A score of back doors led into this alley, but only the Undercroft had an entrance here.
Bums and hobos lay against bare brick walls, hats out to catch change from the passing night scum and the Northtown nobs who drifted east to the Pleasure Quarters after nightfall for their fun. The beggars kept their hands to themselves. If they chased away custom, Walsh would have them cleared out overnight.
Cat staggered upstream against the intermittent current of customers, ignoring the outstretched hands and needy faces and the smiles of the pushers near the corner. She’d tried their drugs before, their Old World poppy milk and their pills stuffed with ground herbs from the Shining Kingdom. A vampire’s fang made them all seem frail, flabby jokes. She had less patience for the pimps, and promised herself she would return some night soon when she was on duty.
The alley opened onto a broad and crowded street lit by ghostlight. You could tell the priests from the other reprobates by the hooded cloaks they wore to hide their tonsures.
The world grayed out and her veins ached for something sharp to spread poison through them. Her sweat was cold. Her legs twitched under her and her back hit the brick wall. She slid down until she was sitting on her heels, shoulders bowed forward and hands resting on the sharp toes of her boots. Some Blacksuit would be along soon, to sweep her off the main street and set her on her way home.
It was barely nine o’clock. It had been an early morning at work, with the murder and all. She was okay. Right?
Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t look up, because the light hurts your eyes.
A pair of black-clad legs trespassed on the upper edge of her field of vision. That hadn’t taken long. She prepared herself for the Blacksuit’s words to rake across her mind.
They never came.
Instead, a voice she hadn’t heard in far too long said, “Cat, is that you?” It wasn’t the most gallant one-liner with which to re-enter her life, but Abelard had never been a gallant type.
“Abe!” She reached out and grabbed his legs, using his body as a prop with which to lever herself, slowly, to her feet. “What the hell, man! What are you doing here?”
He was wearing a black felt hat, she noticed when she climbed her way to his shoulders. The hat covered the tonsure, which was about all you could say for it.
There was a woman with him. Age hard to place; smooth tea-and-milk skin dusted with brown freckles, and her snake-hazel eyes were smooth as well, the way eyes got when they saw too much. She was dressed oddly for a night out, in a black skirt and a blouse with a neckline that barely showed the hollow of her collarbones. Too simple for eveningwear and too severe to be casual.
“Abe, are you
working
?” Cat put all the scorn she could muster into that word.
His eyes searched the graffiti on the wall behind her for an answer, and in his pause the woman extended her hand. “I’m Tara Abernathy. Abe”—she said it with an amused glance at Abelard—“said you might be able to help us.”
“Sure,” Cat replied. Her head spun from gin and blood loss. “Soon as I finish being sick. Excuse me.”
Ms. Kevarian received the letter at the door of the small suite that served as her office and quarters. Her features tightened when she saw the seal, as if it were a vicious insect that she couldn’t decide whether to crush or fling away. Quietly, she closed the door.
She laid the letter in the center of her desk and sat in an armchair across the room. Light filtered through the narrow windows from the city and cast a long shadow off the rolled parchment. Her elbows pressed against her knees, and she clasped her hands in front of her face, one atop the other. Night deepened, and still she sat, pondering.
At last she moved to the table and held one hand above the letter, palm flat and fingers splayed as though testing a skillet’s heat. Starfire glimmered faintly between her hand and the scroll. The seal sparked, hissed, and emitted a line of sick black smoke. She caught the smoke and crushed it into a tiny crystal, pea-sized and jagged-edged, which she tucked into her jacket pocket.
She opened the letter.
It was written in the flowing, watery hand of a person who normally used small, rapid letters but on rare occasions allowed himself a calligrapher’s flourish. As she read, the corners of her lips curled downward and fire crept into her eyes.
Dearest Elayne,
If you’re reading this, you noticed my little joke. If not, then I remind you once again, as you cough up your lungs and breathe your last, to move slowly and be careful. I would send flowers to your employers and seek out what remnants of a family you no doubt possess were I not certain you had contingencies in place to resuscitate you in the event of your demise. An apprentice, perhaps?
