Dead Reign (3 page)

Viscarro laughed. “Nonsense. Perhaps it amused Somerset to let you think so, or perhaps your delusions extend beyond the belief that you’re dead and rotting, hmm? You were a vassal, Ayres. You should leave your betters alone.”

“These pleasantries
are
nice, after so many years in the low company of mindless homunculus orderlies at the Blackwing Institute, but perhaps we’d better get to business? I need a mummy.”

Viscarro cocked his head. “Are you still here, O de-filer of corpses? Perhaps my suggestion that you leave was too subtle for your vulgar senses, so now I say it directly—be gone, or be fed to the worms. Some of them are very big worms.”

“You wouldn’t have let me in to see you if you weren’t worried about the secret I know.”

Viscarro leaned forward. “Understand this, unclean man—I am the master of secrets. I do not fear secrets. Secrets fear me.”

“It’s said two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.” Ayres was enjoying himself. “But, of course, I can speak to the dead, so no one can keep secrets from me. If you are so unconcerned, you won’t mind if I go see Marla Mason, and tell her one of the ruling cabal of Felport is an undead monster. Good day.” He rose.

“You lunatic. You say
I
am dead now? I see your madness has turned outward. Say what you wish, no one will believe you.”

“Oh, really? You don’t think Marla will investigate? You think she’ll come down here and check your pulse personally? You know how she feels about dead things that don’t lay down. Ever since Somerset’s return to life, she’s had a certain…understandable prejudice. And you, sir, are just such a creature.”

Viscarro sat very still. “Your allegations are ridiculous.”

“You’re a lich.” Ayres leaned forward and put his weight on his walking stick. “Because of some horrible genetic quirk, the normal life-extending spells wouldn’t work on you. So you cast a dark magic and allowed your body to die. You are little more than a spirit haunting the shell of your corpse, like a ghost haunts a house. Your soul is locked away in a phylactery somewhere in these vaults, probably a jewel, knowing your tastes, and as long as it’s protected, you are immortal. But you know Marla’s beliefs—a spirit in an unliving body begins to curdle like milk, the humanity sours, and eventually only a monster remains.” He shrugged. “When she finds out you are such a monster, masquerading as a live man, she’ll kill you as she would a dangerous animal, and your treasures will be scattered to buy the loyalty of her other lieutenants. Now, about that mummy…”

“It will not be a quick death for you. Those who threaten me die slowly.”

“I’m not new at this, Viscarro.” Ayres was growing exasperated. A bit of sparring was all well and good, but he was too old to muck about with posturing all morning. He had dead things to raise. “If I do not return home in good time, several letters will reach Marla Mason, detailing exactly what I just said to you. Can we please move beyond the threats and denials? Somerset told me about your…condition, your inability to extend your life by normal magical means. As I said, I was one of his closest counselors.”

“I—that’s not—”

“Somerset helped you become a lich,” Ayres continued. “He cast the spells, and wielded the enchanted blade that drained your life. Who do you think he came to for advice about the process, you fool? Who do you think showed him the rites and incantations? You owe your unlife to me. Besides, I’m a necromancer—I can sense the dead, and
you
are dead.” Once, that boast had been true, but now living people often seemed dead to Ayres, or like figures carved from wax, poor imitations of the living. All part of his illness. He knew the delusions were false, but sometimes they still troubled him. Viscarro needn’t know that, though. “I smell the spices you’ve used to preserve your body, to keep rot at bay. This is my area of expertise, Viscarro. So shut up and give me a damned mummy.”

Viscarro rose from his place behind the desk. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, he nodded. “One mummy. And you’ll keep your…wild speculations…to yourself. Your allegations are untrue, but it would be inconvenient to have you spread such lies about me. Understood?”

“Oh, I think we understand each other beautifully.”

“I
can’t believe I have to do this,” Marla complained as Rondeau eased the Bentley through the crowded summer streets. “In the past few weeks I’ve dealt with the return of the beast of Felport, a crazy blonde in a leather catsuit who thought she was a super-hero, and a godsdamned attempted invasion by interdimensional hedonists.”

“They were elves,” Rondeau said helpfully. “From elfland. Or faeries, from faeryland.”

