Perhaps Purity had been thinking of her own servants and how difficult it was to remove bloodstains from chiffon. That would be just like Purity, wouldn't it, to so wrongheadedly bother herself with the concerns of those who ought to remain beneath her notice? Yes, Bitzy felt sure it was only that. Mostly sure.

"What do you think of the mystery Killer?" NoNo asked the room.

"The what?" Bitzy pounced. A killer? She hadn't heard anything about a mystery. "You mean us?"

"No, no," said NoNo, "the mystery Killer. I overheard Mother and Lord Mothwood talking. Somebody's been Killing people. Just recently someone Killed two of the lesser Tsengs and enough stableboys to leave a noticeable trace."

"Oh please." Bitzy waved the thought away. "n.o.body's committing real Murder anymore. 'mystery Killer?' Listen to yourselves. You sound like silly idiots."

NoNo shrugged. NiNi shrugged. They looked at opposite ends of the salon.

Bitzy scrubbed her eyes. "The Circle isn't Killing each other again, are they?" She would know about that if it were so. She hoped she would. "Well, they aren't. Silly."

NiNi shook her head. "This is different-there's just one person, going around Killing people. Isn't it awful? I love it." NiNi would have been gloating if she'd seemed more than half awake.

"How in the worlds is that possible?" Bitzy asked. The Circle had discovered how to Kill, that news was old by now. But they'd always done so as a group; whatever their secret was, n.o.body dared wield the Weapon as a lone agent for fear of reprisal. At least, not until now. "The Circle Unsung would never allow that to happen, girls. Our fathers-"

"-Our mother," NoNo corrected. "And your father . . . I guess they know something we don't, Bitz." The tiniest divot above her nose suggested a frown.

"But-but," Bitzy stammered, "a lord would never bother Killing a stableboy. Let alone a stableful." She thought that over. "What would you do with that many stableboys, anyway?"

Obscured by her sideways hat, NiNi rolled her single visible eye. "That's why it's a mystery Killer, Bitz. It's, like, mysterious."

Bitzy sniffed, not at all sure how to take the news. On the one hand- excitement!-and on the other, well, the threat of uncertain Death. But mostly she felt affronted that she'd had to hear the news from the twins.

"How long have you known about this? Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"Days?" NoNo lifted a wrist.

NiNi shifted. "Didn't you tell us, Bitz?" Bitzy glared. "I think Bitz told us, NoNo."

"Daddy a.s.sures me that the Weapon remains the sole property of the Circle Unsung." Bitzy tried her best to ignore NiNi. "None of the lords would bother-Daddy says the lords are loathe to use the Weapon again. The first two waves of Deaths nearly undid the Circle, you know, and Daddy said something about 'returning to the stalemate,' but now he won't talk about it anymore. Not even to me." Bitzy suffered from the delusion that she would be head-of-house one day, and thus a member of the Circle, but she seemed unaware of the rules of heritability-the primacy of her three older brothers, for instance. The eldest, Beauregret, had been groomed for succession since he was two.

"Apparently it was the new members who stabilized the Circle after their predecessors had been Killed," she said softly. Bitzy had been engaged to Underbilly Blavatsky-Day-Louis until his Lord father had been Killed. Since his ascension she had not seen as much of Underbilly.

"It doesn't really matter-they can sense the Murders," NiNi said in a rare moment of clarity.

"Pardon?" Bitzy shook her head to clear it of familial ruminations.

"The Circle, um, they can tell if their Weapon has been used?" NiNi continued. "There won't be any physical remains, of course, but they have all kinds of, um . . . frenetics?"

"Forensics," corrected NoNo, "and yes, NiNi, I think you're right." NoNo sighed into the bone handle of her parasol. "All the fun will be over soon, and justice will something-or-other."

"Well, of course they can sense it!" Bitzy proclaimed. "I don't know why you two fret so over these little things! The lords of the Circle Unsung form the most powerful cabal in the civilized worlds. I know they're our fathers-or mothers, in your cases, as you're quite right to remind me- but we mustn't let that familiarity dispossess us of our faith concerning the strength of our parents. The Circle will know as a matter of routine, and if the Circle knows, then whomever is committing these crimes will soon be pa.s.sing through the Last Gate himself." Satisfied, she leaned back into an immensity of cushioned chenille. "Or tossed into an oubliette gourd, or given over to the ossuary artisans for some lovely bonework, or-"

"-We'll see," said NoNo, frowning at the skirts of her yellow dress, where a seam had ripped. "There isn't anything we can do about it, anyway. Not unless the Killer wears the same c.u.mmerbund to two parties in a row."

