The White City

The White City
Copyright © 2010 by Sarah Wishnevsky.
All rights reserved.

Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2010 by Patrick Arrasmith.

All rights reserved.

Interior design Copyright © 2010 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

All rights reserved.

First Edition

ISBN:
978-1-59606-383-9

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

www.subterraneanpress.com

for Beth and for Emma

Moscow

Kitai Gorod

May 1903

Lady Abigail Irene Garrett gazed up at the rose-colored walls of the Cathedral of the Theophanes and frowned as if its elaborate white gingerbread trim were a personal affront. The creature who observed her held his silence, watching her profile as she craned back her neck. Her cropped hair broke in strands of blond and ash around her collar.

A summery wind blew her open coat wide and unraveled the scarf from her neck so it fluttered behind her like a creamy banner. The reflected stain of sunset across the western sky, the last light of the sun, dyed the silk a shade that might have seemed—to merely mortal eyes—not too dissimilar from the walls of the monastery.

But the creature who watched her was better adapted to noticing subtle color differences by halflight than any living man, and he could pick out layered peaches and vermilions in the sunset that no pigment slapped on a wall could imitate. Oils, in the hands of a master—Chinese red, Alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow—might come close.

“If this is the Chinese City,” Abby Irene said dourly, “you might expect a few Chinese persons.”

“Forgive me,” said the creature, who still sometimes called himself Don Sebastien de Ulloa, though that was only one of the dozens of names he’d worn across the centuries. “Shall I endeavor to have a few imported, or will you content yourself with assurances of postponement? I feel certain an excursion by dirigible to far Cathay should
remedy the egregious lack of Chinamen—”

Abby Irene turned her long neck and her shoulders toward him, the corner of her mouth quirking upwards. The gesture made the scandalously unbuttoned collar of her shirtwaist gap, revealing the sorcerer’s tattoo tracing a scarlet column of alchemical symbols from her collarbone to vanish between her breasts. The names of quicksilver, white phosphorous, and red arsenic were written over her heart, and the creature—
Sebastien
—knew it for the outward mark of a vow.

He wanted to chase the marks down to the human, living warmth of her belly and drown his senses in the scent of her blood. Whether she read the desire in his face or not, she smiled. “I’ll settle for Chinese tea, for the time being. “It’s
cold
.”

It was a calm night in early summer, but Abby Irene had grown accustomed to the swelter of the new world, and she was no longer a young woman. She felt chills deeply that she would have shrugged off when she lived in London.

“Tea, I think we can find you.” Sebastien smiled with closed lips and offered his arm most gallantly.

She took it, tugging her coat closed with the other small hand. “Lead me, my prince.”

“I was never a prince.”

Her boot nails didn’t click on the packed dirt, but that was no reflection on the precision of her stride. She kept up easily; thirty years of detecting made a woman strong, and Abby Irene had never needed to lean on Sebastien’s arm. Some day she would; some day he’d bury her, unless she left him first. But now she squeezed his arm with fingers that couldn’t dent the dry flesh beneath his shirt and asked, “What were you?”

He ducked his head. “I was prenticed a stonemason.”

He hadn’t thought the trade of his youth so shocking, but Abby Irene stumbled and let go of his arm to recover her balance, skirts swirling about her ankles. She wobbled a little, but stayed up, and Sebastien kept his hands carefully at his sides.

“Apprenticed,” she said.

He nodded. “I think. It was a long time gone, Abby Irene. Memory never grows less fallible. Even for the blood. Especially for the blood. And that, mi corazon, is a kindness.”

She had her head cocked aside, that Crown Investigator gleam in her eyes. The scent of her arousal stung him. “You were young.”

“Eighteen,” he said. “Nineteen. I don’t remember exactly.” He scrubbed his hands across his face—a gesture for her, a memory of human movement rather than something he felt the need for on his own behalf. “There was a year or two to run on my contract.”

She frowned so that he knew all the questions she was not asking—
how did you meet her? Why did you choose to die? Did she even give you a choice?

What was your name?

He blessed her, that she did not choose to ask them. Instead, she took his arm again and once more fell into step, permitting him to lead her to her requested tea.

The shop he had in mind had been a revolutionary café when he was here last, but times had changed and he imagined so had its clientele. And if not, well—it wasn’t as if Abby Irene had never met an anarchist before. Moscow was Europe’s most populous city, eight hundred years grown from its humble beginnings, a jewel on the Moskva with its ancient rings of walls, its avenues and cathedrals, its theatres and ballets. Sebastien knew he should have found its earthen streets and horse-drawn streetcars incongruous, but to him they only seemed homey. Comforting: evidence that this city was a city as cities should be.

“This is still not tea,” she reminded, as he paused to let a horsecart pass.

He covered her hand with his own. “Follow me. I know just the place.”

Because he took them down a side street to avoid a laborers’ protest by the university, it was all of twenty minutes before she sat across from him at a linen-covered table, her slim hands cupping a tall glass in a silver holder. The name of the café had not changed—it was still called
Kobalt
—but the clientele he remembered, of painters and poets and young Jack Priest’s revolutionary friends talking anarchy over scarred tables—that was gone, replaced by this shabby, gaslit elegance.

