“He’s more of an apprentice. Are we to continue this discussion in the street, or were you planning on inviting us inside?”
She laughed a little. I could always make her laugh. We climbed to the top of the tower, and Celia walked us into the Crane’s drawing room. “The Master should be here shortly. I alerted him to your arrival before I went to let you in.”
We watched the sun fade through the south window. Wren stood close, his eyes scanning the Crane’s treasures with the intensity of someone whose collected possessions could fit comfortably in a rucksack.
The bedroom door opened and the Crane entered, cheerily but with a stiffness that no good humor could hide. “Back for some clandestine purpose no doubt,” he began, before noticing the child at my hip.
Then his eyes lit up like they used to, and years seemed to shed off him, and I was glad that I had bothered to rustle Wren out of the Earl. “I see you’ve brought a guest. Come over here, child. I’m old, and my sight isn’t what it once was.”
Contra the unfriendliness he’d shown Celia, Wren moved forward without further prompting, and again I was struck by the easy grace the Crane possessed with children. “You’re thinner than a boy your age should be, but then so was your master. Chest like a mop handle. What’s your name?”
“Wren.”
“Wren?” The Crane’s laughter echoed through the room, for once not trailed by a hacking cough. “Wren and Crane! We might as well be brothers! Of course, my namesake is a creature of dignity and poise—while yours is a silly fowl, notable only for its rather aggravating song.”
This wasn’t quite enough to bring a smile to the boy’s face, but it was close, awful close for Wren.
“Well then, Wren. Will you grace us with a tune?”
The boy shook his head.
“Then it seems I shall provide the entertainment.” With a youthful burst of speed he moved to a shelf over the fire and pulled down an old creation of his, a strange-looking instrument halfway between a trumpet and a hunting horn, curling bands of burnished copper capped by pale ivory. “You are certain you won’t indulge your musical talents, young Wren?”
Wren shook his head again furiously.
The Crane shrugged in mock disappointment, then put the thing to his lips and let forth with a full-throated blast. It made a sound like the bellow of a bull, and a kaleidoscope of red and orange sparks erupted from the end, eddying about in the firmament.
Wren brushed at the glittering light that swirled through the air. I had loved that thing as a child—odd that I hadn’t thought about it for so long.
Celia interrupted. “Master, if you’d be so kind as to entertain our new friend, I need to have a few words with our old one.”
I thought he would object, but instead he flashed me a quick smile before turning back to the boy. “Each note releases a different color, see?” He blew another tone on the trumpet, and a spray shot out, blue green like the foam of the sea.
We descended to the conservatory without speaking. The glass door was fogged from the heat, and Celia opened it and ushered me inside. Before I had time to appreciate the new suite of flowers that had taken bloom, Celia jumped into it. “Well? What of our investigation?”
“Shouldn’t we include the Master in this?”
“If you want to tear a dying man away from one of the few pleasures left to him, it’s on your head.”
Having seen the man, it didn’t come as a complete shock. But still, I didn’t like hearing my suspicions confirmed. “He’s dying?”
Celia sat on a stool beside a pink orchid and nodded sadly.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s old. He won’t tell me exactly, but he’s seventy-five if he’s a day.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” she said, but moved on quickly. “It upsets him, this business with the children. He’s always been … softhearted.”
“I’m not sure you need to be oversensitive to find child murder distasteful,” I said, brushing a grain of pollen out of my eye and trying not to sneeze.
“I didn’t mean that. What’s happened to the children is terrible. But there isn’t much the Master can do. He isn’t what he was.” Her eyes were firm. “The Crane has served the people of this city for half a century. He deserves peace in his final days. Surely you owe him that much, at least?”
“I owe the Master more than I could ever repay.” A memory came to my mind of the Crane as he had been, his eyes sparkling with wit and mischief, his back neither bent nor bowed. “But that isn’t the point. This thing needs to be stopped, and my resources are not such that I can afford to lose an ally.” I laughed caustically. “In a week it won’t matter one way or the other.”
