Julia Vanishes (14 page)

“Hullo, Brown Eyes,” he says, his voice blurry. “Sorry to scare you. I'm all right, just wanted some quiet.”

I notice the pile of drawings in his lap. I pick them up and look through them. Some of these I've seen before, but a number I haven't. His sketch of Fitch Square is finished. Then there's old Ma Fartham at her market stall with a faraway look in her eyes; a small girl playing with a dog; barefoot boys fishing in the river; a woman with a baby strapped to her chest, carrying a basket of fruit; two old men playing King's Heir in the street. Here is life in the Twist, captured with light lines, with wit, and with love.

“Wyn, these are wonderful,” I say.

“My best ones,” he says expressionlessly.

I stand up and put them on Dek's worktable. “I'm going to make you some coffee,” I say. “And then you tell me what this is all about.”

He grabs my wrist and pulls me into his lap, wraps his arms around me, buries his face in my chest. I put my hands in his hair and kiss the top of his head.

“Wyn,” I whisper. “My darling boy. What is it?”

His voice is muffled against the torn front of my dress.

“I went to Lorka's studio,” he says. My heart sinks. I can guess the rest of the story before he pours it out in a rush. “I've been hanging around there every day this week. Finally got him alone. I can't even remember what I said to him. Something stupid, probably, but he looked at the drawings. I mean, just quickly, you know. Sort of flipped through the bunch of them. Then he says to me, ‘So you can draw. Lots of kids can draw. Learn a trade.' ”

Wyn makes a funny choking sound that might be a laugh. I'm so angry, I can hardly speak for a minute, but I master it. “Well, he's wrong about you. Lorka isn't the final authority on talent, with his nasty, smeary paintings.”

He just hangs on to me, breathing slowly. I stroke his hair, and in some strange way I feel closer to him now than ever before. I've been so many things to him—a little sister and a friend and a lover and a colleague—but I don't know that I've ever been a comfort before.

“He's a bleeding genius, Julia,” he says at last, and makes another odd chuckling sound. “Poor man, he was coming from the market, arms full of winter squash. He must be crazy about squash. Look, I drew this when I got back.”

He looks around on the floor and finds the picture under the wine bottle. It is a sketch of a startled-looking Lorka, his face all severe lines and annoyance, clutching a great bundle of vegetables. The picture is rather crumpled, with a circular wine stain on it.

“What a pity it's spoiled,” I say. “It's a good likeness. Clever.”

“Sorry to be such a child about it,” he says, releasing his grip on my waist a bit. “I'd hoped…well, I hoped too much, is all. I'll keep drawing, of course. I like it, even if I'm not any good at it.”

“Wyn, you
are
good at it. Maybe Lorka was in a bad mood, maybe he paid too much for his squash, or maybe his tastes are just very specific. You…you don't draw like he does, but it's special, what you do. It's real without being miserable. It's
life,
it's
our
life, and our world. You can't give up on yourself just because Lorka is an old crank. What about the class Arly Winters said she could get you a spot in?”

“Oh, that.” He shrugs. “The teacher said no. I suppose Arly thought she had him wrapped around her finger, but it turns out that's not the case.”

“Well, soon enough we'll have plenty of silver and you can pay for a class if you want,” I say.

He manages a small grin. There's my fellow—never one to wallow. “I wouldn't waste your money that way, Brown Eyes. No, I'll draw my pictures like I've always done, and we'll have a good time, live like lords and ladies for a while.” He kisses me, hand straying to the front of my dress, and then draws back. “What happened to your dress?”

I jump up off his lap. “Got it caught on something,” I say. “I just came back to change it quickly.”

I don't want to get into what happened to me in the Edge. Wyn might get reckless, in the state he's in. I shrug off my coat and snatch my other dress off its hook on the wall, irritated that I'll be up late mending by candlelight.

“I'm sorry I startled you,” he says. “I wanted to see you but couldn't, so I just…came down here. I couldn't bear all the noise upstairs. Solly's there, getting drunk with Gregor and regaling them all with ridiculous tales of the latest murder.”

“What murder?”

Solly is a cop, but he's an old friend of Esme's husband and keeps her abreast of police business, including any interest they might have in
her
business.

“This serial killer who's going around slicing heads,” says Wyn. “Solly's of the mind it's something unnatural.”

A ripple of alarm crawls up my spine.

“He's still up there?”

