The Mime Order (The Bone Season, #2)

by Samantha Shannon

“Jax, he’s in danger,” I said. “What if they arrest him?” “They won’t, honeybee.” “You’re raking in a fortune from the buskers’ rent alone. You can’t possibly—” “You may be my heir, Paige, but unless I’m mistaken, I am currently mime-lord here.” He didn’t deign to look at me. “One glance from a voyant girl is not enough to implicate our oracle in anything.”

“Paige,” she slurred, “where have you been?” “Out.” Her eyelids were drooping. I took her by the elbows. “Hey, when was the last time you slept?” “I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter. Do you know when Jaxon’s next pay packet is coming in?” I frowned. “Has he not paid you, either?” “Said he wanted to see progress. Need to make more progress.”

“The Panić Theory?” Her hypothesis still required empirical research. Jaxon wanted to include it in his next great pamphlet. The formula was simple: take the order of clairvoyance, multiply by ten, take away from one hundred, and the answer was the average age for a voyant of that order to die. It meant that I would die at thirty, which was a cheerful thought.

“The hand-held Senshield.” “Why does Jax want you working on that?” “He doesn’t tell me why. He tells me what and when.” I couldn’t think why Jaxon would need such a thing.

“Shh. It’s me.” Nick crouched beside my bed. “You’re sleeping with a knife?” “You sleep with a gun.” I laid it on the nightstand.

the Minister’s Cat, a gambling-house tailored to voyants, with stringent rules on which orders could bet (oracles, soothsayers, and augurs always ineligible, given their prophetic gifts). There was a lottery held here every month, with the winner entitled to a sum of money from Jaxon.

Large eyes looked up at me from below heavy lids. The right was deep brown and the left, green, with a loop of yellow around the pupil and no colobomata. It was the second time in my life that I’d seen a pair of eyes like that.

She shook her head. “It’s like shaking hands with a corpse. Give me the other one.” The scars had always been a bit cooler than the rest of me, but I’d never known anyone to react like that to my touch.

“Scales,” she said, in that strange monotone Liss had used during my reading. “One side of the scale is full of blood, weighing it down. Four figures stand around the scales—two on one side, two on the other.”

So you’ve got two people who are on the right side of the truth and two who aren’t,”

If the æther had a personality, I decided, it would be a smug bastard.

“A hand without living flesh, its fingers pointing to the sky. Red silk surrounds its wrist like a manacle. The hand snatches white feathers from the ground. Two fingers break away, but it keeps snatching.”

“No idea what the hand is. Red silk is likely blood, or death. Or neither,” she added. No wonder soothsayers had so much trouble making money. “White feathers . . . plucked from a bird, perhaps. They could represent parts of a whole. Or exist as symbols on their own.”

“Who is the King of Wands?”

“Seven,” she said, slamming them down on the table. “That’s it.” I raised my eyebrows. “No vision?” “Sometimes the number’s enough. Remember the way they’re divided, too,” she said. “A two and a five is different from, say, a three and a four.

You know he’s stopped the lottery, don’t you?” “Since when?” “Back in August. Nobody was happy, but I suppose he was generous to do it in the first place.”

“She wouldn’t care a jot, that girl. She wasn’t too bad without Hector pulling her strings. Came in here quite often for a game with one of her girlfriends.”

On his right upper arm was a small tattoo of a skeleton’s hand, ivory-white, outlined in black, its fingers reaching upward to his shoulder. A hand without living flesh, its fingers pointing to the sky.

“What’s that symbol on his arm?” “All the Dolls have it. Looks shit, doesn’t it?”

A hand clamped over the lower half of my face. I felt myself being dragged along like a ragpicker’s cart, the asphalt carving up my knees. “So terribly sorry to do this, Pale Dreamer”—a rough voice— “but I’m afraid you know too much.”

The mask tilted to one side as she pressed the pistol to the center of my forehead. Hot pressure rose behind my eyes, and I felt myself being sucked from my body, bone and spirit tearing far away from one another as I jumped. I pulled against it, but it was an impulse, mechanical. It was kill or be killed. My spirit cut through her mind, throwing her spirit right out of her body.

A red handkerchief, stained with dark blood. My fingers curled around it. I knew instinctively that it was Hector’s blood on this little slip of silk. They must have been planning to plant it on my corpse, to use my body as evidence that I’d been the killer all along.

Using the last of my strength, I bumped the man into his twilight zone and left him to his nightmares by the woman’s empty body.

Scion’s most popular comedy was on, the one that revolved around vapid amaurotics and their valiant triumphs over unnaturals. I quirked an eyebrow. “Were you watching a sitcom?” “I was. I find Scion’s methods of indoctrination quite intriguing.”

