And I recognized one more name, at the very bottom, beneath the tear that had defaced my earlier version.
I pulled my shirt over my head, then took out the straight razor nestled in the bottom of my satchel and flicked it open. The full weight of my sins began to settle across my back, and for one self-indulgent moment I wondered where to put the edge of the blade for best effect. Then I cut a shallow incision below the sapphire in my shoulder, wincing at the pain as I did so.
Five minutes later I was double-timing it through Low Town, bleeding through the hastily tendered bandage I had torn from my undershirt.
By all the Daevas, I hoped there was still time to stop it.
The Blue Crane had been dead for about six hours. His body was slouched in the oak chair in his study, azure eyes lolled back in his head, the wounds on his arms and the blade resting on the ground confirming his demise was self-inflicted. On the desk in front of him sat a scroll of parchment, two words in his scrawling chicken scratch. I’m sorry.
So was I. I closed his eyes and walked downstairs.
The door to her study was open, and I slipped inside. Celia and Brightfellow were turned away from me. Wren sat limply on a chair in the corner, unbound, his eyes glazed over insensibly.
“I say we do him now.” The last day had seen Brightfellow slip further toward collapse. He wore the same clothes as at the Blade’s party and was gesturing wildly. “Let’s do him and dump him, before anyone gets wise.”
Celia by contrast was steady as a block of quarried stone, her hands busy with the array of alchemical equipment on the table before her. “You know as well as I do the fever takes a half day to set, and we haven’t even passed it to the boy yet. I’m not going to ruin everything we’ve accomplished because you’re getting jumpy.” She poured the contents of a beaker into a smaller one, then jerked her head at Wren. “Why don’t you take a seat, keep an eye on him.”
“He’s not going anywhere. My working will keep him down for the rest of the night.”
“He’s got the gift, like the others, even if he doesn’t know how to use it yet. You can’t be sure how he’ll react.”
Brightfellow peeled a dirty fingernail between his teeth. “You said you can’t feel the gem any longer.”
“Yes, Johnathan, that’s what I said.”
“That means he’s dead, right?”
“It means exactly what it means,” she said, but not angrily.
“He must be dead,” Brightfellow repeated.
Celia lifted her head up and sniffed the air. “I doubt that,” she said, setting aside an alembic and turning to face me. “How long have you been here?”
“Long enough.”
When Brightfellow saw me, what was left of his equilibrium departed completely. He turned corpse white, and his eyes flickered back and forth between Celia and me, as if in the air between the two of us there was something that would salvage the situation.
“This would mean that Beaconfield…” Celia began, implacably calm, my arrival apparently not causing the slightest hiccup in her planning.
“Has thrown his last Midwinter’s party,” I confirmed. “Poor dumb bastard. He never knew any of it, did he? I guess you brought him in after I started asking questions, to make sure you had a sucker to pin things on.”
“Johnathan had prior dealings with him. He fit the bill.”
“He was perfect. I hated him as soon as I saw him, wanted him to be behind it, was happy to latch onto what your stone gave me as proof. And of course you were always there with your advice, and to plant the occasional piece of evidence.” I pulled her knife from my satchel and tossed it on the ground. “I take it you’ve got another prepared for Wren.”
Celia glanced at the instrument with which she had sacrificed a pair of children, then looked back up at me casually. “How did you get into the Aerie?”
“The Crown’s Eye has the ability to dispel minor workings. I used Crispin’s to force my way in. You remember Crispin? Or do they all start to blend together?”
“I remember him.”
“Let’s see now. There was Tara, and the Kiren you paid to kidnap her. And Caristiona and Avraham. We’ve already mentioned my old partner. And upstairs the Master took the straight-razor cure rather than face what you’ve become-though I’m not sure suicide adds to your tally.”
Brightfellow stiffened in surprise, but Celia only blinked. “It saddens me very much to hear that.”
“You seem real broken up.”
“I was prepared for it.”
“I guess you were-that’s what all this was for, wasn’t it? Preparing for the Crane’s death. You never took over powering the wards, that was a lie-you can’t, and you knew once the Master died his working would go with him.”
“The Master was a genius,” she said, and a flicker of regret passed over her features. “No one could do what he did. I was forced to seek out alternatives.”
“You mean murdering adolescents.”
“If you want to put it that way.”
“And giving them the plague?”
“An unfortunate requirement of the ritual. Necessary, though unpleasant.”
“For them especially.”
Brightfellow made his entrance into the conversation with gusto. “Why are you telling him this? Kill him, before he ruins everything!”
“No one’s going to do anything rash,” Celia commanded.
“How about you, Brightfellow? You in this for the good of the city? Somehow I hadn’t pegged you for a humanitarian.”
“I don’t care anything about this shithole. Let it burn to the ground.”
“A woman, then?”
He turned away, but I knew the answer.
“What did you think, you’d kill a couple of children and she’d fall madly in love with you?”
“I’m not a fool. I know I don’t mean anything to her. I never meant anything to her, not back in the academy, not ever. She said she needed my help. I couldn’t let her do it alone.” He wasn’t talking to me, but I was the only one listening.
“No one means anything to her. Something broke a long time ago; she didn’t break it, but it doesn’t matter. It can’t be fixed. She talks about Rigus, about Low Town, but it isn’t real to her. People aren’t real to her.”
“You are,” he said. “You’re the only one-and you’ll die for it.”
Celia snapped back to attention. “Johnathan,” she started, but he’d already made his decision.
Four things happened then, more or less simultaneously. Brightfellow brought his arm up to perform some working, but before he could get it off there was the sound of meat sizzling, and the air was hot with burnt flesh. That was the second thing. With the third I took shelter behind Celia, or seemed to.
The fourth happened very quickly, and Celia didn’t notice.
Brightfellow looked at the red expanse that was no longer covered by skin, an aperture deep enough to make out the cream of his rib cage. He swung his head back up to Celia, then pitched forward.
Celia’s hand still glowed with the working that had killed Brightfellow. She began speaking immediately, the body in front of us forgotten as soon as she’d made it. “Before you do anything, before you say anything, there are things you need to hear.” She strayed backward, out of my effective range. “What the Master did, the working he performed, it can’t be duplicated. Do you understand? I didn’t want to use the children, believe me, I didn’t. I spent the last ten years in this damned tower, preparing for today, preparing for Father’s death. I wish I was better.” Her eyes shut, then fluttered open. “By the Firstborn, I wish I was better. But I’m not. With the Master dead, his wards no longer hold. It’s winter now, but once the weather warms-you don’t understand what it will be like if the plague comes back.”
“I remember what it was like. Don’t say that again.”