“What does that mean?”
“Forget it—a poor attempt at humor.”
She was unconvinced but didn’t pursue it further. “I’m not cutting you off. If you need help … I’ll never be the Crane’s equal in ability or in wisdom. But I am a Sorcerer First Rank.” She nodded modestly at the ring that testified to this last fact. “The Master has watched over Low Town long enough—having taken over the tower, perhaps it’s time I adopt the rest of his mantle.”
The years since we had seen each other had aged Celia. She was no longer the child I had brought to the Aerie decades ago. Though she still spoke like it sometimes—“adopt his mantle,” the Daevas save us.
Celia took my silence as agreement. “You have any leads?”
“I have suspicions. I always have suspicions.”
“Don’t let me hurry you—if there’s some other matter pressing on your shoulders, feel free to take care of that first.”
“I visited a party thrown by the Duke of Beaconfield, the Smiling Blade. Your gem throbbed against my chest while we talked.”
“And that didn’t seem to you to be information that might benefit from being shared?”
“It doesn’t mean as much as you’d think; as far as the law is concerned, it doesn’t mean anything. If it were just some Low Town bum, it might be enough, probably would be. I could point to him and the Old Man would drag him back to Black House and probe him for stains. But for a noble? Basic jurisprudence needs to be followed, and that means you can’t snatch a fellow from his house and carve him up on the say-so of an ex-agent’s illegally acquired magical talisman.”
“No,” she said, deflating. “I suppose you can’t.”
“Besides, I’m not sure the amulet is right. I spoke to Beaconfield. He seemed like a violent flake, the sort bred in droves by the upper classes. But murdering children, summoning demons … It’s out of character. The aristocracy tend to be too lazy to really commit to malevolence. Easier to spend their inheritance on costume galas and expensive whores.”
“Is it possible you overestimate him?”
“That’s not a mistake I’m prone to. But say I did, say it is the duke. He’s not an artist—I’d be surprised to discover he’s mastered his sums. How would he go about contacting the void?”
“There are practitioners who see fit to sell their skills to anyone with sufficient coin. Did this Beaconfield character have anyone around him who might fit that description?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He did.”
Celia crossed one leg over the other, the pink of her thighs barely visible beneath her dress. “That might be something you’d want to look into.”
“It just might.” I mulled that over, then started up again. “Actually there was something else I wanted to ask you about, something even the Master himself couldn’t help me with.”
“As I said, I’m here to help.”
“I’d like to hear about your time at the academy.”
“Why?”
“Abject boredom. I have absolutely nothing to occupy my mind and hoped your tales of youthful revelry might give me something to gnaw on.”
She snickered, a giggle really, so light it barely escaped her mouth. There was a short pause while she weighed her words. “It was a
long time ago. I was young. We were all very young. The Master, the other practitioners of his ilk, they weren’t interested in signing on, so it was just us apprentices, the weak and inexperienced, whoever they could corral in. The instructors, if you could call them that, were barely older than we were and rarely as competent. There was no curriculum really, not then, not after it first started. They just … dumped us in a room and let us loose. Still, it was the first time anything like that had ever happened, the first time we’d been encouraged to share what we knew, rather than hiding it in ciphered spell books and double-trapped grimoires.”
“Did you know a man named Adelweid?”
Her eyes narrowed, and she pursed her lips. “We weren’t a large group. Everybody knew everybody, more or less.” Celia was the sort of person who would happily spend the rest of her life locked away from the remainder of the species but had trouble mustering up the ill will to bad-mouth any particular member of it. “Sorcerer Adelweid was … very talented.” I thought she was going to continue, but then she closed her mouth and shook her head, and that was that.
So I figured I’d best volunteer something. “Adelweid was part of a military project during the closing days of the war—Operation Ingress.”
“The Master told me your story.”
“You know anything about it?”
