House of Sand and Secrets (32 page)

Carien stoppers her pipe and sets it down on the table. Like a jackal surprised by a gardener in the early morning, she is a creature in a liminal time, out of place and wary but not yet afraid. “What,” she says after many minutes have slid by, “exactly can you offer me?”

I hold up my hand, fingers raised. “Two things.”

Carien waits with a curious stillness, watching me as if all her future rests on what I say next. Perhaps it does, more than even she realizes.

The thing I am about to offer her is immense and ugly, as only the greatest bribes can be. I lower my hand slowly to her belly, pointing. “I can rid you of that.” Next to me Jannik’s muscles tense under his coat. He stamps down quickly on his anger and shock, but I can feel it still, scraping at the inside of my head, sand on raw flesh.

“How?” she snaps, the eagerness in her rising.

“Yes, Felicita, how?” Jannik speaks between gritted teeth.

“With your help. With magic.” I keep my eyes open and my chin raised, because if I close them – if I let myself weaken even the slightest – I will fall. I can feel it already sweeping up in me. I thin my lips and manage something that is not a laugh, not quite. The cold beast, rising. “It can be done.” I am always so sure of the things I can do, because failure would leave me nowhere. I once held a storm of nightmares contained, I can scrape away this little gobbet.

“Interesting,” says Harun. “You consider your control so delicate.” He’s still looking out the window, keeping up his pretence that this conversation barely interests him.

“It will be.” Do not falter. “And I can offer you a death.”

“If I wanted my husband killed I think I would have done better than come to you.” She sneers.

“Not his.” I stare at her face, unblinking. “Yours.”

“My own?” Her expression has not altered; her wild eyes are the emotionless amber glass of a child’s doll.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“You’ve done this before?”

And I have, oh dear Gris, I have. “If you’ve no ties that bind you here, we can dispose of you. There can be an accident. We then set up a body to take your place, suitably disfigured, of course – fire would work well, especially if Eline chooses such a weapon against us; it would be easy to assume you no more than an unfortunate victim of some inter-House rivalry.”

Harun stops looking out the window. “A body?”

“We have an entire city of plague-corpses at our disposal,” I say. “No point in letting the dead go to waste.” The words come up choked and tight, though I’m aiming for a kind of grim humour.

“And I am to be an unlucky accident?” Carien laughs hard and bright. “How very fitting.”

“Just so. What is that you want, Carien – art, freedom? I can give you these things. In Pelimburg.”

“I have no desire to starve to death in some stinking Pelimburg hovel.”

“I would not allow that.” For the first time it feels that instead of sentencing her, I am offering her a choice better than the one I made. She will run, that much is true, but she can also shake off the mantle of her old name and re-invent herself. I would be able to convince Mother and Lenora to take in an artist. Mother especially would love to be seen as some kind of patron. “Who do you want to be?”

* * *

The night fall
s late, the sky rain-cleaned. We sit in silence. Harun has given us the use of a private set of rooms. Everything in the bed chamber is blue, and the candle holders are the only bright point. The furniture is dark, but comforting. The room has a serenity like the final moment of drowning.

It is only Jannik, me and Carien in the bedroom. It is so still that I can hear the rustling of silk as we breathe, our collected air mingles, and in a way the three of us are closer than any person can be. We are bound in guilt.

For those who haven’t had the foresight to take rake’s parsley, or have fallen to ill luck, there are places tucked deep into alleyways that will take care of those unwanted unborn children. Desperate Hobs and low-Lammers will go to them.

Some of them even live. It’s not a chance taken lightly. My faith in myself drops a notch, and I shore it up. “Jannik?”

“I do not want to do this,” he says, but the protest is tired. He will do it, because I have asked. We have. Some of Carien’s wild animal must have spoken to him. I wonder if Jannik saw the thing in her that I did – that Dash-like need to claw at the world and to have it take him on his terms only? Jannik was in love, once. He has always fallen for the wild creatures, the ones which refused to be tamed. If he’d met Carien on a rain-drenched street in Pelimburg – if she’d been the one standing there with her umbrella – would it have been her and not me that he married?