It has been a pleasure to watch you grow, though of course from a distance. Partner now, and in Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao no less! How it would warm old Mikhailov’s heart to see.
I know you don’t welcome advice from me, dearest, but please understand. This is a complex case. Many twists and turns here, many shadowy corners where unsavory secrets hide.
Be careful. Watch the Cardinal. My roots in Alt Coulumb run more deeply than your own, and I know him as an untrustworthy and backward devotee of an untrustworthy and backward faith. I say this not as your friend but as your colleague, and one who, if the letters I have received today are true, is every bit as interested as yourself in the development of this case.
We should speak. I will arrive in Alt Coulumb tomorrow morning, but look for me tonight in dreams.
Your adversary of the moment, but always,
Your friend,
Alexander Denovo
A jaunty line from that last “o” jagged off the scroll’s edge.
There was no one in the room to see the momentary slouch of Elayne’s shoulders, the bow of her head. No one saw her set the scroll down and lean against the desk. Of the four million souls in the artificially brilliant city beyond her window, not one saw her bend.
Nor did they see her head rise and starlight bloom from her eyes and from the numberless, fractally dense glyphs upon her flesh, shining through her body and garments as if they were fog. The room darkened, and smoke rose from the parchment where she touched it.
Her wrath broke, and she shrank within her skin and was nearly human again. Breath moved back and forth over her lips. She lifted her hand from the scroll, and saw that her thumb had burned a small dark spot on the velvety surface, over the trailing line of Denovo’s signature.
Alexander’s signature.
She rolled up the scroll, placed it in a desk drawer, and wove a curse around the drawer so that none who looked within save her would see anything of note. She paused, considered, and amended the curse to exclude Tara Abernathy. Succession planning. You never could be too careful.
A wicker box lay on the desk, stacked with contracts to sign, bindings and wards against invasion and the client’s further decay. On top of that stack she placed the book containing the notes of Ms. Abernathy’s accomplice. What was his name again? She frowned, and gripped the memory as in her youth she gripped the trout that swam close to the riverbank near her house. Abelard.
Ms. Kevarian had taught herself how to tickle trout an age of the world ago, to hold her hand in the brook and entice with her fingers, to soothe with the light brush of skin against scale, and then, fluid and fast, to grip and lift. She had been five when she gained the knack. Her parents had noticed. Everyone noticed when the word got around, including a young scholar, a boy of nearly twelve whose family was passing through on horseback, bearing him away for study at the Academies, those faltering predecessors of the Hidden Schools. That young boy had asked her how she learned, and she said it seemed natural to her, and he said things that seemed natural seldom were.
Alexander.
He would be here tomorrow, as creditors’ counsel, representative of the gods and men and Deathless Kings to whom Kos Everburning made promises that could not now be repaid.
She had expected this. She always hoped for the best, and expected the worst.
She looked through the window upon the starless city, and though she did not pray, she hoped that Ms. Abernathy could protect herself for one evening. When she returned, there would be a great deal to do.
Elayne sat down at the desk, removed the first few hundred pages of documents, prepared her black candle and her phial of red ink, her quill pen and her thin steel knife and her polished silver bowl, and began to read.
*
“You’re sure you know where you’re going?” Tara asked.
Cat did not respond. She held pace five steps ahead, heels clicking on the paving stones.
“I mean,” Tara said, “no disrespect, but we’ve been walking for almost an hour.”
Click, click
.
Click, click.
Abelard, to Tara’s right, walked stiffly and said nothing that might break the tension. Tara wished she could ask him questions with her eyes, questions like, “I thought you said this woman was your friend,” and, “We’ve been to six bars already, how many vamp hangouts can there be in one city,” and, “Was she born with that attitude or did it accrete on her with irritation, like an irascible pearl?”
The Pleasure Quarters convulsed with sick life like a corpse on a novice Craftsman’s table. Dancers in second-story windows shook their hips in time with music barely audible above the crowd’s din. An ermine-robed man vomited in a gutter while his friends laughed; a candy seller blew tiny elegant animals out of molten sugar and breathed a touch of Craft into them so they glowed from inside out. An old man with a distended, hairy belly ate fire on a clapboard stage, while next to him a girl in a pink leotard, no older than twelve and painted like a china doll, swallowed the broad blade of a scimitar.
