CHAPTER 22

Even the vicious weather couldn’t douse the nightlife in the Montmartre district of Paris. The place had a gaiety to it, a joie de vivre that even London couldn’t match. Throngs of students and partygoers swept from one bar to the next, discarding old hangers-on and collecting new ones with every change of location. Artists’ models, courtesans, and dancers orbited around the drinkers in trembling masses of feathers and lace. Those women rarely had to pay for admission to the more private cabarets; their fashionable clothing was the only passport that they needed. The vendors on street corners sold roasted nuts and sweets, little cakes and rolls, hot milk and coffee.

Tables spilled out from Montmartre’s establishments onto the pavements, filling them from wall to kerb, and pedestrians were forced to crowd down the centre of the streets. The buildings leaned closer to each other here, quite unlike the wide avenues of later-built Paris, and parties spilled into upper stories and even onto the roofs. Stamped rhythms echoed on the floorboards as Irene passed bar after bar.

She didn’t make a very convincing young man, but with her short hair and in men’s clothing, and a bit of shadowing on her cheeks, in the twilight pall she could pass for one. A borrowed cap was pulled down low, and she slouched in her cheap overcoat, with a muffler wrapped round her neck. Just another citizen of Paris, out for a good time, too poor to be worth professional attention from the ladies of the night or the tourist-fleecers.

She’d passed under the skeletal arms of the Moulin Rouge windmill, interwoven with red electric lights that threw scarlet streaks across the buildings, the snow, and the faces of the revellers below. Flaring gaslights lit the darkness, and panels of light fell into the streets from the open windows and doorways as she passed them. A small hand tried to slide into her pocket, and she knocked it aside without undue violence. Montmartre was just as ready to prey on its visitors as it was to entertain them.

At that moment, Mu Dan was circling around to the theatre’s entrance in the rue Chaptal. The plan was for her to hang around ostentatiously near the entrance, making herself visible (though absolutely not getting herself kidnapped or assaulted), while Irene sneaked in through the stage door and did some reconnaissance. It was a variation on the tactics that the Countess herself had used—draw attention with a public display and simultaneously make your true move elsewhere. Irene had no objection to stealing a good strategy, any more than to stealing a good book.

As she navigated through the back streets towards the Grand Guignol’s stage door, she considered the theatre’s history. Based in a convent school destroyed during the Reign of Terror, the performances took place in the old chapel, under the mocking gaze of the wooden cherubim in the rafters. It came from a tradition of naturalistic theatre, celebrating real human dramas rather than flamboyant escapism. But it also fed the human passion for cathartic spectacle and horrific violence. Short plays alternated through the performance, a mixture of farces and bloody horror. There was supposed to always be a doctor and nurses present, in case anyone in the audience had a heart attack. Irene rather wished she’d been able to attend a performance herself. It sounded more interesting than the scheduled opera this evening. The theatre might be a crowd-pleasing carnival of torture and death, but it was also genuinely experimental. (Though possibly she was being overly even-handed. Most of the audience probably came for the blood.)

Still, on reflection it also seemed the ideal place for the Blood Countess to pick as a hideout. A theatre that had mock torture and executions on stage? That had a cauldron of stage blood always on the boil because it used so much of it? Perfect. But was it too obvious a choice? Or was it a double bluff?

But one thing was certain: if the Countess was here, and had been for a while, then the whole place should have a higher-than-usual level of chaotic power. Silver should have noticed it, if he’d been checking theatres. Although Silver hadn’t been seen since this morning …

Irene dragged herself back to focus on the current situation. She was reasonably sure she hadn’t been followed from the hotel. Reasonably. It was difficult to be entirely certain, with the streets this crowded. At least she couldn’t see any cats lurking in the shadows or on the rooftops.

In spite of everything that was going wrong, and the danger to herself and to the Library, Irene found herself relaxing in the crowd. It was reassuring to be back among normal human beings, in the middle of this upswelling of life and enthusiasm and art, away from the frozen hauteur and the gold-and-ivory décor of the costly hotels. She wasn’t meant to be a diplomat. She was much happier here in the shadows.

If only there wasn’t so much at stake.

