by Martha Wells
They came up for air after what seemed an interminable time and stood in the kitchen with the scullery door open for the cool breeze. Nicholas was wearing one of his Donatien disguises, the one that made him look about ten years older. Althise didn’t know him as Nicholas Valiarde and he intended to keep it that way.
Althise, leaning on the cracked counter, shook his head. "I can’t do much more than confirm what you’ve already discovered for yourself. Yes, he was alive when it happened, though not for long. Whoever did it used a very sharp knife, and it probably happened no more than a day before you found him. The remaining eye is cloudy and the skin is discoloring. The others have been here much longer, some days, some weeks." He looked up at Nicholas wearily. He was an older man, his hair graying and his face marked by perpetual weariness and defeat. "I know I’m not being much help." Althise had been told what was basically the truth: that Donatien had been pursuing a man who had threatened him and stumbled on this house.
Nicholas shook his head. "I’ve begun to realize I may not be able to do much with this. We can’t keep sneaking in here to investigate—someone is sure to report us. Althise had tried his best but his best hadn’t been good enough for the College of Physicians, either. Doctor Cyran Halle may be Ronsarde’s mouthpiece and a pompous bastard, but I wish I had him here now, Nicholas thought reluctantly.
A startled gasp from Althise brought him out of his own thoughts and he jerked his head toward the open scullery door. There was a figure framed there, between the shadow of the room and the wan light from the ragged garden. It took Nicholas moments to realize it was Arisilde Damal.
"Ari, I didn’t think you’d come," he said, startled.
Althise sagged back against the counter, relieved that the apparition was evidently expected, and muttered, "And I thought my nerves were gone before I came here."
"Yes, well, Madeline’s message said it was urgent." Arisilde came into the kitchen slowly, as cautious as a cat treading on unfamiliar ground. His greatcoat had once been of very good material though now it was threadbare. He hadn’t bothered with a hat and his fine hair was standing up in wisps all over his head. He nodded a distracted greeting to Althise, then looked down at Nicholas, his violet eyes confused. "I’m not at my best today, I’m afraid. We don’t know the people who live here, do we?"
"No, we don’t. In fact—"
"That’s good." Arisilde was relieved. Pale and battered and somehow otherworldly, he could have been mistaken for a particularly feather-headed member of the fay, but the size of his pupils was almost normal and his hands weren’t trembling. "Because something terrible’s happened here."
"Hey," Lamane called from the foyer. "We found something else in the cellar!"
Nicholas refused to allow himself to speculate as he followed the man down the cellar stairs and into the stinking chambers below. Arisilde trailed after him but Althise stayed behind in the kitchen. Nicholas was glad of it. He had told Arisilde not to mention names in front of strangers but it was simply better not to rely on his discretion. They turned down toward the opposite end of the hall, lit now with several oil lamps. As Cusard, Crack and Lamane made way for Nicholas, he felt a cool rush of dank air.
The passage had appeared to end in a bare wall. Now a section a few feet wide and about half a man’s height stood out from it, revealing a dark opening. Nicholas knelt to look inside and saw a rough tunnel supported by moldy brick walls, leading down into pitch blackness. Crack knelt beside him and said, "Look."
He held the lantern out over the floor of the tunnel, a mix of dirt and brick chips, then pushed the slide down. There was a faint glow emanating from the floor and walls. "Perfect," Nicholas said softly. "How did you discover it?"
Crack put the slide up again. With Crack, it was always difficult to tell, but Nicholas thought he was excited at the discovery. "We knocked on the walls. Cusard made the lock work."
Nicholas stood up to look as Cusard showed him the small hole on the outer side of the false door. "It’s an old trick," he explained. "Slide your finger in that hole, push up on the lever, and snick goes the bolt." He added grimly, "You can open it from the other side, too. Lets you in and out, this door does."
Arisilde had taken Nicholas’s place at the tunnel entrance, crawling half into it. He sat back now, closely examining some substance on his fingers. "Nic, this is the same stuff that was on that coat you brought me, and those pieces of fabric from that drowned boy’s clothes. It’s a residue caused by a type of necromantic powder that hasn’t been used in Ile-Rien for hundreds of years. Isn’t that odd? I can’t think who would have made it."
