Tarnished (23 page)

Finally, she stopped outside a set of polished wood double doors. The carvings on each were exquisite. Dragons and tigers and ornate birds tangled together in a frenzied dance. A war? A struggle?

“I’ll be here when you come out.” She knocked smartly.

The door swung open, without any hands that I saw. A faint mist of perfumed smoke rolled out to greet me.

I blinked.

“Best never to keep the Veil waiting,” Zylphia whispered.

With my heart in my throat, and my stomach roiling uncomfortably, I took a deep breath and stepped inside.

The floor was utterly bare.

The walls were not.

I had never seen such ornate paper as that which covered the walls of the Karakash Veil’s chambers. It gleamed like silk embroidery, reflected back the firelight in a thousand shades of crimson and gold. It was as if I’d stepped into the heart of a furnace, only it was dragons and tigers that reared at me, not flame.

In front of me, two stocky men in red trousers and odd, undecorated tunics bowed to me, their hands in their wide bell-like sleeves. Each sported a black topknot of hair.

They didn’t look alike. One had a long, hooklike nose while the other had lips so wide his mouth was almost fishlike. But they moved alike, each in step as they gestured an arm to the interior—the opposite arm, so that I stepped through them like two halves of a gate.

The room had been divided by silk screens on polished wooden frames. The fire crackled merrily behind one, and almost immediately, I found myself sweating. A soft haze clung to the air, oddly sweet but with none of the properties I’d come to associate with Chinese opium. Incense, I think, but spicier than I’d ever seen them use during Mass.

It was vaguely reminiscent of Cage.

Hawke
. Of course I meant Hawke. We weren’t so intimate—
friends
, I hastily corrected myself and gave it up, shaking my head. I didn’t know what to think. Not about that, not about this room.

Another set of dividers had been placed halfway across it. More of that opulent crimson silk, with ornate gold scrollwork embroidered along its length. It comprised three panels, much like the other screens I picked out.

I saw no one else. I frowned. “Hello?” I called. “Is there anyone here?”

There was no answer but the pop and sizzle of wood sap.

My frown edged deeper. I didn’t have time for this.

I turned, took one step when a whisper of sound behind me caused me to pause. I glanced over my shoulder. Though nothing had moved, I was almost certain that I wasn’t alone.

I looked at the Chinese men, who looked upon me with blank eyes. Then again at the screened room.

I cast my cards to the wind.

“I’ve no time for games,” I told the men, moving toward the door.

They didn’t move, but they didn’t have to. I caught the subtle tension in both as they grounded their weight. A simple shift to the balls of their feet.

A fight? I could fight.

Although if they fought at all like the storied Chinese warriors I’d heard about, I was in trouble.

“Take no more steps, Miss Black.”

That wasn’t Hawke’s voice. It wasn’t any voice I recognized, either, and it had come from behind me. Or, I realized as I spun, behind the crimson screen.

There was no silhouette. Only a disembodied voice. Male? Female? It was impossible to tell.

“Who are you?” I demanded. “Come out where I can see you.”

“That will not be possible,” said the calm voice. Not a trace of an accent graced the English words, although the inflection was . . . off. Too careful, almost too precise. As if the speaker had practiced until every last trace of dialect was erased.

I narrowed my eyes. “Are you the Karakash Veil?”

Something drifted from behind the screen. A muffled laugh? A sigh? “So eager, are you? So impatient. Where are your manners, Miss Black?”

“I have no face to which I must be polite.” And no way of ascertaining to whom I was speaking, for that matter. Maybe I
should
have been more cautious.

But I was exhausted, and ill.

“Ah.” The tone remained all too calm. “A very English point of view. We shall, as they say, get to the point. We understand your life was saved by members of this Menagerie.”

Saved? I said nothing, my hands settling to my corseted waist.

“A great deal of magic—”

I snorted. I didn’t mean to, but it escaped before I could muffle it, loud and most unladylike. The voice paused.

Was it amusement I heard as it asked, “You do not believe in magic, Miss Black?” Was it curiosity? Or was it something less forgiving?

I cleared my throat and said curtly, “Magic is simply the word people use to describe something they have no explanation for.” I was beginning to feel foolish, standing in the middle of a bare floor and addressing a silk screen. But I wasn’t so impolitic as to use the terms
unenlightened
or
ignorant
.

My host was not so kind.

“Ah. Regrettably, this very unenlightened belief does not erase the fact that you brought
móshù
into the Menagerie.”

The word slid across the faded remains of my memory like a sharp blade. I flinched. “Mo-shoe,” I repeated. It didn’t sound at all the way the disembodied voice said it.

“The word, broken to its basest point, means ‘magic.’ More precisely, it is someone
else’s
magic brought into our home. Dangerous, Miss Black. Dangerous to all parties involved.”

I narrowed my eyes, but I didn’t have to look to know that the men behind me hadn’t once shifted position. They were waiting. For an order to take me down? A command to kill me?

I squared my shoulders. “I didn’t see any of this mo-shoe,” I said flatly.

The voice sighed. “Please, Miss Black, show the language mercy. You may use your native tongue. We shall endeavor to keep up.”

My stomach pitched suddenly, and I was spared the effort of responding to the thinly veiled insult by the necessity to keep from throwing up the bile rising in my throat. I swallowed hard, teeth clenched, shutting my eyes as if blocking out all the red and gold could salve my insides.

It didn’t work.

“Are you feeling unwell?” asked the voice, not wholly unkindly. Decidedly, I thought, clinically. As if I were a specimen in a glass cage. “That’s to be expected. You were barely saved from a most unfortunate end.”

That was too melodramatic, even for my taste. “What do you want?” I demanded tightly.

