The cemetery was a citadel unto itself. Tens of thousands of graves spilled across this part of Montparnasse, all of them from the centuries before the anchor descended on France. Scion mandated cremation or composting after death, to save on space and ensure its denizens were never tempted to speak to the dead. Grief and remembrance were permitted to a point, but believing that your loved ones might still linger was unnatural behaviour.
It was easy to stay out of sight among the headstones. I followed the girl to where a woman leaned against a mausoleum, pocket watch in hand. The girl presented her with a bundle of money, a phone, two fat purses.
As soon as I stepped into view, the girl was off like a shot. Her kidsman spun to face me, one hand on the hilt of the dirk at her side.
“Busybodies,” she said, “are bad for commerce. Fortunately, there is room for all manner of bodies in this ground.” She rested her boot on a ledger stone. “Why did you follow my courier?”
“No need for threats. I’m looking for a local,” I said. “Goes by the name of Mélusine.”
“Never heard of her.” Her knife rasped from its sheath. “Now, piss off, busybody. Before I slice the nose you stuck into my business.”
“I serve the grands ducs.” I stood as still as the graves. “Help me track Mélusine down, and perhaps I’ll put in a good report for you. Refuse, and I’ll be delighted to piss off . . . but so will all the merchants who would otherwise have bought those stolen goods of yours.”
Her expression changed.
“What are you?” she said. From her tone, my bluff was working. “A bounty hunter?”
I just raised my eyebrows.
Kidsmen were seldom risk-takers. They had gutterlings to do their dirty work. After trying to stare me out for a few moments, the woman let go of her knife and beckoned me closer.
It turned out that Mélusine was the leader of a small gang of hydromancers. Once I knew that, the search went smoothly. One roll of notes to an augur in a public garden, one whisper on the right corner and in the right ear, and I had a list of places Mélusine was known to frequent. The local open-air bath struck me as her most likely haunt at this time of day. Hydromancers were always drawn to water, especially large bodies of it. Just my luck.
The bath was an ancient-looking building, all columns and stone lintels. I walked into the foyer, wondering how the hell I was going to get beyond it, only to glimpse the receptionist on the phone with his back to me. Quick as a whim, I slipped under the turnstile and through a pair of sliding glass doors.
As soon as the gloom enfolded me, I smelled water. Pressing down my nausea, I pulled off my boots and socks, the floor clammy underfoot. I tried not to breathe too hard, or think about anything but my task.
There were no voyants in the bath itself—just a throng of amaurotics, all naked as the day they were born. But sitting alone in a steam room, I found a slender woman with an aura, combing her waist-length hair. A ring bridged her nostrils, and her brown skin was varnished with sweat.
“Mélusine?”
A flash of dark eyes through the gloom. She sprang up, like a fish leaping clear of a river, and I found myself pinned to the tiles, a crooked knife at my throat. I caught her wrist.
“I’m from the London syndicate,” I said under my breath. “Help me, and I can make it worth your while.”
Mélusine searched my face.
“Katell sent you,” she said at last, her tone resigned. “Didn’t she?”
****
Sunlight glittered on the snow again by the time we emerged from the bathhouse. I savored the crisp air, willing the steam out of me. Beneath my coat, I was uncomfortably damp.
Mélusine walked at my side. Gaiters covered her heavy-duty boots, she wore a puffer jacket, and her hair was scraped into a ponytail. Now we were outside, I could see it was mossy green.
“How is the syndicate structured in Paris?” I asked her.
She glanced at me before she answered.
“We call it Le Nouveau Régime,” she said. “There are three grands ducs—Le Latronpuche, La Reine des Thunes, and Le Vieux Orphelin, who each control two of the six cohorts. Within those cohorts, there are local officers, the patrones, who oversee the districts. They are all named after tarot cards.”
“Is there an overall leader?”
A snort escaped her. “Not officially, but Le Latronpuche thinks himself king.” Her lips pressed together. “If you wish to see Le Vieux Orphelin, you will be disappointed. He has been missing since New Year. No one knows what has become of him.”
