Mourningbird (Empire of Masks Book 3)

by Brock Deskins

  He blinked and shook his head. “Wha—what happened? Did someone hit me?” he asked as he rubbed his stinging cheek.

  Fred pointed to a small puddle of drool on the floor. “Clean that up and get out.”

  Top Hat pushed Russel ahead of him and had to half carry him down the stairs into the basement due to his leg injury. Two men sat at a small table near a stout door. One leapt up at Top Hat’s approach and unlocked the door. Top Hat stripped Russel’s hat from his head, forced him into the room, and locked it back up.

  “Don’t take your eyes off that door for a second,” he ordered the two men before disappearing back up the stairs.

  Russel squinted in the dim light in an attempt to take in his surroundings. Without the lenses attached to his hat, he was practically blind.

  “Russel, is that you?” Langdon whispered, his voice thick and slow.

  Russel crept toward the voice and found Langdon chained to the wall. As he moved his face within inches of Langdon’s, he was able to make out the older boy’s blackened eyes and swollen features.

  “Sorry, Russel,” Langdon said through split, puffy lips. “I held out telling them for a while, but then they juiced me with some of Fred’s crap. I think I told them about you, but it’s all kind of fuzzy.”

  Russel twiddled his fingers. “He came into my warren. People aren’t allowed in my warren.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “They have Ashlea. Can’t let them have her. Need to fly. Need to get away before they come.”

  “Before who comes? Fred?”

  “Bad people. Dark people. Evil people.”

  “What people, Russel?”

  “Soul eaters. They will come. They will consume us all. Ashlea says only the highlords can stop them.”

  Langdon groaned. “It might be the drugs, but you aren’t making any sense. The highlords are gone, dead. What are soul eaters, and who is Ashlea?”

  Russel stared past Langdon as his fingers twitched spasmodically, unable to keep pace with his thoughts. “I think Ashlea is a ghost. A highlord ghost, and I have to bring her and the rest back to life.”

  Langdon sighed. “Yeah, that has to be the drugs.”

  Russel went to the narrow bench set against the far wall and began running his hands around it until he found what he was looking for. He turned it over and began working one of the legs back and forth until he was able to pull a loose nail out. Then he sat on the floor and began scratching at one of the stones.

  An ugly face appeared in the door’s barred window. “You planning on digging your way out?” one of the guards asked.

  “What’s he doing in there?” another voice asked a bit farther away.

  The first man looked over his shoulder. “He’s digging at the floor stones. Should I stop him?”

  “Naw. If it keeps him busy and out of our hair then let him entertain himself however he wants. You know, unless he starts making progress.”

  The first man studied Russel a moment. “Naw, he ain’t gonna be able to dig through that rock.”

  The man turned away and rejoined his friend at the small table they shared and began dealing from a deck of cards.

  ***

  Wesley shuffled home, the wadded hand towel pressing painfully against his wound. Not only had his date given him the night off due to his injury, and her being far too upset about the evening’s terror, she had instructed her driver to deliver him to Blindside. Without payment of course. It was a good thing he had taken alternative measures to walk away with a profit.

  His feet clomped up the gangway, the ramp bouncing slightly with each step. “Russel? I’m back,” he called out.

  Not surprisingly, he received no reply. Wesley padded into his room and began unloading his pilfered wares onto a small table. Russel rarely showed interest in silver, so there was no need to hide it. Not that it would do much good. He was certain his little brother could smell gold like a skitter lizard catching the scent of carrion on the wind.

  He pulled out the serving tray from beneath his coat and fingered the hole punched through it. While a feeble shield against a proper weapon, particularly one made of void steel, it had probably saved his life. The lance had struck the thin metal at a shallow angle and deflected it just enough to scrape over the outside of his ribs instead of punching through the bone and into something vital.

  “Russel, I’m back!” he called out once more. “Do you want to hear how I almost died tonight…again?”

