Scholar of Decay (28 page)

The first rat rose onto its haunches and almost delicately closed its teeth around a flailing arm. Even over the screaming, Dmitri heard bones crunch. A second wedge-shaped head darted forward at a scrawny calf and pulled back, jaw moving up and down. The rats were eating the man alive.

His leap from the top of the wall took Dmitri halfway back across the enclosed yard. Without his sword, he’d have to get help.
Pushing his way through the crowded cafe, he grabbed Georges by the shoulder and tried to drag him from his chair. “Come on!”

Georges scowled and lithely twisted free, smacking away an opportunistic hand making a foray at his plate. “Why? Have you lost something?”

“There’s a man in the alley being eaten by rats!”

The café had fallen silent, and the final word filled the room.

Rats.

Yves’s edged laughter seemed to rebound off of every staring patron. “Busy night for it,” he snarled, waving a finger wrapped in a bloodstained handkerchief.

Confused, Dmitri clung to the one thing he knew. “We’ve got to help him!”

“Why?”

“Because …” Wide-eyed, Dmitri stared around the table, unable to believe the response. Or more specifically, the lack of one. “Because there’re four rats as big as dogs eating a man alive out there, and we can’t just let it happen!”

“It’s already happened,” Annette told him calmly, leaning forward and untucking a fold of his vest from the waist of his trousers. “Unless he was hugely fat.”

“No, no, he was skinny, but …”

“Rats are quick eaters.” Georges managed to kick both of the twins as they started to snicker. “Four of them will be finished by now.”

“But …”

“Trust us,” Chantel said with a smile that reminded Dmitri uncomfortably of Louise. “We know.”

He scanned the features of his friends and saw a feral similarity on all six faces. They were obviously not going to help. He turned to survey the café. Conversations hurriedly started up again as everyone
ignored him. No one, not even the servers, met his gaze.

Fists opening and closing at his sides, he took a step forward and then stepped back. He couldn’t win on his own. Not without a weapon. He was certain of that. His shoulders slumped. “It’s already over?”

“They’ll be gnawing on his bones by now.” For emphasis, Georges cracked a pork rib and noisily sucked the marrow out.

“You wanted to be the white knight, didn’t you?” Yves’s eyes glittered mockingly. “Riding to the rescue?”

Surprised by the cruelty in Yves’s voice, Dmitri shrugged. “I just thought I should do something,” he muttered.

“
En garde
, rodent!” Aubert flourished a baguette at his twin, who recoiled in feigned terror. Around and around the table they went, Aubert shouting lofty epigrams, Henri squeaking, their nearest neighbors hastily snatching to safety possessions in danger of being trampled. The chase ended when Henri suddenly turned, grabbed the baguette, and broke it over his brother’s head, yelling, “Rats win!” At which point they collapsed into their chairs, howling with laughter.

As he took his seat, Dmitri joined in the hilarity because it had been pretty funny. While he’d been outside, Yves had apparently cut a finger, so that explained his mood. Of course Chantel’s smile was like Louise’s; they were cousins. There was a simple explanation for everything.

With no idea of how simple the explanation was, he drank until he killed the memory of the screaming, thanking all the gods that he hadn’t seen the man’s face.

Louise Tucked a Silken Curl Back into Place and
stared thoughtfully at the mirror, ignoring the places where the silvering had flaked off the back, creating what appeared to be decaying patches in her reflection. According to her faithful and aching-to-be-needed Dmitri, Aurek Nuikin would be well enough to leave the house within the next few days. She had no doubt that the moment he was able, he’d head straight for the catacombs and the abandoned workshop—which was good, for it meant he’d be out of the house and away from his study for a sufficient amount of time.

This trip, he could make on his own. A wizard powerful enough to destroy a bone golem, and who’d no doubt be picking up still more power from the abandoned workshop, hardly needed her protection against a few insignificant goblins.

She had other plans—lovely, labyrinthine, dark, and twisty plans. But before she could put those plans into motion, she’d have to get rid of Jacqueline.

Get rid of Jacqueline. She repeated the words silently to herself as she stood and swept out of the dressing room set aside by the evening’s host for her private use. It gnawed at her that there was a
slightly larger one for her twin. Her frown parted the crowds as she descended the stairs and reentered the crowded drawing room.

It wasn’t hard to find a messenger. There were always social climbers at these affairs who wanted so desperately to get ahead that they’d do nearly anything without a thought for the consequences.

The front gate of Chateau Delanuit was half open. Guy Muridae stepped under the arch and felt as though he were stepping from evening into night. Shadows that merely slanted through the rest of the city gathered together here and presented a dark and united front. He kept his eyes locked on the pale gray light spilling in from the courtyard and walked as fast as he could without actually running.

Under his best jacket and vest, sweat plastered his shirt to his sides. He nervously brushed a lock of brown hair back off the damp curve of his forehead. His footsteps echoed off the surrounding walls of the gatehouse, and he found himself carefully setting each foot down on the cobblestones so as to make the least amount of noise.

