After the bewildering stinks and colors of the Grand Bazaar, tea at the Hotel Bristol was like stepping through a door and finding oneself suddenly in the south of France. For Lydia this effect was heightened by the fact that, in spite of the Bristol's excellent view of the Golden Horn, she could not see the old city. For her, the world ended a yard past Herr Hindi's broad shoulders in a light- filled sea of obscurity through which white-coated waiters swam, their silver dishes flashing like strange treasure in the late afternoon sun. Women wearing stylish pale-hued frocks chatted with well-tailored gentlemen in French and German over Ceylon tea and creme brulee. A small orchestra played Mendelssohn. Three children in knee pants and starchy white dresses consumed water ices under the benevolent glare of a tightly laced woman in black bombazine.
It was restful beyond words.
At the foot of the hill on which Pera stood, Lydia knew, Armenians cleared up charred beams and broken glass from the harsh retribution against their protests. Men like Razumovsky and Karolyi shifted and jockeyed for position in the background, selling guns to the Turks or the Greeks or the Arabs in preparation for a war that everyone knew was coming, and telling themselves it was all to maintain the peace. In every house in the old city, women lived in ugly little rooms like the harem, behind lattices that forbade not only the eyes of men but the sun itself, and no one raised a voice for them.
And beneath the surface moved darker shadows yet.
"Maybe it's just my being a newcomer here that makes me feel as though I've dropped into another time as well as another world." Lydia blinked brown eyes against the golden light and took a sip of her tea, dainty fingers half covered with mitts of ecru lace. "Sometimes it seems to me it's the small things, not the big ones, that make a country change from ancient to modern, the way the Ottoman Empire is doing. Like buying stoves and furnaces instead of heating their houses with braziers..." After three days in the house on Rue Abydos, Lydia knew all about braziers. "I expect you still have people paying you with handfuls of gold."
Hindi chuckled richly. "Ha ha, precisely so, Frau Asher. One finds the strangest things here in the mysterious Orient! You know, the other day I was called in to consult with a wealthy man who wanted to donate plumbing fixtures to the hospital attached to the mosque of the Sultan Mehmed..."
The ensuing story occupied fifteen minutes and had nothing whatsoever to do with furnaces, odd financial avenues, or possible wars among the city's Undead, but nevertheless Lydia found it intriguing for its contrast between the new and the old. Once she discounted her host's rather heavy-handed attempts at humor and his propensity for telling her what, as a European lady, she should and shouldn't do, she did not find it difficult to listen to Herr Hindi on his favorite subject, perhaps because her own interests had always tended to the technical. He was, at least, a businessman with contacts in one of the strangest and most varied cities in the world, and not a twenty-two-year-old aristocrat whose world began with cub hunting in November and ended at the conclusion of the grouse shoots.
With a minimum of prompting, Hindi quite happily told her about his clients, the sometimes peculiar methods of payment found in an empire whose ruler had vetoed the building of an electrical dynamo because the word sounded too much like "dynamite" and might give encouragement to anarchists... and, of course, a great deal about the differences in burning time between soft and hard coal and the sorts of steam furnaces available from American manufacturers as opposed to those in Berlin.
"Ah, it's a strange city, Frau Asher, a strange city!" He shook a plump, reproving finger at her. "And not one for a lady to be traveling about in alone! I hope you're not one of those lady suffragettes we hear so much of, wanting to wear pants and smoke cigarettes and make us poor men stay home and mind the babies, ha ha!"
Lydia, who would far sooner have trusted any child with James than her friend Josetta or, God forbid, herself, simply out of regard for the poor infant's comfort, refrained from saying so. Instead she angled the conversation neatly back to Herr Hindi's adventures-in which he was far more interested anyway. In time, and with genuine interest, she asked, "So there are some clients who won't appear at all? Who refuse to deal with the infidel even for the sake of their own comfort?"
"My dearest Frau Asher," Hindi chuckled, "legions of them!" He poured her another cup of tea. The waiter had twice refilled the hot water, and once brought the furnace salesman another plate of Italian ice. Hindi was a thickset, fair Berliner of about thirty-five whose wife and two sons had remained in Germany. He had been one of the dozen or so gentlemen who had extended invitations, not, she knew, with the smallest intent of impropriety on either side, but simply because she was a new face in a rather small Western community and- if she didn't wear her spectacles-reasonably pretty. She'd been glad when Lady Clapham, after a moment's thought, had pronounced it "perfectly all right" not to bring Miss Potton along; even gladder when the attache's wife had offered to invite the girl for tea and cards at the embassy instead.
