Julia Vanishes (17 page)

The moon and stars have gone into hiding when I stumble out into the street, which is, unbelievably, even colder than when I left it. But the cold is nothing. I am in a blazing cocoon of pain, and the cold can take me or not for all I care. I don't feel a thing—I don't even know where my feet are taking me. It's as if something is calling me, and I follow the call, blinded by tears that freeze on my cheeks. Down one street and then another, half running. I stumble and fall, landing hard on the frozen snow. Through the haze of my tears I can see a shape at the end of the street. Something tall. Something beginning to move toward me. Some inner voice tells me:
Run.
But I find I can't obey, my horror freezing me where I lie.

A glint of metal in the dark, though I can't think what light it might be reflecting, for there is none. I know what this thing is. I pull back, vanish, but the creature keeps coming. It does not need eyes to find me. The pain and the cold make way for the rush of adrenaline. The voice within telling me
run
gets louder and stronger, and I force my limbs into compliance, scrambling to my feet, slipping. I run.

A soft snarl behind me. I know without looking that I cannot outrun this creature, whatever it is. But we are in the Twist and I know every corner, every alley, every abandoned stairway. I turn up a dark staircase and race up to the empty apartment where some Ishtan traders keep their wares. The smell of spice is overpowering. There is an open window and a pulley here. You cannot see it in the dark, but I do not need to see. This spot has not changed since I was a child, when Dek would send me sailing over the street to the apartment across the way in the crate attached to a wire.

I stub my toe on something and go sprawling. A soft hand touches my neck, then pulls me up by the collar of my coat. White eyes with black pupils, long-slit pupils like a cat's. A panther face, almost—black and feline, yet expressive as a human's. Almost kind. A crest of white in its hair, or fur. I can feel the blast of winter from the window gap behind me. The creature raises his blade.

“I know who you are,” I gasp, making a fist over the weapon Dek made me. “I have a message for you.”

The blade hovers.

“You can go straight back to Kahge,” I say, pulling the mechanism at my palm so that capsicum gas shoots out from the nozzle at my wrist. A great cloud swallows up the creature, and it lets out a strangled howl. The gas burns at my eyes, my throat, and nose as I kick free and send myself sailing straight out the window, grabbing for the wire with frozen fingers. By sheer luck I find it, kicking wildly at the crate. I let myself fall into it and I push myself off, gliding across the street. The capsicum gas does not slow the creature for long—I can see it climbing down the wall, loping across the street with a terrible, swift grace. There is more space between us now, at least. I sail straight through the window across the way, and as soon as the creature enters the building, I send myself whizzing right back. I dive through the window, run across the room and down the stairs, out into the snow again. The Twist is like a maze engraved into my very being. I let it swallow me up, one corner and then another, through the buildings I know to be empty or open. I'd scream for help, but who would help me? I feel the pull, the call, once more. I have to fight myself, force myself each time in the opposite direction of where my feet are trying to take me. Too many times I realize I am letting myself be drawn, and I turn and run, turn and run, turn and run. I hear it before I see it again, the crunch of snow behind me. But I am almost at my destination, tearing down the hill, the Edge dark before me.

“Liddy!” I scream, even before I reach the door. “Liddy!”

I hammer at the door, and the shadow keeps coming, blade aloft. The door opens and I fall inside. The creature is in the doorway, staring at Liddy with those inhuman eyes. The doorway I've just passed through lights up with golden webbing, and three poison-green spiders, like the ones I got for Professor Baranyi from Torne in the Edge, drop down on golden threads. But these are larger—the size of my fist—and they raise their front legs and
hiss.
The blade lowers. Liddy shuts the door then, and helps me to my feet.

It is half an hour or more before I feel able to talk. Liddy wraps me in blankets and furs, lights the stove, makes coffee. I sit and sip the coffee mechanically while my heart tries to batter its way through my rib cage and the cold eases out of me, biting at my fingers and toes as it departs.

“It can't come in?” I say at last.

“My home is protected.”

