Links in the Shadows

"There are two kinds of darkness in a house like this: the kind that hides the murderer, and the kind that is worn to hide the eyes."

The Gothic corridor on the second floor lay drowned in a dim, swaying light cast by brass candlesticks mounted at long intervals along its stone walls, and beyond the quartz-reinforced windows the storm threw itself against the glass with a mournful shrieking, like a congregation of the drowned weeping down the length of the house. Vespera Haze walked ahead of her guest, the hem of her dingy gray skirt gliding over the crimson carpet without a whisper of sound, one thin, pale hand holding the small candlestick so exactly upright that the flame never leaned.

"The house was built two hundred years ago, Scholar Ashwood," she said, in a voice that was clear and strangely nonchalant in that gloomy place. "It is a most intricate structure. There are countless passages under the floors, and whole suites that have been shut up for generations, and doors that open only if you know where to press the wall. Anyone else would lose their way in a week. But to one who can no longer see the light, every corner of it is crystal clear."

Thalessa walked a pace behind her with her ash-gray eyes fixed on every movement: on the evenness of her breathing, on the placing of her feet, on the effortless way she turned aside at a carved wooden pedestal that someone had moved a hand's breadth out of line, and never touched it. It was all perfectly done. It was too perfectly done to be remarked on, and that was exactly what troubled her, in the way a flawless signature troubles an examiner of documents.

"Were you born blind, Miss Haze?" she asked, and her hand shifted on the strap of her chest.

Vespera halted before a heavy oak door at the end of the passage and tipped her head toward her, so that the candle lit the clouded eyes from below, and they stared past Thalessa with a gaze utterly empty of focus.

"I was born into a poor fisherman's family on the southern coast," she said softly, and a small smile touched her lips and went no further. "A malignant fever took the light from me when I was six. Four years ago my elder brother was lost in the wreck of the St. Jude, and I thought I should die of it; I had no one else in the world. It was Duke Alastair who took me in. He brought me here and gave me the keeping of the house, and he pays me generously and sees that I want for nothing. I owe him more than I can say. He is the greatest benefactor of my life."

The words checked Thalessa where she stood, and a faint line drew itself between her brows.

She thought of the man at the head of the table, wiping his hands in that desperate, ritual way, and of how she had taken him at first sight for the cruelest of them, the ringleader of whatever evil lay behind the wreck. Yet a ruthless man does not, as a rule, open his arms to the blind sister of a drowned sailor. Perhaps Alastair Blackwood was no absolute demon. Perhaps there was in him a genuine capacity for pity, and the hysterical washing of his hands was merely the agony of a soul in torment, the helpless thrashing of a conscience that would not die. It was an uncomfortable idea, and she put it carefully away in the part of her mind where she kept the things that did not fit, to be looked at again.

Vespera fitted a big brass key to the lock and turned it with a soft, dry click, and the door swung inward on a spacious chamber where a marble fireplace burned with pine logs and filled the air with the warm scent of resin.

"This is your room," she said, and stood aside with a slight bow. "Hot chamomile has been left for you on the desk. If you need anything, you have only to pull the bell-cord beside the bed. But—"

She stopped. The pleasant smile went out of her face as a lamp goes out when someone closes a door on it, and in its place came a deep and eerie composure.

"I would advise you to lock your door tonight, and not to go out of it on any account. Stormy nights on this cliff have a way of bringing about things that no one foresaw."

She did not wait for an answer. She turned and walked away down the corridor, and her small figure dissolved into the shadows like a stain absorbed into cloth.

…

The door closed of its own weight, and the mahogany shut out the corridor and the wailing wind. Thalessa set her ebony chest down on the writing desk and let her eyes travel around the room, quickly and without moving her head. A great bed hung with dark brocade. A bookcase of black oak, tall as the wall, in the far corner. The fire. And on the desk, beside a ceramic teapot that sent up a lazy curl of steam, a cup already poured.

She went to it but did not drink. She took from her pocket a thin strip of jade, which she kept for testing the acidity of liquids and the presence of the commoner poisons, and touched it to the surface of the pale yellow tea, and watched it for a full ten seconds. No change. She lifted the cup and drew a slow breath across it; chamomile, honeyed and green, and behind it, under it, like a voice speaking softly in the next room, the same sweetish bitterness that covered the whole house. She set the cup down. Then she began, without hurry, to unbutton her coat.

Rustle... rustle...

It was almost nothing, a sound like dead leaves drawn across a stone floor, and it came from the thick shadow beside the black bookcase at the far end of the room.

Thalessa did not flinch. Her gray eyes hardened, and in the time it takes to blink her gloved right hand had slipped into the open chest and closed around the haft of a surgical scalpel of Swedish steel.

"You move remarkably quickly, Scholar Ashwood."

