Reign of Beasts (15 page)

T
he sickness started that nox. The five of us were curled up in Tasha's bed, not wanting to be alone.

I awoke in darkness to hear Livilla sobbing, and it was a short while before I realised it wasn't just an ordinary bad dream. She had the nox sweats, a high fever. Lysandor wasn't looking good either, shivering as he and Ashiol talked in low voices about how to smuggle Livilla to a dottore.

‘I know one,' I said. They looked at me, and now wasn't the time to mention how hot my skin felt, or how everything seemed to be blurring before my eyes. ‘If he's still there. He worked at an apothecary across from the Vittorina Royale. He was a bit of an old crook — I think we can … well, not trust him, but if we pay him enough he might keep his mouth shut.'

‘Garnet, go along with Poet to grab the fellow,' said Ashiol flatly. ‘We can always see to his silence later.'

‘Is that an order?' Garnet challenged him.

‘For fuck's sake, we don't have time for pawing the ground,' Ashiol growled. ‘Argue the point later. Punish me later if that's what you want. Livilla needs our help.'

Garnet scowled, but jerked his head at me and we left together. We heard Lysandor coughing as we scrambled up into the city. Livilla wasn't the only one who was sick.

When we reached the apothecary's, it was empty and no amount of pounding on the doors would rouse anyone from the apartment above.

Garnet pressed his fists angrily against the cool glass of the windows. ‘You haven't sworn an oath to me yet,' he said, staring in as if the cure for Livilla might appear on the shelf nearest to him. ‘Will you be my courteso?'

‘Of course,' I said, surprised he had to ask. ‘Where else am I going to go?'

‘Back to your theatre?'

He looked across the street to where the Vittorina Royale queened it over every other building. There were broadsheets plastered all over the boards at the front, advertising the harlequinade and this year's Saturnalia pantomime. They still called themselves the Mermaid Revue. A small fragment of my old life holding steady between those walls.

‘I don't want to go back,' I said, despite the small twitch in my stomach at the thought of it. ‘You're my family now. Of course I'll swear — we all will.'

‘Ashiol won't,' Garnet said, his eyes cold. ‘He'll come up with some excuse, I expect. He won't swear allegiance. He can't stand the idea of me being above him. He won't take orders from me.'

‘He might surprise you,' I said.

Garnet laughed shortly. ‘You, who watch us with those beady little eyes of yours, taking in every weakness and foible, you really believe he will kneel to the son of a servant?'

I could make no such observations. The sickness had gone to my head, making it ache dreadfully, and I couldn't see very well. But I had watched enough of Ashiol and Garnet together. There was love there, as well as competition.

‘You needn't worry about me,' I said. ‘I'll swear.'

Garnet brushed his hand over my cheek, then leaned down and kissed my forehead. ‘Thank you, little ratling.'
He turned back to the window. ‘Is there anything in here that can help Livilla?'

‘Poultices maybe,' I said dubiously. ‘Something to bring the fever down. Pastilles to soothe her throat …'

Garnet smashed the glass with his fist, spraying blood and glass everywhere, and cupped his hands as a stirrup to lift me inside. ‘If he does swear, then I'll finally know whether I can trust him,' he said thoughtfully. ‘That's something.'

As I stood on the glass-strewn floor of the apothecary, passing items out to him, I felt her coming. Closer and closer, bringing something dark and awful with her. My headache sharpened, the pain stabbing me between my eyes.

‘She's not dead,' I breathed. ‘Garnet, Tasha's not dead.'

Garnet's hand shook as I passed him the last of the poultices. ‘She's dead,' he said in a terrible voice. ‘I know that much.'

He scooped me back out of the window, set me on my feet, and we turned to face her.

Tasha. It was our Lord and yet not our Lord. She walked on unsteady, grey-white feet. I stared, trying to bring her into focus through the pain in my head. There was a stench about her — that familiar scent of her skin and hair and animor mixed with dirt and blood. There was something else there, too, a wrongness. If I had been in animal shape, I would have turned tail and fled whimpering into the darkness.

‘Not fair,' Garnet said in a broken voice.

Tasha laughed, and it was then that I knew it wasn't really her — the sound was cold and wrong. Tasha had always been warm. Some days, the heat of her had knocked us to our knees. She wasn't here; it was just a semblance of her presence.

I could see her in sharp focus now, but nothing else around us. My skin was hot all over. As she moved closer
to us, I fell to my knees, unable to keep upright any longer. The poultices we'd been stealing lay scattered on the ground and I stared mindlessly at them.

‘You made me this,' she said in a throat that was no longer made for human words.