She checked her pocket watch inconspicuously—Mu Dan should be round the front right now, attracting attention before retreating—and she loitered towards the Grand Guignol’s stage door. There was already a queue outside it, though it would be a while till the interval. Placards in black and white listing the night’s performances—THE SYSTEM OF DR. GOUDRON AND PROF. PLUME, MEAT-TICKET, THE CARGO FRAUD, MADEMOISELLE FIFI, A KISS IN THE NIGHT—contrasted with the gaudier pictures beside them. A woman hung impaled on a spike. A white-clad surgeon and nurse leered over the body of a patient strapped to the operating table. Two elderly men in grey suits held a third one down and positioned a scalpel at his eye. The flaring gaslight leached the colours out of the artworks, leaving them in black and white, but the postures and expressions still spoke of drama and horror.

Irene sauntered to the front of the queue, ignoring the mutters from the people she passed, and lowered her voice to speak to the burly stage doorman. “You perceive that I am a person who has a right to go inside and should not be stopped,” she murmured.

“Right you are,” the man said with a nod, and held the door open for Irene, his cigarette still dangling from the corner of his mouth. She slipped through quickly into the narrow hallway beyond, and the rising tide of complaints was cut off by the door closing behind her.

It took her less than a minute to realise that something was badly wrong. While she was hardly an expert in theatrical backstage corridors, she did know that there shouldn’t be so many people in them. It wasn’t just the stagehands carrying props through, or the actors and actresses getting into position. It wasn’t even the pair of nurses, crisply uniformed, making their way to the front of house. (Apparently that bit of the story was true.) There was a constant flow of men—all men, not women, interesting—filtering through the crowded maze of corridors.

And nobody seemed to notice. This was abnormal in itself. Actors and stagehands were territorial: Irene had expected to be challenged half a dozen times in the first few minutes, and the words you perceive that … were on the tip of her tongue. But nobody seemed to notice her, or any of the men drifting through, who were treating the place like some sort of antechamber.

The lights dimmed. The performance was about to start.

Irene couldn’t sense any notable level of chaotic power. The place felt much like the rest of Paris, and certainly nothing like the Fae base at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre. But she was sure that she was on to something. This might not be the Countess’s actual lair, but it could be a gathering point for her servants. She wandered down the current corridor, trying to look as if she knew where she was going, while watching for a possible target to follow.

Then a scream ripped through the air. There was nothing fake about it. The sound was one of genuine pain, genuine insanity, distilled into one single shriek that froze Irene in her tracks. She flinched before she could stop herself.

Two men had just turned the corner—just in from outside, slush still wet on their boots, in the same sort of rough clothing as she was. They both looked at her suspiciously, and Irene realised that she had just identified herself as a total newcomer. A habitué of this place would be blasé about screams from the stage.

She could run. Or she could try to use this to her advantage.

“Do you know where we should go?” she said softly, advancing to meet them. She was grateful that the ongoing play meant they had to keep their voices down. It was easier to fake a man’s tones while whispering. “I’m new here.”

They exchanged glances—the look of conspirators, rather than stagehands. “Go where, and why?” the larger one demanded.

Time for a gamble. “To see her,” Irene said, and tried to put hopeless worship into her voice. “You’ve got to help me. I’ve got to see her again. I need to see her.” She reached for the man’s sleeve, doing her best to imitate the fervour of addiction, practically snivelling. “Look, I can pay …”

He shrugged her off contemptuously, but the suspicion had gone from his eyes. “No need for that, you little rat. Follow us and mind your manners.”

“We’d better get on down,” the second man said. “Come on, let’s get moving.”

He led the way, turning off in a new direction. Irene followed, lagging a few steps behind, conscious of just how close her escape had been. She was surprised they hadn’t even tried to check her identity; they’d just accepted her as one of them without a moment’s hesitation. Did they assume that anyone backstage here was part of the conspiracy? If that was the case, Irene was deep in the middle of a hornets’ nest, and it was going to be very difficult to extricate herself.

The first man pushed aside a rack of costumes—bloodstained shirts, strait jackets, uniforms, nuns’ habits—to reveal a door in the wall behind it. The door opened silently, without even the smallest creak, but the air that came from behind it smelled of the sewers, and dust, and blood. Both the men breathed it in and smiled.

The stairs behind the door, leading down, were of the same stone as the walls outside and the foundations of this building: the basement must date back to when this place had first been built as a chapel. Oil lanterns lit the way as they made their way downwards, flickering with every draught, filling the corners with jumping shadows. A hushed murmur of voices came from ahead, like celebrants waiting in a church for the service to begin.

At the bottom of the stairs, a small anteroom led into a larger cellar beyond. Grand Guignol posters were slathered across the stone walls; leering faces and dead eyes peered at Irene and her companions as they entered.

