“But why—” Lydia began helplessly, and Ysidro shook his head.
“We move in a miasma, and not entirely that of the Bey’s making,” he said softly. “There is some other matter afoot here, beyond a possible challenger or interloper. Treason among the Bey’s fledglings, perhaps, or an interloper not of the common run. We must each search as we can. It may be that as a physician you will recognize something concerning cold as it has to do with the Undead state, which even the Undead do not know. Later, like the knights of the grail meeting upon the road, we can exchange information and see if we can read, one for the other, what each vision signifies. Do not lose hope.”
“No,” Lydia said, consciously steadying herself. “No. At least I know James is alive—if Karolyi was telling the truth. Though I did notice he was very careful not to say when he’d seen James. It might have been—well—days ago. But really, we can only do what we can do.”
“An observation worthy of the sages of Athens,” the vampire said gravely and, holding out his hand, took her fingers in his. “A word in your ear.”
Conscious of Margaret’s glare at her back, Lydia followed him out of the dining room, to the head of the stair.
He stood with his back to the vigil light, so that only its reflection touched the points of cheeks and chin and made a spidery halo of his hair. In his enveloping cloak he looked like Death on its way to the opera; his hands were, she thought, not quite steady as he pulled on his gloves.
“You have fathomed my secret,” he said, the soft voice emerging from the dark, and upon it, like the trace of his antique inflection, Lydia detected the echo of a smile. “The blood of animals gives some nourishment, though it does not warm, and their deaths are useless to feed the hunger and the need of the mind. But it would not do to shock Margaret with the information that the dark hero of her Byronic fancies is currently living on the blood of dogs—and such dogs! As a physician, however, I knew the matter would consume you until you knew.”
Lydia laughed, the fear and tension she had felt since that morning in the bazaar loosening its hold. “I think you’re just too vain to own to it.” She smiled, and Ysidro paused, his hand on the rail of the stair.
“Of course I am vain,” he said. “All of the Undead are vain— too vain to admit that, like common men, we must die.”
He made a move to go, then turned back and took her hand again—carefully, so as not to come near the silver on her wrist— and raised it to his lips.
As he vanished into the shadows of the stair, she said, “Be careful…”
She didn’t know whether he heard or not.
Margaret shoved the papers she was reading quickly into her workbasket and returned to her chair as Lydia reentered the dining room. She kept her eyes downcast, but Lydia felt the sullenness of her silence, the resentment in the set of her narrow back in its ill-fitting cotton shirtwaist. She drew a pile of gray Deutsches Bank ledgers to her, but left pencil and foolscap to one side untouched.
Determined not to have another argument with her, Lydia only asked, “You know what we’re looking for?”
“New corporations in July or August paid for in gold or by transfer of lands, sums transferred to another corporation or another bank monthly or quarterly.” She recited Lydia’s instructions like a schoolchild regurgitating some hated—and barely comprehended—lesson.
“Look for a transfer to the second corporation, or to a new corporation, in the first week of October of ten thousand marks, or twelve thousand five hundred francs, and if you see either the Zwanzigstejahrhundert Abkuhlunggeselleschaft, or any of these names—” She pushed across to her the slip of paper she’d gotten from Razumovsky that afternoon, listing the four or five names under which the Sultan’s chamberlain took bribes or laundered money. “—please flag it for me.”
“I understand,” Margaret said with gruff impatience, and pulled the paper to her, but didn’t even turn it right side up. Lydia half opened her mouth to remonstrate, then let it go. She guessed she’d have to go through whatever Margaret did again anyway, but if these ledgers had to be back in the morning, there was no time for either discussion or for Margaret to slam into the bedroom in a tantrum. She couldn’t work through all of this alone.
And what could she say in any case?
The dream returned to her, of Margaret waiting in the castle ruins for a horseman who never came. Was Ysidro unable even to project the dream memories of passion to her now, the melodramatic romances that held her to him? Was he, she wondered suddenly, unable to appear in them because in them he would be the skeletal, almost insectile creature who had spoken to her with his back to the light?
