by Lane Robins
“I think not. I’ll stay abed, eat chocolate and be an indulged old fool,” Vornatti said, brought to a rare good humor by Maledicte’s obedience. “But stay and let me feed you chocolates until the dinner bell sounds.”
“Like a Kyrdic harem, only much less sandy,” Maledicte said. “Should we invite Gilly to join us?”
“No,” the two men said as one, and Maledicte laughed, even while Vornatti curled greedy hands around his shoulders.
Gilly’s stomach churned at Maledicte sprawled so in Vornatti’s bed, and yet he was afraid to go. Maledicte’s giddy, uncharacteristic behavior struck him as dangerous.
The gong rang; Gilly jumped, the small foil box tumbling from his lap to the carpet. Maledicte disentangled himself from Vornatti’s hands, lips rouged with chocolate liqueur, face flushed with something that might have been pleasure. Or well-masked rage.
“Come on, Gilly. Let’s leave Vornatti to his desserts.” Maledicte tugged Gilly from the room.
IN THE DINING ROOM, Gilly picked at his meal, eyeing the stuffed oysters with repugnance.
“Aren’t you hungry?” Maledicte asked.
His face seemed luminescent in the candlelight, and dark wings spread out from his shoulders. Gilly rubbed his eyes, his aching head, and the vision was gone. But the room felt wavering and fluid, as if the walls were only curtains about to be drawn. He shook his head, the taste of chocolate strong in his mouth.
“What did you give me, Maledicte? What was in the chocolate?” Gilly asked, his voice rising.
“Shadowplay,” Maledicte said, setting his fork down. “It’s not harmful. It’s only a sedative, though some claim it has visionary qualities.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d recognize the taste of Laudable.” Maledicte’s voice was faintly surprised. The answer was not to the question Gilly meant—why drug him at all—but the room shivered; the overhead beams grew sputtering halos as if they were the masts of a ship beset by seafires. Gilly cupped his hands over his eyes.
“Are you seeing things? Tell me what you see.”
Gilly peered through the swirling brightness that leaked from the candles, watching feathers sprout from Maledicte’s skin like spring blossoms.
Maledicte crossed the space between them and sat on the table. Gilly looked up into his face. “Death in your eyes,” he whispered.
“But not for you, never for you.” The touch on his cheek was light and Maledicte was gone. Gilly rose; the floor fell away from him and he tumbled down, sliding across the room, rolling against the closed door. Scratching traveled through the wood, the scrabbling of a large bird. Gilly knelt, clawing at the knob. The door opened, and darkness rushed in on great black wings.
She crouched on the table, mouth agape, Her breathing like the gasps of a dying man. With each exhalation, the room darkened until the only light was one guttering candle, the flame streaming high and thin. The table became an altar, the disrupted meal Her offerings. Gilly crawled backward, trying to escape Her notice. She leaned over the edge of the table, Her pale feet dangling like gibbet corpses, Her wings upraised. “He is Mine. He will worship Me. He will love Me. Nothing you do will keep him from My kiss at the end.” Her voice, a god’s voice, seared his mind.
Gilly cried out and woke, head on the table, neck stiff, numb hands dangling off the sides of his chair. He touched the plate nearest him and found it cool. The candles had burned to half their length, spreading wax into the spillways below. The clock hands had jumped; hours had passed. He shoved back the chair with a shudder of protesting effort, ears still ringing. Staggering, he made his way from the dining room and down the hall.
Vornatti’s door was closed. Gilly touched the blank, dark wood, and hesitated. He opened the door to darkness and cringed, but this darkness was only that of a room dimly lit. In the center of the room, Vornatti’s bed was shrouded by the drawn bed curtains and the deafening silence within them. Gilly stumbled forward in the low light, reaching for the cloth. His fingers clenched velvet, but he could not bring himself to fling the panels back and accept their revelation. A clinking of glass on glass made him twitch galvanically.
Maledicte rose from the shadows of the wheeled chair, a goblet in his hand. The wine had darkened his lips to the color of old blood.
“Did you kill him?” Gilly said, his voice a rasp to match Maledicte’s. “Tell me the truth, Mal….” Gilly slumped against the wall, shivering. “Is he dead?”
