The Instruments of Control (23 page)

In her stateroom in Rhys’s keep, the flagstone floors draped with thick woven rugs and a fire already kindled in the hearth, Livia locked the door behind her and let out a sigh of relief. Alone at last, and not in a prison cell. She couldn’t relax yet, though, not until she knelt down beside the canopied bed and slid her arm beneath the overstuffed mattress.

There. The edges of Squirrel’s spellbook brushed against her eager fingertips. It hadn’t been discovered during her ordeal in the prison tower.

She tugged the book free, climbed onto the bed, and lay on her stomach, riffling through the pages to find the place she’d left off. It wasn’t until ten minutes later, tracing her fingers along Squirrel’s crude etching of an occult sigil, that she thought to ask herself
why
.

I just wanted to make sure it was still there
, she thought,
that it was safe
.

Yet she’d dived straight back into its blasphemous pages. Every time she’d perused the book before, it had been for a good cause. To try to save her father’s life; to try to unravel Carlo’s plans; to try to escape silently and safely when her brother imprisoned her in her rooms.

And every time
, she thought,
it led to some fresh disaster
.

The fire beckoned from the hearth, casting a warming glow across her face. Burn the book. That was all she had to do. Cast it into the flames and be freed of it forever. No more danger, no more fear of discovery, no more risk of contaminating her soul with its foul secrets.

She closed the cover.

And lay perfectly still, holding the book tight.

A knock sounded at the door. She rolled out of bed, landing in a crouch with the book in hand, and looked to the fire. She held her breath. Another knock. She gritted her teeth as she shoved the book back into its hiding place under the mattress.

A nervous-looking footman waited outside her chamber, with six of her self-appointed protectors looming ominously over his shoulders. “Er, our lordship would enjoy the pleasure of your company at supper, if…that’s all right?”

She shooed the Browncloaks back. “Perfectly so. I was just feeling a bit peckish, actually.”

Her guardians flanked her and covered the rear, moving as a pack down a long and broad spiral staircase. Great oak doors led into an open courtyard, where torches burned back the darkness and cast pale orange light across cultivated gardens.

“The queen’s pride and joy,” the footman said to Livia, gesturing to a bed of fall roses. “You really should see it under the light of day.”

There were other things that couldn’t be seen in the dark. The torches snuffed out one by one around the garden walls, plunging the courtyard into murky starlight. Livia heard leathery slithering and quick pit-pat footfalls on the flowerbeds.

A noose of knotted rope soared from the shadows, slipping over the footman’s head and yanking taut. A strangled cry escaped his throat as the rope hauled him off his feet, dragging his kicking body into the darkness. To Livia’s left, a Browncloak went down the same way, face turning purple as he dug his heels into the nearest flowerbed and tugged against the noose.

Figures flitted in from all around, veiled and robed and not running so much as gliding, their feet barely touching the earth as they threw themselves onto Livia’s guardians. Some had garrotes, short lengths of strangling rope held tight between handles of bleached bone. Others laid into the Browncloaks with fists and feet, moving impossibly fast, joints bending in ways no human body could bear.

Kailani was the only defender who had time to draw a weapon, a long-handled knife whipping from her belt as she shoved Livia toward the nearest doors. “
Run!
” she bellowed.

Livia didn’t make it two feet. One of the attackers hit her from the side with bone-jarring force, tackling her into a flowerbed. While she squirmed helplessly in the loam, she reached up with one flailing hand and tore the assassin’s veil away.

How does it see?
Livia thought, frantic. The face beneath the veil leered down at her with empty, black eye sockets, its jaw yawning wide to flash a mouthful of jagged fangs.

“
Livia
,” it hissed. Then fingers with too many joints closed tight around her throat and squeezed like an iron vice.

Her air choking away, red blotches blossoming in her vision, Livia felt herself tumbling into darkness.

I’m dying
, she thought.

