Page 75 of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
Ms. Haas had arranged for a hansom, into which the three of us squeezed in a manner that I found uncomfortable both physically and socially. Thankfully, the journey was of relatively limited duration, as the streets of Little Carcosa were narrow and we were required to walk for the final stretch.
The square around the Lake of Stars was quiet, its daytime businesses being closed and its more nocturnal inhabitants having decamped to those parts of the city with better nightlife. The lake itself was not, in fact, a lake per se but a largish water feature, which the first generation of Carcosan refugees had ensorcelled to reflect the night sky of their lost homeland. Having only recently escaped that place, I declined to gaze into the depths, for fear I would fall into a dream from which I might not awake.
Miss Viola awaited us on a bench. She had recovered her composure somewhat from the night before and was demurely attired in a dark gown, her hair twisted once more into its customary knots. Onseeing Miss Beck, she started and then glowered at Ms. Haas. “You couldn’t resist, could you?”
“Look,” returned Ms. Haas, “the way I see it, we’ll get everything out in the open and either she’ll leave you or she won’t.”
Miss Beck pushed past us to put herself between Ms. Haas and Miss Viola. “She can talk for herself, thank you. Where’s the ——” And here, again, her language became unbecoming of her station. “... blackmailer?”
“If I know her at all, and I flatter myself that I know her quite well, she’s already here.” Ms. Haas pulled out her pocket watch and checked the time. “She’s probably just waiting to make an entrance, and I did tell her to be here at midnight precisely.”
“When have I ever done what you told me, Shaharazad?” The voice from the shadows was familiar, though I could not place it exactly until its owner stepped into the light from one of the gas lamps. She was a handsome woman of some forty or fifty years, her auburn hair touched with grey, her golden eyes still startlingly intense. It was, unmistakably, Miss Viola.
Miss Beck was the first to speak, as she glanced between her present fiancée and the lady’s doppelgänger. “This,” she said, “is going to take some explaining.”
Strolling over to the elder Miss Viola, my companion leaned nonchalantly against the lamppost. “Would you like to tell them, dear, or shall I?”
“Perhaps it would be better coming from me.”
And so the elder Miss Viola told her story, a story that I relate here as best I am able from my recollections in the lady’s own words.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The Blackmailer
The truth is,I’m not quite sure how to begin because, for me, this has all begun and ended many times already, and in many different ways. Which I suppose is fitting, for I have also lived many lives—a nobleman’s daughter, a refugee, an actress, a thief, a murderer, an adventuress, a fishmonger’s wife, and a blackmailer. If you asked my younger self which of these beginnings was the one that mattered and if she answered honestly (which knowing my nature I suspect she would not), she would say that it was the day she met Cora Beck. But the beginning that matters most to me came on the ninth day of the seventh month of the third year of the Twenty-first Council—a little under a month ago from our present position in our present timeline—when I received news that Cora had disappeared on the way back from Aturvash.
As much as I wanted to believe she was still alive and would return to me, I knew she would not. My parents had promised that we would be reunited in a new world and I never heard from them again. Friends and lovers down the years have vanished by choice or circumstance. Until Cora, I had long since stopped either seeking or offering assurances of fidelity, but she gave hers with such generosity that I forgot the lessons I’d taught myself. So as the days passed, and no news came from her, I realised that either I had been deceived or she was dead. I was not sure which I feared the most.
And then the Contessa Ilona paid me a visit. Oh, she made a great show of wanting to comfort me in my grief, but the comfort she offered was not to my taste and had not been for some years. Besides, the moment the vampire renewed her advances towards me I understood what had happened to Cora, and that I had brought it upon her. I had taken up with Ilona a few months after leaving Mise en Abyme and several years before meeting Cora. Shaharazad had already grown bored of me, as she does of everything, and the Repairers were still actively hunting the last survivors of the old nobility. The Contessa was rich, intriguing, powerfully charismatic, and strong enough to protect me. At the time, the intensity of her fascination for me was both flattering and reassuring. I eventually realised her affection was a prison and disentangled myself, or thought I had. But I should have known that while she could tolerate my leaving, she would never accept my giving myself to another. So in a sense, I killed Cora.
And knowing that almost killed me.
My first thought was for revenge. I knew it would be hollow, but I had survived on meaningless pleasures and fleeting victories before, and could do so again. But although I knew a little of how to kill a vampire—having lived with one for some while and having contacts in Little Carcosa who could provide me with some of the strange bullets that the People’s Army used to fight the unnatural minions of the Yellow King—I knew also that I could not confront the Contessa alone.
And so I went to the home of my oldest friend in Khelathra-Ven, the one person in the city I was sure had the resources and the wherewithal to do battle with Ilona: the sorceress Shaharazad Haas.
“I fail to see,” Shaharazad said, when I had finished telling her how the love of my life had been murdered, “why it profits either of us to pursue a blood feud against something immortal and demonstrably vindictive just for the sake of a dead fishmonger.”
I responded as I always did at this stage in our arguments. I seizedthe heaviest and most fragile items I could lay my hands on and threw them at her. It is not a side of myself that I like, but it is a side of me that Shaharazad delights in provoking. Sometimes I wonder if she doesn’t deliberately leave ammunition lying around in order to tempt me.
Her new housemate—a prim Eyan by the name of Wyndham who I disliked instantly—sanctimoniously reinforced Shaharazad’s position with the observation that there was, indeed, nothing to be gained by throwing one’s life away for the sake of retribution. “After all,” he continued, “I know it sounds platitudinous, but it really won’t bring her back.”
“No.” Shaharazad stirred on that awful threadbare chaise of hers with the stains I didn’t like to think about. “If you wanted to bring her back, you’d need either necromancy or time travel, both of which are fascinatingly perilous, utterly forbidden, and have the potential to go quite disastrously wrong.”
I lowered the paperweight I had been about to hurl at her. “But it can be done?”
“Well, yes. If you wanted to bargain with an Eternal Lord, and risk being erased from history, or with the Ossuary Bank, and risk losing your soul.”
“Neither of which,” put in Wyndham officiously, “you should on any account consider.”
I ignored him. “If I were to do one, or both, of those things how would I start?”
“I do so love it when you’re recklessly self-destructive.” Shaharazad had that look in her eye that she got on the rare occasions when she decided she was going to care about me for a while. “If you wish to prevail upon the Ossuary Bank, then I would suggest speaking to Ptolemy Khan in Inadvisable Loans. He should be able to arrange matters at a price you may find almost bearable, and with hardly any ironic consequences.”
“And if I wanted to go to an Eternal Lord?”
Shaharazad gave a sardonic laugh. “Frankly, your guess is as good as mine. They’re all definitionally incomprehensible. Walking Upwards Unmaking has helped me in the past. I sometimes think she might secretly be a bit of a romantic. Of course, the rest of the time I’m just mortally terrified of her. And, if you want my honest advice—”
