The Hidden Goddess

by M. K. Hobson

  Farley held one hand to his bloody nose as he took Emily’s elbow, hurrying her up the street to where the carriage waited. As he opened the carriage door for her, he held out a bloodied hand.

  “Miss … why don’t you give me my book back?” he said.

  Emily clutched the parcel tightly. “No.”

  “You really should,” Farley said. Emily held it tighter. Farley sighed.

  “I wasn’t buying it for me, I just want you to know that. I wouldn’t want you thinking I was a kind of person like that. I was … I was buying it for them. Because they’d want to know. The family has to know. That’s all.”

  He closed the carriage door behind her, and she sunk back in her seat, letting out her breath. Her heart was still pounding like a freight train, and her hands were shaking. She felt up to her shoulder, where Gormley had grabbed her. The place still ached. The half-wrapped book lay in her lap, and a bit of bright red peeped from a torn corner.

  All at once, fearing to hesitate, Emily tore the brown paper from the book.

  It was cheaply printed on bad paper. The title, The Blood-Soaked Crimes of Dreadnought Stanton, was executed in stark gothic lettering.

  The full-color engraving on the cover depicted Stanton, his face twisted with evil intent. His hands and feet dripped with blood even more brilliantly red than the book’s cover. In the picture, Stanton held aloft a squirming infant. At his feet writhed a half-clothed woman who looked disturbingly familiar. Black haired, black eyed … She was, Emily realized with a twist of disgust, the very image of Alcmene Blotgate. The woman’s eyes glowed with lust—for Stanton or for the bleeding infant, it was not clear. It was hideous. It was also, Emily noticed, the very same color red as the thing Stanton had hidden in his desk when she’d been in his office last.

  Back at the Stanton house, Emily spent the afternoon in her bedroom reading. It was not, as a typical afternoon spent reading, a pleasant occupation. It probably would have been more pleasant to read Wordsworth aloud, all things considered.

  Though cheaply and hastily printed, the red book was completely successful in achieving its obvious intent—to make Dreadnought Stanton appear like the most depraved and disgusting individual ever to disgrace the earth’s surface. Worse still, the message was driven home in such a fascinating and absorbing way, Emily could not tear her eyes away. On every page there was something more thrilling, shocking, or scandalous than the last. From a comparatively tame opening scene depicting the wanton defilement of a holy altar, it dragged the reader through a Grand Guignol of orgiastic blood-ceremonies, heartless ritual murder performed upon mercy-begging innocents, and gleefully creative and sadistic torture and mayhem—all peppered with prurient scenes of smut involving objects and animals better left uncoupled, even in the imagination. Emily shuddered. For God’s sake, people didn’t behave like that, even sangrimancers! How could anyone want to read about people behaving like that? Still, Emily turned the pages, even if it was just horror and dismay that kept her doing so.

  Emily didn’t mind much about some of the accusations. She was certain she didn’t believe the part where Stanton breakfasted on a litter of newborn kittens. But some of them had the ring of horrible truth. There was the same story General Blotgate had told at the Investment—of Stanton’s using Black Exunge on living creatures, then burning them alive for the amusement of the other cadets. According to the book, it wasn’t just chickens. The descriptions made Emily shudder. And there was the depiction of Mrs. Blotgate (unconvincingly renamed in the book as Mrs. Blackheart) in Stanton’s arms, the adulterous lovers swearing the eternal destruction of everything good and decent in the world …

  For the fifteenth time that afternoon, Emily threw the book to the ground, temper flaring. Lies! Filthy, ugly lies designed to further weaken Stanton’s position at the Institute. That’s all it was. But if so, why had Stanton hidden it from her? The ways of credomancy generally bewildered her, but she knew from experience that trying to hide a secret only gave it more power. And what was he trying to hide, really? The lies … or the parcel of truth that lay behind them?

  There was a knock at the door. Emily looked up guiltily, her heart jumping into her throat. She snatched the book up from the floor and managed to tuck it behind herself as Mrs. Stanton came into the room. The older woman paused, her hand on the doorknob, and looked toward Emily’s arm, which Emily was holding awkwardly behind her back.

