The Mask Falling

by Samantha Shannon

  “I know how insane it sounds,” I said. “Like a death wish. And I know how you must feel about it—but I promise you, this was not a suicide mission. I meant to get out. Someone I knew was in there, someone who had good reason to help me. We struck a deal.”

  After a time, he spoke. “Who?”

  “The oracle from the colony. David. His real name is Cade, and he works for Ménard.”

  Without answering, Arcturus moved to the chair, where he clasped his hands and waited for me to begin.

  It took me a long time to fill him in. Between thick coughs, I told him about Cade—about his affair with Frère, why he had been in Sheol I, and his firm belief in the Grand Inquisitor of France. I told him why Benoît Ménard had avoided Frank Weaver for months. I told him about the coup Ménard was planning, and his vision for a pure Scion.

  “He sees all of us as branches of the same evil,” I said. “And he won’t rest until all of us are gone.” My throat burned. “I’ll be honest: he scared me in a way Weaver never has.”

  Arcturus seemed to mull this over.

  “Though I dislike how you obtained this information, it has extraordinary value. Ducos will be pleased,” he said, “though you might not have lived to relate it to her. Cade was your only guarantee of an escape. He could have lied to you about the affair to lure you inside.”

  “Cade is clearly a . . . complicated person,” I conceded, “but he had a few opportunities to sell us out in the colony. He didn’t.”

  “Is that reason enough for you to have trusted him with your life?”

  I looked away.

  We sat without speaking for a while. In that silence, I imagined how I might feel if our situations were reversed—if he had given himself up to Scion, barely escaped, and then risked his life again, all on the word of a near stranger. Even the thought of it tightened my stomach.

  “You must have been beside yourself,” I said quietly.

  He might as well have turned to stone. Not even a reassuring hm.

  “When you give your report to Ducos,” he said at length, “I strongly advise you not to tell her that you entered that building of your own volition.”

  “Even I’m not that reckless,” I said dryly. “Ducos can deal with Ménard. We have something else to do.”

  I shifted so I was a little more upright and tried to reach for the mug. Arcturus got up and passed it to me.

  “This can wait,” he said. “If you are in pain.”

  “I’m fine.” I took a sip of saloop. “I found out how the gray market is earning money. The missing link.”

  Seeing that I was determined, Arcturus returned to the chair.

  “I think the grands ducs have been selling fugitives. Voyant fugitives, wanted by Scion, who would naturally look for sanctuary in the carrières,” I continued. “The Rag and Bone Man sells those fugitives on to Scion officials, like a bounty hunter. Those officials can then choose to send the fugitives to Sheol II, and for a fee, Jaxon will let them take credit for their capture.” I touched the ledger. “Ménard paid to take credit for Michael. His name is in here.”

  His expression flickered. Michael was the first human he had taken under his wing.

  “There are other names of interest,” I said. “Nadine and Zeke, and Ignace Fall—otherwise known as Le Vieux Orphelin. We were right. The grands ducs did sell him. Le Latronpuche did, anyway.”

  “How did you obtain the ledger?”

  “The Rag and Bone Man—Rackham, that’s his real name—had a meeting with Ménard.” The mug warmed my fingers. “The ledger belongs to him. I stole it.”

  I told him about the secret way into the walls and everything I had overheard. About the Rephaite chained at the bottom of the Hôtel Garuche, willing to trade with me for his freedom.

  “His name is Kornephoros Sheratan,” I said. Arcturus looked sharply at me. “He . . . told me you were close.”

  “Describe him to me,” he said, eyes burning.

  “Dark hair down to here.” I tapped my waist. “Big scar across his chest. He looked a lot like Terebell.”

  For some time, Arcturus was silent. When he did speak, his voice was low and cold.

  “Rephaite hair is not like yours. It does not grow. To cut it, therefore, is an irrevocable act.” His own brown hair was cropped to his nape. “If you ever come across a Rephaite whose hair is long, they were never Ranthen. Not openly.”