“As I said, we were left free to pursue whatever avenues of studies interested us. Adelweid and I had differing proclivities. I heard rumors, ugly things, but no specifics. If I knew anything I thought would help, I’d have told you already.” She shrugged, anxious to bury the subject. “Adelweid is dead—he’s been dead a long time.”
He was indeed. “But Adelweid wasn’t the only one involved. Whoever killed the Kiren must have been part of it. And something like that, a military project … they’ll have kept records.”
Her head shot up. “They’d be secret,” she said, almost insistently. “They’d be hidden. You’d never get a look at them.”
“They would be hidden, and I don’t imagine whoever is in charge of the army’s classified files would be in a great hurry to share them with me. Happily I have other avenues of inquiry.”
“Other avenues?”
“Crispin, my old partner. I’ve got him looking into it.”
“Crispin,” she repeated. “Is he still reliable? Will he come through for you, after all your … time apart?”
“I don’t imagine he’s happy to be doing me a favor, but he won’t let that stop him. Crispin … Crispin’s golden. It doesn’t matter what’s between us. This could help stop the killings; it’s the right thing to do. He’ll do it.”
She nodded slowly, her face turned away from mine. “Crispin it is, then.”
Around us legions of bumblebees droned about happily, fluttering from petal to stalk to stipule, the lullaby of their steady buzzing a mild soporific.
Celia stood up from the stool, her eyes dark against honey-colored skin. “I’m glad …” She shook her head, as if to refresh her prose, and her long dark hair arched back and forth, the charm around her neck twisting in unison. “It’s been good to see you again, even under these circumstances. In a way I’m grateful you’ve been entangled in this mess.” She took my hand lightly in hers and stared into my eyes without blinking.
Her pulse was very rapid beneath her skin, and my own rose to meet it. I thought of all the reasons this was a bad idea, thought about everything that was rotten and spoiled and cheap about it. Then I thought about them again. This had been a lot easier ten years earlier. “You and the Master always have a place in my thoughts,” I said quietly.
“That’s all you’ll say, then? That I hadn’t completely deserted your memory?”
“I need to see how Wren is doing.” It was a weak excuse, for all that it was in fact true.
She nodded and walked me to the door, dejection marring her heart-shaped face.
Up in the main room, the Crane was sitting on an old chair, his back toward us, laughing and clapping his hands in rhythm. Each time he did so, the collection of sparks that swirled about the chamber changed color and shifted direction, swooping up to the ceiling, then diving toward the window. Wren hadn’t quite joined the Master in his jocularity, but to my surprise he wore an honest smile, a low thing that was mostly in his eyes, as if he was afraid someone would notice. It ended abruptly when he saw Celia and me return.
The Crane must have read our entry on the boy’s face, because he stopped clapping and the sparks dropped slowly to the ground, then disappeared. I put my hand on the Crane’s back. The blade of his shoulder was sharp beneath his robes. “I always loved that toy.”
The Crane laughed again, a bright thing, like his fireworks. I would miss it very much when he was gone. Then it faded and he elevated his head toward me. “That business we spoke of last time—”
Celia interrupted him. “It turned out fine, Master. That’s what he stopped by to tell us. Everything’s taken care of—you don’t need to think about it anymore.”
The Crane’s eyes flashed across Celia’s face, then searched mine for confirmation. I did something that might have been a shrug or a nod. He was old, and tired, and he took it as the latter. A smile spread back over his face, or at least something close enough to mimic it, and he turned back to Wren. “You’re a fine boy. Not like this ’en,” he said with a glance to my direction.
But Wren was having none of it. As if to make up for his moment of lightness he had stamped a sullen growl on his face, and gave the barest hint of a farewell nod to the Master.
The Crane had long years of experience dealing with the ingratitude of overproud youths, and he handled the snub with grace. “It was a pleasure to have had the opportunity to entertain Master Wren.” He continued with the same mock stiffness, “And you, sir, as always, are welcome anytime you wish.” Tell that to the gargoyle outside, I thought, but he seemed happy and hale and I kept my mouth shut.
