Masque (The Two Monarchies Sequence)

by W. R. Gingell

  “Oh no!” I said absently, turning the folded paper between my fingers. I wanted to open it so badly that it was a conscious effort to prevent myself from doing so. “Only to the people I like. I’m very polite and correct to everyone else. Oh! Melchior! There you are at last!”

  The door shut as quietly as it had opened, and Melchior sauntered toward us, looking sardonic.

  “Told you she’d get in,” he said succinctly, in Lord Pecus’ direction.

  “I resent the implication of that remark,” I said, with dignity. “You should have checked the back wards properly when you went out, Melchior. But never mind that! Look, Lord Pecus has found a paper sewn into Raoul’s sash: we were waiting for you to open it.”

  “I’m surprised at your restraint, Carrots! It must have gone very much against the grain.”

  I hovered for a brief second between ladylike outrage and frank amusement.

  “It wasn’t easy,” I said, opting for amusement. A mistake, because amusement always makes me grin, and a grin, no matter how small, cannot be said to be ladylike. That was Lord Pecus’ fault, of course: if he hadn’t grinned that porcelain grin at me it would never have entered my mind. “Do open it, Melchior! You know I’ll never be able to sleep tonight if I don’t know what it is!”

  Melchior’s own grin faded a little. “I have an inkling. Intelligence has been steadily leaking from the Capital in the last six months: military manoeuvres, troop training, weapon capabilities, that sort of thing. We know it’s passing to someone in the Triumvirate, but I must admit I didn’t think it would be through Glause.”

  “Or Raoul,” I said, finding myself suddenly without the faintest particle of amusement.

  Lord Pecus was frowning: or rather, his mask was. “How sensitive is the information?”

  Melchior did something that buzzed uncomfortably through the room, setting my teeth on edge, and then nodded, satisfied. I do detest anti-espionage magic!

  “Some of it intermediate, things only of use in a full scale attack,” he said. “But then there are the little, unconnected pieces of information that should mean nothing, until you realise that they’ve begun to form a picture. It’s the little pieces that are worrying me.”

  Lord Pecus’ green eyes sharpened suddenly. “National Intelligence Bureau or International Alliance?”

  “Neither,” Melchior said. “The NIB and the IA have their own ways of dealing with these things: I only get involved when things get too convoluted. This is a crown matter.”

  “Black Velvet,” I said under my breath, and Melchior’s brow rose dangerously.

  “What do you know about Black Velvet, Carrots?”

  “I know enough to not speak of them,” I said frankly. “So these unrelated pieces of information have been from Black Velvet operations?”

  Melchior nodded. “As far as I can make out. And the things that we thought weren’t, turned out to be Black Velvet as well. We just hadn’t made the connection yet. Someone who knows as much, if not more than we do, is keeping their eye on us.”

  Lord Pecus said: “It’s the same here in Glause. I heard rumours through the IA, so I did a little digging in our own branch of er-”

  “Black Velvet,” supplied Melchior, with a glint of amusement.

  “Black Velvet,” Lord Pecus agreed, mild derision in his curved lips. “And I found the same thing that you did: someone has been leaking dribbles of apparently useless information to a Glausian citizen. Where it goes from there is anyone’s guess.”

  “What happened to your leak?” Melchior inquired, with a kind of professional interest.

  “I, ah- plugged it,” said Lord Pecus, unconsciously flexing his shoulders. “The king authorised an invasive interrogation but whoever was using him was very talented: I barely got out alive.”

  “So we’re both at a standstill.”

  “Only until I find out who killed your man,” said Lord Pecus, carelessly confident. “I’ve finished my preliminaries, but I’ll have to take him to my office. There are avenues I’d like to explore and all my equipment is there.”

  “And what are these?” I enquired, holding up a tiny glass bottle. As far as I could see, all it held was a hair; but there were more than twenty of the bottles, varying in size and content, on the side-table that had been dragged from its appointed place. Even the stitches Lord Pecus had pulled from Raoul’s sash were bottled, stoppered, and marked.

  “It’s a new branch of inquiry that I’m experimenting with. Magical scans can tell us what a victim last saw – providing, of course, that his eyes are still intact – and find traces of who was last with him.”

