by Carrie Patel
Roman couldn’t have used the fireplace in years.
Jane knelt and pulled the topmost log aside, and it clunked onto the brick hearth. She tore another from the stack. Black lacquer shone beneath the grate. Jane reached under and worked a wide, squat box from the grate, its surface gray with dust.
People didn’t hide nondescript little boxes without good reason. Whatever Roman kept here, it was obviously important. Or personal. He certainly didn’t handle it often. She tamped down the last of her guilt with the reminder that, if it was important enough, it might be able to save them both. If not, it probably wouldn’t matter anyway.
She wiped the dust from the lid and tried to raise it, but it was locked.
The key was most likely buried somewhere in the escritoire if Roman wasn’t especially careful. Hidden in one of the bookshelves if he was. If he was anything like her wealthy, eccentric former clients, the key was somewhere in the study.
That was the problem, of course. Roman wasn’t like anyone else.
After a moment’s thought, Jane pulled one of the logs from the fireplace and smashed it on the box’s tiny latch. She lifted the lid.
Inside were a handkerchief, a pocket watch, and half a dozen coins. Personal tokens, but nothing that would explain the vault, and certainly nothing that would ease Roman’s plight.
Jane picked up a couple of the coins and examined them even as her heart sank. They were small and copper, dark with age. But they didn’t look like any currency she’d ever seen. Each had a strange, boxy symbol on one side and a square hole punched through the middle.
She glanced at the watch, suddenly wondering what time it was. The thing probably hadn’t run in years, but Jane felt the hours evaporating around her like air from a sealed room. She’d been here too long already.
She wrapped the coins in the handkerchief and tucked it and the watch into her bodice. As she did, her hand brushed something else.
The key Petrosian had given her. She recalled their exchange the night before and Petrosian’s offer of access to Ruthers’s manor.
The last thing she wanted was to visit the home of the man she’d murdered. But if it held the means to Roman’s freedom, then she had to go.
* * *
Councilor Ruthers’s manor wasn’t far from Roman’s neighborhood. Jane had never been there, but she’d served enough clients in the area to know where it was.
And, even with the gas lamps shattered, the gardens trampled, and the overpriced storefronts trashed, it was difficult to mistake the spacious, arched tunnels of the Vineyard.
Jane passed estates she’d known, where she’d once accepted and delivered laundry for the wealthy and powerful of Recoletta. Now, these places were either neglected or vandalized, with creeper vines growing over smashed or rusted gates. From what she’d seen since Madina, their former residents weren’t faring much better.
She reached Ruthers’s manor after a fifteen-minute walk. She would have known it even if Petrosian hadn’t described it.
The tunnel she’d been traveling, wide enough to accommodate the broad facade of an estate and an entryway garden on either side, opened into a small cavern. Steps, wide and low, rose through an arbor. Two carriages could have clattered along side by side, all the way to the facade, which was an imposing masterpiece a hundred feet wide and just as tall, framed by heavy pilasters and stone monsters carved in relief. A skylight poured afternoon sun onto the scene, and faded radiance stones nestled along the cavern walls.
This was where the most powerful man in Recoletta had lived until she had killed him. Jane felt her cheeks grow hot, as the morning’s nausea returned to her in a rush. She looked up at the diamond windows and gray stone and around at the shaggy garden, reminding herself that these were all just pieces of a place, none of which could hurt her any more than Ruthers could.
Besides, it was what lay inside that mattered.
Jane climbed the shallow steps to the door, a heavy thing of wood and wrought iron, and used the key Petrosian had given her. The door swung open more easily than she would have expected.
The hall inside was dark and cool, with tall, marble-paneled arches reaching up – probably above the surface – to pull a pale glow down from the clouded skylights. The floor had been swept clean, though she supposed Ruthers would have arranged for this in preparation for his return.
She suppressed a shiver.
Jane had been in enough houses like this to guess that the rooms nearest to her would be sitting rooms and parlors. The bedrooms would be at the back and down the stairs that she could just see like shadows in the darkness. Kitchens, laundry, servants’ quarters, and other functional but unsightly places would be scattered behind the walls and stitched together by a network of narrow, bare-stone corridors. Ruthers’s library and office would be somewhere removed, away from the busy main hall and unconnected to the servants’ tunnels.
At least that was the normal design of estates like this, for powerful men and women who balanced delicate matters of state with busy social calendars. Jane had never been in one quite this big, though.
She headed down the central hall, each footfall a thunderclap, checking the rooms as she passed them. Mahogany tables inlaid with opal, velvet-cushioned settees, wall drapes thick and soft as down blankets, all of it priceless and pristine. It was a wonder any of it still remained, but Ruthers had always cast a long shadow.
Jane continued until she reached a grand staircase at the end of the hall. It split halfway up the wall, twin arms winding up and around to two balconies along the hall. She could see the tops of arches on either side just beyond the balustrade, and she guessed that long galleries lay beyond, big and spacious enough that drafts whispered from above.
A gentleman of Ruthers’s station wouldn’t keep anything important so close to the surface.
