Pile of Bones (10 page)

The hallway terminated in a door, which was slightly ajar. Cautiously, Morgan pushed it open, revealing a modest room with a stone desk in one corner and a small tabularium in the other. Unable to stop himself, Roldan walked over to examine the books and scrolls. They were various: poetry, legal texts, a few scientific treatises, and heavy tomes that were probably meant for recording accounts. A mural on the far wall depicted a group of naked undinae, locked in suggestive embraces beneath aquamarine waves.

“So this is the office of a house father,” Morgan said. “Not nearly as tacky as I thought it would be. I was expecting phalloi everywhere, perhaps a chandelier of crystal nipples.”

“We used to have one of those,” a voice said from the doorway, “until it decapitated one of our clients. Then we had to settle for less dangerous lighting.”

He stood in the entrance, wearing a black tunica and a silver mask. The garment was sleeveless, and Roldan tried not to stare at his arms. He looked down instead, at the house father’s bare legs, which proved to be equally distracting. Finally, he settled for staring at an invisible point directly above the man’s shoulder, which seemed safe, if a bit odd.

“I’m Felix,” he said, walking over to the desk. “The father of this house.”

“We know who you are.” The words came out before Roldan could stop them.

Felix smiled. Then he sat down and poured himself a cup of wine. “Of course. Everyone knows who I am.”

Morgan gave him an expectant look. Although she normally would have taken charge, she was clearly leaving this up to him. Roldan wasn’t sure if the trust was well placed. Carefully, he withdrew the knife and placed it on the desk.

“I believe this is yours.”

Felix looked at the knife. In the lamplight, Roldan could see that a faint scar crossed his eyebrow, like silver thread,
exposing the flesh beneath. The meretrix pursed his lips, as if considering something. His brown eyes flicked from the knife back to Roldan.

“You’re mistaken,” he said. “This isn’t mine.”

Roldan frowned. “You left it.”

“No. The knife isn’t mine. It’s yours.”

“I don’t understand.”

Felix picked up the knife. “It’s beautiful. That’s what makes it so deadly. People see it and think it’s merely decorative. But the hilt is perfectly weighted, and the blade is tempered steel, folded dozens of times by a master smith. With just a few pounds of pressure, you could shear off a finger.”

“I doubt it.” His voice trembled slightly. “I’m awful at shearing, cutting, anything related to disarticulation. I’m a listener, not a fighter.”

“Everyone has to fight eventually. Here. Give me your hand.”

Roldan extended his hand, willing it not to shake. Felix touched his palm lightly. The tips of his fingers were cool.

“Soft,” he said. “But soft doesn’t necessarily mean weak.”

He placed the knife in Roldan’s palm. Gently, he curled his fingers around Roldan’s own until they were both holding the knife. He smiled.

“See? It was practically made for you.”

“But—it’s yours.”

“No. I’ve never seen this blade in my life.”

“Oh? What about us? Not even a hint of recognition?”

He looked at Roldan, still smiling. Then he took his hand away. Roldan nearly dropped the knife—which was heavier than he’d expected—but managed to hold on to it.

“Perhaps a hint,” Felix said. “I see a lot of people in my line of work, though. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t remember every face.”

“This is a fun game and all,” Morgan replied, “but we didn’t just come here so that you could give him a knife. We were hoping you had some answers.”

“In this house, an answer is like a kiss. Both have their price.”

“We need to know more about the fibula,” Roldan said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’m sorry if your memory fails you,” Morgan interjected, “but have you considered the possibility that this thing could be dangerous? Brooches don’t normally catch fire when an auditor touches them.”

“Sounds like your bauble put on quite a show.”

Morgan approached the desk. “This isn’t a game. There’s something very odd about that thing. It may have some kind of hidden mechanism.”

“Are you an expert in machinae? A rare skill for a sagittarius.”

“You saw how it lit up,” Roldan said. “Maybe you can’t admit it, but I remember the look in your eyes. Nobody could forget something like that.”