Bitzy thought she detected a note of sarcasm in NoNo's voice and had opened her mouth to lance that boil when the door banged open and her brothers Absynth and Beauregret stumbled into the parlor, red-faced and breathless.

"What in the worlds?" Bitzy demanded from her padded throne.

Absynth started to explain but his stammer was worse than usual. "H-H-He's not th-th-there,a-a-and,and-"

"-It's Father," Beauregret cut in, his gold hair shining with an absurdly overburnished l.u.s.ter. "He's been Murdered."

7.

The column of wheeling black birds rises into the sky taller than any tower on-planet, a beam of cawing agitation that thrusts upward from the Old Cross impact crater and is visible from halfway around the continent.

Parasi walks toward the ruined walls of Old Cross as if she's taking a stroll through her mother's gardens while a suitor holds her arm, not marching to her doom alongside a bristling escort of fifty armed men.

The past surrounds the would-be-queen on her pilgrimage; not the bones of the dead, splintered and blackened among the toppled blocks of the first capital, but the shades of the women who have walked this path before her. Not every queen returns to rule, and Parasi's head brims with the names of the women who failed their coronation ceremonies. The Parliament Above renders judgment harshly, and even the meritorious risk dismemberment at the whim of the feathered melee.

Digna, Rubn, Ghraibh, Fiolle, Wen Faraud: queens of the past century who failed to survive their coronations for one reason or another. The last name rings the loudest in Parasi's mind-her elder sister, who had spent every day of her life training to become the perfect queen. And still Parliament had voted against her. With their beaks and their claws the birds of Old Cross made their choice known.

Poor Wen Faraud, who went up a queen but came down in ribbons.

-Prama Ramay, The Ecology of Rule Kaien Rosa, Journeyman Mason, walked with purpose along the hallways of the Pet.i.te Malaison, secure in his alias and the simple fact that a man in workaday livery would be beneath the notice of anyone important enough to cause him trouble, so long as he didn't arouse suspicion among the house keepers. Sure enough, the praetors in their platinum- chased armor didn't blink an eye as he pa.s.sed by the doors they guarded so needlessly.

Less blind were the staff of the royal household who, much like the praetors, had been largely abandoned to their own devices-but who, unlike the royal guard, were not conditioned to clockwork obedience, and were therefore given more easily to mischief. The royal house hold staff were the closest thing the Dome had to native inhabitants, and that made them dangerous to a spy; Kaien hated thinking of himself that way, but what's what is what, as his mother would say.

A secondary-grade lieutenant house keeper clicked her tongue and almost stopped Kaien for questioning, but he was rescued at the last second by a bellicose laundress with a grudge against wine on silk, who commanded the lieutenant's attention as she barreled down the hallway.

Kaien thanked the dead G.o.ds for laundresses. Even if they did do unmentionable things to poor young men with the bad luck to stumble into one of their eve ning tipple socials. He tugged at his collar, blushing despite himself. Tipple my brown backside, Kaien thought, those women could out-drink a cellar full of plumbics! If he ran into one of the plumpbreasted washing women who'd held him hostage with their hands and hips three nights past, Kaien would die of embarra.s.sment. It wasn't his fault, after all-a young man's body had only so many responses to womanflesh, bells!

Kaien had made it halfway around the longest run of corridor that skirted the keep's ground floor when he realized with an icicle stab of panic that he'd left his hammer behind. Bending smoothly to pretend to check his bootlaces, Kaien's mind raced to retrace his steps. He couldn't have been stupid enough to leave his tools inside the d.a.m.ned royal suites, could he? A memory of smirking laundresses and b.r.e.a.s.t.s pushed together in his face suggested that under the wrong circ.u.mstances he could, indeed, be stupid enough for almost anything. He headed back the way he'd come as hurriedly as possible, reminding himself that to anyone walking the hallways he would seem just another square- shouldered workman, full of the energetic work ethic that men of his station were thought by the leisurely cla.s.ses to possess. Not full of terror and doubt, not running back to the least permissible room in the entire bell-tolling Dome, not scurrying to retrieve an emblem of his order from beneath the most fabled, fragile treasure in the city.

A treasure he'd been too cowardly to destroy, despite his orders. Bells, he had left his hammer on the floor beneath the Dawn Stains. For such a lapse, he should be bricked up and entombed alive like the wayward masons of yore. He should be-well, his father would take care of what should and should not happen to Kaien when he was allowed to escape this gilded maze. If he was allowed to escape.

If I'd been brave enough to smash some old windows, I might already be on my way out.

