There Will Be Phlogiston (27 page)

Ruben had come to the Spire prepared with many
warnings. He had read all the newspaper articles and several penny
dreadfuls, and he believed he harboured no illusions about the man
who stood before him. He knew him for a criminal, a recidivist, a
thief, and a murderer. In short: an unrepentant villain of
unimaginable depravity.

He had not, however, expected the man to have the
face of a feral angel. Nor that he might want to discuss
aesthetics.

“What?”

“The sky,” repeated the most dangerous man in
Gaslight, somewhat impatiently. “Do you think it beautiful?” Since
he could not gesture with his hands, he jerked his chin in the
direction of the window set high into the granite wall.

Beyond its bars, Ruben could just about see a
handspan of the waiting world—a piece of dark, speckled by a few
irresolute stars.

“Well,” he said, at last. “Yes.”

“Curious.” The man frowned. “I wondered if I
should.”

“Should what?”

“Find it beautiful.”

The man’s ice-shard eyes did not waver from Ruben’s,
and Ruben knew better than to look away. “Don’t you?”

“I have never had occasion to ask myself. Until
now.”

“And what do you answer?”

“I believe—” his mouth turned up at the corners,
tugged slightly lopsided by the silver scar that crossed his upper
lip “—the stars are merely distant light and the sky a roof like
any other.”

Ruben couldn’t quite help himself. He shivered. In
the gloom, the man’s pale suit and pale hair gleamed softly, as
though he was already the ghost of himself. But he was utterly
calm. It seemed almost impossible to believe that he was waiting to
die. Only the manacles betrayed him, hanging heavy from his fragile
wrists, like some terrible insult.

“Forgive me,” added the prisoner, in his soft,
too-careful voice, “but I have been remiss with introductions. I am
Milord.”

Ruben swallowed something that might have been the
most ill-advised laugh of his life. The man’s attention dropped
swiftly to his mouth and then away again. The faintest of lines
creased the smooth white skin of his brow. But Ruben pressed on
regardless: “That’s not your name.”

“It’s what I am called.”

“I think,” said Ruben coaxingly, “I’d rather know
your name.”

“Then you had better accustom yourself to
disappointment, Lord Iron.”

Ruben tried to conceal his surprise and failed.
Dissembling had never been among his talents. “H-how do you know
who I am?”

“I have long made it my business to know things.”
Milord’s gaze swept over him, assessing and impersonal, but with a
weight behind it, somehow, like chill hands upon his skin. “They
sent you to me like a lamb to the slaughter, Ruben Crowe.”

Well
, Ruben thought,
I’ve just been
personally insulted by the crime prince of Gaslight. How many
people can make that boast?
And this time, his amusement
slipped out before he could stifle it, and he felt again the
knife-edge of Milord’s gaze upon his lips. “You think me a lamb do
you?” Ruben asked, smiling faintly.

“You all are.” The man turned, or he would have done
had his bonds allowed it. Instead he stumbled, chains clashing, and
it was as though a spell had been broken. Milord stood before him,
neither prince nor monster. He was a prisoner, and that was
all.

Milord steadied himself, but it was too late, and
they both knew it. For a moment after, his face was open, maskless.
Furious. His eyes wild and glittering, like the eyes of a wolf.
Colour seeped across his cheekbones, a dull stain like old blood on
marble. He drew in a harsh breath, but before he could speak, a
violent tremor ran through him, and he began to cough.

Ruben was startled, but he did not dare look away,
in case it was some sort of—admittedly highly imaginative and
obscure—trap. Although, as the attack persisted, it seemed far more
likely that the man was just ill. Terribly ill.

That cough was a familiar sound down in the Stews.
It was a sign of the complaint that was known simply as dustlung,
and as far as Ruben knew there was no cure. Some claimed gin
alleviated the symptoms, but Ruben, who had dabbled in the sciences
as he had dabbled in most things, thought it a questionable
treatment. It probably just made you die more quietly.

He stood there, utterly helpless and fighting down
pity, as Milord choked and coughed and struggled to breathe. He
could not have been aware of much beyond pain, but there was
another rattling of metal as he pulled clumsily away from Ruben.
Seeking privacy in a cell less than two meters across.

Ruben’s burgeoning pity warmed and deepened into
something like genuine sympathy. It was simply beyond him to behold
suffering—however, some might claim, deserved—with indifference.
And he had just witnessed an almost unbearably human act: strength
amidst all that weakness, the futile fight for pride in a moment of
humiliation.

At last the fit abated, and Milord crumpled into a
crouch on the floor, knotted in his chains like some desperate
animal. Black fluid clung to his lips, and he pressed his mouth
into the crook of his elbow, smothering the last of his coughs.
When he lifted his head again, his skin was dead white in the
moonlight, the sweat standing out sharp as diamonds. And when he
spoke, his voice was shreds and tatters: “C-can you believe they
were so uncouth as to arrest me without a pocket handkerchief?” He
dragged a trembling hand to his lips, the links that held him
stirring like snakes.

“For God’s sake, you need a doctor.” Unthinking,
heedless, helplessly moved, Ruben crossed the space between them
and dropped to one knee on the rough, cold flagstones.

Milord flinched back as though anticipating pain, an
instinct that—in the strangeness of that moment—struck unexpectedly
against Ruben’s heart.

He drew a handkerchief from his coat pocket and
offered it.

The other man stared at it blankly. Then very slowly
reached out a hand. Icy fingers slid lightly against Ruben’s,
raising, almost one by one, like the ripple of wind through a
cornfield, all the hairs on Ruben’s forearm. He caught his
breath.

Which was when Milord lunged.

There would have been no warning at all except for
the drag of the chains. His hand closed over the hilt of Ruben’s
sword and yanked it free.