The cries of the Browncloaks around her, being slaughtered by her assassins, rose over the blood roaring in her ears. Innocents, murdered for the crime of getting too close to her. Just like in the Alms District.

No.

Images from Squirrel’s spellbook whipped through her mind. Glyphs and patterns and chants from two dozen spells flickering in her dying vision. Shaping and reshaping. Her final thoughts propelled her along a lightning bolt of raw intuition, the geometries of witchcraft unfolding like the petals of a rose.

Livia had one last breath. And with it, she wheezed out a single word. A word with no consonants and no vowels. A word that couldn’t be spoken with a human mouth. And yet, she spoke it.

Her assassin, for a heartbeat, seemed to be made of ink. A black blot drawn upon the skin of the universe with a mad god’s pen. Then the ink drew away toward the shadows, twisting into a liquid tornado that blew away into the dark. And then it was gone.

Livia’s head pounded. Her vision blurred. Slowly, painfully, she shoved herself up, sitting in a bed of crushed flowers.

The killers had vanished. The Browncloaks, some more injured than others, groaned as they helped one another up. Kailani, sitting five feet away, stared at Livia with wide, horrified eyes.

Witchcraft
, Livia thought, fear surging up along with the bile in her throat.
They saw it all. They know. They know that I
—

Kailani dropped to one knee at Livia’s feet.

“It’s a miracle,” she breathed. “Those creatures, tormentors from the Barren Fields attacked, and you…you banished them with a single holy word.”

The other Browncloaks pulled back their hoods, looking up at Livia with reverent eyes, and knelt before her.

“It—it wasn’t
me
,” Livia tried to explain, forcing the words out through her raw, bruised throat.

“It’s more than a blessing,” Kailani breathed. “
You are Saint Elise
. Returned to save us all.”

*     *     *

In a forest dark, in a tomb of stone, one luminous green eye opened wide.

Ancient fingers lifted up, withered hands catching the light of a single pale candle. The fingers twisted, casting shadows on the walls in writhing patterns. The shadows remained as the hands moved away. And the shadows listened as they clung to the wall, attentive and alive.

“
Find
,” the Dire Mother wheezed, “
who did that
.”

The little finger-shadows ran away, off to do their creator’s bidding.

*     *     *

In the backwoods, beside a burbling stream, Nessa watched Mari sleep.

Then came the roaring in her ears, the wrenching
snap
of wild magic that nearly forced her into a fetal ball. It passed, mercifully, as suddenly as it had come.

L.S.
, she thought.
You poor, doomed girl. You should have given my book back. You should have invited me into your home.

You might have survived meeting me
.

This was a new problem. If she’d felt it, the Dire had felt it too. And half the witches in the coven alongside her. She needed to find the mystery woman and take back Squirrel’s book before her rivals closed in.

She glanced down. Mari’s shoulders trembled as her chest rose and fell, lost in a fitful nightmare.

It will wait one more day
, she thought.
My work here is not yet done
.

*     *     *

In a sleeping city, in a moonlit back alley, Fox gripped his head in sudden pain.

He could feel the world shifting, the walls of reality torn and rebuilt in a heartbeat. Then the sensation was gone.

L.S.
The woman with Squirrel’s book. The cattle who would help him destroy the Owl.
But she isn’t cattle, is she?
he thought, leaning against a dank stone wall until his pulse stopped pounding.
She’s a talent. A natural talent. And she has no idea what she’s just done
.

He turned in place, using the stars to reckon where the tearing sensation had come from. No,
not
from the Holy City. Wrong direction. East? Itresca, if he knew his geography.

And then he thought back to the story he’d heard from a wandering bard that day. Some easily ignored prattle about Pope Carlo’s sister fleeing the Holy City, fleeing toward…

“Livia Serafini,” he said aloud. A ragged old tomcat, perched in a broken window, flashed glowing eyes his way.

Fox turned and strode in the direction he’d come from. Toward the docks. He needed to charter a ship to Itresca.

