The Mime Order (The Bone Season, #2)

by Samantha Shannon

“Remember, Paige,” Jaxon said, “this is a show. I know you could kill them in a heartbeat, darling, but don’t. You must grandstand. You are a debutante at your very first ball. Show them the whole spectrum of a dreamwalker’s talents.”

“And last, but by no means least, the Black Moth.” Silence. The Abbess turned to the crowd. “Black Moth, please step forward.” The silence continued. One rose remained. “Oh, dear. Perhaps the moth has flown away.” Murmurs from the audience. A Grub Street hireling darted out to get rid of the last rose.

My spirit was like an enraged animal in a cage, but I had to control it. There would be nothing noble, admirable, or entertaining about an Underqueen who’d killed her opponents with a flick of her spirit.

All of them were closing in on me. With a quick movement, I pulled out another knife and threw it at the Wicked Lady. Bloody Knuckles swung out his arm, knocking it out of the way. Were they protecting her? Jaxon was fending off a single mollisher with his cane, hardly breaking a sweat, while I was fighting a mime-queen, two mime-lords and a mollisher. When Jaxon saw them all converging on me, his pale eyes widened. Once they killed me, they would probably target him.

The audience were cheering and shouting, baying for it, like amaurotics did in front of their TVs. Like they must have cheered when my cousin was hanged at Carrickfergus. When had we made a show of death?

Both of our opponents’ mollishers lay unconscious or dead on the ash. We were the only allied pair that remained. The audience began to shout the names of their favorites, or whoever they’d put money on. White Binder was the loudest of them all.

“As for the Jacobite, as she calls herself, she won’t last long. He sent her away for betraying him—poetic justice, he called it—but this time he’ll cut her throat and be done with it.”

The Rag and Bone Man and the Abbess hadn’t entered because they planned to put someone else on the throne. A figurehead to control from the shadows. A face for whatever dirty work they were doing. How many people in this ring had been conspirators, helping the Wicked Lady to win? How many of these corpses wore bones on their skin?

Without a numen, she couldn’t use her gift in battle. At least, that was what I believed about augurs until she whirled a spool together and threw it not at me, but at the candelabra hanging from the ceiling. And the spool caught fire. It was as if they were made of flammable gas. Five burning spirits came soaring towards me like comets,

In the instant she was surprised, I bowled myself straight through the junkyard of her mind, knocking her spirit out into the æther. Her silver cord snapped, as easily as if I’d cut through string with scissors. I killed her for Vern and Wynn, for Cutmouth, and for Ivy.

The boy they’d once called gutterling was king of the whole citadel. His arms spread wide, embracing the applause. The cane—held aloft, like a scepter—was glossy with blood. I couldn’t even smile. My wrist was limp in the grasp of his hand. Over our heads, Edward VII, the Bloody King, looked down with frozen eyes. The hint of lip beneath his beard seemed to smile. But with a leader like Jaxon Hall, I foresee only blood and revelry—and in the end, destruction. He was the King of Wands, the one Liss had predicted.

Supposedly stolen from the Tower by a loyal servant when the monarchy fell, Edward VII’s crown had been stripped of its jewels and reworked into a corolla with many types of soothsayers’ numa: keys, needles, shards of crystal and mirror, animal bones, dice, and tiny ceramic images of the tarot, all woven with wire into something like a wreath. Light

“I’m Black Moth.” With a heavy heart, I stepped away from him. “And I challenge you, White Binder.”

And oh, it was glorious, watching Jaxon Hall put two and two together. Watching him understand, inch by agonizing inch, that he could no longer blackmail me into submission. That words, for all their worth, would not protect him this time. His eyes turned to glass fixtures in his skull. For once in his life, he would have to play by someone else’s rules.

This was a first in syndicate history, a real-life revenge tragedy that could only end in death. A mime-lord and a mollisher at war.

He was as easy to read as a book to a bibliomancer. For the first time in my life, I could predict my mime-lord’s intentions.

My hands trembled. Do it, Paige, just do it. But he’d saved my life, my sanity. He’ll come back to haunt you if you don’t. But he’d been like my father, taught me and sheltered me, saved me from a life lived without knowledge of my gift. You’re an item of his property. That’s why he saved you. He doesn’t care, he never cared. He had given me a world in Seven Dials. He wouldn’t listen when it mattered.

White score marks had scarred the underside of his right arm. When I saw the letters that he carved there, my heart jolted into my throat. Paige I stared at him, frozen. His eyes shone with the arch delight I’d once admired in him. Once that name was finished, I would be unable to use my gift without putting myself in terrible danger. In the æther, as a spirit, I was vulnerable to Jaxon’s binding.

Don’t use anger, Warden called from my memory. Dance and fall. But the anger was already there, overflowing from all the parts of myself I’d locked away: anger at Jaxon, at Nashira, at the Abbess and the Rag and Bone Man and everyone else who had corrupted the syndicate.

I shucked my battered flesh and shot through the æther, right into his dreamscape. My dream-form’s feet fell on frost and grass. Jaxon’s midnight zone. In meatspace, the window of opportunity slammed shut. Outside his dreamscape, the æther trembled. I launched myself back out and into my body.

but I was already starving for oxygen after the jump. Eyes watering, I looked up at Jaxon. Too late. The name was carved.

The mime-lords and mime-queens were chuckling. This was a first. No binder had ever snared a living person’s spirit. The dreamwalker was a sleepwalker now, defeated by her own pride, by someone two orders lower than she was. Jaxon took my arm and turned me to face the audience. I was limp and pliant. A puppet.

All I did was jump, thanking every star that my father had changed my birth name.

Jaxon’s dreamscape was an enormous graveyard. Nunhead Cemetery, perhaps, where he’d mastered his gift for the very first time.

