by Cat Hellisen
He starts talking. The words wash over me, his voice soft, with a hesitancy that means he’s reading something out to me. He always sounds nervous when he reads out loud, as if he fears he is saying everything wrong while a critical audience watches, mocking.
I try concentrate on what he’s saying instead of just letting the cadence of it flow around me like his magic.
There is a body. Hoblings found it while working the middens that surround MallenIve. The hands and feet were cut off, face neatly removed.
“Despite this, it was not hard to identify as a bat,” Jannik reads.
We are at the breakfast table, where I am now most decidedly not eating my toast and preserves. He rustles the Courant, and clears his throat.
Carien. Or one of her cronies. My throat closes up. They’ve done it already. Then logic takes over and I give myself all the reasons why this has nothing to do with the things Carien said to me. She’s not a butcher, just a girl who has the natural inclination of the weak to find power fascinating. She wanted to touch the skin, not peel it from their flesh.
I make myself hold my head still and pretend that today is normal, that nothing has changed. “A bat?” The question comes out in a cough, as if it has been years since I last used my voice. I find it hard to believe Jannik used the word.
“I was reading it as written, Felicita.”
“Did they say who?”
Jannik sets the paper down and glares at me. “What.”
“Pardon?”
“Not who – what. Or did you forget where you live?” Before I can answer, he carries on. “No, the reporters did not give a name. Frankly, the chances that the sharif will investigate this further are slim to none. It would make about as much sense to them as hunting down a Hobling who drowned a litter of unwanted kittens.” He’s so very angry. His fingers are trembling.
“What does it say?” I gesture for him to hand the paper over and he complies. Our fingers brush, and the feeling between us jolts me like a spark of static. I frown.
Jannik looks at his empty setting, sighs, then gets up. He paces the room while I read. There’s not much more here than what he told me. The article is a piece of filler, cropped down to fit between an advertisement for a new soap, and a listing of wherry arrival and departure times. It’s just a bat, mutilated so it could not be identified. No one has stepped forward to report a missing slave, and the rookeries have remained conspicuously silent.
When I’m finished, I fold the paper closed and hand it over to him. “We should speak to Harun.”
Jannik raises an eyebrow. “Why trouble him over one dead bat?” That word again, sharp and hateful. The way he says it makes me think he wants it to hurt me more than it does him. “Every time we talk to them, there are more eyes on us. Why ruin your precious face over one corpse.”
“One that we know of,” I say. “There might have been others.”
“There are other people more deserving of your misplaced guilt,” Jannik says. “A whole city is dying by degrees outside us, if you feel the urge to run off and save people. But perhaps plague-fields are not a grand enough setting for your dramas. Or perhaps,” and he stares at me levelly, “Hobs don’t count.”
“Of course they do!” I stand, and run my hands down my stomach as if that will settle my anger. Surprisingly, it helps. Just another little trick I have for showing the world nothing of what I truly think.
Jannik has finally hurt me, and he knows it. I will never forgive myself for all the Hobs who died because I took too long to make a decision, to find a bit of backbone. “However, don’t you think that something like this is perhaps important to those of us who have–” I stutter. “Ties?”
“Is it really?”
“This new-found temper doesn’t suit you,” I say through gritted teeth.
“And neither does this pretty little mask you’ve taken to wearing,” he snaps back at me. “All so perfect and … bloody Pelim.”
I draw myself up straighter; fix my spine like an iron spear. I’ve been wearing this bloody Pelim mask for him as much as myself, doesn’t he understand? If the Houses accept me, then eventually they will have to accept my choices. “And what am I supposed to do – is there some particular manner in which you’d like me to conduct myself?”
“Yes.”
I frown. “Excuse me–”
“Felicita.” The fight has leached out of him and it seems to me he shrinks the smallest bit, and is left tired and ill. “You’re caught back up in it, in being a House piece. You’re back to that.”
It’s not true, I tell myself. Underneath everything, I am still me. Surely he must see that. “What of it?”
“I met a girl once.” He stares over my shoulder, into the past. “A girl who ran from things she hated, who worked in a tea-room just to grab at freedom. A girl who inspired me, because she fought for everything she was told she couldn’t have.” His gaze focuses again. “And now look what she’s become. People died for your freedom,” he says softly. “So you could become this? Is that all he was worth?”
I know better than to think Jannik is talking about my brother. He does not care for some spoiled House son. “Jannik,” I warn him, but my hands are shaking. Memories are spilling past the barriers I have built in my head; the coldness of Dash’s body between us as we waited with him for death, that last flutter-laugh when he knew it was over. I remember crying, even though I wanted to hate him.
This is about Dash. Beautiful and broken. Dead and buried. We both loved him in our ways, but I am certain he only loved one of us back.
The fire and anger dampen, and my shoulders slump. “Do you blame me for – for Dash?”
Jannik just stares, swallows, then finally, minutely, he shakes his head. When he looks at me, I wonder what he sees. I am just a girl who reads the same books as him, who grew up a game piece in my family’s plans, like he did. That is the shared history on which we shakily built this marriage.
He does not see a lover or a partner. That person is dead.
