“Evil or not, I’m impressed you’re turning against him.” Vai went straight to the wall. “You know, down in the Lower City, they say your clan puts spells on all their babies at birth so they’ll be obedient?”
That’s just the Juliet, said Romeo.
Stop eavesdropping and keep watching for guards, said Paris, rattling vainly at the locked drawer in the desk. He’d have to wait for Vai to pick it.
I can do both at once, said Romeo.
Paris sighed. “If you’re stupid enough to believe that, I don’t know how much use you’ll be as an ally,” he said, hoping Romeo heard that as well.
“I don’t,” said Vai. “But I do believe you’re all just about that loyal. I’ve seen it.”
“Because half the city wants us dead, so we have to stick together,” said Paris. “Do you think that would make us all turn necromancers?”
“I don’t know,” said Vai. “If it were me, I might be tempted. I’m my family’s heir, you see. It’s my duty to protect us.”
“By leading a gang,” said Paris.
“Your family dabbles in necromancy,” Vai pointed out. “Anyway, I’m not leading a gang; I’m taking control of all the gangs so that I can run the Lower City. You people up top are doing a terrible job.”
First Romeo, now Vai. Was Paris ever going to be around people who were remotely practical?
Though the really terrifying thing about Romeo was how far he had gotten with his dreams. Maybe Paris should be scared of Vai.
There was a soft click, and Vai said, “Here we go.”
Paris turned. One of the panels of the wall had swung open, revealing a steep narrow stairway that twisted down into the shadows.
“How did you find that?”
Vai shrugged. “It’s what I would do. Come on, grab the lamp off that table.”
They went down. The air in the stairway was cold and stale; outside the dim glow of the lamp, there was absolute darkness. Paris knew that they hadn’t gone far, but it still felt like they were descending deep into the earth, and he couldn’t help wildly imagining that this was a stairway down into the land of the dead, and they would never be seen again.
Then they reached the bottom. Their boots suddenly echoed when they stepped onto the stone floor, and the lights blossomed around them: little stone flowers glowing bright white, like the lights that lined the city streets.
“Your family is stranger than I thought,” said Vai.
They were standing in what was clearly the laboratory of a magus. Paris had never been trained in the arts of the Catresou magi, but he knew enough to recognize the signs: the sigils painted on the floor for safety, the brass sigil-wheels for experimentation, the piles of scribbled paper on the tables.
But that wasn’t what he and Vai were both staring at.
At the center of the room was a huge glass box. And inside the glass was a girl.
She looked Catresou; she had long golden curls, and her sightless, staring eyes were blue. She wore a dress of ruffled white, and she sat on a little silver chair.
For a moment, Paris thought she was an impossibly perfect statue, a doll with the most exquisite painting and wig ever made.
Then she blinked.
Paris flinched.
Vai strode forward and picked up the nearest stool.
“No!” Paris shouted.
“Do you see any problem besides a girl inside a cage?” Vai asked.
“Yes,” said Paris. “Look at the upper rim of the glass.”
Tiny sigils were painted in silver around the top—and while Paris had no idea what most of the sigils in the study meant, he knew these. All Catresou children could recognize a dead seal.
“Those are the signs that the magi put on coffins,” he said. “It takes at least an hour to put them on. Another to take them off. Break them without ceremony and it’ll probably kill you.”
Vai let out his breath in a hiss. “She’s living dead, isn’t she?”
Paris swallowed. “Probably.”
It had been bad enough knowing that Lord Catresou was working with necromancers somehow, somewhere. But the thought of a girl forced back into her corpse and held prisoner, right here beneath the floor of the Catresou compound, was absolutely sickening.
“I hate the living dead,” said Vai. His voice was low and unsteady. “I really, absolutely hate them, and that’s why I kill them dead again. But I can’t stand people who torture them.”
“Torture?” Paris echoed.
