The copper lips closed over Nicole’s finger, and she pulled her hand away and jumped back with a shriek. Gumshoe pulled the gun from the holster, squeezing the pad of paper under his armpit. They stared at the door. The huge, protruding eyes moved closer together, peering at them, and the Head demanded in a booming, metallic voice, opening its mouth unnaturally wide, “THE KEY!!!”
Mike and Lilith made their way out of the tunnel along a spiral stone staircase that led them into the messy, damp basement of an old sewing factory. Wearing the cloaks they had received from Weapon Maker, they looked like a pair of pale-faced shadows floating through the air.
The factory was close to the square, and here, the City’s strength was felt as pressure converging from all sides at once. The air thickened and became sticky, and it was hard to walk. If it weren’t for Weapon Maker’s cloaks, the Inquisitors would not have been able to stay long in this area during the day. Without the protection, after a few minutes, they would have felt lightheaded and then nauseous—Mike knew this from experience. Weakness, black spots in front of your eyes, and then you lose consciousness and don’t come to until someone takes you to a place that’s more suitable for the Shadow’s servants.
They took the creaking wooden staircase out into a spacious room cluttered with tables, sewing machines, and rolls of fabric overgrown with cobwebs. The high windows were broken and the room was drafty.
Dancing with impatience, Lilith pulled Mike higher along the spiral staircase to the attic and then the roof.
This was where two gargoyles lived.
They sat listlessly and sluggishly on the edge of the roof, spending entire days observing the goings-on in the City. They were curious creatures that had a weakness for anything new—but in their own way, at their own pace. The gargoyles always sat on the roofs in order to see as much as possible. They rarely left their lookouts, but they somehow contrived to exchange news so that each gargoyle knew what all the others knew. They might have looked like mere statues, winged figures sculpted out of stone, if not for the lively eyes and the persistent, darting glance.
The stone monsters were sitting with their hunched backs to the Inquisitors. They didn’t budge.
Mike and Lilith stood between them, on the edge of the roof. One gargoyle, with a crest on its head, gave the newcomers a sidelong, hostile look. The other one, which had huge, protruding eyes, didn’t react at all.
Getting the beasts to talk was hard. The gargoyles strongly disliked sharing news with them. In addition to simply feeling ill will toward all soft ones, they believed that it was always better to trade information for something valuable than to give it away for free. In exchange, the gargoyles preferred bright, shiny objects. The city rooftops and attics held scores of their little secrets, and there, like magpies, they dragged all kinds of trinkets that were stolen or bartered. But sometimes, the beasts felt like chatting. So Mike asked, “A new person, a woman, has appeared in the City. Where is she?”
The gargoyle with the thorny crest turned its head with a creak at a painfully slow pace. The mouth opened, and a stone bit showered onto the pavement below. The monsters were obviously not in the right mood.
The gargoyle said in a rumbling, heavy voice, “We . . . don’t . . . know . . . anything . . .”
“What?” Lilith wasted no time getting angry—she had the ability to quickly fly into a rage. “You always know everything! Why are you lying? Stupid cobblestone!”
The gargoyle started to turn away. It had said everything it wanted to say, and it considered the conversation over. One by one, Lilith pulled the four caps from the fingers of her right hand, revealing long fingernails. Semitransparent, as if cast from murky green, rough glass, they gleamed dimly. The second gargoyle anxiously turned its pop-eyed head toward Lilith. Its spiky neighbor began to hiss, stretched its stone claws, and stirred its wings, but it did not have time to fly away. With a catlike movement, Lilith swung and slit its neck.
A loud crack rang out. Large green sparks spattered. Some jumped along the roof while others fell but went out without reaching the ground. Small shards of stone scattered with them.
Wide cracks appeared on the thick, scaled stone neck. Mike winced. “Force isn’t always the best way to go,” he said.
Lilith grinned maliciously. “It’s always better than a bunch of chitchat!”
“Where’s the new woman?” Mike repeated the question. “What building did she spend the night in? Where is she now?”
“If you don’t answer, I’ll break you both to pieces!” Lilith snarled.
The head of the spiky gargoyle tilted even lower, and the dented neck crackled, slowly breaking. Ascertaining that the Inquisitors were determined, the pop-eyed gargoyle finally gave in.
“Last night . . . the woman . . . was . . . in the house . . . by the square,” it squeaked slowly. “Three floors . . . where the man in the raincoat lives . . . now . . . she’s at the house with the copper door . . . both of them.”
“The house with the copper door? But that’s right here!”
Mike and Lilith exchanged glances, turned around, and hurried over the roof. The head of the spiky beast continued to bow under its own weight. The gargoyle moved backward, sliding from the edge. Its fate did not concern the Shadow’s servants—they quickly crossed the roof and looked out over the far edge.
“I see the Collector’s House,” Mike said. “That’s it. And there they are.”
Lilith smiled and opened her jacket, under which she wore a belt with a broad black case hanging from it. She laid her hand on it and said, “Let’s capture them right outside the door.”
Chapter Four
“I wasn’t expecting anything like this,” Gumshoe admitted.
“The key!” the Head repeated, opening its mouth unnaturally wide. “The key!”