“By giant, hissing spiders.”

“Not spiders. They are rhug. Very fast, very poisonous, nearly unkillable. They breed quickly, bond to a place, guard entry points. A handy sort of pet. Given time, the Gethin could break the rhug's bond to the house, but it would take longer than the few hours left before dawn. And the Gethin is a creature of night.” Liddy gives me a searching look. “Why is the Gethin coming for you, Julia?”

“The Gethin,” I repeat the name she is using. “What the blazes is that thing, Liddy?”

“The last of its tribe, as far as anyone knows,” says Liddy. “The Gethin were soldiers and bounty hunters thousands of years ago, often employed by the Eshriki Phars. The story goes that Marike, the Eshriki witch who founded that ancient empire, called the Gethin from Kahge, but nobody knows the truth of it anymore.”

“Is there really such a place as Kahge? All fire and demons under the earth?” I told the Gethin to go back to Kahge, but I didn't think I was being literal.

Liddy snorts. “That is Kahge reimagined to fit a particular worldview,” she says. “Lorian cosmology made a nightmare of it, and the Rainists treat it as a metaphor, but it is neither. It is…how shall I put it? Like the shadow, the echo, the reflection cast by magic in the world. There are beings there, to be sure, but we know almost nothing about them. It is not distant like the stars, nor does it lie beneath the earth. It is all around us and yet separated by…well, what you might like to call our reality.” She waves a bony hand in the air, like she might be able to catch some of it to show me. “Magic flows out of the world through Kahge. In that sense, it also functions as a release valve, maintaining balance. Witches have always had an interest in the boundaries between the known world and Kahge, as a place where magic accumulates. But the nature of Kahge is a question for philosophers, not the likes of me, and you have dodged my question. Someone has called the Gethin. Why is it hunting you?”

“It's looking for a guest at Mrs. Och's house,” I say. “And the holies only know why, but it's killing people who've met her.”

“I've heard it said that the Gethin can drink the memories of its victims,” says Liddy. “Perhaps each victim is a clue in its hunt, leading it ever closer. Oh, Julia. You should leave Mrs. Och's house.”

That startles me. “What do you know about her?”

There is a long silence, so long that I think Liddy will not answer me. I feel so far away from my own body, weak with exhaustion and cold and fear. My eyes fall shut and I think that none of this is possible, this cannot be my life. Then Liddy begins to speak, and it takes me a moment to remember what she is talking about.

“You have heard of the Xianren, yes?
Xianren
means, literally, ‘the before people' in the language of Yongguo. There were three Xianren in the beginning—immortals who spoke their magic and ruled the world. The magic they spoke could alter even death and time, back when the world was new and great lizards were crawling from the seas while dragons battled in the skies. They are called immortals, but all life has an end point, even theirs. They have been fading for centuries now, and their power is much diminished. Och Farya is the eldest of the three.”

“Mrs. Och,” I say. “Is her brother Gennady one of the Xianren too?”

Liddy inclines her head. “Zor Gen, the youngest, and the wildest, according to the stories. Prone to stealing lovely princesses, and father to some of the greatest kings and warriors throughout history.”

“And the third?” I ask. “What's his name?” I think I can guess.

“Lan Camshe,” she says. “A scholar and art lover. A recluse. He built himself a castle with a great library on the Isle of Nago, off the coast of Sirillia.”

“Casimir,” I say, remembering the unfinished letter in Mrs. Och's desk. “Hounds, Liddy, how
do
you know all this?”

“I have been around a long time,” she says, which is as unsatisfying as every answer she's ever given me to similar questions. She looks at the clock, then rises and climbs some wooden steps that lead through a hatch in the ceiling.

“Wait,” I say, and follow her, afraid to be alone.

The room at the top of the steps is full of wire hutches. Inside them, silvery pigeons nestle, sleeping. Liddy scrawls a quick message and ties it to the ankle of one pigeon, then opens a window onto the gray predawn night and sends the pigeon out into the cold. Unprotesting, the pigeon flies straight into the Twist and is gone.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Esme should know where you are and that you are in danger,” says Liddy. “I can protect you tonight, but if the Gethin wants you, you'll need more help than I can give in the nights to come.”