Vai gave him a weary look. “He has her locked up in his magical workshop. Do you think he just takes her out for tea and cookies?”
Paris wanted to say, He wouldn’t, but he wasn’t sure there was anything that Lord Catresou wouldn’t do.
When he’d met Juliet, this girl must have been sitting in her glass coffin underneath them. Had she also been here two years ago, when he glimpsed Juliet laughing with Tybalt? When he was a child, begging for treats in the kitchen?
How much of his life had been a lie?
Vai let out his breath in a hiss. Then he looked at the girl. “We are going to come back for you,” he said, “and put you to rest. I promise.”
Then he turned to the desk of papers. “Come on,” he said, his voice quietly vicious. “Let’s ransack the place.”
24
AS SOON AS THEY GOT back into the regular levels of the Cloister, Runajo opened a door in the wall and shoved Juliet through into her room. She also dropped the bag of scrolls, since there was always a chance that Miryo or somebody would demand to search her room.
She thought that she would at least have an hour to sleep. But when she finally lay down on the mat, she closed her eyes and all she could see was revenants, swarming through the library.
It wasn’t like a nightmare. She didn’t feel afraid. She just couldn’t stop seeing them, and her body couldn’t stop tensing and preparing to run. She couldn’t stop wearily, hazily wondering where Juliet was and if she would be able to fight off this wave.
An hour later, she was still awake, staring into the darkness of her room and thinking of revenants. So many, swarming beneath the Cloister. She had thought that she understood how doomed they were. She had thought that she was the only one who completely understood. But it was different, now that she had seen it. Now that she knew exactly how it would look when they finally breached the stairs.
The spells won’t fail that fast, she told herself, as she imagined for the hundredth time how she would dodge to the left, how she would run. You don’t need to be afraid yet.
But she was wrong. Because less than an hour later—just as she had started to drift off—Sunjai banged on the door. When Runajo staggered up to open it, Sunjai said cheerfully, “If you killed her, you’d better hide the knife.”
“What?” said Runajo. She wasn’t fully awake yet; the memory of the surging revenants still flickered behind her eyes.
“Stay away from Inyaan and it’s nothing to me,” said Sunjai. “But I have never seen Miryo wanting so badly to blame you for something.”
“Why are you here?” Runajo demanded.
Sunjai’s mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “To summon you to the funeral. Lurra was inspired to offer her life.”
Lurra was one of the Sisters who worked at cooking. She was not terribly bright, but Runajo had always admired that she’d managed to get from the Lower City to the Sisterhood.
She remembered how Atsaya’s blood had looked, how it had smelled, and her throat closed up.
Sunjai tilted her head. “Work on looking more distressed,” she advised. “People don’t mind me being cheerful because it’s sweet, but when you go cold like that, they get worried.”
Cold was exactly the word for how she felt—a vast, shivering cold ocean of fear. The murderer was still among them. A reaper could appear right next to her this moment, and there was no Juliet to protect her. There was only Sunjai, weak and ignorant and . . . for once, not trying to get her into trouble.
“Why
do you care?” Runajo asked suspiciously.
Sunjai rolled her eyes. “We’re comrades, aren’t we? Get dressed. We’ll be in trouble if we’re late.”
The funeral was the same, and so were the High Priestess’s lies. Runajo knelt and prayed as obediently as she had before, and felt like a terrified fool. She’d been so wrapped up in the library, she’d briefly allowed herself to forget that there was a murderer among the Sisters.
It was not the High Priestess, for all that she was lying, because if she had done it, she wouldn’t need to lie. She wouldn’t need to murder, either: she could simply order any Sister to take her own life, and be obeyed.
It might be somebody else trying to renew the protections on the Cloister. She had considered that at first, but the more she thought about it, the more she doubted it. Reapers only appeared of their own accord once death already ruled, as in the Sunken Library. They wouldn’t walk the corridors of the Cloister until revenants did as well.
