"I'll hold him," Asher said very softly. "You run for the door."
She had to know it was hopeless, because she nodded. The silk whispered as she gathered handfuls of it to free her legs. "I love you, Jamie."
At the far end of the chamber the door closed, with a sound like the shutting of a tomb. The shadow standing just within it moved, turning the old-fashioned key.
Candlelight flickered on the wicked, curving blade of the silver halberd.
Golge Kurt turned his head.
She stood there like a witch, like a thing truly risen from a nameless grave, filthy in her rags of luminous blue, blood in the curling raven ocean of her hair. The brown eyes had the weird sanity sometimes found on the far side of madness: calm, but a demon's eyes. There was blood on her mouth, and on her hands to the elbow, but the gold of her wedding band shone through.
Golge Kurt pointed the gun at her and fired, and she was stepping forward even before the hammer clicked harmlessly on the empty chamber, and with a vicious blow of the silver halberd took the gun hand off at the wrist.
The vampire screamed as blood exploded from the severed arteries, lunged at her only to be driven back with face and chest slashed, clutching, grabbing at the wounds where the silver blistered and burned. "Orospu!" he shrieked at her, rage inhuman in his eyes. "Infidel whore!"
She stepped in toward him, slashing with the silver weapon, slicing open his legs, his feet, his thighs. When he tried to climb up the lamp niches, to spring from them to the windows of the dome, she cut the backs of his knees so that, when he fell back screaming with his remaining palm a fingerless charred wreck, he could not stand. And all the while her face did not change, nor did the tears cease to run from the empty demon eyes.
Only when she had driven him into a corner, blood gushing from his wounds to splash her skirts, the walls, the floor, did she stop, looking at him with an inner peace beyond compassion or hate.
"You killed him," she said, quite gently. "You let him take the brunt of the fight, let him destroy the master you hoped to supersede. You cared no more for him than he did, this Bey, this... this master. It will be day very soon," she said.
Golge Kurt made a move to lunge, but with his hamstrings severed he could only flop on elbows and knees, while blood spattered around him like thick and stinking rain. She stood out of his range, looking down at him. Without turning her head she said, "Charles?"
The broken form moved then, lying near Olumsiz Bey on the blood-sodden carpets; moved, and reached for her with one hand. No louder than the scratch of a single leaf blown across a marble floor, Asher thought he heard a voice whisper, "Beloved..."
"Beloved," she replied. Her voice shook a little, but she never took her eyes from Golge Kurt. "You never did want this life, did you?" she asked softly. "Never wanted to continue, Undead but Unalive..."
"... Don't... know." Ernchester moved his hand again, tried to raise his head. The guttering candles showed his throat cut almost to the hawse bone. Asher didn't even know whether the dying vampire was actually capable of making a sound.
"Don't... remember... what I wanted. Only that I did not want to leave you."
"Nor I, to leave life," she replied. "Not if your love was part of that life, no matter what the cost to my soul. Nights and nights and nights, killing that I might not die... and you killing, that you might stay here with me. Not so?"
"I chose..."
She moved back to kneel at his side, though she still watched the Shadow Wolf, bleeding on the floor. One hand still held the master's silver weapon; the other reached down to touch the graying hair. "I understand," she said. "We all choose. And in a very short time it will be time for us both to go."
Black eyes wide with horror now, Golge Kurt shouted at her, raged at her, cursed her in German and Turkish and broken French, and she listened with a face of stone.
"It is not I who brought him to this place," the vampire shouted. "Not I who did this to him..."
"It was you who met him among the tombs," Anthea said. "You who used him, who controlled his mind, because he is what he is, weak... Don't you think I was aware of it, hiding among the cisterns and the catacombs of this city, when you two walked its streets to war with Olumsiz Bey? Don't you think I sensed it in my dreams, when you covered and hid his mind that he might not even know I followed and sought? To kill you is nothing."
The yellow light edged her face as it edged the halberd's dripping blade. There was no sound, now, outside, and the windows above showed as squares of ash against the night.
"I have killed every night to stay alive. Brought victims to him to kill when he was so weary of the life he lived that he could not even go to seek his own. All because Grippen wanted him- and Olumsiz Bey wanted him-and you wanted him to keep him from the Bey. And all you wanted was rest, Charles."
Charles shook his head and did not let go of her hand. "No," he whispered. "I wanted you."
It was Golge Kurt whose flesh ignited first. It puckered, blistered, blackening as he crawled screaming for the door, and Anthea cut at him again and again with the silver halberd until he retreated, screaming, to the corner, where the fire took hold. It swelled up from within him, not great flame, but thick blue- burning sheets. He sank to the floor and ceased to move quite soon, but he continued to scream for some time.
By that time Olumsiz Bey was burning as well, though Asher heard no sound from him. Perhaps he was dead, perhaps only lapsed into the vampire sleep that came at daylight, mercifully unaware of the end of his long unlife.
Anthea, who had begun to nod with the onset of that same sleep, laid down the weapon she carried and knelt beside the man she had loved, gathering him up into her arms. Their mouths were pressed together as the fire took them, and neither moved, except to tighten their grip on one another until the very bones locked within the veils of heat. Lydia watched until the end, but Asher turned his face against her shoulder, the suffocating heat pounding him, nauseated with the stink of burning flesh and blind with tears.
Twenty- Two
The army came soon after. Shock had set in, and as Lydia supported him down the stairs with all the grim expertise of one used to maneuvering dead bodies, Asher felt himself drifting in and out of consciousness, pain coming and going in alternation with eerie, frightening dreams. He half expected to find the charred remains of Ysidro's body at the foot of the steps, but didn't-or the reality in which he did was quite clearly a dream. Only Karolyi's body was there, lying in a pool of blood with a hole in his forehead and an expression of astonishment in his eyes.
"I was terrified he was going to talk you out of shooting him, Jamie," she said, helping him to sit on the bottom-most step and sinking beside him in a rustle of skirts. White-lipped and shaken, she propped her eyeglasses with a forefinger and blinked around her. "I mean, he tried to kidnap me this afternoon-yesterday afternoon-and if we'd gone with him, we'd never have gotten out of here alive."
Trust Lydia, he thought, and wondered who had warned her about Karolyi.
The house around them was utterly silent. The Bey had evidently been right about the rioters leaving before first light. It was almost impossible to reflect that he hadn't seen this woman in three weeks, and that the last time they'd spoken it had been on the railway platform in Oxford. He leaned his back against the wall of the stairwell and asked, in what he considered a reasonable voice, "What are you doing in Constantinople?" and lost consciousness again before she replied.
When he came to, the court was occupied by two squads of the Turkish army, who clustered around Karolyi's body, muttering and whispering. Their captain was an Anatolian highlander who seemed to pride himself on his imperfect command of both French and Greek.