*     *     *

In the frozen north, in a high mansion on an icy hill in the city of Winter’s Reach, Veruca Barrett dreamed of the past.

“It is called the Misery,” the woman in the bone mask said. A mask shaped like a muskrat’s face.

Veruca sat on her basalt throne, smoothing her brass-buttoned vest, and crossed her legs.

“Catchy name,” she said. “But what’s it doing in my city?”

“It’s been here since before the uprising. It was…an experiment. Conducted on behalf of a wealthy patron.”

Veruca slouched. All her visitors wore masks. She counted a slim Fox, a bloated Toad, a giant of a man in a polar-bear mask—and the young woman who stood at the Muskrat’s side, eyes wide, listening without saying a word. That one wore the mask of a horned owl.

“This was an Imperial prison colony,” Veruca said. “You’re telling me the Holy Empire hired a coven of witches?”

The Muskrat spread her bony hands. She wore robes the color of a midnight sky, and silver bangles dripped from each slender wrist.

“I’m not telling you anything. Only that the Misery sleeps in the mine, and sleep it must. Forever.”

“We thought we’d eradicated every scrap of knowledge about the alum mine,” Fox explained. “You were…surprisingly tenacious in your research.”

“Yeah, well.” Veruca rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Alum. The Church pretty much has a monopoly on the stuff. You know how much money that mine will bring in once I open it up again?”

The Muskrat shook her head slowly. “Normally we would take the path of least resistance here. Namely, your death. But you’ve managed to bring this forsaken city under control, amazingly enough.”

Veruca studied her fingernails. “I am amazing, yes. Also, notice how I’m clearly not afraid of you? You should contemplate that before you sling threats around.”

“My colleagues and I may need a safe haven in the near future. Keeping you in power makes that possible. No, you cannot reopen the alum mines. As compensation, one of our number will stay behind, as your…court advisor.”

The man in the bear mask crossed his arms, flexing tattoos of ornate blue knots, and growled. The Muskrat shot him a look.

Veruca sat up straight, her interest piqued. “My own witch?”

“Your very own, to serve you as you please, so long as you obey our wishes and forget that the alum mine even exists.”

Veruca stood. Her boots clicked on the cold flagstone as she approached the clustered visitors. She stuck out her hand.

“You’ve got yourselves a deal.”

“Good,” the Muskrat said. She grabbed hold of Veruca’s hand with shocking force. A crackling sensation lanced up her wrist and arm, headed straight for the mayor’s spine. “I should point out that the clause about forgetting the mine exists was quite literal, though. Now…relax. This will hurt less if you don’t fight me.”

Veruca’s eyes shot open.

She lay under heavy furs in a tangle of warm, naked bodies. Head heavy with the aftermath of three bottles of wine, she could barely remember how she got there.

She remembered her dream, though. And she knew, somehow, it wasn’t a flight of drunken fantasy.

How had Bear come into her service? She strained to remember, but she couldn’t. Her brain just…slid around the edges of the question, a thought too slippery to grab.

But the dream told her exactly how it had happened. And exactly why her earliest days in power were so hazy in her memory.

Fuck with my head?
Rage simmered in her gut.
Play me for a fool? Whatever that thing you hid away in the mine really is, I hope you didn’t need it…because I own it now
.

As for my “court advisor,” he’s got a nasty little surprise coming his way.

*     *     *

And down in the darkness, in a chamber of frozen stone, the Misery shuddered in its endless nightmare. Touched by Livia’s magic from half a world away, and close to waking.

Hedy shot up in bed, clutching the scratchy sheets and gasping for breath in the darkness.

Renata jolted awake, startled, fumbling to light the candle between their beds. The village in the valley didn’t have an inn, but they’d found an elderly farmer—awake with insomnia, and the owner of a vacant bedroom ever since he’d married off both of his daughters—who was happy to put a roof over their heads for the night.

“Hedy,” Renata said, “what’s wrong? Can you breathe?”

Hedy waved one hand, shaking her head, and gulped down a swallow of air. She hiccupped.