The thought that the guilds had outfoxed both Fflaen and his lords brought a grin to Kaien's face that was unbidden and, he chided himself, inappropriate. The prince thought his peac.o.c.ks perfectly imprisoned, and the lords saw themselves the same way. Only the Guilds Masonic y Plumbus remembered a simple truth that neither the quality nor their myopic servant cla.s.s would ever have the poor taste to discover for themselves: sewers work both ways. Sure, Fflaen had sealed all the sluice- gates and culverts maintained in the modern-era systems, as well as the calcified remnants of installations from at least two previous eras- but even a ruler of Fflaen's rumored antiquity had gaps in his memory, especially concerning trifles like plumbing and structural integrity. Which explained why the impossibly old central cistern remained unsealed- a fellow could, with a little elbow grease, slip into the bricked-over twelfth subbas.e.m.e.nt of the Pet.i.te Malaison.

Down there, the bones of the building were of the same age as the stonework in the prince's private chambers-Kaien's best guess put that Paleolithic stonecraft as the remainder of a barbican or a tower-and-curtain wall around which the rest of the building had been built, like scaffolding containing a crumbling billionstone statue. Age was relative, of course-not even the masons knew the age of the Dome itself-even though the guild had maintained its superstructure since time immemorial.

Lurking inside the Dome, Kaien had turned up some funny bits of information. If his father, the First Mason, had been surprised to hear that the lords had been Killing each other, he would be doubly shocked to hear they now lived in fear of an unknown Killer among them-one who acted without any regard for the laws of the Circle Unsung. Just last night Kaien had eavesdropped upon some lads from the stables gossiping in hushed tones about a number of their friends who'd vanished and not turned up in any of the usual haunts-nor in any of the usual spots where the carca.s.ses of casual murder were disposed. The servants feared foul play and, despite being generally inoculated against superst.i.tion by cultural inclination and the relative loftiness of their metier, Kaien had seen several make signs against evil when they thought themselves un.o.bserved.

Then again, the guilds seemed to have more pressing concerns; the news about the Killer hadn't changed Kaien's latest orders-if anything, the decreasing stability inside the Dome only made his charge more urgent. But Kaien worried. If he carried out those orders, his future was unclear-the destruction of the Dawn Stains would be an irredeemable act of terrorism and, his father a.s.sured him, had only been conceived of as an act of inst.i.tutionalized desperation.

Consider the inst.i.tution desperate, a glum Kaien thought, kicking white dust off his boots.

Also, consider the inst.i.tution dead- as-deities if he was caught and identified before he could act on his father's late-night orders. The lords might well use their new tool to send him off to oblivion. No, it wouldn't do to think that way; there was no reason to suspect anyone would visit the Dawn Stains and discover Kaien's mislaid hammer-indeed, he doubted that anyone else could break into the secret chamber beneath the absent prince's apartments. The Lords of the Circle Unsung could enter if invited, but lacked a prince to do so; the praetors could enter at any time, of course, but had no reason to do so . . . he hoped. And who else would be clever or foolish enough to break in?

He rea.s.sured himself thus as he levered open the wooden panel that led between the walls and ascended the narrow interst.i.tial stairs carved into the rock of the keep. These ways were traveled more frequently, which was still rare enough, and even then it was usually a mason given charge over whatever repairs or upkeep needed doing. The second hidden pa.s.sage was less congenial, being a crawls.p.a.ce forty paces in length that broad-shouldered Kaien could barely slither through.

Kaien dropped into an interst.i.tial s.p.a.ce so agglutinated by age and mineral crystallization that it seemed a natural cave formation, save for the hole he'd made with his hammer, which looked out onto the shining white rock funnel and etched gla.s.s stairs of the secure pa.s.sage between Fflaen's glacial suite and the Dawn Stains below. Bells, if Kaien were caught, they'd have to invent a new punishment just for making that hole. He pulled himself onto the cantilevered stairs, thankful that the drippedwax folds of the billionstone walls helped to conceal the opening he'd bashed through the radiant rock-he hadn't expected the suites to be quite so blindingly bright. Nor had he expected to see a pretty blond girl standing before the stains with his own hammer raised above her head, her face twisted in a grimace of mingled rage and fear.

"Stop!" she shrieked, seeing Kaien. "I'll do it, so help me I'll do it!"

Kaien said nothing. The girl looked terrified, and Kaien had enough experience with the opposite gender to know to be careful around frightened women wielding weapons.

"I will destroy the Dawn Stains if you take one more step," she said through gritted teeth.

"Now, see, that isn't something I'd be inclined to prevent," he answered as mildly as he could, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "And that's not just because you look much nicer holding my hammer than I do." Those slender arms and narrow waist were a vast improvement, come to think of it.