And suddenly Irene could taste chaotic power like acid in the air. Her Library brand flared up across her back like poison ivy. She looked around quickly, trying to find a reason for the abrupt change in power level, but nothing jumped out to explain it. Not for the first time, she wished for a convenient Library course in Reasons for Fluctuations in Chaos Level and How Fast to Run Away.

The men in front of her drifted forward as if they were pulled by a magnet. Irene hung back: if something in this anteroom could explain how the Countess was hiding herself, then she needed to know what it was. She ignored the inner voice that pointed out that she just didn’t want to go forward into the lair of the Countess. Cowardice and common sense were on the same wavelength here.

But how was the Countess suppressing this level of chaos? Horror literature suggested all sorts of unpleasant ideas: a corpse beneath the stones of the floor, dragon blood circulated in some sort of contraption behind the walls … all right, perhaps the dragon-blood thing was grossly unlikely, not to mention simply gross, but there weren’t any textbooks on what was possible and what wasn’t. Especially when Fae were involved.

Irene decided to investigate the most obvious incongruity and examined the posters on the walls. As far as she could tell, in the dim light, they were standard Grand Guignol fare, with predatory poses and mouths open in screams or laughter. They didn’t have strange runes painted on them, or their ink mixed with blood, or …

She thoughtfully ran the tips of her fingers across the biggest of them, criss-crossing it in a regular pattern. Yes, she’d thought she’d seen something odd in the shifting lamplight—there was a small rectangular extra thickness at the bottom left corner. Hastily she dug her fingernails under the edge of the poster, peeling it back. It came away easily, the paste crumbling and weakened. There was another piece of paper beneath it. No, parchment. She teased it out, sliding it carefully so as not to tear it, and smoothed the poster back in place; then she looked at what she’d just uncovered.

Irene’s breath caught in her throat. It was in the Language. She swallowed and set her back against the wall, trying to calm the sudden panicked hammering of her heart. It was signed, Alberich.

The darkness seemed to close in on her. No. No. He was dead. She’d seen him die.

The rising noise of voices from the large chamber beyond forced Irene to drag herself away from rising panic and back to reality. She couldn’t afford to be caught loitering here; she had to hurry. She made herself read the rest of the script. It contained words in the Language that she didn’t know (and wasn’t that interesting?) but basically seemed to be a ward of some sort, constraining chaos to remain within its boundaries. Interesting; it was referring to itself in the plural. Did that mean that there were several of these, delimiting the area and letting the Countess hide herself within it? That explained a lot.

The parchment was hard and dry under her fingers. It was old, not new. Irene tucked it into her coat pocket, breathing a silent prayer that it was indeed as old as it felt and that the person who’d written it was a thing of the past as well. If he was here …

It was almost a relief when she made herself walk forward into the inner chamber.

Her first impression was throne room, but, incongruously, her second impression was lion’s cage in the zoo. Men lounged on the plain stone floor as though they were drugged with opium, exchanging slow, rambling sentences or playing endless games of dice or cards. The cats that wandered between them were the only real energy in the room, patterns of moving shadow in the flaring light of the dangling oil lamps. As Irene’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, the throne at the far end of the room came into focus, draped with tricolour banners. But empty. For the moment.

The room’s dimensions were uncertain. It wasn’t just the light. The entire space was liminal, vague around the edges, defined by possibility and horror just as much as by reality. It buzzed against her skin and tasted wrong as she breathed it in. She’d been in high-chaos zones before, and they’d all been created and sustained for specific purposes. This one bore the mark of its mistress. It was a place for the Blood Countess to do what she liked best. To do what defined her.

More oddities: iron maidens flanking the throne, their doors shut for the moment but their purpose evident enough. The shadows in the corner, which suggested warped pieces of machinery more appropriate to the theatre above. A table of weapons next to the door, as though inviting visitors to pick one that suited their taste. Flick-knives, brass knuckles, garrottes, and twisted pieces of metal where the only identifiable parts were the blunt end one held. Irene took a small flick-knife, slipping it into a pocket of her coat. She stepped away from the doorway, edging farther into the room.

