Purity was certain to a fact that Baron Kloo wouldn't give two dirties as to what wardrobe standards Rawella Eightsguard adhered-whoever she was. He certainly wouldn't wish harm on a young lady for wearing the same pericoat twice in a fortnight. As petty as the other house leaders could be, she had difficulty imagining any of them condescending to care one way or another about Bitzy's couture inquisition, except perhaps as a tolerable distraction for their daughters.

More likely to catch them bickering about how to deal with the vigilante Killer in their midst. A rogue Circle member who had, apparently, been Killing servants in the northern bas.e.m.e.nts of Dendrite's Folly. The cowards-her father excluded, of course, and Purity felt that conviction did not arise purely from filial adoration-had been all too happy to Murder one another en ma.s.se, but one rumored b.a.s.t.a.r.d going off on his own to permanently Kill a few n.o.bles and handful of stable boys and suddenly the Circle was too busy staring at their bootlaces to do anything but whine.

A servant brought in a tray of coldc.u.mbre sandwiches garnished with thrashmelon slices and citrus from the Dome's expansive orchards, and the four girls laid down their embroidery hoops to pick at the midday meal. Further conversation would be prohibited until their hostess motioned for the attendant to clear the dishes.

Purity sat with her thoughts and nibbled on the corner of a sandwich triangle while NiNi hummed an annoying fragment of song. Transmigration by death was out of the question, she'd admitted to herself with much reluctance. Her efforts in that direction had borne no fruit. And there could be no daring physical escape: the Dome had been well and truly sealed by the prince. Adepts wove wards into every possible exit- even the filigreed air vents-and praetorians loyal to Fflaen stood guard at the end of virtually every corridor. Their presence was not strictly necessary, but evidently Fflaen desired a constant reminder of the power of the Writ he'd declared that imprisoned the aristocracy within the Dome in the name of their own safety. For all intents the Dome was hermetically sealed- servants, Circle, and families all trapped together. And now, one of them had gone rogue with the Weapon.

Escape from safety had proven impossible, and Purity had discreetly tested every method she could think of, including spelunking through some quite unpleasant culverts. The only demonstrable loophole was even worse than this interminable confinement: True Death. Somehow the Lords Unsung had uncovered a means of opening the Last Gate that did not rely on a soul's own readiness for oblivion. That had been a surprise; True Death came only to the Dying, who by definition had lived long enough to have earned oblivion.

Bells, the Weapon! That would have once been unthinkable, but now that the lords had a Weapon they could use to Kill- actually Kill- their rivals, the illusion of "community" the Writ had supposedly been intended to foster evaporated like mist in daylight. And so it surprised Purity not one whit that the children had begun to follow their elders' example, hacking each other apart for the silliest of reasons. If the prince didn't reappear soon, or if the Writ were not somehow revoked, Purity did not see much hope for the peerage. Not that the n.o.bility deserved much in the way of hope, she reckoned, for all the misery they'd doled out over the millennia.

NiNi and NoNo set down their teacups and pushed away their plates in unison. Bitzy waited a moment longer, then lifted two fingers to alert the servant to clear the table. Within seconds no trace of their meal remained. Purity thought of the fate of Lyndee Bocks, so similarly exacted from their lives-and Rawella Eightsguard, who would soon follow. They couldn't permanently dispatch their victims the way the Circle and the Killer could, but they'd dumped Lyndee's parts into three separate cisterns and the poor thing had yet to return. The body-binding enchantment couldn't be broken, but it could be . . . frustrated. Purity wondered if they mightn't all end up Dead or minced and dispersed, the n.o.bility either sent into oblivion or rendered useless while their bodies slowly reconst.i.tuted.

Traditionally, a duel between body-bound n.o.bles ended in ritual cannibalism. Eating your opponent was the best way to ensure a slow waking- she'd heard the process could take a year.

