02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2

by Barbara Hambly

  One of the possibilities on Asher's very incomplete list of suspect properties was on the Steindelgasse: said to stand over the crypt of old St. Roche.

  "No," Asher said softly. "No, I think I'll be all right on my own."

  The palace in the Steindelgasse was typical of the great town houses of the nobility in the old city: five floors of massive gray walls, wedged between an ancient block of flats and the town palace of some count of the Montenuovo family that was illuminated like a Christmas tree for a ball. Looking up, Asher could see the tall windows of its first-floor salons ablaze with gaslight, which partly illuminated the narrow street; crystal chandeliers were visible, and a portion of a god-bedecked baroque ceiling.

  The Batthyany palace was utterly dark.

  Curious enough in itself, thought Asher, pausing before the heavy archway of the door. A number of the old noble families boosted their incomes by renting out the ground floors of their palaces for shops and the topmost floor or two below the attics out for flats. Certainly there were people coming and going through the great gate of the Montenuovo palais who were not of the upper crust. The other buildings Asher had looked at since parting from Halliwell, in the Haarhof and the Bakkersgasse, had been dark as well, lacking even spectral lights, and like them, this one had a slightly dilapidated air. The obligatory marble atlantes that upheld its shallow porch and heavily carved window frames were uncleaned, though Asher was interested to note that the hinges and ironwork on the door were free of rust.

  The building was clearly the oldest in the street.

  Hands in armpits for warmth, Asher strolled slowly past the enormous doors. It was later than he had intended to be still abroad. Fog and deepening cold were thinning the passersby and he heard eleven strike from the Domkirche a few streets away. He noted the shutters behind the windows' iron bars and the lack of recent wear on the pavement before the doors, and turned to fix in his mind the irregular shape of this narrow lane, orienting himself in the tangle of little streets that lay between the cathedral and the old Judenplatz. Within the gate would lie a broad passageway or possibly a sort of columned porch opening into the central court. Not a large one, judging by the frontage, but the building might be far longer than it was wide.

  He walked on, seeking a way to circle the block. Away from the lights of the apartment blocks and the Montenuovo town house he felt his nape prickle with his old instinct for danger, but if he was going to be shipped back to Paris in the morning, the least he could do was arm his successor with some knowledge of what he was getting into.

  He turned down a short lane, his boots splashing in thin puddles. The small iron lamps that burned high on the walls here were the only lights, feeble through thickening fog. He turned again, reflecting that this part of the old city was as bad as the London waterfront. Worse, in some ways, because the uniformly high walls closed in like a canyon, shutting out even the sight of spires or chimneys that could be used as landmarks.

  There was no one in sight around him. He thought, Finish this up and get out. In another narrow street off Tuchlaubenstrasse he identified what he thought was the back of the Batthyany Palace, no more than a slip of older masonry between two apartment blocks set at an odd angle; there was a little postern door there whose iron handle he knew better than to touch.

  A footstep splashed in water, close behind him. Asher turned and threw his back to the wall, lashed out as a dark figure laid hands on him from one side even as he heard the panting approach of another man. His fist jarred on the bony angle of a jaw. The man lurched back and Asher spun, his second attacker seizing his arm; he grabbed the man's hair with his free hand, yanked the head sharply against the stone of the wall behind him, twisted his body from the drag of the grip. At the same time, his mind registered tobacco and sweat and dirty clothes, the sound of breath and the warmth of snatching hands. Pain slashed his side even as he hooked the one man's feet from under him, slammed aside the hands clutching at his throat, smashed his fist into the other's face.

  He could barely see them in the dark between the buildings, but broke for where he thought they weren't. Someone clutched the skirts of his greatcoat but couldn't hold. He fled, stumbling, bruised his shoulder on the stone of a corner, fell where his foot caught a pothole in the broken pavement. He caught himself against a wall and pain seared his side again, and he realized that one of them had had a knife.

