Margot'd gotten herself into a pack, where the stuff she'd learned from Keeper was useful, and she didn't have to start turning tricks. And she'd stayed with the pack, and then somehow she'd ended up leading the pack, and that was when I'd done her a favor, just before I left Keeper myself, getting somebody off her back who Margot said was going to get her and all her pack killed. I hadn't had to kill him, just done what Margot called "heavy leaning." A couple of broken fingers and the kind of reputation I'd had back then had been enough. He hadn't given Margot no more trouble.
So Margot owed me. I hate calling in favors, and I hadn't ever wanted to use this one, just stayed friends with Margot and swapped news with her every month or so. But I was in a hole now, and if the Dogs were sweeping, and if they knew to look for me anyway… I could at least be safe with Margot for a day or two, until I'd figured out where to go. I had that bad, shaking feeling that said any decision I tried to make right now was going to go wrong. I was too scared and too mad. I needed to get somewhere I could hold still and think things out. And the Dogs didn't come up on the roofs, any more than they went down in the Arcane. All they ever found were booby traps and broken legs.
I went up the city through Engmond's Tor and into Dragonteeth, sticking to the roofs and being real open and real careful. Margot'd given me a couple of signals to use to say I wanted to talk to her and it was urgent, and I used them both. My body wasn't shaking, but my mind was—Kethe, that ain't no good way to put it, but I can't say it better than that. Things were fucked up, and I knew they were getting worse, and I didn't know how to stop it. I was afraid for Ginevra, afraid she wouldn't listen to Scabious, and she'd come home and the Dogs would want to know where I was,
and
there was no way in Hell they were going to believe her when she said she didn't know. I was trying hard not to think about Ginevra in the Kennel.
It wasn't long after I crossed into Dragonteeth that I knew the Badgers had found me. I could feel 'em watching. I stopped where I was and waited, keeping my hands out so they'd know I wasn't planning to get cute.
One of Margot's lieutenants, this flabby kid named Carmody, jumped down from a higher roof, and said, "Whatcha want?"
"Need to talk to Margot."
He gave me this scowl.
"Your name's Carmody," I said. "You know who I am. Get Margot for me."
"She don't got to come when you call."
"Fuck, kid, that ain't what I said. I need to
talk
to her."
"What about?"
That didn't rate an answer, so I didn't give it one. I just waited.
He wanted to tell me to go away, but Margot'd tear strips out of him, and he knew it. Finally, he said, "I'll get her," like he was doing me this big favor instead of exactly what he was supposed to, and scrambled back the way he'd come.
I didn't have to wait long before she came over the roof, still wearing that damn ugly motley coat that she'd kited off some barrow in the Cheaps when she'd had a septad and three or so. She still hadn't grown into it, and it didn't look like she was going to.
"You," she said. Margot'd never in her life admitted to being glad to see anybody. "What's up?"
"Dogs," I said.
"You and the rest of the Lower City."
"No, I mean, they
found
me."
"Oh," she said. "Shit. How close?"
"Prob'ly they're still in my front room, waiting."
"Okay. So they ain't on your tail or nothing."
"Nah. I'm clean. I just… I got to hide."
"Okay. We can do that. Just don't give my kids any crap, okay?"
"Okay."
"Come on, then." I followed her into the maze of rooftops over Dragonteeth, heading for the Judiciary, where the Badgers made their home.
Felix
I went to a place the ghosts had shown me.
I had noticed that the older ghosts still paced the rooms and hallways of the building they had known, not the building as it was now. Sometimes, when no one was around to see me, I tried to follow them. Mostly this habit led me into dead ends, walled-up doorways, and rooms partitioned without grace or kindness. But once I followed an anxious ghost into a broom closet and discovered a partly boarded-up staircase. The ghost walked through the shelves; I crawled under them. Three-quarters of the way up the stairs, the ghost disappeared. I kept going and found myself in a long, narrow attic, a triangular wedge just beneath the main gable of the roof. I wondered what business the ghost had had up here and why he had been so nervous, but the ghosts did not speak to me, and I had no way to find out.
