Traveling With The Dead(25)

“Do you know the vampires of Vienna?”

“No.” She crossed to the window, spread back its teal-green velvet curtains, with their treble fringes of gold and tassels like double fists. “I feel them… feel their presence. As they feel mine, without being able at once to see where I am. They know I am here.”

Her fingers traced the fringe, the fabric, drinking of the texture as they had drunk the shape and texture of the porcelain cup. The dim light from the street below edged and transformed her face into a song of gold planes and black.

“I feel… everything. This new city that seems to bleed music from its very stones… When I saw the men pursuing you, I’d been walking about the streets for nearly an hour, just glutting myself on new tastes, new smells, the voice of a river that isn’t the Thames. All those new dreams and thoughts and sensations hammer around me and in me and at me. I feel as if every cobblestone has a diamond underneath it, and I want to run through the streets gathering them up like a greedy little girl.”

The colorless lips curved in a half-wondering smile, and Asher remembered her watching the dancers in the cafe, drinking the smell of the coffee, the music of the waltz. “I know I’m in danger. I’m afraid, and I know I should be more afraid than I am. I could die in moments, just because I don’t know the right place to hide, the right turning to take. But it’s so beautiful.”

She half wrapped the curtain around her, the lush color startling against her face, like a silver icon or a painting by Klimt.

“This is all so new to me, wonderful and strange. It’s the first time, you understand, that I have left England. The first time since… since I became what I am… that I’ve been out of London. It’s been nearly two hundred years, Dr. Asher. I traveled a little after I thought Ernchester was dead, visited a sister in the north. But in my mourning I had no taste for it and only wanted to return to what I knew. I mourned for a long time.”

Asher had seen a portrait of her, done when she was over sixty in her mortal life. She’d put on weight, and her hair had grayed, and the raptor eyes that flashed copper in the rosy lamp flame had been dead, resigned, filled with a kind of hurt puzzlement, as if she had never ceased to ask, How can he be dead? In the painting she’d worn the broad gold band that gleamed now on her finger.

“A vampire traveling is… horribly vulnerable.”

“And yet you came.”

She smiled, a human smile, the full, pale lips hiding the fangs. “I love him,” she said. “To my last breath—and two centuries beyond.”

Lady Ernchester had instructed the management of the hotel that she was not to be disturbed by chambermaids. She was an actress, she had said, and likely would be out most of the night, sleeping in the day. When she told Asher this, during a discussion of how words were pronounced in her early girlhood while she mended the slashes in his jacket and greatcoat, he closed his eyes briefly, imagining the concierge’s reaction to this request.

But in fact when Asher later heard the chambermaids chatting in Czech and Hungarian in the corridor, none even tried the door.

Asher had tried to remain awake through the night, talking of philology and folklore with the vampire countess—her imitation of her nursemaid’s Wessex dialect had been both hilarious and fascinating—but the ache of his wound, loss of blood, and exhaustion had claimed him. The voices of the chambermaids woke him in mid-morning, to find a heavy sunlight slanting through the chinks in the teal-colored curtains. He lay back on the settee again, trying to formulate an article in his mind— countryfolk of Anthea’s day had pronounced the y or e at the end of such words as hande as a sort of aspiration, though they no longer spoke an e as a, and they would walk across a field rather than meet a pig in the road. But how on earth could he claim he’d had an interview with a contemporary of the Cavalier poets?

In time the voices of the chambermaids faded and the upper floor of the old palais fell silent. A heavy silence, broken only by the far-off clatter of a tram in the Schottenring and the distant threads of a hurdy-gurdy. He thought again of the woman sleeping, sealed within her double trunks, trusting his word that he would remain through the day and see that she came to no harm. Over the centuries she had killed… how many?

I wish you could have known us as we were.

Was all vampirism a craving to hold to the sweetness of a vanished youth, a desire not to have the good years, the dream years, slip away in the flowing stream of time?

I love him, she had said. I knew he could not be dead.

Who had loved the men, the women, the children whose lives she had traded for the continuance of her own?