Could that be the prince's endgame? Purity wondered, as she tasted the last remaining crumbs of a coldc.u.mbre sandwich. Was the Writ of Community just a ruse to herd the aristocracy into destroying itself? If anyone were capable of such conceit, it would be Fflaen the Fair. Purity stifled a yawn. Maybe it was a symptom of her confinement, but lately she'd had trouble remembering how to care- and then, just when she felt overcome by ennui, she felt a fever to escape, escape, escape. But sometimes she wondered: escape what? Was it just this golden cage? There was a kind of madness bubbling up all around her, but no one seemed to see it. Purity had doubts she couldn't quite name, and rages she couldn't quite control, and she ruminated overmuch on the nature of the Weapon and what it must feel like to cease to be. . . .

"Ladies?" Bitzy reconvened. "Have we all finished our needlework for the afternoon?"

"As close to finished as can be, I suppose." Purity frowned at her own work, black flowers blossoming across the face grille of her hood. What cannot be avoided must be endured, her father said.

"Well then. Shall we attend to our responsibilities?" Bitzy put up a good effort at seeming reluctant.

"Yes," said NoNo.

"Let's," said NiNi.

With that, the four girls stood up, smoothed their skirts, and donned the blue silk hoods, each helping the others secure them in place with three snug bows down the back of the head. Then they each pulled razorhoned sickles from behind their cushions and filed out of the room to butcher Rawella Eightsguard over a breach of etiquette.

Not everyone came to the city to Die. Beside the trickle of dreamers and pilgrims who followed the tunnel to the Apostery sat the carnival tailgaters Cooper had seen, musicians beating out their rhythm to the patchwork songs of the polyglot Dead. Elsewhere, on the mile-wide plazas surrounding the sealed Dome, the cobblestones bustled with hawkers and vendors plying the hundred trades fueled by the industry of Death: indulgences and remembrances, relics of questionable authenticity. Fingers of vanished saints and martyrs, gold-forged wigs of G.o.ddesses long since divorced and forgotten-icons to suit sentiments that hearkened from all the near-numberless universes whose Dying converged in the City Unspoken.

Among the elite of the worlds a teleological tourism existed, and guides traveled with cadres of archmagi and offworld royalty who took a dozen different routes to see the squalid splendor of the City Unspoken: astrally projected, temporarily incarnated in borrowed bodies; even physical entrances were rare but not unheard of-if the emperor of twelve microcosmi wished a window opened to the Piazza of Distant Roads, there would be a party of city n.o.bility waiting to greet their otherworld peers and whatever army of adepts the otherworlders employed to make such a voyage possible. Terenz-de-Guises, Bratislaus, Blavatsky-Day-Louis, Kloo, FenBey-the most powerful n.o.ble houses welcomed trade in any form.

And then there were the Eightfold Worlds-realities that physically adjourned the pocket dimension of the city and had, in ages long vanished, functioned as both suburbia and supply route. Today they were remembered as a lesson in a kind of a abstracted urban decay: left to rot, the paths to and through the Eightfold Worlds had rusted shut, collapsed due to poor maintenance, vanished, or been rendered useless by the truancy of munic.i.p.al oversight. Once they had been cathedral worlds whose aisles led to the City Unspoken. Only three of the Eightfold Worlds remained accessible, but raw materials still made their way into the city with profitably regular custom: Terenz-de-Guises, its hands in every pie, trafficked in mineral and lumber trade, while the mercantile cla.s.ses forded agriculture, livestock, and other necessities across the thresholds and through the ca.n.a.ls that separated the city's districts. Work continued, such as it was, albeit diminished in both capacity and profitability-the city missed governance, if not its governors.

So the barge that made its way down the ca.n.a.l that separated the annexed blocks north of Dismemberment from the Callow Heights and the shrinking demesne of Purseyet blended seamlessly into the nighttime traffic of industry, weighed down by crates of goods and crewed by a sullen bunch of dark-browed men and women.

The madman at the prow drew little enough extra attention-madness was merely another commodity here, and some of the more superst.i.tious local business owners even considered it good luck to employ at least one lunatic in some capacity or another-a moon-touched potato peeler might bring good fortune to an innkeeper, and more than one nutter worked as deckhand on the many barges that plied the city's arterial waterways.

