Living With Ghosts (40 page)

He was unable to repress a start when a familiar voice spoke at his elbow. “Ah, Kenan. We haven’t yet said good evening, I think?”

Yvelliane. She could not know, of course, that he had been looking for her, but he could not help mild irritation. Turning to her, he did not trouble to disguise this, neglecting to salute or bow. “Good evening, Yviane Allandur. Since the greeting is necessary.”

She looked at him without liking. She said, “I have someone here who wants to meet you.” Her tone suggested that she found the desire inexplicable. Kenan followed her gesturing hand, and came up short.

Auburn curls and fair skin. A scent blended at pulse points, to speak to those who might hear in it the syllables of a name. Kenan stood motionless. He did not look at Yvelliane, who surely had no knowledge of what she had just done. He was not himself conventional within
undarii
bonds. He did not choose to proclaim his identity to the knowing world in tones of perfume. His Lunedithin blood protected him from suspicion. This painted toy of a man could not know him for who—or what—he was.

He smiled. Yvelliane said, “Kenan Orcandros, may I present Gracielis de Varnaq, a Tarnaroqui . . . entrepreneur.”

The eyes of Gracielis de Varnaq laughed deliciously, glancing sidelong at Yvelliane. Kenan nodded and said with conscious politeness, “An honor, sir.”

“For me, also, monseigneur.” Gracielis had more of an accent than Quenfrida. He smiled, showing white, even teeth.

Yvelliane said, “I need to speak to the prince consort, so I’ll leave you, messieurs. Good night.” Kenan acknowledged her departure with no more than a glance. Gracielis bowed elaborately over her hand.

Kenan said, “You are not a member of the Tarnaroqui delegation, I believe?”

“No. I reside in Merafi.”

“So? You have abandoned your homeland? I am not myself overwhelmed by the opulence of Gran’ Romagne.”

The corners of the carmined lips twitched. Gracielis said, “Choice isn’t given to every man. You’re fortunate, monseigneur.”

“Doubtless.”

“For myself . . .” Another overstated gesture, trailing scent. “I’m sure you’re sufficiently acquainted with my history.” His hand was abruptly over Kenan’s. His eyes were immense with delight. His fingers crooked in the sparse lace at Kenan’s wrist. “
Chai ela
, Kenan
istin-shae
Quenfrida.”

There was something shadowing him . . . Through that touch, skin to skin, Kenan felt the unformed ability chained in the other’s alien blood, bound, asleep in all but small ways. Something crossed it, some fleeting taste, almost familiar, which did not quite belong. Keeping face and voice neutral, Kenan said, “That knowledge is mine, I concede. And I know also what you are not. I am proof against your abilities, Gracielis
arin-shae
Quenfrida.”

“Naturally.” Taking his hand away, Gracielis looked down, cloaking his too-readable eyes. “I would expect no less.”

Kenan in turn looked down at the small tear in his cuff. Then he laughed. Gracielis was still, silent. “You will not drink with me, I assume?” Kenan asked.

“Why should I not?” The beautiful eyes swept up. “We are, after all, almost brothers.”

15

W
HEN THE INFANTRYMAN finally forced open the door, Joyain was unable to stop himself taking a step back. Then, swallowing, he said, “What
is
that?” A heavy, sweet smell wafted out toward them, sticky with decay. Like rotting flowers . . . rotting honeysuckle. The air inside the temporary guardhouse was hazy, even though the nearby river was relatively clear.

The soldier said, “I don’t think there’s anyone here, sir.” He choked, coughed, and began to back off. “Perhaps they didn’t get down here?”

“Then where are they now?” Joyain asked, finding shelter for his own uncertainty in sarcasm. “Not a single member of that patrol has been seen in eighteen hours.”

“Maybe their relief . . .”

“The relief patrol was diverted to help deal with the fire in the Artisans’ quarter.” Joyain sighed and pushed back his hair. He was sweating, and his palms felt sticky. “Well, let’s get on with it, since we’re here.”

It was nothing like a proper guard station. After the desolation of the shantytown and the illegal, desperate severing of the half-rotten bridge that had connected it to the main city, this nearby old warehouse had been hastily turned over to military use. The official reasoning, passed down from high command, was to put down any further trouble in the area around the new dock. In the barracks and in the officers’ mess whispers hinted at a different cause.

