Her blush got redder. She wasn't real demimondaine, just a bourgeoise trying hard to make it. "All right," she said, and I thought again that she had guts. She wasn't flinching from what she'd started.
We went in. I gave the clerk a half-gorgon. That got us a room for an hour. He pushed a key across the desk. "Room six."
I jerked my head at Miss Thomson, and we climbed the stairs. Two flights up and down at the end of the hall, there was Room 6. I unlocked the door, waved her in like a gent, locked the door behind us.
Miss Thomson looked around, at the bed, at the table and two chairs, at the fashion plate somebody'd cut out and pinned to the wall two septads ago. I saw the way her hands tightened on her reticule, and I knew what she was thinking.
"I ain't gonna," I said.
She jumped again, and blushed, and lied, "I didn't think you were."
If she really hadn't thought so, she would have said,
Going to do what?
I shrugged out of my topcoat, the one I didn't hock unless I was really a half-centime this side of starving. It had been tailored careful, so you could carry a fair amount of stuff under it and it would still hang all right. I'd balanced the dancer on one side with the clock and the box on the other. I put them on the table.
Miss Thomson gave a little squeak of excitement and brushed past me—I felt the soft weight of her dress and breathed in her perfume. She touched the clock and the dancer—just little pats, like she had to prove to herself they were really there—and then pressed her hands down on the box. That wasn't only greed, and I wondered just how nasty Ellis Otanius had been.
I said, "Is the dancer Tolmattin?"
Her laugh was half a gasp. "Oh, yes. El—Lord Ellis's mother wrested it from her older sister at their father's funeral. It is the family's great Pride."
"Nice people. You got a key for that box?"
"Oh! I didn't even think—"
"Hang on." I had my lock picks in my inside waistcoat pocket, where nobody was going to find 'em unless they were specially looking for trouble. I got them out and forced the lock again. I didn't fuck up in front of Miss Thomson, either, and it didn't take but a second longer than a normal key would have.
I glanced up into a narrow-eyed look of interest. "Is that a particularly easy lock?" she said.
" 'Bout average for jewelry boxes."
"Could you tea—I mean, could one learn to do that?"
"I guess. It ain't all that hard."
"It looks like a useful skill."
She reached to open the box. Our hands touched for a second, and then I backed up out of the way. I won my bet with myself. The first thing she went for was the rubies.
I said, "Know a good fence?"
"And what makes you think I won't wear them myself?"
"Ain't your color."
"True," she said, with a cute little grimace that it looked like she'd practiced. It was the sort of face to get a guy to kiss her on the tip of her upturned nose and give her anything she wanted. "Actually, I have a buyer. They're supposed to be off Corundum Gate."
"Oh pull the other one!" I said, and she laughed.
"No, I promise. Is provenance the right word?"
"Yeah. If you mean where they came from and everything."
"Well, I've heard their provenance. Three times. It might even be true."
"Yeah, and dogs got wings." I meant to leave it there—she wasn't none of my business once I had my cut—but I couldn't help asking, "Your buyer got a name?"
She looked at me sidelong, her eyebrows raised. "Do you have a better price?"
"Don't I wish. Some people waving gorgons around for bits of Corundum Gate… well, let's say they ain't safe." And fire's hot and plague's a bad time. Calling Vey Coruscant "not safe" was like saying arsenic would give you a stomachache.
"I know that. I'm not stupid."
"Yeah, but do you know why?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Look, dammit, there's people out there might be planning to buy
you
right along with them fucking stones!"
"I didn't understand a word of that," she said, and I took a quick chokehold on my temper before I boxed her ears. She'd said it on purpose to be nasty—and, yeah, I had got going too fast—but that was only because she didn't yet know what she'd walked into.
"Look. It ain't none of my business. But if your buyer is Vey Coruscant—or Desirée Vaumond or Christine Cooper, 'cause she uses those names, too—you could be in deep trouble."
Her eyes went wide. "How… how did you know?"
"I didn't. It's what you call an educated guess."
"Who's…" She licked her lips. "Who's Vey Coruscant?"