‘No,' said Garnet, close to tears, or something.

‘Oathbreaker,' Tasha hissed. ‘Because of you. My blood brought me back. You brought me back, traitor boy.'

She reached out to touch his face and I was overwhelmed by the stink — not of her body, which had hardly had time to rot, but of the power clinging to her. It was like animor, but so wrong, turned inside out and upside down. Topsy-turvy, I thought hysterically, remembering that it was Saturnalia. A bad festival for me. Madalena had died, and Tasha had dragged me into the Court, and I had killed Saturn, and Garnet had killed Tasha. The daylight people thought that Saturnalia was a time for joy, but I knew better. How could a festival in the coldest part of winter be a happy thing? No wonder it stank of death.

‘Don't let her touch you!' yelled a voice. Many voices.

Saved, we were saved. It was Ashiol, and he'd brought help, and I let myself slump to the cobbles, overwhelmed by the sickness that Tasha had brought back with her. It was up to them, now. The cubs and whomever they had brought with them. All I could do was die.

 

I was cold when I awoke, so cold that I thought I had died after all, but then I heard Livilla's soothing voice and I slipped back into sleep.

Next time I awoke, Ashiol was there, sitting at the end of my bed, telling me how the Lord Priest had saved Garnet's life, that they hadn't been able to stop the Tasha-shade, she was haunting the streets still. Just as I lost consciousness again, I heard his whispered confession: that he had promised allegiance to Priest in return for saving our necks, mine and Garnet's.

‘He'll hate me for it, won't he?' he asked.

I closed my eyes. He didn't need me to confirm what he already knew. Garnet's prediction had come true and he would not forgive Ashiol for it.

S
aturnalis became Venturis and Tasha's shade stuck to the city like greasepaint. The Creature Court didn't only have the sky to fight any more. Livilla came to my bedside, grey and twitchy, telling me about the daylight children who had died already from the plague that began the nox Tasha died. They called it the Weeping Fate.

Garnet visited me sometimes. He had recovered from whatever it was Tasha's shade had done to us, faster than we mere courtesi. He hardly even coughed any more. He said nothing, did nothing, just sat with me. I opened my mouth more than once to tell him it wasn't his fault, and then kept my silence.

He laughed when he told me that Ashiol and Lysandor had both sworn allegiance to Priest, but the laugh sounded hollow. Normally I would look to his eyes for the truth of it, but the fever had damaged my sight too badly for me to read him that way. The world was blurred.

I could still hear Tasha. It wasn't a loud sound, just a faint echo that drifted through the Arches from time to time. She was miserable and broken and dead, but she couldn't lie down. Every time I thought that maybe the silence would last, she started again. Whether I was asleep or awake, I could hear her.

‘You hear her, too,' I said. ‘Don't you?'

Garnet fell silent, and I wanted to yell that I couldn't see him, it wasn't fair to not use words. Then he reached out and took my hand in his, skin cool against my warmth. ‘It can't last.'

 

It lasted for a market-nine, and then another. Tasha's voice sounding in our ears; Tasha's shade trailing sickness and death through the streets of the city above.

Ortheus demanded that the Seer give him answers, that she tell him how to banish Tasha once and for all. Heliora tried, she really did. She wore herself ragged, throwing herself into the futures over and over, until blood flecked in her eyes and on her lips and Ashiol carried her bodily out of the Haymarket, prepared to fight the Power and Majesty himself to keep her from destroying herself. Priest supported his new courteso, letting him keep Heliora in the Cathedral. Ortheus didn't challenge them.

There were no answers coming from anywhere. People died. People died. People died.

‘They blame us,' Garnet said once, pacing back and forth on the sandy floor of the den. ‘All of them. The Lords and Court think this is our fault.'

‘Your fault,' said Livilla in a clear voice. She had been dazed and distracted since Tasha's death, taking more potions and powders than usual. It was angel dust today, which made her alert and feisty. ‘They blame you.'

Garnet growled deep in his throat, but didn't pounce on her.

‘Ortheus says we should stay out of it,' was my only contribution. Our snake of a Power and Majesty had sent Argentin to my bedside specifically to tell me that the ghoul trailing contamination through our city was no concern of mine.

‘Ortheus can't solve this problem,' said a dark voice, and I didn't have to stare at the familiar shape in the
mouth of the tunnel to know it was Ashiol. Lysandor was at his side.

‘What are you doing here?' Garnet demanded in an unfriendly voice. ‘I thought you served a new master now.'