“Can Mrs. Och help me?” I ask, a coldness twining about my heart.

“Mrs. Och is known for helping people,” says Liddy. “Indeed, I have sent a few desperate souls her way myself, over the years. But she is
not
known for having a forgiving nature. If you are working against her for her brother Casimir, would she be inclined to help
you
?”

Probably not. I imagine going to her and telling her everything, and shudder. We go back down the stairs to huddle by the fire.

“Ah, Julia,” sighs Liddy. “How did you come to be in the employ of such people?”

“Gregor told me it was a lot of money,” I say, and then, like a fool, I begin to cry. Liddy doesn't say anything. We sit by the fire and sobs shake me, wring me out, leave me empty and shuddering in the chair, too warm now under the furs but too exhausted to cast them off. I cry for Bianka and whatever will become of her and her little boy; I cry because of Wyn and Arly Winters laughing as if I didn't exist; I cry because I feel sometimes that I barely exist, barely touch the world I walk in; I cry because Dek is unhappy and Gregor is a drunk and Esme is lonely; I cry because Florence thinks she is lucky to be marrying a grocer to take care of his shop; I cry for my mother and the brown-haired witch I saw last month, falling to her death in the unforgiving river Syne. I cry because I am exhausted, because I fear for my life, and I want to live, more than anything I want to live. I fall asleep in the chair and am woken not long after by, of all people, Gregor.

“Better get you back before you're found missing,” he says.

It shocks me how glad I am to see him. I want to throw my arms around his neck, but don't, of course.

I
don't know what to say to Gregor as we trudge through the gray half-light, the snow crunching underfoot.
Well, Gregor, it seems that a monster just tried to kill me and will likely try again tonight, probably because I'm working for an immortal wizard who is interested in this witch I'm spying on, but lucky for me, my mysterious, secretive friend has some giant, ugly pet spiders guarding her shop
….It just doesn't make for easy conversation, but it's almost impossible to ignore one's near-death experience of a few hours past and talk about something else.

Since I don't know what to say about my brush with death, I raise the subject of my heartbreak instead, the easier of the two to face now. Nothing like nearly dying to put losing your lover into perspective.

“Wyn is shagging Arly Winters,” I tell him.

And suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself remembering Wyn in the dark, a year ago or more, stroking my cheekbone with his rough thumb and telling me,
You're lucky, you remember your mother.

“Ah,” says Gregor, hands deep in his coat pockets. He doesn't sound surprised.

“I suppose everybody else knew about it already.”

And now I'm remembering Wyn and me sitting together at his open window in the summer, feeding the pigeons on the roof, and how I thought, This is what it means to be happy,
this.

“I didn't know, Julia, but I can't pretend to be surprised,” he says. “I'm fond of Wyn, but he's a rake and always will be.”

“We were just having a good time,” I say lamely.

Wyn and me, laughing our way home after burgling a West Spira house, me draped in the stolen jewels.

“I'll tell you, when I fell in love with Csilla, I knew every other woman would be a shadow to her after that, and I was right. She stole my heart and it's been hers ever since. She's stuck by me through everything.”

“How lovely for you,” I say sarcastically.

“What I mean, Julia, is that if you're going to fall in love, you make sure it's with somebody who knows how to love you back the same way.”

“It's not like that,” I say, because my pride hurts as much as every other part of me. “I don't care what he does when I'm not around.”

Gregor says nothing to this. I suppose he knows I'm lying. We cross the bridge, Cyrambel Temple looming over us. I can see snowy lumps on the low path, indigents and Scourge survivors frozen to death and covered over by snow. Soldiers will take them away soon, but sometimes in the spring, after a sudden melt, you'll find a few thawing corpses before they are tidied away.