  “Lord Topher and I,” I nodded. “Very useful, but incorporeal. These samples are physical.”

  Lord Pecus matter-of-factly began to slip the little bottles into his pockets. “Yes. Samples that can’t be tricked into existence, and that can’t be planted without leaving traces that the magic scans will pick up.”

  Melchior, again with a professional interest, demanded: “What if the killer cleans the body?”

  “They don’t know to, yet,” Lord Pecus said, briefly grinning again. Under my curious eyes, bottle after bottle went into the same two waistcoat pockets and left no bulge. “I’ve only just begun to experiment with the theory, so the criminal element hasn’t caught on yet. They know we’ve begun autopsies, but this is my own branch of enquiry.”

  “Speaking of the criminal element-” Melchior added; “No, not you, Carrots, don’t look so guilty- speaking of the criminal element, how are we going to get the body out without half a dozen inveterate gossips seeing it?”

  “Oh, I’ve already done that,” said Lord Pecus.

  Melchior was looking impressed, which interested me: Melchior was not easily impressed.

  “Smooth shift!” he remarked. “Didn’t even feel it. Where are we?”

  “Pecus Manor. Lord Quorn will find his blue saloon a little larger than usual for a few days, but it shouldn’t inconvenience him too much. I gave them a morning room that I never use.”

  Lord Pecus held the door open, and I stepped into a wide, dark hall, gazing around me with all the curiosity that a lady has for the home of a man who has asked her to marry him. There were rich, dark floorboards beneath my thin dancing slippers, and the ceiling was braced decoratively with a series of massive, carved arches of the same wood. It was very large, very simple, and very male.

  At the end of the hall was a man I could only assume was Lord Pecus’ butler. He wore the correct air of dignity and deference, but there the correctness of his attire ended. He was in his shirt-sleeves, garters holding his cuffs away from his wrists, and he wore an odd apron that could have been made of oilskin, so shiny was it.

  “I am in receipt of your message, sir. Where is the body?”

  Lord Pecus gestured briefly at the door we’d recently walked through. “I’ll join you once I’ve shown my guests out.”

  I was disappointed but not surprised, and lingered behind Melchior long enough to see the butler enter the Quorn’s blue saloon with a businesslike air. I expected that we would shown to the front door, but Lord Pecus took us only a few steps down the hall to another door.

  “It opens into the palace gardens,” he said, to Melchior’s inquiring eyebrow. “It will mean a short walk only.”

  Of course a door in the Lord Pecus’ hallway would open into the palace gardens. I have always found magic a little disconcerting, but I couldn’t help feeling impressed as well: Lord Pecus was really very clever.

  The shift between hallway and gardens was barely perceptible, but when I turned involuntarily to catch a last glimpse of Lord Pecus, all I could see was the full moon between the shadowy bars of the palace gate.

  Melchior offered me his arm in the best royal manner.

  “Come, Carrots!” he said grandly, and added in a stage whisper: “Just don’t tell my wife I was out after dark with another woman.”

  By the time we arrived back at the Ambassadorial Quarters, dawn
was breaking in a rosy half-light, and the last of the guest were dilatorily straggling out. We slipped in unnoticed, and found Lord and Lady Quorn on the point of retiring to bed, leaving the considerable mess for the servants to quietly and invisibly do away with. Melchior and Lord Quorn melted away in the odious way men do when they are discussing things they think ladies shouldn’t hear, and I was left to help Delysia up to her bedroom. Fortunately, this made it perfectly easy for me to slip a sleeping draught into her bedtime chocolate, and before long Delysia was in bed, yawning prodigiously and protesting that she would never be able to sleep. In the midst of her protestations she fell asleep, little pink mouth dropped slightly open, and I left her to the ministrations of her maid.

  My own maid was waiting up for me, her eyes round and red from lack of sleep, and guarding my own pot of chocolate. I stripped in a businesslike manner, waving her off to bed, and slipped into one of my more sensible nightgowns, sipping at my chocolate. I wanted to think.

  My dressing done, I climbed into bed and sat with my arms clasped around my bent knees, staring at the foot of the bed in unseeing contemplation. It was not until I saw the blue rhinoceros peeking coyly around the doorpost that I realised that I, too, had been drugged.

