Scholar of Decay

by Tanya Huff

  When I am lord, I shall “entertain” more often.

  “Mamselle Jacqueline! So glad you could attend!” Their host’s shrill voice cut through the music and conversation and shredded Louise’s pleasant evening. As the intricate movement of the dance spun her toward the door, she could feel the focused attention of both family and townspeople slipping away.

  Jacqueline stood just inside the ballroom, already at the center of an obsequious crowd. She caught Louise’s eye as her twin danced past and smiled.

  She’s here just to irritate me. Louise was as certain of it as if Jacqueline had admitted it aloud. How dare she! She said she wasn’t coming!

  “You’re frowning. Was it something I did?”

  Louise jerked. She’d forgotten all about Dmitri. “No,” she spat through clenched teeth. “Nothing you did. I wasn’t expecting my sister is all.”

  Dmitri looked a little confused. “But she’s always there. I can’t remember being at a party without her. Ow! Louise, your nails …”

  While her mouth voiced insincere apologies about the crimson half-moons soaking up through the slashed sleeves of Dmitri’s shirt, Louise considered what he’d said. To her deep disgust, he was right. Nothing happened in the city without Jacqueline. The realization left a bitter taste in her mouth.

  However, a great deal was about to happen without her. When Aurek Nuikin was back on his feet and ripe for manipulation, Jacqueline would have to be temporarily removed from Pont-a-Museau.

  And then they’d bring her home just long enough to make her removal permanent.

  “Young sir, the master wishes to see you.”

  Dmitri snorted and tossed his hair back off his face. “Well, I don’t want to see him.” When Edik continued to block the top of the stairs, he scowled and folded his arms across his chest. “What?”

  “It has been nearly a week.”

  “This may surprise you, but I know what day it is. Now, get out of my way.”

  Edik shook his head. “The master wishes to see you.”

  “I heard you the first time.” Dmitri squared his shoulders, realizing all at once that he was as tall as Aurek’s servant and nearly as broad. “And I don’t want to see him.” He smiled as he realized that Edik understood the subtext. “If you were planning to drag me into his bedchamber, I’d just like to see you try it.”

  Silently, Edik moved from the top of the stairs, disapproval radiating off him in heated waves.

  Flushed with triumph, Dmitri descended to the entrance hall and out onto the front steps, where he paused in the circle of lamplight to pull on his gloves. So Aurek wants to talk to me, does he. Probably wants to make another sanctimonious announcement. He tugged the gray kid smooth over the backs of his hands and murmured aloud, “Let’s see how he likes being ignored.”

  “So …” Aubert—at least Dmitri thought it was Aubert, though the twins went out of their way to make identification difficult—tipped his chair back on two legs and tossed a splintered chicken bone onto the platter in the center of the table. “How’s your brother?”

  Before Dmitri could answer, Yves hooked a foot around his cousin’s chair and sent him crashing to the floor. Although the other patrons in the café kept a politic silence and their eyes locked on their food, the members of the family made plenty of noise without them.

  “What did you do that for?” Aubert demanded when the peals of laughter had subsided enough for him to be heard.

  “You were being a bore,” Yves told him. “Dmitri doesn’t want to talk about his brother. His brother is …”

  “Morne?” Georges interjected around a mouthful of food.

  “Fatigant?” Annette offered, smiling across the table at Dmitri.

  “Hors de propos?”

  “Contrariant?”

  “All of the above,” Yves declared, lifting his glass so that the dark wine gleamed in the lamplight. “And as Dmitri here is none of the above, why would he want to talk about his dull, tedious, irrelevant, and vexacious brother?”

  “He wouldn’t,” Dmitri agreed, laughing, lifting his own glass in answer.

  Georges swallowed and stood, swaying slightly. “A toast to our friend Dmitri. Pont-a-Museau wouldn’t be the same without him.”

