The Waking Engine Part 10

Again, she seemed to follow his thoughts. "I found your Shakespeare on my doorstep one day. A great one for wh.o.r.es, the shaker of spears. I teased him until he promised to write me over-he never stopped writing, you know. I don't believe he could stop if he wanted to. I am told he wrote me into plays at least twice more; he swore to me that he had not met another model for his historical roles, and I enjoyed the opportunity to thoroughly educate him on my nature and bearing. His subsequent efforts will have captured me more cunningly, I am confident."

"That's unbelievable." Except that it wasn't, not anymore. What would be?

"Believe it, little brother. Our people rise and conquer all across the worlds, you know. There is no truer cradle than Gaia, for our sands bear the sweetest fruit."

Cooper realized then that as a former Earthling, no amount of time or distance would diminish the sense of kins.h.i.+p she felt toward him. Would that fraternity extend to other planetary graduates? Had he joined a club so improbable in its exclusivity? This woman and he knew each other in a way so permanent it shocked him. She was famous, the original celebrity, born and died two thousand years before him, yet as far as the Lady was concerned, they were countrymen or closer; she called him brother. Never minding that she was, he suspected, the last queen of Pharaonic Egypt and he merely an overeducated, bull- shouldered American with an unhelpful att.i.tude and zero survival skills.

She leaned closer, and the scents of flowers and poison grew stronger. "But you have not answered my question, though perhaps I press it upon you too soon: how fares your faith, child of Rome?" Her fingers stroked a rhythm on the tender side of his forearm.

Cooper shook his head and raised himself to a sitting position, ignoring his nakedness and the sc.r.a.pes that pained him. He wanted to say this right. "I don't think the people here are that different from those back home: I'm sure the need for something . . . larger . . . is universal. I just can't imagine-given the scale of the worlds and the lives we live, apparently-what kind of G.o.d could be big enough to encompa.s.s these worlds? What's a Christ compared to that?" He gestured at the window, where twin cerulean suns had peeked above the horizon, limning the skyline in an underwater glow.

"He was a kinder man than I expected. We who proclaim ourselves the children of G.o.ds are rarely so gentle." Thea laughed, and Cooper realized that he felt a hint of fear from her, a constant undercurrent running just beneath her surface. He didn't have to be a student of history to know she held plots within plots. "Or maybe you'd expect him to be the paragon of compa.s.sion-I confess I haven't paid much attention to those who followed in my footsteps. Was he the forgiving one? I, too, was an avatar of G.o.d on Earth. I was the sun himself, Cooper, and as for me and Yeshua of Canaan, my end was no n.o.bler than his."

She slipped an arm from her dress and lifted one weighty breast out of its confines. Puncture wounds were tattooed across her flesh, not one pair but many, as if she had fed her chest with poison until it was ready to burst. "My children died. What use had I for milk?" She shrugged herself back into her clothes. "I gave myself to the serpents instead, and now I express milk of another kind."

A thought occurred to Cooper. "Shouldn't you have left those scars behind when you died? Or are they new?"

She flashed another smile-one that dazzled. Cooper wondered if she ever faltered. The woman who made a triumph of suicide. "Finally asking the smart questions, my innocent soul! You may yet survive the trials to come. Yes, that is what ought to have happened. It did happen. And happened, and happened, across a dozen-dozen spheres. My journey has not been as dignified as you might think, Cooper. I spent many lives in a haze of self-destruction, drunk on loss, and I found serpents rarer than the viper whose kiss I once thought so final.

"I have become something somewhat more than woman, thanks to those many-fevered kisses, and something less. I cannot die, or Die, and I cannot leave this place. I poisoned myself too deeply, and now I am bound to this body as thoroughly as the rest of the wh.o.r.es in this city."

Cooper couldn't imagine this woman, whose ident.i.ty he had begun to accept-as a wh.o.r.e. Or was it that he could not imagine her as anything else? Two faces on the coin, or one? The submerged fear that veiled the Lady fluttered as if in a breeze.

"There are many diversions on the streets of the City Unspoken." She turned the subject away from True Death. Cooper thought that if he reached out with his mind, he could hear their fear. A sea of it, and it would drown him. "You know the card game they play on the streets, which cannot be won?"

"Three Wh.o.r.es? Yes, Asher warned me away from it."

She nodded. "Then you know the three flavors of courtesans who populate the bordellos of the City Unspoken?"