Margaret had-characteristically-turned her down.
"Frau Asher, if you want to hear of impossible clients, you should talk to Jacob Zeittelstem. Now, there's an eccentric client for you! Huge old labyrinth of a palace lost in some maze in the heart of the city, bills of credit from who knows what companies and corporations, can only work under certain conditions, won't meet with him in the daytime at all, won't meet with him under any circumstances half the time but sends these-these thugs who don't know to do anything but open doors, it seems; won't meet with him on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays, changes his mind, tear it out, do it over, but hurry, hurry, hurry..." He laughed again, and sipped his tea.
"Poor old Jacob comes away tearing out his hair and wishing he'd never heard of ammonia refrigerating plants."
"Refrigerating?" Lydia inquired.
"Refrigerating?" Ysidro leaned back a little in his chair and drew the soft cashmere lap robe more closely around his shoulders. A reflex, thought Lydia, left over from the days when he had body heat to conserve. She wondered if the shivering reflex persisted. What would it be, she thought uneasily, to be conscious-unable to lose consciousness-in a body slowly consumed with the cold of death?
"Maybe he wants to keep blood in bottles?" suggested Margaret. "So he won't have to... to take it from people?"
"If it's the death of the victim rather than the blood itself that feeds the vampire, refrigerated blood would be useless," Lydia replied, then wanted to bite out her tongue as Margaret flushed hotly and flashed an apologetic look to Ysidro, as if to say, Don't pay attention to her, she doesn't understand. The vampire didn't seem to have noticed either Lydia's faux pas or Margaret's reaction to the possible laceration of his feelings.
"It's been tried," he said calmly. "More for the sake of convenience than humanity, I admit. Refrigeration causes blood to clot and separate even more quickly. In any case, in a city as rife with dogs as Constantinople, I can scarce imagine anyone storing blood for purposes of mere physical nourishment."
"You know, I wondered-" Lydia began, then cut herself off quickly, realizing her medical curiosity on the subject of whether Ysidro were feeding on nonhuman blood sources might be tactless in the extreme.
The yellow eyes touched hers, only for an instant, but awareness of her question, confusion, and self-deprecation all danced like an ironic star. But he only said, "I have not heard cold itself could injure the Undead, nor cause them to sleep on into the night. The vampires of St. Petersburg dwell in palaces left empty through the winter, while most of the court goes south to the Crimea, and they rise and hunt and sleep as usual. It is not an easy thing," he added, turning to Lydia with that same remote amusement, "to be Undead during the time of the white nights. But in winter they walk abroad from three in the afternoon, and sleep does not weigh them down until eight or nine in the morning. They do not feel cold that would kill a living man, though it is true that the Master of Petersburg has spoken of removing permanently to the Crimea, which tells me that he has begun to tire, and so feel the pain of cold in his joints. Still..."
He turned his head a little, to contemplate the stacks of ledgers and papers heaped on the table around the oil lamps that Madame Potoneros had brought in at Lydia's behest. An embassy clerk had delivered the material late that afternoon, with a note from Lady Clapham: I won't ask what you want them for, my dear, only that if you learn anything we should know about, you'll pass it along. The red are the Banque Ottomane; the gray, the Deutsches Bank. I'm afraid we'll need them back in the morning. The we amused her, confirming as it did who was really running Intelligence-such as it was-in Constantinople.
"It will be a matter of interest to see how deep the fingers of the master of the city have gone into the flesh of the empire."
"If it's the Bey that we find."
"Oh, it will be." Ysidro rose and laid aside the lap robe, averting as he did so his face from the light. Margaret scurried away to fetch his cloak, as if she feared Lydia would usurp this task that she considered her right. "Money takes on a life of its own once it enters the veins of this body they call finance.
All the masters of the great cities are aware of this and make sure they have great sums of it, not hidden, but disguised as something else. This is why they are masters. I would hazard that since July, with the army coup, the Bey has been transferring his assets from the old forms-hidden stocks of gold, investment in land-to the new. It is his protection against the interloper, if interloper there be, or against a rebellious fledgling. His protection against the upheavals of the living."
