The Mime Order (The Bone Season, #2)

by Samantha Shannon

Jaxon was lying on the couch, his hands folded on his chest. He swung himself into a sitting position and hunched over, hands clasped between his knees like a bridge. For once he wasn’t drunk, but in his lounging robe and striped trousers, he looked small and exhausted in a way I’d never thought possible for my mime-lord.

“Thanks, Jax.” “Anything for you, O my lovely.” He held up the cigarillo, studying it. “You know I would do anything for you, don’t you, darling?”

Goose bumps broke out all over me. That hadn’t been in the original. The word had been incarcerate, not liberate, and I was sure Nashira hadn’t been described as beautiful. Had she? I didn’t have the two originals now—they were with Alfred and Terebell—but why would any of us have written beautiful?

“It’s been edited extensively.” I fought to keep control of my voice. “Who did this?” “The writers, of course. Did they not tell you?” The bottom dropped out of my stomach. “The writers,” I repeated. “Did you hear their voices, Alfred?” “Well, I certainly heard somebody’s voice. A very nice young man named Felix Coombs. He said that on reflection, he thought that there needed to be a good faction in the pamphlet as well as an evil one.

Terebell’s money had been used to glorify the Sargas. The Rephaim didn’t feed on humans. There was no sign of the poppy anemone. They were shown fighting the wicked Emim, protecting feeble clairvoyants. It was the beautiful myth, the one Scion’s leaders had believed for two hundred years:

Jax needs some more white aster.” That gave me pause. “Why?” “Just between you and me, I think he’s been slipping it into his absinthe. I can’t work out what’s wrong with him lately. He’s going to smoke and drink himself to death.”

“By the way, has Jax had a good rummage through your room, or is it just mine?” She glanced at me. “I did notice a few things had been moved. You think it’s Jaxon?” “It has to be.”

I was starting to suspect that Ivy’s trust in her old kidsman had been misplaced. Agatha had been the gatekeeper of the Rag and Bone Man’s den—and something else, from the looks of it.

Another lost station, by the looks of it, like the one under the Tower. The train waiting on the line was unusual in that it only came up to my waist, more of a cart than a carriage.

hands and knees to stop my boots squeaking. When I reached the end of the passage, I found myself looking through a series of thin slats, the sort you might find on a wardrobe door. Between them, I could see the back of a chair, with hands grasping its sides, and a head with short green hair. Agatha.

“May I ask what you’re doing here, Agatha?” My gut lurched. I knew that voice, low and smoky. When I looked through the slats, even the memory of warmth drained from my body. It was the Abbess.

“It was a necessary precaution, my friend. The Pale Dreamer has an unfortunate habit of worming her way into hidden places.” You have no idea, I thought.

“Did the Jacobite wake?” “She did.” The Abbess said, pouring two glasses of rosé wine. “We have the information we require. It took some . . . coaxing.” Agatha grunted. “Serves her right for leaving my service. Dragged her up from the gutter, I did, and she repays me by running off to work with your master.”

You don’t know what I had to pay the local hirelings to dispose of them while the other four slept.” The boy and the girl, the other two survivors. Rage made me tremble. I’d taken them from one hell to another.

“Do you need lithium?” “No.” His mime-queen closed her eyes, her chest expanding. “No lithium. Our symbiosis is much stronger now.”

“You know very well what it’s for. Because they know my face, not his. Because I made the mistake.”

The Abbess was a physical medium. Symbiosis . . . I cursed myself again for not bringing Eliza. She would understand what it had meant.

And where had all the vile augurs been imprisoned after On the Merits of Unnaturalness? Where were they taken if syndies saw them on the streets? Where were their children born? Tell me where Ivy Jacob is hiding.

After On the Merits of Unnaturalness had been distributed, forty-three vile augurs had been murdered, and the rest imprisoned here. I didn’t know much about what was inside the slum, but I did know that its inhabitants were never allowed to leave.

All Jaxon’s words about vile augurs rattled through my thoughts. The extispicists used animal entrails in their work. The osteomancers burned or handled bones. There were blood-loving haematomancers; drymimancers who scried with human tears; oculomancers obsessed with eyes, whether they were in the head or not.

Two tall red candles burned on a rickety chest of drawers. And there, sprawled across the floor, covered in blood, was Cutmouth. I dropped to my knees and got her into my arms, the rightful Underqueen of London. Blood soaked her clothes, but she was still just about alive.

“Why did they kill Hector?” I spoke as gently as I could. “What did he know?” “About Rags . . . about them . . .” Her grip tightened on my hand until I thought my fingers would break. “Got too greedy. I told him, I told him.”

I couldn’t think of a single excuse. “You think there are really killers in this place? You believe in the Binder’s tall tales, girl?” he barked. “You think he was right to put out bitter guesswork and call it research?”

In life, Cutmouth had been brutal and a bully, but what had I been but that? Hadn’t I used my fists and my gift to serve Jaxon? Hadn’t I obeyed him without question? She must have seen everything in me I’d seen in her.

“Well, if that were the case, maybe all the rules could be changed. Maybe the vile augurs of Jacob’s Island would no longer be obliged to stay in this small corner of Bermondsey. And if that were the case, Pale Dreamer, they’d be happy to assist whoever had overturned the White Binder’s ruling.”

