The Mirador (26 page)

Felix sent me away the moment court was over, and I was glad of it. I had shit I needed to do, and I needed to figure out how I was going to do it without getting my stupid self beaten up again.

Keeper—I mean Kolkhis—Kolkhis wanted to know why Jenny Dawnlight had gotten herself arrested in Laceshroud with a corpse. And I’d admit if you pushed me that I was curious, too. I mean, it really wasn’t Jenny’s kind of thing. And more than that, I’d made a bargain with Kolkhis, and if I blew it, not only would I never find out who’d gotten Ginevra killed, it’d be all over the Lower City between one septad-day and the next. And what the Lower City knew, the Mirador would find out sooner or later, and the thought made me want to crawl into a hole and die. So, yeah, the question of what the fuck Jenny thought she was doing needed some answering.

Since I wasn’t about to go to the Kennel and ask Jenny herself, I’d have to try and find out some other way. Starting maybe with who’d sent her, because you could’ve told me it’d all been her idea until you were bright purple, and I wouldn’t’ve believed you. Somebody
sent
her. And it didn’t take much thinking to figure that the place to start asking about that somebody was with the resurrectionists.

’Course, as far as I was concerned, it might as well have been the moon. I couldn’t go down there. I’d get my ass kicked back to the Mirador so fast my head would still be spinning when Felix took it off my shoulders for me.

And then I thought: no, what I
can’t
do is go alone. What point is there in being surrounded by hocuses if you don’t make use of ’em?

My first thought was to ask Felix, but that wasn’t going to work. I mean, part of it might’ve—Felix loved mysteries, too— but the other part, the part about going down the city. Felix wouldn’t do that for me, and if he knew I was thinking about it, he’d forbid me, just like he’d said. I could only think of a couple hocuses who might help me.

At least I knew where to find them.

Simon answered the door when I knocked. “Mildmay!” He didn’t say,
What are you doing here?
but he never had any luck keeping what he was thinking off his face.

“It ain’t for Felix,” I said, ’cause I figured he’d want to know that right off.

“What isn’t—oh, never mind. Come in.”

Rinaldo was settled in by the fire with his coat and boots off and his waistcoat unbuttoned. He cracked an eye at me. “
Don’t
say you want me to go anywhere, there’s a good fellow.”

“Nah. Just wanted to ask Simon . . .”

“Just wanted to ask Simon what?” said Simon. “Sit down. Or can’t you stay?”

“He’s off doing something of his own.” I sat down so as to make Simon happy.

“Felix and his little mysteries,” Rinaldo grumbled. “And you’re no better. What
did
happen to you?”

“I told you. Got in a fight.”

“And you don’t want to talk about it. Yes, we know.”

“It . . . it wasn’t Felix, was it?” Simon said anxiously.

I didn’t mean to laugh, but powers and saints. Like Felix had the least idea of how to go about doing this kind of damage. “Nah. Some goons down in Gilgamesh.”

Rinaldo opened both eyes. “And what, pray tell, were you doing in Gilgamesh?”

This was about where the fight with Felix had started last night. I didn’t want to fight with Rinaldo—and Simon, because I wasn’t confused about whose side he’d come down on—and I didn’t want to lie to them. But I also
really
didn’t want to talk about Ginevra. Because for one thing—well, I just didn’t want to. But for another, before I could make them understand what Ginevra had to do with getting the shit kicked out of myself in Gilgamesh, I’d have to explain about Keeper—which I also didn’t want to do, thanks—and kept-thieves and how the Lower City worked, and it’d be the septad-night before I got anywhere close to talking about Jenny.

So I didn’t want to lie, but if I could just leave out some of the middle of the truth . . . I said, “A gal I used to know is in the Kennel.”

“I’m sorry,” Simon said. “I
can’t
have heard you right.”

Powers. “The Ebastine. She got picked up in Laceshroud—”

“In
Laceshroud
?” Rinaldo said.