  Dmitri colored as they drank, his fair skin a deep crimson with pleasure and his eyes overbright from all the wine already drunk. This was the acceptance he’d searched for all his life. When they finished, he toasted new friends; Henri toasted family—a designation, he pointed out carefully, that excluded Dmitri’s brother but included Cousin Louise—and Yves called for more wine.

  Empty bottles and empty platters were already piled high on their customary table.

  “I don’t understand how you can all stay so thin,” Dmitri marveled as Aubert, or maybe Henri, topped up his glass. “If I ate like you do, I’d be the size of a horse.”

  “Horse is good,” Georges muttered. “In a sausage with a little red sauce …” Annette elbowed him in the ribs, and he began to hiccup.

  Dmitri laughed with the others. In the early days, he’d tried to share the costs of the massive meals but had been told that the Renier family had made arrangements with the cafés. As discussing money was distinctly not done among the upper classes, he’d never asked what those arrangements were.

  Businesses that dared to charge the family didn’t remain in business for long. However, as Pont-a-Museau society followed the Reniers’ lead, the cafés they frequented stood to make a profit in spite of the freeloaders’ appetites. Unfortunately, younger members of the family found it amusing to randomly announce that everyone in the establishment was, for the evening, their guest, leaving the owners to reflect that alive and bankrupt was infinitely preferable to the alternative.

  Leaning back in his chair—though carefully keeping all four legs on the ground lest he repeat Aubert’s tumble—Dmitri reflected that he’d never had better friends. They’d accepted him into their circle as though he were one of them. And they were certainly a lot more fun than the friends he’d left behind in Borca—even young Borcans had a certain solid respectability completely lacking in this group.

  Completely lacking, he reaffirmed, hastily averting his eyes from the twins and Annette. Although he tried, he couldn’t quite get used to such blatant sensuality. Casting about for something else to look at, his gaze fell on Chantel, moodily rolling a walnut between two pale fingers. “You’re very quiet.”

  She shrugged.

  “She’s jealous of all the time you spend with Cousin Louise,” Yves mocked, leaning forward.

  “Are you?” When she only shrugged again, Dmitri laid a hand on her arm. “Please don’t be. Louise is very, very special to me, but I don’t want to lose our friendship.”

  Chantel sighed, unable to decide whether she was more irritated by his blindness or amazed by it. Naiveté was not something she’d had any experience with—family members exhibiting such a fatal flaw were weeded out very young. “I don’t want to lose you either,” she replied at last. That the admission was the truth—if slightly skewed—leant a certain amount of sincerity to her voice.

  Dmitri smiled and lifted the back of her hand to his lips. “Good. Now if you’ll excuse me …”

  Twisting her hand, Chantel grabbed his and hung on. “Where are you going?”

  Yves laughed as Dmitri blushed. “He wants to see a man about a waterworks, Chantel.”

  “Oh.” She released him and watched him weave across the crowded room. Her knuckles whitened and the walnut cracked, spraying bits of shell across the table. “I wonder what would happen if I told him Louise was only using him to get to his brother.”

  “Louise would kill you.”

  “What do you think she’s up to?”

  “Who? Louise? What difference does it make? If you find out, she’ll kill you.”

  “Only if she knows I know.”

  “She’d know.” That was a given he shouldn’t have had to remind her of. Yves leaned forward and lifted her
chin on the tip of one finger. “And I’d miss you when you were dead.”

  Chantel snatched her head away from his touch, then whipped it forward and closed her teeth, through flesh to the bone.

  Yves screamed as she released him, and for the first time that night, Chantel smiled.

  The cool night air cleared Dmitri’s head, and he barely swayed as he walked across the inner yard to the privies. A lot of men didn’t bother, just stood clear of the back door and let it go. Even drunk, Dmitri couldn’t do that. He’d tried one night when Yves and he had left the café together, but his sisters’ opinion of such behavior kept ringing in his head and, in spite of the other man’s scornful laughter, he’d continued to the row of latrines. Besides, the latrines smelled marginally better than the yard.