Felix looked slightly uncomfortable. “I’m not sure what your intentions are, but let me give you some advice. Don’t meddle in the affairs of the basilissa.”

“Or we’ll end up a foot shorter. Right, we’ve heard that before.” Morgan put both her hands on the desk and leaned forward. “Only I don’t quite believe it. I may not know much about the woman who controls Anfractus, but I do know that she isn’t her mother. She’s not going to feed us to lions for being insolent.”

“You’re right about one thing—you don’t know much about her.”

“I don’t know much about you, either, but I can still tell that you’re spinning lies like spider-silk right now. And someone of your status would only do that if he were afraid of something. Or someone.”

He stared at her coldly but said nothing.

“Felix,” Roldan said. “If the fibula truly is dangerous, we need to warn her.”

“Why would the basilissa order something that might harm her?”

“She didn’t order it. Narses did.”

His eyes widened.

“Didn’t know that, did you?” Morgan stepped back. “It looks like we aren’t the only ones in the dark.”

“You’re certain that the chamberlain is involved?”

“Absolutely.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Absolutely not. But trust us—he hired the artifex to deliver it. He arranged for us to meet in the Hippodrome. His hands are all over this.”

Felix stared at the desk for a moment, lost in thought. Then he folded his hands and looked at them. His expression was, if anything, wary.

“All I know,” he said, “is that it has something to do with a celebration that she’s having, two nights from now. She has an important guest coming, and everyone who craves her favor will be there. I don’t fully understand how this item relates to the festival, but she told me to ensure that it was safely delivered.”

“Did you mention to her that it was glowing like an unholy candle?” Morgan asked. “That seems like something she’d be interested in knowing.”

“I didn’t give it to her directly.” He looked slightly cross. “We were supposed to meet, but then it turned out that she was indisposed. A young spado met with me instead, and I gave him the item in question.”

“I wouldn’t call Narses young.”

“It wasn’t him. It was one of his servants—a youth. I didn’t catch his name.”

Morgan gave him an incredulous look. “You handed it over to some freshly gelded boy, without any questions?”

“He bore the seal of Narses. And he seemed very efficient.” A note of defensiveness crept into his voice. “I had to return to this house, to ensure that all was in order. The basilissa wasn’t going to see me, and I didn’t have time to interrogate an unknown spado.”

“Impressive. You clearly have a mind for espionage.”

“Careful, sagittarius.”

“This is all going in a crazy direction,” Roldan said.
“Let’s pause for a moment and think about how we might proceed.”

“Can you get us into the banquet?” Morgan asked.

Felix laughed. “Don’t be absurd. Even the greenest spado—a freshly gelded boy, as you so poetically put it—would recognize that you didn’t belong there.”

“Not if we were dressed for the part.”

Roldan looked at her in surprise. “I thought you didn’t really want to pursue this. Babieca and I don’t have much to lose, but the arx is where you work.”

“I think I’m done with the battlements. This seems far more satisfying. If Felix could just procure us some fancy tunicae—”

“I’m not about to dress you so that you can infiltrate the basilissa’s banquet. Even with the right clothes and the proper ciphers, you’d never get close to her. And what would your presence even accomplish?”

“Nobody else is prepared for the possibility of chaos or carnage,” Morgan replied. “Except for maybe Narses. If something terrible does happen, we’d be the only ones there with a chance of stopping it.”

“You’re not even a company.”

“Yes we are,” Roldan said. “We may not look it—we may be only three—but this is our quest. This is our time. And you know it. Why give me the knife, otherwise?”

Felix looked at him thoughtfully. He was about to say something when Babieca stumbled through the doorway, half-naked, mead dripping from his hair. The drummer appeared behind him, one of her breasts exposed, along with a man wearing nothing but a torque.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Babieca said. “The sun’s going down, and someone puked on my tunica. We’d better go.”

