The Mirador (7 page)

“Of course not,” Fleur said. She was a terrible liar.

“Perhaps I’d best take him home before he starts, then,” Felix said. I’d’ve been happier if he’d just belted me one. He said good night all around, with one of his killer smiles, and walked out like he owned the world. I followed him.

He tore into me as soon as we were out of earshot, his voice low and mean. I didn’t try to talk back. I couldn’t beat him that way, and anything I said would just make it worse. I especially didn’t say, though it lumped in my chest like a knot sealed with lead, that, just once, I wished he would take my side instead of theirs.

Gideon’d already gone to bed when we reached the suite. Felix ordered me off to bed like a thief-keeper would a stupid, useless kid, and I was glad to go. I fell asleep pretty quick—too tired to stay upset. Walking all over the Mirador’ll do that for you.

And of course I dreamed about Ginevra. Again.

The door closed behind Mildmay, and I let my breath out explosively. Alcohol wasn’t enough tonight, and the black, mindless fury was building. I looked at the closed door of my bedroom. Gideon was probably awake; I could go in and pick a fight, but I knew how it would end, and Gideon did not deserve that.

Silently, carefully, I let myself out of the suite. I’d promised myself a year and a half ago that I wouldn’t go near Gideon unless I could be gentle, and there was no gentleness in me tonight.

I went to the Arcane. The guards at the Mortisgate pretended they didn’t see me; that was better for all concerned. The denizens of the Arcane also pretended they didn’t see me, but that was common courtesy. Uncommon courtesy—I was not the only Cabaline who came to the Arcane, but I was the only one who ventured farther than the Gargoyle’s Bride, the import shop where you could buy Myrian amber at half the price it cost in “respectable” shops.

And for most purposes, the Gargoyle’s Bride was deep enough. But not for mine.

The Two-Headed Beast was not in the lowest reaches of the Arcane, but I could hear the Sim from its doorway, a dancing, rushing, roaring howl, just at the edge of perception. Once inside, the door shut behind me, the sound was gone, drowned beneath the noise of the Two-Headed Beast itself.

There were candles everywhere, in candelabra and wall sconces, on every table, anchored in their own wax on the shelf behind the bar, casting strange reflections in the wavery and fly-specked mirrors. Jean-Tristan was holding court in one corner, the candlelight kind alike to his aging beauty and paste jewels. Young martyrs knelt adoringly at his feet; Jean-Tristan might be nearly fifty, but he was still as terrifyingly compelling as a chimera. I felt the draw myself, but wrenched away.

I was not a martyr any longer.

Sylvienne and her girls were spread like orchids across the broad staircase that divided the room in two: black velvet and fake pearls and rice-powder pallor on the fair ones, while the dark girls had kohl on their eyelids, subtle rouge on cheekbones and temples so that they glowed like bronzes. Even if I had been janus, that sweet poison would not have been what I wanted.

Sylvienne gave me a wary nod as I passed, one tarquin to another, unspeaking.

The upper level of the Two-Headed Beast was darker, all nooks and crannies and curtained alcoves and oddly shaped small rooms. The sweet smell of orange and clove incense was heavy in the air, not quite hiding the underlying musk of sweat and sex. I looked over the men leaning against the bar, sitting at the tables, in the mismatched chairs. There were women, too, hungrier than Sylvienne’s flowers, feral, savage. It was hard to tell the predators from the prey; I supposed grimly that we were all predators, one way or another. And we were all prey.

There were signals, which I had learned in the Shining Tiger both to deploy and to interpret. The boy sitting alone, skinny, ferret-faced, probably not more than nineteen: his hands were folded on the table in front of him, and he wore red at his throat—a tattered kerchief, badly dyed, but you did the best you could with what you had. I understood that, and did not hold it against him.

It was not done for a martyr to approach a tarquin, not unless the martyr knew and wanted what he would get if he did. I had seen one of Jean-Tristan’s martyrs do it once, deliberately, after a quarrel. Jean-Tristan had slapped her to the floor, as fast and vicious as a striking snake. And then he had helped her up again, quite tenderly, and kissed her until her mouth was red with her own blood.

