2.28. Desdemona

Go on, then. The Fox snickered in his cerebellum. Before she realizes you’re gone.

Seth had just used the Fox’s active, hadn’t he? Its voice shouldn’t be back yet. This was not how hexentats worked. Surely it wasn’t.

A cackle in his brain. And what do you know about how hexentats work, kid?

Where had the Fox been all these weeks, and why was it back now, and what the fuck was it doing, trying to get him in trouble again?

What am I doing? Hey now. Who got who laid by a rich stacked widow with a domination kink?

This was a trap. Had to be. The fucking thing was on the fritz.

Look at yourself. You got the girl, got the uniform. You’re hot shit now. No legion asshole can tell you otherwise. That’s me, kid.

Me and you.

“Are you all right, Mr. il Gutierre?” Ofelia inquired, still lingering nearby. “Have you tried the shrimp?”

It’s not like I can steer you myself. You wanna stay at the kiddie table, knock yourself out.

“Fine,” he said, a little too loud, and Ofelia’s dimples peeked out at the edges of her frown. “I’m fine, I mean. No thank you for the shrimp. Will you excuse me, actually? I’m—if Anna asks, I’m hitting the jakes. Be right back.”

“Lisa,” Ofelia said. “Not Anna.”

“Right.”

“And we’re far too fancy for the jakes,” Tiago said. “You’re hitting the powder room.”

Seth huffed a perfunctory laugh—he was in no mood for noble affectations, even from his friends—and slipped away from the lit hall and its unlit merrymaking.

What else are you good for, Seth il Gutierre? whispered the atoms of dried Syndicate blood beneath his fingernails. You’re going thieving.

He ducked out a side door into a hallway lined with suits of Legionnaire armor. The full plate stuff the heavy horsemen and the generals and Rafi’s spouse wore. In the gleaming mitelamps overhead, their frog helm faces seemed like sardonic leers.

At the end of the hall, a velvet rope divided the permissible festival from the forbidden chambers further in. Seth stooped beneath it and slunk onward into the bowels of the bastion.

Behind a door made to blend in with the marble wall and into the plain, austere byways where the servants moved unseen. Up a staircase whose metal grille steps creaked beneath him. The second floor’s lock yielded to the sole pick Seth had brought—his very first, the old triangle tip he’d used to escape the basement of his deprived youth.

The second floor was as grandiose as the first, but its hush and half-light instilled a different mood into the fancy fixings. A haunting, it seemed. A reminder of where he was—a fortress, and an ancient one, where kindred and seraph blood had been spilt in great gallons and mingled in the cracked stones.

He tried a door. Locked. Briefly he considered picking it, but he wasn’t here for the finest stuff, or for trouble. He found a simpler target instead, a slab of finely chiseled marble ajar, through which was a well-furnished office, its desk topped in darkwood tile, its walls lined by bookshelves. In the center of the room a set of swoopback leather seats were arrayed around an oval sitting table with a globe of the world in its center. The last continent like a wine stain across an otherwise cloud-choked sphere.

There were mitelamps on the walls held by miniature wooden women, smiling and bare-chested. Classy. Seth let the room stay dark. He wasn’t trying to read any of the books; he was searching for something smaller and more precious.

Between two thick volumes of Tuthimi history he found a likely lift—a statuette of a traveler in a peaked murani softcamp cap, a barge pole in his hand with a little brass lantern hanging from it on an ornamental hook.

It had such a pleasant heft to it. Such a solidity. The ferine tension that had been scratching his skull all morning skittered beneath that cool, heavy weight like a kit into its den.

The hallway door pushed open, and it came screaming back.

Freeze, the Fox whispered, and he froze in his tracks halfway to a hiding spot. Again he asked himself why the fuck he was listening to this thing.

A pull of the chain on the wall-mounted mitelamp. A sharp clack as the bug died and the corpselight flared. A legionnaire, framed in the light, squinting suspiciously. “Who’s there?” Seth was already away from the shelf with the statuette behind his back. “Identify yourself.”

