“I could wish her to have reserved such theatrics for another place and time.”
“Yes.” Irritated as she had been with Margaret, her greatest anger still lay toward him. She folded her arms against the cold. “It’s a nuisance, isn’t it, when people decide to feel more than you’ve scheduled them to feel?”
“It is.” He might have been agreeing that today was Saturday. The moon was sinking; only the glow from the votives by the kitchen door showed her the garden before them. “Yet the dreams she dreams are not all of my making. And I admit I will feel safer to know that the two of you sleep in the one bed, which I trust you will hang about, as you did in Sofia and Belgrade, with those stinking weeds you have carried with you since Paris.”
The chilly breeze from the Asian hills stirred the last leaves high overhead. A stray breath of it flared the votive lights, showing her briefly Ysidro’s face, eyes darkened by shadow to skull-like sockets and cheekbones hollowed to bruises. Remembering what he had said about mirrors, Lydia wondered suddenly if he was actually thinning away before her to a wraith of ectoplasm and bone, or if what was thinning was simply his ability to make her believe that she saw him other than he truly was.
“The Galata slums at the base of the hill and the high streets of Pera with their embassies and their banks, they all smell of vampires.” The flame repeated itself, cold yellow crystal in his eyes. “Standing just now on the steps of the Yusek Kalderim, I stretched forth my mind across the Golden Horn, and the city lies under such miasma as I have never encountered before. The minds of vampires, the mind of the master, other minds… I can smell them, heft them like silk in my hand. But everything is blocked, shadowed, wreathed in illusion and deception, as if every card on the board were down-turned, and one had to wager all one had on a hand of three.”
He frowned and turned to look once more at the gate. Involuntarily Lydia stepped closer to him, her anger forgotten. “Are you sure? You’ve said yourself you aren’t as… as able to perceive…”
A wry line sketched itself in the corner of his mouth, the echo of a living man’s ironic smile. “A regret, mistress? A concern for the fact that you have asked me not to kill to preserve my own life, only to discover that such abstinence may prevent me from preserving yours?”
She studied his face a moment, trying to read something in the twin sulfur glints of his eyes. They were like a dragon’s in their hollows. “No,” she said. “A concern, maybe, but not a regret.”
“No,” he echoed softly. “A lady worthy to her bones.”
It was, she realized, the first time he had spoken to her of her stipulation.
Then he shook his head and looked back to the gate and the inky, pitch blackness that lay beyond.
“And Jamie?” She found she could barely speak his name. It was hard even to ask, for fear Ysidro would tell her what she had dreaded for days to hear.
His brow flinched, just barely, in a frown. “If he is here, he is not in Pera.” There was almost hesitation, an unwillingness in his voice. “If he sleeps on the Stamboul shore…” He shook his head. “No, my perceptions are impaired, but this is not a matter of degree. This—shadow, this—blurring that lies over the city… it is something that emanates from the vampires themselves. An obscurity, gathered to hide aught within it. A fog, as they say the Undead can summon…”
His smile had been—almost—a living man’s smile. The shadow in those dragon eyes was suddenly, fleetingly, a living man’s fear. “Tomorrow night will be soon enough to cross, to walk and listen in the darkness, to see what more can be descried at nearer quarters.” He drew his cloak more closely around him, a subconscious gesture, the white of his gloves against the dark wool like frost on black rock.
“But it is clear to me that something very strange is taking place in this city, and I had rather our romantic friend had not cried aloud, even in English, regarding hunting and killing and the drinking of blood. I think it best such things not be spoken of, not even here in Pera. Not even by light of day.”
Chapter Twelve
The voices of the muezzins woke Asher: “There is no God but God; Mohammed is His Prophet…” He knew the words, but could not tease them from the somber roll of sound.
Arched windows had at one time opened all along the room, five times the length of its narrow width, but centuries ago these had been bricked shut. The windows in the drums of the five shallow domes above were, as far as he could ascertain, barred with silver, though it was hard to be sure. By day he heard no voices, no clip of donkey hooves or creak of wheels from below, and only occasionally and far off, the barking of Constantinople’s infamous dogs. Now and then the wind would bring him a street vendor’s cry in sawed-off Romaic Greek. Day or night, the closest sounds were the squawking of the seagulls and the yowl of cats.
