The Mime Order (56 page)

“She is a wanted
fugitive
,” Jaxon bit out. “Tell me, how is she to lead us when Scion knows her face, her name? And do you really
want
to allow this backstabber to partake in these proceedings, Miss Wolfson? If she can challenge her own mime-lord, what will she do to her subjects?”

“Coward,” I said.

Jaxon turned to face me. There were a few jeers from the audience, but other than that, silence reigned. “Say that again, little traitor.” He cupped a hand around his ear. “I didn’t quite catch it.”

The crowd was hungry for this kind of drama. I sensed it in their dreamscapes, in their auras, in their faces. This was a first in syndicate history, a real-life revenge tragedy that could only end in death. A mime-lord and a mollisher at war. I stepped through the ash and the blood.

“I said you were a coward.” I held up my blade, letting it catch the candlelight. “Prove me wrong, White Binder, or I’ll send you to the æther tonight.”

There it was. The beast lurking in Jaxon Hall. The film of ice that spread across his eyes: the look I’d seen before, when he struck a pleading beggar with his cane or told Eliza he would fire her from the job that was her lifeline. The look in his eyes when he’d told me I was his, that I was property. An asset. A slave. His lips tilted, and he bowed to me.

“With pleasure,” he said, “O my dearest traitor.”

25

Danse Macabre

Jaxon Hall wasn’t one to waste time when he wanted something done, and it was clear that he’d had no absinthe today. The blade came singing toward me in a flash of silver and a gust of dark wood, almost too fast to avoid, but I was ready for him to strike. I’d sensed his aura move to the right a split second before he had.

He was as easy to read as a book to a bibliomancer. For the first time in my life, I could predict my mime-lord’s intentions. With two quick turns, I avoided the stab and stopped myself dead, like a wind-up dancer in a music box.

With arched eyebrows, Jaxon took a second swing, this time with the blunt end. It hit the flagstones with a heavy, gong-like chime, but the blast of air soon came again. The chunk of metal caught the front of my shoulder, knocking me back a few steps. My hands came straight back up.

Jaxon herded me toward the crowd. Their auras registered like a wall of heat on my back. I cartwheeled past him and spun on the spot, back in the middle of the ring. A smattering of cautious
applause
broke out from the I-4 supporters. Jaxon’s head turned toward the audience. If he won this battle, they would pay for their treachery.

He stayed where he was, with his back facing me. An open invitation to strike. It would have been irresistible to most participants, but I knew him too well to take the bait.

“Rotten ploys, Jaxon,” I said. “Last I checked, no voyant used a cane to touch the æther.”

“Yet you seem to be dancing out of its way, O my lovely.” The cane’s blade dragged across the flagstones, sharp enough to leave sparks in its wake. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say that was a sign of fear. Now, tell me—where did you learn these pretty pirouettes?”

“From a friend.”

“Oh, I’m quite sure you did. Tall sort of fellow, is he?” His footsteps matched my heartbeat. “Variable eye color?”

He didn’t swing for me; instead, he stabbed with the spring-loaded blade. Its reach was much farther than I’d anticipated, forcing me into an awkward step backward. “In a manner of speaking,” I said, ignoring the laughs in the audience. “Are you seeing him behind my back?”

“I know more than you might think about the sort of company you keep. More than I care to know, my sweet traitor.”

It sounded like banter to the watching crowd, who expected a good show for this unprecedented finale, but there was meaning underneath the mockery. He knew about Warden, but what else did he know? When I looked at him now, with the raw clarity of adrenaline, I saw a mask with empty eyes, soulless as a mannequin.

“Of course, this is a duel,” Jaxon said, “much like the duels of the monarch days, when honor was settled with blood and steel. Whose honor are we settling today, I wonder?” Swing, spin. “You know very well that your reign will never be accepted by these good people.
Even
if you win this fight, you will always be remembered as the Underqueen who murdered her own mime-lord. And, as rumor has it, the Underlord.” Spin, clash, an arc of sparks. “I don’t think we’ve yet thought of a name for someone so callous, so ungrateful, that she turns on the man who kept her safe for years. Who fed her and taught her and put silk on her precious back.”