Cooper frowned, shaking his head. "There are three kinds of wh.o.r.es? I didn't know that. I know about the bloods.l.u.ts, I mean, the life-wh.o.r.es, or whatever we're calling the ones who die for a living. I saw one in the Guiselaine. I . . . heard her fear, I guess. The scratching whispers in my head. She was half-mad from it . . . poor thing . . ."

"Yes. Thing is closer to the mark." Cleopatra's voice was bitter. "The life- wh.o.r.es are people who have become little more than chattel. Here at La Jocondette, my sisters and brothers and I are something less inhuman, but no less trapped."

"If you're not a life-wh.o.r.e, then what do you . . . do?" He found no way to lessen the awkwardness of the question.

"If you will permit me, Cooper, I will show you the talents my sisters and I possess. The people of this city come to us for emotional rather than physical release, although that may become part of the work. But my ilk do more than talk, you understand? The poison in our veins provides our patrons with a seer's insight, unveils visions and unlocks forbidden knowledge. Our succor is not the enchantment of the flesh, but the fulfillment of fate. I will awaken your secret self and hold up a mirror to your lidless eye."

"Okay." Cooper did not hesitate. "I mean yes, yes please. Show me my fate-if you can do it, I will dare it." Since it was worth kidnapping me, he thought but did not add.

The Lady opened her arms and whispered something sibilant to the corners of the room before redrawing the curtains against the cobalt morning. "Once this city gleamed, although you may not believe it; I have seen it myself, in the memory of a very, very old client. He still mourns, I think. Long after the city fell into mortal hands, and thence into dust and disuse, my sisters and their peers retained the glamour of the previous ages-there were whole epochs when we plied our trade and the word 'wh.o.r.e' was all but unknown. This was before my time, of course, but La Jocondette still s.h.i.+ned spotless white when I arrived in the city. My talents brought me here and as the years wore on I became its mistress."

"Yes," Cooper mouthed, barely speaking. "I see that."

The wh.o.r.e who had been queen leaned over him, the redolence she wore like a shroud enveloping and intoxicating him, and all was liquid eyes and trails of hair like the lightless depths of the great celestial river, drowning and nouris.h.i.+ng him until the corbeled ceiling opened and swallowed Cooper into vision beyond sight.

"What about the third kind of wh.o.r.e?" Cooper asked the beluga whale with orange fire for eyes. They treaded water beneath the surface of a sea of silk cloth, aquamarine banners and ribbons flowing past his body, curling about his limbs, and eddying off into the depths.

"He makes you feel. He feels for you." The beluga's cloud-gray skin s.h.i.+mmered in the aquatic light and the hand bones hidden by evolution within its flippers glowed white-hot, visible through the skin. They began expanding, fingers curling in gloves of fin- flesh.

"Oh," he said, as a school of wooden geese darted overhead. "What are you thinking, Cooper?"

He held out his hand, palm forward, and splayed his fingers. They matched the bones of the whale, which had stopped glowing along their length and now only sparkled at the joints, like a constellation. When Cooper answered, he spoke from a subsystem of himself that had perfect recall and zero irony: "I am thinking that Gould's Belt is not part of the natural spiral structure of the Milky Way. It spans three thousand light years and sits at a twenty-degree angle to the galactic plane. Yet it surrounds us with a ring of bright stars, and without them we would not have Orion, Scorpius, the Southern Cross, Perseus, Canis Major, Vela, or Centaurus. What astrological sign would I be if Gould's dark matter had not impacted my galaxy? Would my story be different?"

The beluga nodded, taking notes on a pad of legal paper. "I see. And how does this make you feel?"

"I feel that these plastic stars are in my way." Cooper brushed a mobile of toy stars away from his face as they drifted past. "And also that the gray jacka.s.s feels responsible for the dying of Death. Why would he feel that way? What has he done to close the Last Gate? It makes him so afraid, he doesn't know himself anymore."

"Please, go on."

"He's in love with her. And she loves him back, so strong, but she hates herself for it. I don't think they will be together, even though she would give him the one thing he wants more than anything."

"And what do you think Asher desires most?"

"A child." Cooper raised an eyebrow at the inquisitive cetacean. His replies were reflexes. "Wait, no: a second child. Aren't you supposed to be the one doling out the answers?"

The beluga-who he somehow knew was part Lady, part Cooper, and part something else entirely-laughed bubbles and brushed dark hair from her face. "I am just the swimmer, little brother. You are the sea."

"That explains it, then, why I am so cold and dark and empty."

