Full Fathom Five (27 page)

The mailbox held two days’ mail at least. Mara must have forgot to pick up her mail—or else she never came home after her meeting with the Craftswoman. With Ms. Kevarian. The meeting Kai thought had finished too fast.

The empty house watched Kai from behind the fence.

Hells, Mara’s wards probably wouldn’t let her pass. She touched the fence latch, felt no electric tingle, heard no warning bell. Maybe the wards only went off if you opened the gate.

She pressed down on the latch, and stepped into Mara’s yard.

No lightning. No thunder. Not even a dog’s bark. Silence and wind. She walked up the yard. Front door locked. Stepping-stones circled around to the back, and she followed them. One stone shifted beneath her feet.

Orange trees grew in the backyard. Kai’d always been jealous of Mara’s trees; her own house’s last owners had no interest in horticulture, save for the psychotropic variety. She picked a low-hanging orange, thought about peeling it, decided not to, and continued to the rear porch. Through glass sliding doors Kai saw the kitchen, marble countertops and cabinets of pale imported wood. A percolator on the stove. Clean counters, dishes racked. She tried the door, out of curiosity.

It opened.

A chill ran up her spine and down her arms. Mara wouldn’t leave her door unlocked. Then again, anyone might leave her door unlocked. People ran out of the house, forgetful, stuffing a boxed lunch into a shoulder bag, spilling coffee on their hands.

Mara didn’t forget things, she rarely ran, and she was never late.

Kai stepped into the empty kitchen.

She didn’t see anything wrong or out of place. One dish in the sink. Crumbs. Dried purple smear of jam on a dull knife. Three tiny black flies stuck in the jam.

Kai didn’t care for Claude’s God Wars historicals, all bluff and thunder and improbable heroics, but she did attend the occasional mystery play, and she’d read a detective novel Gavin lent her once. The murder she liked, but the clues bothered her. A detective in a kitchen could tell how long the occupant was gone from the relative staleness of bread crumbs. Kai couldn’t. But Mara kept a neat house, and hired maids to keep it neater. Burned her garbage, even, ever since a bad breakup in which her ex had stalked her through her trash. Dirty dishes in the sink could be another sign she hadn’t come home the night before. Or that she came home so late she lacked the energy to wash her breakfast dishes before bed.

Through the kitchen door Kai saw, on the couchside table, a small spiral-bound calendar, the kind with a new cartoon for each month. Days X-ed off. She’d come this far already. Might as well check the calendar, then get out. Stuff the letter in the mailbox and leave.

She slipped off her shoes, set them on the tile floor, and padded across the carpet into the living room. Here too she saw no signs of life. The strange order of a maid-cleaned house, that was all. Pillows propped in plush chairs. Wood surfaces dusted, polished. Thick carpet.

A closed house. A dead house.

She approached the couch, the end table, the calendar.

She heard a crack upstairs. Wood contracting, or expanding. Wind through an open window. But she hadn’t seen any open windows. “Mara?” As the echoes died she cursed herself for a fool. If someone else, something else, was here, now they knew her voice.

She picked up the calendar. Two neat lines crossed each day save for the last—yesterday’s
X
was half-complete, one diagonal slash. Mara marked the first half of the day in the morning, the second half returning, a weird habit, morbid, something she’d picked up from her mother. So she hadn’t come home last night. After meeting Ms. Kevarian. After framing Kai.

A carriage passed down the street outside. Wheels growled over gravel, and the horse’s tack jangled and rang.

Kai set the calendar down, and turned to leave.

The harness chimes receded, but the growl stayed. And the growl was nearer than the carriage wheels.

Kai looked up.

Two red eyes glimmered on the second floor. A great gold shape hunched on the banister, bared yellow teeth, and leapt.

Kai stumbled back, ran for the kitchen. The creature landed behind her, heavy and precise, four sharp taps on the carpet. Claws ripped over shag.

