The Mime Order

by Samantha Shannon

  The cane arced over his head this time, hitting home an inch from my right foot. Had it met its mark, it would have broken every toe. He spun it in his hands and took a step back.

  “I think we’ve both established that we excel in good old-fashioned mêlée,” he said, “but perhaps we ought to show the world what sort of gifts we hide beneath these simple exteriors. The first act should be yours, I think. After all, only I have ever known the true extent of your abilities. You ought to have your chance to shine.”

  Jaxon was going to take my head off if I didn’t get hold of a sturdy barrier to block him. I pushed my spirit to the edge of my dreamscape.

  Veins swelled in Jaxon’s temples. He tried to hide it, but he gritted his teeth against the sudden influx of pressure that hammered at his dreamscape. My eyes ached, but I kept pushing until I felt something crack inside his mind. Blood wept from his nose, a shock of red against his waxy skin. He lifted a hand to touch it, staining the white silk fingers of his gloves.

  “Blood,” he said. “Blood! Is she no stronger than a haemato-mancer, this so-called dreamwalker?”

  Their laughs seemed distant now. My ears closed as my sixth sense took control. Jaxon thought I’d fall when I left my body, and it was entirely possible that he was right. I’d not yet mastered the art of staying on my feet. I should have practiced more often with Warden. Like a fool, I’d allowed myself to be distracted by him.

  I snapped my attention back to meatspace when Jaxon attacked with his cane again, swinging and stabbing with vicious accuracy. When he aimed at my side, so hard the air whistled in its wake, I brought my blade to meet it. The metal deflected the force before it could shatter one side of my ribcage.

  My feet carried me away from the next onslaught. A spring of laughter welled up inside me. Some swings I met with the blade, others with evasion. I thought I heard a growl of frustration from Jaxon. Amused by the chase, the julkers took up another chant:

  Ring a ring o’ roses, Binder’s got a nosebleed.

  Defeat her, the Dreamer! She won’t fall down!

  “How appropriate,” Jaxon called to them. “Some say that song is linked to the Black Death. My first strike will be with a dear friend, who died of bubonic plague in 1349.”

  I soon worked out what he meant. One of his boundlings hurled itself from the corner and crashed into my dreamscape.

  At once, a hideous slideshow of images went ripping past my eyes. Blackened fingers. Buboes swelling under my skin, bursting under the weight of a hen’s feather. Most spooled spirits were easy to force out, but this one was under Jaxon’s control, carrying his willpower into its attacks. I staggered, fighting to see past the horror: mass graves, red crosses barring doors, leeches growing fat on blood, all growing out of my poppy anemones. Through his boundlings, Jaxon could manipulate the appearance of my dreams-cape. My defenses expelled the spirit just in time to throw myself out of the way.

  Not quite fast enough. As my arm came up, the cane-blade tore down my left side, leaving a shallow wound from underarm to hip. The base of my spine hit the stone with a force that jarred what felt like every nerve. I rolled to avoid the second slash. My blade lay a few feet away.

  Imagine your spirit as a boomerang. A light throw and a quick return.

  I needed a few seconds to reach the blade. My spirit lashed into his dreamscape. Jaxon reeled back with a shout of anger. As soon as I made impact, I returned to my body, drenched in sweat, and crawled toward the knife. Behind me, he swung blindly with his cane. Another surge of blood flowed from his nostrils, past his lips and chin.

  “Dislocation,” Jaxon said, pointing at me. “You see, friends—the dreamwalker can leave the confines of her own body. She is the highest of all seven orders.” When I launched myself at him, he blocked my offensive with the cane, holding both ends. “But she forgets herself. She forgets that without flesh, there is no anchor to the earth. To one’s autonomy.”

  With a sudden shove and a deft hack, he knocked my legs out from under me and pitched me on to my back. My left side was soaked, the white silk of my blouse tarnished with red. I could feel it trickling from my gashed collar, oozing down my chest to my stomach.

  “Now,” he said, “I do believe it’s my turn. Say hello to another friend of mine.”

  Sweat ran down my neck. I readied myself, snapping up every defense, imagining my dreamscape with walls as dense as those of an unreadable.