"Is that how the sea makes you feel?" She pushed wire spectacles onto her nose with a dainty flipper. "Even though it drinks warmth and light from the sun and houses teeming billions?"

"The sky is empty and dark and cold, but it houses billions too-and teems with suns besides." He paused. The sea was emptying, silk streamers rippling off into the distance, where they vanished. "Where is all the woven water going?"

The beluga pointed to the center of his forehead with a fin. "Back where it came from. Have you ever touched a star, I wonder, and found its furnace cold? I think we are almost out of it, Cooper. How do you feel?"

"Sleepy." He opened his eyes and saw the Lady of La Jocondette above him, cradling him in her ample lap. Her storm of scents was withdrawing from him like a tentacled thing; it had reached inside him and cracked him open. Cooper felt like a crab sucked empty of its meat. "You did quite well, child of Rome." The Lady smoothed his face with her fingers. "I would almost suspect you of being familiar with the narcotic haze."

"Well, there was college."

She shook her head. "I would advise against hiding behind your humor when unnecessary, or your intellect. I believe you have two new friends who suffer from one or the other such tendencies, yes? Do not mimic their flaws. It will only make your lives harder."

Cooper let out a sigh that seemed to go on forever, until his lungs were flattened pancakes. "I suppose that's good advice. Don't be smart or funny, and don't play Three Wh.o.r.es. And whatever you do, try not to f.u.c.king die. But if you do die, it's okay, because n.o.body can Die, which makes the most perfect sense ever. Yep, I've heard some good advice today." The Lady swept her hand toward the windows, where watery light struggled through the curtains. "Today has become tomorrow." Cooper rubbed his face with his hands, but the Lady pulled them away and leveled an earnest look.

"There is another side to the coin of advice you've been paid-it has been said that a visitor to the City Unspoken may call upon the aid of three wh.o.r.es to guide him. Once for blood, once for wisdom, and once for love."

Cooper blushed but felt a crabby awkwardness-was he developing an allergy to unsolicited counsel, or just sick of all the s.e.x-worker jargon? "Asher warned me that there was no way to win that game. I think I'm beginning to understand what he meant."

The dead queen laughed, and her throat matched the bells that rang in the city outside her bordello palace. "Asher told you that? He's lying, of course. Any game can be won. Remember that"-she touched her chest- "when you are stripped of the choice of whether or not to play, my strapping boy."

"I can avoid a hard hustle, Lady. I'm a New Yorker."

"All the pride of a Roman! Three wh.o.r.es, I think, will help you. I have been one of them."

Cooper paused, weighing his increasing resistance to anything tangential to bulls.h.i.+t against his need to absorb all the useful knowledge he could. "What else did you see inside me?"

"Every soul s.h.i.+nes with its own brilliance, and yours is a blossom, unique. You have a strong affinity toward the call shamanic, yes? You will feel it one day, if you have not already been drawn to it. To the omphalos, yes? It means the navel, the axis mundi, the worlds-pillar. The center of the world, where all truths and lies converge. You will take its name for your own, CooperOmphale, and become something of an axis yourself. But listen to me well: this is less a position of power than it is a moment of leverage. And you have some of the seer's sight, if you'd learn to use it-we have already spoken of your propensity for hearing the frightened thoughts of others. This is the beginning of the path of the shaman."

She let out a slow breath, and pressed her knuckles against his cheek. "But I do not see in your possibilities the greatness to merit the attention of any of the true penates, the elder ones who call themselves the First People. Nor do I see a great worker of the art whose awakening ripped him whole from his physical reality and sent him hurtling down, down, down to me."

Cooper resisted the urge to hang his head. "In other words, I'm still a useless mystery. An erratum."

The Lady shook her head and pierced him with an intense look. Again, he felt her fear, distant and undefined, but which lessened whenever she spoke, "I do not understand why the gray one and the faerie n.o.blewoman care so strongly about resolving your mystery-there are far stranger things in the worlds than one lost man. Your ash-skinned friend is one of those things, as am I. But I'd sooner tear out my eyes than betray his trust, and you yourself have earned my deepest respect and admiration, Cooper. Your answers may not be easily uncovered, but you are far from useless."

"I am?" He didn't feel it.

"You have retained your self-possession in the face of a reality that has crushed lesser minds. So few experience the truth of the worlds entire during the course of a single day! There is waking to new life, yes, and this is always a shock-but you are a white-hot smelting thrust into the coldest water without cracking."