Through the lattice the sky was the color of tiger lilies, the light momentarily a soft and fading salmon hue on the blue tiles that ringed the domes.
Asher did not face Mecca—though he’d deduced in what direction it lay—nor repeat the words intended by the muezzin, but sitting among the cushions and blankets of the divan, he prayed. He was very frightened.
The light in the room had deepened when he finished, bleeding away to shadow. Because of the domes, the room filled with darkness from the bottom up. In the center of the floor the rectangular, blue-tiled basin of what must have been a fountain or fish pool seemed fathoms deep in the gloom, a horror from which anything might emerge. Asher scratched a match that he took from his pocket, to light the wick of one of the few bronze lamps that still occupied the serried ranks of niches in the wall.
The glow did little to dispel the dreadful brooding dimness. He reached for his watch to wind it, as was his habit, but of course it had been taken, along with the silver chains that had protected his wrists and throat.
He dressed and washed, and stowed the bedding in which he’d slept in one of the room’s shallow cupboards, listening all the while to night fall within the silent house. In full dark—enough so that a white thread could not be distinguished from a black, as the Koran said—he heard the key turn in the old-fashioned lock.
He moved as far from the door as he could and deliberately willed his mind not to feel, not to succumb to the odd, lazy distraction of the vampire power. Still he did not see them enter the room. He had the vague impression that he had dreamed once about standing in a darkened gallery, watching a door inlaid with brass and ivory as it began to open…
But it seemed to him that one moment he was stepping back against a pillar, and the next, they were all around him, binding his wrists behind him with narrow silk cord. Their eyes in the lamplight were the eyes of rats, their flesh dead clay on his. They had not fed.
“So who are you, Englis?” asked the one who had been pointed out to him last night as Zardalu. Beardless, boneless as an empty stocking, he had red-painted fingernails and a Circassian’s bright blue eyes. “Yesternight I took you for one of the Bey’s mikaniki, and I thought, This is one he intends to make one of us, to look after this thing they make in the crypts, this dastgah.” His eyes slid sidelong at Asher under painted lids; and knowing they could hear it, Asher tried to calm the pounding of his heart.
“And now the Bey has given us other instructions concerning you. What are we to think?”
“You really think he’d join another to us for the sake of one of his experiments?” Jamila Baykus—the Baykus Kadine, she had been called, stick-thin with a strange, disheveled wildness that was somehow very like her namesake owl—put her head to one side and considered him with enormous demon eyes. Half her hair was braided or curled, dressed on jeweled combs, the rest hanging in a huge malt-colored tangle to her thighs. Pearls were caught in it, like shells glimpsed in a jetsam of kelp; she had a necklace of rat bones and diamonds around her throat. “Is that what you are, Englis?” The finger she reached up to touch the underside of his chin—for she was no taller than a twelve-year-old English girl—was like a twig brought in from out-of-doors, icy with the ice of the night.
“He said we weren’t to question him.” That was Haralpos, a one-eyed tough who had been a janissary. He held up a scarf, fine cotton, creased and filthy and patched with dark stains.
“And did he say I was not to question you?” Asher had studied Persian and enough Arabic to approximate the thick Osmanli they spoke and make himself understood.
Zardalu’s eyebrows tweaked into circumflexes of malicious delight, and his fangs gleamed in a smile. “Oh, what a clever Englis. Of course you may question us. Who are we but your fellow servants of the Deathless Lord?”
“He said silence,” Haralpos insisted. The dark Habib and the voluptuous and silent Russian girl, Pelageya, stirred uneasily. Asher knew of whom the janissary spoke and knew the others had a right to be uneasy. “He said to walk in silence, like the fog. Would we have this infidel cry out to be saved?”
“Would it do me any good if I did?” countered Asher. He turned to Zardalu, whom he sensed to be the most dangerous of them, and asked him, “What dastgah is this?” The word meant a scientific apparatus, which could mean anything from an astrolabe to a chemical experiment.