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Chapter XV
A Paper Inferno

High Bashti: Autumn 55

I

He sat at the foot of her bed, smiling sweetly at her out of a waxen mask.

“Child, you have been gone so long. Remember those whom you left behind. Remember, at least, me.”

Jame indeed recalled that caressing voice which had haunted the nights of her childhood in the Master’s House under shadows’ eave. She tried to move, to push off the cold hand which lay possessively on her thigh, but her muscles froze and she could not speak.

“Ah, how soon ungrateful children forget. Would you rather that I had left you with your father? Poor Ganth, driven mad by grief and desire. Yes, if he could not have your mother, he wanted you.”

Ganth had slammed her against the wall and pinned her there. She could feel his body shudder against her own, man against child.

“How dare you be so much like her?” he had panted in her face. “How dare you! And yet, and yet, you are . . . so like.”

And then he had kissed her hard, on the mouth.

The memory made her cringe, and unlocked her voice.

“Go away!” she cried at the night. “He was weak and wounded. You are worse, who would seduce the world!”

Rue stirred at her feet, muttered, and fell back asleep.

Jame edged herself out of the bed so as not to disturb either her servant or her ounce, who was curled up at her side and now rolled into the warm depression left by her body, his paws curled up on his chest. It was a chilly morning at Campus Kencyrath, close to what passed here for winter. Let them sleep. She herself was shaken wide awake. This was the first time she had heard the pallid specter speak, although she had guessed before who it was.

Gerridon, in High Bashti? If so, it wasn’t for the first time. He had been Mordaunt’s pet (or vice versa) thirty years ago when the latter had been a mere princeling. Ever since, when his attention wasn’t elsewhere, he had led the cult of the Deathless. He always followed the same patterns. Maybe, this time, his plans would succeed, whatever they were. After all, since the depletion of his larder of souls, how many tricks did he have left to play?

Paper crinkled under her hand. What, another note from the Shadow Guild? Unnerving enough that they had delivered it while she slept.

No place, they meant to imply, is safe from us.

“Come,” it said.

She dressed in her black d’hen, which somehow seemed appropriate for such business, and left.

The great city was barely awake. Early laborers, coughing, trudged to their jobs. Cook shops threw open their shutters. Dust men plied the streets, hoping that their gleanings would someday amount to piles of treasure. It had been known to happen.

There were signs, also, of last night’s tumult: shattered statues, defaced street signs, ash still on the air from multiple fires, words scrawled on marble walls with pitch.

“Keep the dole!” the latter read, often misspelled. “Down with the Tyrant!”

While she had been absent in Transweald, Mordaunt had not endeared himself to his subjects. Among other things, he had closed all theaters except for the god farce, which remained popular in these days of disorder if with ever shifting venues. Suwaeton spoke there freely through his artist Trepsis, to Mordaunt’s fury. Also, the king had closed as many temples as he dared. The idea seemed to be that people should worship at his own nascent sanctuary in the palace complex or not at all. This, too, had not been a popular move. Snaggles had told her as much on her return, grinning. He really didn’t like the Patricians, among whom he apparently did not count the Kencyrath. Further evidence of discord trotted down the street—the city guards either on patrol or bound back to their barracks after a busy night. It seemed debatable who controlled them, the Council or the king. And there was the west bank army, hovering off to the side. The betting shops must be doing great business. Who would win, and at what cost?

Jame walked on to the house in the maze off Thyme Side. The door, as before, was unlocked. Probably no one came here willingly, much less had anything to do with the Guild unless perforce, and then it would be through the crack in the door by the River Thyme. The inside remained dusty and dark, lit at intervals with solitary, dribbling candles, sharply redolent of mouse droppings. Around one bank of shelves, around another, and there was Smeak’s alcove with him in it. He rested his head on the small desk. Near his only hand was a cup half full of strong red wine. Beside him stood a branch of lit candles. Before him lay two scrolls.

“Here,” he said without looking up, his voice muffled on the curve of his right arm. “Take them and get out.”

Jame paused, perplexed. She hadn’t asked for anything except the Knorth contract, which he had already delivered.

A candle-cast shadow rippled across the shelves. Unseen nails clutched at Jame’s coat and someone breathed hoarsely in her ear. She turned to grapple with what felt like invisible limbs no thicker than rotten sticks and about as strong. Her assailant tripped and fell.