"Pioneers!" called out the bearded man standing afore. The night wind whipped his unkempt hair about his face and pulled back the corner of the canvas that covered the body at his feet. Cooper slept on, oblivious to the madman or the shattered sky that glittered above the water.

"Enough, Walter," a husky voice scolded from the flimsy shack that served as the scow's deckhouse. A stocky woman with arms muscled like a pair of pythons stood in the open hatchway, her hay-colored hair cropped short at the nape of her neck and a grimace on her thick-featured face. "We must be quick about our business tonight, and I'll have less of your crowing and more of your hands securing the hawser, if you please." The lighter-cla.s.s scow had seen better days, but Captain Bawl ran her boat like a ship, and all the oak.u.m-patched, split-bitted hull in the worlds wouldn't discourage her professional pride, even if tonight's dispatch did leave a nasty taste in her mouth.

"But the moon . . ." the wild man protested, searching the sky. "Won't rise tonight no matter how you howl, so lay off and get to work or I'll weigh you down with stones and drop you in the soup. The patron wants us there by midnight, and you have enormous chains to watch out for." And there were-huge, rusted chains crisscrossed this section of the ca.n.a.ls, as they did elsewhere across the city. Bawl had no idea what the buried chains were about, but they were as thick as her barge and could shear her hull in two if her c.o.xswain didn't do his job.

Walter lowered his eyes and nudged the unconscious body with a foot. He wondered in his mad way if the boy was dead or merely sleeping, and if there had ever been a difference between the two states of being in the first place.

"Do the sleepers sleep? Daughters of the West?" He looked at his Captain imploringly. "All the prisoners in the prisons. The righteous and the wicked. All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying? Do the sleepers sleep?"

"Yes, yes, the kid is fine, Walter. Stop fretting." Bawl was unmoved by Walter's sympathy but answered him nonetheless. It wouldn't do to have her token madman upsetting the quality, if the quality ever decided to show his face above deck.

Walter combed his fingers through long brine-yellowed curls. "The ghostly millions, yes." He nodded, seemingly satisfied. "The places of the dead quickly fill'd."

"You care too much, old man." She should have ignored him, but the intensity in his shrunken eyes compelled her, as it had when she first took him aboard. He sulked out at her from beneath his broad-brimmed hat.

"Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his shroud," Walter explained, as if to a child.

"Okay, care then, if it's so d.a.m.ned important. See if I mind."

"Captain Bawl," snapped a voice from behind her. "If you're quite through humoring your beast there, I believe we approach my point of disembarkation?"

Tam stepped out of the cabin, the torchlight catching his fox-roan hair and turning it to copper. No sooner had he sc.r.a.ped the guts off his face than his mistress dispatched him to deliver a package, a package that had turned out to be a man. Tam sighed, fingering the bloodstains on his lapel and pitying the human cargo. He looked handsome, if a bit oversized, but anyone unlucky enough to gather the attention of the Marchioness TerenzdeGuises and her machinated mother was dog meat. Tam hadn't a clue why Lallowe wanted the childborn taken to this particular destination- probably to lure out the pale vagrant, see if or how important the dog meat was to Asher. She had an unhealthy obsession with that man.

Tam repeated himself and clapped his hands for the captain's attention-Captain Bawl mistrusted hands as smooth as those, but everyone needs to eat, and the marchioness paid better than most.

"Aye," she said curtly, remembering the price she'd been promised.

There wouldn't be sufficient payment for the band of toughs who'd led the a.s.sault on the Manfrix house, though-the lucky majority had died, and were now enjoying the freedom of a new sky. Some few had withdrawn from the mess without grave injury, but most of the men had to be left behind on the embankment, minus an eye or an arm or skin to hold their guts inside. Bells, but those two could fight!

