The Mime Order

by Samantha Shannon

  Wynn still said nothing, but she looked between us.

  “Put her down, you two,” she finally ordered, and the augurs holding my arms let go of them. “Vern, take her to Savory Dock. Quick, now, before the doorman comes looking for her.”

  The woman on my right bit out her next words: “You’re going to let her see Chelsea?”

  “Briefly, and with Vern beside her,” Wynn said. “She’ll be here because somebody from the Unnatural Assembly sent her. I won’t bring down the anger of the syndicate on our heads, or they’ll burn this place with us still in it.”

  “I want my weapons,” I said.

  “You can have them back on your way out.”

  With a hard look at the crowd, the bald man took me by the arm and marched me away from the Ship Aground. “Yeah, go on, Vern, take out the trash,” the old man in the gallery shouted. “Don’t come back, syndie!”

  Vern walked with enormous strides, not looking at me. The stink of waste alleviated as we walked, replaced by a fug of foul water, rotten eggs, and phosphorous. A man watched from a shack with aching eyes, wrapped in clothes so filthy they were all one shade. Blood glistened on his fingertips. As soon as we rounded a corner, I jerked my arm free.

  “I’m not leaving until I see Cutmouth.”

  “I’m taking you to Shad Thames, up Savory Dock. That’s where she’s staying. But I’m coming in with you,” he said roughly. “You know the person who came to see her, then, do you?”

  I spun to face him. “What? Who?”

  “Somebody came to speak to her, somebody to make sure she’s got proper protection until the scrimmage. Couldn’t tell who it was, given they were in a mask,” he said. “First official visit we’ve had since the last time the Wicked Lady deigned to check on us, which was when she took—”

  I was already sprinting down the alley.

  “Oi!” Vern pounded after me. “You don’t know where you’re going!” “How long ago?” I shouted.

  “Quarter of an hour, if that.”

  She was here already. The Abbess. I sprinted through the streets, ducking under clothes lines and vaulting over broken fragments of fence. The words SAVORY DOCK were printed across the grimy brick walls of the next street. Here, the slum petered out to a stretch of olive-green water, where a fleet of rotten fishing-boats rocked on the surface. Images from Cutmouth’s dreamscape.

  A group of mudlarks waded in the shallows on the shore, picking through wet plastic bags. When they saw me, they fled like a startled flock of birds.

  “You,” I shouted at one of them. “Which house is Cutmouth in?”

  She pointed at a rickety dwelling with a blue door, several stories high. Only slivers of paint still clung to the wood. I didn’t knock. The hinges were on their last legs.

  New smells filled my nostrils. I stepped into water that came up to my shins, littered with empty bottles and bits of river debris. The tide must come up often here. Below my boots, the floorboards had a soft foundation of rot.

  “Cutmouth.” I waded to a rickety staircase. “Cutmouth!”

  Silence.

  My spine was rigid. There was a dreamscape in this building, flick-ering and faint. I grabbed the concealed knife in my boot, flipped it open and made my way up the stairs. As I took another step, my boot plunged through the wood and swung out over a long plummet to the basement. The rest of the staircase collapsed behind me.

  With gritted teeth, I clawed myself out of the gap and kept going. My shoulder burned where the hook had torn it. Water dropped on to my face from above. At the top of the stairs, I looked down the corridor, keeping my spirit at the brink of my mind. This house was falling to bits. A wrong step could cause the floor to cave in. At the bottom of the staircase, Vern cursed.

  “I’ll find her,” I called.

  “Don’t you try anything. There’s another way up,” he said. “I’ll come around the front.”

  He ran back out to the street. I walked with careful steps, keeping my hands on the walls.

  A door was ajar at the end of the corridor. I pushed it open, sensing the dreamscape. The room beyond the door was dark, the rotted shutters closed. Two tall red candles burned on a rickety chest of drawers. And there, sprawled across the floor, covered in blood, was Cutmouth.

  I dropped to my knees and got her into my arms, the rightful Underqueen of London. Blood soaked her clothes, but she was still just about alive. Her eyelids and cheeks were hewn with the same precise V-shaped cuts as those on the rest of her gang. At her right side, close to her thigh, her fingers curled around a red handkerchief.