Nicholas stared at him and Arisilde’s vague eyes grew worried. The sorcerer said, "That was you that brought me those things to look at, wasn’t it?"
"Yes, of course, but—"
Arisilde sighed. "Thank God. I thought I was going mad."
"But I didn’t think you’d looked at them at all. Why didn’t you tell me last night?"
"You saw me last night?" the sorcerer demanded. "What was I doing?"
"You don’t remember— You said you had something important to tell me. Was that it?"
Arisilde sat down on the filthy floor and tapped his cheek thoughtfully. "It might have been. Did I give you any hints?"
Nicholas ran a hand through his hair and took a deep breath. "What about the powder from the golem? Did you learn anything from that?"
"The powder from the what?"
Nicholas looked sourly at Cusard, who was regarding the ceiling with pursed lips, and Crack, who was staring down at the sorcerer with a puzzled expression, and gave in. "Never mind."
"Maybe I’ll recall it, you can never tell." Arisilde was on his hands and knees now, crawling into the tunnel. "Let’s see where this goes. I love secret tunnels, don’t you?"
"My back’s bad," Cusard said quickly.
Lamane immediately asserted that his back was bad, too. "I know, I know," Nicholas said impatiently. "I want to see it for myself, anyway."
Crack was already following Arisilde. Nicholas crawled after them.
"You don’t need the lamp," Arisilde was saying, partly to Crack and partly to himself. "Well, I used to know how to do this." Light flared in the tunnel suddenly, soft and white. "There we go," Arisilde said, pleased. The spell light seemed to emanate from all over his body.
Nicholas’s fear was that the tunnel would prove to be only a repository for more bodies, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Crack glanced back at him and muttered, "I should go first, in case we run into something."
"It’s all right," Nicholas told him. "Arisilde is more capable than he appears." In fact, the sorcerer was acting more like himself than he had for a long time. Nicholas added, "But thank you for not claiming a bad back."
"I like this," Crack said simply. Then, as if realizing that statement needed more explanation, added, "Finding things out. I like it better than stealing."
So do I, Nicholas thought, but he wouldn’t say it aloud.
"The tunnel gets wider here," Arisilde reported cheerfully. "I think we found the sewer." In another moment this supposition was confirmed by the sound of trickling water and the fetid smell of sewage.
The tunnel widened and opened into a ledge, a few feet above a stream of putrid water flowing through a round, brick-lined sewer. Nicholas got to his feet, one hand on the damp wall to steady himself. Arisilde swept his hands over his battered coat, gathering the spell light into a ball, then set it in midair where it hung suspended by nothing and illuminating the tunnel. "Here we are," Arisilde said. "Is this where you thought it would lead?"
"It’s where the one in the Mondollot House cellars led," Nicholas told him, thinking of the hole in the wall of the wine vaults that the first ghoul had fled through. He heard a scrabbling and put it down to rats. "I think—"
It came up from below the ledge, too fast for him to move, to shout a warning. He could only fall back against the wall as the claws grasped for his neck and the maw gaped i
n the withered, hate-filled face. Crack shoved an arm between them, trying to seize it around the neck, and its teeth started to sink into his arm. This gave Nicholas the chance to grab its head, to push it away, but it was too strong. Then Arisilde was suddenly behind it, catching the thing from behind with a handful of its lank dead hair. The spell light flickered and suddenly the tremendous force shoving Nicholas against the wall was gone. He stumbled, caught Crack’s arm and steadied him as the other man almost fell backward over the edge.
The creature lying at their feet bore little resemblance to the ghoul that had whipped up from beneath the ledge and nearly torn them apart. Nicholas stared down at it, amazed. This thing was barely a pile of rag and bone, held together by shreds of skin and tendon. He managed to clear his throat and release Crack’s arm. "One of the ghouls," he explained.
