Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

She fell silent, her fingers in their lacy mitts resting still on the purple plush curtain, her brown eyes staring out into the night. Seeing the night with the night's own eyes.

"Even Paris is different from London," she said at length, as if speaking to herself. "In London I know it if a policeman takes an unfamiliar turning within two miles of any of our houses. I could find Charles did he sleep in the lowest subcellar, did he walk the most obscure back way, did he haunt the steeple of St. Paul's or the warehouses of Whitechapel-given time. Vienna was more different still, chaos, a game without rules. Constantinople..."

She shook her head, but in her voice Asher heard the tremor, not of fear, but of excitement, of joy.

"It's strange," she went on, her voice so low that it should have been barely audible. "I should be terrified. Outside of London I'm a snail dispossessed of its shell, a rabbit with all her earths stopped. And yet all I feel is delight. The lights on the Alexander Bridge in Paris, like being inside a star; all the voices and music and scents of Vienna, making me drunk as I walked along the Ring. I know I could be destroyed in seconds, but all I wanted to do was dance and laugh and take off my hat and swing it around by its veils, just to be... just to be somewhere else. Seeing something new, something wonderful that I'd never seen. I don't know if you can understand that."

"Maybe not fully," Asher said. "I've never been dead."

"That's what being alive is, isn't it?" She turned toward him and reached up to pull out the jet and steel pins that held her hat to the close-folded raven universe of her hair.

Asher nodded, understanding something else about her now, and the desire he felt was softened and transmuted to pity. "You never wanted to be a vampire, did you?"

She hesitated, the hat like a dark bouquet overflowing her hands. "Oh, I did," she said. "The sharpening, the deepening, the enriching of the senses... one drowns in the color of silk, or the scent of coffee, or the weeping of the fiddles in distant night. Or the smell of blood, of sweat, of human fear. It is all the universe, as it never is to mortals, except maybe to a small child. It is living. And I wanted more than anything else not to leave Charles, ever. Once I came into it, I wanted it, craved it as a drunkard craves brandy." Her lips quirked ruefully; pale, Asher noted automatically. After Anthea had released him from her coffin, they had rushed onto the train with only minutes to spare, and Anthea knew well that every passenger was rich and expected at the other end, every porter and waiter accounted for.

"I gather people become vampires because they want life; they want life that won't stop, won't even pale as life does for the old." She stroked the ostrich plumes of the hat, curling them around her fingers, her eyes not meeting his. "But to be dead is to become... static. And that is what we all become. We do not travel because it is dangerous. We wall ourselves into our houses, our crypts, our secret ways, because sleeping in the hours of daylight, we are as if drugged. We ring ourselves with locks and traps and things that we can control, and destroy those things that we cannot. We become dead. Journeying like this..." She shook her head once more. "All new things are peril, peril of death- and maybe peril of death is one definition of life. Sometimes I feel that I shall never return to London again."

Asher remembered Cramer, who would have been one of the best if only he'd had the chance.

She stretched out her hand to him, her face gravely beautiful. He knew that what the moonlight girl had tried to do to him in the dappled silence of the Vienna Woods, this woman had done to thousands of men in the streets and alleyways of London: made them love her, want her, need her, with a need that brought them mindless and damned into her arms. He remembered Fairport crying pitifully as the vampire women stripped him of his clothes, ripped at his veins in tiny, shredding cuts that would not kill immediately; drank his terror and his despair as well as his death. Fairport who had only wanted to live as normal men lived. And still he reached out and touched the long square fingers with his own. "Thank you for coming with me," she said quietly. "Thank you for... for seeing that I come to no harm."

I feel as if I shall never return to London again.

Standing alone in the darkness at the heart of the crypt, Asher felt the knife- twist fear in his heart, that he would never see Lydia again.

He had thought of her often in the long prison chamber, listening to the sunset wailing of the muezzins, the constant squabbling of the gulls, the wind-whisper flight of vampire feet in the labyrinths below. He was glad in an odd way that if it was to be so-if he was going to die in the House of the Oleanders-he hadn't known it that rainy morning when all he'd been looking forward to was the emotional harrowing of his cousin's funeral and the distasteful scenes of family greed sure to follow. He'd have been solemn then, he thought, and solemnity would have completely spoiled the pillow fight early on the morning of his departure, and the giggling tussle of lace and kisses and stray medical journals.

Seven years. It should have been longer. She'd probably track him to Vienna, but Anthea had smuggled them both onto the train. It was not possible that anyone from either Halliwell's Department, or the Stadtspoliz, or the Kundschafts Stelle, had seen them board. Thin, matter-of-fact, beautiful with a breathtaking marsh- fairy beauty which she herself had been forbidden to see... His soul ached, suddenly and desperately, with the need to see her one more time before he died. Only that, if nothing else were possible...

He wondered if, in tracing his contacts in the Austrian city, she would somehow meet Francoise.

The tarnished silver bars glimmered dully in the light of the single candle, cold even in the comforting yellow glow. Asher set the candle down carefully on a crossbar, its base protected by a circle of paper torn from a book to preclude telltale drips of wax while he worked carefully with the twisted bronze wires of the homemade picklock. It was hard to keep his hands steady, given the cold of the November night, the ice piled here in such quantities... the fear. The silence was a second darkness, and the smell of ammonia clutched his throat.

The silver hinges did not creak. He stepped into the low-roofed corridor, edged past the puddles of water, the sawdust and the straw.

Why ice? Absurdly, he remembered something the vampire Ysidro had once told him, about aging vampires suffering from cold. Surely all this wasn't just to make an old enemy uncomfortable? He wondered, if he freed Ernchester a second time, whether the vampire earl would escape with him at all, or whether he would, as he had in Vienna, simply let him free and cleave to the Turkish master who had summoned him.

Why?

The second door along the corridor, as Asher had already begun to suspect, opened into a cramped pitchy wilderness of coils and tubes and tanks, the harsh stink of ammonia like acid in the air. The weak firefly glow lined the words

ZWANZIGSTEJAHR-HUNDERT ABKUHLUNG GESEIXESCHAFT on a Crate.

Twentieth Century Refrigeration Company.

Freezer chests, a vacuum plant, hoses like obscene rubber entrails dangling.

Glass carboys of poisonous ammonia gas gleamed like monstrous eggs. Though the floor of the corridor was wet, there were no tracks in here, no straw, no sawdust. Having gone through the installation of a new furnace in one of the New College lecture halls, Asher guessed that some part or valve had broken, and had been sent for to Berlin. Five days since the breakdown, the Bey had screamed, and still no word... He closed the door, locked it, wiped the silver handle with his handkerchief. The second door's handle was like ice. The sound of the tumblers going over was that of hammers driving coffin nails, answered from within, as from the deeps of a tomb, by a profound, sickening groan.