  A few moments later, while readjusting his clothing, he heard running footsteps in the alley on the other side of the stone wall the privies were built against. The staccato sound held a certain desperate rhythm. A moment after silence fell, a hoarse, terrified scream lifted the hair off the back of Dmitri’s neck and slammed his heart up against his ribs.

  He charged out into the yard, saw no gate or door through the wall, and leaped for the iron spikes set into the top of the stonework. Muscles straining, pitted metal digging into his palms, he heaved himself up onto the broad top and, body twisted around the spikes, squinted down into the alley.

  Although the moon was only a quarter full, there were clouds enough to spread the pale silver light. Dmitri could just make out a thin and ragged man trying frantically but unsuccessfully to scrabble over the wall at the end of the alley. Three, four shadows were moving slowly, deliberately toward him. At first he thought they were dogs, but the hump-backed silhouettes were unmistakable. They were the biggest rats Dmitri had ever seen. They had no need to hurry; it was obvious their prey would be unable to escape.

  Apparently well aware of this, the ragged man redoubled his futile efforts and screamed again.

  Eyes widening in anticipation of the fight, Dmitri inched forward and clapped a hand to his hip—grabbing only air. Swords were considered unfashionable in Pont-a-Museau. With his sword, even at four-to-one odds, he wouldn’t have hesitated for a heartbeat. Without his sword …

  The first rat rose onto its haunches and almost delicately closed its teeth around a flailing arm. Even over the screaming, Dmitri heard bones crunch. A second wedge-shaped head darted forward at a scrawny calf and pulled back, jaw moving up and down. The rats were eating the man alive.

  His leap from the top of the wall took Dmitri halfway back across the enclosed yard. Without his sword, he’d have to get help. Pushing his way through the crowded cafe, he grabbed Georges by the shoulder and tried to drag him from his chair. “Come on!”

  Georges scowled and lithely twisted free, smacking away an opportunistic hand making a foray at his plate. “Why? Have you lost something?”

  “There’s a man in the alley being eaten by rats!”

  The café had fallen silent, and the final word filled the room.

  Rats.

  Yves’s edged laughter seemed to rebound off of every staring patron. “Busy night for it,” he snarled, waving a finger wrapped in a bloodstained handkerchief.

  Confused, Dmitri clung to the one thing he knew. “We’ve got to help him!”

  “Why?”

  “Because …” Wide-eyed, Dmitri stared around the table, unable to believe the response. Or more specifically, the lack of one. “Because there’re four rats as big as dogs eating a man alive out there, and we can’t just let it happen!”

  “It’s already happened,” Annette told him calmly, leaning forward and untucking a fold of his vest from the waist of his trousers. “Unless he was hugely fat.”

  “No, no, he was skinny, but …”

  “Rats are quick eaters.” Georges managed to kick both of the twins as they started to snicker. “Four of them will be finished by now.”

  “But …”

  “Trust us,” Chantel said with a smile that reminded Dmitri uncomfortably of Louise. “We know.”

  He scanned the features of his friends and saw a feral similarity on all six faces. They were obviously not going to help. He turned to survey the café. Conversations hurriedly started up again as everyone ignored him. No one, not even the servers, met his gaze.

  Fists opening and closing at his sides, he took a step forward and then stepped back. He couldn’t win on his own. Not without a weapon. He was certain of that. His shoulders slumped. “It’s already over?”

  “They’ll be gnawing on his bones by now.” For emphasis, Georges cracked a pork rib and noisily sucked the marrow out.

  “You wanted to be the white knight, didn’t you?” Yves’s eyes glittered mockingly. “Riding to the rescue?”

  Surprised by the cruelty in Yves’s voice, Dmitri shrugged. “I just thought I should do something,” he muttered.

  “En garde, rodent!” Aubert flourished a baguette at his twin, who recoiled in feigned terror. Around and around the table they went, Aubert shouting lofty epigrams, Henri squeaking, their nearest neighbors hastily snatching to safety possessions in danger of being trampled. The chase ended when Henri suddenly turned, grabbed the baguette, and broke it over his brother’s head, yelling, “Rats win!” At which point they collapsed into their chairs, howling with laughter.

