Corroded tscc-3

by Karina Cooper

  “One by one, Miss Black, we will punish everyone who has ever made contact with you. You will become a pariah, a thing of pain to all who lay eyes upon you. Where you go, blood will follow.”

  I slumped. The will to fight, the anger that I so desperately clung to, faded. What point was there? I had nothing left. No family. No husband. No virtue, no inheritance, no freedom.

  No Teddy.

  Where I went, blood already spilled, lurid and obscene. My heart, that blackened pit within my chest, crumbled to ash. My head lowered. “Very well,” I said, and every syllable audibly shook. My fingers trembled so badly, I could not do anything but twist them together in my lap. “I am yours.”

  “Yes,” agreed the Veil, offensively polite in the face of my terror. “You are. Tù zi wĕi ba cháng bu liăo.”

  I closed my eyes. “The tail of a rabbit mustn’t be long.”

  “Not mustn’t,” the Veil corrected. “Can not. Like the rabbit’s long tail, those who resort to treachery can not last. You have been foolish, Miss Black.”

  Heaven help me. I already knew this much.

  My lips curved into a tortured slant. “Shì,” I whispered.

  Possibly, I surprised him. He said nothing for a moment, allowing the crackle of the fire to fill the silence. Sweat slid down my temple, trickled to my throat.

  Still, I could not swipe it away. I could not summon the will, the energy.

  Nothing. I had nothing.

  This time, a chattered fragment of Chinese earned two hands on each arm. I did not bother to fight them.

  As one, the Veil’s servants took me from the too-hot room.

  I was not left alone for a moment. They should not have bothered. I lacked the will to fight my captors now, burdened as I was by a debt I had no choice but to pay. As willing as I had been to drag the sweet tooth here, to leave Zylphia to the punishments the Veil threatened, I could not follow through now.

  I was a murderer, just like the men I had chosen to collect. Just like my father, who had ordered his associate—dear Lord, my Teddy, my dearest friend—to murder on his behalf.

  Like Teddy himself. So many hours spent in my parlor, debating with such spirit the theory and application of the science periodicals. How often had we danced? Him because it pleased him to tease me upon the floor, and me because it was the only way I could shake off the Master of the House’s matchmaking eye.

  Which was the mask? The vile acts in the dark, or the man who had met my every vigorous debate with good humor and sharp intellect?

  Which was the lie?

  What fight I might have offered, what fury I could have unleashed, would not come. Bowed and broken, unable to place my blood-stained soul above the well-being of all who had ever helped me, I allowed the Veil’s servants to care for me without struggle.

  Whatever they had planned, I would commit.

  To think such thoughts was not to will them true.

  Terror sapped what calm I had left as the hours faded. For the rest of that awful night and most of the following day, I’d slept the sleep of a corpse, and whatever the Veil had done, it had taken my pain. Or, fortunate as I was not feeling, my state of advanced recovery had closed the wound in my side. I couldn’t be sure.

  It hurt when I moved, likely would have hurt all the more were it not for the medicinal refuge I hid behind. The servants left tending me made sure that I had opium to smoke, dulling whatever feelings I might have had to bear. Even my bath passed without a struggle.

  The attire they brought me took my deadened sense of dread and wrapped it tightly around my insides. Squeezed as viciously as the corset they strapped me into. I had no familiar faces, this time. Only two women I had no names for—one black as pitch with the lush accent of the Caribbean, and one whose hair was nearly white with age.

  If either knew me, they said nothing—only as much as needed to prepare me.

  The sheer blouse I wore had cap sleeves that clung to my shoulders and ended in a bell poof just beneath. The corset over it was the color of eggshells, beaded with tiny glass drops that would catch the light and wink at the audience, and cinched tight enough to force my waist into as fashionable a curve as my body would allow. It had been a long time since I had been quite so pinched.

  I did not cry out. I barely felt the pain of ribs compressed to vicious demand.