‘We're not done with the last one yet,' Ashiol said grimly. ‘I don't give a frig what Ortheus and Argentin have declared. Tasha was ours. It's up to us to release her. The Power and Majesty would have done it by now if he knew how.'

Lysandor cleared his throat. ‘Celeste has been letting me read Lord Saturn's journals. He wrote down theories about how the Creature Court worked, the history we've lost, even what lies beyond the sky. He talked to the Smith, to the Seers … I've been trying to learn if anything like this has ever happened before.'

‘If it happened in Saturn's lifetime, Ortheus would know,' Garnet said scornfully.

‘Maybe,' Lysandor said hesitantly. ‘He had this theory about the cleansing properties of the Lake of Follies. There are stories about it vanquishing devils in the old days.'

‘And how do we convince our dear departed Lord to get her feet wet?' said Garnet.

I could hear the edge in his voice. We were in dangerous territory now that he felt control slipping from him.

‘Poet,' said Ashiol, sounding so bloody sure of himself.

‘Me?'

I was the youngest of them, could barely stand up after my first brush with Tasha's taint, and — though I had admitted it to none of them — I could barely fucking see. I had only been out of bed a few days, able finally to walk on my own two feet provided I squinted to check how close the walls were. There had been a few embarrassing tumbles. ‘Tasha always loved your voice,' said Ashiol.

Livilla laughed sadly. ‘Well, of course,' she said. ‘That would do it.'

 

There are two feast days in Venturis in honour of Saint Carmenta, the oracle who announced the end of the skywar and led the people of Aufleur out from their underground city to start life anew. Or, as the Creature Court call her, that lying bitch. The daylight folk celebrate her through songs about the hoped-for future.

The last time I sang for Tasha was the nox before the first day of Saturnalia: a carol about plums and sweet coffee and toy soldiers. She had fallen asleep with her hand resting on my hair, smiling as if she were a child under the spell of a lullaby. Those moments we had together were rare, but there are days when I can't push them out of my mind. She loved me; I know she loved me. More than my mam, who left too young. More than Madalena, who was stuck with me. Tasha had chosen me: I could never forget that. By forgiving Garnet for what he had done, I had betrayed her as surely as I had betrayed Madalena.

There was a little pavilion in the lake that the priests floated on during summer festivals. I didn't know how the cubs had got hold of it, but it was out there now, in the middle of winter, waiting for me under boughs of winter greenery and cotton bunting.

I couldn't see far in front of my face, just the grey darkness that comes not long before dawn, and the flicker of the scarlet and purple ribbons that fluttered around the poles of the pavilion.

What kind of repertoire do you use to lure your former mistress to her death once she has become a ghoul of pestilence and plague?

I sang the songs that she had always liked: sad and angsty ballads, war songs, childish rhymes that said nothing and meant everything. Then, feeling alone and vulnerable — the others were around somewhere, but not within touch; they could have abandoned me for all I knew — I started to sing the songs that I liked best: my
favourites from the Mermaid and the Vittorina Royale, comedy routines to music, character pieces.

Just as I was close to giving up, the chill air making my voice stutter and catch in my throat, I heard from across the shore the same song reflected back to me in a singing voice I hadn't heard in years. Livilla; she had a peach of a voice, untouched and still halfway innocent. I closed my eyes, because darkness was better than the blurred lantern light, and I heard another voice, and then another. All of Tasha's cubs, singing for her. For a few minutes, it felt like we were inside each other, all limbs of the same body, connected in a way we had almost forgotten about. Tasha was gone. We would never be held together the same way again. But right now, on this nox, we were beautiful.

She came for us. We all felt her. I could sense Livilla's revulsion, Garnet's guilt, Lysandor's fear. Nothing from Ashiol; nothing but walls put up to keep the rest of us out.

I kept singing. The others fell away. I couldn't see her; didn't want to see what she looked like now, if she was even really here, or just spirit.

An ugly stench overwhelmed me, but I kept singing. A darkness of fear and despair swept over me and my skin started heating up. I couldn't survive another bout of whatever illness she carried with her. The thought of losing what little eyesight I had left …

I heard the others talking, as if they were close to me, though I knew by the feel of their animor that they were on the shore, nowhere near.

Lysandor: What's this going to do to the lake?

Garnet: Poison it, obviously.

Ashiol: It's an ornamental fucking lake; it's not like it's the city reservoir.

Livilla: I can't see him, I can't see Poet. What will she do to him?

Garnet: I doubt somehow she's going to join him for a duet.

I started singing again, to drown out their voices more than anything, and, after a few moments, Livilla joined me. I had missed the sound of her voice. Why hadn't Tasha asked her to sing?

