The back entry to the kitchen was unlatched. They could have fled that way as soon as the sounds of strife were heard at the foot of the hill.
"I hope Margaret hasn't come to grief herself." Lydia raised the lamp as she returned to the front hall. "She's really not very bright, and completely out of her depth here. I shouldn't like to think of her trying to negotiate with a Turkish cabdriver, or..."
Asher straightened up from examining something heaped on the hall table-a wreath of garlic bulbs and hawthorn. "There are four or five of them here," he said.
"And none on the windows."
"Madame Potoneros may have taken them down," said Lydia, though she felt a qualm of cold within.
"Maybe." They looked at each other, then turned as one to hasten up the stairs.
Lydia froze in the doorway of the bedroom, lamp lifted so that the light fell through to show the unshuttered windows, the protective wreaths heaped in the corner, the still figure lying on the bed.
Asher disengaged his arm from her shoulder at once, crossed to the bed. Lydia set down the lamp, a little numbly, on the vanity, and with a taper kindled the two smaller lights there. The added glow warmed the colors of the room but did little to dispel the dark in the corners.
The woman on the bed was Margaret. But then, she hadn't really had any doubts. Asher touched the woman's neck. There was a little dried blood around the mangled puncture marks, but of that, also, Lydia had never really had any doubts.
The waxiness of the skin, the blue color of the lips, the fingers, the bare toes visible under the white flannel nightgown, were very clear. Lydia set the lamp down again on the bedside table next to Margaret's eyeglasses, reached down-as Asher had already done-to touch the mangled neck, the short, unpretty jaw. They were still rock-hard. If Margaret had died at the beginning of last night's darkness, rather than at the extreme end, almost at dawn, the rigor would be wearing off now.
"She took the herbs from the windows herself," she said softly. "Ysidro said... a vampire could get a mortal to do that, if once he met her eyes."
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."