Havemercy Read online

  I couldn’t have said why I indulged in such a torture night after night. It certainly wasn’t my business to look after Rook, and there was no reason now to wait up for him as there once had been. The only thing I could come up with, staring at the ceiling in the darkened common room while my brother raced off to risk his life or give th’Esar’s men more time to win the war, was that I had a duty, however misplaced, and that it was mine and no one else’s.

  Perhaps I’d given up the right to look after Rook when I hadn’t called him brother straightaway, but if I didn’t do it, I didn’t know who would, and that thought kept me up much later than the explosions ever did.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HAL

  Two men died, and three women, making five in total since I’d come. This was why I refused to leave Royston; it was as if I thought that, by remaining at his side, I could ward off death simply with how fiercely I loved him. This was insane, but the room seemed to evoke that after a time in all its inhabitants, the close air laden with fever, the sickly smell of epidemic, of sweat, of unclean bodies tossing and turning without relief.

  On the first day, Royston was so certain that we would be the ones to break the riddle of the fever and find its cure that I could do nothing but believe him.

  “You must find those who are still capable of using their minds against this,” Royston told me, holding one of my hands with both of his. “I would suggest trying Alcibiades—he’s the blond man who keeps grunting at us—as well as Marius, if you can coax him into opening his eyes. You remember, I spoke with him at the party? And then there’s . . . ah, Marcelline, the redhead. Over there, do you see her?”

  I lifted a cup of water to his lips, and he drank greedily. “Yes,” I told him. “I do. I’ll try my best.”

  I had no trouble in coaxing Marius to come, though he insisted first on checking the condition of a pale woman with blonde hair. She was the same woman with the fluttering fan that Royston had been flirting with at the ball, though I hardly recognized her now. Alcibiades and Marcelline agreed to come, as well as a small young man who overhead my conversation and told me his name was Caius. I’d known all along that Caius Greylace was a real person, of course, and not a character from a roman like so many of the others I’d read about, but it was strange to see him living and breathing in front of me. It was almost like encountering Tycho the Brave under the golden dome of the Basquiat. The fever seemed to have struck one of his eyes—the left one—which was gray and filmy as death, but the other was so crystal clear an emerald color that it unnerved me; he reminded me of an old statue with one of its jewel eyes missing.

  “The rest are bemoaning their fate,” he told me in a high, easy voice. “I don’t think you’ll find much help among them, only I did manage a game of High Kings with Berhane earlier this morning. You may ask after her.” He paused, noting my confusion, and added helpfully, “The blonde. With the curls. She may, however, vomit on you; it’s what she did when I won.”

  I gathered Berhane as well, as per Caius’s suggestion, though she required my aid in helping her over to Royston’s cot, where our small group of the bedraggled and feverish was gathered.

  “Ah,” Caius said, making way for the fifth and final addition. “Come sit here by me, darling; if you feel the need to exile your lunch in the same manner in which you exiled breakfast, feel free to do it once more in my hair.”

  “Have you seen your hair lately?” Alcibiades asked wearily. “This isn’t the place for vanity.”

  “Don’t tell Berhane that,” Marius said in a quiet voice, holding out a hand to steady hers while she settled. “She considers it still the highest of priorities.”

  Somewhere far off in the corner of the room, the same young woman began yet another fit of coughing, and as I took my seat at Royston’s bedside we were all momentarily sobered by the sound. It strengthened Royston’s resolve, however, and he even sat up with minimal aid from me.

  “First,” he said. “Caius. What do we know?”

  Caius pushed limp, pale blond hair back from his eerie eyes. “What do I know, you mean,” he said.

  Berhane pursed her lips, leaning her head against Marius’s shoulder. “ Rumors are rampant,” she said. “I don’t know if a single one of us here knows a damn thing about what’s happening. You’re closer to the Esar than all of us—or were, in any case.”