Arisilde squatted next to it, careless of his balance on the ledge, and picked up one of the bones thoughtfully.
Crack was rubbing his forearm where the creature had planted its teeth. "Did it get you?" Nicholas asked, worried. Crack shook his head and showed his coat sleeve, unpunctured. "In another moment, Ari. . . ." Nicholas found himself almost speechless, which didn’t happen often.
"Yes?" Arisilde looked up inquiringly.
"Thank you."
The sorcerer waved it away. "Oh, no trouble at all, no trouble at all."
Nicholas looked around again. They travel through the sewers, but we knew that already. There didn’t appear to be anything else here to see. Octave, connected with this house, with the ghouls, with necromancy.
"This isn’t a ghoul, precisely," Arisilde said suddenly. "It’s a lich. The necromancer obtains a long-dead corpse—very long dead, in this poor fellow’s case—then animates it with a spirit that has been enchained to do the necromancer’s bidding. Of course, the easiest way to obtain such a spirit is to kill an innocent victim in an act of ceremonial magic."
"Like that man was killed in the cellar?" Nicholas asked.
"No, that was something else, another way to raise power." Arisilde glanced around the tunnel expectantly. "There’s another aspect to the lich-making process. The remains that contained the enchained spirit still, um, hang about, you know. As revenants. Mindless, soul-dead creatures. I don’t see any around here, though." Arisilde waggled his brows thoughtfully and frowned up at Nicholas. "Necromancy is such a messy business, and someone’s been very busy at it. Very, very busy."
The woman who called herself Madame Talvera looked darkly at the passersby on the other side of the railing and said, "Communication with the spirits isn’t a game. For those of us who embrace it truly, it is a religion."
Nicholas nodded encouragingly. Knowing he needed to question another practitioner of spiritualism about Octave, he had been working to arrange this meeting since the day before yesterday. He had found Madame Talvera by asking a couple of old acquaintances whom he knew dabbled in the pastime and also in confidence work. Neither of them had heard of Octave before he had appeared on the scene this year, but both had recommended Madame Talvera as a reliable source of information.
The cafe was on the Street of Flowers, just within the borders of the Philosopher’s Cross. Madame Talvera hadn’t wanted to go any further into that area, because she said she was afraid of witches. Nicholas was glad she didn’t seem to know what Arisilde was; if she had realized that the vague young man sitting next to her and rendering cream pastries into their component parts before devouring them was a powerful Lodun-trained sorcerer, she might not have been as forthcoming.
He had been agreeably surprised that Arisilde had wanted to come with him. After crawling back out of the tunnel, he had had Cusard and the others close the door and leave Valent House. Before going, he had made Arisilde look at the oddly melted wall in the room with the vivisected body. All the sorcerer could tell him was that it had been done by a great release of power, definitely magical. When Nicholas had asked him what sort of magical power, Arisilde had replied, "Very bad power," and that was all he would say.
The other tables under the striped awning were occupied by tradespeople, but they were close enough to the vicinity of the Cross that no one cared too much about the state of their clothes, which had suffered greatly from the crawl through the tunnel. Nicholas had only had time to remove his Donatien disguise, which he didn’t wear during the day in public if he could help it.
A wind stirred the trees in the strip of garden that ran down the center of the street and the strong scent of rain filled the air. Nicholas stirred his coffee and said, "Is it proper to use one’s religion to earn money?"
"No, not at all. A gift is permissible, but it should be freely given and not more than the giver can easily part with." She made a sharp gesture. She was Aderassi, olive-skinned and hawk-featured, dark hair pulled back into a severe bun, serious dark eyes. She wore a black, plainly cut dress with a high collar and her hat had a small veil. "There are tricksters, who make tables rock with their toes, and imitate strange voices. You’ve heard of these things?" At his nod she shook her head grimly. "Such things are to be expected. There are men who make their living pretending to be priests, also."
She touched her glass thoughtfully. He had offered to buy her lunch, but all she would have was water. "It is not a thing of sorcery. The etheric plane is free to anyone who will strive to open their mind to it. The Great Teachers of spiritualism, the Sisters Polacera, have written of many techniques for schooling the senses to embrace it. Speaking to the dead is only a negligible part of what we do. Truly, taken altogether, it is a way of life."