"Dassament boss. Bloodwitch. You
do
know about bloodwitches, don't you?"
She shook her head. But she was listening now, not mad.
"It's nasty shit. People that get tangled up in it mostly don't come out the other side alive—or in one piece."
She thought that over. "I don't suppose I can call it off."
"Nope."
"Can I hire you again?"
I had my mouth open to say,
Fuck, no
, when she said, "Double your cut."
"What d'you want me to do?"
"Just come with me."
"Bodyguarding ain't my thing."
She gave me a look. And behind those raised eyebrows, saying as how I looked nasty enough for her purposes, I could see that she was scared. But she wasn't going to beg, and I admired her for that.
"Okay, fine. What's the lay?"
"We, um, we're meeting at nine o'clock tomorrow night in Adrian's Park."
Of course they were. And that told me what Vey Coruscant really wanted. Gems from Corundum Gate, that had belonged to Sharon Thestonaria, were supposed to be extra good for blood-magic. "You ever been in Adrian's Park?"
"No. Why?"
"You know about it, right?"
"About what? It's a park, like Richard's, isn't it?"
Powers and saints, if she was any flatter, they'd be using her to pave the roads. "No. It's a cemetery." Adrian's Park was a cemetery the same way Vey Coruscant wasn't safe, but I didn't think Miss Thomson would believe me about that until she'd seen it for herself.
"Are you saying you won't go?" She wouldn't let me see she was scared, so it was all prickle and a mulish tilt of the chin.
"No, I ain't saying that." Though Kethe knows I should've been. "We're gonna have to be careful. Who d'you follow?"
"Phi-Kethetin."
"Good."
"Why?"
"He don't like blood-witches."
"Okay, but, Dennis, I don't think he's particularly interested in me."
She was in over her head and knew it, but she was brave enough to try a joke. The gal had guts. "Don't matter," I said. "You're consecrated, right?"
"Of course I am." She even sounded a little offended, like I'd asked whether she bathed regularly.
"Then we're okay. Get one of them little sun necklaces—"
"Like this, you mean?" She pulled a long chain up over her collar. It was as fine as spider silk, and hanging on it was Phi-Kethetin's sun, the circle with the five spiky rays. The circle and the tips of the rays were set with tiny diamond chips. That had set somebody back, and not to a gorgon and change, neither.
I had my mouth open to ask why she hadn't been wearing it last night when I realized the answer. Flat she might be, but not stupid. You don't go meet a thief wearing your good jewelry. I started wondering what it meant that she'd worn it tonight and stopped myself in a hurry. I said, "Good. You'll give her a bad moment with that."
She was frowning. "How do you know all this?"
"Don't matter. You'll wear it?"
"If it will make you feel better."
"Yeah. And don't let her touch you if you can help it. Can you use a knife?"
Her hand moved toward her reticule again. But she stopped it and, blushing, said, "Not for fighting."
"It ain't that hard. Point the sharp end at the other guy."
"Very funny," she said, but her mouth twitched a little.
"Other'n that… where d'you want to meet?"
"Oh. Min-Terris's. Is that all right?"
"Sure." Min-Terris's courtyard is always crowded, and one more gal meeting one more guy—nobody's going to give a fuck. "How quick can you get there?"
"We close at sundown, and I can take a hansom. Give me half an hour?"
"Okay. We want to be early 'stead of late."
"I understand."
Looking at her, I thought maybe she did, and that was the best news I'd had since my stupid mouth had agreed to go with her to meet Vey Coruscant, the woman folks in the Lower City, when they had to talk about her at all, called Queen Blood.
Felix
We met no one in the halls—the one time when I was begging the Mirador to send me a vile coincidence, none came. Malkar moved without hindrance down through the snarl of half staircases and spiraling, slanted rooms called the Nautilus, debouching in an old, old servants' passageway in the heart of the Warren. Perforce, I moved with him. The fog of phoenix around me made it difficult to remember from one moment to the next what was happening, where we were going, why I should not go there. It made it even more difficult to remember that I was twenty-six instead of twenty, that Malkar was no longer my master.