Maledicte poured a small snifter of brandy and handed the glass to Gilly. “Your hands are shaking.”
Gilly thought of murder done, and murderers caught red-handed, of cornered rats and poisons, but raised the glass to his lips and gulped the liquid without hesitation. The brandy warmed his tongue, his throat, his belly.
“Yes,” Maledicte said, taking his seat again, setting his feet up on the bed, boots parting the hangings.
“How?” Gilly asked. “Poison? Or like Kritos?” His voice cracked, imagining the sheets sodden with blood.
“Peacefully.” Maledicte drained his glass, poured another.
Gilly set his snifter down and yanked the drapes back, still expecting Vornatti to wake into furious complaint. He lifted the feather-heavy pillow from Vornatti’s face, the fabric as malleable as liquid and as drowningly lethal. Vornatti’s mouth was open, his eyes shut, his gnarled hands limp with a relaxation life and drugs had not granted. Gilly rubbed his wet face. “I should have warned you.”
“When did he ever listen, Gilly?” Maledicte said.
“Why?”
“You know why.” Maledicte leaned his head on the back of Gilly’s shoulder, took his hands in his. Panic spiked him beyond brandy’s ability to soothe. This murder might have freed Maledicte, but it cast Gilly into unemployment.
“You couldn’t wait?” Gilly asked.
“To have Janus at hand and beyond my touch? Impossible. And time is fickle, Gilly, as was Vornatti. He would have grown bored with the victory handed him, might even have thrown me over for Mirabile, despite his promises. I thought him near death, but every month he seemed to improve. I could not chance it.”
“You’ve gambled on other things,” Gilly said.
“Not this,” Maledicte said. “Gilly, I am in your hands. A murderer. What will you do?”
Gilly turned, freeing his hands from Maledicte’s cool touch. He tilted Maledicte’s face to meet his, to see what the dark eyes held: fear, hope, pain, the lashes spiked with dampness.
“Do you regret this?”
Maledicte met Gilly’s eyes. “No.”
“What would you have me do?” Gilly whispered.
“Nothing.” Maledicte’s voice was tight. “His death should pass without scrutiny; his habits were known to be precarious—drinking mixed with Elysia. But do find me his will. I need to be sure he didn’t append some recent codicil. I wouldn’t put it past Mirabile to finagle one out of him.”
Gilly nodded, feeling oddly numb, as if the Shadowplay lingered yet and this was only another dream. He knelt and prised up the floorboard near the hearth, revealing the strongbox beneath.
Gilly lifted the parchment out, smoothing the creamy vellum from its rolled shape. He weighted one end with the strongbox, the other with his hand.
Maledicte knelt beside him, so close they were nearly bumping heads. Above them, the pillow Gilly had taken from Vornatti’s face shifted and Gilly jumped to his feet, heart pounding.
Maledicte flattened the curling edge that Gilly’s abrupt movement had allowed, and skimmed the elaborate language, sorting and reading. Gilly, turning back, thought again that Maledicte had the instinct of a solicitor.
Maledicte smiled for the first time since Gilly had entered the room. “Seems he was not so much a fool as that,” Maledicte said. “Mirabile is nowhere mentioned. Nor are his Itarusine relatives. I suppose he held that grudge right and true enough.”
Gilly slid the document away from Maledicte, sought out his own name, fearing, hoping. It was with the other
servants’. Though his bequest was by far the largest, it still knotted his belly with resentment and fear. Tired of him, Gilly thought, his dismissal imminent. The sum allotted was a year’s salary, no more. Enough to buy himself a berth to the Explorations, but not on the swift Virga. Enough to take him slowly away, and set him down in the Explorations, penniless, with no funds to return. Alone and friendless, he thought, as chilled as if a dash of blown snow had touched him; it would leave him without Maledicte.
“Don’t worry, Gilly. You’ll stay with me,” Maledicte said, reading over Gilly’s shoulder. “I told you. I’ll take care of you.”
“As a servant,” Gilly said.
“As a friend.” The quiet word resonated in this room, this city of purchase and patronage, manipulation and deception. The silence gave weight to the word, and Gilly realized with sudden disbelief that this was the measure of the city’s moral decay—that his closest ally and dearest friend was a murderer, with more bodies yet to reap.
