Travelling with the Dead

Nine

Asher didn't move. "I'll use it," Fairport warned. He came slowly into the room, circling wide to stay out of Asher's reach and keeping the pistol pointed, until he was close enough to the desk to stretch out his free hand and push down the cradle, breaking the connection.

Asher settled from kneeling to crouching again beside the desk, his legs gathered under him, the handset still dangling from his grip. "Even against one of your own countrymen?" It was the cant of the Great Game-honor on the playing fields of Eton and God Save the King. But the Game was one Fairport had been playing for years as well, and there was a chance he would still think in its terms. And Asher was curious about the terms in which he did think.

"This matter goes beyond country, Asher," said Fairport softly. He backed a little, out of immediate arm's reach. "It's all you can think of, isn't it? All that sleek brute Ignace can think of. Like savages, both of you, tearing up volumes of Plato to stuff into cracks in the roof to keep the rain out. What we have found is the greatest revelation, the greatest discovery, in the history of mankind, and all he can think of is how such a man can be used in Macedonia and against the Russians in Bulgaria -and all you can think of is how to kill such a man, that the balance won't tip against you in the 'Great Game.' You don't understand. You refuse to understand."

"I understand how much damage a man like that can do, if he allies himself with any government. And I understand the kind of fee a government would pay such a man."

Fairport looked completely blank. Then, when Asher raised his brows, the old man flushed an unhealthy, blotchy pink. "Oh. Oh, that. I'm sure it's a condition that can be rectified with proper medical investigation... I've found astonishing virtue in yogurt as a food of longevity, and in Chinese ginseng. They won't always be drinkers of human blood..."

"I'm sure that lacemaker Ernchester killed last night would be glad to hear it," Asher replied grimly, though some objective corner of his mind had to fight not to laugh at the image of Lionel Grippen, Master Vampire of London, supping on a dish of yogurt and ginseng tea. "And don't you think there might be vampires who're as fond of the taste of human death as they are of human blood?"

The old man's mouth flinched. "That's the most revolting thing I've ever heard!

They can't possibly be... No one in his senses could be. They'll welcome that liberation as much as any drunkard would welcome the liberation from drink. And in the meantime there are the physically and socially unfit-"

"You mean traitors?" No other sounds in the house, though there was a dim clashing of shrubbery as someone passed by under the window. If he could disarm him without a shot being fired, there might still be time.

Fairport drew himself up. "I am not a traitor," he said with dignity.

Asher sighed in genuine disgust. "I never met a double agent who was."

"I have never passed information along to Baron Karolyi which would hurt any of our contacts or our agents..."

"How would you know?" Asher demanded tiredly. "You know nothing about politics, you barely read a newspaper, or at least you didn't when I was here. You don't think, if he can make a deal with vampires-if he can blackmail Ernchester into creating other vampires, fledglings loyal to the Austrian government- they won't eventually be used against us here? Or back at home?"

"That won't happen!" Fairport cried. "I won't let it happen! Asher, Karolyi is only a means to an end. These petty politics, a handful of military secrets that are going to be useless in three years, they're a small price to pay for the knowledge, the learning, that will free man, finally, from the grip of age, and debility, and death!

"Asher, look at me!" He gestured like a frustrated child with his miniature fist. "Look at me! I've been an old man since I was thirty-five! Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste..." He shook his head. "And every day for the past twenty years I have dealt with men who, like me, have felt that cold, awful terror of knowing their bodies are failing them. Men stumbling as they try to outrace the Pale Horse. I've tried everything, traveled to the far corners of the world, seeking out those who have conquered age-trying to find what it is that makes the body fail, that cripples us, blinds us, deafens us, renders us white-haired and flatulent and impotent and brittle."

Behind his thick lenses the blue eyes glittered suddenly, and genuine venom seeped into his voice. "What it is that wears out some while others continue to gorge and rut and dance into their eighties, their-"

Asher struck, thrusting off his long legs like lightning, smashing aside Fairport's gun hand at the same moment he drove a fist into the little man's chin. He struck with all he had, to carry him across the distance between them quicker than Fairport could react and shoot, and the impact hurled the professor back and to the floor, as if Asher had struck a child. There wasn't time to think or regret-in another moment Karolyi or one of the footmen might enter, and at that point Asher knew he would die. Karolyi, unlike Fairport, was not a man to justify or explain.