She brought him a plate from a credenza by the wall, all curves and curls and coils of venomous sight. "This resilience is perhaps the only quality I see in you that might qualify for greatness. Let us appreciate that irony for a moment, before your monochrome savior storms my keep and rescues you from the torments of luxury. Pastry?"

Asher dripped down the sentinel wall and swung onto the branches of a papery sycamore, flipping head over heels before grabbing a lower branch and pus.h.i.+ng himself off, swinging his feet in a backward arc, and hooking his knees around on a still-lower branch. He hung there for a moment, upside down, and scanned the grounds of La Jocondette through inverted eyes to see if he'd been detected or triggered any sort of alarm, then unlocked his knees from the bough and allowed himself to drop headfirst to the manicured lawn before bracing his impact with an arrowstraight handstand. As he spun forward into a machine-perfect landing, Asher wondered if anyone could acquire dexterity like his if they had lived as long-and as dangerously-as he had, or if acrobatics were simply another of his natural gifts. He couldn't remember ever feeling clumsy, but who could say what details of his long-distant childhood had been eroded? The worlds themselves had changed. His family, his people. Chara, for instance, wherever she was. Would he even recognize her as the sister who once chased him through Anvit's Glade? She would surely not recognize the gray- skinned beggar he had become.

Poor Chara.

The lawns of La Jocondette always did remind him of home- something in the symmetry of the fruit trees and their shaded lanes, or the flower beds that seemed to float like the tips of icebergs across the immaculate gra.s.s. All the white stonework, too, the white bricks and the steepled rooftops. So quiet and clean and well-lit in the night.

The door leading inside from the garden was ajar. He poked his head in and saw no one. Strange. La Jocondette no longer turned as much business as the less tony brothels, certainly not with most of the city's wealth locked up inside the Dome, but there should be at least a few morsels lounging about, waiting for those seeking their particular custom-dissolution and dreams in the arms of a poison-wh.o.r.e.

Das.h.i.+ng up the spiral stairs to the second level where bedrooms branched off from three plush brown-carpeted corridors, he found one room empty. And another. Another. Another.

Panic p.r.i.c.kled his spine, and Asher called out. No guards came running. No wh.o.r.es looking shocked or annoyed at having their work interrupted. Asher possessed a bloodhound nose for manipulation, and he smelled a skunk. La Jocondette appeared empty: neither Cooper nor the Lady whose profile had been so crudely inked on the broken chip were anywhere to be found.

Outside a blue morning dawned-the window faced west but the buildings across the ca.n.a.l were washed in cool light. Including one narrow building, once a townhouse, now part of a row of houses annexed by La Jocondette as additional s.p.a.ce for guests or special events. The brothel hadn't seen that much custom in some years, so the annex had lain fallow- but now a candle burned in a window on the third storey, and below it a figure in black s.h.i.+mmied up the colonnade, inching toward the lit window.

Asher watched the shadow of the Lady of La Jocondette through the distant gla.s.s, so far across the grounds and the ca.n.a.l; he fingered through his pocket the cracked chip that bore her likeness. What had Oxnard intended, by giving it to him? Had it been a tip, or a trap?

Cooper heard Asher's howl from across the water. The cry of frustration was a primal sound, bell-clear in its purity, and even though Cooper had known Asher for less than twenty-four hours he recognized the gray man's cry. Leaping off Thea's bed, Cooper shook away the lethargy that still combed its poisoned fingers through his mind-he pulled the lace away from the window and spied Asher across the ca.n.a.l, standing in the gardens of La Jocondette. His lanky body was bent back in dismay, the smoke of his face raised to the silvery sky, staring up over the water into the window where Cooper stood. With still-watery vision, Cooper thought he saw dark puppets emerge from the shadows and surround Asher.

"What is Asher doing all the way over there?" he asked, still clearing his head of the puppet- show Thea had shown him. Sid and Marty Krofft have nothing on f.u.c.king Cleopatra, he thought to himself.

"Why," began Thea, crossing and uncrossing her legs as she reclined on her chaise longue, upholstered in a chamois the same watery blue of the rising suns, "I believe he's loosing a scream of unbridled rage." She smiled.

The b.i.t.c.h smiled. And instead of infuriated, Cooper found himself mollified. Somehow. He could understand how his hostess had captivated an epoch of history; it wouldn't have posed the slightest challenge, not for her.

"But. You said my savior, my monochrome savior . . ."