And this too shall pass
.

Abby Irene leaned forward as if inviting the curls of heat rising from the samovar on her left side to coil through her disarrayed hair. She swirled her tea in the glass and smiled at him. “Thank you. This is lovely.”

“And restorative, I hope.”

The aroma of tea was pleasant to Sebastien, though he couldn’t have said how it might have seemed to a mortal man. He had come to his current state of undeath long before encountering his first infusion of
Camellia sinensis
. But he could also detect the smells of her bread and butter, and of the tablespoon of strawberry jam she had stirred into the hot drink, and
those
nauseated and cloyed.

Human food
.
So complicated.
He drew himself back from his introspection to find Abby Irene gazing at him speculatively.

She pressed a fingertip to the polished silver handle and let the weight of her hand turn the glass. It left no mark on the tablecloth.

Softly, unsettled, Abby Irene said, “There’s nowhere in this city I could take you where you have not already been.”

“You’ve never been in Moscow before,” Sebastien said, reasonably, wishing she would eat her bread a little faster—or perhaps send it away. But no, she’d need her strength. Better if she dined. “And I have, many times. That wouldn’t be any different if I were a human thing.”

“But a human thing wouldn’t have seen it built stone by stone.”

To speak with absolute literal precision, neither had he, but he was willing to allow the metaphor—for its beauty if nothing else. He was glad they had not gone to London. She would have hated having him there, knowing her own native brick and cobble with an intimacy her own life was too short to encompass.

She frowned down at her glass. When her fingers rippled restlessly, a flat silver and garnet band caught the light. Another wampyr would know it for a mark of her allegiance to Sebastien, but seeing it now annoyed him. If you lived long enough,
every
place was equally an exile. But after even a few years in the New World, coming back to the old—with its traditions and elaborations, its codes of conduct and its strictures and its rules—it chafed more than Sebastien had expected.

He was old enough to ignore most of the social niceties. But he wouldn’t take risks with the safety of his court. In Europe, Abby Irene—and their friend, Mrs. Phoebe Smith—must go tagged as his property like city dogs.

As if oblivious to his interest, Abby Irene tore off a piece of black bread and tucked it into her mouth. She ate like a princess, meticulous and particular. Sebastien enjoyed watching her: she looked something like a (dowager) princess, too—slender and fair in that English Rose sort of way, with her sleek graying hair cropped fashionably short and the gold-framed spectacles she had just recently overcome her vanity to wear perched on the bridge of her nose.

“It’s the curse of a relationship with a more experienced man.” Her moment of melancholy seemed to have faded, because she gave him one of her wry half-smiles and picked up her tea. “It gets harder and harder to feign proper naïvete. At my age, I should treasure the opportunity to play the ingénue.”

Sebastien let his chin rest on his hand. As he was not dining, he hadn’t removed his gloves, but the chill of flesh cooled by the autumn evening outside still permeated gray kid. He thought about what would warm him, watching the light pulse flutter in Abby Irene’s lovely throat. It came to Sebastien that he must dine, too, and not from either of his companions—he had drawn from each of them more recently than he liked. Travel was exhausting, and the chill and pallor would not leave his flesh until fresh blood infused it.

Well. Moscow was a cosmopolitan city. And one—as Abby Irene had mentioned so disconsolately—with which he was tolerably familiar. Sebastien tugged at his watchchain—another antique affectation, and one he needed to rid himself of soon if he meant to stay
au courant
, though he had not quite reconciled himself to wristwatches yet—and opened the case under the table’s edge.

Abby Irene set the crust of her bread down on the plate and lifted her chin, stretching skin that began to grow slack. “Poor thing,” she said. “You must be starving.”

“Moscow has a club,” he said. Not an untruth, but a misdirection, and even as he said it he wondered why he felt the need to dissemble. Others lied to their courts, or did not trouble to lie. Sebastien would have preferred to think of his warm companions as—well, as companions. “Several, in fact. Shall I meet you at the ballet?”

She sighed, but it was more affectation than genuine distress. If she were upset in truth, he would have read it in her pulse rate, her respiration, her scent. She lifted one elegant hand, leading with the wrist, and brushed him away with affected disdain. “Go.”

“Are you certain?” He glanced over his shoulder, trying to catch the waiter’s eye. Abby Irene didn’t need his money—certainly not for tea and a slice of bread—but it was a matter of pride to care for one’s court.

“Creature of the dark,” she intoned, “fly from me. The Moscow nights are brief in May.” She hesitated, but could not keep a stern face any longer. Her pink mouth curved. “Seriously, Sebastien. I’ll see you in an hour or so. Just don’t leave me all alone in my box, or I’ll have to seduce some tender scion of minor nobility just to keep up appearances.”

Sebastien pushed his chair back and stood. He bowed over Abby Irene’s hand and kissed the ring he’d placed there.

«
Enchantée, mademoiselle,
»
he said, and slipped back before the sorcerer could cuff his ear.

Outside the café, the brief summer night still teemed with people. It was a Saturday, and the Muskovites were making the most of mild weather. Lamps flickered on faces and ladies’ fashionable hats—the Paris styles of two or three seasons past. Sebastien closed his eyes briefly and breathed deep, bringing the scent of the city within.