It was clear that she had killed both Hector and his mollisher, and if Cutmouth was right, her skin was marked with a Rag Doll tattoo— one that she had never shown in public, to my knowledge. It was possible that she’d been a Rag Doll once and left her mime-lord’s service, eventually rising to lead her own section.

There was no reason that she should still have a tattoo she didn’t want. A hand without living flesh, its fingers pointing to the sky. Red silk surrounds its wrist like a manacle. Was that the message? That the red silk handkerchiefs had been placed by the Rag and Bone Man’s hand?

But what I didn’t understand was why neither the Rag and Bone Man nor the Abbess would be entering the Rose Ring. Their names hadn’t been listed on the last letter as candidates. Why wouldn’t they take advantage of the vacuum they’d created?

“The Abbess killed Hector and his gang.” I spoke softly. “She just killed Cutmouth, too.”

“Symbiosis?” She frowned. “It’s the relationship between a medium and the spirit that possesses them. If you have good symbiosis, you work together well.

Could she have used a spirit to kill Hector?” Eliza hesitated before she said, “It’s possible that she was possessed when she did it, which would have given her the spirit’s emotions on top of hers. It might have made her faster, too. But she had to get through seven people to kill Hector, then cut off his head. The spirit doesn’t give you any extra physical strength,

The last thing she said was that I had to stop the gray market.” “What’s that?” “I don’t know,” I admitted. “If a black market is illegal, I guess a gray market is . . . unauthorized. Or tolerated.”

My sixth sense was ringing like a set of bells. I’d seen this before, with Warden. The woods. The cold. The absence of spirits. As Zeke tapped the coin against the ice a second time, a wave surged through the æther. The realization punched the breath from my lungs. He was knocking on a door that shouldn’t be opened.

When I collided with the dreamscape, it was just like it had been in Sheol I: a blistering point of impact, sending sparks through my spirit. A force was festering in this dreamscape, deep within the innards of its mind. With all the effort I could muster, I cut through its first line of defence, into its hadal zone. The pain was catastrophic.

This was no dreamscape. This was a nightmare. The hadal zone of this creature was excruciatingly dark, but I could just about see what my dream-form was standing in: a rotten mass of dead tissue.

there was one last inkling of thought: that this was hell. The absence of æther, of anything at all. This was what we feared, we voyants. Not death, but non-existence.

Silver letters spelled out WAX AND CANDLE, the legal face of Leon’s trade. The bay window looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Eliza pulled a key from her pocket and opened the door. Why she had a key for Leon Wax’s chandlery, I had no idea.

“Your pupils are unequally sized. It is a sign that your silver cord has been shaken. Had the creature succeeded in trapping you, it would have devoured your spirit.”

You may have noticed that that cold spot repelled spirits, rather than attracting them, for even spirits fear their side.” This must have been what Ognena Maria had meant all those weeks ago, when she’d said that spirits were disappearing from her section.

Our lifelines will meet only when the æther sees fit. That may not be often. It can never be always.” I linked his fingers through mine. “I know,” was all I said.

“The traitor from the first rebellion. Did you ever see their face?” “If I did, I may never know. I was never told which human had betrayed us.”

“Specters,” I recalled. I’d read about them in an early draft of On the Machinations of the Itinerant Dead, and seen them for myself when I’d glimpsed the insides of other dreamscapes. Silent, spidery figures that crawled in the hadal zone. Most people had at least one. Some people, like Nadine, had a dreamscape overrun with them.

“Nick, I don’t want to forget what he did. He could have let me go the first day he took me in. I know that. That doesn’t mean I can stop feeling like this. And I know you think I’ve started to sympathize with him,” I said, holding his gaze. “I haven’t. I don’t sympathize with what he did to me—I have no compassion for it— but I understand why he did it. Does that make sense?”

I have a bad feeling about it.” “We’re clairvoyant. We’re supposed to have bad feelings about things.”

“Bea’s a physical medium. She used to let all sorts of spirits possess her for performances. Escape artists, contortionists, dancers. It wore her dreamscape down after twenty years of it.”

I didn’t know where I’d be the day after tomorrow. Certainly not here, in my little room at Seven Dials. I could be on the streets, a pariah and a traitor. I could be Underqueen, ruling the syndicate. I could be in the æther.

My hair had been pinned with a fascinator, woven together from swan feathers and ribbon. My lips were black and my eyes painted with kohl, expertly applied by Eliza. Jaxon’s hair shone with oil, and his irises were blanched by white contacts, as were mine. On his head was a top hat with a white silk band around it.

“Do you see the spirit?” He pointed with his cane. “That is a rare thing: a psychopomp. It has been present at every scrimmage since the first.” “Where did it come from?” “No one knows. After the final round, it escorts the vanquished candidate’s spirit to the last light. A final kindness from the syndicate. Isn’t that delicious?”

But the Rag and Bone Man . . . I could feel his dreamscape—a guarded one—but the most I could say about his aura was that he had one. He wasn’t a Rephaite. The hollowness reminded me of a Buzzer, but he couldn’t be one of those, either. Apart from that, I couldn’t say a thing about his gift.

“Who are you?” I asked softly. A muffled thud hammered at my ears. “Are you going to confess that you had Hector and Cutmouth killed, or let someone else take the blame for it?” “Do not interfere. I will cut your throat, as a pig’s for the slaughter.” “You, or one of your puppets?” “We are all but puppets in the anchor’s shadow.”