Or would the whole world have been different? Carien‘s a Reader. What use would she have been to Dash – he wouldn’t have bothered to snag her, to fall a little in love with her. He and Jannik might still be passing books of poetry back and forth, meeting in shadows and stolen moments.

Where would I have been?

“Carien,” I say and my voice ghosts about the room, trembling at the lit fatcandles, making the flames dance. “You’re certain you want us to do this?” All I can give her is this last moment to make sure the decision is hers and hers alone. I sit at the foot of the bed on which she’s lying, while Jannik - who seems desperate for a chance at flight - skulks by the locked door.

She raises her chin, not looking at either of us, staring instead at the stained geography of the ceiling. She drags her hands through her curls, freeing them. When she turns her head to us, her eyes glitter with the candle-light. “There is nothing I want more,” she says in a low cat’s hiss, as if she is about to start a fight, claws out.

There, it’s said, and now we must press on. I can do this. I have practised a little with Jannik in preparation, using his magic to move things, to test my control. It has been something like joy. And something like terror. To use his power my mind needs to be completely open. No secrets.

Just magic. There is a well of it within him, deep and dark and sweet.

“Drink,” I say and pour her a strong infusion of willow-bark. It will be little enough help. I’m loath to give her lady’s gown too – although it will help her sleep. I need her to be with me while we do this – at the slightest chance I am doing something wrong, she needs to be able to tell me.

Her fingers tremble against mine as she accepts the drink, but that is the only sign she gives. Her face is calm, her body limp with a resigned expectation – a strange lethargy that I put down to that moment when one realizes they have changed their future irrevocably.

I’ve been there – it’s like being drugged, shifted out of your body and mind, and walking alongside yourself, watching everything you do with curious detachment. “You need to tell me if you experience any pain worse than cramping.” I take the cup from her hands. She’s drained it.

“I understand. Must you repeat everything as if everyone around you had merely a child’s mind?”

I flush. “Lie back, close your eyes.” Carien does as she’s told and when she’s no longer looking at us, I turn to Jannik. “Please?”

He crosses the room to stand next to me, one hand resting on my shoulder. The weight of it comforts, but also leaves me with a flickering sense of unease. I feel pinned in place, committed now to what I have offered. When Jannik drops his mental guards I am unprepared for how much power he is offering. The hiss and slide of sand pours through the room, and I look down involuntarily, expecting the ground to be covered in beach-white sand, dry and unforgiving. There is nothing. Only the plush pile of a woollen carpet woven of Ives blue and Mata gold

“Let go,” says Jannik.

“Of what?”

“Indecision.”

He’s right, I am still holding my house—my room – tightly locked up, like a music box holding childish secrets. I fling open the door of my mind and I am immediately caught in two worlds. Jannik’s labyrinthine mental house folds my room and my secrets into his. My childhood bed sinks into white sand, and the sea mews fly in through the open window. They bring the wind with them, and all the drawers of my bureau rattle open, sending paper whirling about the room. The breeze smells of heat and river water instead of the cold salt sea.

My secrets dance about the room, written in a black slanted hand that I have perfected to appear less childish than it used to. The papers fold themselves, take on new shapes, spread their sharp hard wings and fly out into the desert.

“Are you ready?”

I turn. Jannik, barefoot as he always appears here, is waiting for me, one hand held out. Faint after-images dance around him, snaking ghostly ribbons between us. I wonder if this is some outward sign of our bond, if these ribbons will grow deeper and darker the longer we are together. I take his hand and his magic surges through me, freely given, unbelievably powerful. I suck in a gasp of air and find myself back in the closed chambers of Carien’s room. The air is damper here, filled with our exhalations, with the humidity of MallenIve in summer.

When I was still a War-Singer, adept of scriv and air, I knew I was powerful, that with training I could have been as great as some of the famous generals of our House. But that – that was nothing. Jannik’s magic unleashed willingly into my control is immense, unbelievable. I am reminded of his mother, of the time we met and it seemed to me that her power could just about strip my skin from my flesh unless she kept it in constant check. Jannik has always been this powerful, and I never understood that. Perhaps the vampiric hierarchy is in place not because the females are the only powerful ones, but because only women have the ability to tap into that power.

