The Golden City

by Cheney, J. Kathleen

  He groaned and tried turning onto his side. It was something about water. Something had happened or was going to happen in the river.

  He was helping the police investigate the work of art being slowly assembled near the river’s mouth, The City Under the Sea. Surely his edginess was related to that. The artist, Gabriel Espinoza, had taken into his mind to re-create the grand houses that lined the Street of Flowers. He’d anchored the first replica in the water a year ago, yet only recently had the Security Police—the regulars—begun to investigate those houses, suspecting that something more sinister than art might be driving the creation. They had immediately been ordered to close their investigation, although it was unclear from how high in the government that order had come. That had only served to pique Duilio’s interest. As a private citizen, he could still ask all the questions he wanted.

  The latch of his bedroom door turned with a faint click.

  Reflex more than anything else got him onto his feet before the door opened halfway. He didn’t feel the twinge of warning that usually alerted him to danger, but he snatched up the revolver that lay on his nightstand and held it ready as he turned to face the intruder. A shape stood unmoving in the doorway, startled by his sudden action. Someone else waited in the hallway with a lamp, casting the intruder into silhouette.

  His visitor was female, even though she clearly wore trousers. That didn’t mean she was harmless; a woman could be as dangerous as any man. But Duilio felt sure there was no reason to fear this visitor. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “What do you want?”

  “You’re him, aren’t you?” a feminine voice asked, confirming her gender. “Erdano’s brother.”

  Well, any woman who knew that wasn’t likely to be a threat. Duilio lowered the revolver and set it back on the nightstand. His visitor had to be one of Erdano’s women—part of his brother’s harem.

  Duilio buttoned the top button of his nightshirt and started hunting for his felt slippers. “Give me a moment, please.”

  Very few humans had any inkling the Ferreira family possessed selkie blood, and those who did were polite enough not to let themselves into his bedroom in the middle of the night. It was, of course, an open secret among their employees that Duilio’s mother was a selkie. While most selkies spent their lives in seal form, every moment in the sea or on a beach, she’d been raised among humans. But for a time she had lived as a seal among the nearest harem, to the north of the mouth of the Douro River at Braga Bay. Erdano was her child by that harem’s master. He often visited the Ferreira household, but tonight he’d sent one of his women instead.

  Duilio cursed under his breath. His valet had hidden his comfortable-but-worn slippers again, an unsubtle reminder that the man wanted Duilio to replace them. He gave up on finding them, crossed to the mantel, and lit the gaslight there. It wasn’t likely that bare feet would offend this woman anyway. He turned up the light enough to cast a feeble circle of illumination about the armchair and table waiting before the hearth, then looked back at the unknown woman. “Do you have a message from Erdano?”

  “Yes.” She stepped into the light, revealing pointed features set in a heart-shaped face. Light brown hair fell sleekly over her shoulders. She was a lovely girl, but as soon as Duilio caught the scent of her, any thought of getting to know her better fled. Evidently before she walked barefoot into the city to find him, she’d simply borrowed some of Erdano’s garments. The clothes—a man’s trousers and shirt cinched tight by a wide belt at her waist—reeked of musk. Duilio resisted the urge to pinch his nose closed. Even though he was only half selkie himself, he had never much liked the scent of other males.

  “Sir?” a voice asked from the hallway, dragging Duilio’s attention away from the girl. João, the young boatman who stayed down on the quay with the family’s boats, stood there, his sheepish expression evident in the light of the lamp he carried. “She came onto the yacht looking for you, sir. I thought it best to bring her here to the house. I . . . I thought she would knock, but . . .”

  “It’s fine, João.” Duilio knew better than to expect polite behavior from this girl. Selkies didn’t have the same manners as humans. She stood gazing up at the gaslight distrustfully. “Give me a few minutes,” Duilio said, “and then you can escort her back.”

  “Yes, sir.” The young man nodded quickly and withdrew into the hallway, pulling the bedroom door shut as he went.

