The Mime Order (15 page)

“
If I never return
,” he’d said, “
it will mean that everything is all right. That I have ended her
.” Well, he hadn’t returned, and it was clear that nothing was all right. Something was happening behind the masquerade of Scion, and if Nashira had killed my only real Reph ally, I might never find out what it was.

He had risked—and lost—everything to help me escape my prison. In return, I’d gone crawling back to my petty treasons with my tail between my legs, failed to convince Jaxon to fight, and cursed Hector’s name where he couldn’t hear me.

When I got out of the cab, I slammed the door a little too hard. Zeke was waiting for me under the stone archways. He’d scrubbed up nicely, as he always did on selling days: silk brocade waistcoat, neatly parted hair, thick-rimmed glasses that looked fifty years old.

“How are you, Paige?”

“Chipper. Nice glasses.” I checked my cravat. “What’s the story?”

“Eliza’s finished three paintings. Jax wants them all sold by the end of the night. Plus all the junk.” He fell into step beside me. “We could use your help with selling. I’m terrible.”

“You’d be better if you didn’t think you were terrible. You said he wants us to sell
everything
? Does he need a new antique cane, or something?”

“He did say we were low on money.”

“I’ll believe that when he stops buying cigars and absinthe.”

“He hardly stopped drinking while you were away. Absinthe every night, Nadine said.”

Behind the eccentric lenses, his eyes were bloodshot. He looked as if he’d been at the absinthe himself.

“Zeke,” I said, “did Jaxon really look for me?”

“Oh, yeah. He didn’t stop searching until July. Then he seemed to
give
up, and he took Nadine as a temporary mollisher. When Nick got word about you in August, after we saw you in Trafalgar Square, he was . . . well, a little mad with joy. That was when he started the search again.” He adjusted his glasses. “Has he said he’ll do anything about the Rephaim?”

“Nope,” I said.

“Are
you
going to do something?”

“He’s told me not to,” I said, trying not to sound bitter. “He requires our complete commitment to I-4.”

He shook his head. “That’s insane. We have to do something.”

“If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.”

“I don’t,” he admitted. “I don’t know where we’d start. I was talking about it with Nick the other day, and I thought we could do some kind of national broadcast, but we’d have to get into the Archon to do that. And even if we could, how do you tell people what you know they won’t believe?”

I hadn’t realized Zeke was that ambitious. Much as I liked the idea, ScionEye’s security was far too tight for us to even consider broadcasting a transmission from the inside. “We can’t run before we can walk, Zeke,” I said gently. “If we’re going to do something, we have to work from the bottom. Let the syndicate know, then the rest of the citadel.”

“Yeah, I know. It was wishful thinking.” Zeke cleared his throat. “By the way, did Nick tell you—?”

“Tell me what?”

“Nothing. Forget it. Did you get the spirit?” he asked quickly.

“The Abbess snagged it. But what were you going to—?”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t think Jax really cares about H Division. He almost admitted he was doing it to spite Didion.”

“What else is new?” Didion and Jaxon had been at war for years, jabbing at each other with pamphlets and, occasionally, physical violence. Didion despised Jaxon for being “the most discourteous
sir
I ever did meet”; Jaxon hated Didion for being a “useless, curly-haired fribble”, and for having terrible teeth. It was hard to argue with either assessment.

We walked together along the colonnade until we reached a lantern. Instead of the muted blue of the average Scion streetlamp, its panes were made of a deeper, cobalt glass, tinged with green, hard to see unless your eye was attuned to it. It hung above the door to a second-hand clothes shop. Zeke gave a subtle signal to the shopkeeper, a voyant, who nodded.

A winding staircase took us into the basement of the shop. There were no customers down here; just racks of second-hand clothes and three mirrors. Zeke looked over his shoulder, then pulled one of them open like a door. We sidled through the gap and into the long tunnel.

The black market was situated between Covent Garden and Long Acre. An underground cavern of about fifteen thousand square feet, it had been the hub of illegal trading for decades. Most hawkers earned their flatches on the fringes of the amaurotic markets, but this one was entirely voyant, and entirely secret. The NVD had never surrendered its location to Scion, probably because so many of them still bought their numa from its stalls. Their employers gave them food and shelter, but no means to touch the æther. It was a wretched life they led, fighting their own natures.