So the murderer had summoned the reaper. That meant she was somebody who wanted to master death. A necromancer.
And apparently nobody but Runajo was interested in catching her.
But how could Runajo even start? She knew nothing of how to track necromancers, and with four hundred fifty-eight Sisters—no, four hundred fifty-seven now—there was no possible way to find out who had been where at the moment the murder was committed. If she could even find out when and where the Sister had been killed. And if the necromancer had even been there at the time; she might have just summoned a reaper and sent it off to kill for her.
The problem was that Runajo did not know enough about necromancy.
Well. She did have a set of ancient lost texts, didn’t she? Maybe one of them would have the answer.
It seemed like very long odds, but it was the only hope she had.
After the funeral, Runajo was supposed to have her normal duty weaving the walls with Sunjai and Inyaan. But instead, they were all summoned to speak with the High Priestess. Runajo went warily, wondering if Miryo had found a way to blame her for the second death.
“Your duties are changing,” the High Priestess told them. “We have three promising novices who are ready to start weaving. Sunjai will work in the water gardens below. Runajo will assist Vima and begin learning the laments from her. Inyaan will enter ascetic seclusion and engage in the penance that befits her rank.”
It was not bad news. It might even be good news, because Vima seemed to know a lot of obscure lore. Perhaps she even knew something about reapers and necromancers. At any rate, she did not actively hate Runajo, which put her ahead of most of the Sisterhood.
It might also be an attempt to put Runajo under closer supervision, because they suspected her of being involved with the murders or being likely to talk about them. But then, Runajo was planning to be in trouble for necromancy pretty soon anyway. Not to mention that the other necromancer might very well kill her first.
Inyaan didn’t react any more than she usually did; she stared at the wall, not deigning to look at any of them. “As the gods wish,” she said, her voice soft and bored.
But Sunjai crossed her arms, lifted her chin, and said, “Why?”
“The water gardens are the life of the city; we can never have too many Sisters who know how to tend them—”
“No,” said Sunjai, and this was the first time that Runajo had ever seen her interrupt someone who outranked her. “Why must Inyaan do more penance? Surely you don’t need her blood to keep the walls up.”
Runajo thought of the shriveled bodies on the staircase into the library, of the reapers that were summoned into the Cloister anyway. And she imagined one appearing among them right now as they were squabbling.
“Of course they need her blood,” she said. Her heart was beating faster than usual; her voice sounded just a half-note off in her ears. “They need every drop from every person in the city. And it still won’t be enough.”
“Do you desire eternal life?” The High Priestess raised an eyebrow at her. “Only for that is our magic not enough.”
Runajo carefully remained still, her chin up. But it felt like she flinched inside her chest, because she suddenly remembered falling onto the corpse on the stairs of the Sunken Library. Paper-dry skin crunching beneath her hand. The crack of fragile bones.
She wanted to live forever. The most wretched and wicked of all sins, and she wanted it.
“No,” said Runajo, because that fear might have rotted its way into the center of her heart, but she was still—she could still set it aside, could be stone and steel beneath her skin, if she chose. And she chose. “I do not wish it. Therefore I can admit what fate awaits our city.”
“The fate of the gods,” Inyaan said disdainfully, no doubt thinking of her glorious ancestry.
“Indeed,” said the High Priestess, and looked back at Sunjai. “The gods demand Inyaan’s blood. As they demand yours, and mine. Need I remind you of our purpose?”
What the High Priestess ought to remind her of was that undergoing ascetic seclusion was a sure way to glory among the Sisterhood. Those who had done it were reverenced forever after. Sunjai had always been ferociously ambitious on Inyaan’s behalf; it was surely all she could want for her.
But Sunjai didn’t seem to think so. She said, “Our purpose or yours?”
“Enough.” Inyaan’s voice was still soft, but it might have been a slap across the face, for how Sunjai flinched and went silent. “The blood of the gods is in my veins,” she went on—as she had a hundred times before—and the High Priestess nodded in satisfaction. “I will do as the gods command.”
