Chapter 10
The negotiation chamber was empty, and although the chandeliers remained lit, it had a sombre air. Leaf stopped at the top of the stairs and stared out at where the body of Rufus Gillingham had hung, seeming almost to float in place like a macabre lustre.
“Someone wanted to make a point,” she said. “Or a warning, perhaps. The choice of room feels significant.”
“It does,” Nic agreed. “Though I can’t say I like the idea this might have something to do with the contract. The man had a lot of enemies?”
“I believe so.” Leaf started down the stairs. “Although how many of them are in this house?”
Nic followed. “A fair point, though if we’re considering motives, Rowerre never left the house for long enough to make enemies, and any he made here could have pushed him down the stairs at any time.”
“That suggests it was one of my party who killed him, though I cannot imagine why. Unless he was murdered for a different reason, like perhaps he saw something he shouldn’t have. Or it was over that piece of paper you saw in his hand.”
“Or, as much as I hate the idea, he could have just tripped. He was late dressing me for dinner that night because he’d had to wait on Lord Ricard first, so perhaps he was tired and careless. I didn’t get the chance to ask how many other—”
Having reached the bottom of the stairs, Leaf spun around. “Wait on Uncle Ricard? But why? He brought his valet with him. As did Papa.”
Nic stared at her, unable to fit this information into his mind without knocking other things out of place. If Lord Ricard had brought his own valet, why had Rowerre gone to wait on him? His hands had been shaking when he’d returned.
“Perhaps that was just a lie then,” Nic said, though the possibility rankled. “I suppose he could have just been late.”
“Maybe.” Leaf turned a slow circle, taking in the negotiation chamber from the bottom of the stairs.
“Let’s see. If Gillingham was murdered and then hung, he must still have been killed in here because someone would have seen a body being dragged around.
But once he was dead, all the murderer would have needed to do was let the chandelier mechanism down, tie him up, and lift it again. ”
“And bring the ladder in afterward.”
“Exactly. Now where is the mechan—oh, is this it?” She headed toward where a hinged section of wall stood outlined against the new wallpaper. “It’s not hard to find.”
Like every other large house, Monterris Court was full of interconnected service passages—narrow, unfinished spaces for accessing things like chandelier mechanisms and dumbwaiters. They were, naturally, the parts of the house that were cleaned the least.
“That,” Leaf said, having pulled open the door, “is a dead mouse.”
Nic made a show of examining it closely. “Are you sure? Perhaps it’s a bird in disguise. And if it is a mouse, shouldn’t we find out who killed it? If we don’t, they might come for us next.”
He was beginning to enjoy her withering looks.
“Why did I bring you with me?” she asked.
“Because you’re scared of dead mice? I can assure you, Charborough House will have dead mice, too, if you look in the right places.”
“Wrong places.” She stepped resolutely over it and turned to where the mechanism sat in a small alcove. There, the chandelier chains entered through what passed for the ceiling in these passages, down into the alcove where a pulley-and-wheel system made it easy to wind them up and down.
“It all looks normal to me,” Leaf said, looking at the handle and wheel. “Not that I have any idea what they’re supposed to look like.”
Nic soon came to the same conclusion. “All looks fine,” he said, but Leaf had already moved on to examining the floor. He frowned at her. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for clues, obviously. Why don’t you make yourself useful and help.”
She was already staring at the floor, so Nic peered along the service passage instead. It led away toward the drawing room and the great hall, darkness deepening as it went. Out of sight, something rustled.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“Sounds like a less-dead mouse,” Leaf said, not looking up from the dusty boards. “You had better go question it about its very dead friend.”
It did sound like skittering claws, yet it seemed not to move, rather to stick in place like the creature was trapped. It kept scratching, the distant sound possessing a silky edge.
With a sigh, Nic fetched a candle from the chamber.
Back in the narrow space, he followed the sound deeper into the mazelike passage made up of mechanisms and hatchways, dumbwaiters and doors—every breath full of dust and smells he didn’t want to investigate too closely. The scratching grew louder, and as he reached a corner, Nic slowed.
