“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.