Bawl had seen the disaster from outside. It was supposed to have been surgical-strike quickly after dusk when the marks were at their least vigilant. Ha. That had been a relative concept-the gray man must be some kind of martial savant, the captain had decided. She'd once seen one of Prince Fflaen's praetorian guard duel outside the Way of Forgotten Methods garrison, back in the days before the sealing of the Dome, and he'd had something of the gray man's grace. But Asher fought barehanded. He'd been everywhere.

And the Manfrix woman hadn't been much easier to subdue. Whatever informant had pinned her as-how had the doc.u.ments described her?-"an inconsequential academic" would have to reconsider his or her notion of "consequence" once the mercenaries who'd survived the razor kisses of her blades came calling.

The captain had refused to take part in any of the bloodletting. It was only the insane amount of coin that the marchioness had placed on tonight's business that had gotten Bawl involved at all, and while she'd agreed to take the cargo aboard the Barge Brightly once the toughs had hauled the body out of the house-at great cost- she'd let nary a one of them set foot on her ship. Her boat, she corrected herself with a shake of her head. Bawl might have fallen far from the admiralty she'd led lives ago, but she still had standards. Ethics. Battered as they were- and bells, were they battered.

Thoughts of the botched abduction evaporated as the barge rounded a bend and Bawl's destination loomed before her. The peaked white building was half keep, half palace, and the sight of its walls shining against the night took the captain's breath away every time she pa.s.sed this way. She'd never had a reason to stop and stare before, though, let alone to moor at the jetty of ca.n.a.l-stained marble that reached out into the water like a pale finger.

"At last." Tam exhaled with relief. "I'll take a brothel over a barge any day."

La Jocondette was more than a brothel-it was the remainder of an age when the wh.o.r.es of the City Unspoken had ruled their own district, Purseyet, like queens. Once, the lifebinds that now held them hostage to pimps and madams had been no different than the charms that distinguished peerage from hoi polloi: the n.o.bility, governors, and courtesans had all been deemed too important to have their city lives interrupted by as minor an inconvenience as death. So it was with great honor that they submitted themselves to be bound to their bodies, bound to their city, and bound to their duty.

Times had changed.

The courtly arts had long ago become devalued, the n.o.bility devolved into a handful of families clutching at whatever diminished grandeur could be found-and these days wh.o.r.es were merely wh.o.r.es, body-bound or regular flavor. But La Jocondette retained more than a glimmer of her former prominence, and her edifice reminded the city that once it had counted courtesans among the peers of the realm. Men and women who, lovely of flesh and spirit, had helped ease the pa.s.sage of the Dying and other pilgrims-like the trickle of dead saints who came to join the Winnowed in their caverns beneath the streets. La Jocondette reminded the worlds of that less ign.o.ble past: scrubbed daily, wreathed with flowers and with a candle lit in each of its tidy windows, La Jocondette dominated the back end of Purseyet. The rest of the district had succ.u.mbed to disrepair and the ceaseless encroachment of squatters and industry, but the white stone building kept manicured lawns that extended to its wrought-iron gates and wrapped around to kiss the ca.n.a.l at its rear.

Like the two-faced G.o.d of portals whose face supported some of the grander bridges over the waterways, La Jocondette presented two faces to the city-one to the ruined street and one to the ca.n.a.l. Once, she would have greeted patrons from both ends; now the only traffic she saw came from the water, since the adjacent streets were no longer considered safe enough for her dwindling visitors.

Still, she maintained an air of beauty despite the humiliation that the years had forced upon her. La Jocondette could never be raped while her walls glowed in the limelight-she withstood the ravages of dissipation like a queen in a tumbrel, refusing to hang her head until the executioner held her neck down against the chopping block.

The Lady waited at the end of the jetty, swathed in white muslin, the pearl-white facade of La Jocondette gleaming behind her. They were versions of one another-both glowing from within the enshrouding filth, regal despite any circ.u.mstance. The Lady found her best light, silhouetted from behind while limestone and burning torches lit the building from aesthetically pleasing angles, banishing the shadows that swarmed the neighboring buildings. Fruit trees lined the path from the chateau to the dock and glowing enchantments had been set among them, floating between the branches like lazy fireflies.