The look on its face was glum and almost wild. Its entire lower jaw moved, fixed on unseen hinges. Its bushy beard trembled. With each word, the protruding eyes started to revolve, then went still.
“Open the door,” Gumshoe demanded.
“The key!”
“I said, let us in!”
“The key!”
“We’re not enemies!” Nicole interjected.
“The key!”
“Okay, drop it, we just want to go in . . .”
“The key!”
“I’m going to kill you, Head. I’m going to shoot you right in the mouth.”
“The key!”
“It doesn’t hear us.”
“The key!”
“Stupid head!”
“The key!”
The copper head continued to repeat the words, automatically and monotonously. It had no other words in its vocabulary.
Baffled, Gumshoe looked around. Nicole thoughtfully chewed her lip. How would they get inside? Where would they get the key from? The window was blocked with grating that couldn’t be broken, the roof was too high, and there were no stairs going up. While Gumshoe continued to haggle with the door, Nicole went over to the window and stood on her tiptoes to look in. The thick curtains blocked her view.
Gumshoe angrily kicked the door.
“The key!” the Head answered.
Gumshoe turned away. He exasperatedly took out his cigarette case, but then immediately slammed it shut. His face transformed, Gumshoe raised his hat slightly with his index fingers, and Nicole went over to him.
“What is it? Did you think of something?”
“The key!” the head droned on.
“I’m not talking to you.”
“The key!”
“Cardsharp used to have a talking potion,” Gumshoe said. “He has said that he would sometimes pour the potion into the drinks of the people he was playing with—”
“The key!”
“What kind of talking potion?” Nicole was surprised. “Is it like a truth serum?”
“The key!”
“Why would we need it? And where—”
“The key!”
&
nbsp; “—do we find Cardsharp?”
“Let’s go.” Gumshoe took her by the elbow and led her away from the Collector’s House.
“Don’t ask how all of that works. Magic has its own system that I don’t understand. I think that if I pour the potion into the Head’s mouth, it will be able to remember other words.”
“Are you sure? There’s something I don’t really understand.”
“Me neither,” he acknowledged. “In the City, everything is tied up with magic and mechanics, but not typical mechanics—the City’s mechanics. I’ve come across rather unusual mechanisms and very strange enchanted amulets here. Anyway, we’re going to see Cardsharp.”
“Where does he live?”
“On the same street as the Red Rose. Remember the building with the amber tile that was practically right across from the cafe? Cardsharp really wants to get into the Red Rose, so he hangs around nearby fairly often, and he even settled closer.”
“You were saying that you’ve already seen a house like the one where the Collector lived. Is that all connected with how you ended up here? Will you tell me more?”
“The house in the side street is exactly like the one in my town that I went through to get here,” he explained, walking with her out of the dead end and onto the street. “But in my world, the house was neglected and stood on an abandoned street. The river often flooded there, so in the end, the people moved away. The house didn’t have grating, and the door was a run-of-the-mill wooden one. It was an unremarkable building. I had tried to find the girl from Narrow Circle who disappeared and the chain of symbols that someone had left on the streets—the same symbols that the people from the group were studying and that we saw on the door. I followed the chain, from symbol to symbol. I saw the last one on the door of the abandoned house—the one that was exactly like the Collector’s House. I pushed on the door and went in. It was dark inside. I turned on a flashlight. There was mist in front of me. How did mist get into the house? I decided that maybe it was smoke, even though I didn’t smell anything burning. I went on, the mist closed in on me, I kept going, and I couldn’t see anything around me—not the walls, not a stairway, nothing. Then, it didn’t feel like a floor under my feet. Finally, the mist started to lift, and I came out on the edge of the square, where City Hall is.”
He ran his hand over his face.
“How can there be two identical houses here in the City and in the real world?” Nicole asked, captivated by the story. “And the symbols . . . what does it mean? Who left them in your town?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “But I haven’t told you the most important thing yet. Before I found that chain of symbols and ended up here, I conducted an investigation. I was in the archives. While I was looking for references to similar disappearances, I was looking at photos. And I found out that such symbols have appeared in different time periods and different places, always accompanied by the disappearances of people. There were searches and commotion, but no one ever found anything. Then the disappearances stopped and the symbols also disappeared. Now, I think—”
“So you think that whenever and wherever the symbols appeared, somewhere on the edge of the city, there was an unremarkable, abandoned house?” Nicole continued. “Exactly like the Collector’s House, only without grating and with a regular door? The symbols led people to it, and they went in and disappeared?”
“Yes, I think that’s exactly what happened,” he said.
“So maybe the Collector was the one who left the symbols? The one who, through his own House, crossed over into the real world, in different times and places, and then returned? If we can get into his house, we’ll find the path . . . to the outside? From the City, to the outside world?”
“Look, there’s Cardsharp,” Gumshoe said instead of answering.
A young man with a sophisticated, foppish appearance was loitering by the cafe. It took only a glance for Nicole to size him up: a trickster and a swindler. Cardsharp looked exactly like his nickname: he was long-limbed and sported a mustache, white shirt, black suit, and top hat. His eyes darted from side to side.