  “I’ve been speaking with Farley,” Mrs. Stanton said. “He was quite worried for his job. For good reason, as I have since discharged him.”

  Indignation flared up in Emily. “He was only doing as I asked him. It’s not fair to—”

  “My son sent you here to be safe, not to tramp around New York City getting yourself involved in street brawls.” She gestured obliquely to Emily’s hand, which was still behind her back. “Farley told me you’d managed to obtain one of those … things. I assume from your ridiculous posture that you’ve been reading it?”

  Slowly, Emily pulled her hand out from behind her back and laid the garish red book on the side table. Mrs. Stanton advanced, took the book in between two fingers, lifted it disdainfully, and threw it into the fireplace. The cheap paper flared up quickly, issuing a great quantity of foul-smelling black smoke.

  “It is an exceptionally transparent attack,” Mrs. Stanton said, watching the flames and smoke rise together. She turned and looked at Emily. “I certainly hope you’re not silly enough to have let it upset you.”

  “Why should it?” Emily said. “If it’s all lies.”

  “If?” Mrs. Stanton’s green eyes glittered. “Then you have doubts?”

  Emily swallowed, but said nothing. Mrs. Stanton hmphed.

  “Most of it, I’ll own, seems rather unlike him. Blood strikes me as a highly unsanitary and disgusting beverage, and I can hardly picture him swilling jeweled goblets full of it. But the rest …” She paused. “Well, perhaps it is best that I refrain from sharing my opinion of my son’s taste in intimate companions.”

  “You don’t … you can’t believe any of it?”

  Mrs. Stanton lifted an eyebrow. “Dreadnought was a willful and perverse child. There is not a single earthly foolishness that I am unable to imagine him perpetrating. But whether he did any of those outlandish things or he didn’t, it makes no difference. He is my son.”

  “Well, I’m sure he didn’t do any of it!” Emily said. “But, for heaven’s sake, if he did … you couldn’t—”

  “Of course I could,” Mrs. Stanton said. She came to sit near Emily, in a chair that looked very uncomfortable. The way she sat in it, with her back straight as a poker, made it seem even more so. “And I would. What else would you have me do? Disown him? Denounce him? Ruin my world and my reputation in the service of some idealistic moral fantasy?”

  “In the service of … decency.” Emily could hardly choke out the words.

  “Your frontier ethics are so rawboned, Miss Edwards, as rough-hewn and clumsy as the log cabin in which you must have been raised.” Mrs. Stanton’s face was like marble as she spoke; only her lips moved with ugly precision. “Decency is striving for perfection in a world in which every other hoglike creature satisfies himself with sloppiness and indulgence. Decency is not in failing to murder someone. It’s in murdering the right person, and sparing your family the indignity of getting caught.”

  Emily stared at her. Mrs. Stanton blinked once, slowly.

  “The Senator has gone through his share of difficult times over the past twenty years. There have been public scandals—allegations of bribery, graft, kickbacks. And there have been private disappointments. There will always be other women, Miss Edwards. To imagine otherwise is sheerest self-delusion.”

  She drew in a deep breath. “However, when my husband looks in the mirror, his reflection shows him an unblemished servant of the people, a faithful spouse, and a wise father. There is no doubt in his mind. He is a clear, unruffled pond. He is perfect in his belief in his own perfection. I have bui
lt this in him. I have killed all remorse, all conscience, all compromise within him. Because the strength of our perfection, the strength of our right to rule, is only as strong as our faith in it. Do you understand?”

  Emily stared into the older woman’s green eyes, lost in their ocean of implication.

  “But what about the truth?” Emily whispered.

  “The truth doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Stanton said.

  A heavy silence filled the room. Emily moved to the other side of the room, wrapping her arms around herself. She felt dizzy and sick. Of course the truth mattered. It had to matter. What would life be if it didn’t? Bitter self-delusion in the service of power? Despair flooded her. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, pressed it hard against her teeth to keep from screaming something foul.

