In horror, I fled to my room.
The surgeons spent considerable time with my grandmother. Then they came for me. I was stripped, examined under urym lens and thummyn stone, and judged suitable. And now, at last, I learned my purpose in life.
My soul was to be harvested to extend Grand-maman’s sterile existence.
You know the five organs of the soul, of course. They are identical for mortal and fey, save that mortals have no true name and feys lack a heart. The soul surgeons planned a series of six operations, two of which were to be carried out immediately. First, the changeling would be gutted, removing all residual spirit save only the spark of life. Then my shadow would be transplanted from my body to hers. Grandmother’s shadow, of course, was so enervated as to be nonexistent. After the changeling and I had recovered, a third operation would place Grandmother’s self in the host body. A fourth would mingle a tiny fraction of my self with hers. After which, a regimen of drugs and incantations would teach her self to feed upon mine. The fifth operation would render the rest of my self helpless after which it would be fed, bit by bit, over the course of weeks, to the changeling. My heart and body would then be discarded. Finally, Grand-maman’s true name would be transplanted into a body containing both our memories and skills, and my own extremely unseely shadow.
All this was explained to me as I screamed, spat, struggled, and fought. To no avail. The soul surgeons had gone through this many, many times before. I awoke in my bedroom the next morning with my shadow gone, the windows nailed shut, and a young fey sitting in a chair, watching me.
“I don’t feel any different,” I said.
“The shadow is like your appendix. It can be removed with no ill effects,” the stranger said. He was thin and albino-pale, like the others, and wore the same milk-glass spectacles, but lacked their cold affect. And he had the most beautiful hands—like ivory. I was later to learn that he was but an apprentice, new to the profession.
“Why are you here?” I said. “Leave at once.”
The apprentice surgeon made a dismissive gesture. “It is my duty to watch over you to ensure you do not try to escape. So here I stay.”
“Pervert.”
“If you wish.”
Dunstan was the apprentice’s name. For a week he watched over me. We talked and grew to know one another. On the eighth day, I held open the sheets and he joined me beneath them.
The fourth operation was held and the changeling began to prattle and talk and sing like any normal child her age. Because she had a share of my memories, she felt an affinity for me, and because she possessed my shadow, she always knew where I was and wanted to be with me. All that long and sultry summer was a labyrinth of time to me, through which I simultaneously fled the child and sought out private spaces to share with my pale lover. All the while, perpetually awaiting me at the center of the labyrinth was the operating table, which had been set up in what had been, in my grandmother’s artistic youth, her studio.
Inevitably, as all doomed lovers must, we plotted an escape. I had some small access to the family wealth. Dunstan, whose only duty was to guard me, had the freedom to come and go as he pleased. Our plans ripened as the fifth and, for me, fatal operation neared.
All things end, alas, and doomed loves sooner than most. The affair came to its climax not on the day before the last operation, nor on the eve of that day, but on the antepenultimate day before my soul was to be gutted. The sheets were damp with sweat and the pillows scattered about the floor and I was sitting naked at my vanity, applying a beeswax balm to my lips, when I said to Dunstan, casually, “All our preparations are made. Let’s leave two days early. By dawn we’ll be over the horizon in another land.”
Dunstan struggled to an upright position, looking alarmed. “No!” he cried. “We have to wait! The plan won’t work until—”
“That’s what I suspected,” I said, and kissed him long and hard. It would be a stretch to call me an alchemist. But I had been trained in the concoction of love-philters and the like—another skill Grand-maman lacked—so it had been no hard thing to put a sleeping potion into my lip balm.
When Dunstan was asleep, I put on my clothes and bundled up his to be thrown into the reptilarium. Let the sonofawoodsfey stand naked before his superiors while he tried to explain how I got away from him! From the closet, I took my largest purse, which contained all the money I had, my Cartier watch and a few other pawnables, a change of underwear, and the like. I would be traveling light. Then I visited the changeling’s room. So long as she possessed my shadow, she could be used to track my whereabouts. This was a threat I had to eliminate.