Another missing voyant. Now I was suspicious. “And what do the other two grands ducs say about this?”
“They are trying to find him. Or so they say.”
“You think otherwise?”
“If I did, I would not tell you so.” She looked straight ahead. “Thoughts like that are dangerous.”
Arcturus was waiting for us in the derelict church. He stood in a pool of sunlight where the roof had caved in.
“Mélusine,” I said, “this is my . . . associate.”
She had to crane her neck to look Arcturus in the face. Her eyebrows crept up, and I knew she was trying in vain to read his aura.
After the scrimmage, I had asked Eliza, who was sighted, what she saw when she looked at Arcturus. She had described his aura as resembling a dark cloud that spat occasional glints, like embers. All their auras look unstable, she had told me. Like sparking wires.
Mélusine finished her examination with a shrug. “Is it just the two of you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“It is forbidden to show anyone the way through the carrières without express permission from the patrones. I was caught once before.”
She showed me her tongue, solidly black. I remembered now. In Paris, revealing the secrets of the syndicate earned you a spoonful of l’encre ardente, a poison that discolored the mouth and caused a week of excruciating cramps. It could take months for the stain to fade.
“Should it happen again,” she went on, “I will be banished. And I cannot let that happen.”
“I wouldn’t be asking you to do this if it wasn’t urgent.”
Mélusine looked hard at my face, as if she could remove my lenses through sheer willpower.
“You say you are from the Mime Order,” she said. “Tell me, did you work for the Underqueen?”
“You could say I still do.”
At this, she chewed her lip. Uneasy allies were rarely reliable, but she was our best shot at getting to the syndicate.
“Katell is an old friend,” she said at last, “and I know she has been desperate for coin since Paul was taken. For her sake, I will guide you to the grands ducs. You are clearly not Vigiles.”
“How do you know?”
“Because no Vigile would seek to enter the carrières. They’re not stupid.” A thin smile. “I do have a condition.”
“Name it.”
“My fellow anormales patrol the tunnels for outsiders. Once we are down there, you must keep your distance from me,” she said, “and if we do run into a patrol, you must say you were following me.”
“We’ll be convincing,” I said.
“Good.” Her neck was tattooed with green scales. “You are confident the grands ducs will receive you?”
“Trust me.”
“I wish I could. Most likely they will abandon you both in the dark and leave you to die of thirst. And I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you if they do.”
“Understood.”
Mélusine hitched up her backpack. “Follow me. Not too close,” she said, and strode back into the snow. I waited a few moments before I went after her.
She walked down the boulevard. Arcturus and I followed at a reasonable distance until she stopped near a bus shelter and beckoned us.
“Here is our door.” She tapped her foot on a manhole. “I have the equipment to pull it up,” she said to Arcturus, “but you look as if you might be quite strong.”
Arcturus picked up the cast-iron cover as if it were made of cardboard. Mélusine shot him an impressed look and slithered into the manhole. I tucked my lenses into my pocket and checked no one was watching before I went after her.
My boot found a rung. I climbed down the ladder, darkness coagulating around me. Above, Arcturus slid the cover back into place. My knuckles strained as I clung there, sightless and unmoving.
“Paige?”
When I could speak, I said, “I’m all right.”
I forced my legs to keep going, one rung after the next. Mélusine waited in a circle of light at the bottom.
“Welcome to the carrières.” She wore a headlamp. “Home of Le Nouveau Régime.”
The blackness formed a wall before us. “Do the Vigiles not know about the manholes?” I asked her.
“Oh, they know—but as I said, they don’t come down here now. You’ll see why.”
Arcturus stepped off the ladder. I set my back against the wall, hands on my hips. There were hundreds of thousands of spirits around us, pressing so hard on my aura that cold sweat prickled on my brow.
“First-timers always find it hard,” Mélusine said. “You will get used to it.”
“How many spirits are here?”
