Yasette’s laboratory was halfway up the tower, behind a thick steel door. Vertale brought two plate armored vellum knights with us, and still looked wary as we entered.
Inside was a dimly lit, decadent smoking lounge, like the common area of that high class brothel my uncle Vouregael took me to when we visited him in the city.
Two clean faced women in stylish, multi-layered dresses were sprawled out languidly on a couch, puffing on a hookah while watching a skinny teenage boy wrangle a disembodied human hand. He grasped at a leash I couldn’t see.
The hand stood on its fingertips, twitching like a spider cautiously approaching unwary prey. It stole a skittering step toward the boy, before he wrenched the invisible leash tighter, halting its progress.
“Shame on you, darling!” one of the watching women said around a puff of hookah smoke. It was a scolding, but it sounded surprisingly tender; the first tender thing I’d heard in days. The woman was lean, dark skinned, and languid as a cat reclining beside a half-dead mouse it was taking a break from toying with. “You haven’t been practicing, have you?”
“I have been!” the boy protested. “Whenever I can, at least.”
Vertale cleared his throat. “Initiates, where is that Calico?”
The hand skittered forward when the boy lost focus.
“Don’t get distracted,” the lioness said.
The boy wrenched the hand to a stop when it was only five feet from his boots.
The lioness turned on Vertale, grinning. “Oh, Arbiter, how delightful of you to grace our humble floor.” She pointed at me with the hookah pipe. “And you bring guests? How marvelous.”
“I don’t have time for this, Mavia,” Vertale said. “Where is she?”
The lioness, Mavia, shrugged and blindly waved over her shoulder at a thick steel door half covered in curtains at the back of the room. The door was cracked open, letting out dim flickering light. “Oh you know our Yasette: always working.”
Vertale snorted. “I’m sure.” He put a hand on the back of my neck and pushed me toward the door.
“I wouldn’t,” Mavia said.
Vertale stopped. “I’m this tower’s Arbiter, Mavia. You forget your place.”
Mavia shrugged. “I’m just warning a friend, darling; you’re such a charming man, I’d loathe to lose you before your time.”
The hand tightened at the back of my neck. “Is that a threat, Mavia?”
“Of course not.” She laughed brightly. “Why would I threaten my own tower’s Arbiter? But we all have our seasons, don’t we? Mortality is already vicious enough as it is; there’s no need to cut your time any shorter than it’s destined to be.”
“So you’re a soothsayer now, are you?”
“Among other things. I’m a woman of oh-so-very-many talents, you know that.”
She lazily grasped at the disembodied hand from a dozen feet away, snatching a leash out of the air, and tugged tight. The hand twitched under her control, then skittered into an empty bird cage, locked itself inside, and left the key dangling from a chord inside the cage. The moment she released it, the hand skittered at the bars, fingers grasping through. It seemed it didn’t know how to use the key on its own.
“You’re going to have to practice more,” Mavia said to the boy. “Every night. Take the cage with you and run along. The adults need to talk.”
“Yes, lady Mavia,” the boy said, and scampered off with the cage into one of the rooms splitting off from this central lounge. Bedrooms, it seemed.
“I am not going to wait here, Mavia,” Vertale snarled. “Go let her know I’m here.”
For some reason, that made the second woman giggle as she suckled on the hookah. The sound was ludicrously endearing. She kept staring at me, grinning, pupils huge, the way my brother’s got after he ate blue gill mushrooms. What the hells were they smoking?
“Oh, Yasette knows. But I’ll tell her anyways, if you’re so particular.” Mavia twisted over the couch to look up into a mess of curtains. “Yasette, we have some honored guests petitioning an audience.”
Vertale’s fingers dug painfully into my flesh. I clenched my fists against the pain and focused on looking through the curtains, trying to see what Mavia was talking to.
A dead eyed raven was perched up there, watching us. Vertale flinched when he saw it.
“Yes, I see that,” the raven said with a woman’s bored voice. “And they’re waiting so patiently.”
Vertale said, “Magister Zoivan demands we show this cav your laboratory, so she knows what’s in store if she thinks to shirk her duties.”
“Ah. So she is sentient, is she?” Yasette said.
Mavia’s gaze twisted to me.
“Technically,” Vertale said. “Although you wouldn’t know it by the way she—”
Yasette cut him off before he could get the insult out. “So you’ve finally accepted you’re an insufficient man, and come for my assistance? You truly have grown, haven’t you, Vertale.”
Vertale’s grip dug so painfully into my neck that a whimper escaped before I bit down to hold it in. “I do not—”
“Oh it’s fine,” Yasette said, cutting him off again. “You can leave her with me. I’ll take over terrorizing the poor girl. I might even keep her. I’ve been needing a revenant.”
“I didn’t bring her here so you could poach her, Yasette,” Vertale snarled.
His grip tightened until I finally caved and crumpled away from him, mindlessly trying to escape his grasp with a whine. I knew it would only make it worse, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“But you’ll leave her here all the same,” Yasette said, “because we’re such good friends.” The raven turned its dead eyes on one of Vertale’s vellum knights standing beside me. The armored undead twitched, then pried Vertale’s hand away from my neck.
I collapsed to my knees, shivering with relief.
“How dare you!” Vertale said.
“Oh, that was one of yours? Forgive me, the hold was so weak I didn’t notice.” I like this woman. “I meant no offense, of course. You’re such a busy man that I didn’t want you to waste any time lingering about while I terrorized little Aveline. Here. I’ll let go so you can take it back.”
