by Cat Rambo
And if this crime were truly the result of some Beast’s actions, then the creature needed to be put down, for both the public good and its own. That was always true of a Beast gone awry—you had to dispose of it or there was no telling what it might do, once it had gone outside its integral nature. That was where so many Beast owners went wrong, thinking theirs was the sole outlier, the one creature different from all the rest. In that, all owners were the same.
“Who and what should I take with me?” he asked Faustino.
“Whatever equipment you think necessary,” the Mage said. “Within reason, of course,” he added as a suspicious afterthought. “Take some student as an apprentice, one of the serious ones, not some flibbertigibbet just there to hold your cloak and curtsey to you.”
“I know just the one,” Sebastiano said.
But to his surprise, he found Maz reluctant to come.
“I have studies to do,” he answered, even though it was apparent to anyone that he was not studying, but instead sitting on the lawn studying the dragonflies clustered on the bushes.
“This is part of your studies,” Sebastiano said. “How often do you get to see a murder scene?”
This was something that he had not meant to let slip, but he did not regret it when he saw the boy’s face brighten with curiosity. That was true of teens; they craved sensationalism and excitement, candy for the mind, and Sebastiano was not above using such a morbid treat to coax the boy into accompanying him.
It occurred to him as he headed out of the College gates, Maz trotting after him, that perhaps his affection for Maz was the result of misplaced parental desire. Maybe Corrado was right, and Sebastiano should see to fathering children, sooner rather than later. He tried to imagine raising a child like Maz, and found himself utterly unable to imagine what the boy had been like as a babe. He decided to ask.
“What was I like as a child?” the boy said over his shoulder, sounding puzzled. “Like any other babe, I suppose.”
“Babes are all different,” Sebastiano said cheerfully. Letha had helped a midwife one week, with her son assisting, in order to show him some of the ins and outs of the body and Sebastiano had taken a great deal of interest in the babies afterwards, visiting them once or twice every white moon. “Some are angry and fretful, and others are sunny and cheerful. My mother says I was among the latter. What were you?”
Maz considered. “I don’t know,” he said. “My mother died when I was very little, and no one has ever told me what I was like then.”
“What do you think you were like?”
The boy’s fists clenched and an odd expression flickered on his face. “Helpless.” He shifted, deliberately releasing his hands, glancing down at them as he did so. “Not any longer,” he said, half to himself.
There were many things that Sebastiano could have said, but he forewent all of them. He wanted to reach out and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, but touching a student was something instructors did not do, unless it was some form of punishment and even then, it was much better to talk to the Dean and have her act.
He wondered if he were doing the right thing, after all. This had been a murder, and one conducted by magical means.
But they were Mages, both of them. Strong-minded. How bad could it be?
Quite bad, as it turned out.
He knew this house. Had sat sweating under the glare of the dolls that now lay in crumpled drifts around the battered bodies. Everything in the Della Rose mansion had been smashed as though by the blows of a club. His head swam and he found it hard to breathe, the Dryad scratch on his cheek throbbing.
“You should wait outside,” he said to the boy, thinking to spare him, but Maz glared at him.
“I am a Mage, and I am as capable as any man or woman,” he said.
“Indeed you are,” Sebastiano said gently, “but I will not be responsible for your nightmares.”
The boy’s face worked at that, indignant and also a touch relieved, Sebastiano thought. Without saying anything more, he went out into the street.
Sebastiano drifted around the room, touching nothing. He examined the sticky splotches of blood and the place where one woman’s head had been dashed against the wall, shattering it. Bile kept collecting at the back of his throat, and every time he swallowed it, he could feel his stomach burning.
What had done such a thing? He could think of no Beast known for such attacks. But there was an odd energy that he could feel. He took out some of the tiny brass and crystal instruments he had brought with him.
After a few tests, he frowned. There was excess earth energy lingering in the air, but earth magic was usually gentle magic, growing magic. The magic of Dryads, of creatures of the sun and soil. Mixed with blood magic, it was responsible for the almost choking oppression in the air.
Sometimes murder was used to fuel magic, although that was a Sorcerer’s tactic, not one for an honest Mage. But Sebastiano could feel no twisting like that of the room’s energies.
What was this death meant to achieve? he wondered. Nothing killed just for the joy of it, except those who were mad, and he had never known a Beast to go mad. That was another thing that was outside their nature.
His stomach kept roiling, kept threatening to push its contents up and out. He swallowed hard against the burn and took a deep breath. Out of the corner of his eye, he cast a look at the Peacekeeper who had brought him here, thinking he’d see scorn for his weakness on her face, but there was sympathy there.
“Never seen anything this bad before myself,” she said. Her hand twitched as though to reach out and pat his shoulder but she curbed the impulse and saved his dignity. He wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t have rather had the touch, an affirmation of normality and humanness, than his dignity. Still he pulled himself up and squared his shoulders.
“You said there’s more in the Beast quarters?” he said. This household was large; they would have had any number of slaves and servants. His stomach clenched at the thought of even more carnage.
