by Martha Wells
Nicholas stopped to unlock a door at the opposite end and they went through into a much smaller area. There were crates stacked here, too, and shelves lining the walls and locked glass-fronted cabinets. There was also a safe about waist high, square and forbidding, which held nothing more exciting than the receipts from the warehouse’s honest clients.
Cusard glanced up from the clerk’s desk and tipped his cap to them.
"Any problems?" Nicholas asked.
"Not a one. Want to see it?"
Nicholas smiled. "I’ve seen it. Last night, remember?"
"M’lady hasn’t seen it." Cusard winked at Madeline. "Want to see it?"
Madeline took a seat, laying aside her parasol and slipping off her gloves. "Yes, I want to see it."
"Very well." Nicholas surrendered, going to lean against the mantel. "But don’t become attached—it’s not staying long."
Cusard knelt and slid the braided rug aside—the rug was pure window dressing; this particular safe hole was hidden better than mere human ingenuity could manage—and pressed his palm flat against one of the smooth fieldstone blocks that composed the floor. A small section of the blocks seemed to ripple, not like a trick of the light, but as if the stone itself had become suddenly liquid.
It was one of Arisilde’s old spells, cast before he had begun his retreat into opium. Nicholas knew there was not one sorcerer in a thousand who would have been able to tell that the spell was here, let alone to break it. Arisilde had explained something of the principle: the blocks were still the same fieldstone, but the spell caused them to change their "state" from solidity to something more malleable. It was set to respond only to Nicholas, Madeline, and Cusard. Reynard knew of its location but had claimed at the time to be too unreliable to be trusted with a key to the money box.
"Keep watch for a man calling himself Doctor Octave," Nicholas told Cusard while they waited. He described the man in detail, including the style of clothing the golem had worn. "He’s probably a sorcerer, possibly a deadly one. And he seems to know somewhat more than is comfortable about us."
Cusard looked properly taken aback. "Don’t that ruin my mood," he muttered. "I’ll make sure the others are warned."
The section of stone was sinking down and rippling sideways, running like water to vanish under the more permanent blocks. Revealed was a compartment lined with mortar, now filled with the small gold bars.
"Forty-seven of them," Cusard said, with great satisfaction. "That’s what, fifty thousand gold royals?" He fetched out a bar and handed it to Madeline.
Her arm sagged from the unexpected weight as she accepted it. "I didn’t realize it was so heavy."
"I also want you to pay everyone involved the bonus we discussed," Nicholas said. There was a penny sheet, Review of the Day again, lying on a nearby table, and his eyes were irresistibly drawn to it. He picked it up and scanned the contents.
"Today?" Cusard asked. "Before we’re finished?"
"We’re finished with their part."
Cusard hesitated, looking from Nicholas, who was now engrossed in the penny sheet, to Madeline, who was smiling enigmatically and hefting the small bar. He asked, "Is this one of those I’m not going to want to know about, and wish I didn’t know once I do?"
Nicholas turned a page and didn’t answer. Madeline handed Cusard back the bar, and said, a little ruefully, "It’s most likely, yes."
"When did you get this, Cusard?"
"The pamphlet? My wife carries that about." Madame Cusard made lunch for all the men who worked in the warehouse and came in daily to clean the offices. It was important that Madame Cusard be seen by her neighbors to work, to help explain the presence of the generous funds that fed and clothed her and all the little Cusards.
"What is it?" Madeline asked.
"They found a body in the river. Washed up in the watergates."
Cusard snorted. "That’s worth putting in a pamphlet? Happens every day."
"Not the missing girl Arisilde was interested in?" Madeline said, her brows drawing together.
"No, not her. A young man. Not identified as yet."
"And . . . ?"
"And," Nicholas read, " ‘Attention was called to the ghastly occurrence when the gatekeepers spied a spectral glow under the surface in the vicinity of the water gate. When the working men drew near, the glow vanished. Upon further investigation, they discovered the young person’s corpse.’ "
"A spectral glow?" Madeline frowned. "You’re thinking of last night. That stuff that was on your coat."
