Traveling with the Dead

Chapter Seven

"Have you seen him?"
Lady Ernchester tilted her stub of candle to spill a few drops of wax onto the stonework of an elbow-high niche, then propped the light upright in it. The flame steadied and broadened, touching first her face with its deceptive warmth, then the stiff, sad features of a small stone image of the Queen of Heaven in the niche itself, fouled with rat droppings and the trails of slugs. The light penetrated farther, to show them in a sort of vestibule at the foot of the crooked stairs down which Anthea had led him. The walls and ceiling groins of brick and stone had lost most of their covering plaster, and earth floor filled the air with a raw exhalation of damp. Opposite them a door into another chamber had been bricked shut, but not the long windows on either side. Looking through, Asher could see that the room, far deeper and higher than the one in which he stood, was filled with human bones.
He leaned against the wall, the pain in his side suddenly turning his knees to water. When he pressed his hand under his coat, he felt the hot soak of blood.
"You're hurt..."
She stepped forward and caught his arm; her hand pulled back and he staggered, for her fingers had accidentally brushed the silver chains where they ran under the cuff of his shirt. For a moment they stood looking at one another in the candle's wavering light.
"Wait here for me," she said. He heard the rustle of her petticoats but did not see her depart.
He sank down onto the windowsill, leaning against the rusted iron bars. His head swam, but losing consciousness was something he dared not do. The bones behind him rose in heaped mountains, losing themselves in a distance of utter night. A faint scratching clatter: movement among the piled skulls, and the glint of tiny eyes.
A plague crypt, he thought. Easily as large as the one under the cathedral, though probably deeper in the earth. In the faint glow of the candle the bones were as brown and shiny as ocean stones.
Get thee to my lady's chamber, thought Asher dizzily. Tell her that though she paint an inch thick, to this end will she come...
Unless, of course, she chooses not to die.
For some reason Lydia came into his mind, and he shut his eyes. To this end will she come...
"Here." A hand touched his shoulder, swiftly withdrawn. She stood at his side again, his valise in her hand. "Take off your coat."
The attacker's knife had slit the heavy wool and the lighter tweed of the jacket and waistcoat beneath. Shirt and waistcoat had absorbed most of the blood; had he not been wearing the greatcoat, he would probably have been killed. As it was, the wound, though painful, was superficial-he could move his arm, though he knew it would stiffen, and his breathing was unimpaired.
With an exertion that left him light-headed, he stripped to the waist, the air shockingly cold against his skin. He remained seated in the embrasure while she moved away from him, to the opposite side of the vestibule under the Virgin's niche, where she tore the bloodied shirt into neat pieces as if the tough linen had been cigarette paper. As she worked, she spoke in the quick, jerky voice of one who seeks to preserve herself from what silence might bring.
"Have you seen him?" she asked again.
"I saw him at Charing Cross Station," he replied, "talking with a man I knew to work for the Kundschafts Stelle, the Austrian secret service."
She glanced up, eyes flaring wide with shock. They were the color of mahogany but no more human than a raptor bird's. In the small saffron light her lips were colorless as the pallor of her flesh, pallor somehow mitigated-or explained-by the mourning black of her clothing. Her hair, upswept into the style Lydia called a Gibson Girl, seemed to flow out of the darkness of her clothing, garnet- tipped pins gleaming in it like droplets of blood.
"Talking with someone?"
"Why does that surprise you?"
"I had thought..." She hesitated, looking at him for a moment; then, as if not daring to linger on the dark glitter of blood on his side, her unhuman eyes returned to her work. "Our house was searched, you see. Ransacked by men while I was out." From the reticule at her waist she withdrew a square of yellow paper, folded small, and crossed the room to hand it to him with bloodstained fingers, then moved quickly back away. "That was on the floor when I came back."
Asher unfolded it. It was a railway timetable. Sunday night's seven-thirty boat- train was circled; a strong European hand had added, in the margin, Vienna Express.
