She hadn't been in the water long, and she'd been dead before they dumped her. Her throat had been cut. There was no color in her face, but it was perfectly calm, and somebody'd combed her hair out. She'd had her pick of heroes, but nobody'd saved her from the dragon, not when it mattered.
I looked away. Austin had drowned. I wished I couldn't tell, but I could. Probably he didn't know how to swim. Most people in the Lower City don't. And some of the guys in Mélusine who'll kill people for money—the ones that ain't no brighter than bull-baiting dogs that'll bite anything they're pointed at—they think it's funny to throw the mark in the Sim, someplace where there ain't much current, and bet on how long it takes him to drown.
I wondered if the crazy historian in Nill would ever know what'd happened to his secretary, and something tightened in my chest.
I couldn't look at her, at her perfect body that should've been loved by a king, not some no-good thief like me, at her lips, her nose, the arch of her eyebrows. I turned away, put my hand on the wall beneath Cardenio's torch, bent my head.
"Mildmay?" Cardenio said. I could see his hands if I looked sideways, and he was still mauling his damn hat. "You okay?"
I never told her I loved her. I swallowed the hard lump in my throat and said, "Yeah, I'm fine."
He didn't call me a liar to my face, which was nice of him. "You wanna come upstairs and have some tea?"
I swallowed again, although it wasn't like it was doing any good, and said, "No, thanks, I don't want tea." I couldn't look at Cardenio, couldn't look at the torches or the tables or the bodies laying there, waiting for whatever the cade-skiffs were going to do with them.
"C'mon, Mildmay," Cardenio said. "I think tea might do you some good."
I couldn't keep arguing with him. It was too much work. And if I did what he wanted, I'd be able to get away from her dead, empty face "Okay," I said. "Tea."
I looked up. Cardenio's face was stricken, even though he tried to smile at me. He came out from between the tables and started back the way we'd come. I covered Ginevra with the sheet before I followed him.
I thought about simple things. Follow Cardenio. Hold the mug. Sit where he tells you. I didn't meet anybody's eyes. We ended up in a place that was like some kind of cade-skiff bar, with little groups of them at tables and standing along the walls, all with their black hats and long black coats. I hated them for being alive when Ginevra was dead. I hated me, too.
Cardenio said urgently, "Stay put," and went darting away.
It was still too much work to argue with him. I stayed put. I stared at the tea in my mug, at the ugly patterns the tea leaves made at the bottom. People read the future in tea leaves sometimes. I wondered what they'd see in mine and then thought, Why the fuck do you care? The future's dead.
Cardenio came back with an older cade-skiff in tow. I looked up long enough to see who it was, that, for instance, Vey Coruscant hadn't gotten in here somehow to finish the job, and then looked back at my tea. They sat down opposite me. Cardenio said, "Mildmay, this is Master Auberon. My master."
"Nice to meet you," I said. After all Cardenio'd said about his master, I'd expected him to be a septad-foot tall and gilded to boot, but he was just a square, white-haired old party who looked like a pretty decent sort of guy.
He had a dark, rich voice, like plum cake. "The young woman's name is Ginevra?"
"Ginevra Thomson," I said.
"And the young man is Austin Lefevre?"
"Yeah." I didn't ask how he knew. You don't ask cade-skiffs that kind of question, because either they won't answer you, or they will—and then you wish they hadn't.
"We are a little puzzled as to why they were killed, and we were wondering if you had any ideas."
"What's the mystery? They got murdered. It happens a lot."
"They went into the Sim," said Master Auberon, steepling his fingers, "under St. Kirban's."
I shut my eyes, but it didn't help none.
"You see why we are troubled."
"She crossed Vey Coruscant," I said. Phoskis Terrapin, the fat bastard who controls St. Kirban's flooded crypts—and the smuggling and other nasty shit that gets run through there—had been in with Vey for septads. "In Pluviôse."
"I see," Master Auberon said. "Thank you."
"Thanks for the tea," I answered and got up. I hadn't touched it, any more than I'd looked either of them in the eye.
"Mildmay," Cardenio said, reaching across the table. "Don't you—"
"Keep your fucking hands off me," I said and knocked his hand aside. Then I turned and left, and
pretended I couldn't hear Cardenio's voice calling me back.
