House War - The Hidden City Part 85

"She told us to wait."

Carver, following the trail left in snow that had not yet been obliterated by other footsteps, other pedestrians, shrugged. At this time of night, pedestrians were few, although the magelights still shone that guided them from one place to another.

Lander had followed; he was silent now. The words that had come to him in the undercity had deserted him the moment he left, and only Lefty had the composure to speak to him in the silent gestures of their moving language.

Fingers danced in the cold, shaking slightly; Lefty used both his hands, and the absence of two fingers seemed right, here. They spoke of loss, but also of healing. He would never have them back; what he might have, instead, was a lack of shame at the mutilation that he had never asked for.

"Old Rath's not going to like it," Carver said quietly. But as Carver was leading them, they only nodded. He wasn't going to like it, and they had chosen-mostly-not to care.

"You know where we're going?"

Carver shook his head.

But Teller spoke up. "I know," he said quietly.

They all stopped to look at him, but with a lot of gaping. Teller shrugged. "He was writing a letter," he said, finally. "A lot of them. They were on his desk. I saw them. I saw the addresses."

No one asked how much rifling it took to see those addresses; better not to know. There was only one important question to be asked, and Carver asked it. "And how do you know which one of those addresses is the right one?"

"There was only one in this part of town," he said, "or close to it." He looked at the streets, the empty, wide roads with buildings that were not actually packed into each other's armpits. It might as well have been a foreign country, and they all knew it.

"But you don't know the city-"

"He's been teaching me. To read his maps."

"Why?"

"Because I asked," Teller replied, with a hint of question dragging his tone up at the last syllable. "I don't know. I-I like his maps." It was lame. He knew it was lame. He didn't care.

Then again, neither did anyone else. Jewel had taught them that strangest of things: hope. They now took it as they found it, and they clung to it as they began to move.

Not even Finch asked the question they all kept to themselves, although it was hard. What are we going to do once we get there?

"Your father understands business," Lord Waverly was saying. He had said a variant of this about six times over the course of a very uncomfortable ten minutes, and each time he said it, moving a word around and changing its tone, as if the rearrangement somehow added weight or meaning, he drew slightly closer to where Jewel now sat.

She had taken care to mind her posture, and her spine was stiff and straight. Her hands were folded in her lap, as Haval had taught her, and she pressed them into her legs to stop them from shaking.

"I don't know very much about his business," she said, for perhaps the fourth time.

"No, no, of course you wouldn't," he replied, which would normally have annoyed her. It was clear that he expected her to be stupid. At any other time, she would have done what she could to correct his a.s.sumption; now, she wanted to hide behind it.

Because she knew-of course she knew-why she was here. Knew that he knew it, that he expected her to be ignorant. That she very much wanted to be ignorant.

He poured her a gla.s.s of a pale, yellow liquid, and placed it on the table before her, very close to the gla.s.s he then filled for his own use. "I appreciate a canny man," he told Jewel quietly, lifting his gla.s.s. "And should your father choose to ally himself with my business interests, I a.s.sure you your family will be well taken care of."

He waited for a moment, and Jewel understood that she was meant to lift her own gla.s.s, with its fine, slender stem. Which meant she would have to raise her hands. "I-I don't drink very much," she said, apologetically.

Still, he waited, and his smile seemed to freeze in place, becoming not so much a frown as an ill-fitted mask. A warning, there. She understood it as such, and also understood that he would, if pressed, put that warning into far less pleasant words-and she was not yet willing to see him stripped of his facade of pleasantry.

She took the gla.s.s.

His smile became fluid again as she lifted it to her lips and took a small sip. The wine-if it was wine-was almost bitter to the tongue; it was neither sweet nor sour, but acrid, biting. Haval's lessons stopped her from spitting it back out.

"So," he said, "you are fourteen?"

She nodded, drinking only enough to taste. The motion, she could mime, and she wondered-briefly-if the liquid would kill plants, and if she could discreetly experiment. He really didn't look away at all.

"Fourteen," she said quietly. "Do you have children?"

"Three."

She waited, but the subject did not engage him. The awkward pauses in adult conversation had seldom been filled by her, and she struggled. "The plants here are very lovely."

"They are, especially in this cold season; it is for that reason that I often spend time here."

"You like flowers?"

"I like," he said quietly, "all things that are delicate and lovely; they seldom remain so, and it is best to appreciate beauty while it lasts."

Before you destroy it, she thought. Before you consume it. The anger was brief and intense, and her lips were closed to prevent the words from escaping. No escape, here.

"You don't find the wine to your taste?" he asked her, after a moment.

"I don't drink often," she replied. "It is only this past season that I have been invited to spend time at the table with my father's visitors. He doesn't approve of my drinking."

"Ah," Lord Waverly replied, his voice lowering, softening. "Then we shall keep this between us; a secret if you will. The forbidden is often enticing."

No, Jewel thought. It's just forbidden. And she meant it, and again, she swallowed the words, remembering Haval. Remembering why she was here. There would be food, soon. Duster was supposed to help with that, to help just enough.

But Duster was nowhere in sight, and Lord Waverly was much, much closer than he had been. Walls of gla.s.s, she thought, and leaves, and flowers. Surely, here- His hand touched her leg; his palm was warm.

And Jewel was very, very cold.

"She is afraid," the Patris said quietly, standing beneath the fronds of large, smooth-barked trees, as if he were the entirety of the shadow they cast.

Duster knew who he referred to. She didn't ask how he knew. Instead, she shrugged, and was rewarded with the edge of a smile that was almost approving.

