Something made Lydia look around. A noise from the doorway, she thought later, though she could not have said what it was.
Gold-stained by the lamplight against the dark of the hall, Ysidro had returned to something of his old appearance, the death-head mask filled out a little, the black rings of pain and fatigue around the eyes less staring, though a great bloodless cut ran from his scalp down forehead, cheekbone, chin, from Golge Kurt’s claws, and two others crossed the fine-grained flesh of his neck. They were like the slashes a sculptor might make in a wax that he had suddenly come to hate: horrible, clean, without puckering. Ysidro seemed collected into himself again, perfect as an ivory angel, as if he had never dropped anything in his life or held strengthless to a doorpost, or written a poem admitting to dreams of warmth that did not come from stolen lives. As if he had never been anything but perfect, and the master of himself.
Lydia thought, He has fed. All her body seemed to be one giant pain. He had no further need of her, save for that.
Rage exploded in her, all the stored horror at Anthea’s death, all her sickened bitterness at Ysidro’s arrogance, at those pathetic, melodramatic dreams he had sent to Margaret, kindling love in her like the flames kindling from the vampire flesh, and she fell on him, striking with her open hands at his face, with her fists at his chest and shoulders, hating him with a rending hatred that seemed to rip something deep in her soul.
After a moment he took her wrists and held her from him. Under the bloodless cut his yellow eyes were aloof, looking without expression into hers.
“You cannot expect us to be other than we are, mistress,” he said, in a voice she knew was pitched for her alone. “Neither the living nor the dead.”
Then he was gone, and James was beside her, holding her in the circle of his good arm. Lydia clung to him, weeping, from exhaustion and shock and blinding, bitter grief at what she had lost.
I will find you, Ysidro had said to him once. For those of us who hunt the nights, that will be no great task.
Above the looped chains, the cobwebbed mazes of counterweights, the hanging lamps of silver, gold, and ostrich eggs, darkness soared like the exultation of ancient spirits, nearly two hundred feet upward to the shabby painted plaster of Aya Sofia’s dome. Below, Asher’s footsteps ran whispering to all corners of the mosque, as if they had some mouse-sized secret to tell. Only a few of the lamps burned. By them he could see his breath.
He had walked here from Pera, down the steep steps of the Yusek Kalderim, across the New Bridge. Through narrow streets under the eyes of the Sultana’s Mosque and the raw gray granite buildings of the new administration, up the gentle hill to this most ancient place.
A Roman emperor had built it, or a man who thought of himself as a Roman emperor—he and his beautiful, scandalous, red-haired wife. After everything that had passed around it, Asher still heard their names in the silent music of the columns, the unheard bass rhythm of the domes. As he had walked in the cemeteries and the cisterns under the eyes of Olumsiz Bey’s fledglings, bait for the trap, so he walked now.
If Ysidro would find him, he thought, he would find him here.
Charles Farren, Earl of Ernchester, would have walked here. A living man, two and a half centuries ago—periwigged, ruffled, and court-suited—dreaming of the woman who waited for him in England. All I ever wanted… and all I ever had.
I wish you could have known us as we were.
He closed his eyes, knowing that he should not feel about her what he did.
When he opened them again, it was to see the ghost-flicker of movement in the darkness among the line of columns in the apse, the touch of pallid lamplight on a colorless web of hair.
Asher remained where he was. The vampire’s footfalls made no sound on the dusty carpeted acres of the floor.
“I wasn’t sure this was an appropriate place to find you.” The echoes of Asher’s voice were solitary drips of water in the immensity of an underground cave. “But in the streets I felt unsafe, and there was a chance that the others—the fledglings—wouldn’t enter a place considered holy to them.”
“There is no reason why they should not.” He moved carefully, in obvious pain, though his face showed no expression; Asher knew that Ysidro was a little tougher than younger vampires with regard to silver but guessed Karolyi’s bullet had left an agonizing track of burns and blisters within.
He wondered who had dressed Ysidro’s wounds.
