Scholar of Decay (40 page)

Chantel whirled around and nearly fell from her perch at the base of one of the Chateau’s chimneys. Her claws scrabbled for purchase on the wet slate, and she somehow managed to keep from pitching over the edge.

Framed in one of the attic’s tiny dormers, Jacques frowned down
at her. “You’re Chantel, aren’t you? Mama says she’s surprised you’ve lived so long. ’Cause you’re white,” he added in case she needed an explanation of his mama’s pronouncement. “Does Tante Louise know you’re on the roof?”

Her footing secure, Chantel quickly changed enough for speech. “No. I’m—I’m watching her for your mother.”

Jacques frowned, his expression so like Jacqueline’s that Chantel found herself trembling. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “I’m going to tell Tante Louise you’re here.”

“No!”

He paused, head cocked. “Why not?”

Desperately, Chantel searched for a reason. Threats wouldn’t work; Jacques knew himself to be inviolate. Then she remembered what she’d been like at his age. “How would you like to get your Tante Louise into a lot of trouble?”

“A lot of trouble?” His eyes brightened at the thought. “With Mama?”

“Your tante is up to something with that human she has—”

“He was bit but he didn’t change.”

“Bit?” Chantel felt her hackles rise. “Who bit him?” she demanded, tail lashing from side to side.

Jacques shrugged. “I dunno. Wasn’t me.” He studied her with sharp curiosity as though trying to fathom just why it was grown-ups did what they did. “Did you want to bite him?”

“No. Yes.” She snarled. “I don’t know. Do you know what room he’s in?”

“Yes. But they’ll see you if you try to get to it.”

The attic window appeared to be unguarded by anyone but the boy. “I could get in through there.”

“No.” His mouth set in an obstinate line. “I don’t want you to. And if you try, I’ll tell on you. I want to get Tante Louise in trouble.
Me. Not you. I’ll talk to the human, and then I’ll talk to you. No one ever comes up here but me, so you can meet me here tomorrow night.” With that, he slammed the shutters closed.

Changing back to full rat form, Chantel leaped forward and sank her claws into the wood.

“If you come in, I’ll tell.” The boy’s piping voice carried easily through the barrier.

Teeth bared, she sank back onto her haunches. If he told Louise he’d seen her skulking about on the roof, Louise would kill her—or have her killed, it amounted to the same thing. She had no choice but to return the next night and hope she could convince Jacques to take her to Dmitri. Or at the very least, tell her where he was. If she knew for certain what room he was in, she’d risk moving down off the roof, but she couldn’t risk searching randomly from window to window—her white fur would shine like a beacon against the dark face of the chateau.

Jacques paused in the hall outside the human’s room, suddenly realizing Chantel hadn’t told him just what his aunt was up to with the human. Tante Louise did a great many things with humans that he wasn’t supposed to know about, but it never made his mama angry. His nose wrinkled. Except, he amended silently, for the time she’d forgotten about one, and the pieces had stunk up the whole trophy room.

Shrugging narrow shoulders, he pushed open the door. It didn’t really matter. If he couldn’t get Tante Louise in trouble with Mama, he could definitely get Chantel in trouble with Tante Louise. Maybe, he thought cheerfully, I can get this human in trouble with someone, too.

A trio of candles burned on the small table by the bed, and the
servant his mama had marked slumped, exhausted, in a chair. Her head jerked up as he entered.

“Get out,” he said shortly.

She glanced at the bed, opened her mouth to protest, sighed, and left the room. Jacques could hear her waiting in the corridor outside but he decided, with all the magnanimity of a privileged child, that he could allow that. Even regular humans couldn’t hear much, and the servants at the chateau learned to hear less.

He stared at the sleeping human for a moment, noting with ghoulish curiosity the scabbed bite on his shoulder, then poked him hard in the ribs with a skinny finger.

Dmitri jerked awake, glancing wildly about him.

“Hello. Who are you?”

Heart pounding, Dmitri stared at the boy beside his bed. “D-Dmitri Nuikin,” he stammered.

“I’m Jacques Renier. My mama is Jacqueline Renier.”

“Yes.” The glossy ebony cap of hair, emerald eyes, and pointed features were almost exact replicas of his mother’s—barely even allowing for age and sex.

Jacques frowned. “What do you mean, yes?”

Beginning to recover from his sudden awakening, Dmitri found an explanation. “I mean, you look very much like her.”

“I do?”

The boy seemed so pleased, Dmitri smiled. “Yes, you do.”

“She’s the most beautiful, the most wonderful person in the world!”

Dmitri’s smile broadened. While he personally considered Louise Renier to be the more beautiful of the twins—to be, in fact, the most beautiful, the most wonderful person in the world!—he certainly wasn’t going to argue with a boy’s opinion of his mother. “Yes,” he said. “She is.”

“I like you.” Jacques made himself at home on the bed at Dmitri’s feet. “What are you doing in my mama’s house?”

“Well, your Aunt Louise and I … I mean, that is …” He felt his cheeks grow hot and his ears burn. “I had a fight with my brother.”

Jacques shook his head. “That’s not the real reason.”

“I did have a fight with my brother.”

“Okay.” His tone suggested he’d allow the fantasy for the moment. “Who bit you?”

“A wererat.”

“I know. Which one?”

“There’s more than one?”

“Of course there’s …” Then, just in time, he stopped himself. His mama had said never to tell the humans anything they hadn’t already worked out for themselves, and this human obviously hadn’t worked out anything. The idiot, he added silently. “… always more than one.” That seemed safe enough.

