House War 03 - House Name

by Michelle West

  “Very well.” Jarven lifted his cup; Finch found hers too hot to touch. “Have you heard the news?”

  She cleared her throat. “Yes.”

  One brow rose, and his lips turned up in a very slight smile. It reminded Finch of Teller’s cat, although she couldn’t say why. “And we have a deal?” he asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I would like to know—”

  She held up one hand. Den-sign, but it passed muster as a general signal for silence as well, and she was comfortable using it here. “I want to know exactly what our terms are.”

  “Pardon?”

  “When I give you information, how can I be certain I’ll receive something of like value in return?”

  His brows—both of them—rose in surprise, and then he laughed out loud. This was followed quickly by a grimace, as he’d been holding the cup that was too hot for Finch. “How would you suggest we go about this to ensure that I’m being fair to you?”

  She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was laughing at her. “I was hoping,” she said, in a quiet voice, “that you had a suggestion. This isn’t something I do very often.”

  “It is not necessarily something that I do very often, either. And the public suggestion that I do indulge in this type of barter would give Lucille enough outrage to last years. But yes, I am much older than you are, and I have had the advantage of a broader range of experiences, some of which will no doubt be seen to be of dubious value.

  “I had no formal contract in mind, verbal or otherwise. Where I can be of aid to you, without compromising the House or my role in it, I will be of aid. I will answer your questions honestly; if I cannot do so, I will tell you that I cannot do so.”

  “And how will I know you’re telling me the truth?”

  He laughed again and shook his head. “My dear,” he said, when all that was left of that laugh was a smile, “I do wish Lucille had stayed. She would be proud of you. Shocked, I think, but proud.

  “You can never be certain that someone is telling you the truth. No, I am not saying that you can be certain they’re lying; that is not the way truth works. Take me, as an example. If you were to describe me to your den-kin, you would no doubt tell them that I am old, or even ancient, and that I am somewhat absentminded. If Lucille were to describe me to her kin or to her peers, she would say that I was an older man who was as canny as the most cutthroat of our ambitious young merchants and that my demeanor of aged experience hides the youthful mind of a wastrel.”

  Finch’s brows rose. “She would never say any of that—she respects and admires you greatly!”

  “Oh, tush. You are too easy to outrage, Finch. What I have said is the truth. You would be describing the same person, and your words would be the truth you perceive. There is no one truth.

  “What I tell you is not information that you will necessarily know. It is the product of observation and examination, as well as some education. The information will not come from your observations, and they will not be derived from your experiences. The ways in which my experience and yours intersect will probably become clearer only as you, yourself, gain that experience.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Good. You will, of course, attempt to verify the truth, where it is possible. You will, won’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Good, again.” He sipped tea slowly, studying her face.

  She wasn’t afraid to study his in return. She didn’t understand Jarven. He was ancient, to her. And he was clearly absentminded; Lucille always said he’d forget his head if it weren’t attached. But he was also clearly important enough to run this office, and he had rooms in the manse on the Isle. He was good enough at what he did, Lucille had told Finch, that he could stop an entire trade deal with a single well-placed word—usually spoken directly to The Terafin. He had money. He had no wife and no children, according to Lucille, but he had everything else he wanted.

  Yet what he didn’t seem to want was either her fear or her groveling obedience. He didn’t mind that she questioned him, although it often made him laugh.

  She didn’t have Jay’s instincts; no one else did. But she had her own instincts, and at this moment, watching this old man, she knew she could trust him.

  “Yes,” she told him. “I’ve heard the news.”

  “And it’s not good.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No.” She took a deep breath and let it out; she lost three inches of height as she did, and she put her hands on the edge of the armrest to stop herself from slouching into the comfort of the padded chair. She hadn’t been getting much sleep the past few nights.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Jarven—we’ve seen demons,” she replied. She expected him to laugh. When he didn’t, she became as still as the rabbit he had compared her to when speaking with Lucille. “You’ve heard this already.”

  That did pull a slight smile from him. “I have,” he conceded.

  “You’re trying to figure out how honest I’ll be.”

  The smile deepened. “I am. You may not read well, Finch, and according to Lucille your understanding of numbers is . . . rudimentary. But you are not without cunning; you are just without guile. That can be useful, if you use it correctly.

  “But I have interrupted you. My apologies.”

  She nodded. “We’ve seen demons,” she repeated. “And we’ve lost some of our own to them. We’ve seen—more. But this is the first time I’ve seen Jay like this.”

  “Like this?”

  She’s afraid to go to sleep. She’s afraid to go outside. She’s so afraid for all of us she can hardly breathe sometimes. But none of those words came out. Finch was willing to trade what she knew—but only about certain things. She wasn’t willing to expose Jay to a stranger. Not yet. Maybe not ever. “She’s worried,” she finally said. “More worried than we’ve ever seen her.”

  “She wasn’t worried about the demons?” he asked, raising both brow and cup.

  “Of course she was. But that was—it was different. I think—I think this is so much bigger that she doesn’t have a way to express it.” Finch took a breath and then touched the sides of her cup. It was on the edge of too hot, but she could lift it, and it gave her something to do with those hands instead of folding them into her lap. “You know about Lord Cordufar?”

