Chapter 42 - Part 2: Taking the Bait (Patreon)

Aria had reached the bottom landing by the time I caught up, one hand on the newel post, swinging herself round it. Isabella waited by the outer door with her wings folded flat.

"Finally." Aria let go of the post and fell in beside me, bumping my hip with hers. "So? What did you and Professor Blue talk about? Was it dirty? Tell me it was dirty."

"Second-year material." I held the door for them both. Outside, the air was warm and smelled of ash from the forges past the gardens. "It pertains to the structural distinction between—"

"Ugh, no. Stop." She clapped both hands over her ears and walked backwards down the path. "Stop right there. I take it back, I don't want to know, I'm, like, physically allergic."

I laughed. Three syllables of pertains, and she had dropped the whole question on the step behind her.

"Your place, then?" I said to Isabella. "After the last seminar."

"Mine." She turned toward the main building and her tail settled against the back of her skirt. "Brutus will have wine ready."

*

The lift opened onto black marble, and the air coming out of the flat was cooler than the street. The warmth of the walk went off my arms by the time I'd crossed the entrance hall. Brutus stood at the far end of it with a tray and three glasses already poured. His eyes were on the floor.

Isabella took hers first. Aria took two, put one in my hand without looking, and kept going until she reached the sofa. She dropped onto it sideways with her legs over the armrest.

I took the armchair by the window. Isabella sat in the other one, back straight, the glass balanced on her knee. Brutus set the tray on the obsidian table and went back behind the kitchen counter, where he wiped a surface that was already clean.

"So," I said. "The undead. How are we doing this?"

"First, we find where they are coming from."

Aria let her head fall back over the arm of the sofa so she could look at Isabella upside down. "Isn't that the caves? Up north? Everyone knows it's the caves."

"It is the caves." Isabella turned her glass a quarter turn on her knee. "The Northern Caves run for miles. Knowing it is the caves tells us very little."

I drank. The wine was dark and dry and colder than the room. "Go back a step. How did they get into the caves in the first place?"

Aria rolled onto her stomach to stare at me. "Wait. You don't know?"

"Not really."

"You. Of all people." She pointed at me with the glass. "Miss reads-the-footnotes. Miss stays-behind-to-ask-Professor-about-second-year-stuff."

"Forgive me for not knowing much about a world I've lived in for barely a month."

I lifted the glass and drank more than I'd meant to.

Isabella's eyes came up to me. Aria sat up on her knees. Then she grinned.

"Oh no. Oh, the poor princess." She pressed the back of her wrist to her forehead. "Shut up in her great big palace, maids brushing her hair a hundred strokes a night, never once allowed down to see how the little people live—"

"I was asleep, Aria."

"—and then she wakes up and has to share a room with a commoner. Tragic. I'm in tears." She was laughing, and she slid down the cushions until her horns knocked the armrest.

I laughed with her. Isabella's eyes went back to her glass. I had meant the entire Hell, not the city, and I let Aria keep it.

"If we might return to the caves." Isabella waited until Aria had righted herself. "The undead were mortals. Damned souls, re-embodied and sold up from the Crucible. Some of them ran. Some were let go, because whoever owned them had grown bored and wanted to watch what they did with the gate open." She drank. "Either way, the bodies they were given are still mortal. They age. They break. And when they die out here, they go back to Pandemonium."

"To be minted," I said.

"Most of them, by then. Running does nothing to lighten a soul." She set the glass down on the table. "So they made arrangements with other escapees. The ones with a gift for necromancy. A corpse that keeps walking does not go back to the Crucible."

"Honestly? Can't blame them." Aria stretched out on her back and balanced her glass on her stomach. "Getting squished into a coin sounds like the worst. Like, the worst." She frowned at the ceiling. "Though if they'd been trained properly they'd never have run in the first place, would they? Someone did a really sloppy job. They wouldn't dream of freedom if they'd been broken in right."

Brutus folded the cloth into a square and set it down beside the sink.

I held out my glass, and Brutus came round the counter and filled it, and went back.

"That still doesn't tell me why the caves," I said.

