by David Edison
Poor Chara.
The lawns of La Jocondette always did remind him of home— something in the symmetry of the fruit trees and their shaded lanes, or the flower beds that seemed to float like the tips of icebergs across the immaculate grass. All the white stonework, too, the white bricks and the steepled rooftops. So quiet and clean and well-lit in the night.
The door leading inside from the garden was ajar. He poked his head in and saw no one. Strange. La Jocondette no longer turned as much business as the less tony brothels, certainly not with most of the city’s wealth locked up inside the Dome, but there should be at least a few morsels lounging about, waiting for those seeking their particular custom—dissolution and dreams in the arms of a poison-whore.
Dashing up the spiral stairs to the second level where bedrooms branched off from three plush brown-carpeted corridors, he found one room empty. And another. Another. Another.
Panic prickled his spine, and Asher called out. No guards came running. No whores looking shocked or annoyed at having their work interrupted. Asher possessed a bloodhound nose for manipulation, and he smelled a skunk. La Jocondette appeared empty: neither Cooper nor the Lady whose profile had been so crudely inked on the broken chip were anywhere to be found.
Outside a blue morning dawned—the window faced west but the buildings across the canal were washed in cool light. Including one narrow building, once a townhouse, now part of a row of houses annexed by La Jocondette as additional space for guests or special events. The brothel hadn’t seen that much custom in some years, so the annex had lain fallow— but now a candle burned in a window on the third storey, and below it a figure in black shimmied up the colonnade, inching toward the lit window.
Asher watched the shadow of the Lady of La Jocondette through the distant glass, so far across the grounds and the canal; he fingered through his pocket the cracked chip that bore her likeness. What had Oxnard intended, by giving it to him? Had it been a tip, or a trap?
Cooper heard Asher’s howl from across the water. The cry of frustration was a primal sound, bell-clear in its purity, and even though Cooper had known Asher for less than twenty-four hours he recognized the gray man’s cry. Leaping off Thea’s bed, Cooper shook away the lethargy that still combed its poisoned fingers through his mind—he pulled the lace away from the window and spied Asher across the canal, standing in the gardens of La Jocondette. His lanky body was bent back in dismay, the smoke of his face raised to the silvery sky, staring up over the water into the window where Cooper stood. With still-watery vision, Cooper thought he saw dark puppets emerge from the shadows and surround Asher.
“What is Asher doing all the way over there?” he asked, still clearing his head of the puppet- show Thea had shown him. Sid and Marty Krofft have nothing on fucking Cleopatra, he thought to himself.
“Why,” began Thea, crossing and uncrossing her legs as she reclined on her chaise longue, upholstered in a chamois the same watery blue of the rising suns, “I believe he’s loosing a scream of unbridled rage.” She smiled.
The bitch smiled. And instead of infuriated, Cooper found himself mollified. Somehow. He could understand how his hostess had captivated an epoch of history; it wouldn’t have posed the slightest challenge, not for her.
“But. You said my savior, my monochrome savior . . .”
“I did.” She nodded with just a blush of enthusiasm, like he’d hit upon a half-hidden truth the Lady secretly wanted to share, and the fact that Cooper knew it was an act did nothing to diminish the effect of her performance. “And I did not lie to you once. Be patient a moment, CooperOmphale, and wait for life to catch up to accuracy. It happens thus, sometimes.”
But the puppet show had ended—those were thugs out there, fighting and greatly outnumbering Asher—and Cooper turned his back to the window, feeling his indignation rise as he faced the Lady. He found his footing again against this woman—this queen—who must not be trusted. Cooper shook his head and scolded himself. Is that the understatement of the goddamn year. Christ on a multigrain cracker, you don’t let Cleopatra lull you into a sense of security, not unless you’re looking for a handful of bastards and a dependable excuse for suicide!
“I never asked you who kidnapped me, did I?” Cooper kept his voice level. He might be overmatched by two thousand years and a handful of empires, but he intended to use his inclination toward the male sex in his favor. He would not be seduced again, now that he knew who he faced.
