The White City (11 page)

“It’s rare,” they’d say. “But if you have a source of the stones, we can do it.”

Until they came to a shop in a blind alley near Sokolniki Park, the awnings already rolled up but the lights still on and the door unbarred. There, the woman behind the counter was small and strong-handed, her hair skinned into a knot on the back of her head. She wore fingerless mitts against the draft through the door, and the creases in her eye-corners were at odds with the transparency of her skin.

She nodded decisively. —Yes, my lord. I can make you a ring. What is your stone?

Jack stood back, arms folded, as Sebastien described Starkad’s band. —Can you make me a ring like that one?

The jeweler’s face compacted and her fingertips paled on the counter’s edge. —Not like that one.— she said. —Somebody else uses that stone. You would need another.

—Red garnet?— Sebastien said. —Trillion cut?

She sighed, and Jack thought it was relief. —Absolutely. For the gentleman?

With the nod of her head she indicated Jack.

Sebastien smiled over at him. —For a lady.

Moscow

Kitai Gorod

May 1903

Sebastien followed Phoebe through rainy late-night streets, contemplating the inconvenience of it. He would have liked to have a word about perversity with the weather gods who arranged for sky coverage after dark, when no sun needed shrouding and no heat needed breaking and the mud, like some swamp-dwelling monster predating the city built across its back, threatened to swallow everyone.

It was a waste of a good rain.

Phoebe seemed to know where she was going, though, which—given her unfamiliarity with Moscow—told Sebastien she’d planned out this route over the course of the afternoon, and maybe even walked it once or twice. He wondered if she’d already contacted—and perhaps warned—Irina. If she had—well, he trusted Phoebe’s judgment. Implicitly, and with tested cause. She would have weighed her options and done what she thought best, and Sebastien would choose to rely on that.

Another way in which he had little in common with his brethren in the blood, come to think of it.

Phoebe’s path led them into fashionable streets through which rolled glossy carriages, lanterns burning on each corner, the matched teams of horses tossing wet feather cockades on rain-draggled heads.

“I would have summoned a hansom,” Sebastien said.

Phoebe in her turn shrugged, shawl hiked up to her collar, and said, “It’s not so far now.”

Nor was it. Phoebe paused before a modern block of flats, five stories of pale green façade with wrought-iron balconies, and gestured impatiently for Sebastien. You couldn’t argue, exactly, and so Sebastien fell in beside her obediently.

—Flat B3,— Phoebe told the stocky red-faced doorman. —We are expected.

She must have rehearsed the phrase, to say it so smoothly.

He consulted his book, an obvious affectation, and when he had paused with his finger on the page said, —Name, please?

—Mrs. Phoebe Smith and Don Sebastien de Ulloa.

He frowned at them over the tops of rimless spectacles. —The lift is on your right.

It was, along with a slight, blond lift operator who took them to the third floor through the power of eavesdropping, because neither Phoebe nor Sebastien had any need to direct him. The floors scrolled past beyond the filigree cage, each heralded only by a hum and a series of slight bumps—and Sebastien made up his mind to enjoy the novelty of the experience. It wasn’t actually his first ride in a lift, but it was the first in some months. When the operator released his handle and the cage settled at the proper floor with the slightest of rocking motions, Sebastien found himself rather grateful not to have plummeted to his death.
Will wonders never cease?

“Probably not,” Phoebe said, as if she had heard him. She nudged him with one elbow and started forward as the lift operator scrolled the cage door back.

The hallway was tiled in black and white diamonds, very modern and very chic. The rattle of the brass lift cage behind them echoed against hard edges, making Sebastien wish for the carpets and upholstery of a bygone age.

Phoebe, unaffected, paused before the door closest to the lift and raised one small gloved fist to knock there. The scent from beyond the door told Sebastien in advance who had lived there, and he wondered that the police had not already arrived.
Perhaps
, he thought,
the apartment was in some third party’s name.

