by Martha Wells
This theater was the Tragedian, one of the newest in the city. The wide sweep of the stage was lit by gas jets and the walls were delicately molded in white, pale yellow, and gold. The overstuffed seats in the boxes were stamped velvet of an inky blue, matching the plush seats of the stalls, and the curtains were yellow silk brocaded with flowers.
The curtain around the door was swept aside and Reynard appeared. He said, "Did you know the opera is absolutely full of thugs?"
"Well, there is a Bisran composer there," Nicholas said. Anticipating the request, he started to pour Reynard a glass of wine from the bottle breathing on the little table nearby.
Reynard leaned down to kiss Madeline’s hand and dropped into the nearest chair. "Besides him. The place is stuffed with thugs from the Gamethon Club and they’re blowing whistles, of all things. Of course, it doesn’t help that the damn Bisran is crouched up on the stage, giving alternate signals to the orchestra. It’s driving the conductor mad." Reynard was dressed much as Nicholas was, in black trousers, tailed coat, and straw-colored gloves appropriate for the theater. Reynard’s black satin vest only had three buttons as was de rigueur for someone who carried themselves as a bit of a dandy and Nicholas’s buttoned further up the chest, exposing less of his starched shirtfront, as befit his persona as a young though staid businessman.
Madeline lowered the lorgnette in alarm. "If someone blows a whistle during Arantha, I’ll have him killed."
"My dear, I would be devastated if you did not demand the favor of dispatching such an undiscriminating character from me personally. But to continue, the reason I went to the opera was to speak to someone about your Doctor Octave."
"I’m relieved," Nicholas said. "Go on."
"Octave appeared on the scene in just the past month, but he’s already done circles at three or four homes of the beau monde—not the sort of places I could get invitations to, mind." Reynard leaned forward. "Apparently, at one of the first of these exhibitions, the host hired a real sorcerer, from Lodun, to watch and to certify that Octave was not a sorcerer himself and that he was not performing any sort of spell. That’s what made his reputation."
"That’s odd." Nicholas shook his head. "There’s a sorcerer in this business somewhere." He had taken steps through acquaintances in the Philosopher’s Cross to meet with a spiritualist who might have an insider’s view of Octave’s activities, but real spiritualists were apparently elusive beasts and it would take a day or so to arrange the meeting.
"What do people say about him?" Madeline asked Reynard. "Are they afraid of him?"
"Not that I could tell. I spoke to several people and they all thought him a bit odd, but that’s fairly normal for someone in his business. Though the people I questioned were friends of friends, you understand, not anyone who had been at one of these circles. But tomorrow night Octave is descending far enough in society to preside at a spiritual evening at Captain Everset’s house. Everset used to be invited to court, but then there was that gambling scandal with the son of the Viscount Rale, so he’s a member of the fringe at best, now. He’s stark raving wealthy, though, which keeps him in company. The circle is being held at that new place of his a few miles outside the city proper. I managed to bump into him at the opera and coaxed an overnight invitation out of him."
"Was it his idea to invite Doctor Octave for a circle?" Nicholas asked. "If we’re going to walk into the good doctor’s lair, I’d like to have a little more forewarning than this."
"No, it was his wife’s idea. From what I’ve heard, she’s merely bored, sick of Everset, and trying to be fashionable." Reynard appeared to consider the matter seriously. "Everset is flighty, and not terribly clever. Not the type to be involved with this, I’d think." He sipped the wine and held the glass up to the light. "He’s invited me along to liven things up, but I wouldn’t have the man on a bet."
"Very good." Nicholas nodded to himself. "That should do nicely. I’ll come along as your valet."
"Good." Reynard downed the last of his wine. "It’ll be fun."
"It won’t."
"And what do I do?" Madeline asked, her voice caustic. She lowered the lorgnette to eye them critically. "Stay at Coldcourt and roll bandages?"
"But my dear, if Nicholas and I are killed, who else can we depend upon to avenge us?"
Madeline gave him a withering look and said, "What if he recognizes you? He knew Nicholas, he might know you as well."