"And his challenger won't have the capital base yet."
"I doubt it. Most fledglings do not realize the need for such invisible redoubts. They think immortality sufficient."
As he reached to take the cloak from Margaret's hand, Lydia saw that the gold ring he wore had slipped around his finger, turning so that the bezel faced inward to his palm, as rings do when the flesh shrinks away from them with cold, or age, or death.
"As for me, I shall pursue Anthea and Charles as the Undead pursue, listening in the streets where the poor dwell and seeking those places where the living do not walk. If James is yet alive, as this Karolyi has said, it is because the Bey needs something of him, and at a guess it is as bait, either for Charles or for Anthea. Karolyi is still bargaining, offering what he has to sell-the support and alliance of his government in these uncertain times- while feeling for other advantages."
"But why- " Lydia began helplessly, and Ysidro shook his head.
"We move in a miasma, and not entirely that of the Bey's making," he said softly. "There is some other matter afoot here, beyond a possible challenger or interloper. Treason among the Bey's fledglings, perhaps, or an interloper not of the common run. We must each search as we can. It may be that as a physician you will recognize something concerning cold as it has to do with the Undead state, which even the Undead do not know. Later, like the knights of the grail meeting upon the road, we can exchange information and see if we can read, one for the other, what each vision signifies. Do not lose hope."
"No," Lydia said, consciously steadying herself. "No. At least I know James is alive- if Karolyi was telling the truth. Though I did notice he was very careful not to say when he'd seen James. It might have been-well-days ago. But really, we can only do what we can do."
"An observation worthy of the sages of Athens," the vampire said gravely and, holding out his hand, took her fingers in his. "A word in your ear."
Conscious of Margaret's glare at her back, Lydia followed him out of the dining room, to the head of the stair.
He stood with his back to the vigil light, so that only its reflection touched the points of cheeks and chin and made a spidery halo of his hair. In his enveloping cloak he looked like Death on its way to the opera; his hands were, she thought, not quite steady as he pulled on his gloves.
"You have fathomed my secret," he said, the soft voice emerging from the dark, and upon it, like the trace of his antique inflection, Lydia detected the echo of a smile. "The blood of animals gives some nourishment, though it does not warm, and their deaths are useless to feed the hunger and the need of the mind. But it would not do to shock Margaret with the information that the dark hero of her Byronic fancies is currently living on the blood of dogs-and such dogs! As a physician, however, I knew the matter would consume you until you knew." Lydia laughed, the fear and tension she had felt since that morning in the bazaar loosening its hold. "I think you're just too vain to own to it." She smiled, and Ysidro paused, his hand on the rail of the stair.
"Of course I am vain," he said. "All of the Undead are vain- too vain to admit that, like common men, we must die."
He made a move to go, then turned back and took her hand again-carefully, so as not to come near the silver on her wrist- and raised it to his lips.
As he vanished into the shadows of the stair, she said, "Be careful..."
She didn't know whether he heard or not.
Margaret shoved the papers she was reading quickly into her workbasket and returned to her chair as Lydia reentered the dining room. She kept her eyes downcast, but Lydia felt the sullenness of her silence, the resentment in the set of her narrow back in its ill-fitting cotton shirtwaist. She drew a pile of gray Deutsches Bank ledgers to her, but left pencil and foolscap to one side untouched.
Determined not to have another argument with her, Lydia only asked, "You know what we're looking for?"
"New corporations in July or August paid for in gold or by transfer of lands, sums transferred to another corporation or another bank monthly or quarterly." She recited Lydia's instructions like a schoolchild regurgitating some hated-and barely comprehended-lesson.
"Look for a transfer to the second corporation, or to a new corporation, in the first week of October of ten thousand marks, or twelve thousand five hundred francs, and if you see either the Zwanzigstejahrhundert Abkuhlunggeselleschaft, or any of these names-" She pushed across to her the slip of paper she'd gotten from Razumovsky that afternoon, listing the four or five names under which the Sultan's chamberlain took bribes or laundered money. "-please flag it for me." "I understand," Margaret said with gruff impatience, and pulled the paper to her, but didn't even turn it right side up. Lydia half opened her mouth to remonstrate, then let it go. She guessed she'd have to go through whatever Margaret did again anyway, but if these ledgers had to be back in the morning, there was no time for either discussion or for Margaret to slam into the bedroom in a tantrum. She couldn't work through all of this alone.
