"You didn't kill the Potton girl, did you?"
Ysidro said nothing.
"It's not something I'll speak of to Lydia. There were other vampires in the city, maybe others besides those I saw in the House of Oleanders. I don't know. If the laborers and mechanics and beggars put together Lydia's inquiries with the house of Olumsiz Bey, there must have been vampires who became aware of you. Who waited for the servants to flee the sound of the riot. Who had, perhaps, met her eyes somewhere, sometime, and could command her in dreams to open the windows for them."
"The girl was a fool," Ysidro said. He glanced sidelong at Asher. "You may tell Mistress Asher I said that."
"Many years ago," Asher said, "when I was in Vienna, I loved a woman there, and she me. She was clever and had great integrity. I was a fool to speak to her after the second time, because I should have known where it would lead. But after the second time I met her, it was too late. When she began to guess that I was a spy sent to find military secrets that would hurt her country, probably kill her friends and family who were in the army, I... betrayed her. I stole her money and left town in ostentatious stealth with the most brainless and beautiful member of the demimonde I could convince to accompany me-knowing that Francoise would take her own rage, her own hurt, into account, and more than into account, and not look further into anything else that had to do with me. She was that kind of person. I did this not only to protect myself and my contacts, but so that she would cut from me cleanly, never regretting or thinking that what had been between us could ever be repaired."
Ysidro was silent for a long time, cold crystal eyes fixed on some middle distance, as if, through the walls, he could see out into the night, back to the London that had been his haunt and his home from his twenty-fifth-and last-year of human life.
"There was nothing ever between us, you know."
"I know." She hadn't told him about the sonnets, but he had found them-including the torn one-in Miss Potton's crochet basket. Asher's own passion returned to him, yearning and illogical, for Anthea, and for the moonlight girl in the Vienna Woods who had later helped to empty Fairport's veins. He remembered Lydia's voice when she said, Simon... and recalled, too, the disillusioned agony of her tears.
She would recover, he knew. But the hurt ran deep.
The vampire shook his head. "Life is for the living, James. Death is for the dead. As for her attraction to me, it is our lure to be attractive. It is how we hunt. It means nothing."
Asher thought about Anthea again, and knew that Ysidro lied.
Ysidro considered the matter in silence for a moment more, then went on, "As for Miss Potton, I cannot say that I wouldn't have killed her, in the end, as Lydia expected me to. In truth I don't think she would have minded. But I think it was a woman named Zenaida, a concubine who haunts the deserted areas of the old seraglio, abandoned now even by the palace servants. Zenaida saw her there-I think she may even have summoned her, using the illusion that I might wish her to follow me. Afterward I thought I saw her once or twice around the house on Rue Abydos, but by then my perceptions were not acute enough to be sure. Another reason I would keep Mistress Asher in ignorance of how this came about. She would take it as her own doing. I trust you have not left her alone."
Asher shook his head. "She's with Lady Clapham and Prince Razumovsky. I asked them to stay with her till I returned. I told them she has nightmares-not that Lydia has ever had a nightmare in her life."
The defaced ivory mask relaxed, momentarily, into a smile.
"Will you be all right, returning home?"
"The Dead always find ways," Ysidro said, "to get the living to serve them. Some, like the Deathless Lord, buy that service, or use hate, like Golge Kurt, or love. Sometimes the living don't even know why they serve."
Asher studied the narrow, enigmatic features, the rucked ruin of fresh and bloodless scars. Like Anthea, like Ernchester, Ysidro was a killer and would have been as deserving as they had the sunlight trapped and consumed him in that upper room. The fact that Ysidro had risked his curiously friable immortality to help him- to save Lydia-should have no bearing on that deserving. The fact that Ysidro had not killed Margaret Potton did not change the fact that he had killed someone else-possibly several others, if he had been as long fasting as Lydia had said- that same night.
"Sometimes they do." He held out his hand to the vampire. "They know... but damned if they understand."
Ysidro regarded his hand for a moment with an air of slightly startled offense, as if at a familiarity; then smiled, like a man remembering his own follies, and very quickly, with two cold fingers, returned the touch. "In that they are not unique," he said.
And he was gone, in a slight, quick blanking of attention that covered a soundless retreat. Asher found himself alone in the immense darkness of the ancient holy place, without so much as a flicker of motion among the dark pillars to show that any soul, living or dead, had passed that way.
Weary of dark, I asked to see the day,
And Jesus, jesting, to a mountain's height
Upbore me, and spread before my sight
The Kingdoms of earth in morning's bright array.
I saw a man betray two dames who wept;
Saw a mother cripple her child with love;
Saw priests flay Jews, their piety to prove,
And brother sell his brother while he slept.
A man gave up his dreams, a child to save.
A woman bound a beggar's bleeding sores.
A youth pursued war's summons to his grave
While th' king for whom he died gave gold to whores.
And all died frightened, weeping and in pain.
I left the mount, and sought the dark again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
At various times in her life, Barbara Hambly has been a high school teacher, a model, a waitress, a technical editor, a professional graduate student, an all-night clerk at a liquor store, and a karate instructor. Born in San Diego, she grew up in Southern California, with the exception of one high school semester spent in New South Wales, Australia. Her interest in fantasy began with reading The Wizard of Oz at an early age, and it has continued ever since. She attended the University of California, Riverside, specializing in medieval history. In connection with this, she spent a year at the University of Bordeaux in the south of France and worked as a teaching and research assistant at UC Riverside, eventually earning a master's degree in the subject. At the university, she also became involved in karate, making Black Belt in 1978 and competing in several national-level tournaments. She now lives in Los Angeles.
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02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2 Page 36