  Melchior! I thought, growing swiftly too sleepy to be as indignant as I would be tomorrow. Unfortunately, the sleeping draught of choice in Glause tends to have hallucinogenic properties for a select few, myself included. In short order, I found myself floating on a downy cloud of softness with the blue rhino and a rather crosseyed ostrich for company.

  “Tomorrow,” I said firmly to one of the ostrich’s eyes, “Tomorrow, I need to find a new maid.”

  Chapter Three

  “My lady? My lady?”

  The voice sounded worried. Good, I thought, in some satisfaction. Marissa, my young maid, was no doubt having horrific visions of an eternally unwaking mistress, and the consequences attached. I toyed with the idea of remaining comatose until she left but it struck me reluctantly as taking things a little too far, so I sighed and sat up with unconcerned grace, as if my head were not pounding with a steady and malignant headache. I hate sleeping draughts with a passion.

  Beside the bed, my tray of breakfast was exuding a delightful, savoury steam that quickly permeated the room with an alluring scent of bacon. Of course, I say ‘breakfast’ in the loosest sense of the word: it was by now noon at least, judging from the glaringly bright patch of sunlight at present warming my toes through the bedspread. I could just see the searing edge of the middle sun through my window, and I found that my aching head didn’t appreciate the fact. The Triad is no closer in Glause than Civet, but it feels closer, with every searing sunbeam.

  There was also a city newspaper, but since the headline proclaimed nothing more sensational than the arrival of Lacuna’s newest prince, and in smaller print, the newest thing in gloves – gnau leather, for the discerning lady (and the lacking in taste, no doubt) – I felt that I was at liberty to ignore it.

  “My blue and tan walking dress, thank you, Marissa,” I said decidedly, wriggling until the breakfast tray fitted just comfortably over my legs.

  “Yes, my lady,” Marissa said, but she hovered by the door, twisting her apron between her fingers until I was forced to neglect my bacon and eggs to inquire what was the matter.

  “Nothing my lady,” the girl said, in an irritatingly gormless manner. If it was nothing, why was she still standing there? “That is, are you going out, my lady?”

  “I am, Marissa. Perhaps you wanted me to purchase you something while I am out?”

  This gentle sarcasm was lost on Marissa. Eyes wide, she said: “Oh no, my lady! But His Majesty asked me to summon you to the royal suite when you woke.”

  Chewing a mouthful of bacon and eggs thoughtfully, I considered leaving Melchior to stew in his own juice and go out just as I had planned to. But Melchior had an uncomfortable habit of making sure one regretted such decisions; and, after all, he might want to see me about the affair last night.

  “The walking dress, but keep the hat aside,” I decided. If I was to be wandering through the length and breadth of Delysia’s house, I did not want a hat compounding my headache. It was a very smart hat, businesslike in blue with just a bow to add frivolity, but only the great outdoors could make the tightness of the hatband bearable with such a pounding in my temples.

  When I was done with breakfast I sat down at the dressing table to allow Marissa to do my hair, absently playing with the haresfoot and powdering my fingers in the process. The remnants of the drug were making my thought processes a little slower than usual, and I didn’t notice that Marissa had curled, braided and basket-woven my hair to within an inch of its life until I looked up from my powdery fingers to see my face, pale and big-eyed in the mirror, made distressingly more so by the tightness of my coiffure.

  I sighed. “Marissa-”

  “It’s a royal interview, my lady!” Her eyes were wide and earnest. I have always suspected that I am not respectable enough for Marissa. Her sole mission in life is to see me perpetually coiffed and painted, in which goal I constantly disappoint her. I have earned the right to certain comfortable eccentricities by virtue of being an old maid, eccentricities I have no intention of surrendering, and it was a constant battle between us.

  “Very well,” I said, rising. Normally I wouldn’t think of letting Marissa and her big eyes inveigle me into going out in such a state, but happily, I had thought of a wonderful way both to deal with her and get my revenge on Melchior in one stroke. I took the hat from her hand quite cheerfully, choosing a favourite hair pin to match the blue. “Your fortunes have turned, child.”