“I've sent word to Pia,” he says. “As soon as we hear back, I'll have Solly fetch you with a good story—he could say the police need to question witnesses of a theft or some such thing. We need to make sure this business is all taken care of by tonight. Liddy thinks you'll be safe until nightfall.”

“Liddy seems to know everything there is to know about it but only tells what she wants. As usual.”

“She's never steered anyone wrong that I know of,” he replies curtly. “Now, do you want to tell me what in Kahge you were doing out in the middle of the night in the first place?”

“How is that any of your business?” I ask.

“It's my business because you work for me,” he says. “You shouldn't be taking stupid risks. You were almost killed, and now we have to beg for help. It's unprofessional.”

“I work for Esme, not you, and I'm so sorry that my nearly dying strikes you as unprofessional,” I shoot back. “What an embarrassment and inconvenience it must be for you.”

“By the holies, Julia, stop being sarcastic for a minute, would you?”

“Fine. Here it is. I'm not asking for your bleeding sympathy, but I don't need to be scolded for nearly being killed either. You got me this job, and it's the most horrible,
dangerous
job I've ever worked.
You're
the one who as good as threw me in the way of this beast. ‘Just go and work as a maid, have a look around, heaps of silver,' you said. You didn't say the client's a lunatic and there's magic involved and you may find yourself next on a beheading monster's hit list, did you? You failed to mention that in the job description, and you'd met Pia, so you
knew
this was no ordinary job! Stop blaming
me
for what's happened.
I'll
talk to Pia. This has nothing to do with you, besides being your fault.”

We walk on in angry silence for a time—or, at least, I am angry. When Gregor speaks again, his voice is surprisingly soft.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

“I should hope so,” I answer tartly, though in fact I'm rather startled to get an apology at all.

“I never meant to put you in harm's way, and I shan't forgive myself for it.” He clears his throat. “You know that Esme watched her husband and her son die within five days of each other, don't you?”

“Yes.” If he's trying to change the subject, this is a dark direction to choose.

“It broke her heart in such a way that now it swings open and shut at random, letting in unexpected strays. I didn't understand until she just scooped Wyn off the streets one day. He'd run away from that terrible orphanage, was living by his wits, if that's what you want to call it. Esme brought him home, started calling him her son. Then, a few years on, I come by after a job and find she's acquired two more children—young ones too—a crippled boy and a girl with a scowl that would turn any heart to stone. I figured she'd lost her mind, and said so. She told me what you could do, your vanishing act, and she told me she had a feeling about Dek, that he was cleverer than any child she'd ever known. ‘They'll be useful,' she said. She was right, but even so, I knew it wasn't for your skills that she took you in, exceptional though they are. It was the Scourge marks on his face, his blasted limbs, and those motherless eyes of yours. One look at your eyes, Julia, my dear, and anyone with a heart and soul in them can see you are motherless.”

“Shut up,” I tell him. I don't want to hear this. He keeps on talking.

“Esme always said you were the one who'd take over from her someday. No doubt in any of our minds about that. You were made for this work. You were tough as nails, even back then. Quick wit, quick feet, quick to laugh, but sharp,
sharp.
I mean to say—look, you work for Esme, but you're family too. Hers, and mine, and Csilla's. You know that, don't you? That you have a family?”

“Of course I do,” I say a bit numbly. It would have meant the world to me just weeks ago, days ago—knowing I was being groomed to take over for Esme. I don't know what it means now. Is this the work that I am made for? And if not this, what else is there for a girl like me?

“It's all right, Gregor. I know it's not really your fault. I'm just…I don't want to die. I
really
don't want to die.”

“Nor shall you,” he says, and when he takes my hand I let him, because it's blasted cold. “Look, what I'm trying to tell you—I'll stand between you and that thing myself, if it comes to that.”

“Well, let's hope it doesn't, for it would make very short work of you and do me no good at all,” I say, which isn't very kind, but true. “But thank you—for the sentiment.”

I am about to make a joke about how drunk he must be when I realize that he
isn't.
There is no trace of liquor on his breath or in his face or gait. He is stone-cold miserably sober.

