The Mime Order (45 page)

Ivy
hadn’t had a surname on the screens. If she’d been born here, she would never have entered Scion’s census. But how would she and Cutmouth have managed to leave?

If I was wrong, it would be too late.

I jumped out of the buck cab, telling him to leave the bill in the dead drop (I’d have to empty it before Jaxon noticed) and took off in the direction of the gate. My boots slithered down a muddy slope. At the bottom, a bored young syndicate guard stood at the east gate of Jacob’s Island, a rifle propped against a crate beside him. Thirty-six powerful spirits surrounded the district, one from each section of the citadel. The gate itself was a grid of metal bars, set into a chain-link fence. An antique Scion plaque was nailed to the top of it.

II COHORT, SECTION 6

SUB-SECTION 10

WARNING: TYPE D RESTRICTED SECTOR

Type D was used for small construction sites that were considered too dangerous to occupy. That sign must have been there since before they decided not to repair the slum; since before Jaxon’s pamphlet had forced the vile augurs into this place, beyond Scion’s knowledge. As soon as he saw me, the guard drew a spool.

“Back, you. Now.”

“I need access to the Island,” I said. “Right away.”

“You need your ears cleaned, girl? No entry except on the business of the interim Underqueen.”

“I’m not the interim Underqueen, but I am the Pale Dreamer, heir of the White Binder,” I bit out, “whose pamphlet is responsible for the existence of this slum. Tell the Wicked Lady and the Abbess what you like,” I said, already shoving past him, “but let me in.”

He
shoved me back, so hard I almost went into the mud. “I don’t answer to I-4. And don’t think you’re getting in through a hole in the fence, either. These spirits will destroy your mind.”

“And I’m assuming a dutiful guard like you has some way to drive them back.” I dug into my boot and threw him the envelope full of money from Chat’s rent. “Is that enough for you to let me in and keep your trap shut about it?”

The guard hesitated, but the thickness of the envelope must have convinced him. He took a cloth sachet on a gold chain from his neck and tossed it to me. “Make sure you return it.”

As the doorman unlocked the rusted gate, I wrapped a hand around my knife. The fragrant sachet sat in the middle of my collar, smelling faintly of sage.

“You’re on your own in there,” the guard warned. “I won’t be coming in to get you out.”

“No,” I said. “You won’t.”

With a flick of my spirit, I knocked him unconscious, leaving him on his back in a puddle. Not even the faintest hint of a headache followed. I took the envelope of money from his hand and tucked it back into my inner pocket.

And so, alone, I walked into the most notorious slum in London. The spirits parted like a set of stage curtains.

The gate led into a tight passage. Sweat was pouring down my face, and my cheeks were burning hot.

All Jaxon’s words about vile augurs rattled through my thoughts. The extispicists used animal entrails in their work. The osteomancers burned or handled bones. There were blood-loving haematomancers; drymimancers who scried with human tears; oculomancers obsessed with eyes, whether they were in the head or not. Jaxon had scared Eliza half to death when he told us about the Deflowerer, the legendary anthropomancer who prowled the sewers of this place, waiting for young women to
skin
and dismember before he used their entrails to predict the next one’s death.

Just a story
, I thought.
Just a story . . .
A story told in alleys and on corners, nothing more than an urban legend.

But weren’t some legends true?

Turbid smoke belched from the remains of a nearby pit fire, clothing the air with a grey reek. The stench of the place turned my stomach: sulphur and wet rot and the stink of a burst sewer, mingled with charred meat. The Rookery had been a palace in comparison. Waste had built in piles around the broken doors and vomited all over the streets, which trickled with thin streams of water. I sloshed my way through translucent fish bones and the corpses of sewer rats. The silence was broken only by the caw of a raven on the nearest rooftop.

This place was like a tangle of threads. An ancient water pump stood at the end of the next one, dripping mud-brown water, with the leaking sewer only a few feet away. When a door swung open, I stopped. A woman emerged from a dwelling, thin and pale as bone. I hid behind a fence, trying to commit her aura to memory. Three years in the syndicate and I’d never laid eyes on this particular kind of augur. She pulled at the pump with a frail hand, but only a trickle of black slime rewarded her efforts. Silently, she knelt beside a deep puddle and used her palm to scoop as much of the filthy swill as she could into her pail. After licking a little off her fingers, she limped back up the steps.

