House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(13)
“Malik Glassclaw, but he’s not here now.”
I sigh. “And do you have any idea when he’ll return?”
The wray shakes his head, still not looking at me directly. He is cowed, thin and utterly unlike my Jannik, even though there is something about them that is similar; the narrow hands, the long patrician nose, the dark eyes. In Jannik, I have begin to see them as beautiful.
They just make this boy look crow-hungry.
Pity makes my heart feel soft and useless. “May I borrow your quill?”
He does not even attempt to say no; merely places his ink-pot closer to me, and offers me his ragged quill.
I jot down my name and business on my House card, and a request to see the Rookery head. “If you’d be so kind as to pass this on to him.” I add a handful of brass next to the card.
The vampire looks up properly for the first time, his eyes questioning.
“For the loan of your quill.” Everyone has pride, even when sometimes it doesn’t appear that way. “You’ve been most kind.”
Once I’m back in my little coach, I instruct the driver to take me across the river into the Ives’ side of the city – the less-fashionable side. There’s another rookery there. Hopefully I’ll have better luck with this one. We travel for almost an hour though the city traffic before we are anywhere close to the Splinterfist Rookery.
But it seems that this time I am to be rewarded for my persistence. Or stupidity, call it what you will. Their head is in, or so the wray at the desk assures me. The Splinterfist rookery must be in better standing; the boy is polite, but he doesn’t grovel and there is no fear when he looks at my face. Nothing, in fact. He is as efficiently unemotional as a well-trained servant.
He sends another skinny little wray off to inquire if the head will have time to see me now, and I stand in the foyer and wait. Splinterfist is cleaner than Glassclaw; the walls whiter, the wood scrubbed. It has that same tang of despair, but it hides it under lemon-water and whitewash. There are more fatcandle lamps lit, and they spill circles of butter-yellow at the feet of carved couches upholstered in a green dark as pine needles
The glass-paned doors crash open behind me, and the lamplight shivers.
A man in a muddied sleeveless topcoat comes in, his head lowered, and I start backward, turning my face away from him. He may wear no expensive tailored jacket, but it is immediately obvious that he is a House Lammer. There’s no disguising that air of wealth and pompous self-importance. He is long-limbed, and his sly face shows his alarm that I’m here, standing in the entrance hall and blushing red as a thief. When Owen told me that the vampires in MallenIve are whores until they can earn their way free, he seemed amused and disgusted in equal measure by the idea that they even had clients.
And here is one now.
I look away from the Lammer, back to the wray behind the desk. He flicks his third eyelids down, and walks past me to the customer.
There was a thankfully brief time when people thought I was one of the kitty-girls who work the streets of Pelimburg. People pretend you are not there. Their eyes slide past, because they do not like your reality intruding into their own.
The man is led away, upstairs. Does he come here often? I can’t help but wonder. Does he have a favourite – some vampire he likes best? My eyes ache with a curious dryness. Jannik could have been this, if he’d had the ill-luck to be born in this cesspit of a city.
“She’s ready to see you now,” the wray says after a whispered conversation with the returned vampire.
She? I don’t know quite what I was expecting; I had taken it into my head that all the vampires in MallenIve were male. I suppose I had just thought that with the feyn being so rare and supposedly precious to the bloodlines, they would have been brought through to Pelimburg by the three vampire Houses there. It seems not. The feyn are normally powerful, that much I do know, having had the misfortune to meet Jannik’s mother.
I follow the wray upstairs all the way to the very highest part of the building to where an odd squat little central tower forms an eyrie. I can feel nothing from behind the heavy red and polished wood of the door even though my head hurts just from the strain of expecting to be blown back by the power of an adult feyn.
The wray knocks rapidly then steps back and allows me to enter.
I square my shoulders and walk in, on edge. The woman waiting inside is striking in her beauty, if not in her power. The crash of needling iron pain that I was expecting is barely a flickering prickle against my face. Hardly noticeable unless one were looking for it. I frown, momentarily thrown.
She turns the perfect cameo of her head and looks at me with white blank eyes. “Welcome,” she says, though her tone is anything but welcoming. Her third eyelids flick back under heavy lids, and I am caught in her midnight gaze. “To what do I owe the honour, Pelim Felicita?”
So she knows me – has heard of me, and of Jannik. I suppose I should hardly be surprised. We will have been whispered of. Despite what Jannik is, we have not made any formal overtures to the rookeries. If we are to survive MallenIve politics, we must pretend to be separate from the rookery vampires. Their reputation must not be allowed to taint ours.
Jannik was right. I have become a House pawn. And even as I recognise the truth, I still look about me, wishing that a rabbit hole could appear and I could crawl away. What am I thinking – walking into a mess like this and destroying all I’ve worked toward?