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THREE

They reached St Petersburg in two days

Asher had been clean-shaven during his earlier visits to Gerht before his departure for London he shaved the top of his head and dyed his re hair and les Still, it ed trains – with aYsidro’s double-lidded coffin-trunk – in Berlin

Abroad, men in the Department called it

In ene has a treaty hoever’s in charge where you are To the Department, Abroad was, by definition, always enemy territory

And natius Leyden

So why the Herr Professor had so suddenly dropped out of sight after the South African war

Ysidro left their first-class compartment some miles outside of Berlin – it was dark by that tih the dreary wastes of Prussian pine-forests and gray little Prussian fares – and it wasn’t until after the cab ride frorazerstrasse to the Settiner Bahnhof on the other side of the river, the inspection of travel papers, and the St Petersburg train’s departure shortly after ain and settled doith a copy of Le Temps

‘Was the Master of Berlin aware of you?’ Asher set aside his own paper, the Norddeutsche Allge the masters of other cities he had met: the brittle and vicious wo shadow he had so narrowly escaped in Vienna

The bleached horror in Constantinople that still sometimes burned in his dreams

Compared with those, the chance of a brush with soht remember his face paled into a momentary contretee ‘And as I around not my own, I think that the Master of Berlin only watchedlike a spider in his cave, unless one draws his eye All know this to be unwise’ He folded the newspaper ‘I was not aware of his attention’

‘And your friend in Petersburg,’ asked Asher, after a long hesitation – did one speak words of reassurance to the Dead? – ‘will you be able to find her through her dreams, once we’ve reached that city? Learn what happened to her, and why she has not written?’

Ysidro was silent for so long that had he not known the vampire as he did, Asher would have taken the lack of reaction as a snub The valione at the Savoy, with a delicious slow sensuality, as if he could taste the ether At length he said, ‘I don’t know’

‘She was not valand, then?’

‘No’

‘Then she is not your fledgling?’

Ysidro looked up for a brief instant, and it seebeat of the Angel of Death – he ain, ‘No,’ in a voice remote as the arctic ice

So weWHICH Gerht Nor in knowing how far things have progressed, and in what direction

A few hours later, blackness still lying over the Baltic forests, Ysidro handed Asher a slip of paper bearing two addresses, and a draft on the Crédit Lyonnais for five thousand francs, then silently vanished into the corridor again

At five , with dirty snow still blotching the streets and breaking ice bobbing in the steely canal below a rampart of dreary apartly-named Warsaw Station in the Russian capital Cab drivers and porters swaddled in sheepskin clustered around bonfires built on the street corners; the air reeked of charcoal, burnt bread, and the frowst of unwashed wool Little drifts of Russian, French, German, and Polish see along the station platfore of excitement that was only half fear

Abroad

Where everything was brilliantly focused, every color vivid and every scent the scent of peril Where every sound was significant and the blood in the veins felt charged with electricity – only in fact, reflected Asher ruefully, what the blood was charged as adrenalin, which Lydia had inforlandular reaction to stress

He recalled what it had felt like to love being Abroad

For two days he’d been reading War and Peace, so that enough of his rusty Russian had coe porters and summon a cab It was Lent – not, Asher knew, that that would slow St Petersburg society down much, with the exception of the Tsar and his pious Eon slithered and skidded its way towards the first of the addresses, a ses and ht, ho parties Against the silvery s stood out like spring flowers – pale greens, lemon yellows, cerulean blues – all tri on Rococo pastries Bureaucrats, clerks, and ways, hurrying – Petersburgers were always hurrying – with the purposeful stride of men who fear to be seen by their superiors as less than passionately dedicated to the welfare of their pettifogging depart from one office to another an endless round of Russian paperwork Overhead, the seagulls mewed eerily in the raw ed

Asher had the trunks disposed in the rather shallow – but pitch dark and less – cellar of the town house, locked the house thoroughly, summoned another cab, and betook himself to the second address, Les Meublées L’Imperatrice Catherine on the Moyka Earlands of dried garlic and wild roses – plants universally recognized as causing severe disco, wreathed the s in thee’s servant to bring up breakfast and draw a bath He did not sleep particularly well