“For digging up a dead guy,” I said, more or less over him, and I felt like I deserved a round of applause or something just for getting the whole damn sentence out.

“She was caught exhuming a corpse in the oldest cemetery in Mélusine,” Rinaldo said, kind of slow, like he wanted to be sure he understood.

“Yeah.”

“You want to help her?” Simon said.

“Sort of. I mean, yeah, but I wanna know what she was doing digging people up. She ain’t no resurrectionist.”

“A what?” said Rinaldo.

“Resurrectionist. Don’t they trade with the Mirador?”

“I don’t think I understand,” Rinaldo said. “Again, what are resurrectionists?”

“Um,” I said. “People that go around digging up dead people. ”

“Why?” said Simon.

“Well, ’cause people will pay ’em for it.”

“What sort of people?”

“Um, well, the necromancers in Scaffelgreen. And there’s a market for hair and sometimes people are buried with jewelry and shit like that.” You can make a profit off most anything in the Lower City.

“Are they organized?” Simon said. “Like kept-thieves or the assassins’ guild?”

“There ain’t no assassins’ guild. Never has been. But, yeah, the resurrectionists got a kind of system worked out, so they don’t go cheating each other or nothing. They even got a kind of guildhall out in Ruthven.”

“So why don’t you go ask them?”

“Well . . . um . . .”

“What?”

“That’s sort of what I need help for.”

“What do you mean?”

“I go down there by myself, I won’t get nothing. ’Cept another fight. I . . . I ain’t exactly popular in the Lower City no more.”

“Ah,” said Rinaldo. “Because of Felix?”

“Because of a lot of things,” I said, and I didn’t mean to sound so tired.

“So,” Simon said, “where do I fit into this?”

My face went red, but I said it anyway. “The one thing nobody in the Lower City will fuck with is the Mirador’s tattoos.”

“Oh, then I’ll come,” Simon said, like it was no big deal.

I couldn’t keep from asking, “Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes,” Simon said. “It sounds interesting.”

“Powers, you’re crazier’n I am. But thanks. When d’you want to go?”

“Tomorrow won’t do. I’ve got a committee meeting. What about Mardy afternoon?”

“Fine by me. I’ll show up here when Felix is done with me.”

And maybe it was dumb, but I felt better. Because I could put off seeing Septimus Wilder again for another couple days.

It took us a little over four hours that afternoon to read through a play that would take two-and-a-half in performance, not counting intermissions. The language was hard, and Jean-Soleil was visited by occasional spurts of enthusiasm, when he had to stop and try a scene again with a different interpretation.

After the read-through was finally over and Jean-Soleil had bolted off to his office with scribbled-over wax tablets to wrestle out a plan for the play, Gordeny Fisher approached me hesitantly.

“Madame Parr,” she said with an awkward bob that wasn’t quite a curtsy.

“Don’t do that,” I said, and remembered to smile at her. “You’re Madame Fisher yourself now, you know.”

"S’pose I am,” she said; her eyes widened with wonder, and for a moment she looked like the street urchin I was sure she had been.

“A lifetime’s aspiration achieved?”

“Oh, nothing like that. Just, you know how sometimes you end up places you’d never’ve thought you wanted to go?”

“Yes.”

“I remember coming to a play here once when I was real little, and if you’d told me then I was gonna be one of them fine ladies up there on the stage saying all that poetry, I’d probably’ve blacked your eye. I was a hellcat.”

“What
did
you think you wanted to do?”

“Oh, kids get all sorts of crazy ideas. But I wanted to ask you . . .”

“Yes?” I wasn’t going to pursue the evasion.

She made a charming, nervous grimace. “Do you know, have I done something to make Mr. Baillie not like me?”

Drin. “Has he been making himself unpleasant?”

“No,” she said, although she clearly wasn’t sure of it. “It’s mostly the way he looks at me. I mean, maybe I’m imagining things or being too sensitive, but I didn’t . . .”