“As was mentioned, you brought outside magic into the Menagerie. As well, one of our
w¯ush¯ı
was forced to expend a great deal of energy to ascertain the nature of your . . . dilemma.”

Dilemma.
A delicate word to describe the hell I’d gone through. I inhaled as silently as I could, trying to force down a rising tide of nausea.

Then I blinked. “One of your what?”

“Such magic is not easily obtained, Miss Black,” the voice continued, unruffled by my sharp question. “In other words, you owe us.”

My fists clenched against my waist. “Like hell I—”

“Need we discuss what
might
have happened had Mr. Communion not taken you here?” There was nothing delicate about the steely edge in the faceless voice now. I glared at the screen as it continued. “Let us be clear: you would not have survived. Oh, your body would be ambulatory, as it is now, but your mind would no longer be within it. Your very soul ripped asunder by the creature that assaulted it.”

I had no words. None. Was this person as barking mad as I was beginning to suspect?

“Shall I translate into words your
scientist’s mind
”—the voice sneered the words—“can understand? Pay attention, Miss Black, we are not accustomed to explaining ourselves.”

Bully for the Karakash Veil. “I’m listening,” I said evenly.

“The . . . drug, as you so called it, weakened the bond between your body and your soul.” The voice behind the screen said this in easy conversational tones, as if every word didn’t sound like something out of a penny dreadful found in a gutter. “While so weakened, your body was as undefended as an empty castle, do you understand? And like a castle, it was under assault.”

Impossible.

“While we’re sure that the ma—the drug acted as the catalyst, Miss Black, we lack proper understanding of how. Rest assured, however, that if left to your own devices, you would now be something not dead and not alive. A revenant, enslaved.”

“Fine,” I bit out. “You kept me safe while I was out of my skull, thank you
ever
so much.” He—she?—was talking debt. I couldn’t help my sarcasm. “So I owe you. I’m a collector, I can easily repay.”

“Easily?” The word stretched out, a thoughtful sound. “Perhaps.”

“I won’t perform,” I told the screen. “If you’ve any thought of dressing me up in pretty paint, you may as well strip the payment from my hide now.”

I’d swear the room dipped in temperature suddenly. There was no sound, but gooseflesh tore over my arms, rippled down my spine.

For a long, aching moment, silence reigned.

Then a breath. “Do not ever,” the voice said, so softly, so icily that I repressed a shiver, “presume to tell us our business, Miss Black. You are our employee. You will do as we command. Should we choose to, as you so quaintly suggest, strip the payment from your hide, that is exactly what we shall do, and we shall do it on our terms.”

My weight shifted, and I heard the rustle of movement behind me. My shoulders went rigid as I pictured the Chinese guards reaching for me. Ready to obey any directive.

I set my jaw, but before I could force any graciousness from my tight throat, the voice continued in the same cool tones. “Despite your apparent desire to be so used, you are not fetching enough to garner the same price as even the plainest of our sweets. It would take you far,
far
too long to redress your debt in that manner.”

My head reeled. Saved and insulted all in one breath? I bit my lip.

“Therefore,” the voice continued crisply, “we agree to those terms. In exchange for saving you from the rings—”

“But you just said I wouldn’t fetch a price,” I cut in quickly.

“We said you would not fetch as
swift
a price.”

This was rapidly spiraling out of control.
Nothing for nothing
, Hawke had said. My own need to assure I’d be left out of the ring was dropping me farther into debt.

I gritted my teeth, one hand splaying across my stomach. “Is that what you told Zylphia?” I demanded. “Pay with her body or pay with her hide?”

The voice was silent a moment. When it spoke, I was given the undeniable sense that my host was answering me only because he or she—bugger it,
he
would do—wished. “Zylphia already fulfills the role of garden flesh. Punishment must take another form.”

So she had been whipped. “Why? What had she done?”

“There are no secrets from us, Miss Black. We do, however, expect a certain amount of decorum from our employees, which now includes you.” The voice steeled. “Do not attempt to hide anything from us, and you will not feel our bite.”

My eyes narrowed. So they’d found out Zylphia had hired me.

“Fine,” I said evenly. “I won’t—” I caught myself.

I’d already said the word
perform
once. The Karakash Veil, if that was who my host was, had taken it to mean I chose not to sell my thinly retained virtue.

I bit down on my tongue, hard enough to hurt. I didn’t market my unique skills. I never have. But if I bartered for immunity from the circus as a whole, I could lose even more. I’d have to step carefully. Cautiously, I amended my statement. “So, I won’t become a sweet. What is the price of that reprieve?”

“In exchange, you will take Zylphia.”

“Take her? Take her where?”

“Clearly, you are meddling in affairs of magic and lacking entirely the ability to understand it.” I locked my lips closed before I argued further with the Karakash Veil’s outmoded sense of thinking. “Therefore, in order to fulfill your duties to us, you require someone who can. Zylphia’s bloodline will ensure she is useful.”

Her bloodline? I frowned. “What bloodline?”

“A
useful
one, Miss Black.”

Unlike my mysterious host. Except I couldn’t take Zylphia anywhere. I needed to get home, and I needed to do so without spilling my secrets any more than I already had. I shook my head. “Zylphia is a sweet, not—”

“If you do not take and keep her with you, we shall sell her.”

Ice pitted in my stomach, and suddenly, I was too angry to be ill. “You wouldn’t dare,” I said, taking two steps toward the screen.

Hands grabbed at me, much faster than I ever expected possible. I didn’t sense even a whisper of motion behind me. Although I was allowed to keep my own balance, the implacable grip at my upper arms told me
that
was only a matter of courtesy.