She skidded onto kitchen tile, grabbing for her shoes. The creature leapt. Kai swung her cane in a desperate arc, and struck something that yowled in pain. She scrambled for the door, halfrunning, half-falling. She’d left it open, thank whatever gods watched out for dumb burglars—she ran onto the empty porch, and spun to see red eyes and bared teeth and muscle under gold fur gathering again to leap. The growl rose to a cry like an angry child’s. She flailed for the door handle, found it, slammed the glass shut so hard she feared at first she might have broken the pane. But the glass did not break. The door closed, the child’s cry cut off, and the eyes’ red glow died.

The yard around Kai was carved gray, highlighted purple and orange by sunset through the trees. She did not move. She watched her own reflection in the glass, surrounded by porch furniture. The world throbbed. No. That was her.

A statue crouched on the kitchen floor: a cat the size of a foal, broad shouldered and detail perfect, fur distended by rippling muscles, dagger teeth bared. Stone claws pressed against the ceramic tile.

“Shit,” she said, and swore again, because she felt better swearing. “Ebenezer.” My security, Mara had joked. The perfect pet. There when I’m home, stone when I’m out. More loyal than most people I know, of any species.

Which solved the mystery of the open back door. If Kai had a pet lion, she might stop triple-checking her locks before she left, too.

Or not. Even Ebenezer could only do so much.

She’d dropped her cane, and bent to retrieve it. The cane’s head hung at a sharp angle from the shaft: it must have broken when she hit the cat. Inside, she saw a glint of metal.

Strange.

She twisted the cane further, and through the widening crack saw its core was webbed with silver wire. She couldn’t read the patterns, but she recognized Craftwork when she saw it.

Something hid inside her walking stick. A monitor, maybe. Simple medical Craft to keep her safe, help her heal.

Or not.

Night wind blew cold around her.

Mara might have stayed at work. Taken an unannounced vacation. Sickness. Death in the family.

She went up the mountain yesterday. She did not come down.

Kai took her orange from the table. The cat statue’s eyes seemed to follow her as she followed the stone path back to the front yard. She looked back, into the hole between its teeth.

Two blocks from Mara’s house, Kai took a last glance into her cane’s broken heart, and tossed it into a compost bin.

37

Edmond Margot returned to his flat and cleaned. There was not much to clean: he owned little, most of that spread out on his floor due not to laziness but to an inveterate affection for chaos. This, at least, was what he told guests he wanted to impress. Few in number, these. More lately, but Margot doubted he had many latelies left before he became late altogether. As in, the late Edmond Margot.

So, his possessions: Seven socks without mates, holes in three. Two shirts, first ink stained on right wrist and left breast and ripped in the back, second paint smeared across the left shoulder, missing three buttons and left cuff. One pair trousers, mangled. One intact sandal, and its mate with strap broken. Three of the insufferable, and insufferably cheap, bright patterned short-sleeved shirts the local beach bums loved, which Margot wore around the house when awake during the day (seldom) and writing (often). Two notebooks, pages torn out, empty. A box of stationery, likewise empty, consumed in correspondence during one of the dark periods early in his Kavekana stay when he wrote only weepy ten-page letters home to friends laboring through university adjunctship and drowning their sorrows in overpriced absinthe bars. One book of stamps, half consumed. Stubs of three pencils. Empty ink bottle. Before he’d come to Kavekana he hadn’t even known those could empty; he drained one in a week, after his beating, when the words first came. Broken pen nibs, five. Broken quills, two. He had experimented with quills out of a hope they’d feel more authentic than writing with a fountain pen, but after two weeks of hives he deduced he was allergic to down.

He gathered all this into a large sack, and after consideration returned to his bookshelves to add more. If the woman Kai was right, then soon history might weasel into his garret. Newspapermen would archive this scene for posterity. The room was his colophon, his epilogue. Best edit now, for he would have no chance after he went to press. He hoped to offer friendly biographers no embarrassments, and unfriendly biographers no ammunition. He added his Velasquez and Keer hardcovers to the stack, that post-mortem reviewers not sneer his verses were sentimentalized by a taste for swashbuckling romance. A few Alt Selene flimsies too joined the pile. A deck of well-shuffled cards, that he not be seen as frivolous. Of course the slender folio of Shining Empire prints he had bought in a back-alley shop in Chartegnon, a simple brown leather edition without label or insignia—the covers gave no hint at their contents, which was hint itself he supposed. The folio’s curvilinear beauties deserved better than a trash heap, but perhaps some passing patron would rescue them before they reached such extremity.