The cavern was poorly ventilated, thick with the heat of hundreds of bodies. Stalls sold thousands of numa, every kind imaginable. Mirrors: hand-held, full-length, framed. Crystal balls too heavy to lift. Smoked-glass shew stones, small enough to fit inside a palm. Séance tables. Burning incense. Teacups and cast-iron kettles. Keys for locks that might never exist. Small blunted blades. Boxes of needles. Blacklisted books. Tarot decks of all designs. Then there were the augurs’ stands, where flowers and herbs were sold in abundance. Past that were bottles of medicine for mediums—muscle
relaxants,
adrenaline, lithium—and fine instruments for whisperers, and pens for psychographers, and smelling salts to block out the foul odors that sniffers would pick up on.

Zeke stopped by a booth selling masks and put one on. A cheap one caught my eye, plastic with a coat of silver paint, just big enough to cover the top half of my face. I dug into my pocket and paid with a little of the money Jaxon had given me for the auction.

The flagship booth of I-4 specialized in funerary art, winding sheets and other morbid luxuries for the affluent clairvoyant. No cheap numa on our stall. All our goods were laid out on crushed velvet, arranged around glass vases of roses. Behind the table, Eliza was a vision in a deep-green velvet dress. Her golden hair fell in polished ringlets down her back, and her arms were wound in delicate black lace. She was talking with an augur in a trader’s attire. When she saw us, she said something to him, and he left.

“Who was that?” I said.

“Art collector.”

“Great. Now go behind the curtain.”

“All right, all right.” She brushed a spec of dust from the largest painting. “Zeke, can you pick up some more roses?”

“Okay. You want a coffee?”

“And some water. And some adrenaline.” Eliza wiped her brow with her sleeve. “We’ll be here all night if we don’t get these sold.”

“You need to be out of sight.” I took her elbow and led her to the back of the stall, where a curtain concealed our coats and bags. With a sigh, she sat down and took out some work Jaxon had given her. She liked to be there so we could consult her, but if anyone saw an art medium near our paintings, they’d put two and two together at once. Zeke put his head around the curtain.

“Where’s Jax?”

“He said he had business somewhere else,” Eliza said. “As per usual. Just get the roses, will you?”

With
a slight frown, Zeke went on his way. Eliza was usually in a foul mood after a possession, riddled with tics and spasms. I unloaded a few human skulls from a box. “Do you want a break?”

“I need to be here.”

“You look shattered.”

“Yes, Paige, I’ve been up since Monday.” Her eyelid gave a hard twitch. “Jax sent me here as soon as I finished with Philippe.”

“We’ll sell them. Don’t worry. Where’s Nadine?”

“Hawking.”

I couldn’t blame her for being short with me. By rights she ought to be asleep in a dark room after a trance, waiting for the tremblings to subside. I helped her with the wares, piling up skulls, hourglasses, pocket watches, specimen frames. Most of them were made by skilled soothsayers in Jaxon’s employ, then sold for five times what he paid for them.

A dispute soon broke out on the opposite stall, where a pair of palmists were offering readings. The querent was an aculto-mancer, and he seemed to be slightly unhappy with what his palm had told him.

“I want
all
of my money back! Charlatan!”

“Your palms are your enemies, friend, not me. If you want your own version of the truth,” the palmist said, his eyes hard as flint, “perhaps you should try knitting it.”

“You what, you dirty augur?”

There was a crunch as he was hit right on the nose. The nearest voyants stamped and jeered. Palmists were good with their fists. The acultomancer fell into the table, then lunged forward with a roar. Blood flashed across the carpet. The second palmist smashed a duo of spirits into his assailant’s face, only to be hit in the throat with a sharpened awl. Her scream was drowned by choking, and by the crowd’s cheering.

“Anyone else?” the acultomancer roared.

A
lone whisperer raised her voice. “You think you’re a big man, don’t you, needle boy? Compensating for your tiny pinprick?” Laughter rose everywhere.

“Say that again, hisser”—he flicked another awl into his hand—“and this might just put a pinprick in your heart.”

He shoved a table over as he left. Eliza shook her head and went back behind the curtain. How could I ever hope to unite this rabble? How could anyone?

The mess was cleared away. Business as usual. I’d sold three watches and a finger-sized hourglass by the time Zeke came back, his vintage glasses clouded by the heat. I took him behind the curtains to Eliza. “Did you hear about the fight with the palmists?” he said.