Too late to ask that question now.

The floating pavilion swayed under my feet. The creature that had once been Tasha was close. I sang harder, louder, deeper. Twelve years old and it was the performance of my fucking life.

Sight or no sight, I knew the moment she set foot into the lake. It was hard to miss. The water's temperature dropped suddenly, fiercely. Frost ran up the poles of the pavilion and the wind-stirred ribbons froze solid.

I forgot all the words to all the songs in the world. There was nothing else. My voice faltered. In the silence that followed, I heard Livilla's thin voice getting stronger — a sad song from the cabaret that sometimes formed part of the Mermaid Revue. It was Madalena's favourite, she'd always sung it when she was drunk, and I didn't even know the title because we'd called it ‘Madalena's brandy song'. It was about wanting to be loved, wanting to be the stellar on someone else's stage, not just another player in the chorus. Half the words weren't words at all, but silly sounds that weren't so silly when sung by a mournful drunk, or a demme on the shore of a lake tinged with the frost of a dead woman's shade.

Jazz is good like that. Songs for every occasion.

Tasha, or the thing that used to be Tasha, waded deeper into the water Nothing happened. There was no scream, no cleansing. What was left of her body didn't shatter like glass under a mallet. The water around me and the pavilion merely grew colder under my feet, and my breath fogged the air, and she was getting closer, closer.

It would be nice to say that we banished her with love, that the power we had from being together was enough to conquer her. It would be nice to say that we gathered the
strength to send her to a better place; that we held hands and chanted a song with meaningful lyrics and turned her to dust. That would be a story worth the telling, wouldn't it?

Instead, she reached the pavilion and dragged her grey body onto the frosted platform. I backed up as far as I could go, and cried out as she lunged for me, her hands grabbing. She felt like bone and plague all at once, and just being near her was enough to make me struggle for breath.

Garnet rose up behind her, dripping wet, and snapped her neck. She didn't even seem to notice, her thin fingers still clamped around my throat, her fingertips drilling into me like spikes of ice. This close, I could see her, could see the grey patterns on her face, the broken skin, the shadowy shapes inside her that animated this thing that was no longer Tasha. It was as if the nox itself was leaking out of her.

The sun should have risen half an hour ago.

Light, orange and crackling, bright and hot, flashed past my eyes. Ashiol yelled, and Lysandor, and I felt myself burning as the flames took hold of everything — me, Garnet, the Tasha-thing. The pavilion broke under our feet, submerging us all in the cold, contaminated water.

It tasted like death, and I was happy to drown in it.

Livilla found me, and we came up out of the water together, her sodden strands of hair stuck to both of us. She buried her face in my chest, and I stared through my misty vision to see whatever it was she didn't want to see.

The cubs, all three of them, were in their animal forms. The lynx, the gattopardi and the cats clung to the wreckage of the pavilion, shadowy shapes tearing and gnawing at something in the water. It was a moment before I realised what it was that they were doing. They were eating her, piece by piece.

 

Livilla and I made it to shore and sat there shivering as the sun finally rose over the city. One by one, the cubs joined
us, naked and man-shaped again. They flopped down on either side of us, breathing hard.

‘Thank you,' Garnet said in a low voice, his eyes closed.

Ashiol leaned over in that casual, thoughtless way he had and dropped a kiss on his forehead. ‘We're family,' he said. ‘We'll always be family.'

But Tasha was gone, and Ashiol and Lysandor had already sworn allegiance to Priest. Garnet was a Lord, and the rest of us were courtesi. It would never be the same again.

When we returned to the Arches, we stayed together as long as we could, but then we went our separate ways, Ashiol and Lysandor walking up the canal path to the Cathedral, while Livilla and I followed Garnet back to the den.

‘Nothing has to change,' said Ashiol, but Garnet turned away from him.

Back home, Livilla burrowed into the covers of Tasha's bed. I sat in the chair that was mine, the one with the squeaky leg that showed I was the lowest in the pecking order. I could take Ashiol's chair now, but I didn't want to make that gesture.

Hands came over my face, cool and gentle. I blinked, looking through the glass of a pair of spectacles. The room came into sharper focus than before.

‘They were in the haul from the apothecary the other week,' said Garnet.

I was pretty sure that wasn't true. He had to have gone back for them specially.

I leaned back, letting my neck rest against his hand. ‘Thank you.'

‘You won't leave me,' he said, and there was barely a hint of question in his voice.

‘Never,' I vowed.

Garnet sighed. ‘You're lying. Everyone lies, whether they know it or not.'

I could still feel the imprint of his hand on my neck long after he walked away.