“Something…something bad. Something really bad.”

Renata pulled aside the linens and padded over to sit on the side of Hedy’s bed.

“It’s all right. We’re safe now.”

“Not us. It’s not us. It’s…” She sighed. “There are things I can’t explain to you. I took oaths, but…all right. Witchcraft is a…a discipline, and an art. There are rules. Ways to do things, and ways
not
to do things. When we weave a spell, we draw power from the Shadow In-Between. So we have to be very careful—”

Renata looked blankly at her. “The shadow in between what?”

“In between
everything
. But you have to know how to do it right. If you don’t, if you haven’t been properly trained, you can…open doors that shouldn’t be opened. Tear things that shouldn’t be torn. You can get specks of raw Shadow
inside
of you. And they don’t come out. They fester. And grow.”

Hedy stared at their distorted reflections in the farmhouse window. The glow from the oil lamp turned the glass into a ghostly mirror.

“Somebody,” Hedy said, “somewhere…just made a very big mistake. They called on a power they couldn’t possibly understand. And if they’re very,
very
lucky, they’re already dead.”

Renata sat quietly and let the girl catch her breath. Then she reached out, gently touching Hedy’s shoulder.

“Hedy…I wish you’d come with me tomorrow.”

Hedy sighed. Her shoulders slumped.

“You still think you’re talking to sweet, kind-hearted Hedy. Didn’t you learn tonight?” She shook her head. “The Mouse is who I am, Renata. Hedy is the mask I wear.”

“I don’t believe that.”

Hedy stared down at her hands.

“Well. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. It doesn’t…it doesn’t matter anyway. I have a calling. A purpose.” She looked back up at Renata and gave her a tired smile. “You go to Kettle Sands, and your Felix, and live your life together. And someday I’ll come visit your little inn. We’ll sit down and catch up on old times, and you’ll see I’m doing all right. I promise. Okay?”

Renata squeezed her arm. “You’d better.”

Then she pulled her into a hug, surprised by how fiercely Hedy clung to her. Her thoughts drifted to Felix and his promise to kill Basilio Grimaldi.

Do whatever you have to
, she thought,
but come to me. Soon
.

*     *     *

“Felix,”
the terse note read,
“we need to talk. Come to my estate at once. Basilio
.
”

As he walked through the quiet, marble halls of the Grimaldi estate, Felix tried to keep his emotions in check. He hadn’t spoken to his father-in-law since the explosion at the Ducal Arch. He had no doubt Basilio had spent every minute since trying to find a loophole in Felix’s trap.

I’ve got enough trouble dealing with Simon and Lodovico Marchetti
, Felix thought.
You, Signore Grimaldi, are staying right on my hook where you belong
.

Strange. No servants, beyond the tall, grim-faced Oerran at the door who let him in and pointed the way. No guards. Basilio’s home felt like a mausoleum, spotless and cold and hollow.

He knocked on the door to Basilio’s office. It swung open under his knuckles.

“Signore?”

No answer. A cool breeze washed through the room, and Felix wrinkled his nose at a strange, coppery stench. Basilio’s high-backed chair had been turned to face the open window. Brow furrowed, Felix walked around the desk—and froze.

Basilio couldn’t have been dead for long, slumped in his chair. His glazed eyes stared at Felix, his torn throat gaping and scarlet. Felix shook his head, trying to process what he was seeing.

The assassins who attacked him on the street
, he thought,
or any of a hundred other people who wanted the bastard dead. One of his enemies finally got lucky
.
It was bound to happen eventually.

His thoughts leaped to Aita. If she was here and the killers found her…he had to find her. Help her, if he could. They were allies, not friends—an alliance that meant nothing now that her father was dead—but he wasn’t going to stand by and let her get hurt.

A shrill scream jerked his head toward the open window. Aita. Out on the lawns, pointing right at him as he stood over Basilio’s corpse.

And she was surrounded by a small platoon of armed men, draped in the gold and black livery of Mirenze’s city militia.

