Mélusine (11 page)

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Authors: Sarah Monette

BOOK: Mélusine
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I stripped my clothes off as soon as the door closed behind her. Each piece of clothing landed on the floor with a squishing noise. By the time Miss Thomson came out, I was decent again, my stuff by the fire where there was at least a chance it'd dry out, and I'd worked out an arrangement of blankets on the floor that I thought would be okay. I put a stack for her on the daybed. Then I just sat there on the daybed, being glad I was still breathing.
Miss Thomson came back looking like the lead in a trouser farce, and I said, "There's no bed." I'd had to sell the bed the winter before. "You can have this. 'Less you
want
to go back out there."
"No, thank you. Dennis…" And then her face changed, going white and slack. I thought she was going to faint. "Oh,
Dennis
! I did, didn't I?"
"Did what?"
"I said your name! I know I did. I am so terribly sorry." Her eyes were huge.
"No, it's okay."
"But you
said
—you said I shouldn't tell her mine, and surely…"
"No." I could feel my face going red, and that made me feel even stupider. "I mean, that ain't my name."
"What?"
" 'Dennis' ain't my name. It's a whatchamacallit."
"An alias?" she said doubtfully.

"Maybe, if that means a name you use when you don't want nobody to know yours. I got a septad or so

of 'em."
"Really." She thought it over, the color coming back into her face. "Then what should I call you?"
"Oh, Kethe, I don't know." I was tired of it. I'd been tired of it for indictions, since I'd left Keeper and didn't have her to keep me safe. I was tired and lonely, not to mention wet and cold. I said, "My name's Mildmay. That's for real."
She was from Wraith. She didn't know the baggage that name had. "Mildmay," she said. "That's nice. You can call me Ginevra. If you like."
"It's a real pretty name."
Her lips twitched. "My aunt found it in a romance and talked my mother into it. But thank you."
"Here," I said and got off the daybed. "You must be tired."
Her face flooded with color. It was like watching a sunrise.
"What?" I said. I couldn't help checking, but I'd put my trousers on, and they were buttoned. "What is it?"
"I'm sorry. This sounds so horrible, and I'm sure you wouldn't, but…" She took a deep breath, and I did my level best not to stare at her chest. "You won't try anything, will you?"
"If I do, kick me in the balls."
"I'm serious."
"So'm I. I don't like rape, and I ain't in the mood besides." That made her laugh. I'd hoped it would. "Vey scares the living daylights outa me."
"Me, too," she said, and we both sat down on the daybed. "What… what was she
doing
?"
"Dunno. I mean, I can guess, but that's about it."
"Well, what's your guess?"
"My guess is she was looking to raise Brinvillier Strych."
"Brinvillier Strych? You mean Lord Bonfire? In the stories? He's
real
?"
I wondered who was the patron saint of little provincial girls who came to Mélusine without no more brains on 'em than a chickadee. "Fuck, yes," I said. "Porphyria Levant was real, too. I know people who knew Strych."
She opened her mouth and shut it again.
"And I know a guy"—a crazy old resurrectionist so crippled up with arthritis he could hardly move—"who swears he saw them taking Strych's body into the Boneprince."
Her breath hitched in, and she signed herself, that quick five-point circle to ward off hexes and bad luck and Phi-Kethetin's especial dislike.

"Vey Coruscant was his student. Like I said, my guess is she was trying to raise him."