Leladrien had said that there were no more people left alive in the sodden ashes of the shantytown. Rumor suggested that someone in headquarters meant to make sure of that.

From the stone steps of the warehouse, greasy with soot, Joyain could see nothing to hearten him. The remains of the shantytown steamed and smoked on the opposite bank, already partially underwater. The piles of the bridge were gone, either covered or swept away. The water was evil with mud and refuse. The remnants of the floating dock tugged and splintered at their moorings. Beyond it, the wide artificial basin created for the use of shallow-draft boats was an empty swirl of scum and foul vegetation. The debatable land between that and the raised road to the southeast gate was also vacant, not even a stray dog nuzzling amongst its mud and wrack. The river ran high. To Joyain’s left, the confluence of the middle and northern channels was a pounding rush of filthy water, swollen by too many days of rain. Scant wonder no ship had tried to moor. The landslip below the north cliff was gone, underneath those tumbling waters. High above it, some lights still shone. Distant images of torches hung in pleasure gardens and avenues used by the nobility. Still dancing and playing, as the city sank into decay around them.

The burned-out shell of The Pineapple was only a few hundred yards away. Joyain did not look at it. Two days and a night in a Merafi deluged in rain and mist and panic had left him remote in feeling from the Lunedithin embassy and Iareth Yscoithi.

It had been a cold gray going. He was desperate for sleep. His hair and clothes smelled of sweat and ash. By rights—as if he, or any other common-born officer, had rights!—he should have gone off duty eight hours ago. But the fire had broken out anew in the Artisans’ quarter, despite the river-cursed rain; and Joyain’s exhausted, resentful unit of mixed watch and infantry had had to man their post until it was extinguished again.

After that, the rank and file had been allowed to go to their beds. The laughing fates had not, however, forgotten Joyain Lievrier. Tired as he was, his recompense had been a short interchange with his captain, and the charge of coming down here and checking up on the progress of this scratch garrison. “I haven’t time to go myself,” the captain had said, “and besides, I suspect you’ll get better results. DuResne has charge there, and he was in no very cooperative mood when I sent him.”

“Leladrien wouldn’t mutiny, sir,” Joyain had said, stiffly. “I’m sure he has a good reason for his silence.”

“Doubtless.” But the captain’s tone had given lie to the word. “And a reason too, I’m sure, for why it is that no one in or around that area has seen him, or any of his men, for twelve hours.” Joyain, lacking permission to speak, had maintained a resentful silence. “Well, he’s a friend of yours. Get down there and sort him out for me. There’s a unit seconded from the Garde-Rouge outside. Take them with you.”

More infantry, and from a provincial levy . . . Ideal material to take orders from a worn-out cavalry staff lieutenant with a headache and a sensation of being exploited. Joyain had sighed, saluted, and said, “Yes, sir.”

It had been the only reply he could think of that wouldn’t land him in the military prison. Now he poked at the dirt on the warehouse steps with a booted foot and tried his hardest not to be aware of the honeysuckle smell clinging everywhere.

“Lieutenant, sir!” The call came from inside the warehouse, and apparently upstairs. One of his party of searchers had found something.

Joyain put his hat back on and called back, “Yes?” “I’ve got something, sir, if you’ll come up.”

“On my way.” Rubbing his soiled toe cap on the back of his calf, Joyain tugged at his cassock and straightened his shoulders. The reek inside the building was far worse than he’d imagined. He wanted to throw open all the windows and gulp what passed for fresh air. The stone floor was wet. All the fires were dead. The makeshift grates looked as if they’d been put out with buckets of water. The temperature was at least ten degrees too high to be compatible with the lack of fire and the weather outside. Against his will he recalled bitter man-forms in a night-mist and shivered.

The soldier who had summoned him was waiting on a second-floor landing. Peering into rooms on his way up, Joyain had seen no life beyond his own unit; no sign of anything other than chilly abandonment. The soldier saluted him and said, “In there, sir.”

He indicated a narrow door made out of cheap deal, standing ajar. There was something wrong with his face . . . Joyain looked at him curiously, awaiting further explanation. He received none. After a moment, he shrugged, and said, “Right. You carry on, then.” It would help if he had the least notion of the names of any of this unit . . .

The soldier made no effort to accompany him. Joyain pushed the door open and understood why.