He sighed and leaned the bridge of his nose on his knuckles, twisting at the problem again as a fish twists on a hook. She trusted him. And indeed, only through her could he hope to find Ernchester now, to keep him from selling his services to the Hapsburg Emperor, if he hadn’t already. What had Karolyi offered him? Safety from Grippen? Why not tell Anthea, then? Why not bring her to Vienna with him?

Who had searched the house, who had known of Karolyi’s plans, and for what had they been seeking? Who was Olumsiz Bey?

A transliteration for the Master of Vienna? Who might, after all, be Turkish himself. The whole area had been overrun as late as the mid-seventeenth century, and it was conceivable that the Undead in this most cosmopolitan of cities might not be Austrian—or even European—at all.

And what, above all, was he going to do when he did find Ernchester. Kill him?

He knew already that he would never sleep easy again if he didn’t kill Anthea as well.

With a soft, oiled click, a key turned in the lock. Asher’s mind fumbled tiredly for the Hungarian for This room is not to be disturbed as he rose and crossed to the door, which opened to reveal Bedford Fairport.

“Asher!” The little man blinked in surprise and adjusted his spectacles as if Asher were some trick refraction of the light. “What on earth… ?”

Deportation telegram, thought Asher automatically, his mind still sluggish with sleep. And then, How did they trace me… ? He was mentally framing what he was going to tell Halliwell about the layout of the Batthyany Palace when, with panther quickness, Ignace Karolyi stepped around the side of the door and put a knife to Asher’s throat.

Fairport bleated, “No!” as the blade gashed like splintered glass. “Not here!”

The ape-browed coachman and two burly thugs Asher had never seen before were already in the room and closing the door. One of them caught Asher’s elbows behind his back, thrust him against the wall; the other walked straight to the window to pull the curtains shut. Blood from the small cut on his neck burned hot on Asher’s skin, but Karolyi had already turned his attention elsewhere, though the blade remained cold against the flesh.

“Find it.”

Asher tried to turn but was pushed against the wall again. Over his shoulder he saw Fairport staring at him in a kind of aghast astonishment; one of the thugs took the medical bag out of Fairport’s hand, opened it and pulled out a paper of sticking plaster, which he slapped over Asher’s mouth. With his free hand Karolyi took something from his greatcoat pocket, a silk scarf, with which the thug tied Asher’s hands. Probably the same one, thought Asher, he’d used to strangle the woman in Paris.

Only then did Karolyi take his knife from Asher’s throat, sheathe it in an inner pocket of his jacket. The man who’d been holding Asher’s arms kicked him roughly behind the knees, thrusting him to the floor, a minor theater of operations while the others pushed through the doorway into the next room. Asher tried to cry out, a warning, protest, appeal against the hideous vision of them prizing open the double lids of the trunks…

Then he realized that Anthea was perfectly safe.

It was Karolyi who’d had her house searched—probably Karolyi who’d written Vienna Express on the timetable.

He’d had her followed here from the station.

“This has to be it,” he heard Fairport say in German.

“You’re not gonna check to see?” asked the coachman.

Fairport squeaked protestingly; Karolyi said, “Let it be, Lukas,” his voice casual, but the henchmen stepped quickly out of the room. “Did you think she would not follow?”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t know.”

Asher turned his face against the thick, dust-smelling carpet, saw them standing together in the doorway, the old man looking up into Karolyi’s face like a retriever who’s just lugged in a pheasant nearly its own size. He thought, Fairport’s a double. Something about the distance between them, the tilt of Fairport’s head, told the whole story. Has been a double for years.

On reflection he supposed he should feel anger, but he didn’t. It was something that happened in the Great Game, like stray whores being strangled or those who learned too much getting shot.

Karolyi looked down at Asher with an expression of rueful half amusement. “So tell me, Dr. Asher—was it just coincidence that you were the man assigned to follow me? Or was Ernchester wrong in believing that the British are not also using the Undead?”

Asher inclined his head. He reflected that it might even be the truth.