  The spirit hit me.

  Oxygen ignited in my throat.

  Stakes pinned my clothes to the earth. All around me, my flowers were withering away as easily as paper. The boundling took the form of a shadow-figure in my hadal zone, laughing from afar. I recognized that laugh.

  The London Monster, back to get me.

  From out of the earth of my mind, new flowers rose and bloomed, shaking blood from their petals. Artificial flowers, wrapped into posies with lengths of barbed wire. Spikes burst from between their silken petals. In meatspace, my hands hit the floor of the Rose Ring. The pendant was burning on my chest, trying to force the creature’s pictures from my mind, but Jaxon was fighting to keep it rooted. In meatspace, Jaxon raised his cane to strike. One blow to my head, and all of this would stop.

  No.

  It wasn’t just my life that hung in the balance. If I didn’t defeat this enemy, others would rise up and seize the syndicate. Everything would be lost. Liss’s and Seb’s deaths, Julian’s sacrifice, Warden’s scars—all of it would have been for nothing. I swung my head under Jaxon’s cane. I willed the Monster gone, willed it until my dream-form screamed with the effort. The earth trembled beneath me, and a rolling wave turned the artificial flowers on their heads, burying their spikes in the earth. The London Monster screamed as my poppies bloomed around him. My defenses slammed back up, and he was pitched into the æther.

  When my vision cleared, Jaxon was perfectly still, both hands folded on the top of his cane. A strand of hair had worked its way loose from the oil, and his breathing was heavy with the effort of keeping control. Still, a smile was playing on his lips.

  “Very good,” he said.

  My blade was in one of his hands, the cane in the other. Fury swelled from the darkest parts of me. I seized a candlestick from a terrified libanomancer and used it to block the cane. When he struck with the knife, I used the candlestick to knock it from his hand and into mine. As soon as my fist closed around it, my wrist flicked up. A scarlet line appeared above Jaxon’s eyebrow. A smear of paint on a blank canvas.

  “Ah. More blood.” His gloves were more red than white. “There are pints of it in my veins, O my lovely.”

  “Is it blood or absinthe?” I caught his cane in my hands when he thrust it toward me. Fire blazed along my left side. “Not that it matters,” I said softly. “I can spill it all either way.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” he said. My hands were slick, hardly gripping the ebony. “I need a little more of it, you see. I have one more trick before the grand finale.”

  I kicked out with the side of my boot, catching his knee. Jaxon’s grip loosened. And somehow, I wrenched the cane against his throat.

  Both of us grew still. His pupils were tiny dots of hatred.

  “Go on,” he whispered.

  The blade of the cane pressed against his neck, where his jugular pulsed with blood. My hands trembled. Do it, Paige, just do it. But he’d saved my life, my sanity. He’ll come back to haunt you if you don’t. But he’d been like my father, taught me and sheltered me, saved me from a life lived without knowledge of my gift. You’re an item of his property. That’s why he saved you. He doesn’t care, he never cared. He had given me a world in Seven Dials. He wouldn’t listen when it mattered.

  My hesitation cost me. His right fist punched up and caught the underside of my chin, right where the Wicked Lady had cut me open. I staggered back, almost retching at the pain, before the same fist crashed into my ribcage. The crack of bone resonated through my body, and I fell to my knees with a cr
y of agony. The audience shouted out: some cheering, some booing. Whistling, Jaxon drew the full sword from inside the hollowed cane.

  This was it, then. He was going to take my head off and be done with it.

  But Jaxon didn’t turn the sword on me. Instead, he pushed up his own sleeve and set to work. White score marks had scarred the underside of his right arm. When I saw the letters that he carved there, my heart jolted into my throat.

  Paige

  I stared at him, frozen. His eyes shone with the arch delight I’d once admired in him.

  Once that name was finished, I would be unable to use my gift without putting myself in terrible danger.

  In the æther, as a spirit, I was vulnerable to Jaxon’s binding. He could trap me for as long as he liked. Clever, clever Jaxon, always thinking . . . turning my own gift against me . . .

  The knife slid through his skin, creating the next letter. Forcing the last of my strength into the jump, I leaped out of my body and into his dreamscape, aiming for the heart.

