by Martha Wells
Reynard called softly from another doorway, "Signs of life, here."
It was a library. The walls were lined with empty shelves and the floor was bare, but a large secretaire stood against one wall, with a straight-backed chair nearby.
Nicholas went to it, holding the lamp close to examine the scarred surface. There was hardly any dust at all and the lamp that stood on the shelf above was still half-filled with oil. The drawers were standing open and one had been pulled all the way out onto the floor.
"Left in a hurry," Reynard commented softly.
They searched the desk without having to discuss it, each taking one side. Nicholas found nothing but broken pens, an empty ink bottle, and a deserted mouse nest, and Reynard’s haul wasn’t nearly so promising. Nicholas pulled out the other drawers and crouched down to reach further back into the cabinet, disturbing a flurry of spiders and something that skittered noisily away. He was rewarded when his hand brushed paper.
"There’s something back here," he muttered.
"Hopefully not a rat."
"Someone pulled out that drawer," Nicholas argued, "because something was stuck and he didn’t want to leave it." It felt like a sheaf of torn paper fragments, wedged into a crack.
"Or because he was in a hurry and clumsy."
"Well, that too." The paper gave way without tearing and he was able to withdraw his arm. In the dim light, he could see the scraps were covered with handwriting. He reached for the lamp, just as Crack’s voice came from the doorway.
"Found something."
"Found what?" Reynard asked, as Nicholas stood and shoved the paper fragments into his vest pocket.
"What you thought," Crack elaborated and vanished back into the hall. Reynard turned to Nicholas, brow raised, for a translation.
"The not-rats," Nicholas explained, already moving toward the door.
Crack led them to an alcove under the staircase. Going down, they found themselves in a hall with bare plaster walls, with various closed doors leading off it, probably to such places as the stillroom, the wine storage, the butler’s pantry, and the bedrooms for the upper servants. Crack turned right and opened a door. The smell warned Nicholas what to expect. It had grown stronger as they neared this room and as the door swung open he nearly gagged. Crack took the lantern out of Nicholas’s hand, knocked the slide all the way up and held it high.
In the center of the room a makeshift table had been fashioned out of planks and overturned tubs. Stretched across the planks was the corpse of a man. The chest and abdomen had been ripped open, the ribs pried back. Most of the organs had been removed and were littering the flagstoned floor, along with a great quantity of blood and other bodily fluids. The entrails were still attached but had been pulled out and were dangling to the floor.
Nicholas heard himself say, "I wasn’t expecting this."
"There’s more," Crack said, his soft raspy voice grimly matter-of-fact. "But this is the worst. That room there, closest to the stairs, I checked it first. There’s a hole knocked in the back wall with six of ‘em crammed in it."
Reynard turned to him, aghast. "Six?"
"Kids," Crack added. He looked at Nicholas earnestly. "There’s more, I know there is. I could find ‘em all for you if you need it."
"That won’t be necessary just at the moment." Nicholas was staring at the carnage. Whether Crack had sensed it on a visceral level, or observed signs that led him to that conclusion, he knew it was true. Bile was rising in his throat and he had to turn away for a moment and rest his head against the doorframe. Reynard stepped down the hall a few paces and stayed there, cursing under his breath.
Nicholas forced himself to turn back and look at the room again. He had, for a time, trained in the physician’s college at Lodun, though he had given up the courses after Edouard died. He could recognize a dissection when he saw it, and this was not one. This was a vivisection.
He made himself take a step further into the room, confirming the theory. There was no reason to tie down a corpse and the man’s wrists and ankles, practically the only intact flesh still left on the body, bore terrible galls from straining against the bonds. One of the eyes had been gouged out and the face cut and disfigured. He wasn’t alive through much of it, Nicholas told himself. He couldn’t have been. But the moments the victim had lived through had been terrible enough.
He looked down at the debris on the floor. The remains were that of more than one person.