· 18 ·
G ILLY AND MALEDICTE HAD BEEN returned from the funeral for only minutes; in silence both of them fled to the dining room and the warming comfort of the liquor on the sideboard. Maledicte poured two glasses, and raised a toast. “Done and be-damned,” he said. Gilly swallowed his whiskey without a response, too shaken by Mirabile’s conduct at the funeral. They had not expected her to attend at all, considered her safely rusticating in the country. But Brierly Westfall’s sudden miscarriage had kept the Westfalls in the city, and Mirabile with them.
Still, funerals were not the ceremonies they once were. With the gods gone, there was no one to impress with their piety but themselves, and Vornatti’s funeral was sparsely attended: Mirabile, Echo, two representatives from the palace, indistinguishable from each other, and Vornatti’s solicitor, Bellington. There was no ritual, nothing but two cemetery workers covering the hole in the earth, shadowed by a chapel now used for harvest storage, and overlooked by the great stone god chairs, overgrown by weeds.
It was when the grave was nearly full that Mirabile had whispered, “You murdered him. To keep him from me. I would have shared everything with you—now we’ll see what rumors I can spread, see how fast your welcome disappears.”
“Do so, and I will comment on the timeliness of Brierly’s miscarriage, your access to Harlot’s Friend, and your hatred of the countryside. Whileeveryone knows of your murderous past, they know nothing of mine,” Maledicte said.
“Bastard,” she hissed, trembling with frustrated rage, then as suddenly as a shadow chased by sunlight, her face cleared. “I’ll strike a bargain with you. We’ll keep each other’s secrets, each other’s counsel, and each other’s company—”
“No. I’ve made one dangerous bargain already and it’s consumed any desire to make another.”
She growled under her breath, a distinct animal sound, and Maledicte cast a wary glance at her. She dimpled and said, her voice sweet again, “Mal, remember me, and this, the moment you’ve spurned me. I told you once before—I am as clever and as determined as you. I have been playing too gently, but that’s done now. I have a mind to level the field. I know what you fear—”
Maledicte seized her shoulders, grip bruising, suddenly washed with rage at her nebulous threats, but instead of the fright he hoped to see, she laughed, honestly amused. “Such a savage,” she said. “Is unthinking force always your solution when there are subtler resources to draw on?”
Heads were beginning to turn, and Maledicte felt trapped, unwilling to back away, conceding her this round, and equally unwilling to keep Echo’s scrutiny on him. Gilly put his hands on Maledicte’s arms, and Maledicte relaxed, given a reason to release her. Mirabile leaned forward, closing the distance between them once more, even as Maledicte attempted to back away and was blocked by Gilly.
Mirabile kissed his mouth, her lips cold on his, and he shivered. She left the gravesite, the only sign of her anger the fisted hands at her sides. Maledicte turned back, aware of Gilly muttering quietly to their coachman, and the man slipping away. Then it was done, and Maledicte and Gilly had come home, Gilly taking up the reins of the coach.
“You sent the coachman after her?” Maledicte said.
“She seemed too confident. I want to know where she goes,” Gilly said.
“Yes,” Maledicte agreed. Unsettled, he took refuge in peevishness granted by the front door opening, heralded by its usual creak and Livia’s voice as she played butler. “Who’s that now? All these cards and flowers, all this fuss for one old man—”
“It’s Bellington,” Gilly said, looking into the hall. “With Echo at his side.” He set down his glass; it clattered on the tray. “With Vornatti’s death so sudden, with Last’s dislike of you, with Mirabile spreading her venom, Echo will be looking for something actionable.”
“I don’t fear Echo,” Maledicte said.
“You should. He has followers beyond that rabble of Particulars. Powerful men like Westfall and Last. Even Aris listens to him.”
“So what do you counsel?” Maledicte said.
“Attend to Bellington’s reading of the will without any asides or insults. Be silent as best you can and pretend to grieve. Please. Or Echo’ll have you in jail.” He ushered Maledicte into the hallway. From the library, Gilly heard the stilted tones of Echo conversing with Bellington.