“Don’t hurt him!” Smeak cried, his head jerking up in alarm.

“He? Who? Oh.”

She fumbled on the floor, gripped a thin arm, and drew it up. There was a chair. When she maneuvered the other onto it, the cushion dented to receive skinny buttocks and dust puffed up to give them further definition.

“Grandmaster?” she asked, remembering stories of the invisible, insane Guild lord, also the shadow that had bent over the young archivist and snickered the last time she had been here.

“My grandfather,” said Smeak. “He should be worshipped. Instead, they hunt him.”

“Who? Why?”

“On Autumn’s Eve they tried to harvest the souls of the sanctified. That didn’t work, did it? More fuel for the pyre.”

“Heh, heh, heh.”

Jame felt fingertips as light as rain drops tap her arm and seek to draw her down. She bent to listen. A sheen of sweat beaded shriveled lips seeming to hover in mid-air. Crusty yellow eyes blinked at her. Of mouth, tongue, and throat there was no sign.

“How far into any orifice can the needles go?” Graykin had asked. Far enough.

“Want to feed their dark prophet, they do,” whispered that thread-bare, avid voice, in a mist of spittle. It didn’t sound as if he had any teeth. “Heh, heh, heh. Any willing souls would do, you’d think, if they could find them, but how much better the hallowed dead? Didn’t work so well with Prestic or with the would-be saints, though, did it? The Guild can kill but it can’t reap. Still, they keep trying. I am shadow, pure soul, or so they think. Fools. I eat, I drink, I piss, and am no grist for such demonic mills!”

“I believe you,” said Jame. “Smeak, I had some claim to the Knorth scrolls, but why are you offering me these other contracts? I don’t even know whom they involve.”

He hit the desk, upsetting the cup of wine. Liquid spread like a blood-stain across the ink-blotched table, threatening parchment. Candles tottered. He was obviously drunk.

“You dare to ask that? What choice did you give me, even from the start?”

“What?”

“Think! I was only a boy, on my first blooding. The Guild Master arranged everything. He said we had to kill every Knorth Highborn female we found, and that was only you. All the rest were long dead, by the contract that you demanded of me. Don’t pretend this is about anything else!”

Light dawned, and it dazzled her.

“You were one of a casting of shadow assassins who tried to kill me when I was in the Women’s Halls of my brother’s keep,” she said. “Years ago, when I first reached the Riverland. The blonde apprentice.”

“Yes!” He beat the table again. The stump of his left arm twitched as if like a phantom limb it would have followed suit. “You lured us up into that high chamber. The others cast their souls after you. You were as good as dead. Then you said—something.”

“A master-rune.”

“And a great wind came. It blew out the stained-glass window. It sucked out my companions’ souls. They died of shock. I was scared. I ran away.”

She remembered him fleeing, the only one to escape. “But we met again, outside Wilden.”

“I caught up with you. We fought.”

That was putting it generously. He had attacked her, at the same time pleading that she let him kill her. Journeyman thief had stared at apprentice assassin.

“Please? Please?” she had cried, outraged. “You want it, you earn it!”

Instead, she had kicked him into a cloud-of-thorns bush where he had floundered until a Molocar bitch had descended like an avalanche upon him. His scream echoed in her memory, cut short by the hound’s jaws.

“I thought your skull had been crushed,” she said.

He laughed, with an edge of hysteria. “Better that it had been. Instead, the brute only mangled my arm. Only! It had to be amputated. Lady Rawneth helped me. I don’t know what I babbled to her in my delirium, but she was pleased enough to send me on the long, painful journey home. Because of my grandfather, the Guild found me work here in the archives. Not as a proper assassin, mind you. They sneer at me in passing, when they notice me at all. Who else, though, would have employed me even here, maimed as I was? But they won’t continue to do so if they learn that I ran. Twice. It’s all your fault!”

What, that he had come to kill her? That she hadn’t let him?

Graykin rushed into the room and grabbed Jame’s arm. “You have to get out,” he panted. “They’re coming!”

“What? Who?”

Scrolls rustled. Jame grabbed the two on the desk, thrust them into her sleeve, and backed away. A wind seemed to blow through the stacks, a rush of bodies seen only in flashes of bare skin, a hand here, half of a face there where neither mere tattoos nor dye covered flesh. So many yellow, blood-shot eyes. They must have seized the grandmaster, for his impression lifted from the cushion and the chair itself toppled over backward. He squawked and thrashed. Candles fell over. Scrolls spilled off shelves.