It’s a cult, Nicholas thought, though a rather harmless one as cults go. He knew about the Polaceras and the other intellectuals who had started the spiritualism craze. "Do you know of a man purporting to be a spiritualist who calls himself Doctor Octave?"
"Oh, him. Everyone knows of him." She looked disgusted. "I see why you wish to know these things. He has taken money from you perhaps? From someone in your family?"
"He’s been most troubling to me, yes."
"I first saw him six or seven years ago, when the Polacera Sisters still lived in Vienne. They live in the country now, outside of Chaire. Much more conducive to spiritual living, the country. And of course it’s very nice there, near the sea. But anyway," Warming to her story, she leaned over the table intently. "He had been to circles held at other houses, by lesser devotees of the movement, but when he came to one of the Polaceras’ circles at their old house in Sitare Court—" She shook her head. "Madame Amelia Polacera ordered him to go, saying his shadow in the ether was as dark as a well at twilight and she would give him none of her teaching. Many important people were there. Doctor Adalmas. Biendere, the writer. Lady Galaise. I’m sure it was most embarrassing for Octave, but—" She shrugged and admitted frankly, "I was glad she sent him away."
Madame Amelia Polacera may have something after all. Either that or she’s simply a marvelous judge of character. Nicholas asked, "And you saw no more of him after that?"
"I heard he left the city and was studying privately with someone. It was not my concern, so I paid little attention. Then early this year, he returned and became very fashionable, holding circles for wealthy patrons. Many people are curious about spiritualism, but the true devotees will not hold circles for any but the pure and those who truly wish to learn. Octave does it as a party trick." Her lip curled. "The Madames Polacera will be greatly angered when they hear of it."
"Did Octave ever show any sign of knowing sorcery?"
She looked startled. "No, he was no sorcerer. Madame Polacera would have known, if he was."
Nicholas nodded. Perhaps she would at that. "There is just one more thing, Madame. If you wanted to contact a spirit, would you need something from the dead person’s corpse? A lock of hair, perhaps?"
Madame Talvera frowned. "No, of course not. Hair, once it is cut, is dead. It would be of no more use than a cut flower. There is a technique that allows one to see visions of a person, living or dead,
using something that they once wore close to their skin. Jewelry is best. Metal is very good at holding the impressions of the glow of ether that surrounds every living soul."
Arisilde was nodding agreement. "Hair, skin, bones are more useful in necromancy," he added.
Madame Talvera shuddered. "I have no knowledge of that and I wish none." She stood abruptly, collecting her little black-beaded reticule. "If that is all you wish to ask me. . . ."
Nicholas stood and thanked her, and watched as she made her way through the tables and out to the street. A light rain had started, which she seemed not to notice. "I hope I didn’t frighten her off," Arisilde said, worried.
"You may have, but she’d already told us everything she knew of use." Nicholas left some coins for the waiter and they strolled out onto the promenade. "She’s bound to be nervous of being associated with necromancy." 1 see.
Nicholas had held off on questioning the sorcerer about Edouard’s work, knowing that if what Arisilde had told him last night was the truth, then the less he thought about Edouard the better. If Ilamires Rohan had known Edouard was innocent and still let him be executed, revenge was all well and good, but. . . . But I’d rather have Arisilde, Nicholas found himself thinking. "I know how Octave is contacting the dead," he said carefully.
"Oh, I must have missed that part. How?"
Nicholas felt some misgivings at further involving Arisilde in this. But he remembered how the sorcerer had destroyed the ghoul in the sewer, so casually, as if that display of power was not even worth comment. I suppose he’s in less danger from Octave than the rest of us are. "He’s using a device very like the ones Edouard made with you and Asilva. He must have had access to Edouard’s notes to create it, but everything that survived the trial is at Coldcourt and hasn’t been disturbed. That leaves you and Asilva. . . ."