“I never asked you who attacked me and Asher, and Sesstri. Why is that, Thea Philopater? Tell me why my assault and abduction so conveniently slipped my mind after I awoke in your psychoactive brothel?”
A shoulder raised, lowered; the Lady didn’t need to shrug when the stirring of her every joint was choreography. “Damage to the head can have all sorts of effects, Cooper,” she purred, “and it’s fair to say that you might have been a tad overwhelmed.”
He shook his traumatized head. “But didn’t you just finish telling me about my remarkable mental resilience? My retention of sanity in the face of this, um . . . waking absurdity?” he continued, though still very much in awe of the pedigree of the woman he addressed. “After all I’ve seen recently, one dead Egyptian doesn’t exactly overwhelm. Try again.”
“I have not lied to you once, CooperOmphale.” Thea caved, tipping her hand to Cooper with two thousand years of rehearsed grace. Of course she mustered grace: Cooper doubted she could break wind without arousing jealousy from Zephyr himself. “Please remember that when you dole out your justice at the end of this shadow play.”
“That doesn’t explain—”
“Ah. Here he comes.”
“Asher?” Cooper could no longer see him, but he couldn’t possibly have crossed the canal yet, let alone escaped his attackers. The curtains fell closed as Cooper rounded on his infamous hostess.
“Did I not promise you a monochrome savior?” Thea stretched her arms in a gesture of generosity that Cooper doubted she merited. He could still feel a veil of fear about her, too thin or well-restrained for him to grasp, but there nonetheless. What did she fear? He reached for something scathing to say, but just then came a knock at the window. It slid open with an accompanying grunt, and as he spun around Cooper saw a face that wasn’t the face he’d expected to see. The City Unspoken could surprise and surprise and surprise.
Marvin, pale with black hair, black-rimmed eyes, and shredded black clothing, climbed through the open window and parted the curtain like a marriage veil. Cooper stepped back as this new grayscale soldier glided into his embrace, wrapping strong arms around him and intoxicating him with a different sort of scent entirely than the Lady’s poison perfume: man-sweat, tobacco, liquor, smoke, and something else . . . something rank but irresistible. That’s the smell of undeath, Cooper told himself, knowing he was right but not knowing how; knowing that ought to terrify him but unable to care.
“Hi,” whispered Marvin into the small of Cooper’s neck.
“Oh.” Cooper found he could not move, or would not. “Hello.”
“Lady.” Marvin ducked his head at Thea, who acknowledged him with a bow of her head and the barest ripple of her fingers through the air.
“Tell your wretched masters that I have upheld my end of the bargain,” she said with a voice Cooper had not heard before. Her flattery fell away to reveal a wyrm in woman’s flesh, and he shivered despite himself. Marvin held him closer, and another measure of Cooper’s free will melted away.
“They already know,” Marvin deferred, biting his tattooed lip. “The skylords see us always. They are the shaman gods come to free us from the tyranny of living.” He rubbed his stubble against the nape of Cooper’s neck.
Thea brushed the air with her fingers again, as fluent in the choreography of dismissal as that of seduction. “I am unimpressed by your flock of cadavers, Death Boy. I do what is necessary for my own survival and nothing more. I ask you to tell your owners that I have upheld my end of the agreement, and you will do so, regardle
ss of what you think they do or do not know. You will convey my message not because of the import of its contents but because I ask it. Even the masters of unlife will recognize my authority.”
Marvin bowed, taking Cooper halfway with him. It felt like a dip in the strangest dance.
“My Lady. I will do as you say.”
“Of course you will.” Cooper said before he could stop himself. Lustblinded and drug-fucked halfway across a thousand thousand creations, and he was still a smart-ass. A little shit, his mother would say, wherever she was. Oh god, his mother. His father!
“Hush.” Marvin smiled so close to Cooper’s mouth, his breath smelled of smoke and cloves.
“Okay,” Cooper agreed, and lost the rest of his words, staring at his thuggish seducer. Black hair, black eyes, fishbelly white skin, tattered black cotton torn in all the right places—above the nipple that was the only flash of color, across the stomach ripped with a six-pack but no navel, slashed off at one soft-muscled shoulder— no, Cooper had no more clever words. Only a rising barometer of desire and the instinct to run.