  “D-Dreamer.” She could hardly speak. “Just gone. You can—c-catch them—”

  The primal urge to run whipped through my muscles. I could feel a dreamscape on the edge of the slum, moving quickly. Logic told me to follow, but I knew who it would be. And when I looked down and saw that mutilated, frightened face, wet with blood and tears, I couldn’t.

  “No,” I said quietly. “I know who it was.”

  Cutmouth’s skin was already freezing, as if death were breathing over her. One hand twitched to mine, and I gripped it. Her spirit guttered in her dreamscape, pulsing out signals of confusion and distress. The whole of her abdomen was awash with blood. She was still wearing the same clothes from the market night, the night Hector had died.

  Footsteps thumped on the landing, so hard I thought the floor would collapse. Vern almost fell into the room.

  “Chelsea!”

  His fists clenched on the door frame; his face contorted with rage. Cutmouth’s eyes drifted toward him, but her hand was still gripping mine. “Wasn’t her,” she said, and Vern clamped his mouth shut, white-faced. “Dreamer, they—they killed Hector. T-tell Ivy I didn’t—I’m sorry they took her. Trusted him. She was—everything. She has to—to make it right—”

  A tear ran down her cheek, smearing blood. “Why did they kill Hector?” I spoke as gently as I could. “What did he know?”

  “About Rags . . . about them . . .” Her grip tightened on my hand until I thought my fingers would break. “Got too greedy. I told him, I told him.”

  Tears flooded down her face, and her bloody fingers flexed around mine. She was just like me. Same position, same age, same bizarre situation. I’d had to watch Liss die like this in the colony, powerless.

  “Did so much wrong,” she whispered.

  “Don’t worry.” The backs of my fingers stroked her hair. “The æther takes us all. No matter what we’ve done.” I met her unfocused eyes. “Tell me what they’re doing. Tell me how to stop them, Chelsea.”

  A rasping breath. “It’s—it’s the gray—” Her chest rose one last time. “Gray market. Rags and . . . the Abbess, together . . . selling us to—” The æther trembled as her silver cord fell to pieces. “The tattoo. Saw it once. Her arm . . .”

  Then she grew still. Her silver cord broke with a gentle snap, releasing her from her mortal body, and the weight of her grew heavy in my arms.

  Vern crouched down beside the body and laid his hand on her wrist, checking her pulse. I stayed where I was, kneeling in the blood, too shocked by what I’d learned in the last hour to think straight.

  “I suppose you think we deserve this. That she deserved this.”

  “What?” My voice was hoarse.

  “What was it he said? ‘Base Practices’? ‘Primitive and clumsy’? And the best one: ‘should properly have died out by this era.’” Vern said it between gritted teeth, and there were tears in his eyes. “Why do you have to hate us so much?”

  I couldn’t think of a single excuse.

  “You think there are really killers in this place? You believe in the Binder’s tall tales, girl?” he barked. “You think he was right to put out bitter guesswork and call it research?” He bent over Cutmouth’s body, taking one limp hand between his. “This’ll be the end of us. If they syndicate gets a whiff that she was killed here.”

  “The Binder won’t know,” I said.

  “Oh, he’ll find out
.”

  The door swung open, and Wynn stepped into the room. She knelt beside the body and stroked Cutmouth’s matted hair.

  “Is nothing enough?” she murmured.

  “She was from here.” I wiped the sweat from my face with my sleeve. “You should bury her.”

  “And we will. Not that we’ve anything but a landfill or a river to bury her in.” Vern took the handkerchief from Cutmouth’s hand and covered her bloody face with it. “Now get out.”

  His tone made me flinch inside, but I didn’t show it. I eased her body into Vern’s arms and turned away from the scene, not bothering to stop my sixth sense taking over. Everything rang softly in the æther.

  “Chelsea Neves”—Wynn made the sign—“be gone into the æther. All is settled. All debts are paid. You need not dwell among the living now.”

  Her spirit evaporated from the room, sent far away to the outer darkness. Vern buried his face in one hand. I looked at Cutmouth’s body one more time—looked at it until every detail burned itself into my memory like a brand—before I went back to the landing and leaned against the wall, my hand clenched in my hair, trembling uncontrollably with anger.

