The Mime Order (The Bone Season Book 2)

by Samantha Shannon

Here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted. – JANE AUSTEN

In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have told him to get fucked.

When I reached a gap between the battlements, my chest tightened. There it was. That shatterbelt of metal, glass and lights, all glittering with promise. London. After six months of captivity, I was back.

But I had survived, as I had in Dublin. I had survived, and the Sargas would know it.

‘She’s in one piece because of Jaxon,’ Eliza said. ‘You will come back to Seven Dials, won’t you, Paige?’ ‘I quit,’ I reminded her. ‘Jax will take you back.’ ‘I called him a stretched weasel and told him to get fucked. You don’t come back from that, Eliza.’

You’re up against decades of tradition and corruption. If you put your head above the parapet—’ ‘I might lose it. I know.’ I folded my arms. ‘The Rephs need to feed, and they just lost most of their voyants. Sooner or later, they’ll come for us. I don’t know if we can beat them, but I can’t lie down and let Scion decide how my life will look. I can’t do it, Nick.’ There was a brief silence. ‘No,’ my best friend said at last. ‘I don’t think I can do it, either.’

Find Rackham, a bleeding man whispered. He is the one who hunts. Find him.

I knelt beside a poppy. At the touch of my hand, it changed, its petals reforming. A deeper red, a smaller bloom – the windflower, which harmed the Rephs. They broke across my dreamscape like a wave.

But if there was one thing worse than having Jaxon as an employer, it could be having him as an enemy.

I went down the creaking stairs. When I opened the front door, cold wind clawed at my face. For a minute, I just stayed there, staring at Soho Square. The first tremor hit me. I gripped the doorframe. The dosshouse was safe. I shouldn’t leave it. But the streets were my life. I had fought tooth and nail to get back to this citadel. I knew the location of every security camera in this section. I would be fine.

Everything I ate and drank was another way to spite Nashira.

He was a dab hand at tarot games, Magtooth. The best cartomancer I had ever played. The only way to beat him was to cheat him, and I surely had.

Perhaps this was why Frank Weaver hadn’t bothered to make us fugitives. Our story was simply too hard to believe.

I couldn’t fight the Rephs alone. They had the whole empire of Scion behind them. The sheer size of the enemy seemed insurmountable. If I didn’t have the syndicate, I had nothing.

Jaxon must have told him about us, trusting him with our real names. The idea of Jaxon having a friend was fascinating.

In Oxford, the performers had been convinced to fight back after years of pain. With the right reasons, at the right moment, even the most beaten and broken of people could rise up and reclaim themselves. The mime-queens and mime-lords of London were not broken. They had simply grown comfortable in the shadows. Somehow, they had to be persuaded that overthrowing Scion would give them better lives, and that it was possible – but while Hector lived, he would always silence me. He would always have more power.

For the first time in days, I reached for the golden cord. You needed me to start this, I thought. I need you to help me end it. No answer. Just the same grave silence.

‘Behold, its living power in our midst. Isn’t it wonderful, how words and paper can enthral us so? We are witnessing a miracle, dear heart.’

To avoid a death sentence, my father would have to publicly disown me. To deny he had ever seen my clairvoyance. Did he hate me for what I was, or Scion for bringing us here?

‘I’ve heard kidsmen don’t like to let their investments go. They crawl out of the woodwork when their gutterlings are older, claiming unpaid debts,’ I said. ‘Did yours come after you?’ ‘Later,’ he said, ‘I went after them.’

‘Paige, Paige. Your passion is to be commended, but let me remind you that we are not revolutionaries or freedom fighters. We are the Seven Seals.’

‘Ah, modesty. It’s a vice. True, you might have struggled without your friends, but on that final night, you were a queen. I understand you even made a little speech. And words, my walker – well, words are everything. Words give wings even to those who have been stamped upon, broken beyond all hope of repair.’

Without waiting for a reply, Jaxon led me into his study. His boudoir, as he called it. It had made sense when I realised it meant sulking room in French.

The syndicate lacked honour, but rats were always killed.

And I wondered what Warden would think of me now, after everything we had done. He had risked everything to help me escape. He might have died so I could stand here, right back where I started. I had crawled back to my petty treasons with my tail between my legs – hawked stolen trinkets, submitted to Jaxon, and cursed Hector where he couldn’t hear me. Yellow-jacket, I thought to myself.

