Had Romeo begged on her behalf? He’d tried to convince her to leave the Cloister, but he was the only person in Viyara who might dislike it if she was dragged out by the hair.
“And now you’re the youngest Sister ever to survive the vigil of souls,” said Sunjai. “We all expect great things from you. I’m sure he does too.”
“What sort of things?” asked Runajo, trying not to think of Romeo reciting poetry, his stupid face alight with joy. Trying not to think of how he was dead.
“I don’t know,” said Sunjai. “I’m not clever enough to survive the vigil. But I am your closest friend, so I hope you remember me when you reach your inevitable heights of glory.”
“I’m not—” Runajo stopped as another, worse thought hit her. Sunjai didn’t believe a single thing unless it had been gossiped first. If she thought that Runajo had sat the vigil for the sake of ambition—
“Do they all think that?” she demanded. “All the Sisters, do they think that’s why I sat the vigil?”
“Well, there are a few who think you did it out of despair, now that Romeo is condemned to die for killing a Catresou in a duel,” said Sunjai.
Romeo had already died, because he was a lovesick idiot who shouldn’t cause this heaviness in Runajo’s chest.
“But I told them you didn’t love him,” Sunjai went on. “And reminded them that the man he killed was a Catresou and probably asking for it, because we Mahyanai have to stick together.”
They all thought she had done it for fame, and for the power that fame could bring.
Runajo had known that Miryo despised her and would always believe the worst of her. She had vaguely known that a lot of other Sisters and novices disliked her. But somehow—because she was stupid, stupid, stupid—she had thought that proving herself in the vigil would matter.
It had only proved to them that she was determined. That was why the High Priestess had not let her make any progress toward the Sunken Library. Why she never would. She thought that Runajo had only sat the vigil for glory.
Never in her life had Runajo cared what people thought of her. But now it mattered.
And she was going to lose her chance at the Sunken Library because of it.
“Did you not know about Romeo?” Sunjai asked, her voice dripping with sudden fake pity. As if she actually cared.
“I knew,” Runajo snapped. She felt numb and cold; it was only bone-deep memory that kept her fingers moving in the pattern. “But I didn’t care. Just like I don’t care about you. If I ever do see Lord Ineo, I’ll tell him that you gossip when you’re meant to be weaving and your divine little friend still needs your help on the advanced patterns.”
There was a short silence. For nearly all the time they’d been weaving, they’d had a truce where Runajo pretended not to notice Sunjai covering for Inyaan’s faults—the girl was wildly talented, but only at half the weavings they did—and Sunjai didn’t try to destroy Runajo.
“Don’t make me hurt you,” said Sunjai, all the sweetness suddenly gone from her voice. It was not an idle threat.
“Concentrate on the weaving,” Inyaan droned, her voice as colorless as her hair.
Sunjai fell silent, because she always obeyed Inyaan. Because she was a fool and she accepted the divine right of the Exalted’s family as no Mahyanai should. And yet she had seen something idiotically obvious, which Runajo hadn’t even noticed.
Everything she’d done had been for nothing. She had possibly committed necromancy, and it had been for nothing.
That night, Runajo couldn’t sleep. She stared at the dim ceiling of her cell and tried to make a plan.
If the High Priestess wouldn’t allow her to enter the Sunken Library, Runajo would have to force her way in. That was obvious. There was no other choice, except giving up and waiting for death.
That meant she would have to get down to the door—easy enough—and break open the spells holding it shut. That would be hard. The magic had been woven to keep revenants in, not keep Sisters out, so it wasn’t impossible. Unweaving spells had been part of her training. But Runajo had never tried to undo any magic so powerful before.
And then she would need a way to keep the revenants from tearing her apart before she managed to get the books out of the library. Runajo had always known that was a risk, but she had hoped to get help from the Sisterhood. She had hoped to at least die knowing that others would follow in her steps.
Now there was nobody who would help or follow. So she could not afford to die.
There was another part to that problem: if Runajo died now, then Juliet would be left locked in that hidden room until she starved to death. But she couldn’t smuggle Juliet out of the Cloister until she knew for sure if she needed to die for being undead. And she still couldn’t ask any of the Sisters for advice, because if she was locked up for necromancy, she’d never be able to sneak down.
With a sigh, Runajo finally gave up on sleeping and stood. She couldn’t solve the whole problem tonight. But she could at least examine the door into the Sunken Library and start to get an idea if she could open it.
So she slipped out of her room and through the quiet corridors.
The most direct way down went through the heart of the Cloister. It was a huge, round room where glyphs and patterns shimmered as they swirled ceaselessly across the stone walls. At the center, on a great round dais whose surface glowed with a pattern of ever-shifting lights, sat the sacred stone. It was a dark, knobby lump of rock, as wide as Runajo was tall. Legend said it had fallen from the sky; another legend said it had been dragged up from the land of the dead, when the first Sister walked down to bargain with Death.
Whatever its origin, it now had a single purpose: to weave the walls around Viyara. The glowing, translucent foam of the walls drifted up from the surface of the sacred stone, and farther up through the pipelines that channeled the raw material, all the way up to the platform where Runajo had tasted the walls.