  “You have to rise above things like this, Miss Edwards,” Mrs. Stanton said to Emily’s back. “My son has explained many things about this ‘credomancy’ he practices. It is a fascinating art, though I can hardly understand why he had to spend a half-decade of intensive study on what seems to me little more than common sense. One of credomancy’s foundational precepts has always struck me as extremely comforting: While false things can be made true with enough belief, true things can also be believed into becoming false.”

  Emily heard Mrs. Stanton rise. The woman went over to a carved walnut sideboard. She took a key from the small ring that hung at her waist and unlocked the cabinet. Inside, there was an arrangement of bottles and decanters. Mrs. Stanton selected an unopened bottle of brandy. She set it on a table, along with a cut-crystal tumbler.

  “Personally, however, I prefer a more direct brand of comfort.” Was that an attempt at kindness in her voice? If so, it was very difficult to distinguish from contempt. Emily watched as the old woman tore the seal off the bottle, poured herself a brimful glass. She brought the glass to her mouth, drained it slowly and fondly. When she was finished, she set the tumbler down softly, touched a fingertip to each corner of her mouth. She recapped the bottle and left it on the table.

  “I’m sure you’re very tired, Miss Edwards,” Mrs. Stanton said. “You’ll want to remain in your room this evening. I’ll have something sent up. We all understand.”

  Emily turned violently, glaring at the bottle of brandy, at the old woman who hovered over it. She wanted to kick the table over. But at the moment, Emily did feel tired. Very tired. And the thought of locking herself in a room with a bottle of brandy didn’t seem all that exceptionally bad.

  Mrs. Stanton moved toward the door. Her hand was on the doorknob when she paused.

  “It is a shame you must feel such heartache, Miss Edwards,” Mrs. Stanton said, not turning. “It is as disappointing to me as it is to you. I did not raise my son to fall in love. I raised him to be like his father.” She paused, and Emily heard her murmur as she closed the door behind her: “If only I knew where I went wrong.”

  Emily snatched the bottle of brandy and sat on the edge of the bed. She uncorked the bottle and tipped it down her thoat, forgoing the niceties of the cut-crystal tumbler. She assumed it was good brandy, but even so, it burned like hell going down. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  So. The truth didn’t matter. If there was truth in the red book, she was supposed to ignore it. Forget it. Polish Stanton into a gloss so fine that nothing real or honest could stick to him ever again.

  She took another drink, the choking alcohol tickling her nose. Warmth spread through her quickly, tingling and numbing. It would be easy. Drink a little more, go to sleep, smile pretty, and for God’s sake don’t move. Ignore the goblets of blood and sadistic ex-mistresses.

  Swim with the current.

  “To hell with that!” she growled to herself, dashing the bottle of brandy into the fire. It smashed with a satisfying sound, and blue flames leapt on the hearth. Swim with the current? Let Stanton stand by and get away with murder, if that’s what he’d done … She swallowed hard. Three years at the Erebus Academy. How could she never have thought about what that really meant? Did she think that he’d spent those three years discussing theoretical abstractions? She trembled, wishing suddenly for another mouthful of brandy, wishing Mrs. Stanton hadn’t taken the keys to the liquor cabinet with her.

  Even if he hadn’t gone to the diabolical lengths described in the book, he would have killed for blood. He would have tortured his victims to empower the blood. It was what sangrimancers did.

  … it’s in murdering the right people, and sparing your family the indignity of getting caught …

  She put a hand over her mouth, trembling harder. These people really believed that! That life was worth nothing more than the power that could be bled from it.

  And she’d told him it didn’t matter. That it was all in the past.

  She leapt to her feet, pacing the room up and down its length. She’d told him it didn’t matter because she’d never really believed it of him. She’d never thought he could have done it. But he could have. She knew it now, with terrible certainty. He could have been that person. His mother’s coldness, his father’s reflective emptiness; the images drifted together, resolving into an image of Stanton, his face cold as marble, his soul uncluttered by doubt, driving needles into the flesh of a struggling victim …

  Emily ground the heel of her hand into her eyes, trying to rub the image away.

  And what if … what if he was still that person? The kind of person who would send thugs to smash bookstores, beat an innocent man to a bloody crumpled pulp …

  She couldn’t marry someone like that.