  He shrugged at the sound of his own voice echoing off the nearby city wall and packed his pipe full of dream weed. At least he’s being quiet for once, he thought as he let the powerful euphoric dull the ache in his side and take him to a world where fear and pain did not exist.

  CHAPTER 26

  Kiera limped through the door of Conner’s home. “Surri!”

  The Thuum woman drifted in with such silent grace that Kiera thought her feet did not touch the floor. “What has happened? Where is Conner?”

  “Conner’s fine and is probably on his way home. What happened is me getting in a fight with that Necrophage thing and nearly getting cut a third butt cheek.”

  Surri strode over to Kiera and pulled away the blood-sodden waistband of her leggings to get a look at the deep cut beneath. “Come upstairs with me. I need to clean that and stitch it together.”

  Kiera allowed the woman to pull her by the hand to what she called her sewing room, where she stitched more flesh than fabric. Surri used a pair of scissors to cut the slashed leggings away from the wound before blotting at it with a piece of cloth soaked in a liquid that smelled and burned like something used to remove tarnish from good silver.

  “What happened?” Surri asked as she cleaned the cut.

  “That creature attacked the party. Bertram and I chased him into the ballroom. Conner tried to stop him, but he got hit with some kind of magic.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He seemed to be. I sent Cleary in after him before running after his attacker. Bertram and I caught up with the creature again, but we lost the fight.”

  “You lost? How did you escape?”

  Kiera winced at Surri’s ministrations but managed a grin. “I hailed him a cab and sent him on his way.”

  Surri chuckled at the girl’s recitation of the horse dragging the creature down the street. “You were very lucky, but you handled yourself well. You have been an excellent student.”

  Kiera rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, with all the praise and encouragement you gave me how couldn’t I be?”

  “Praise is for insecure children, not warriors. We Thuum get our affirmations through victory, not kind words.”

  “Speaking of Thuum warriors, something odd happened while I was fighting.”

  Surri stabbed the needle through the edges of Kiera’s torn flesh and began drawing them together with the shimmersilk thread. “You battled a Necrophage. I imagine you experienced many strange things.”

  Kiera winced and shook her head. “No, I don’t think it was about the creature. It was the necklace Conner gave me.”

  Surri’s large eyes flicked up at the piece of jewelry, betraying a hint of objection. “What about it?”

  “I think it did something.”

  Surri’s sewing hand paused its mending. “What did it do?”

  “It…electrified. I felt it sending little shocks across my chest and down my arms. A couple of times, tiny bolts of electricity leapt off my hands or my baton and shocked the Necrophage while we were fighting. Was I doing that somehow?”

  The Thuumian huffed and shook her head. “No. The necklace belonged to my sister, and it does contain power, as all arcanstones do. But only those trained how to access and channel that energy can use it. There is a storm blowing, and it carries a great deal of latent energy. I imagine that is what you felt.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Kiera replied, her voice hesitant with doubt.

  “Kiera!” Conner’s voice echoed up the stairs.

&n
bsp; “Up here,” she called back.

  Conner’s footsteps pounded up the stairs before he burst into the room a moment later. “Thank the gods. I—”

  His voice trailed off as he stared at the red birthmark, shaped like a bird in flight, on Kiera’s exposed hip.

  “Hey, ever hear of knocking?” Kiera snapped. “Why don’t you paint a portrait? It will last longer. Pervert.”

  Conner shook his head and looked away. “I…I’m sorry. I need…”

  He turned away and left as quickly as he had come. His head reeled as he fought to deny what he had seen. It was not possible. He had seen his daughter’s charred corpse, wrapped in the arms of his wife. He had buried them both.

  Cleary stood in the foyer, having finished putting the carriage away. “Conner, what’s wrong?”

  “I have to go out,” he gasped, barely able to draw breath.

  “Out? It’s blowing like the gods’ own farts out there.”

  “I have to go!”