  Duilio wished João hadn’t closed the door. The girl wouldn’t be concerned for her reputation, but Duilio would prefer that the servants not get the wrong idea. He plucked his velvet dressing gown off the end of his bed, drew it on over his nightshirt, and belted it. Then he returned to the girl’s side, leaning closer to get her attention. “What did you need to see me about?”

  “Oh. There was a woman in the water,” she said, watching the flickering gaslight as if concerned the flames might suddenly jump out of the fixture.

  A woman in the water? That had to be what his gift had been yammering on about. “Where?”

  The girl glanced at him for the first time. Her eyes slid toward his velvet dressing gown, her brows drawing together. “What is that?”

  She’d probably spent most of her life in the sea and would have little familiarity with human luxuries. Duilio held out his arm so the girl could touch his sleeve. “It’s called velvet.”

  She laid a tentative hand on his arm. The corners of her lips lifted as she ran her hand over the fabric’s nap. Her warm brown eyes were, in the gaslight’s glow, quite lovely. “Pretty. Can I have it?”

  In addition to their ability to change form, most selkies purportedly had magical abilities in the area of seduction—selkie charm, it was often called. Duilio doubted this selkie was more than eighteen; young in human terms, but likely experienced in many things human girls of that age would not be. He patted her hand in his best fatherly manner. “What is your name?”

  “Aga.” Her eyes flicked toward the bed and then up to meet his. “Tigana said I could stay with you. You could give me the velvet.”

  God help me. Duilio pressed his lips together, weighing his response. Tigana, the queen of Erdano’s harem, had control of the harem’s many females. It wasn’t the first time she’d sent him a girl, apparently believing he must be in dire need of a woman. Duilio had never been sure of the rules of harem politics and, not wanting to cause friction between Erdano and his queen, he’d always refused the gift. Well, save for the first time. Since then he’d tried to handle it diplomatically.

  “Can you tell me what you saw, Aga?” he asked, reminding the girl of the reason she’d come. “Where was the woman?”

  The girl’s mouth drew down in a moue. “Over the rotting houses.”

  The rotting houses were what the selkies called The City Under the Sea. The houses themselves were all new, even the oldest not showing much wear from being underwater yet. All the same, the selkies had noticed a scent of rot in the water about them—a detail that Duilio feared was linked to several reports of missing servants. They had only made a connection between those missing servants and the work of art a few weeks ago, when Lady Pereira de Santos had reported two of her maids missing only a day after the replica of her house had been mentioned in the newspapers. They’d wondered if their bodies might be hidden within those houses. Aga’s sighting firmly linked Duilio’s sense of foreboding to The City Under the Sea, but he was still missing some vital clue. “Was she swimming?”

  Aga shrugged fluidly. “Yes, but then she was in the boat.”

  Duilio felt his brows drawing together. When had a boat entered the conversation? “How late was this, Aga? Had the sun set?”

  She sighed as if vexed by all his questions. “Only a little while ago. I swam to the mouth and then to the big boat . . .”

  The “big boat” would be the Ferreira family’s yacht, moored out past the Bicalho Quay. “I see.”
r />   “. . . and then I walked here with the man.”

  Duilio chewed his lower lip as he calculated. Aga had swum out to the mouth of the Douro, almost three miles against the current, back to the yacht, and then she’d walked nearly a mile up the steep streets of the Golden City. How long had that taken her? Perhaps two hours? Three? “So, was it before the moon rose?”

  “Yes.” Her tone suggested he might be dense.

  Women did not swim in the river in the middle of the night. Most human women never learned to swim at all. “Did you see the woman, Aga? What did she look like?”

  The girl stepped closer and laid graceful hands on his velvet-covered chest. She didn’t quite reach his chin. “She wore black. And white.”

  His gift told him that this conversation was important, that he needed to know something this girl was telling him . . . or not telling him. He wasn’t sure what questions he needed to ask. “Were you close?” he pressed. “Did you see her face?”

  Aga rubbed her cheek against his chest. “No. Wrong way.”