The staircase also curved down in two wide arms that met on a darkened landing. Whatever she needed had to lie in that direction.
She took a radiance stone glim from the side table and proceeded down the stairs.
She descended to a rotunda that was wider and almost as tall as the hall above. Three smaller corridors radiated from it, one straight ahead and one to either side. On a hunch, Jane followed the hall to the left.
Cool drafts prickled at the back of her neck. Even though Ruthers was as cold and still as his manor, she couldn’t help but feel dread at snooping around uninvited. She didn’t believe in ghosts, but something intangible lingered in this place, and it made her want to leave it as quickly as possible.
Halfway down the hall, she smelled something dry and musky. She recognized it as the scent of old books.
She followed a twisting, carpeted passage – the kind most guests would have ignored – until she reached a heavy wooden door with a darkened brass lock. It creaked open at her push, and she gasped.
For a man who had spent a significant portion of his career hiding an ancient library from the rest of the city, Ruthers had an impressive collection of books where most whitenails would have kept their wine. Jane didn’t realize her hands were shaking until she noticed the shadows jumping behind the rows of bookshelves.
Something groaned in the distance behind Jane. She spun but saw nothing besides the thick shadows painting the hall.
So she turned back to investigate the library. It seemed like the best place to start.
There must have been a dozen shelves, each holding a couple of hundred books. She couldn’t tell what they were about from a quick scan of the spines, but if the heavy lock on the door was any indication, they pertained to matters of the utmost secrecy.
Pre-Catastrophe history, in other words.
A locked room like this would also be a perfect place for storing records of the excavation. Correspondences with foreign city leaders. The kinds of records that might exonerate Roman Arnault.
Pre-Sato history, in other words.
She looked around and past the shelves, hoping to find a desk of some kind. That was
the likeliest –
“Stop right there,” a voice said from behind her.
Jane did. She heard a metallic click.
“Turn. Slowly,” the voice said.
Jane turned.
In the glow from her radiance stone, she saw five – no, six – people standing near the door. The woman in the lead wore regal, outdated attire – a heavy silk dress with the seams torn at the shoulders and a few badly matched patches sewn at the elbows. There was something familiar about her. She pointed a gun at Jane with one hand and held her shoes with the other.
“It’s poor manners for someone like you to enter a house like this uninvited,” the woman said, looking Jane up and down with evident disdain.
The haughty, cultured voice was also familiar, but it was the woman’s four-inch fingernails, immaculate despite her attire, that jogged Jane’s memory.
“Madame Attrop,” Jane said. “This is hardly the sort of welcome I’d have expected from you.”
Confusion clouded the whitenail’s brow and cleared with a sudden lift of her eyebrows. “Jane Lin. Forgive me, but strange times have bred caution.” She kept the gun raised.
“If I meant you harm, I certainly wouldn’t have come like this,” Jane said, holding the glim aloft and keeping her other hand conspicuously open.
“Yet you have come. And with a key, no less.”
Jane tried to keep her expression neutral. She didn’t know the nature of the relationship between Attrop and Petrosian, but she’d always prided herself on discretion.
“I came for information,” she said.
Attrop tilted her head to one side.
For the first time, Jane considered the people standing around Attrop. She didn’t recognize any of them, and they wore a strange assortment of clothes – tailored, pearl-buttoned blouses over heavy factory workers’ trousers and long, woolen cloaks on top of threadbare shifts.
It was impossible to tell what they’d been before Sato, but it seemed telling that Attrop was here, in tattered finery, rather than in Dominari Hall with Lady Lachesse. Perhaps she’d be willing to help.
“The Qadi of Madina tried to send a trainload of soldiers into this city barely a week ago,” Jane said. “Strange that she’s taken up residence in Dominari Hall, no?” She was fishing for a reaction – some sign of where Attrop stood in relation to everything else.
An invisible thread tugged Attrop’s lips taut for a split second. “Strange, indeed. You’ve come to an unusual place to stop her.”
There was a challenge in Attrop’s eyes. The woman was smart enough to know Jane was feeling her out, and now she was daring her to lie, to tell her what she wanted to hear. “I’m here to save Roman Arnault,” Jane said.
The man next to Attrop shifted, his lantern jaw elongated in a frown.
“So you know him,” Jane said, looking at the man.
He remained silent. She didn’t recognize him, but something about the way he held his shoulders suggested he’d be offended if he knew that.
Attrop almost smiled. “Mr Arnault has a certain effect on most people. Though I see he’s had a very different effect on you.” She cocked her head as if jostling a memory back into place. “Yes, I remember a certain attachment at the city’s last gala, months ago.” The inflection with which she said “last” seemed to mean “final” as much as “previous.”
“And I remember you were keeping different company then,” Jane said. “With Lady Lachesse in particular.”
Attrop kept her face still, but the light that flashed through her eyes was unmistakable. Jane’s suspicions had been correct.
But then the whitenail thumbed back the hammer and extended the gun toward Jane.
“As I hear it, she’s become your ally,” Attrop said. “Your compatriot and confidante in Madina. And now, your liberator in Recoletta.”
