The Mirador (35 page)

And if that was true, then the Prison needed no explanation. I knew Mildmay was trapped.

Death, the Dog, the Prison.

Malkar had trapped him, had hurt him. Hurt him terribly, so terribly that he could not—or would not—remember what had been done. But I could guess. I could guess all too easily. I had been Malkar’s . . .
plaything
for six years, bound by the obligation de sang; I knew his full repertoire. I remembered the tearing, sparking pain as Malkar forced the spurred gag between my teeth.

Remembered being bent backwards over a splintery table, Malkar’s hand knotted in my hair, his other hand lashing my chest and stomach with a riding crop, his curses and my screams jangling in my ears.

I don’t know what I’ve done, but he pushes me down onto the worn flagstones, bruising my knees. One forearm presses against my throat, holding me upright, and he croons in my ear, the bulk and heat of him all down my back, “Be very still, my darling, or this bauble will tear through you like paper.” He shows it to me, cold black iron, shaped with terrible mocking realism. I can’t move. Paralyzed with shame, with terror, my breath whining in my throat, the burning cold of the thing as Malkar works it into me.

He leaves me there, unable to move, unable to breathe, blind with tears I dare not wipe away.

And when he returns . . .

I shoved back, almost tipping the chair over, and then sat, my elbows on my knees and my hands tangled in my hair, swallowing hard, until my breathing was steady again and I no longer tasted Malkar in the back of my throat. Gideon had wanted to know why I hadn’t made Mildmay talk to me about Malkar, and I’d told him it was because I was afraid he wouldn’t answer me. And that was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I was even more afraid that he
would
.

“I am a coward,” I said aloud. “I admit it, all right?”

I drew my chair back close to the table, gathered the cards, shuffled, cut, dealt.

And this time, as if they’d proved their point, they were different.

Vulpes appeared again that afternoon, like a malevolent spirit in a story, and fidgeted around my dressing room while I told him about Lord Stephen’s offer. He pulled himself together to act pleased about it, but I could tell his mind was on something else. So when I’d finished my report, I sat and waited, watching him fidget. He didn’t look quite as self-confident as he had the first time I’d seen him. I was glad of it.

He had something he wanted to ask me, I could see that much, but he either wasn’t sure how I’d take it, or he didn’t want to admit to me that he had a problem. I kept expecting him to leave, and he kept looking at the door like he wanted to—but he didn’t. Whatever this problem was, it was serious.

Finally, he burst out, “How well do you know Felix Harrowgate? ”

“Well enough for my purposes. Why?” He became suddenly and uncommonly interested in the toes of his shoes, and I thought I knew. “Does Louis want you to seduce him?”

Vulpes glanced at me, looked away, and then looked back defiantly. “Yes,” he said, and we were no longer master and servant, but two servants of the same master.

“And have you?”

“Yes,” he said, and then added in a lower voice, “Once.”

“What do you think of him?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you. I mean, you’ve known him a long time.” And the look he gave me was a pointed reminder that he could double-check anything I told him.

“Three years isn’t all that long,” I said. “And I’ve never been to bed with him. He doesn’t go for women.”

“At all?”

“As far as I know.” I remembered an old piece of gossip. “There’s a story that Roseanna Aemoria tried to surprise him once by waiting for him in his bed, stark naked. He marched her out into the hall and locked his door with her on the wrong side.”

“Do you think it’s true?”

“I know for a fact she hates him.”

“Do you think he did it just to be cruel?”

“I think she made him mad. He has a filthy temper, you know.”

“Yes,” he said. No one in the Mirador could avoid knowing that. I thought that a more useful index of Felix’s character was his social cruelty, the enjoyment he got out of making other people uncomfortable. He did it to Mildmay all the time. But Vulpes was going to have to work that one out for himself.

“What’s got you tied up in knots?” I said, turning the focus back on him. “Has something gone wrong?”