In some vague, timeless otherworld, insulated from
the concerns of his body and its imminent danger, Ruben felt
foolish. He was accounted an intelligent fellow. He had been
warned. And he had thought he had understood those warnings. But it
had taken Milord less than five minutes to prise him open like an
oyster shell. It should not have felt like a betrayal, but it
still, somehow,
did
, as though Milord had twisted into
weakness everything Ruben held deepest, believed truest.

Internal hesitation did not, however, dull Ruben’s
reactions. He possessed, in spite of everything, a certain facility
for taking care of himself, something a year in the Stews had only
improved. He caught Milord by the wrist—skin, metal, and bones as
thin as a bird—and twisted. He would have preferred not to hurt
him, but Milord—devil take him—would not yield. The sword was too
unwieldy a weapon to be used effectively in the narrow space
between their struggling bodies, but still Ruben felt the edge of
the blade scrape a shallow cut beneath his ribs.

He forced Milord’s hand to the floor, and his
fingers at last twitched open. The sword hit the floor with a dull
clatter. Milord’s other hand came up, weakly, then his knee with a
most uncouth intent. It was not a time for Ruben to concern himself
with dignity; he got his leg across Milord’s, pressed him flat to
the floor, and pinned him there with the weight of his body.

His captive writhed and hissed like a feral cat, but
Ruben simply held him down until Milord exhausted himself
and—finally—lay quiescent. His head was turned away, his ash-blond
curls plastered to his brow with sweat. It was not a thought Ruben
wished to entertain at such a juncture, but there it was
regardless: Milord was beautiful. Like a pre-Raphaelite angel, his
lips—even with the scar that marred them—as pale and soft as rose
petals.

“If you carried a knife instead of that gentlemen’s
toy, I would have killed you.” The texture of Milord’s voice had
changed again, roughened somehow.

“And what good would that have done you?”

“Perhaps I enjoy it.”

“Is that why you do it? Because you enjoy it?” It
seemed somehow too simple, too base an answer.

“I do what is necessary.” He met Ruben’s gaze. So
close, the silver-blue purity of his eyes was almost unbearable. As
was their coldness. Ruben searched, with something that might have
been desperation, for remorse, for feeling, for some shadow of
humanity. And found nothing.

There was a long silence.

Milord stirred restlessly, his body pressing sharply
into Ruben’s. His throat rippled as he swallowed. “Release me.”

It was not quite command, not quite plea, but there
was a strange softness to it. And, at last, in his eyes—something,
something that might almost have been fear. Another trick? It had
to be. “I’m not sure I trust you.”

“Of course you should not trust me.” That sounded
more like Milord. Sharp and impatient. “But—” again that anxious,
twisting motion “—you must release me.”

He had a point. Ruben could hardly keep sitting on
him. But, in a strange way, it felt safest. Like holding a tiger by
the tail. He shifted slightly, strengthening his hold on the man,
and Milord . . . Milord
gasped
.

His eyes closed, and the sudden stillness in him was
like the moment before glass shatters. But there was no resistance
there. None at all.

That was when Ruben knew: he could make the crime
prince of Gaslight beg, and it required nothing but this rough
collision of their bodies and souls, two magnets spinning between
the twin impossibilities of attraction and repulsion.

And he wanted to do it. He wanted to hear words of
desperation shaped in that voice of silk and shadows. He wanted to
punish Milord, not for any of the atrocities he had committed, but
for making Ruben too aware of his own follies and failures. It was
the most sordid and contemptible of impulses, tangled up in
something that was almost worse, something that was somehow
sensuous and cared nothing for morality, retribution, or wounded
pride. It simply, achingly wanted. This man. Like this. Powerless.
For Ruben.

He jerked away from Milord as if he held fire
between his hands, stooping clumsily to retrieve his sword, in full
retreat from the other man, and from himself.

He banged his elbow against the cell door to summon
a gaoler.

After a moment, Milord sat up, curling his legs
primly beneath him, like a maiden aunt at a picnic, his manacled
hands folded as best as he could manage across an utterly
undeniable erection.

They did not look at each other. They did not
speak.

Ruben paced the length of the Mirrored Gallery. Lost
amidst silver echoes of himself, he sometimes thought he saw the
reflection of his father.

He would have to tell Jaedrian he could not do
it.

The man—Milord—was irredeemable.

And so, in a different way, was Ruben.

The mirrors passed the bloodstain on his white shirt
back and forth between them like a rust-red kiss.

Ruben was not, and had never been, troubled by his
inclinations, nor by the mode of their expression—the sweet-dark
things that made his heart quicken and his cock rise. On the other
hand, he had never felt them so thoroughly and comprehensibly
exploited. Milord had worn his weaknesses like trinkets. They had
glistened like fallen stars on his long, pale fingers.

He paced and he paced, and he tried not to remember
wolf’s eyes and a catamite’s mouth, and the too-sharp, too-thin,
too-surrendered body under his. He broke several of the probably
irreplaceable mirrors. But neither his thoughts nor his blood would
settle.

Later, he tended the cuts on his hands and the gash
in his side. The pain was hot and soft as tongues, and stirred him.
When he was respectable again—a man who did not think too much on
chains and those they held—he left the town house in the Golden
Quarter for the Gilded Crescent and a discreet, inordinately
expensive establishment where a honey-haired courtesan promised,
and would likely have delivered, all the pleasures, dark and light,
that Ruben might have desired. But there was no hidden harshness in
the man’s voice. No frailty in his wrists. And the eyes that held
Ruben’s from beneath a sweep of pale lashes were the wrong blue,
and too gentle.

Ruben pressed coins into pampered hands, murmured
his apologies, and left.

Back at Lord Iron’s mansion, he tried to read, then
to rest, but for the first time in his life, the nature of his
thoughts and the desires of his body shamed him.