"I did." She nodded with just a blush of enthusiasm, like he'd hit upon a half-hidden truth the Lady secretly wanted to share, and the fact that Cooper knew it was an act did nothing to diminish the effect of her performance. "And I did not lie to you once. Be patient a moment, CooperOmphale, and wait for life to catch up to accuracy. It happens thus, sometimes."

But the puppet show had ended-those were thugs out there, fighting and greatly outnumbering Asher-and Cooper turned his back to the window, feeling his indignation rise as he faced the Lady. He found his footing again against this woman-this queen-who must not be trusted. Cooper shook his head and scolded himself. Is that the understatement of the G.o.dd.a.m.n year. Christ on a multigrain cracker, you don't let Cleopatra lull you into a sense of security, not unless you're looking for a handful of b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and a dependable excuse for suicide!

"I never asked you who kidnapped me, did I?" Cooper kept his voice level. He might be overmatched by two thousand years and a handful of empires, but he intended to use his inclination toward the male s.e.x in his favor. He would not be seduced again, now that he knew who he faced.

"I never asked you who attacked me and Asher, and Sesstri. Why is that, Thea Philopater? Tell me why my a.s.sault and abduction so conveniently slipped my mind after I awoke in your psychoactive brothel?"

A shoulder raised, lowered; the Lady didn't need to shrug when the stirring of her every joint was ch.o.r.eography. "Damage to the head can have all sorts of effects, Cooper," she purred, "and it's fair to say that you might have been a tad overwhelmed."

He shook his traumatized head. "But didn't you just finish telling me about my remarkable mental resilience? My retention of sanity in the face of this, um . . . waking absurdity?" he continued, though still very much in awe of the pedigree of the woman he addressed. "After all I've seen recently, one dead Egyptian doesn't exactly overwhelm. Try again."

"I have not lied to you once, CooperOmphale." Thea caved, tipping her hand to Cooper with two thousand years of rehea.r.s.ed grace. Of course she mustered grace: Cooper doubted she could break wind without arousing jealousy from Zephyr himself. "Please remember that when you dole out your justice at the end of this shadow play."

"That doesn't explain-"

"Ah. Here he comes."

"Asher?" Cooper could no longer see him, but he couldn't possibly have crossed the ca.n.a.l yet, let alone escaped his attackers. The curtains fell closed as Cooper rounded on his infamous hostess.

"Did I not promise you a monochrome savior?" Thea stretched her arms in a gesture of generosity that Cooper doubted she merited. He could still feel a veil of fear about her, too thin or well-restrained for him to grasp, but there nonetheless. What did she fear? He reached for something scathing to say, but just then came a knock at the window. It slid open with an accompanying grunt, and as he spun around Cooper saw a face that wasn't the face he'd expected to see. The City Unspoken could surprise and surprise and surprise.

Marvin, pale with black hair, black-rimmed eyes, and shredded black clothing, climbed through the open window and parted the curtain like a marriage veil. Cooper stepped back as this new grayscale soldier glided into his embrace, wrapping strong arms around him and intoxicating him with a different sort of scent entirely than the Lady's poison perfume: man-sweat, tobacco, liquor, smoke, and something else . . . something rank but irresistible. That's the smell of undeath, Cooper told himself, knowing he was right but not knowing how; knowing that ought to terrify him but unable to care.

"Hi," whispered Marvin into the small of Cooper's neck.

"Oh." Cooper found he could not move, or would not. "h.e.l.lo."

"Lady." Marvin ducked his head at Thea, who acknowledged him with a bow of her head and the barest ripple of her fingers through the air.

"Tell your wretched masters that I have upheld my end of the bargain," she said with a voice Cooper had not heard before. Her flattery fell away to reveal a wyrm in woman's flesh, and he s.h.i.+vered despite himself. Marvin held him closer, and another measure of Cooper's free will melted away.

"They already know," Marvin deferred, biting his tattooed lip. "The skylords see us always. They are the shaman G.o.ds come to free us from the tyranny of living." He rubbed his stubble against the nape of Cooper's neck.

Thea brushed the air with her fingers again, as fluent in the ch.o.r.eography of dismissal as that of seduction. "I am unimpressed by your flock of cadavers, Death Boy. I do what is necessary for my own survival and nothing more. I ask you to tell your owners that I have upheld my end of the agreement, and you will do so, regardless of what you think they do or do not know. You will convey my message not because of the import of its contents but because I ask it. Even the masters of unlife will recognize my authority."

Marvin bowed, taking Cooper halfway with him. It felt like a dip in the strangest dance.