You’re being an idiot, he told himself, holding like a talisman the memory of Louise Renier’s promise. Twitching his cravat straight, he stepped out into the courtyard, blinking a little in his sudden return to the late afternoon light.

The vast open courtyard was overgrown and ill tended. Guy was surprised, actually, at how ill-tended it was. The Reniers were at the top of the Pont-a-Museau social hierarchy; surely they could afford caretakers? His gaze skipped from cracked and broken cobblestones to stone tubs holding small ornamental trees he was sure were long dead, to a tangle of leafless vine nearly burying a three-tiered fountain—where it stopped.

Something stared back at him from the top tier.

Then it was gone.

He wiped his palms on the thighs of his pantaloons. It was probably nothing more than a rat. There were rats all over Pont-a-Museau—why not here? Taking his cue from the stratum of society he longed to be fully accepted into, he’d learned to ignore them. Mostly.

Being out in the open helped.

The stone arch over the front door echoed the arch of the gate, and the door itself echoed the squalor of the courtyard. The black paint not actually peeling off the wood had cracked into a thousand pieces like a mudflat in the heat. The massive brass knocker had been etched with a pattern once, but too much of it had corroded away for him to recognize what it had been. The sound it made was surprisingly mellow.

“I have come with a personal message for Jacqueline Renier,” he informed the elderly servant who dragged open the door, her scowl somewhat deflating his lofty tone. “My card,” he said grandly, handing it to her.

She stared at the small pasteboard rectangle held in a three-fingered hand, and then at him. After a moment, the scowl smoothed out into a near total lack of expression. “Follow me, Monsieur Muridae. I will take you to the mamselle.”

The decay so obvious in the courtyard was not as evident in the house. Or perhaps the house was just too overwhelming for a visitor to notice the decay. Following the servant across the great hall, Guy stared at the oak roundels in the ceiling, at the curved molding around the paneling, at the stained glass in the windows turned to glorious color by the last rays of the setting sun. They went through a door, dwarfed by the sixteen-foot walls, and passed a second servant in the hall.

He had much the same expression, or lack of it, as the first.

These were people, Guy realized, who didn’t see what they weren’t supposed to see. I wonder how I could train my servants to be this discreet. Although his entire staff currently consisted of a cook-housekeeper, he had big plans—plans that this visit would help him accomplish.

“Wait here, Monsieur.”

He waited, crushing his gloves in first one hand and then the other as his escort disappeared behind a baize-green door. Although he was alone in the corridor, he felt as though he were being watched. Which is ridiculous, he told himself. He wished only that the protest sounded more convincing.

A few moments later, the elderly servant returned and ushered him into the Chateau’s library.

Jacqueline Renier sat in a crimson wingback chair as though she sat on a throne. At a ball, any ball, she shone like a diamond, brilliant and cold. Here in her own home, she was the most beautiful woman Guy had ever seen and, for no reason he was consciously aware of, he felt a return of the terror he’d felt crossing through the dark under the gatehouse.

“Mamselle.” He bowed gracefully, knowing how crucial it was he make a good impression.

“You have a personal message for me?”

“I do, mamselle.”

“From whom?”

“I beg your pardon, but I swore not to reveal that.”

Red lips drew back off ivory teeth. “Swore to whom?”

His heart pounding harder, faster, Guy spread his arms. “Mamselle,” he said chidingly. When she smiled, he remembered that Jacqueline Renier was a widow and wondered if she’d ever considered remarriage. Now that would definitely make his fortune.

“And your message?”

“I was to tell you only that Henri Dubois has been seen in Mortigny.” He heard her sharp intake of breath and saw her fingers tighten on the brocade-covered arms of her chair.

“And what,” she asked after a moment, her voice sounding as though it had traveled from far away, “is there in this message for you?”

Guy bowed again. “Only the honor of doing you a favor.”

“This is news my sister desperately wants to hear.” Louise leaned a little closer to him, wrapping him in the heat of her body. “If you bring it to her, she’ll be so grateful she’ll see to it that your social standing in Pont-a-Museau is assured.”

Swallowing hard, Guy tried to force his brain to function. “Why don’t you tell her yourself?”

“You know how it is with sisters.” She drew her fingernail lightly down the line of his jaw. “This man came between us and …”

“Say no more.” As a man of the world, he completely understood
.

“The honor of doing me a favor? That’s all?”

He smiled charmingly. “To have the most beautiful woman in Pont-a-Museau in my debt? I think that’s enough.”

“Yes, I think you’re right.”

Her smile reminded him very much of her sister’s—but that was hardly surprising as they were twins. When she stood and began to walk toward him, all he could think was that, since they were alone, she was about to show him just how grateful she was. This is incredible. All I really needed was her public approval.

It was his last thought.

“I dislike being in debt,” Jacqueline told him, wiping bloody fingers on the full skirts of her dress. Stepping over the body, she walked quickly back to her private apartments through a Chateau suddenly crowded with memories of Henri Dubois.…