6
Felix paced in the cool spring morning, restless energy snapping at his heels.
He’d already finished his book. Miss Rosara hadn’t been joking—she’d been gone almost four hours.
If it hadn’t been for the shop-bought vigilantus charms he’d strung across the back alley, he’d have been worried that she’d absconded.
Should’ve put a tracking charm on her, after all, he thought. Make sure she hasn’t drowned in that blasted bath.
Good grief, it was a waste of time. A year ago, he’d been soaring with his comrades through the mountains of Isra, hunting down the Majdan insurrectionists. This . . . this was . . .
Beneath you? said a dry voice in his head. Don’t be a splitwit. You’re lucky not to be scrubbing streets. If you ever want to climb the ranks, you’d better pull yourself together.
And, like the Carinth justice system, he probably oughtn’t start by assuming that his charge was innocent.
However much the evidence suggests the contrary.
The addle-headed woman had stepped out in front of a phaeton in her first ten minutes out of jail.
Still . . . a tracking charm couldn’t hurt.
He checked his watch, then glanced to the end of the street.
There was a prefecture watchhouse half a mile away.
They ought to have her arcanic trace on file.
He’d need it to work one of those off-the-shelf spells.
Felix dithered for a moment. He didn’t want to be missing when Miss Rosara emerged. Then again, she’d threatened to be six hours, and he half believed her.
Impatience stuck its spurs into his sides, and he set off. He was unused to such long inactivity. Freehand casting burned up strength at a punishing rate, so when the corps hadn’t been on the march, they’d been training like athletes for the Pantheon Games.
He was at the watchhouse in minutes. A frisson of arcana swept across his skin as he entered. He blinked for a moment in the bluish gloom, then flashed a smile to the desk officer.
“Morning, there,” she said. “Anything amiss?”
“Just on governess duty nearabouts,” he answered, edging through the grid of chairs and tables in the waiting room. “The lady’s enjoying her first day at liberty.”
“Dossing in Lumenia Street on the imperial payroll?” the prefect said with a grin. “Nice work if you can get it. How can I help you?”
“Can you reach the trace-base from here?”
“Certainly. The name?”
“Donna Rosara.”
The woman flicked two golden catches, then ran up a smoked-glass screen from a slot in the desk. At a wave of her hand, copper figures came spilling across the surface. She turned her head this way and that, squinting at the hieroglyphic nonsense.
“Rosara. She’s here, but . . . hmm. No trace, I’m afraid, sir.”
“That’s peculiar. She’s been in jail.”
“Oh. Governess duty, you said? A dominius case?”
“Yes.”
“I expect that’s why. They’re not technically criminals, so the law says we can’t keep their traces.”
Blast. He’d been rather surprised to find that sort of thing actually stopped them from doing it, until he’d met the lawyers on level nine. He was twenty-six years old, and the chief counsel’s stare still made him feel like a misbehaving schoolboy.
“Do we have the file, at least?” he asked. There might be something scandalous in there.
“Ah . . . we have the headnotes, but they’re scant,” the prefect said, brushing her fingers down the screen. “Name, offense, jail, release date . . . that’s all. Still, you could ask at the Magisterium. They’ll have the details.”
“I see. Thank you,” Felix said, then took his leave.
He was soon back in the little garden near the bathhouse steps. He resumed his pacing, one eye on the Seraph’s Rest.
At last, he spied Miss Rosara. She stepped into the open, looking nervously about, and he realized that he was concealed by the balustrade. Curious, he paused, wondering what she’d do.
He was strangely disappointed when, instead of taking to the wind, his charge walked primly down the steps and stood to wait.
The cat’s away, and the mouse waits dutifully for it to return?
Felix thought, eyeing her up. She somehow didn’t look the better for her morning’s indulgence.
She was scrupulously clean, with her white gown starched and hair pinned tightly back, but it had given her a severe and spinsterish look.
In four hours, she’d turned fully five years older.
He painted on a gentlemanly smile and strolled back into sight. “Miss Rosara,” he called, raising a hand in greeting. “Pardon me. Had to stretch my legs.”
“Officer!” she said. “There you are. Thought you’d left me for another convict.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said with an unexpected flicker of amusement.
“Oh, but I hope you’ll forgive my dallying.”
“Not to worry. It’s been years since I’ve had the chance to finish a book,” he said, patting the thin volume in his hand. Miss Rosara gave a bashful smile.
“It’s been years since I’ve had the chance to do anything else,” she said. “I do apologize. When I planned my first day at liberty, I hadn’t expected a companion.”
