The Death Of The Necromancer - The Death Of The Necromancer Part 28
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The Death Of The Necromancer Part 28

Giarde glanced at the Queen and seemed to receive some quiet and almost imperceptible signal. He said, "Fallier may be Court Sorcerer, but he is not her majesty's only advisor in things sorcerous. The person who holds that position is a very old woman who lives in a corner of the main kitchen in the North Bastion. To consult with her it's necessary to go to the kitchen in question and crouch on a coal scuttle, but she is always correct, and her advice is untainted by political pressures of any kind. I'll put this before her and see what she thinks." He added, "She sent me a note a short time ago to tell me that within the past few hours there have been no less than three etherial assaults on the palace, all repelled by the wards.""That. . . isn't unexpected," Nicholas said. He's still after us, he thought. Killing Octave didn't satisfy him. Perhaps the man was mad. There was an odd sense of disappointment in that. He really would have preferred a sane opponent. But how could the man be a sorcerer in Ile-Rien and not know the palace at Vienne was the most heavily protected place, both physically and etherically, in this part of the world? The wards that guarded it were woven into the very stones of the oldest parts of the palace, they had been created and maintained by the most powerful sorcerers in Ile-Rien's history, and some of them were so old they were almost self-aware. How could the man think he could strike at them past that magical barrier? Except. . . . "Fontainon House."

Nicholas looked up to realize everyone was staring at him. Ronsarde nodded and said, "Yes, the reason Octave stayed to perform his circle."

Giarde swore. "Fontainon House is inside the wards."

The Queen was frowning. She looked at Nicholas, brows lowered, and he explained, "During a circle Octave would apparently materialize ghosts. It's possible he meant to open a circle in Fontainon House, within the wards, and open a way for something else to materialize."

"He leaves bodies strewn like discarded trash," the Queen said, suddenly. She stroked the now somnolent cat with a quick, nervous touch. "I take it we assume he is a madman?"

"The indications are there, my lady," Ronsarde said.

She subsided again, staring bitterly at the carpet.

"Well?" Giarde asked her. There was a stillness to his expression that brought Nicholas back from all thoughts of their sorcerous opponent. He is asking her if we- I- should be released. Ronsarde had done nothing except try to stay alive; Nicholas was the one who presented a problem.

The Queen's eyes lifted, met Nicholas's gaze shyly. Shy doesn't mean weak, Nicholas thought. It would be entertaining to live long enough for Fallier to realize that. She said, "You're certain?"

That one baffled him. "Your majesty?"

"About the inheritance? About giving it up?"

It was such an ingenuous question, yet he didn't doubt her seriousness. "I'm certain, your majesty. I was certain a long time ago." He found himself adding, "Of course, a true Alsene would say anything to get out of this, would swear allegiance to the devil even."

She sighed and looked at nothing in particular. Then she stood, gathering her cat in one large ginger armful. She stepped close to Nicholas before he could react, put her hand on his shoulder and said, gravely, "Your aunt Celile still writes to me. If you fail, I shall give her your address."

Then she was making her way to the door, the cat's tail snapping with irritation at its interrupted nap, while the men in the room hastily bowed.

As the doors closed behind her, Nicholas felt something unclench around his heart and distinctly heard Ronsarde draw a relieved breath. Giarde shook his head, as if in continued amazement at his sovereign's thought processes. With an air of resignation he asked Ronsarde, "Is there any other assistance you require?"

"Albier was correct on one point," the Inspector said. "We have to find this sorcerer first. We can do nothing until we know where he is."

"The Prefecture will search the abandoned structures along the river with the help of Fallier and his apprentices. Lord Albier will believe he is directing the investigation, but he'll take my advice, and I'll take yours."

"A pardon, so I can continue my investigations without impediment, would also be helpful," Ronsardepointed out.

Giarde folded his arms. "Our influence with the Prefecture is not all inclusive. It will take some time to persuade the Lord Chief Commissioner that your rampage through the lower levels of the prison was done in the Crown's name." He added, "But I'm sure something can be arranged."

Ronsarde's bow was a trifle ironic. "In the meantime, I would prefer to stay with my associates and contact the Prefecture through you or Lord Albier."

"That would probably be wise."

Giarde led them out, pausing in the reception room to say, "Take care, Ronsarde. You have powerful enemies."

"Yes, that had begun to dawn on me," Ronsarde confessed.

Giarde sighed and glanced briefly heavenward. "I'm serious. If you leave the palace, I can't protect you."

"If I don't leave the palace, I can't catch him," Ronsarde said, patiently. "And that would be too dangerous for all of us."

Giarde watched him narrowly, then nodded. "We can get you outside the palace walls without drawing unwanted attention. There's a passage under St. Anne's Gate that leads to the underground station on the Street of Flowers. My men will take you that far." He glanced at Nicholas, his eyes hooded, then said, "I think you are keeping dangerous company, Inspector."

