The Mime Order (24 page)

It was impossible to see her eyes through those lenses, but her fingers bunched into a fist. I exchanged a glance with Nell and said, “How do you know that?”

When she replied, it was hardly loud enough to hear. “Just heard it on the streets. You hear a lot as a gutterling.”

Nell looked suspicious now. “Nobody in my district thought Cutmouth hated Hector. People said she was half in love with him, if anything.”

“She was not,” Ivy bit out, “in love with him.”

“You knew her, didn’t you?” I said. Ivy looked between us. “I saw her the night Hector died. She asked where you were hiding.”

Ivy opened and closed her mouth. “She asked—” Her whole body was trembling as she leaned across the table. “Paige, what did you tell her?”

“I told her I didn’t know where you were.”

Mixed emotions thrashed their way across her face. Like me, Nell had clearly caught a scent. “How
did
you know her?” she said.

Shoulders hunched, Ivy pulled her knuckles up to her chin. “We grew up in the same community.”

“But she got the scar when she was working for Hector, and I’ve never heard that story about him cutting her,” I said, watching her face. “So you stayed friends with her after she became his mollisher, and she confided in you about how much she hated him. That’s dangerous information to share with a gutterling.”

Something like panic was crashing over Ivy’s features now. “You
know
they’re saying it was you who killed him, Paige?” she said, with an edge to her voice. “Agatha told me. The Unnatural Assembly cleared you, but you were at his parlor that night. Why are you so interested in Cutmouth?”

I fell silent and leaned back in my seat, trying not to notice the look of confusion Jos gave me. She had me there. If I could prove Cutmouth guilty, it would clear my name and rid me of the need for Jaxon’s “protection”
—
but I couldn’t press Ivy in front of the others, or they’d wonder the same thing.

“I’m tired.” She stood, pulling her sleeves over her shaking hands. “I’m going back to the boutique.”

Without another word, she walked toward the stairs, her head ducked. As I rose to go after her, Nell caught my arm. “Paige, don’t,” she murmured. “She’s confused. Agatha’s been giving her sedatives to help her sleep.”

“She’s not confused.”

I pulled my arm free and swung my legs over the balustrade, on to a wrought-iron stairway that zigzagged down the side of the building, leaving the other three to finish their drinks. Below me, Ivy was making her way out of the bar at top speed, back towards the inner market. I jumped down and jogged after her, into a close pathway that was packed with empty stalls.

“Ivy.”

No reply. Her pace quickened.

“Ivy,” I said, raising my voice, “I don’t particularly care why you know Cutmouth, but I need to know where she might be hiding.”

Her shaved head was bowed, her hands shoved into her pockets. When I got within a few feet of her, she turned on her heel and thrust something toward me. A switchblade glinted in the blue light of a streetlamp.

“Just leave it, Paige,” she said, with a coldness I’d never heard from her. “It’s none of your business.”

Her
face twitched and her hand trembled, but her eyes were almost black with resolve. Bruises were still fading from her skin. She kept the knife pointed at my heart until I took a step back. “Ivy, I’m not going to hurt her,” I said, raising my hands a little. The knife flinched up again. “She could be in danger. Whoever killed Hector will be looking for—”

“You know what, Paige? I don’t know if she loved or hated him. I thought I knew her once,” she spat, “but I’ve always had a knack for trusting the wrong people.” Her voice was threadbare. “Back off, Pale Dreamer. Run back to your mime-lord.”

The knife snapped closed. She cut through a line of hanging rugs and disappeared into the market.

****

It might be nothing. Maybe Cutmouth and Ivy had been friends who’d stayed close enough to share their secrets and that was the end of it. It was clear she had some idea of where Cutmouth was, but she had no reason whatsoever to trust me with the information. She didn’t know me from the next person she’d met in the colony. I was just the white-jacket from the meadow whose keeper had been kind to her.

Back near the Underground station, I climbed into a rickshaw and pulled my hood over my eyes, watching the stars sail in and out of the clouds. At least we’d all agreed on the penny dreadful. It was the most secret breed of rebellion I could imagine, putting words on paper. But hadn’t Jaxon’s pamphlet completely changed the structure of the syndicate? Hadn’t it dictated our protocol, our rivalries, the way we looked at one another? Jaxon had been a nobody, a self-educated gutterling, yet his pamphlet had done more than any Underlord, simply because people had read it in droves and found something worth acting on.