He almost turned and walked out of the room then, certain he was going to be ill. Nothing had ever affected him this way before. He was not squeamish: anatomical studies, the morgue, or the surgeries he had watched had never disturbed him. This was different. This was foul in a way almost past comprehension. He knew what Crack was seeing here, why the other man was so certain they would find more corpses if they searched. This was not something one did once. This was a crescendo, worked up to with time and much experimentation.
Nicholas forced himself to look around the room again and this time saw something else. The whitewashed plaster on the walls, where it wasn’t stained with blood or some other fluid, was melted.
"What the hell. . . ." he said softly, so intrigued by the anomaly he almost forgot the butchery around him. He stepped to the wall nearest the door, where he could reach it without having to move anything aside or step into a puddle, and probed the affected area. It was not only the plaster that was melted, but the wood beneath it. It was fused, the two disparate materials running together, forming glassy textured lumps. Nicholas swore again. This was something he had learned at Lodun too, but not in the medical college. This was something sorcerous; the result, perhaps, of uncontrolled power.
He should search for more telltale signs of sorcery, but he found himself suddenly unable to turn and look at the rest of the room again. He stepped out and nodded to Crack, who dimmed the lantern again and pulled the door shut.
They climbed the stairs and once back in the hall Reynard turned immediately to the passage that led outside.
Nicholas caught his arm. "We still have to search the rest of the house. We can come back tomorrow to investigate further, but we have to make sure there’s no one still hiding here."
Reynard hesitated. He was badly disturbed and doing his best to conceal it. "Yes," he said finally. "You’re right. Let’s finish it."
They split up to make quicker work of it. Crack had already scouted the basement, which seemed to contain nothing but the bodies and the instruments that had been used to torture and kill. They found repeated evidence that the house had been inhabited and recently. The ground floor was barren, except in the kitchen which still showed signs of meals prepared and eaten at the deal table. Stores of candles, lamp oil, and various foodstuffs had been left behind. The dust and dirt coating the remaining carpets took footprints easily, though it didn’t hold enough of the shape to make identification of the type of shoe possible.
On the second floor Nicholas found a bedroom that had seen recent use and a search of the drawers and cupboards in the remaining furniture turned up a slim stack of notebooks, covered with elegant, spidery handwriting. He fell on those eagerly, but as he flipped through them they seemed to be nothing but verbatim notes out of a book of sorcerous instruction. It was mildly encouraging that the type of sorcery discussed was necromancy. That was patently obvious from the first page, which went on about all the uses of dried human skin. It was the type of notes a student would make, from a book he was allowed to use but not remove from a master’s library. Nicholas took the notebooks anyway and found nothing more of use.
In the last room at the far end of the left hand wing, the now familiar smell of mortal decay stopped Nicholas in the doorway. It was a bedroom, more completely furnished than the others he had searched. His eyes went to the dressing table, where brushes and combs and a few cut glass bottles stood under a heavy layer of dust. He moved reluctantly to the heavily curtained bed and drew back one of the tattered drapes.
This, at leas
t, was peaceful death. An old woman lay on the counterpane, dressed in a faded gown of a style out of fashion for twenty years, her feet in delicately beaded slippers. Her eyes were closed and her arms folded on her breast. Her flesh was deeply sunken and decayed; she must have lain like that for a year or more.
He let the drape fall back. It was unlikely the usurpers of her house had ever known she was there. He hoped that last loyal servant, who had dressed her in her best and laid her body out and drawn the bedcurtains, had followed those actions with packing her things and locking the door behind her, and had not lingered to become part of the collection in the basement.
Nicholas kept them searching as long as he could, but with only the three of them and lamplight, there was only so much they could do. Finally, Reynard collared him.
"Nic, there is nothing more we can do tonight. We need a medical doctor, and a sorcerer, and enough men to look in every cabinet, cubby, and mousehole in this house. Besides, you aren’t going to find a message scrawled in blood on a wall that says, ‘I did this come find me at such and such address’ no matter how hard you look. Leave it for now. We can come back in the morning with help."