"Oh come now," Ronsarde said, smiling indulgently. "That's a terrible thing to say about old Halle."

Giarde glared at him in exasperation. "I'm the only thing that's standing between you and a few nights in the Prefecture cells, so I'd think you could at least pretend to show me a little diffidence."

"I'm sorry." Ronsarde managed a contrite expression that fooled no one. "I will try to do better."

"Get out, before I change my mind."

Following their escort of Queen's Guards down the opulent halls, Nicholas waited until they were a safe distance from Giarde and the royal environs, then said, accusingly, "You're enjoying this."

Ronsarde glanced at him, arching a brow. "And you aren't?"

There was no answer for that. Seething, Nicholas made no reply.

After a moment of silence, the Inspector said, "Don't be fooled by her majesty's rather unusual manner. Her habits of thought are devastatingly precise."

"Whatever gave you the idea I was fooled," Nicholas said, coldly. "It was everything I could do not to accept her offer of marriage at once. I think we would have taken Bisra and half of Parscia within the year."

"A frightening thought." Ronsarde watched him alertly for a moment, then as they reached the head of the staircase, stopped Nicholas with a hand on his sleeve.

Their escort halted on the steps below, looking back up at them impatiently. Low-voiced, Ronsarde said, "We'll find this madman. We'll find him because he doesn't know when to stop. He lacks the professional criminal's instinctive knowledge of when to cut and run." The expression in Ronsarde's eyes turned rueful. "That's why I never caught you. You knew when to stop."

Nicholas swallowed in a dry throat. He wanted to be away from here and pursuing the hunt so urgently it was almost a physical need. He wasn't sure he knew when to stop, not anymore. "He wants something," he said, starting down the stairs again. "Even if he's mad, he wants something and we have to know what it is."

Chapter Seventeen.

The stench rising up from the dark swirling water in the stone pit was truly hellish; the handkerchief Nicholas had wrapped around his mouth and nose did little to mask it. He managed to draw enough of a breath to ask, "But have you noticed anything unusual in the refuse lately?"

The oldest sewerman frowned and paused to lean on his broad paddle, which he was using to direct the flow of sluice water down the channel of the main sewer into the collector pit. "Some days it's hard to say what is usual," he said, which was a more philosophical answer than Nicholas was hoping for. The man's much younger assistant, wielding a paddle on the other side of the channel, only nodded in perfect agreement.

Nicholas nodded too, keeping his expression sympathetic. This was only partly because he needed the sewermen's cooperation to get the information he wanted. After only a few minutes down here it was easy to see that you either became philosophical about your lot in life or you went quickly mad.

It had been three long days since his interview at the palace and the Prefecture's search along the river had turned up nothing so far, at least according to the frequent bulletins from Giarde. Nicholas was uncomfortable with having his connection to the Alsenes known, even though Halle had been too polite to bring the subject up and Crack, of course, had ventured no opinion at all and Cusard only worried that it would draw attention to them. Reynard had affected to think it amusing, and commented, "Now I know why you tried to hand the Duke of Mere-Bannot that bomb at the Queen's Birthday celebration two years ago."

"I was drunk, Reynard, that's why," Nicholas had reminded him tiredly. "And besides, Denzil Alsene wasn't an anarchist. He was a dedicated monarchist, he just thought it should have been him on the throne and not the legally crowned Fontainon who was currently occupying it. That he had to destroy the country to accomplish that goal was immaterial."

Notices in the penny sheets had cautioned people about the sorcerer's method of obtaining victims and there had been some panic in Riverside and many false reports, all of which diverted constables from the search. Oddly, there had been no more verifiable disappearances in the past few days. Nicholas found that more ominous than reassuring.

He had kept up his own observations of the Prefecture's efforts, spying on them from various vantage points with Crack's help and employing Cusard and Lamane's network of street children and petty thieves to follow their progress. He brought the information back to Ronsarde, who pored over it, muttering to himself, and sent terse orders to Lord Albier through Captain Giarde. Nicholas felt this procedure was highly unsatisfactory; if directing a methodical search was all that was needed, Albier and his cronies were as good at organizing that as anyone else in authority. What was needed was Ronsarde's reductive abilities, his genius for ferreting out apparently unrelated clues and finding the relationship between them. He needed to be on the scene, where the constables could report their findings directly to him. It infuriated Nicholas that the Prefecture was probably even now overlooking important information, simply because they, didn't know what they were looking at. He knew the Inspector felt this as deeply as he did.