“It's not like you to be up so early without a hangover,” I say, suspicious.

“I've given it up,” he says. “For good. Not another drop to pass these lips.”

Something in me hardens at this. I pull my hand away and say, “I've heard that before.”

He gives me a sad look, but I don't care, not a whit, not for everything he's said or for his struggle with the bottle or any of it. The first lesson I ever learned, and I learned it well, was never to trust a man who is a slave to the bottle or the poppy or anything like that, because he will choose it over those he professes to love, over and over and over again.

“People don't change,” I say.

“You're sixteen, and you're so sure of that, are you?” he says.

I say nothing to that. He knows I'm right.

“You don't need to believe it. You will eventually. Csilla believes it.”

“If she does, I'm sorry for her,” I say feelingly.

Gregor looks at me sideways. “You're too young to be so cynical,” he says. “We have to live in hope, you know. What else do we have?”

“We have exactly what we
have,
” I say. “I'm not interested in playing pretend.”

“What do you have, then, if you're so keen on stark realities?”

Love, I might have said, just yesterday. A love unlike any other, so rare and strange and wonderful. Now I know better, for whatever that's worth.

“I have Dek,” I say. “Soon I'll have lots of money too.”

My life, for the moment.

“We're all about to have lots of money,” says Gregor. “That's a fantasy too, you know.”

“No it isn't,” I say. “I'm working a job and I'll be paid for it, and I don't gamble my money away. Then Dek and I can go on holiday.”

“Dek can't go anywhere, and you know it,” says Gregor.

He's right. Scourge survivors are not welcome anywhere. We are lucky to have a home; we would never find another decent place that would take us in.

“I'll buy myself a fur coat and eat hot cakes every day till spring,” I say.

“Sounds like bliss,” says Gregor dryly.

Florence and Chloe are already up and heating water in the scullery when I get back. I come in with an armful of firewood from the shed in the yard, hoping they haven't fetched it already.

“You were up early,” says Chloe, startled to see me.

“Just a little before you,” I say.

Florence looks suspicious, but not even she would imagine I'd be mad enough to spend a night like the last out in the cold.

“You don't look well at all,” adds Chloe. She glances at Florence. “Perhaps she ought to lie down?”

Florence puts her hands on her hips and glares at me.

“I'll be fine,” I say, avoiding her gaze, though in fact I am feeling a bit feverish. I begin to assemble the coffee things.

“I've got everyone upstairs,” says Chloe. “Take that one to Bianka?”

I do not want to see Bianka, and I hope she will still be asleep. I let myself into the back parlor gently, balancing the tray of coffee and sweet buns and fruit on one hand.

Baby Theo is nestled among the blankets, one arm flung back, dark curls in disarray, breathing deeply. Bianka is awake, sitting by the window and looking out thoughtfully at the snow. When I come in, she looks up but does not smile.

“Breakfast, ma'am,” I say softly.

“You've had a bad night,” she says.

“I'm feeling a little under the weather, ma'am,” I say.

“I should say so.” She rises and takes the tray from me, putting it down on the table by the window. “Sit a moment,” she says. “Have a bun.”

I don't want to talk to her, but I do want the bun, and so I sit and take it before she can change her mind or indicate she didn't mean it.

“You've been up all night,” she says. “And crying.”

“I have a cold,” I say. “It makes my eyes red.”

“I know the difference,” she says. “I've had my heart broken before, you know.”

The bun sticks in my throat. “I'm fine,” I say, forcing myself to swallow.

“Well,” she says with a shrug. “If you say so.”

I eat the rest of the bun while she pours a cup of coffee and sips at it. Baby Theo sighs in his sleep, and we both look at him. I wish I could ask her about being a witch—all the questions I never asked my mother about discovering such a power, what it means, how it feels, using it or choosing not to, being hated and hunted. I want to shake her and cry:
Do you really believe that you're safe here? Don't you know your enemies are closing in on you? That I am here to do you harm?
But, of course, I can say none of that. I stare at the rest of her breakfast longingly.