“There’s no such thing as elves.” Marla scowled at a cab turning left through a red light. “If stupid people want to call those creatures elves, I can’t help that, but I’m not going to. Anyway, my point is, things have been busy, and the last thing in the world I want to do is plan a fancy dress ball. I don’t
do
balls. Or cotillions. Maybe, occasionally, a kegger, but that’s about the extent of my party-planning expertise.”

“Eh, it’s only once every five years, and it keeps the ghosts of the founding families from destroying the city, right?”

“I think the Chamberlain made it all up just because she likes parties. Why doesn’t she plan the thing? I mean, she’s the presiding sorcerer up on the Heights. The ghostly ancestors of Felport’s upper class are her responsibility, not mine. Let her keep them entertained!”

“She does keep them entertained, except for one day out of every 1,826.”

“Stop being reasonable, Rondeau. I count on you to share my outrage. Five years ago I wasn’t even invited to the Founders’ Ball.”

“You were a badass freelancer with a scary reputation back then. Nobody knew you were going to kill Somerset and become the big boss of Felport. Besides, we had way more fun at the block party.”

“Well, yeah.” Founders’ Day had a strange magic in Felport—street parties and other celebrations broke out spontaneously among the city’s ordinary citizens, a sort of magical-resonance response to the more stately revelry of the Founders’ Ball. By the same magic, if the founding families were unhappy on Founders’ Day, the populace of Felport would riot. It had happened once before. Historians called the events of that night the Great Fire of Felport. “Give me a monster to slay or a wall to knock down or an evil conniving bastard to out-smart, and I’m golden, I’ve got it covered. But I’ve never planned anything like this before. I’m gonna need, like, caterers. Waiters. Decorators. A whole party-planning squad. And they have to be people who won’t freak out when ghosts start appearing, dressed like refugees from a costume drama, twirling around in a ballroom!”

“That’s why we’re heading up the hill, boss. The Chamberlain was pretty stoked when I called to set up this meeting. She said she was beginning to think you were going to hire a DJ and hang some crepe paper from the ceiling and call it a job well done.”

“The Chamberlain always looks at me like I’m an idiot. Every time I see her I think about class warfare.”

“She wasn’t always so hoity-toity. She came to the city alone, working as a maid or some shit, right? But the ghosts took a shine to her, and now she’s their chosen one. The two of you probably have more in common than you think.”

“But she’s the kind of woman who wears evening gowns and
likes
it. We’re fundamentally incompatible, her and me.”

“You’re always telling me how rich people
got
rich, how the ruling class became the rulers.” Rondeau honked the horn at a slow-moving flotilla of high school girls crossing against the light. “They were the meanest, smartest, toughest bastards around, and they killed and schemed and murdered their way to the top, right?”

“Yeah, and then those tough bastards had kids who grew up soft and spoiled, and
their
kids grew up even softer and more spoiled.”

“Sure, but the founding fathers of Felport were those original tough bastards. Maybe their ghosts like dressing up in ectoplasmic tuxedos and listening to string quartets, but they started out backstabbing and scheming their way to power. Maybe you and the Chamberlain can relate, after all.”

“Why are you defending her? Wait. You think the Chamberlain’s hot, don’t you?” Marla said.

“She wears high heels
all the time,
” Rondeau said, a little dreamily.

Marla grunted. They had to drive the long way around, because the rather redundantly named Market Street Market was in full swing, and that meant four blocks of prime downtown was closed to vehicle traffic and transformed into the weekly summertime street bazaar. The Market Street Market had started life as a farmers’ market, but over the years had mutated into a strange hybrid of a swap meet and a county fair, where you could buy anything from heirloom tomatoes to motorcycle parts of questionable provenance to deep-fried candy bars. Marla loved the market, the press and jumble of her city’s people afoot, and wanted nothing more than to walk there now, chatting with the guy at the carnivorous-plant booth, tossing a coin into the big fountain everyone used as a de facto wishing well (and which, local legend said, actually granted one wish in a million), drinking beer out of a plastic cup, and messing with the fake psychics. But she had to take a meeting. The Chamberlain had probably never even
been
to the Market.

