The Mirador (34 page)

Simon made a face. “All right. I agreed to help.”

“Other’n that, just stick close, both of you. Nobody wants anything, um, unfortunate to happen, but they’re gonna be nervous, and nervous people do stupid things.”

“All right. Ready, Gideon?”

Gideon nodded. His clerky, choirboy face was as hard to read as ever, but his eyes were bright. He looked better than I could remember him looking in a long time, and I wondered if maybe he hated the Mirador as much as I did.

“Okay,” I said and opened the inner door.

The resurrectionists had remodeled pretty extensively inside. The huge openness of the nave was gone, except for a narrow corridor that went straight up for three stories. It was like being stuck in a crack. The rest of it they’d partitioned off with a hodgepodge of stuff: bricks, boards, stone columns from somebody else’s church. The doors looked like they’d tried to get one from every district in the city and had mostly succeeded. There was nobody in the hallway at all.

“Now what?” Simon whispered.

“We knock,” I said. I picked a door, a good big mahogany one that had probably come off one of the abandoned townhouses in Lyonesse, and used the knocker. It echoed like a thunderclap. Simon winced.

“They know we’re here anyway,” I said. “They ain’t stupid. There was a guy watching from the roof when we got out of the fiacre.”

Both of them gave me a weird look, but it wasn’t my fault if they’d never learned to be nervous about what was over their heads.

I could feel the resurrectionists watching. There were probably a double-septad of spyholes in their makeshift walls. More so than most guilds, they had reason to be twitchy about unexpected visitors. And I could feel them thinking, trying to figure out what to do with us. They knew who I was, and they knew Simon was from the Mirador, and they probably didn’t have a clue about Gideon at all.

But they also knew that if we’d come this far, they couldn’t outwait us. You come down to Ruthven from the Mirador, you ain’t gonna get bored and go away. They waited long enough to let me know they weren’t happy about it, and then the door I’d knocked on swung open. The guy behind it looked like some of his own merchandise, he was that thin and his eyes that far back in their sockets. I was glad he was wearing a knitted cap, because I didn’t want to know if the rest of his head was as skull-like as his face.

“Yeah?” he said.

“I wanna talk to somebody knows about Laceshroud,” I said.

It threw him. Dunno what they’d been expecting—probably to find out that the Mirador was either coming down on necromancy like a ton of bricks or taking it up as a hobby—but for sure I was asking about the wrong end of the business.
“Laceshroud?”

“Yeah. Whoever knows the most about it.”

“Just a minute.” He shut the door.

“We wait,” I said to Simon’s raised eyebrows. Gideon was still looking around like a squirrel in a roomful of nuts.

We didn’t have to wait as long this time. I guessed they were hoping now that if they hurried up and humored us, we’d go away quicker. So the door opened again. This time, it was a little balding man with a round face. He bobbed his head nervously, and said, “Your lordships wished to speak to somebody about Laceshroud?”

“I ain’t a lordship,” I said, “but yeah, that’s what we want. Are you the guy to talk to?”

He wanted to say no and bolt. “I . . . I guess so.”

“Then let’s go somewhere we can sit down,” Simon said and smiled when the little man’s eyes jerked to him.

“All . . . all right. If your lordships would come this way?”

As we followed him, I said in an undertone to Simon, “I thought I said let me do the talking.”

“Sorry, but did
you
want to stand out there all day?”

Not much, but I also wasn’t sure we wanted to get caught back here in the resurrectionists’ maze. We all knew they didn’t want to tangle with the Mirador, but like I said before, people can do some downright stupid things when they’re frightened. And if the little man with us was a good example, the resurrectionists were scared shitless.

But we hadn’t gone more than a couple of turns before he stopped and opened a door, this one an old iron grille that somebody’d backed with a green brocade curtain. “Here,” he said and stood aside. Simon and Gideon went in, but I stopped and waited.

“Oh!” he said, going red. “I wasn’t going to . . . you couldn’t think ...”

“I ain’t thinking nothing,” I said. “Go on in.”

He went, and I followed him, closing the door after me.

It was a neat, small room, with one of the old stained glass windows for light. They’d only bricked up half of it, so you could see St. Lemoyne Harkness’s head and two crows over him in the weak blue sky. There was a table with four chairs, and some bookcases along the wall opposite the door, and that was it for furniture. We all sat down, and the little man looked around the table.

“I don’t know what your lordships are after,” he said. “I’m not really a resurrectionist—I haven’t been out on a job since I reached my third septad—”

“What d’you do?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know. I guess you’d call me a bookkeeper. I mean, I keep track of our finances and our membership and all the rest of it.”

“And you know more about Laceshroud than anybody else?” Simon said. The little man went the color of whey, and I kicked Simon under the table.

"Y-yes, my lord, I guess I do. You see, I’m
interested
.”

“Interested in what?” I said.

“Well, in history, I guess. I like knowing who all the people are and why they’re buried there. I know a lot about the Boneprince, too, but that’s not what you’re interested in?”

“Not right now,” I said, although all at once I was itching with questions. “We’re trying to find out something kind of particular. ”

“I’ll do my best,” he said.

“It’s like this,” I said. “A girl got picked up in Laceshroud last decad for digging up a body. I want to know what she was doing.”

“A girl in Laceshroud?” He was frowning, like that hit a nerve. “We don’t have many women, and none of them has anything to do with Laceshroud.”

“So she ain’t a resurrectionist?”

“What’s her name?”

“Guinevere Dawnlight.”

“No,” he said at once, and I could see that he knew what he was talking about.

“So if she wasn’t a resurrectionist, what was she doing there?”

“Who did she exhume?”

"Dunno. That’s the problem. She won’t talk, and the Dogs can’t figure it out.”