  He wished Tigana hadn’t been in a mood to be generous. He didn’t need this sort of distraction now. Duilio set his hands on the girl’s shoulders, stepped back, and tried again. “This is important, Aga. Can you tell me anything else? Did she fall out of the boat?”

  “No, it was waiting when she came up,” Aga said, her shoulders slumping.

  Came up? From the houses? Why would someone come up from the houses? If they wanted a better look at them, they could ride out to the site on one of the submersible boats that sold tickets to curious folk who wished to see the work of art. He’d even gone to look at them himself. And at night it was too dark to see them anyway.

  “You don’t want me?” Aga’s hands began to roam his chest, drawing Duilio’s wandering mind very firmly back to the present.

  Oh, what a vexing question. His body had clearly noted the girl’s lithe form. Heaven knew she was attractive enough, and once he got her out of Erdano’s garments, the disturbing scent of male selkie would be greatly diminished. But she was part of Erdano’s harem . . . and there was a servant outside in the hall, waiting. Both factors dampened any ardor she aroused in him. “He’s my brother,” he told her. “I want to keep on his good side.”

  “Why?” She sighed again, sounding petulant. “Tigana said . . .”

  He held her at a distance. “All the same.”

  “They said you were nice,” she added plaintively.

  Oh, good Lord. The only time he’d gotten involved with any of the women from Erdano’s harem had been when he was fifteen. That was half a lifetime ago, and evidently they still talked about him being “nice.” Well, it could be worse. “I’m sorry, Aga, but I need to sleep.”

  That only made him sound like an old man.

  Her lower lip thrust out in a pout. “What do I do?”

  “There’s a room down the hall where Erdano sleeps when he’s here. You can stay there for the rest of the night or go back to the boat if you wish.”

  Her face took on a calculating look. “Is the handsome man from the boat still here?”

  Duilio resisted the urge to laugh at her eager tone. Poor João. “I believe so.”

  The corners of her pretty lips lifted. “Is he nice?”

  Duilio wasn’t going to speculate about whether João was nice. “You would have to ask him, I suppose.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said brightly, then her brows drew together. “Do I leave now?”

  “Can you think of anything else to tell me about the woman in the water?”

  Aga took a deep breath and appeared to be thinking hard, her lips pinched together. She finally pronounced, “She had webbed hands.”

  Like a thunderclap inside his brain, Duilio knew.

  That was the fact he’d been fishing for. His gift confirmed it.

  A woman with webbed hands. Duilio set his own hand under the girl’s elbow and drew her back toward his bedroom door. When he opened it he found a very flustered-looking João right outside. The young man must have been listening at the keyhole.

  “Sir,” João said quickly, “you asked me to wait.”

  Seeing the young man’s flushed features, Duilio held in a laugh. “Yes, João, I did. Can you escort Miss Aga to Mr. Erdano’s room at the far end on the left? Or back to the yacht, if she wishes.”

  João’s eyes slid toward the girl. “Yes, sir.”

  Recalling the girl’s request, Duilio slipped off his dressing gown, bundled it up, and handed it to her. “In trade for the information, Aga.”

  She petted the bundle of velvet like a pup. “Pretty.”

  She didn’t even look back, but happily followed the boatman away, the light of his lamp fading as they went down the hallway. Duilio shut his door, content to leave his little problem in João’s capable hands. He returned to the hearth, settled into the leather armchair, and stretched out his legs.

  A woman had been out in the water, near the submerged houses. That woman had webbed hands: a sereia, not a human. Unlike selkies, who were called selkies all over Europe, the sereia bore different names in other countries. The French called them sirènes, the English mermaids, and the Germans knew them as Lorelei. No matter how they were named, they weren’t allowed in the Golden City.

  Selkies weren’t either, but the ban hadn’t ever kept his mother or Erdano—or him, for that matter—out. For all Duilio knew, there could be dozens of selkies living in the Golden City. Unlike the sereia, once they’d shed their pelts they were almost indistinguishable from humans. Without a selkie’s pelt, one couldn’t prove that they weren’t human. The sereia’s webbed hands, their gills, and the scale patterning of their skin were all elements of their nature that they couldn’t put aside.