That dark, skinny boy was sitting still, not making eye contact. Not merely curious, then, and not a thrill-seeker come slumming in the bear-pit. Some martyrs were excited by the waiting; from how
very
still he sat, I thought he might be one of them.

I crossed to the table, waited until he began to look up, then caught his chin with one finger and pushed his head up the rest of the way so that I could see his eyes: clear and bright, the pupils normal. Drugs were easily come by in the Two-Headed Beast, and I would not accept a martyr dosed on phoenix.

He held my gaze, though I could feel the tension in him, like a lute string, and when I released him, he looked down at once. He had lovely eyelids, smudged with kohl, and long veiling lashes.

I sat down across from him, placed my own hands flat, palms-down on the table. His breath hitched. I said, low and hard and fast, “I do not want to know your name, and you do not need to know mine. I will not kill you or cripple you. Do you require other assurances?”

His throat bobbed, and he said in a husky whisper, “No, m’lord.” He might know my name anyway; it didn’t matter as long as he never said it.

“Good,” I said. He looked up, hopeful. And I smiled at him. “My pleasure tonight is the Red Room. This is your last chance to decline.”

But he shook his head, and I saw the tremor go through him.

I tossed a demigorgon across the table. “Find out when it will be available.”

He was quick in his obedience, eager to please, and I approved. I was in no mood for a fight, not when I wouldn’t be able to trust myself to remember the limits I had promised. Not tonight.

Before I could stop myself, my fingers had gone to the little wash-leather bag in my inner pocket. It was stupid to keep carrying it about, even more stupid to be so deathly afraid of opening it. Its contents could not harm me; it was mere superstition that made me imagine Malkar’s spirit might linger in the rubies he had worn all the years I had known him.

Until I killed him.

And it was not—unfortunately—that Malkar’s spirit
could
not return. I was apostate from Cabaline orthodoxy in admitting the possibility, but I had seen the ghosts of the Mirador. I had laid the spirits orthodoxy claimed did not exist. When it had occurred to me, some months after we had returned to Mélusine from the Bastion, that Malkar might . . . might come back, I had wished I could dismiss the idea as nightmarish fancy. I had
tried
. But he had been a blood-wizard, worse than a necromancer, and I could not silence the voice in my head whispering that Brinvillier Strych had died, too, and that had not stopped him. And who might he have been before he was Brinvillier Strych? How old
was
he, when my magic set his heart alight in his body? How many times had he cheated death?

That he was physically dead, there was mercifully no doubt. I had taken the rubies from the still-smoldering ashes of his body. But I did not know about his spirit, his essence . . . his miasma, for surely if ever a man had a miasma, a palpable cloud of cruelty and self-will wrapped about him, that man was Malkar Gennadion. And that was what I feared more than anything, that that miasma might endure past death. That he might find a way to parlay it again into agency, into control.

I had studied, piecemeal, clandestinely, not wanting to discuss my fears—not with Gideon, and certainly not with any of my Cabaline brethren, who would merely sneer at my overactive and heretical imagination. Gideon would not sneer, but if Malkar was a miasma, I did not want to make Gideon breathe it. He had suffered enough in my company.

So the process had been slow, frustrating and frightening, and even now that I thought I knew what I needed to do, I found myself hesitating, drawing back as if committing to the idea would somehow give Malkar’s spirit the strength I feared it had. I did not admire myself for dithering, and it was that tension that was preying on me, shortening a temper that was never amiable in the first place, making me reckless, wantonly cruel, hateful even to myself.

And so I came to the Two-Headed Beast, in search of an outlet for all this fury.

My outlet came pattering back then. “The Red Room is free now, m’lord. If it pleases you . . .”

“Oh, it does,” I said, and looked him over slowly, once, before I stood up.