“Several hundred thousand, at least. Hard to count. Be grateful there are not more,” she added. “The remains of about six million people lie in the carrières.” She pulled a second headlamp from one of her pockets. “Many of the dead remain with their bones. We do not banish them. In return, they let us share their domain.”
“I don’t see any bones,” I said.
“You will.” She tossed me the headlamp. “At points, the ceiling is very low,” she warned Arcturus. “Mind your head. And remember, keep your distance.”
She set off down the passage. I turned to Arcturus, whose eyes lit the absolute darkness.
“Paige.”
The silence was so thick around us that it ate the echo of his voice.
“I’m not letting this trail go cold.” I switched on the lamp. “In the syndicate, you take what opportunities you can.”
“It is too much for one day.”
Faced with the abyss, I had never been more tempted by the thought of retreat. I was already shivering in my boots and woolen coat, which were about as waterproof as paper.
“No,” I said. “If we go back now, we’ll never find her again.”
Mélusine was already far ahead of us, almost out of sight. Before I could change my mind, I walked on. A long beat passed before I heard footsteps in my wake. He had promised me we would stay together.
We moved in single file, Arcturus behind me. I let Mélusine disappear around each corner before I followed.
I had seen my share of the subterranean, but this was something else. A labyrinth beneath the earth. Moisture dewed like tears above our heads. Here and there, graffiti streaked the walls.
I could see why Mélusine was confident in the security of this place. Any Vigile would piss themselves at the prospect of trying to navigate down here. Perhaps some of them had wandered themselves to death in these passageways, searching in vain for the heart of the syndicate, or perhaps they had been put off by the sheer volume of spirits. They were like sandpaper on my sixth sense. Too many of them in too little space.
Arcturus had explained to me once that it was an excess of restless spirits, unable to move on after death, that had caused the Mothallath—the former leaders of the Rephaim—to cross over to the human realm, to chase our unquiet dead to the Netherworld. One of their visits had gone terribly wrong, and the veils between the worlds had thinned. That was what had started the civil war that had led to the destruction of the Mothallath.
Here in the carrières, I could feel how threadbare the veils had become. The reverberation in the æther was overwhelming.
I flinched to a stop when my boot knocked something across the rubble. The beam of my headlamp revealed part of a jawbone. The herald of what lay ahead, in the next tunnel.
Bones packed tight as bricks. Human skulls, buffed to a high shine—some as perfect as they must have been in life, others missing jaws or sporting holes. Candles sat in some of their eyeholes, weeping tallow. Crowning these eldritch walls were yet more shards of skeleton. Orphaned ribs and shoulder girdles, littered like a morbid game of pick-up-sticks.
Arcturus beheld it with no expression. I wondered again what he was thinking. One day, every human he had ever met, and had yet to meet, would look like this. I would look like this. The lips he had kissed would rot away. Yet he would remain. Untouched and unchanging.
There were murals on some of the walls, as beautiful as any in a gallery. Mélusine led us through a cleft and down a flight of steps. I was about to follow her when I froze. Several dreamscapes were closing in fast.
“Wait,” I hissed after Mélusine. “There are people coming.”
She was too far away to hear. Moments later, the thunder of footfalls filled the tunnels.
Somewhere ahead, Mélusine shouted. Boots pounded up the steps she had taken, and then they were on us, a swarm of masked voyants. I made out grinning skulls, fingerless gloves and dirty nails, the gleam of carabiners—then one of them slammed me to the floor, pinned my arm, and twisted the knife from my grasp.
“What do we have here?” A knee dug into the small of my back. “Intruders in the dark.”
Several pairs of hands took hold of Arcturus and shoved him against the wall. He made no attempt to resist.
“Regarde ça les gars,” someone called. “Ce mec est un colosse.”
Laughter abounded. The weight on my body wore my breath thin, made my fists clench and my chest heave as I tried to writhe away. I couldn’t be trapped again, I couldn’t . . .
“Hey, hey, bouge pas.” A hand fisted in my hair and jerked my head up, and a rusty switchblade flashed in front of my face. “Parle, maintenant. Who the fuck are you people?”