Then she froze as she saw them, chained in alcoves to the wall behind the throne. Kai, slumped unconscious and dangling from his shackles. Vale, watching the room and with half a dozen cats watching him back. Had he made an attempt to escape already? He’d certainly have lockpicks up his sleeve. His cane was propped near him, just out of reach, as though to taunt him by its presence. Both of them were in the sort of clothing that a working man or a low-grade clerk would have worn, rather than suits—an attempt at disguise? It apparently hadn’t worked.

Her gaze followed along the wall. Silver was there too, in chains as well, with the air of a man who was waiting to speak to the management and make a complaint about his accommodation.

At least she knew where all three of them were. Now she just had to work out—somehow—how to get them out of there. Given a roomful of accomplices (and cats), this could be difficult. Perhaps the best course of action would be retreat, followed by a call on Inspector Maillon …

Irene rapidly abandoned that plan as she heard noises coming from the stairs behind her. She drifted across to a nearby group of gamblers and folded down to sit next to them. They barely noticed her.

Mu Dan was hustled into the room. She carried herself like an aristocrat heading for the tumbrel, all anger and affronted pride, but her face was pale, even in the dim lamplight. She would be feeling the chaos like a sickness, much worse than Irene’s own perceptions of it. A man on either side of her held her arms, while a third was directly behind her: Irene saw the glint of metal in his hand, pressed into her back. Even a dragon would have problems with a close-up bullet while in human form. Or maybe, like Irene herself, she’d intended to play along with capture in order to find out the enemy’s plans, and abruptly found herself in far more danger than she’d expected.

So much for reinforcements. So much for fetching help. So much, possibly, for Mu Dan and Irene and all the rest of them.

Mu Dan caught sight of Kai in his chains. “Your Highness!” she called desperately. “Your Highness, wake up—”

Chaotic power washed through the room, and Mu Dan recoiled mid-shout, turning her head as if she had been slapped. And abruptly the throne at the end of the chamber was occupied.

Irene recognised the Countess from their previous meeting, though it would be inaccurate to say she recognised the woman’s face—it was her presence that was familiar, like the taste or smell of blood. She occupied the throne like an invading army. Her hair and dress were the same colour as the dried blood on the base of a guillotine, and she held herself like a naked blade. Men across the room fell or scrambled to their knees, turning towards her, and murmurs of liberty and revolution filled the air like prayers. Dorotya lurked at the base of the throne, an animate mass of shawls. Cats swarmed from all quarters of the room to stretch and grovel at the feet of their mistress.

Irene cowered like the rest of the englamoured audience, keeping her head down and her face hidden, struggling with panic. She could feel the net of glamour washing across the surface of her mind, seducing with dreams of blood and violence and anarchy—shouting and killing and revelling in it—but her Library brand and training gave her the will to withstand them.

The Countess extended a lazy hand, and the audience fell silent. “An endless stream of visitors today,” she remarked. “Bring the prisoner before me.”

Mu Dan looked as if she was considering resistance, but the gun jabbed into her spine again, and she reluctantly marched forward until she stood before the Countess’s throne. But not too close—the Countess clearly had more sense than to allow an enraged dragon within arm’s length of her. Mu Dan stood there, tolerating the grasp on her arms, her eyes burning with suppressed fury.

“Well?” the Countess asked. “Have you nothing to say?”

“To you? Unlikely.”

The Countess smiled. “I understand that you are a judge-investigator, or so my cats tell me. I have some ability in that line myself. I imagine that in a little while you will be very willing to unburden yourself and tell me anything that I might want to know. Of course, by that point I may not be interested in listening.”

“Your threats are pointless,” Mu Dan answered flatly. “Bring on your tortures. I and my colleagues will laugh them to scorn.”

“Excuse me,” Silver muttered, quite audibly.

“You have been found out,” Mu Dan continued, raising her voice to carry over Silver’s interruption. “Your lair is discovered. I have allowed myself to be brought down here to negotiate with you. If you surrender and allow your followers to be cleansed, I am empowered to offer terms.”

Since it was unfeasible to actually do so, Irene allowed herself to visualise beating her head against the floor. Mu Dan was not a good bluffer. Irene thought that she herself might have been able to get away with that, but then she’d had a lot more experience at lying to people …

The Countess laughed, and her voice somehow held the echo of trickling blood. “Except there is nobody in the streets above who should not be there. The theatre is full of people watching their beloved Guignol plays, celebrating pain and torture and death. You are desperate, little dragon, and it will not save you. Do you have a single reason why I should not kill you here and now, and make better use of your blood than you are doing?”

Irene rose to her feet. “She may not,” she said, “but I do.”