The Mirador (15 page)

All at once, suddenly enough that it scared me, he let out a shout and flung up his arms. Light, whiter and harder than anything I’d ever seen his magic do before, shot out from his fingertips to fill every corner and crack. There was a loud, sharp snap like a firecracker. When I looked, I saw that the manacles in the pentagram had all broken in half, right where he’d put those little greasy lumps. Every candle and piece of coal, even the candle in our lantern, burst into flames, burning so fast and hot that they went out again seconds later.

But there was nothing scary about the darkness they left, excepting of course where we were and what we were doing. I didn’t hear nothing strange or feel like anything was reaching for me. And it was probably only a second or two before Felix’s green witchlights woke up again. By their light, I saw that Felix’s chalk lines had disappeared, and the mosaic glass of the pentagram was all dull and cracked, like it’d been in a fire.

Felix was swaying where he stood. I scrambled up and got to him just before he fell. I had his full weight for a second before he got his feet under him again. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ve been facedown in this damn pentagram too many times already.” We staggered together out the door, where he leaned against the wall while I fetched the lantern.

“Let me see that a moment,” Felix said. I handed it over. He examined it from all sides, even touching the puddle of tallow with one finger. “That’s odd,” he said. “No magic is supposed to be able to cross that circle of protection—at least, according to the grimoire I found it in—but that spell certainly did.”

“Did it work—your spell, I mean?”

“I think so,” he said. “It’s a nebulous sort of thing to try to do, but I am at least sure that Malkar’s spirit—if there is anything left of it—can’t use this room as a focus to . . . restructure itself.”

“Restructure? You mean, like, come back?
Could
he have?”

“There are records of such things happening,” he said, pushing himself slowly off the wall. We both waited for a moment, but his legs held him. “Oh damn. The rubies.”

“The which?”

“Malkar’s rubies. I can’t leave them there.”

He went back into the workroom, moving about as fast as a slow turtle, and picked up his little greasy lumps of something-or-other, two at a time. Strych’s rubies. I swallowed hard, remembering like a fever-dream him kicking through Strych’s ashes, picking them out.

“How long you been carrying them around?” I asked when he came back into the hall, the rubies already back in their little bag and it already back in his pocket.

He shrugged. “I won’t have to any longer.”

“What’re you gonna do with ’em?”

He gave me a look, sidelong and very bright-eyed. “Oh I thought I’d give them to the necromancers down in Scaffelgreen. What do you
think
, dimwit?”

“Well, I dunno. Dunno what you’re s’posed to do with something like that.”

“There isn’t exactly an established protocol,” he said, real dry but not mean this time. “But I have some ideas.”

I didn’t want to know. Really didn’t.

He closed and locked the door, muttering a word to it that I didn’t catch. “
That
will be a surprise for whatever weasel has been sneaking down here.” I didn’t like the glint in his eye when he said it, but I didn’t like the idea of somebody poking around in that room, neither.

We started back up the hall together. “Who d’you think it was?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said, “and that worries me. Up until an hour ago, I would have said I was the only person in the Mirador Malkar trusted his hold on sufficiently to bring to that room.”

“Could somebody’ve found it by accident?”

“Not a chance. The spell on that door was specially tailored. I got past it because I helped him cast it—anyone trying to pick it, whether magically or physically, wouldn’t do anything but fuse the entire lock mechanism straight into the wall. No. Malkar trusted somebody enough either to teach them the spell . . . or give them the key.”

“Powers,” I said.

“What really worries me, though,” Felix said, “is if there’s anything in the Mirador that Malkar told this weasel about, and didn’t tell me.”

I didn’t have any kind of answer to that, but we walked a little closer together, like sheep who hear a wolf howling.

Dinner that evening was a peculiar meal. Felix and Mildmay were preoccupied with something which they weren’t sharing.

Sometimes you could feel the bonds between them, their blood-ties and the obligation d’âme, like a kind of wall—or the borders of a kingdom, as I’d thought that morning—and that was how it was tonight. Felix barely even seemed to notice when I remarked that Gideon and I had plans for the evening and would be out late; I saw Mildmay register the news, but he didn’t so much as lift an eyebrow at me. I hadn’t intended to keep it secret from him, exactly, but there seemed no point in discussing it when he and Felix were so clearly somewhere else. I could see in Gideon’s face when we closed the door behind us at quarter of nine that he was as relieved as I was.

We met Antony in the Stoa St. Maximilian and made our way down through the shadowed and derelict halls of the Mirador. Despite my crack about Gideon’s usefulness, Antony had brought a lamp, and I was glad of the homely light.

“So what is this theory you want to test?” I asked Antony.

“I did some checking. And reconfirmed everything I already knew, including the fact that Amaryllis Cordelia never returned to the Mirador after her husband lost his post. Not that she had much time to, since she died in childbirth two years later.”

“What was his name?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“His name. Mildmay couldn’t remember it.”

“Wilfrid, if you truly want to know. Wilfrid Emarthius. But my point is that that tomb has to be a blind. It must be concealing something.”

“Ah,” I said warily, but Gideon interrupted with a touch at my sleeve. His witchlights illuminated his tablet very nicely:
Who was Amaryllis Cordelia?

It was a fair question. It wasn’t hard to get Antony started, either, and the rest of the way to the crypt, we regaled Gideon with the sordid history of Amaryllis Cordelia.

The door was still unlocked. Antony led the way directly to Amaryllis Cordelia’s tomb. Gideon read the inscription and wrote thoughtfully,
Is this a common sentiment for memorials?

Antony considered a moment, taking candles from the sack he had brought and lighting them to let their wax anchor them to the freestanding tombs nearest Amaryllis Cordelia’s plaque. “I know of three or four variations on that same platitude. Why?”