His lack of concern increased hers. "This hammer is yours?" She winced at the shrillness of her voice. Bells, that hammer looked heavy in her hands.

"I'm afraid so." Kaien nodded. "But by all means, keep it if you like. It's a good one, as hammers go, and I've got plenty more where that came from."

She lowered the hammer and let it fall to the floor with a blessedly dull thud. Kaien frowned: her arms looked like lead weights. How long had she been standing there?

"Who are you?" the blond girl demanded.

Kaien allowed himself a chuckle. "You know, I was just wondering the same thing about you."

She gathered herself in that self-important manner these n.o.bles possessed. "I am Purity Kloo, and my father the Baron will Kill you himself if you so much as . . . as . . . touch me, or . . . breathe a word . . . about . . ."

"Now, there's no need to fear on that count, Lady Miss Kloo. I think we'd both best keep quiet about where we met." He'd inched his way toward her and now extended his hand. "Kaien Rosa, Journeyman of the Guilds Masonic y Plumbus."

"Um. Pleasure." Purity Kloo blushed, then seemed to recover herself. "My, but your shoulders are broad." She winked, and Kaien retained his composure through some effort. He raised an eyebrow and swallowed a smile.

"I've never shaken hands with a servant before," Purity explained. It was technically true- she'd dallied with criminals, but never with the help. Still it felt like a lie. "But, of course, you aren't a servant, are you, mister guildsperson?"

"Indeed I am not, Lady Kloo. As it happens, I am a second-degree journeyman brother of the Guild Masonic, but here . . . here I suppose I'm a spy." Kaien ducked his head in an honest gesture, and Purity saw crumbled stone dusting his close-cut black hair and the brown skin of his neck.

"Why in the worlds are you telling me this?" The fear rose in her throat again.

"Well, see, I told you that so you'd not worry." Kaien made his voice sound as gentle as possible. "Now we each know something scandalous about the other." He hoped his wink came off as conspiratorial rather than improper. Not that he'd mind a little impropriety with such a lovely thing. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were small enough to fit nicely in his cupped hands, and her dress hugged her slender hips in a most tempting way.

Purity turned away and looked out through the clear gla.s.s wall that looked out onto the wilderness at the heart of the Dome. She wrung her hands; the Groveheart spread out beneath them, all branch and birdsong.

"Lady Kloo?"

"Miss, not Lady. And it's Purity." She turned around and looked as if she'd made up her mind about something. "Please, call me Purity. I don't suppose there's any reason for us to stand on ceremony now, is there, Mister Rosa?"

Kaien shook his head. His body radiated the heat of exertion and his eyes were brown and bright, just a shade lighter than his skin. For such a strong-looking big man, his face was round-cheeked and friendly. "Now, see, if I call you Purity, I'm going to expect you to call me Kaien. It's only fair."

"Fine, Kaien. Now will you please explain what exactly you're doing here, and why you're leaving hammers all over the place?" Purity put on her best imitation of her mother, raising her brow at Kaien for intruding while acting as if she belonged nowhere else at all.

Kaien chewed his cheek. "That was an oversight on my part, Miss Purity. As for my purpose, well, it's not so different than yours, judging from-"

He was cut off by a deafening Klaxon. Purity clapped her hands to her ears and winced.

"Run!" he yelled, grabbing her elbow and pulling her toward the stairs.

"No!" Purity yanked her arm out of Kaien's grip and tried to make her voice audible over the shrieking horns. "That's not meant for us!"

"Who in the worlds is it meant for, then?" Kaien looked physically pained by the volume. "Some deafened G.o.d?"

Purity shook her head. "That sound, we shouldn't ever hear it. That's the high alarum-and it only tolls if there's a physical threat to the prince himself."

"Oof," said Kaien, scrubbing his ears with his palms. "Well, these are the prince's apartments, so maybe-"

"No. An intruder alarum sounds completely different and would be localized. Do you feel that?" Purity put her hand against the thick window. It vibrated strongly along with the Klaxon, and outside birds rose up from the treetops in turbulent swarms. "Look at how the bells vex the birds, do you see? The high alarum rings everywhere at once."

She put her knuckle in her mouth but took it right out without biting. Bad habits. "It would be prudent for us to leave, yes, but this is a toppriority summons to the entire praetorian guard. Like I said, it is reserved for an immediate threat to the royal body- and the prince is absent." She allowed Kaien to lead them halfway up the stairs, where the glowing stone muted the high alarum, somewhat.

"That's another question I wonder if you could answer . . ." Kaien felt as if their roles had been reversed somehow, and it had happened awfully quickly.