“Not at all, miss,” he said, but then let through the shadow of a wry expression. “Truly, though, four and a half hours . . .”
“I know, I know,” she said with a chuckle as they set off down the street. “If it’s any consolation, I wasn’t idle. I thought of an old acquaintance who might be able to help me. I was making inquiries.”
“Inquiries. In a ladies’ bathhouse?” Felix asked. A blush colored his companion’s face.
“He has a certain . . . How to put it . . . He’s known to ladies about the city,” she said quickly. “They told me where I might find him.”
Ah. A scoundrel.
“I see. Shall we, then?” he asked.
His companion bit her lip. “I’d appreciate your company, sir,” she replied, “but best steel yourself. I suspect you won’t like where he is.”
Carysium Street. Seraphs might not quite have feared to tread there, but they’d certainly have lost their wings for visiting.
There, cloaked and masked, the grayside rubbed shoulders with the diamonds of Carinth society.
Pleasure flirted with ruin behind the jet facades, and the high and low threw away more gold every night than an honest trader earned in a year.
There was no mistaking the boundary. The place was sunk in glittering arcanic night from dawn till dusk. The kinds of things that visitors went there to do . . . well, most of them were better done in darkness.
Miss Rosara held tighter to his arm as they reached the border.
“I heard of this place, in the Hall,” she said under her breath. “Still, I’ve never . . .”
“Stay close by, don’t meet their eyes, and don’t stop walking,” Felix advised. The place was a stew of swindlers, rakes and hooligans, and he doubted she’d like the taste.
They stepped across the threshold into heated darkness. A curtain of false starlight swept above them.
They were barely a pace in when a phaeton careered past, lamps ablaze. Miss Rosara flinched as the vehicle screeched by, its six passengers leaning over the sides and hollering with glee.
“Well,” she murmured. “Welcome to Carysium Street.”
Felix blinked against the lights assaulting him from every side.
Flame-colored lanterns spun by magic on the air.
Windows split the black facades like square-cut amber, revealing glimpses of the dens of iniquity beyond.
Wheels of chance dashed light across the street, and crimson-skirted ladies skulked in shadowed doorways.
One gave him a lingering look from beneath heavy lashes, breathing out a cloud of smoke. He hurriedly averted his gaze.
“Best not loiter,” he said. “Did they say where you’d find this fellow?”
“The, ah . . . kind of houses where the venturous gentleman might enjoy a little female company.”
Ah. He supposed he should have cottoned on earlier.
“I see. Can’t say I know where they are, but I expect we’ll run into some eventually.”
“Yes, I imagine we shall,” she said, sizing him up with an oddly shrewd eye. “To catch a moth, best bring a flame.”
Felix rather thought he blushed for the first time in five years.
There was a sameness to most vice, however glamorous—drink something, smoke something, or spend an hour in company one oughtn’t keep.
Even so, Carysium Street added its own flourish to the old game.
A rich enough patron could drink sea-seraph venom and spend the next night floating in Elysium, if they didn’t mind the month of wild hallucinations it’d cost them.
They could become a god for the evening at the Pantheon Hotel, dining in the gardens of paradise, soaked in heaven’s light and waited on by nymphs.
Or there were darker pleasures. There were places where wild souls wagered treasured memories and years of life.
There were shuttered houses behind little doors, where a man who’d had enough could step into a pit and never stop falling, or climb into a simulacrum’s body and do what he’d never dared before.
Mementori parlors lined the way. There, sorry creatures staggered in to let the arcani drain away their cares and bottle them for sale.
Vials of recollection glimmered from behind the windows—memories of love with all the thorns trimmed off, the acid green of little boys’ excitement, and smoke-gray vials of madmen’s fear.
“The miracle of memory?” Miss Rosara read, pausing by a beautiful facade of dark wood and silver. “I wonder . . .”
“Best not, Miss Rosara,” said Felix. Before he could sweep her onward, though, a man shimmered out of the doorway.
“Memories troubling you, young lady?” he said with a confiding smile. “Slip inside, my dear, and we’ll soon have them off your mind.”
“Oh, no, you see, my difficulty’s quite the reverse,” she answered. “They’re missing. I was wondering if you might restore them.”
“Why restore them, miss, when you could replace them with better ones?” He gestured theatrically to the window. “Only the purest, of course. No risk of residue from owners past—”
“Come along,” Felix said more insistently, tugging her arm.
“But if they could—”