I made him precede me down the narrow staircase to the Red Room, gratified by his nervous glances over his shoulder. On the landing, the intricately carved panels of the Red Room’s door indecipherable in the low light, I caught him by his kerchief, pulled him to me. He choked a little, but did not struggle, and I kissed him as a reward, deep and hard, not loosening my grip. He responded eagerly, his mouth pliant and welcoming beneath mine. He tasted of gin and mint.

I raised my head after a time, said, “The key.”

He fumbled for it, and if I had been another sort of man, I would have punished him for that, for the seconds it took him to press the key into my waiting hand. I merely kissed him again, bit his lower lip not quite hard enough to draw blood, and then released him completely, stepped around him, and unlocked the door.

My hand at the small of his back guided him into the Red Room. He stopped moving when my touch left him, and he stood perfectly still, save for a fine shiver, as I locked the door.

I left the key in the lock and walked round in front of him. “Undress.”

He was quick but fumbling, and I did not bother to hide my amusement. When he stood naked, I reached out, brushed the silky skin of his pectoral, ran a slow caress down to his navel, feeling his stomach muscles twitch beneath the lightness of my touch.

He had scars, clean thin lines marking his shoulders, his thighs, crisscrossing his spine with a geometer’s precision. To this ferret-faced boy, they were beauty; to tarquins such as myself, they were desire. The ruined skin of my back seemed to burn beneath my shirt, though that was mere morbid fancy. I traced one of the lines across the front of his left thigh, watched his sex jerk with his indrawn breath.

I moved away then, out of the boy’s line of sight, to the long table that held the Red Room’s selection of erotiques. Other rooms offered silk ribbons, peacock feathers, little jars of various unguents—the petty toys for those who wished to play at power, or those whose cruelties were subtle, serpentine. In the Red Room there were manacles, blindfolds, lengths of chain, hard gags, fine-bladed knives, choke collars, clamps both delicate and brutal, a seven-tailed cat lying curled in obscene splendor like a dragon sleeping among its hoard. The oil was unscented, glowing in a decanter once used for sherry. Next to it was a pitcher of water and a pile of cloths.

I made my choices, returned to the boy, restrained him.

At the Shining Tiger, Merle and Justin had held me down while a patron plied a riding crop. I couldn’t remember his name, but I remembered the way the pain had burned in toward my bones. This martyr didn’t make a sound for the cat cutting his shoulders, dancing on his inner thighs. It was the blindfold that undid him, making his breath catch in a whimper when I showed it to him.

I was intrigued, heat unfurling in the pit of my stomach, and I tied the blindfold around his head with exaggerated caution, not wanting his reaction to be muddied by the pull of so much as a single strand of hair.

It was worth it, for he could not quite keep himself from trying to wrench away, even though he knew as well as I did that it was useless. I pressed myself against him to feel the quivering he could not control, to let him feel my arousal. I guided him to the floor, positioning him the way I wanted him, supported on his chained forearms and on his knees. He panted, his breath rasping in his throat, his head turned as if he was trying to see me through the black padded silk of the blindfold, and pleaded breathlessly.

I pulled back. “What do you want?”

“M’lord?” Bewilderment.

“You keep saying ‘please,’ ” I said patiently. “What is it that you want?”

“Oh—!” A sob, hastily bitten back.

He didn’t know; lost in the darkness, clouded by pain and sexual heat—I doubted he would have been able to tell me his own name. But I asked again, “What do you want?”

“You!” The word burst out of him. “Please, m’lord, please, fuck me, touch me, anything, just please, please—”

“Your enthusiasm is very gratifying, however crudely expressed. ” I ran my hand over his flank, delighted by the way he leaned desperately into my touch. I unstoppered the oil and slicked my hands. There were certain kinds of pain I chose not to inflict.

I teased him for a time, making him work for what he wanted, making him sweat. The sweat would keep his whip-weals alive for him.

When I was ready, both of us effortlessly slick with oil, I wrenched him onto his whip-marked back. He landed hard, his mouth open in a scream he had no breath to voice, and I entered him, not letting him arch off the floor, my fingers clawing into his buttocks, dragging them higher so that he had no choice but to take his weight on his shoulders.