Eventually they made their way through the clogged streets and crossed one of the iron bridges spanning the Balsamo River. Marla lived and mostly worked on the south side of the city, and they were going to the old city uptown now, to the neat, narrow streets of the original settlement on the river’s north side. It was all Felport, and the whole city belonged to her—and she to it, for that matter—but she felt out of place up in the Heights, where the great houses of Felport’s founding families stood alongside the mansions built by the nouveau riche. There were museums and art galleries there, and the Felport symphony orchestra hall, and the mayor’s mansion, all places Marla mostly avoided, preferring to get her culture in nightclubs and beer halls and the little amusement park down by the esplanade with the Ferris wheel that looked like an exotic torture device. Despite the Chamberlain’s humble origins, she was still a daunting presence, and seemed utterly at ease in exactly the situations where Marla felt most out of place. There weren’t many people on Earth capable of making Marla feel inadequate—low self-esteem was pretty much something that happened to other people—but the Chamberlain came close.

“It won’t be so bad,” Rondeau said. He was worse at abiding a silence than Marla was. “It’s not like you’re having a seven-course meal with her or something. You don’t have to remember which fork to use. It’s just a little conversation. I’m not worried.”

Marla snorted. “Right. That’s why you’re wearing a normal suit for once. Because you’re so unworried.” Rondeau’s taste in clothes tended toward the vintage and the strange, and his closet was full of garish zoot suits, powder-blue tuxedos, and leisure suits in eye-wrenching shades. But today he wore a conservative black suit, utterly unremarkable.

“You blame me? The way she looks at you, it’s like her eyes are tiny lasers. And I notice you’re wearing your fancy new black cloak, Miss Pot Calling the Kettle Black.”

“Shut up. I like this cloak. It has lots of little pockets sewn inside, and it never tries to take over my brain and make me kill innocent people like my old cloak did.” She looked out the window as the streets became narrower and more tree-lined, the shops going upscale as they headed farther north. They wound through a residential neighborhood where the houses got progressively bigger and set farther back on their lots, as black wrought-iron gates and stone walls rose up to hide the estates from prying eyes. Finally they approached the hill of the Heights, the highest point in the city, providing unobstructed river and bay views for the lucky few houses on its slopes. And the highest house, perched on the ridge, was the Chamberlain’s, a gated mansion of ancient stone surrounded by acres of meticulously landscaped grounds. It was the largest private residence in the city, and the Chamberlain lived there all alone—or so most thought. As far as her ordinary neighbors knew, the Chamberlain—Mrs. Chambers—was an intensely private, incredibly wealthy black woman in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood. There were lots of rumors about her, Marla knew—she was a mad recluse, or she ran a highly exclusive brothel, or she hosted private orgies, or she was a senator’s mistress, or, or, or. Most of the stories weren’t even close to being as weird as the truth.

Rondeau pulled up to the front gate, and the uniformed attendant sauntered over and leaned down. “Afternoon,” Rondeau said. “Ms. Mason to see the lady of the house.”

“She’s expected. Go on up. Just park in the driveway.”

The barrier lifted, and Rondeau eased up the curving road to the house, pulling around a large white fountain to park in the circular driveway. He cut the engine and they sat for a moment, looking up at the house. “It’s like something out of
Jeeves and Wooster,
” Rondeau said at last. “Some English country house-style shit.”

“It is,” Marla said. “One of the founders of Felport, Randall or Tennyson or something, I forget which, he got rich in the New World and decided to buy himself a lordship back home in England. Except even though he was officially Lord Such-and-such, when he got back to London, people still laughed at him behind his back and called him a jumped-up merchant, so he decided to piss them all off by shipping the big estate out of the country and reassembling it brick by brick in America. Left a big gaping hole in the middle of his newly acquired ancestral lands.”

“Those old dudes knew how to be spiteful,” Rondeau said, with a certain amount of admiration. “Guess we better go in.”

Marla got out of the Bentley, and Rondeau followed her up the broad steps. The front doors were enormous, carved wood, with knockers shaped like lions, and Marla was rearing back her foot to kick one in lieu of knocking when someone opened them from the inside.

The Chamberlain stood in the entryway, beautiful as always, but Marla had never seen her like
this
—her cascade of dark hair tied under a kerchief, her fine gown replaced with an ordinary housedress, and inconceivably, a smudged apron. She was still wearing heels, though. “Welcome to my home, Marla.” She gestured for them to enter, frowning at Rondeau. “Your associate can wait while we discuss things.”