Writing
didn’t carry the same risks as speaking. You couldn’t be shouted down or stared at. The page was both a proxy and a shield. The thought was enough to bring a smile to my face for the first time in days, though it faded when I saw the nearest transmission screen.

The rickshaw took me back to I-4. As it rattled into Piccadilly Circus, it swung to the right, jolting me in my seat. The driver glanced over his shoulder. Automatically, I pulled my scarf up to my eyes.

A paddy wagon was parked in the center of the Circus, where a unit of Vigiles had rounded up nine voyants and bound their hands. In front of me, the driver muttered to himself, cursing his job, flex-ing his fingers on the handlebars. We were hemmed in by the sheer weight of traffic, brought to a standstill by a red light and the curiosity of the passengers. Another rickshaw client was standing up, craning to see the show.

“. . . miscreants, seditionists, and the vilest of unnaturals,” a Vigile commandant was bellowing through a speaking-trumpet. His pistol was aimed at the heart of a soothsayer, whose head was bowed. Beside him, a medium had broken down in tears of fright. “These nine traitors have confessed to being seduced by Paige Mahoney and her conspirators. If these fugitives are not found, they will spread the plague all over our citadel! They plot to destroy the laws that PROTECT you! Let London BURN before the Bloody King’s legacy continues!”

The red light blinked off, and the bus moved on. Another jolt, and the rickshaw was weaving around traffic again.

“Sorry,” the driver called, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Would’ve taken a different route if I’d realized.”

“Have you seen a lot of that?” I asked.

“Too much.”

He was amaurotic, but he sounded sad. I didn’t speak again. Every
move
Scion made was controlled by Nashira. Those nine voyants would be dead before the week was out.

The rickshaw dropped me off at the base of the Seven Dials pillar. The vibrant blues and golds on the sundials at the top had been replaced by red, white and black, with silver anchors in the middle of each oval. Chat had painted them during the night, coating their beautiful symbols with Scion’s colors. It looked authentic, like something done for Novembertide, but the sight of the enemy’s symbol on that pillar hurt my heart. I took out my keys and walked away from it.

When I got back to my room, I found four small Grub Street booklets on my bed. I picked up the nearest and skimmed my fingers over it.
The History of the Great Syndicate of London: Volume I
. This must be what Jaxon had meant by “homework.” I sat down in my armchair and opened it.

Originally, the clairvoyant people of London had only ever met in small groups. There had been a few large gangs with voyant members, like the Forty Elephants, but it was a “mirror-reader” named Tom Merritt who had stepped up and taken charge of it all in the early 1960s. Interesting that the first Underlord had been a soothsayer, the lowest of Jaxon’s orders. Along with his lover, the “flower-caster” Madge Blevins, he’d divided the citadel into sections, created the black market, and given each clairvoyant a job. The most committed were raised to positions of power, becoming the first mime-lords and mime-queens. In 1964, his work was done. He declared himself Underlord, and Madge his faithful mollisher.

It was strange to see a record that didn’t use the Seven Orders clas-sification system.
Mirror-reader
and
flower-caster
had long since been replaced by
catoptromancer
and
anthomancer
. There were other archaisms scattered through the text:
numina
for
numa
,
spirit-reel
for
spool
.

The first scrimmage had been held twelve years later. Good Tom and Madge had both been killed in a freak accident, leaving the
syndicate
without a leader. The resulting battle for the crown—the first scrimmage—had been won by the first Underqueen, who’d called herself the Golden Baroness. She had ruled for another four years before being brutally murdered by an “axe-diviner.”

Upon the Underqueen’s gruesome Demise, it was decreed by the Unnatural Assembly that her Mollisher, the Silver Baron, would inherit the Crown in the style of the deposed Monarchs of England, whose line was interrupted by the arrival of Scion ( for are we not, as one Mime-Queen said, the monarchy of those who have been crushed beneath the Anchor?). From that point on, Mollishers would always inherit, except in the rare situation that both Underlord and Mollisher were killed at the same time, or the Mollisher refused or ignored their Claim.

