Traveling With The Dead(53)

We smell the naft, the alkol, the stinks of what he does…

His mind returned to the throat-catching sharpness of the air in the crypt. A room with a wooden floor, to the left across a courtyard where grass grows between stones like cannonballs. A second flight of steps after the first…

He fingered the picklocks in his pocket and drifted through the House of Oleanders like a ghost.

The solitary gleam of his candle wavered over chambers hung with printed Chinese silks whose colors showed themselves briefly; over vaulting that flickered and shone with the unmistakable dusky bronze hue of gold in shadow. He passed through an octagonal chamber whose walls were sheathed, floor to ceiling, in red tile the exact color of ripe persimmons, containing only a black-and-white wooden coffee stand; an arch looked out on a court smaller than the room itself and so choked with oleander bushes that only the dim white shape of a single statue could be seen in their midst.

Near that place he found the room he sought: the small, rich chamber of painted walls and blue and yellow tiles whose bare wooden floor thumped familiarly underfoot. From it a door let into a courtyard, long and narrow and paved in blocks of worn stone the size of halfpenny loaves, through which brown grass and weeds thrust tall.

The moon had not risen. No light touched the windows in the low buildings that surrounded the court on two sides. Roman, thought Asher, identifying the heavy rounded arches, the broken fragments of marble facing and the thick, fluted columns. What looked like the rear wall of another han closed in the third side of the court—he could just see the edge of a dome against the midnight sky—the red and white stone walls of the Turkish house, the fourth.

Under the columned porch the blackness was profound. The smaller cobbling was uneven, familiar. Almost he felt he could quench the candle as he passed to the left, fifteen steps across the court and through the door, five steps and left again. It was difficult to see that doorway, where it stood in shadow, though it opened in the middle of a wall of faded frescoes—more oddly still, he lost control of his steps twice, passing it without being aware. Around him the darkness brooded, watching. It could, he knew, contain anything.

Or nothing, he told himself. Or nothing.

He descended the stair. Had he not remembered a second stairway, he would have turned back, for its entrance lay concealed in the niche formed by one of the shallow false archways in what turned out to be the tepidarium of the house’s original Roman baths. A small room, faced with marble, its shallow pool long gone dry. The mosaics of the floor gleamed faintly in the moving light of Asher’s candle: Byzantine, and like those of the octagonal vestibule, long ago defaced.

The second stair, as he recalled, was twice or three times the depth of the one above. If he met them now—the Bey’s homecoming fledglings with their night’s prey—there would be no possibility of escape.

He guessed the crypt below had been a prison, or a storage place for something more precious or more sinister than wine. The low brick groinings of the ceiling barely cleared his six-foot height, and the few rooms that opened to his right from the short passageway were tiny, sunk below the level of the floor, which was itself worn in a channel inches deep. The air—as he recalled and as Zardalu had remarked—was bitterly cold.

Dastgah . Scientific apparatus. There were Western scientific journals in the library dating back to the eighteenth century, treatises in Arabic from the days before the Moslem world had become a scientific backwater. Just exactly what was it, Asher wondered, that the Master of Constantinople was having his Western engineers build for him? That meant so much to him that its delay would rouse him to fury? That he hid from his own fledglings?

The penny-dip glow touched something dully reflective, lodged like a gleaming bone in the throat of a dark arch.

Here, he thought. The place the Bey kept hidden, veiled with his mind.

At the end of the abyssal corridor before him, Asher knew he would find that long stone stair, climbing to an outer door. But branching down to his left, his raised candle flame showed a grille of silver bars, behind which lay—what?

Or who?

Before him the tunnel extended like the bowel of night—to his left, behind the silver bars, Stygian velvet.

He wondered how much time he had left.

He had to know.

Cautiously, he moved down the short side branch.

His wan light winked on water pooled on the uneven stone floor. The corridor was extremely narrow, curving slightly; the silver bars, tarnished nearly black save around the lock where the bolt went into the stone, blocked it about ten feet from the convergence of the two passages. Beyond, Asher could make out two archways set in the left-hand wall. On one, at least, he caught the glint of a metal lock plate on a door. The smell of ammonia was overpowering; he had to fight not to cough.