"I was coming to it." Isabella's mouth moved at one corner. "The caves are remote. Most demons do not care to go and look. A few find the whole arrangement amusing and leave it be on purpose. And they are a nuisance, so nobody spends the effort to clear them out. Not until they grow rowdy, which they do, every so often." She lifted one hand from her knee and let it fall. "Then the city sends someone in. Enough of them are minted or retrained, and the rest go quiet again for a while."

"Just like now," Aria said.

"Just like now."

I looked from one of them to the other. "So we're a cleaning crew."

"That is the gist of it."

Aria snorted into her wine.

I sat forward and put my glass on the table beside Isabella's. "All right. What did you have in mind?"

*

Brutus held the lift gate for us with two fingers and kept his eyes on the floor while we stepped in. The doors closed on the cool white of the hall, and the cage dropped six floors.

The street was warmer than the flat by a long way. I felt it first on my wings and then on the backs of my knees. Aria shook herself out on the pavement, arms over her head, and hooked one of them through mine before we had gone three steps.

"So." She steered us towards the bridge over the channel. Below it the magma ran slow and orange, and the heat came up through the crystal under our feet. "Map. Now? Or now-now?"

"Now."

"Ooh, decisive."

"Kara gave the assignment this morning," I said. "By tonight half the first years will have thought of it."

"And tomorrow they'll cost, like, a small fortune." She bumped her hip into mine. "Not that you'd notice. You could probably buy the whole shop and the old guy behind the counter."

"I don't want the old guy."

"Nobody wants the old guy, Lily-pad, that's not the point."

A cart came across the bridge the other way, drawn by something low and scaled, and we stepped to the rail to let it pass. Aria leaned her elbows on the iron and looked down at the channel while it went by.

"Speaking of tomorrow." Her tail had stopped moving. "Are we actually doing the caves? Like, actually going in."

"You heard Isabella."

"I heard Isabella say a lot of words."

"She wants the undead mapped. Where they go, how many, when they move." I pushed off the rail. "We can't do that from the library."

Aria caught up and took my arm again. "Okay, but every girl in our year is going to be crawling over those caves with a lantern and a stick. Won't that, I don't know, get in the way?"

"It helps." I waited for her to look at me. "The undead will be busy with them. Nobody's going to bother three girls fixing little stones to a wall. We only have to be careful nobody works out what the stones are for."

"Huh." She chewed on that for half a street. A shopkeeper was pulling down a shutter on our left, and the crash of it covered whatever she said next. She tried again. "I didn't even know those were a thing. The aura... the something-aura-somethings."

"Seismic aura scanners."

"Yes! Those." She flung her free hand out and nearly caught a passing imp across the ear. It swore at her. She blew it a kiss. "Bella says it like everyone keeps a box of them under the bed."

"I didn't know they existed either."

"Hm." Aria drew the sound out. She leaned into my shoulder and looked up at me sideways, chin tucked. "You sure?"

"Yes."

"Because you didn't even blink. She got the little case out and opened it and I went ooh, and you just sort of nodded at them. Like they were spoons."

I had nodded. Five discs in black velvet, each with a rune ring round the rim, and the moment she said they picked up movement through stone I had seen the grid in my head and the spacing between them. Geophones on a survey line, a lecturer at Imperial pacing out a car park with a tape measure. None of that would go into words for Aria.

"I've heard of something like them," I said. "Before."

"Before." She let it hang a second. Then she shrugged with her whole body and her tail started up again, flicking at the backs of my calves. "Figures. You've probably heard of everything. You probably came out of the egg reading."

"Succubi don't come out of eggs."

"You might've been an unique case then."

The cartographer's was on the corner of the next street, a narrow front with the shutters still up and a lamp burning in the window behind a rolled chart. Aria saw it, saw me see it, and dug her fingers into my arm before I could turn towards the door.

"Okay, so. Unrelated. Do you want to come with me somewhere? There's this place on Cinder Row, and they've got a discount on today, a third off everything, and it ends at the twelfth bell, and they have this set in red that would look criminal on you—"

"We're buying a map."

"Yeah, but after." She was already walking backwards in front of me, both my hands in hers, pulling. Her eyes were wide and purple and entirely innocent. "After the map. Map first. I'm very responsible."

The lamp in the window flickered. The shopkeeper inside looked up at the two of us on his step and went back to his ledger.

I let out a breath through my nose.

"Fine."