Cursebreakers, page 15
The effect was immediate; I found myself marveling at the power of a name. No one was willing to obstruct the Prefects. No one was willing to even question me. “Fine, then,” the guard said. “Who should we leave a message with if he shows up?”
“Desfourneaux at the Pharmakeia,” I said, and hurried away.
So Gennady was missing. I reflected on that, queasy and guilty, as I began the walk back to Deme Palenne. He hadn’t struck me as the sort of person to have much to his life apart from work—I could recognize the type very well.
Except—
Was that true? Did he really have nothing else in his life? I remembered what he’d told me on the day he’d broken into my house. My sister Mariya is a mekhanic for the witchfinders.
I swore viciously as I turned and set my course for Deme Alidor instead, where the witchfinder Watchtower loomed. I’d need to take a caleche—I was going to have to ask Casmir to give me access to more money for the fares that were beginning to add up.
The trip took a long time, but not nearly long enough. My feelings on the witchfinders have been made abundantly clear; I’ll restrain myself from repeating them. All I’ll say is that I was tense and miserable as the caleche finally approached the complex’s massive gates and I let myself out.
The Watchtower is the seat of all important witchfinder business, home to their various offices and management. The architecture is jagged and unwelcoming, flat stone broken up by tall, thin spires. It’s a sprawling campus—and in the past year, it had been subject to a terrible attack. A group of witches, tired of being hunted, had caused an explosion. The casualties had not been inconsequential, and the reconstruction around the huge crater wasn’t quite complete.
Other evidence of the attack was less physical, but just as clear. The witchfinders were vigilant about who walked through the complex’s gates. They’d slipped once, and after what it had cost, they were determined never to slip again. As I walked up, two witchfinders fell upon me immediately. Partners, obviously, a tall man with a sharp nose and a nervous-looking brunette woman.
“Identification,” the man barked.
It’s said that some witchfinders can sense magic—whether through their mekhania eyes or through some warped sixth sense, no one besides them is really sure. They keep their trade secrets away from the public. Whatever it was, these two could clearly sense the talent in me. I was a magician, and I was subject to the appropriate treatment.
When I hesitated, they both drew close, their mekhania eyes whirling.
“Adrien Desfourneaux. I’m a professor with the Pharmakeia,” I said tightly.
Anyone who looked at me would come to that conclusion. From my clothes, I could have been an attorney or a clerk—but as a magician, there was one main possibility. They accepted my answer.
“Business?”
I took a deep breath. “Is Mariya Richter here?”
There was a brief pause. They looked at each other, exchanging one of the witchfinders’ patented glances, unreadable to any outsider. “The mekhanic?”
“The mekhanic,” I agreed.
“Why the hell would anyone want anything to do with her?” the taller witchfinder asked, his nose wrinkled. Evidently, Mariya had something in common with her brother: a gift for frustration and the will to use it.
“I need to talk to her about her brother,” I said. “I didn’t know where else to ask after her.”
“If you’ll accept supervision, you can come in and ask her yourself,” the woman said, begrudgingly. As an affiliate of the Pharmakeia, I posed no threat by witchcraft, but that didn’t mean they had to approve of my presence.
I nodded my acceptance, and they shepherded me inside, muttering sourly to each other all the way.
The inside of the Watchtower wasn’t quite as I’d imagined it. My whole life, without ever having set foot near it, I’d pictured it as a place of horrors, full of captured witches and sinister hunters with their cruel metal eyes, watching over the city like beasts of prey. What I got, instead, was a place of business.
Aside from the damage from the explosion, the offices were laid out neatly across the complex. Witchfinders streamed in and out of buildings at a methodical pace, moving from one assignment to the next, going about their hunts with casual efficiency. They were killers, but there was paperwork to be done. There were reports to file. I found myself almost more uneasy with the reality than with what I’d been imagining.
