Chapter 33
Rain splattered a small window as the Grand General situated himself in a chair across from mine. He leaned back, allowing Wake to light the cigarette pinned between his lips. He puffed, set his elbows on his knees, and considered me.
I crossed my own legs at the knees and hooked my handcuffed wrists over them. Wake—his wounds miraculously healed—retreated to the door, leaving the Grand General and I in an open space.
I felt his lingering gaze like a cold draft.
“So?” I prompted. “This is not your house, and I became rather disoriented in the back of the truck. Where are we?”
“The Old Citadel,” he replied, tapping off the first round of ashes onto the wooden floor.
There was no rug, nor was there any décor on the plaster walls.
The room looked as though it had been abandoned until recently, when it had been scrubbed clean.
A room without personality, without markers or identification.
A prison cell, despite its lack of stone and iron.
Thunder boomed beyond the window.
“Where will your companions take the artifact?” the General inquired.
“That entirely depends on which companion you are speaking of,” I said, trying not to show just how deeply I cared about what he might say next. Alone as I had been at my capture, I had no way of knowing whether anyone had escaped. “We are not what you might describe as a cohesive fellowship.”
“Your Starlit sister. She certainly has the skills to intercept the artifact between when Mr. Wake saw you pick it up and when we met in the foyer,” Baffin said and took another draw on his cigarette.
His gaze was calculating. He knew precisely the information he was giving me by inferring Pretoria had escaped, and it made me nervous.
“Well,” I said, taking pains to hide my relief. “Pretoria and I are not as close as we once were.”
Baffin’s expression was grave. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a small notebook and a pen, and placed them on the windowsill.
“I will leave this with you. What you write on these pages will determine what I do with you. Tell me what you know of the artifact. Tell me about your companions. Judge for yourself what will save your life, or end it.”
With that he rose. Wake opened the door, and Baffin stopped on the other side to look back at me.
“A foretaste,” he said, and waved a dismissive hand at Wake. “Leave her hands intact.”
Cold fear prickled up the back of my neck as Wake closed the door and turned on me. I stood up quickly and put the chair between us.
“Mr. Wake, I am already quite aware what you are capable of, there is no need to demonstrate,” I said, palms out to ward him off. “We need not be enemies.”
Wake took the center of the room, crowding me back into the window.
“Wake,” I said, unable to keep pleading from my voice. “I hate the Guild as much as you do. I am not your enemy. Tell me about Moran, tell me—”
At that, he leapt the space between us and screamed directly in my face. It was a visceral sound, an inarticulate burst of rage that was raw and pure and wholly terrifying.
I am not ashamed to say that I turned away, cringing into my shoulder.
“Why would you hate the Guild?” he hissed, his voice a blanket of fog over a raging sea. “Tell me.”
“My mother,” I said. I scrounged the courage to meet his eyes again. “She was devastated when the Guild took us. It nearly killed her.”
Wake’s upper lip trembled in a brimming snarl. His glare was unsettling, raw with what might have been comical intensity—had it not been entirely genuine. “Not. Enough.”
“Emeline,” I added. “Emeline Rosenthal. They killed her. The Glass Coffin.”
Wake continued to glare, but I detected a minute flicker of his expression. Given his age and connection to Moran—obscure though that still was—there was a chance he had known Emeline, or at least of her execution.
“And the children,” I added. I found I could meet his eyes again, not because I had in any way calmed, but because the intensity of the moment and the truth of my words had somehow arrested my terror.
There were dangers beyond this room, as this very conversation reminded me. Threats other than Wake. And there was a life I was still determined to claim, though the how of it was increasingly uncertain.
“Because I will not let them take my children,” I stated. “I will not be bred. I will not be traded. I will not be broken as my mother was.”
“Then allow me to add fuel to the flame,” Wake said lowly.
The looming threat of him did not lessen, but the rage in his voice shifted, I sensed, away from me.
“The Guild has known about the artifacts for thirty years. Yes, artifacts. The Landsdown Trove, and its Stele. A puzzle to which the Guild already has several pieces. Your Mr. Stoke had another, the one which brought us all together. But the pieces are not what Baffin believes.”
He had said as much at the museum, but I did not remind him of that. “Then what are they?”
He lowered his voice still more. “Perhaps they do have the potential to turn human into Entwined, in their proper, united form. Dr. Maddeson believes so, with his texts and translations. All I know is that when one of those artifacts is used on an Entwined, it makes us something more. Permanently amplified. You, for instance, would exist forevermore in a state of twilight.”
