hadn’t thought about it for so long.
Celia interrupted. “Master, if you’d be so kind as to entertain our new friend, I need to have a few words with our old one.”
I thought he would object, but instead he flashed me a quick smile before turning back to the boy. “Each note releases a different color, see?” He blew another tone on the trumpet, and a spray shot out, blue green like the foam of the sea.
We descended to the conservatory without speaking. The glass door was fogged from the heat, and Celia opened it and ushered me inside. Before I had time to appreciate the new suite of flowers that had taken bloom, Celia jumped into it. “Well? What of our investigation?”
“Shouldn’t we include the Master in this?”
“If you want to tear a dying man away from one of the few pleasures left to him, it’s on your head.”
Having seen the man, it didn’t come as a complete shock. But still, I didn’t like hearing my suspicions confirmed. “He’s dying?”
Celia sat on a stool beside a pink orchid and nodded sadly.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s old. He won’t tell me exactly, but he’s seventy-five if he’s a day.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” she said, but moved on quickly. “It upsets him, this business with the children. He’s always been… softhearted.”
“I’m not sure you need to be oversensitive to find child murder distasteful,” I said, brushing a grain of pollen out of my eye and trying not to sneeze.
“I didn’t mean that. What’s happened to the children is terrible. But there isn’t much the Master can do. He isn’t what he was.” Her eyes were firm. “The Crane has served the people of this city for half a century. He deserves peace in his final days. Surely you owe him that much, at least?”
“I owe the Master more than I could ever repay.” A memory came to my mind of the Crane as he had been, his eyes sparkling with wit and mischief, his back neither bent nor bowed. “But that isn’t the point. This thing needs to be stopped, and my resources are not such that I can afford to lose an ally.” I laughed caustically. “In a week it won’t matter one way or the other.”
“What does that mean?”
“Forget it-a poor attempt at humor.”
She was unconvinced but didn’t pursue it further. “I’m not cutting you off. If you need help… I’ll never be the Crane’s equal in ability or in wisdom. But I am a Sorcerer First Rank.” She nodded modestly at the ring that testified to this last fact. “The Master has watched over Low Town long enough-having taken over the tower, perhaps it’s time I adopt the rest of his mantle.”
The years since we had seen each other had aged Celia. She was no longer the child I had brought to the Aerie decades ago. Though she still spoke like it sometimes-“adopt his mantle,” the Daevas save us.
Celia took my silence as agreement. “You have any leads?”
“I have suspicions. I always have suspicions.”
“Don’t let me hurry you-if there’s some other matter pressing on your shoulders, feel free to take care of that first.”
“I visited a party thrown by the Duke of Beaconfield, the Smiling Blade. Your gem throbbed against my chest while we talked.”
“And that didn’t seem to you to be information that might benefit from being shared?”
“It doesn’t mean as much as you’d think; as far as the law is concerned, it doesn’t mean anything. If it were just some Low Town bum, it might be enough, probably would be. I could point to him and the Old Man would drag him back to Black House and probe him for stains. But for a noble? Basic jurisprudence needs to be followed, and that means you can’t snatch a fellow from his house and carve him up on the say-so of an ex-agent’s illegally acquired magical talisman.”
“No,” she said, deflating. “I suppose you can’t.”
“Besides, I’m not sure the amulet is right. I spoke to Beaconfield. He seemed like a violent flake, the sort bred in droves by the upper classes. But murdering children, summoning demons… It’s out of character. The aristocracy tend to be too lazy to really commit to malevolence. Easier to spend their inheritance on costume galas and expensive whores.”
“Is it possible you overestimate him?”
“That’s not a mistake I’m prone to. But say I did, say it is the duke. He’s not an artist-I’d be surprised to discover he’s mastered his sums. How would he go about contacting the void?”
“There are practitioners who see fit to sell their skills to anyone with sufficient coin. Did this Beaconfield character have anyone around him who might fit that description?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He did.”
Celia crossed one leg over the other, the pink of her thighs barely visible beneath her dress. “That might be something you’d want to look into.”
“It just might.” I mulled that over, then started up again. “Actually there was something else I wanted to ask you about, something even the Master himself couldn’t help me with.”
“As I said, I’m here to help.”
“I’d like to hear about your time at the academy.”
“Why?”
“Abject boredom. I have absolutely nothing to occupy my mind and hoped your tales of youthful revelry might give me something to gnaw on.”
She snickered, a giggle really, so light it barely escaped her mouth. There was a short pause while she weighed her words. “It was a long time ago. I was young. We were all very young. The Master, the other practitioners of his ilk, they weren’t interested in signing on, so it was just us apprentices, the weak and inexperienced, whoever they could corral in. The instructors, if you could call them that, were barely older than we were and rarely as competent. There was no curriculum really, not then, not after it first started. They just… dumped us in a room and let us loose. Still, it was the first time anything like that had ever happened, the first time we’d been encouraged to share what we knew, rather than hiding it in ciphered spell books and double-trapped grimoires.”
“Did you know a man named Adelweid?”
Her eyes narrowed, and she pursed her lips. “We weren’t a large group. Everybody knew everybody, more or less.” Celia was the sort of person who would happily spend the rest of her life locked away from the remainder of the species but had trouble mustering up the ill will to bad-mouth any particular member of it. “Sorcerer Adelweid was… very talented.” I thought she was going to continue, but then she closed her mouth and shook her head, and that was that.
So I figured I’d best volunteer something. “Adelweid was part of a military project during the closing days of the war-Operation Ingress.”
“The Master told me your story.”
“You know anything about it?”
“As I said, we were left free to pursue whatever avenues of studies interested us. Adelweid and I had differing proclivities. I heard rumors, ugly things, but no specifics. If I knew anything I thought would help, I’d have told you already.” She shrugged, anxious to bury the subject. “Adelweid is dead-he’s been dead a long time.”
He was indeed. “But Adelweid wasn’t the only one involved. Whoever killed the Kiren must have been part of it. And something like that, a military project… they’ll have kept records.”
Her head shot up. “They’d be secret,” she said, almost insistently. “They’d be hidden. You’d never get a look at them.”
“They would be hidden, and I don’t imagine whoever is in charge of the army’s classified files would be in a great hurry to share them with me. Happily I have other avenues of inquiry.”
“Other avenues?”
“Crispin, my old partner. I’ve got him looking into it.”
“Crispin,” she repeated. “Is he still reliable? Will he come through for you, after all your… time apart?”
“I don’t imagine he’s happy to be doing me a favor, but he won’t let that stop him. Crispin… Crispin’s golden.
