She glimpsed two newts. They seemed to fly in the limpid water, like courting dragons.
It begins.
She started with a prism, a shape simpler than a cube, but somehow more impressive. For her ritual, she had devised something between a dance and a signalman’s code, pieced together from the esoterica of her studies. To every pronation of the palm and extension of the elbow, beckoning and sway of the waist, she had assigned a tone and theme; major or minor, flat or sharp. Together they formed a dance that was also a song. It was a secret language; a complete work that bordered on genius. She knew it instinctively and revelled in the confidence that it gave her.
She began to weave a pattern with her hands, singing and stamping out the rhythms that she sensed around her, held the image of the prism in her mind and believed it to appear before her. It was hard to distinguish the exact moment when reality succumbed to her imagination, because it happened with so little effort, but it did – and the faintest outline of her perfect shape hung in the air before her, persisted without effort.
Miranda shrieked with delight.
She threw more shapes into the air, each simple but assured. Before long, a collection the pride of any geometer hung before her. She looked around. Master Somney was watching her intently. As she caught his eye, he signalled that she had done enough, and that her practice time would soon end.
It was a surprise. It seemed to Miranda that she had been working for only a few minutes. Yet the sun hung lower in the sky. With a wave, she disassembled what she had made, watched the sharp-edged forms collapse and dissipate like gossamer in a storm.
The demi-masters around her were struggling to construct anything coherent. The sun warmed her face, and the salty taste of the sea brought to her mind the summer days in the duchess’s garden at Baembra.
All was well in the world.
It was time to try her experiment.
She imagined a rose, or rather the idea of a rose. She supposed that idea to be a single point and to that idea she began to attach associations: colour and shape, scent, romantic fancies, each described with mathematical precision. The phantom of a shape began to form in front of her. It didn’t look anything like a rose, more like a dandelion, or a sea urchin, but its form was strong. She sensed a melodious whispering from the magic, like a choir just out of earshot.
“Stop messing with my work,” Nathan said angrily. Miranda’s rose-map was absorbing the magic around itself, suffocating his feeble efforts.
“I’m sorry, I’m doing it all wrong,” she lied, and dismissed her experiment with a motion. She had gone too far in the structuring of it, and didn’t want the others to understand what she was doing or to copy her. They couldn’t anyway. They weren’t smart enough. She looked around. Lavety was staring at her in a certain way. Wickedly. Thin-lipped. So were the rest of his clique.
Of course. Dinner is awaiting.
Somney announced that the training was over and called Miranda to him as she was leaving the garden.
“Fine work, even if you got a little muddled towards the end. Don’t stop practising. It’ll be the real thing before you know it.” Over his shoulder, Miranda saw Big Albert applauding discreetly.
***
“Do you enjoy sleeping with men?” Miranda asked with a twinkle in her eye. Lavety cleaned his teeth with his tongue, took another swig of wine and tossed his monogrammed napkin over his barely touched meal.
“You refer to my accommodation, I suppose. I paid my roommate to take an empty bunk in another room. I sleep alone.”
“That must have been expensive.” Lavety shrugged and waved at their surroundings.
The hall in which they dined had been prepared beautifully. Perched high above the kitchens, its arched windows, delicate by the standards of the Convergence, had been dressed in flowing drapes. A small orchestra played somewhere out of sight – or maybe it was a device. That was an interesting idea. Wreaths of fresh autumn flowers covered the twenty-foot expanse of table that separated Miranda from her host. Whatever message Lavety was trying to send, he had spared no expense. At least he hadn’t paid for dancing dogs or jesters, Miranda thought. She hated both.
“You chose beautiful flowers,” she said.
“Forgive me for speaking plainly, Miranda, but I am a busy man.”
“Hurry all you like. A book deserving of my attention awaits in my chamber.”
“That is the heart of the matter.”
“My chamber?”
He chuckled and pointed at that which she carried beneath her head. “If I sought the favours of your body, I would have approached Her Grace directly.”
“How romantic.”
“It is your work here that concerns me.”
“You want me to help you with your studies?”
“No, I want you to cease yours.”
Lavety stared at his bejewelled knuckles disinterestedly. It was quite an act, Miranda thought, to appear bored after a request like that. Impressive even.
“Surely you do not fear competition from a lady?”
He scowled. “I am no fool, Miranda; I know how clever you are. I had the university send me your examination papers.”
“You did?”
“And your work on the Drowner’s Finger. I saw what you were doing. It is time for you to leave.”
“And if I will not?”
“I am prepared to make a substantial donation. Pay monies directly to your estate.”
“I belong to the duchess. Anything that you give to me belongs to her.”
“And the support of my family is of utmost importance to her cause.”
There was no clever parry or riposte to thwart that sharp truth. “She is grateful for it,” Miranda replied, eyes downcast.
“I have a younger brother who prefers the company of men in all ways. He is gentle and discreet. He could be made available to you for marriage. Thereafter you could both live as you wanted.”
“I am here by Her Grace’s command.”
“Nobody can command you to master the cunning, and the Convocation of Masters will never elect a woman to their ranks.”
“If that is true, you have nothing to fear,” she said miserably.
