House War 03 - House Name

by Michelle West

“We could touch any two points on the map, and lines—usually blue lines, but some were brighter than others—would travel between them, following the streets.”

  His eyes widened.

  “There were three maps. Rath thought they were in sections,” she added. “I think the—I think they used them.”

  “Before they fell into your hands.”

  She nodded.

  “And you used them, after?”

  “Rath did. I couldn’t really make sense of them; I could see some familiar landmarks, and the main streets, but there was too much there that doesn’t exist anymore.”

  Meralonne removed the stem of the pipe from the corner of his mouth and walked over to the desk. He searched there a moment and then, cursing, bent to the floor to retrieve scraps of paper. These, he placed on the empty table. “Find me an inkwell in this mess,” he added.

  When she did, he took it from her hands, opened it, and then cursed again. She handed him the quill she’d found as well.

  In spite of herself, she watched with fascination as he slid carelessly into Rath’s working chair. His fingers were long, but smoke hadn’t stained them; they looked almost delicate as he took the quill and began to write.

  What he wrote, she couldn’t say—he didn’t write the characters in Weston letterforms, if they were letters at all. But something about the bold lines he’d scribed was nagging in its familiarity.

  “Was this the language?”

  “I—I don’t know.” She frowned. “I don’t think so.” She looked up at the shelf above the mantel without much hope; it, like the tabletop, was empty.

  “What do you see here?”

  She forgot to look at his face or his expression; instead, as if he were an echo of Rath, she looked at what he’d written, at the small, precise shapes that were more like geometry than any language she’d learned.

  “They look familiar to you,” he said. It wasn’t a question. She nodded hesitantly, because they did. “Where did you see these runes?”

  “Not these ones,” she finally said. “But ones that were similar in shape. In the undercity,” she added. “But they were much larger. One of them was carved into the floor.”

  He was utterly silent for a long moment. Then he left the chair. Blue smoke wafted from his compressed lips.

  “What does it mean?” she asked quietly.

  “It means, Jewel Markess, that we must work—quickly—to find this undercity of which you’ve spoken.” He shook his head. “I confess I don’t understand the timing.”

  She waited, and after a moment, he said, “It was Scarran last night. Anything that happened should have happened then. Perhaps Ararath bought time in some unexpected way; we will likely never know.”

  “You knew him, didn’t you?”

  The mage raised a silver brow. “I did not know him as you knew him, but yes, we were acquainted, and yes, I was aware of some of his activities. I was not, however, aware of where those activities occurred, and had I been, much might have been prevented.”

  “Would he still be alive?” She hadn’t meant to ask the question, but it left her lips of its own volition, shadowed by, of all things, a twinge of guilt.

  Meralonne met her gaze and held it. He doused his pipe. “I cannot say. He played a game that I would have said was beyond him, and in the end, he won.”

  “It killed him,” she replied, her voice steady and flat.

  “Yes. But victory is not always defined by survival.”

  Jewel shook her head. “For Rath, it was.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. If he hid things from you, he had his reasons for doing so, and I will respect his implicit wishes in this. But more than that, I cannot do. Come, Jewel. We must find this maze.”

  Jewel nodded and once again glanced at the debris strewn across the floor. At the velvet jacket that had once seemed so fine to her, at the shirts, the various jars of color, lids cracked, contents spilled. But her eyes returned to the sword in its scabbard. Bending, she retrieved it in shaking hands.

  “You have use for a sword?”

  “No. Not me. But . . . it was important to him. It was from his old life, and I think it’s the only thing he couldn’t make himself throw away. He almost never wore it—but he did; I saw him use it once.” To save Arann, she thought, when Lefty had come at a desperate run to their home.

  Lefty.

  “I can take this?”

  “I think it fair to say you can take anything at all that is left here. If you do not, the landlord no doubt will.”

  She hesitated again and then, making a decision, asked, “Can you help me carry the books?”

  Jay came in just before the middle dinner hour, and she looked both dirty and exhausted.

  “We saved you food,” Finch began, but Ellerson cleared his throat. Jay, weary and pale, looked up at a man who was starched and perfectly clean.

  “Bath,” he said firmly. “Everyone else has.”

  “But not quietly,” Teller added, glancing at Carver. Carver shrugged; it was his only response. Finch watched as Jay glanced at the table. Saving food in this case didn’t mean much; Angel couldn’t eat his way through half of what was left on a good day.

  “Bath,” Jay said, forlornly, and headed down the hall.

  After dinner, they gathered in the kitchen. It had gone past the middle and into the late dinner hour, but as they had no guests—and the den privately thought the idea of having guests when they were guests was ridiculous—Ellerson made little comment. He did, however, join them in the kitchen.

  Finch noted that there were actual chairs—matching chairs—around the butcher-block table, and she glanced at Ellerson’s completely neutral expression before she took a seat.

  “I’ll keep it short,” Jay told them, as she shoved her hair away from her eyes. The weather was cool and dry enough that it almost stayed that way; it certainly didn’t have the springy quality it adopted in the humidity of the summer months. “I spent the day with a very irritating mage.”