“I don’t know. That’s the problem.” He paused for a moment, on the brink of telling me,
Never mind, I’ll deal with it myself
, and then simply blurted the whole thing out. The initial seduction had apparently gone just as planned. They flirted; one thing led to another; they ended up in Vulpes’s bedroom, in the dark, with their clothes off. And then, the next day, when Vulpes was all prepared to go on to the next step in Louis Goliath’s program, suddenly they were back at square one. Felix watched him flirt with a tolerantly amused eye—“the same way he watches Dominic Jocelyn,” Vulpes said bitterly—but wouldn’t really flirt back. Vulpes had finally got him aside and tried to ask, and Felix stonewalled him. Vulpes didn’t go into details, but I could imagine the scene without any help; I’d seen Felix do things like that often enough to know what the expression on his face would be and how his voice would sound. Vulpes hadn’t been able to get a straight answer out of him. Felix had been perfectly friendly first to last, a fact which only seemed to aggravate Vulpes further.

When he was done, he looked at me hopefully, as if I could give him the key to Felix’s code. Which I couldn’t, and wouldn’t have if I could. But I still needed to show willing. I said, “Did you know that Felix started out as a prostitute in Pharaohlight?”

He hadn’t known. His whole face sagged. I was surprised, since it was a fact that got bandied about in the Mirador quite a bit, especially by the people who wished Felix would go back to Pharaohlight and quit bothering them. But I supposed it wasn’t the sort of thing that would immediately get offered up to a defector from the Bastion.

“He has a rather . . . casual attitude toward sex,” I said.

“Oh God, you’re joking.”

“No, I’m sorry, it’s perfectly true.”

His face worked for a moment; then he said, “Thank you for the information, Mehitabel. I’ve got to go.” He left, quite rapidly. It was only some time later, in the middle of a heated discussion with Corinna about what one ought to wear as the guest of the Lord Protector, that I realized he’d forgotten to call me Cressida.

The little resurrectionist’s name was George Tuillery. Simon asked a question as we got in the fiacre and got him launched on the subject of Laceshroud, saving me from having to talk and Mr. Tuillery from his own nerves. Nobody knew exactly when the cemetery had been founded, although there were references to it as far back as the reign of Maxim Thestonarius, the second Thestonarian king, who’d ruled almost twenty-five Great Septads ago. Mr. Tuillery told us about the catacombs beneath the little church of St. Osprey, where skeletons had labeled pigeonholes, and about the ghosts that were supposed to haunt the cemetery gates. Then he told us about the funeral of Paul Raphenius, and that lasted us all the way to the cemetery itself.

“It didn’t used to be in the middle of the city, of course,” Mr. Tuillery said as he got out of the fiacre. The cabbie wasn’t no happier about Gilgamesh and a cemetery than he’d been about Ruthven and a guildhall, so Simon was up in front arguing with him again. “But cities grow if you let ’em, even cities of the dead. I read a book about a city in the south where it floods every year, so they have to build all the tombs above ground, the city on one side of the river and the cemetery on the other, so you can’t hardly tell which is which.”

When Simon came back, he gave Gideon a funny look and said to me, “Gideon says the Necropolis of Nimuë.”

“Thanks,” I said to Gideon.

Mr. Tuillery had gone up ahead to look at the gates, and we joined him. They were locked, of course—Boneprince is the only cemetery in the city that don’t keep its gates locked—but Mr. Tuillery said, “I took the liberty of borrowing the correct, um, tools from a friend, but I’m afraid I haven’t the foggiest how to use them.”

He knew who I was, all right, or one of the other resurrectionists had told him. “Hand ’em here,” I said. The other three clumped around in front of me in a kind of nonchalant way that would have had any Dog worth his salt licking his chops. Kethe, spare me from flats. But this wasn’t either the time or the place for a lesson in how not to look like you’re doing something illegal, so I just hurried. That lock had been picked so many times that it wasn’t no bother, not stiff or dirty or nothing like that. And lock picking is more about whether or not you understand what the lock’s doing and what you want it to do. I wouldn’t have backed myself to do an in-and-out, not with a crippled leg and not going on three indictions out of practice, but the lock clicked open for me in only about twice the time it would take a good crack-man like Sempronias Teach. I pulled the right-hand gate a little ways open, and we slid in.

