Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

She wondered now whether he had meant during the night hours, or by day, when the vampire lay sunk in deathly sleep.

Did vampires dream?

"I said, can we go now?" Margaret repeated sulkily. "If Ysidro didn't see anything here..."

A thought flashed through Lydia's mind-she knew not from where-of a dark face lying in darkness, not very far away. Of sleep that wasn't really sleep.

Of someone, or something, that knew her name in its dreams.

"Yes," she said quickly. "Let's go."

As she was turning away, a glint of red caught her eye, lying in the long grass. She didn't want to go near the tomb again, but she forced herself and saw that the weeds along this side of it had been trampled. In the grayish dust she found the track of a man's hard-edged Western shoe.

Fairly fresh, she thought. Curiously fresh, for a place that had recently acquired the reputation as the haunt of hortlak.

Kneeling in the dusty weeds, she cast about for more tracks and saw the bright thing that had drawn her attention a moment ago.

It was a man's cravat pin, fashioned in the shape of a griffin, with a single blood- ruby eye.

"My dearest Asher Sahib." A shadow materialized in the archway in front of him, nearly invisible in the darkness of the old hern's court; an angular silhouette, and the gleam of far too many jewels. At the same moment, as Asher stopped, his heart tightening in his chest, arms slipped around his waist from behind, the thin hard body of Jamila Baykus pressing against his back, like the steel triggering mechanism of some lethal trap. The stench of blood in her jeweled hair mingled with the wash of Zardalu's patchouli.

"You left our party precipitously."

"I have a weak stomach."

"Tcha." The eunuch made the word almost a caress. "Pity for a beautiful young man like the one last week, maybe, or for that little beggar girl, who I admit was pretty... But that ugly old grandmother? I swear to you she was still complaining over being cheated out of two piastres' worth of olives in the market. Now, how can you pity that?"

Asher turned his face aside and moved to go, but the arms around his waist, thin as a child's, held him. He knew no amount of struggle would break their grip. Zardalu stepped forward into the colonnade, laid his hands on Asher's shoulders.

Under their painted lids, the long eyes glittered in the distant glint of the lamp by the stairs. There was no other light in the court, and Sayyed, who had as usual been dogging Asher's steps, had vanished at the first sound of Zardalu's voice. "Olumsiz Bey hasn't been out of the compound," the eunuch said softly, in the vampire whisper no louder than the whisper of a silk curtain on an- almost-windless night. "Has he?"

"I don't know."

"This is the eighth night that he's had us bring him his kill." Tiny breasts, sharp hipbones moved against his buttocks and back, the Baykus Kadine rising to tiptoe so that the movement of her lips stirred against the back of his neck. They were warm. "These other vampires-"

"What other vampires?"

"It is scarcely any affair of the living," Zardalu murmured, drawing close, "what other vampires. The woman we seek in the tombs and the cisterns-the man we are told to look for..."

"What man? Since when?"

"Does it matter since when?" The blue eyes glittered strangely in the reflected light. "I see that it does. Why does it matter? What does it tell you, clever one? Why does he fear them? The Malik of Stamboul, the Wafat Sahib, the Deathless Lord who has ruled this city... He could crush them like fleas under his thumbnail. So." The long hands tightened over Asher's shoulders, the pressure of the thumbs like a geared wheel bearing on the collarbone; Asher shut his teeth hard against the blinding stab of pain, kept his eyes on the vampire's before him.

"This foreign machine, built by these infidels... What is it? Who is it that he keeps down there, groaning and crying out in the dark hours of the night?"

"Ask him." It was impossible to keep his voice steady; the steel thumbs had found the nerves they sought, and Asher had to fight to keep his vision from graying to darkness, his mind from blanking with pain.

"I'm asking you."

"I don't know."

The pressure lessened; Zardalu moved back a few inches, his hands remaining where they were. Asher was breathing hard, the sweat flowing cold down the sides of his face, though the night was chilly.

"But you've gone to look?"

Asher managed to shake his head, wondering if they had seen him, passing the archway last night, or smelled his blood. Wondering if they had told Olumsiz Bey. He doubted it. He doubted that he would be alive now, had the Master of Constantinople known.

Zardalu grinned like a rubber devil. "For a man who went about the town questioning storytellers about the houses of evil rumor, you show a disappointing lack of curiosity. Do you know that Olumsiz Bey keeps a set of silver keys in a recess in the floor beneath the coffee table in the room of the red tiles? No? A curious thing for a vampire to keep, wouldn't you say?"

"Not something he could readily use," Asher agreed. The Jamila Baykus moved, trying to draw him with her, and he braced his feet on the broken tiles. "Not something I would use at all. I do value my life."

"Your life?" The blue eyes widened. The silvery vampire laughter shivered in the air. "Your life? Your life ends here in this court if I so wish."

"You'd go against him?" Darkness swirled on the edges of his mind, blanking his attention, confusing his thoughts, as if he moved in a suffocating dream.

Deliberately, he walled his mind against it, thought of nothing, pictured iron doors closing the darkness out, sunlight burning it away.

From far off he felt Zardalu's hands shift up to his throat, heard the vampire say, "He'll be displeased, but it won't make you less dead, Englis..."

He thought they were dragging him, threw out his hand to catch at the arch as they drew him into the dust-smelling blindness of one of the old warehouse bays. It was like fighting in a dream, against a narcotic weight of nothingness that filled his mind. If he could only break free for a moment...

Then he was thrown aside, striking the wall as if someone had hammered him with a railroad tie, and his mind cleared like shattering glass. Against the reflected lamplight he saw Zardalu hurled sprawling, a bundle of sticks wrapped in a hundred pounds' worth of sequined silk, and the Baykus Kadine backing away, mouth open, hissing, her eyes glittering rat-red. In a swirl of nacreous robes, Olumsiz Bey stood over the Circassian, the silver blade of his halberd cold as a fingernail moon. His bald head swung to and fro, like a savage dog's.

There was blood on his mouth and on his clothing. Zardalu rolled lightly to his feet, face twisted into something Asher hadn't seen outside a Museum of Horrors, fangs glittering in the stretched mouth. But the next moment the younger vampire flinched and turned away, hiding his face in his hands from the master vampire's glare, and Asher felt-guessed-sensed peripherally the cutting agony of Olumsiz Bey's will.

Zardalu made a sound, thin as water twisted out of a near-dry rag. His body bent and bent, knees buckling, hands spreading, fingers stretching, trying to cover his face as his arms came up like the arms of a fractured puppet.

Softly, the master vampire whispered, "Don't be arrogant, little Apricot."

Asher, slumped against the stones of the inner wall, wasn't even sure he heard the words spoken, could not have said what language they were in. Weightless as a giant cat Olumsiz Bey stepped toward the crumpled gaudy form of the eunuch, and the dim lamplight flicked on his outstretched talons, the graceful gesture of the halberd.

"Is this the little Apricot who wept in my arms when he gave up his life? The little Apricot who said to the slave masters, when they came to geld him..."