And what could she say in any case?
The dream returned to her, of Margaret waiting in the castle ruins for a horseman who never came. Was Ysidro unable even to project the dream memories of passion to her now, the melodramatic romances that held her to him? Was he, she wondered suddenly, unable to appear in them because in them he would be the skeletal, almost insectile creature who had spoken to her with his back to the light?
If that was what vampires saw in mirrors, no wonder they avoided them, veiled them, kept them closed behind doors. If that was what the living eyes would perceive, no wonder the vampires caused the living to see-or remember seeing- nothing at all.
All of the Undead are vain...
"Kiria..." Stefania Potoneros appeared, hesitating, in the doorway and held out two stiff cream-colored envelopes.
The first contained a note on the letterhead of the Zwanzigstejahrhundert
Abkuhlunggeselleschaft-Berlin, London, and Constantinople-typed neatly in English and signed by a secretary.
Mrs. Asher:
We regret to inform you that Hen Jacob Zeittelstein is unable to make an appointment with you for this week, due to the fact that he is in Berlin at this time. When he returns to Constantinople on Wednesday next, he will of course be delighted to get in touch with you regarding a meeting.
Sincerely,
Avram Kostner
Private secretary to Herr Zeittelstein
Wednesday! thought Lydia, aghast. Two days from now until he was even in Constantinople, let alone when he'd have time to see her, answer her questions.
Jamie could be dead by then...
Jamie could be dead now.
My dearest Madame , the other letter read, in an elaborately indecipherable French hand.
It appears we have located the storyteller your husband sought. With your permission, my carriage shall arrive for you at ten tomorrow morning, though it would be well to be prepared to do some walking.
Your most humble servant, Razumovsky
"If I may be permitted to ask a question, effendi?" Asher turned his cheek to the slab where he lay, blinking the sweat from his eyes. In the still, dense heat of the tiny hararet-the chamber of the baths that the Romans would have called the calderium, or hot room-the shape of the Master of Constantinople, white as the marble that entirely formed the walls, seemed to emerge from and blend into the steam in a disconcerting fashion, so that half the time Asher was not entirely certain he could see him at all.
"It is always permitted to ask, Scheherazade." The voice of Olumsiz Bey came out of the steamy twilight, and the red glow of the braziers in the corners made twin embers of his eyes. There was dreamy, heat-soaked amusement in the deep voice as he spoke the nickname, taken from Asher's curiosity about old words and ancient tales even in the face of his imprisonment and peril. "There would be no wisdom in the world, did men not ask."
"What do you want with the Earl of Ernchester?"
It was nearly midnight. With the early fall of winter dark, Zardalu and the other fledglings had taken Asher to an immense dry cistern, like a pillared cavern beneath the city, given him a tin lantern and sent him out in that endless forest of columns. "Behave as if you searched for someone, Englis," whispered the eunuch, with his mocking smile. "Gaze about-so-put your hand to your heart, as if to calm the pangs of love." The others laughed, the thm, metallic shivering he had heard in Vienna, and faded into the darkness, leaving him alone.
So he had walked, as he had walked in the cemeteries, holding the lantern high, and the shadows of the pillars reeled and shifted with the movement of the light. The columns themselves were of all girths: thin Ionic with rams' horn capitals, and heavy, unfluted Doric worn with the marks of water. The floor underfoot was hardened mud, silted up who knew how deep. Between them night lay thick, and the cold breaths of moving air told him the place had more than the one entry the vampires had used. He was thinking how fortunate it was that the candle within the lantern was protected by glass when the flame went out, as suddenly as if covered by a snuffer.
Asher stepped back at once, putting his back to the nearest pillar and forcing closed his mind against the crushing numbness that bore down upon it. He reached for the pocket where he kept matches, wrapped in waxed silk, and his nostrils were filled with the smell of old blood and graveyard mold. A hand closed around his arm, as if the arm had been trapped in machinery; but before he could lash out with the lantern in his other hand, before he could move or think or cry out, the gripping hand was gone.
There was a kind of movement, a breathing rustle in the dark, and he pulled the matches from his pocket and lit one with a hand that shook. He was alone.