  “Do you want me to drive you?” Cleary asked, grasping at Conner’s arm in an attempt to halt his headlong dash out into the storm.

  Conner swung his cane at his friend. “I’ll drive myself! Leave me be!”

  Cleary stood dumbfounded as Conner hurled himself into the storm. Conner threw open the doors to the mews, harnessed his horse to the coach, and forced the recalcitrant beast into the blowing dust and lightning. Conner squinted through the stinging haze, not having bothered to grab a storm mask in his hasty departure.

  Knowing that there would be no one on the streets during the storm, and not caring if there was, he drove the frightened animal at breakneck speeds, heedless of his, or anyone’s, safety. The only thing that mattered was learning the truth, no matter how horrible it might be.

  Pulling up in front of Wayward House several minutes later, Conner tethered his horse to an iron ring mounted in the wall and beat furiously on the door with the haft of his cane until someone answered.

  A night orderly cracked open the door enough to peer through. “Can I help you, sah?”

  Conner pushed against the door, forcing it open and driving the orderly back. “I need to speak to the headmaster at once.”

  “I’m sorry, sah, the headmaster is not on the premises.”

  “What about someone who works with the records? Ramona I think her name was.”

  “Aye, she’s here, but she won’t like me disturbing her at this hour.”

  Conner tightened his grip on his sword cane and held it with an air of menace. “I don’t give a good gods damn about the hour. Get her, or so help me I will tear this place down brick by brick!”

  The orderly appeared to weigh Conner’s threat, but his eyes settled on the man’s mask and he did as he was ordered. Ramona, the orphanage’s records clerk, shuffled into the entry hall several minutes later, hitching her robe tighter as her slippers slapped against the stone floor. She was alone, the orderly having chosen to unload this particular burden onto her.

  She squinted in the dim light of a single oil lamp burning softly on one wall. “Sah Conner? What are you doing out at this hour, and in this gods awful storm?”

  “I need to see your records again, immediately. It is of extreme importance.”

  The woman shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

  “Look, I’ll pay you just like last time. Money is not an issue.”

  “You’re right, it’s not, because there was a fire in the records room shortly after your previous visit a few weeks ago.”

  Conner blinked, dumbfounded. “A fire?”

  “Yes, sah. Burned everything that could burn. We were lucky to put it out before the timbers caught and brought down a section of the House above it.”

  Conner felt as if he had been punched in the gut. “Do you keep copies somewhere? Off premises perhaps.”

  Ramona chuckled. “You’re lucky we keep any records at all. It’s more out of habit than need these days. When people dump children off at the House, they don’t want records that could lead their abandoned offspring back to them. Not that they would do much good. I don’t know many parents who give their true names when they make a deposit.”

  “Then I’ve lost her again…”

  “Unless Gertrude is still alive.”

  Conner snapped his head up. “Who is Gertrude?”

  “She was the records keeper when I came on. Retired about ten years ago. Mind like a steel trap. Had that—what do you call it…?—idealist memory.”

  “You mean eidetic memory?”

  “Never forgot a thing in her life. If she read it, saw it, or heard it, she remembered it.”

  “Where can I find her?” Conner beseeched her.

  Ramona gave him an address in Midtown. “Assuming she’s still alive and her mind hasn’t gone.”

  Conner did not waste time with thanks. He turned on his heel and drove his carriage through the storm with purpose. Had he not been the city’s chief inquisitor for so many years, he likely would not have been able to find the place in the dead of night and in the midst of a dust storm. Even so, he had to double back on a couple of streets after losing his bearings.

  He finally found the quaint home, a narrow, two-story house wedged between two others as if built as an afterthought. Conner knocked on the door with a little more restraint than he had at Wayward House. He did not want to frighten the old woman into a heart attack.

  The door opened a crack, after several agonizing minutes, just far enough for the crossbow to point at his chest. The weapon was ancient and probably dated back to the revolution, but it looked perfectly functional.