The thought was unsettling and alluring all at once. “How is it done?”
He shrugged. “I was a child. I could not tell you. Moran could not either, as I burned his laboratory and killed everyone of his assistants when I escaped. A decade of research, annihilated.”
He smiled at that, a boyish satisfaction mingled with wrathful remembrance.
“It was imperfect, anyway,” he added. “Moran would forever speculate on other methods, other uses, and what the complete restored Stele could do, if its individual parts were so powerful.”
“That is a chilling thought.”
“It is,” he agreed. His demeanor was relaxing, but he was still well and firmly in my personal space, and seemed intent on staying there.
“What were you?” I asked, pushing the conversation forward.
“Moonless,” he said. “And now I am what a Moonless became. But my mother, she was a Silver. I carried enough of her blood to gain her strength and Leeching too, with Moran’s meddling.”
I had more questions about him and his abilities, not least related to the manifestation of two kinds of Entwined. But another query seemed more important, particularly when I recalled how simply touching the orb had heightened my abilities, back in the vault.
“Why are you helping Baffin?” I asked. “If you know that the artifact has real power?”
“Because he stands a chance of bringing down the Guild.”
“Even if he kills Entwined in the City States in the process?” I pressed. “At the risk of giving him the power to make himself Entwined?”
“Baffin has his delusions,” Wake said dismissively. “We cannot be made, Miss Rushforth. We are like gods—we have no beginning, no end. Only greater heights of glory. Heights which our masters, all of them, would keep us from.”
A chill crept over me. “I would not go that far.”
Wake did not reply. Instead, he glanced at the window as rain began to patter a little harder on the glass. He seemed to gauge the light, then pulled me into it—the faux twilight of a storm.
My threads awoke, prickling and warm. He pushed my collar down and turned my chin with a thumb, examining my throat, then looking up at my forehead.
“Your threads are already extensive,” he observed. “The Guild must have been furious to lose you. I wonder what you would be, if they had done to you what they did to me? Moran intends to find out, I believe.”
That struck too close to home. Was that why Madge had sent me away, and released Lewis to keep me safe? Was that the division between her and her husband?
I pulled away and separated myself from Wake by a pace. He allowed it, watching and waiting.
“Did you kill Mr. Stoke?” I asked. “Did you do what you did with Geoffrey, and steal his life to save yourself?”
“I did not kill Stoke,” he replied.
There was a knock at the door—three sharp raps.
“I have somewhere to be,” Wake said. He looked me up and down, and sucked his teeth in momentary contemplation. “You are not going to confess anything in that notebook for the General, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then he will send someone less tactful to encourage you,” Wake told me. “If he does not lose patience altogether and throw you to the Zealots again.”
“Let him. They already failed once.”
Wake gave me a look that said, very clearly, that he thought me naive. “Well, then,” he said. “Goodbye, Ottilie.”
I waited for the door to close, then went to the windowsill, opened the notebook, and picked up the pen.
* * *
The Grand General opened the notebook in the door of my cell, blinked, and squinted.
“Try turning it over,” I offered from a corner, where I sat with my forearms propped on my knees and my inky fingers dangling. “You are the one on the bottom.”
He choked in disgust and flipped through the other pages, then cast the notebook aside.
It hit the wall and fell open onto the floor, showing a rather explicit depiction of Baffin and a Kessan imp entangled in one another.
My drawing hand is quite good, if I may be permitted to preen, and my imagination liberal.
“Lewd drawings?” he growled. “Have you no sense of self-preservation, woman? I offered you a chance.”
“You did not even look at them all,” I replied with false disappointment. “The one with the Sirens of Amarto is particularly inspired.”
Baffin turned to Wake, who had returned from whatever sordid appointment he’d had and now loitered in the doorway. “Find me another Eventide among our Separatist prisoners and have them scour her memory.”
“There are none,” Wake said. “There are several Eventide Affinates, but no one with the strength to get anything off her.”
Baffin was clearly displeased. “A word in the hall, Mr. Wake.”
Wake conceded and the two stepped outside. I watched the closed door, listening, but could not make out their words.
At length Wake came back in and, grabbing my arm, hauled me to my feet.
He did not speak as he led me out of the room, down the hall and towards a flight of stairs. Focused as I was on not falling over, it was not until we walked past a particularly large, lavish mirror that I noticed Wake’s face. It was tight and grim, but his ire was not directed towards me.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“The dark.”