  “Before I began to go blind,” Caius said, without a hint of anything more than cheerful acceptance. “Yes, that is true. I was working on devising some sort of cure, in fact, before the fever took me.”

  “Well?” Royston demanded. “ Caius, now isn’t the time for tangents, and of the two of us—I believe, though I cannot be sure—I’m the better equipped for knocking sense into you than you are for escaping.”

  Caius sighed. “Very well,” he said. “It was a snake.”

  “A snake,” said Alcibiades.

  “That’s preposterous,” Marcelline added.

  “I saw it with my own eyes,” Caius insisted. “A snake. Black as onyx, with eyes like two opals, sparkling and changing color in the light. It was dead, but there it was, curled at the bottom of the Well. The Sisters fished it out, but by then it was too late—the color of the water was turning black as though someone had dumped a pot of ink into it. The only curiosity was that the inky color hadn’t yet finished dispersing, as if the whole thing were paused in time and the clouds of murky black unfurling with very slow precision.”

  “A snake did that,” said Alcibiades.

  “I’m telling you what I saw,” Caius said. “The Esar sent for a group of us. By that point, the Wildgrave and a few others had already taken ill.”

  “He said that he had a fever,” Marius interjected. He sounded more angry than shocked.

  “This was the time of the ball,” Royston said grimly. When Caius nodded, I saw pleasure at having been right mingle in Royston’s expression with displeasure at what being right meant. I offered him water another time, but he shook his head slightly.

  “This was the time of the ball, indeed,” Caius confirmed. “The ball was something of a ruse—I suspected more than a few would realize it. You may have noticed the incongruous lack of our esteemed Majesty at his own party. Grievous poor manners, and I told him as much, but he needed the time to show us what had happened. Then, of course, we set to torturing the Brothers and Sisters of Regina to find out which of the guards was responsible for this. We suspected foul play—naturally, for it could be nothing other—but we had no idea what sort it was, or why a snake, however clearly of magical origin, could poison the Well simply by crawling into it and dying there.” Caius paused for a moment, and without thinking I offered the glass of water to him. Unlike Royston, he took it gratefully, and I steadied his hands against the glass with my own as he drank deeply from it. “Ah. That’s better,” he said, voice indeed sounding much less dry and harsh. “Where was I? Mm, the Brothers and Sisters, and how we tortured them for answers. Yes. As you might suspect, we went through a number before we came to one who knew anything at all.”

  I winced, and turned away. Royston covered my hand on his coverlet with his own, and I tried to force the image from my head. This was a problem that needed solving, and there was no time to let my emotions get the better of me. Yet I became this involved even in my romans, so telling myself it was “only a story” did little good to erase the injustice of the innocent Brothers and Sisters undergoing such an ordeal.

  “Go on,” Royston said quietly.

  Caius nodded. “It was one of the Brothers,” he continued. “He’d been bribed into it—at quite the exorbitant price, I’ll have you know; he would have been a rich man when this was all over if I weren’t so very good at my job. They must have offered to take the stitches out of his lips and everything! In any case, the Ke-Han had reached him, and we’re damned to bastion and back if we know how they did it, but he stole a sample for them. We can only assume it was the analysis of that sample that the Ke-Han employed in
formulating their poison. When they had it perfected, they gave it tangible form in the guise of a snake—it’s a powerful thing, or was before it served its purpose and died there. And, when last I spoke of the matter, common theory was that it was the work of a great many Ke-Han magicians, since their Talents lie more in the natural realm than the subversion of nature. The snake, we have also surmised, was merely for the sake of function; it must have slipped in entirely unnoticed. That, too, was exceedingly clever. I should like to congratulate the man who thought of it.”

  “Before you torture him to death, you mean,” Alcibiades said.

  “Credit where credit is due,” Caius replied smoothly.

  “All this time, then,” Royston said, steering the conversation smoothly back to its purpose, “you can assure us that the men working on the problem have been attempting to devise an antidote to the poison the snake released into the waters of the Well?”