Arcturus watched with hot eyes. I gave him the barest shake of my head.
“Mélusine,” a polyglot barked. “Letting outsiders into the carrières again, are you, nymph?”
A scuffle on the stairs, and Mélusine was hauled back into view. They threw her down beside me, and she, too, was pinned with a knee.
“What are you talking about, Trouvère?” she said thickly. Her lip bled. “What outsiders?”
“This pair of rats were lurking in the dark.” A flashlight blinded me, then shone toward Arcturus. “How much coin did they pay for you to let them in, and was it worth your life?”
“We followed her,” I cut in. “It’s not her fault.”
The nearest mask tipped. Mélusine wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
“Dear lady, thank you for your honesty.” Warm breath prickled at my ear. “Unfortunately, you and your handsome friend will both have to die for it. No one enters la ville souterraine without invitation. You understand. We must defend our domain from the Vigiles.”
“I demand to see the grands ducs.”
More uproarious laughter. “And who are you to make such demands?” A hoarse chuckle to my left. “Another lowlife mendiante who thinks she can drag herself up from the Cour—”
“I am Paige Mahoney,” I said. “Black Moth. Underqueen of the Scion Citadel of London.”
My voice was a guillotine blade, ending all sound. The one with the knife gripped my hair a little tighter.
“Paige Mahoney is dead. Slain in Edinburgh,” a medium said coldly. “You insult her memory.”
“Wait.”
The polyglot grasped my chin and raised it, so the lamplight reached my face. Pale eyes assessed me from inside his skull mask.
“Her face is familiar,” he conceded. “A red aura, yet it does not belong to an oracle. They say the Underqueen was another kind of jumper. And that she walked with the gods of the æther.”
“Lies to shift penny dreadfuls,” came a sharp reply from the medium, even as a few of the masks turned toward Arcturus. “If there are gods in the æther,
they abandoned us a long time ago.”
“No. He is one of them,” someone else muttered. “Look at his eyes. Did you not read the pamphlet?”
The Rephaite Revelation. I had organized its publication to warn the syndicate about the Rephaim, and the Spiritus Club had distributed it all over London. It seemed it had made its way here, too.
“Whispers from over the sea mean nothing,” the medium insisted. “And this could be a trap.”
“That is for Le Latronpuche to decide,” the polyglot said. I jerked my chin free. “Come, then, my new friends. Walk with us. And do try to keep up, or we will not be friends for very long.”
****
They escorted us farther into the labyrinth, past free-standing towers of bone that looked like altars to some nameless divinity of death. Though I tried to remember the turns we took, I soon lost track. Arcturus would remember the way.
Water trickled beneath our boots. It set me on edge, but I could stand it so long as it was away from my face.
At some point, rubble and shards of ceramic overtook the bones. One passage was so cramped that we humans had to duckwalk through the knee-deep water, while Arcturus was almost on all fours. I clenched my stomach to keep myself from heaving. When we emerged in a small chamber, I stopped. One of the voyants was up to his waist in a milky pool.
He took a deep breath and went under. One by one, the others followed. Mélusine stepped in last, hair drifting like seaweed on the surface.
“Thank you,” she said. “For covering for me.” She tucked the slack tresses back into her ponytail. “This is the final test. Le Couloir des Noyés. I trust you can hold your breath for a while.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the water as it closed over her head. The light from her headlamp dwindled to nothing.
“Paige.”
There was soaking cloth over my face, rancid water in my mouth. Worming down my throat, swelling my abdomen, rusting my lungs. I was alone and suffocating. A living corpse.
“I can do it,” I said, more to myself than to Arcturus. I took off my coat and knotted the sleeves around my waist.
Cold swashed up my body as I lowered myself into the flooded basin. I shuddered at the feel of the water, the dank smell of it. It had almost reached my chin before my heels scraped the bottom. With an uncontrollable shudder, I turned back and gripped the edge of the pool. Chalk smoked around me.
The Mask Falling Page 6