My guards took me on a circuitous route around the mostly filled crater to a larger office with more traffic than most. “Mekhania office,” the woman said briefly, and waited for me to go inside, watching me with undisguised vigilance. I couldn’t quite blame her; the witchfinders depend on their mekhania to a great degree. If something were to happen to their production center or their mekhanics, the Watchtower would suffer.
The office was clean and sparse; there were three rooms, from what I could see—one with a front desk, a storeroom full of mekhania parts, and a workshop. The witchfinders took me past the woman at the front desk and into the workshop, a claustrophobic space full of tables piled with mekhania parts that smelled of oil and metal. I felt, paradoxically, somewhat at home.
A teenage girl turned to greet us. Immediately, I could see Gennady’s features in her—sharp cheekbones, bronze skin, and narrow, deeply hostile eyes. She had no mekhania; she was a technician, not a witchfinder.
“What the hell do you want?” she asked, just in case I’d been nursing any lingering doubts about their family relation.
“I think your brother is missing,” I said, keenly aware of the witchfinders at my back. There was no use wasting time on polite introductions. “Gennady. He hasn’t been seen for three days.”
That got her to blink. She came close, staring at me, inspecting me. “And who are you?” Her inflection was close enough to Gennady’s that I was a little perturbed; it was as if she was copying him.
“I’m a professor with the Pharmakeia,” I said, tired of introducing myself. “Adrien Desfourneaux. I know him because he’s been guarding the Pharmakeia, and—”
“Oh, the curse thing,” she said blithely. “He’s been telling me all about it.”
I looked back to the witchfinders behind me in time to see them raise their eyebrows at each other.
“Get out of here,” Mariya told them, as if she had full authority to do so. “Go on. Get.”
“Little miss,” the woman began, and Mariya hissed at her like an angry cat, breaking into a sudden fury.
“Leave us alone, or I’ll put spikes in your next lens,” she said.
The woman’s partner tried again. “Any information about the comatose curse—”
“You won’t find out anything you don’t already know,” Mariya said scornfully, jabbing a finger toward the door. “Get.”
The witchfinders got. For the very first time, I felt something approaching sympathy for them, especially when Mariya wheeled on me instead.
“So,” she said, and sat down at a table with a box full of cracked mekhania eyes to sift through them, looking for one to fix. “Gennady’s missing. You figure he got himself killed?”
The words were empty. She didn’t sound as though she cared.
“I hope not,” I said, at a loss. “I thought you might know where he is.”
“What,” she said, “just because I’m his sister?”
I took a good, long time to choose my words. “You were the only person I knew of, apart from other Vigil officers, who might have any idea. He mentioned you once. That’s all. If you don’t know where he is—”
“If you find him, tell him to stay gone,” she said.
I knew I shouldn’t ask, that it would only embroil me further in whatever trouble was between them—and I could tell that wasn’t a place I wanted to be. Unfortunately, curiosity has always been a vice of mine. “What exactly is your problem with him?” I asked.
She bared her teeth at me. “Murderer,” she said. “He’s a murderer. Ask him about it.”
I couldn’t bother to feign surprise. Many Vigil officers are, and Gennady didn’t seem likely to be an exception. What did interest me was that a witchfinder mekhanic might have such a strong distaste for killing. What did she think her lenses were being used for? “I can’t ask him about it,” I said patiently. “He’s missing.”
She dug a screwdriver into a mekhania eye with gusto, cracking it apart, and began to dig around inside with a horrible grinding sound. “You check his commissariat?”
Quickly, I drew a breath to assure her that I had, in fact, because I wasn’t stupid. Just as quickly, she waved a hand to cut me off. “Check the Penumbra,” she said. “He likes to haunt that place whenever he’s upset. Reminds him of when we were kids.”
“The prison,” I said cautiously. The Penumbra in Deme Eudora is the city’s largest prison, a huge, sprawling mass of misery, complete with its own demilune. I wasn’t sure what reason two children would have to become so familiar with it, but none of the possibilities were good.