  Jaxon had immense defenses. Not quite as tough as a Rephaite’s or an unreadable’s, but stronger than any other I’d ever seen. They threw me out at once, as if I’d hit a wall. My body buckled and collapsed again. Fresh blood dampened my side, and my skin glinted with mingled blood and sweat. Raucous jeering boomed from every corner of the vault.

  “Look at the little dreamwalker! She’s tired !”

  “Put her to sleep, Binder!”

  But there were some cries for me. I couldn’t tell whose voices they were, but I heard a distinct shout of “Go on, Dreamer!” My legs were like straw. It didn’t feel as if I could lift a single coin from the gutter, let alone dislocate my spirit again.

  “Dreamer! Dreamer!”

  “Come on! Give him what for!”

  Blood is not pain.

  “Get up, girl,” shouted one of the mime-queens. “Get up!”

  My hand pressed to my injured side, wetting my fingers. I could survive this. I could survive Jaxon Hall.

  The balls of my feet pushed against the floor. I lunged for the fallen candlestick and ran at him, ignoring the screaming burn in my shoulders. Jaxon laughed. I attacked again and again, but he blocked each blow with ease—and worse, he only used one arm to wield his cane. The other was behind his back. He was so much stronger than I was, this man that never raised a finger. Don’t use anger, Warden called from my memory. Dance and fall.

  But the anger was already there, overflowing from all the parts of myself I’d locked away: anger at Jaxon, at Nashira, at the Abbess and the Rag and Bone Man and everyone else who had corrupted the syndicate. The syndicate I loved, in spite of everything. I hit him an eighth time. A split second later, his fist collided with my stomach. I doubled over, gasping for air as my diaphragm went into spasm.

  “Sorry about that, darling.” He turned the blade on his arm again. “You mustn’t interrupt. This is delicate work.”

  Every muscle in my abdomen was reacting to the blow, but there was only a small window of opportunity to stop him. I dragged in oxygen. The tank must be empty.

  The pommel of his cane struck my forearm. I didn’t scream. I didn’t have the breath left in my lungs. Weak, but still fighting, I picked up a chair and hurled it. Jaxon let out a shout of anger and fell, dropping his cane. It rolled. I made a grab for it. He clawed it back into his hand. The blade swung over my head. We were spitting and snarling like animals now; any pretense of a duel had dissolved. The cane came flying at me again, striking my elbow. Crackling agony burst from the point of impact, sending prickles to my fingertips.

  I was running out of time. Gathering my strength, I shucked my battered flesh and shot through the æther, right into his dreamscape. My dream-form’s feet fell on frost and grass. Jaxon’s midnight zone.

  In meatspace, the window of opportunity slammed shut. Outside his dreamscape, the æther trembled. I launched myself back out and into my body.

  And couldn’t breathe.

  My fingers went straight to my neck. A creak of sound escaped me, edged with panic. This had only happened to me two or three times before. Nick had called it laryngospasm, a sudden constriction in the larynx when I dislocated. It always resolved itself within half a minute, but I was already starving for oxygen after the jump. Eyes watering, I looked up at Jaxon.

  Too late.

  The name was carved.

  The oxygen tank had run too low to help. While I drowned without water, Jaxon smiled down at me. Blood seeped from his cut eyebrow. He added a little curl to the “y” at the end of my surname, just for good measure, but it was done. It had been finished while I was still in spirit form. His influence was already gripping my limbs, keeping my knees locked and my head held stiffly upright. Sweat dripped into my eyes. He held out his arm for all to see, and the letters glistened in the candlelight.

  Paige Eva Mahoney

  All I heard was my own thin breaths, the air whistling through a tiny space between my vocal cords.

  “Stand, Paige,” he said.

  I stood.

  “Come to me.”

  I went to him.

  The mime-lords and mime-queens were chuckling. This was a first. No binder had ever snared a living person’s spirit. The dream-walker was a sleepwalker now, defeated by her own pride, by someone two orders lower than she was. Jaxon took my arm and turned me to face the audience. I was limp and pliant. A puppet.

