Chapter 11
The Spilling
The stair was steep and narrow and old. The boards were dark with the polish of centuries.
The wall on the right was rough cool stone.
The wall on the left was the back of the house's original chimney, brick that had been laid before the front porch was built.
The stair ended at a heavy old door with three iron locks set one above another at chest height.
Rhoda took the chain from around her neck.
She turned the top lock, then the middle lock, then the bottom lock.
Each one made a small flat clack like a stone dropping into a still pool. The door swung in.
The vault was a long low room with rows of narrow file cabinets along three of its walls, each cabinet labeled in her careful hand.
The fourth wall was the gold-coin wall. Sleeves on sleeves on sleeves.
Hundreds of years of bonds laid into their narrow gold homes.
The air was the air of a place that had been kept cool and dry on purpose.
It smelled the way the back of an old library smells, of paper and wax and a faint sweetness from the cedar of the cabinet bodies.
Lazlo stepped in behind her. He did not look at the gold-coin wall.
She was walking toward the East Europe cabinet with her mind on her own carelessness about Nadia Costin and the years she had let slip without checking her file.
She slid the long top drawer open and walked her fingers down the tabs.
Countries, then towns, then names. Hungary.
Poland. Romania. The Romanian tabs, alphabetical.
Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Sibiu. The Sibiu names, alphabetical. Banescu. Costin.
Costin, Nadia.
She drew out the file.
It was thin. It was thinner than the file should have been for a hunter of Nadia's tenure.
Rhoda made a small unhappy sound at her own carelessness, at the hand on the bottom of the page that was her own hand, at the year on the bottom of the page, from when she was much younger.
She had been a poor friend, and the file was the evidence. Three pages.
Lazlo was at her shoulder. "Take all the time you wish, my dear," he said. "This is a very interesting room."
Rhoda opened the file on top of the cabinet. The first page was Nadia's intake. Date of swearing-in, her sponsor, the names of her parents. Rhoda's finger moved down it slowly. She had logged her own hand at the bottom. The ink had darkened with time the way ink in this room always darkened.
The second page was Nadia's field assignments, a list Rhoda had not read in years. Bucharest. Sibiu. Bra?ov. Sibiu again. The shape of a hunter's working life laid out in towns.
The third page was Nadia's familiar registry.
Rhoda's finger went down it. The cat's name was Duchess. Himalayan. Silver-cream coat, dark mask, blue-water eyes. Long plume tail. Female. Bonded to Nadia Costin, Sibiu.
No transfer logged.
Rhoda's finger stopped.
She did not breathe. She had touched the head of a long-haired Himalayan three days ago, on her own threshold, in her own front hall.
It's lovely to have you here, sweetheart.
Make yourself at home. She had said that.
She had said it to a cat she had been told was Lazlo's.
All those years on Nadia's line. No transfer logged.
The cat that had sat at Lazlo Varga's ankle on the rug of her own parlor for three days was Nadia Costin's familiar.
And Nadia Costin had been dead in Sibiu since the Duchess arrived.
Rhoda did not turn. She closed the file slowly, slid it back down into the drawer, and slid the drawer shut. The drawer made a small flat sound.
"There is no transfer logged on her familiar, Lazlo." Behind her, a breath. The soft sound of a man letting out air he had been holding.
"Forgive me." His voice came measured. "Such a tragedy. She would not have wanted that little cat to be alone. I…"
One soft step. Away from her. Toward the door.
Rhoda heard the small sound of fabric: his hand into the inside pocket of his coat. She tried to see what he was doing. She heard a smaller sound, soft, almost not a sound. The kind of sound a man makes when his lips move against something he has been carrying close to his chest. She couldn't see.
Then she heard the inner bolt of the vault door slide home.
Rhoda stepped toward him.
Lazlo was standing with his back to the closed door. His silver eyes were on her. The hand that had been in his coat was at his side now, the fingers slightly curled around something the lamplight did not reach. His face was still warm. Still mild. Still the face she had known for years.
He smiled. "My dear Rhoda."
For a long moment, the vault held them both. The cool dry air. The gold-coin wall on her left. A lifetime of work in cabinets at her right. The lamp above the door. The bolted door behind the man she had loved as a friend for the whole of their careers together.