They had discovered yesterday through a friend of Reynard's that the warrant issued for Doctor Halle's arrest had been formally rescinded. This had occasioned an almost violent argument, since Halle had wanted to join the search himself, hoping his experience with Ronsarde's methods would allow himto bring items of possible significance to the Inspector's attention that the constables and their officers might overlook. Nicholas had forbidden it on the grounds that their opponents knew Halle was a direct link to Ronsarde; if the doctor tried to take a visible role in the investigation, they would move against him as violently as they had moved against the Inspector. It was no accident that the Prefecture's principal investigator and the city's foremost medical expert in violent death had both been effectively stymied.

Nicholas knew that there was at least one person behind all this who knew what he was about.

The argument had raged on until Madeline had stepped in to explain Nicholas's point of view, even though he had already explained it several times himself. Halle had grudgingly given in then and Nicholas had stormed out of the apartment to spend an hour kicking gutters in the Philosopher's Cross and had ended up sitting at Arisilde's bedside again, hoping for improvement. Part of his anger came from his suspicion that there were things Ronsarde wasn't telling him.

It was all being taken out of his hands but they couldn't stop him from pursuing his own line of inquiry.

Which was why he was currently some distance below the street, squatting on a walkway above the stagnant waters of a sewage collector, talking to sewermen and ratcatchers. The lamplight flickered off the oily stone curving above them, though this part of the sewer was well-tended and relatively clean.

There were pipes overhead, splitting to cross the domed roof of the collector, some carrying potable water which had been brought in from outside Vienne by aqueducts ever since the city officials had given up the charmingly naive belief that the river water was drinkable if pumped from the deepest current.

"This would be within the past five days, say," Nicholas persisted. This was the fifth work group he had spoken to and he had learned he didn't want to offer suggestions for the items that might have been found, since the sewermen were often of the type of witness who tended to say what you wanted to hear, simply to be polite.

The oldest sewerman straightened, one hand on his obviously aching back, and hailed the two men aboard the small boat that was plying the waters of the collector. "Hey, is there any talk of odd things found in the pits?"

An adroit push from a paddle brought the boat within easy speaking range. There was some chin-scratching and due consideration from the two men in the boat, then one said, "We don't ever find much in the way of coin or valuables. That's a myth people tell, like the one about the big lizards."

"I found a silverpiece last year," the youngest one commented helpfully.

"Perhaps I don't mean something unusual," Nicholas said, trying to think of a good way to explain.

"Perhaps I mean an unusual amount of something you often find. Like a large concentration of sand, or bits of ironmongery, or-"

"Bones?" one of the boatmen suggested.

"Or bones," Nicholas agreed, concealing his reaction. "Was that the case?"

"Aye, the word was the Monde Street syphon came up full of bones two days ago. The Prefect figured a wall had broke through in one of the catacombs somewhere and that's where they come from."

"No," the oldest sewerman disagreed. "If that was it, the water level in Monde would drop and our collectors all down fifth precinct would go dry. There hasn't been enough rain to fill a catacomb."

The discussion abruptly turned highly technical, as water levels, drainage, rainfall, sluices, collectors, and connecting passages were all brought in as evidence for and against the catacomb hypothesis.

Nicholas listened carefully. There were catacombs under Vienne and old covered-over rock quarries, and other places where a wily sorcerer could hide. It was a more likely place than an abandoned river palace, no matter what Octave had said.

The sewermen's lively discussion moved on to other topics and Nicholas interrupted long enough to bid them good-bye before he moved on to the next group. The sewers called for more research and hehad many more questions to ask.

Madeline let herself into the apartment off the Boulevard Panzan, tired and cursing her luck. She had been following the progress of the Prefecture's search with the others but the frustration of being unable to participate actively was wearing on her. She would have preferred to be off with Reynard, who was pursuing Count Montesq's possible connection to their mad sorcerer, or Nicholas, who had been damnably uncommunicative about his pursuits.

Doctor Halle was in the salon, standing in front of the fire, apparently as preoccupied and discouraged as she was. He glanced at her as she flung herself down on the sofa and commented, "This inactivity rather grates on one, doesn't it?"

Madeline laughed ruefully. "I'm glad someone else feels it." She removed her hat, a plain gray affair to match her plain gray walking dress, an assemble guaranteed not to draw attention on the street and which did nothing to lift her flagging spirits.

Halle leaned on the mantel and cleaned out his pipe. "Ordinarily when the Prefecture has no use for me I see patients at the charity hospitals."

Madeline nodded in agreement. "I feel fortunate that I didn't take a role this season; I wouldn't have been able to do a farce justice with my mind on this."

His brows lifted. "So you are that Madeline Denare."

"Come now, you knew that."

"I did, but I wasn't sure I should mention it." He hesitated.

"I'm sure you have questions," Madeline said, carefully.