S
HELBY WOKE UP DAMP AND ANGRY
. S
HE’D
sweated through the comforter again. It was the old dream, the one where her mother pushed her out the window.
You have to be more independent,
she said, before shoving her into empty space. It took forever to fall. Like Alice, she passed all sorts of people in slow motion. Andrew sat on a cloud, reading intently. He still noticed her out of the corner of his eye, though, and waved as she fell. Carl had tied himself to a flock of birds and was heading west. He gave her a thumbs-up, then returned his attention to the foldout map he’d been studying. Finally, she saw Professor Laclos, addressing a cirrus cloud.
You’re spread too thin,
he was saying.
You need to consolidate. Did you do the reading?

She checked her pockets, looking for anything that might break her fall. But she only had a pack of Starburst, a rusted arrow, and her ATM card. As she was pondering what to do with these things, the ground rushed up. She laughed. Then she screamed. Then she opened her eyes. It was hard to move—she’d rolled herself up in the comforter, like a piece of sushi. For a moment, all she could do was lie there, breathing hard.

The phone rang. She managed to free one arm.

“Hello?”

“Morning.” It was Andrew. “Were you falling again?”

“What else is new?”

“There’s a coffee waiting for you. I said your name was Carlotta, because I thought it sounded empowering, so the barista wrote it on your cup.”

“I can’t believe you’ve already left the house.”

“It’s nine forty-five. I’m already downstairs.”

Shelby looked at the clock. “Motherfuckit. My alarm failed.”

“Did you set it?”

She peered at the clock’s innocent display. There was no little bell icon. The alarm switch was in the off position.

“Why do you ask questions that you already know the answer to?”

“We’ve all done it. I once slept all day because I set my alarm to nine
P.M.
”

“That sounds amazing.”

“It was.”

Shelby got out of bed slowly, as if pulling herself from quicksand. The comforter was still partially wrapped around her feet. Shaking it off, she looked in the hamper.

“Oh no.”

“What?”

“These sweaters are bullshit.”

“It’s too hot for a sweater.”

“You know it’s my instinct to layer.” She dug to the bottom. “What would you think about a black sweater over my Earl of Rochester shirt?”

“Do you mean the sweater with the safety pin—”

“That’s in the back. You can barely see it.”

“Well, the shirt is solid. Will you be wearing pants?”

“No. I’ll be naked from the waist down.”

“That should increase attendance in your tutorial.”

She pulled on a pair of jeans. There was an ink stain on the knee, but she decided not to mention this. “I think I should wear the boots.”

“They give you blisters.”

“But the pain makes me stand up straight. That’s good for something, right?”

“Just wear comfortable shoes.”

“Sorry. You cut out there for a second, or maybe you were talking crazy and I didn’t understand you. I’ll be right back—I have to put on Band-Aids.”

She eventually made it downstairs, still shoving papers into her bag. Andrew gave her the coffee, which she took with her free hand.

“Remember when you were drinking tea?”

“Nobody likes a smartass.”

“I sincerely hope that isn’t true.”

The first time they’d spoken to each other was at a colloquium series called Liminal Encounters, which had attracted visiting speakers from several major schools. Shelby and Andrew had come for the food, along with a clutch of graduate students from various disciplines. They lingered on the edges of the room, waiting for the crowd to part so they could strike the buffet table. She’d seen Andrew before but had never talked to him. Unlike the other members of her cohort, he didn’t cleave to a particular group. In fact, she’d only ever seen him alone, grading papers, reading, or frowning at a computer screen. Once, while walking past the shared TA office, she thought she heard him talking to someone. But when she looked in, he was alone, staring out the window.

They both reached the buffet at the same moment. He looked at the warming tray full of Swedish meatballs, then at her.

“Four left,” he said. “Want to split them?”

“That’s okay. You can have them.”

“I only want two. Four will make me sluggish, and I have to get some writing done later tonight.” He studied the buffet. “If we take four meatballs, two mini quiches, a Nanaimo bar, and a handful of carrot sticks, we’ll basically have dinner for two.”

She blinked. “Are you asking me out?”

“I’m asking you to share carrot sticks with me on a balcony.”