  “My lady?”

  “His Majesty is very pleased with your obedience,” I told her, ignoring the fact that Melchior couldn’t possibly have told me any such thing, since I had not seen him yet this morning. No doubt he had been pleased, the beast! Marissa was not likely to call this fact to mind: her face was already glowing with a quiet, saintly pride. I have received my just reward, her demeanour said.

  “You’ll be very sad to leave me, I don’t doubt,” I added mendaciously. Marissa, the little traitor, was clasping her hands to her narrow chest, her shining eyes raised beatifically to my face.

  “Oh, my lady! Do you mean-”

  “You are now in the employ of the royal family,” I nodded. I wondered if she had even objected when Melchior gave her the drugged chocolate to give me. No, she would have thanked him for the honour, with that wide-eyed look of awe. At least I had had the decency not to corrupt Delysia’s maid: I had slipped the drug into her chocolate with my own hand. I had no place in my staff for a maid whose loyalties were not all mine. On the other hand, I could not bring myself to let the child go out unemployed, and she would undoubtedly be happier with another master. Besides, it would annoy Melchior immensely.

  “I congratulate you. You begin tomorrow morning, and you may have the rest of the afternoon to move your things to a room in the royal suites. I will not require your services again.”

  I left her with a small purse of coins, trembling and still trying to stammer out ecstatic thanks. Really, it was most uncomplimentary. Anyone would think that I had mistreated the child! I found myself grinning as I walked briskly down the wide halls of the ambassadorial palace: Melchior would regret his interference. The footman looked suspiciously at me when I asked admittance to the royal chambers: I wondered satirically if he thought I was the Laughing Assassin, and grinned a little wider.

  However, by the time I had walked through an excessively sunny morning room that started my headache pounding again, the smile had faded somewhat. When Melchior opened the door to his own sitting room, he frowned at the sight of me.

  “You look terrible, Carrots.”

  “Yes, Marissa did my hair this morning,” I said calmly, and swept past him to sit on my favourite seat. I set my hat carefully beside me and began to unpin my hair while Melchior, with a suspiciously mocking smile, sauntere
d back to his own chair.

  “How did you sleep?”

  I arched my eyebrows at him, untangling a particularly tiny, tight plait. “That, Melchior, is deliberate provocation. What do you want?”

  “Lord Pecus would like a word with us,” Melchior said. He was still grinning in a way that warned me I was missing an important detail.

  “Very well,” I said absently, struggling to reach one integral pin that Marissa seemed to have lodged deep in my skull. “When are we meeting him?”

  Melchior’s eyes twinkled. “Er, Carrots?”

  Oh dear. I dropped my arms and turned, hair half-tumbled down my back, to see Lord Pecus. He was standing just behind me, doing his invisible trick again.

  “Good morning, my lord,” I said with careful unconcern. Melchior was smiling, horrible man, and I thought I could detect the trace of a smile on Lord Pecus’ porcelain mask. Oh, well. No way out but to attack.

  I said: “There’s a pin I can’t reach, my lord. Could you remove it for me, please?”

  I had the malicious pleasure of seeing his hand hesitate for a brief moment, then gentle fingers felt through the complicated knot Marissa had woven into the back of my head and there was a sense of pressure released. The rest of my hair tumbled down my back, weave disintegrating and tiny braids unravelling.

  I set to work combing the braids out with my fingers, and said pleasantly: “What was it you wanted to ask me, my Lord?”

  Lord Pecus blinked, as if he had been thinking of something else entirely, and said: “The nature of my questions will be ah, rather more official, Lady Farrah.”

  Oho! I thought, with interest. So Lord Pecus was what we in the Capital knew as The Guv’nor, was he? That explained the look the footman had given me: he thought I was a shady type, no doubt.

  “I never done it, guv’nor!” I said promptly. “I swears it!”

  Melchior choked into his coffee. “Carrots, behave yourself!”

  “The questions are in regard to Lord Topher, Lady Farrah,” said Lord Pecus, a smile curving in his mask. He sat down in a huge leather chair that just contained him, and leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. His eyes were keen, alert and unwavering: if I had been guilty of something I would have been feeling distinctly uneasy.