For a long moment, I stood by the changeling’s bed, watching her sleep. Then I shook her. “Wake up, small abomination,” I said. “Have they given you a name yet?”
She rubbed her eyes. “No.”
I extracted a doll from my purse and gave it to her. “It’s Esme. Now come with me, we have a far way to go tonight.”
And we have been on the road ever since.
* * *
Narcisse applauded with a grace that spontaneity could not hope to match. “That is a lovely story,” she said, “and impressively crafted. So many specific details! But it casts you as a sexually manipulative minx, which, forgive me, dear heart, I simply cannot believe. Also, it does not explain your reading.”
Lightly, as if she did not recognize the challenge in Narcisse’s words, Cat said, “I like to read.”
“Legal papers. Every night.”
“I’m involved in a lawsuit. A great deal of money depends on it.”
Fata Narcisse was having a hard time containing her mirth. “Of course! A lawsuit! And you riding the rails! It all makes perfect sense.”
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss the matter. You’ll just have to—”
“Tut! You have so little faith in me. Never mind, I’ve made arrangements that will take care of whatever your problem may be.” Queenie, who was Fata Narcisse’s pet among her retinue of haints, materialized at her side, kneeling to whisper in her ear. She sat up. “In fact, I believe that’s Counselor Edderkopp now!”
* * *
Cat thought it an enormous insect at first—the hunched brown figure carefully, awkwardly, feeling its way across the lawn toward them. But on closer approach, it resolved itself into a reed-thin man, bent over at the waist almost parallel to the ground, with a short stick in each of his four hands to help him walk. He wore, as Fata Narcisse insisted all male visitors must on her clothing-optional days, a blindfold.
Rodolphe—who was male but not blindfolded, because servants didn’t count—materialized to present Narcisse with a diaphanous wrap and Cat with a terry-cloth bathrobe. As soon as she was garbed, Narcisse ran lightly across the lawn to give the newcomer a hug and a peck on his cheek. But when she tried to tug his blindfold undone, the six-limbed man slapped her hand away.
“It’s all right, Counselor. I’m as decent as the dawn now. Well … as decent as some dawns.”
“It’s not your immorality I worry about seeing,” Counselor Edderkopp grumbled. “It’s this wicked, wicked world’s. I’d gladly gouge my eyes out to avoid it, but I need the weak and watery things to read with. You can’t expect me to give up my books when I’ve lost so much else: whiskey, red meat, tobacco, snuff, cobra venom, whole milk, toad flesh … the list is endless. Where’s the inconsequential chit you wanted me to meet?”
“Her name is Cat and she is very dear to me. So treat her accordingly. Edderkopp has been on retainer to the family for centuries, Cat, so you must love him as much as I do.”
Edderkopp bent low before Cat and then raised himself so high that his sharp nose came up to her chin, inhaling all the while. With a blush, she realized he was committing her scent to memory. “Well,” he said brusquely. “What matter brings me here?”
“Our Cat has a legal problem. But she is a skittish creature who trusts not even her loving sister. So an oath would seem to be in order?”
&
nbsp; “As you say.” A haint appeared at Edderkopp’s side and presented him with a goblet of wine. Another proffered a small silver knife. Grimacing with concentration, he cut one finger and squeezed a drop of blood into the wine. After which, he extended the cup and knife to Cat, who did the same. Then, slopping a libation of the mingled drink onto the ground with each proper name, he solemnly intoned, “I swear by the Year Eater and the Dark Lady, by the Labrys and the Maze, by the Goddess Herself and her consort the Baldwynn, to uphold the privilege of attorney-client confidentiality with this woman going by the name of Cat, whosoever she may be, whatsoever crimes she may have committed, howsoever dire the consequences of silence. Let these Powers strike me deaf and illiterate, never to read or be read to again, should I break this vow.” He drank half the wine, then thrust the goblet at Cat. She finished it off.
