Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

The stench that rolled over Asher as he pushed the door inward almost physically blinded him. He shut his eyes, averted his face. Stupid... he thought the next moment. And then, If it's this bad when it's this cold in here... His breath was a cloud in the wan candle flare; the hoarfrost glistened on the stone walls, as did the ice that almost filled the crypt.

But all that was peripheral to the dark thing crawling toward him through the mess of half-frozen sawdust and straw on the floor-and to his understanding of what it was, and what it meant.

Staring down into the face-into what was left of the face-he knew everything, everything except where Ernchester was, and even that he could begin to guess. Then his breath was shut off under the crushing grip of a fleshy hand, and he was swept backward through the door with such force that he felt his feet leave the floor. He barely had time to pull his head forward when he struck the corridor wall, not thrown into it, as Olumsiz Bey had hurled him before, but slammed against the stonework with such force as to break ribs. He cried out-he thought he cried out-as the bones knifed him within, his mind suffocated under darkness, breath driven from him and unable to return. He struck the wall a second time, pain lancing his left shoulder blade as if he'd been struck by an ax, and all the while a voice screamed at him, screamed curses in Persian and Arabic and Turkish, incomprehensible through his mounting desperation to breathe...

He didn't know what language, he thought the voice was shouting, "Is this what you wanted? Is this what you sought?" and the hand twisted his head, the pressure on the spine intolerable, the icy water on the floor drenching him as he lay in it. "Is this what you wished to see?"

But he could see nothing, the candle having fallen to the wet floor of the crypt; nothing except, in his mind's eyes, the livid face of the thing in the crypt. Claws slit his sleeve open, shoulder to hem, while a knee ground in his back and the terrible weight pinned him to the stone, his neck bones cracking under the vindictive twist of Olumsiz Bey's hand. His arm was torn open to the wrist, blood burning hot on the sudden cold of his flesh, and all the while the smell grew around him, mounting and horrible, waves of it, while something fell squishily against the wall nearby, dragged with a horrible, thick groaning through the pools on the floor. Something fumbled at his arm, slick and glutinous around the sharpness of teeth; he heard the vampire whisper, "Drink. Drink, my kitten, my child, my beloved... drink..."

Something that felt like a hand-or what had once been a hand-groped along his arm for a steadying hold.

Then with a retching noise the thing pulled away, rolled, crawled, with horrible sounds, back toward the door of its crypt and began to vomit. Asher thought later it was the release of the twisting pressure on his neck and backbone as Olumsiz Bey left him, as much as anything else, that finally let him faint.

He didn't think he was unconscious more than a minute or two; the jabbing pain of a tourniquet on his arm brought him back to the same inky darkness, the icy water seeping through his clothing to icy flesh, the sinking weakness of blood loss. His own blood, coppery in his nostrils, was the least horrible thing he smelled.

The cold was marginally less. The crypt door was closed.

Softly, his body aching with the careful ration of his breath, he said, "So that's why you wanted Ernchester."

"You know nothing of these things." The master's voice came shrill, slivered thin through constricted throat, constricted lungs.

His hands dragged the tourniquet as if he would use it to cut off the arm he bound.

"I know you're fighting an interloper on your territory. I know you don't trust those of your fledglings you have left... and I know now that you've lost the ability to make more."

The nails tightened on his arms, tearing again the numb flesh.

"That's it, isn't it? You haven't been able to make a fledgling for years. Only six vampires, for one of the biggest cities in Europe? Where the government doesn't even care if you kill, so long as it's Armenians and Jews and the poor? Even your fledglings were beginning to comment that you were growing choosy about getting others to replace those who'd been destroyed.

"But when the interloper came, you had to make the attempt. And when you saw it wouldn't work-that you could hold the fledgling's mind alive through physical death but couldn't transmit the physical syndrome of vampirism to the body-you used your contacts with the old Sultan's allies to send for the one vampire you knew you could control, the one you knew whose fledglings would be yours, under your power..."

The hand closed around his neck again, not strangling this time, the clawed nails hooking like wolf's teeth under the bundle of nerve and tendon and blood vessels below his ear. The hard knee pressed, bracing, on his chest, like the small, blunt end of a ram. Very softly, Olumsiz Bey said, "I... could... kill you..."

"If you didn't need me for bait," he said, barely able to whisper against the dig of the claws. "Bait to trap Anthea, and bait to trap the earl. If Ernchester isn't with the interloper already."

The hand released his throat. Wet silk passed over his bare arm, the side of his face, as the vampire stood. Then Olumsiz Bey kicked him, like the deliberate blow of a hammer, again and again like a man smashing rocks, and in a very short time Asher fainted again.

"There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God." The voice of the muezzin pierced the sodden fog of Asher's dreams like golden wire. "Come to prayer. Come to prayer."

Anthea, Asher thought, trying to surface, then slid back into velvet chasms of unconsciousness. He could see her on the train, her profile a milky coastline against the windows obsidian sea. "Ernchester has never trusted trains," she said, and then her pale face, her white hands, turned to the marble bones of the grave steles beyond the Adrianople Gate, the dark of her dress and hair to the black cold of night.

Through brittle moonlight he saw a man walking, small and stooped in his old- fashioned clothing, but moving from gravestone to gravestone with the flitting lightness of the vampire. In the open ground he stopped, like an indrawn breath. Asher felt the presence of the shadow without seeing it, but in his dreaming it seemed to him that he smelled again the rank mixture of blood and mold that had overwhelmed him in the darkness of the dry cistern. Ernchester moved, turning as if to flee, but as he turned, the shadow was before him. The air stirred with vampire laughter.

Do you think his favor is now off this man, and he is ours?

The voice slipped into the dimming scenes of his dream, as if the wind had said it, but he knew what it was. He fought, panicked, to wake, struggling back out of the abyss.

"Did he want him dead, he'd be dead, not here," grumbled the voice that he recognized as one-eyed Haralpos.

"Wake him," the Baykus Kadine giggled. "Wake him up and ask."

Wake up! he screamed at himself. Wake up, they're all around your bed! Sleep was a black velvet pillow over his face. Maybe his body realized that if he woke, he'd hurt.

"Maybe he should be kissed," Pelageya said in her deep voice, "like the damsel in tower?" Something that might have been fingernails trailed across the bare skin of his chest.

The whispering blurred, blended. He thought he saw the dim golden outline of the open door to the corridor outside, the subaqueous flicker of the pierced brass lamps, but he could not see the vampires around him at all. Only the red glint of their eyes.

"Maybe he knows where the Bey has gone?"

"What makes you think he might?"