Scholar of Decay (36 page)

“I know how you can force Aurek to pay attention to you,” she murmured. “Take the little statue of his wife away from him and refuse to give it back until he listens to your concerns.”

Dmitri twisted around so that he could look up at her adoringly, his chin pillowed on the arm he rested on her knee. “It’s a wonderful idea,” he said regretfully, “but you’ve forgotten that Aurek’s a wizard. If I take away the figurine of Natalia, he’ll just take it back.”

Eyes glittering in the flickering light of the library fire, Louise smiled. “Not if you bring it to me.”

Dmitri had come in, as usual, long after Aurek had gone to bed and would, so close to dawn, still be asleep. Aurek paused in the hall outside his brother’s room, one hand on the latch. A restless night, twisting and turning in tangled bedclothes, had brought with it the realization that he owed Dmitri an apology. To have turned away from him so obviously had offered him a grievous insult.

After a moment spent listening to the prodding of his guilt, he sighed quietly and shook his head.

Dragged out of a sound sleep, Dmitri would be sullen and resentful, in no mood to listen to anything he had to say.

I’ll wait, Aurek decided, shrugging his pack up onto his shoulders as he continued down the hall, ignoring, as best he could, the mocking laughter that accompanied him. There’ll be time enough to speak with him tonight.

Dmitri heard Aurek leave his room, heard him come down the hall, boot soles slapping against the uncarpeted floor. Then, to his amazement, he heard him stop right in front of the bedroom door.

Ear pressed against the wood, Dmitri froze, barely daring to
breathe. What does he think he’s doing? Sluggishly—for he’d gotten very little sleep in the short while he’d been home—he tried to come up with a plausible reason that would explain his being up and fully dressed should his brother open the door. To his relief, Aurek started moving again.

He listened as Aurek descended the stairs, then waited, heart pounding uncomfortably hard, until he heard the faint but unmistakable sound of the front door closing.

Slipping quietly from his room, avoiding the loudest of the creaking floorboards in the hall, he made his way to Aurek’s study. Outside the door he paused, his hand on the latch, voices out of the past ringing in his ears.

Old voices.

“No, Dmitri, don’t go in there.”

“You must never bother your brother when he’s in his study.”

“The master is in his study and does not wish to be disturbed.”

And a more recent one.

“I told you to never come in here!”

“I have work to do. Important work. Get out! Leave us alone!”

“Get out!”

“Get! Out!”

Jaw set, teeth gritted, he opened the door.

Aurek’s study was just a room with a desk, some shelves, and a pedestal in an alcove. Dmitri hadn’t really taken the time to look around at it during his single visit—at first he’d been too worried about his brother, and then he’d been too mad at him—but his imagination had filled a wizard’s sanctuary with the strange and the bizarre. His imagination had gotten it pretty much completely wrong. There were scorch marks on the floor by the fireplace as though something burning had fallen out past the edge of the stone hearth, desk and shelves were piled high with notes in Aurek’s
illegible handwriting, ruined pens and uncut quills were scattered randomly about, and a large map of the city had been pegged to one wall and covered in strange notations, but there was no indication that the usual occupant of the room was a wizard.

No newt eyes. No frog toes. No bat wool. No dog tongues. Only the light over the figurine, light that had, as far as Dmitri could determine, no source.

The Natalia he remembered had not been beautiful like Louise was beautiful; she was softer, gentler, kinder. She always seemed to understand what he meant, and though she laughed frequently, she never once laughed at him. Aurek had adored her, and if she’d had a fault at all in Dmitri’s eyes it was in the way she’d hung on Aurek’s every word as though it were holy writ.

“Just what his overblown ego needed,” Dmitri muttered, looking down at the statue. “Another woman telling him how smart he was.” Their sisters had always been very vocal about that. “Frankly, I’m amazed he got his nose out of a book long enough to get married, let alone stay married for three years.”

As far as he was concerned, Natalia was the best thing that had ever happened to his brother. While she was alive, Aurek had been almost human.

Lightly stroking the figurine’s upraised arm, he shook his head. “I wonder why he had this commissioned in such a stupid pose.” Maybe, if Louise’s plan worked and he and Aurek actually held a conversation, he could ask. In the meantime …

He scooped up the statue and wrapped it carefully in a silk scarf, then a piece of sheepskin, then he tucked it into the bottom of a small leather pouch. Louise’s instructions had been explicit: “Do everything you must to see that it isn’t damaged in any way. We want only to get his attention; we don’t want him to turn whatever powers he might have against us.”

“I’m his brother,” Dmitri had reminded her.

“And he’s already made it clear that he thinks more of the figurine than he does of you.”

An inarguable observation.

Back in his own room, Dmitri shrugged into his greatcoat and set the pouch on top of the clothing he’d packed into a small carpetbag. Louise wanted him to stay at the Chateau until he and Aurek straightened things out between them. Considering how Aurek would likely react to the loss of the statue, Dmitri figured that his absence from the house would be a definite plus on the survival side of the ledger.

He stretched out his hand toward his sword, hanging over the bed on two pegs, and let it fall again. Swords were not a part of fashionable dress in Pont-a-Museau. He hadn’t worn his since he’d arrived. At the door, he turned and shrugged ruefully before recrossing the room, taking down the sword, and buckling it on. It looked ludicrous against the full skirts of his greatcoat, so he removed it and put it back on beneath the coat. It wasn’t a special weapon by any means. It wasn’t even an expensive weapon, but it was his, and he wasn’t going to leave it here for Aurek to destroy in a fit of petty revenge.

Jean roused as the front door slammed a second time, and he poked his muzzle over the edge of the roof. The brother of the human who’d killed his brother was leaving the house. Alone.

The wererat snarled softly as his prey moved toward the river. A boat would delay the hunt yet again, as it had when the young idiot left the chateau by way of the gazebo just before dawn.

Dmitri scanned the narrow channel of the river flowing turgidly past the house, but there were no boats close enough to hail. Shifting his carpetbag into his left hand and shooting a nervous glance back at the curtained windows, he started toward the nearest bridge.

“I guess it won’t hurt to walk,” he told a disinterested pigeon as it strutted from his path. “Maybe a little fresh air will make up for the lack of sleep.”

The prey was walking. Jean scrambled over the rooftop and down a drainpipe, eyes slitted nearly closed against the early morning light. There would be no white-haired girl arriving to save the prey this time; the family went abroad by day only when it had plans for mayhem the night could not fulfill.

I’ve never seen this place so dead. Dmitri paused on the arc of the bridge and stared upriver and down, looking for some sign that he wasn’t the only living creature awake in the city. A sudden bang whipped him around only to see the tiny figure of a servant struggling to close an upper shutter blown back by the wind. He watched until the … Man? Woman? At this distance he couldn’t be sure.… until the servant succeeded, then started walking again, feeling reassured.

The black slate roof of the Renier estate on Delanuit Island was visible over similar rooftops on Craindre Island. Dmitri stared at the rutted path cutting through the ruins in the center of the island and then at the safer, longer road that led around to the northeast bridge. He’d just borrowed his brother’s most prized possession, and all at once, taking the shorter route to safety made a great deal
of sense. He’d never have dared cut across the island at night but, in the pale light of day, it seemed foolish to trade a possible risk for a probable one.