“That—actually sounds pretty good.”

“Okay. You grab the quiches and the roughage. I’ll get the protein.” He began parceling meatballs into a napkin. “On second thought—get the Nanaimo bar first. They go fast.”

“I’m on it.”

A few minutes later, they were ducking through the window of the TA office, which led to a concrete patio. Cigarette butts and spiderwebs decorated the corners. Andrew divided the food equally, and they ate in companionable silence.

“So—you do Restoration stuff.”

Shelby wiped her mouth with the napkin. The mini quiche was sitting like a rock in her stomach, but at least the hunger pangs were gone. “Basically. I’m studying Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle.”

“Wasn’t she crazy?”

“Crazy like a seventeenth-century fox.”

He laughed. “I liked
The Convent of Pleasure
. Especially the part where the women keep trying different sauces, and each one is better than the last.”

“Yeah. It was a rock-and-roll convent.” Shelby smiled. “She said that her plays were her children. Her paper bodies, she called them. And when she committed them to the flames, it was like burning her own flesh and blood.”

“So—crazy.”

“Any woman who wrote during that time was considered crazy.”

“What drew you to her work?”

“She wrote these letters to an imaginary friend. They’re so lively, and bitchy, and they feel—I don’t know”—she stared at a spiderweb—“like they were written to me, or something. When she complains about annoying children, and bad makeup, and ignorant people who make her feel small—I understand where she’s coming from. Plus, we both love boiled chicken and suffer from panic attacks.”

“Fair enough.”

“What are you studying?”

“These two Anglo-Saxon poems.
Wulf and Eadwacer
and
The Wife’s Lament
.”

“That’s intense. Old English makes my mouth hurt.”

“Sometimes I speak it in my sleep.” He smiled. “So many fricatives.”

“Who are you working with?”

“Natasha Black.”

“She scares me. She’s always wearing a pantsuit.”

“I just pretend that she’s Bea Arthur.”

“That might actually work.”

“It does. What about you?”

“I’m cross-appointed. Trish Marsden in Gender Studies, and Victor Laclos in English. I feel like they’re always having brunch to complain about me.”

“I doubt they think about us at all.”

Andrew was looking at her strangely. “Where did you go?”

Shelby blinked. She realized that she was standing in the middle of Scarth Street Mall, holding her coffee. A few feet away from her, a guy was doing some sort of act with a crystal ball, letting it dance across his fingers. A boom box positioned behind him played “Orinoco Flow.” She studied the crystal’s progress for a second, then returned her gaze to Andrew. He was frowning slightly, as if she were a questionable footnote.

“Sorry. I was just remembering that time we shared meatballs on the patio. We had to use a letter opener to cut the Nanaimo bar.”

“It was either that or go back for a knife, and that room was way too full of critical energy. I didn’t want to get sucked into a conversation about being post-human.”

She sipped her coffee. “When you asked me to dinner, I thought for a second that you might be into me.”

“You were extremely interesting.”

“Nobody knew anything about you.”

“That’s because nobody asked.”

They walked down to Broad Street to pick up Carl. Their
conversation drifted, like a slightly intoxicated person wandering through a department store. After a while, Andrew began saying “Right” to everything, then simply nodding, which made her realize that he’d checked out. He was studying bright, misspelled signs, vague promises stenciled on windows, or anything else that caught his attention. He had a loose tether, but Shelby had grown accustomed to it. As they continued in silence, she thought about how odd their group was—their company, if you could call it that. Andrew was an introvert who studied poems that didn’t rhyme, sawtoothed alliteration and white space that had slept on vellum for a thousand years. Carl was a material historian with the self confidence of a male pageant contestant, twirling his baton in any direction.

Who am I? A slightly damaged girl who likes to read old letters? A girl in serious debt, with a shelf full of Broadview editions but only three usable plates?