“I’m, ah—Malark.” Seth shoved the statuette into his sash. The nomad sat awkwardly, prodding its stick into his spine. “From the Verdugo’s retinue. I’m afraid I must have gotten turned around looking for the power room. Powder.”

“Guests of the Bastion aren’t to venture into the private wings, Malark. I’ll escort you to the ballroom. You don’t belong here.”

The correct thing was—of course—to be grateful for this insubstantial disapproval as the only punishment and gladly accept the guard’s offered escort. Seth could not explain what he did instead, which was to snap “Yes, I do,” and mean it.

He meant it with such force that it sent an oscillating thrum through the primeval tarpit of Darkness filling the empty chambers of his heart where his soul once sat, until the love of his life ripped it from him. Something rose from its vantablack surface, bent taut and ready to fire. And with a great cathartic release, the world unbunched its shoulders and stepped aside to turn his statement true.

And that was the nature of his power. This was not a lying spell—he understood that now. If Ofelia’d had cause to match her own Darkness against his, it wouldn’t register. Seth belonged here. The plate tectonics of reality rumbled and slid to create an illogical but unassailable place of unquestionable correctness, and tucked him into it.

The legionnaire’s face changed with the rupture, from its hard-edged skepticism to a look of perfect placidity, without malice or joy. As if Seth were just another piece of priceless furniture he’d strolled past one thousand times on the mind-drumming monotony of his patrol. “All right,” he said, and clicked the light again, venting the remaining hexis into a bulb-blackening spark and darkening the room once more. Off he ambled, thudding mechanically along the reverberant stone of the corridor.

Seth knew what came next. Don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep. Don’t— He took a shaky, insistent step toward a swoopback leather chair, then sat heavily into it.

The cotton-ball artery train collided with his mind and knocked it into a sleepy, weightless spin. He would not fall asleep. Feeli and Tiago and Annalise, they could all use their Darkness at least once a day and stay upright. It was possible. He had to remember it was possible.

Sleep’s oblivion was pooling in the basal curve of his consciousness. But for all his wobbling, he was staying afloat. He became aware of an assistant prodding against his back. He recovered the purloined statuette. Someone—a servant or a designer or something—had gone to the market and picked this out and paid their braces and brought it back here. Someone real, not a laughing phantom.

The door opened again; the nimble darting behind the seat he attempted, in its translation from mind to muscle, polymorphed into a landed-fish flop. The wavering shadow laughed as it spread its way in from the torchlit hallway. “Well, now,” it said, in a silky-smooth woman’s voice, and the figure from which it cast entered the room with undulating grace, like a bolt of cloth carried in a zephyr. “Here’s a man I have been supremely anxious to meet. Good evening, Mr. Seth il Gutierre.”

He recognized her. He did his best to turn his enervated crumple into a disaffected slouch, and the fatigue dragging his voice down into—drunkenness, maybe? That wasn’t particularly good either. “Verdugo al Vhesse, I presume,” he said, and just did his level best not to slur his words.

“Desdemona al Vhesse, yes. At your service.” She curtsied with the tails of her slimline suit. Black, of course, with a white posey boutonniere at her chest. She was Annalise’s height, but Annalise wore herself with stocky surety, like a standing wall from the preseraphic antiquity. Al Vhesse was gaunt and gossamer in comparison. She approached with a curious wavering gait, as if she were drunk or teetering to fall, only to nimbly catch herself, like a needle weaving through the air, or a ballerina, or one of those mantises that kills its mates.

“And you are the Verdugo al Ydris’s newest retainer,” she said. “What a distinct charm to make your acquaintance.”

He tensed the muscles in his legs, desperate to will them awake again. “My charms are notoriously distinct.”

“I’m a friend of your mistress’s,” al Vhesse said. “How is dear Annalise?”

“Have you not spoken with her yet, Madam Verdugo?” he asked. The little act of impudence—and the flicker it sent through her smile—threaded another strand of wakefulness into his ligaments.