I feel crumpled and discarded. My heart is a dusty paper ball inside an empty urn. “Then what is this about?”
“I heard you call me a bat, just the other day.” His voice is very mild, as if we are discussing a change in the weather. “To one of the servants.”
“I did not.” But my assurance wavers in the last word. Oh Gris. Did I? I can’t even remember. My stomach tightens, and heat rushes my cheeks. I could have – Oh Gris I could have, and the worst of it is simply that I wouldn’t even have noticed if I had. This is the mould my family poured me into, the one I thought I’d broken out from.
“If it makes it any better I don’t think you meant any real insult by it.”
And how exactly does that make it better?
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “There are things I need to deal with in the offices.”
After he’s left, I swallow thickly and go to pick up the folded newspaper. The story about the dead vampire is hidden in there; a little entertainment for the Lammers, now over. I open it again and read slowly, as if each word were part of some incantation that will lead me to the truth of my own heart. As if rereading it will give me the vampire’s name, their history, their loves and dreams. As if I will somehow give them back the humanity my own people stole.
A servant comes in to begin clearing away the breakfast dishes, and I wave him to me. “See to it that a card is taken to House Guyin, the younger one. I need to speak with him.”
The servant nods and leaves me alone.
The sunlight in the room is warmer now, but it doesn’t make the place feel less forlorn, less empty.
GLASSCLAW AND SPLINTERFIST
I’m not planning on sitting around waiting for Harun to extend an invitation, however. There are other people to whom I can speak. The servants prepare a carriage for me – not the ostentatious drag, but a small chaise with the laughing dolphins of House Pelim only a faded marking on the doors, and pulled by a single roan nilly.
My family name hidden, I travel to the rookery on the Mata-side of the river – Glassclaw. MallenIve is home to three rookeries; the places where the bats - vampires work and live, and I suppose, occasionally die. Any vampires outside the rookeries need to have travel papers, or be House-owned. I will show Jannik that I am not afraid of what he is. That nothing about our marriage is convenient. I might not be Dash, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care for him.
He was hurt this morning. The lines of his turned-in anger were all over his face. Jannik is trapped in a city where he can do nothing, where he is nothing, and he is scared to fight against those strictures and find how small his cage really is. Perhaps he thinks he will end up like that corpse they pulled off the heap. I think I have become his captor, in his head. Just another master to another slave.
My gloved hands tighten together on my lap. I will find a way to build a bridge between us, even if it is a thin as spider silk. And I won’t let him be right about me.
While Jannik can do nothing about this death, I still can.
Glassclaw looms over the other buildings on the street. It is cold and dark, the windows shuttered. The bats – No, the vampires; wrays if they’re male, feyn if they’re female. I will remember this, I will not say that word again. The vampires here don’t look up as my carriage draws to a halt.
Perhaps they assume I am just another customer. The thought tightens my stomach, my fists, my throat.
The coachman open the door and holds out his hand for me. “My lady.”
I let him help me down.
“Are you certain–”
“Yes.” I am not, of course. “I shan’t be long. I have some small business to attend to.”
“In Glassclaw?” The coachman’s doubt makes his tongue loose. “My lady, if anyone should see you … .”
“A minute,” I say. “We will not be here long.” I make my way to the closed doors of the Glassclaw rookery, my hands sweaty in their thin gloves.
It is a tall building, narrow as a needle, and full of mirrored sky. There are windows everywhere but they show nothing of the interior. Shades and curtains of rose and grey are closed against the sun. Everything is very clean; even the pavements are swept smooth and the stones washed down. Here and there a drying puddle leaves a small dark lake. Despite this, the whole place gives off the empty air of a mausoleum.
A set of long, shallow steps rises to a small roofed alcove, and two doors made with tiny panes of glass of varying sizes mark the entrance. Some of the panes are big enough for me to fit my hand, others would barely take a thumb-print.
The glass mosaic shows my wavering reflection, and I pause, my breath shaky. On either side of me the street is quiet, but still I worry that someone of consequence will see me, that I will be judged. Only the desperate and the perverse visit the rookeries where the few MallenIve vampires work as whores. Certainly no high-bred lady would ever come here, would want to rut with one like a dog.
“Now,” I say to myself as I press my hand against the glass.
What am I going to find – men like Jannik, who keep everything hidden behind empty silences? Or like Isidro, whose silence is what makes their hatred plain? Will they be grovelling, thin, ill-used, and do I really want to see them?
I do not think so.
Inside is gloomy and unlit, a direct contrast to the glittering exterior. Despite the dust, the walls were once whitewashed and the plain wooden floors stripped down and bleached. Long, low couches of a dusky rose with ball and claw feet stand against the walls. The style has come and gone at least twice in the history of Oreyn and the few paintings are drab landscapes by nameless artists. The only light in the room comes from a lamp on a small reception counter on the far end. To the right, a flight of stairs rises into darkness.
The wray behind the desk eyes me nervously, and he keeps his head dipped so that his long hair falls over his eyes. In the gloom, the bone-white of his hands and face stand out like stars.