Miss Kloo pursed her lips as if she'd thought the same thing. "Yes, well. We're each just chock-a-block with unanswered questions, Kaien. Perhaps when there are fewer Domewide alerts screeching through every corridor, we might even enjoy a moment to sit down and answer some?" Kaien blinked but didn't try to hide his smile. "Miss Kloo, are you always so pretty when you're cross?"

She blew wisps of blond hair from her forehead. "Only when sirens are screeching and I've been caught contemplating treason by strange young men."

"Oh, I dunno, a little treason is good for the spirit." Kaien shrugged and wondered if there was a way he could survive the day. "But it's a false alarm, isn't it? If the prince really isn't here . . ." He hurried them toward his ill-made escape hole.

"I'd like to say so, yes." Purity frowned. "But I can't. The lords and ladies of the Circle Unsung have stopped Killing each other with abandon now that we've all been properly mortified by their manners, and even if they'd started up again it would be unthinkably bad form to involve the praetors. But the truth is, the peerage has come more than a bit undone, and I can't rightly pretend to know who is capable of what anymore."

Kaien rubbed his head and wondered how much the girl knew. "Unless it's the, um, Killer."

"What?" Purity started, and hid her hands behind her back without thinking. "We were just having some girlish fun and I'm sure n.o.body would make a fuss over a few daughters garroted or beheaded and besides which we're all body-bound so you know they'll revive eventually and . . . er. You aren't talking about my friends at all, are you?"

Kaien took her hand and shook his head with what Purity thought just might be a smile of the charmingly indulgent sort. "Not your little coterie of princesses, Miss Kloo-even the scullery hears about that. No, I mean the capital-K Killer that everybody seems afraid to talk about." Purity wilted and Kaien mistook it for aggrievement rather than shame. "I hate to shock you, but somebody's been Killing in secret. Two Tsengs and a mess of horsey-lads were pulled through the Gate, just this week."

"The whole scullery? Oh, nevermind." Purity flushed and moved on, clearly pumping Kaien for information by playing the vapid socialite- she wasn't the best actress. "But whomever would Kill servants? And a couple of Tsengs? Are you certain?" The Tseng family were harmless buffoons, the lot of them.

Kaien nodded. "Your helpers do talk, Purity. And the lords may be keeping it quiet, but they're terrified."

"Of course they are," Kaien thought he heard her mutter, and then, "You oaf." Purity didn't seem to like the implication that the Killer had begun taking n.o.ble victims. . . . "It could be Murder, I suppose," she relented. "If it isn't Circle business, if the lords decide they themselves are endangered by an outside or unknown force . . . Well, I didn't think it could happen, but if so . . . they might call for the praetors. Bells, they'd call for their mistresses if something threatened their perfectly ordered lives."

"Someone must be Killing out of turn." Kaien pulled her up a few steps to the hole he'd made in the glowing stone. Better to take the anonymous route and avoid any praetors running through the hallways. "Come with me. I still think we're not safe here. I hope you don't mind getting a little filthy."

Purity smiled, allowing herself to revel in the chaos as she got down on her hands and knees. So she'd choose to attach herself to Kaien instead of sabotaging the Dawn Stains; that was still more say in her own fate than she'd had in five long years. She hadn't needed to throw away her life to effect change after all-change appeared all on its own.

"On the contrary, my strapping new Masonic friend"-she glanced up at Kaien with a brilliant and, she hoped, lovely smile-"I absolutely adore filth."

In her reverie, Lallowe remembered running through the forest: morning light filtered through the leaves and cast the world in a yellow- green glow, but it was not the sickly and variable glow of the skies above the City Unspoken. These were her favorite moments to relive. She recalled leaping into the air, her arm reaching out to grab one branch and swing to another, child-sized hands with bony spurs of rock digging into the wood. At that, the memory shifted-light flashed brighter than any sun, and Lallowe found her child self cradled in the arm of a grownup, looking up at the face of a woman with auburn curls and a faraway expression.

It was her, the Cicatrix-not the ersatz chimera she'd become, but as she'd been before she'd ruined her body with machine obsession: lovely, not beautiful, but dainty and sweet of face. The queen wore a crown of purple- flowered kudzu, the weed that would not die. Her dress was plain cotton, but the st.i.tching near her small, perfect b.r.e.a.s.t.s was of unmatched craftsmanship. The queen wore a bra.s.s cuff upon her bare upper arm, and before little Lallowe's eyes, the bra.s.s cuff emitted a puff of white steam. It drifted away on the gentle breeze that always stirred the bower, and soon disappeared, but Lallowe felt a familiar pain stab her heart.

"Tell us again about the quickening, Mama." The question came from a brown-haired girl with Almondine's unreadable eyes curled up on the other side of the queen's body.