Reign of Beasts (21 page)

Lysandor would have been disappointed that I began my new life without letting go of the old. But it wasn't as if he cared enough to come back and check on what I'd done with his gift.

As with any mask, my best performance will be the next one. Right around the corner. Not long now.

T
ierce fell, and that was the beginning of the end for all of us. Heliora told us it was to happen, and there was a moment when we thought — all of us — perhaps we could stop it. We looked to Garnet to see what we should do. He walked away, up into his rooms alone, and drank himself into unconsciousness.

‘At least he still has a soul,' Livilla said to me, when no one else was listening. Then she laughed. ‘Not sure I do. Who gives a frig about Tierce really? We have our own city to worry about.'

It was one of the last times she spoke to me as if we were friends.

When Garnet didn't emerge for several days, I took my life into my own hands and went in after him. Made him drink water and one of the healing tisanes we used in the theatre to keep our voices fresh and our heads clear for performance.

He sighed, and leaned into me. ‘Have you ever had to make a terrible choice, little rat?'

I thought of the stagemaster of the Vittorina Royale and the way his throat had felt breaking under my hands. One of many dreadful things I had done, but that choice had been so simple and mundane. I still heard the voices of the
dead every time I closed my eyes and slept with Saturn's pocket watch beneath my pillow.

‘Yes, my Power,' I said.

‘Good,' he muttered. ‘Let us be monsters together, then.'

I wanted to give him something, a keepsake, a treasure. Something to show him that he wasn't alone, that no matter how many times Ashiol and Livilla broke his heart, there was someone who would always be his. I only had one treasure, apart from the faded playbill that meant something only to me. I stroked Garnet's damp hair back from his face, and made him cup his hands, then dropped the fob watch into them. The chain slithered against his skin, and for a moment I felt lighter, as if I'd done the right thing.

He sighed again and smiled at me. The best of smiles. ‘It's beautiful.'

‘It's yours,' I said in a quiet breath of a voice, meaning something else.

He drew me close and kissed me, his mouth brushing my forehead and then my lips. ‘I will never forget,' he said softly, ‘that you stayed.'

I wanted to be warmed by those words, but his face crumpled as he remembered that the ones he had loved best didn't love him enough.

 

Garnet had bad dreams after that, worse than ever. They tormented him. It's hard to remain sane on so little sleep, especially in a world like ours, where death must be constantly fought against.

I had no courtesi to worry about (nor ever would, that was my promise to myself; we all have to choose our own paths to stay as human as we can) and so would sometimes visit him in the Haymarket when Livilla or Ashiol were sleeping elsewhere. I would curl up as rats on the foot of his bed and keep him company so that someone would be there when he screamed himself awake.

Yes, I was in love with him. That much must be obvious by now.

‘Poet,' he whispered one day in the darkened bedchamber. ‘Do you hate me?'

‘Never,' I sighed, shaping back into human the better to talk. ‘Hush, don't be stupid.'

‘The bitch Heliora won't see the futures for me.'

‘I know. Doesn't matter.'

‘Of course it matters, Poet. Everything matters. I've been to every fortune-teller in the city. Hacks and charlatans, most of them. And yet … twelve of them have said the same thing to me. It must be true.'

‘What must be true?'

‘That I will die by fire.'

That woke me up. ‘You won't die. I won't let you.'

‘Sweet boy,' he sighed, and reached down to grasp my hand. He tugged me to lie beside him, the blanket tangled between his body and mine. ‘We screwed you up good and proper, didn't we?'

‘I wouldn't worry about that,' I said, watching his chest rise and fall in the dim light. ‘I was never going to amount to much.'

 

My life separated into two halves. At the Vittorina Royale, I was the lord and master, the Orphan Princel, stellar and stagemaster rolled into one. Some of them feared me — when I was displeased, I could channel Tasha or Garnet pretty damned effectively. Others looked up to me.

There were new children every year: pages and scrappers learning the trade, scrabbling to get a chance on stage. I saw myself in every single one of them.

Then there was the other nox, the one that lit up the sky after the theatres had closed. I became the Lord of Rats, though Garnet and Ashiol and even Livilla still thought of me as the lamb, the youngest one, not worth worrying
about. They were at war, the three of them, and yet each thought me neutral.

When Garnet started torturing Ashiol, punishing him in public and in private, locking him in that dark room and using the net or the blades to show him just who was Power and Majesty, Livilla chose a side. Suddenly her love for Garnet was eternal. She stopped running to Ashiol when Garnet was in a temper with her; instead, she amused herself with her courteso, who at least treated her like she was important. I knew she was frigging Mars long before anyone else did. I don't know why people tell me these things.