I muster up a brittle courage to hide my conflict. The rookeries are whore-houses, after all. This was a foolish idea. My heart stammers loud in my own ears, but even so I keep my head raised, and I take in the dust and the patina of neglect on the walls. The place smells like poverty – cheap soap and must and over it all, that neglected struggling reek of despair. I have been here, however briefly, and it hurts. Instead of letting myself sink into the misery of remembered hunger and cold and fear I cultivate my blank cold mask. My House face, full of nothingness and disgust. “Who’s in charge here?”
He looks down at his ledger.
“I hardly think you’re going to find the answer there,” I say to him. I shouldn’t be amused by his nervousness, but there’s no way I can explain to him that he has nothing at all to fear from me. I’m hardly here to buy myself an afternoon with a wray.
“Malik Glassclaw, but he’s not here now.”
I sigh. “And do you have any idea when he’ll return?”
The wray shakes his head, still not looking at me directly. He is cowed, thin and utterly unlike my Jannik, even though there is something about them that is similar; the narrow hands, the long patrician nose, the dark eyes. In Jannik, I have begin to see them as beautiful.
They just make this boy look crow-hungry.
Pity makes my heart feel soft and useless. “May I borrow your quill?”
He does not even attempt to say no; merely places his ink-pot closer to me, and offers me his ragged quill.
I jot down my name and business on my House card, and a request to see the Rookery head. “If you’d be so kind as to pass this on to him.” I add a handful of brass next to the card.
The vampire looks up properly for the first time, his eyes questioning.
“For the loan of your quill.” Everyone has pride, even when sometimes it doesn’t appear that way. “You’ve been most kind.”
Once I’m back in my little coach, I instruct the driver to take me across the river into the Ives’ side of the city – the less-fashionable side. There’s another rookery there. Hopefully I’ll have better luck with this one. We travel for almost an hour though the city traffic before we are anywhere close to the Splinterfist Rookery.
But it seems that this time I am to be rewarded for my persistence. Or stupidity, call it what you will. Their head is in, or so the wray at the desk assures me. The Splinterfist rookery must be in better standing; the boy is polite, but he doesn’t grovel and there is no fear when he looks at my face. Nothing, in fact. He is as efficiently unemotional as a well-trained servant.
He sends another skinny little wray off to inquire if the head will have time to see me now, and I stand in the foyer and wait. Splinterfist is cleaner than Glassclaw; the walls whiter, the wood scrubbed. It has that same tang of despair, but it hides it under lemon-water and whitewash. There are more fatcandle lamps lit, and they spill circles of butter-yellow at the feet of carved couches upholstered in a green dark as pine needles
The glass-paned doors crash open behind me, and the lamplight shivers.
A man in a muddied sleeveless topcoat comes in, his head lowered, and I start backward, turning my face away from him. He may wear no expensive tailored jacket, but it is immediately obvious that he is a House Lammer. There’s no disguising that air of wealth and pompous self-importance. He is long-limbed, and his sly face shows his alarm that I’m here, standing in the entrance hall and blushing red as a thief. When Owen told me that the vampires in MallenIve are whores until they can earn their way free, he seemed amused and disgusted in equal measure by the idea that they even had clients.
And here is one now.
I look away from the Lammer, back to the wray behind the desk. He flicks his third eyelids down, and walks past me to the customer.
There was a thankfully brief time when people thought I was one of the kitty-girls who work the streets of Pelimburg. People pretend you are not there. Their eyes slide past, because they do not like your reality intruding into their own.
The man is led away, upstairs. Does he come here often? I can’t help but wonder. Does he have a favourite – some vampire he likes best? My eyes ache with a curious dryness. Jannik could have been this, if he’d had the ill-luck to be born in this cesspit of a city.
“She’s ready to see you now,” the wray says after a whispered conversation with the returned vampire.
She? I don’t know quite what I was expecting; I had taken it into my head that all the vampires in MallenIve were male. I suppose I had just thought that with the feyn being so rare and supposedly precious to the bloodlines, they would have been brought through to Pelimburg by the three vampire Houses there. It seems not. The feyn are normally powerful, that much I do know, having had the misfortune to meet Jannik’s mother.
I follow the wray upstairs all the way to the very highest part of the building to where an odd squat little central tower forms an eyrie. I can feel nothing from behind the heavy red and polished wood of the door even though my head hurts just from the strain of expecting to be blown back by the power of an adult feyn.
The wray knocks rapidly then steps back and allows me to enter.
I square my shoulders and walk in, on edge. The woman waiting inside is striking in her beauty, if not in her power. The crash of needling iron pain that I was expecting is barely a flickering prickle against my face. Hardly noticeable unless one were looking for it. I frown, momentarily thrown.
She turns the perfect cameo of her head and looks at me with white blank eyes. “Welcome,” she says, though her tone is anything but welcoming. Her third eyelids flick back under heavy lids, and I am caught in her midnight gaze. “To what do I owe the honour, Pelim Felicita?”
So she knows me – has heard of me, and of Jannik. I suppose I should hardly be surprised. We will have been whispered of. Despite what Jannik is, we have not made any formal overtures to the rookeries. If we are to survive MallenIve politics, we must pretend to be separate from the rookery vampires. Their reputation must not be allowed to taint ours.