Edderkopp dug a business card from a vest pocket. “Drop by my office tomorrow. Hour of the Snake. Bring any documentation you may have.”
* * *
As Cat was about to leave, Esme by her side and grimoire and papers heaped upon her lap, Narcisse popped her head into the car, a Bugatti this time. “I have something for you,” she said, and handed Cat a Chanel attaché case. It was exactly the right size to hold the documents.
“Where did this come from?” Cat asked.
“Oh, sweets. I have money, remember?”
“I thought maybe you’d magicked it into being.”
“Money is magic, darling.” Almost as an afterthought, Narcisse added, “Oh, and here’s a matching clutch with a cell phone and some mad money. You might want to make a day of it. I’m having a few friends over to dampen the sheets and scatter the pillows about. You’d be welcome, but I’m positive it’s not your sort of thing. Ta!”
The gate to the House Syrinx compound closed behind the car and melted back into the wall of ancient buildings. In that instant, Cat and Esme were surrounded by slums. Haints, dwarves, and other lowlifes sat on stoops drinking forties out of paper bags, or huddled under dirty blankets while they smoked crack, or leaned against brick walls waiting for an opportunity that would never come. “You’d think they’d resent us passing through,” Cat said. “But they don’t even look our way.”
“They can’t see us, ma’am.” The driver pointed to a hex dangling from the rearview mirror. “That’s to keep them from knowing House Syrinx is so close by.”
“Why is the compound in such a bad neighborhood?”
“It was a nice neighborhood once. Then House Syrinx bought all the buildings, one by one, and rented them to transients. Now it serves as a kind of moat. This way, nobody with power enough to see through the protective glamour is likely to walk up to the compound by accident.”
The Cathedral of Law, where the driver dropped them off, had a façade whose marble Ionic columns were black with soot, and a gloomy interior of ramshackle grandeur. Cat made her way down hallways with cracked granite floors and tarnished bronze lighting fixtures and a fusty smell compounded of cedar, cigars, and cleaning fluid to Counselor Edderkopp’s office. Leaving Esme with crayons and a coloring book under the watchful eye of the receptionist, she knocked on his door and was hooted inside.
The shelves covering all but a fraction of the walls were so overladen with books they bowed slightly, nodding their heads over piles of codices, drifts of paper, cardboard boxes crammed full of scrolls, mounds of magazines that had long ago gone out of business. Beyond which, in the farthest, darkest corner, was an overflowing desk, hemmed in on either side by stacked crates containing, inevitably, yet more books. Picking her way through the clutter, all Cat could think of was the conflagration that would ensue were she to drop a single lit match.
On her approach, Edderkopp looked up from a half-written letter, placed pince-nez before his eyes, and blinked. Seizing his four short canes, he clambered over his desk—it was the only route possible—to meet Cat halfway. Then he bowed deeply and raised his thin nose as high as her chin, inhaling noisily. “Ahhhh. Young Narcisse’s protégé, all sweaty with mystification and distrust. Welcome. There’s a chair in here somewhere. Find it and sit down.”
“I’m … not really sure this is a good idea.”
“You mean you’re not sure I’m a good idea.” Edderkopp stumbled and lurched about the mounds of detritus, searching. “Timidity is a salubrious virtue and one shared by far too few of your generation. But it can be overdone. Aha!” He hoisted an enormous armload of files and loose correspondence and dumped it atop a box of clay tablets. “I told you there was a chair!”
It was a Chesterfield. Cat brushed the seat with her hand and sat.
“You doubt my competence. Very well. Point to any book in the room. Yes, up there if you wish. The green volume, you mean? Ah, the orange one to its side! You have chosen A Brief History of Klepsis, an excellent selection, most obscure.” With unexpected agility, Edderkopp climbed up the bookshelves almost to the ceiling. Then he returned, handed Cat the book, and turned his back on her. “Now pick out a word and tell me where in the book it is to be found.”