Jane saw her miscalculation as clearly as a loose seam in a jacket. Attrop was on the outs with Lachesse and the very people who had just released Jane. The whitenail’s companions shuffled and squared their shoulders, dogs chafing at the leash.
She was aware of her own arms stretching forward, as if she might force them all back with her glim and flat palm.
“Lachesse and the Qadi,” she said slowly, “released me because they had no choice. Because they would rather make me part of their plan than admit that I foiled it.”
Someone in the back of the group snorted.
“But Lachesse is the one who turned us over to the Qadi and brought us back here,” Jane said. “Roman and me. She’s the reason Roman’s locked up now. She’s no friend of mine.”
It was a simplification, but only a minor one.
“So,” Attrop said, “you’re telling me Lachesse got close to you, used you to bargain, and then sold you out when the price was right?” She watched Jane with eyes as hard and sharp as flint.
“Basically,” Jane said.
Attrop lowered her gun. “That does sound like her.”
Jane heaved a sigh and brought her arms down. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath.
The younger man next to Attrop was still scowling. “We don’t know–”
“I know,” the whitenail said, cutting him off without looking over. “The question is, what is Miss Lin doing here?”
“If you’ve been following me, you already know,” Jane said.
Attrop’s eyes widened in surprise. “Following you? My dear, we live here.”
“But how–”
“We saw you coming from the windows over the garden. And even if we hadn’t, you made enough noise to announce yourself to the factory districts.” Attrop seemed offended that Jane could have believed otherwise.
It certainly explained a few things. Like how well the place had been kept up. As big as Ruthers’s garden was, this place was probably pretty easy to defend –
Jane glanced up at a dry, hissing sound to see Attrop glaring at her in impatience.
“I was told I’d find information here that proves that Ruthers, not Roman, was behind the excavation of the Library, the death of Sato’s parents, and–”
“And you think any of that is going to save your gallant?”
Jane said nothing. She’d known it was thin, but at least it was something.
“Even if you prove that Ruthers was as bad as he was, even if you somehow convince people that Roman was merely his pawn, none of that is going to loosen his shackles one bit. You know why?”
Jane couldn’t bring herself to do more than shrug.
“Because all of that was months ago. Years, in some cases. All that matters is what’s happening today.”
Jane swallowed a lump. It had felt good to hope. More than that, to try something. “Is that why you’ve been hiding out here?” she asked. “Holding court in the ruins of the Vineyard and wearing priceless silks that have gone to rags?”
The people gathered around Attrop frowned and looked between one another. The lantern-jawed man took a step forward and growled – actually growled. Jane made another mental note; he was the one to watch out for.
But he stopped at Attrop’s humorless chuckle.
“Miss Lin, I’m afraid you’ve missed the point. The last thing Lachesse and her new allies want is for Recoletta to think about the last week, let alone the last several years. That’s why they’re giving people something else to think about.”
Jane met Attrop’s expectant glare as it all fell into place. “Roman’s execution,” she said.
“Is a sideshow.” Attrop nodded. “And if we want to drain it of its power–”
“We give them something bigger,” Jane said.
Attrop’s grin showed all her teeth.
“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,” Jane said.
“We,” Attrop said, inclining her head to include the as-yet nameless men and women with her, “have been working on something bigger.”
Jane didn’t wait to think about it. With Roman’s execution days away, doing anythin
g was better than doing nothing. “Then I want to help.”
Attrop barked her humorless laugh again. “My dear, I wouldn’t let you leave this place if I believed otherwise. But let’s continue this discussion somewhere warmer, and where we can all sit. Dalton, fetch the brandy.” She set her shoes on the floor and stepped into them with uncanny grace.
As she held one hand out for balance, Jane couldn’t help but notice that one of her carefully kept nails had snapped off.
Chapter 7
Up And Running
Geist nodded, eyes wide. “Ach, but you are having such an interesting series of professions! A detectif, a politiker, and now an criminal. Phelan, you are still cleaning?”
The woman was running a rag over the spill for maybe the hundredth time. She looked up sheepishly.
Geist jerked his head at the door, and she left.
Malone thought she was starting to get a read on her strange host. The way he sipped at his drink – his caffee – when he was excited or tugged at his goatee when he was mulling over something.
But there were still many details she hadn’t figured out. Like what – exactly – Geist and his people wanted from Arnault. Or how they’d known to search in Recoletta.
Or why they were trusting the word of a woman they’d cut down from the gallows.
Geist sighed through his nostrils as Phelan’s footsteps receded down the hall. He shook his head and turned his attention back to Malone.
“You are telling me that this Jane – the waschergirl – did the assassinat of the ausland guards? Most imposant.”
“She didn’t kill anyone,” Malone said. “Not beside Ruthers.” What Jane Lin did was far more destructive.
“Then I am hoping you are arriving at the point rasch,” he said, tenting his fingers and tapping the tips together.
“You said you wanted the history. I’m giving you the history.” Malone waited a beat, just to make her point. “This is where it started to fall apart.”