  That it seemed somewhat more narrow than it should, I attributed to falling out of the habit of seeing myself so compressed. It did not occur to me then that I had lost some excess flesh to the tar I continued to take.

  Beneath the corset, I wore bloomers designed especially for a performer. They left much of my legs bare, much too short for comfort and the same color as the rest.

  At my throat, a froth of sheer material in a kind of false cravat.

  Upon my feet, slippers in like white, also beaded.

  My arms and legs were bare, left unornamented entirely. My hair was wrestled into place, smoothed and curled as it had once always been. It took both women, but they piled the waist-length tresses into a loose coil, pinning it in place, then capping it with a like froth of white that made me look too much as if I prepared for a farce of a wedding.

  I stared dully at myself in the narrow mirror and did not flinch at the sight.

  They pressed kohl into the rims of my eyes, painted my mouth and reddened my pallid cheeks. In the end, I became something of a blend between the whore the Ripper had accused me of being and the bride I had once been—exotic in the eyes, wicked at the mouth.

  Obediently, I sucked the smoke from the slender jade tube pressed into my hands—the filigree upon the pipe so fine as to be considered priceless—and did not argue when the Veil’s servants came to fetch me.

  A cloak was draped over my shoulders, lest I catch a chill.

  I had stepped no farther than the confines of my prison when the reality of my predicament encroached upon me.

  The circus. The red tent, looming large upon the grounds, always seemed as if it dominated all eyes. It didn’t, not truly, but in my state, I could not force reason.

  I balked suddenly, seized up through no will of my own and could not force myself to take one step farther. The servants around me tightened, four to escort me.

  I would move, or I would be moved.

  They screamed when they fell, shrill voices ended so suddenly. “You lot,” called the trainer, “get on to the other side or join ‘em.”

  The Monsieur did not believe in nets.

  I shivered in place, shaking so violently that the light from lamps lining the hall danced across the glass beads; a glittering shimmer.

  A hand caught wrapped around a country cove’s fogle—the monsieur’s punishment leaves scars. Not for the crime, but for the catching.

  “I won’t,” I whispered.

  A hand in my lower back forced me to step—I flinched as it found the wound. I stiffened. Fear turned every limb to something immovably weighty. Iron and sand, an anchor that would not move were I even to try.

  I couldn’t.

  A crowd so tight as to pack the tent, mingled excitement turning the heat unbearably thick. They wanted blood. The monsieur had always been able to read the audience.

  “Please.”

  “Go,” ordered one servant, his gruff voice curt.

  “I can’t,” I replied, fear turning my voice to something strident and alien. “I can’t, please!”

  Another hand grasped my shoulder. Flanked though I was with four, I lashed out at the nearest.

  I was in no shape. Though I cried out, pleading to be spared the canvas I dreaded, there was no sympathy in my captors. They dragged me, thrashing and screaming, into the hall. When my voice grew too loud, a hand slapped over my mouth and I was hauled bodily over one shoulder, my wrists held by one and my ankles another.

  Shame was not a thing I understood—not then, trapped in the certainty of my own fears, lashed by memories I had never truly worked out. Not from the opium fog that held them.

&nbs
p; Ghosts of them whose face bore no name, memories of children held in thrall; opium for the good ones, the boot for the bad—if we were lucky.

  Blood was a color not easily forgotten, and I had never realized how much of it painted my life.

  I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t! Let them punish all who’d ever spoken to me, I could not set foot in that tent.

  Such shameful terrors, that I would sacrifice so many for it.

  We passed gaping servants and I heard their startled cries. It did not silence me. As the air turned from the warmth of the manor to the biting frost of winter’s coming, my terror climbed.

  I screamed against the hands that held me silent, tears running freely from my eyes and smudging the effect the women had worked so hard to achieve. With inhuman strength, I wrenched myself free of the arms that bound me, crashed to the cold ground. Pain streaked up my arm, jarred loose whatever spiritual gauze the Veil’s man had bound over the wound in my back, and I shrieked unholy madness into the stillness of the gardens.

