“Yeah. Whoever knows the most about it.”
“Just a minute.” He shut the door.
“We wait,” I said to Simon’s raised eyebrows. Gideon was still looking around like a squirrel in a roomful of nuts.
We didn’t have to wait as long this time. I guessed they were hoping now that if they hurried up and humored us, we’d go away quicker. So the door opened again. This time, it was a little balding man with a round face. He bobbed his head nervously, and said, “Your lordships wished to speak to somebody about Laceshroud?”
“I ain’t a lordship,” I said, “but yeah, that’s what we want. Are you the guy to talk to?”
He wanted to say no and bolt. “I . . . I guess so.”
“Then let’s go somewhere we can sit down,” Simon said and smiled when the little man’s eyes jerked to him.
“All . . . all right. If your lordships would come this way?”
As we followed him, I said in an undertone to Simon, “I thought I said let me do the talking.”
“Sorry, but did you want to stand out there all day?”
Not much, but I also wasn’t sure we wanted to get caught back here in the resurrectionists’ maze. We all knew they didn’t want to tangle with the Mirador, but like I said before, people can do some downright stupid things when they’re frightened. And if the little man with us was a good example, the resurrectionists were scared shitless.
But we hadn’t gone more than a couple of turns before he stopped and opened a door, this one an old iron grille that somebody’d backed with a green brocade curtain. “Here,” he said and stood aside. Simon and Gideon went in, but I stopped and waited.
“Oh!” he said, going red. “I wasn’t going to . . . you couldn’t think ...”
“I ain’t thinking nothing,” I said. “Go on in.”
He went, and I followed him, closing the door after me.
It was a neat, small room, with one of the old stained glass windows for light. They’d only bricked up half of it, so you could see St. Lemoyne Harkness’s head and two crows over him in the weak blue sky. There was a table with four chairs, and some bookcases along the wall opposite the door, and that was it for furniture. We all sat down, and the little man looked around the table.
“I don’t know what your lordships are after,” he said. “I’m not really a resurrectionist—I haven’t been out on a job since I reached my third septad—”
“What d’you do?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know. I guess you’d call me a bookkeeper. I mean, I keep track of our finances and our membership and all the rest of it.”
“And you know more about Laceshroud than anybody else?” Simon said. The little man went the color of whey, and I kicked Simon under the table.
"Y-yes, my lord, I guess I do. You see, I’m interested.”
“Interested in what?” I said.
“Well, in history, I guess. I like knowing who all the people are and why they’re buried there. I know a lot about the Boneprince, too, but that’s not what you’re interested in?”
“Not right now,” I said, although all at once I was itching with questions. “We’re trying to find out something kind of particular. ”
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
“It’s like this,” I said. “A girl got picked up in Laceshroud last decad for digging up a body. I want to know what she was doing.”
“A girl in Laceshroud?” He was frowning, like that hit a nerve. “We don’t have many women, and none of them has anything to do with Laceshroud.”
“So she ain’t a resurrectionist?”
“What’s her name?”
“Guinevere Dawnlight.”
“No,” he said at once, and I could see that he knew what he was talking about.
“So if she wasn’t a resurrectionist, what was she doing there?”
“Who did she exhume?”
"Dunno. That’s the problem. She won’t talk, and the Dogs can’t figure it out.”
“Dogs,” he said with a sniff. “I could write a book on what the Dogs don’t know about Laceshroud. Two books.”
“Is there any way to figure out who he was?”
The little man thought. We’d got through his fear into his pride, and as long as Simon could keep his big mouth shut, I thought we were okay.
“I’m guessing there wasn’t any identification on the body?”
“Not that I know about,” I said.
“Hmmm. Well, there’s only one thing I can think of, and that’s for us to go there.”
“Go there?”
“Unless you know where he was buried?”
“The Dogs said the oldest part of the cemetery, but I don’t s’pose that’s much help.”
“I can think of five different areas that might be called ‘the oldest part of the cemetery,’ so no, not much.” He looked from me to Simon to Gideon and back to me. “I really will be happy to go to Laceshroud with you.”
I realized I was looking at Simon, too. “I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t,” he said to me.
“No, I guess not. Okay. We got a fiacre waiting outside.”
The little man caught the joke. His eyes crinkled into a smile, and he said, “Just a minute while I get my coat.”
Felix
There was no guarantee the Ynge would be of any use, even if I could find it. And I could not allow myself to forget, in my purely theoretical panic about a ghost of whose existence I had no proof of any kind, that I had another problem, an actual problem: ten greasy smoke-dark rubies in a wash-leather bag. I retreated to the Archive of Cinders, repressing with difficulty the desire to barricade the door. No one would look for me here; no one was likely to come here in pursuit of their own research, for the books in the Archive of Cinders were of interest far more for who had owned them than for anything intrinsic to themselves. Vey Coruscant’s books were here—the harmless ones, anyway, and if anyone had noticed that de Charon’s Principia Caeli was missing, they at least hadn’t said anything about it to me. Vey Coruscant’s books, Susanna Parmenter’s books, the books of the annemer heresiarch Arcadian Holter, who had preached that all people could be wizards if they would fast and abjure sex and meditate upon seven sacred symbols, the names of which escaped me at the moment.