“Your soul, old man,” someone hissed. “Give it to us so that we may taste immortality!”

“Fools, fools,” he cried. “You and your master both! Haven’t you learned yet that murder and dismemberment aren’t enough? I do not yield!”

Blood speckled the outlines of a bony, contorted face. Someone had punched him in the nose, which bled freely. Then they drew back, their silhouettes freckled with red.

“Yield, yield, yield . . . ”

A bloody line across his collar-bone marked the track of a mere knife’s blade. Another appeared down the heaving sternum, then across the major pectoral of the right breast, then across the left, jagged as he bucked in their unseen grip. It was the pattern of cuts called kuth, a mark of shame, the precursor to being flayed alive.

Smeak gagged and overthrew the desk. Lit candles, spilled wine, and molten wax flew onto the detritus of tumbled scrolls. Flames kindled.

“You . . . you bastards! Who are you to judge him or me? He is so much better than any of you, while I have never been good enough. But we both serve our king. What do you serve except that false phantom, immortality? Burn, damn you, burn!”

He stumbled over to his grandfather and gathered him up in his one good arm. They clung to each other, the old man’s blood painting them both, while all around flames climbed from shelf to shelf with eager flickering fingers. Walls of fire ignited to the left, to the right, then toppled inward in waves of heat.

“Go,” said Graykin, grabbing Jame by the scuff of the neck. “Now.”

They were swept out of the archives, through the halls, into the street, by a rush of near-invisible bodies—the assassins, panicking. Heat licked after them, and tongues of flame, and screams. Not all, perhaps not even half, had escaped. The door of the archive opened onto an inferno. Then the hungry fire sucked it shut with a slam. Smeak and his grandfather were gone.

Where was the fire watch? Granted, they had been out all night, but still . . . ! Bells, whistles, and hoof-beats echoed in the adjacent streets of warehouses. None, however, came here.

Graykin and Jame huddled against the wall across the street. Already, its bricks were beginning to steam with radiated heat.

“Well . . . ” said Gray, panting, one hand pressed to his thin chest, “the Guild has used those contracts for millennia . . . for blackmail. Everyone knows that. It was a major source of their influence . . . and a way of life. Why d’you think your precious archivist crumbled so easily? You may just have . . . broken their back.”

“I?”

If so, though, good. They had nearly broken her house. “Damn you,” as Smeak had said. How better for That-Which-Destroys to work, even if she hadn’t intended it.

But that didn’t answer all questions.

“What are you doing here?” she asked Graykin.

He shrugged. “Followed you, didn’t I? Did you get the contracts?”

Jame touched them, thrust up her sleeve, crumbling at the edges with heat and age. “Yes, but how did you know?”

“I’m not sure how you did it . . . but you blackmailed that archivist to get the Knorth contract. Didn’t you?”

“It seems so, although I didn’t realize it at the time.”

He looked at her askance. “Strange, strange girl. But you have your mysteries as I have mine. You only choose to tell me so much. I could do more if you fully trusted me.”

“I can’t trust you with what I don’t yet myself understand.”

He snorted. “This isn’t quite what I expected of you in terms of morals. Still, you aren’t stupid. Given Smeak’s background of blackmail, what else would he respect, and why else would he give you anything? Much less, why would he cave when I merely hinted that I was your agent? Hence these contracts.”

“Yes, but who are they for?”

He smirked. “Look and see. Their choices are logical, when you think of it. You should be pleased.”

She held first one contract and then the other up to the morning light and read the letters blazing through.

“Sweet Trinity,” she said, letting them roll up again, slipping them back into the full sleeve of her d’hen. “Now what?”

II

Walking back toward the campus, she thought not only about the fire, and the deaths, and the contracts, but also about the Grandmaster’s final, defiant words: “I do not yield!”

She had wondered before if the reaping of a soul worked only with the consent of the victim. Smug Gerridon believed in the power of seduction. Who, after all, could resist him? The Dream-weaver had seduced in order to reap, but only for Gerridon’s benefit. As such, had she been an unfallen darkling? Jame wanted to believe so. At the Res aB’tyrr she herself had been tempted to take what her tavern audience freely offered her in that perversion of the Great Dance that the first Jamethiel had performed. The would-be dead saints, by contrast, had no consent to give. Perhaps the already sanctified and deified did. The living could resist, if they were strong enough. It was still a puzzle, but worth thought.