"My Lady. I will do as you say."

"Of course you will." Cooper said before he could stop himself. l.u.s.tblinded and drug-f.u.c.ked halfway across a thousand thousand creations, and he was still a smart-a.s.s. A little s.h.i.+t, his mother would say, wherever she was. Oh G.o.d, his mother. His father!

"Hush." Marvin smiled so close to Cooper's mouth, his breath smelled of smoke and cloves.

"Okay," Cooper agreed, and lost the rest of his words, staring at his thuggish seducer. Black hair, black eyes, fishbelly white skin, tattered black cotton torn in all the right places-above the nipple that was the only flash of color, across the stomach ripped with a six-pack but no navel, slashed off at one soft-muscled shoulder- no, Cooper had no more clever words. Only a rising barometer of desire and the instinct to run.

Thea had been right: Marvin was monochrome, but as for being his savior-Cooper's l.u.s.t did not dispel his doubt. He looked to the distance, where the blue clouds flickered orange above the burning towers. Marvin would take him there, wouldn't he? He heard the crying clearly now, a wail from the north that no one else could hear. A woman's voice.

Thea yawned. The Queen of Poisons, the Lady of La Jocondette, and the blighted b.i.t.c.h of Cooper's blue- bruised dawn stretched her whole body and yawned like a cat on sun-warmed stone. "I would offer you gentlemen the entirety of my hospitality if time permitted, but alas, it does not. Would that I could see you two safely installed in each other's arms, as nature clearly intends. But the pale vagrant approaches with arms of a different sort, so romance must yield to exigency." She indicated the gaping window, again the pa.s.sive hostess. The smile she wore was bland. "Please, forgive my urging, but I hold your safety paramount."

Cooper squinted his eyes and tried to force his awareness toward the towers of the Undertow. The call shamanic, Thea had said. He tried to answer the call. Marvin had called his masters "skylords," not "lich-lords." He had called them shamans.

That settled it, then. Ever onward, whether he wanted to or not. If he found the origin of that ghostly sobbing, perhaps he could make it stop. Perhaps there were answers, forward.

Marvin withdrew to the window, pulling Cooper with him. Across the ca.n.a.l, the black bodies of the Death Boys and Charnel Girls of the Undertow skittered across the face of La Jocondette like flies and vanished into the morning. Hand-in-hand, Cooper and Marvin climbed out and were lost to the sapphire dawn.

Purity Kloo took a breath to steel herself against the possibility that she might be discovered trespa.s.sing near the royal suites of Prince Fflaen. No one-absolutely no one-was permitted on the upper storeys of the Pet.i.te Malaison without explicit invitation from the prince, and Purity had no means of knowing whether or not the prince's absence meant fewer praetorian patrols along the corridors of the royal suites, or more. As the dawn began to illuminate the white stone hallway and strip her of concealment, Purity could no longer pretend that she was merely skulking: along one side of the hallway ran grand windows that looked down upon the Groveheart and were just beginning to s.h.i.+mmer with the light of the morning, revealing the vast primordial forest that lay beneath the Dome's enclosure.

The Groveheart was more than mere wilderness, and as its canopy emerged from night into morning Purity began to feel a deeper sense of foreboding-within that nearly impenetrable wood lay the history of the City Unspoken in all its uncountable millennia; even the size of the place instilled a sense of terrifying enormity, as the gla.s.s and metal of the Dome arced overhead and was obscured by a fine layer of cloud. As she watched, competing flocks of birds wheeled up from the canopy and scattered into the morning mists with caws that echoed off the pale green Dome gla.s.s.

Purity straightened the heavy praetor's helm she'd looted from one of the extraneous armories and reminded herself that she was no stranger to poor behavior and derring-do. If only the helm didn't keep tipping forward over her eyes-it threatened to throw her off balance and break her nose at the same time. The blasted thing probably resented being stolen; the praetorian helmets, platinum- chased and crested, were swaddled with layers upon layers of enchantments, most of which she hoped were dormant, except for the pa.s.skey charms that had, so far, allowed her to slip into the Pet.i.te Malaison without triggering any alarum.

The lock to the armory had been easy enough for Purity to pick: yet another skill she'd acquired during her frequent and tacitly approved-of acts of rebellion-this particular ability she'd learned under the tutelage of an Undertow cardsharp with whom she'd dallied for a fortnight. He'd tossed a mop of ginger curls and flashed a disarming smirk, and Purity had allowed him to become the first to pick a lock of a different sort.