  “Then why did he say you were close?”

  “Because long ago, and for a very short time,” he said, “Kornephoros was my mate.”

  I almost choked on my saloop. Arcturus looked at me in puzzlement. By some miracle, I managed not to descend into yet another coughing fit.

  “Kornephoros.” My eyes watered. “You and . . . Kornephoros.”

  “You are surprised.”

  “He struck me as cruel and devious. I just can’t imagine you ever finding that attractive.”

  “I had not seen his nature then. I soon did.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He claimed to be Ranthen. We fought alongside him, and believed he shared our desire to keep the Mothallath in power. In the end, however, it was he who delivered our star-sovereigns to Nashira.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Let him rot down there.”

  “You say he expects you to return in a sennight. If you do not, and he escapes, he will come looking for you.”

  “What the hell is a sennight?”

  “Seven nights,” he said, as if this wasn’t the most unnecessary word in existence. “Kornephoros is an osteomancer. He used to read the bones of human children for Kraz Sargas. Not only that, but his touch causes excruciating pain.”

  I really did know how to choose them. “We needed to know where Sheol II was,” I said. “I didn’t have much choice.”

  “He did tell you the location, then.”

  “Versailles. It made sense to me, but I suppose he could have been lying.”

  “Likely. Deceit comes easily to his kind.”

  “You would know.”

  It shot out before I could stop it. Arcturus looked at me and waited.

  “You said there was one last truth you would keep from me,” I said, very softly. “Did it happen to concern the Emim?”

  With his face cast into shadow, his eyes were living flame. “You know.”

  “That they used to be Rephaim?” I said. “Is that the secret you claimed you had to keep from me?”

  “Yes.”

  Both of us fell silent for a time. “Well,” I said, “now I know.” I put the mug down a bit too hard. “If you want to explain, this is your chance.”

  His chin tilted down. Through the cord, I sensed a yielding, as if something had released in him.

  “Terebell believed that if you knew, you and other like-minded humans might refuse to work alongside the Ranthen—that you, in particular, would not hear reason,” he said. “Not long after I met you, she swore us to secrecy.”

  I could picture them assembled by candlelight, agreeing to keep me in the dark.

  “I did not care for you then. As I came to know you, I also came to regret the oath, for I suspected it would cause the very mistrust Terebell had predicted. I asked her to release me from it. She refused.”

  “You could have told me the truth in confidence.”

  “And you would have seen that my promises were hollow.” He looked at me. “For Ranthen, it is a matter of honor. To break my word, given freely—it would have stained me.”

  “Not in my eyes.”

  “Paige, know this: I would never swear an oath that endangered our trust again. But I did,” he said, “and once made, it could not be undone. I am Ranthen. Terebell is my sovereign-elect.”

  “And I was your Underqueen. When we struck this alliance, I trusted you all to be honest with me,” I said. “Instead, you conspired to keep your human associates uninformed, so we couldn’t even ask questions.”

  He had the grace not to contest me.

  “You b
roke your word once—to Nashira—because you knew it was the right thing to do,” I said. “You could have done it again.”

  “It is of no import if the blood-sovereign calls me an oathbreaker,” he said. “If my Ranthen-kith had, I would have been locked out of their affairs, and unable to advocate for your interests.”

  “You defied them in other ways.” Suddenly I felt too drained for inhibition. “Every time you were alone with me—every time you touched me—you risked their suspicion and anger, but you still did it. For me.”

  Both our stances were rigid, our gazes in a deadlock. “I made no oaths on that front,” Arcturus said quietly.

  “You didn’t need to. It’s implicit.”

  “The taboo of flesh-treachery is Sargas doctrine,” came his reply. “Even if many of the Ranthen have chosen to embrace it, I will never consider it to be unspoken law among us.”

  I lifted my chin.