"He was gone by the time I came back that night," said Anthea, digging in his valise for the small flask of whiskey there. She soaked an unbloodied fragment of shirt in it, braced herself almost imperceptibly before stepping near enough to touch him again. Asher raised his arms against the top of the window in which he sat, that the silver on his wrists might not come into accidental contact with her ungloved hands. The whiskey stung coldly in the wound, the smell of it almost covering the raw whiff of the blood.
"In wintertime, when dark falls by four, I often go on errands, to buy newspapers or books. I have a dressmaker who keeps open for me. Ernchester will sometimes stay all the night through in his study, reading, even on those nights when I go out later..."
She stopped herself visibly from saying to hunt. But Asher saw it in the shift of her eyes. Her hands were icy against his bare flesh, and she worked quickly, holding the bindings in place with small bits of what little sticking plaster he'd had in the valise in case of emergencies. His blood dabbled her fingers, garish as paint on ivory. Cold breathed over his ribs from the bones within the crypt, chilling him further.
She went on, her words swift, like a woman talking in the presence of a man whom she fears will seduce her. "He used to go out walking. I thought it was only that. So I went out again and, when I returned, found the place rifled, smelling of human tobacco and human sweat, and that was on the floor. I thought... I thought that he had been taken away."
Her dark brows pinched together as she pinned the final bindings in place. "I would have known it, had he... had anything befallen."
Asher remembered his dream. How can he be dead? she had asked. Did I walk up the stairs, would he not be waiting at the top?
Even then she had known.
"And you didn't go to Grippen?"
Anthea shook her head. "Since last year-since the rift among us concerning you and your knowledge of us-there has been uneasiness among the Undead of London. Grippen has gotten other fledglings in place of those who were killed; has summoned to London older fledglings of his as well. Me, he never trusted.
Indeed, I... until you spoke of the Austrian, I could not be sure that this was not of Grippen's doing. But for that reason I dared not go to Ysidro, either."
She handed him one of the new shirts he had bought, then took the whiskey flask and stepped quickly away, pouring the liquor on her fingers and meticulously, repeatedly, almost obsessively wiped from them all trace of his blood. While she did this, he put on his shirt, resumed his tie, his jacket, his coat, moving slowly for his vision sometimes would suddenly gray, but she did not offer her help. In the dark of the crypt, rat shadows flickered among the bones.
"At a certain distance I can feel my husband's mind. Sense his presence. I did not... I dared not wait." She raised her eyes to his. "Might he have gone to this Austrian because he was fleeing the Master of London?"
"He might," said Asher. "But I suspect Grippen had nothing to do with it. Come." He picked up his valise. "Will you go with me for coffee?"
They went to LaStanza's on the Graben, luminous with gas-light and bright with the pastel frocks of the dancers. Anthea had donned, over her cold white fingers, a widow's black lace house mitts, and produced from a corner of the crypt's vestibule a plumed hat bedighted with veils that further hid-and heightened by contrast-the whiteness of her flesh. She must have left it there, thought Asher, when she went to rescue him from his attackers in the alley. The scent of her hair on the silk had evidently been enough to keep the rats from coming anywhere near.
"I have been afraid for Charles for years," she said after the Herr Ober took their orders. "Part of it was Danny being killed-the man who had been our servant since the days of the last King George. Burned up in the light of the sun. Some would say, a fit end for such as we." She glanced quickly at him, challenging, but Asher said nothing.
"Part of it was the death of the city that he knew. Not all at once, as when the fire took it, but little by little, a building demolished here, a street torn up there that the Underground might pass beneath. A word or expression would fall out of use, or a composer die, whose work he loved. He used to go every night to concerts, listening with joy to the new men, to those light airs like clockwork flowers, and then the strength, the passion that came after..."
A waiter brought them coffee: for her, "dark with skin"-one had to be specific when ordering coffee in Vienna -for him an einspanner, black coffee, whipped cream.