A sudden scrabbling in the wainscotting jerked Dmitri around. “What was that?”

“Rat.”

“You have rats in your house?”

Jacques shrugged. “Everybody has rats in their house.”

“Can you see my sword?”

“You have a sword?” The boy’s eyes widened. He dove off the bed and did a whirlwind search of the room. “There’s no sword here,” he concluded at last, voice and expression an accusation.

“I had a sword when I got here.”

“Maybe Tante Louise took it away. I’ll go look for it for you.”

“Why would Louise take away my sword?”

Jacques paused at the door and turned around to face the bed again, one eyebrow cocked. “You’re not very old are you?”

“I’m twenty,” Dmitri told him, confused.

“Uh-huh. I’m ten.”

As the door closed behind him, Dmitri had the strangest feeling the boy knew something he didn’t. Something he didn’t, but should.

“Sir, please, you must eat.”

“Go away.”

“You have barely eaten or slept since you returned from that house, sir. You will be able to help neither of them if you fall ill.”

With ink-stained fingers, Aurek pushed a strand of filthy hair back off his face. “I have much work to do and little time to do it in. Leave me alone.”

“Sir …”

“Edik.” He lifted bloodshot eyes off the parchment sheets spread across the desk and turned just enough to see the bulky shape of his servant outlined in the door to the bedchamber. “I said, leave me alone.”

Edik’s sigh said enough to fill volumes. After a pregnant pause, he bowed and retreated. Aurek knew he wouldn’t go far, but distance was unimportant as long as he went. He’d rarely had to raise his voice to Edik, unlike Dmitri …

Dmitri.

How could he have done such a thing? How could he have given Natalia to that contemptuous vermin?

The quill in his right hand bent and finally snapped as his fingers curled into fists. Irritably throwing the ruined pen onto the floor, Aurek’s gaze ended up, as it always did, on the alcove and the empty pedestal.

How could Dmitri have done such a thing?

Well, he didn’t know what he was doing, did he?
chortled the hateful voice in his head.
You never saw fit to tell him about the results of your arrogance. You were the great scholar, and knowledge was your power. You were too blind to see that knowledge is powerful only when you use it. Your arrogance, your blindness, trapped your precious Natalia
.

Aurek ground his knuckles against his temples. “Shut up,” he snarled.

You know, you might get further if you asked yourself why he took the little lady. Maybe he was trying to get your attention. Maybe he had something to say to you, and it was the only way he could get you to listen
. The voice twisted itself into an edged parody of concern.
Now, why would he think that, I wonder?

“You know nothing about this,” Aurek ground out through clenched teeth. “Nothing!”

The laughter swelled until it beat against the inside of his skull, pounding and pounding and pounding as though it were determined to break free.
You blind and arrogant fool! I know everything you know!

“You know NOTHING!”

“Sir?”

“Go away, Edik!” With trembling fingers, Aurek dipped a fresh quill into the dish of ink and began to write. Once he’d had a hundred spells at his command, a hundred spells collected and bound into a single volume. Some were so simple they barely needed to be written down. Some were so complicated they barely could be written down. Some were original. Some variations. He’d studied them all—studied them, learned them, inscribed them, and gone on. He’d almost never used them, unless it became necessary to clarify the details of a gesture or a material component. He thought of himself as a scholar, not a wizard.

“A scholar.” His own bitter laughter joined the echoes in his head. A wizard would have thought first of the power he’d collected and protect it. He’d thought only of his scholarship, and it had destroyed his life.

He stared down at the words he’d written, pushed the parchment aside, and began again. Once he’d had a hundred spells. He didn’t have them now. He needed to re-create, out of memory, a spell to hold a wererat captive, a spell to hold Jacqueline Renier. He had to be a wizard now, or his Natalia would die.

And your brother? How fortunate that you warned him of what he was getting into. If I’d blithely allowed my brother to become involved in a wererat power struggle, I’d be feeling pretty guilty right about now.

Calling up his last reserves of strength, Aurek pushed the voice to the back of his mind and buried it under memory. Dmitri had been lost—tragically and irrevocably lost—when he’d given Louise Nuikin what she wanted. No matter what the wererat said, he doubted his brother had lived even a moment after handing over the figurine.

“How did you persuade Dmitri to go along with this? Did you convince him that you loved him?”

“I didn’t have to. I merely convinced him that you didn’t.”

Just as his Lia had, Dmitri had paid for his blind arrogance. But there was still a chance to save Natalia, and grief would have to wait. As Aurek worked, he could still hear faint reverberations of the laughter, but he’d grown almost used to that.

The lamp on the corner of the desk sputtered. Shadows danced maniacally about the room. Snorting impatiently, Aurek reached out and turned up the wick. He didn’t have time to tend to insignificant details, but when the flame leaped up in answer to his touch, he stared at it, suddenly mesmerized by the light.

“Something to burn the darkness away,” he murmured, leaning wearily toward it.

Then, in its white depths, he saw a familiar face under a wild shock of gray hair. Pale eyes gleamed under heavy lids, and thin lips stretched into a cruel smile.

“NO!”

The lamp’s clay bowl smashed against the mantel, burning oil spilling down over the brick and across the hearth. Flames danced out onto the wooden floor, and the planks began to smolder.

That’s it
, laughed the hateful voice.
Burn the darkness away
.

Aurek sighed and stretched out his hands to the blaze. He was just too tired to do anything about it. And the warmth felt so good.