  Ivy was the only one left who might know why this had happened, and she was still in the Abbess’s clutches. There was nothing I could say to mend this; even sorry sounded hollow. In life, Cutmouth had been brutal and a bully, but what had I been but that? Hadn’t I used my fists and my gift to serve Jaxon? Hadn’t I obeyed him without question? She must have seen everything in me I’d seen in her.

  The door closed behind me. Wynn wiped the blood from her hands on a cloth. She didn’t look angry. Just tired. “She wasn’t a bad woman.” A rough edge crept into her voice, but her eyes were dry as ashes. “She never took our name, given that she wasn’t born here. Your syndies took her from the street. Stole her from her mother’s side when she was only a child.” She paused. “See much of the Molly Riots?”

  I nodded. “My cousin was killed during the Incursion.”

  “I was the librarian of Trinity College at the time.” She opened her collar. There was a gunshot scar between her neck and chest, like the mark left by a finger in soft clay. “What was your cousin’s name?”

  “Finn McCarthy.”

  A thread of laughter escaped her. “Oh, I remember Finn McCarthy, the troublemaker. He only ever came into my library to pull pranks. I . . . suppose he was sent to Carrickfergus with the others.”

  “Yes.” I wanted to ask more about Finn, about how she remembered him—what pranks, what kind of trouble had he made?—but this wasn’t the place. “Did you see Chelsea’s killer?”

  “From a distance. Couldn’t see much of them. Long coat, a top hat, and some sort of mask. When I asked the doorman about it, he said this person was there on the business of the interim Underqueen and I should shut my mouth if I wanted to keep my tongue.”

  My fist clenched. “Did Cutmou—Chelsea say anything to you while she was here? Anything about what she saw at the Devil’s Acre?”

  “She got here a little while after Hector was buried, but she wouldn’t say a word to anyone. Locked herself straight into this house and for all we tried she wouldn’t come out. Is Ivy all right?” she asked.

  “She’s in trouble,” I said. “And I know you have no reason to help me, Wynn.”

  “But you’d like my help.”

  I nodded. “If the Abbess wins the scrimmage, she’ll have ultimate power in this syndicate. But if someone else does, they can call a trial for the deaths of Hector and Chelsea.”

  “If you’re saying you want me to give evidence,” Wynn said, “the Unnatural Assembly would never accept testimony from the mouth of a vile augur. The White Binder wouldn’t allow it, for one.”

  “They would if there was a new Underlord. Or Underqueen. Those rules could be changed.”

  “Well, if that were the case, maybe all the rules could be changed. Maybe the vile augurs of Jacob’s Island would no longer be obliged to stay in this small corner of Bermondsey. And if that were the case, Pale Dreamer, they’d be happy to assist whoever had overturned the White Binder’s ruling.” She took off her long coat and handed it to me. “Wear that. You’re covered in blood.”

  My trousers were steeped to the knee in slick mud, to say nothing of my boots, and blood coated my hands and chest. “I will if you take this.” I lifted the gold chain from my neck and, after emptying a pinch of sage into my palm, dropped the silk sachet into her hand. “The scrimmage is being held on the first of November at midnight. This will get you past the spirits that are bound to Jacob’s Island.”

  “Ah. The doorman’s sage.” She rubbed it between her fingertips. “This amount won’t get more than one or two people through the barrier.”

  “I only need one or two.”

  “Then I’m glad to have been invited.” With a thin smile, Wynn handed me my revolver and knives, then took me by the elbow and steered me back toward the stairs.

  “I hope to be seeing you soon,” she said, “Paige Mahoney. For now, hurry away. The people of this slum won’t want outsiders at the burial. And please, try to help Ivy, wherever she is. This will break her heart.”

  22

  The Gray Market

  There was poison in the blood of London. Cutmouth had been confused and afraid, but her last words had been chosen carefully.

  I wasn’t sure I could stomach what I’d learned about the Abbess. All that rubbish she’d spouted about being Hector’s friend . . . and until the scrimmage, she had more power than any other voyant in London.

  It was clear that she had killed both Hector and his mollisher, and if Cutmouth was right, her skin was marked with a Rag Doll tattoo—one that she had never shown in public, to my knowledge. It was possible that she’d been a Rag Doll once and left her mime-lord’s service, eventually rising to lead her own section. Perhaps she’d been that first, unnamed mollisher Jaxon had mentioned, and the bitterness of her desertion was what had caused their rivalry.

