Page 98 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
“Mary,”a woman’s musical voice sang while a cracked cello buzzed and whined.
An ill-favored dream: Georgiana struggling, her slight body shrouded in frost-rimed music scores longer than bed sheets. I clawed at the freezing bonds, found I held a fistful of woolen blanket, and woke to blink owlishly at a hovering, blurred face. I felt for a nonexistent dressing table—no, not Pemberley—then retrieved my spectacles from the shelf above the bed and slipped them through my tangled hair.
Rebecca Spoon’s pretty, serious face came into focus, a delicate twenty-two-year-old woman with wispy eyebrows and bones as fine as the clavichord music she composed.
“Did I startle you?” she said. “The maid would have done it better…” She gave a helpless shrug. Her maid had fled. “You said an hour of sleep, but I could not make you stir. Colonel Fremantle said to wait. It has been two hours.”
The window behind glowed dull gray. I found my watch. Three o’clock in the afternoon.
Yesterday, the colonel and I walked until jammed refugees and sightings of Blackcoats forced us to detour eastward, finally entering London at Stratford. It was dark by then. The cobblestones were strewn with broken carts and luggage. The omnipresent nighttime poor fought over the abandoned goods whiledistant cannons rumbled and nearer gunshots barked. We ran, hid, and retreated until the morning light drove away the scavengers, then I spotted a familiar street and followed it west to Rebecca’s residence, the Marys’ emergency shelter in north London. Exhausted, we thumped on the door at noon, and Rebecca herself answered.
“Has your brother returned?” I asked now. This was his home; a single lady did not reside alone in London.
“No,” she said, an awkward chirp as if she meant it lightly but her throat could not sustain the sound.
I had slept in my clothes, having nothing else, so I dragged a few knots from my hair and followed Rebecca into the parlor.
Colonel Fremantle, washed of the worst road dirt, was looking out another window. “Did it wake you?” he asked. “That infernal sound.”
“The buzz? I only dreamed of it.”
“Like nothing else on earth,” he muttered. “A roaring whir like a monstrous machine. It means the perfumer has come. She is in London.”
“La Demoiselle des Parfumshas a machine?” Steam-powered machines were fiddly, heavy contraptions. They had ruined many honest professions, but I could not imagine machinery being useful in war.
“She is a demon, not ademoiselle, and I do not know what the roar is, only that it is unnatural. None who see her live to speak of it.”
I rubbed sleep from my eyes. “More reason to reach the museum and be done with London.”
“May I come?” Rebecca asked suddenly.
“You are safer here,” I said.
“I do not think so. Robbers broke into the home beside us yesterday. My brother has been gone for two days. He said it would be an hour. Something horrible has happened, I know it. There are no markets, no food…”
Rebecca was one of the ladies of good family abducted last autumn by Tinsdale and his slaver allies. The slavers had sought a potent wyfe to raise the black dragon; Lizzy and I had rescued her but after vicious maltreatment. She was a brave woman and recited her litany without tears, but each word frayed some thinning restraint within her.
Feeling clumsy and a poor friend, I blurted, “Yes, you should come. But after the museum, we will need to plan. Perhaps another shelter house is staffed. I must return north with the flute, and the trip here was… I would not wish that on you.”
She nodded, blinking, her arms crossed and her hands clutching her elbows.
Carrying valuables would draw thieves, so Rebecca fit a few coins and mementos in her reticule, then the three of us set out, sharing the last of a bag of stale cobnuts.
The streets, sparse of traffic before, were utterly deserted. A humid haze veiled spires and bridges, draping us in uncanny, pastoral calm. For luck, I whispered a line from Virgil, “Incipe Maenalios mecum, mea tibia, versus”—Flute, sing with me Maenalian songs. The loyal song draca flapped to my shoulder, a sapphire gleam in the city’s grime. A handful more followed as we set off at a hurried walk toward the museum.
“It is good to be out,” Rebecca said. Her imprisonment had been in a dark, sealed cellar. Since her rescue, she always proposed meeting under open sky, even when the weather was foul.
A half mile banished the illusory calm. Raucous ravens whirled as we entered a rundown district called Bagnigge Wells, the subject of futile and heated debates on civic improvement. The junction was a scene macabre. Eleven English soldiers lay in painful poses, their skin livid with death and picked at by the birds.
Colonel Fremantle muttered a prayer, the religious observance at odds with his angry tone. “I have seen this in the south. The perfumer’s work.”
“It is a large war,” I said, kneeling by one of the bodies, a slender, fair-haired man. “She cannot be everywhere.”
The colonel’s head swiveled as muskets sounded to the south. “We should move. Ministering to the dead is a swift path to join them.”
“I wish to know why they are dead. They were not shot.” Rigor had peeled back the soldier’s lips like he was shouting a final warning. Behind his rigid jaw, the exterior jugular vein bulged, distended and cyanotic. I lifted his collar and saw twin punctures an inch apart, the skin torn as if struck in passing. “A sting. This could have been any of the enemy with a captive wyfe to control crawlers.” But the torn skin was unlike other stings I had seen.
“Or the perfumer,” Colonel Fremantle repeated. Through the frenetic night, he had been collected and professional. Now he twitched at every sound. “She has killed hundreds. They say she is as beautiful as an angel, but under her clothes, she is half crawler and has pincers for hands.”