The longer I was away from Warden, the more I thought of the Guildhall. All those weeks of mutual distrust, and suddenly I had been wrapped in his arms, not wanting to leave him. I still didn’t quite understand when things had changed between us.

‘A small number of poltergeists can inflict phantom sensations, often related to their past lives. It’s a sinister breed of apport, the force that breachers use to affect the physical world.

And somewhere, a god was in chains again, waiting for a golden thread to lead the dreamwalker to him.

‘For goodness’ sake.’ Maria sighed. ‘Who cares if it was a forgery?’ She lit a cigarette. ‘We’re criminals. What’s a little mime-art among friends?’

Writing didn’t carry the same risks as speaking. You couldn’t be shouted down or stared at. The page was both a proxy and a shield. If people at least knew about the Rephs, I could work up to proving their existence.

‘If you’re thinking of taking me back to Oxford, you can kindly cut my throat first, Reph.’

Twenty years ago, a human had betrayed him. Now I was wondering if Nick was on to something – if that human could have returned to London and concealed himself deep in the tunnels of Camden, where Scion could never catch him again, and named himself the Rag and Bone Man.

‘I see a set of scales,’ she said, in the same monotone Liss had used when she read my cards. ‘One bowl is full of blood, weighing it down. Four figures stand around the scales – two on one side, two on the other.’

‘In my experience, scales usually point towards justice or truth. In this case, you have two people on the right side of justice and two who aren’t.

‘A hand without living flesh, its fingers pointing to the sky. Red silk surrounds its wrist like a manacle,’ she said. ‘The hand snatches crushed petals from the ground. Two fingers break away, but it keeps snatching.’

‘No idea about the hand. Red silk is likely blood or death. Or neither,’ she added. ‘Fallen petals could represent … lost parts of a whole.’ A vein stood out in her forehead. ‘Last question. I’m getting tired.’

‘Remember the way the number is divided. A three and a four,’ she said. ‘That division will be significant.’

I could not have fought tooth and nail to escape Oxford, only to die alone in an alley.

‘We’re all puppets, mollisher,’ he rasped. ‘Make sure you know … who’s holding your strings.’

‘You know, since I came back to London, I’ve been chased, punched, spat on – three fucking times – and now there are people trying to stab me. I’m almost starting to miss Oxford.’ ‘You do not mean that.’ ‘Possibly not.’

‘What are you made of?’ ‘We call it sarx.

The Netherworld itself was the cradle of immortal life, the womb in which they were created. There were no parents or children.

In the early days of humankind, the Rephs had relied on their messengers, the psychopomps. In the Netherworld, these fragile spirits took the form of birds.

His voice held my attention as well as music. In that dosshouse, I could see the Netherworld.

A proud and respected family of scholars had disagreed with the Mothallath. They had believed that crossing the veil would be an act of inconceivable desecration, and that their immortal bodies would perish on Earth.

The Reph they had chosen was Azha Mothallath, who had successfully crossed the veil and communed with as many spirits as she could. She had returned safe and sound, and the threshold had lowered. It seemed the Sargas had been wrong. There was no harm in the crossing.

‘My family, the Mesarthim, were sworn guardians to the Mothallath. We wanted to accompany Azha, as did the Sargas, to protect and assist her – but we soon discovered that only the Mothallath could step between the worlds.’ ‘Why?’ ‘That remains a mystery. To pacify the Sargas, Azha and her watchers – those Mothallath who travelled with her – swore that they would never cross the veil without our blessing. They would wear armour made of adamant to protect themselves from corruption. Most importantly, they would never reveal themselves to the living. They would always maintain their distance from humans.’

The first and only war in their history. Procyon had declared his intention to overthrow the Mothallath. The Mesarthim had sprung to their defence. The Rephs had split down the middle, their families declaring for either the Mothallath or the Sargas. The Sarin had initially remained neutral, but even they had finally been drawn into the fray. ‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘You were fighting a war against both yourselves and the Emim, all while you were slowly wasting away?’

‘Did Azha ever come back?’ ‘Yes. She returned with the news that some humans had shown the ability to connect with the æther. The living could now converse with the dead.’

‘Procyon Sargas had been the loudest voice of dissent against the Mothallath,’ he said, ‘but by the time they fell from power, he was incapable of leadership. Two members of his family rose to take his place.’ ‘Nashira and Gomeisa.’