  “I have heard about his manse, if that is what you mean.”

  Finch nodded. “That’s what I mean.”

  “It is cordoned off from public view. Jewel Markess has been given access to it?”

  “Given is the wrong word,” Finch said, lips twisting in a frown. “She’s been ordered there, by The Terafin. She’s gone there every day.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Yes, but you’ll have to ask The Terafin.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And you won’t.”

  He smiled. “No, Finch, I will not ask her; that is not how the game is played.”

  Finch didn’t ask, although she was curious about the rules of the game he thought he was playing. “I don’t—I don’t understand all of what’s happening there; Jay doesn’t talk about it much because she’s not really supposed to. And she only talks to us,” she added quickly. “But . . . there’s some sort of magic. The Order of Knowledge is there, all the time. And the bards from Senniel came; Jay said there were fifteen of them.”

  Jarven nodded.

  “There are voices,” Finch said, her own dropping. “Jay said—she said that someone was killing people slowly and horribly and that it never stopped.”

  “They could see this?”

  “No. That’s the thing. They could hear it. They can’t get to the people who are dying. They told Jay—the mages did, and I think Devon—”

  Jarven lifted a hand. “Devon? Devon ATerafin?”

  Finch nodded. “Do you know him?”

  Jarven was silent for a long moment. “She is in the company of Devon ATerafin.”
/>   “Yes. Constantly.”

  “I see. I’m sorry for the interruption. Please, continue. Would you like a biscuit?”

  “No, thank you. I ate.”

  “I was in a hurry and did not, if you’ll forgive me.”

  Finch nodded. “Devon told Jay that the voices were magic. That they were an illusion, a trick being played by the demons to demoralize us.”

  Jarven closed his eyes for a moment. It looked like one long blink. “Your Jewel doesn’t believe this.”

  “She’s Jay,” Finch replied. “Why do people have problems calling her that?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Jarven replied dryly. “Does she believe it?”

  “No. She knows he’s lying. She knows those people are dying, for real, beneath the city and that we can’t do a damn thing to save any of them.” She hesitated for just a minute and then said, in a rush, “Three days ago, you could only hear the voices where the mages were digging. Yesterday, you could hear them from the streets outside the manse—the people who live there kept calling the magisterial guards. She says the voices are going to get even louder, Jarven. She says we’ll be able to hear them, by the end, all over the hundred. Maybe even the Isle.

  “And she’s afraid that some of our lost are there, waiting to die without any hope of rescue or mercy.”

  “She said that?”

  “No. She’d never say that. But that’s what she’s afraid of. It’s what we’re all afraid of, and it’s making us crazy.”

  “Why are the demons doing this, Finch?”

  “I don’t know,” Finch whispered, looking past him and toward the light that streamed through the cut-glass panes of his window. “I think it has something to do with gods.”

  He set his cup aside and rose. “Very well. You have work to do, and I have apologies to make to Lucille; she is not very patient with my desire for company, even when the office is not particularly busy.”

  “Jarven?”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you worried?”

  He hesitated for a moment, and then he said, “Yes.”

  19th of Corvil, 410 A.A.

  Terafin Manse, Averalaan Aramarelas

  “The point is,” Jewel said, watching the faces of her den in their council room, pots hanging from hooks and chains above their table’s center, “we’re looking—the mages are looking—at the coming of the Lord of the Hells. I don’t know when—they don’t know when—but they’re afraid. Some of them are terrified, which makes them useless.”

  “Devon?”

  “Is not useless.” She grimaced. “I don’t think we have much time, if we have any time at all. It’s going to be so bad in the city, I wouldn’t stay.”

  “You’d leave Averalaan?” Finch’s eyes had widened in genuine surprise.

  “It’s going to be a burning building. I love my home—when I have one, that is—but we can always make another home. If we’re alive.” She glanced away. “I don’t want to be here,” she finally said, dropping her voice. “I don’t want to be here when you can hear the dying no matter where you are in the city. I don’t want to hear them—” She almost lifted her hands to cover her ears.

  Teller touched her elbow gently, and she lowered those hands, forcing them to lie at rest in her lap. She was so damn tired. The dreams wouldn’t leave her alone; they came, again and again, like a wyrd that she could make no sense of.

  No, that wasn’t true. She was afraid that she did understand them—that they were the voices of the dead that she had yet to hear, that she would hear them—Lefty, Fisher, Lander—and even distorted by continuous and unimaginable pain, she would recognize them. While she was here, in safety, and they were unreachable.

  But . . . they were dead, in her dream. Duster was always there, always. She was the walking corpse that troubled Jewel the most, possibly because she had always been so cruel and so determined in her need for vengeance.

  “The mages think the deaths are occurring as part of a ceremony; they get something—magic, power, I didn’t really understand that part—from the suffering and the deaths themselves if the deaths occur in the right place. The ceremony,” she continued, drawing breath, feeling it cut, “is meant to summon the Lord of the Hells from the Hells to our world. To our city. If he succeeds, the end of the world starts here.