She heard a squad of the city guard come up behind her and stepped aside into a doorway to let them pass. They swerved to surround her.

“You,” said the captain. “Where did you come from?”

“Thyme Side,” she answered, wondering why they asked.

“Come with us.”

They grabbed her arms. Their pace lifted her off her feet and their hob-nailed boots kicked her in the shins. The warehouses around the Guild’s archives had burst into flame. Who would have guessed that parchment could burn so fiercely or the fire spread so fast?

“Arsonist,” one of her captors snarled. “D’you think you can burn out honest folk?”

“Filthy foreigner,” another growled. “The Council wants to see you.”

She shouldn’t have worn the d’hen, Jame realized. They didn’t recognize her as an honored guest of the city, nor in this mood would they listen.

They hauled her north, not westward toward the palace mound as she had thought they would but to the Tigganis hill to the east of it.

The Tigganis compound was smaller and more kempt than King Mordaunt’s. Family members walked in the gardens. Children played on the grass. Guards wandered around the edges of the precinct, looking calm but purposeful.

Jame was dragged into an inner chamber with high marble walls, tessellated floors, and alcoves graced with many statues. The guards left her there, somewhat at a loss. What next?

A stocky figure appeared at the head of a flight of stairs, black robed, veiled, descending. Jame recognized that heavy brow, those fine, unhappy eyes.

“Lady Pensa,” she said, with a salute, equal to equal.

The other paused, frowning. “Do I know you? I do! Lady Jameth, welcome to my house, and apologies for the manner of your arrival. But what were you doing in Thyme Side when it burst into flames?”

“I had business in the archives of the Shadow Guild.”

“Ah, I would like to hear about that.”

I deal with politics now, Jame thought, but also with personalities. Truth or dare? Truth.

“The fire there arose in part by accident,” she said. “There was a conflict between Guild members. A number of them burned alive.”

Pensa continued her descent.

“I thought they would fight, sooner or later,” she said. “The traditional who support the king against those who follow the Deathless. Now, are you saying that they have killed their own?”

“Yes. A Grandmaster and his grandson. Or if they didn’t, the fire did.”

“And all of their contracts are gone? Oh.” She sat down on the stairs and clasped her hands tightly in her lap. “I hoped that those would prove their guilt in my father’s death, also that they would disclose who commissioned it.”

Jame considered this. The contracts prickled in her sleeve, lucky not to have been smashed to pieces by the guards’ rough treatment. She drew out one, checked that it was right, and handed it to Pensa.

“This belongs to you.”

Pensa unrolled it. She caught the knack of reading the mere ink faster than Jame had, and stared.

“Oh,” she said blankly. “Oh! I guessed that the Guild was responsible, but that Mordaunt commissioned it. . . . ” She looked up at Jame. “And you simply give this to me?”

Jame shrugged, feeling awkward. “I don’t know what will follow, for good or ill. With my nature, it could go either way. It just seems . . . right.”

Yet, in her sleeve, was the other contract. What to do with that?

Pensa cleared her throat. “You do realize,” she said, “that the Guild depends on blackmail.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“This could shatter it.”

“I hope that it will.”

“So do I. Let the poison work.”

Jame sat down on the step beside her. “I have to ask,” she said. “How is your father?”

Pensa laughed, an unhappy sound. “I visit him in the Necropolis as often as I can, and bring him flowers, and talk to him. He can’t reply. I never did find his tongue.”

Jame remembered the dog slinking out of the ruined mausoleum, something long and red in its jaws. That had been when she had first ridden into High Bashti. She hadn’t told Pensa then. She didn’t now.

The girl dragged the back of her hand across her face, smearing tears, and laughed again. “The funny thing is, while he doesn’t heal, he also doesn’t decay, and he is still dead. Do you think he might become a saint or god after all?”

That was a rather terrible question. Lord Prestic was grossly mutilated, held together by a daughter’s love but also by her stitches, each one of which was a curse against his murderers who had not yet been called to account. What kind of afterlife could such a monstrosity expect?

“I don’t know,” said Jame. “Things work out in this city differently than I would ever have expected.”


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