The streets were narrow, squeezed between tall, roofless buildings. There was no evidence that there had ever been windows. My boots pushed through dirty water, marbled with white foam. I held my sleeve over my nose. Scion should have burned this place down a century ago.

There were dreamscapes in the houses, but they were quiet. Cutmouth had to be here somewhere. She’d be agitated and afraid,
easy
to sense. As the red sun sank, I emerged from an alley into the widest street I’d come across so far.

Pain exploded in my shoulder.

Something between a gasp and scream came out of my mouth, and my fingers reached automatically for the source of the agony. The thing was metal and curved, wedged right under my skin. It jerked, pulling me off my feet and into the mud.

Quick footsteps came splashing through the water. I threw out my spirit, repelling one of them, but there were six pairs of hands on me already, hauling me to my feet. A slim, quick-featured man walked out of the nearest dwelling, the other end of the fishing line wrapped around his hand. In the other was some kind of pistol, an old design with a handful of modifications.

“Looks like we’ve caught something. A
trespasser
,” he sounded out, stroking a thick finger along the pistol. Freckles spread out across his sunburnt cheeks. “Tell me, what did you do to this one?”

He pointed to the man on all fours, who was holding his skull in both hands. I made a grab for my revolver, but the ringleader gave the line such a yank that the fish hook tore out of my shoulder, shaving off a long strip of my skin. A curse slammed against my teeth, but I swallowed it. This wouldn’t end well if I antagonized them. Blood pulsed from the tear, soaking my shirt.

“We should take her to the Ship, shouldn’t we?” one of the others said. “They’ve got rope.”

Rope?

The ringleader seemed to consider for a moment, then nodded. “I suppose they have. Please, somebody disarm her.”

My visible weapons were taken, one by one, before I was frogmarched through the narrow passageways.

After a minute of walking in silence, the ringleader pushed through a laden clothes line and emerged on to a wider street. I found myself being shoved toward a picket fence.

“
What’s this?”

Another stranger stood in the doorway of what looked like an old pre-Scion public house, surrounded by a wooden fence. The man was barrel-chested and bald as a teaspoon. His pale face had a semi-transparent look that reminded me of frogspawn. A discordantly beautiful sign hung from the centre of a gable above him, spelling out THE SHIP AGROUND in bold silver paint. When I didn’t speak, he wiped his hands off on his shirt.

“Caught a raider, have you, lads?”

His accent was Irish, not dissimilar to mine. He was certainly from the south. “We found her sneaking around near the water pump.” The ringleader threw me to the ground. “Look at this aura.”

Blood seeped down my back, soaking into my blouse. I kept my fingers pressed over the wound. It didn’t seem too deep, but it hurt like hell. The bald man walked down the rotten steps and crouched in front of me.

“You don’t look much like a local, girl.”

Saying the White Binder’s name would usually get me out of a situation like this, but in this case it would be a death sentence. “I’m not,” I said. “I’m looking for one of your people.”

“I take it you don’t work for the mime-queen, or you wouldn’t be creeping around like a rat. Does the doorman know you’re here, or did you break in?”

“He knows.”

“We should ransom her,” one of my captors said, to shouts of approval from the others. “The Assembly might let one of us out in exchange.”

“Who’s that?”

A new voice, quiet and high-pitched. A young woman in a pinafore had stepped out of the pub, a bucket of slop in one hand. “Go back inside, Róisín,” the bald man said gruffly.

A shiver flickered through me. A tangle of distinctive scar tissue
charred
the left side of the woman’s pallid face, jaw to temple. During the later years of Molly Riots, ScionIDE—Scion’s military arm—had used an experimental nerve agent to disperse large crowds of rebels, with devastating results. I’d never learned its proper name, but the Irish had named it
an lámh ghorm
, the blue hand, after the finger-shaped indigo burns it left on those who survived it.

Other faces had appeared at the windows of the building now. Fevered eyes gaped through filthy sheets of glass. Doors and shutters creaked open in the dwellings. Footsteps slapped through the shallow water. My throat tightened as they emerged from their shacks and galleries and slowly, step by step, surrounded me. Before I knew it, I was trapped by a ring of thirty-odd vile augurs. A dull thump echoed through my ears.