  He turned down what he thought was a lane back to the Seitzergasse, but the dirty glow from a window high and to his right showed him a blank wall. He pressed himself back into a corner where the shadows were darkest, reached to whip the knife from his boot as panting and footfalls echoed loud in the narrow space before him and he saw the blur of what might have been faces and the glint of edged steel.

  Then a hand like the mechanical jaws of a trap caught him above the elbow, and another, corpse-cold and strong as death, covered his mouth. He was dragged backward, down, into damp cold that smelled of wet stone, earth, and rats, and the dim arch of paler darkness blinked from existence as the door was kicked shut.

  The smell of Patou perfume filled his nostrils, covering a dim exhalation of putrefying blood.

  A woman's voice said in his ear, "Don't cry out."

  Asher was silent. Even if the silver protected the big veins of his throat and wrists, a vampire could still break his neck, and he knew what was in the darkness beside him.

  The hands left his arm and face. He listened, wondering how many of them there were.

  There was no sound of breath, of course. After a moment a silvery rustling, like infinitely thin metal fragments rubbing against each other. A woman's taffeta petticoat.

  He thought, She spoke English.

  Then the scratch of a match.

  He blinked against the needle-bright golden light that suddenly outlined a colorless hand, a papery white face, and touched with cinnamon threads the black mass of framing hair. Brown eyes met his, reflective vampire eyes, but still the color of brown leaves at the bottom of a winter pond.

  It was, he realized, Anthea Farren, Countess of Ernchester.

  "I do not understand the how of it," Ysidro said.

  He had taken off his gloves to deal the cards, and now he held up his hand, slender and white with long fingers like the spindles for bobbin lace. Lydia observed again the quasi-onychogryphosis of the fingernails and the fact that the musculature showed no abnormal development, though she had seen this man wrench apart iron bars.

  "It's my theory that it is a virus, or more probably a complex of several viruses." Lydia sorted her cards: ace, king, ten, eight, and seven of hearts; queen, jack, seven, and ten of spades. Almost no clubs-a nine-queen and jack of diamonds. Darkness fleeted past the train windows. Around them the first-class carriage had slipped slowly into silence.

  "Because the cells of the flesh are themselves altered?"

  She paused, a little surprised that the vampire knew what a virus was, then remembered all those medical journals in his house. Playing cards, and conversation, had insensibly lessened her fear of him-she wondered if he had chosen the absorption of a new game for that reason, or simply because, like her aunt Lavinia, he wanted a partner for the journey.

  "It's one way of accounting for the extreme sensitivity of the flesh to things like silver and certain herbs," she said after a moment. "Not to mention photocombustion."

  "Do we really need to talk about this?" Margaret squirmed uncomfortably, never lifting her gaze from the flying crochet needle and the lacy snowflakes of antimacassars overflowing the workbasket on her lap. After two or three tries at learning picquet, Margaret had retreated to her needlework, fighting to remain awake so as not to be left out of Ysidro's conversation, though she had very little to add. Into the discussion of railway travel, the finer points of picquet, the mathematical odds involved in card play and the structure of music- which Ysidro understood on a level very different from Lydia 's superficial acquaintance-Margaret had interjected periodic observations that she had
n't been out of England before or that she had read of this or that monument or notable sight in a travel book or Lord Byron's memoirs.

  She had tried two or three times to deflect the talk from the physical state of vampirism, but when she spoke now, her voice was low, as if she wanted to register a complaint that she didn't actually want the others to hear. Silly, thought Lydia, considering the fact that Ysidro could tell people apart by their breathing.

  The vampire moved two cards in his hand, removed three and laid them facedown near the stock, replacing them in his hand with three others. "It may sound odd, but to this day I do not understand what happened to my flesh the night I was taken, in a churchyard near the river, as I was coming home from my mistress... I always had mistresses in those days. Girls south of the river, who cared not that I was a Spaniard of the consort's entourage."

  He lifted the corners of two other cards and replaced them in the stock without change of expression.

