“Lucio Winter,” she said in a voice like a silver bell.
Avior cleared his throat. He jittered more than ever, and his forehead glistened wet. “Demon!” he cried. “Demon, it is I who summoned you!”
Theodora—no. This was no more Theodora than the proprietress had been. The movements were different, more removed. There had been something human about her, when she had called herself Theodora. This was the personification of Deals & Bargains, and “demon” was as good a name for it as any.
Deals & Bargains stooped within its circle and plucked up one cotton pad among nine.
“Demon, speak to me! Tell me about yourself!” Avior demanded, hopping for its attention.
Deals & Bargains said: “I will not have her as part of this bargain.”
“Demon, here I am. Over here. I am the one who—”
Deals & Bargains held up a hand, and Avior’s voice choked within his throat. Its face softened slowly toward me, though it remained the personification and not Theodora. It extended the cotton pad my way. It said: “I will not have you as part of this bargain. Take your offering and step away.”
I licked my lips. “The payment offered was the blood of nine prefects, not eight. I would not have this exchange count as a renege on payment.”
Deals & Bargains said: “I will collect my payment, but not from you. Take your offering and step away.”
I couldn’t read its face. Heaven help me, but I didn’t know what it was thinking, if indeed there was any thought behind its demand—anything beyond the personification working by its own rules.
What I did know was that, if I’d suspected for an instant that Deals & Bargains would respond to the summoning, I would never have agreed to take part in it. I accepted the cotton pad and stepped back.
“Demon, I’m the one who summoned you, not her!” Avior shouted, stomping his foot. “Pay attention to me! I abjure you, by the symbol that binds you, speak to me! I wish to make a deal with you!”
Deals & Bargains pivoted his way. It said: “Go on.”
Avior withered under its gaze but did not collapse. It was not making itself beautiful now, but terrifying. Shadows gathered about its shoulders like wings, and I was glad I could not see its silver eyes.
I neither moved nor spoke again during the rest of the bargaining session. I never thought to. I think I couldn’t, for I had no part in this deal.
Avior squared his shoulders. He cleared his throat, and a prepared speech squawked forth: “We nine—eight—prefects have watched our nation crumble under rule pernicious, and we must rid ourselves of that rule. But if we act by obvious means, we will be rendered guilty in the eyes of the people and will be rendered unable to guide our beloved nation into her golden age.”
Deals & Bargains tilted its head, neither believing nor disbelieving—or simply not caring whether this was true. It said: “What do you want of me?”
Avior bared his teeth, and his voice emerged clearer this time. “Give us a way to kill the king!”
Deals & Bargains said: “Have you no pistols? Have you no poisons?”
“Have you nothing better?” he shot back, rocking forward on his toes. “We need an untraceable way to kill him, one no one can blame on us.”
Deals & Bargains said: “I do not kill mortals.”
No, she blamed them for killing themselves by her hand.
“I’m not asking you to do it yourself,” Avior said. “Give us a means, a way to kill the king—but not by our own hands, and so that no one knows we’re the ones responsible. Can you do that?”
Deals & Bargains said: “I can.”
“Then give it to us and take our blood in payment.”
Deals & Bargains raised elegant, feminine hands to its vest. With forefingers and thumbs, it drew from two pockets two dirty, matted messes. It kept pulling, and the mats resolved into hair, followed by faces, shoulders, and arms. It pulled and pulled, until it had drawn out two young children, which it released upon the freezing concrete floor. Filthy, scowling, skeletally thin and wasted, the children cowered against Deals & Bargains’s legs.
They were a boy and a girl, shriveled and hideous, their faces untouched by the springtime of youth. The boy folded in on himself, pressing his hands to his eyes, thumbs to his ears, pinky fingers pinching his nose, recessed jaw hanging loosely. The girl swiveled her head, assessing us, eyes deep and round and hungry as two empty wells. Both children were utterly loathsome and wretched, wrecked and revolting, more animal than human. My stomach churned to see them. They aroused no sympathy in me, no maternal instinct. I think if I could have, I’d have killed them then and there and accounted it mercy.
“What are they?” Avior asked, as fascinated as he was disgusted.
Deals & Bargains said: “Children.”
“Yours?”
It smiled. “This boy,” it said, stroking the child’s hair, “is Ignorance. This girl is Want. They are in my safekeeping, but I am willing to bargain them into yours. Do you want them?”
No one could want them, but Avior practically salivated. “Yes.”
“You will treat them as your own?”
“I will.”
“Then we have a bargain.”
Deals & Bargains lifted its hands and stepped away from the children. They released it without complaint and zeroed in on Avior. The boy hurled himself blindly at the prefect’s legs, and Avior put out a hand to steady him. The girl latched onto that hand. She stuffed the fingers into her mouth and ground her teeth into them until blood ran across her cheeks and down her chin and Avior screamed.
Theodora didn’t stick around to watch. She swept between Lindo and Hemmel and disappeared beyond the pillars, leaving nothing behind but eight scraps of clean white cotton in the center of the circle . . . and the hollow clack of my heels as I sprinted after her.
