Heart's Blood(3)

"Conjury," she cried. "Great and powerful conjury was worked here! Magic from the depths of hell." Didn't the woman have any other metaphors?

All eyes snapped to Grey. Eyes filled with rage.

He drew himself up straight, refusing to cower. He did hope Toby arrived quite soon with that policeman. "You might want to scarper," he said to Pearl from the corner of his mouth.

"I'll stick." She backed off a step. "But from here. You might need someone on the outside." And her features blurred. She became unnoticeable, unimportant.

A man's rough shout rose over the rising angry mutter. "Demons come from 'ell. Conjurers kill to summon demons!"

"Conjury cannot summon demons." Grey spoke loudly and precisely, hoping the locals' ingrained deference toward their "betters" would outweigh their native resentment of those born to privilege, at least temporarily. "Only God has power over hell's demons. God and their master, Satan, who works according to his own whims and not those of petty mortals. Satan may have been present during this abomination." He let his rage and horror into his voice. "But Satan's presence was not due to conjury."

" 'Ere! Wot's all this, then?" The policeman-and Toby, presumably-had arrived at last.

Grey took advantage of the distraction to slip his bloody handkerchief to Pearl and watched it vanish into her blur. He expected to be taken up for questioning at the very least, and wanted to be sure the handkerchief with its innocent blood got to Amanusa. Who knew what would happen to it, or to him, if the police found it in his pocket?

The people in the crowd all spoke at once, allowing the uniformed man through to see the body. Grey could pick out the words "murder" and "conjury" and "hell" from the cacophony. He saw fingers point at him, felt hands grab and hold him, felt the little jabs and vicious pinches where the bobby couldn't see.

He couldn't see Pearl's blur anymore. He hoped she got away. He hoped he didn't see her little elfin face again. Not unless he was there when she delivered the handkerchief to Amanusa's justice. He didn't need an apprentice. Especially not a tempting little morsel like this one.

The policeman blew his whistle. Other officers arrived. Higher-ups were sent for, and a detective to begin inquiries into the murder. The hands holding Grey were exchanged for policeman's hands, and then for manacles. Eventually he was put into a wagon and transported to the nearest police station, where he was locked up and left to rot.

Or to contemplate his dire situation. Whichever came first.

While Grey felt very much as if he were already rotting, and while most would agree that he had always been spoiled rotten, he thought he ought to try contemplation first. It seemed more productive than rot.

Astonishingly enough, given his checkered past, Grey had never actually been arrested before. Not the sort of arrest where one had one's wrists pinioned by dashedly uncomfortable, heavy, cold, iron manacles and was placed in a dank, cold, stone-walled cell with an iron door that closed with a forbidding, permanent-sounding echoey clang. While still wearing the uncomfortable, hard, rough, cold manacles.

Grey considered calling out, requesting the manacles be removed, but he rather doubted anyone could hear him, and if they did, he doubted even more that they would comply with his request. He was a conjurer. Next to sorcery, conjury was the most feared of all the magics.                       
       
           



       

Since there hadn't been a sorceress in existence the past few hundred years, until Amanusa took up the mantle so recently, conjury suffered the slings and arrows of the superstitious and fearful. Likely these poor ignorant souls thought cold iron a bar to his magic, as if he were one of the fae.

The only thing that barred his magic was the willingness of the spirits to rise, and that depended on the rise of the moon and the dark of the night. Mostly.

He sighed as he slumped against the wall behind him. The cell was small, but it didn't need to be large, as it held nothing but a solid metal bunk hung from the wall with heavy chains, where he now sat, and a bucket for a chamber pot. At least the place was dry, though this near to the Thames, "dry" was a relative term. He saw no actual droplets of water trickling down the gray stone blocks of the walls.

There were ghosts, of course. He could sense them all through the building, which had been properly warded by a government conjurer to keep them at bay. He supposed he could entertain himself by counting up the ghosts, or reinforcing the local man's work. Later, maybe.