  “Who in the Tormented Plane are you and what do you want at this damn hour?” Gertrude rasped.

  Conner ducked at the waist. “My apologies, madam. My name is Conner Rey, and I have an urgent question I hope you can answer.”

  “If the question is ‘are you going to get shot tonight?’ I probably have the answer. Anything other than that, I don’t think I can help a mask wearer with.”

  “You worked at Wayward House keeping records. I’m told that you have an amazing ability to recall details. It is my hope that you can remember some specifics of a drop-off. Please, it is extremely important.”

  The old woman scowled behind her crossbow, looked Conner up and down, and pushed the door open with the weapon’s stirrup. “I suppose when the reaper comes for me he won’t be dressed in a suit wearing a mask. Come in then.”

  Conner stepped into the tiny foyer and closed the door behind him. “Thank you very much.”

  Gertrude grunted in response. “Must be one heck of a question to bring you out in a storm like this. Spit it out then. I ain’t getting any younger.”

  Conner gave her the date and time of the fire that killed his wife and daughter. “Do you recall a child, an infant girl a little less than a year old, dropped off near that date?”

  The woman closed her eyes and swirled her tongue around in her toothless mouth. “I remember. I had a boiled egg for dinner that night. A real chicken egg, not one of those sour skitter lizard eggs. A man woke me, like you just did, early in the morning. I guess he couldn’t wait until a decent hour to dump off his kid. He smelled of smoke and whiskey. I figured he worked in the brickyard, but his eyes were wrong. He had the eyes of a man who didn’t do honest work.”

  “What name did he give the girl when he dropped her off?”

  “He didn’t. I named her Kiera after the daughter I lost a long time ago.”

  Conner’s stomach roiled and his heart pounded in his chest. “Did the man give his name?”

  Gertie nodded. “He gave a name, but if it was his real name I’m a highlord.”

  “What did he say his name was?”

  “Lucas Weston.”

  Despite leaning on his cane, the name caught Conner off balance. He reeled back and caught himself on the doorknob behind him. His breath vanished, and he fought to regain it. He fumbled at the doorknob pressing into his back, but his hand shook
so badly he could not work it.

  “I’m guessing that’s the name you wanted, or didn’t want, to hear,” Gertrude said. “Try to compose yourself. You’ll want a steady hand if you plan on shooting the man,” Gertrude called out at Conner’s back.

  Conner hurled his cane into the driver’s seat of his carriage as he mounted the step rung. In his haste and frazzled mind, he led with his bad leg, which collapsed the moment he tried to lift himself up. He fell onto his back and rolled to his feet with a curse and successfully mounted the carriage on his second attempt.

  He snapped the reins and shouted at the back of the horse’s head to urge it to go faster. The coach slid around corners, spraying sand at every turn. It wasn’t possible. His wife and daughter were dead. He found their bodies. Buried them together in the same grave.

  He drove the coach straight into the mews. Only the horse’s sense kept it from crashing into the far wall. Conner did not bother unharnessing the animal. He threw himself off the driver’s seat, falling once again when his leg failed to support his landing.

  Conner stormed into his home with twice the fury as the one raging outside. “Lilliana!” He shook his head and cursed. “Kiera!”

  Kiera shambled down the stairs with Surri following behind her, both women’s steps slow and hesitant in the face of Conner’s near-hysterical outburst.

  Conner ripped his black mourning mask from his face and hurled it away as he entered the parlor, shattering it against the far wall. “Kiera!”

  “What’s wrong?” Kiera and Surri both asked as they reached the bottom of the stairs.

  Conner ambled toward them, leaning heavily on his cane due to the pain his two falls had incited. “The mark on your thigh,” he gasped out.

  Kiera glanced down at her hip. “My butt bird? What of it?”

  Conner swallowed and took a deep breath. “My daughter was born with the very same mark. In the exact same place.”

  Surri looked from Conner to Kiera. “Conner, you can’t think that—”