It bemused me, the way the Lords and Court and Kings opened themselves to each other so easily. Did they have so little regard for their safety that they would let a wolf, snake, panther into their bed for the sake of a quick tumble? I remembered the cleverness of Argentin and took no lovers from the Creature Court. Why should I, when there were so many eager boy actors desperate to catch the eye of the oddly young stagemaster and stellar of the Vittorina Royale, each hoping I would give him a part in our latest pageant.

Sometimes I even brought the boys down to the Shambles, to the cozy grocer's-shop apartment that I took for myself once I was a Lord. It was easy enough to dodge the rest of the Creature Court as I had the Shambles to myself, and a glass of doped imperium after the fact ensured that my lovers never found their way back down into the tunnels.

It added to my mystique, I like to think.

 

It was my seventeenth birthday, and I was feeling nostalgic. I bought oysters at the docks and wandered along the embankment, eating them until my mouth dripped with salt water and lime juice. It was a strange life I had made for myself, though, to be fair, I knew of no sensible alternative.

I would never return to my seaside town, I knew that then as now. We would hardly recognise each other, Oyster and I. For a moment, I wondered what it might have been like if we had never left. If Madalena had been there to play mam and give me a new shirt to celebrate the day, or at least buy me a pot at the alehouse.

Certainly I would not be stagemaster if I had stayed there. But what would I be? Perhaps I was always meant to be a monster even if my life was mundane. I might drink too much and beat my wife, demand sugared almonds and orangeade before every performance. Perhaps I would have died of a cold before I turned ten. There is no sense wondering about such things. The futures are endless possibilities, and all we have is who we are from one moment to the next.

When I returned to my warm nook above the grocer's shop, I found Livilla waiting for me, drunk on my most expensive imperium. From the smell of her, she'd found some herbal remedies to ease the passage of the drink.

‘What's all this, sweetling?' I asked, trying not to show how annoyed I was by her presence. No sleep for me now if I had to cart her across the Arches and dump her back in Garnet's bed.

‘He doesn't love me,' she said into her glass.

Oh, one of those mornings indeed.

‘If you wanted love in the traditional way, you should have chosen worthier objects,' I said, which was true and yet applied to me as well as her.

‘I should be everything to him. I should be everything to someone,' she said, the last of her drink slopping out of her glass and onto my expensive rug.

I relieved her of her glass. ‘Is it Ashiol or Garnet making you miserable?'

‘Both of them.'

Ah, and wasn't that that a fine problem?

‘They'll never love anyone the way they love each other,'
I said, and threw a blanket over her. ‘Something we all have to live with.'

I had a choice then: to drag drunken Livilla home, or to wait and deal with cranky, hungover Livilla sometime in the future. I chose the latter.

The other choice would have found Ashiol healing from his latest punishments in Garnet's bed. The outcome, with a miserable Livilla thrown into the mix, would almost certainly have been different. But how was I to know that?

 

Once Livilla woke, groaning and complaining before she even opened her eyes, I forced her to eat bread and honey, which she threw up in my kitchen. I sponged her face and dressed her in a suit of my own, vaguely recalling the times I had tended to Madalena after she had been in her cups.

Livilla said little about Ashiol and Garnet, though it was clear from her melancholy the two had at least temporarily reconciled from their latest fight and neither had a thought for her. It was tempting to ask whether she preferred it when Garnet had Ashiol chained up as punishment for some imaginary rebellion, but she was too miserable for sarcasm and I took pity on her. Silence suited us both for once.

We reached the Haymarket eventually, and when she stared at the steps with an utter lack of recognition as to how to use them, I helped her up as far as the balcony.

The doors flew open and Garnet burst out, looking worse than Livilla. He was wide-eyed, terrified, and hung over the balcony rail as if the sky itself were after him.

‘What have you done?' said Livilla in a deadened voice, and it occurred to me that perhaps her misery was not at all about how much either of the cubs loved her, or how much they loved each other. Something had happened here, and I had been too distracted with my own life to see it clearly.

‘He's dead,' said Garnet in a gasp. ‘I've killed him.'

He was naked, and smelled of sex and animor, too much animor. He shone like a beacon, the power pouring out through the motes in his skin.

I couldn't feel Ashiol. Not at all.

I went to the door of the room and saw him sprawled on the bed, his body unnaturally still. I heard the sob that caught in Livilla's throat and stuck there. I could hear Garnet's heart beating louder and louder, too fast.

‘You'll have to make them think you meant to do it,' I said, when I had a voice.