Thea had been right: Marvin was monochrome, but as for being his savior—Cooper’s lust did not dispel his doubt. He looked to the distance, where the blue clouds flickered orange above the burning towers. Marvin would take him there, wouldn’t he? He heard the crying clearly now, a wail from the north that no one else could hear. A woman’s voice.
Thea yawned. The Queen of Poisons, the Lady of La Jocondette, and the blighted bitch of Cooper’s blue- bruised dawn stretched her whole body and yawned like a cat on sun-warmed stone. “I would offer you gentlemen the entirety of my hospitality if time permitted, but alas, it does not. Would that I could see you two safely installed in each other’s arms, as nature clearly intends. But the pale vagrant approaches with arms of a different sort, so romance must yield to exigency.” She indicated the gaping window, again the passive hostess. The smile she wore was bland. “Please, forgive my urging, but I hold your safety paramount.”
Cooper squinted his eyes and tried to force his awareness toward the towers of the Undertow. The call shamanic, Thea had said. He tried to answer the call. Marvin had called his masters “skylords,” not “lich-lords.” He had called them shamans.
That settled it, then. Ever onward, whether he wanted to or not. If he found the origin of that ghostly sobbing, perhaps he could make it stop. Perhaps there were answers, forward.
Marvin withdrew to the window, pulling Cooper with him. Across the canal, the black bodies of the Death Boys and Charnel Girls of the Undertow skittered across the face of La Jocondette like flies and vanished into the morning. Hand-in-hand, Cooper and Marvin climbed out and were lost to the sapphire dawn.
Purity Kloo took a breath to steel herself against the possibility that she might be discovered trespassing near the royal suites of Prince Fflaen. No one—absolutely no one—was permitted on the upper storeys of the Petite Malaison without explicit invitation from the prince, and Purity had no means of knowing whether or not the prince’s absence meant fewer praetorian patrols along the corridors of the royal suites, or more. As the dawn began to illuminate the white stone hallway and strip her of concealment, Purity could no longer pretend that she was merely skulking: along one side of the hallway ran grand windows that looked down upon the Groveheart and were just beginning to shimmer with the light of the morning, revealing the vast primordial forest that lay beneath the Dome’s enclosure.
The Groveheart was more than mere wilderness, and as its canopy emerged from night into morning Purity began to feel a deeper sense of foreboding—within that nearly impenetrable wood lay the history of the City Unspoken in all its uncountable millennia; even the size of the place instilled a sense of terrifying enormity, as the glass and metal of the Dome arced overhead and was obscured by a fine layer of cloud. As she watched, competing flocks of birds wheeled up from the canopy and scattered into the morning mists with caws that echoed off the pale green Dome glass.
Purity straightened the heavy praetor’s helm she’d looted from one of the extraneous armories and reminded herself that she was no stranger to poor behavior and derring-do. If only the helm didn’t keep tipping forward over her eyes—it threatened to throw her off balance and break her nose at the same time. The blasted thing probably resented being stolen; the praetorian helmets, platinum- chased and crested, were swaddled with layers upon layers of enchantments, most of which she hoped were dormant, except for the passkey charms that had, so far, allowed her to slip into the Petite Malaison without triggering any alarum.
The lock to the armory had been easy enough for Purity to pick: yet another skill she’d acquired during her frequent and tacitly approved-of acts of rebellion—this particular ability she’d learned under the tutelage of an Undertow cardsharp with whom she’d dallied for a fortnight. He’d tossed a mop of ginger curls and flashed a disarming smirk, and Purity had allowed him to become the first to pick a lock of a different sort.
Purity blushed at the thought of his fingers, so deft at finding their way to places they oughtn’t be. What was his name? She tried to recall. I’m terrible.
Of course she’d given him a false name, or else she’d have been kidnapped for ransom in a trice. Those cultists were disposable due to their mental defects, but they did acquire a few memorable talents on their way to torture and undeath.