“We saw it.”

“There was another one near the coffee stand. The Crowbars and the Threadbare Company again.”

“Idiots.” Eliza gulped down half her coffee. “Did you find any adrenaline?”

“They’re out,” he said. “Sorry.”

She was swaying on her feet. “Take a break.” I took the paperwork from her hand.

“I’ll come back. Just keep selling.”

“Half an hour.” Zeke grasped her shoulders and moved her away from the stall. “No arguing, okay?”

“Fine, fine, but you two have to get your facts straight,” she said, exasperated. “Philippe was Brabançon-born, but he was
from
the Duchy of Brabant. Brabançon is not a place. And Rachel used
liquor balsamicum
when she helped her father. Do not say ‘balsamic vinegar’ again, Paige, or I swear on the æther I will break a vase over your head.”

She picked up her knitted bag and was gone. Zeke and I looked at each other. “Skellet bell?” he said.

“
Go for it.”

I searched through the box. It was a heavy, hand-held bell, once used for medieval funeral processions. As I unwrapped it, Nadine slammed a creel of wares down on the table. I stared at the full basket.

“You didn’t sell
anything
?”

“Unsurprisingly,” she said, “nobody wants table junk.”

“They’re not going to want it if you call it ‘table junk.’ ” I picked up one of the skulls, checking it for breaks, but there was nothing aesthetically wrong with it. “You have to make them tempting.”

“Tempting? ‘Oh, hello, madam—would you like to buy the skull of some plague-addled fourteenth-century churl for the price of a year’s rent?’ Yeah, that’s sex appeal.”

I couldn’t bring myself to argue with her; instead, I handed her the bell. With pursed lips, she walked out in front of the stall and rang a single note, startling a sensor. The sound made at least fifty people look up.

“Ladies, gentlemen, do you remember your mortality?” She held out a rose to the sensor, who laughed nervously. “It’s so easy to forget, isn’t it, when you live alongside death? But even voyants die.”

“Sometimes,” Zeke said, “you need a gentle reminder.
He aquí
, the lost masterpieces of Europe!” He swept a hand towards the paintings. “Pieter Claesz, Rachel Ruysch, Philippe de Champaigne!”

“Roll up, roll up for the sale of the month!” Nadine rang the bell. “Don’t forget death—it won’t forget you!”

Soon we’d attracted a large crowd. Nadine described the species of butterflies in the frames, lavished praise on the largest painting, and demonstrated the speed of the sand in the hourglasses. Zeke spent the time charming people with stories of his years in Oaxaca. They clung to him like flies to honey, desperate for tales of a country beyond Scion’s influence. The free-world was a paradise in their eyes, a place where voyants could find peace. A few noticed Nadine’s accent, too, but she changed the subject if they asked. Zeke handed
out
the flowers while she did the talking and I took the cash, keeping my head down.

Most of the listeners bought a trinket or two. I counted coins in silence. It was as if Sheol I had never happened.

Yellow-jacket
, I thought to myself.

****

Eliza didn’t return for two hours. When she did, she looked gray. “Anything?”

“Everything.” I nodded to the empty table, exhausted. “Pieter’s painting went to I-3, and I’ve got two traders interested in the Ruysch.”

“Great.”

She took a rose from a vase and fastened it to her hair. The ringlets were falling out. “Did you get any sleep?” I said, hoisting yet another crate on to the table.

“Where do you think I’ve been?”

I watched her. She slid back into her chair and stared blankly at her work.

The fake Ruysch sold to a group of Welsh botanomancers. At quarter to five, I was ready to go. The NVD came on duty at five during the autumn and winter, and Jaxon had insisted that I didn’t spend more than a few hours at the market.

“I’m off,” I said to Nadine. “Are you all right to carry on?”

“If you can get Eliza back down here.”

I’d thought she was right behind me, but she was nowhere to be seen. “I’ll try.”

“If you don’t find her, keep an ear out for the phone booth. I might need to call you.” Nadine scraped a hand through her hair. “I hate this.”

My head ached from hours of noise and concentration. Near the
exit,
I spotted a stall selling metallic numa: needles, small blades, bowls for cottabomancy. The metallurgist looked up when I approached.