"My dear Scheherazade." The voice was suddenly close. Asher blinked again in the steam, to see that the Master of Constantinople stood beside the marble table where he lay, naked, as was the Bey himself, but for a towel around his loins.
"These are vampire matters, of no concern to the living. Indeed, I doubt the living would understand them."
"They're of concern to those who want to stay among the living." Asher sat up, his brown hair hanging lank in his eyes, and the bathman Mustafa stepped back. Asher had guessed that the Bey's living servants weren't deaf, but he had never succeeded in getting more than a few words out of any of them. When they brought him food, when they placed clean clothing in his room or escorted him to the library or the baths, they watched him with the eerie impassivity of guard dogs, as wary as if he, not they, were the servant of the night. "Was it you who had Lady Ernchester's rooms searched, after Ernchester had gone?"
"My instructions to Karolyi were to have her destroyed," the Bey said shortly. His orange eyes, gaudy as aniline dye, glittered coldly. "The woman is his strength. A man need not be a sorcerer, or a reader of dreams, to have learned that in the course of a single conversation. In the eighteen months of his abiding here as a living man, there was not a day that he did not speak of her, nor a night when she was not in his dreams. When I heard that both had been made Undead, I thought it a foolish risk on the part of the Master of London, to have among his fledglings one with such power over his mind as she."
"He disobeyed you, then."
"Stupid Magyar, to think he could defeat the purposes of the Undead." The Bey's left hand caressed unthinkingly the silk bindings around the hilt of his silver weapon- thornwood, Asher guessed, the silk just sufficient to keep from discomfort a vampire as old as the Bey, who had toughened a little against some of the substances reactive to vampire flesh. Around his neck he wore a foot-long knife, sheathed in leather and lead. Asher guessed the blade within the sheath was silver as well. "Was it she who freed him in Vienna and killed those set to watch over his prison there?"
Asher shook his head. "It was the Vienna vampires. Karolyi had brought a victim for Ernchester to kill."
"Fool." The vampire turned his face aside, anger in his eyes. His lean body seemed almost completely without muscle, the hair of chest and armpits paled to a strange red-brown. Though the heat of the hararet had laid a film of condensation on the pallid skin, Asher could see not a drop of sweat. "The man is greedy, seeing only the path to his own power, and not that things are ordered as I have ordered them for reasons beyond his comprehension. And yours," he added, looking back at him.
"Then why deal with him?"
"A man is a fool who casts away a plank in a shipwreck, Scheherazade. He is impertinent, to think that I would do as his Christian emperor bids. But power, and allies, are always needful in a difficult time."
"And are the times so difficult?" Asher asked quietly. "Is that why you're hunting Lady Ernchester so diligently? Not only to control the earl, but to keep her out of Karolyi's hands? He'll go to your fledglings, you know, if he hasn't already."
A drift of moving air stirred the steam. The curtain of embroidered leather that separated the hararet from the sogukluk, the warm room, lifted aside. The man Sayyed stood there, his head- shaven like the Bey's-glistening with moisture.
"There is one to see you, Lord. A makanik." Except for the last word, which was Persian, he spoke peasant Turkish, the longest sentence Asher had yet heard any of the living servants speak.
"You will excuse me." The Master of Constantinople bowed deeply, turned to go, then, pausing, looked back.
"Do not concern yourself in the affairs of my children, Scheherazade," the Bey said, and the giant ant seemed to watch Asher from its amber prison on the Bey's ear. "This is not the course of a prudent man. Do not trust them. They will promise you things-escape from this place, safety from harm, even the kiss that brings eternal life. But it is all lies. They are all treacherous. They envy one another and envy the power each thinks the other might possess; and above all they envy me. But I am the master of the city. This city is mine, and all things in it."
He held up his silver weapon, the blade flashing gently in the dull braziers' gleam. "And do not concern yourself with Ernchester. That, too, is a course that will bring you only death."
When he had gone, Asher stretched out on the table again, gingerly favoring the dressing over the knife wound on his ribs. It was healing well; Mustafa had changed the dressing, and now, as the man kneaded and pummeled his muscles into lassitude, Asher stretched out his right arm before him and looked at it in the dim light.
The heat had reddened the scars that tracked the vein from wrist to elbow, the scars left by the Paris vampires. Among them, the fresh dark blot of a bruise was printed like a blackening stain.