“Call me whatever you want,” I said. “London is what matters. London and her people.”

That got a fair few cheers from the spectators, enough to ratchet up my confidence.

“As if you care for people.” His voice was too soft for the crowd to hear. “You’re lost to them, Paige, and London does not forget a traitor. It will suck you down, O my lovely. Into the tunnels and the plague pits. Into its dark heart, where all the traitors’ bodies sink.”

The cane arced over his head this time, hitting home an inch from my right foot. Had it met its mark, it would have broken every toe. He spun it in his hands and took a step back.

“I think we’ve both established that we excel in good old-fashioned
mêlée
,” he said, “but perhaps we ought to show the world what sort of gifts we hide beneath these simple exteriors. The first act should be yours, I think. After all, only I have ever known the true extent of your abilities. You ought to have your chance to shine.”

Jaxon was going to take my head off if I didn’t get hold of a sturdy barrier to block him. I pushed my spirit to the edge of my dreamscape.

Veins swelled in Jaxon’s temples. He tried to hide it, but he gritted his teeth against the sudden influx of pressure that hammered at his dreamscape. My eyes ached, but I kept pushing until I felt something crack inside his mind. Blood wept from his nose, a shock of red against his waxy skin. He lifted a hand to touch it, staining the white silk fingers of his gloves.

“
Blood,” he said. “Blood! Is she no stronger than a haemato-mancer, this so-called dreamwalker?”

Their laughs seemed distant now. My ears closed as my sixth sense took control. Jaxon thought I’d fall when I left my body, and it was entirely possible that he was right. I’d not yet mastered the art of staying on my feet. I should have practiced more often with Warden. Like a fool, I’d allowed myself to be distracted by him.

I snapped my attention back to meatspace when Jaxon attacked with his cane again, swinging and stabbing with vicious accuracy. When he aimed at my side, so hard the air whistled in its wake, I brought my blade to meet it. The metal deflected the force before it could shatter one side of my ribcage.

My feet carried me away from the next onslaught. A spring of laughter welled up inside me. Some swings I met with the blade, others with evasion. I thought I heard a growl of frustration from Jaxon. Amused by the chase, the julkers took up another chant:

Ring a ring o’ roses, Binder’s got a nosebleed.

Defeat her, the Dreamer! She won’t fall down!

“How appropriate,” Jaxon called to them. “Some say that song is linked to the Black Death. My first strike will be with a dear friend, who died of bubonic plague in 1349.”

I soon worked out what he meant. One of his boundlings hurled itself from the corner and crashed into my dreamscape.

At once, a hideous slideshow of images went ripping past my eyes. Blackened fingers. Buboes swelling under my skin, bursting under the weight of a hen’s feather. Most spooled spirits were easy to force out, but this one was under Jaxon’s control, carrying his willpower into its attacks. I staggered, fighting to see past the horror: mass graves, red crosses barring doors, leeches growing fat on blood, all growing out of my poppy anemones. Through his
boundlings,
Jaxon could manipulate the appearance of my dreams-cape. My defenses expelled the spirit just in time to throw myself out of the way.

Not quite fast enough. As my arm came up, the cane-blade tore down my left side, leaving a shallow wound from underarm to hip. The base of my spine hit the stone with a force that jarred what felt like every nerve. I rolled to avoid the second slash. My blade lay a few feet away.

Imagine your spirit as a boomerang. A light throw and a quick return.

I needed a few seconds to reach the blade. My spirit lashed into his dreamscape. Jaxon reeled back with a shout of anger. As soon as I made impact, I returned to my body, drenched in sweat, and crawled toward the knife. Behind me, he swung blindly with his cane. Another surge of blood flowed from his nostrils, past his lips and chin.