I don’t think Theodora was moving like ordinary people do. I saw flashes of her walking unhurried ahead of me, but I couldn’t catch up. By the time I reached the stairs, she had disappeared entirely. If I hadn’t known where she was going, no way could I have followed her.
But I did know.
I tripped, scrambled, and slammed my way up the stairs, through the door, and into the arms of the knights waiting above. Warm bodies blocked my path and firm hands seized hold of me.
“That woman,” I panted. “Red hair, just passed. Which way?”
“No one passed us,” a knight told me.
“I have to catch her!” I insisted. “Please let me go!” I tried to plunge onward and got about twelve inches.
“No one passed us,” said the same knight, a rough-faced woman with narrowed eyes. “What’s the hurry?”
“I have to catch her before she gets to my brother. It’s important. Please, let me go!”
“I think,” the knight said, with deliberate pacing, “that we’d better wait for Prefect Lindo.”
Seriously?
I ground my brain to a halt and reset it. Not easy, when it was screeching at me. It kept screeching, even as I straightened as well as I could under the pressure of a dozen hands and adopted a superior tone. “Take your hands off me,” I commanded. “I am Prefect Edenfield, and this is my manor. You have no right to restrain me.”
Prefect Lindo had not told them about the passing of the title, based on the way two of them laughed and the other four looked at me like I was insane.
“Please observe the ring,” I added icily. “I am Lord Holst’s replacement. Release me.”
Instinct made them glance down and training immediately loosened fingers and snapped back hands. But they didn’t move out of my way.
“We apologize for the inconvenience, prefect,” said the same knight as before. “We did not know of your elevation. But, respectfully, Edenfield isn’t in charge here anymore. Prefect Lindo is, and she told us not to let anyone pass.”
I could’ve screamed at her. “I’m not running away! I need to get to my brother before that woman does! He’s in the knighthouse. It’
s just around the corner. Don’t any of you have siblings? That woman is a dangerous psycho, and she’s got my brother wrapped around her little finger!”
“Doesn’t matter,” my new least-favorite knight intoned. “We have our instructions. You’ll need to remain here until Prefect Lindo says otherwise.”
I was not sitting around while Theodora went and destroyed my brother. But even as I worked myself up to do something truly desperate, another of the knights spoke: “I’ll take her.”
Like the others, this one was female. Though she’d never said it outright, the last few days had given me the impression that Prefect Lindo didn’t trust men.
The other knights gazed at my savior askance. She shrugged. “It’s important to keep up good relations . . . and I think the prefect wouldn’t appreciate it if we stopped a woman from protecting her sibling, do you?”
The other knights shuddered and drew back. My savior took my arm. “Let’s go,” she said. Her hand tugged on me once, and then she was running by my side. We burst out of the front door together, dashed along the side of the building, and slammed into the knighthouse beyond.
Lindo knights had taken over here, too. Four of them crowded into the outer room, which was no longer even remotely neat and organized. Their heads went up as I passed, but no one tried to stop me from barging into the back room. I found two more Lindo knights there, going through the closet under Roald’s incensed gaze.
“Francis?” I called. I could see at a glance that there was no Francis here, but I looked frantically over the room again to make sure. “Where are Olaf and Torben?” I demanded of Roald. “Where is my brother?”
“He got away,” Roald growled, glaring death at the knights. “Olaf was off-duty when they arrived, but they’re going to arrest him the moment they find him. I don’t know about Torben. He comes and goes as he pleases.”
“He’ll come here soon enough,” one of the Lindo knights said confidently. “And then he won’t be leaving again.”
Roald snorted.
“My brother,” I prompted him. “Tell me about my brother. What do you mean, he got away? When did he leave? Just now? Was he alone, or—”
A dreamy smile stole over the faces of all the knights. “Not alone . . .” Roald murmured.
“There was a beautiful woman,” said one of the Lindo knights.
“The most beautiful woman,” corrected the other. “Magnificent red hair, like the fire of sunset.”
“Eyes like stars.”
Roald sighed. “Body like a candlestick.”
“A candlestick?”
“You know, the ones that—”
I cleared my throat, and Roald dropped his hands, which had been carving an excessively womanly shape in the air. “We were distracted,” he said sheepishly. “She was very beautiful. They thought so too.”
“I’d have thought better of you two,” my escort told the other Lindo knights sharply. They looked embarrassed, but the star-struck distance in their eyes emolliated their shame.
“Did you see which way they went?” I asked.
The Lindo knights motioned vaguely, but Roald said, “To the woods.”
My heart sank to my boots, urgency replaced by despair and the closed-eyed moan of Francis, Francis, what have you done?
“I watched them out the window,” Roald went on. “I was surprised the patrol didn’t stop them. If Edenfield knights were as lax as Lindo knights, our borders would be overrun in a day. That’s what happens when you get fat off the luxuries of the land and the protections of the bay: you lose your edge.”
“Like you’re one to talk,” said a Lindo knight, eyeing Roald’s corpulence. “Our prefect insists on top physical condition.”
“And if only you had brains to go along with it, maybe you wouldn’t have let them slip through your fingers. You’re never catching Captain Nass.”
A knock on the open door, a cough, a new Lindo knight. “Excuse me, Prefect Edenfield?”