  “There, now. I believe this counts as unconsciousness, mistress of ceremonies.” He curled his fingers into my hair. “What do you say, my boundling?”

  I touched my finger to his arm, letting my lips part a little, as if I were mindlessly fascinated.

  “Yes, my lovely, that’s your name.”

  Howls of laughter.

  I didn’t say a word. All I did was jump, thanking every star that my father had changed my birth name.

  His defenses were weakened by vanity and premature thoughts of triumph. They snapped up just an instant too late.

  Inside his dreamscape, I stumbled over snarls of weeds and twisted tree roots, whipping branches out of my way. Each branch dripped bloodred leaves. As I sprinted, I caught glimpses of the lichen-covered slabs that surrounded me. They radiated out from the center, right into the depths of his hadal zone, embossed with numbers that blurred as I passed them. Jaxon’s dreamscape was an enormous graveyard. Nunhead Cemetery, perhaps, where he’d mastered his gift for the very first time.

  I didn’t stop. He could correct my middle name, if he didn’t mind making a mess of his arm. It wasn’t too tough to guess its Irish counterpart. But as I sprinted towards the very heart of his dream-scape, I strained my dream-eyes to see the names on the graves, but there were none.

  Specters were scuttling from his hadal zone, tall and translucent, creatures made from memory. Their fingers reached for me.

  “Back,” I shouted.

  My voice echoed endlessly through Jaxon’s mind. One of them gripped my dream-form in its arms, and for the first time in my life, I looked into a specter’s eyes. Two yawning pits gaped back at me, full to the brim with fire.

  In another person’s dreamscape, they determined what my dream-form looked like—but only if they were focused. Just as I had with Nashira, I imagined myself growing larger, too large for the specter to hold. Its arms fell apart, and I tumbled free. My dream-form fell into his twilight zone, where the grass was thick and living and the smell of lilies hung on the air. The specters gave chase, but I was faster. I jumped over another grave and ran toward the light.

  At the center of Jaxon’s sunlight zone was a statue. Carved into the shape of an angel, it was slumped over a burial vault as if in grief. As soon as I was close enough, one of its hands lifted the lid of the tomb. Jaxon’s dream-form was inside it. Its eyes opened, and it climbed out.

  “There you are,” he said. “Do you like my angel, honeybee?”

  He put his hands behind his back. The dream-form’s face wasn’t quite Jaxon’s; it was softer, older, almost
plain. Cold black eyes stared at me with odium. The curling hair that grew from his scalp was like beaten copper, and strands of silver fingered out from his parting.

  “You look different,” I said.

  “So do you. But you’ll never know what my Paige looks like.” He looked up. “Or will you?”

  An X-shaped shadow hovered over my head. When I tried to move my wrists, I realized they were bound, as were my ankles.

  “Poor puppet,” he said. “You have no idea of anything, do you?”

  “Neither do you.” I pulled my wrists downward, and the strings evaporated. “Good thing I never told you my name, or that trick might have worked.”

  A smile touched his lips. “I see that you can change the natural state of your dream-form within my dreamscape. Your talents continue to impress.”

  I paced around him. His dream-form stood with its hands behind its back. Black eyes watched me.

  “What are you going to do now? Make me dance around the ring? Make me cry and beg and whimper, just to show how powerful you are? Or perhaps you mean to force my spirit out, though I doubt you have the strength to do that now.”

  “I’m not going to kill you, Jaxon,” I said.

  “It would make a grand denouement. What a show it would be,” he said. “Prove them right. Prove you’re a destroyer, darling.”

  “I’m not your darling, or your lovely, or your honeybee. But I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to take your crown.”

  That was when I ran.

  He was slow. The specters couldn’t breach his sunlit zone, and his injuries had weakened his focus on his dream-form. I threw myself into the burial vault, and the lid slammed down on top of me.

  My vision was sucked into Jaxon’s sighted eyes. Colors flared up everywhere, each like an electric storm. Nerve systems in the æther, outstretched for any spiritual activity. The faces of the audience blurred and spun. My vision—Jaxon’s vision—slid in and out of focus. Everything felt oddly light, as if I hadn’t quite possessed him. Like his body was too loose. Like I wasn’t quite filling it.