"But he wasn't there. I mean, that voice—"
"I know."
"Do you think he's still… alive?"
"Dunno. I don't think so, though. I mean, if he was—where the fuck is he? He wasn't the sort to lay low, even with the Mirador on his ass. I think they lied about where they put him."
"Oh," she said, like the idea was a relief. "Really?"
"They're hocuses. It's what they do."
She yawned. Not one of them polite, ladylike little yawns to tell the guy he's being a bore, but a real jaw-stretcher.
"Go on and sleep," I said. I got up and went to my own blankets. "It's okay. Whatever was going on in the Boneprince tonight, nobody's gonna have the space to come looking for us for, oh, at least a decad."
She gave a sleepy little chuckle and rolled herself up in the blankets. Far as I could tell, she was asleep as soon as she got settled. As for me, I heard the Nero Street Clock chime the tenth hour that night before I finally fell asleep.
Felix
The rain started sometime later, sometime in the dark. I felt it in my dreams and dreamed of drowning the rest of the night. At dawn, when one of the cat-headed monsters kicked me awake, I was almost glad.
The guards got me down in the mud again when Stephen and Vida walked away from the camp to argue, but they had no higher purpose this time than degradation and filth. When Stephen came back, one of them said blandly, "He tried to escape." Stephen knew it for a lie; he did not pursue They shoved me up onto the horse again and started for the walls of Mélusine.
By noon, we were in sight of Chalcedony Gate. Stephen reined in at the end of the causeway through the St. Grandin swamp, held up a hand. "He walks from here," he said, and Esmond dragged me off the horse.
Stephen intended me to walk to the Mirador.
I wondered if I could, and I was still wondering when we passed beneath the arch of Chalcedony Gate.
Mildmay
In the dream, I'm a kid again, like maybe a septad and two, septad and three. Keeper and me are standing outside the Boneprince's gates. It's past the septad-night.
In you go
, Keeper says and shoves me forward, so that I'm in the Boneprince before I'm ready for it. I'm scared out of my mind, but proud. We all know what the Boneprince test means.
I start walking, not too fast, not like I'm scared or nothing, along the Road of Marble. Behind me, the gates swing shut with this horrible noise, like screaming and laughing and puking all at once. Even in the dream, I know them gates were welded open back in the reign of Laurence Cordelius, cause he was sick to death of people breaking the lock or being found in the morning hung up on the spikes.

And that's kind of worrisome, you know, them gates closing when I know they can't. I turn around.

Keeper's still there, on the other side of the gates. She smiles at me. Things are okay, then. This is just part of the test, and I can take anything she throws at me.
I turn back and keep walking. I can hear my footsteps and my heart beating. It's dark, not just like the night being dark when the moon's gone in, but dark like being shut in a room with black walls. I can see the Road of Marble, and that's about it.
And then there's a voice beside the path, and it whispers my name.
I stop in my tracks, looking from side to side, even though it won't do me no good. There's nothing to see. Just blackness and more blackness.
Is… is somebody there?
Mildmay
, another voice calls, from someplace else.
I spin around, but I can't see nothing. There's just the path, gleaming white, and all that blackness.
Mildmay, Mildmay, Mildmay
. Lots of voices now, and I know who they are. They're the kept-thieves, the kids that got the sanguette 'cause Lady Jane didn't know no better way to deal with her city.
Come play with us, Mildmay
, they call.
We're lonely. You're one of us.
No
! I say, too scared to keep my mouth shut.
It's true. It's true. You
belong
to us, Mildmay. You know it.
I'd run if I knew which way to go, but the voices are all around me. I can see things on the path, like shadows.
Then something tugs my hair. I yelp and try to dodge, but I'm fenced in now, with bone, all their skeletons, some of 'em still hung about with bits of rotting cloth and bits of rotting flesh. They catch hold of me with their fingers like brambles, crowding around me, and I know they can feel my body heat. The eye sockets of their skulls are dark, like they've got all the night inside their heads.
You are ours
, one says, close enough to kiss me. I pull back, fighting their grip and the things they say, and wake up.
It was near the septad-day. Ginevra was still asleep on the daybed. I was tangled up in my blankets like they had a new career coming as an octopus.
"Powers," I muttered under my breath and unwrapped myself. Standing up was hard—I ached all over from that crazy run through the Boneprince—but I did it anyway and went to the window. There ain't much happens on Persimmony Street in the daytime. I saw two cats fighting over a fish head and a girl scrubbing the steps of the Hourglass. The sky was dark and kind of far-off-looking. There'd be more rain soon.
I couldn't settle. The dream was in my head. So I pulled on my boots, still damp from last night, and left. Persimmony Street's only four blocks from the Road of Chalcedony, and across the Road and up three stories, there's a roof market. Stuff there was cheaper than what you could buy on the Road itself—and fresher, too, half the time.