Chapter 5
Felix
The corpse stands in the doorway of the intractable ward like the shadow of winter. I can feel all the monsters looking at him. Everyone has gone extremely still, holding their breath, praying that if they do not make a sound, the corpse will not notice them. Even intractables are frightened of the corpse.
I turn around. I know that the corpse has come for me, that the others have no reason to be afraid. He gives me that little come-along jerk of the head. He knows I don't understand him when he speaks. I follow him. At first, I tried to defy him, but all that happened was that he got other brother-monsters to come and drag me. I would rather walk into the darkness on my own feet.
This time I swear, as I have sworn before, that I will not forget what happens, that I will find a way to hold it in my memory. I push my fingers through my hair; my hands are already starting to shake. And I remember now, following the corpse down the stairs, that my hands
always
shake; my body remembers what is coming.
I follow the corpse beneath the earth; I wonder if he is taking me to Hell I know that Hell must lie beneath St. Crellifer's. But we do not come to a river. Instead, we come to a room.
I remember the table and the straps; I remember the monsters who are waiting: the yellow-eyed snake and the enormous gray piglike thing with its tiny, glowing, red eyes. I remember the sobbing ghosts. I remember that it is useless to run, useless to struggle.
The pig grabs my arm, envelops me in its grayness, the weight of its flesh; it forces me down on the table. The corpse and the snake buckle the straps. I He and stare at the damp and cracking plaster of the ceiling and tell myself that this time I will not scream, will not cry, although I know already—I remember—that I am lying to myself.
I feel the snake's fingers in my hair. It hisses and rasps instead of roaring, but I still cannot make out any words in what it says. Pain begins to stitch through my head; the cracks in the ceiling begin to blur with the tears in my eyes.
A globe of orange light spins into being above the table; the darkness opens its mouth like a trap, and I am gone.
Mildmay
Around about 27 Vendémiaire, it started raining like the end of the world was coming, and it had to get all this water cleared out of the way first. It was early for the winter rains. Folks said as how it was balancing out for having been late last indiction. I remembered Ginevra and me, soaking wet in my rooms in Pennycup, and tried to think about something else, but every time I turned around, there was
more
rain.
The damp got into everything. Every room you went into smelled like mildew and rot. Every time I went out, I got soaked to the skin. I wasn't gone out much—I had an ugly little room above a bar in Engmond's Tor, and the bartender'd hired me as a bouncer and a second-string bartender, and if anybody needed a fourth for Grimoire, well, there I was. But even staying in, the damp crawled up and wrapped its clammy little fingers around my joints and my head and my chest. The Winter Fever—it always shows up in Mélusine along with the rains, you can set your watch by and it was working its way through the Lower City with a butcher's knife and a nasty snigger. It'd get me sooner or later, and then I'd lie here in this ugly little room and nobody in the Circle of Lions would even wonder where the fuck I was. Not 'til I died and started to stink, anyway.
I needed money. Gilles at the Circle was paying me, sure, but he was paying me about half of what I could've made as a bouncer in Dragonteeth, never mind all the other shit I did. He knew he had me where he wanted me. You don't take a job like that one unless you're too fucking desperate to complain. So I was living hand to mouth, and I knew the first day I couldn't make it downstairs on time, he'd fire my ass and not think about it twice. And I didn't have nothing to fall back on, no other job I could go to, no money saved up, no place that would take me in, except St. Cecily's and taking yourself there with the Winter Fever is just the same as walking out in the street and letting a brewer's dray run you down. Except slower.
I had to do something, but I knew I couldn't swing a better job, not now, and I've always been nervous about doing cat burglary in the rain, You may make it in and out, no trouble in the world, two times, three times, but sooner or later, the shingles are going to be just a hair more slippery than you thought they were, and there you are, smashed to pieces three stories down. And it might be the first time just as easy as the fourth.
They say that when you dream you're falling, you got to wake up before you hit the ground. I felt like I was at a septad-foot and falling fast. Nobody in Mélusine gave a rat's ass about me. Nobody was going to pay good money just to keep me alive. I mean, that had been true anytime the past three indictions, ever since I'd walked away from Keeper, but it had never bothered me none. I'd never thought I'd need anybody to care. I'd been so sure I was careful and reasonable and not cocky—I'd learned my lesson about that and carried it around on my face with me—that Id backed myself into another kind of cocky and not seen it until the rug was already out from under my feet.