  “Member APhaniel may be many things,” Ellerson said, clearing his throat slightly, “but simply irritating would not be among them.”

  “He can be whatever he wants—he can clearly get away with it,” Jay snapped back. “But he is damn irritating.” She folded her fingers together and cracked her knuckles, which caused the domicis to frown.

  “Did he do anything magical?” Teller asked. They all wanted to know, but only Teller was willing to risk the question.

  “Yes. He lit his pipe.”

  Silence, followed by a disappointed, “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much. He’s got eagle eyes, though. He notices everything.”

  Meaning, of course, that he noticed things she wasn’t happy to have noticed. Finch glanced at Angel, and Angel nodded.

  “We went by Rath’s place first. Meralonne wanted to see it.”

  Ellerson cleared his throat, and Jay glanced up at him; he stood by the doors. “What?”

  “Member APhaniel is what he is most frequently called.”

  “He told me to call him Meralonne.” Her expression made clear that it was a lot better than anything else she might have called him.

  “Be that as it may,” Ellerson replied, “it is possible your familiarity will draw more attention to you than you would ideally like at this stage in your career.”

  “My what?”

  He didn’t blink. “Your career. Your performance will be evaluated, and while it is unlikely that the mage will consider the use of his personal name to be of note, others who are not as familiar might.”

  All of the den were staring at him now.

  After a long moment, Jay spoke. “It might not matter,” she told them softly, staring at the tabletop, and the glow of lamplight against it.

  “How so?”

  “What The Terafin said was true. There is no entrance to the maze from Rath’s place.”

  “But—but where did it go?” Finch asked.

  “We don’t know. Meral
onne—Member APhaniel—examined the basement for an hour, and he found nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Dirt. Rock. Old, rotten wooden boards. Nothing else.”

  “But—”

  “He said none of it seemed new, either. It’s not like they covered over the hole—it’s just not there anymore.”

  A thought occurred to everyone—except possibly Jester—at more or less the same time. “Do they think you were lying?”

  Jay’s shoulders sagged. “No one’s said that,” she told them, placing her hands flat against the surface of the table. “But it’s got to damn well look that way.”

  “It’s only one entrance,” Carver began.

  Jay nodded, but it wasn’t a particularly good nod. “The entrance by Bronson’s is gone, as well.”

  “What, the chute?”

  “Yeah. We pulled up the boards; we went down into the basement. We even pulled up the trap that led down. It led to dirt and the stone foundation.”

  “Where else did you go?”

  “There and the entrance by the edge of the thirty-second.”

  No one asked her what she’d found. They didn’t have to.

  Jay still stared at the tabletop. Then she rose, restless, and shoved hair that wasn’t in her eyes out of them. “It’s got to be there,” she told them all, spreading her hands. “And we’ve got to find it. If it weren’t for the—the creature that tried to kill her, she’d probably have us bouncing off our asses in the high streets by now.”

  They weren’t yet up to the task of showing gratitude for a creature that graced their nightmares.

  “We just need to find entrances that Rath didn’t use much,” Jay added. “Meralonne—the mage, I mean—”

  “Member APhaniel.”

  “Member APhaniel thinks they’re somehow closing the entrances that Rath knew about. He thinks they knew a lot of what Rath knew. But they obviously didn’t know it all,” she added.

  “Why?” Ellerson asked.

  “Because if they had, I’d never have come to Terafin. They’d have known about the letter. They’d have known what it told me to do.” She rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I’m beat,” she told them. “And I have nothing else to say. I’m going to bed.”

  Finch opened her mouth to speak and closed it again, aware of Ellerson’s presence in the room. “Go,” she said, instead. “We’ll clean up here.”

  “No,” Ellerson told her quietly, “you will not.”

  “But the dining room—”

  “It is already cleared.”

  “But—”

  “Finch, there are servants whose sole duties are to this wing. If you attempt to do their work, one of two things will happen. Either they will take it as a criticism of their work, and they will be somewhat justifiably aggrieved, or they will be judged by the quality of your work, with the same result.”

  Finch stared at Ellerson.

  He waited a beat. “You are here, for the moment, as The Terafin’s guests. The servants take their duties to her guests seriously; it is a matter of House pride. If you feel you must be considerate of these servants, do your best not to make too much of a mess. Anything else would be interference.

  “It cannot have escaped your notice that many of the servants have the House Name. They did not come to that name by extraordinary acts of heroism; they achieved their names by diligent service in her name. Do not deprive the servants here of their ability to earn that rank.”

  Carver snorted. “Rath was right,” he muttered. “The patriciate is insane.”

  “Even their servants,” Jester added.

  Jay didn’t sleep well. Even a room away, Finch could hear her cries as she woke from sleep into an unfamiliar darkness. The third time it happened, she woke, found the robe hanging by the bedside table, and put it on. Then she dragged herself out of her room, pausing only long enough to pull the counterpane and one pillow from her own bed. Teller’s door was slightly ajar. She went to knock on it and nearly shrieked as it opened.

  “You too?” he asked quietly.

  She nodded.

