James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (43 page)

“Golge Kurt,” said the Bey’s soft voice, almost as if it were in his ear, while beneath the bandages Kahlil made soft, broken noises of pain. “The Shadow Wolf. God knows where he came from, or how he came to be vampire. Some Greek witch, no doubt, whom he later escaped… But he is a Turk of the new Turks, this upland peasantry that they’ve given guns and delusions of rule. I saw him first just after the coup, when all the city was in confusion. He had made a fledgling already—as easy as spitting—to challenge my power. I killed the fledgling—but I could not kill him. And after that I had no choice.”

They reached the long upper chamber. Asher sank, hand pressed to his side, onto the divan, the wrapped and shrouded living corpse beside him. While the Bey unfurled his oilskin to let the ice clatter down, filling the dry tiles of the fish pool, Kahlil, instead of lying on the divan, remained sitting beside Asher, clinging to him, as if frantic for the comfort of a living touch. Stinking, rotting, horrible within the bandages, but Asher could not thrust him away.

The Bey came back, tenderly lifted the boy’s body and carried it to the ice. Watching them in the juddering orange flare of the lamps around the walls, Asher wondered bitterly how many men fell back on that phrase, I had no choice, when it came to what they wanted—even when it did that to those they loved.

Ernchester, when he had killed Cramer.

Karolyi, certainly, if he thought at all.

He himself.

Olumsiz Bey knelt on the steps of the basin, holding the putrefying bundle that had been the boy’s hand.

“So you tried to make him vampire,” Asher said quietly. “Even though you knew.”

The Bey nodded, once.

“And when you saw that though his mind survived, his body was beginning to rot, you sent for Ernchester.”

“I could rule him,” the Bey said simply. “I knew him. I knew he was weak. He could get fledglings but had not the strength to command them. Once away from that woman of his—”

“Who loves him,” Asher said. “Who cares for him, as you care for Kahlil.”

The Bey did not even look up at that, didn’t take his eyes from his friend; only shook his head, a heavy, animal gesture, impatient and puzzled, as if he truly did not understand what Asher said. “Women don’t love. Not like men. Not like a man loves one who is the son he would have chosen out of all souls in the Universe. No love is like that.”

No, thought Asher. A vampire to the end, even to the nature of his love.

The Bey did not even pause to speculate, to justify. His love was unique, and because it was—and because it was his—that justified all. He went on, “But without the Sultan’s power, I had to find what help I could. A savage, Karolyi, for all his civilized manners. A Magyar Hun. I think he had already begun to guess at what I was before I sent for his help. I think he had already wondered what use he—in the name of his country—could make of the Undead.”

He leaned over to touch the forehead of the boy who lay now unmoving in his bed of ice. The great uneven blocks were old, dried and cleared and slick; they caught the feeble ember light like monster diamonds, faceting it to a wild rainbow over the walls, as if from a bier of jewels.

“I was able to hold Golge Kurt at bay for a time—I think ail would have been well, had not Karolyi chosen to make what he could of the chance, to try to force Ernchester into the service of his country.” His eyes, in their dark hollows, were dying coals of some old rage. “Country. We the Undead at least were human once. Our sins are human sin. Magnified a million times, but human. These countries, these nations—they are not human. They care not what they use, so long as it serves them. They care not what they do, and their sins are far beyond ours, literally of a different nature. You have served them. Karolyi told me that, Karolyi who is hollow inside, nothing inside, because this ‘country’ requires that he be nothing. You know.”

“Yes,” Asher said, remembering again. “I know.”

He shook his head. “And so Karolyi delayed. And Golge Kurt was able to gain a little more territory, to learn a little more of the city. I fear that when Ernchester tried to come into the city to obey my summons, he was met by Golge Kurt and made a prisoner, and a slave. I thought that if I could trap the woman through you, I could draw Ernchester to me… Or at the worst, use her to make Kahlil whole. But it did not come about. And now it is finished.”

Shouts rang in the courtyard, echoing from distant regions of the house. In the windows that ringed each shallow dome, the sky was red, like a cloth used to mop blood. The Bey reached in his robe, threw something to Asher that caught a spangle of the light as it flew. It was a key.

“Go,” he said. “First light is not far off. They’ll be gone before then, and they will not come here. They will not even realize there is a stairway, though they stand at its foot looking up. Such is still my power.” After a moment’s thought he took the halberd and slid it across the floor to him, the silver blade flashing.

“You may meet one of them still,” he added. “If it is Golge Kurt, kill him. Not for me. He is a man of the new breed who will try to buy power from whatever country he thinks will give it him. And he will buy it with any terms they ask. He is like your Karolyi. I only wanted one fledgling. They will want hundreds, loyal to their service. And what will come of that I do not wish to think.”

He shook his heavy head, turned back to the boy in the ice. His voice was so low as to be almost inaudible, like the murmur of a fading ghost. “And—thank you, Scheherazade. Thank you for your help.”

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.

It was a game. The Great Game.

His clothes were rough, a laborer’s clothes, spattered with mud and blood. His dark hair hung in his eyes. But his appearance, thus or in his gorgeous Hussar uniform, had always been only a disguise.

Hollow inside, as the Bey had said.

“Silly niggers broke up the refrigeration coils in the crypt,” he said. “I heard them choking behind me. The place is chock-ablock with ammonia gas, and spreading. I know another way out.”

“That true?” Asher asked.

Lydia
nodded. She was well clear of them both, in the center of the court, firelight a carnival of brass and vermilion on her hair, her spectacles rounds of fire. “We were directly behind them, Ysidro and I. He covered my face with his cloak…” She glanced toward the silent, bleeding huddle at the foot of the stairs, but said nothing more.