I could remember once—I guess I was maybe at my first septad, maybe a little older—coming here with Keeper to see a funeral. I don’t know anymore whose it was, if I ever did, but I remember the way she had us kids, the five of us she brought, line up along the fence, and the way she said that we weren’t to move and we weren’t to make noise. I guess she picked us ’cause we were the five most frightened of her. None of us even dreamed of not doing what she wanted, and we stood there, shivering a little in the cold, and watched all the people in black, the way they were standing around one of the graves, the way the priest’s movements made little ripples in the big pool of black bodies, the way every so often, somebody’d turn a pale blotch of a face in our direction. But nobody came over to ask what we wanted, and nobody sent for the cemetery guard to do the same. Probably they were afraid Keeper would tell them. When the priest was done, we stood and watched him leave, and then we stood and watched all the people in black leave and try to pretend they couldn’t see us, and then we stood and watched the sextons fill in the grave. Keeper stood watching, too, and I think she’d forgotten about us. I think she was crying, but we argued about that for decads among ourselves, me and Christobel saying we were sure she’d been crying, and Devie and Jean-Souris and Nero saying Keeper
couldn’t
cry, that she was a witch like in the stories Nikah told. So I don’t know about that, any more than I know who the stiff was or what Keeper was trying to prove. Or to who.

But I was a little prepared for Laceshroud. It ain’t just the oldest cemetery in the city. Even though it’s in Gilgamesh, it’s the rich people’s cemetery. Poor people don’t get buried there. They get stuck in Tammas Yard, down in Scaffelgreen, or in the Ivorene outside the city walls. People living in Gilgamesh are always the first to know when somebody important dies, because the Dogs come down and bust heads.

There’s a lot of marble in Laceshroud, a lot of granite. During the Protectorates of Malory and Helen there was this craze for obsidian, so there’s a lot of that around, too. The granite’s mostly in slabs and the obsidian mostly in these tall skinny sort of towers. The marble’s in statues, some of ’em representing the stiff—though I don’t know why, since flashies can read—most showing Phi-Kethetin’s daughter, Phi-Lazary, since she’s supposed to be merciful and loving and sympathetic to the needs of dead folk, being dead herself. We followed Mr. Tuillery up one tidy little gravel path and down the next, me and Simon and Gideon kind of in a clump and Mr. Tuillery trotting ahead like a hunting dog, yipping and muttering to himself.

He tried a couple different places before he hit pay dirt, a place where somebody’d clearly been digging and somebody else had clearly not been at much trouble to fix things up. It was down in the southwest corner of the cemetery, near the iron fence, and the grave markers down here were a lot tamer and low-key than the ones around the gates.

“Well, she certainly wasn’t after anybody
important
,” Mr. Tuillery said with a sniff, like he’d’ve liked her better if she had been. “This is the servants’ quarter.”

“The what?” I said.

He shrugged. He didn’t like it neither, but it was how things were. “Faithful servants, devoted retainers. If you were
very
good, your employer might have you buried here, near him.”

“Were? Isn’t it done anymore?” Simon said.

“Not very much. Although . . .” Mr. Tuillery checked a new-looking granite block. “This poor fellow was only buried an indiction and a half ago, so the custom’s got life in it yet, so to speak.”

“What about the guy Jenny was after?”

Mr. Tuillery looked at the block at the head of the disturbed piece of ground. He made little tut-tutting noises. “Dear me, I see why the City Guard are distressed.”

“Well?” I said, since he didn’t seem like he was going to go on by himself.

“This grave belongs to a woman named Ismene Culpepper, and she died, oh, about ten Great Septads ago.”

“Well, that don’t make no sense at all.”

“No,” Mr. Tuillery said thoughtfully. “I think I see what happened. I had been wondering how your friend had managed with the coffin.”

“Well?”

“It’s hard to get buried in Laceshroud anymore. There’s not much room left, and most of it belongs to the nobles and the burghers. So if there are reasons you’ve got to bury somebody here—and there can be—you, um, borrow somebody else’s grave.”