Originally, he supposed, it had been a clerk’s office. A crook-backed slip of a room crushed under the eaves and lit by a single unglazed window. The army had imported a cot and dragged the desk away from the window. The scuff marks were still barely visible on the floor through the overlay of mud and bloody vomit and water. There were no words adequate to describe the smell. Something that Joyain did not intend to investigate too closely lay half behind the desk. It might once have been a man. If he had looked—but he wasn’t going to look—he might have been able to theorize about the cause of death. (Obviously, it was dead. No one could live in that many pieces. He was not even going to begin to imagine what might have come to chew and tear limbs after that fashion. Half the gut must be missing, apart from what had fallen across the floor.) Joyain found he was rubbing his hands up and down his thighs convulsively. Drawing in a long breath, he forced himself to stop and clamped one hand around the hilt of his saber instead. That was nearly reassuring.

Then he looked up. Something in the pit of his stomach protested dimly, while through his mind rattled a dry military tally of the room and its contents. Bed, one; chair, one; body, one . . . no, two, another shape hidden beyond the desk in the unlit corner of the room, a disjointed bundle of a man dropped from too high, and left to lie in a congealing puddle of his own fluids.
Unrecognizable, ofcourse,
said that same dry voice in Joyain’s mind, even the uniform too marred and mangled to lend any identity; skin blackened and discolored, flesh torn and seared, some wounds still weeping light thick fluid into the mess on the floor . . . Scanning upward past the wrecked chest, past the pitiful ends of rib protruding from the broken skin, past the crushed forearm flung out as if it would protect the head, look up, look up, and look away quickly . . . On one side, the skin had been ripped clean away from the throat and jaw, exposing teeth which were still strong and good; and, on the upper right-hand side, the face was also torn off, no cheek, no brow, no eye. Joyain was shaking, he could barely breathe, he was trying so hard to look away anywhere but down; his loins were cold and unmanned, he was—river rot it—shaking! He was . . .

The ruined jaw moved, and Joyain started back, banging his thigh against a corner of the desk. Under the blood and the knotted, matted hair, a single eye opened and looked straight at him. He could see the effort in the bared muscles, the convulsive swallowing in the gullet. Sweat ran down his own neck, and he breathed fast through his mouth.

A voice he did not want to recognize said, “Hello, Jean.”

“No,” Joyain said. He could no longer stand. Sinking back, he leaned on the desk, gasping.

“Sorry . . . about the mess.” Leladrien’s lips were partly gone. The muscular rictus where they should have been was a vicious parody of a smile. “Things you . . . should know.” Joyain knew he should do something, say something, summon help, anything. He could not move at all. He wanted to cry. He had forgotten how. Leladrien said, “We were . . . mostly dead, before they came. The . . . things. Look in the cellar. It’s a sickness. But the things . . . are real. Not phantasms.” His voice was ghastly, a sobbing thread caught up perpetually on the angles and floods of its own pain. Black fluid dribbled from the edges of his mouth and between his teeth. “Burn this place. Promise me.”

“I . . .” Joyain said, and swallowed bile. “Lelien.”

“Promise, Jean.” Joyain was afraid to speak. He nodded, chill, wan. Leladrien said, “Good.” And then, “Other matters . . . Don’t touch anything. Not without gloves. You still there, Jean?”

“Yes,” Joyain whispered, eyes tight shut, hand hard on his sword.

“Jean, listen. You must . . . You must shoot your deserters . . . Hear me?”

“Yes.”

“If they go into the city . . . they’ll spread it.”

It made grim sense. Although it was surely too late . . . How many of the watch and the city garrison lived in the Artisans’ quarter, or the low city, or over the shops in the business district outside the wall? Joyain swallowed again and said, “Yes, Lelien.”

“Good man. Good thing they sent you. Thought so, last night, before the things came . . . Jean will be down for us, sooner or later.” Leladrien’s single eye was no longer seeing Joyain. He coughed, or tried to, and nausea knotted in Joyain’s stomach.

Joyain said, “What are the things?”

Leladrien ignored him. “I watched the lights . . . on the hill. You can see so much, when the sickness has you . . . They were dancing last night in the palace . . . Couldn’t even see the fires in the streets from up there . . . Laughing, I suppose. Loud enough to drown the cries . . . It won’t rise so high, the river, to drown them too . . . D’you see it, Jean?”