He scooped up the gun, transferred Fairport's key ring from the old man's coat pocket to his own, pulled free the old man's four-in-hand and used it to bind his wrists behind him, then stuffed Fairport's handkerchief into his mouth for a gag. He took another moment to drag him behind the desk, keeping low still, out of the range of the windows... Really, he thought, half regretful, the man had always been out of his league...

And smelled smoke.

Gray smoke was rolling along the ceiling of the upstairs hall. Asher cursed. He would almost certainly be caught if he tried to get Fairport out of there, but there was nothing for it, and the man's halfhearted interference back at the pension in Vienna had almost certainly saved his life. He glanced out the long windows behind the desk, ascertained that there was no one visible in the gardens below, and kicked them open, dragging the little man out onto the balcony where the fresh air would revive him and he'd be able to hump himself down the outside stairs. Then he ducked back inside. Crimson reflections on the bare boughs showed him where two or three of the downstairs rooms were already in flames, and, even as he watched, he saw yellow light flare in the dark windows of the old stable building.

Arson, thought Asher in alarm. Two places at once. Who the hell...? He flung himself down the stairs, Fairport's gun in hand, the smoke already tearing his eyes and eating at his lungs. Under the stucco the old house was mostly wood and would go fast. Downstairs the smoke was worse, the heat pounding on Asher's face and making him dizzy as he raced along the corridor to the scullery. As he ran he thought, If this is Karolyi's work, why let Fairport stay free? Or has Anthea somehow started this?

The coachman's body lay in the scullery door. His eyes and mouth were both wide in a look of utter shock. His collar had been torn open, his shirt pulled back to reveal the hairy masses of neck and chest. Wounds bulged like tattered white mouths from ear to collarbone, but there was almost no blood.

Asher felt as if his heart shrank and turned to ice in his chest.

He crossed the scullery, looked swiftly out the rear door to the yard and saw what looked like another body in the shadows under the outside stair. Smoke seared his nostrils, weighted his rib cage. He couldn't tell if there was a smell of blood or not.

Not Anthea. And not Ernchester.

The others. The vampires of Vienna.

The ones who had followed him here.

Sweat was rolling down his face as he shoved back the shelving, ran down the stair into the cellars cool abyss. He struck a match as he thrust through the door at the bottom; Ernchester, pacing the silver cage like an animal, wheeled, his eyes flashing in the tiny speck of the flame. "They're here," he said hoarsely. "I feel them. The house-they've fired the house..."

He flicked through the barred silver door the moment Asher had it open, twisting his body so as not to touch.

"Anthea!"

He started for the door, then turned back, catching Asher by the elbow in a grip that came close to breaking the bone. "Did you find her? She isn't in this house, I'd have known, I'd have felt her, read her dreams..."

Asher recalled something Ysidro had said to him once, about being unable to sense the presence of people deep in cellars through the muffling weight of the earth.

"She'll be in the crypt under the stable."

Flame light poured down the stairs, bloody on the earl's face; a thin face and not particularly an aristocratic one, with an indefinable air of age despite the fact that, like Anthea, he appeared to be no more than thirty-five. Asher did notice, as they raced up the stairs into the choking inferno of the scullery, that at no time did sweat break from the smooth skin of the vampire's brow.

Asher crossed the yard at a run, but the vampire earl was ahead of him, moving with an insectile, weightless speed, huge bounds like a gazelle. Ernchester stopped, however, in front of the burning stable, hands raised before his face and his blue-gray eyes sick with horror and shock.

The earl followed him without question, however, circling the building to the rear, where the flames were less. Asher drove his boot through a cellar window, dropping into what had been a boiler room. The place smelled of dirt and damp brick, and the thin, sickly odor of kerosene that lifted the hair on Asher's neck. He dug another match from his pocket, scratched it on the wall behind him.