“I reckon so. Haven't heard anyone leave.”

I button up the fresh dress quickly and grab my coat.

“Listen, Wyn, I'll be right back, all right? I just need to find out what he's heard.”

“You won't be long, will you?” he says, looking maudlin again.

“Just a few minutes,” I promise. I take his face in my hands and kiss him gently on the mouth. “You're brilliant. Lorka's a fool.”

“What would I do without you, Julia?” he sighs.

“I don't care to find out,” I say. “You don't want to come up with me?”

“I'll wait here,” he says, holding up the nearly empty bottle.

I kiss him again and dash up the stairs.

The whole crew is there in the parlor, seated around the crackling fireplace, and Esme's broken out the good brandy. They are talking about Marianne Deneuve now. Apparently she's been caught near the border between Frayne and Prasha.

“Offer enough silver, and yer own brother'll turn you in,” opines Solly. “But thank the holies, eh? She was a nasty piece of work.”

“She was my friend,” says Csilla, teary. “I still can't believe it of her.”

“She weren't what you thought, my dear,” says Solly. “She weren't what you thought.”

“Hullo, Julia!” calls Dek, waving me over to the fire.

Csilla leaps up and embraces me. “We never see you anymore. How is the house of monsters and secrets?”

Esme shoots her a look. Solly may be a friend, but he doesn't need to know the details of my job.

“Monstrously secretive,” I say, and nod toward Solly. “Hullo, Solly.”

“My goodness, you've grown up, haven't you!” he says. Solly says that every time he sees me. I think the truth is that he doesn't remember any of the times he's seen me in recent years, and so I remain imprinted on his memory at around age twelve.

“I hear there's been another murder,” I say.

“That's our Julia. A taste for the gruesome,” says Gregor. He holds the bottle of brandy out to me and I glare at him.

“Now that he's sobering up, perhaps Solly will admit to embroidering the truth a bit,” teases Dek. “According to him, there are great big paw prints in the snow where this last murder happened, and the blade being used is sharper than any man-made blade on this earth. You stand by that, Solly?”

“It's true,” says Solly, goaded. “I heard them talking about the cuts. No ordinary knife or sword could do it just like that, so thin and fine, so delicate. And I heard about the prints from an officer who was there the next day. He's not the type to make stuff up. He was good and scared.”

“Who was it this time?” I ask, running through the list of victims in my head. A dancing girl and a banker in Nim. A governess arriving from Nim. A cabriolet driver. The innkeeper at the Red Bear, where Bianka stayed.

“Just a kid in the Edge,” says Solly. “Sad. Little boy on a rooftop. Kids found 'im. Holes in his boots, poor tyke.”

“Gingery hair?” I ask, feeling sick. “Freckles?”

He gives me a sharp look, shaking off the drink. “What do you know?”

That's as good as a yes. “I don't know anything. I heard a rumor.”

He relaxes slightly. “Poor little kid.”

The boy who delivered Bianka's letter to me—the one who ran messages for the murdered innkeeper.
He is looking for someone,
Mrs. Och had said of the killer. Bianka knows it too—she said in her letter to Mrs. Och that somebody was after her. And if I'm right, it's not only this killer hunting her but our client too.
A shadow,
said Pia,
but it could look like anything now.
Oh, Bianka—what have you got?

Esme takes me by the arm and I jump. “I need to talk to you,” she says, drawing me aside, over to the door. Gregor and Solly are noisily arguing over the reliability of Solly's fellow police officers now.

“What is it?” I ask distractedly, but when I meet her eyes, I get a start. The look on her face is pure murder.

“Somebody hit you,” she says, very quiet.

I touch a hand to my cheek. I don't bruise easily, but trust Esme to notice, no matter how bad the light.

“Who was it?”

It is tempting to tell her—very tempting to imagine what she might do, how she'd make those bastards pay, every one of them. But I don't know enough about Torne and his fellows, and Esme doesn't need more trouble.

“I don't know them,” I say. “It was just a scuffle. I was fetching something for the professor in the Edge. I'm not really hurt.”

She gives me a long look, and I can't hold her gaze.

“Somebody
hit
you,” she says again. “I want a name.”

“I told you, I don't know,” I say impatiently, and then Dek appears to save me, swinging over with his crutch and saying, “Here, before you run off—I've finished your lockpick!”

That perks me up. I turn away from Esme and say, “Let's see it!”

