Yes, Caleb thought. You worry about me in those last raw hours before nightfall, before you try to tear down everything we who work in this city build during the day. You worry about me, because there’s no more priesthood, and what are kids to do these days when there are no more reliable careers involving knives, altars, and bleeding victims? “That makes two of us,” he said, and: “Look, I have to go. I have work in four hours. Can we talk about this later?”
No response.
He turned back to his father, to apologize or to curse, but Temoc was gone. Wind blew down Bloodletter’s Street from the ocean and sent a small flock of discarded newspapers flapping into the night: gray beasts old the moment they were made.
“I hate it when he does that,” Caleb said to nobody in particular, and limped across the street to the House of Seven Stars.
Teo had an apartment on the seventh floor, a corner room she’d bought with her own soulstuff. The day she signed the contract she’d drunk a half-gallon of gin with Caleb in celebration. “Mine. Not my father’s, not my mother’s, not my family’s. My soul, my house.” When he observed that she was technically part of her family, she’d thrown a napkin at him and called him a bastard.
“You know what I mean. My cousins are all tied to the purse strings. Not one of them has even the poorest excuse for a career. They live in those damn beach houses up the coast, or circle the globe on Pop’s ticket, three weeks doing coke off the naked back of an eighteen-year-old boy in one of those nameless ports south of the Shining Empire, a month ogling sentient ice sculptures in Koschei’s kingdom. Lunch in Iskar, dinner in Camlaan, a romp in the Pleasure Quarters of Alt Coulumb, and none of it earned. This place, this is mine.” She put a fierce edge on that word.
“And what’s yours,” Caleb replied, drink-slurred, “is mine.”
“I’ll hang the most absurd pictures on the wall, and keep a shelf of single malts, and polish the counters so they reflect themselves a hundred million times. Never will there be a single book out of place or a single picture crooked.”
She was drunk, too.
“Can I visit?”
“You may call on me for the occasional bacchanal and revel.” She glared down her nose at him like an empress from her throne. “In exchange, if I am out of town on business, you must feed Compton,” meaning her cat, a treacherous calico.
“Sure,” he said, and took the key she offered.
He leaned against the lift wall and watched the floor numbers tick up to seven. Phantoms filled his skull: Temoc, father, rebel, murderer, saint. The goddess whispered in his ear. Blood. Stars reflected in dark water. They all faded into vacant, expansive night, the night after the death of the world.
The night of his mind shone black. Mal curved before him like a blade.
The lift’s bell called Caleb back from the ocean of her eyes to a white-carpeted hallway hung with dull oil paintings. Vases of silk flowers stood on teak tables heavy with ornamental bronze. He shuffled down the hall, and searched his jacket pockets for Teo’s key.
His thoughts were chaos and blood and fire as he slid the key into the lock. Chaos, blood, and fire; flood, poison, riot, ruin. Mal didn’t seem the poisoning type, but what was the poisoning type? Why linger at Bright Mirror if she wasn’t involved? She should have snuck away the moment she saw Wardens. Perhaps she trusted her shark’s tooth to keep her safe. Flimsy defense, since Caleb could see her. Then again, the Wardens lacked Caleb’s scars.
He needed a bed, or a comfortable couch. He’d catch hell from Teo in the morning for stumbling in unannounced, but her apartment was closer to the office than his, and he had stashed clothes in her closet— clubbing clothes, yes, but he could salvage an outfit from them for work.
He pushed the key home, turned the knob.
Light stung his eyes, and for a confused moment he thought, good, Teo’s still awake. He stepped into the living room.
Thirty seconds and a shriek later he staggered, eyes closed, out into the hallway. The door slammed behind him. His cheeks burned. From within, he heard two women’s voices raised in argument. He waited, eyes still shut, until Teo’s words assumed the weight of finality, and the other woman retreated toward the bedroom, cursing.
The latch turned and the door opened.
“You can look now,” Teo said.
She’d wrapped herself in a plush white bathrobe, hair a tangled mass on her forehead. Compton wound sinuously between her bare feet, and licked sweat from her ankles. Over Teo’s left shoulder, Caleb saw a blonde wearing white cotton briefs and nothing else stagger into the apartment’s one bedroom and slam the door. “She seems nice,” he said, lamely. Teo didn’t respond. He tried again: “Sorry. I’ll go.”
She assessed him with a glance: clothes in disarray, hair standing up, tie crooked and loose. “What happened?”
“The Bright Mirror thing went south. There was a girl there, and she woke the Tzimet up. I have to be in the office early, but I need sleep. Hoped I could use your couch.” I didn’t realize you were using it, he thought but didn’t say. “Sorry. Dumb idea.” He didn’t want to go home. “I hope I didn’t screw up anything for you.”
She sighed. “You didn’t screw anything up. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. Sam’s emotional. An artist. She’ll be fine in the morning. The couch is yours, if you want it.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“I can’t let you stumble back out into the night looking like a half-strangled puppy. I’ll tell her you’re one of my idiot cousins or something. Don’t make me regret it.”
“Too late,” he said, but she had already turned her back on him.
Lights off, he lay on Teo’s couch in the dark, staring up at the terrifying cubist landscapes that adorned her living room. A panorama of the Battle of Dresediel Lex hung over the couch, burning pyramids and torn sky, spears of flame and ice, bodies impaled on moonlight sickles, warring gods and Craftsmen rendered in vivid scrolls of paint. One corner of the painting showed Temoc locked in single combat with the King in Red, before he fell.
Caleb’s eyes drifted shut. Tzimet towered above him, reaching toward the cold stars. Compton dug claws into his leg. He rolled onto his side. Leather creaked.
He drifted to sleep, drowning in a black sea.
5
Dreams of knives and blood on stone woke Caleb to the hard harsh morning, to the light beyond Teo’s windows and to the crick in his neck. He pulled himself off the white leather couch like a man pulling himself out of hell, and staggered for her bathroom, rubbing one hand over the scars that webbed his torso.
A long shower later, he dripped across Teo’s living-room carpet to the hall closet. His nightclub suit would do, a sharp pressed gray with a white shirt, so long as he left the vermilion vest and spats and cravat behind. Yesterday’s shoes were scuffed, but serviceable. He’d have them polished on the way, and find a toothbrush, too.
From Teo’s spare pantry he scrounged a bowl of polenta, and two eggs, which he scrambled. On the table as he sat down to eat, he found a note written in her sharp hand.
The signature was an uppercase