"Is it passe now, the waltz?" She put back her veils and raised the cup to her lips, not drinking, but breathing deep of the bittersweet riches of the steam. On the dance floor women floated weightlessly to "Tales of the Vienna Woods," their gowns like lilies of saffron, rose, pale lettuce-green; the black clothing of the men a delineating bass note, the officers' uniforms jeweled flame.
"I think so." He remembered dancing with Francoise. She'd been gawky as a scarecrow to look at but never missed a step, as light as a bluebell on a stem. "Not with people my age," he went on. "But the young and the smart are doing things like the foxtrot and the tango."
"Tango." She savored the unfamiliar word. "It sounds like a New World fruit. Something whose juice would run down your chin. I shall have to learn it one day." Her eyes returned to the dancers, quickly, as if avoiding a thought. "The waltz was a scandal when first I learned it. And so I thought it, too." She laughed a little at herself. "Ernchester still enjoyed dancing in those days.
Grippen mocked at us. For him all things are only to serve the kill. But we'd go to Almack's Assembly Rooms or to the great ton balls during the Season. He... was not always as you've seen him."
"Did something change him?" His voice was low, under the music, but she heard, and past the wraiths of her veils her glance crossed his again. Then she looked away. "Time." She traced the ear-shaped curve of the cup's handle, a gesture that reminded him of Lydia when she had something worrying her. Her eyes did not meet his. "I wish you could have known him as he was. I wish you could have known us both."
Silence lay between them, save for the music and the swirl of silk and slipper leather. "Do you read the Personals?" asked Asher, and the question startled her out of the reverie into which she had slipped. He started to reach down for the valise on the floor between their chairs, but the bite of his wound stopped him; he gestured to the newspaper visible in the bag's open mouth.
"Or more to the point, does your husband?"
"We all do." She leaned to withdraw the folded sheets. "We follow families, names, neighborhoods for years, sometimes decades. To us, chains of events are like the lives of Balzac's characters, or Dickens'. The nights are long."
Asher unfolded the section and touched the advertisement he had seen.
"Saturday's paper," he said. "His departure was arranged in advance. Umitsiz is Turkish for hopeless-a variant, I think, for Want-hope. Does Ernchester know Turkish?"
"He was part of the legation King Charles sent to Constantinople, before we were married. He was away three years. To me it seemed eternity."
A wry smile brushed her lips as she considered the irony of that, and she added, a little shyly, "It still does, you know, when I look back."
Then she frowned and held the railway timetable beside the few short lines of type, as if comparing them. "But why?" she asked at last. "What could they have said to him-this Olumsiz Bey-to make him come here without a word to me? Even without Grippen's support, we have wealth and a place where we are safe. Men searched the house, yes, but it was night when they did so-they could not have overpowered him, even had he returned to find them. At night men are easy to elude. Charles knows London 's every cellar and bolt-hole. Even if he knew Vienna once, cities change with time, and those changes are perilous to those whose flesh the sun will destroy. What could he have been offered?"
"I suspect the men were only agents of someone else." Asher folded both paper and timetable again. "Ysidro told me once that the Undead usually know when someone is seeking them. You know nothing, guessed nothing, of the men who searched the house?"
She shook her head. "There had been no... no unknown faces seen too many times, no footfalls passing where none should be."
"Which means that someone told them about the house."
The waltz had finished. On the platform the orchestra was putting up its instruments. A woman, small and gray-haired and dumpy, laughed as her white- bearded gentleman friend swept her up into an extravagant cloak of golden fur. Anthea turned her head to watch them, and in her eyes Asher saw an expression of almost sensual delight, a softening, as if she had drunk wine.
Karolyi? Asher wondered. An attempt to make sure the earl's wife didn't stop him from coming? But would Karolyi have known of the power struggle between Anthea and Grippen that would rob them of the master vampire's support?