The sight was nearly enough to make Captain Bawl herself gape.

"Welcome back, friend," called the woman on the dock to Tam. He a.s.sembled his face into its most winsome mask.

"As always, my Lady, I feel I as though I have never left your gracious home. Once welcomed into the bosom of La Jocondette it is impossible for the heart of a man to leave." Tam bowed so deeply that his hair brushed the wood of the deck, and Bawl would have laughed if she hadn't been so eager to be off, coin purse in hand, away from this business of kidnapping.

The woman in white nodded and smiled generously at the footman, but made no move to help him as he stepped onto the dock. She remained in perfect poise, every inch a queen, as Tam motioned for Bawl's crew to hurry unloading their cargo.

"Be about it then," Bawl muttered as two of her crewmen dropped the canvas-wrapped body on the dock. The mistress of La Jocondette appeared not to notice any of it- not the body, not the barge, not the men tracking ca.n.a.l mud across her tidy little jetty.

Bawl winced as Walter stepped to the edge of the barge and put one boot on the mooring bitt, pressing his hat against his heart like a lovesick suitor. To the Lady, he said with reverence, "Every moment of light and dark is a miracle."

To Captain Bawl's surprise, the Lady bowed her head toward the old deckhand and replied in kind: " 'The fishes, the rocks, the waves, the ships with men in them. What stranger miracles are there?' "

Walter puffed his cheeks in what might have been pride and nodded- nodded to the Lady, then to himself, then withdrew. Bawl had seen odder interactions on the waterways of the City Unspoken, but never for a moment did she doubt the city's ability to surprise her. Tam, on the other hand, rolled his eyes elaborately.

"Come, Young Tam Lin, and enjoy our hospitality," said the Lady to Tam, and his irritation melted away. He blinked.

"Thank you, great Lady. Your graces are numberless, as are the pleasures of La Jocondette, no matter the hour or the circ.u.mstance." He indicated the wide swath of lawn behind them but had eyes only for the Lady. "But I must return to my mistress posthaste."

She flashed an enigmatic smile, a diamond glinting light off a hidden facet. Bawl received the impression that the Lady had as many smiles as she did clients; more than that, even.

"We'll have the marchioness' guest brought inside and made comfortable," the Lady a.s.sured Tam, taking him by the arm and leading him toward the spotless structure. "And for you, the fleetest carriage." Their feet crunched the crisp gra.s.s that grew between the flagstones of the path. The Lady continued to ignore Cooper's body, and she and Tam disappeared into the garden, obscured by fruit trees and puffb.a.l.l.s of blue and pink hydrangea blossoms. Bawl, her boat, and its less-than- sane crew were dismissed.

Captain Bawl made to call out after them, until she saw the purse of coins Tam had dropped beside Cooper's head. She swiped her payment with a meaty mitt and stepped back aboard her craft, signaling to her crew to release the moorings.

"Shove off, then," she added unnecessarily, but the female deckhand unwinding rope from the bitt merely nodded. They understood one another, captain and crew. Understood that tonight's work, while distasteful, had been profitable. They'd all sleep with a full stomach tonight, swinging from their nets in the berth below. Death and sanity be d.a.m.ned.

As the barge slipped off into the night, Walter resumed his post at the fore and picked up his mad song again.

"Your flesh," he cawed to the receding splendor of La Jocondette, "your very flesh shall be a great poem!"

Nixon squealed beneath the vise- grip of Asher's hands, which crushed the breath from his chest and kept the boy from answering the gray man's questions. Questions for which Nixon had no new answers-he hadn't finked them out to the attackers, and if he had he'd surely have made himself scarce. Instead he'd been a dupe, laying on the doorstep trying to shake the wool from between his ears, nursing ribs bruised where the men had kicked when they came upon him unawares. He was trying to explain this to Asher, but the sere fool wouldn't stop strangling him long enough to listen to Nixon's alibi.