  They walked over to Jay’s door. It was closed. Finch pushed it open and walked in. The room was huge; it was bigger than any of the others. It seemed empty, although there was furniture to navigate in the darkness that was alleviated only by moonlight through the unshuttered glass.

  They made their way to the bedside, and they arranged their blankets and pillows in a familiar way. The blankets were much finer, and the pillows were thick and heavy with down; the floor was flat, and it didn’t creak much beneath the carpets.

  They bedded down on the same side of the bed, nearest the window, placing their blankets at the same distance they’d been in their old home. The edges were touching.

  “I don’t know if it’ll help,” Finch told Teller.

  “It can’t hurt,” he replied. She couldn’t tell whether or not he smiled as he said it, but it didn’t matter; it was comforting to know that, absent starvation and the fear of street dens and cold, they could still worry about the same things and come to the same conclusions.

  Not everything had to change.

  When Jewel woke in the morning, the first thing she saw was Finch, and the second, Teller. They were sleeping in blankets far finer than the ones they’d owned back home, but they were curled on a stretch of floor as if bound by invisible walls. She knew why they were there, and she felt two things at once: gratitude and guilt. She struggled with the latter as she slipped out of bed and walked toward the closet—which was a large room—that Ellerson had been slowly filling.

  They knew about her nightmares. They knew she always had them. They also knew that she was sleeping, or trying to sleep, in the dark. Teller had hesitantly—and privately—suggested that she tell Ellerson that she needed a lamp, at the very least, when she slept, and she almost bit his head off. I can’t be seen as a child who’s afraid of the dark, she said between clenched teeth, when she’d managed to rein in a very frayed temper.

  Teller, however, had endured her anger. You can’t go without sleep and do what you need to do. Ellerson won’t tell.

  But she’d know, damn it.

  So Teller and Finch—who both finally had beds, real beds, of their own, and gods only knew for how long—were sleeping on her floor. She should have been angry. She should have felt humiliated by the need for their company and its familiarity.

  Instead, she made every effort to move quietly as she approached her second day of work for The Terafin. Even if things didn’t work out well here, it didn’t matter—the solarii Jewel earned would see them through the hard times. They could find their own place in the holdings again. They could take back their life.

  Because her duties lay in the dark and damp basements of the old holdings, Ellerson hadn’t insisted she immediately learn to dress, as he put it, properly; he’d allowed, and requisitioned—his word—practical clothing that was nonetheless of matching, rather than clashing, colors. This practical clothing didn’t feature skirts, and it did boast large pockets in several places.

  He’d allowed her to keep her boots because on her return from the holdings they’d been encrusted with dirt and dust. The boots she would have insisted on keeping, in any case; they were good. She knew they were good. They’d certainly cost enough.

  She slid into an undershirt, covered it with a heavy shirt, and then did the same with the wide pants; she selected a jacket as well, a heavy blue fabric that seemed too fine or soft to be wool. Ellerson, however, assured her that it was.

  She didn’t argue with him.

  When she slid out of her door, he was waiting for her in the hall. He bowed, ignoring her sharp intake of breath.

  “Make noise,” she told him sharply.

  “As you wish,” he replied. “Breakfast is waiting.”

  “Is anything else?” she asked as she followed him down the hall.

  “The rest of your den appear to be sleeping.”

  She shrugged
. “There’s not much for them to wake up to,” she pointed out.

  “That might be a concern.”

  She hesitated. Shrugged. “We usually head out to the Common in the morning and to the well; we do laundry once a week in rotation.”

  He nodded, as if this were somehow relevant.

  “But in the past few weeks, any real work we’ve done, we’ve done in the evening.”

  He didn’t ask, and she didn’t elaborate. But when he led her into the breakfast room—which was a much smaller version of the dining room with a table that wasn’t so insanely long—it wasn’t empty. Meralonne APhaniel was seated in front of a plate, smoking.

  The plate was covered with food he hadn’t touched. Jewel recognized most of it—bread, cheese, some sort of soft fish. “Am I late?” she asked, struggling to keep anxiety out of her voice.

  “No.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m endeavoring to make certain that you are not. Late,” he added, blowing rings into the still air.

  Jewel opened her mouth and snapped it shut again. She glanced at Ellerson who stood, impassive, by the wall.

  “I would like, if possible, to make a list of the entrances that Ararath showed you, starting at the most commonly used and ending with the least common. We can compose this list while you eat,” he added. “With luck, we’ll have more success today than we had yesterday.”

  With her luck, Jewel thought, scraping a chair across the floor and sitting heavily in it, success was not in the cards. Breakfast, apparently, was not in the cards, either, at least not according to her appetite. But she ate. Her Oma had never liked to see food wasted, and Jewel had a lifetime of ingrained habit, against which lack of appetite counted for little; she chewed, she swallowed, and she made her way through whatever was on her plate.

  As she did, she began to do what the mage had asked. It wasn’t hard. During the long bouts of sleeplessness, she’d been mentally composing the list he’d asked her to make.

  “I don’t know all of the entrances he knew about,” she admitted. “I know which ones we found on our own.”

  The mage nodded. “Are you certain you found exits—or entrances—that Ararath didn’t know?” He sounded dubious.