A second's unwelcome clarity: Malkar had never quit being my master. He had just let me run on a remarkably long leash.
"Could you have called me back anytime you wanted?" I said, as we turned into a long hallway, pouring with soot and cobwebs and the ominous, intrinsic darkness of its stones.
"Of course I could, my dear. But I
didn't
call you back. You came to me of your own accord."
I opened my mouth to protest, saw Malkar's eyebrows raised in polite disbelief, and looked away, the words withering on my tongue.
"You can't deny what you are." He sounded amused. "And you're useful, my dearest, but about as stable and resolute as an aspic. Can you deny it?"
"No, Malkar," I said, thinking of the boy in the Arcane.
"At least you are honest… for a whore."
I couldn't help the way my muscles tensed with revulsion—for him, for myself—and he roared with laughter. "What, dearest, no devastating riposte? Can this truly be Lord Felix Harrowgate, whose deadly wit is the terror of the court?"
No, I thought. No, that was someone else. That was someone who wasn't afraid of Malkar. But I was as terrified as I had been in Arabel, so terrified that I could not even answer him. That pleased him—Malkar was always annoyed by defiance—and he forbore to taunt me further. We came in silence to the door,
his
door—ironbound, worm-eaten, it looked no different than any of the doors along that hall. But I knew what lay behind it. He unlocked it and, with abrupt violence, shoved me through.
I almost kept from falling, ending up on one knee, with my left hand braced against the floor. Behind me, Malkar locked the door again, calling witchlights as he did. The phoenix was lifting, faster and faster, as I looked around, seeing the familiar threadbare hangings, the familiar ugly braziers, the familiar red mosaic pentagram… the completely
unfamiliar
shackles anchored to four of the pentagram's five corners.
After a second, the implications sank in, and I made a noise that was too thin, too paralyzed to be a scream.
"None of that," Malkar said. He dragged me upright again. "Really, Felix,
why
couldn't you have drunk yourself into a stupor and saved us both the bother?"
I was staring at him, both hands pressed against my mouth, thinking in an idiot babble, The door is locked, I can't get out, the door is locked, I can't get out. Only Malkar could open that door from the inside; I'd helped him cast the spells that ensured it.
"Never mind," he said, with a little, impatient sigh. "A compulsion will work just as well."
"But you can't…" I said, my voice barely more than a squeak.
He laughed. "I'm not a Cabaline, remember? I can do anything I damn well please. If I had more time, I'd reinvoke the obligation de sang—and
then
you'd tell me how you'd broken it, wouldn't you, dearest?—but this will do for now."
Malkar's compulsion cracked across my mind like a whip. I knew ways to avert compulsions, break compulsions—most of them, Malkar had taught me himself—but even as I tried to cast them, he swatted them side. "Don't be silly, darling. You've never been able to beat me. You never will. Now take your clothes off. And hurry. I have to get this done before midnight."
I did as he said, shivering with cold and fear and the pain of my futile struggle against his spell. When I was naked, he scooped my clothes up negligently and tossed them aside. "And one other precaution," he said, "for I will need all my concentration, and I know how… loud you can he." I forced myself to look at him; he was smiling. He produced two lengths of silk from his pocket.
If you scream, I will gag you.
"No, Malkar, please, I won't—"
"Shut up, Felix," he said and gagged me. Then he left me there, like a marionette, while he made his preparations: lighting the braziers, changing into a white, open-fronted silk robe that confirmed my fears about what he intended, for he wore nothing beneath it.
And all the while, as I stood there shivering, I was fighting the compulsion, searching for cracks and leverage, telling myself over and over again that my magic was stronger than his, that I could beat his spell. And the spells of the Virtu were on my side. I knew that, that the Virtu's defenses extended to a ward against compulsions—although Malkar seemed to have walked past that ward as if it weren't there—that somewhere that strength was waiting, too.
But I could not find it. At first I thought I had to be looking past it; I'd grown so used to the Virtu's spells and wards and power over the past six years that I frequently forgot about them for days on end. But the harder I looked, the more the ward wasn't there.