This was nothing. Garnet had killed Tasha. He was one of the beasts who had ripped Madalena to pieces. What was one more beloved corpse?

I made my way to the bed and stood over Ashiol. He didn't breathe or move, and there was no animor in him. He was empty, like someone had carved out his insides, taken everything that made him himself.

This is what happens to the people Garnet loves
, I thought, traitorously, and laid one hand on Ashiol's bare chest.

He woke up, and started screaming with a pain and anger I'd never heard, not from any of them. He was still empty.

Garnet and Ashiol had been trained and punished by some of the harshest monsters the Creature Court had ever produced and yet no one could hurt them as deeply as they could hurt each other.

 

While Garnet buried his anguish in every potion he could get his hands on, and Livilla stayed at his side to lick up every fallen drop, it fell to me to cart Ashiol to the people of the daylight who might care for him.

Mars helped. He was Livilla's courteso now, but he had served Ashiol once. He said little to me as we carried Ashiol's inert body up through Saturn's old Eyrie and
towards the Palazzo on the top of the hill. Garnet had drugged Ashiol to dampen his screams, dosing him with so much poppy juice we were lucky he hadn't killed him all over again.

‘I didn't know it was possible,' Mars said, breaking his silence as we laid Ashiol on the Palazzo steps. ‘To drain a man of animor. A King …'

‘There is much the Power and Majesty can do that we could never understand,' I said.

We walked away and left Ashiol to be found by his daylight family and their servants. He lived, though it wasn't long before we heard that he had left the city.

Mars had a point. No one had ever heard of a King being drained of his animor. It was possible to give and take animor, to share it when your Lord needed greater strength, to bestow it when your courtesi were wounded … but this was unheard of. The only conclusion we could reach was that Ashiol had given it of his own free will, but that hardly fitted with the facts known.

I went through Saturn's books again, hunting for some answers as to what powers Garnet had, and what he had done to Ashiol, but they provided little.

There was one book missing. I counted and checked several times to be sure. I knew it; had once deciphered several pages of inane theories about creatures that lay beyond the sky and how we could communicate with them. I didn't know what the rest of the volume held. But I found a single fine red hair in the chest and knew who had stolen it from me.

Apparently, my capacity for forgiveness is infinite. It's important to know these things about yourself.

T
he train journey south brought memories crashing in on Ashiol. He kept flashing back to that day five years ago when he had awoken, still half-drugged, miserable, broken, to find himself in a carriage en route to Diamagne. Three blank-faced lictors had been his only companions, charged with ensuring he arrive alive at his stepfather's estate. (No, not stepfather; his brother's estate. Diamagne was dead, there was a letter, but Ashiol had been so caught up in Garnet and his madness that he hadn't even sent a card of consolation to his mother.) Ashiol had spent most of that journey trying to figure out how to steal one of those axes that the lictors carried, or to escape them long enough to throw himself off the train.

The smell of smoke and steam, the coal dust and the constant noise — rattle bang, rattle bang, rattle bang — were the same. It was even the same fucking train line. Heading south. He was running away from Garnet again, all over again. Garnet was back from the dead and Ashiol was still running, tail between his legs, choosing some form of survival over doing what he should have done years ago.

He should have put Garnet in the fucking ground and ensured he stayed there.

Last time, Ashiol had abandoned Heliora, Livilla, Poet, everyone he loved. He had been sick and wounded, empty of his animor, thinking of nothing but how to end it, how to get another drink, how to find some kind of fucking oblivion. He had told himself he had no choice. The betrayal had been too great.

‘Forgive me,' Garnet breathed, kissing the marks that the net had burnt into Ashiol's shoulders, down his back. ‘I was angry.'

Ashiol closed his eyes, feeling the imprint of Garnet's mouth slowly trailing down his spine. ‘You have to trust me. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going to take anything from you.'

Last time, Ashiol had been a wreck, powerless, his life at an end. The train journey had represented failure.

This time, he wore a respectable suit and sat in the first-class carriage opposite his cousin, the Duchessa d'Aufleur. Isangell sat upright, formal in her travelling attire, a little suit with a long skirt reaching to her ankles, her blonde bob concealed under a cloche hat.

The blank-faced lictors were the same. There were maids, too, just as blank. Ashiol had never bothered to learn their names. They were interchangeable.

He made occasional attempts at conversation, but Isangell gave only short, clipped answers. She still didn't trust that he was doing this for her and not some other Ashiol-specific reason; and besides, the very fact that she was travelling so far to find a husband was entirely his fault. He couldn't blame her for hating him right now.