Olesia Valentinova had lived here, while she had lived, and it seemed striking to him that he had not realized until now where Irina Stephanova might have come for refuge in the aftermath of her friend’s death. That she had done so enlightened him on certain matters. He knew now that Olesia
had
been a friend, that Irina knew of her death, that Irina also knew that no-one was likely to come looking here. His sense of smell also told him that Irina was alone in the apartment, and that she had not recently been at work.

“Come in,” she said, and stood aside to let him and Phoebe clear the door.

It was a little too fast of a greeting. Sebastien thought he would have liked to have tested his ability to just walk inside, because that might have told him whether or not Olesia Valentinova lived alone, or if there were another presence keeping him from entering he apartment. But what he had would have to do for now.

Once they were inside the kitchen, Irina shut and locked the door behind them. She still wore his ring, he noticed—as he could hardly have failed to—though her jet-black hair was cropped at her jawline now and she wore men’s trousers and a un-tucked flannel shirt with the braces rucking the tails up this way and that.

The room was large, for a flat, and furnished with antiques distressed enough to seem comfortable rather than precious. The woman who had lived here had been fond of copper molds shaped like hens and roosters, a few ducks or geese among them. The bright things hung along the moldings. Sebastien was fairly certain they were not of Russian origin.

“Mrs. Smith wouldn’t say much,” Irina Stephanova said, offering them seats at the dark, scarred table with her gestures. “I take it you don’t think I killed anyone?”

“Were you in the room when Olesia Valentinova was killed?” Sebastien felt no need to sit. He chose instead to hover beside the table.

“I found her.” Irina shook her head, in dismay or negation. “I found the slashed canvas. I remembered Sergei, and it seemed best to me if I…make myself scarce before whoever did this came back.”

“Sergei,” Sebastien said. “So you’ve changed your mind about
his
killer?”

He might not sit, but Phoebe sank down gratefully enough, and Irina across from her. Irina, hands folded on the table before her, nodded. “I never really was sure about Ilya,” she admitted. “But the police were so convincing.” She shrugged. “Sebastien, where’s Jack?”

She must have suspected, by the lift of her chin and the way she was at pains to meet his gaze directly. And it wasn’t as if he could lie or temporize. Not to Irina.

“He was killed,” Sebastien said. “I am sorry.”

Expecting it or not, she rocked with it. Back, and then forward, as if bad news had a kind of momentum. “I am too,” she said, her voice thin but determined. “I know what he meant to you.”

Beside her, Phoebe was white-knuckled, chin tucked. Grief, Sebastien had reason to know, never got easier, though each individual case of it did fade in time. And in time, one developed strategies.

People still sometimes got inside the armor, though. And whether Jack had developed it during the time he had been indentured, or if it had been native-born in him, like his charisma—insinuating himself into the affections of just about anyone had been Jack Priest’s particular gift.

“So you have come to Moscow to tell me this?”

He shook his head. Her English had been improving already when he and Jack left her. He was not surprised to find she had kept it up. Practice was the best cure for monolingualism.

“Not only to find you, anyway. But I thought you should hear it from me. And I seem to have arrived in the nick of time.”

“Sebastien,” she said, shaking her head. “If I did not know better, I would say you brought death in the folds of your coat. But of course that would be silly.”

“Of course,” he agreed.

“Mrs. Smith, can I fetch you tea? Lesya wouldn’t have minded.”

“Tea would be—”

“Lesya,” Sebastien said, his head tilting with a memory of six years past. “Olesia Valentinova. Lesya.”

Irina nodded. “Of course. It is the common nickname. Why does it suddenly concern you, Sebastien?”

“The gallery owner who hosted your show, when first we met. Lesya. You never said her full name then, and I never met her. But I have—” he let himself smile, slightly, self-deprecating and not so widely as to be out of character for a murder investigator. “—a very good memory for names.”

“She was. She was an old friend.” Irina Stephanova stood and moved to the counter. Sebastien saw no sign of a samovar, and indeed Irina went to fill the kettle and light the gas stove like any Englishwoman. It charmed him, as did the copper hens, and made him wish he had known this xenophilic Russian gallery owner.

“At the time, you also said she was one of Starkad’s courtesans.”

