Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

She asked brightly, "Will you be back tonight?"

Ysidro seemed to settle into stillness, considering her with eyes that looked, in the lamplight, as gold as the honey. "My errand should take me no great time." He pulled on his gloves and held out one hand to Lydia. "It is true that the Dead travel fast."

It was still impossible to see him leave a room.

"Frankly, I've always wondered how they do," remarked Lydia, spooning honey onto a chunk of bread. "And considering the fuss he made about traveling in the daytime..."

But the slamming of the bedroom door was her only answer.

For a moment Lydia considered knocking and asking what real or fancied slight Margaret suffered from now. But it would only provoke another tantrum, another spate of incoherent romanticism about the eternal bond carried across lifetimes, and she felt simply too weary to go through with it. Margaret had coolly refused Lydia's offer yesterday of instruction in the intricacies of cosmetic art. Lydia was still unsure whether she was being blamed for Ysidro's absence from Margaret's dreams, for finding clues where Ysidro had missed them, or for some other offense entirely.

And indeed, she thought with a stirring of old anger, it was Ysidro's fault as much as Margaret's. More, in fact, for originating the whole silly vaudeville of romance and need and lies. She put from herself in disgust the concern she had been feeling for him and ladled lamb and stuffed aubergines onto her plate, cursing Ysidro tiredly for his command that for safety the girls share bedroom and bed. It was not anything she was looking forward to tonight.

The meal made her feel better. She spread out her papers again, jotting down the names Ysidro had mentioned and seeking them among the lists of drafts drawn at the end of October, but it was difficult to keep her mind on her work. She was angry at Ysidro and, she realized, hurt. Disillusioned. But what illusion had she held, she wondered, that she felt robbed of it now?

The illusion that behind those bleached, crystalline eyes still lurked a living man's smile?

Don Simon Xavier Christian Morado de la Cadena-Ysidro had been dead since 1558. She recalled the books on his parlor chest. A dead man might read medical journals, and mathematics texts, and volumes of logic. But would a dead man read the stories of Toad and Ratty and Mole? She took off her spectacles, leaned her forehead on her hands. And why should it matter to her whether he was dead inside or alive?

In the street below, the dogs began to bark.

Lydia raised her head, startled, and looked at the clock. It was nearly three. Had she been asleep, she wondered, since Margaret's huffy departure, or had she wakened from her first sleep later than she'd thought?

Below in the street, someone pounded on the outer gate.

"Hamam, hamam!" cried a voice, vaguely familiar, though she could not have said from where. "Hamam, it is your husband! Your husband!"

She jerked to her feet, ran to the window that overlooked the street. She pushed aside the chains of garlic and wild rose that hung there, unhooked the heavy lattice; down below she could see a cluster of dim shapes in a lantern's blurry light.

"Where?"

"Your husband!" cried the man below. "Find you, he say."

The hakdwati shair, she thought. The man in the yellow turban. Catching up the lamp from the table, she paused only long enough to snatch her silver knife as a precautionary measure and then ran downstairs. They'd want money, she thought, stepping through the door out into the carriageway. As the light of the lamp jostled huge shadows over the carriageway's vaulted roof, she thought, Good heavens, they could be thieves for all I know...

She stood on tiptoe to slide back the cover of the judas in the main gate, and tried to hold the lamp so that light would illuminate the faces of those who stood outside.

There was no one in the street.

Behind her, the house door slammed.

Lydia whirled, her breath stopping in her lungs-a glance showed her that both the main outer gate and the small postern were firmly locked and bolted. The silence seemed suddenly, dreadfully alive. She strode back toward the door, cold with terror, pulling the silver table knife from her belt...

The lamp in her hand went out.

Instinct more than anything else made her flatten at once to the wall. Shadow moved in the dark arch where the carriageway let into the little courtyard, where fallen pomegranate leaves made spots like dripped blood in the thin moonlight; she threw the lamp with all her force in that direction and heard it strike something soft, then shatter on the pavement. In that instant she flung herself to the door, yanked the handle, and felt the heavy jar of the bolt. She whirled and slashed at the shadow that she felt more than saw suddenly beside her. She slashed, felt it give, turn before her. For an instant crushing pressure seized her wrist, a hand hideously strong closed over her throat, and with her mind swimming in a curious, hazy dream state she saw a face close to hers: smooth, full, olive-complected, fangs gleaming behind a thick mustache. Then he cried, "Orospu!" and his hand jerked away, and she cut at his face again, knowing she couldn't let him get near enough to take her by the elbow, the waist, someplace where she wasn't wearing silver. She tried to scream, but it came out thick and tiny, like a child's wailing in a dream; a vision flashed through her mind of letting him seize her, of wanting to feel those iron arms holding her, pressing her close to that iron chest.

She cut again at his face and cursed as hands seized her arms above the elbow, gasped out the worst word she'd ever heard from the grave diggers who brought bodies into the infirmary for dissection and felt the claws tear her arms, ripping through her sleeves. She kicked and slashed and cursed at the face that she saw now as if through the muzzy darkness of a dream.

There were two of them, she thought, blindly terrified, hacking and twisting against a grip like devil-inhabited stone. Two of them, two faces in the patchy moon shadows...

Then she was alone, leaning against the stuccoed wall with the knife shaking in her hand.

Her sleeves were torn, the blood shockingly hot against flesh that seemed to be getting colder by the minute.

I can't go into shock, she thought, from what seemed like a great distance off.

I can't let myself...

"Madonna..." Darkness came out of the deeper dark behind her, though she hadn't heard the gate open or close-a glint of eyes and the smoke of pale hair. Cold hands seized her arms, icy despite the frost that seemed to be spreading through her own flesh. She sobbed something, she didn't know what, pressed her face to the damp wool of a cloak that smelled of dew and graveyards, as if its weight could save her from the fanged brown face that had come so close to hers. She was unable to breathe, barely felt the cold, gloved hands that thrust her hair back from her face, touched her neck. "Are you hurt?"

The words had no meaning to her. She considered them from a great distance away, turning them-for she seemed to have all the time in the world-one way and another, like a rare bone. Was she hurt? she wondered. For a moment she floated weightless against him, conscious, it seemed, of the skeleton within his clothing, like Death in his winding sheet... conscious of almost nothing else. She heard him say her name, or thought she did, and looking up she saw, at some unbridgeable distance, the face of a living man.

He called her name again, and she gasped, shaken, disoriented, but alive once more, and stepped back quickly from him so that he had to catch her elbow to keep her from falling.

"I'm so sorry," she managed to say. She looked around the courtyard. Everything seemed very distant and odd, as if nothing had anything to do with her. Shock, she diagnosed. The silver knife lay on the ground at her feet, the smashed lamp beneath the pomegranate tree. She wondered how much it would cost to replace. "I didn't mean-"