There was only one table in the Archive of Cinders, and only one rather rickety chair. I moved a stack of books from the table to the floor, sat down, and took the Sibylline’s box out of my pocket.
The catch was hidden, but I knew the secret to it.
I shuffled the cards; I had to concentrate, unlike Mavortian von Heber, whose cards these had been. But some of my finger joints were stiff, and I had never been graceful.
I did not use the Sibylline for divination as Mavortian had, although he had taught me how. Or, rather, I used it for divination, but of a wildly different sort.
I shuffled the cards to rouse them, to get their power flowing, dark and clear and strangely rich. Noirant, I supposed the Coeurterre would call it. Then I sorted out the twenty-one trumps and the four Sibyls; the lesser cards, I had found, were not as responsive outside of the formal nine-card spread. I might proceed to that eventually, but I preferred to start with something simpler.
I shuffled the trumps and Sibyls and laid them out in five rows of five to choose a card to represent Malkar’s rubies. What I had realized in the Khloïdanikos was that the Sibylline offered a way, not merely to connect the world of matter and the world of spirit, for any act of magic did that, but to forge links between them, to invest enough meaning in a symbolic representation of a material object that the object could be consumed by the symbol.
At least, I hoped so.
The Khloïdanikos was clearly the Unreal City; even the shifting water-like instability of the card’s allegiances, with the Spire on one side and the Dead Tree on the other, suited the Khloïdanikos with its Omphalos which was not like the Omphalos of the waking Gardens and which made both Thamuris and me uneasy. And the world of
matter was the Rock, solid, unyielding, inescapably present. But choosing a semeion—to borrow a term from what little Thamuris had told me of Troian divination—for the rubies was fraught and deeply unsettling.
Death was the most obvious and immediate choice: they were the remnant of someone dead, someone whose death I had caused, someone who had carried death in his train. But I was unwilling to reinforce that particular piece of symbolism; the rubies carried too much death already. I looked instead for something more neutral, something that would capture what the rubies were rather than who they had belonged to, and settled on the Beehive, the Parliament of Bees, signifying balance and cooperation, many things working toward the same goal. Like the fingers of a hand, Mavortian had said. Like the rubies in the rings that would have adorned those fingers.
I left the Parliament of Bees face up on the table, collected the other cards, shuffled them again. When their power was clear, I cut the deck and dealt three cards in a row beneath the Parliament of Bees.
Death, the Dog, the Prison.
I stared at the cards blankly. Death made sense—too much sense—but the Dog and the Prison? The Dog was loyalty, also the semeion of an animal, or of a person’s animal nature . . . I thought of the Two-Headed Beast and shuddered with self-loathing. The Prison was confinement, bad choices, dead ends. Also the need for solitude. The Sibylline, by its nature, invited a multiplicity of meanings.
But even if the Dog and the Prison were pointing to my own dark beast, what had that to do with the rubies? Or even with Malkar?
I collected the cards again, leaving the Parliament of Bees where it was, shuffled, cut, laid them out.
Death, the Dog, the Prison.
The Parliament of Bees led to Death, which meant at least that I’d aligned the symbols correctly; I might not want Malkar in my reading, but I couldn’t deny he belonged there. But Death leading to the Dog and the Prison . . . it made no sense.
“What in the world is the Dog supposed to mean?” I said under my breath. Loyalty to Malkar was not an option, and I didn’t care who was suggesting it.
I stared at the Dog: an enormous black creature, more bear or wolf than any dog I’d ever seen. It bulked across the face of its card, eyes red and mournful, clearly as loyal as it was savage.
No, it was nothing to do with Malkar. But it was linked to him somehow. Loyalty . . . savagery . . .
The answer came to me in a wave of cold nausea, and my hands clenched painfully. Mildmay. Of course Mildmay was the Dog, my savage, loyal shadow, dismissed as a near animal by those of my friends who even noticed him at all.
And if that was true, then the Prison needed no explanation. I knew Mildmay was trapped.
Death, the Dog, the Prison.
Malkar had trapped him, had hurt him. Hurt him terribly, so terribly that he could not—or would not—remember what had been done. But I could guess. I could guess all too easily. I had been Malkar’s . . . plaything for six years, bound by the obligation de sang; I knew his full repertoire. I remembered the tearing, sparking pain as Malkar forced the spurred gag between my teeth.