Karolyi had certainly hired the toughs who attacked him tonight. They had probably followed him all day, waiting their chance. That meant he'd better pick the toughest-looking fiacre he could find and warn him of trouble once they got into the isolated lanes and vineyards of the Vienna Woods.
The Ober appeared, Lady Ernchester's black cloak on his arm. putting it around her shoulders brought Asher a stab of momentary agony, and she turned quickly.
"You're in pain." Her fingers were cold still, though she'd warmed them on the cup. "I'm sorry, I didn't think."
"It just took me by surprise," he said. "I'll take you to your lodging."
A tulle of fog suffused the gaslight on the Graben to dim haloes, blurred the swags and statues of the facades. Here and there a window still glowed, where maids, having unlaced their mistresses, brushed their hair and handed them nightdresses and prayer books, now locked up jewels or brushed dirt from slippers, or laid final fires for the morrow before creeping to cold beds themselves. The air was ice, the leafless trees friezes of unreadable runes passed by only a few final, home-hurrying shadows.
"Dr. Asher."
He paused in his stride and saw, again, her face turned half away from him in confusion.
"I know no honest woman asks a man to come back to her rooms with her, to stay with her the night." Her fingers stirred at the buttons on his sleeve. "And I understand that it's the stuff of farce for me even to care about such conventions. Old habits die harder than you think. But... will you do this?"
She raised her eyes to his as she spoke. Oddly, Asher felt no sense of danger.
He remembered how carefully she had wiped the blood from her fingers and the stammer of her nervousness that hurried to fill the silences of the dark crypt. It crossed his mind to wonder if she had inhaled so deeply of the coffee to cover from herself the smell of his blood.
Yet he had no sense that she was influencing his mind, laying upon it the vampires glamour that blinded victims to their danger. Which might only mean, he thought, that she was very, very good at what she did.
Into his hesitation, she continued, "Save for one thing only, traveling alone on that train was the most terrifying thing I've ever done." They moved on along the wide street, two isolated figures in the thickening brume. Beside them the Plague Pillar ascended in an astonishment of cherubs, saints, and clouds, white in gaslight and shadow. "I only just reached the hotel room in Paris in time, and I was terrified that sleep-the unbreakable sleep of the Undead-would overcome me where I stood in the street. They must have thought me a madwoman, hurrying the porters to take my trunks into my room and then pushing them all out and locking and double-locking the doors. And even when I was alone, the fear near overwhelmed me. How could I know that I'd wake with the setting of the sun again and not burn up screaming through some chambermaid's prying or greed?" Her step quickened and her hand tightened on his arm, the memory of that terror making her fingers, for a moment, crushing iron.
"And it was worse, shipping the trunk the following night," she went on.
"Sending myself like a parcel, falling asleep to the rocking of the train, trusting to fate. Not knowing if I'd ever wake. They say we don't wake, should our darkness be violated by sunlight-that we burn up in sleep. But who knows?"
Under the veils her face was calm, but there was a flaw in her voice, and she drew her cloak close about her, as if even her Undead flesh felt the cold. "None of us are ever there, to see it happen to another. Even in utter blackness, the sun submerges our minds. Sometimes we hear and know what happens about us, but we do not wake."
They reached the door of her hotel, a splendid mansion whose lower stories comprised the palatial residence of some wealthy family, but whose marble stair led to a far humbler lobby on the upper floor.
Anthea paused in the columned shadows of the entryway. "A year ago Ysidro hired you- forced you-to be his servant. To do for him in daylight what he himself was unable to do. And you did it honorably."
His breath mingled whitely with the fog that had floated through the outer gate behind them. Her words had produced no such clouding. "I had no choice."
"We all have choice." Her gaze met his in the dim light from the chandelier of crystal and gilt. "I can only ask you. Stay with me in the room until the sun sets again. Please."
Lydia had once calculated how many human beings the average vampire killed in a century. If he were the man he once had been, Asher thought, he would have said yes, then later thrown open the trunk lid and let the sun reduce such a murderess to dust.
