Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

They were tumbled untidily, as if she had been reading them when sleep overcame her and they'd slid from the coverlet. When Lydia picked them up, she saw the handwriting, precise and black and, though the ink was clearly modern, nothing that had been seen since the days of Elizabeth.

They were sonnets.

About darkness. About mirrors. About roads untrodden stretching endlessly into night. One of them Margaret had ripped into quarters. Lydia had to lay it on the nightstand to fit its pieces together again.

And she understood.

Where can hunger better substance find than sanguine fire drawn from living hearts? I've seen a brightness dwells not in the veins- In thinking eyes, and smiles that shame despair. Color and heat beyond what blood contains- Rose and copper in cheek and lips and hair. But flesh that can't be warmed by such a fire To only blood and silence may aspire.

The papers were creased, as if they'd been wadded small- hidden in the crochet basket, she thought, or in Margaret's carpetbag. She wondered at what point Margaret had found them and pocketed them for her own.

She laid them back on the floor where they had been and turned down the light.

A curious thing for a vampire to keep. And so they were. Two silver keys, cut in exact replica of English Yales, even to the finger grips. Asher stared at them for a long time, as they shimmered in the concealed well in the red-tiled coffee room's floor.

Local work. Probably just enough admixture of bronze to keep them from bending in a lock. Reaching down, he weighed them in his hands. Even with gloves, a vampire would have difficulty holding them long enough to use. One as old as the master of the city might just manage, as he managed to hold the whitethorn of his halberd staff, to wear the thickly sheathed silver knife around his neck.

Asher's heart pounded hard as he slipped them into the pocket of his coat. As he pushed the tile cover back over the well, returned the black and white table to its place, the shadows of his single candle seemed to lean closer, silent with a terrible, listening silence in which the Master of Constantinople seemed to be standing just outside the door.

This was not the case, he knew. Olumsiz Bey was meeting that night with one of his men of business and had himself escorted Asher back to his gallery after supper and locked him in. "I apologize," the vampire said, "for my Zardalu last night. He is treacherous and insolent, like most of the palace eunuchs. He needed a good thrashing, to make him remember his love for me." The amber eyes narrowed as they studied Asher's face. In the ambiguous flicker of the pierced lamp the Master of Constantinople had seemed wrought entirely of amber, the dusky pallor of his flesh like copal, the many-pleated silken trousers and the tunic over them, the vest and the sash all warm shades of fire and honey and marigold, the fur-lined pelisse sewn with shining flecks of gold. The lump of amber swinging from his earlobe caught the light like an unnerving third eye.

"I trust you understand that he is a liar," Olumsiz Bey went on. "He never imparts information which is not aimed at starting prey."

"He's certainly told me a number of odd things about this house." Asher folded his arms, returned the orange gaze; even in his own mind the picklocks under the carpets did not exist. "Twice he's told me the way out." This was a lie, to see what the master would say. Olumsiz Bey's eyebrows bent in the middle like startled diacritical marks, and the hard mouth quirked in laughter.

"I observe you didn't go seeking. Sayyed wouldn't be difficult to overpower." "The way he told me was different the second time," Asher said. "I've heard them talk about the games they play with their prey, chasing them through the dark here; I've heard those poor young boys and girls screaming."

Another diacritical mark, this time in the corner of those colorless lips, and Asher thought, It was not his custom then, to have his prey brought him by the others. It was something recent.

Zardalu was right.

Something was holding him to this house.

Ernchester? he wondered now, working his way carefully around the walls of the Roman court, that he would not leave a trampling in the overgrown grass. It made no sense. Why send for Ernchester now, why not a year ago, or a hundred years ago? Why not in July, when the Sultan's regime was overthrown? If it was to ask his help against the interloper of whom Zardalu spoke, why keep him locked in the crypts? Starving, perhaps, in pain certainly-the moans were cries of the most hideous torment.

Revenge?

Asher shivered, feeling his way from pillar to pillar of the old porch, for he'd blown out his candle. The Bey's revenges would be long.

But long enough for him to summon the old earl from his moldering town house in London, from the slow crumbling of his life, back to the city where he'd spent eighteen months a living man? What ill turn would have warranted that, after almost two hundred fifty years?

And what did the interloper have to do with any of this?

What about the machine the Bey was having constructed? Or the ice Asher had seen, melting on the floor behind the silver bars?

It crossed his mind obliquely to wonder if the revenge was against Anthea, and not against Ernchester at all.

"He is not on this train," Anthea had said, coming back into his compartment while the flat lands of Hungary swept by in the darkness. That had been late the first night of the journey from Vienna. Exhausted, half sick with the coffee the porter had brought, his head aching and every clack of the well-sprung wheels reverberating as if slaved to some infernal machine inside his skull, Asher had watched her shed the long black-fringed shawl and put back the spotted gauze of veils. She seemed beautiful to him beyond words, staring at the molten ink of the window glass. The only light on the length of the Orient Express was theirs, and now and then it tossed threads of illusory fire on the wind-lashed weeds beside the track. Not even the moon remained in the sky.

"Good." Asher set aside the book he'd been trying to read, a truly dreadful account of life and love in Nero's Rome; tried to set aside at the same time the stirring within him of protectiveness and desire. He kept his voice deliberately casual. "It means we've got every chance of reaching Constantinople before him. 'The Dead travel fast,' Goethe says-but few things travel faster than the Orient Express. If he left Vienna by any other route, even by another train the minute he got away from the sanitarium, he'll still be a day behind us. Would you know, when he enters the city?"

"I... don't know." She turned in her fingers the pearl buttons of her glove, a beautiful ghost in her blue and violet silk dress. He remembered the moonlight vampire girl in the woods outside the sanitarium and knew this dreadful warm surge of wanting for what it was-the lure to prey. Dimmer, more distant, almost certainly without her conscious volition, still it was there. He wanted her.

"I don't know what arrangement was made with this Olumsiz Bey," she went on after a moment. "I looked at the guidebook. There are smaller stations in the city before one reaches the main gate, and this... this Bey, this master... may have planned to meet him at one of them. I don't know whether it will be safe for me to watch the main gate through the night. Perhaps he will not enter the city by train at all. Charles never trusted trains, nor the Underground of London, never liked them and never rode them. And the city itself, its sounds and smells, will be... different."