“Dislocation,” Jaxon said, pointing at me. “You see, friends—the dreamwalker can leave the confines of her own body. She is the highest of all seven orders.” When I launched myself at him, he blocked my offensive with the cane, holding both ends. “But she forgets herself. She forgets that without flesh, there is no anchor to the earth. To one’s autonomy.”

With a sudden shove and a deft hack, he knocked my legs out from under me and pitched me on to my back. My left side was soaked, the white silk of my blouse tarnished with red. I could feel it trickling from my gashed collar, oozing down my chest to my stomach.

“Now,” he said, “I do believe it’s my turn. Say hello to another friend of mine.”

Sweat ran down my neck. I readied myself, snapping up every defense, imagining my dreamscape with walls as dense as those of an unreadable.

The spirit hit me.

Oxygen
ignited in my throat.

Stakes pinned my clothes to the earth. All around me, my flowers were withering away as easily as paper. The boundling took the form of a shadow-figure in my hadal zone, laughing from afar. I recognized that laugh.

The London Monster, back to get me.

From out of the earth of my mind, new flowers rose and bloomed, shaking blood from their petals. Artificial flowers, wrapped into posies with lengths of barbed wire. Spikes burst from between their silken petals. In meatspace, my hands hit the floor of the Rose Ring. The pendant was burning on my chest, trying to force the creature’s pictures from my mind, but Jaxon was fighting to keep it rooted. In meatspace, Jaxon raised his cane to strike. One blow to my head, and all of this would stop.

No.

It wasn’t just my life that hung in the balance. If I didn’t defeat this enemy, others would rise up and seize the syndicate. Everything would be lost. Liss’s and Seb’s deaths, Julian’s sacrifice, Warden’s scars—all of it would have been for nothing. I swung my head under Jaxon’s cane. I willed the Monster gone, willed it until my dream-form screamed with the effort. The earth trembled beneath me, and a rolling wave turned the artificial flowers on their heads, burying their spikes in the earth. The London Monster screamed as my poppies bloomed around him. My defenses slammed back up, and he was pitched into the æther.

When my vision cleared, Jaxon was perfectly still, both hands folded on the top of his cane. A strand of hair had worked its way loose from the oil, and his breathing was heavy with the effort of keeping control. Still, a smile was playing on his lips.

“Very good,” he said.

My blade was in one of his hands, the cane in the other. Fury swelled from the darkest parts of me. I seized a candlestick from a
terri
fied libanomancer and used it to block the cane. When he struck with the knife, I used the candlestick to knock it from his hand and into mine. As soon as my fist closed around it, my wrist flicked up. A scarlet line appeared above Jaxon’s eyebrow. A smear of paint on a blank canvas.

“Ah. More blood.” His gloves were more red than white. “There are pints of it in my veins, O my lovely.”

“Is it blood or absinthe?” I caught his cane in my hands when he thrust it toward me. Fire blazed along my left side. “Not that it matters,” I said softly. “I can spill it all either way.”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” he said. My hands were slick, hardly gripping the ebony. “I need a little more of it, you see. I have one more trick before the grand finale.”

I kicked out with the side of my boot, catching his knee. Jaxon’s grip loosened. And somehow, I wrenched the cane against his throat.

Both of us grew still. His pupils were tiny dots of hatred.

“Go on,” he whispered.

The blade of the cane pressed against his neck, where his jugular pulsed with blood. My hands trembled.
Do it, Paige, just do it.
But he’d saved my life, my sanity.
He’ll come back to haunt you if you don’t
. But he’d been like my father, taught me and sheltered me, saved me from a life lived without knowledge of my gift.
You’re an item of his property. That’s why he saved you. He doesn’t care, he never cared.
He had given me a world in Seven Dials.
He wouldn’t listen when it mattered.

My hesitation cost me. His right fist punched up and caught the underside of my chin, right where the Wicked Lady had cut me open. I staggered back, almost retching at the pain, before the same fist crashed into my ribcage. The crack of bone resonated through my body, and I fell to my knees with a cry of agony. The audience shouted out: some cheering, some booing. Whistling, Jaxon drew the full sword from inside the hollowed cane.