  "I believe that this condition is two separate matters: the matter of the flesh, which preserves the body, not as it is at the moment of death, but as it is in the mind, molding even those who are taken old back into the shape of their living prime; and the matter of the mind, which sharpens and strengthens both the will and the senses, and gives us power over the wills, and the senses, of the living."

  Lydia discarded her club and two diamonds, drew another club-the eight-the ace of spades, and the queen of hearts. After four or five games in which Ysidro had systematically bested her, she was beginning to get the hang of the game, a complicated manipulation of points in which she could almost always deduce more or less what Ysidro had in his hand, though as yet the information did her little good. As a teacher, he had endless patience, gentle without being in the slightest bit kind. He had dealt with Margaret's total absence of card sense and her inability to follow or remember rules with a matter-of-factness that had, oddly enough, almost driven the governess to tears. "It is the blood that feeds the flesh," Ysidro said. "We can- and do, at need-live upon the blood of animals, or blood taken from the living without need of their death. But it is the death that feeds the powers of our minds. Without the kill, we find our abilities fading, the cloak of our illusion wearing threadbare, our skill at turning aside the minds of the living shredding away. Without those skills we cannot send the living mind to sleep or make others see what they do not see, or bring them walking up streets they would not ordinarily tread in moments of what feels, to them, to be absentmindedness." Margaret said nothing, but her needle jabbed fast among the flowery lacework in her hands.

  He gathered his cards. "Those, by the by, are our only powers, Mr. Stoker's interesting speculations aside. Personally, I have always wondered how one could transform oneself into a bat or a rat. Though lighter in weight than a living man, I am still of far greater bulk than such a creature. But in the speculations of this man Einstein I have found considerable food for thought." "Do you cast a reflection in mirrors?" Lydia had noticed upon coming into the compartment that a scarf-one of Margaret's, presumably, blue with enormous red and yellow roses printed on it-had been draped over the small mirror, and the curtains drawn tightly over the dark window glass.

  She recalled her own ghostly image in Ysidro's huge Venetian mirror draped with black lace.

  "We do." Ysidro made his discard. "The laws of physics do not alter themselves for either our help or our confusion. Many of us avoid mirrors simply because of the concentration of silver upon their backs. Even at a distance, in some it causes an itch. But chiefly, mirrors show us as we truly are, naked of the illusions that we wear in the eyes of all the living. Thus we avoid them, for though we can still cast a glamour over the mind of a victim who glimpses us in reflection, the victim will usually be troubled-unaccountably, to him-by what he sees or thinks he sees. We are not over fond of the experience ourselves. Four for quart in spades, ten high."

  They played cards until long past midnight, as the lights of Nancy flashed past the window and then the Vosges rose under their starless shawls of cloud. Still fascinated but nodding with weariness, Lydia finally returned to her own compartment, but, as she had feared, could not sleep. A little light strayed through the curtain from the corridor, a comfort, like the elephant-shaped veilleuse that had burned in her room when she was a child. Once, a shadow passed that light, and she lay awake for some time, imagining Ysidro drifting like a soundless specter along the train, sampling the dreams of the lady with the little dog, of the pair of brothers who'd asked to share the dinner table in the restaurant car with Lydia and Margaret, of the conductor in his chair and the kitchen boys in their bunks, like a connoisseur tasting different vintages of wine.

  She wondered what Margaret and Ysidro had to say to one another in the course of the night.

  Seven

  He's forgotten I'm here, thought Asher. More furious than frightened, he made a muffled noise that might have been Fairport's Christian name.

  "Have you seen him?"

  Lady Ernchester tilted her stub of candle to spill a few drops of wax onto the stonework of an elbow-high niche, then propped the light upright in it. The flame steadied and broadened, touching first her face with its deceptive warmth, then the stiff, sad features of a small stone image of the Queen of Heaven in the niche itself, fouled with rat droppings and the trails of slugs. The light penetrated farther, to show them in a sort of vestibule at the foot of the crooked stairs down which Anthea had led him. The walls and ceiling groins of brick and stone had lost most of their covering plaster, and earth floor filled the air with a raw exhalation of damp. Opposite them a door into another chamber had been bricked shut, but not the long windows on either side. Looking through, Asher could see that the room, far deeper and higher than the one in which he stood, was filled with human bones.