There was a faint, soft humming in the air, as if the city were singing. For this was not the heart of just the Cloister, but of all Viyara: this shining, singing column of light that drank up the blood of the sacrifices and made the city alive with magic in return.
The normal solemn sacrifices were held in the grand court, outdoors beneath the sunlight. But once every five years, a Sister herself must be sacrificed, and that was done here, where her blood could pour across the dais and dye the base of the sacred stone red.
Runajo swallowed, feeling a little sick.
You cannot raid the Sunken Library if you can’t face death, she told herself. You will just have to learn to be brave.
She started walking around the room. First things first. On the other side was a stairway that would take her down to the door of the Sunken Library. All she had to do was examine the door. Find a way in. Find a way to survive.
Find out if she had to kill Juliet or not.
No matter what Juliet thought, the idea of cutting her throat made Runajo feel sick. Of course she had known that as a Sister, that duty might fall to her someday, but she had thought there would be more time to get used to it, time to stop being afraid, time—but there was no time for anything now.
Maybe Juliet had never really been dead. Maybe Runajo would find a way to break the bond between them, so that Juliet could be sent home and Runajo could live out the rest of her days in peace.
Or maybe everything would end in blood. Runajo felt another wave of nausea—she could almost smell it—
She could smell it.
Her heart gave an awful lurch. There were alcoves all along the wall, and now she realized that there was a dark puddle seeping out from one of them.
Some of the Sisters came down here to make offerings. Maybe one of them had not bothered to bleed in the right place, had not bothered to clean it up.
She knew she was thinking nonsense, but she couldn’t help hoping as she ran forward.
Then she looked into the alcove.
There was blood everywhere
—puddled on the floor, splattered across the wall, but also dribbled in a great spiral around the dead body. It took Runajo a moment to recognize her: Atsaya, the Sister who taught the novices how to offer their first penances. She always stuttered, hands gesturing wildly, as she tried to explain how glorious it was to perform sacred penance.
Her throat had been cut from ear to ear.
Runajo didn’t remember the next few moments. The next thing she knew, she was in the hall outside, gasping for breath and trying not to vomit.
Atsaya had been alive yesterday. Romeo had been alive a few days ago. Everyone was dead. Bloody and dying and dead.
Her ears were ringing; the world seemed to have gone blurry around her. She knew that she was panicking. It didn’t matter, because they were all dead. They were all going to die.
Hands grasped her shoulders and shook her. Somebody was talking. Runajo blinked and saw the person’s neck. She remembered the raw, red edges cut into Atsaya’s throat, and that was when she gave up and lurched to the side to vomit.
“—tell me what you are doing, you disgusting little—”
It was Miryo. Of course. The one person in the temple who hated her most would find her when she was being unforgivably weak. No Sister of Thorn should ever flinch from blood or death.
Runajo pushed her hands away and managed to straighten up.
“Atsaya,” she said. “She’s dead.” She pointed back toward the great hall.
Miryo huffed out a breath. “Don’t be ridiculous—”
Runajo held up her hand. She must have touched the wall of the alcove to steady herself, because her palm was smeared with blood.
“Stay here,” said Miryo, and ran for the hall.
Runajo leaned back against the wall. She thought of the dead woman in the hall nearby, and the living girl hidden in the walls, and she tried to breathe.
And she thought of Juliet’s voice: I am going to kill you. I am going to kill you all.
13
THREE HOURS LATER, PARIS WAS lurking outside Meros’s favorite pleasure house and thinking about the flaws in his plan.
As soon as he’d gotten far enough away from Justiran’s house to calm down, he’d panicked. Paris didn’t know anything about the Lower City. He didn’t even know where he was. He certainly didn’t know where Tybalt had been, much less how to discover what he’d been doing for Lord Catresou.
Pretty much all Paris knew about the Lower City were the stories that Meros had told of his exploits. The way Meros talked, all the young Catresou lordlings went to the same pleasure house to drink the same liquor, watch the same dancing girls, and purchase the same prostitutes. It didn’t seem possible that Tybalt would have done such filthy things, but it didn’t seem possible that he would help Lord Catresou work with a necromancer, either.
No part of the situation made any sense. What could Lord Catresou mean to accomplish by tampering with the adjurations upon the Juliet? What could any Catresou even want with a necromancer? They were supposed to be the people who didn’t fear death.
They were supposed to be better than everyone else. Not worse.
Meros liked to boast that his pleasure house was the most elegant spot in the Lower City, and Paris could believe it. The street was wide, and many of the people thronging it were dressed in clothes just as finely made as Paris’s now-rumpled formal outfit. The pleasure house itself was not made from actual white stone, but it was painted white, and the lines of the eaves and windows had the same gentle curves and sudden curlicues as buildings in the Upper City. The doorposts and lintels were painted gold.
Paris realized he had no idea what to do next. He was pretty sure he’d need money to get inside, and he didn’t have a single coin. And if he did get in, how would he know whom to question? Tybalt wouldn’t have told his secrets to any of the staff, and who knew if he even had any friends, let alone if they came regularly to be entertained at this house.