Their clothes were ratty and plastered with filth. Most went barefoot or wore bits of cardboard to protect their soles. The younger ones were staring at me as if I were something gleaming and bizarre that had jumped out of the river. The older residents were wary, lingering in doorways. When I looked at them, I realized I was seeing the Rookery and its performers, huddled in their shacks. I was seeing Liss Rymore behind the curtain that had served as her front door, guarding the few frayed things in the world that were still hers.

The Irish man knocked his fist into the pub door. After ten seconds had passed in reverent silence, a woman opened it and stepped out into the dense air, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. She looked to be in her late thirties, with dark Iberian eyes and oily brown skin, spattered with freckles. Thick black hair was loosely threaded in a fishtail braid.

“What is it?” she said to the man, who nodded to me.

“We’ve got an intruder.”

“Have we, now?” She folded her arms, looking me over. “You were clever to get in here, girl. If only it were as easy to get out.”

She
was from Dublin; her accent was the strongest I’d heard in a while. “Are you the leader here?” I said, trying to sound unruffled.

“This is a family, not one of your gangs,” she said. “I’m Wynn Jacob, the Island’s healer. Who are you?”

“A friend of Ivy,” I said, hoping on hope that someone knew the name. That I wasn’t wrong. “I’ve come here to find one of your people, someone who grew up here. She goes by the name of Cutmouth in the syndicate.”

“She’s talking about my Chelsea,” an elderly woman shouted from another house. “Tell her to leave us alone! Hasn’t the Wicked Lady taken enough of us?”

“Shut your trap, you. Get back to work.” Wynn looked back at me. “We knew Ivy and Chelsea well before they left us. Raised Ivy up myself from a babe. What sort of danger is she in, pray tell?”

“What does she mean?” I said. “That the Wicked Lady’s taken enough of you?”

“Don’t tell her a thing,” another augur spat. “If she ain’t got the Jacob name, she ain’t one of us.”

“Wait.” Róisín had picked up a flimsy bit of newspaper, so damp and wrinkled it was hard to tell how she could read it. She held up the front page, staring at me. “You’re the one Scion’s after.”

My own face looked back at me: mangled, but still perfectly recognizable. The vile augurs fell silent, looking between the photograph and me, matching features to features.

Another hand took my sleeve, belonging to a man with blackened teeth and a glistening chunk of nose. “Her hair’s different,” he said, “but she’s got that same look. Yes, Róisín, I think you might be right.”

“We could sell her!” A woman gripped my nape. “Scion would pay us fortunes, I reckon. She’s
preternatural
, this one.”

The dark-haired Irish woman said nothing. My spirit was about to rupture its bonds, but these people would kill me if I hurt anyone. Suppressing the jump set off sparks in my eyes.

“
Chelsea said they’d come for her.” On the steps, Róisín looked terrified. “Please, don’t hurt her. They said they were going to protect her.”

The nearest augur’s nose dripped blood. “I didn’t hurt anyone. And I don’t plan to.” My palms tingled. “When did you meet the blue hand?”

Recognition jumped into her eyes. She lifted her fingers to her cheek. “I was ten,” she said.

“Dublin?”

“Bray.” The Sack of Bray, one of the most shattering defeats of the Molly Riots. She glanced at Wynn, then looked back at me with a curious expression. “Did you see the riots, too?”

“
Éire go brách,
” I said. My first language rolled off my tongue.

Wynn still said nothing, but she looked between us.

“Put her down, you two,” she finally ordered, and the augurs holding my arms let go of them. “Vern, take her to Savory Dock. Quick, now, before the doorman comes looking for her.”

The woman on my right bit out her next words: “You’re going to let her
see
Chelsea?”

“Briefly, and with Vern beside her,” Wynn said. “She’ll be here because somebody from the Unnatural Assembly sent her. I won’t bring down the anger of the syndicate on our heads, or they’ll burn this place with us still in it.”

“I want my weapons,” I said.

“You can have them back on your way out.”

With a hard look at the crowd, the bald man took me by the arm and marched me away from the Ship Aground. “Yeah, go on, Vern, take out the trash,” the old man in the gallery shouted. “Don’t come back, syndie!”