There were barrels of the stuff, ranged along the wall beyond the hunched black monstrosity of the generator itself. He heard the earl whisper, "God's death!" behind him, and pointed toward what looked to be the door of a closet, nearly invisible in the shadows by the coal bin.

"Through there. We have a few minutes. The fire's just caught."

The door was locked. Ernchester ripped the entire mechanism-lock plate, handle, bolt- free of the wood without visible effort and threw it clanging to the brick floor, then vanished like a moth in the darkness.

Asher had been in the crypt many times. Like the subcellar beneath the scullery, Fairport used it to conceal people who weren't supposed to be in Vienna or who had to leave the town in a hurry. Because of its remoteness from the main house- and the patients who usually resided there-it had also been used for meetings, if instructions had to be passed along with minimum risk of being seen.

He'd felt his way halfway down the boxed-in stairway when yellow light glowed at the bottom. Through the doorway he saw Ernchester setting on the table a newly lighted oil lamp and turning back to the coffin trunk that filled half of the room.

"She's in here," the earl said softly and knelt beside the trunk. He passed his hands along the lid, pressed his cheek to the leather. His eyes closed. The flesh around them rumpled and compressed, like an old man's. Then he moved his head and looked up over his shoulder at Asher, standing in the doorway. "Can you take an end?"

It was awkward, getting the trunk around the corners of the stair. Even in the few minutes they had been in the crypt, the air in the boiler room had heated, and the smoke there was growing thick. Like the house, the stable was wood, the roof and walls went up like tinder. When they dragged and manhandled the trunk upstairs, they found the ground floor suffocatingly hot, filled with blinding smoke under a vicious rain of cinder and sparks. Asher coughed, gasping for breath, his grip on the trunk slipping. As his knees gave under him, he wondered suddenly what chemicals Fairport had in the laboratories here and what fumes they might be adding to the miasma of smoke.

He tried to get to his feet, and fell.

Above the roaring of the fire overhead he heard the scratch of the trunk's brass- bound corners as Ernchester-unbreathing, undead, desperate to save his wife at all costs-dragged it toward the door and safety.

Black unconsciousness rolled over Asher like a wave. He tried to stand, then realized that the air was a little cooler down near the floor. Inhaling was like trying to breathe kerosene. Kerosene, he thought dizzily. When the roof goes, it'll take the floor with it, and the whole place will turn into a furnace... The thought that he'd probably be killed by the falling roof before the kerosene scattered the building over half an acre of the Vienna Woods was not much of a comfort. At one point he thought he was crawling, but a moment later realized he was lying with his cheek to the superheating linoleum of the floor, a fallen cinder burning the back of his left hand.

Hands as cold and strong as machinery took hold of his arms, lifting and dragging him as if he were a bale of sticks. The smell of smoke seemed stronger outside, perhaps because his lungs were working again. He stumbled, trying to get his feet under him, and clutched at the shoulders that supported his arm. He felt them flinch.

Silver, he thought. The chain on his wrist would sting through Ernchester's coat.

The trunk lay just within the compound gate. It was still shut. Ernchester must have turned back the moment he'd dragged it out of range of the fire.

"She's asleep."

Asher raised his head, his brown hair hanging in his eyes, his face burning in the cold air under a film of sweat, soot, and grime. Ernchester knelt beside the trunk, one arm resting along its lid, the reflection of the flames imparting gory color to his narrow face, glittering in his close-cropped fair hair, his haunted, weary eyes.

"Drugged, I think," Ernchester went on softly. "That is... as well. Thank you."

Asher looked back across the gardens. The front part of the main house was in flames. The rear wing, where Fairport's office and his own rooms had been, was still intact. By the flaring light two bodies were clearly visible on the gravel paths.

He fumbled in his pocket for Fairport's keys, found two that would open the trunk's heavy latches. Ernchester touched his hand lightly as he would have opened the lid. "Not yet. The air will revive her, and I don't think I could stand that. I won't do that to her." The earl straightened his back, though he remained kneeling, one hand atop the other on the lid of the trunk. "Take her away from here. Go with her back to England. Take her out of this place. I beg you." He closed his eyes. "I beg you."