  “Even if I saw the bread crumbs,” I finally said, breaking the tense silence, “maybe I didn’t let myself follow them, because in spite of everything, I chose to trust you. And now we—”

  Before I could finish, a razor blade seared under one breast. My vision bleached. Pain gored between my ribs, all the way through to my back, deep inside me, reaching places it never had before. As I tried to cushion my chest, Arcturus came to my side.

  “Paige.”

  I shook my head. There was nothing he could do. I bent at the waist, holding myself, and waited for each excruciating jolt to pass. By the time the pain ebbed, my face was bathed in sweat and tears.

  “I refuse to prove Terebell right,” I said, once I could breathe without agony. “I need a bath. Then we’re going to talk this out, put it behind us, and get on with the jobs we need to do. More lives than ours depend on it.”

  Arcturus watched me rise, his face as closed as I had ever seen it. I brushed past him without another word.

  14

  Necessary Truths

  Even though the water troubled me as much as ever, I sat in the hot bath for a long time, my knees drawn up to my chin. The steam eased my breathing. I stared at the wall and thought back over the last year.

  I knew how hard Arcturus had worked behind the scenes in London. It was because of him that I’d had the money to feed and house so many voyants, because of him that Terebell had kept backing me financially even after I botched the raid on the warehouse. Perhaps he really had believed that if he broke his oath, he would forfeit that power.

  Harder to absorb was the fact that he had gambled with our hard-won trust. Our alliance had always been fragile, and by sitting on a secret for so long, he had risked shattering it.

  I got out. When I had dried off, I wiped the steam from the mirror. My lips were always dark, but they were also smudged with gray now, like my fingertips. I had overused my gift.

  My fresh bruises had ripened to plum. I dabbed the scrape on my thigh with antiseptic, pulled on a nightshirt, and attempted to untangle my curls, giving up when the comb snapped clean in half. All the while, the pain rose in my chest and made it difficult to breathe.

  There would be time enough to rest. For now, I had to seal this fracture in our friendship.

  Arcturus waited for me in the parlor, nursing a large glass of wine. I lowered myself on the other side of the couch.

  The rain had turned to hail. By now, it was late in the afternoon, the sky like charcoal.

  “As you know,” Arcturus said, “Rephaim are not born. We emerged from the Netherworld.”

  “Yes.”

  “We did not all emerge together. There were waves of creation. Not long after the Netherworld began to fall into decay—the event that started our war—there was one final wave, the equivalent of a death throe. The Netherworld created not Rephaim, but Emim. Not many, to be sure, but we were ill-prepared, and already riven into two factions. Many were turned.”

  In the quiet that followed, I eased onto my right side. Breathing hurt a little less.

  “I see now why we had to risk our necks,” I said. “Going near them puts you at risk of the half-urge.”

  I had never understood why, when they were so fast and strong, the Rephaim had wanted to train humans to fight the Emim. At last, I could make sense of everything I had seen.

  “Cade told me how it all works,” I said. “Most of it, anyway. You have to be bitten, clawed, anything that breaks your sarx. Salt and human blood hold it off, but you have to take aura to cure it.” Arcturus confirmed it with a nod. “There was one thing he hasn’t been able to find out. Whether or not you can also develop the half-urge if you don’t take aura.”

  “No.”

  I watched him with heavy-lidded eyes, one hand on my ribs.

  “If we do not feed,” Arcturus said, “we become delirious. We lose our gifts. Finally, we cease to function. The pollen of the poppy anemone both hastens this process and disfigures us.”

  “So you go into spirit shock,” I said. “Like when a soothsayer or an augur loses their numen.”

  “It is comparable, except that voyants can die from spirit shock. For us, there is no such mercy.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “How much we can perceive in that state, I do not know,” he said. “What is known is that we become considerably more tempting to the Emim. The only way to reanimate us, then, is with the half-urge. Usually, our fellow Rephaim choose to remove that possibility by sequestering us.”

  “That is, beheading you,” I said. “Which can only be done with opaline, because nothing else severs Rephaite bone.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then?”

  Arcturus watched the hailstones clatter on the window.