Perhaps because she had saved his life, he would only have said no.
The clock on St. Stephen's was striking two, and like courtiers repeating a sovereign's joke, clocks on churches and monasteries throughout the Altstadt took up the chime. He would be alone, awake, with this woman for hours before she would be with him, alone and sleeping, trusting him as he must trust her.
If it weren't all a trap, to get him to a place where he could not call for help.
But surely the crypt had been that.
He told himself it was because he needed to find Ernchester, something he could not do without a vampires help. But he knew that wasn't true.
"Very well," he said.
"He ceased to care at all, about anything, fifty, maybe sixty years ago." Anthea removed her hat, and despite the renewed slash of pain in his side, Asher helped her off with her cloak and the jacket beneath it. Her frock was Norwich silk, its ruffles glittering with star fields of jet. "Music, watching people-not for prey but just for the curiosity about how they live their lives-it all meant less and less to him. Like that fairy book that came out a few years ago, where a man's limbs are replaced, one by one, by magic with limbs of tin, until suddenly he realizes he has no heart and is no longer a man." She passed her gloved hand across her eyes, the smooth skin of the lids pinching at the memory of pain.
"You're thinking that all those fifty, sixty years, when his life meant less and less to him, still he prolonged it by killing two and sometimes three men a week. There are things that can't... be explained. It's easier than you think, to fall into... habits."
"I'm not thinking anything." He remembered Jan van der Platz's blood on the barn wall, the shocked hurt in the boy's eyes just before Asher pulled the trigger.
She lighted the lamp on the heavy table. Asher wondered if she had been aware of the brassy-haired prostitute's death agonies, and it occurred to him that this woman had probably seen worse. Maybe done worse herself. The small chamber, copiously decorated with swathes of peacock feathers and dried flowers and smelling vaguely of carpets, had not even been fitted with gas, much less electricity. The topaz light made the vampire's face more human, lent color to her cheeks and a kind of life to her eyes, and brought forth cinnabar glints in her hair. Asher remembered again his vision of her lying on the floor of what he realized now was the old Ernchester town house in Savoy Walk, the house where first he had met this woman-where she had saved him from the Master of London's wrath.
"I'm sorry to have provoked this division," he said. "To have robbed you of whatever support Grippen would give."
She shook her head. "It's been decades coming. Maybe centuries. He wanted Charles- and the houses and land that would give him a system of bolt-holes. We had no living child, and there are ways of manipulating even entailed property, to keep a good part of what you own. Grippen lost much in the Great Fire, and afterward the city was greatly changed. I kept the property tied up in trusts, so Grippen couldn't own them outright. But it was only a matter of time before he would come to an end of needing Charles. Vampires do not kill vampires, but... I suspect in any case he would not have helped.
"Who is this Karolyi?" She took off her mitts, and her long nails glinted oddly in the lamplight.
While she plucked the jewel-headed pins from her hair, Asher told her about his
early acquaintance with Karolyi in Vienna. "He's continued in the diplomatic corps, I understand. Young men of his class do, with only minimal qualifications. I know he's been responsible for the deaths of at least two of our agents over the last ten years, but it's never been proven."
"How would he have known about my husband?" She paused, brush in hand. "He may be ruthless, yes, clever and dangerous, but it would not have told him how to find a London vampire. Only another vampire could have done that. And why would he have chosen a London vampire to... to bring here? The masters among the Undead are jealous of their territories. They do not tolerate vampires who are not their fledglings and subservient to their wills. Ernchester knows this."
"That may be part of Karolyi's plan." Stiffly and clumsily, Asher began to sponge with cold water at the blood in his coat, and Anthea said, "I'll do that," and took it from him. Now that the shock had worn off, he felt very tired, the pain in his side settling into a dull ache. He was glad to sit quietly on the room's overstuffed brocade settee.