  “Exactly that,” Caius confirmed. “They’ve taken samples from the Well, in much the same way as the Ke-Han did to fashion the poison in the first place. We’ve been seeking to combat this trouble from the same standpoint taken to begin it. I wonder if that’s the proper tack to choose, but I’m no longer, as you may see, on the team of scientists still working to find a cure.”

  “And they’ve tested the snake,” Royston asked.

  “Of course they have,” Caius replied.

  “And they’ve found no cure,” Marius said in a dull voice.

  Caius said nothing at all, though he did gesture around the room. The woman began her coughing again, and our group seemed all too suddenly distracted by the sound.

  “How long have they been working to find it?” Berhane asked, wincing even as she did so.

  “I would say it’s been a month,” Caius answered. “Perhaps a little more than that. I am uncertain as to how long it had been before I was called to the scene, but I assume it was a few days to a little more than a week, and no more.”

  “Seeing as how they wanted you for all the torturing,” Alcibiades said.

  Caius’s smile gleamed. “Something to that effect.”

  “We must read up on everything we know about the Ke-Han magic,” Royston interjected.

  “With what romans?” Marcelline asked. “Whom shall we send to fetch the relevant material? Who will be granted access back inside?”

  I feared at that moment Royston would ask me to do the job, and that I would have to refuse him—for Marcelline was right, and once I left, I’d have no such luck returning.

  “My dear Marcelline,” Royston said, closing his eyes and leaning somewhat heavily against my side. “We are in the Basquiat. Hal has two good legs, two good hands, and two good eyes, in case these facts have all escaped you, and there are in fact fifteen libraries within this building at our disposal.”

  “He won’t be granted access to any of them, either,” Marcelline pointed out, but her dark eyes had been gifted with sudden light.

  “Then he’ll just have to be devious,” Caius replied. “He’s small. He seems clever. He should be able to manage.”

  I didn’t know whether to be touched at their faith in me or overwhelmed by the task now set upon my shoulders. Royston breathed against my side, rasping occasionally but a warm weight that hardened my resolve all the same. There was no time for hesitation, or my own uncertainty in the face of a foreign and somewhat terrifying authority.

  Thom had faced down the Esar for me, after all. I could certainly fetch some romans.

  Royston gave me directions to the nearest of the libraries, then the most thorough, and also the one that was likeliest to have a collection of all accounts of known poisons and their antidotes, until he had to stop halfway through at the perplexed look on my face and call for paper so that he could dictate as I wrote it all down. I was cheered by the smallest of things. That Royston’s voice was yet strong enough to pitch to a yell in order to be heard when many of the others were arguing lit a tiny spark near my heart. It stayed there, glowing and ebbing with Royston’s progress, and I found it harder than I’d thought it might be to actually leave the room with the golden dome to find the romans.

  “Hal,” Royston said, and though his eyes were closed, he was smiling at me. “We can’t do anything more without romans, do you understand?”

  “Forget this mysterious bastion-forsaken snake plague,” said Alcibiades. He didn’t sit up very often anymore, but his opinions were as strident as ever. “You two are what’s going to make me ill.”

  I held very tightly to Royston’s hand, then forced myself to release it, stepping gingerly around the cots strewn haphazardly across the floor. The quicker I left, I reasoned, the quicker I could return, then give the romans to minds that would understand them, unravel this mystery, and take Royston home with me.

  The first library I went to—the one Royston had told me had the most extensive collection of publications on known poisons and antidotes—was a room at the bottom of a spiraling staircase. The walls were fitted with high windows covered in metal filigree, and there was row upon row of impossibly tall stacks that seemed to reach from the floor to the very high ceiling. Hidden in the shadows against the left-hand wall there was a wheeled ladder, and scattered thoughtfully here and there were low, squat chairs with gold feet and small round end tables supporting stained-glass lamps. It was a room clearly designed for the access and reading of romans, and for one full minute I could do nothing but stand there in admiration and longing.