Reynard shrugged philosophically and made a gesture of turning the query over to Nicholas, who said, "That’s a chance we have to take. Octave wanted something at Mondollot House and he was afraid that we had somehow discovered what it was. We have to find out how he knows about us." Madeline was right; spiritualists catered to people who knew nothing about real sorcery. Most were tricksters, fakes for the most part who couldn’t attract a ghost in the most haunted house in the city. But speaking to the dead was dangerously close to necromancy.
Necromancy was primarily a magic of divination, of the revealing of secret information through converse with spirits and the dead. There were plenty of simple and harmless necromantic spells, such as those for identifying thieves, or recovering lost objects or people, that did not require the spilling of human blood. There were scarcely any apprentice sorcerers at Lodun, at least not when Nicholas had been studying at the medical college there, who had not used a simple necromantic spell to derive hidden knowledge from visions conjured in a mirror or a swordblade. The more powerful spells did require the use of a corpse, or the parts of a corpse, or a human death, and the whole branch of magic had been outlawed in Ile-Rien for two hundred years or more. If any of the spiritualists had really been necromancers they would have found themselves on the wrong side of a prison wall long before now. That they were ignored by both the law courts and the sorcerers of Lodun showed how powerless they really were. Why would a sorcerer capable of making a golem bother posing as a spiritualist?
Nicholas turned his own glass to the light, watching the blood red sparkle. His hand still ached from the oil burns, though they hadn’t blistered. You don’t have time for this, he reminded himself. Octave was distracting him from the destruction of Count Rive Montesq, his real goal. Montesq had caused Edouard Viller’s death, as surely as if he had personally fired a bullet into the gentle scholar’s head, by making it appear that Edouard was experimenting with necromancy. Nicholas still didn’t know the full story; he had been away finishing his education at Lodun when it had happened and Edouard had said only that he had regretted accepting Montesq as a patron and that he had discovered him to be dishonest. The only explanation Nicholas could arrive at was that Edouard had learned something about Montesq that the Count found dangerous. What that was, Nicholas had been unable to discover and Edouard had refused to tell anyone anything about his work during the last months of his life.
Nicholas had managed to convince himself that the why didn’t matter; Montesq had done it and he was going to pay for it.
But Nicholas couldn’t simply ignore Octave. He knows we were in the Mondollot House cellars. If he also knows about the Duchess’s Bisran-stamped gold, then we can’t use it to frame Montesq. And he couldn’t afford to ignore the danger. Octave could send another golem tonight, even, he thought.
The house lights dimmed and the noise of the crowd swelled in anticipation before levelling off somewhat. It would never quite cease, but the performances of the actors and actresses in this play were absorbing enough that it would stay a background hum and not rise to drown out the dialogue entirely.
Any more discussion among themselves now, however, would cause Madeline to become agitated. And besides, Nicholas wanted to see the play himself. He said, "We’ll work out the details at dinner tonight."
The late afternoon air was chill, but Nicholas had lowered the shades on the coach windows so he and Reynard could view the approach to Gabrill House. The wide packed-dirt road led up through a stand of trees toward a triumphal arch, perhaps fifty feet high and wide enough for
four coaches to pass through side by side. As they drew nearer Nicholas could see the stones were weathered and faded as if the thing was a relic of some long forgotten age. He knew it had been built no more than ten years ago.
"Strange choice for a garden ornament, isn’t it?" Reynard said.
"If you find that odd, wait till you get inside. This place was built by a wealthy widow from Umberwald. She had two grown sons, neither of whom she allowed to inherit. She had smaller homes built for them—one on either side of the main building." Constructing opulent houses outside the city wall had become all the rage in the past few decades and they had passed many such, of varying degrees of size and wealth, along the way. It allowed for large gardens and the dirt roads out here were wider and tended to have better drainage than the ancient boulevards within the city proper. "Before Everset bought it last year the owners were selling tickets for people to come out and look at it."
"Yes, I’d heard that." Reynard adjusted the set of his gloves as their coach turned off the road and passed under the arch. "You’re not a sorcerer, Nicholas. What do you intend to do if this Octave takes exception to your presence with something more than another golem?"