Esme folds her arms across her chest, watching us. Dek passes me a smooth metal disk. It fits neatly into the palm of my hand.

“Want to show me how to use it?” I ask.

“What, now?”

“Tomorrow,” I say, handing the disk back to him. “At the house. I thought you could take me hostage. What do you think?”

Dek grins. “What time?”

“Come round the side, the scullery door, around half past four. Everyone should be busy then. And bring a pistol just in case.”

“Why does he need a pistol?” asks Esme.

“He wouldn't be very convincing as a hostage taker otherwise, would he?” I say. “Look, I've got to get back.”

“Julia,” says Esme, her voice deadly calm.

“I'll tell you all about it later!” I say desperately, opening the door.

“All about what?” asks Dek, puzzled.

“Stay and have a drink!” Csilla calls over, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, but I wave goodbye and run down the stairs.

I am halfway to Mrs. Och's before I remember I've left Wyn waiting in my flat, but it's too late to turn back.

B
etween my job as a housemaid and my job as a spy, I am finding no time to do any snooping of my own. I know I will have to get back into Mrs. Och's reading room at some point if I want to find out more about witches, but I have been putting it off because, frankly, I'm frightened. The fact that Mrs. Och can see me even when I vanish has left me uneasy, but more than that, I'm afraid of what happened the last time I vanished. The way I was
nowhere
for a moment and then found myself on the other side of the room. In any case, right now I have other things to take care of.

It's easy enough to persuade Chloe to leave Baby Theo in my care while she and Florence set the fires and fill the lamps in preparation for evening. He is an inconvenient alibi, given what I need to do now, but watching Theo is the only thing I can come up with to get me out of my regular duties. Now they are carrying firewood up the stairs and Mrs. Freeley is lying down in her little room just off the kitchen, so I hoist him onto my hip and hurry to the scullery to open the side door.

“Good afternoon, miss,” says Dek, leaning on his crutch and tipping his snowy cap at me.

“Hush,” I say. “There's a lantern over the woodpile—grab it for me.”

“You look good with a baby on your arm,” he teases me, swinging into the scullery and taking the lantern off its hook on the wall. “And that outfit! I've never seen you in a cap and apron.”

“Don't even start,” I say, glowering at him and touching a hand self-consciously to my frilled white work cap. He follows me to the cellar stairs. Stairs are a chore for him, but he manages well enough with a shoulder to the wall for balance as he descends. Bianka is in the library, tinkling away on the piano. Mrs. Och is in her reading room. Mr. Darius, Frederick, and Professor Baranyi are in the professor's study, where they have recently been meeting for the hour before supper. If we are caught, Dek is a burglar and has taken me hostage. He'll get out of here with a pistol to my temple.

“So tell me what we're looking for,” he says once we're in the dark of the cellar.

“Whatever we can dig up on him,” I say. “Listen, Dek….” I haven't told anyone the extent of the strangeness in the house. I don't know where to start. “Mr. Darius is…well, the client says that he's a wolf man.”

“A
what
?”

“That's what I said.”

“Clearly we're related. Both geniuses. Did you get an answer when you said it?”

“It's a man who turns into a monster at night,” I say. “Eventually he turns into a wolf all the time. And I've heard him roaring away down here. There's no doubt he's…
something.
”

“Stars, Julia! No wonder the client offered so much silver. This all sounds like something out of a folktale.”

“I know.”

Even folktales are illegal in modern Frayne, but growing up in the Twist, we heard them anyway—grandmothers whispering about lights in the woods, spirits that would borrow your body for a night of revelry, fiends that would crawl out of their graves to drink human blood before dawn. I used to have nightmares, and Dek would beg Ma to tell us the stories weren't true, but she would only say, “Such stories are half truth, half lies—that's what makes them stories.” Now I think there was a little more truth to them than even she let on.

Dek still sounds skeptical. “So you're thinking about what Solly said, paw prints and the like, and wondering if you've got the killer here in the cellar?”

“No,” I say. “I don't think so. He's locked in at night, and Pia told me it wasn't him, not that I trust her, really. I
am
sure the killer is connected to Bianka and Mrs. Och somehow, though.”

“If your Mr. Darius has paws, there could be something or someone else with paws,” says Dek.

I wonder if
Pia
might have paws under those boots of hers.

“Mama,” says Baby Theo in a small voice.

