Austin came with a musician in tow, a rabbity little middle-aged man even more out of place than me. His name was Hugo Chandler. He came from the music school in Nill, where he was teaching and angling for a court appointment, like every other musician in Mélusine. He nursed one weak sherry all evening and jumped a foot when anybody spoke to him. The girls all teased him something fierce, batting their eyelashes at him and cooing, like they did to the flashies. Hugo Chandler went red as a beet, but you knew he was always looking at Austin, even when his eyes were pointed somewhere else. And it seemed to me like Austin was always looking at Ginevra.
I told myself I was being stupid, that it was because I hated Austin Lefevre's beautiful guts and nothing more, but then one night Estella said to me, "They used to have a thing going, you know."
"Sorry?" I said. Estella didn't talk to me much. She couldn't get a rise out of me the way she could out of Hugo, and I knew I bored her.
"Austin and Ginevra. Before she took up with Lord Codface. He was expecting her to come back to him when she came back down the city."
"Well, she didn't."
"No. There's no accounting for taste."
She waited a moment, but I knew better than to try any kind of comeback. She snorted and turned to say something to one of the other girls—Dulcie or Danielle or something like that. I sat and watched Austin watching Ginevra and tried to convince myself she wasn't watching him back. I didn't do a very good job.
Felix
Light.
The voices in my head—babbling, excoriating, mocking, whining—fall silent as if slain. I sit up. Sometimes the monsters get angry if I don't. But I keep my face turned away from the light. It hurts too much.
A voice says, "Blessed saints. Can't you even leave him a light?"
"Not 'til he talks. That's our orders. You want us to stay?"
"No, thank you."
The clash and cacophony of armored monsters. They slam the door behind them.
The first voice says, "Lord Felix."
I shake my head. "Not a lord."
A silence. I can hear, all through it, the labored arrhythmia of the Minor's magic. Even when the voices in my head are silent, I have to listen to that.
"Do you know me at all? My name is Erasmus Spalding."
I squint in his direction, but all I can see is a blurry shape, blue and deep violet with circling sparks of gold. "Yes," I lie.
"Good. That is, Lord Stephen and the Curia have appointed me Witchfinder Extraordinary. I need to ask you some questions. Not about the Virtu. It's all right."
I wonder what they think of me, in their world of light, deaf to the broken patterns around them. I wonder what stories they have invented, to explain me when I cannot explain myself. "All right," I echo him.
"The night after… after the Virtu was broken, something strange happened in Adrian's Park. Do you know anything about it?"
"No."
"Was it something to do with you? With Malkar Gennadion?"
"I don't know. I don't think so."
"But it
can't
be coincidence. Are you sure?"
Pushing the limits of what the compulsion will allow, I whisper, "Malkar didn't say anything."
"What about your contacts in the Lower City?"
"What?" I think I must have misheard him. My hearing is erratic; I know that. But he repeats his question, and it sounds the same the second time.
"I don't have contacts in the Lower City."
"Very well," he says. The colors around him flex into darkness for a moment, and I know he thinks I am a liar. He is frightened of me. "What about Malkar?"
"I don't know! I really don't. I'm sorry."
"It would not hurt you to cooperate."
"I'm sorry," I say. He says something else, but I can't understand him. Sounds are blurring, booming. The monsters are coming out. I knot my hands together in my lap and try not to shake, try not to cry.
After a while, the monster leaves.
Darkness.
Mildmay
The political situation was getting hotter and hotter, and I started spending more time with Lollymeg and Cardenio and Elvire, listening to news, trying to figure out which way to jump. The Lord Protector had learned his lesson from last time.
This
time the Witchfinder Extraordinary wasn't coming down the city with the Protectorate Guard, arresting everybody who looked like maybe they could hex a teapot.
This
time, the Lord Protector and the Witchfinder Extraordinary were talking to the Mayor and giving the Dogs money to hire extra people and trying to keep everything from exploding the way it had when Cerberus Cresset was in charge. There'd been rioting, the summer of 20.2.1, and shops and houses got mashed up, and people had died who weren't heretics or sympathetic to heretics or nothing like that—just in the wrong place at the wrong fucking time. Erasmus Spalding was trying to keep that from happening again, and I kind of liked him for it.