“Yeah,” she said. “There. He loves it. Freak.” She clenched the screwdriver between her teeth as she held the lens up before her eyes, speaking around it in a low growl. “I bet he’s not missing. I bet he’s just sulking there, and he hasn’t bothered to tell anyone where he’s spending his time. He’s just skipping out on work.”
She shook a few loose gears out of the eye and looked back up at me, removing the screwdriver. “Bet you a corune.”
I tried not to hope too strongly. “Maybe. If he is, do you want me to—?”
“Tell me?” she interjected. “No. He can come see me himself if he thinks I’ll care.”
I began to miss Gennady in earnest. “Thank you,” I said.
She bent over the eye and fished a small, round piece of glass out of a box on the table, a pair of tweezers in her other hand. “Is that it?”
“That’s it.” I turned to make my retreat before she could demand it.
“Don’t come back here asking about Gennady again,” she called after me. “I don’t care!”
My witchfinder guards were still there, waiting sullenly outside the room; I saw a flash of reluctant sympathy in their faces. Quickly, I closed the door. “She’s a handful,” the man said, as discreetly as he could.
“About the curse,” his partner said, less willing to indulge in smalltalk. “What was she talking about?”
“You already know someone from the Pharmakeia is involved,” I said, wishing either Richter was capable of even a modicum of subtlety. “That’s all she meant. I have to assume she learned it from the gossip here. Her brother was investigating the same issue.”
“Witchfinders do gossip,” the man agreed, somewhat ruefully, trying to decide if I was worth questioning any further.
I tried my best to look useless. It came easily.
“Time for you to go,” he said. Without any more delay, he and his partner escorted me out of the Watchtower, and I could breathe again. I ran the last few steps out the gates.
I wanted to go home; the city felt unfriendly. I was exhausted—with the day, with all of it. The only thing that held any real interest for me was going home and sleeping.
Except I knew I needed to visit the Penumbra for the sake of my sanity. I owed it to Gennady to look for him in earnest. I hailed yet another caleche and tried not to drift off inside while it took me to Deme Eudora.
Chapter 13
Not unlike the Watchtower, the Penumbra is a dreadful place. Unlike the Watchtower, it feels old, a stone palace rotted by time and terror. It used to be a basilike, home to the Basilissae—but the empresses and their twin thrones abandoned it long ago. Now it’s a gargantuan tumor on the city; it lies at the center of Deme Eudora, gray and uncompromisingly functional. I’d never had a reason to visit it, and I was far from happy to change that.
I wandered through a gathering of the stray cats that make the Penumbra their home as they sunned themselves and put a hand out to one, seeing if it would let me near. It got up to amble a few steps away and settled down again.
It was difficult not to think of the poor souls trapped inside the prison. I had to wonder how many of them were slated for capital punishment—what must the promise of the demi-lune or the gallows be like? But I set my mind to the goal at hand and kept an eye out for any undersized raches like Lady.
The large dirt yard was populated mostly by Vigil, with the occasional nervous citizen interacting with them, asking after incarcerated family or friends. The entire place had a claustrophobic, anxious energy, as if something horrible was waiting to happen.
Mariya was right. I found Gennady safe and sound, surrounded by old unitmates, outside the northernmost set of gates. It wasn’t difficult to spot him—I looked around, and there he was, sulking against a wall. Beside him, Lady played in the dirt with another rache. All my worry melted away until I was merely very irritated.
Then I remembered what I’d said to him after we’d escaped the warehouse, and I covered my face. If nothing else, I was going to need to make sure he was willing to testify in front of Velleia with me, and I was going to need to apologize.
Before I could question if it was a good idea to approach, given that he was surrounded by other soldiers, I was walking up to him. When he saw me, he pushed aside the two men he was talking to and strode toward me, face already twisted in distaste.
“Not you again,” he snarled. “What the hell are you doing here?”