Gideon shrugged, running his fingers over the deeply carved letters of her name, and then wrote,
Only a folk belief
common in the Grasslands, that ghosts are the dreams of the dead.

“You mean someone was trying to avert haunting?” I said.

Possibly. From what you said of her life, I can understand not wanting her ghost to walk.

“It’s an interesting idea,” Antony said, “but it hardly matters, because she isn’t here.”

“Do you think it’s just a fake, then? Nothing but the slab?”

“I think it’s a riddle,” Antony said, and the unsettling light in his eyes wasn’t all reflections from the candles.

Gideon and I exchanged an uneasy look. “What kind of riddle? ”

“What better place to hide secrets than in a crypt?” Antony said, flourishing a crowbar he’d pulled out of his sack.

“Don’t answer questions with questions, Antony,” I said.

He glared at me. “You need not help if you don’t want to, but kindly don’t get in the way.”

I promptly got in the way. “I want to think this through again.”

“What is there to think through? An obviously,
demonstrably
false tomb—it’s only logical to assume that it’s a hiding place for something.”

“But what in the world—”

“That,” said Antony, stepping around me, “is what I intend to find out.”

The tombs of the Cordelii had been designed so that one
could
open them again without breaking anything, if one really wanted to. I wondered morbidly, watching with Gideon as Antony levered the stone out of the wall, if that had been in case they forgot and buried one of the kings with his heart still in his body. I hadn’t meant to help—this felt wrong to me, and I was increasingly sure I wanted no part of it—but I ended up taking one end of the stone, just to keep it from smashing to bits on the floor. I figured we’d be putting it back in another couple minutes.

It was a thin stone, not as heavy as I’d expected; on the count of three, Antony and I pulled it free of the wall and laid it down.

Gideon screamed.

I had never heard him make a noise before, not once since Bernard Heber and Mildmay had hauled him out of the oubliette in Aiaia. At first, I didn’t even connect the noise with Gideon but looked frantically up at the tomb, assuming in some morbid madness that such an awful, senseless sound had to have come from there.

I might have screamed myself; later, I found my memory of the next few seconds vague, until I was standing, with Gideon and Antony, pressed back like cornered animals against the tomb of Geoffrey Cordelius, the same one Mildmay and I had sat on as he told me the story of Amaryllis Cordelia and her ambition.

There was a body in the wall niche, now slumped halfway out; Gideon later confessed that for a moment he had thought the body was a ghoul, like the ones that infested the swamps to the south of the city. It was richly clothed in a gown of what had once been velvet, black stitched with white seed pearls; its hair, long and colorless, was dressed under a cap of the same. The eyelids were open, the sockets clotted and staring. The hands had petrified into claws, and every time I tried to close my eyes that night, I saw them again.

“It wasn’t a riddle,” Antony said in a dull, dazed voice. “It was the literal truth.”

“
Is
it her? I hate to ask, but, really,
is
it?”

“The ring she’s wearing.” Antony pointed with a none-too-steady finger. The ring, plainly visible on the corpse’s dangling left hand, was a huge beryl signet. “It’s the Emarthius unicorn holding a rose. That’s
her
signet. It’s her.”

“God,” I said.

We have to put her back,
Gideon wrote, in straggling, wobbly letters completely unlike his normal handwriting.

Antony and I looked at him in horror.

We can’t leave her like that.

“God,” I said again, knowing he was right. “Who’s going to touch her?”

We looked at each other. I had seen death before. But this thing which had once been Amaryllis Cordelia . . . I bit back the question rattling around my skull: do you suppose she died before or after they put that stone in place?

“I’ll do it,” Antony said. “It is, after all, my fault.” Neither Gideon nor I was moved to protest. Antony carefully lifted the corpse back into its niche and laid it out flat; he put the dreadful claws together over its chest, the beryl signet uppermost, in a parody of peace.

I helped Antony guide the tombstone back into place. It was harder to lift than it’d been to let down; in the end Gideon had to help after all, bracing it as we lined it up with its tiny grooves. When it slotted back into place, it did so with a sudden thump of finality.

Antony blew out the candles, leaving them where they stood, as if Amaryllis Cordelia’s tomb were a kind of shrine. As if the rumor he’d mentioned, about burning offerings in the crypt of the Cordelii, was starting, in a strange backward way, to come true. He collected the lamp, and we left; I looked back once, seeing the inscription stark with shadows. All things considered, I thought that was the kindest wish one could make for Amaryllis Cordelia, and I made it a prayer of my own as I closed the door of the crypt: God grant her sleep be dreamless.

Chapter 4

When we got back from the Warren, we found Gideon, Mehitabel, and Lord Antony huddled around our fireplace like kids who’ve been told too many stories about the Tallowman to be able to sleep. I think me and Felix felt about the same.

“What is this,” Felix said, “a second Cabal?”

“Not exactly,” Mehitabel said. “Oh, Felix, this is Antony Lemerius. Antony, Felix.” But you could see she’d done it by reflex, like good manners were so ingrained she couldn’t ever get quit of them. Her mind was really somewhere else. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her look that spooked, not even in Aiaia. “We just . . .” She trailed off.

“We just found something,” Lord Antony said, almost like he was apologizing.

Mehitabel gave a laugh that sounded as fake as a four-centime piece and told us about their return trip to the crypt of the Cordelii.

“Sacred bleeding
fuck
,” I said.

“Rather,” Felix said. “Why would anyone do that?”

“More than that,” Lord Antony said. “Who’s buried at Diggory Chase?”

“And Gideon wants to know,” Felix said, “why it is commonly believed that she was Amaryllis Cordelia.”