Asher picked out the marks of fingers and thumb, remembering the hand that had crushed his arm in the dark of the cistern. The dressing pinching as he moved, he brought his other hand forward and laid it over the marks.
The hand was bigger than his own.
Ernchester's hands, he remembered, were small.
The fledglings had returned to him almost at once, in the silence of the dry cistern, had blindfolded him and brought him back to the House of Oleanders without a word, as they had brought him back twice now in three days from those desolate places where Anthea might have hidden. They had blanked his mind as they came through the street, so that he returned to a kind of frightened and dizzy consciousness in the octagonal Byzantine vestibule that led to the Bey's salon.
He was beginning to think that Zardalu had made a genuine mistake and let his mind be distracted while coming back into the house from that first expedition. Zardalu and the others had departed on their own hunt after returning Asher to the House of Oleanders, and were still gone when Asher dressed again in clean linen and secondhand gray trousers, red wool vest and a worn and slightly ill- fitting Stamboul coat. He made his way back along the corridors to his room with Sayyed padding silently behind. He knew that route now, and how the small palace of some Byzantine prince connected with one of the several hans that made up its wings. Twice he'd passed a doorway he guessed led into some late Roman crypt or church, and the painted room with the tiled dome in which he'd seen Karolyi was definitely Turkish.
The courtyard of the old han was lighted with brass lamps hanging from the colonnade before what had been deep bays of warehouses downstairs. A single lamp burned in the niche at the end of the open gallery, two floors above. Lights burned, too, in the Byzantine vestibule-Asher could see their reflection on the arched passageway.
A makanik, to see the Deathless Lord.
Something concerning that secret experiment, that strange crypt far beneath the house, stinking of oil and ammonia.
Near the old baths, Zardalu had said.
There were no clocks in the House of Oleanders, and the hours of darkness could be disorienting. Asher, who had a fairly good sense of time, estimated it was close to one in the morning as Sayyed turned the key in the lock and padded away, and guessed he had an hour or two in which he'd be relatively safe. Do not concern yourself with Ernchester, the Bey had said. But he was still bargaining with Karolyi.
Except for the dry basin in the center, the long floor was a faded moss bank of carpet, four and five layers thick. Among these carpets he had concealed the picklocks he made.
He fetched them now.
The bronze candlestick, which he kept quite openly beside his small pile of books in one of the inlaid wall cupboards, had provided him not only with wire for picklocks, but with a number of candles as well. These he slipped now into the pocket of his coat. The lock was a very old single-tumbler Banham, probably the best obtainable when put in, but that had been more than a hundred years ago. As he descended the stairs to the courtyard, he heard the voice of the Bey shouting in the salon and stopped, startled, by the vestibule passageway to listen.
"It has been three weeks, you sputum of Shaitan's dog!" That any vampire, let alone one as old as Olumsiz Bey, should give way to rage at all was unheard of, and the passion that cracked in his deep voice was terrifying to hear. "Five days since the breakdown, and still no word of the man! I tell you there can be no more delays!"
"Peace, m'sieu," came a more muffled-and understandably nervous-reply. "The man will be back Wednesday. Wednesday is not so very long..."
Asher hesitated, torn, sensing that whatever could so enrage the Master of Constantinople must be of paramount importance, but knowing that if he were caught standing here-much less with picklocks and candles in his pockets-he was a dead man indeed. His every instinct told him to stay, but at least, he thought dryly, moving like a shadow away from the arch, if he's shouting at his engineer he isn't listening for me...
The mental image of the Bey as he had seen him other nights, sitting still on the divan of his pillared salon, silver weapon across his knees and orange eyes half shut while he listened to the teeming dreams of the city around him, was a disturbing one.
Even as we hear the footfalls of the workmen, Zardalu had said. At least as long as he walked above the ground, if the Bey listened for them, Asher knew he could hear his.
The way that leads to the old baths.
Fashions in building came and went, and the House of Oleanders was at least five old buildings fused into a monstrous maze of dark rooms and decaying memories, but, Asher knew, plumbing remains plumbing. The elaborate system of pipes and hypocausts that made Turkish baths-and before them, Roman-was not a thing to be relocated lightly or far.
We smell the naft, the alkol, the stinks of what he does...