“Hush, your mama is upstairs,” I say. “Here's the door. Shall I light the lantern?”

“Not yet,” says Dek. He lays his crutch to one side and the lantern with it, kneeling in front of the door on his good knee, folding the other leg awkwardly under him. He feels the lock, feels the door, and says, “My, they don't want
this
door opened, do they?”

He takes the little metal disk, his magnetic pick, from his pocket and puts it over the lock. He shifts it about a bit, listening intently. Theo is sliding down my hip, so I jostle him back up. “Mama,” he complains, wriggling in my arms, trying to get down, but I hold on tight and pin him to me. Then there is a click and the lock gives way.

“Not bad,” I say, impressed. This lock has bent all my picks easily.

Theo yanks my cap off my head so that my hair tumbles loose, and the door swings wide. I try to get my cap back but Theo screams in protest.

“Have it, then, but be quiet,” I hiss at him.

Between Dek and me, we get the candle lit and shut the door of the lantern, creating a warm, flickering light that makes Theo go, “Aaaaaah.”

And here is Mr. Darius's room at last. It has a high ceiling, with thick rugs on the floor and tapestries on the walls to keep out the chill from the stone. His bed is large and unmade. Next to the door there are heavy silver chains attached to the wall, with thick arm and ankle cuffs.

“Charming,” I say.

“Who does he chain up down here?” asks Dek, interested.

“Himself, I think.” I put the squirming Baby Theo down and tell him, “Don't get up to any mischief.”

Silly. Like telling a dog in a very friendly voice not to wag its tail. Theo makes for the big trunk by the bed.

“Just what I was thinking,” I say. “Wonder if that'll be locked too.”

The trunk isn't locked. It's filled mostly with clothes and a few dull-looking books: a tepid-sounding novel about war in Ishti, a history of Fraynish kings and queens, and a book of theological philosophy called
What We Are,
so famous as to be banal. You see it on any moderately educated person's bookshelf. Mr. Darius is not a particularly adventurous reader. There are also pouches of tobacco and packets of shoe polish and hair grease packed away in there.

“Enjoy yourself,” I tell Baby Theo, who proceeds to take everything out of the trunk and pile it on the floor. That should keep him occupied at least.

“Not a very glamorous existence, living in a rich old lady's cellar,” says Dek, looking over the mostly empty shelves and a broad side table with a few dirty cups on it.

We search the room, checking the mattress, pulling back the edges of the rug, looking under the bed, and feeling all along the walls. I lift the tapestry at the head of the bed, and there it is: a little cupboard in the stone wall.

“Found it!” I cry.

“Found what?” asks Dek.

“Something secret,” I say, trying the cupboard. It's locked. “Let me try that pick.”

“You can have it,” he says, tossing it to me. “I'll make another.”

I pass it over the lock a couple of times, feeling the answering tug. Then something shifts and there is a sharp click as the lock opens.

“It's bleeding genius, Dek,” I say admiringly. “You could make a killing selling these.”

“Maybe,” he says.

“What, maybe?”

He starts talking about patents and how you can live forever on a single invention if you handle it right, and how we could be leading a very different kind of life, the two of us, but I'm only half listening now, taking a thick envelope from the cupboard and sitting down on the bed with it.

“You know—we could get a flat in the Plateau, or even the Scola, if the price was right.”

“I like the Twist,” I say, pulling a sheaf of documents out of the envelope. “His papers!” I say triumphantly, waving them at Dek.

“I mean that things could be different for us, Julia. We could even leave Spira City, start over somewhere. You could be anyone, somewhere else. You're educated, or as good as, anyway. You could marry a wellborn fellow if you wanted, have a brat or two.”

I look up at him in amazement. “Bleeding Kahge, Dek! Why in the name of all that's holy would I do that?”

“I don't know,” he says, looking suddenly terribly unhappy. “Maybe it's a fantasy. Who'd give
me
a patent? It's just…I get sick of the whole thing.”

“What whole thing?”

“Stealing.”

I'm speechless for a moment. I knew that Dek was often dissatisfied, but I'd assumed it was with the limitations of his own body, not with our work. I can imagine no other life for myself and am unsettled that he has clearly spent a good deal of time and energy imagining it.

“I
like
my job,” I say at last. “This is the
life,
Dek! Loads of excitement, free to do as we please.”

But he is shaking his head. “Esme did us a good turn when we were kids. I'm grateful to her, but I'm a man now, and you're practically grown up too. I want more for us.”