That might explain Cutmouth’s disappearance. It was safe to assume that whoever had killed Hector wanted her dead, too. She’d chosen to go into hiding rather than announce herself to the Unnatural Assembly. When I opened Volume III, published in 2045, I clenched my jaw.

It is in this period of our History that the great Pamphleteer, known under the pseudonym “An Obscure Writer”, stepped forth to reorganize the Syndicate. In 2031, the Seven Orders of Clairvoyance—published in the pamphlet
On the Merits of Unnaturalness
—caused a minor spate of Disagreements (including the historic imprisonment of the Vile Augurs) before its implementation as the official System by which we understand Clairvoyance in the Syndicate. Grub Street is proud to have published this stupendous and ground-breaking Document. As of the present time, Obscure Writer, now formally known as the White Binder, is Mime-Lord of I Cohort, Section 4.

“A minor spate of Disagreements”? Was that what this historian called all that senseless murder, all those gang wars? Was that what
he
called the divisions that still riddled us? I turned to the section on syndicate customs.

The Scrimmage is based on the medieval art of
mêlée
. Mime-Lords, Mime-Queens, and their Mollishers fight in close Combat in a “Rose Ring,” an enduring symbol of the Plague of Unnaturalness. Each of the Combatants fights for his- or herself, but a Mollisher may work with his or her Mime-Lord or Mime-Queen at any time during the battle. The last Candidate standing is declared Victor and is presented with the ceremonial Crown. From that moment, the Victor rules the Syndicate, and bears the title of Underlord or Underqueen, depending upon their Preference.

When there are only two Combatants left in the Rose Ring, and they are not a Mime-Lord or Mime-Queen and Mollisher duo, they must do battle to the Death in order for a final Victor to be declared. Only by using a specific invocation—“in the name of the
æther
, I, [name or alias], yield”—can a Combatant end the last fight without bloodshed. Once this word is spoken, the other Party is automatically declared Victor. This Rule was introduced by the Golden Baroness, first Underqueen of the Scion Citadel of London (ruled 1976–1980).

Jaxon rapped on the wall with his cane. I closed the book and laid it on the nightstand.

In the office, I was hit by the waxen smell of flowers. There were cuttings all over his desk, along with a heavy pair of scissors and a length of orange ribbon. On the couch, Nadine picked through the week’s earnings. She glanced at me before looking back at the pool of coins in her lap.

“There you are, Paige.” Jaxon waved me to a seat. Our argument had already been forgotten. “Where did you go this morning?”

“Just to Chat’s for a coffee. I woke up early.”

“Don’t wander off. You’re far too precious to lose, O my lovely.” He sniffed, his eyes bloodshot. “Wretched pollen. I’d like
my
mollisher’s opinion, if you’d care to cast your eye over these blooms.”

I sat down in the opposite chair. “I didn’t have you down as a botanist, Jax.”

“Not botany, darling. Custom. Each participant in the scrimmage chooses three flowers to send to Grub Street with their application. They still use the language of flowers as a tribute to the first Underlord’s mollisher, who was, legend has it, a talented antho-mancer.” Each of the flowers had a small label. “Here are the ones I’ve chosen. Forsythia, to tell them how much I’m looking forward to the fight.” That flower was small and yellow. “Ragged-robin, of course, for wit.” A second bloom came spinning into my lap, its petals mauve and spidery. “And lastly, monkshood.”

“Isn’t that poisonous?”

“It is. Symbolically, it can either mean ‘chivalry’ or ‘beware.’ Nadine doesn’t think I should send that one.”

“No,” Nadine said, not looking at him. “I don’t.”

“Oh, come now. It will be fun.”

“Why
would
you send it?” I said. The last flower was a shapeless sort of bloom, deep soothsayer’s purple in color.

“To be different, darling. Most mime-lords send begonia as a warning, but I rather like monkshood.”

“If I was the one receiving it,” I said, “I might think you were threatening the organizers.”

“Thank you,” Nadine sighed.

“Damn you, dullards. There really is not a whit of wit between you.” With careful fingers, he tied a length of ribbon around the flowers and held them out to me. “Take these to the dead drop. Nadine and I have something to discuss.”

Nadine dropped her chin, and her hand balled into a fist on the arm of the chair. It was tempting to stay and listen in, but my better side told me not to.