Nicholas smiled. "Only you would ask that question as we are actually driving up to the house where Octave is." Two paved carriage ways led toward the house from the entry arch, splitting off to bridge a sunken garden where they glimpsed the tops of tall stands of exotic foliage. The house had been built backwards, so the facade facing them was a large colonnaded oval, which in other homes of this design would have given on to the back garden. But the architect had planned it well and the graceful columned portico had a mound of natural rock at its base, connecting it to the grotto of the sunken garden their carriage was passing over and giving the whole front of the large house the look of an ancient temple in ruins.
"Oh, I’ve no sense of self-preservation," Reynard replied easily. "That’s what I depend on you for."
"I suppose we should have brought Madeline, then, because that’s what I depend on her for. But even your reputation wouldn’t support a female valet."
"I don’t know about that." Eyeing Nicholas thoughtfully, Reynard said, "Seriously. What if Octave resents your intrusion?"
"Seriously, I only mean to observe Octave. For now," Nicholas said. There had been no disturbances at Coldcourt or at any of his other headquarters last night, though several of his henchmen had kept watch with firearms just in case.
The hooves of the horses clopped on stone as the carriage passed under an arched opening to the right of the portico and into a well-lit stone-walled passage. They were going through the ground floor of the house itself now. One of the flaws in the backward-facing design was that this was the only practical way to reach the carriage entrance.
The passage opened out into the cool air and late afternoon sun again and their coach pulled up in the semi-circular carriage court, overlooked by the elegant pillars of the back facade of the house.
Reynard collected his hat and stick. "We’re on." He nodded to Nicholas. "Good luck. And don’t embarrass me, my good fellow."
"If you’ll do me the same favor," Nicholas murmured. A footman was already running to open the coach door. "Reputation of the firm, you know."
"Of course."
As Reynard stepped down a man appeared between the carved set of double doors and came down the steps toward him. Our host, Deran Everset, Nicholas thought, and he looks quite as dissipated as Reynard said he would.
Everset’s clothes were foppish in the extreme, his waistcoat patterned with a loud design and his cravat tied in an elaborate way that seemed to interfere with any attempt to move his head and his lanky frame wasn’t well suited to the fashion. He was pale, with a long face and limp blond hair, and he was consulting a jeweled watch on a chain. "My God, you’re late," he said, by way of greeting. "And since when have you kept a coach?"
"It’s on loan," Reynard said, "from a very, very dear friend of mine." He clapped Everset on the shoulder, turning him back toward the house. "I hope you have a wild night planned for us."
"None of this was my idea. . . ." their host protested, the rest of his answer lost as the two men passed inside.
Nicholas stepped out of the coach himself. He stretched, keeping one eye on the doorway into the house as a real valet would, in case a butler appeared. "Can we take down the baggage?" he asked the waiting footman.
"Yes, your man’s the last guest to arrive, so there’s no hurry." The man scuffed one polished shoe against the clean-swept stones of the court, obviously bored. The house livery was dark green, with gold piping on the coat. "Need a hand?"
Crack, dressed as a coach outrider, had hopped down from the box. "No," Nicholas told the footman. "Thanks the same, though."
There was stabling for the horses and coaches built into the walls of the court. Some of the carriage doors still stood open and Nicholas counted at least three town coaches. Reynard had wangled the invitation so quickly there had been no opportunity to find out about the other guests. A terrace ran along the top of the wall; he could see urns of potted flowers and benches facing out into the rest of the garden. He knew the elevated terrace extended out from the back of the carriage court, crossing over the garden to reach a small elevated pavilion built to resemble a classical temple. It was isolated from the main house, but easily reached along the terrace by guests in evening clothes; if they meant to hold the circle anywhere else, Nicholas would eat his hat.
He took Reynard’s single case as Devis handed it down and exchanged a nod with Crack. Crack and Devis would be quartered out here with the coach for the night and would probably be too closely watched to slip out and be of any help to him. Hopefully, he wouldn’t need them.