  A man leapt upon my chest, knees pinning my wrists. White teeth, golden eyes. Black skin revealed by his sleeveless shirt, and long hair plaited into a multitude of tiny braids slapped me in the face as he bent over me. Ikenna Osoba did not seem deterred by my panic.

  He said nothing I understood, but his fingers prised open my mouth and tar fell to the back of my raw throat. I tried to spit it out, but he clapped that hand over my mouth, covered my nose until I could not breathe.

  In defense, desperate for air, I swallowed the bitter lump, but I writhed and squirmed to force him from me. He did not budge. His knees ground into my wrists, forcing fresh tears.

  He waited. The edges of my vision went black.

  When the bliss took me and my body went slack, only then did he lift his hand.

  “We’ll fix her face,” suggested a girl’s voice.

  “No.” Ikenna’s deep resonance. “Leave her. It will titillate the spectators.”

  “But...” A pause. “This isn’t—”

  “Shut it. Or you’ll be in with her,” he said tightly. His knees eased from my limp arms. This time, it was him that lifted me, with an easy strength that belied his lithe figure.

  Cradled against his chest, I stared listlessly at nothing as the opium took from me the last vestiges of my resistance.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They did not take me to the canvas tent.

  I had assumed, in my folly, that I would be forced to endure the circus show. I did not understand what had happened when I became more aware of myself and my surroundings. Though my senses soared with forced bliss, I had not spent much of my life mired in it for nothing.

  As Hawke had once counseled me, them what eat it by habit must always eat the more. For this reason, I was able to thrust myself from waking dream to a surreal actuality. I seemed to come into my skin a little bit more than I should have, for pliability. I was aware of the harsh glow bathing me in golden light, could feel the shuddering heat roiling against my flesh. Yet all of it retained its dreamy state.

  The source revealed itself as that of candles lit by the dozens. Possibly even the hundreds. A wall of fire I could not climb.

  Ringed as I was, near blinded by the flickering droplets of crystalline light, I did not realize exactly where I stood until I attempted to move from it.

  A whisper of fabric, a silken rustle, and I gasped as the lengthy silk ribbons wrapped about my forearms tightened.

  I stood, that much was clear, with my arms pulled above my head and given enough slack to allow them to bend, elbows splayed. My fingers clenched around the satiny material, jerked hard—it did not give. Where I might have spoken, a wooden shaft had been forced between my lips, banded to my skull by a tightly tied ribbon.

  I could only bare my teeth and growl something wordless and angry. Saliva already gathered in my mouth; I could not swallow, and my jaw ached from the forced parting.

  Candlelight flickered, painting wild shapes and demonic shadows.

  Each wax column had been placed upon stone seating, arranged in such a way as to allow for empty seats just at the front. A faint haze clung to the air, swirling now and again in the warm glow. Inhaling through my nose left my senses twitching—the fragrance was a familiar one. I’d smelled it often on Hawke’s skin, and again when I’d spoken with the Veil last. Familiar, but different enough that it distracted me. I frowned as much as I was able around the wooden rod between my lips.

  They’d placed me in the amphitheater. The seating was only partially familiar to me, as the last I’d been inside, the whole had been converted to the plush decadence of a Roman bathhouse. That I was not ensconced beneath the circus tent was a relief that nearly stole the support from my knees—at least until the rest of my predicament became clear.

  Wherever I was—or was not—I was not safe.

  I looked up, straining to see anything that I could in the midnight sky above, yet all I noted was that the acrobat ribbons binding me so securely trailed from an apparatus built to be as unimposing as possible to avoid detection by the casual observer. For an audience, it may appear as if the long, crimson stream of silk fell from the very sky.

  I had been upon a trapeze, though I did not recall whether I enjoyed the sensation of flying or not. As I had little problem navigating Cat’s Crossing, I suspected I had not minded it. I recalled somewhat more clearly the art of walking the tightrope, and of dodging the knife-thrower’s blades.