  “I can’t leave,” Jewel told them all, trying to shrug the image of Duster off, as if it were just a superficial cover and not something that had sunk roots so deep she would never extricate them. “But the usual offer is open.”

  She glanced at Ellerson, who had taken up his spot to one side of the door. He was a constant presence in the wing and in the life of the den—one of them, but not one of them. She saw a slight frown deepen some of the creases around the corners of his lips, where a slight smile would deepen different ones. No expression on his face was more than slight.

  Teller watched Jay as she waited for their answer. Jay had always said they were free to walk, and she had always meant it. But it had never been an option for any of them. They watched her, waiting. She’d seen them through winter in Teller’s case and certain death in Finch’s. They’d eaten more or less at the same table for years if you counted the apartment floor, and if they’d taken to thieving, they’d never stolen from each other.

  She’d brought them here.

  It was here that they meant to stay as long as she did.

  “Is there anything that anyone can do to stop him?” Teller asked quietly.

  “Yes.” Jay’s eyes widened slightly, and then the stiff line of her shoulders suddenly trembled. Teller nodded gravely. He knew what the single word, spoken in that tone of voice, meant. She was certain. She could see it.

  But what she could see wasn’t clear to anyone but Jay. Years of experience had shown that sometimes it wasn’t clear to her, either. But . . . there was a way. There was something.

  “It’s the feeling,” Jay told them after a few awkward minutes had passed. “Don’t ask me what.”

  “Well, look at the bright side,” Finch told her.

  “What?”

  “If things get much worse, we’ll all be here when Moorelas rides again.”

  “Moorelas is a story,” Angel told her, more curt that he usually was when speaking to Finch. “And we’re going to need a helluvalot more than stories to save us.”

  “Well, Allasakar was supposed to be a story, too. And if he’s here, Moorelas can’t be far behind.”

  “Jay?” Teller had not taken his eyes from her face.

  “When the Sleepers wake. When Moorelas rides again, the Sleepers wake.” Her voice dropped into a whisper, and the awkward smile of joke-gone-wrong slowly drained from her face. “ ‘To fulfill their broken oath and restore honor to their lines.’ ” Her eyes widened, then. Her chair couldn’t contain her; she was almost hopping from foot to foot with something very like excitement but more hysterical.

  “It’s the crypt. Mother’s blessing, it’s the crypt.”

  “The what?” Angel asked, sharply.

  “We were there. That’s what they’re trying to tell me.”

  Carver slapped the table with his palm to get her attention. It worked, but in this state, it might not have. “Can you explain it to the rest of us?”

  “Back when we first started exploring the maze, Duster and I—we found one old tunnel that was, well, like a manor hall. It was made of big, wide cut-stone blocks—real high ceilings, pretty frilly engravings, stuff like that. There were magelights in the walls. We thought it’d be the perfect place for the den; we’d never have trouble with turf wars again, and we could live in style.

  “But something was already living there.”

  “You never told us about it.”

  “If I’d told you, you’d’ve dragged Lander off on some crazy search for—” She stopped, remembering who had been with Lander the night he had disappeared. “Sorry,” she said, the word rough but meant.

  “Doesn’t matter.
Tell us now.”

  “You remember the old crypt in the Church of Cartanis?”

  “Yeah. Plaques on the floor, engravings on the wall, bits and pieces of stone.”

  “Not those. The big, stone boxes, with the statues on top. The ones the really important people get.”

  “I believe,” Ellerson said quietly, “that you are speaking of the sarcophagi. And it is not necessarily people of import that receive such treatment, but rather people whose generosity to the church is measured in appropriate funding. Usually after their death, when their last testament is made public in the Halls of Omaran.”

  “Ellerson,” Angel snapped, “do you have to turn everything into a lecture?”

  “Do forgive the interruption, Jewel. Continue.”

  “We didn’t know what they were. We thought they were just statues, same as always. I didn’t think we’d come out beneath a church—but you know how hard it is to figure out how the underground and the above match up. Anyway, we went to grab a torch—the room was lit—but there weren’t any. It was magic, of course, and magic makes me nervous. Made Duster nervous, too.”

  Angel knew what that meant; they all did. But Duster had been gone for long enough that they didn’t flinch or avert their eyes. They missed her, in their own way; flinching, drawing back—it would have meant she was here.

  Jay knew it. Jay felt it, Teller thought, more strongly than any of them. “Right. You know what she was like when she was nervous.”

  Yes. Usually it was hard to distinguish between nerves and fury with Duster. Both had the same effect on her. “We had our own small light, and we went into the crypt. You couldn’t see the ceiling. I don’t understand why. It was like—like walking into another world. But you could see these three tombs, and on them, these three statues. The floor was stone, same as the walls, but around each of the tombs were three thin, black circles, and in each of the circles were words. At least I think they were words. Couldn’t read them.”

  “Did you recognize the alphabet?” Ellerson asked. They all glanced at him. His usually quiet voice was slightly sharper, his eyes narrowed.