He let the candle lead the way, thrusting it out before stepping into its light. The new passage it illuminated was much like the last, except there, just beyond the candle’s reach, the suggestion of a white face hung in the air.
“Shit,” Nic breathed, only for the face to vanish as though blinked away, a mere flicker of imagination in the dark. He started after it, two steps all he managed before a faint hint of magic tingled along his scalp. No sigils, no accent, just an uneasy prickling that stuttered his steps to a halt.
“Hello?” How to talk to ghosts had not been part of his education, but with his heart thumping hard, he took another step. “Is someone there?”
Shadows shifted at the edge of his candlelight, reaching out like moths drawn to the flame.
The thin fingers thickened, twisting into coils like the inky night that had spilled from the automaton, and Nic stepped back—one step, two, his grip tightening on the candle.
And like an animal sensing weakness, the darkness lunged.
Nic gasped as it surged toward him, filling the air and pouring into his open mouth like so much ice.
Nic screamed, but no sound came out. He stumbled against the wall, but there was no wall, as there was no passage—only the darkness that had swallowed him as he had swallowed it, leaving him stranded in nothing.
“Nic?”
Leaf’s voice chimed like a song echoing through water, and Nic spun toward it, the air thick and sticky with magic that trickled cold down his spine. He tried to call back, to beg help, but the words seemed to wad in his mouth, not even a muffled plea escaping the smothering dark.
“Nic!”
Her hand closed around his, and he grasped it like a lifeline. As though a spell had been broken by her touch, the darkness fell away, shedding its chill onto the floor. And there stood Leaf, eyes wide, holding as tightly to him as he held to her.
“What in the world was that?”
“I… I don’t know.” He dared not move, caught to the floor as though even to breathe too heavily might bring it all back. “I thought I saw that automaton and then there was just… darkness and—”
Leaf took the candle out of his hand and walked a short way along the passage.
It was all Nic could do not to grip her sleeve and pull her back.
“Well, if it was here, then it’s gone,” she said, “but that darkness was strange, so thick I couldn’t see you.
Was that magic? I’ve never seen anything like it. ”
Nic’s heart still pounded, yet each breath that didn’t bring back the solid night calmed the most pressing of his fears. “It had the feel of magic, but there were no sigils—no signature.”
“Maybe it really is a ghost. Or it was that automaton. You said it did something similar in the style wing. Oh, what’s this? Could this have something to do with it?”
Leaf pointed to the wall a little farther on, and unsticking his feet from the floor, Nic joined her. The candlelight illuminated a mass of silvery strands bunched up and spilling from a timber wall brace. A hint of gold sparkled in the light.
“It’s sigil tape,” he said, untangling the slippery ribbon from the rough wood where it had been caught. “This must be what I heard rustling. It has a few uses, but around here it mostly makes automata go.”
“I thought clockwork made them go.”
“Clockwork powers all the gears and rods, but how do they know where they should move to? What they should do? What hour to chirp or croak?” He gestured to the tape. “It’s like… instructions, I guess. Although I use a much narrower gauge than this for my small creations.”
“Not yours then.”
“No.”
She indicated the tape he had gathered in his hands. “Can you read that? I have to admit my sigil knowledge is confined to what makes nice poetry, but you could read it, couldn’t you?”
Nic grimaced. “Maybe? It’s not the same as reading a book, though.
Smithing work is worse than sigil poetry because it works backward and forward and up and down depending on the sigils.
One halfway along the reel could change the meaning of the very first, so it’s…
complicated. And some are for movement and some are for speech, and honestly I’ve never been good at reading them because being able to feel them makes it harder, like reading while everyone in a room is talking at once.
But,” he added, seeing her disappointment, “I could try. And even just translating a small amount might tell us what it does.”
“Well, that’s your next job.”
“Anything as long as I don’t have to come back in here again.”
It was a short walk out of the narrow passage, but Nic had to fight the feeling the walls were closing upon him all the way.
Even when he escaped into the chamber, he found it haunted, with not only the ghost of Gillingham’s hanging body, but also the threat of living darkness now filling every corner.
“I… I think I need some air,” he said, blowing out the candle.