They’d be coming back soon: Zardalu and the Baykus Kadine, and the others, bringing another victim to chase through the pitch-dark house until they cornered him, weeping and screaming…

Even locked in his upper room, Asher had heard the Armenian boy’s voice for a long time.

He turned from the silver grating, back to the main corridor, and resumed his quest for the stair that led out.

There was a door, locked, that had to be it—like the doors above, he missed it two or three times, found it only by walking with his hand on the weeping stone of the wall, until what he had somehow taken three times for an angle of shadow resolved itself suddenly into an arch. This evidence of the power of the master vampire’s mind he found extremely unnerving. They must have left the door open behind them that first night when they’d gone forth—or perhaps one had gone ahead of the others to open it for them.

In any case the lock was a Yale, new; a matter for a duplicate key, not a homemade shank of bronze wire.

Heart beating fast now with apprehension, he returned to the silver grille. That lock, at least, was of the old-fashioned kind, probably because the softer metal couldn’t take the stress of the smaller wards. He angled the bronze wire carefully, knowing every scratch would show. Even the lugs and pins that held it to the stonework of the walls were silver.

They are treacherous … the Bey had said, the silver blade of his halberd gleaming in the smoldering half-light of the baths. They are treacherous.

His heart slamming blood in his ears, he edged his way along the buckled, puddled flagging next to the wall. A wet footprint here would condemn him to death. Straw and sawdust salted the corridor, making the going even more delicate, and the cold was arctic. He wondered if he would hear the fledglings returning. Wondered if he would know, should the Bey be watching him from out of the darkness with those leached-out ochre eyes.

“Ernchester,” he whispered at the nearer of the two doors.

Both were locked. Hasps of silver, or more probably electroplated steel. Padlocks sheathed in silver, even to the bows. Silver solder dabbed over the screw heads. The locks were new—the rest, black with age in the candle’s feeble light.

“Ernchester!” he whispered again. How much—how far— could the Deathless Lord hear? Not through earth, he thought. Not through this much stone. “It’s Asher. Are you there? Anthea’s free, she’s here in Constantinople…”

He had almost said, Anthea’s alive.

Listened.

Deep behind the heavy door he heard it: a groan, or a cry, that lifted the hair on his head—physical agony mingled with the blackest depth of despair. Hell, Asher thought. Such a sound you would hear if you put your ear to the keyhole of Hell.

“Can you hear rne? Can you understand?”

Only silence replied. His hand trembled, fumbled at the lock, half numb with cold but unsteady, also, with the knowledge that time was now very short…

“I’ll come back for you,” he promised hoarsely. “I’ll get you out…” And I’ll need your help, he added as a grim afterthought, to return the favor.

A draft, a shift of air, and his heart stopped as if knifed with an icicle, then began beating fast and thin. Even in that first second, he pinched the candlewick, thanking God for the smell of the ammonia that would drown the smoke of a full-fledged conflagration, much less that of a single dip. That drowned, even from the Undead, the smell of his living blood.

From the dark of the corridor beyond the silver bars he heard stumbling footfalls, and a pleading breath, “My lord, be kind—be kind to a poor girl…”

At the edge of hearing, a tickle of obscene mirth.

“Oh, the lord you’re going to will be kind.” The voice might have been Zardalu’s. “He is the kindest lord in the city, sweet and generous… you’ll find him so, beautiful gazelle…”

In the utter blackness there was nothing to see, no way to know if they’d noticed the slight jar of the doorway in the silver bars—he’d pulled it to behind him, the hinges oiled and uncreaking…

He could only wait, desperately listening, wondering if the next thing to happen would be a cold touch on his neck. The staggering footsteps faded. He himself remained where he was for a long time, unmoving, dizzy with the ammonia stink and the cold that ate at his bones, before he felt his way along the wall to the bars, and so out into the corridor, wincing as the gate lock clicked behind him like the hammer of doom.