Catching sight of them, Cardsharp hurried over, took Nicole by the hand, and gallantly kissed it. He stepped away without letting go.
“Ah, a new young lady!” his voice was high and guttural. “And what is your name, mademoiselle?”
Nicole was about to introduce herself, but Gumshoe started talking first.
“Give us the talking potion.”
The eyebrows on Cardsharp’s expressive face darted upward. He ostentatiously threw his hands up with cheerful amazement and exclaimed, “You don’t waste any time. ‘Give us the potion!’ You like to surprise people! What do you need it for? The young lady doesn’t want to introduce herself? And you’re faced with a frightening choice—put her through the ringer or just poison her? Young lady, run away from this guy! Come to me—I’ll protect you!”
Nicole tried to get a word in, but Gumshoe squeezed her shoulder and she shut her mouth.
“We need the potion,” Gumshoe repeated.
Cardsharp sighed, reconciling himself to his interlocutors’ reticence. He winked at Nicole, spread his arms, and rolled his eyes.
“It’s a rare thing. I would hate to just hand it out right and left without a really good reason. You must understand that. Martha doesn’t know how to make such things, but you’re making a request—”
“She can get into the cafe.” Gumshoe nodded toward Nicole.
Cardsharp opened his mouth wide. The theatricality disappeared. It was as if makeup had been washed off his face—his face became that of a tired, worn-out man who was no longer young and had endured a difficult fate.
“You’re lying!” he gasped.
Nicole walked over to the Red Rose and grasped the door handle. She looked back. Cardsharp was staring at her.
“But the cafe won’t open while you’re standing close by,” Gumshoe added.
“Why not?” Cardsharp was indignant.
“We’ve already seen it happen that way. She can go inside, but only when there’s no one close by. She couldn’t take me in—we tried.”
“All right.” Cardsharp moved back, grasping his top hat with both hands, as if fearing that the wind would blow it away. “I’ll walk away.”
“Not just walk away,” Gumshoe said. “You need to reject the desire to go inside. Don’t even think about making a run for it when the door opens. You can’t. Even I understand that you intend to run toward the door, and the City understands it even more.”
“She can’t get into the cafe,” Cardsharp said defiantly. “You’re lying.”
“If you need proof, we’ll give it to you. It’s true that you love absinthe, isn’t it?”
Cardsharp swallowed in bewilderment and smacked his lips. Gumshoe continued ingratiatingly: “Green, fragrant, strong absinthe . . . you can even see through the window a bottle filled with it. It’s on the shelves behind the counter, eh? You’ve looked at it a thousand times from outside. Here’s what we’ll do . . . Nicole, how do you feel about absinthe?”
“It’s strong and bitter,” she said hesitantly. Never in her life had she had occasion to drink it.
“Wormwood!” Cardsharp cried out with feeling. “It’s all because there’s Roman wormwood in it, there’s thujone in its essential oils. When there’s a lot of it, it’s a poison, but in tiny doses . . . oh!” He smacked his lips. “And then they add anise, mint, lemon balm, licorice root, and angelica root. And—”
“Nicole will bring three glasses, and we’ll drink to your health,” Gumshoe interrupted. “And you’ll bring us the potion we need. Is it in your house?”
Cardsharp stared slyly at them.
“Nicole will bring the bottle,” he corrected Gumshoe. “And three glasses. We’ll drink, I’ll take the bottle home, and I’ll bring you the potion.”
Gumshoe shook his head.
“Nicole will bring the bottle and three glasses. And while she’s doing that,
you’ll go get the potion. We’ll drink. I’ll take the potion, Nicole and I will leave, and you’ll take the bottle and drink your fill by yourself. Right?”
Instead of answering, Cardsharp threatened him with a thin, artistic finger and hurried to the amber-tiled house, continually looking over his shoulder.
“Wait a minute,” Gumshoe said when Nicole again reached for the door of the cafe.
Cardsharp went into the house, and the door shut behind him.
“Why? He’s gone.”
“No, he’s watching. Cardsharp needs the absinthe, but getting into the cafe is more important to him.”
Nicole could make out Cardsharp’s face through the dingy little window in the door of the amber-tiled house. Gumshoe lifted his arm and slowly, firmly showed him a fist. The face in the little window disappeared, bringing with it the sound of muffled footsteps on the stairway.
“Now he won’t have time even if he runs. I’ll walk away, and you go inside.”
For the third time that day, Nicole opened the door of the Red Rose and stepped inside. She looked closely at the bar, but the phantom mustachioed bartender did not appear. She had an urge to apologize for the invasion, but she pushed the thought out of her mind: if the cafe hadn’t wanted it to happen, Nicole would not have entered.
Heading toward the counter, she saw that there was a tray holding a bottle of absinthe and a saucer with a white ball of pastry that seemed as if it had been braided from snowflakes. What a gift from the restaurant . . . she smiled in spite of herself. She picked up the old, dusty bottle and wiped it with the sleeve of her sweater. A bright, emerald-colored liquid splashed inside, and a woman in a luxurious dress and old-fashioned hat gazed at her coquettishly from the label. Nicole read the writing on the label:
Hidden City 2_The Shades of Silence Page 5