Firelight picked out the sudden lines around his eyes, the set of the thin lips- a face no one would notice, thought Asher, except that it was not a nineteenth-century face, much less one that belonged to this newborn era. The muscles, the speech, the expressions that had formed the mouth and chin and the set of the cheeks were all from some earlier time, and the years had not changed them.

"I can't repay you," he added softly. "I won't be seeing you, nor anyone known to you, ever again. I will owe you this favor, this boon, for all of time. But please make sure she gets home all right. Tell her-" His voice did not break but halted for a moment, almost as if he sought words. "Tell her that she is all that I ever wanted, and all that I ever had."

Then he raised first the outer lid, then the inner, to reveal the woman sleeping within.

The living dead, they had been called. By the fevered glare of the firelight she looked, indeed, both alive and dead: waxen, still, unbreathing, with her dark hair scattered about her, the linen of her gown not whiter than the flesh it covered. And beautiful, thought Asher. Beautiful beyond words.

Looking up, he saw Ernchester's face, without expression, as though all expression had grown too much to be supported under the weight of endless years, save for his eyes.

Ernchester bent a little to touch his wife's cheek, then leaned down to kiss her lips. To Asher he said, "She'll wake soon. Tell her that I love her. Always." Yellow light flared higher as flames ran along the roof of the main house. Asher turned, startled, in time to see a spindly figure move on the balcony, work and thrust itself to its feet, wobbling and off balance. Disheveled white hair caught the light, and the lenses of his spectacles made great rounds of burning amber as he turned his head. Staggering, Fairport began to descend the stairs. Asher shouldn't have been able to hear it under the roaring of the fire, but he did. Thin, silvery laughter, like the breaking of wafer-frail glass, and beneath that, the obscene toad-croak of a bass chuckle. They seemed to hover on the balcony, and on the stair, not quite touched by the fire's light, as if visibility were something to be put on or off at will, but at one point Asher thought that one of them wore a dress the color of web and moonlight. Fairport cried under the gag and fell, rolling down the stairs. They floated after him, half-seen migraine visions of alabaster faces, shining hands, eyes that caught the light as had those of the rats among the bones of St. Roche. At the foot of the steps he tried to get to his feet, falling heavily and trying again, and they ringed him, like porpoises playing, flickering shadows of a force he had entirely underestimated, following him as he scrabbled and heaved along the ground.

They let him get quite some distance before they began to feed. With a roar, the roof of the stables fell in, curtains of flame leaping higher, yellower, beating upon yet somehow failing to completely illuminate what was happening in the court. Then a deeper roar, like a battery of eight-inch guns, and the earth jarred underfoot as the kerosene went up. Beside Asher, Anthea cried out, "Charles!" and sat up suddenly, her brown eyes wide with terror. Asher caught her hand. Her gaze met his, clouded with old dreams. "The stones. The stones exploded with the heat." Then she flinched and turned her face away, and Asher realized that for a moment she had thought she was still in London, many years before, when the whole of that city burned.

She said again, "Charles," and when she looked at him then, her eyes were clear. "He's gone."

She started to rise, and he closed his hand hard on hers, draw-ing her back and knowing he had no way to hold her if she simply wrenched herself free. She could have broken his wrist, or his neck, with very little effort. She looked at him again, questioning and pleading, her black curls a cloud around her face and shoulders, the flame a soaked gold in her eyes.

"He told me to take you back to England," Asher said. "To see that you reached there safely. He said that he would not see me- and, I presume, you-again. He said that he loves you, always and forever."

In the courtyard the vampires had sunk down in a ring around Fairport, whose frantic noises had risen to a muffled crescendo, then ceased. Asher wondered what he'd do if Anthea vanished, as Ernchester had, flickering away like a ghost in the woods to seek him. He'd never make it back to Vienna.

For a moment he thought she would. Then she, too, glanced across at the dark shapes in the firelight. Just for a moment her pale tongue slipped out and brushed her lips.

But when she turned to him, her eyes were a woman's eyes. "Do you know where he's gone?"