  He leaned against the wall, the pain in his side suddenly turning his knees to water. When he pressed his hand under his coat, he felt the hot soak of blood.

  "You're hurt..."

  She stepped forward and caught his arm; her hand pulled back and he staggered, for her fingers had accidentally brushed the silver chains where they ran under the cuff of his shirt. For a moment they stood looking at one another in the candle's wavering light.

  "Wait here for me," she said. He heard the rustle of her petticoats but did not see her depart.

  He sank down onto the windowsill, leaning against the rusted iron bars. His head swam, but losing consciousness was something he dared not do. The bones behind him rose in heaped mountains, losing themselves in a distance of utter night. A faint scratching clatter: movement among the piled skulls, and the glint of tiny eyes.

  A plague crypt, he thought. Easily as large as the one under the cathedral, though probably deeper in the earth. In the faint glow of the candle the bones were as brown and shiny as ocean stones.

  Get thee to my lady's chamber, thought Asher dizzily. Tell her that though she paint an inch thick, to this end will she come...

  Unless, of course, she chooses not to die.

  For some reason Lydia came into his mind, and he shut his eyes. To this end will she come...

  "Here." A hand touched his shoulder, swiftly withdrawn. She stood at his side again, his valise in her hand. "Take off your coat."

  The attacker's knife had slit the heavy wool and the lighter tweed of the jacket and waistcoat beneath. Shirt and waistcoat had absorbed most of the blood; had he not been wearing the greatcoat, he would probably have been killed. As it was, the wound, though painful, was superficial-he could move his arm, though he knew it would stiffen, and his breathing was unimpaired.

  With an exertion that left him light-headed, he stripped to the waist, the air shockingly cold against his skin. He remained seated in the embrasure while she moved away from him, to the opposite side of the vestibule under the Virgin's niche, where she tore the bloodied shirt into neat pieces as if the tough linen had been cigarette paper. As she worked, she spoke in the quick, jerky voice of one who seeks to preserve herse
lf from what silence might bring.

  "Have you seen him?" she asked again.

  "I saw him at Charing Cross Station," he replied, "talking with a man I knew to work for the Kundschafts Stelle, the Austrian secret service."

  She glanced up, eyes flaring wide with shock. They were the color of mahogany but no more human than a raptor bird's. In the small saffron light her lips were colorless as the pallor of her flesh, pallor somehow mitigated-or explained-by the mourning black of her clothing. Her hair, upswept into the style Lydia called a Gibson Girl, seemed to flow out of the darkness of her clothing, garnet- tipped pins gleaming in it like droplets of blood.

  "Talking with someone?"

  "Why does that surprise you?"

  "I had thought..." She hesitated, looking at him for a moment; then, as if not daring to linger on the dark glitter of blood on his side, her unhuman eyes returned to her work. "Our house was searched, you see. Ransacked by men while I was out." From the reticule at her waist she withdrew a square of yellow paper, folded small, and crossed the room to hand it to him with bloodstained fingers, then moved quickly back away. "That was on the floor when I came back."

  Asher unfolded it. It was a railway timetable. Sunday night's seven-thirty boat- train was circled; a strong European hand had added, in the margin, Vienna Express.

  "He was gone by the time I came back that night," said Anthea, digging in his valise for the small flask of whiskey there. She soaked an unbloodied fragment of shirt in it, braced herself almost imperceptibly before stepping near enough to touch him again. Asher raised his arms against the top of the window in which he sat, that the silver on his wrists might not come into accidental contact with her ungloved hands. The whiskey stung coldly in the wound, the smell of it almost covering the raw whiff of the blood.