Irina nodded. She put her back to the counter, folded her arms, and rubbed her own ring, the trillion garnet flashing in the gaslight. “At the time, you thought it was possible that whoever killed Sergei wanted to get to Starkad.”

Sebastien steepled his hands before him. “Do you still think Ilya was behind it?”

“He confessed—”

Sebastien cocked his head at her, and her lips crumpled together like paper.

“No,” she said. “I think the Investigator—Kostov—convinced me. I think Sergei’s death was a useful excuse for the police to get rid of Ilya before he fomented rebellion. And I know they were eager for all of us, his friends, to give evidence. Dmitri, Svetlana, and me in particular. And of course you know that Sacha and Grigor were the Investigator’s sons. I always suspected it was Sacha who put his father onto Ilya. But I don’t
know
.”

Sebastien tried to bring some life into his face, to make himself seem more compassionate, more warm. More human, if he were being honest with himself. “Would you speak to another Imperial officer? This time, I think, a better one?”

She winced. “There are no better, Sebastien.”

“There are always one or two honest men,” he argued. “It is the world’s tragedy.”

She shook her head. “I am sorry I spoke against Ilya, and I do not think he killed Sergei. I think I killed him, because Inspector Kostov wanted the murder solved, and wanted a revolutionary to hang for it. A tidy,
political
solution, that took the heart for revolution out of all of us. And where am I now, and where is Kostov?”

“He is a judge,” said a new voice, unheralded by any of the traces of a presence—living or dead—that Sebastien normally relied upon his sense to provide. “And some say in line to be minister of justice. And then he will be dust.”

A mortal would not have seen Sebastien move, and there was no drama of overturned tables or broken chairs. Sebastien was simply across the room, before the door that must lead back to the bedrooms, turned to face the hallway. He kept himself between the voice and the women, but far enough from them that he would not harm them incidentally
if he had to move.

What stood framed in the doorway was a bony man, pale-haired and strawberry-bearded and livid with the pallor of the hungry undead. He was so tall that Sebastien at first denied the evidence of his own nose, ears, and eyes: surely this could be no elder of the blood, for all his stillness, dryness, and lack of scent. But all those senses supported the impression of immense age in the one Sebastien faced. Now merely tall and broad, in his own age, Starkad had been a giant of a man.

Sebastien eyed him a moment longer, noting the way the linen shirt hung from Starkad’s branch-thin limbs, the color and cut of his brown-black burned velvet waistcoat and the weight of the turnip-shaped fob watch whose chain closed it.

He appraised Sebastien for a moment, then cast his blue eyes, water-transparent as the jewels in the rings he gave his courtiers, towards Irina. “So this is what you left me for? Not bad.”

Starkad’s English accent was exquisite, cultured, and a hundred years or so out of date. Sebastien had no doubt that his Russian would be similar, and perhaps even more archaic.

Irina pressed her hand to her breast, her other one clenched at the wrist, turning her fingers as if to conceal Sebastien’s ring. Starkad glided from the hallway, silent as if his steps fell on down and not shoeleather. He had, indeed, the main part of a foot on Sebastien in height, and inches across the shoulders. Such matters mean less among the blood than mortals, but it was still an advantage. And for once, Sebastien could not rely upon the privilege of age to make up the difference.

“Well met, Starkad,” he said, and bowed lower than—strictly speaking—he must. “I have heard a great deal about you, and all of it at second hand.”

The elder smiled, and with a hand that could not have seemed less negligent, tucked an unfashionably long lock of hair behind his ear.

Sebastien had survived for as long as he had through acclimatization: his grip lay light on the long years, and what they ripped from his grasp he let spin away without too much longing or regret. It let him live in the world, live
with
the world—and his courtesans—in a way most of the blood considered peculiar. But there were other tactics—
as many adaptations as immortals
, Evie had once said, when she kissed him—other ways to move through the world when the world was always moving past you.

And one of those was to become unstuck in time, unglued from human society. Watching Starkad cross the kitchen—slowly, his gestures devoid of threat or nervousness—and knowing what he knew of him, Sebastien blinked with a realization. Starkad was so old that to survive he had come unstuck, not just from human society, but from the timeless society of the blood as well.