Garnet's mouth was in the small of his back now, his hands splayed over Ashiol's hips. ‘Never again,' he whispered. ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry …'

Ashiol gasped softly at the touching, fingers, mouth, light pressure here, and then there. ‘I always forgive you, bastard,' he said, and then there were no words, there was just
Garnet, mouth, tongue, lips, lick, lick, lick, fingers warm and urgent and everywhere …

When he came it was with a scream, and the pleasure dissolved into something else, something bad and dark and fierce that latched on and ripped him into pieces.

Ashiol blinked, back in the carriage, staring guiltily at Isangell. ‘What did you say?'

She gave him an acid look that said
I knew you would be no help whatsoever
. ‘Have you ever been to Bazeppe?'

‘No. Mother used to send there for her dresses, or to have Diamagne's clocks mended, and sometimes she went for … some kind of season? She took Bryn there to find himself a wife. I think she preferred to avoid Aufleur if she could.'

‘Aunt Augusta has good taste. Bazeppe's costumiers are said to be the best in the world,' Isangell said primly.

‘You don't have to do this,' he said in a low voice. ‘It's too soon.'

‘I was always going to have to find a husband, Ashiol,' she said, sounding very much like her mother. ‘Silly to postpone the inevitable.'

‘So what are we looking for?' he drawled. ‘Some older man who will take the reins of the city from you and tell you not to bother your pretty head? Or a young fop who'll be so busy trying on apricot cravats and buggering the footmen that he won't get in your way?'

Isangell stared at him, half-shocked, then burst into peals of laugher. ‘Oh, they both sound such charmers. I'm glad you're here to put it all into perspective.'

 

It was late in the day when they arrived at the station just north of the city walls. Isangell stood, pale and swaying as she contemplated what lay ahead of them. Ashiol took her arm.

‘You're worth more than any of them put together,' he said in a low voice. ‘Don't convince yourself otherwise. You're offering some lucky arsehole the chance of a lifetime.'

She squeezed his hand gratefully and then released it, the mask of formality coming down. ‘Please walk a few steps behind. I don't want you to spoil my entrance.'

For once, Ashiol did what he was supposed to do.

There was a metallic tinge to the air as they stepped out onto the platform. The city of Bazeppe smelled like coal dust and machinery. Steam swirled around them, thick and masking everything from view.

It cleared to show a retinue of lictors in scarlet and gold livery lined up like toy soldiers on the platform. They saluted as Isangell approached. A gentleman in a bottle-green striped suit and top hat stepped forward to make a formal bow. He had a bristly moustache, and his monocle almost popped out as he straightened.

‘High and brightness, you honour us with your presence. I am Jenkingworth, Minister of Mechanism, and on behalf of the Duc-Elected Henri of Bazeppe, I welcome you to our fair city.'

Isangell bowed her own head graciously. ‘I am glad to be here, Minister.'

The station gates jerked open as if pulled on strings and Minister Jenkingworth led them towards an unlikely contraption. ‘If you would like to take your seat, high and brightness?'

Ashiol reached out a hand to Isangell before she could move. ‘What the saints is that?' he asked, curbing his tongue against more violent swearing.

Minister Jenkingworth smiled broadly. ‘Why, Seigneur Ducomte, that is an automobile. One of Duc-Elected Henri's personal fleet, as it happens. His pride and joy. It took a long time to source the racing-green paint, but the effect is rather splendid, don't you agree?'

‘Isangell,' Ashiol said in a low voice, ‘you can't step into some random mechanised cabriolet you know nothing about. It looks dangerous.'

‘Nonsense,' Isangell said defiantly, and allowed the
Minister to hand her into the machine. ‘We don't want to insult Duc-Elected Henri,' she added, smiling brightly.

Glaring and grumbling, Ashiol followed her. The whole damned city smelled like metal and thunderstorms. The hairs on the back of his neck spiked up and it was all he could do not to snatch Isangell up and abduct her back onto the train and away.

‘What marvellously impressive factories,' Isangell said as they jerked along in the ‘automobile', which had a growl like a wounded panther. ‘The smokestacks are so very high.'

‘We pride ourselves on our industry,' the Minister said, as if it was the culmination of his life's desires to explain the history of Bazeppe to a pretty young demoiselle. ‘Our clock factory is the finest in the known world.'

‘Goodness,' said Isangell, while Ashiol muttered darkly to himself and tuned out the educational ramblings.

The lands around the city were flat enough that you could see much further than you could from the shambling urban hills of Aufleur. The buildings were taller, for the most part, and there was a pale greyness to them. Steam was everywhere: funnelling out of factory stacks, rising from the urban outline and clouding the air around them.

