"Indeed." The vampire inclined his head politely. "Less so than I had been, had I not come back to this place to seek you, however. It were foolish of you to follow me, Margharita, for your reputation's sake alone, and your safety's. And mine, and Mistress Asher's, too, coming to find you here. Now let us return, ere our absence causes remark; and I warn you, do not come after me thus again." His voice never rose above its usual even key, nor did its tone change one whit from the polite phrases of his accustomed speech, but Lydia cringed inside as if at sarcasm or curses. Margaret's cheeks flushed dark and she looked away, and for a moment Lydia had the impression she would have fled, plunging into the unknown labyrinth of the deeper harem, had not Ysidro laid an imperative hand on her arm. Her voice trembled as she looked back at him with tear-filled blue eyes. "I was only afraid..."
"Afraid?" He smiled his chilly smile, manufactured, Lydia guessed, to cover the remainder of his anger. Still, the impact of it was startling, the echo of an astringent charm that had been the living man's. "That I should find peril here beyond my capacity, from which you could save me?" No expression, no inflection; he had been dead, Lydia recalled, a long time. But still she guessed the smallest twinkle of banter, far back in the sulfur-crystal eyes.
Margaret didn't. She only hung her head and snuffled, and suffered Ysidro to take her arm and lead her through the maze to the perilous cistern stair, and thence back along the terrace where the harem ladies had gone to their lord. As they passed through a vast court above a terrace and pool, where shuttered windows hovered tier upon tier above their heads, Lydia thought she saw the glow of a lamp left under one of the ramshackle stairways, and made to turn aside. "Leave it," Ysidro said softly. "It will only draw those we have little desire to meet."
Lydia removed her spectacles again and folded the shawl inconspicuously in the cloakroom before reentenng the diplomat-crowded salon. She concentrated, through the remainder of the reception, on avoiding an encounter with the straight, graceful figure in the crimson uniform of the Hungarian Life Guards.
"You watch out for that Razumovsky, mind," Lady Clapham said to her as they were getting into the carriages. "And watch that girl of yours."
Startled, Lydia turned to regard Margaret, being helped by servants into the embassy coach. Soldiers clustered in the small square, torchlight throwing sharp flares on their rifles, for warning had come of sporadic fighting among the Armenians in Galata that might spread to Stamboul.
"I really don't think we need worry," she said. "I happen to know her heart is... otherwise engaged." To someone, moreover, infinitely more dangerous than a Russian nobleman.
"I mean watch what she says." Her Ladyship drew Lydia a little farther back into the darkness of the gate. The shadows of the soldiers wavered drunkenly across the vine- grown brick wall opposite, behind which the silent domes of the Aya Sofia slept in the dark.
"And what you say. Razumovsky isn't a fool, and he knows perfectly well your husband didn't come to Constantinople to interview storytellers. That treaty the King signed won't cut much ice if the Czar sees a chance of getting a point ahead of us, either here or in India."
Lydia sighed, reassured her hostess and shook her head inwardly as she took Sir Burnwell's hand to ascend to the coach. At least everyone in the world had cardiovascular systems and endocrine glands, and there wasn't any argument over those. For a moment she thought longingly of the Radcliffe Infirmary, where things were safe and in their places-was Pickering keeping proper graphs of the long- term weight gain of those subjects? She had no idea what she'd tell the editors of the Journal of Internal Research about her article. I'm sorry, I had to go to Constantinople to rescue my husband from vampires.
But without Jamie...
She shook her head. She would find him.
She had to find him.
Fifteen
"What was it you were afraid of, in the seraglio?" Ysidro did not turn. Upon bringing the women back to the house on Rue Abydos, he had uncharacteristically made sure that Margaret got safely to bed, then gone to the floor below to sit in the parlor's projecting bay, a sort of balcony that overlooked the front door. For nearly an hour Lydia had been aware of him there, as, still in her evening frock, she drank the aromatic tea Madame Potoneros brewed for her.
It was late, close to three. The near-riot in the Armenian quarter had forced a long detour through the market district to the old Mohammed Bridge; even then, winding their way up the steep Rue Iskander, they could hear the distant cries, the breaking of glass, the shots. Sitting quiet between Margaret and Lady Clapham, Lydia had pulled her cloak closer and wondered if she'd ever feel warm again.
There was still no emphasis, no rise or fall, to his voice. "So you, like Margaret, suppose me to have been in peril? I thought better of you, mistress."
"Well, I do know you're perfectly capable of avoiding any twelve saber-wielding eunuchs out to protect the Sultan's name from dishonor. So what were you afraid Margaret had encountered?" She thought it through, then asked, "Another vampire?"
He tilted his head a little. Late-risen moonlight edged his profile in watery milk. "Her name is Zenaida. I went to the seraglio to speak to her, before ever I knew Margaret had followed."
His hands, lying one atop the other on the window's sill, seemed about to move, then subsided again into quiescence, the echo of some gesture pared away by time. "She has been there a long while, and no longer recalls the name of the Sultan for whom she was first bought in the markets of Smyrna. Perhaps she never knew it. Like most of the Sultan's women, she was cunning but stupid, and uneducated as a peddler's donkey. She told me many of the odalisques still think she is a living woman, some forgotten Sultan's kadine!'
"And you think she may know something about... about Ernchester? Or James?" He sat on an old chest that did service for a low table in the bay; she leaned against the corner of the wall. The windows were open behind their lattices, and listen as she would-she could not keep herself from doing so-she did not now hear any sound from the slums that lay all along the foot of the hill. Smoke still gritted in the air.
"That," the vampire agreed quietly. "And other matters."
He gazed for a few moments more in apparent disinterest through the carven screens to white walls and tile roofs. The City of Walls, with its minarets and domes, its markets and its filth, was no more than a great shoulder of tucked velvet across the water in the night.
Then the yellow mantis eyes shifted to hers. "My senses, my perceptions, my ability to touch the threads of thought and scent and heat which move upon a city's air-these have suffered from lack of their proper feeding. Nonetheless I should be able to feel some of what takes place in the lives of night-walking things. If not from here, from the gatehouses of the palace where I stood tonight, from the hill of the Aya Sofia, where all the dreams of the city come together like light in a glass. And I do not."
Lydia pushed her spectacles up onto her nose. She'd taken off her gloves and her pearls, and the silver shone on her throat and wrists like looped links of ice.
"And the last thing you needed was a couple of silly heroines to look after," she said, rueful and shy.
His head moved again, once, and his eyes met hers with that brief flicker of human amusement. In the street below a dog barked, the gruff shrillness picked up in another alley, and another, as all that starveling horde felt called upon to comment and reply. Ysidro waited them out, listening as if he could distinguish some clue within the sound.
"I walked in Galata last night when I left you here," he said in time. "I crossed the bridge to Stamboul and sought out the other quarters where the Armenians live, down seaward of the Burned Column and in the poorest quarters along the walls. It is there, you understand, that the vampires will hunt, among those whose deaths the Turks count as less than the scraps I feed my cats. The miasma was thick there, the sense of diverted attention, of watching through smoke, though the night was clear. It was like the veil we lay over human eyes and human minds, but the veil was of a different quality, a different texture, wrought to shield a different kind of mind.