“Alsafi has informed us that, now they have no colony to protect, the red-jackets have been put to work in the citadel.

We were both fugitives, both separated from our allies, both on the wrong side of Scion. We had more in common than we’d ever had before,

“The Rephaim are a timeless race,” he began. “We have been in the Netherworld for time immemorial. Its true name is She’ol, hence the penal colony’s name. We existed only on æther, for nothing grows in the Netherworld. There is no fruit or flesh. Only æther and amaranth, and sarx-creatures, like us.”

The Rephaim had always been in the Netherworld. They were not born, like humans, nor had they evolved (to their knowledge); instead, in Warden’s words, they emerged, fully formed.

From time to time, more Rephaim would surface, though the waves of creation were sporadic.

When humans had first appeared in the corporeal world, they elected to keep close watch over them to ensure they did no damage to the fragile balance between worlds. Originally, this watch had taken the form of sending spirit-guides, the psychopomps, to escort the spirits of dead humans into the Netherworld.

Eventually, the ethereal threshold had risen to dangerous levels. At that time, their leaders were the Mothallath family. The star-sovereign, Ettanin Mothallath, had decided that Rephaim should enter the physical world and soothe the ethereal unrest, encouraging the spirits to go into the Netherworld,

A proud and respected family of scholars—the Sargas, whose duty had been to study the ethereal threshold—had decided that crossing the veil would be an act of inconceivable desecration.

The first watcher, the daring Azha Mothallath, had successfully crossed the veils 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.

We Mesarthim, who were guardians to the Mothallath, desired to escort them—but we soon discovered that only they could go through.” “Why?” “That remains a mystery. To protect themselves, the Mothallath made a strict law that they would never reveal themselves to humans.

We do not know exactly what happened, but the Sargas informed us that one of the Mothallath had crossed the veil without permission.” His eyes dimmed. “After that, everything disintegrated. That was when clairvoyance entered the human world. That was when the Emim appeared.

It was only after that event—the Waning of the Veils, as Rephaim call it—that humans began to interact with spirits. You have been here since ancient days, but not quite as long as amaurotics.”

The creatures had crawled out of the shadows like a plague, rotting the Netherworld in their wake. The Rephaim stopped being able to exist purely on the æther, which they had once breathed the way humans breathed air.

Finally, Procyon, Warden of the Sargas, had declared himself blood-sovereign and waged war against the Mothallath and their supporters, blaming them for letting death into their realm. Those who were still loyal to the Mothallath called themselves Ranthen, after the amaranth—the only flower that grew in the Netherworld.

The Mothallath were usurped and destroyed, and the Netherworld could sustain us no longer.”

Sargas family had risen to take his place. Nashira— one half of this pair—declared that she would take one of the traitors as her blood-consort, to show them that even their leaders would conform to the new order. As ill luck would have it, she chose me.”

“As we could no longer connect to the æther, she said we would have to see if we fared any better on the other side of the veil. We waited for the ethereal threshold to reach its highest ever point before a large party made the crossing in 1859. There, we discovered that we could feed on the link certain humans had with the æther. Where we could survive.”

“We could have survived in the shadows, but Nashira was determined that we had to be apex predators, not parasites. We revealed ourselves to Lord Palmerston, telling him that the Emim were demons and we, angels. Almost without question, he surrendered control of the government to Nashira.”

On the day he was crowned, their son Edward VII was framed for murder and accused of bringing unnaturalness into the world. And the inquisition into clairvoyance— our establishment of control—began.”

“The Ranthen believe the Netherworld can be restored, but we do not wish it to be isolated from the human world, as it once was. If the threshold can be lowered to a stable level, we wish to have an advisory presence in the human world,” he said. “To prevent the total collapse of the veils.”

I believed that you were reckless, destined to destroy both yourselves and the æther with your endless, petty wars. I thought— perhaps naïvely—that you would benefit from our leadership.”

I took no pleasure in the degradation and misery of the penal colony.” “No. You just went along with it.” I turned my head away.

“To a creature of sarx, Earth can seem . . . unpleasant.” “What do you mean?” “Everything here is dying. Even your fuels are made of decomposed matter. Humans use death as a means of sustaining life. To most Rephaim, that is an unpleasant thought.

“So to you,” I said, “this is rotten.” “We see the rot before it rises.” I tossed it back into the bowl. “That’s why you wear gloves. So you don’t catch mortality.

So what the hell is it that you want, Arcturus Mesarthim?” “I have many aims. Many desires,” he said. “I aim to bring about a settlement between humans and Rephaim. I aim to restore the Netherworld. But above all, I aim to end Nashira Sargas.”

We do not know how to overthrow the Sargas. They seem to draw their power from a deeper well than ours,”