"Oh yes, yes!" The big man sneered, indulging his mockery of the explanation Nixon had yet to finish. "You were just casing the neighborhood, is that it? And not leading a band of armed men to our location, 'certainly not, sir!' " Here Asher affected a falsetto yip that sounded nothing like the cagey urchin. " 'No sir, never would I squelch on a mark of such fine quality as yourself, sir!' Is that it? Do you think I'm as green as that boy your friends dragged bleeding out of the window? Do you think us fools, is that it?"

Nixon croaked in the negative, but if Asher noticed he gave no sign. "Dead G.o.ds drowned and blazing! First you're paid to follow me, now you lead them to our doorstep? You stupid unboy, if I'm wrong about Cooper-if Sesstri and I are wrong and he is part of this, and if you've led him away from me, then I will slice out your bones one by one and crack them open with my teeth."

Sesstri laid a finger on Asher's wrist. His eyes flickered to her face, serene despite the blood splattering one freckle-dusted cheek.

"I should like to hear his answers, if mercy provides, before you b.u.t.terfly his flanks and chops for our supper."

Asher had the good sense to look abashed, and shook his head as if to clear it. He set the boy down but kept him cornered against the entrance and the coat closet with one splayed palm.

Nixon coughed and spluttered, his world reduced to a small red weal of pain where his breath usually went. Inhale. Exhale. Why did they always have to choke him so?

"I think you can appreciate our concern." Sesstri stood shoulder-to- shoulder with Asher, peering down her nose at the urchin. She'd spared him from an accidental strangling, but Nixon knew better than to expect anything further in the way of compa.s.sion. Christ, she was a beautiful bird, but colder than Kissinger's teats.

"I told you f.u.c.kers, I had nothing to do with this. Why would I take one thrashing and stick around for another?" He glared at the gray man. "I just wanted my new shirt."

"I don't think he was involved, but not because I believe his motives are honest." Sesstri pulled away and stalked to the windowsill still spotted with Cooper's blood, put her hands to her head, then wrung them. "Did you see their faces?" she asked the shattered window.

"Yes." Asher had seen the madness beyond bloodl.u.s.t that boiled behind the eyes of the men who'd attacked them. It was a madness he'd seen with increasing frequency on the streets of the City Unspoken.

"Why attack here? Why not scoop Cooper up off the streets where he'd been wandering-alone-all day long?" Sesstri shot Asher an accusatory look.

"Beats me." Nixon watched the two adults pick at the facts like carrion birds.

"Who planned this?" Asher looked at the windows, all broken when the men had swamped the house. The calligraphied wallpaper was torn and stained with blood-so much for the enchantments of ink. "Whoever did this knew when and where to strike, and that's a precious short list of b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

"They may not have expected Cooper to have been routed to the Guiselaine and abandoned." Another look.

"I will hunt them down and cut out their hearts." Asher pushed a half- broken pane through the cas.e.m.e.nt, which splintered into the flower bed.

"Has it occurred to you that such a reaction might be precisely what our a.s.sailants sought to provoke?" A feral dog would bring down its quarry just as quickly as a trained hound-but leave little for the huntsman.

"Does it matter? Would that change what we've got to do next?"

"If it sends you on a rampage of evisceration, possibly. What do we do next?"

"Listen," piped up Nixon. "If you tell me what this problem of yours is, I know a few guys-"

"-Absolutely not." Sesstri shut him down with a palm.

"So what happens," Asher asked, "if I've lost us the only lead? What happen if we fail, Sesstri? Do you even know? I don't."

"Comes the svarning," quoted Sesstri, a look of realization painted across her face. "Then we will all drown."

A beat of silence. Another. Sesstri sat motionless, a frozen dawn of fright.

Asher hesitated, uncertain how he should behave. Should he ask if she was alright? Would she cut him if he touched her shoulder? Would he begrudge paying so small a price? This woman-they faced a fate quite literally worse than extinction and the simple fact of her presence filled his head with thoughts of foxgloves and pink hair fanned across pillows.

The Dying could no longer Die, and Asher fixated on a crush. He was too old for that- an excess of years that could have been measured by the eon-and yet he couldn't manage to feel reproachful. What's captured her attention? Is it me?