"What he wants your husband for is less clear," he said after a time. "Maybe he wants your husband because he isn't a fledgling to some local master, here or someplace like Bulgaria or Greece. That's what I need to find out. It may be he wants your husband to make a fledgling who can be put to Karolyi's uses. But whatever he planned, he had to get your husband out of London because of Grippen."
"Yes," Anthea said softly. "Grippen would know."
She walked to the doorway between that chamber and the next, the movement of her shadow summoning vague blinks of light from the brass fittings of the trunk that filled most of the space not already occupied by the four-poster bed. Her hands, straying in the lace at her throat, were like lilies, ringed with solitary gold.
"When a master vampire begets a fledgling," Anthea said slowly, "he... he takes the fledgling's mind, the fledgling's consciousness and personality, into his own being, for the time it takes that... that fledgling's body to die. Once death is complete, once the... the changes to the vampire state have begun, then the master breathes that mind, that soul, back into the changing body once again. But not all of it. And what is breathed back is... stained. Altered. Just a little."
The marble profile remained averted, sienna eyes staring blankly into distance.
"No," she said. "He wouldn't use Charles in London. Grippen knows... everything.
And he has been watching us. Maybe waiting for his chance. I hate him." She shook her head, moved her shoulders as if to shed a weight of thought. "I have hated him since the first night Charles brought me to his house. Elysee de Montadour, the Master of Paris, is not so old or so powerful as Grippen, but she would sense it, I think, if a strange vampire came to Paris. Still, they could have gone to Rouen or Orleans to make their plans. The vampires of those cities perished in the confusions of the last German war. Such a journey would have been safer, would not have involved travel by day..."
"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.
Karolyi laughed. "Not many, I daresay. They're good, rational, God-fearing, Church of England, university men in your Department. Civilized, the way they tried to civilize me all my life." He came over and squatted beside Asher's shoulder, slim and soldierly even in the impeccably cut brown suit he wore. A hot blade of sunlight flashed across the gold and ruby of his cravat pin, red and gold repeated on his signet ring.
"But being raised in the mountains does something to you. I suspect I got from my Moravian nurse, at the age of five, what you got from years of comparing legends and collecting odd facts that don't fit into the curricula of Oxford and Innsbruck. Was that why they picked you to follow me? Surely they don't think I'd miss a familiar face?"
Unable to reply because of the sticking plaster, Asher only met his eyes. You know I'd never answer your questions anyway, his look said, and the full, red lips curved in a mocking smile.
"Well, I admit I didn't realize it was you in 'ninety-five until I saw you in the Munich train station. Our good Dr. Fairport kept that little secret from me back then." Karolyi stood up. Behind him, the two thugs carried Anthea's trunk to the door which the coachman Lukas held open; Fairport stood by, watery eyes flicking nervously from the trunk to Asher and Karolyi. "You know, I'd have thought you'd have been promoted past field agent by this time. You always struck me as being smarter than that. But maybe that was luck."
He took his gloves from his pocket, started to put them on but glanced down again at Asher and returned them to the pocket again. A small gesture, but Asher knew at once what it meant.
White kid was expensive, and blood would not come out of it.
" Remember my instructions, Lukas... all of my instructions..." he called out, and then turned with an admirable casualness to say, "Dr. Fairport, perhaps you'd best go with them."
Fairport nodded, his gaze behind the massive spectacles glued to the trunk as the stevedores maneuvered it through the door.
"Of course," he breathed, "they can't appreciate... Klaus! Klaus, please, a little more gently!"
He's forgotten I'm here, thought Asher. More furious than frightened, he made a muffled noise that might have been Fairport's Christian name.
By the way the old man flinched, Asher knew he'd guessed right. Absorbed, fascinated, obsessed by the prospect of taking a vampire alive, Fairport had forgotten. Had forgotten what Karolyi did with those inconvenient to him, if he'd ever known. The old man turned back, not quite in time to catch Karolyi smoothly withdrawing his hand from the front of his coat.
