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.
But none molested him. In time he felt his way back to the stair-painfully, endlessly, across the baths, thanking God that navigating in the dark was a skill he'd kept up from his spying days-and up to the grass-grown court, where the little light of the stars seemed bright to his eyes. As he crept through the courtyard, he heard the silvery clashing of vampire laughter from within the salon, and the young woman's voice pleading incoherently. It seemed to him, as he bolted his own door behind him and sank to his knees under a sudden wave of nervous shaking that the sound came to him still-that, and the moaning of the prisoner behind the crypt door.
It was a long time before he managed to get to his feet and stumble to the divan, where he lay shivering as if with killing fever until the muezzins of the Nouri Osmanie cried the late winter dawn.
Seventeen
"I suspected my remark about how valuable you thought the information would yield results." Prince Razualmovsky slashed with his riding whip at the two curs sleeping on the marble steps. They slunk a few feet away and stretched out again in the dust of the plaza that had once been the Hippodrome, tongues lolling an incongruous raspberry against wolfish coats which, even without her eyeglasses, Lydia could tell were half worn away with mange.
Constantinople had more dogs-and, as she had seen last night, more cats-than any city she'd ever been in.
The animals seemed to operate on two different levels, as indeed, she reflected, they would have to. As Prince Razumovsky's carriage had worked carefully through the streets of the old city, where wooden Turkish houses appeared to sprout spontaneously from more ancient walls, the dogs had been everywhere, lying in the muck or against the walls of ochre or pink stucco. The cats had the overhanging balconies or shared the sills of heavily barred windows with potted geraniums, or lay on the walls and trellises of tiny cafes where Turkish men sipped tea and talked under stringy canopies of leafless vines.
"Someone always knows someone," the Russian continued, white teeth gleaming under tawny haystacks of mustache. "The good brass seller mentioned our questions to his friends at the cafe that night, or perhaps a beggar overheard us or the man selling baklava. One of them knew a street sweeper whose sister knew the hakawati shair by sight or had a cousin who'd heard one of the muezzins mention that a new hakawati shair had taken up residence in this place, or one of the neighborhood children mentioned it to another child... It was a Syrian boy who brought me the information."