Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

Asher stood in the doorway for a moment, leaning on the silver halberd, shivering, for he had stripped off his death-stinking coat and only the piercing cold prevented him from shedding his shirt as well.

How many had the Bey killed? wondered Asher, looking at the bowed form in its golden robes beside the pathetic, shrouded figure on its jeweled pyre of ice. As many as a war, certainly. Karolyi would justify himself the same way-as he, Asher, had justified himself, time and again. At the time he may even have been right.

Painfully, clinging to the halberd for support, Asher made his way down the long stairs.

In the courtyard the noise was louder, echoing from the archway that led to the Byzantine house. Shouts, and the crash of precious things breaking, the thud of running feet. Smoke rolled in, burning his eyes and catching in the light-too much, too strong, for torches. Some part of the house was in flames.

Legs shaking, Asher leaned on the column at the foot of the stair and wondered if he had enough strength left to make it down the colonnade, across the overgrown court, through the crypts...

And home, he thought.

If Golge Kurt became Master of Constantinople-and Asher knew it lay beyond his strength, now, to stop him-it was only a matter of time before Karolyi, or some Young Turk just as eager for his country's triumph, convinced him to become a weapon of the state.

And then a new age would come indeed.

He would tell Clapham, though he knew Clapham wouldn't believe. Even the redoubtable Lady Clapham would think his ravings delirium. One had to be born to it, raised in it, as Karolyi had been, to believe quickly... quickly enough.

Razumovsky would believe, and Razumovsky would help him home... but Razumovsky would make a deal with Karolyi for what he could get. Bulgaria for you-India for us.

And the infection would spread.

Something dark rushed through the archway into the court, making straight for the stair. It paused before him, dark eyes flaring in the lamplight, and Asher realized, tardily, who it was. Tall for a Turk, with a Turk's black hair and scimitar nose, a feral bristle of mustache... the eyes were indeed the eyes of a wolf. All this he saw in less than a second; Asher didn't even have time to raise the halberd from its position as a crutch to that of a weapon when the vampire struck him aside, the impact with the wall like a sword in his side.

Breath left him and wouldn't return, and when he opened his eyes again the vampire was partway up the stairs, lithe and silent as a lion in his torn khaki rags.

Asher thought, grimly, I have to pursue... but knew he was incapable of catching him, of moving more than a step or so without agony...

And Golge Kurt was not alone. Asher had seen vampires run-eerily weightless and without a sound-and knew the second dark form that streamed in like smoke and bones was a vampire as well. Even before he realized it was Ysidro-Ysidro?-the vampire of London, gaunt and starved and ghastly, fell upon Golge Kurt like a silent falcon with a talon-rip at his throat that would have ex-sanguinated him had he not, impossibly, heard and turned at the last instant to meet the attack.

The two closed, fell, locked together on the steps, ripping at one another with clawlike nails, and seconds later a third vampire emerged from the dark, sprang up the steps. Him Asher knew at once, though in a strange way he seemed to have changed even more than Ysidro. When they last had spoken, by the flame light of the burning sanitarium in the Vienna Woods, Ernchester, if torn by indecision and grief, at least had been his own man. Now his face was empty, faded as the rags of his old black coat and filthy trousers, his blue eyes pieces of dirty glass. He caught Ysidro by the arms, dragging him back from the silent, slashing tangle on the steps, and held him while Golge Kurt whipped a long soldier's knife from his belt. Ysidro took one cut across the chest before he kicked the blade aside, another across the face as he slid bonelessly free of Ernchester's grip...

Then twisted as a pistol roared in the enclosing walls of the court. Ernchester and Golge Kurt stood frozen, as between them Ysidro sank like a broken thing to the steps.

Ignace Karolyi stepped from the colonnade on the other side of the court. "Go," he said. He had an army pistol in his hand, the barrel smoking. "I'll finish him." He spoke German.

"He's faking." Golge Kurt looked down at the crumpled tangle of black and white at the foot of the steps. Blood glittered darkly on his face and throat where Ysidro's claws had ripped, but there was no sweat, nor did he pant-in fact, he did not breathe at all. "I never saw bullet stop one of us yet."

Karolyi grinned. "My dear Kurt, you've never heard of silver bullets? They're a sovereign remedy for Evil. You'll have to look out for them, when you're working for us."

Golge Kurt's dark eyes glittered warily on the last sentence, but he made a smile, a demon manufacturing one for human consumption. "Even so. Sharl..."

Charles Farren, third Earl of Ernchester, had come down the steps to kneel beside Ysidro's body, his hand pressed to his mouth. "Simon," he whispered, half unbelieving, and Asher, still leaning against the wall in the warehouse bay's concealing shadow, knew then that it was true. It was, somehow, Ysidro. "Simon ..."

"Come." Golge Kurt had mounted a step, half turned back, and Asher remembered how Olumsiz Bey had spoken to Zardalu that night in the garden.

Ernchester looked up, his face struggling to regain an expression, some sign of life. The air was nauseating with the smell of blood. "This man..." he said haltingly.

"Come."

He did not touch him, did not make a move, but Ernchester flinched. Vampires do not generally show age, but Ernchester's face, thought Asher, was lined and haggard with the weight of centuries of immortality in which he had never, for one moment, been free.

He rose to his feet and followed. The two vampires passed like shadows up the stairs.

Karolyi crossed the court, cocking the pistol as he moved. From the shadows of the bay where Asher stood it was three long strides to the foot of the stairs, too long to move without taking a bullet in the chest himself. Still, the key was in his hand, ready to throw as a distraction to buy himself time to spring, when a voice called out from the passageway to the house, "Mr. Karolyi!" and Karolyi turned in surprise.

If Asher hadn't spent seventeen years on Her Majesty's Service dealing with the absolutely unexpected, he would have thought, Lydia??? in sheer, baffled, horrified shock... and lost the split second her distraction bought him. He knew it was Lydia's voice even as he was moving, two fast strides, slashing down with the silver halberd blade at Karolyi's neck. The Austrian spun, his bullet cracking the pink plaster of the arch through which Asher came at him, and Asher reversed the halberd and caught Karolyi across the temple with the shaft.

Karolyi fell back, dropping the gun, and grabbed for the halberd shaft. The two men grappled, and someone-absolutely and unmistakably Lydia-plunged out of the salon with a long bronze candlestick in hand whose weighted base she smashed into Karolyi's spine. Karolyi gagged, lurched; Asher kicked him hard in the belly, thrust him away, then stooped and snatched the pistol from the floor-at the same moment Lydia sprang back out of any possible range and stood panting, red hair everywhere, like a disheveled mermaid in a torn green gown and opera gloves, her neck a treasury of silver and pearls.

Karolyi backed, his hands raised, panting. "My dear Dr. Asher." Firelight from the windows of the Byzantine house made everything luridly clear in the court.

"You can't shoot me, you know." There was a wryness, almost amusement, in his eyes, his voice; the same glint he'd had in his eye when he saluted Asher as Asher was led away to the Vienna jail.