He felt like an idiot. He’d spent the last few hours trudging through the city, sweating in the humid afternoon heat, asking for directions and getting snickered at. And it was all for nothing, because he had no plan, and really he’d never had any hope of succeeding, just like Father had always—
Paris drew a breath. He had to try. Whatever it cost him, he had to try.
His one comfort was that—whether because of the distance, or because they had both been trying so hard to block the other out—he couldn’t feel anything from Romeo at all. No matter what happened, at least he wouldn’t have Romeo weeping into his mind.
Paris forced himself to walk toward the door. His pulse was racing, and he knew that his face was flushing more than the afternoon heat could excuse.
There was a stout, heavily muscled man at the door. Paris bowed slightly to him, the way he would to a doorkeeper at a house where he had come as a guest, and then wondered if that was wrong.
“I’m supposed to meet a friend here,” he said. “His name is . . .” He remembered that all the Catresou boys—or Meros, anyway—used false names while they were in the Lower City. “Lurien,” he finished, after probably much too long a pause. It was Meros’s false name, which would probably cause problems if Meros was down in the Lower City right now, but he had to still be helping with the search for Paris above, didn’t he?
The man stared at him with an expression like the giant stone toads in the grand marketplace of the Upper City.
“I’m his brother,” Paris added hopefully, and then remembered that he had already said he was meeting a “friend.”
“Do you have coin?” the man asked flatly.
“No,” said Paris, “but if you let me in to wait for him—he’ll be along any moment, and I won’t make any trouble, I promise—I just need to meet him. I told him I would be here and it’s very important.”
He knew that he was babbling, and that it was pointless trying to get in because he had no idea how to investigate anyway, and he’d probably have to bribe the girls with money he didn’t have to make them say anything. But he couldn’t give up. He had to get justice for the Juliet. He had to stop Lord Catresou and the necromancers.
“If you don’t have coin,” said the man, “you don’t get in.”
For one wild moment, Paris thought of yelling that there were necromancers about and trying to run inside during the confusion. But nobody would believe him—nobody would believe anything that had happened today—and he didn’t think the man in front of him would panic even if the Ruining breached the walls.
Maybe he should just admit that this was a pathetic, useless attempt and go away.
Maybe there was a back door he could sneak in.
He turned away and had taken two steps when an arm landed roughly on his shoulders.
“Terrible thing,” a man announced cheerfully in his ear, “locking up pretty girls behind a wall.”
“And charging what almost no man can afford,” another chimed in from the other side as they dragged him forward.
“I—thank you, but I don’t want—” Paris tried to slow down, but they were pulling too hard; he only stumbled over his feet.
“Never you mind, we know a place where the girls are cheap,” said the man with his arm over Paris’s shoulder. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“No,” said Paris. “No, I don’t want that.”
“Ohhh,” said the other man, drawing out the sound, “the boys are cheap too. I know you Catresou like to keep that kind of thing secret. We won’t tell.”
They were already off the main street and turned down an alleyway. It was both clean and quiet, and it would have been a relief from the busy street except that Paris was now alone with the two men. And he realized that it didn’t matter how respectable the narrow alley looked, it was dangerous.
He lunged forward, and for a moment he twisted free. Then one of them caught his arm and wrenched him back so sharply that it felt like the arm was coming out of the socket. Then came a punch in the stomach, and for a few moments Paris could
n’t focus on anything except the pain and trying to breathe.
When his lungs started working again, he was on the ground with a knee in his back.
“Don’t damage the clothes,” one of the men was muttering.
“I have done this before,” the other one snapped, and then there was the prick of a knife at Paris’s throat. “We don’t want blood on all this nice cloth,” the man went on, a little louder, “so just stay quiet and be good and we can all walk away from here, eh?”
The whole world narrowed down to the tiny sharp edge against Paris’s throat. His breath, rushing in and out faster and faster. He was going to die here.
“Just look at the embroidery on the collar,” said the man holding the knife to his throat. “Ever seen the like?”
“No,” said the other one thoughtfully. “This boy comes from money. D’you think the captain will want to see him?”
The man whistled. “He probably will.” Then he eased the knife back a little and said, “Xinaad smiled on you today, boy. You’re going to live long enough to be ransomed.”
Paris had a hysterical impulse to point out that they had just promised to let him live if he was only quiet, and it wasn’t logical to keep changing the rules like this, but he managed to keep his mouth shut. Maybe, if he stayed calm, he could get a chance to run.
They hauled him back up, but kept him pinned between them, one arm twisted so painfully behind his back that his eyes watered. Without dislocating his arm, there was nothing he could do except keep walking where they pushed him.
There was going to be a chance. He just had to wait for it. But after they had dragged him down two more streets, Paris realized that there might not be a chance. He might actually have to dislocate his arm if he wanted to live.
He thought, Now or never, and before he had time to get any more terrified, he kicked at the man holding his arm.
The man staggered, and for a moment Paris thought it was going to work, but then the other man punched him in the gut, and Paris was on the ground again, trying to breathe.
Bright Smoke, Cold Fire Page 10