Ashiol roused himself long enough to hear Minister Jenkingworth promise Isangell something called a ‘princessa clock', which was apparently all the rage with the demoiselles this year.

Isangell demurred and told him that clockwork mechanisms were considered unlucky within the city bounds of Aufleur.

‘Good gracious, how do you live?' the Minister said in surprise. ‘No, no, I'm sorry, that was dreadfully rude. Religious compunctions are the backbone of society, of course.'

Ashiol could not help but be reminded of the endless tick, tick, tick of his stepfather's clock collection. Diamagne would have loved this fellow.

After a circuitous route designed to show Isangell the glories of the city, with Ashiol gritting his teeth at every bump and jolt in the road, they arrived at a wide tree-lined avenue leading up to a grand Palazzo. There were statues everywhere: along the road, and the stone edgings of the Palazzo, and overlooking them from the roof. They all gleamed metallically in the wintry sunshine.

Finally the fucking inhuman rattletrap juddered to a halt, almost flinging them out in the process, and Ashiol could breathe again. He stepped out, and allowed Minister Jenkingworth to help Isangell, relinquishing his own role as consort with a combination of resentment and guilty relief.

As they walked towards the Palazzo, every statue came to life, saluting in jerky, automated fashion. Ashiol jumped and swore, while the Minister blithely pretended he hadn't heard the stream of profanity. Fucker.

‘Don't mind our saints,' he said, leading Isangell forward. ‘They don't bite, ha-ha, though you wouldn't want them to, would you. Don't fancy a pair of bronze choppers sinking into your leg.'

Bronze. The statues — the saints — were bronze, but articulated: an army of clockwork men with faces as flat and emotionless as those of Isangell's maids and lictors. Ashiol was so busy staring at them, he almost missed the appearance of Duc-Elected Henri, who emerged from the large doors to hold out both his hands to Isangell. He was every bit as sartorially splendid as the Minister of Mechanism, in a bright purple coat and red boots, and both his moustache and beard rivalled Minister Jenkingworth's for bushiness.

‘My dear demoiselle Duchessa, how splendid, how lovely, what roses you have in your cheeks, I had no idea what a tulip you are, the very pink of health, excellent, excellent …' The man appeared never to breathe between words, let alone sentences. He turned on Ashiol with the same degree
of gush. ‘My word, Ducomte Ashiol, is it, I know your mother well, excellent madame, such impeccable taste, the most educational dinner conversation, quite an elegante, we do miss her these days, you must give her my very best wishes, very best.'

They were ushered into the main foyer, through doors that steamed and hissed as they opend and closed.

‘Automation — a curse and a blessing,' Duc-Elected Henri said gaily. ‘The entire mechanism broke down once and we had to go in and out of windows for a week; rather bracing but hard on the knees, don't you know.'

Automation. It was everywhere. The Palazzo gulped and spat steam and smoke like it was some sort of mad, hissing dragon creature. The cats inside Ashiol wanted to run away, but he had to stay at Isangell's side, had to prove to himself that he was here for a reason. That he hadn't fled Aufleur like a coward.

This is where I am meant to be. I owe her this much.

The taste of iron clung to the back of his throat, but he forced himself to accept port from Duc-Elected Henri and, if not to make polite conversation, at least to glower in the corner with a semblance of civilisation.

‘I am delighted, beyond delighted, terribly honoured, that you have chosen to seek a consort among our humble people,' Henri was saying, so earnest and polite that Ashiol entertained himself by wondering what noises the Duc-Elected would make if all his fingers happened to get broken, one by one, in some kind of dreadful accident.

‘It seemed a politic choice,' said Isangell. ‘Our own city is so inward looking, with the Great Families dancing around each other in the hope of some slight crumbs of power. I do not want a husband whose agenda is separate from my own.'

‘Quite wise, quite wise,' said Duc-Elected Henri, his head bobbing with enthusiasm. ‘We have a small reception for you this evening, discreet, merely a few notables who
wish to make your acquaintance, some refreshments. I trust you are not too tired from your journey to attend?'

‘Nothing would give us greater pleasure,' said Isangell.

Ashiol, naturally, was not consulted. Silence seemed appropriate, especially if kidnapping Isangell and taking her home weren't an option.

‘Marvellous,' said Duc-Elected Henri, and laughed merrily as a huge clock in the corner exploded with noise to chime the hour. Echoes were heard throughout the Palazzo. There were clocks everywhere, ticking, chiming, so fucking delighted to be in synchronisation with each other.

Isangell smiled politely.

Ashiol estimated the measurements of the windows, in order to determine which would be easiest to jump out of.