“You make it sound like we have a wealth of options,” I say, more bitterly than I intend to. “Can we have this conversation another time? When I'm
not
in the middle of working?”

He gives me a ridiculous bow, and I turn to Mr. Darius's papers, my exuberance rather dampened.

Mr. Darius is not Mr. Darius, of course. According to his travel documents, his name is Sir Victor Penn Ostoway III. He is forty-six years of age and was born in Spira City to Sir Neer Liam Ostoway and Lady Emma Voltaire. I'd assumed him to be a man of business, but it seems that he is a diplomat of some kind, having risen rapidly through the officer ranks in the military. Near the top of the stack of papers is a letter dated two months ago. When I see the signature at the bottom, my heart gives a jolt.

“Listen to this!” I say eagerly, and read it aloud to Dek.

Dear Sir,

You are hereby granted the ten weeks you requested for research and the assembly of a new team. The king joins me in sending his condolences for the men you lost. They died bravely in the service of their king and the Nameless One.

I am distressed to find the Parnese wolves giving you such difficulty. They are wily and resilient, as you say, but nevertheless I assumed you were the man for this job. I hope I am right. In the meantime, Elisha seems content at court and, as always, we will keep her close to us while you are gone.

Best regards,

Agoston Horthy

“Agoston Horthy!” cries Dek. “Holy Nameless, your wolf man has friends in high places! Remember our assassination plan?”

I can't help but laugh, though it isn't very funny, really. As kids, Dek and I held the witch-hunting prime minister responsible for our mother's death. Not long after moving in with Esme, we started hatching a plot to assassinate him with poison darts. The hours we spent! In the end, the chemist we tried to buy poison from told Esme about it, and that was the end of that. It seems childish now, but in a way I miss how I felt while we were working on our ridiculous plot. Like there was something we could do about the rotten way of things. Like vengeance against all the injustice of the world was somehow possible.

I leaf through the other papers. Letters bearing Agoston Horthy's signature date back for years, referencing locations all over the world. I wonder how much Mrs. Och knows about this connection, or if she knows about it at all. The letters are concerned with the assemblage of teams, numbers of men, and sinister-sounding assignments well beyond the borders of Frayne:
You will need skilled trackers….You must enlist some of the T'shuka tribesmen to lead you to the nest….I cannot provide the firepower you ask for….The coven is rumored to be hidden in the Tikali Mountains….If what you describe is true, we have no choice but to flood the entire valley.
At least half the letters make some reference to Elisha and her activities at court. At the back, a letter seven years old bears no signature but is in the same hand, neat and cramped. It says only:
Did you think you could hide her from me? I have a proposal for you. Come to my office an hour after midnight.
There are a great many more papers, but we have been here too long as it is and I daren't stay longer. I take a sampling of the letters from Agoston Horthy out, fold them up, and tuck them into my stocking.

“Where's the baby gotten to?” I ask, looking for Theo. When I find him under the table I can't help but laugh. He has worked open a jar of shoe polish and smeared it all over his face and hair and clothes.

“Daaaaaabudabudabu!” he says triumphantly, holding up his tarry hands.

“How am I going to clean him up?” I say, my amusement quickly giving way to alarm.

“I saw a basin of water on the stove when I came in,” says Dek. “Shoe polish won't be any great trick.”

I try to pack everything away again the way it was. Once the room is in reasonable shape, we snuff out the lantern and make our way back to the scullery in the dark. I check ahead of Dek that nobody is there. Then I strip Baby Theo as fast as I can. I can still hear the piano tinkling upstairs. I don't have time to heat up the basin of water, and Theo screams blue murder the second I put him into it, clawing and wriggling to get out again, and who can blame him? I grab a dish brush and make a desperate go at the shoe polish matted into his hair.

“You're going to take his skin off with that thing,” says Dek, reaching for a thick bar of soap above the dish rack. Somehow, between the two of us, we hold Theo in the water and I lather my hands and, thank all the holies, the shoe polish comes away easily. Dek sings a folk tune our mother used to sing us, a morbid tune about a father and son visiting a grave together, though the song doesn't say whose grave. It's a pretty song, but I wish he wouldn't sing it.

“There!” I say, pulling the wet, howling baby out of the water and bundling him into a dish towel. He quiets immediately, shivering against me, still shaking with breathy sobs.