Even so, he was going at it all the wrong way round. He was being all cautious and methodical, and telling the Mayor about what he was doing, and what was happening was he was giving people more time to get frightened. Especially because people were getting confused. What the Witchfinder Extraordinary was after was people who were helping the Bastion, and what people in the Lower City were frightened of was Obscurantists. And it was no good people saying that the Obscurantists weren't nothing to do with the Virtu getting broken or the bad magic on 12 Pluviôse that now it seemed like everybody knew about. Because the Lower City's been frightened of Obscurantists since the days of King Jasper, and everybody knows that the Obscurantists would sell us all to the Kekropians in a minute flat if it meant they could do what they liked and not get burned for it. And, I mean, they're all heretics anyway, according to the Mirador, so when the Mayor says that heresy will not be tolerated, that don't exactly help straighten things out. But nothing the Mayor did helped the Lower City anyway. We all knew he would have been crying just buckets if the Great Fire of 19.7.2 had burned the whole Lower City flat.
Lollymeg was a fence in Ruthven. She wasn't as good a source for news as Elvire, but she didn't mind me sitting in her store all afternoon—not that anybody in Ruthven was stupid enough to fuck with Lollymeg. I could sit and look at people's faces and hear them saying as how they weren't letting their kids out after dark no more and how they were going to church and they'd asked their priest to come bless their doorstep, so nobody who meant evil could cross it, and I could feel for myself that the Lower City was getting frightened.
And Lollymeg, who listened to people all day long, like pawnshop owners got to—Lollymeg told me all the things she was hearing and weird stuff like that last Quatrième, it seemed like half the Resurrectionists' Guild had been in looking for saints' medals.
"Anybody special?" I said.
"Anybody they thought would look out for them. I mean, ain't no good them asking St. Carmen for favors, you know?" And she tapped the little gold medal with one fingernail, so it swung back and forth above her head. Lollymeg kept all the cheap jewelry like that, hanging off this kind of trellis over the counter that divided the store in half.
"Yeah," I said. St. Carmen is the patron saint of dutiful children, and ain't going to have no kindness for resurrectionists.
"They was just spooked," Lollymeg said. "All of 'em. They said as how they weren't doing no business in the Boneprince no more, they didn't care who asked and they didn't care how much they'd pay."
"Think it'll last?"
"Nah. I know how much some people will pay for a murderer's finger-bone. But they mean it for now. They ain't happy."
"Who is?"
"I hear you," Lollymeg said glumly, and the bells in the door jangled as a new customer came in.
Not all of Lollymeg's news was bad, though. I'd taken Ginevra's jewelry and the clock and the dancer to her, and she'd come back right away with a good price on the jewelry and the clock—the stuff that was easy to shift. It took her longer on the dancer, because with genuine Tolmattins you got to find somebody who's rich enough to afford it and crazy enough to buy it. But Lollymeg was a good fence, and she tracked somebody down around the middle of Germinal. I didn't ask too many questions, along of not really wanting to know, but the dancer's new home was someplace in Roy-Verlant, where rich is where people
start
. I was just glad of the money.
Ginevra was happy, too, but it got us into a fight, because she wanted to spend it. She might not care about politics, but she got all the scandal sheets and the fashion books—and she worked in that flash store. She knew who the best modistes were, and the best parfumiers, and who you went to for really top-notch hats, and those were the places she wanted to go. I didn't mind that so much—except for wishing she'd go through our money a little slower—but what she'd got in her head that Germinal was that she wanted a miniature of me, and she wanted it from Stavis Macawnbrey, who painted people like Lord Shannon Teverius and Araminta Packer, the Mayor's third wife, and Susan Dravanya, the lead actress at the Empyrean.
"You got to be kidding," I said.