The voice came out of the dark, low, sharp, and with an unmistakable edge of threat, and from the blind angle of the bookcase a tall man stepped into the candlelight. He wore a long leather coat dusted with melting snow, and his body was lean and steady, like a juniper standing upright in a blizzard. His face was all angles, with a hard squared jaw, and in it the most striking features were a pair of dark ash-gray eyes, tiger's eyes, which bored into hers with an intensity of suspicion and readiness for violence. In his right hand was a silver-plated snub-nosed revolver with its hammer drawn back, and its dark muzzle was leveled at the left side of her chest.

She knew him by his reputation before she had finished looking. Chief Investigator of the Royal Investigative Corps, Roderick Thorne.

She did not blink at the muzzle. She stood quite straight, her hand still in the chest, and spoke in an ice-cold voice:

"Breaking into a lady's bedchamber in the dead of a stormy night and presenting a firearm at its occupant. I think the High Court would be amused to hear of such conduct from the Chief Royal Investigator, Inspector."

Roderick's mouth drew into a jagged, mirthless line, and the barrel dropped an inch, though his finger stayed on the trigger. "I should be glad to explain it to the Court, Scholar, as soon as you have explained to me why the capital's most eminent toxicologist should appear at an isolated manor on the edge of nowhere, three days after the strange death of Thorne Valerius."

She narrowed her eyes. The name of the man before her was not unknown to her; it was known in every drawing-room in the capital, spoken with distaste and with respect, as the name of the Crown's bloodhound, who specialized in fraud and corruption and the labyrinthine conspiracies of the great, who suspected everything on principle and had never in his life abandoned a trail once he had the scent of crime in his nose. It struck her with a faint, bitter irony that the living man should share his surname with the dead, and she resolved, as a matter of hygiene, to think of the one as Thorne and the other, whatever his manners, as the Inspector.

"I came on a private invitation, to look into the death of my betrothed," she answered evenly. "And you? Since when does the Royal Investigative Corps trouble itself with private deaths on a remote peninsula?"

Roderick slid the revolver into the holster at his hip and came closer to the desk, and leaned his back against its edge, and folded his arms over his chest, and let his gray gaze rest on her instrument chest.

"I did not come for Valerius's death," he said coldly. "I came for what Valerius and his companions are so anxious to keep hidden: a colossal fraud on the insurers, four years old."

From inside his coat he took a sheaf of yellowed documents wrapped in a waterproof pouch of leather and tossed it onto the desk beside her tea. "Four years ago the merchant ship St. Jude went down off this coast. The Duke and Sterling swore that she carried a cargo of common goods, and a crew of twenty, and the Royal Insurance Company paid the survivors a record indemnity of two million pounds. Three months ago, however, an ingot of uncut gems, bearing the cipher-seal of the Royal Bank, came onto the black market in the capital. It was part of a treasure that was supposed to be lying at the bottom of the sea with the St. Jude. It was sold through a private account, and the account belongs to Ragnar Sterling." He leaned toward her and lowered his voice to a dangerous whisper. "That ship was not wrecked by weather, Scholar Ashwood. She was scuttled, deliberately, for the cargo and the money."

Thalessa looked at the papers on the desk, and behind her eyes the wheels began to turn very fast. Fraud. Black-market gems. A fortune divided among five men and women. And Thorne, who had been murdered with a letter inked on a poisoned petal.

"You think he was silenced," she said slowly.

"Or killed by someone who wished to collect a bloody debt from four years ago." His gaze drilled into her face, watching it. "The St. Jude did not carry only gems. She carried twenty human lives, twenty men who never came home. And now the road is severed, and the survivors are shut in this house with a murderer."

For a moment she was silent. Then she came to the desk, took her hand from the chest, and laid beside his documents the half-torn sheet of hawk-parchment with its brown corner. "Thorne wrote this before he died. And in his last hour he kept repeating a phrase, in a wild panic: the hunger at sea."

Roderick bent over the line written in dried blood and his brows drew down hard. When he looked up again at her, the suspicion in his eyes had begun, almost against his will, to yield to the sort of unwilling respect a clever man pays to a mind he cannot easily refute.

"We are after the same truth, Scholar Ashwood," he said, grave now. "But in this house you can trust no one. The blizzard has made it one great locked room. The murderer is among those people downstairs, or else he is in the shadows of the house."

At that moment something broke the dead hush of the storm.

Thump... Thump... Thump...

It was not at her door. It was a frantic, savage hammering that came from the far end of the corridor on the floor below, where the Duke's study stood, and it fell on the stone like a fist on a coffin lid.

Their eyes met. Neither wasted a word. Roderick's revolver was out of its holster in an instant, and Thalessa snatched the ebony chest from the desk, and the two of them ran out of the room together into the wisteria-scented dark of the manor.