  “Sequestration is not the same as mortal death,” he said. “Our bodies do not rot. Our dreamscapes remain in the æther. So far as I know, there is no way to free our spirits at that point. We cannot truly die—nor, from then on, can we truly live.”

  Eternal imprisonment. Alsafi had condemned himself to that frozen state to save me.

  “In the colony, I used the pollen of the poppy anemone on Kraz Sargas,” I said. “Afterward, you told me he was dead.”

  “At the time, it seemed the best way to explain it. Kraz did not find a voyant in time to restore himself,” he said. “Nashira would have sequestered him.”

  For all intents and purposes, I really had killed off one of the blood-heirs. I felt nothing.

  “Well,” I said, “thank you for the honesty. How nice it feels to be well-informed.” I touched my burning forehead. “Ménard doesn’t know about sequestration. Not that it would matter if he did, because I doubt Nashira leaves opaline lying around.”

  “No.”

  “Then he still thinks Sheol II is necessary to trap you. If we tear it down, we risk losing him as a potential ally. And of course, the Emim will spread.”

  “Yes. There will be consequences, as there were consequences the first time. But for the sake of all unnaturals—Rephaite and human —we cannot let Sheol II stand,” Arcturus said. “Any civilization that must subjugate a part of itself to survive is not worth saving.”

  “I agree,” I said. “You’re with me, then?”

  “If you will have me.”

  Usually our silences were peaceful. This one was still and heavy, like the air before a storm.

  “I suppose I will,” I finally said.

  “You do not seem as angry as I expected.”

  “Trust me, I am. I’m just too tired to shout at you.”

  “I see.”

  My desire to bridge the rift between us strained against my pride. I was split in half by that tug-of-war.

  “We’ve no time for it, in any case,” I said shortly. “We need to establish if the colony really is in Versailles.”

  Arcturus looked back at me for a long moment, as if he wanted to press the subject.

  “We could ask the perdues,” he said. “They are the followers of Le Vieux Orphelin, the missing grand duc.”

  “Y
ou know about them?”

  “You asked me to discover who painted the graffiti. Who supports you in Paris,” Arcturus reminded me. “It was the perdues. It seems Le Vieux Orphelin is an admirer of yours.”

  Interesting. “What makes you think they would know about Sheol II?”

  “Because all three of the grands ducs may know a way into Versailles. Do you recall the jewelery La Reine des Thunes wore during our audience?”

  “It was hard not to notice,” I admitted. “I’d love to meet whoever can cheat that bright a sparkler.”

  “I do not believe they were ersatz diamonds. In fact, if I am not mistaken, those jewels once belonged to a resident of the Château de Versailles,” Arcturus said. “Marie Antoinette.”

  I tried not to wince. In the syndicate, it was taboo to speak the names of executed monarchs out loud.

  “She was guillotined,” I said. “Her jewels could have been stolen, washed up in the Parisian underworld that way. It doesn’t necessarily mean the grands ducs know a way into Versailles.”

  “If I may present some more evidence,” he said. “The chandelier was solid silver, identical to those that once hung in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. There were other treasures in that chamber. A harp. A guéridon, fashioned of marble and gilded wood. A porcelain jewel box.”

  “You think the grands ducs looted all that from the ruins?”

  “It is possible. In order to do that, they would have needed a clandestine way in and out of the city. I imagine Le Vieux Orphelin was part of this operation. If so, his perdues may know more. I spoke again to Katell, who admitted that Mélusine is one of them.”

  Mélusine had kept her allegiance very quiet. “We need a meeting with them,” I said. “Think you could arrange it, now you’re an underworld expert?”

  “Once you have seen Ducos and Cordier, I will try. We should both be here when they arrive.”

  ****

  We waited. Arcturus made me a bowl of buttered salmon and lentils. After days of almost nothing to eat, I should have been ravenous, but my appetite was gone again—as good as it tasted, I couldn’t eat more than a mouthful. I settled for plain toast.