Nicholas looked around at the silent hall and the disturbed dust hanging in the damp air. Finally he said, "You’re right, let’s go."
They left the house by the garden door. Nicholas was hoping the outside air, remarkably clean and fresh after the fetid humors inside, would revive him, but he didn’t get two paces down the broken path before he found himself braced against the garden wall, being messily sick.
When he straightened up he saw Crack had gone ahead, probably to scout the street. Reynard was waiting for him, arms folded, staring at the silent house.
Still leaning weakly against the wall, unable to help himself, Nicholas said, "It doesn’t make sense. What does this have to do with spirit circles? You heard him ask Madame Everset’s brother about his ship. It was so obvious that he was after the cargo, probably valuable if they were coming out of a Parscian port. He was after hidden wealth, not. . . . What does this have to do with it?"
Reynard looked back at him, frowning. "But you thought he had something to do with those disappearances, that boy you went to look at in the morgue?"
"There was evidence, I couldn’t discount it, but I thought it would turn out to be some sort of coincidence. This doesn’t make sense."
"Madness doesn’t have to make sense." Reynard turned away from the house and took Nicholas’s arm. "Let’s get away from here."
They found Cusard waiting up the street and climbed aboard the wagon. After a brief whispered explanation from Crack, Cusard whistled and said, "Next time I moan about being left behind, remind me of this."
Nicholas and Reynard settled in the wagon bed, Crack climbing back to join them as Cusard urged the sleepy horses into motion.
They were silent for a time, watching the darkened houses pass by. The night was winding down in this part of the city and the loudest sound was the clop of hooves on stone.
"What do we do now?" Crack asked.
That’s the first time he’s ever asked, Nicholas thought. No matter what was happening. It was too bad he didn’t have an answer.
"That’s simple enough," Reynard told Crack. "Tomorrow night you and I will go out, find Octave, and commit his remains to the river."
"That’s the one thing we can’t do," Nicholas said. He met Reynard’s eyes. "Octave couldn’t have done all that alone. There must be others. There’s his coachman, for one." The coachman wasn’t the one Nicholas was worried about. There was someone else in this, someone who wasn’t interested in Octave’s spirit circles.
Reynard returned his gaze steadily. "Are you sure we can afford to wait?"
Nicholas didn’t look away. "No. But if there’s even one other, he’s got to be found. Octave knows too much about us. His colleagues must also."
"That wasn’t the reason I was thinking of," Reynard said quietly.
"I know." Despite the devil-may-care persona Reynard had carefully constructed, his sense of morality was better suited to the officer and gentleman he had once been. His impulses were always in the right direction. Nicholas’s impulses were usually all in the wrong direction and it was only the intellectual knowledge of right and wrong painstakingly instilled in him by Edouard that allowed him to understand most moral decisions. But something in that room had struck him to the heart. He would stop it, but he had to do it his own way.
Reynard said nothing for a time. The wagon boards creaked as Crack shifted uneasily, but the henchman didn’t venture an opinion. Finally Reynard sighed.
"He’s clever, Octave or whoever helps him, to take so many and not be caught, not start some sort of panic. He could keep at it for years."
Nicholas was staring at the street moving past. It was necromancy, obviously. Octave and his followers were performing—committing—some sort of necromantic magic. There was a memory, just on the edge of recall, that would seem to explain much if he could just capture it. He said, "I think I’ve seen something like that room somewhere before."
Even Crack looked to him in astonishment. Reynard snorted. "Where? In a slaughterhouse?"
"Not in person," Nicholas explained with a preoccupied frown. "In a book, an illustration in a book. I used to read the most appalling things as a child, my mother. . . . My mother bought torn-up, broken books by the stack for me, at the old shops near the river, and she didn’t always have the leisure to look at what they were." He shook his head. "That’s all I can recall of it. I’ll look in Edouard’s library—he used to read appalling things too."
