Mélusine (21 page)

I came closer. I couldn't help it. I said, "He won't make it out of Dragonteeth."

Margot said, "He didn't used to be like that. I remember when he first came up here. He was so amazed that nobody was
hitting
him, he went around for days just being
happy
. I remember him like that."

" 'Course you do," I said.

There was a long silence. I didn't know what to say. I didn't think she'd hear me if I said anything anyways. She didn't look up, but finally she said, "When I go to the Kennel…" She stopped. I knew she had to go to the Kennel, had to try to get her kids out, try to patch things up and get on with something. Those kids needed her, and these dead ones didn't, not no more. I wondered if the Dogs would believe she was old enough to stand surety. Not that standing surety was anything but a lie on both sides anyway, since the people standing surety for the kids in the Kennel were all thief-keepers and pimps.

Margot took a deep breath, still didn't look up, tried again: "When I go to the Kennel, I'll tell them you're dead. I'll tell 'em one of these dead fucking Dogs killed you. They'll like that. Maybe they'll even believe it. But that's it." She looked at me. I backed up without even meaning to, because the thing in her eyes was screaming and sick with blood. I'd always kind of wondered, when I told stories with them in it, what the Eumenides looked like. But I wasn't wondering no more. "If I ever see you again, I may have a go at killing you myself."

"Thank you, Margot," I said. I didn't say she'd never get near me. She knew that.

"
I don't want your fucking thanks
!" She started crying, big racking sobs that looked more like somebody was beating her with invisible sticks.

She pulled the dead child into her lap and bowed over it, sobbing and sobbing.

She wouldn't take comfort from me, and I couldn't stay on this rooftop no more. I just couldn't. I left, starting back for Midwinter because I couldn't think of no place else to go. It didn't matter. The Dogs knew I'd been here, on the Judiciary roofs, and before long they were going to think I was dead. I was as safe as I'd been in a full septad, and I hoped Kethe was enjoying the joke, because I wasn't.

Brother Lilburn and I were alone in the Chapel of St. Crellifer, which jutted awkwardly out from the back of the hospice like a wart. It was a dank stone hemisphere with narrow-slitted windows, and gory renditions of the martyrdom of St. Crellifer were frescoed around the walls. It was too small for all the patients to be crammed in at once, and so was not in regular use except for the morning devotions of the brothers. Otherwise, it belonged to Brother Lilburn, and everyone in St. Crellifer's knew it.

There was a ghost kneeling at the end of the first pew, praying. She had clearly been a patient in St. Crellifer's before her death; her hair hung in ragged strands around her face, and she was wearing an ugly, shapeless dress like the ones the women wore.

"What are you looking at?" Brother Lilburn said.

"N-nothing," I said, wrenching my gaze back to my hands.

"You weren't praying."

He said, his voice soft but not in the slightest gentle, "Are you praying, Felix?"

"I'm trying, Brother Lilburn." I had learned that that was a better answer than a straight "yes," although both were equally lies.

"Good. Prayer will help you more than anything, but you must learn to submit your spirit to the saint."

"Yes, Brother Lilburn." I did not confess that I found the idea spiritually, morally—almost physically—repugnant. Instead of my knees and aching hips, I tried to think about the gardens, about the flowers and the grass, the faint breeze that had ruffled my hair. I thought about the Sun ling, who had been kind, who had said I could be helped. I did not think about St. Crellifer at all, but I watched Brother Lilburn as best I could out of the corners of my eyes. He wore gray around him like a shroud. Although I could not see his face, I knew he was watching me, his eyes as remote and indifferent as the cold stones beneath me.

It came to me, half fancy and half conviction, that Brother Lilburn was dead that he had died years ago but had held off corruption, decay, the helplessness of death, with the force of his will alone, that I was kneeling here in the cold darkness being stared at by a corpse. I shut my eyes, gripping my hands together tightly, and sank my teeth into my lower lip to keep from screaming.

"Good," said Brother Lilburn. "
Now
you are praying."

Mildmay

I went to unlock the door, and it swung open. I stood staring at it. The Dogs
couldn't
still be waiting for me. I'd just died in Dragonteeth. But if they were there, they knew I was out here, and somehow the only thing that seemed important at all was not waking Mrs. Pickering and particularly not waking Scabious. It was nearly dawn. They'd be stirring in another half hour. But maybe the Dogs would be nice and arrest me quick, and we could be out of here by then.

I went in. Ginevra turned around with a gasp that was almost a shriek.

Not the Dogs.

"What're you doing here?" I said.

It came out bad, in this sludgy kind of mumble, but either she understood it, or it was just the only thing anybody was going to ask, because she said, "I came… I came to get my things. Austin says the Dogs wouldn't arrest me if they knew… I mean, I haven't done anything wrong."

"Yeah, right."

"I
haven't
! I don't have any idea what the Dogs want you for or… or anything!"

"I told you they was after me." I could've said something about Ellis Otanius and whether he might think Ginevra'd done "something wrong," but I didn't. That wasn't the point here anyway.

"I didn't know…" I think she figured there was no good way to get out of that sentence, because she said, "I'm really sorry."

"I… oh, damn." Her chin came up, and she said, "I'm moving in with Austin."

"Austin."

"He loves me. He always has."

I love you. But I couldn't say that. I never had said it, so maybe she didn't think I felt it. And it was too fucking late now. I said, "Go on, then Take whatever you want and go."

But I went first. I turned around right then and left. There was nothing for me in Midwinter.

Felix

I did not look for the gardens anymore. In my dreams, I could not get to the city, could not find Horn Gate; I could only catch bare glimpses of the gardens, and I never saw the Sunling at all. Brother Lilburn's dead gaze followed me everywhere; even in dreams of Shannon, or dreams of my childhood, he would be there, in one corner or another, his hands folded, white as bone against his black robe, watching.