"What stuff?" Cusard demanded.
"When that creature attacked me in the cellar, it left a residue on my clothing," Nicholas explained, preoccupied. "Once I was away from torchlight, in the darkness of the coach, the glow was plain to see."
Madeline stood and came over to take the paper. "When they drew near the glow disappeared," she muttered. "This happened last night. They were carrying lanterns, of course."
"It bears looking into," Nicholas said, taking back the penny sheet and folding it. He smiled at Madeline. "You didn’t have any plans for the afternoon, did you?"
"Sometimes I wonder about you," Madeline said. Her scalp itched under her cap.
"Why do you say that?" Nicholas seemed honestly surprised. They were standing in a corridor beneath the Saints Crossing Morgue, at the ironbound door that was the entrance to the lower levels, and he had just sounded the bellpull for admittance. Nicholas was dressed in a plain dark suit, with the short top hat and caped coat affected by professional men. He wore spectacles and Madeline had used a theatrical powder to tint his hair and beard gray. He carried a surgeon’s bag. Madeline wore a plain dark dress with a white apron and had tucked all her hair away under a white cap. She had skillfully used makeup to change the long lines of her face from elegant to gaunt and to narrow her wide dark eyes. The floor of the hall was wet and filthy and the plaster was dank and smelled of carbolic.
"I think you’ll do anything for curiosity’s sake."
"I’m trying to establish foundation for a hypothesis."
"You’re curious."
"That’s what I said."
Madeline sighed and supposed it was her own fault for not voicing any real objections. There was no danger in coming here like this; Nicholas was adept at assuming different personas and she had faith in her makeup and her own acting ability. But she could think of better things to do with her afternoons than look at drowned young men. They would be starting rehearsals at the Elegante about now, she remembered, and then tried to put it out of her mind.
There was a thunk from the heavy door and the sound of bolts being pulled back, then it was opened by a man with thinning brown hair wearing an apron over his suit. He said, "Ah, Doctor . . . ?"
"Doctor Rouas, and my nurse."
Madeline dropped a little curtsey, keeping her eyes downcast. The other man ignored her, which was the attitude most physicians took with nurses and what made it such an effective disguise, almost as good as making oneself look like an article of furniture. He said, "You’re here for our latest unfortunate from the river? It’s this way."
He motioned them through and locked the door after them, coming forward to lead the way down. This hall was stone and stank even more strongly of carbolic. Madeline knew the heavy door and the size of the locking bolts were not current precautions, but holdovers from when this place had been part of the dungeons of the old prison that had once stood on this site.
The doctor led them down the hall, past ancient archways filled in with brick and modern wooden doors. Finally they turned a corner into a wide chamber with something of both the laboratory and the butcher shop about it. There were shelves containing chemical apparatus and surgical equipment. There was also an air that led one to expect chains, torture devices, and screaming captives. Perhaps it’s only the weight of the past, Madeline thought. Or her imagination.
In the center of the room was a steel operating table and atop that a limp form wrapped in burlap. There
was another doctor present just now, an older man, with gray in his receding hair and in his neatly-trimmed mustache and beard. He was washing his hands in the basin against the wall, his sleeves rolled up and his coat hanging on a peg nearby. He glanced up at them, his expression open and friendly. There is something familiar about that face, Madeline thought. He said, "I’m just going."
"Doctor Rouas, this is Doctor Halle," their guide said.
"Ah." The older man dried his hands hastily and came forward to shake hands with Nicholas. He nodded pleasantly to Madeline and this gesture of uncommon politeness on his part she almost met with a blank stare. She recovered herself in time to smile shyly and duck her head, but her mind was reeling. Doctor Halle. Of course she knew that face. Only once before had she seen it at such close range: two years ago at Upper Bannot when Ronsarde had almost uncovered their plot to steal the jewels in the Risais ancestral vault. This man was Doctor Cyran Halle, the good friend and colleague of Inspector Ronsarde.