  Or perhaps not. What I knew for certain was that it was quick and cheap to have ink removed at a tattoo parlor. There was no reason that she should still have a tattoo she didn’t want.

  A hand without living flesh, its fingers pointing to the sky. Red silk surrounds its wrist like a manacle.

  Was that the message? That the red silk handkerchiefs had been placed by the Rag and Bone Man’s hand?

  That the crime might just be his undoing?

  I pressed my fingers to my temples, piecing the clues together. The Rag and Bone Man must have wanted Hector and Cutmouth to die so that a scrimmage would be called. Somehow he’d got the Abbess on his side, convincing her of his aims to the point that she was willing to kill for him. That he’d given the order and she had held the blade. Their public enmity must be a complete falsehood, a smokescreen to conceal their alliance.

  That motive would hold up if the Rag and Bone Man wanted to be Underlord himself. It would have been necessary to get rid of the Underlord—and stop his mollisher taking his place—in order for a scrimmage to be called. But what I didn’t understand was why neither the Rag and Bone Man nor the Abbess would be entering the Rose Ring. Their names hadn’t been listed on the last letter as candidates. Why wouldn’t they take advantage of the vacuum they’d created?

  This was where the theory fell to pieces. I needed to talk to Ivy. She might be the last person alive who knew something about this, the final piece in the puzzle. I should have got it out of her that morning on the rooftop terrace, when she’d first admitted to knowing Cutmouth. Now she was locked in an unknown building at the end of a blocked tunnel. There was no chance of getting her out of there without the Abbess noticing something. I could storm the place with the Ranthen, but by the time we got past the tunnel guards, they would have alerted the Abbess and moved the fugitives elsewhere. Or just killed them.

  Rain poured down on the pavement. I stayed where I was, wrapped in Wynn’s long coat waiting for a buck cab, numb. After a few minutes, a
rusty black car came sliding to a halt in front of me and Nick got out of the back, holding up his arm to shield his eyes.

  “Paige!”

  He held open the door. I clambered into the car, drenched.

  “We were worried sick when Eliza said you were in Bermondsey.” Nick closed the door and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. I leaned into him, shivering. “Whose coat is that? We’ve been driving around looking for you. Where have you been?”

  “Jacob’s Island.”

  He drew in a sharp breath. “Why?”

  I couldn’t say it. Zeke, in the driver’s seat, shot me a worried glance before he started the engine. Beside him, Eliza sat with a cellophane-covered painting on her lap, her hair beautifully curled, red tint shining on her lips. She reached between the seats and touched my shoulder.

  “We’re on our way to Old Spitalfields,” she said quietly. “Jax wants us to try and get a pitch there. Can this wait?”

  “Not long,” I said.

  “We won’t be long. Ognena Maria’s easy to deal with.”

  Zeke turned on the ancient radio, switching to a music channel before we could hear any of the news. The entrance to Jacob’s Island disappeared into the citadel as the car drove away from II-6, back to the central cohort.

  There was nothing I could do for Ivy and the others tonight. Getting her out of that place, wherever it was, would need careful timing. I rested my head against the window, watching the streetlamps flash past the glass.

  The car passed several units of night Vigiles. Zeke locked the doors. They seemed to be interrogating passersby. One had his gun pointed at an amaurotic man’s head, while another man was in tears beside him, trying to shove the Vigile’s arm away. I turned to look through the car’s back window. As it rounded the corner, I just saw the Vigile’s baton coming up, and the two men crouched on the pavement with their hands over their heads.

  Zeke parked on Commercial Street, and we walked together to the covered market hall. Old Spitalfields was a far lighter space than the Garden, with a roof made of cast-iron and glass, but most of the traders were amaurotic. Cheap clothes, shoes and jewelry hung from racks, along with fashionable chatelaines for the wealthy. Ognena Maria’s stall, which sold numa hidden inside hearth spaniels and vinaigrettes, was somewhere in the center of the maze. We shouldered our way through hordes of vendors and buyers, keeping an eye out for the mime-queen. Zeke stopped at a tiny stall selling trinkets from the free-world.