“I could remove his threatening presence for good,” Maledicte said. “A doctored drink—some of my stock is quite tasteless. It would be a small matter to—”
“No,” Gilly yelped. “Are you mad?” He dropped his voice to the barest whisper. “And to discuss such a thing so close to Echo.”
“He’s nothing but a man. Not some avenging creature of a dark god,” Maledicte said, a faint smile curling his mouth.
By the time Gilly had his panicked urge to laugh under control, Maledicte was greeting the two men, Echo first as was due his rank. “Lord Echo, what brings you here? I find it hard to imagine that you intend to pay your respects to Vornatti since you had none for him while he was alive.”
Echo’s dark eyes narrowed. “I find it odd that Vornatti took you in, and suspicious that he died so abruptly.”
“The ways of the heart are not easily understood,” Maledicte said. “Neither why he cared for me, nor why his heart stopped. But if it gives you pleasure, you may join me for the reading of the will.”
Bellington started into speech, portly form rocking back onto his heels. “If it’s your will that Lord Echo be privy to the contents, then I withdraw my objection.”
Maledicte settled himself as Bellington took the will from his worn leather valise. Bellington coughed, face reddening. “You are familiar with the late baron’s will?”
A tap on the door interrupted Maledicte’s response, and drew a snarl from Echo. “Your servants don’t know their place.” He yanked the door open, startling Livia.
Behind her, Janus stood, elegant in the color the court called Last blue. Echo mimicked Livia’s startlement and stepped back. “You visit a house of mourning?” Maledicte’s smile bloomed, and Bellington coughed again.
“Aris sent me,” Janus said, with a half bow in Echo’s direction, “to carry his condolences.” He held out a letter sealed in gold-edged blue. Echo moved to take it, and Maledicte forestalled him.
“First you pry into the will, now my correspondence? How deadly dull your life must be, Echo, to find mine so fascinating.”
He claimed the missive from Janus, and Janus bent and brushed his lips over Maledicte’s fingers. “He waits on a response, my dark cavalier.”
Bellington stood, “Perhaps I should return—”
“Sit,” Maledicte said, “read away. Let us hear my guardian’s last thoughts.”
“In broadest outlines, the entailed properties in Itarus and his title go to his next of kin, Dantalion Vornatti; his Antyrrian country estate, being a residence for life, reverts to the Crown; the Dove Street residence and his considerable fortune fall to you, Maledicte.”
Ech
o grew more intent. As if sensing their master’s mood, the Particulars in the garden straightened.
“Perhaps we should take another look at his cadaver,” Echo said. “To leave a fortune to a stranger and slight his own blood—”
“If it pleases you. Only make sure you tamp down the grave dirt well after, or you’ll find him up yet again, and burgled,” Maledicte said, even while Janus stiffened minutely. Gilly’s throat felt thick, and he concentrated on looking merely miserable, rather than guilty.
“By the gods, your tongue is foul—”
“Tell Aris,” Maledicte said, his voice overriding Echo’s. “Tell him I am only too glad to accept his condolences, and to accede to his request. With pleasure.” The opened letter whispered stiffly in the close room, the vellum brushing Maledicte’s sleeves.
“Perhaps Echo can deliver your reply,” Janus said, “if he truly intends to petition Aris for an exhumation.”
Echo stormed for the door, and Maledicte said, “Gilly, it seems Lord Echo has had a surfeit of our company. Show him out, and Bellington as well, please.”
“Sir,” Bellington said, hesitating. “We should go over the details. Besides the usual estate matters, there’s the Antyrrian audit books to be dealt with. They need to be sent abroad to wait for the next auditor.”
“Another day will suit, surely,” Maledicte said.
Bellington nodded. “It may take some time for Itarus to name a replacement for Vornatti’s post. I understand the court abroad is most competitive. Though I believe Dantalion Vornatti is in the running, if only for familiarity with the baron’s script.”
Gilly herded the men to the door. Bellington stepped out with the step of a man relieved of an onerous duty.
Janus nodded to Echo and said, “Shall I walk you to your coach, my lord?”
“No,” Echo said, letting his gaze linger on the letter in Maledicte’s hands.
Gilly shut the door and slumped against it, slid down to rest on the cool tiles of the foyer, exhausted.