Asher met Fairport's eyes, forbidding him not to guess what was going to happen the minute he left the room. The old man's eyes, pale blue and tiny, distorted behind enormous rounds of glass, flinched away. Damn you, thought Asher, if you're going to let him kill me, at least admit to yourself what you're doing...
"You'd best supervise them," Karolyi said gently, nodding after the departing men. You don't really want to see this, do you?
Karolyi's eyes met Fairport's, held them, and Asher understood the unspoken barter: If you don't want to have anything further to do with vampires, of course that can be arranged, too...
Fairport turned uncertainly, as if Karolyi had implied that only his intervention could prevent the three stevedores from heaving Anthea's trunk out the window or riding it down the stairs like a bobsled.
Then he turned back. "Someone, er-might have seen us come in," he said hesitantly. "They'll certainly have seen the name on the van." He looked apologetically down at Asher and twisted his hands in their gray cotton gloves, as if that were the best he could do. Asher wanted to kick him.
Karolyi fetched a long-suffering sigh. "Have you chloroform in your bag, then?" Fairport went to his instrument case, but the tremor of his hands, increased by nervousness, spilled the chloroform as he tried to pour it onto the cotton pad.
Karolyi strode over to steady him, and in that moment Asher twisted his wrists against the hastily knotted scarf. The silk wasn't like rope, with rope's matted fibers; one knot tightened hard while the other slithered and loosened. As Karolyi turned back with the drug-soaked cotton in hand, Asher chopped hard with his legs at the Hungarian's ankles, pulled free one arm from the scarf, rolled to his feet and bolted for the door.
Karolyi, who had caught his balance on Fairport's shoulder, threw the fragile old man aside and flung himself after, shouting at the same time, "Stop, thief!" Coatless, unshaven, unknown to the hotel and still mute from the sticking plaster over his mouth, Asher could only redouble his speed down the front stair, swinging himself over the banister and down to the next flight as two stout porters in brass-buttoned green uniforms pelted up to meet him. He kicked his way through a rickety French door to a balcony that ran around two sides of the building's central court, scrambled down a rain gutter to the court where a red and white van, Lukas at the reins, was just lurching into the carriageway to the street. He veered as the coachman drew rein and one of the thugs dropped off the back to meet him, ducked through a door into kitchen quarters, dodged past two startled cooks and a scullery girl and out again into a lane, pursued by cries of "Dieb! Mord!" and hammering feet.
The cramped, medieval streets of the old city seemed filled with pedestrians,
either retreating from him in alarm or joining in the pursuit. He struck someone, blundered against a market woman and a postman with his parcels, ducked down an open gateway into another court and through another kitchen as half a dozen young officers in the blue and yellow uniforms of the Imperial-and-Royal Hussars sprang up from a table at a sidewalk cafe and streamed joyously after him, hands to their sword hilts and spurs rattling on the pavement.
He dodged into another gate and raced up the shadowy stairs, while police, guards, and passersby sped past him and into the courtyard, looking for a kitchen door or postern through a shop-finding it, they roared on through, while Asher pulled the sticking plaster from his mouth-with a certain amount of damage to his mustache-and, when they were gone, descended the steps and walked out to the pavement of the Dortheergasse again.
The ache in his side was breathtaking, and under the bandages he could feel the warm seep of blood. Gray afternoon cold cut through his shirtsleeves. He fought a wave of dizziness as he hurried toward the crowds on the Graben, feeling in his trouser pocket and praying there was something there besides his handkerchief.
He was in luck. He'd paid for the coffee last night with one of Karolyi's ten- florin notes and, owing to the pull of the wound in his side, had put the change in his trousers rather than the inner pocket of his jacket. It was enough, maybe, to get him a jacket at the flea market in the Stephansplatz if he wasn't too fastidious, and a tram ticket out of the immediate area, to somewhere that he could hide.