  Duilio laced his fingers together and propped his chin atop them. He could recall seeing sereia walking the streets of the city when he was young, in the days before the prince’s ban. Although they kept their distance from human society, a few had owned houses in the city or in Vila Nova de Gaia across the river. They had traded with the locals, but not any longer.

  When Prince Fabricio came into power following his father’s demise, he had issued a proclamation banning all sea folk from the Golden City on pain of death. He’d been told by his seers he would one day be killed by one of the sea folk. Duilio had his doubts. He found it hard to believe a seer could reliably predict anything far into the future, and it had been almost two decades since then. Too many factors had changed in the interim.

  Whatever the impetus behind the prince’s order, for the first few years following its issuance the Special Police—whose explicit mandate was to carry out the orders of the prince, whether or not those orders served the best interests of the people—had obediently rounded up every sereia or selkie they could find, along with many of those who protected them. Sympathizers had been jailed and their property seized. The sea folk themselves had been executed. Otterfolk rarely came into the city, and most selkies slipped in and out, interested in little beyond a night’s pleasure, so the majority of those executed had been sereia. And although Duilio hadn’t heard of an execution in the past few years, most citizens believed the Special Police still carried them out, just not publicly. There was actually an ambassador from the Ilhas das Sereias—the islands of the sereia—at the prince’s court, but the man lived under house arrest at the palace. And while Duilio had long suspected there might be sereia hiding in the city, he hadn’t been sure until he met Miss Paredes.

  He closed his eyes, remembering that day. It had been a brief encounter, back in the spring. Everyone else had watched the stunning Lady Isabel Amaral. Duilio’s attention had been captured instead by the lady’s companion, a woman somewhere near his age, modestly dressed and attractive, although he wouldn’t have called her beautiful. Pretty, perhaps, but nothing special. Well, she had exceptionally nice lips, lips made to k
iss. He recalled admiring her tiny waist and rounded hips, although that might simply be her corset. Her flat-brimmed straw hat had cast a shadow across her face, but as she shifted the parasol she carried to better shade her mistress’ alabaster skin, he’d noticed her dark eyes.

  His breath had gone still. He had known, in that way his gift worked, that she was more than just a hired companion. She was special. That had been enough to make Duilio look again.

  And for the six months since that brief meeting, his gift had kept telling him the woman was important. He didn’t know how, exactly, but he didn’t take the feeling lightly. He’d watched her from a distance. He bribed a servant in the Amaral household to discover her given name, Oriana. He’d investigated her background. Before becoming a lady’s companion, she’d worked in a dressmaker’s shop. He discovered little else. It was as if she hadn’t existed before then.

  He’d often attended the same social events as Lady Isabel and her companion, even if he didn’t travel in the Amarals’ elevated stratum of society. They were old aristocracy, while the Ferreiras were newly moneyed and not worthy of their conversation. Duilio had watched Miss Paredes carefully, though. She often kept her hands in her lap. She wore silk mitts rather than gloves, an old lady’s affectation. She always chose high-necked shirts, even at formal occasions, carrying her modesty to an unfashionable extreme, although he’d heard a rumor from one of the servants that she had spots . . . or something catching on her hands.

  Taken individually, none of those things had given her away. But the longer he thought about it, the surer he became that all of those foibles combined were signs of a sereia hiding her true nature. Duilio opened his eyes and stared at his cold hearth. He had no proof that Miss Paredes was a sereia, but his gift assured him it was true.

  Just as there might be dozens of selkies hiding in the city, he was willing to accept that sereia might be living here as well. But it was more dangerous for them. Their nature was harder to hide. The most reasonable explanation that he could come up with was that she was a spy, although what she could learn in the Amaral household mystified him. While the Amaral family had impressive social ties, their political ties were limited.