Editing complete, he hefted the sack downstairs, almost spilling its contents first over the balcony, then onto the street. A crepe seller on the corner stopped mixing batter and stared at Margot, who nodded gruffly in reply and waddled past under the weight of his cast-off life. Three blocks should be distance enough, on the sidewalk beside a few trash cans, the sack’s drawstring loose to display the riches inside. He stopped at the crepe wagon on the way back, and ordered one with mango and powdered sugar, and a coffee.

“You moving out,” said the man as he spiraled batter onto the griddle, “or cleaning?”

“Both,” Margot said, and laughed as if he’d said something funny. The man laughed, too. Mostly Margot took meals in his room, but the sun felt less furious today. He stood by the cart and ate the crepe, which the man cut into rolls for him. Mango juice glistened on his knife.

“I don’t remember seeing you here before,” Margot said after eating half the crepe.

“We move around,” the man replied, and stroked the cart with his full hand, like Margot had seen men pat their horses. “Don’t like to stay in one place long.”

“People don’t get to know you if you move, though.”

“Maybe it takes longer for them to know you. But if you want to be famous, you have to leave home. Who wants to stand on the same block forever?”

“Some people might,” Margot said.

“Sixty years ago my family lived in an orange grove. Forty years ago we were one house in a field of houses, with few orange trees between. Twenty years ago we were one of many houses in a row in a rich neighborhood. Ten years ago, mainlanders bought up all the houses, all but my family’s, because my father didn’t sell. So now we have a hotel to the left of us, and a surf shop to the right, and two bars on the street, and three mansions, and no orange trees. My father sits on the porch and rocks, as he’s done all my life.”

Margot ate the last piece of crepe, and finished the coffee. “Is that so.”

“Even if you live sixty years on one block, the block moves around you.”

“It does at that,” he said, and paid the man. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

“I’m always here,” the man replied, and patted the cart again. “Where you are, is the question.”

He climbed the stairs back to his room. Coffee burbled in his stomach, and grated his nerves. He felt drained, and wired. He needed more lunch, or dinner, he supposed, with a glance at his watch. Then again, he might as well work. If the Watch came, they would feed him in prison. If assassins, he would not need food.

He unlocked his door and entered an empty room. Bedclothes heaped in disarray. A few books on the shelf: poets, mostly, last-century Iskari and a few from the lost generation of Camlaan, broken remnants of the God Wars. Several dictionaries. A suitable library. A suitable room. Its contents bespoke poverty and dedication, a man striving against the limits of his own mind and life. His last work of art.

No. Not his last.

He caressed the surface of his desk. Stroked the pen in its stand. Opened a drawer, removed a fresh notebook, spread notebook on table, savoring the soft crack of glue and string and leather. Wind blew through the window. His fingertips drank the cream of the fresh page.

He reached for his pen, but did not draw it from the stand. He pushed back his chair and stood. The notebook drifted closed.

He paced his room as the sun declined. Three more times he sat. Three more times he stood. He wrote a doggerel verse on scrap paper. No help. He wadded the paper in his pocket, sat again, and bent to work. Palm fronds rustled. He looked up, sought the bruised sky for oncoming doom, and saw none.

He’d always thought waiting for death or prison would terrify him. He was not afraid. No control of his future, and no expectation of one, either.

He drew his pen and sat down to work. Outside, the sun set and the stars rose.

38

Kai always made herself hot cocoa before a nightmare. The routine soothed her: heat milk on the stove, stop just before it boils, mix milk and cocoa powder to form the paste, pour the remaining milk, and whisk. Dust cinnamon on top. She needed calm. She needed to stand in her kitchen and forget for a moment, forget Claude and Margot, forget Jace and even Mara. Remember home. Remember soothing candlelight. Remember warm blankets, and towels, and good sex, and pancakes, and the clear sky after a storm.

This was the doublethink of the nightmare telegraph: if you were scared, you couldn’t sleep unless you tired yourself to the brink of exhaustion, and then you might sleep too soundly for dreams, or not soundly enough. Kai couldn’t afford delays. She had to speak with Mara, now.