Remembered being bent backwards over a splintery table, Malkar’s hand knotted in my hair, his other hand lashing my chest and stomach with a riding crop, his curses and my screams jangling in my ears.
I don’t know what I’ve done, but he pushes me down onto the worn flagstones, bruising my knees. One forearm presses against my throat, holding me upright, and he croons in my ear, the bulk and heat of him all down my back, “Be very still, my darling, or this bauble will tear through you like paper.” He shows it to me, cold black iron, shaped with terrible mocking realism. I can’t move. Paralyzed with shame, with terror, my breath whining in my throat, the burning cold of the thing as Malkar works it into me.
He leaves me there, unable to move, unable to breathe, blind with tears I dare not wipe away.
And when he returns . . .
I shoved back, almost tipping the chair over, and then sat, my elbows on my knees and my hands tangled in my hair, swallowing hard, until my breathing was steady again and I no longer tasted Malkar in the back of my throat. Gideon had wanted to know why I hadn’t made Mildmay talk to me about Malkar, and I’d told him it was because I was afraid he wouldn’t answer me. And that was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I was even more afraid that he would.
“I am a coward,” I said aloud. “I admit it, all right?”
I drew my chair back close to the table, gathered the cards, shuffled, cut, dealt.
And this time, as if they’d proved their point, they were different.
Mehitabel
Vulpes appeared again that afternoon, like a malevolent spirit in a story, and fidgeted around my dressing room while I told him about Lord Stephen’s offer. He pulled himself together to act pleased about it, but I could tell his mind was on something else. So when I’d finished my report, I sat and waited, watching him fidget. He didn’t look quite as self-confident as he had the first time I’d seen him. I was glad of it.
He had something he wanted to ask me, I could see that much, but he either wasn’t sure how I’d take it, or he didn’t want to admit to me that he had a problem. I kept expecting him to leave, and he kept looking at the door like he wanted to—but he didn’t. Whatever this problem was, it was serious.
Finally, he burst out, “How well do you know Felix Harrowgate? ”
“Well enough for my purposes. Why?” He became suddenly and uncommonly interested in the toes of his shoes, and I thought I knew. “Does Louis want you to seduce him?”
Vulpes glanced at me, looked away, and then looked back defiantly. “Yes,” he said, and we were no longer master and servant, but two servants of the same master.
“And have you?”
“Yes,” he said, and then added in a lower voice, “Once.”
“What do you think of him?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you. I mean, you’ve known him a long time.” And the look he gave me was a pointed reminder that he could double-check anything I told him.
“Three years isn’t all that long,” I said. “And I’ve never been to bed with him. He doesn’t go for women.”
“At all?”
“As far as I know.” I remembered an old piece of gossip. “There’s a story that Roseanna Aemoria tried to surprise him once by waiting for him in his bed, stark naked. He marched her out into the hall and locked his door with her on the wrong side.”
“Do you think it’s true?”
“I know for a fact she hates him.”
“Do you think he did it just to be cruel?”
“I think she made him mad. He has a filthy temper, you know.”
“Yes,” he said. No one in the Mirador could avoid knowing that. I thought that a more useful index of Felix’s character was his social cruelty, the enjoyment he got out of making other people uncomfortable. He did it to Mildmay all the time. But Vulpes was going to have to work that one out for himself.
“What’s got you tied up in knots?” I said, turning the focus back on him. “Has something gone wrong?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem.” He paused for a moment, on the brink of telling me, Never mind, I’ll deal with it myself, and then simply blurted the whole thing out. The initial seduction had apparently gone just as planned. They flirted; one thing led to another; they ended up in Vulpes’s bedroom, in the dark, with their clothes off. And then, the next day, when Vulpes was all prepared to go on to the next step in Louis Goliath’s program, suddenly they were back at square one. Felix watched him flirt with a tolerantly amused eye—“the same way he watches Dominic Jocelyn,” Vulpes said bitterly—but wouldn’t really flirt back. Vulpes had finally got him aside and tried to ask, and Felix stonewalled him. Vulpes didn’t go into details, but I could imagine the scene without any help; I’d seen Felix do things like that often enough to know what the expression on his face would be and how his voice would sound. Vulpes hadn’t been able to get a straight answe
r out of him. Felix had been perfectly friendly first to last, a fact which only seemed to aggravate Vulpes further.
When he was done, he looked at me hopefully, as if I could give him the key to Felix’s code. Which I couldn’t, and wouldn’t have if I could. But I still needed to show willing. I said, “Did you know that Felix started out as a prostitute in Pharaohlight?”
He hadn’t known. His whole face sagged. I was surprised, since it was a fact that got bandied about in the Mirador quite a bit, especially by the people who wished Felix would go back to Pharaohlight and quit bothering them. But I supposed it wasn’t the sort of thing that would immediately get offered up to a defector from the Bastion.