“You haven’t given me much to go on,” Cat said, and from her tone Tara knew she, too, was frustrated by their difficulty locating Raz Pelham. “Iskari sailor, vampire. Do you have any idea how many of those there are in this city?”
“No,” Tara replied, feeling testy. “I don’t. This is my first time in Alt Coulumb.”
Cat whirled on her. “Kos!” Had her eyes been less bloodshot and her complexion not as pale, she would have been quite pretty. As it was, the word that came to mind was “striking.” “Do you want to get jumped? Your first time. Might as well put on a schoolgirl’s dress and walk about complaining you can’t get the buttons in the back done.”
Already a few slick erstwhile tour guides had proffered their services. Abelard fended them off with no effect; Cat shot them a deadly glance and they fled.
Tara bristled. “I was trying to thank you for helping us.”
“I’m helping because Abelard’s a friend even if he hasn’t dropped by in months, and because maybe your Iskari sailor can find someone to get me high.” She took a deep breath. “Look. I’m sorry. There are thousands of bars and dance halls and dives and whorehouses in the Pleasure Quarters. Some are clean, good places, most aren’t. We can’t cover them all in one night. I’ve been hitting big vamp lairs, but who knows if that’s this guy’s idea of a good time? We need more information.”
“Well,” Tara said, “I’ve told you most of what I know about him. Iskari, pirate, sailor, vampire. Five-nine, maybe five-ten, broad shoulders, red eyes, black hair. Owns his own ship.”
“Do you know how he became a vampire?”
“What difference would it make?”
“Some asked for the change, some didn’t. Some are into the terror-that-flaps-in-the-night thing, some aren’t. Some mope around all night, some want to dance from dusk till dawn.”
“I only met this guy for a minute or two.” An excuse. You could learn much in a minute. She remembered standing by his ship’s ramp, about to descend into the milling dockside crowd. “He was … made about forty years ago. After Seril’s death. He doesn’t come here often.”
Cat pulled back when she mentioned Seril, and made a brief hooking sign with her left hand. Superstition? She didn’t seem the type, but Alt Coulumb had long been a city of gods and secrets. “Forty years ago.” Cat tasted the words. “The Pleasure Quarters weren’t so friendly to vampires and their ilk back then.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the Guardians,” Abelard whispered from her side. “The, ah, gargoyles. They were still around.”
“Ah,” Tara said without understanding.
Cat lowered her head in thought, and crossed her arms beneath her breasts. The Pleasure Quarters surged around them. Then, with startling speed, she looked up, and said, “He’ll be at the Xiltanda.”
She set off through the crowd with a purposeful stride. Tara and Abelard exchanged quick, nervous glances, and followed her.
*
The rooftops of a great city present a panorama unlike anything in the world. A range of giant gumdrop karst formations may impress, a deep canyon awe, and a jungle canopy stun into silence, but cities alone are the product of human hands and human tools, human blood and human will. They come into being through worship, or not at all.
Too few see a metropolis from its peak. Those who do are a strange mix of the city’s angels and its demons, those who hold the strings and those who never rose far enough to have strings tied around them. A penthouse apartment has much the same view as a cardboard box on a tenement roof. The resident of each drinks his wine and calls the other a fool, and seldom is either certain in his laughter.
Both the skeleton in the black suit and the round bedraggled man with his paper-wrapped bottle of rotgut watch the city, and they do not change it as much as it changes them.
Something moved across the rooftops. It had many bodies but one heart, many mouths but one breath, many names but one truth. It leapt in shadow from building to building, gliding on spread granite wings. Dim lights from the distant street illuminated the sculptures of its form.
The Flight returned in glory to the rooftops of its birth, which it once ruled until cast out by traitors and blasphemers. Its talons marked passing buildings with harsh, glorious poems of praise, exhortations to the moon that fools below thought dead.