His mind returned to the throat-catching sharpness of the air in the crypt. A room with a wooden floor, to the left across a courtyard where grass grows between stones like cannonballs. A second flight of steps after the first... He fingered the picklocks in his pocket and drifted through the House of Oleanders like a ghost.
The solitary gleam of his candle wavered over chambers hung with printed Chinese silks whose colors showed themselves briefly; over vaulting that flickered and shone with the unmistakable dusky bronze hue of gold in shadow. He passed through an octagonal chamber whose walls were sheathed, floor to ceiling, in red tile the exact color of ripe persimmons, containing only a black-and-white wooden coffee stand; an arch looked out on a court smaller than the room itself and so choked with oleander bushes that only the dim white shape of a single statue could be seen in their midst.
Near that place he found the room he sought: the small, rich chamber of painted walls and blue and yellow tiles whose bare wooden floor thumped familiarly underfoot. From it a door let into a courtyard, long and narrow and paved in blocks of worn stone the size of halfpenny loaves, through which brown grass and weeds thrust tall.
The moon had not risen. No light touched the windows in the low buildings that surrounded the court on two sides. Roman, thought Asher, identifying the heavy rounded arches, the broken fragments of marble facing and the thick, fluted columns. What looked like the rear wall of another han closed in the third side of the court-he could just see the edge of a dome against the midnight sky-the red and white stone walls of the Turkish house, the fourth.
Under the columned porch the blackness was profound. The smaller cobbling was uneven, familiar. Almost he felt he could quench the candle as he passed to the left, fifteen steps across the court and through the door, five steps and left again. It was difficult to see that doorway, where it stood in shadow, though it opened in the middle of a wall of faded frescoes-more oddly still, he lost control of his steps twice, passing it without being aware. Around him the darkness brooded, watching. It could, he knew, contain anything.
Or nothing, he told himself. Or nothing.
He descended the stair. Had he not remembered a second stairway, he would have turned back, for its entrance lay concealed in the niche formed by one of the shallow false archways in what turned out to be the tepidarium of the house's original Roman baths. A small room, faced with marble, its shallow pool long gone dry. The mosaics of the floor gleamed faintly in the moving light of Asher's candle: Byzantine, and like those of the octagonal vestibule, long ago defaced.
The second stair, as he recalled, was twice or three times the depth of the one above. If he met them now-the Bey's homecoming fledglings with their night's prey- there would be no possibility of escape.
He guessed the crypt below had been a prison, or a storage place for something more precious or more sinister than wine. The low brick groinings of the ceiling barely cleared his six-foot height, and the few rooms that opened to his right from the short passageway were tiny, sunk below the level of the floor, which was itself worn in a channel inches deep. The air-as he recalled and as Zardalu had remarked-was bitterly cold.
Dastgah. Scientific apparatus. There were Western scientific journals in the library dating back to the eighteenth century, treatises in Arabic from the days before the Moslem world had become a scientific backwater. Just exactly what was it, Asher wondered, that the Master of Constantinople was having his Western engineers build for him? That meant so much to him that its delay would rouse him to fury? That he hid from his own fledglings?
The penny-dip glow touched something dully reflective, lodged like a gleaming bone in the throat of a dark arch.
Here, he thought. The place the Bey kept hidden, veiled with his mind.
At the end of the abyssal corridor before him, Asher knew he would find that long stone stair, climbing to an outer door. But branching down to his left, his raised candle flame showed a grille of silver bars, behind which lay-what?
Or who?
Before him the tunnel extended like the bowel of night-to his left, behind the silver bars, Stygian velvet.
He wondered how much time he had left.
He had to know.
Cautiously, he moved down the short side branch.
His wan light winked on water pooled on the uneven stone floor. The corridor was extremely narrow, curving slightly; the silver bars, tarnished nearly black save around the lock where the bolt went into the stone, blocked it about ten feet from the convergence of the two passages. Beyond, Asher could make out two archways set in the left-hand wall. On one, at least, he caught the glint of a metal lock plate on a door. The smell of ammonia was overpowering; he had to fight not to cough.
They'd be coming back soon: Zardalu and the Baykus Kadine, and the others, bringing another victim to chase through the pitch-dark house until they cornered him, weeping and screaming...
Even locked in his upper room, Asher had heard the Armenian boy's voice for a long time.