Celia stood by the stairs and leaned down to meet Wren as he approached. “It was lovely meeting you. Perhaps when you return we’ll have more of a chance to chat.”
Wren didn’t respond. Celia kept her face friendly and waved the two of us past.
We left the Aerie and began our walk north. A few blocks went by as I ran over what I had learned, sifting through the noise for something valuable, something that would click with the rest of it.
Wren interrupted my contemplations. “I liked the tower.”
I nodded.
“And I liked the Crane.”
I waited for him to continue but he didn’t, and we walked on in silence.
I met Guiscard an hour or so later outside a small warehouse a few blocks from Black House. Having already availed myself once that day of the hospitality of my former employers, I wasn’t altogether keen on returning to the neighborhood—but I consoled myself with the thought that if the Old Man wanted me dead, proximity wouldn’t be an issue. It wasn’t exactly the sort of comfort that keeps you sleeping soundly at night, but it was all I had.
The building itself was the sort of structure that seemed to have been deliberately built so as to give no hint to the activities which took place inside. Storage space, you might have guessed if pushed, but only because you couldn’t think of anything more vague. Unlike Black House, the Box’s value was not enhanced by having its purpose widely advertised. It wasn’t a secret, though most of Rigus was happy to pretend itself ignorant. Because inside the Box the scryers made their nest, and to draw attention from them was to have your secrets made known—and what man alive doesn’t have a few things he’d rather keep quiet?
The kid towed himself behind me, quiet since we had left the Aerie, shifty even by his standards. I didn’t bother to draw him out. I had other things on my mind.
My favorite agent, after Crowley, sulked next to the doorway, smoking a cigarette like it was an affectation and not an addiction. He saw us from a hundred yards off but pretended otherwise, buying time for his histrionics to ripen. He was unhappy
to be accompanied on this little side errand, and he wanted me to know it.
When we were too close to keep up the pretense, he flicked his half-smoked tab into the muck and looked me up and down with his usual tenderness, then trailed his eyes across Wren. “Who’s this?” he asked, almost decent, before catching himself and returning his thin lips to their practiced sneer.
“Can’t you see the resemblance?” I shoved Wren forward lightly. “The genteel nose, the grace and carriage that bespeak noble blood. You were fourteen, shallow and insipid—she was a chambermaid with a clubfoot and an overdeveloped jaw. When your parents learned of the affair, they packed her off to a nunnery and sent your issue abroad.” I tussled the boy’s hair. “But he’s back now. I imagine you two have a lot to talk about.”
Wren smirked a little. Guiscard shook his head, disdainful of any theatrics that weren’t his own. “It’s good to see you’ve kept your sense of humor—I would think with all that’s going on you wouldn’t have time for these childish jibes.”
“Don’t remind me. I’ve already changed pants twice today.”
That was about as much banter as he was capable of without outside assistance, and, realizing it, he headed inside.
“I’ll be out in a few minutes,” I told the boy. “Try and avoid doing anything that might lead Adolphus to beat me to death.”
“Don’t take shit from the snowman,” he said.
I laughed, shocked at his outburst and vaguely flattered to see the child take my feuds as his own. “I don’t take shit from anyone,” I said, though in fact most of my life lately seemed to consist of doing just that.
He blushed and looked down at his feet, and I followed Guiscard into the building.
Scryers are a strange breed, strange enough that they have their own headquarters away from Black House, and not just because part of their duties include the inspection and anatomization of dead bodies. They come in on big cases—murders and assaults, the occasional rape. Sometimes they get impressions, images or sense memories, bits of data, rarely entirely coherent but occasionally helpful. They aren’t artists, leastways not as I understand it—they have no ability to effect the physical world, but rather a sort of passive receptiveness to it, an extra sense the rest of us lack.
Low Town: A Novel Page 14