"You will wait here," he told her. "And I will wait with you. Judge for yourself how strong-or weak-your little friend is. She was there, was she not? She was present when you chose to leave us."

"I never chose to join you," Duster told him, defiant now, the hand around hilt a comfort, even if it was almost useless.

"You were not ready, then," he replied. As if he had always intended to grant her some measure of choice or respect. She tried to remember the chains at her ankles, the bare room, the bed itself meant for anything but sleep. She wanted to kill him, but then again, she wanted to kill almost everything that lived or moved and had ever crossed her path.

"It is not in death you will find your salvation," Patris AMatie told her, as if he could hear the thought. "Death is too simple. It is in pain that you derive power, or will. Pain, fear. Especially fear." He drew closer. "Do you fear me?"

And she met his gaze. Held it a moment. There was only darkness there, in the lights of the Arboretum, and it was a darkness that was familiar. Desirable. It was so like her own, she felt an echo of herself in its depths.

"No," she told him. "I don't. I don't fear death."

"I told you-"

"It's still death," she replied.

His frown was not slight, and it was not pleasant. It changed the shape of his face, and he straightened to a height that Duster would never reach. He was close to her now, as she sat, and he touched the side of her face. A sharp touch, and shallow; she felt it burn. Knew she was bleeding.

Knew that this was nothing at all but a caress and a warning. "What you desire," he told her softly, "you cannot hide."

"I'm not trying."

"You want her to suffer."

It was true.

"Suffer as you did. And be broken as you were not."

All true. It didn't even make her squirm.

"I myself would like to witness it," he added, his hand, slightly crimson along the edges, drawing away. The blood would never show unless you knew it was there; knew what to look for.

"Why?"

"Her friends have caused me some difficulty," he replied. "And in ignorance. But ignorance is not an excuse. Do you know where the others went?"

Duster shrugged. "Do I care?"

He smiled again. "We want them back," he told her.

"I could find them for you."

"I suspected as much. Find them," he told her, but his glance strayed over her, past her, and to the walls of gla.s.s, their lead bars spread to contain transparent color, a hard tapestry, a mosaic of a type.

She nodded.

"Then let us wait."

She had little choice in the matter.

It was choice that had always confounded her. She made the wrong ones, over and over again, and she paid. She had scars-ones she could see, ones that were hidden and therefore worse-as proof of that. She had wanted power for herself because only with power was there any chance of safety.

And safety meant? Freedom. The freedom to cause suffering rather than to experience it.

She thought of them, then: Finch, Fisher, Jester. They were ridiculous, stupid, happy in Jewel's illusion of safety. They wanted to call it home.

Her hands were moving in her lap, her fingers dancing slowly, even around the hilt of her knife. Familiar movements, this odd dance, although it took her a moment to realize what they were: Lefty's language.

Lefty's attempt to speak to Lander.

No, she thought. Worse than that: they were her words. Her silent words, her own way of conveying her meaning and her intent to the silent boy whose tongue might as well have been cut from his mouth by what he had suffered.

She said, "I saved the girl to spite them."

And he laughed. "I know. I know you well, Duster."

Her name, from his mouth, had a power and a resonance that Jewel's thin voice would never, ever give it.

"And the girl might even believe that you cared about her life."

Duster shrugged. "Only if she's stupid."

"The beauty of humanity," Patris AMatie replied, "is just how stupid it can be in the face of fact." He paused, and then added, "Do not be stupid here."

She nodded. Waiting for the first scream, the first crack in the silence. Waiting now in the shadow of a man who could give her-she knew it-everything she had ever desired.

They approached the building with dwindling confidence; it was large and fine, and it boasted a gleaming fence that even snow did not dare to cling to for long. There were guards in livery at those gates, men with swords and armor. Not one of the children who called themselves Jay's den had any fondness for armed men.

"What do we do now?" Finch asked softly.

Teller drew his shoulders back. Instead of making him look taller, it made him look younger; he was all bone, and his skin was Winter-white, pale with lack of sun. And pale, as well, with fear.

But it was a fear they all felt; these men were not their deaths, but they were obstacles that might never be pa.s.sed at all.

"Do we go in?" Carver asked. "I don't think that was the plan."

"What plan?" Teller replied. And then he added, "It wasn't Old Rath's plan, no. But we were never a part of that; we have to make our own."

"Great. Standing in the middle of the street and freezing to death isn't much of a plan-" Arann grabbed Carver's arm. Tightly. And Carver's thoughts caught up with his mouth as he remembered a frenzied run through streets newly white and unwalked. Remembered his first sight of Teller, and the body over which he lay like a blanket that was too small and too slight to provide warmth.

But if Teller was offended, it didn't show. Finch watched him, watched his face, realized that she was holding her breath. A white wreath escaped her lips, rising upward like a ghost. Teller was not Jay, and not Arann; he wasn't Carver. But although he was as quiet as Finch herself, although he found the same comfort in the kitchen that Finch did, although he seemed to have more in common with Lefty than with anyone else, he was not Lefty.

"I have a letter," he told them all.

They stared at him. "You wrote a letter?"

"I didn't say I wrote it," he replied. "But I have one." And he pulled, from the inside of a jacket that Jewel had paid for, an envelope with a red wax seal.

"That's Old Rath's-"

Teller nodded.

"You asked him to-"

"No. He would never have agreed. I have no idea what's in it."

"You took a letter-"

"From his desk, yes."

"When?"