If that was what vampires saw in mirrors, no wonder they avoided them, veiled them, kept them closed behind doors. If that was what the living eyes would perceive, no wonder the vampires caused the living to see—or remember seeing—nothing at all.
All of the Undead are vain…
“Kiria …” Stefania Potoneros appeared, hesitating, in the doorway and held out two stiff cream-colored envelopes.
The first contained a note on the letterhead of the Zwanzigstejahrhundert Abkuhlunggeselleschaft—Berlin, London, and Constantinople—typed neatly in English and signed by a secretary.
Mrs. Asher:
We regret to inform you that Hen Jacob Zeittelstein is unable to make an appointment with you for this week, due to the fact that he is in Berlin at this time. When he returns to Constantinople on Wednesday next, he will of course be delighted to get in touch with you regarding a meeting.
Sincerely,
Avram Kostner
Private secretary to Herr Zeittelstein
Wednesday! thought Lydia, aghast. Two days from now until he was even in Constantinople, let alone when he’d have time to see her, answer her questions. Jamie could be dead by then…
Jamie could be dead now.
My dearest Madame , the other letter read, in an elaborately indecipherable French hand.
It appears we have located the storyteller your husband sought. With your permission, my carriage shall arrive for you at ten tomorrow morning, though it would be well to be prepared to do some walking.
Your most humble servant, Razumovsky
“If I may be permitted to ask a question, effendi?” Asher turned his cheek to the slab where he lay, blinking the sweat from his eyes. In the still, dense heat of the tiny hararet—the chamber of the baths that the Romans would have called the calderium, or hot room—the shape of the Master of Constantinople, white as the marble that entirely formed the walls, seemed to emerge from and blend into the steam in a disconcerting fashion, so that half the time Asher was not entirely certain he could see him at all.
“It is always permitted to ask, Scheherazade.” The voice of Olumsiz Bey came out of the steamy twilight, and the red glow of the braziers in the corners made twin embers of his eyes. There was dreamy, heat-soaked amusement in the deep voice as he spoke the nickname, taken from Asher’s curiosity about old words and ancient tales even in the face of his imprisonment and peril. “There would be no wisdom in the world, did men not ask.”
“What do you want with the Earl of Ernchester?”
It was nearly midnight. With the early fall of winter dark, Zardalu and the other fledglings had taken Asher to an immense dry cistern, like a pillared cavern beneath the city, given him a tin lantern and sent him out in that endless forest of columns. “Behave as if you searched for someone, Englis,” whispered the eunuch, with his mocking smile. “Gaze about—so—put your hand to your heart, as if to calm the pangs of love.” The others laughed, the thm, metallic shivering he had heard in Vienna, and faded into the darkness, leaving him alone.
So he had walked, as he had walked in the cemeteries, holding the lantern high, and the shadows of the pillars reeled and shifted with the movement of the light. The columns themselves were of all girths: thin Ionic with rams’ horn capitals, and heavy, unfluted Doric worn with the marks of water. The floor underfoot was hardened mud, silted up who knew how deep. Between them night lay thick, and the cold breaths of moving air told him the place had more than the one entry the vampires had used. He was thinking how fortunate it was that the candle within the lantern was protected by glass when the flame went out, as suddenly as if covered by a snuffer.
Asher stepped back at once, putting his back to the nearest pillar and forcing closed his mind against the crushing numbness that bore down upon it. He reached for the pocket where he kept matches, wrapped in waxed silk, and his nostrils were filled with the smell of old blood and graveyard mold. A hand closed around his arm, as if the arm had been trapped in machinery; but before he could lash out with the lantern in his other hand, before he could move or think or cry out, the gripping hand was gone.
There was a kind of movement, a breathing rustle in the dark, and he pulled the matches from his pocket and lit one with a hand that shook.
He was alone.
“My dear Scheherazade.” The voice was suddenly close. Asher blinked again in the steam, to see that the Master of Constantinople stood beside the marble table where he lay, naked, as was the Bey himself, but for a towel around his loins. “These are vampire matters, of no concern to the living. Indeed, I doubt the living would understand them.”