  Some of these engendered a fear that only heightened the dreamy atmosphere of the whole. Too many memories, some real and some formless as ghosts haunting my imagination, fluttered on all sides.

  I forced myself to squint beyond the dancing colors and shapes of my mind.

  If I’d ever been tested upon the ribbons, I could not recall. Those what utilized them best were graceful creatures, sleek muscle and lengthy control, and I had never assumed myself among their number.

  In any case, these were not meant to be used by an acrobat. Obviously, I’d been bound with an intent towards security, but with a flamboyance I had come to expect of the Midnight Menagerie. The trailing material folded about my wrists and arms, pulling both arms at angles above my head, and the rest had been left to cascade to the ground. It framed my body—pristinely pale in shades of white against the starkness of the vermillion ribbon. The candles danced off the multitude of glass beads, sheathing every movement in a shower of golden sparks. I could not so much as draw breath without scintillating light declaring the act.

  Display. I was on display.

  The candles wavered, pulling my gaze as a moth to that unforgiving flame, and I sucked in a breath around the wood between my teeth.

  So much effort to think. What was it they demanded of me?

  I forced my mind to focus through the haze I floundered in. Inhaling deeply only filled my nose with the fragrance of spice—sweet, thick, and different enough from the incense I’d smelled in the Veil’s own chamber that I found myself again distracted trying to place it.

  It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it wasn’t likely to help me escape this predicament.

  I rifled through what I knew of the Menagerie’s acts. They employed knife-throwers—two, to be precise, though only one was as good as Monsieur Marceaux’s, I think.

  However, the binding they’d put me in wasn’t nearly effective for a good knife-throwing display. So, something else?

  Blast it. Why couldn’t I think?

  A step behind me was all the warning I received before a hand reached around me to cup my chin. The fingers were long, severe, gloved in what looked like white—not a color Hawke usually wore. Yet I could not mistake his voice beside my ear. “Awake at last...” The fingers bit at my jaw. “Countess.”

  I flinched, yet had no room with which to move away. “Ha’ke,” I managed, straining against the binding at my mouth. “Unha’ ‘e!”

  In answer, he forced my chin higher, my head back, until I was all but balanced upon my toes. Saliva I
had not been able to swallow filled my throat, earning me a reprieve from drooling like an abram flaunting his false insanity.

  “You don’t look scared.” Was that disappointment I heard?

  Bollocks to that.

  I cursed at him to show just how scared I wanted him to believe I wasn’t, but the finer detail fell short behind the constraining muzzle.

  Slowly, the grip at my face eased, until I could once more balance my weight upon both feet. Yet I was given no reprieve, for his gloved fingers trailed lower, to skim my neck beside the false cravat. I shuddered. To my dismay, my vision distorted.

  When his palm spanned my throat, fingers tightening without warning or gentleness, my breath fragmented. Pain plucked at the cords tightened beneath his palm, fingers biting hard enough to pinch.

  “There,” he murmured. “Now you look scared.” A wicked heat entered his voice; a mocking, knowing lilt that I had never heard from him before. “I like it.”

  I did not. I wrenched my face away, heedless of the grip upon my throat, and gagged when it did not loosen. Yet I did not cry.

  This was naught but a dream—and dreams, I had come to realize, were too ephemeral to last.

  Hawke did not loosen his grip. Instead, his free hand came about my other side, splayed possessively over my corseted stomach. His laughter slid over my skin like a mocking benediction. “You have done this dance before.”

  No. Not this one. I could not shake my head, not beneath the grip he claimed about my throat, but I garbled a denial.

  “Liar.” His breath touched my ear. His tongue flicked the sensitive skin.

  His other hand slid lower, closer to the bloomers. The inordinately powerful heat of his palm seared through the material, as if I wore nothing at all.

  In that instant—when my body clenched and my mind shrieked a terrible warning—I hated him.

  I clamped my eyes shut.

  If this was all the Veil demanded of my punishment, so be it. I would suffer under Hawke’s ministrations, knowing that it was no suffering but that of my pride.