He could correct my middle name, if he didn’t mind making a mess of his arm. It wasn’t too tough to guess its Irish counterpart.

Just as I had with Nashira, I imagined myself growing larger, too large for the specter to hold.

At the center of Jaxon’s sunlight zone was a statue. Carved into the shape of an angel, it was slumped over a burial vault as if in grief. As soon as I was close enough, one of its hands lifted the lid of the tomb. Jaxon’s dream-form was inside it. Its eyes opened, and it climbed out. “There you are,” he said. “Do you like my angel, honeybee?”

“I’m not going to kill you, Jaxon,” I said. “It would make a grand denouement. What a show it would be,” he said. “Prove them right. Prove you’re a destroyer, darling.” “I’m not your darling, or your lovely, or your honeybee. But I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to take your crown.”

My vision—Jaxon’s vision—slid in and out of focus. Everything felt oddly light, as if I hadn’t quite possessed him. Like his body was too loose. Like I wasn’t quite filling it. Then I saw why. My body was still standing, straight-backed. A thin line of blood had seeped from my nose, and my eyes looked vacant, but I was upright. The silver cord was holding me in both dreamscapes.

“In the name of the æther,” I started in his voice, and this time I didn’t slur. Wait. His dream-form’s voice was a whisper in my ear. Stop. “—I, the White Binder, mime-lord of I Cohort, Section 4—” Stop. No, no, get out, GET OUT! “—yield—”

“Mime-lords do not yield to their mollishers.” “This is a first, then.” “It is clear,” the Abbess said, with a stare at me, “that the great mime-lord of I-4 did not yield out of choice. The girl is a cheat.” “She is a dreamwalker. The scrimmage allows for unlimited use of an individual’s clairvoyance. If the æther has gifted the Pale Dreamer with any ability, then it was, and is, her right to use it.”

“Do you know, my Paige . . . I find that I’m altogether quite proud of you. I truly believed you would stay your hand in the Rose Ring, like the weakling you were when you first came into my service, and walk away without a single death on your conscience.” He stopped in front of me, his face inches from mine. “But no. You have learned, O my lovely, to be just like me.”

With no expression, he took his jacket and pulled it over his shoulders. Nick reached for his hand, and he squeezed it once before his fingers slipped away. He gave me a quick, remorseful look, then walked out of the vault after his sister and Jaxon.

“In the name of Thomas Ebon Merritt, he who founded this syndicate, I crown you Black Moth, Underqueen of the Scion Citadel of London, mime-lord of mime-lords, mime-queen of mime-queens, and resident supreme of I Cohort and the Devil’s Acre. Long may you reign.”

“Who is your mollisher?” “I have two. The Red Vision,” I said, “and the Martyred Muse.”

But I owe you an explanation for why I turned on my mime-lord and broke the unwritten rule of this syndicate. Why I risked everything for the opportunity to speak without hindrance. And it wasn’t for a crown, or a throne. It was so that I would have a voice.”

Every head turned toward the entrance to the vault, and a clamor of shouting and gasping ensued. In the doorway was Arcturus Mesarthim, and at his back were his allies. “Rephaim,” Ognena Maria murmured. Courage came rushing back. “No,” I said. “Ranthen.”

“Divya Jacob. Ivy.” Her gaze dropped. “Most of you won’t know my real face, but I used to go by the name of the Jacobite. Until January this year, I was mollisher for the Rag and Bone Man.”

When I was twenty, he made me his mollisher and asked me to join him on an . . . ‘endeavor,’ as he called it. Said his people were suffering—people like me—and he wanted to make it better.”

“He called it the gray market. He said we were recruiting them into the Rag Dolls.”

I went to Cutmouth, Hector’s mollisher, and reported it to her. She came to see him with a group of bodyguards and asked to see the catacombs, and she found someone in chains.” Her hands dug into her arm, as if she was only just holding herself together. “She said she had to tell Hector. That an operation like that couldn’t go on without his knowledge.”

“No. He didn’t stop it. He joined in with it.”

“When Cutmouth and I picked, we sent murderers and kidsmen. Violent thieves and thugs. People who’d hurt others for pleasure or coin.”

“One night, he called me to these catacombs and stuck me in the neck with a syringe full of flux. When I woke up, I was in the Tower. He must have guessed it was me that reported him.” She managed a grim smile. “Poetic justice.”

Wynn and Vern of Jacob’s Island walked into the vault, Wynn with the sachet of sage around her neck. Ivy let out a weak groan before she threw her arms around Vern, who held her to his chest without a word.

The Abbess stared at them, then looked over her shoulder. There were no Rag Dolls left in the crowd. Even her own associates had vanished. The Rag and Bone Man had abandoned his assassin. It took a moment for the Abbess to realize that she was on her own.

It was a poltergeist I didn’t know, and one I didn’t want to know. That was my last thought before it hit me. “Here,” the Abbess called, “is Hector’s true murderer.”

The Abbess started to laugh. And a gun went off, but it wasn’t hers. The bullet hit her just under the ribcage. Two more shots finished her off, one each from Tom the Rhymer and Ognena Maria, head and heart. The Abbess collapsed into the red velvet, dead. I took in a deep, gulping breath. Blood seeped from the hole in the Abbess’s temple. Nick’s knuckles were white on the pistol.

“Scion can have their natural order. The White Binder can keep his Seven Orders of Clairvoyance. And because our actions will speak loud and clear to Scion, who would never listen to our words . . . ours will be the Mime Order.”

“It was that poltergeist, wasn’t it?” “Yes.” His hands clasped a little more tightly. “An old enemy.” “Then how could the Abbess have controlled it?” “That creature obeys Nashira alone. She would have had to command it to comply with the orders of another.”