The intoxicated woman covered her mouth and tittered again, clearly at Vertale’s expense. I knew he was going to take it out on me even before he shoved me between the shoulder blades, and I was ready to catch myself before I faceplanted into the rug. My hair spun out of my bun and tumbled around my face in a loose crimson cascade.
“You’d better be there for your next shift in the catacombs, cav, or I’ll—”
“We’ll see,” the raven interrupted. “If I’m done with her, I’ll send her along, of course. If not, it’s because I’ve decided to keep her. That’ll be my choice, not hers. So if you have any problems with Aveline in the future, you can assume it’s a problem with something I’ve ordered her to do. In that case, I’ll be the one at fault, so you’ll need to discipline me, not her.” The raven chuckled, an odd, rasping sound. “So if you scold her again, we all might just think you’re intimidated by me.”
“Which you clearly are not, are you, Arbiter?” Mavia asked innocently.
Vertale spluttered something incoherent, and stormed out, having one of his vellums slam the door behind him.
The women on the couch exploded in laughter.
“He’s going to do it soon,” the intoxicated woman said.
“Are you joking?” Mavia said. “She could piss on his mother’s ashes, and that man still wouldn’t challenge her to a duel. He’s such a coward it’s delightful. Throws his weight around like a chimp with anyone weaker; trembles like a lost little boy with anyone stronger.”
The back door opened, and Yasette strolled out, wiping blood from her gloved hands. She was a slim, bookish young woman with mismatched eyes and calico skin. Her glossy, tri-colored hair was in a stylishly spiralled bun, like a conch shell at the back of her skull.
One of the valefolk. The empire may have proclaimed ethnic impartiality, but those proclamations weren’t worth the wasted paper. Even in the most unusually cosmopolitan towns I’d seen in my youth, I’d never seen half so wild an ethnic melting pot as the tower lands. Here, competence was all that mattered—and this bookish young woman was clearly competent.
“So you’re the new revenant I’ve heard so much about?” Yasette peeled off her gloves and tossed them at the raven, which caught them out of the air. Another dead bird flew over and hovered beside her, holding a bottle of antiseptic. She squirted some onto her hands, and it flew off back into the curtains. How many undead birds were hiding back there?
Not for me to worry about.
“Yes, lady Yasette,” I said.
“You’re surprisingly emotive,” Yasette said. It sounded like a scolding.
I’d been crying without realizing it. Pathetic. You’d think I’d never been humiliated before. She clearly wanted me to stop, so I frantically scrubbed the tears away with my left hand. I averted my eyes to the ground. Should I stand? I couldn’t curtsy on my hands and knees. I decided against it—better to be as submissive as possible, if I was already doing something wrong—and I bowed forward instead.
“I’m sorry, lady Yasette, I didn’t—”
“Oh, no, darling, you’re fine. It’s alright. You did nothing wrong.” Yasette squatted down in front of me. She gently tipped my face up to look at her. “Let’s stick with just names, and none of this effusive supplication. I’m not going to hurt you.” She smiled like a friend, calico skin crinkling around her mismatched, blue and brown eyes. “Mavia,” she sang while staring at me. “There is a person in here.”
“I… I know, I can tell. But they told me she wasn’t fully sentient.”
“And you didn’t verify it?” Yasette demanded. “I’m relying on you here, Mavia.”
“I know, it’s my fault entirely, I should have checked. Apologies, Mistress.”
“Why are you apologizing to me! Apologize to her!”
I did not want another dangerous enemy, and I knew what happened when people were humiliated at your expense. “It’s really okay.”
“No, no, darling, it’s not okay at all,” Mavia said. She didn’t sound humiliated, just tender. “Aveline, I’m sorry, we never would have left you with these monsters if I had done my job. I shouldn’t have trusted what I heard without checking myself. But I will make it up to you, I promise.”
It was so flabergastingly unexpected that all I could stammer out was a meager, “that really isn’t necessary.”
“Heavens, you must have had a rough few days.” Yasette eased me up so I was sitting back on my heels. “And a live embalming? From what I’ve heard, that’s among the worst ways to die. You have my sympathies, for what little sympathy is worth.”
The casual compassion blindsided me, and my composure melted like ice in the sun. This was the first time anyone had shown me the slightest sliver of empathy since Dorien and I were captured.
“Thank you,” I said, blinking my eyes clear and shivering around a long breath that wanted to break into a sob. “Uh. No. No, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience.”
“And I can’t imagine it’s gotten much better for you since.”
“I…” I flicked a glance around the room and chose my words carefully. “Vel Zerav has been very welcoming.”
Yasette snorted. “Oh, I’m sure. It’s alright. I won’t force you to speak ill of your old slavers. That’s the sort of thing you keep between friends—and you look like you need a few friends right now. So we’ll prove we’re all worth befriending before we ask you anything like that again.” She helped me up to my feet. “How absurd to think that old geezer of a magister actually believed he could use me to threaten you.”
“Yasette only uses unthinking flesh in her creations,” Mavia said. “None of us would ever tear up a sentient revenant.”
“That’s certainly relieving,” I said.
Yasette tenderly fixed my hair, the way I used to with my little sister. You’d think we hadn’t just met. She was only a few inches taller than me, but her presence made her seem enormous. “He never would have thought to send you my way if he paid any attention to the nuances of what happens in his tower. But then he’s a withered old fool, same as all the rest of them.” She leaned in and flashed me a vulpine grin. “Some might even think it’s time for a changing of the guard.”