Carlos murmured to himself. “I shall have to ask him for the details.”
We fell into silence for a minute or more as we each tried to rally whatever reserves of energy we had. After a few more minutes, I asked, “So, this old master of yours—Lenoir—helped you tonight but he also tried to kill you?”
“No. He no longer has the power of life and death. He is a shade, but his knowledge of his old brothers in the art has not faded. Nor has his treachery. A young friend of his discovered our meeting and crashed the party. I suspect he would not cavil at telling the place if he were asked, and would have cared not at all whether I lived or died as a result. Our association was a study in betrayal and power. As I spoke to him, he eked his knowledge out by small degrees, teasing me with it, and I told him what had become of his creations, of the one I destroyed for you in particular. It infuriated him, but there was nothing he could do to harm me here. I had not counted on the reappearance of Maggie Griffin.”
I wasn’t surprised. The web of bone-white magic that held him down had been too much like the spell that I’d torn off Quinton the night before to be coincidence. “Griffin. How?”
“She is of the Kostní Mágové and she asked the right question of the right ghost. She was not unprepared or overtaxed this time, but she did come alone—which was my only piece of luck. Lenoir chose not to warn me when she moved to strike.” Carlos shrugged as if it hadn’t nearly killed him. “As I said, I miscalculated.”
“But she didn’t stay to finish you off. That wasn’t wise.”
“She had no choice. Rui may still be incapacitated, but he is her master and would demand her attendance, even if he were the one to send her. And her powers are limited here, for there are few bones left in this place. The tombs contain only dust now and even the bones of dead monks are scattered like straws in the wind. But there is the shadow of death in plenty here—my element and strength. Her only chance was to silence me and cast what spells she had already prepared. She did her work well, though she had little time to craft it and could not stay to see the end. Her art would have destroyed me without your intervention.”
“Your old master is a hard case to stand by and let his star pupil die for pissing him off.”
“What makes you think I was ever a star pupil?”
“You said you pursued the knowledge he offered with all your passion.”
“Ah. I did. And when I had what I wanted from him, I slaughtered him. A peculiar kind of stardom. The irony was that he killed me first and should have known I would repay him in kind. He did not warn me that the ascension I desired would be a journey through hell from which I would emerge a vampire and the only way to reach that state—the Becoming—was to be murdered, torn open while alive and bled like a butchered animal. Not merely to die, or to sink into the Bliss and change painlessly in the addiction of blood. For that alone, I enjoyed destroying his creation when you brought me to it.”
“His creation . . . ?”
“The organ. The object of your first client’s desire. Sergeyev’s prison. Just like the small boxes assembled in the temple last night.”
He’d mentioned it before and it had been on my mind, too. A ghost had come to me in my first days as a Greywalker and asked me to find “an heirloom,” which proved to be quite a bit more than that. I hadn’t known what I was into, that my client was dead for centuries and that the solution of the case would require me to leap into the occupation I hadn’t wanted. “Oh gods . . . You wanted it. Mara and I believed it was because it was a dark artifact—a thing of power you could use for your own ends.”
“That was true. But even greater was the satisfaction in undoing what he had done.”
“I nearly got you killed then, too.”
He looked amused. “It was a close thing.” He pressed his back against the column and pushed slowly to his feet. “Which of us can stand well enough to carry the other this time?”
“I think that’s you.”
“This may also be a close thing. . . .”
I found it harder to get to my feet than he had, but though I flinch from the touch of vampires in most cases, this time his hand on my arm didn’t send a bolt of nausea or pain through my body or shake my mind with unimagined horrors. It was a cool touch—unnaturally cool—but not grave-cold, and though it raised the hairs on my arm and the back of my neck, it didn’t make me ill. “I think I’m getting used to you,” I panted through weakness and the persistent cold of the Grey.
“I may find that inconvenient.”
“I said ‘used to,’ not ‘fond of.’”
He laughed and leaned back to counterbalance my awkward struggle to regain the upright. When I’d attained it, he put his arm around my shoulder and I put mine around his waist. It felt very strange to be half hugging someone who spoke casually of slaughtering others and ripping souls into shreds as if we were boon companions—though in our horrifying way, we were. Between us, we reeled like a pair of drunks.
“Where’s the exit?” I asked.
“Griffin went through the doors to the north chapel. There should be stairs to the crypt from the ambulatory or the transept.”
“I was never a good churchgoer. I have a rough idea of what the nave, aisles, and altar are and beyond that, I’m a heretic.”
“I never imagined I’d be pleased to have been a Catholic in life.”
We made our unsteady way out of the ruins through a door that deposited us on a bare roof.
“The apse . . . is gone,” Carlos said, and stopped, looking out at the city.
“You didn’t notice that when you arrived?”
“No. I came another way.” He stared into the distance over the Baixa and toward the castle of São Jorge. “The streets were never so straight when I lived here.”
“Quinton told me it was all rebuilt after the earthquake by some nobleman called the Marquis of Pombal.”
Carlos jerked as if I’d electrocuted him and turned to stare at me, nearly letting me fall.
“Pombal . . . didn’t rebuild anything. He was no nobleman. He was secretary of state—what would be the prime minister now. He ordered it done, the same way he ordered an end to the Inquisition and to the purity of blood laws—which was well-done—but in the same autocratic way he decided who would die after the Tavora affair. He was only Carvalho e Melo then, but by his hand he would have wiped out every member of the Tavora, Lencastre, and Ataíde families if he could have. He hated and distrusted them and it was a fair excuse. He was made Count of Oeiras for his duplicity and Marquis of Pombal ten years later. It was the end of the old families—all but Bragança and Periero de Melo. He took the rest down like hares in the field.”
“Your name is Ataíde.”
“Only a bastard son.”
“How do you know what became of them after you left? You said you never came back.”
“I was neither blind nor deaf. News always comes. I did not know at the time that this would be the result of what I went to do on All Hallows’ Eve. When I survived another betrayal, when I found out what had happened, I knew it would be the seal on my doom. He was the secretary of state—the voice of the king—and he hated me. His brother was the patriarch of Lisbon by then. Had I, a man who would not die, nor age, reappeared in the ashes, alive and whole when all the city was still in flames and ruins, that would surely have been taken as sorcery—he threw me from the window of this holy place and I lived, but it fell! Even without the Inquisition, little would have stopped them from having me burned at the stake.”
“Wait, wait . . .” I begged him, not sure I’d caught the implication that was circling the back of my brain like a shark. “The Marquis of Pombal . . . was your cousin? The one who threw you—”