He smiled again, warm, and his fingers at his side curled a little tighter around the thing he had taken out of his pocket.
"My dear Rhoda." He smiled.
Just above the vault, in the parlor where Lazlo had left her, Duchess stepped onto the rug slowly.
Her fur shedding around her. She paled and sighed.
She knew the bond between a familiar and her warlock is not a leash and is not a thread.
It is a thing the cat carries in her chest the way a person carries her own breath.
Duchess had been carrying a bad version.
She had not let herself feel the wrongness of it because the wrongness of it was what had been keeping her warm.
Duchess tripped on the rug, as the others just watched. She tried to stand. She got her front legs under her, then one of her back legs. The other one folded. She tried again. The plume tail dragged.
"Goddess," said the calico from the wood basket, who had been sitting at the edge of her basket pretending not to look. "What's wrong with her?"
"She's trying," the Persian said from the armchair, opening one yellow eye.
"Her?" said the calico.
"The Himalayan. Who has been swanning at us with her tail in the air for three days. Look at her."
The calico stepped to the lip of the wood basket and peered down. "Oh, my. What is wrong with your fur?"
Duchess did not answer.
"You look like a coat someone left in the rain."
"Maud, please," said the Persian. "We are ladies."
"I am being a lady. I am being a very polite lady. I have not yet mentioned the smell."
From the chair beside the bookcase, Quill, Phineas's quiet grey tabby, sat up. He had not stirred from that chair since his witch had died. He looked across the parlor at Duchess now with the steady mild gaze his witch had turned on every cat in this house.
"You stink the way a wrong thing stinks," Quill said. His voice was soft. It was not unkind. It was the voice of a scholar delivering a hard truth in a library. "And I know it. Because Phineas knew it."
Duchess's head dropped. The cloudy blue eye closed.
In the front hall, Fat Bastard rolled to his feet. He did it the way an enormous man rolls to his feet: by stages, with dignity. He looked at his boys.
"Gentlemen."
"Sir," said Boba from the kitchen doorway.
"Sir," said Jango from the rug.
"Looks like our lady's takin' a turn," Fat Bastard said.
The three cats of Assjacket rolled into the parlor.
They did not pounce. They did not rush. They sauntered.
Boba slipped past Lady Grey on the settee and tipped her a slow wink.
Jango paused at the wood basket and bowed at the calico the way a man bows to a woman at a dance.
Fat Bastard parked himself two feet from Duchess on the rug, dropped his enormous head a little, and gave her a long appreciative once-over.
"Hey there, beautiful," he said.
Duchess did not look at him.
"Don't be like that, sugar. We come all this way."
Boba arrived at her left shoulder and elbowed Fat Bastard. "She ain't payin' you no mind, brother."
"She'll come round."
Jango arrived at her right shoulder and elbowed Boba. "She's gone, fellas. Look at her."
The three of them stood around her in a loose triangle, holding their noses with one paw each in a slow theatrical way that would have made the room laugh on any other day.
Duchess opened her mouth.
What came out of it was not a voice.
A page formed in the air just in front of her mouth.
The page folded itself once, then again.
It hung there a moment, white and bright in the parlor's morning light.
Then it drifted across the parlor in the slow way a paper drifts when a breath has been put behind it.
It made the desk on its own. It slipped, neatly, through the long worn slit at the top.
It was gone.
Fat Bastard stopped flirting. "Boys."
"Got her," said Boba. He stepped onto her left wrist. She did not resist. Jango sat down on her head with the slow contained grace of a cat sitting on a cushion.
Fat Bastard sighed once, then flopped his entire considerable body across the back of her, soft and warm and absolutely immovable, and Duchess went the rest of the way down to the rug under him with a sound that was half a hiss and half something less dignified.
"There we are, sugar," Fat Bastard said comfortably. "There we are."
Duchess opened her mouth again. A second page formed, folded itself, drifted to the desk, slipped through the slit. Gone. A third did the same. A fourth.
The parlor watched but the cats did not say a word. The Boys held her. Page after page formed at her mouth and drifted across the room and slipped through the slit. The slit drank them.
The front door of FACTS & FIBS slammed open.