I put my hands up. “I thought you might have been missing,” I said, feeling more stupid for it by the second. “I thought maybe you’d been caught and killed. So I—”
“Stalked me here,” he said. Lady gave an accusatory yelp.
He wasn’t wrong, I realized with deep distress. I’d gone so far as to ask his sister. All because he hadn’t come to work for a few days.
I took a breath, held it, and released it slowly. “I’m sorry for what I said,” I recited. “It was unacceptable.” Again. I’d already had this conversation with him. We barely knew each other, and I’d already been cruel to him more than once.
He froze; he had no idea how to react. I let him take his time processing what I’d said. Eventually, he rolled his eyes. “Whatever,” he said. “So you found someone to heal up your face?”
I didn’t answer the question. If that was as much of a reaction as he could muster, I wasn’t going to push it.
“Additionally, since you aren’t dead,” I said, as his friends snickered around us, “I thought I’d ask you if you’re ready to go to Velleia about what we found.” I had to assume there was no use being furtive with the other soldiers around. Gennady had almost certainly told them by now, given the way they were looking at me.
He glanced away, wincing. Apparently, even he had some concept of responsibility—or at the very least, he feared the displeasure of his Prefect. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t think we should wait until she calls us,” I said tentatively. “That might incur some anger. It’s been a while already.”
Above all else, I did not want to her to send someone to come get us. Being dragged before her would be hard to stomach, and possibly hard to survive.
Lady lay down in the Penumbra’s dirt and whined. Gennady looked around at his small group of peers.
“I don’t know, Genya,” a woman said. “If you want to get Captain, you ought to go to the Prefect sooner than later.”
So Gennady wasn’t the only soldier from his old unit who wanted Corvier to answer for what he’d done. I wondered just how many of them felt otherwise. How many old friends was Gennady going to have to face down eventually?
He sighed heavily, concealing genuine nerves, and deigned to nod. “Tomorrow, I guess. Does seven in the evening work?”
“Seven works,” I said, hasty with relief.
“Now go away,” he said, ever so slightly cheered by the opportunity for further rudeness. Then I saw a spark—he was recalling something, remembering some kind of abstract lesson. Alexarchus, maybe. “Please,” he added.
I felt the slightest hint of an educator’s pride. He was learning, no matter how reluctantly. No matter how sporadically or unreliably, no matter if it was in spite of my influence.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” I said, and turned to leave the Penumbra as quickly as possible, kicking up cloud of dirt. I caught the briefest glimpse of his expression as I fled: total perplexity.
So I prepared to meet Velleia again, a process that consisted mostly of creating and repeating various soothing mantras to myself. Keeping my secrets from Casmir in the meantime had become more and more difficult. I hated to lie to him—I’d never been any good at it. He was my keeper, and he could see right through me. He knew that something was wrong, that I was keeping something from him, but he couldn’t figure out what. It was driving him crazy.
He’d been badgering me night and day—I was worried that he might resort to following me, and I’d already made the hard decision to let him maintain his ignorance. “What are you hiding?” he would say, and I would insist that it was nothing, and he’d stare at me with his wounded hawk’s gaze, and all the while, the guilt grew stronger. Inviting him along to see Velleia would be satisfying for an instant, but disaster would surely follow. When I set out for Deme Aufford to meet with the Prefect, I did my utmost to make sure he wasn’t going to know where I was.
The Vigil administrative office was, if anything, even more austere and threatening than it had been the first time. The dark wood seemed ready to open and swallow me whole. Gennady was punctual, at least; he met me outside right on time. We walked inside together in a strained, uncomfortable silence. I felt the anamnesic pseudogram burning a hole through my bag, and I felt the kitchen knife waiting.
This time, we didn’t have a scheduled audience. We had no guarantee that she would be ready to receive visitors—in fact, there was no guarantee she’d be around at all. Unfortunately, there were no other sure ways of determining a Prefect’s whereabouts. An educated guess was the best we could hope for.