The air was cold enough to bite, and I could smell the rain coming. I walked fast, not needing to get soaked again, thanks all the same. But when I came to the Road, I couldn't go no farther. Couldn't even get near it.

"What the fuck is going on?" I said.
A scissors-grinder said, "It's the hocus. Lord Stephen caught the son of bitch, and they're bringing him back to the Mirador." It's the Mirador's way with hocuses they're pissed at. They drag 'em the length of the Road of Chalcedony, and the people of the Lower City, who ain't got them nice bourgeois manners, line the sidewalks and yell and throw things.
I wasn't annoyed no more. Now all I wanted was a better view. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the Mirador, and they don't like me—but I ain't no fool, neither. The guy who broke the Virtu was nobody's friend. I started edging closer.
You could track their progress by the way the shouting got louder, and I knew I wouldn't have to wait long. The Mirador don't do that sort of thing very often, but I could remember the last one. They'd found out that one of the younger hocuses was fucking around with "forbidden magics"—if you put a knife to my throat, I'd guess that meant blood-magic, but it could've been most anything. They marched her up through the streets to the Plaza del'Archimago and burned her in front of Livergate. She was young and pretty, and half her body was most of the way to charcoal before she finally died.
Everybody around me started yelling their stupid heads off when the Lord Protector and the Protectorate Guard came into view. The hocus was walking behind Lord Stephen's horse. I couldn't get close enough to see good without doing somebody some serious damage, but I could see how tall he was, and Ginevra'd been right. He
did
dye his hair bright red. I couldn't think why anybody would want to. That was all I could see of him.
I saw when the rock came out of the crowd, though, somewhere near me. I'd've thrown one myself, if I could've got a clear line of sight. The People around me were yelling insults. The stone hit the hocus—you could tell by the way the crowd screamed—and that's when I left. I hoped they stoned him to death right there in the middle of the Road of Chalcedony.
Felix
Pain explodes in my head, and I fall to my knees, blood trickling into my good eye and down my face. The Road of Chalcedony blurs and doubles around me. With my good eye half-gummed shut, I am nearly blind, Malkar is somewhere, waiting to hurt me.
There is a terrible howling, shrieking noise assaulting me from all sides. Monsters line the street, baying like hounds. I have been trying not to look at their gaping maws, their red, glaring eyes, ever since we came through Chalcedony Gate. The bear-headed man keeps his horse moving forward at the same deliberate pace. He does not care whether I walk or am dragged.
I stagger to my feet and walk, stumbling over the cobbles, flinching from the howls of the monsters, which only makes them howl louder.
I am coming apart, on the verge of howling back at them. I lock my throat, keep moving. I can see nothing now but blurred shadows, terrifying bursts of movement that my bad eye cannot track. I fall a second time tripped by a pothole. I can hear myself whimpering, and I hope that no one else can hear. I get up again, cringing from the noise, from the monsters I can no longer see. I fall the third time because I can't go on walking. There is too much pain, too much fear. My legs can no longer bear me through this maelstrom of shrieking glass.

Stephen does not look back; the crowd, sensing blood, redoubles its baying in anticipation. The noise is

a whip; I am back on my feet, though I am shaking from head to foot, fighting to keep from falling again.
Mildmay
When I got back to Persimmony Street, Ginevra was sitting on the daybed, combing her hair.
"Want to go to the Tunny?" I said as I came in.
"The
what
?"
"The Tunny Street Baths. Over in Gilgamesh."
"Aren't there baths in Pennycup?"
"Oh, sure, but the Tunny's better."
She was looking at me weird. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah. I'm fine." I sat down beside her. "Lord Stephen caught the hocus. I saw them taking him along the Road of Chalcedony."
"Good," she said.
Our gazes locked for a second, and then we looked away from each other, Ginevra and me. She cleared her throat. "Mildmay?"
"Right here."
"Last night… I was… there was a minute or two where I thought I wouldn't be alive this time today."
"Only
two
?" I asked, and she laughed. It was a beautiful sound. "We're lucky—I mean,
really
lucky—just to be here, sitting and talking to each other." One cat and a Great Septad dogs.

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