“Unless one has put up garlic or silver, or some other thing inimical to us around the entrances, there is no limitation upon what building we may go in. Neither crosses, nor crescents, nor horseshoes nailed with cold iron above the door forbid us any more than they forbid a living man, nor must we wait to be invited to cross a threshold we have not crossed before.”
Ysidro gestured, the black kid of his glove spiderlike against the white shirtsleeve.
“Though we do tend to avoid holy places. Not because God is there—for presumably God is everywhere, something men seem to forget in their battlefields, bedchambers, and boardrooms—but because man is there, and woman, without the defenses they erect to protect their minds from one another. The yielding up of their innermost dreams—love, and hatred for those different than they—charity and violence all mingled—makes a music which remains in such places even in their emptiness. Dreams lie thick here, like the smoke of incense; the smell of the blood that has been shed here seeps still from its stones. Many of us barely notice, but I find it—unpleasant.”
The silence returned, like the cloak of vampire powers: the turning aside of attention, the blinding of living eyes. All the things that someone like Ignace Karolyi—someone like Golge Kurt—would have sold to living men preparing to fight a war.
And might still, thought Asher wearily. And might still.
But that was something about which he could do no more. He should have known that, he reflected bitterly, before he got on the Paris train. He had known about it this time, stopped it this time… Plucked up a single weed, knowing already that the seeds were everywhere in the air, looking only for fertile soil.
“Thank you for looking after her.”
Ysidro turned his face away. “You have married a very foolish woman, James,” he said softly. “I would have looked after her better had I broken both her legs, to teach her to stay out of vampire nests, and sent her back to Oxford under care of a nurse. I did ill and stupidly, for we all go back home nursing our hurts, hers maybe the worst of all. And nothing here will change.”
“Which is as well,” Asher said, “considering what changes might have come had Golge Kurt become Master of Constantinople. We did win this time, you know.”
The colorless eyes touched him, rested on him, giving away nothing of their thoughts, then moved away. “This is not my affair. The dead are the dead.”
“You will miss her,” Asher said, “won’t you? Anthea.”
Ysidro looked aside without replying.
“I don’t think,” Asher said, “that she was sorry.”
He did not think the vampire would answer him, and for a long time he did not. Then he said, “She was. But I do not think she would have lasted long after he was gone.”
He had known her, thought Asher, for all of that two hundred and fifty years. Worlds were hidden in the stillness of the alabaster face, the pale, champagne-colored eyes. Questions forever unanswered.
“You didn’t kill the Potton girl, did you?”
Ysidro said nothing.
“It’s not something I’ll speak of to Lydia. There were other vampires in the city, maybe others besides those I saw in the House of Oleanders. I don’t know. If the laborers and mechanics and beggars put together Lydia’s inquiries with the house of Olumsiz Bey, there must have been vampires who became aware of you. Who waited for the servants to flee the sound of the riot. Who had, perhaps, met her eyes somewhere, sometime, and could command her in dreams to open the windows for them.”
“The girl was a fool,” Ysidro said. He glanced sidelong at Asher. “You may tell Mistress Asher I said that.”
“Many years ago,” Asher said, “when I was in Vienna, I loved a woman there, and she me. She was clever and had great integrity. I was a fool to speak to her after the second time, because I should have known where it would lead. But after the second time I met her, it was too late. When she began to guess that I was a spy sent to find military secrets that would hurt her country, probably kill her friends and family who were in the army, I… betrayed her. I stole her money and left town in ostentatious stealth with the most brainless and beautiful member of the demimonde I could convince to accompany me—knowing that Francoise would take her own rage, her own hurt, into account, and more than into account, and not look further into anything else that had to do with me. She was that kind of person. I did this not only to protect myself and my contacts, but so that she would cut from me cleanly, never regretting or thinking that what had been between us could ever be repaired.”
Ysidro was silent for a long time, cold crystal eyes fixed on some middle distance, as if, through the walls, he could see out into the night, back to the London that had been his haunt and his home from his twenty-fifth—and last—year of human life.