Ghosts were tetchy. One never knew what might set them off, and unlike spirits, they weren't reasonable. They'd been trapped on earth, usually by the violent circumstances of their deaths, and those circumstances sent them out of control. Or would once night fell. Ghosts were as shackled to night as-as his hands by these manacles.

He tried to be grateful that they'd shackled his hands in front rather than behind, so he could use the chamber pot when it became necessary. Which, actually, it rather was, since he'd woken not long ago and hadn't yet made his toilette.

That took up a few minutes of time, which then became instantly endless again. Grey feared he wasn't very good at this contemplation business, and even worse at rotting. He needed something to do.

The blasted cell had a tiny window high in the wall at the end opposite the door, nearly blocked by other buildings crowded around. It let in a pale watery shade of almost-light, and did not allow him any view of the sky when he tried looking out it. Yesterday had been a daylight moon, rising at 9:33 a.m. and setting at about 4 p.m. The days were getting shorter, but hadn't yet reached December's darkness, so he had had to deal with a strip of moonless daylight before nightfall had given back his magic.

Today would be a daylight moon as well, as would the next several. He didn't have his charts to know the exact time of moonrise, but it would be sometime between 10:30 and 10:45 a.m. He felt his waistcoat pockets again. No, he did not have his watch. Whether stolen or left behind in his night of . . . forgetfulness, he didn't have it now to know what time it was and whether the moon, or any spirits, were awake.

He had one spirit who would answer his call whatever the time. But he hated to disturb her. Surely he was not so feeble that he could not endure a few hours of isolation without having to conjure up a bit of distraction. And he didn't dare risk disturbing a ghost without a spirit to back him up, even in broad daylight. Relatively speaking. It wasn't precisely broad. More watery gray.

Grey lay down on his hard metal bunk, without the comfort of even a single thin, moth-eaten blanket, and threw an arm up over his eyes. Of course, since his hands were bound together, the other arm came, too, and he nearly brained himself with the blasted manacles. The weight of his arms dangling one from the other made the cuffs dig even deeper into his wrists. And now that he was motionless, rotting, his body reminded him that the whole of it still ached. Especially his head.

No, his face. His forehead and his cheekbones and his nose and even the hinge of his jaw throbbed and pounded as if they'd been stuffed with lint and set afire, and then placed in a linen press and the wheel turned till it crushed him.

A faint idea stirred in the depths of his brain, possibly rolling to the surface, but it sank again when a voice came whispering through the door.

"Mister Carterette?"





2




HE KNEW THAT voice, with its husky, dusky tones crawling inside him to twist up his innards. He knew that mispronunciation. He lowered his arms and sat up.

There was a little window in the door. It had been opened and a pair of eyes peeped over the bottom rim. Pearl wasn't so tall, was she? Standing on her toes, likely.

"What are you doing here?" Was that a snap in his voice? What happened to the languid, disinterested dilettante, the Grey Carteret everyone knew and . . . tolerated? "And it's ‘Carteray,' not ‘Carterette.' ‘Carterette' sounds like I've 'et' something, and I ain't." Damn. He was letting his annoyance show. She shouldn't have followed him to this dismal place.

"I'd like to say I've come to break you out, but alas, that is beyond my capacity." She sounded more refined than he did. How had she wound up in this part of London? In those clothes?

"Why did you come, then?" He glowered at her. One of his best tricks, glowering.

"To see who you wanted me to inform that you've been tossed in clink." The slang term combined oddly with her educated speech. "If no one knows you're here, who knows when they'll let you out? Maybe never."

She had a point. Eventually, they would have to either charge him with a crime or let him go. English law was funny that way. But Grey didn't know how long that "eventually" might be, and once they charged him, he doubted they would let him go. Not for murder. Especially since he was who he was.

"All right." Grey didn't have to think. "Go to Henry Tomlinson. He's magist-"

"Magister of the alchemist's guild. I know." Pearl's tone sounded snappish, too, but her eyes had gotten big. Impressed her, had he?

"Yes. Well. He's a friend. Got a big house near mine in Albe-"

"Magician's Street. I know."