She had been in disguise then, and far more thorough a disguise than she was wearing now. The other times she had seen him had been at a distance and in innocuous circumstances: the theater, the grill room at Lusaude’s, in a crowd outside the Prefecture. He couldn’t be suspicious and indeed, he didn’t seem so, but Madeline became acutely aware of a nervous flutter in the pit of her stomach.
With an expression of easy goodwill, Nicholas said, "Doctor Halle, I’m familiar with your work. It’s an honor to meet you."
"Thank you." Halle appeared honestly pleased with the compliment. He nodded toward the body as he rolled his sleeves down. "You’re here to make an examination?"
"No, I’m to attempt an identification only. One of my patients has a son who’s gone missing—though the rest of the family believes him to have run away on his own. The mother isn’t well and I agreed to come here in her place."
"A sad duty." There was real sympathy in Halle’s voice. He put on his coat and took his bag from the stained table. "I’ll be out of your way, then. Pleasure meeting you, Doctor, and you, young lady."
Madeline had to remind herself that this man was dangerous to them, even if he did have impeccable manners and was as genial as a favorite uncle. If he knew who we were, she thought, if he knew Nicholas was Donatien, the man Ronsarde has been searching for all this time. . . .
Nicholas had moved up to the slab and turned the burlap sheet back. Madeline caught sight of a face, hardly recognizable as human, discolored as if it was some nightmare creature of the fay. Nicholas said, "He resembles the boy slightly, but I don’t believe it’s him." He shook his head, frowning. "I’d rather be absolutely sure. . . . Has his clothing been saved?"
"Yes, it has. Doctor Halle advised us to do so." The other doctor turned to open one of the cabinets and as he rummaged through its contents, Madeline took the opportunity to glare at Nicholas with a mixture of annoyance and exasperation.
He frowned at her. He hated to break character in the middle of a performance and normally so did she, but it wasn’t every day that one encountered one’s second most deadly opponent.
The doctor returned with a metal bucket, which he upended on the table. "There’s not much left," he admitted. "Fragments of a shirt and trousers, the rags of a coat. No shoes. Nothing in the pockets, of course."
Nicholas used a pencil from the workbench to fastidiously poke through the damp stinking collection, "No, you’re right, that’s not much help." He tossed the pencil away and took the doctor’s elbow, turning him back toward the body on the slab. "I take it you noticed these marks on his arms? What is your opinion on them?"
With the other physician’s attention engaged, Madeline slipped a pair of sewing scissors out of her sleeve and quickly cut fragments from the torn and bedraggled coat and trousers. She folded the pieces in her handkerchief and tucked it away in the pocket of her apron, then turned back to the two men.
Nicholas took their leave shortly after that and within moments they were back out in the dank corridor on the other side of the ironbound door.
"Interesting that Ronsarde is taking notice of this," Nicholas said in an undertone. "He must have sent Halle—the man doesn’t stir a foot from his house unless Ronsarde sends him."
Madeline wouldn’t have put it that way; she had always found Cyran Halle the least objectionable one of the pair, but Nicholas had never forgiven the doctor for describing some of Donatien’s activities as "the products of an hysterical and badly disturbed mind" in a letter to the current head of the city Prefecture. "Interesting? Is that the word for it?" she asked dryly.
"My dear, he suspected nothing."
They were nearing the stairs up into the main part of the building and Madeline was prevented from answering.
The dingy corridors on the ground floor were far more crowded and it was almost impassable near the public area. Here one of the walls was a glazed partition, behind which stood two rows of black marble tables, inclined toward the glass wall and each cooled by a constant stream of water. They held the bodies of the most recent unidentified dead, usually lost souls found on the street or pulled from the river. Each was left three or four days, in the hope that persons who were missing relatives or friends might come and claim them. Over half the corpses found in the city were eventually claimed this way, but Nicholas had told her that many were probably identified incorrectly. It was just too difficult for the bereaved to recognize even close relations under these circumstances.