The footman led him up the steps and through the open doors. Nicholas caught sight of an airy high-ceilinged vestibule, floored in what was probably imitation marble with the classical theme continued in frescoes with nymphs and graces that climbed the walls above a grand staircase. The footman showed him a servants’ door and Nicholas climbed a narrow plain staircase up two floors, hoping this would provide him an early opportunity to scout around.
But as soon as he reached the top he almost walked into one of the upstairs maids, who directed him to the chamber assigned to Reynard.
The room was well-appointed and the eccentricity of the rest of the house hadn’t been extended to the bedrooms, or at least not the guest bedrooms. Heavy damask draperies of pale yellow framed the windows, matching the ivory silk panelled walls and the cushions and covers on the couches, overstuffed chairs, and the delicate little tables. The bed hangings made up for this restraint with embroidered garlands, silk blooms, and a crown of ostrich feathers.
Nicholas had never employed a valet himself and was able to unpack Reynard’s case with speed and efficiency. While the guests were at dinner, maids would be in and out of the rooms, freshening flowers, filling the basin, and making sure the sheets were aired, and he didn’t want the room to look out of the ordinary. Finishing up, he took out his pocket watch—a cheap one, without any ornament, that he kept for this sort of disguise—and gauged the time he had until Reynard came up to dress for dinner. That would be an ideal opportunity to get an initial report on the other guests and whether Octave was present in the house yet. The more information he had to act on, the better.
He slipped out into the hall and quietly shut the door behind him. It was quiet, except for the faint hiss of gaslights inside their porcelain globes and muted voices echoing up the grand stairwell. He moved down the hall, quietly but purposefully, and without furtive caution. In a house of this size, with as many servants as this one had, and with the additional confusion of an overnight party, anyone who looked as if he knew where he was going was not too likely to be questioned.
He found the servants’ stair at the far end of the corridor and went down it quickly, coming out in a narrow low-ceilinged hall that ran toward the back of the house. As he passed an open door
someone called out, "Wait, there, whose are you?"
Nicholas stopped obediently. It was a pantry, a small room lined with glass-fronted cabinets, with china and silver plate gleaming inside. The man who had addressed him was gray-haired and stout, dressed in a dark suit and clutching a bundle of keys. The butler, obviously, Nicholas thought. There was a woman in the room too, a respectable-looking matron in a gray gown and an apron. Nicholas said, "Captain Morane’s, sir."
"Ah, go on, then." The butler turned back to the agitated woman in the flour-dusted apron. "No, tell Listeri that’s my final word."
"No, you tell him! I’m sick of his Aderassi chatter and you can—"
Without even having to deliver his carefully prepared excuse concerning gloves left behind in the carriage, Nicholas reached the arch at the end of the passage and the argument was lost in the greater clatter of the kitchen. The stove was a monolithic monument stretching across the far wall, copper fish kettles steaming on the burners. A long plank table was weighed down with molds, baking trays for meringues, and stone dishes for pies. Dressers standing against the brick-lined walls held the plain china and an array of silver pots for chocolate and coffee.
The cook, sweating under his white cap, slammed a pot on the range and shouted an amazing Aderassi profanity. From the hearth an aproned woman turning spitted capons over a sheet metal scallop shouted, "What do you know about it, you dirty Foreigner!" The door in the far wall banged open to admit two scullery maids struggling with a tub of water. Nicholas hastened to help them guide it in and deposit it on the tiles near the table, then left them to join their colleague in battle. He escaped through another pantry and out the door into the kitchen garden.
He made his way down a dirt path, past geometrically laid out beds for melons, cabbages, endives, and wooden racks for climbing vegetables. The wall to his left was lined with skeletal pear trees and bordered on the carriage court. There was a wooden door, a back entrance to the stables, but it was fortunately closed. On his right, over the top of the garden wall, he could see the side of one of the two outbuildings the widow had constructed for her sons. The gray stones were overgrown with climbing vines, but it looked as well-kept as the main house. Both were probably used for extra guest and servants’ quarters.