I whirl his magic about myself, and it dances at my command, part of me, but not. A sentient thing, almost playful despite what it is about to do. With a quick inhalation to centre myself, I focus on my task. Carien is lying still. Her hands are palm up on the coverlet, relaxed. The room is sweaty with her trust. I close my eyes, and sink into the darkness inside my head. Everything goes silent around me. With one hand pressed against her stomach, I breathe slower, stiller, and the room changes.

Vampiric magic is not like scriv. It moves between skin and blood, it follows the shape of heartbeats, the chambers of the human temple. It fills them and walks between them.

This is not a simple matter of knowing the body like a chirurgeon, and slicing with a blade of sharpened air. It’s about something far stranger and harder to explain.

Heartbeats echo, loud as if I had my head underwater. Distant drums of the body. I sense my own, slow; Jannik’s in time, and deeper-pitched; the scatter-thump of Carien’s, and the smallest sound of all. So fast and bright.

I bring the magic neatly to rein and, with a tenderness I almost did not expect of myself, I end the child’s song. I want to ask it to forgive me, that I would have made it my own, if I’d known how. But there are no words in magic.

The first cramp hits me as I open my eyes. Carien is staring at me, her amber eyes bright as lamps. When she speaks it is with a happy ferocity. “It’s done?”

I grimace, pressing one hand to my stomach, and nod at Jannik to leave. I would speak with Carien. She has no need of further humiliation. He closes the door softly behind him, leaving us alone in a room already beginning to smell heavy with blood. “I will have servants bring you cloths and food and drink.” With my hand still hard against the pain in my belly I rise from the bed. “When you have recovered I will organize safe passage for you to Pelimburg.”

“And then what?” Her face has gone pale.

“There are people who will help me find you a place. I will set you up with a patron.”

“So I’m still to be beholden to someone else?”

“Only for a while. You are Iynast. Reinvented, I believe it will not be long before you have thrown the Pelimburg art world into chaos, and gathered many patrons to choose from. I think you will find yourself to be a flame, surrounded by little moths.”

She manages a weak and painful approximation of mirth. “And there I will burn all those who want me.”

“It’s your choice. I think there are better ones to make – to burn steady and long, rather than flare, consume and die out after too brief a moment.” The pain is damping and rising, and I wince as another surge passes through me. Perhaps using Jannik’s magic too often will have its toll on me the same way Harun suffered to take his scriv.

Carien narrows her eyes. Her dark hair is stuck to her waxy skin, the sweat on her temples golden dew in the candle light. “How many lives have you lived?” she asks me. “You’re still just a girl. You’re younger than me.”

“I know.” I smile sadly at her. “And today I feel it. I am overwhelmed.”

“You don’t look it.”

“I was trained to wear a mask, like all House girls.” My face relaxes. “You were never one, were you?”

She shakes her head. “Garret concocted some fancy tale about House Sidora, but I’m an accident. A throwback.”

“He hid your ancestry?” He would only have done that were she not from a House; Great, High, or Low. She is most certainly not a Hob. “A low-Lammer?”

“My mother was. My father.” She shrugs. “I’m no Mata.” She touches her dark-brown hair with the palm of one hand. “Whoever he was, he gave me something of his lineage, the ability to Read.”

“And Eline Garret created for you some suitable history that allowed him to marry you.” I gnaw at my lower lip. “Why did you say yes?”

She laughs. “Why did your bat say yes to you?”

The lance catches me. I withdraw from her room and beckon for servants to bring her necessities, to give her lady’s gown and let her sleep. I have other enemies to destroy.

Downstairs I am greeted by silence. Jannik must have already told them that it has been done, that I have successfully bound Carien to us and set her on her path against her husband. There is no sign of Merril. Undoubtedly he has been locked away out of sight, far from Isidro who, of us all, finds him most upsetting.

“Well,” says Harun. “It will not be long before Eline makes another move.”

Especially now that we have taken more than mere playthings away from him or humiliated him at Council. “Do we wait?” I ask as I walk to the table. Someone has bought more wine. Harun must have decided to refill his depleted stocks. At least he still appears to be sober and standing. I make no comment, instead taking the glass of apple-coloured wine left on the table for me. “Or do we use this to bring him to heel now?”