Cat opened the book at random. “The fourth word on the seventh line of page 147.”
“It is steroma, again an excellent choice, for it refers to the firmament or sky, a matter of considerable significance to you.” Counselor Edderkopp extended a hand to reclaim his book. “You are wondering how I can possibly know not only the one word but, by implication, every word in every book in my office.”
“Yes.”
“I am old, child, old, and I have spent my life in the service of the Law—writing laws, enforcing laws, interpreting laws, inventing ways to circumvent laws … Also, I am cursed with a perfect memory—that is a tale I may well inflict upon you another time—and consequently there is very little that can surprise me anymore.”
“But if you know every word in these books—why keep them?”
“For the same reason a young woman such as yourself might know every inch of her lover’s skin, and yet want nevertheless to touch it, taste it, luxuriate in its smell. Which reminds me.” Edderkopp flowed up the shelves, restored the book, and flowed down again. Then he began tugging at one of the towering piles of crates. “There is a window around here somewhere, I saw it only a decade ago.” The topmost crates fell over noisily, spilling their contents and revealing a curtain. He twitched it open with a puff of dust, and a beam of sunlight stabbed through the room, turning him white as cream.
Raising himself as high as he could, Edderkopp clasped two hands behind his back, adjusted his pince-nez with a third, and dramatically raised a forefinger. “You are Caitlin of House Sans Merci, dragon slayer and at present the single most-wanted fugitive from military justice in all of Faerie.”
Cat gasped.
Edderkopp made a rattling noise, like seeds being shaken in a dry pod, and Cat realized that he had just chuckled. “Young people. You all think that yours is the first injustice, the first treacherous act, the first escape, the first desperate run for freedom in a world in which that concept barely exists. Fortunately for you, you have fetched up in one of the few places in all Europa where you are safe from pursuit. Unfortunately for you, it will not last. You must make the most of it while you can.” Turning, he yanked at the curtain rope, bedimming the room again. “Thus have I proven my competence. Tell me everything.”
* * *
In less time than Cat would have thought possible, Counselor Edderkopp was showing her to the door. “There is no doubt that you have been conspired against. Give me a few days to look into matters and I am confident we can clear this whole thing up. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that I can have you restored to your previous rank and position. At the very least, I am certain, I can discover who’s behind it all. That’s the beginning of wisdom, after all—knowing who to blame for your misfortunes.”
At which, her business was done and she had the afternoon to herself.
It was a strange sensation, having nothing to do and somebody else responsible for
taking care of her problems, and it left Cat feeling as light as dandelion fluff. Leading Esme by the hand, she set out to explore the city.
Noon found them in a market square off of Via della Streghe, just below the north wall. Bare-breasted hags in black ground-sweeping skirts and veiled headdresses with narrow slits for their eyes dickered with vendors while children ran about underfoot or tumbled naked in the air overhead. An ogress pulling a red handcart laden with fresh-baked bread bumped into a table with star fruit and moon melons arranged in a pyramid, almost toppling them. This prompted a torrent of billingsgate from its overseer, to which the ogress responded by amiably making the sign of the horns and waggling it in the air. Cat caught her as she was moving away and bought a loaf. Further purchases of a slab of cheese, some soppressata, and a bottle of still water later, Cat and Esme made an excellent lunch of the batch while sitting on the rim of a fountain with a statue of Erodiade, Minerva, and Noctiluca dancing in a circle.
At meal’s end, Cat stood, slapped the crumbs off her hands, and was about to plunge deeper into the city when somebody exclaimed, “Caitlin!”
She spun about. Two faces flickered into recognition. “Sibyl! Ysault!”
For an eyeblink, the two pilots stood frozen in astonishment. Then Ysault’s expression softened and Sibyl’s hardened. “You’re alive,” Ysault said. “I thought … we thought … everybody thought you were dead. They said you’d locked yourself inside your dragon and blown it up rather than face court-martial.”
The Iron Dragon’s Mother Page 11