Reynard said grimly, "Whether he’s committing plagiarism or he’s thought it all up on his own, Doctor Octave’s got to die."
Madeline wasn’t able to sleep. It was for no rational reason: Nicholas had done far more dangerous things than pose as a servant at a house party. At least, she thought he had. Doctor Octave was such an unknown quantity.
Unable to reason away her sleeplessness, she sat up on the chaise in the bedroom, wrapped in her dressing gown, with a glass of watered wine and a book she was unable to pay proper attention to.
It’s not as if Octave is the first sorcerer we’ve had to deal with, she thought for perhaps the third time, tapping one well-kept fingernail on the page before her and staring into space. They had once burgled the town home of a sorcerer called Lemere and found their way through a bewildering maze of magical protections. But Arisilde had been more active then and well able to cope with any attempt at retaliation. If Octave is a sorcerer. Perhaps it was the unknown that disturbed her.
She wished she could tell if it was ordinary nerves or some long buried sense trying to warn her. Nearly all the women in her family had strong talents and inclinations for witchcraft. Madeline had given all that up for the stage and in truth, she didn’t miss it. Her real talent was for acting and the roles she played in pursuit of Nicholas’s goals were just as thrilling as lead ing้nue at the Elegante.
She shook her head at her own folly. Life was safer at the Elegante. Any fool could see Nicholas was obsessed. With destroying Montesq mainly, but also in a broader sense he was obsessed with deception itself. And obsessed with playing the part of Donatien to Vienne’s criminal underworld, and dancing in and out of Inspector Ronsarde’s grasp, and a dozen other things to varying degrees. And now with stalking Octave, for all she knew.
Lately the obsession had been gaining the upper hand. Madeline supposed that if she were of literary bent she would see Donatien as a separate, distinct personality that was fast consuming Nicholas. That, in fact, would make a good play. Davne Ruis could play Nicholas, she thought. And I could play me. Or maybe his mother; that would be a good part, too. But she knew it wasn’t the case. Nicholas and Donatien were too obviously the same personality; at heart and everywhere else that counted they were the same man, with only cosmetic differences to fool the onlookers. They both wanted the same things.
But then sometimes she wasn’t sure sh
e knew Nicholas at all. She suspected Reynard might know him better. He had been helping Nicholas with his various plots for about six years or so and Madeline had only been involved for half that time.
Not long after Nicholas had first taken her into his confidence, Madeline had had a t๊te-เ-t๊te with Reynard, over brandy on the veranda of the Cafe Exquisite. She had asked him, point blank, if he and Nicholas had ever slept together, wishing to get that question resolved before she embarked on any deeper relationship with him. Sensing her seriousness, Reynard had replied, immediately and without baiting, that they hadn’t. "Not that I didn’t inquire once if he was interested, not long after we first met." After a moment he admitted, "I had the feeling that if I had pushed the issue, he would have given in. If you can imagine Nic giving in on any point whatsoever, which I admit is rather difficult."
"But you don’t push issues," Madeline had said, swirling the warmed brandy in her glass.
"No, I don’t. He didn’t want me, he wanted affection and understanding. I didn’t really want him, I just wanted to try to learn how his mind worked. Neither of us would have gotten what we wanted and we both already had more trouble than we could handle."
"You can’t find out who someone is by sleeping with them," Madeline had pointed out.
"Thank you for the words of wisdom, my dear," Reynard had said, dryly. "Now where were you twenty years ago when the advice would have done me some good?"
Reynard had been of some help, but instinct told Madeline that both of them knew exactly as much as Nicholas wanted them to know and not one hint more.
Such speculations were pointless. Madeline shifted restlessly and tugged her dressing gown more firmly around her. There was a soft scratch on the door and as she put her book aside it opened and Sarasate peered in. "Madame, there’s a telegram."