sense of injury and a terrified desire to go back to the old storyteller, to try to learn more. There was something Ysidro hadn't seen in the cemetery... Something that occurred after he'd gone? She looked back over her shoulder, to see the hakawati shair shouting his wrongs to the man selling beads, and though at this distance he was little more than a threshing puppet of dirty brown rags, she could tell he was pointing at her.

Sudden tears stung her eyes, born of weariness and frustration and the hurt of being criticized when she had done no wrong.

"Forgive him, madame." It was the man in the yellow turban, waiting for them in the blue marble shadows of the colonnade beside the gate. He stepped down and bowed to them, though Lydia had the impression that he was a man of some importance here. "He is an old man and believes that those who do not dress or eat or speak as his parents did were created by some other God for purposes ill to mankind."

Lydia halted, peering up at him. Above the graying beard the dark eyes were bright and kind, and not as old as she had thought. His robes smelled of tobacco, cooking, and soap. "I'm sorry if I... if I said something wrong. I truly meant no harm."

"He is a very frightened man, hamam, and frightened men are easily angered. He claims he is pursued by demons who live in this city, and he will not be alone, not even to sleep. He sleeps on the floor of the soup kitchen. Do not judge him harshly. They are real to him."

"No," Lydia said, remembering the abyssal darkness of the streets after nightfall. She had dreamed last night, in troubled sleep, of something that had passed the house, singing beneath the balcony in a high, thin, tuneless wailing that no one but she could hear. She had risen-or, later, she thought she had only dreamed of rising-and stumbled half blind to the heavy lattices that overhung the street, but she had seen nothing, or maybe just a stirring in the dark below. Margaret had rolled over and sighed in her sleep.

"He spoke of a... a gola, dwelling in the tomb of someone called Hasim al-Bayad."

She pronounced the words carefully, thanking heaven for ten years of James' quiet emphasis on correct sounds.