“Not as bad as here,” she said. “Though it’s bad enough.”
She led him back through passages whose furnishings grew less and less elaborate the closer they came to the quarters near the back of the great mansion where the Beasts and Human servants that kept it running were housed. It was prestigious to have Beasts as servants, because they were more expensive than Humans, but there were some jobs reserved by tradition or common sense for Humans, such as any task that had to do with the Beasts’ upkeep. As the hallway shifted, he felt more and more claustrophobic, his stomach still twisted.
Did the College realize what they had sent him into? Was this some sort of punishment? Had he made someone too much his enemy? The politics of the College were labyrinthine and full of hidden machinations.
But no, this must be as it appeared. He was the only one who was truly interested in Beasts—an interest that had served him well in the past but now seemed to have truly led him astray.
He expected all in the quarters to have been slain, but it was only Humans. “Where are the others?” he asked and the Peacekeeper knew immediately what he meant.
“’Scaped,” she said. “But those that have been rounded up are adamant that they had nothing to do with any of this.”
“I need to speak to one of them,” he said.
She frowned. Most Humans viewed Beasts as less than children, unreliable and given to lies. It was an unfortunate prejudice and here it was actively hampering the investigation. He stifled a flicker of impatience and said, “There are things it might have seen that were important, but which you might not have realized the significance of.”
She nodded and shrugged.
THE BEAST WAS one he’d rarely seen, a Fox Woman. Explorers had brought the first ones back to the city several decades ago, but they were not prone to breeding in captivity. They were one of the species that relied on their resemblance to Human beings to beguile, and indeed, the face was a mixture of vulpine and Human that managed to s
omehow seem appealing: the wide, lambent eyes, the spray of silvery whiskers, the pointed ears with a delicate tuft at the end.
Clearly terrified, and he wondered what her treatment had been before this. Expensive Beasts like this were used as expensive ornaments, rather than for servants. She would have been trained in light tasks but primarily the arts of entertainment: some musical instrument, how to play cards and cabot, things like that. Perhaps even the art of conversation, though that was something most Beasts did not take to.
“What is your name?” he said, trying to project reassurance.
Her eyes darted everywhere in the room except his face. “Silver, Lord, they call me Silver.”
“But what do you call yourself?” he said gently.
She jerked as though struck, terror flaring in her eyes. He thought to himself that she must have been badly used by whatever had entered the estate, and he wondered to himself why the Peacekeepers had not paid more attention to that.
“Silver is my name,” she said, with a touch of terror in her tone. “Silver.”
This was a Beast who had been trained by someone who used pain and fear. A Beast who knew Humans only as something to be obeyed, not trusted. “Silver,” he repeated. “Very well. Tell me what you saw. Who killed the Human servants? What sort of Beast was it?”
The denial came instantly. “No Beast. It was a monster. It came through the house and smashed.”
“Did you see it then?”
A quick headshake. “I heard it. I heard the screaming. So I hid.”
“Then how do you know it was not a Beast?”
“It did not smell like a Beast,” she said.
“What did it smell like?”
“Like wood and blood,” she said. “Like wood and blood and death.”
He got nothing else out of her. Finally he told the waiting Peacekeeper to lead her away.
Out in the street, he apologized to Maz.
“Was it bad?” the boy said.
Sebastiano nodded.
“Who did it? They said it was a Beast.”
“Not a Beast, I think,” Sebastiano said. “A magic of a kind I’m unfamiliar with.”
Maz’s eyes were wide. “A Sorcerer’s magic?”
“Probably,” Sebastiano said.
“Which Sorcerer?” the boy demanded, surprising Sebastiano. He frowned down at him.
“Which? As though I have them all named and numbered!”
“Some are famous,” the boy mumbled.
Sebastiano stared at him. Had the boy been studying such things? Why bother? The Old Continent was riddled with Sorcerers, famous or not, and their politics were complicated beyond measure.
But there was no time for asking. “Go back to the College,” he said. “I have more work to do here. I am sorry to have brought you out for nothing. I thought you might learn a little from it.”
Maz hesitated. “It means something,” he said.
“What does?”
“That you brought me. That you treat me like any student. It means more than anything.”
The boy was stammering, incoherent. “Go home,” Sebastiano said gently. He turned back inside. He’d ask Silver what visitors had come recently to the house.
But the Peacekeeper only stared. “You said you were done, so we put it to death.”
A Beast in a household where Humans had been killed was always put to death, as a safety measure, and he could see the practicality of it, but he felt deep regret at the thought of Silver’s eyes closing without ever hearing her real name again.
Now there was only a single Human survivor—Lilia herself. They were reluctant to let him see her at the hospital, but finally, backed by the authority of the College of Mages, he pushed his way in.
She lay pale and wan, a discarded doll dressed in white.
“You must wait till she wakes,” the Nurse said rudely, but she stirred at his approach.
“Merchant Mage,” she said. “You find me … in different circumstances.” Her heart beat in the hollow of her throat; bruises marked all of her that he could see.
“What happened?” he questioned.