I had not stayed long that first day, afraid that my absence would be noticed. But now all I wanted was to get away from Robert; as long as they did not find me, I did not care if they knew I was hiding. I was lucky; I met no one on the stairs, no one in the grim corridors of the third floor. I shut the broom closet door behind me and wished I could call witchlights. But I could not do magic; I could not even remember what it felt like, only pain and Malkar's voice.
I felt my way to the back of the closet, ducked under the shelves, squeezing through a gap barely wide enough for me, and climbed the stairs, still feeling my way with my hands.
There was a little light in the attic from louvers at either end. I curled up on the floor just to the left of the stairwell. It was stuffy up here and smelled terrifically of dust, but it was safe. Robert could not find ntf! Brother Orphelin was too fat to follow me. I fell asleep.
Since I had come to St. Crellifer's, I had begun to dream of gardens—when I was not dreaming of Malkar or Keeper or the Virtu, or of Shannon. In these fragmentary, fleeting dreams, I found myself walking in a garden I had never seen before, through stands of dark, twisted trees with small white flowers whose scent was as sweet as remembered joy; through rose gardens laid out in elaborate knots; through simple plots of herbs, whose names and properties I could, in my dreams, still remember. And everywhere the grass was dense and soft and heartbreakingly green. Sometimes I saw people—dim and vague like memories or ghosts—on the garden paths they were always far ahead of me, and I could never catch up with them.
This time, I find myself among the trees again. I step off the path to touch one; the trunk is hard and ridged beneath my fingers. The scent of the flowers seems to surround me like a cloud of peace. I wish that I could stay here forever.
Even as I think it, the dream begins to break apart around me. I turn, thinking confusedly that perhaps I can hold the dream together if I get back on the path, and find myself face-to-face with a man, tall, redheaded, yellow-eyed, a Sunling out of a child's story. He is vividly and vibrantly present, clearly real, clearly alive; I am so shocked that I back into the tree. My head strikes one of the gnarled branches, and I wake.
My head ached where I had banged it on the attic wall. The light seeping through the louvers was purple with dusk. I waited for my heartbeat to calm, then crept back down the stairs. I made it back to the ward just in time for dinner. No one commented on my disappearance. Brother Lilburn's intolerant eyes scourged me in passing, but did not linger. Of course, I realized, Robert would never admit to anyone that he couldn't control a weak, whimpering, broken madman. I felt as giddy as I had when I had evaded some richly deserved punishment from Keeper. For a moment, St. Crellifer's felt like sanctuary.
Mildmay
Margot put me in with the younger members of her pack. She said it was the only free bed she had. I think it was a kind of joke, maybe a little revenge for me bringing her trouble she hadn't asked for. Her little Badgers—maybe a septad old, a septad and two at the most—didn't think it was funny. I made them tongue-tied, and they watched me with their eyes as big as bell-wheels. I would've smiled, except that would've scared 'em worse. But when the last candle was blown out, when we were all laying in bed in the dark, one of them got up the gumption to ask if I knew any stories. Another voice said as how they'd told all the ones they knew "Three times," said somebody else, sadly.
"Okay," I said. "You know the one about Jenico Sun-Eyes and the Clockman?"
"No," said somebody.
"That sounds exciting," said somebody else.
"Who's Jenico Sun-Eyes?" said another voice, I thought the one who'll asked me first if I knew any stories.
"Well, lemme tell you," I said, and I lay there, staring up into the dark and instead of thinking about Ginevra or the Dogs or the witchfinders I told Margot's little Badgers all about Jenico Sun-Eyes and his terrible journey to get back the heart of the Princess of Keys from the Clockman. They didn't care that my words came out funny and slurred. They loved my story and made me promise to tell it again the next night. We all went to sleep happy.
I guess it ain't no surprise I had nightmares. I kept waking up and having to think where I was, and then I'd fall back asleep and right back into that horrible gray version of Gilgamesh, where there was nobody alive but me. It was like being caught in a maze, like the curtain-mazes at the Trials, only I get a kick out of them, and this was like being buried alive. In the dream I was trying to get to Britomart and find Keeper, except that I didn't want to, the way you do sometimes in dreams, so that I was trying to get out of Gilgamesh and at the same time hoping I wouldn't. When the little Badgers woke up, I dragged out of bed feeling worse than I had the night before.