In the waking world, I was desperately careful, focused so intently on my scrubbing that at night my hands would stay cramped around the absent shape of the brush. I could not think about anything else, could not let myself raise my head. I did not look at the ghosts, even when I had to move through them; when I thought I smelled the trees of the garden, I leaned over the bucket beside me and inhaled the bitter reality of the Sim.

I was good, as I had tried to be good as a child. But I had never been good enough for Keeper, and so, in some terrible way, I was not surprised when it turned out I wasn't good enough for St. Crellifer either.

It was morning, after breakfast. I was scrubbing halls on the second floor, outside the women's intractable ward. I could hear Jeanne-Chatte singing, as she always sang when she was not trying to kill herself or one o the brothers. I was cleaning flagstones, listening to Jeanne-Chatte's beautiful voice, ignoring the ghostly madwomen rocking back and forth along the outside wall.

Brother Orphelin's voice said behind me, "You have a visitor."

The scrub brush dropped out of my fingers. I turned. Brother Orphelin, beaming, and Brother Lilburn, expressionless as always, advanced; they took my arms, one on each side, and dragged me upright.

"Your visitor was very disappointed, last time he came," Brother Orphelin said as they marched me toward the stairs. "He says you were very rude to him."

"No," I said, but it was a strengthless half whisper. Robert again, Robert after something that was more important to him than his vanity.

"Don't lie," Brother Lilburn said.

They started down the stairs, dragging me between them.

"Your visitor has asked us to be sure you aren't rude to him again," Brother Orphelin said.

"No," I said again, but this time so weakly that not even Brother Lilburn heard me.

Behind us, in the women's intractable ward, Jeanne-Chatte began to scream.

penetrated farther into the maze of stone, down sloping corridors into greater and greater darkness, until at last we came to a room crudely squared out of the rock, rank with the breath of the Sim. It was lit by torches; I tried to count them to keep the panic back, but I couldn't make the number come out the same twice.

Robert was waiting among the torches—himself, although his eyes were the snake's, sulfurous yellow and staring—standing beside a wooden table fitted out with straps and buckles. I was distracted by the torches, and it took me a moment to realize what that table was, to realize what Brother Orphelin had meant, to realize what Robert planned to do. Then I dug in my heels, wrenched free of Brother Lilburn and Brother Orphelin—they had not expected resistance—turned, and bolted. I didn't care if I got lost; in that moment, I didn't care if I never found my way to the surface of the city again. I just ran.

I had known the first day that it was useless to run from Brother Orphelin, and now the truth of that was proved to me. He and Brother Lilburn trapped me in a dead end, as neatly as wolves work together to bring down a deer. I tried to dodge past them, but Brother Orphelin used his great weight to pin me against the wall, and Brother Lilburn caught my hands and tied them, bound my ankles together. They carried me back to the room where Robert waited, sleek and self-pleased.

I fought them like a feral cat, but they fastened the straps around my wrists, around my ankles; a strap across my neck threatened to strangle me, and I was forced to lie still. I cursed them, cursed Robert, my voice shrill and hard, the vowels thick as molasses, the voice of the whore I had been. I tried to bite Robert's fingers when he brought them near my head, but the strap cut into my jaw, and I could not keep him from touching my temples.

"Now," he said triumphantly, and I felt his fingers tense.

Pain explodes through my head like a swarm of iron hornets. A snake and a corpse and a terrible monstrous pig with tiny red eyes are staring down at me and laughing. I scream for help, but the Sunling is not there, and Joline is not there, and the ghosts in the corners are screaming, too. No one will help me.

The darkness swallows me alive.

Mildmay

On 11 Messidor, Cardenio found me.

I'd dumped everything—the rooms I rented, the fake names, the cat burglary on commission like I was some kind of flash merchant—and gone down into the Arcane, where nobody cared what you did and nobody'd go to the Dogs, no matter who you were. Nobody'd even tell the daylight world you existed. That's what the Arcane is for. I played cards for money—and every time I got up to go out to another bar and find another sheep, I hated myself for it—and sat in a shabby rented room and stared at the cheap lithograph of St. Suphrysa on the wall. I didn't get drunk. I didn't pick fights. I just sat there and waited for time to pass.

And on 11 Messidor, when I got up to go out, there was Cardenio in the lobby of the boardinghouse, clutching his black guild-hat like he was thinking of maybe tearing it in two.

"Nice earrings," I said.

I knew it right then, I think, but I followed him anyway.

Sometimes there's traps laid for you, and sometimes you deserve to walk into 'em I'd been down in the Dead Gallery before. It's this long natural gallery along the Sim, where it oxbows sideways under Havelock. They dug the Undercanal, sometime way back when, so that people using the river, like people always have, don't have to take a tour of the corpses—and there's a grating mesh, so the cade-skiffs don't got the river garbage coming through their guildhall—but the Sim's a big river, and it don't mind filling two channels. The river keeps the bodies at least kind of cool, and that seems to be worth the damp as far as the cade-skiffs are concerned. Or maybe they got some way of keeping the damp off. I don't know. There's torches every two septad-feet or so, and Cardenio grabbed an extra off the wall when we came in. They lay the corpses out on marble-topped tables that are probably worth more than Queensdock and Simside put together, and they cover 'em with whitework percale sheets. The sheets come from the convent of St. Lycoris in Britomart, where the nuns sew them as penance.

About halfway down the gallery, Cardenio stopped. He gave me a look that said he really didn't want to do this and he was sorry as a sick horse about it. Then he put the torch in an empty bracket, walked between two tables to the river end, and stripped the sheets back on both of 'em.