Damn you, Drin. “It’s nothing you’ve done. It’s just Drin. He doesn’t like change.”

“He don’t like girls from Queensdock, you mean.”

“Doesn’t.”

“Doesn’t,” she agreed, but her amber eyes remained steadfastly on my face.

“No, you’re right. Drin thinks . . .” Oh dear, how to put it? “He thinks you might have an unsavory past.”

She burst out laughing, a warm, full-bodied, infectious laugh as compelling as her speaking voice. “Me? I’m just a docker’s kid. Poor but virtuous, that was my parents.”

“I didn’t say
I
believed it,” I said, although my suspicion was that Drin was more right than wrong. Gordeny Fisher would clearly tell lies with the same candid air with which she told the truth. And what
had
she wanted to be when she grew up? “Drin has a fertile imagination.”

“Well, if that’s the problem, there ain’t—I mean, I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do about it.”

“Give him time,” I said. “He’ll come around.”

She thanked me and sauntered off, as nonchalant as an alley cat. I hoped that what I had told her was true, and also that Gordeny Fisher’s secrets were not going to turn and bite her.

My own secrets, with their fierce panoply of teeth, were waiting for me in my dressing room. Vulpes was sitting with his feet up on my dressing table, reading my copy of
The Wrong Brother
.

He looked up as I came in; the door closed and bolted behind me, and he said, “What in the name of God did you do to Mildmay Foxe?”

I considered my options for a split second. A little misdirection wouldn’t hurt, and I was calm enough that what had been real with Stephen would be playacting with Vulpes. “Nothing,” I snarled. “Get out of my chair.”

He got up, smirking, and I sat down in front of the mirror and began viciously pulling the pins out of my hair. “What do you want now?”

“What happened to Mildmay Foxe?”

“Somebody beat him up,” I said and left the words
you moron
palpable but unspoken.

“Was it Felix?”

The idea was laughable, so I laughed at it. “No.”

“How can you be sure?”

"I know both of them,” I said, hard and sharp enough to sting.

“I see.” Sulky, and that was a real pleasure to hear. He switched topics. “How many wizards do you think will accept the amnesty?”

“Good God, how should I know? Surely you, lieutenant, are in a better position to answer that than I.”

In the mirror, I watched him start to pace. “An opinion then, Maselle Cressida. How many do you
think
?”

“I can’t imagine what good my opinion will do you, but I don’t believe that any of the wizards who have taken the Mirador’s vows will return to the Bastion. They don’t trust General Parsifal.”

“Yes,” he said, peevishly. “The busy tongue of Thaddeus de Lalage.”

“Don’t put it all on Thaddeus,” I said. “Eric Ogygios will never trust the Bastion no matter what Gemma promises.”

“But at least Eric is rational. What
is
the matter with Lord Thaddeus?”

“I don’t know. He hates the Bastion. Many people do, lieutenant. ”

He waved that away, like the stupidities of lesser beings weren’t worth his time. “What of the others? The Eusebians who haven’t submitted to those barbaric tattoos?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. I imagine it will depend on the individual wizard.”

“What about Gideon Thraxios?”

“You must be out of your mind. What possible reason could Gideon have for returning?”

Vulpes paced crossly; it would probably be quite a coup to get Gideon to return to the Bastion of his own free will. “Have you heard anything else of interest?”

“The Lord Protector’s going to hold a soirée on Mercredy,” I said. “People are dragging their daughters in from all over the Protectorate.”

“Ah, yes, the Lord Protector. Tell me, Maselle Cressida, how was your dinner with his lordship?”

“Very pleasant. Lord Stephen is a charming host.”

Vulpes didn’t believe me for a second, but it hardly mattered. “What did you learn?”

“He’d like to get along better with Felix.”

“Hmmph. What else?”

“I don’t think he grieves for his wife any longer. He seems more amused than anything else by this hunt for a second wife.”

There was a pause. “Is that
it
?”