Why be a grad student? It was such a boring question, but they all asked it, every day—while drinking (why), while smoking (why), while fucking (why), while sleeping (zzz), the question followed them around on little cat feet.
Why am I doing this?
Andrew probably knew, and his answer had notations. Carl might not have known, but he went through the motions beautifully. In the end, he’d fall into something. He’d become a cute archivist or pilot some kind of project that involved ground-penetrating radar. He’d find a lost Byzantine button hoard and land a front-page feature in
National Geographic
, looking happily smudged in his sweat-stained vest and cargo pants.

Her research wasn’t about to appear in the pages of
Restoration Culture
. Nobody gave a shit about how closely she was reading the letters of Margaret Cavendish. Academia was about finding something obscure, something lost at sea or misfiled in the British Library. In Restoration circles, the work of Cavendish had become feminist-mainstream. Unless she could unearth a lost play, a libretto, or a lock of Margaret’s hair, chances were slim that she’d be able to parlay her research
into a job. The seventeenth century was still the misfit kid, the period that scholars politely avoided on their way to the Victorian era. Not sexy enough to be Early Modern, not functional enough to be Medieval, it hung out behind the bleachers, watching girls while comparing expansion packs.

Maybe her mother had been right. She should have studied something that applied to her, something immediate and political. But Shelby couldn’t help it. She loved reading about syphilis and dancing masters. Just the thought of Early English Books Online gave her a thrill, as if she were a country wife visiting the big city for the first time. Why couldn’t she hang out with the vizards and the wise orange-girls? Why hadn’t she received an urgent letter? Unopened collection notices from SaskTel were not the same thing.

Her mother had it all figured out. She had an office inside a translucent crystal cliff, with built-in bookshelves and art on the walls. She wrote action plans, returned calls, and attended meetings for something called “executive of council,” which Shelby thought must be some kind of admiral in vermilion robes. When her mother used the word
community
, she wasn’t referring to a sitcom or a gaming website.

“How big is a silenus?”

The question jolted her. “What’s with you and parking lately?”

“Nobody’s listening. How big are they—on average?”

She didn’t want to think about silenoi. “I don’t know. The size of a sasquatch, I guess. Taller than the average human, and about three times as strong.”

“You’re the only one of us who’s actually seen one up close. You must still remember a few physical characteristics.”

“I wasn’t exactly paying attention to its height.” For a moment, she could see the rain on the battlements and smell the creature’s dank hair. “Why do you need to know?”

“I was just curious.”

“Andrew. I think we’re past cryptic.”

“Okay. Just—humor me for a second.”

“Our friendship is based on mutual humor.”

“You know what I mean.” He wasn’t looking at her. That was a bad sign. It meant that his brain was working furiously. “A silenus could easily”—she felt him hesitate over the word
kill
—“incapacitate a human. They hunt with weapons, but they could probably take down a fully grown adult with bare hands. Correct?”

Fingers locked around her throat. Its eyes were a feverish green in the darkness. She’d expected its gaze to be purely animal. Inside, a terrifying intelligence regarded her, cold and patient, as the hands continued to squeeze.

“Yeah.” It came out as a half whisper. “Easily.”

“You were lucky to survive.”

“Morgan was lucky. I—barely remember. Why are you making me talk about this?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just—”

“Andrew.”

His left hand was lightly drumming against his pant leg. He was anxious. Finally, he stared at a spot directly above her nose.

“What if silenoi were hunting on this side of the park?”

“That’s impossible.”

“Is it? We don’t really know what they’re capable of.”

“Look. Your crazy salamander dreams aren’t coming true. Things can’t cross over to this side of the park.”

“You don’t know that.”

Shelby looked around to make sure that they were actually alone. Then, lowering her voice, she turned back to Andrew. “The silenoi are a wild gens. They only exist on the other side of the park. They’re
characters
—just like the ones that we play. Some of them choose to live in the wild, beyond Anfractus. But most of them are part-time players, like us. The moment they return to this side, they go back to being normal people.”

“How do you know that we’re just playing characters? It doesn’t feel that way. I know that parts of Roldan are rattling around inside me.”