They had expected to see the drowned boy on display, but had been told that they could find him in the examination room instead. Madeline wondered if it was Doctor Halle who had saved the nameless young man from this fate. As Nicholas forged a path through the crowd for her, she could see that few of the people here looked as if they were searching for loved ones; most of them looked remarkably like well-dressed tourists, drawn here by the grotesque nature of the display.
Once they were outside in the late afternoon light and relatively fresh air of the street, Madeline had decided it was useless to argue. The day had grown warmer and the morning clouds had given way to brilliant blue sky, incongruous after the morgue. The nights would still be cold, but the snow last night had probably been the last of the season and winter was in its death throes. She asked, "What were you saying about the marks on the boy’s arms?"
"They were shackle galls. He was obviously held prisoner before he was killed."
"Killed, and not accidently drowned? It does happen, you know."
"Not in this case. His throat was torn out. It could have happened after death, if something in the river attacked the corpse, but Halle didn’t think so. He had left some case notes for them on the table and I managed to glance over the first page."
Madeline considered that, frowning. They had to walk two streets over, to where their coach was waiting for them. Nicholas hadn’t wanted it to wait in front of the building so that no one would associate it with the ordinary medical doctor and his nondescript nurse, and she was glad of it. Meeting Cyran Hall wasn’t the same as running into Sebastion Ronsarde, but it was far too close a brush with the famous Inspector for her comfort. "Well, do you think this boy was killed by the same creature, or same sort of creature, that attacked you under Mondollot House?"
"I won’t know that until I have the substance on the corpse’s clothes examined and compared to the substance on my coat. I wish Arisilde. . . . But there’s no help for that."
"I could see there was something on the clothes other than river sludge; it was a sort of silvery grease. If it is the same, what does that tell us?"
"At this point, not much."
Nicholas leaned back in his seat, resigning himself to waiting. From the height of their private box he could watch the crowd swarming into the stalls below. Reynard was late, but then lateness at the theater was eminently fashionable. Nicholas had never managed to catch the habit of it himself. He had spent the first twelve years of his life in the Riverside slums, among decaying tenements and human misery, bef
ore Edouard Viller had taken him in. He still found the theater a delight.
Nicholas glanced at Madeline and smiled. She was watching the activity around the stage below with a jeweled lorgnette. She had started as a member of the chorus in the opera five years ago, working her way up to last season, when she had taken a leading role at the Elegante. It was only because of Nicholas’s plans for destroying Count Montesq that she hadn’t accepted a role for this season.
Members of the demi monde had wondered why a fashionable young actress had taken up with a restrained and often reclusive art importer, no matter how wealthy he was. Nicholas still wasn’t sure he knew, either. His original plans had never included Madeline at all.
Three years ago he had sought her acquaintance on impulse, after seeing her several times in her first ing้nue role. Before he knew it he was helping her extricate herself from a tangle involving a rather predatory lord who habitually stalked young actresses. Though by the time Nicholas had arrived, the only help Madeline had really required was instruction in the little known art of artistically arranging a body to make its injuries look self-inflicted. After making certain the lord’s death would appear to be suicide, Nicholas had taken Madeline back to Coldcourt. At some point during their first night together, he had been shocked to discover that he had not only told her about his identity as Donatien, but blurted out his entire life story as well. He had told her things that only Edouard, or Nicholas’s long dead mother, had known. It hadn’t just been a haze of lust clouding his brain; he had never had that kind of rapport with anyone before, never felt that kind of bond. He had certainly never expected to find instant camaraderie with a country girl, self-educated and come to Vienne to be an actress.
But Madeline had more than native wit. She had had no intention of staying in the chorus and had prepared for a career in classical theater by reading every new play she could get her hands on and studying the history behind the old period pieces. She had taught herself to speak and read Aderassi so she could take roles in the opera if she had to, but her real goal was the dramas and comedies played out on the stages of the big theaters of the fashionable district.