He turned from the silver grating, back to the main corridor, and resumed his quest for the stair that led out.
There was a door, locked, that had to be it-like the doors above, he missed it two or three times, found it only by walking with his hand on the weeping stone of the wall, until what he had somehow taken three times for an angle of shadow resolved itself suddenly into an arch. This evidence of the power of the master vampire's mind he found extremely unnerving. They must have left the door open behind them that first night when they'd gone forth-or perhaps one had gone ahead of the others to open it for them.
In any case the lock was a Yale, new; a matter for a duplicate key, not a homemade shank of bronze wire.
Heart beating fast now with apprehension, he returned to the silver grille. That lock, at least, was of the old-fashioned kind, probably because the softer metal couldn't take the stress of the smaller wards. He angled the bronze wire carefully, knowing every scratch would show. Even the lugs and pins that held it to the stonework of the walls were silver.
They are treacherous... the Bey had said, the silver blade of his halberd gleaming in the smoldering half-light of the baths. They are treacherous.
His heart slamming blood in his ears, he edged his way along the buckled, puddled flagging next to the wall. A wet footprint here would condemn him to death. Straw and sawdust salted the corridor, making the going even more delicate, and the cold was arctic. He wondered if he would hear the fledglings returning. Wondered if he would know, should the Bey be watching him from out of the darkness with those leached-out ochre eyes.
"Ernchester," he whispered at the nearer of the two doors.
Both were locked. Hasps of silver, or more probably electroplated steel. Padlocks sheathed in silver, even to the bows. Silver solder dabbed over the screw heads. The locks were new-the rest, black with age in the candle's feeble light.
"Ernchester!" he whispered again. How much-how far- could the Deathless Lord hear? Not through earth, he thought. Not through this much stone. "It's Asher. Are you there? Anthea's free, she's here in Constantinople..."
He had almost said, Anthea's alive.
Listened.
Deep behind the heavy door he heard it: a groan, or a cry, that lifted the hair on his head-physical agony mingled with the blackest depth of despair. Hell, Asher thought. Such a sound you would hear if you put your ear to the keyhole of Hell.
"Can you hear rne? Can you understand?"
Only silence replied. His hand trembled, fumbled at the lock, half numb with cold but unsteady, also, with the knowledge that time was now very short...
"I'll come back for you," he promised hoarsely. "I'll get you out..." And I'll need your help, he added as a grim afterthought, to return the favor. A draft, a shift of air, and his heart stopped as if knifed with an icicle, then began beating fast and thin. Even in that first second, he pinched the candlewick, thanking God for the smell of the ammonia that would drown the smoke of a full-fledged conflagration, much less that of a single dip. That drowned, even from the Undead, the smell of his living blood.
From the dark of the corridor beyond the silver bars he heard stumbling footfalls, and a pleading breath, "My lord, be kind-be kind to a poor girl..."
At the edge of hearing, a tickle of obscene mirth.
"Oh, the lord you're going to will be kind." The voice might have been Zardalu's. "He is the kindest lord in the city, sweet and generous... you'll find him so, beautiful gazelle..."
In the utter blackness there was nothing to see, no way to know if they'd noticed the slight jar of the doorway in the silver bars-he'd pulled it to behind him, the hinges oiled and uncreaking...
He could only wait, desperately listening, wondering if the next thing to happen would be a cold touch on his neck. The staggering footsteps faded. He himself remained where he was for a long time, unmoving, dizzy with the ammonia stink and the cold that ate at his bones, before he felt his way along the wall to the bars, and so out into the corridor, wincing as the gate lock clicked behind him like the hammer of doom.
But none molested him. In time he felt his way back to the stair-painfully, endlessly, across the baths, thanking God that navigating in the dark was a skill he'd kept up from his spying days-and up to the grass-grown court, where the little light of the stars seemed bright to his eyes. As he crept through the courtyard, he heard the silvery clashing of vampire laughter from within the salon, and the young woman's voice pleading incoherently. It seemed to him, as he bolted his own door behind him and sank to his knees under a sudden wave of nervous shaking that the sound came to him still-that, and the moaning of the prisoner behind the crypt door.
It was a long time before he managed to get to his feet and stumble to the divan, where he lay shivering as if with killing fever until the muezzins of the Nouri Osmanie cried the late winter dawn.