“There was a great … crashing noise from the back of the estate,” she whispered, pausing at intervals to summon strength enough to feed him a few words. “Some sort of machine made of wood, but shaped like a Human, walking on two legs, taller than you and I. It smashed everything. Everything. I tried to run, but it knocked me aside, left me for dead as it killed the rest.”
She lapsed back on her pillow.
“There was nothing that happened before it? No signs or portents? No strange visitors?”
She shook her head. Her breathing shifted, became more labored.
“You must go now,” the Nurse snapped, moving to a bell beside the chamber entrance and ringing it.
But Lilia clasped his hand, would not let it go. “Cast that spell again,” she whispered. “The one with the pretty lights.”
He cast a glance at the Nurse. Footsteps sounded, running in the hallway, coming this way.
He cast it, and this time ten-fold: the dancing lights filled the chamber, cast glittering shadows everywhere. Two Doctors rushed in only to pause, surprised, and the Nurse’s mouth gaped in astonishment.
Lilia’s mouth opened in wonder. She smiled and squeezed his fingers once before a Doctor recovered her sense and shouldered Sebastiano aside. The two knelt over the bed, doing something Sebastiano could not see, intently working, ignoring the spell fading around them.
As the last sparkles died, one stood back, sighed, and drew the sheet up over Lilia’s face.
“IT IS possible to have a mad Beast,” his mother said thoughtfully, sorting through her bookshelves. “Jolietta Kanto spoke of it a few times. She knew mad Beasts. Her methods were capable of causing it.”
She turned to him.
“I thought I had it here, but Tiggy has borrowed it, I think. A book is going around,” she said, “which claims to be the story of one of the many creatures she tamed, a Centaur. There are some oddities about the book—perhaps it was only written by a clever Human who is an Abolitionist sympathizer, trying to stir up sentiment on their behalf—but I would be willing to believe a Centaur wrote it.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve read it. That cannot be a Centaur mind speaking.”
“They have a certain pragmatism that is reflected in the book, I think. But it is odd, because it mentions Bella Kanto not once, and yet she would have been there at the time the book was written, as far as I can tell.”
“Why would a Beast have left her out?”
“Affection, perhaps?”
The thought startled him. Beasts did not feel affection or loyalty. “Why affection?” he asked.
“It seems to me something that it might have done to protect her in some fashion.”
“You think there is something that she needs to be protected from? That she killed Jolietta, perhaps?”
“If she did, that crime is too far in the past to ever be accounted for,” Letha said. “But Jolietta was a hard woman and I cannot imagine what it would have been like to serve as her apprentice. I imagine she would have trained another Human as savagely as she treated any Beast, and I would not have wanted to be a Beast that belonged to Jolietta Kanto.”
He looked at his mother with surprise at her tone. She was normally so mild in her speech, and it was rare to hear her speak ill of anyone.
“Did you know her personally then?” he asked. Her nod surprised him much less.
“We trained together, under a Beast Trainer named Urbus,” she said.
“Even then, was she tough-minded?”
Letha nodded, eyes distant. “Very much so.”
“You disliked her?”
“She disliked me,” Letha said. “She was one of those people who often take an instant like or dislike to another person, and from the moment we first met, I rubbed against her grain somehow.”
He could not imagine anyone objecting to his mother, her
small, neat, and always calm presence, her voice somehow the epitome of reason. At times he hated his father, but he always loved Letha.
“Is this crime something a creature trained by her would be capable of doing?” he asked.
Letha’s brows knit. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “From what you describe—the savagery of it—it is something else.”
“Then why would it reek of Beast magic?”
Letha’s expression was thoughtful. “Indeed,” she said. “Why would it?”
They talked until late in the afternoon, comparing notes. Finally Letha rose and said, “Your father will be wondering where I am.”
“Do you do this often, gallivant about town and stay out till all hours of the evening?” Sebastiano asked.
He was teasing, but she gave him a wry look and said, “You’d be surprised!”
It was one of the things he’d always liked about her, her willingness to acknowledge herself a person, more than Corrado’s wife, or Sebastiano’s mother, or even a representative of the Silvercloths.
She said, “Should I even ask how the courtships are going?”
He bit his lip, remembering his suspicions. He said, “I need some extra coin to fund it, truth be told.”
“I would,” she said, “but your father has asked me not to.”
“He is very thorough.”
“It is his nature, Sebastiano, and part of yours as well. The two of you are more alike than either of you would ever think.” She gave him a fond look. “Now go forth and conquer, my dear.”
CHAPTER 47
L ucy stood on the steps of the Press, looking at the closed door through the blur of her tears. Life as Obedience was starting to look a lot more appealing. How could this have happened? How had she managed to turn Adelina from kind employer one moment to a shrieking squall the next? It was unfair, utterly unfair, one of the series of vast unfairnesses that made up Lucy’s life, to not have been told what to say or not say to Adelina’s mother.
Or was that true? She cast back over her memory of that first day. What all had Serafina told her about Adelina’s position in the House? She remembered being told that Adelina was important, but to be treated to those outside the Press as though she was not so.