  After a moment of wide-mouthed wonder I thought of Royston, and also of Alcibiades in the cot next to his; of Berhane, who could barely manage to move, of Marius, who looked gaunt as a skeleton, and Marcelline and her red-rimmed eyes, and of Caius, who had tortured people to come to the bottom of this mystery and was nevertheless going blind. I couldn’t take the time to savor the view before me, I told myself rather angrily. There were people depending on my work here.

  Thankfully, the scrap of paper I held in my hand suggested the best place to begin, denoting organization of the romans as set by binding color, then by faded golden number on the spine.

  When I wanted to reach the higher stacks I had to first pile the romans neatly on one of the little round tables, then make my ascent, clutching tightly to the paper list and all the while praying I didn’t fall off and break my neck or anything similarly embarrassing and ruinous.

  It was when I descended for the third time, having at last settled into something of a functioning routine, that I noticed I was no longer alone.

  A woman sat in one of the low chairs, posture-perfect with her legs neatly crossed, making her seat seem more like a throne than a cushioned reading chair. Her dark hair was twisted back from her face in the same fashion as worn by the women in portraits of the old Ramanthine nobility. Her dress was a deep, bloody crimson, and the hem brushed delicately against the floor as she tapped her foot. That was the only delicate thing about her, I thought, and though it was a strange thought to have, I’d never been quite so intimidated by anyone in my life, not even the Esar.

  She was reading the topmost roman I’d left stacked on the table, one finger idly tracing the line of the words, as if she hadn’t seen me yet. When I stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder her head lifted immediately, and I felt as though her black eyes would bore a hole right through my head and out the back if I couldn’t escape the force of her gaze.

  “You aren’t a magician,” she said. Her voice was like the wine Royston had bought in Bottle Alley, the same color as her dress.

  “No,” I said, knowing full well that I had no skill at lying, and that even if I wanted to try, now was certainly not the time to start. “I’m not.”

  “You are the Margrave Royston’s—Hal,” she said, pausing to tuck away a curl that had fallen loose from her chignon.

  I felt the blush before it came, staining my cheeks and throat, but she only smiled, full-lipped and amused, as though I’d done something particularly entertaining.

  “Surely
Royston must have explained to you the rules of the Basquiat and its libraries,” she went on. “There is information here that cannot be read by anyone other than sworn magicians.”

  I drew a breath, thinking once again of that room with all the sick people lying jumbled together on their cots, and how I might very well be their best and only hope at this point to solve anything. I could see, too—and thought I might never forget—the looks of frustration in the magicians’ eyes at being able to do nothing. If I could help in any way, I knew that I had to at least try.

  “We—that is, Royston and I, and some others; I’m not sure of their titles—we believe that there might be an answer in one of these romans as to what’s making everyone sick,” I said at last, in a voice as assertive as I could make it.

  She regarded me for a moment longer, and I had the most curious sensation of something soft sweeping in the corners of my mind.

  “Berhane is a friend of mine,” she said at last. “And little Caius will need something to occupy his mind now that he is no longer the Esar’s lapdog.”

  “I—Oh,” I said. Then, I nearly jumped, for I’d realized all at once what her Talent was—or rather, what it had to be. I hadn’t seen the badge on her chest that would have declared her status as a velikaia, but now, I no longer needed to. She’d taken what information she’d needed from my mind with more precision than I’d removed the romans from their stacks, which meant that she was also a magician, though she didn’t seem nearly as sick as the others.

  She closed the roman and set it to rest on top of the pile with the others, and I saw then that her hands were shaking. As soon as she followed my gaze, she placed them in her lap as if there were nothing at all the matter, and I wondered just how much control she was exerting over her own mind in order to override whatever effect the illness was having upon her body. I wondered why she wasn’t upstairs with everyone else.