“I have no fear. But if and when a promotion to master becomes available, it must be mine.”
“By what right?”
“Miranda, the orphanage is a worthy institution. The wards also. The existence of your kind protects the North from falling into unworthy hands and salves Her Grace’s soul. Nonetheless, an orphan cannot take the place of a Lavety. That is impossible.”
Miranda arranged her silverware neatly on her plate and folded her spotless napkin into a triangle. “Lord Lavety. Thank you for inviting me to dinner, it was delightful, but I am feeling a little unwell and must return to my chambers.”
It wasn’t entirely untrue. She rapped on the table and her chaperon pulled back her chair.
“Miranda, you are not welcome here, amongst these men. Why put up with the indignity of it?”
“For the sport of it,” she replied, with as much gaiety as she could muster.
He looked at her queerly. “Whatever happens after this, do not say that I did not warn you.”
***
A grotesque number of stairs lay between Miranda and her room, good exercise and more than enough time to worry. What if the Lavetys did petition Her Grace, ask for Miranda to stand aside for the sake of their son’s advancement? What would Mother decide? It would be a tough choice.
She bit her lip.
Miranda had done good work at the pool, and it had been noticed. The idea that rewards and recognition would come in due course was comforting and, like most comforting thoughts, a falsehood. Childish. Lavety had unwittingly alerted her to what needed to be done. A part of her mind was already set to the aggrandisement of her prog
ress. To being noticed.
Something else bothered her. Not just the burning in her thighs. What had Lavety meant when he said that he had seen what she was doing? It was easy to understand why he felt threatened by her presence, but why had he looked at her so oddly when she had left him.
She entered her room and it was as if she had fallen backwards into a well. Her stomach plunged, and her surroundings became as dark as the deepest dungeon, despite the candles that burnt brightly on the walls.
The duchess and her governess dangled before her, hanged from the ceiling side by side. Thick ropes stretched their bent and broken necks. Wet hair curtained their faces. The skin of their hands and feet was grey. Miranda turned to flee but the door through which she had just entered was gone, replaced by a swirling maw of blackness, an oily wall of writhing limbs. The ropes creaked. Miranda turned. In unison, the corpses lifted bowed heads. Their eyes were the colour of rancid milk.
The duchess cried out. Her tongue lolled green between her yellow, bloodstained teeth. Miranda screamed. The governess smiled benevolently.
“Stupid bitch,” she said, with the voice of a man. Miranda screamed again. Every insult or hurt she had ever endured, real or dreamed, was repeated in a diabolical chorus. Screams raced to tear themselves from her throat. She could not think.
“Bitch. Orphan. Dirt.” As they railed against her, the corpses hitched their legs like marionettes and thick streams of blood poured from between them. Miranda retched. The thick blood soaked her bed, splashed her desk, poured onto the floor. The crimson torrent rose to her ankles.
For some reason that brought her to her senses.
She became calm. This is sick, she thought, awful and stupid, wanton, juvenile and sadistic, but it isn’t real. She closed her eyes, put her hands over her ears and waited. After a few minutes, the chaos in her mind ended.
She dared to look. Her room was pristine. Without hesitation, she went to the whistle-tube by her writing desk and called for a messenger.
***
There was a knocking at her door, which meant Edmund had come quickly. Miranda opened it, relieved to see him.
He dropped to one knee.
Miranda gawped at the embarrassing genuflection and checked that nobody in the corridor was watching. Mister Sutton truly knows nothing of manners, she thought. It might have been amusing on a different day.
“Arise and enter, please,” she said.
“I came as quickly as I could.” He prostrated himself, pressed a cheek flat against the floor. That was beyond embarrassing, and she began to wonder if he was party to Lavety’s cruel joke.
“What are you doing?” she asked icily.
“Looking for a trigger.” He got to his feet. “Nothing mechanical. It was probably heat, or light. Can I see the device?”
Miranda pointed vaguely at the tiny contraption on her writing table and returned to her favourite place, the windowsill, draped herself in a woollen throw and tucked her knees under her chin.
Daniel inspected it closely. “Four triangular plates, and in the centre… some kind of clockwork. A vial. And a little gold horn like a trumpet flower.”
“I imagine it folds up into a pyramid,” she said.
Edmund leaned over it, sniffed cautiously and wailed. The shock of his cry cost Miranda her balance and she feared a plummet into the atrium. Edmund stood stock still, his shoulders bunched, eyes squeezed tight and fists clenched into white balls.
“Dogs’ cocks,” he shouted, trembling as tears rolled down his cheeks. After a few seconds, he relaxed a little, blew hard through pursed lips. “By the gods. That was awful.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and blew a shot of snot onto the floor. It was ungentlemanly in the extreme.
“What happened?” Miranda asked.
“Hallucinations.” He dug his fingers into his brow as if to gouge the memory of them out of his head. “I guessed that some alchemical vapour was involved in the trap. There must have been a little left in the device. The last of the evidence is up my nose. That was stupid of me.”
That was when she regretted having called for him.