When I was awake, it seemed like I was always thinking about Ginevra. I didn't have to close my eyes to see her face—cold and dead and empty as a broken pot. It was always right there. But at night, I dreamed about Keeper, the way I hadn't for indictions, dreamed about her mist-gray eyes and her pale skin and her long nails that she lacquered the same color as her eyes. I dreamed about her long, snaky body and about her deep, drawling voice. The voice was the worst. I'd wake up at the ninth or tenth hour of the night, my heart banging in my chest, and I'd lie there holding my breath in case she called my name again.
I felt like an old bone being worried by three dogs, like sooner or later one of them was going to pull too hard, and I was just going to snap in half. The Money Dog, the Fever Dog, and the Dreams Dog I called them, and I didn't know which one of them I should be scared of most. They all three had teeth like alligators.
Felix
I come back, and I don't know where I am. This isn't the ward. Then I see the cracks in the ceiling, feel the wooden table beneath me. I come upright with a panicked scrambling jerk and only then realize that the straps are unbuckled.
The monsters are staring at me, yellow eyes and red eyes and the corpse's blank, fish-white eyes. They are speaking to each other. I bring my knees up to my chest, wrap my arms around them, try to stop shaking. My head hurts, and I cannot hear the off-kilter rhythm of the city because my own heartbeat echoes in my ears.
The corpse jerks his head at me. I get off the table. The snake looks me up and down, and I know by
the colors around it that it is pleased. I don't know why. Then the snake turns and leaves the room. The corpse flaps his hand at me, and I follow the snake. The corpse and the gray pig bring up the rear.
We do not go back to the intractables' ward. Instead, we are in the vestibule, and the porter is opening the doors. I stop, sure that this is wrong, but the corpse pushes me, his hands like black, jagged ice even through my shirt, and I realize that I am supposed to follow the snake out of St. Crellifer's. I can't remember how to move across that black threshold, but the corpse takes my elbow and drags me through the door with him.
It is raining. There is a fiacre in the courtyard; the horses hitched to it look like horses, which is a relief, because the driver looks like a man-sized rat, huddled into a shabby shapeless overcoat as if it will help him pass for human. The corpse does not release my arm until we are in the fiacre—the corpse and the snake and I—and then he slams the door shut, and the fiacre moves off.
Out of the gates of St. Crellifer's, it turns uphill. At first I cannot think why I should find this frightening, although I know that I do, and then I begin to feel the terrible, black brokenness in front of us, coming closer. I remember the Mirador, the laboring arrhythmia of its broken magic.
"No," I say, in barely a whisper. It is the first time I have spoken since… I have to shake my head to clear it of the effort to remember how long it has been. The snake and the corpse ignore me.
We make the turn into the Plaza del'Archimago. I have my eyes shut but I know what that feels like. "No!" I say again, more loudly. Someone catches at my wrists, and I strike their hands away. It hurts to open my eyes, but I have to so that I can find the latch of the fiacre door; I reach for it, but then the corpse grabs me, pinning my arms to my side, and drags me back onto the seat. I struggle, but there is no room in the fiacre, and the snake catches my ankles.
The fiacre turns in through Livergate, and the weight of the Mirador drops on me. I can't fight any longer. It's too late. The monsters have won.
Mildmay
You know how if you sit and think about something stupid long enough, it starts looking like a good idea? That's what happened to me.
See, robbing hotels ain't something I was ever into. Keeper kind of sneered at it, like it wasn't no decent way to make a living, and I guess the hardest habit in the world to break was that habit of wanting Keeper to be proud of me. So I'd never done it. I knew people who swore by it, and mostly they were the kind of stupid pig-lazy people you'd expect, and most of them had got caught by the Dogs. But I couldn't help remembering what one of them had told me, how he'd cleared two great-septad gorgons in one night. I kept thinking about that and about how long I could stay comfortable on that kind of money and about how fast I was sinking, here in this nasty room in Engmond's Tor, with the Money Dog and the Dreams Dog and the Fever Dog growling at each other, and pretty soon it started looking like the right thing to do.