Nixon interrupted their respective reveries with a salty curse.

"f.u.c.k me for a Frenchman, Little Tokyo's on fire!"

Sesstri rushed to a window. Red smoke billowed from the other side of the yellow hills. But she did not think there was fire. Bonseki-sai, the district Nixon referred to with his nonsense- speak, lay beyond those hills. That was where Sesstri had woken when she arrived in the City Unspoken; that's where her landlady, Alouette, had found her. As absurd as it was, she did not think this a coincidence.

Tam looked as tired as he felt. Blood and mud splattered his once-tidy uniform, and he fairly wilted against the doorjamb while his mistress considered her next steps. His face was flushed from comings and goings.

"Tam, fetch my implements. This daily task grows boring, but perhaps this morning will prove unique." Lallowe Thyu stood at the door to her study, contemplating the oak-paneled room from within the starched collar and shoulders of an overconstructed dressing gown cut from peach slipper silk; she scanned the oval library that had belonged to her husband for something out of place, missing, or secretly flawed- with an expression suggesting that at the first sign of any such offense she would have the whole room razed and rebuilt from scratch. Maybe chaparralwood-stained Terenz-de-Guises black, carved with pears and pomegranates. Maybe greenstone and jet tile.

"Implements?" Tam asked dumbly, hoping he'd heard wrong through his haze of exhaustion, although he knew perfectly well that "implements" meant only one thing-the valise packed with instruments of torture and murder that sat in the study's small closet. The valise-pale green damask painted with tiny yellow flowers that smelled too strongly of lavender and hyssop, but not strongly enough. Tam often cleaned the blood, s.h.i.t, and mangut off the tools within the valise but had never before attended his mistress while she wielded them. Those were days when Tam locked himself inside his sleeping nook and played his lute as loudly as he could to drown out the screams.

"Bring the tools I require to the second dressing room." Stone turquoise nails tapped a staccato warning on the leather-bound tabletop. All of Lallowe's kin grew earthen elements from their nail beds rather than keratin-elements such as rock or wood, metal ore or thorns. Family legend held that the tradition-for the protean fey, tradition often served the function that inheritable genetic traits did in human stock-had originated with Lallowe's revered mother and queen, the Cicatrix. The last time Tam had seen the ancient queen, her once-lithe body had been sheathed in graphene and ebon polycarbonate-only her face appeared even remotely organic, though her linen-wrapped hands had sported epee-thin lancets of obsidian stone. That had been a difficult day for them all.

"Yes, ma'am." Tam braced himself for the second dressing room and turned to leave.

As Tam scurried off to do her bidding, the marchioness let her gaze linger in the well-lit study, black bouillotte lampshades with gold-leafed inner panels cast ghosts of yellow light that almost obscured the blue dawn struggling to gladden the day. Something felt wrong to Lallowe. Not quite wrong, exactly-purgatorial, perhaps. She felt flushed, her head hurt; well, facing her father's unflappable arrogance pained her. She hadn't slept, that was all-a long night of tying up loose ends must have put her on edge.

Tam was waiting in the second dressing room for his mistress when she arrived, looking anywhere but toward the small door across from the entrance. The chamois-paneled room smelled of lavender and hyssop just like the valise of agony that visited it daily; its cushions were soft and plentiful, and the small door that Tam refused to see led off into a charming little confection of a privy that scared him witless.

To be fair, Tam thought, he wasn't frightened by the room per se. Not the silver-leaf ceiling nor the white and pink dogwood blossoms on branches painted across the walls, nor the hardwood privy seat, nor the black-tiled bathing pool set into the center of the dark gla.s.s floor. No, what scared Tam was the man shackled to the wall, caked with his own filth and blood. The man was old and frail, with drooping white moustaches and Lallowe's eyes.

Once a poet renowned across a dozen worlds, once a philosopher-king in his own right, Hinto Thyu had d.a.m.ned himself by choosing to pay a visit to his estranged daughter.