She wrestled a few minutes longer with the praetor’s helm. If she could pad the gap between her forehead and the helm, perhaps it would sit still and let her get on with burgling. She glanced about hopefully, but all she had in the way of padding was the dress on her back and the stockings on her feet.
Stockings it is, then.
Purity gritted her teeth and braced her back against the wall, trying to remove her stockings without upsetting the helm that sat atop her head. Gemmed citrine slippers came off easily enough, but Purity had to twist herself like an old drunk moving his bowels to tug off her stockings, and the flimsy things were still too insubstantial to be of much use, she thought, when at last she had them balled up in her hands. She pushed up the helm a few inches and held it there with one hand while she wound each stocking about her skull as best she could with the other—when she resettled the helm upon her brow it didn’t cut into her scalp so badly, but it didn’t seem much steadier, either. Purity sighed, and stalked toward a white oval door that blocked her path.
Beyond that door, carved from rare billionstone to resemble the branches of the Groveheart, lay the prince’s personal suites. Only the prince and the Lords and Ladies Unsung were ever allowed inside—Purity had tried in vain to find a maid who’d tended the prince’s apartments, but there seemed to be nary a soul within the Dome who’d ever stepped foot above the third floor of the Malaison. And here she stood on the sixth, with stockings wrapped around her ears and a looted praetorian helm wobbling atop her head.
Oh, oh, Purity you silly quim, what ever are you doing?
Well, that self-recrimination was easily answered: I’m fed up with this imprisonment, and if I can’t escape the Dome, I’ll damn well know its secrets. She nodded to herself with authority, and the helm nearly caved in the bridge of her nose. She squeaked, then cringed.
To gather the nerve to open the door, Purity Kloo reminded herself that she had plenty of experience bending the rules. She recounted her past exploits by way of a mantra for courage, enumerating the reasons why she dared burgle the leader of the world—even if he had vanished. When, at ten, she’d found the secret doorway that led from Baron Kloo’s study to his pleasure suite, her father had been more proud than cross. When she’d disguised herself as her brother Pomeroy for the all-male Midseason Tourneys and thrown Erasmus FenBey from his courser inside of fifteen seconds, her father had been concerned but not- so- secretly proud—and the Baroness had no choice but to swallow her humiliation and join in her husband’s good-natured ribbing of Duke and Doctor FenBey while a mortified Doctor FenBey tended to her poor son Erasmus’ shattered ribs. When, at the
age of sixteen, Purity Kloo debuted before formal society, she had filled the entire Barony with pride at the sight of her dainty figure and spun- gold hair. But when she swept down the aisle leaning not on the arm of her brother but suspended between a pair of rough-cut gigolos—one supporting each kid-gloved wrist—the Barony had been mortified.
And then a few years ago she’d spent a week killing herself, of course, which was less rebellious than just plain odd. It hadn’t worked, but Purity persisted for longer than anyone had expected—her brother lost his bet with their father— and she’d earned a bit of respect for herself in the process. The body-bound nobility dismissed suicide as an extreme form of masochism but little else, and after slashing her throat every half hour for seven days Purity had to agree: no exit lay in that direction.
So she didn’t consider her actions the least bit out of character when she excused herself from another dozen hours of embroidery and dared to penetrate the Petite Malaison, a rather non-petite architectural confection of unimaginable age that sat at the crown of the Dome’s largest open space, the primordial Groveheart. From his seat here, in theory, the prince had watched the Dying wind their way into the remnant of Anvit’s Glade, where ages ago the mortal Third People first found release from the wheel of lives.
Purity felt a kinship with the birds wheeling above the Groveheart, looking down on the tops of the oldoaks, redwoods and rustwoods that seemed to stand so straight and rise so tall from the forest floor. Only the massive central column of gold metal, which supported the roof of the Dome, rose above the trees. From this high vantage the treetops reminded her of green thunderclouds, like the dark emerald cumuli that had showered her family in ethylene glycol the day her sister Parquetta had miscarried. Toxic rain for a toxic day.