  Using her mouth, she stripped the diamond ring from her finger, teeth raking her skin. She spat the thing into her hand, then slammed it down on a side table with a fierce cry. Then she stood looking down at it, watching it wink and glitter. As she watched it, her anger crumbled, tumbling into little shards of brandy-fueled misery. She thought of the afternoon up at the blockhouse, with Stanton’s warm hand on her sore ankle. That was the man she wanted to marry.

  Emily shook her head hard, as if the action would drive the thoughts away. She wasn’t going to think about it anymore. There wasn’t anything left to think about, really. Misery transmuted into bitterness. “Mrs. Blackheart” and the leather bindings imputed to her were not Emily’s true rival. Her true rival was far more abstract and far more demanding. The Institute. The Institute would never relinquish him. It would always be the arms that held him fast, black glass hands tracing blood trails on his smooth flesh …

  Emily shook her head. Stupid thoughts, all getting mixed up. She had to think of something else. She sat down and crossed her arms, squeezing her eyes shut tight, making herself small and hard.

  Aleksei Morozovich. The name the Faery Reader had found on the hair sticks came back to her, and she pounced on it, eager for the distraction. Aleksei Morozovich. She had heard the name before. But where?

  She tried to concentrate on the name, tried to remember where she’d heard it, but all she could see in her mind were young men in plaid suits, tearing up red books. Drifts of paper, white as ash, tumbling down the muddy streets of Chatham Square, balling in gutters …

  Stop it! Emily used her good hand to give her own cheeks a smart slap. It didn’t hurt as much as she’d expected it to. She slapped herself again, experimentally.

  Aleksei Morozovich.

  She remembered the sun shining down through the ivy-covered roof of the blockhouse, Stanton’s warm hands. She was about to slap herself again for letting her mind wander, when she remembered Stanton’s words, the words he’d spoken thoughtfully while his fingers played over her ankle, finding the sore places with perfect accuracy:

  … They propose to implement a sort of toxin … a poison, deployed within the Mantic Anastomosis itself, that would make magic toxic to any practitioner channeling it. The idea was put forth by a scientist named Aleksei Morozovich …

  Emily blinked.

  Aleksei Morozovich. The scientist who’d been working on the poison.


  Her father. A member of the Sini Mira. Mrs. Kendall had said he was working on an important project, one that had driven him from Russia. She had said that he’d had a mentor who’d been killed for his research. If his mentor was Morozovich …

  She remembered being young and small and cold, her father standing before her with the gleaming sticks of engraved silver in his hands, the sticks she had thought were so pretty …

  … There is a secret written on these hair sticks, Emilichka … A dangerous secret …

  Emily could not move. Her head felt as if little explosions were going off in it. The poison. The secret of the poison that would make magic unworkable. Volos’ Anodyne, that’s what Zeno had called it. The poison hidden by the God of Oaths. That was what had to be written on her hair sticks, in hyper-tiny violet scale letters. That was what her father had been trying to protect.

  She leaned forward, staring at the carpet beneath her feet. It couldn’t be. But it had to. That’s what the Sini Mira wanted from her. They wanted to reclaim Volos’ Anodyne. And now she knew where it was. At least, she thought she did.

  She had to suppress the urge to leap to her feet and rush down to the Bowery that very moment. The Faery Reader’s report wouldn’t be ready until morning. She couldn’t make the man work any faster, but the trembling anxiousness inside her was killing her.

  She rocked back and forth in her chair, staring at her trunk. Inside, the blue bottle of memories lay half full. The rest of her past was in there. Her past, her father … and maybe the poison that everyone was looking for. Maybe there was an explanation in there, a confirmation, a confession. Maybe there was more he had to tell her.

  Falling to her knees, she scrambled across the floor to her trunk, unbuckling it and throwing the heavy lid back with a thump. She dug through fabric until her ivory hand clinked against the glass. She lifted the bottle, looking at it.

  Father, she whispered in Russian. Let me see.

  She uncapped the Lethe Draught and drank it down to the last dregs. The bitterness of it filled her mouth, tasting of blood and mold and mushrooms …