  As he took his seat, Dmitri joined in the hilarity because it had been pretty funny. While he’d been outside, Yves had apparently cut a finger, so that explained his mood. Of course Chantel’s smile was like Louise’s; they were cousins. There was a simple explanation for everything.

  With no idea of how simple the explanation was, he drank until he killed the memory of the screaming, thanking all the gods that he hadn’t seen the man’s face.

  Louise Tucked a Silken Curl Back into Place and stared thoughtfully at the mirror, ignoring the places where the silvering had flaked off the back, creating what appeared to be decaying patches in her reflection. According to her faithful and aching-to-be-needed Dmitri, Aurek Nuikin would be well enough to leave the house within the next few days. She had no doubt that the moment he was able, he’d head straight for the catacombs and the abandoned workshop—which was good, for it meant he’d be out of the house and away from his study for a sufficient amount of time.

  This trip, he could make on his own. A wizard powerful enough to destroy a bone golem, and who’d no doubt be picking up still more power from the abandoned workshop, hardly needed her protection against a few insignificant goblins.

  She had other plans—lovely, labyrinthine, dark, and twisty plans. But before she could put those plans into motion, she’d have to get rid of Jacqueline.

  Get rid of Jacqueline. She repeated the words silently to herself as she stood and swept out of the dressing room set aside by the evening’s host for her private use. It gnawed at her that there was a slightly larger one for her twin. Her frown parted the crowds as she descended the stairs and reentered the crowded drawing room.

  It wasn’t hard to find a messenger. There were always social climbers at these affairs who wanted so desperately to get ahead that they’d do nearly anything without a thought for the consequences.

  The front gate of Chateau Delanuit was half open. Guy Muridae stepped under the arch and felt as though he were stepping from evening into night. Shadows that merely slanted through the rest of the city gathered together here and presented a dark and united front. He kept his eyes locked on the pale gray light spilling in from the courtyard and walked as fast as he could without actually running.

  Under his best jacket and vest, sweat plastered his shirt to his sides. He nervously brushed a lock of brown hair back off the damp curve of his forehead. His footsteps echoed off the surrounding walls of the gatehouse, and he found himself carefully setting each foot down on the cobblestones so as to make the least amount of noise.

  You’re being an idiot, he told himself, holding like a talisman the memory of Louise Renier’s pr
omise. Twitching his cravat straight, he stepped out into the courtyard, blinking a little in his sudden return to the late afternoon light.

  The vast open courtyard was overgrown and ill tended. Guy was surprised, actually, at how ill-tended it was. The Reniers were at the top of the Pont-a-Museau social hierarchy; surely they could afford caretakers? His gaze skipped from cracked and broken cobblestones to stone tubs holding small ornamental trees he was sure were long dead, to a tangle of leafless vine nearly burying a three-tiered fountain—where it stopped.

  Something stared back at him from the top tier.

  Then it was gone.

  He wiped his palms on the thighs of his pantaloons. It was probably nothing more than a rat. There were rats all over Pont-a-Museau—why not here? Taking his cue from the stratum of society he longed to be fully accepted into, he’d learned to ignore them. Mostly.

  Being out in the open helped.

  The stone arch over the front door echoed the arch of the gate, and the door itself echoed the squalor of the courtyard. The black paint not actually peeling off the wood had cracked into a thousand pieces like a mudflat in the heat. The massive brass knocker had been etched with a pattern once, but too much of it had corroded away for him to recognize what it had been. The sound it made was surprisingly mellow.

  “I have come with a personal message for Jacqueline Renier,” he informed the elderly servant who dragged open the door, her scowl somewhat deflating his lofty tone. “My card,” he said grandly, handing it to her.

  She stared at the small pasteboard rectangle held in a three-fingered hand, and then at him. After a moment, the scowl smoothed out into a near total lack of expression. “Follow me, Monsieur Muridae. I will take you to the mamselle.”