"Why?" She leaned up on one elbow to look at me in the candlelight We'd just finished fucking, and she was flushed and bright-eyed and so gorgeous it hurt to look at her.
"What makes you think… I mean, Stavis Macawnbrey ain't gonna paint
me
."
"We can afford it."
"That don't change things."
"What things?"
"I ain't exactly the type of person gets painted by Stavis Macawnbrey. Besides"—I looked away from her, up at the ceiling where the plaster was starting to crack—"you don't want a picture of me."
"Of course I do. Why wouldn't I?"
I gave her the hairy eyeball and hard. "Fuck, Ginevra, you ain't blind, so don't pretend like you are."
"Oh. You mean the scar."
"Of
course
I mean the scar. Kethe!"
"But I don't… I mean, you could be painted in profile if you wanted, but it doesn't matter to me."
"I don't want to be painted at all."
"You don't? Why not?"
"I got reasons."
"Mildmay, this is silly," she said, stroking my hair. "It's not like you've got two noses or anything."
"It ain't that."
"Then what is it? What's the matter with you?"
"Ain't you been paying attention? Ain't you caught on yet? I'm a
thief
."
She pulled her hand back, like I'd threatened to bite. "Yes, but—"
"I done things they'd send me to the sanguette for if they caught me."
"But surely no one in the Mirador—"
"I ain't going to the Mirador."
She stared at me. I didn't blame her. It'd come out halfway to a shout, and it wasn't no use pretending she hadn't caught me on the raw.
"What s wrong with the Mirador?" she said finally.
"Nothing. I just ain't going there. You want a miniature, you go get one of yourself."
"But I don't understand—"
There's nothing to understand. I just ain't going nowhere near the Mirador, and I don't want my picture done anyways, so it don't matter. "You're scared," she said.
"I ain't scared. I just don't do stupid things, okay?"
"Fine," she said, like arsenic over ice, and rolled over to put her bad to me. But she didn't bring the idea up again.
Felix
Light.
I sit up.
The darkness has been full of pain and screaming; I am still shaking and I cannot hide it. Monsters booming at each other. I hope they are not angry at me, but I know they are. They always are.
They open the cell door. I scramble backwards on the cot, pressing myself against the wall. If I could become part of the wall, I would be safe. One monster comes nearer. I am shaking. I put my hands over my ears, but I cannot block out the assault of noise.
It stands in front of me. I think there are fragments of words in its roaring, but they make no sense: "here… feel… use… in." I dare to glance up, but the monster looks back at me with the gleaming eyes of a hawk.
It reaches out, takes my arm, drags me to my feet. I am too scared to try to fight it. It pulls me out of the cell. The light hurts my eyes; I keep my head down.
I follow where the monster leads. More light. I cannot help crying out; I twist, trying to hide my eyes, trying to retreat into the darkness, but the monster will not let me go.
More monsters, roaring and crashing. I see a confused blur of colors, red and black and orange and green. They are all angry. I have my hands over my face; I am trying not to cry.
The monster holding my arm keeps dragging me. The other monsters follow us. There is light everywhere. The stones beneath my feet are cold. I don't know where I am. I can only follow the monster and hope that it will lead me out of the maze.
We walk for a long time. The floor changes from stone to wood to blue and violet tiles. The monsters are silent, but I can feel their anger, like water in the air. I do not look at them. Their colors frighten me, and their eyes glow red. I can hear broken edges, failures, a great emptiness where there should be beauty. I can hear a faint, sobbing thread of song, running through the desolation like a trickle of tainted water through a battlefield strewn with corpses. It is all my fault. I cannot remember how or why, but I can feel my guilt in everything I touch.
Now there are carpets. They are the colors of old blood and bone. The monsters begin booming again. Their anger stabs through me like knives. I cross my arms, cup my elbows in my hands, try not to shake. Feet approach me. I hunch my shoulders. A hand catches at my chin; I flinch away. It is a statue: white marble with gilded hair and sapphire eyes. Behind it, I see a bear, and a lioness made of granite. They are all surrounded by black and red, streaked with orange, striated with a terrible drowning green.