I buried my despair and smoothed over its grave as I turned a gracious nod on the knight. “I am she.”
“You’re wanted,” she said. “If you’ll come with me, please.”
Chapter 31:
Profanity
I had spent most of my waking hours in the conference room, over the past few days, and was beginning to know every whorl in the wood, every crack in the ceiling and fold of the curtains. More than that, I had come to know the habits of the other prefects. In the way of church congregants, they had self-assigned seats reflecting friends and alliances, adapted only by necessity when one of their number had brought a visual aid or wanted to make a point. Always, the head of the table had been left vacant for the king.
Avior sat there now, Sr. Nordfeld to his left, the children behind and to the right. Someone had fastened a heavy leather belt around the girl’s head to hold her mouth closed. The buckle pinched the skin of her temple, and the biting leather pinkened the skin, but she made no move to adjust the belt.
In the better light of the conference room, I could see that both children wore dirty sackcloth, the kind we use to transport thirty pounds of moonlight potatoes. Its extremely coarse knitting had rubbed sores onto their shriveled arms and legs, and their feet were bare. Beneath the dirt and matting, I thought the children must be naturally blond—that very fair blond that’s almost white. It was hard to tell without seeing more of the boy’s face—he still pressed his hands over it, blocking eyes and nose and ears—but I thought the children might be siblings.
I wondered how Theodora had acquired them. And why.
“Prefect Edenfield,” Avior said, unsmiling. “You ran away.”
He did not look well. His eyes shone feverishly bright, brighter even than in his anticipation in the basement, bright as delirium. His skin had gone yellower and more haggard than ever, his black hair limp, and someone had bandaged his hand. He seemed to have expanded, as if going over the edge into his delusion and (as he saw it) being vindicated had given him permission to fill his own space.
“I did not run away,” I rejoined. “I ran toward.”
“Toward your knighthouse.”
Interesting: the other prefects were letting Avior run this interrogation by himself. By this time yesterday, at least three others would have jumped in. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who perceived Avior had gone up in the world. How long the prefects would remain wary was another question, and I wondered what I had missed in the basement, that had led to this and to the belt around Want’s head.
“That’s right,” I agreed, tracking the shifting gazes and nervous tics of the prefects in my periphery. “I ran to find my brother, who happened to be in the knighthouse.”
“How convenient,” Avior said flatly. “You made no mention of a brother before, but suddenly you remember you need him—right in the middle of a delicate operation.”
He was not bursting into insane cackles or crowing, which was somewhat of a relief. He was talking almost as normal, except for the lilt in his voice, the set of his shoulders, the wariness of the other prefects.
I looked to Lindo. She met my gaze defiantly, maybe expecting another attack on her methods, her knights, or her invasion. “I know the demon Avior summoned,” I told her, “because she has her claws into my brother. I brought him here with me to get him away from her, and locked him in the knighthouse. You understand that when I ran after the demon, I did so knowing how it would look and not caring how it would look—because I’d do anything to protect him. But I was delayed, and I was too late. She took him.”
The blood drained from Lindo’s face, and her lips parted in horror.
“I knew they must know each other by what the demon said,” Silvertip explained. “That was too weird, the demon singling Edenfield out like that.”
“Is that why my demon refused to deal with you?” Avior asked me. “Have you already made a deal with her? Did you succeed in summoning her?”
“Not exactly,” Sr. Nordfeld said. It was the first time he
’d spoken, and the prefects turned to him. He soaked in their attention, unruffled. “That was professional courtesy.”
I shot Sr. Nordfeld an admiring look while the others waded through the mayonnaise of incomprehension.
“Explain yourself,” Canopus snapped.
Avior narrowed his glittering eyes and tilted his head, examining me anew.
Sr. Nordfeld leaned forward to rest his wrists against the edge of the table and steeple his fingers. The diamond sharpness of his mind revealed itself, slicing through the room, effulgent with brilliance and beautiful to behold. He did not look like an accountant now. “I am no fly-by-night specialist who can be consulted and disposed of,” he said. “The cliché of clichés is the man who orders a weapon of indomitable power and then tests it on its creator. Loose ends must be tied up, and I was not inclined to help Prefect Avior summon a demon without insurance.
“It has, I am sure, crossed your mind”—he inclined his head to Avior—“to test the abilities of these children upon me. Thus far, only wisdom has prevented you from so acting—for it is not wise to destroy the only one who might be able to assist you if something goes wrong with your deal. And yet no doubt—no doubt—you feel yourself increasingly capable of dealing with the demon you summoned. You begin to believe that if something goes wrong with your current plot, you could summon her again without difficulty and make another deal and thus solve your problem.
“You are inclined to dismiss the true reason there are no practical amateurs in the field of demonology: that those who try do not survive long.”
Avior leaned back contemptuously. “I’m not an amateur.”
“No? Then why did you hire an expert? Why did you not perform such a summoning long before? Regardless,” Sr. Nordfeld went on, before Avior could respond, “I prepared for your pride. I bought my insurance.” He waved a hand at me. “Or do you still believe that Mercedes here is the ordinary brand of personal assistant?”
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