“Dogs,” he said with a sniff. “I could write a book on what the Dogs don’t know about Laceshroud. Two books.”

“Is there any way to figure out who he was?”

The little man thought. We’d got through his fear into his pride, and as long as Simon could keep his big mouth shut, I thought we were okay.

“I’m guessing there wasn’t any identification on the body?”

“Not that I know about,” I said.

“Hmmm. Well, there’s only one thing I can think of, and that’s for us to go there.”

“Go there?”

“Unless you know where he was buried?”

“The Dogs said the oldest part of the cemetery, but I don’t s’pose that’s much help.”

“I can think of five different areas that might be called ‘the oldest part of the cemetery,’ so no, not much.” He looked from me to Simon to Gideon and back to me. “I really will be happy to go to Laceshroud with you.”

I realized I was looking at Simon, too. “I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t,” he said to me.

“No, I guess not. Okay. We got a fiacre waiting outside.”

The little man caught the joke. His eyes crinkled into a smile, and he said, “Just a minute while I get my coat.”

There was no guarantee the Ynge would be of any use, even if I could find it. And I could not allow myself to forget, in my purely theoretical panic about a ghost of whose existence I had no proof of any kind, that I had another problem, an actual problem: ten greasy smoke-dark rubies in a wash-leather bag. I retreated to the Archive of Cinders, repressing with difficulty the desire to barricade the door. No one would look for me here; no one was likely to come here in pursuit of their own research, for the books in the Archive of Cinders were of interest far more for who had owned them than for anything intrinsic to themselves. Vey Coruscant’s books were here—the harmless ones, anyway, and if anyone had noticed that de Charon’s
Principia Caeli
was missing, they at least hadn’t said anything about it to me. Vey Coruscant’s books, Susanna Parmenter’s books, the books of the annemer heresiarch Arcadian Holter, who had preached that all people could be wizards if they would fast and abjure sex and meditate upon seven sacred symbols, the names of which escaped me at the moment.

There was only one table in the Archive of Cinders, and only one rather rickety chair. I moved a stack of books from the table to the floor, sat down, and took the Sibylline’s box out of my pocket.

The catch was hidden, but I knew the secret to it.

I shuffled the cards; I had to concentrate, unlike Mavortian von Heber, whose cards these had been. But some of my finger joints were stiff, and I had never been graceful.

I did not use the Sibylline for divination as Mavortian had, although he had taught me how. Or, rather, I used it for divination, but of a wildly different sort.

I shuffled the cards to rouse them, to get their power flowing, dark and clear and strangely rich. Noirant, I supposed the Coeurterre would call it. Then I sorted out the twenty-one trumps and the four Sibyls; the lesser cards, I had found, were not as responsive outside of the formal nine-card spread. I might proceed to that eventually, but I preferred to start with something simpler.

I shuffled the trumps and Sibyls and laid them out in five rows of five to choose a card to represent Malkar’s rubies. What I had realized in the Khloïdanikos was that the Sibylline offered a way, not merely to connect the world of matter and the world of spirit, for any act of magic did that, but to forge links between them, to invest enough meaning in a symbolic representation of a material object that the object could be consumed by the symbol.

At least, I hoped so.

The Khloïdanikos was clearly the Unreal City; even the shifting water-like instability of the card’s allegiances, with the Spire on one side and the Dead Tree on the other, suited the Khloïdanikos with its Omphalos which was not like the Omphalos of the waking Gardens and which made both Thamuris and me uneasy. And the world of matter was the Rock, solid, unyielding, inescapably
present
. But choosing a semeion—to borrow a term from what little Thamuris had told me of Troian divination—for the rubies was fraught and deeply unsettling.

Death was the most obvious and immediate choice: they were the remnant of someone dead, someone whose death I had caused, someone who had carried death in his train. But I was unwilling to reinforce that particular piece of symbolism; the rubies carried too much death already. I looked instead for something more neutral, something that would capture what the rubies were rather than who they had belonged to, and settled on the Beehive, the Parliament of Bees, signifying balance and cooperation, many things working toward the same goal. Like the fingers of a hand, Mavortian had said. Like the rubies in the rings that would have adorned those fingers.

I left the Parliament of Bees face up on the table, collected the other cards, shuffled them again. When their power was clear, I cut the deck and dealt three cards in a row beneath the Parliament of Bees.

Death, the Dog, the Prison.

I stared at the cards blankly. Death made sense—too much sense—but the Dog and the Prison? The Dog was loyalty, also the semeion of an animal, or of a person’s animal nature . . . I thought of the Two-Headed Beast and shuddered with self-loathing. The Prison was confinement, bad choices, dead ends. Also the need for solitude. The Sibylline, by its nature, invited a multiplicity of meanings.

But even if the Dog and the Prison were pointing to my own dark beast, what had that to do with the rubies? Or even with Malkar?

I collected the cards again, leaving the Parliament of Bees where it was, shuffled, cut, laid them out.

Death, the Dog, the Prison.

The Parliament of Bees led to Death, which meant at least that I’d aligned the symbols correctly; I might not
want
Malkar in my reading, but I couldn’t deny he belonged there. But Death leading to the Dog and the Prison . . . it made no sense.

“What in the world is the Dog supposed to mean?” I said under my breath. Loyalty to Malkar was not an option, and I didn’t care who was suggesting it.

I stared at the Dog: an enormous black creature, more bear or wolf than any dog I’d ever seen. It bulked across the face of its card, eyes red and mournful, clearly as loyal as it was savage.

No, it was nothing to do with Malkar. But it was linked to him somehow. Loyalty . . . savagery . . .

The answer came to me in a wave of cold nausea, and my hands clenched painfully. Mildmay. Of course Mildmay was the Dog, my savage, loyal shadow, dismissed as a near animal by those of my friends who even noticed him at all.