The Badgers mostly slept in the attics of the Judiciary, behind doors that nobody'd tried to open for a Great Septad or better. They'd rigged a stove in the longest attic, with a kind of half-assed patch into a chimney flue that gave me the crawling horrors just looking at it. But Margot swore it worked, and it let her be sure that her littlest kids had a hot breakfast be fore they went out to the pick-pocketing and begging and petty thievery that was what pack kids did before they got old enough to cardsharp and stuff like that. Margot's two best lieutenants, Io and Ramon, did the cooking. Everybody else was on their own, to go steal fruit off the costermonger stalls in the Cheaps or to scrounge up a septad-centime for a bakery bun. Me and Margot drank tea and had the last of the oatmeal when everybody else was gone.
We'd swapped gossip the whole time—what the Dogs were doing, what the witchfinders were doing, what people in Scaffelgreen and Ramecrow said about the Obscurantists now. But when everybody else was gone, Margot got up and wandered around, putting things away, damping the stove. That was Margot. She had a tidy mind. And I thought it was why she'd kept the Badgers as long as she had, and why she'd kept them safe.
After a while she came back and sat down and said—gently, for Margot—"D'you want to talk about it?"
"About what?"
"If I knew that, I wouldn't have to ask. About what's got you so upset."
"I ain't upset."
"Mildmay." She gave me a look. "I know you better than that. Something's got your tail in a knot, and it ain't the Dogs. Now would you put that fucking knife down and
talk
to me?"
Startled, I looked down. Sure enough, there was the butterfly knife from my boot, dancing like it used to when I had a septad and five and thought I was some kind of fucking hero. "Sorry," I said, closed it, put it back. "Thought I broke that habit." She still looked worried, and I added, "Not nobody here."
"You could knife Yapper, and I'd kiss you for it. But if it ain't us, then who is it?"
"Dunno."
"Well, who are you mad at?"
"Dunno who tipped the Dogs."
"That ain't quite what I asked."
"It's my business, ain't it?"
" 'Course it is. I'm just wondering if it's something I can help with."
"Dunno," I said. "Don't think I'm mad at anybody."
Her eyebrows went up. "And the knife?"
"Dunno. I'm sorry, Margot, but I don't."
"Well, if you don't, you don't. I got shit to do, but if you figure it out enough to talk, you let me know. Okay?"
"Okay." I watched her leave, and then, because I didn't have nothing better to do, I followed her out, closing the door like she'd showed me, and went to try to walk off my twitchiness across the roofs.
I couldn't do it, couldn't shake whatever black dog had my scent. I was scared of the Dogs and worried about Ginevra and even worried about Faith Cowry—I mean, she'd never done me no harm. And I was scared of what I felt building. I remembered the mood that had got people riotin' three summers ago, and I was feeling something like it now. Not the same It wasn't that people were angry now, like they'd been angry at the Mirador but they were scared. And one thing I knew was if you got scared enough you ended up acting just like you were angry. It was the Obscurantists had people scared, and the fact that nobody—not the Dogs, not the Mayor, not the Mirador—was doing nothing about them. Of course, looked at right ways on, that's because there was nothing
to
do. There'd been no actual Obscurantists in the Lower City for near on two Great Septads, and I had Cardenio's word on it that there weren't now. Cade-skiffs know that kind of thing. But most people just had rumors to go on, and the rumors said the Obscurantists had done something big in the Boneprince back in Pluviôse—so big it had Vey Coruscant hiding—and that they'd paid off the Mirador to ignore them, and they were planning something more, something worse. People wanted the Obscurantists locked down, and what were the Dogs doing about that? Zip, zero, and zilch.
Powers and saints, it was no wonder the mood was getting ugly.
I went round and round with it all fucking day, but I still hadn't figured nothing out by sunset, when the Badgers all came back to the Judiciary, to pool the day's taking and sort out who was doing what in the night. They were in the middle of it, arguing and laughing, when one of the kids Margot had on sentry came charging onto the Judiciary roof from the north, heading straight for Margot and her motley coat.