Halle smiled gently and shook his head. "Only impertinent ones. Why Reynard Morane persists in presenting himself to society as a debauched and dissipated wretch when he's as sound as a young horse. How a wandering scion of the infamous Alsenes made the acquaintance of so many congenial thieves." He looked at her gravely. "And what you are doing here."

He would ask a hard one, she thought. She shook her head. "I'm not entirely sure of that myself,"

she admitted.

Halle didn't show surprise. He regarded her gravely. "How long have you known Valiarde?"

"Since my first real ingenue role, as Eugenie in The Scarlet Veil. I got into a bit of trouble and Nicholas helped get me out." She saw the expression that Halle hadn't quite concealed in time and laughed. "No, not that sort of trouble. I had gotten the attention of a rather terrible person called Lord Stevarin. Did you ever hear of him?"

"Vaguely." Halle frowned thoughtfully. "He took his own life at his country home, didn't he?"

It had been so long Madeline had almost forgotten that part of the story. She nodded and said, "Yes, I believe he did." She would have to judiciously edit the rest of her account. "He was a great theater-goer, but not quite in the way other people are. He would go to look at the actresses, and when he took a fancy to one he would have her abducted, keep her at his town home for a few days- until he was tired of her, I suppose-then dump her out near the river somewhere, usually covered with bruises and too terrified to accuse him of anything. After all, they were only actresses, and he was a lord."

"Good God," Halle said softly. After a moment he looked at her sharply. "Then one day he chose you."

"Yes. He had drugged champagne sent to my dressing room, and then sent his men to haul me off likeI was a bag of laundry. Then-"

"You needn't tell me anymore if you don't wish-" Halle interrupted hastily.

"No, he never got a chance." She smiled. "I woke in a bedchamber in his town home, he told me his intentions rather baldly, and I... brained him with a vase." She wondered what had possessed her to tell this story. You should have made something up. But she didn't like to lie to Halle and wasn't doing such a good job of it with a story that was mostly the truth. "I was climbing out the window into the inner court when I met Nicholas climbing up. He had seen me in The Scarlet Veil too, and also had the idea of making my acquaintance but in a more conventional fashion. He saw Lord Stevarin's men taking away what he thought was a suspicious bundle, discovered I wasn't in my room and that my dresser had no notion where I'd gone, leapt to a conclusion no one else in his right mind would have leapt to, and followed them. So I got away."

Halle looked at her a long moment, his gaze penetrating. "And Lord Stevarin killed himself in remorse?" he asked finally, as if he meant to believe her answer, whatever it was.

"No." Madeline hesitated, then shook her head. It suddenly seemed pointless to conceal it, what with everything else Halle knew. She said, "That wasn't quite true. It wasn't a vase. He had a gun, you see, and I took it away from him and shot him with it. I wasn't afraid. As soon as I realized what he was, I knew I'd kill him." That was simple truth, though it sounded more like bragging. Madeline knew herself well enough to realize it had more to do with a disbelief in her own mortality than courage. That could catch up to you at any moment, she told herself. And you call Nicholas reckless.

Doctor Halle shook his head. "A young woman, abducted and threatened? Not a court in Ile-Rien would see it as anything but self-defense."

"Perhaps." Madeline shrugged. "I never had much to do with courts and Nicholas had good reason not to trust them, after what happened to Edouard. Stevarin had sent his servants away so he wouldn't be interrupted and so it was very simple to take his coach and transport his body to his country home and make it look like suicide. Nicholas knew how to make it appear as if Stevarin had held the gun, and put powder burns on his hand and around the wound, and all these other things I wouldn't have thought of if he hadn't mentioned them. I found it truly fascinating."

Halle watched her a moment, a worried crease between his brows. "Valiarde doesn't... use this against you, does he?"

"No, Nicholas only blackmails people he doesn't like." She bit her lip. She really wanted to make Halle understand, but she wasn't sure it was possible. She was only an actress; she didn't make up those eloquent speeches she gave on stage. "It's not like that. Nicholas isn't just a clever criminal. If Edouard hadn't been killed, he would be a physician or a scholar or a dilettante or.... But if Edouard hadn't taken him in when he did ... he would be a good deal worse."

"Yet you trust him?" I do.

Halle fiddled with his pipe a moment, then his eyes lifted to meet hers seriously. "Should Ronsarde and I trust him?"

Madeline smiled. "You ask me?"

"You strike me very much as a young woman who goes her own way."

"Nicholas is a dangerous man," Madeline said honestly. "But he's never betrayed anyone who kept faith with him."

There was the sound of the outer door rattling as someone opened it with a key. Halle cleared his throat almost nervously and Madeline stood, fussing with her hideous hat and unaccountably embarrassed, her face reddening as if the conversation with the doctor had been of a far more intimatenature.