“Afraid not.” Al Vhesse folded herself into the seat opposite his and settled one long leg across the other’s knee. “I called us friends, but truth be told she considers our fellowship at an end. But I’m a creature of habit, I suppose you could say. Habit and hope. Annalise, Lisa, whatever you’d wish to call her, has been a dear friend erstwhile. And I entertain the idea… well. I’m sure it’s only of passing interest to a young bravo like yourself, the political dimension of your employer’s work.”

“Partner,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“My partner’s work.”

“Partner.” Her eyes flickered and burned brighter. “But she outranks you, surely. Surely you don’t mean—Saints returned. The Black Widow of Bastelan has finally allowed herself a man.” She laughed. It sounded like an icepick had taught itself to laugh. “Wonderful! Wonderful for you both.”

She’d seen them, he knew. Lisa was not subtle; her hand had been affixed to his like a dog’s leash. But he stayed silent through the show, forcing his mind’s muscle away from acerbic responses and into pushing the fog from his head.

”And with any luck, it means you’ll last longer than the rest,” al Vhesse said.

“Indeed,” he said, and left it at that. This was bait. He wouldn’t rise to it (not that he could rise to much at the moment).

“Has she told you about them? The others?”

There it was. He heaved himself halfway up and had to sit back down. He tried to pass it off as an adjustment. “She’s told me what was useful to tell. If you’ll pardon me, I ought to go find her.”

“There’s no rush.” Her captoe brogue wiggled as she bounced her leg. “This will be quite helpful for you to know, I think. No companion of the al Ydrises has survived the experience. No retainer but her children has seen their third season. That woman she insists on wearing tonight, for example. She lasted two. Well, closer to one-and-a-half. They picked her up in Lamila, in the Tuthiman borderlands.”

Annalise had told him about the blood sorceress she’d taken Lisa’s skull from. She hadn’t told him that the woman had been in her retinue.

“Oh, you hadn’t known.” Al Vhesse tutted. “My big mouth. I presumed she’d trust you enough to tell you, being her partner. The good news is that you’re likely safe from the usual al Ydris method. As far as I’ve known she’s never harvested a man. But a harvest’s what it is, I’m afraid. She befriends them, and cultivates them, and then—well. She doesn’t always swing the sword herself, of course, though she did with Lisa. But she and her children, they have a rule. Anyone without the last name al Ydris is expendable.”

And here was something he couldn’t shake off, because it was true. Tiago had said it in Shaheill. The upward curve of al Vhesse’s thin lips—she knew that had found an unarmored mark.

“I have run my mouth, haven’t I,” she said. “As is my rotten habit. I barely know a thing about you.”

“Correct.” He sat forward. “You don’t.”

Desdemona al Vhesse sighed. He’d privately hoped to piss her off, but she looked more resigned than anything. “Well, I don’t mean to hold you hostage. And mum’s the word on whatever it is you were doing up here.” She stood. “I suppose we’d better get back.”

He tried to stand again. His legs trembled.

“Oh dear.” She reached out a hand; on impulse he took it, and let her pull him out of the seat. She stabilized him by the shoulders. “Are you well, young man?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I have to use the powder thing. Excuse me.” And before she could offer further assistance he hurried from the office.

Strength was returning to him with every step. He half-jogged his escape, wanting as much space as he could get between himself and the strange, swaying Verdugo. He didn’t know this woman, but he knew the al Ydrises, and their hate wasn’t easily earned.

Do you know them? Do you really?

Now that sort of intrusive bullshit was exactly what the great unlit praying mantis had hoped to plant in his brain. He hated that it had worked, even in part. He’d tell Lisa everything, and she’d pull the thorn out.

Because she always knows just what to say, doesn’t she? Just how to get what she wants out of you.

Before he could pursue that thought to its natural conclusion, heavy white hands seized him and turned him with such speed his feet briefly left the ground. His back pressed into the wall. A huge, tattooed body shoved against his, pinning him in place on his tiptoes.

“Seth il Gutierre.” Lisa al Ydris’s exquisite face was drawn into a heavy frown. “What in the world is to be done with a boy as disobedient as you?”