Traveling With the Dead by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly [Hambly, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: SteamPunk, Fiction, Fantasy, General, Mystery & Detective, Vampires, Occult & Supernatural
ISBN: 9780517198438
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1995-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

The voices of the muezzins woke Asher: “There is no God but God; Mohammed is His Prophet…” He knew the words, but could not tease them from the somber roll of sound.

Arched windows had at one time opened all along the room, five times the length of its narrow width, but centuries ago these had been bricked shut. The windows in the drums of the five shallow domes above were, as far as he could ascertain, barred with silver, though it was hard to be sure. By day he heard no voices, no clip of donkey hooves or creak of wheels from below, and only occasionally and far off, the barking of Constantinople’s infamous dogs. Now and then the wind would bring him a street vendor’s cry in sawed-off Romaic Greek. Day or night, the closest sounds were the squawking of the seagulls and the yowl of cats.

Through the lattice the sky was the color of tiger lilies, the light momentarily a soft and fading salmon hue on the blue tiles that ringed the domes.

Asher did not face Mecca—though he’d deduced in what direction it lay—nor repeat the words intended by the muezzin, but sitting among the cushions and blankets of the divan, he prayed. He was very frightened.

The light in the room had deepened when he finished, bleeding away to shadow. Because of the domes, the room filled with darkness from the bottom up. In the center of the floor the rectangular, blue-tiled basin of what must have been a fountain or fish pool seemed fathoms deep in the gloom, a horror from which anything might emerge. Asher scratched a match that he took from his pocket, to light the wick of one of the few bronze lamps that still occupied the serried ranks of niches in the wall.

The glow did little to dispel the dreadful brooding dimness. He reached for his watch to wind it, as was his habit, but of course it had been taken, along with the silver chains that had protected his wrists and throat.

He dressed and washed, and stowed the bedding in which he’d slept in one of the room’s shallow cupboards, listening all the while to night fall within the silent house. In full dark—enough so that a white thread could not be distinguished from a black, as the Koran said—he heard the key turn in the old-fashioned lock.

He moved as far from the door as he could and deliberately willed his mind not to feel, not to succumb to the odd, lazy distraction of the vampire power. Still he did not see them enter the room. He had the vague impression that he had dreamed once about standing in a darkened gallery, watching a door inlaid with brass and ivory as it began to open…

But it seemed to him that one moment he was stepping back against a pillar, and the next, they were all around him, binding his wrists behind him with narrow silk cord. Their eyes in the lamplight were the eyes of rats, their flesh dead clay on his.

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