By what Zardalu had said, Asher wasn't sure they knew exactly who it was they expected to trap.
Anthea, he thought, fly this place. Go away.
Then Zardalu was walking toward him, across open ground with the ashen grass surging around his pantaloons. When he bound Asher's wrists again and wrapped the scarf over his eyes, his hands were warm.
"You serve a heartless master," said the eunuch. "Or maybe by this time he's found himself another servant, clever or no. Did he promise you everlasting life, James? They all do, you know."
"Even the Bey?"
"Ah. An impudent infidel, no less."
Asher could hear the smile in Zardalu's sweet whisper. "Just curious."
When they passed the city walls this time, there was no sound in the streets, save the crying of the gulls. Zardalu kept one hand on Asher's elbow, the other on the back of his neck, and the smell of fresh blood and the reek of death drowned out both the smell of the muck underfoot and the vampire's perfume. Only when they were, Asher estimated, coming over the Second Hill again did he hear other voices and steps drawing near. A man mumbled, "Beloved... beautiful fairy..." in harsh-sounding Romaic Greek, and on the air, like the vapors of poisoned flowers, Asher heard the silvery flicker of vampire laughter.
"She's found a treasure, our Pelageya," Zardalu's voice breathed in his ear.
"How is it, sagir sayyaP. Did you find a strong bullock to trap in your nets?"
The Russian girl laughed, a soft, thick tickling that, in spite of himself and all he knew, went straight to his groin, as if the woman leaned naked in his arms.
They stopped. There was the sound of a key in a lock, impossible to tell what kind of key-the man with them muttered drunkenly, swearing eternal love, promising feats of ecstasy that would have his newfound adored one crying out with gratitude, and all the while around him Asher heard the whisper of unholy mirth- Haralpos, Habib, the Baykus Kadine. Their voices were a fleeting susurration, now before, now behind, as he was guided through a doorway and down long uneven stairs, worn in the center and incredibly deep, to a place that smelled of water and stone.
"That little beggar Habib's got won't be missed, but what of that bullock of yours? He looks well-fed."
"And if he is? He's an Armenian, she found him in the Kara Geumruk. The Sultan is quicker to avenge Gypsies and Jews than such folk..."
"But is he sober enough to give us sport?" Zardalu's drawling voice was petulant. "Well enough to steal sleeping beggar children for El-Malik, but after a night sitting in a graveyard, with only one wretched tramp sleeping behind a tomb, I want a little sport."
"El- Malik entertains his infidel makaniki!" He could almost see the Russian girl's lazy shrug. "I can smell the coffee from the street. This one will waken enough."
El- Malik. The master, the king. The Master Vampire of Constantinople. And while they were talking, a sharp turn at the bottom of the stairs, two of his own steps, and the brush of a curtain against his face, right turn, wildly uneven brick underfoot and the sudden throat-catching stink of ammonia and chemicals, and a blast of cold.
And far off, inarticulate with agony and horror, muffled as if behind some barrier of wood and iron, the sound of a man's voice.
"I came on one of the makaniki the other night, as I was returning early," Zardalu was relating lightly, turning, Asher thought, so that his hand slid from neck to shoulder. Had it not, he thought the vampire must have felt the prickle of the hairs at the sound of that horrible, distant despair. "A fat little infidel like an asure pudding, with spectacles on his nose, so... He backed against the wall by the rear gate, holding his little hammer out like this, staring around squeaking, 'Who is that there? I hear you... You cannot get away. Come show yourself and I will not hurt you...' " while the unfortunate Armenian youth mumbled endearments and Asher measured in his mind a narrow stair that wound around itself three times, then the echoes of some open room, and more stairs. Cobbly pavement of small stones underfoot, then of bigger ones, like cannonballs, in an open space where grass grew between blocks. Right, and a locked door...
They stopped, suddenly, in a room with a bare wooden floor. By their silence Asher knew why.
"Nothing?" The voice was brown velvet, roses, and gold.
By the shift of Zardalu's grip, Asher knew that he bowed. "Nothing, Lord."
In his blindness he heard the dense rustle of silk, but only when it was close enough that he could smell coffee, incense, ammonia... blood.
"Yet you have done passing well. Habib, my sweet, is that sarigi burtna for me? What a dirty little thing she is. And ah, Pelageya..." Asher could almost see him bow, and there was a momentary scuffle, the swish of clothing and a stifled grunt of terror as the young man suddenly, belatedly, realized that he stood in the presence of smiling death.
A hand like animate steel brushed the side of Asher's face, almost in a caress. The scarf was slipped aside. Eyes that had once been coffee-dark but had been bleached, by a trick of the vampire state, to a garish and unnatural orange blinked into his by the glow of oil lamps close overhead.
Olumsiz Bey stepped back.
He was as tall as Asher-six feet-and nearly as thin, but his shoulders stooped, giving the narrow, hairless head an uptilted angle like a tortoise's. The nose was an ax blade such as might have hewed the lipless mouth into existence with a single stroke, but it was not an unhandsome face. In one ear he wore a huge chunk of amber, as orange as his eyes, in which an ant was trapped, so big that Asher could see the curve of its serrated jaws; one almost expected to see other insects locked in the frozen prisons of his real eyes as well.
"It is probably well," Olumsiz Bey said to him in the flowery Osmanli of the court, "that you return to your chamber now, Scheherazade, and remain there for the balance of the night. The tales we will tell tonight are not for the ears of the living."
Asher's eyes went past him to the fledglings, grouped closely now around a husky young man with a prominent nose and dark, thickly curling hair. The young man was staring around him, growing horror struggling against wine and whatever glamours Pelageya had laid upon his mind, taking in the rich garden of blue and yellow tiles in the hall and the way darkness waited in every corner. Asher took it in, too, printing it in his mind...Habib, a coarse and powerful vampire who seemed to be special friends with Haralpos, carried, as Asher had deduced, a sleeping beggar girl of twelve or so, holding her against his shoulder as if she were an infant.
"Sayyed has already taken food thither for you," the Master of Constantinople went on. "And books-if you will pardon my presumption in choosing them for you- to beguile with old legends the passing of the night. There will be... a little sport here." His smile had a flex, a curve to it, like a reflex that his eyes had long ago forgotten or had never known. He gestured with his right hand, for his left never loosened its hold on his silver-bladed weapon, which glittered whitely in the many-hued glow of the bronze lamps overhead.
The eyes of the fledglings threw back that glow, cats waiting to be fed.
The Armenian boy made a little noise of terror and tried to pull his arms free of Pelageya's grip and Haralpos', but he could not. Asher smelled urine as the boy pissed himself. He would give them the run they wanted, Asher thought bitterly, through all the dark galleries of that accursed house.
And all the while he repeated silently to himself, A cobbled courtyard beyond this place, smaller cobbles, right through a door, across a hall, down a narrow stair and then another twice as deep...
The place of silver bars, where Zardalu said the dastgah was, smelling of chemicals...
And a voice that screamed its despair to the dark.
There was only one person he could think of whom the Bey would hold prisoner behind silver bars.
"My children forget themselves sometimes in their chase."