“I saw him do it,” she cried. “
He killed my father!
”

As Aita clung to one of the guardsmen, breaking down in heaving sobs, the others drew their rapiers.

Felix took a step back, stumbling against Basilio’s chair, and held up his open hands. “No, it’s…this isn’t what it looks like—”

Half of them charged toward the front door of the mansion, the rest heading straight for the open window. Felix, seized in a blind panic, turned and broke into a dead run.

Pounding boots and short, sharp shouts echoed through the mansion, sounding like they came from all around him. Lost in an unfamiliar house, the only direction Felix could manage was
away
. He darted through a cavernous ballroom, so cold he could see a gasp of breath on the air, and down a twisting warren of back passages.

*     *     *

“He
will
be found,” Governor Baumbach said for the third time. He was a chubby Murgardt with a round, curiously flat face and a nose that blossomed with a spiderweb of red veins.

“I have absolute faith in the city militia,” Aita responded, sitting diagonal from him on a plush powder-blue divan. A small lacquered table stood between them, set with a porcelain tea service.

She had draped herself in black, her face shadowed behind a delicate mourner’s veil.

“I’m just so…so very sorry. Your father was a good man. A
great
man. And a dear friend of mine.”

Aita bowed her head.

“He was. But his ledgers…were in disarray. The family barrister tells me our assets could be tied up for weeks before my inheritance is settled. Months, even. Months without a coin to feed myself, much less keep the bill collectors from the door. The law expects a lady to be well cared for by her husband when she loses her father, Governor, and by her family when she becomes a widow. What of a tragedy like mine, when I lose both husband and father in one day? Am I to be turned out into the streets? Made to beg?”

Baumbach poured two cups of tea. The faint scent of ginger filled his ivory-walled sitting room.

“No,” he said. “No, I won’t allow it. I’d be dishonoring Basilio’s memory if you wanted for anything. Aita, do you have any idea why Felix would do this horrible thing?”

She reached for a teacup, picking it up delicately.

“I’ve heard rumors. Nothing I can comment on with any certainty, but…you know his family died in the explosion at the arch, yes?”

Baumbach lowered his eyes. “A tragic day for us all.”

“Some say that Felix’s father, Albinus”—she paused, lowering her voice—“they say he was some sort of
criminal
. It’s possible that he sought this merger with my father’s business in order to facilitate some sort of…illegal scheme.”

“And you think Felix was involved?”

Aita lifted her veil an inch, taking a dainty sip from her teacup.

“He was always kind to me, but you know what they say: like father, like son. Perhaps he tried to coerce my father into going along with his plan. I imagine Father refused, things turned violent, and…well. Here we are.”

“He
will
be found,” Baumbach said again. “I’ll see Felix hang for this. I promise you.”

“I have every faith. But again, the reason I’m here: can you help ensure my needs are met?”

Baumbach gave a vague shrug. “I looked over the paperwork you sent over concerning the Banco G-R. You’re right, there are some extremely odd clauses, and the timing of the registration just doesn’t line up. It seems very suspicious. Now, this third company director, this ‘Renata Nicchi’—”

“My oldest and dearest friend,” Aita said quickly. “Except she vanished, a week ago. I think…Governor, I think Felix may have murdered her, too.”

Baumbach took that in, nodding gravely.

“As the Imperial administrator of Mirenze,” he said, “I’m empowered with a good deal of judicial authority. I think, given the…obscene nature of this tragedy, that I’m comfortable issuing a formal writ on the matter. Until such time as Felix Rossini is brought to justice and we can untangle this mess in the courts, I am granting you full authority over the Banco G-R and its accounts and operations. I would suggest you hire an educated gentleman to supervise it for you. If you need a recommendation—”

“That’s quite all right.” Aita sipped her tea. “I have just the man in mind.”

“Again, my deepest condolences. Felix
will
be found.”

Aita smiled under her veil.

“I have absolute faith.”