So that was that.
The gods had gone down into darkness, and in darkness they died one by one. So Vima mourned them not in the heart of the Cloister, where light danced around the altar of sacrifice; she mourned them in a room that they called the Navel: an almost perfect sphere of a chamber, with only a little flat circle of floor, only one little door half as high as a grown woman. Runajo and Vima had to crawl through on their hands and knees; then Runajo curled herself against the curving cup of the round walls—it was the only way to leave enough room—while Vima lit one little candle.
A novice slid the door shut from the outside. There was no light left but the tiny spark of the candle.
Runajo did not believe in the gods. She did not mourn them. But she believed in death, and in this dark place, she felt the weight of it dragging down upon her. She knew she was just as fragile as that candle.
And then Vima began to sing.
Runajo had heard and sung many chants about the gods, but this one was different. Perhaps it was just the beauty of Vima’s voice, low and sweet—but the soft, sad repetition of the tune, in the nearly complete darkness and silence, felt at once tiny and vast. For once, Runajo was not thinking about idiotic superstitions; she was listening to the story of the song.
This lament was for Nin, the goddess of truth. She had been the second of all the gods to die; when the earth had been formed by the blood of Ihom, but the sky was dark and fathomless, Nin cut out her own heart and called for Death.
Death came. Death smiled, and kissed her bloody heart, and set it in the sky as the sun. She cut out one of Nin’s eyes, and made it into the moon, and scattered Nin’s tears across the sky as stars. And then she took Nin by the hand and led her across the water into the land of the dead.
Ihom, her husband, waited for her there. Runajo had seen sculptures of them feasting together, king and queen of the dead gods. But the lament ended with Nin still walking into the underworld, alone except for Death.
She remembered the dead souls she had seen in her vigil, how none of them had seemed able to see each other or her, and she thought that much of the song, at least, was true.
When Vima had finished singing, she did not move to blow out the candle or open the door.
She said, “I think you will do well at mourning.”
There was, in fact, nobody who could be worse, but Runajo su
pposed she didn’t need to tell her. Vima would learn her lesson soon enough, the same way as everyone who thought Runajo might be useful.
“Will I have to scrape the flesh off the bones of a sacrifice, so I can have a pendant like yours?” asked Runajo.
Vima laughed softly. “Is that the tale the novices are telling? This is an heirloom, which you may inherit from me one day, along with my post. But that’s not your true question, is it? Tell me, my brilliant, disgraceful child. What do you want to know?”
Her voice was strangely thoughtful. It almost sounded as if she cared—as if she expected more questions than How do I hit the right notes? As if she wanted more than mute, mindless obedience.
So Runajo obliged.
“I would very much like to know how to summon a reaper,” she said.
Her body hummed with tension. She knew this was a risk—Vima could think she was the necromancer, Vima could be the necromancer—but Runajo was running out of time. And she was tired of being afraid. Everyone died, even the gods.
Vima laughed. “And when do you plan to do that?”
“I don’t,” said Runajo. “But the more I know about them, the longer I’ll survive in the Sunken Library.”
It was not even a lie. Runajo did mean to go back if she could, and knowing more about reapers would certainly help. It was just more important to find the murderer first.
“Oh? That’s still your plan?” asked Vima. “I was beginning to wonder, since you hadn’t demanded to do it for two whole days.”
There was something insufferably affectionate about the way she said the words. As if Runajo was hers to indulge.
“I never go back on my plans,” said Runajo. “Unless I find better ones.”
“I’d advise you to go back on this one,” said Vima. “They are the children of Death herself, and she does not take kindly to seeing them dragged away by force.”
“You believe that story?”
“I am not a liar,” said Vima, with quiet dignity. “I could not lament the gods, did I not believe in them.”
Bright Smoke, Cold Fire Page 21