Edmund was the only half-friend she had in the Verge, or at least the only one she was willing to share this incident with, and she wanted comforting, a friendly voice, not to play a game of censors. I will ask him to leave, politely. She twisted from her perch and found herself in his arms.
The surprise of it paralysed her. He tucked her head gently under his chin, and embraced her like a brother. She allowed herself to accept the warmth of his comfort and then realised, to her surprise, she wanted to hold him too. But by the time she had decided to put her arms around him, he had already stepped away.
“I can’t imagine how terrible a full dose must have been.” His face clouded with anger. “Do you know who did this?”
“Lavety,” she said.
Edmund stood, ruminating. Not again, she thought, I can practically hear the cogs whirring.
“No, it wasn’t. At least not without help. I can’t enter the Masters’ Quarters without an invitation, and neither can he, and there’s no way Lavety built that trap on his own. A master did this, or at least one was involved.”
It was hard to dispute his logic, even if he was wrong. “Lavety, Talon or some other bastard I’ve never heard of. What difference does it make, really? None of them cares about what I can do. They all want me gone.”
“I don’t want you gone,” Edmund said, “and neither does Somney. I think he likes you.” She glared at him in silence. “Anyway you can’t go. You’re the best by far. Everyone knows it, even if they won’t admit it. Cunning’s your calling.”
“My calling?” she snapped. “What could someone like you possibly know about that?”
He looked at her as if she were a child having a tantrum. “It’s obvious,” he said calmly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry, it’s normal. You’ve had a fright. It’s better this way. If you’re angry at me.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll deal with Mr Lavety.” There was something odd about the way he said it, flat and cold and with a look in his eyes, dangerous, like a razor left unattended. For an instant, she felt a little afraid, for Lavety, and for herself.
“No,” she said, “don’t even think about it. The Lavetys are powerful and I have no proof. That little horror was meant to provoke me, so I shall do nothing, tell no one. If anyone mentions it, I shall tell them that I laughed, that their prank bothered me not at all.” He looked disappointed.
Her chin jutted proudly.
Edmund raised an eyebrow. “Fair enough,” he said, “but keep your door locked, and your window. Who knows how far they’ll go.”
He still seemed to be brooding on what had happened to her as he left. His words stayed with her.
‘Cunning is your calling. It’s obvious.’
She wondered what her governess would think about that.
The strain of the yoke
A shove of Kareem’s pole sent the punt gliding towards a floating dock of planks and barrels. Overhead a man stood in a crow’s nest lashed to one of the wide stone pillars that supported the cistern’s roof. Jon supposed he was a guard; he was armed with a pike fourteen foot long and steel-tipped, but his eyes were closed and he leaned against his weapon as languorously as a drunkard propped up by a lamp-pole.
“Soldier!” Kareem shouted.
The man’s lobster-pot helmet clanked against the shaft of his weapon as he convulsed to attention. He saluted Kareem with the enthusiasm of a treadmill donkey and offered Jon the haft of his weapon. Jon grabbed it and pulled the punt to dockside.
“Report to me at the end of your watch.” Kareem cast a stern glance upwards, tethered the boat and set off into the ramshackle encampment that hung in the darkness. Jon shared a look with the w
atchman and followed after.
The route took them from platform to platform, float to float, across precariously balanced planks and untrustworthy rope bridges. Jon moved slowly, nervously watched his steps and the swirl of water below.
The shantytown was a hive of activity. Men worked iron, faces glowing red in the light of a makeshift forge. In another place, women carved printing blocks by candlelight. A line of derelicts waited to be served from a foul-smelling cauldron of stew. They passed a veteran with a sea-lion moustache who demonstrated the manufacture of firebombs. He looked old enough to have fought in the War of Edicts. The fellow made a joke and his students guffawed.
If the business of the encampment was deadly, its atmosphere was that of a festival. Everywhere they went Jon heard talk of rebellion and Barehill’s name.
He was at the centre of it all, sat at a ring of benches set around a brazier, lecturing a small group of earnest-looking fellows, puffing at his pipe and asserting his finer arguments with its stem. He still looked young and untested, but down in this place Jon noticed an edge to his manner that he had somehow missed before. The idea that the boy was an imposter seemed fanciful now.
The censors will be pleased, Jon thought, and felt his stomach tighten.
Here, the sweet smoke of rose charcoal scented the air.
“Take a pew, big man. You’ll get your chance when the boss is done,” Kareem said, and whispered something to Barehill. He smiled and, without a break in the rhythm of his speech, signalled his audience to make a space for the newcomer.
Jon squeezed between a young maid, whose dirty scarf failed to hide a cleft lip, and the traitorous godsworn who had let him into the temple of the Devourer.
“I weep at the perilousness of our situation,” Barehill continued, “how close our country stands to ruination. Some claim that all men will benefit from magic eventually – the rich first of course.” There were chuckles from the audience. “They say that one day there will be machines for everyone. I fear no greater prospect.”
The crowd eagerly awaited Barehill’s explanation.
“Don’t listen to me, listen to one another.” Barehill singled out an elderly wastrel with lank hair. “Herryk – that’s your name, isn’t it?”
The Censor's Hand: Book One of the Thrice~Crossed Swords Trilogy Page 16
