He took a drag off his cigarette, and I looked up at the sky. The stars were still shining brightly, though a pale blue light crept up from the horizon.
"It's a nice night, isn't it?" Sariel asked at last.
"Yes," I agreed.
"Can we start over?" Sariel asked, and I knew he meant more than the conversation.
I wanted to tell him that we could. But the past could no more be forgotten than it could be undone. It would always be between us. When I looked at him, I could not help but remember who I had been and how low I had sunk since then. No matter how many years passed, I knew that I would never be able to think of him without recalling my time under the prayer engines. He would think of the same things when he saw me.
"No," I said. "Let's just go on."
A few more moments of silence passed. Sariel blew smoke rings, and then as a thick plume of smoke floated up from between his lips, he whispered the word, "Moth." The smoke curled into the form of a gypsy moth. Its wings beat against the breezes, dissipating as it rose up.
I smiled. Creating smoky moths had been the first magic Sariel had accomplished. He had shown them to me on a night much like this one, when the two of us had snuck up to the roof of the school. I remembered how his young face had been flushed with exertion and pride. He had singed his hair and burnt one of his fingers, but that had hardly mattered to him. Now he made it look as effortless as breathing.
Sariel leaned languidly on one elbow, as if he were on the edge of sleep. He watched me, but from the shadows of his lowered eyes. I didn't catch the word that he whispered, but the smoke that rose from his mouth whirled up into two slender forms. They circled each other, the thin trails of their bodies winding together. At last they drew into an embrace that swallowed them both.
Sariel looked directly at me then. As much as he wanted to return to the past, I needed to leave it behind. The man I was could never reclaim that time of trust and pride. I no longer fit into it. I looked past Sariel to where black walls of smoke still hung over Edward Talbott's house.
"Did you know Joan Talbott very well?" I asked.
"I knew her," Sariel said, "but we weren't associates outside of Good Commons. She was never willing to get her silk gloves that dirty."
"Tell me about her."
"What do you want to know?" Sariel looked slightly unsure of the turn of the conversation.
"What connection she had to Peter Roffcale and to a woman named Lily and another named Rose."
"So, Captain Harper really has hired you for his investigation." Sariel frowned. "I thought he might have just brought you along with him to protect himself."
"He hired me," I said. Whether to investigate, to provide a buffer from others of my own kind, or just to waste his money, I didn't know.
"Mica might have killed him if you hadn't been there." Sariel moved a little closer to me. "She raised Peter from the time he was nine. When we heard that he had been murdered, she.. .Well, you saw how she was. She's almost wasted away to nothing."
"Did Mica know Joan also?"
"Oh yes, they were fond of each other. I think Mica believed that eventually Joan would come back to Peter. She used to say that the girl was just scared. She needed time." Sariel shook his head. "Joan wrote a lot of our speeches, some of the best ones. But she never had the courage to deliver any of them or to attend any of the demonstrations. Peter and Lily read most of what she wrote. Rose took the vitriolic ones.
"Rose had a sweet look about her that let her say vicious things without losing the crowd. Peter did six months of labor for one of Joan's speeches. Lily spent ten months in a reformatory for Prodigal women. Rose was charged, but I think the judge couldn't bring himself to give her more than a fine. Even I've given speeches that Joan wrote. I was charged for public indecency for one." Sariel smiled briefly at this. "Joan, on the other hand, never even stepped into an Inquisition House unless it was to take a lunch to her half-brother—"
"Half-brother?" I asked.
"Captain William Harper," Sariel said, as if I should have already known that. "His father was some Inquisition abbot who got his head ripped off during the mine riots. Joan was the child from the mother's second marriage."
"I see."
"They're a rich family. Though you wouldn't know it from the captain. They own a huge estate house out past St. Bennet's. Before she married, Joan had a house up near the banks all to herself. She hired Peter on as an under-gardener. He carried her speeches down to us in Hells Below. I suppose he provided other services as well. It must have been quite nice for her. She could express her displeasure with the society around her while still enjoying its amenities."
"You sound like you hated her," I commented.
Sariel frowned a little, thinking about it.
"No," he decided, "I'm just bitter; perhaps, jealous. She had so much that the rest of us didn't. She was in a position to help many of us, but she was never willing to risk her own comfort. It's easy to get angry at her for that. But if I had been in her situation, I don't know that I would have done more. She did try to take part in a demonstration once."
"What happened?" I asked
"We broke into the Taylor Shirt workhouse and released twenty Prodigal children who were being rented out from a reformatory and forced to work. One of the shift foremen pulled the fire siren and the Inquisition rushed in on us. Joan was grabbed along with about ten others of us, but when we reached the Inquisition House, she was gone."
Sariel lifted his cigarette, then realized that it had burned down almost to his fingers. He flicked it to the street below.
So, the woman had disappeared more than once. I found that interesting.
"Do you think that Harper got her out?" I asked. It struck me as something he'd do.
"He could have." Sariel shrugged. "In any case, she didn't come back down to Hells Below. About three weeks later we found out that she had gotten married to Dr. Edward Talbott. They'd been engaged for a few months, but none of us had known. That was the last we heard from her."
"Peter Roffcale wrote to her," I said.
"I suppose he would have." Sariel looked down at his hands. "He never blamed her for leaving, but anyone could see that it tore him up to know she'd married another man."
"He mentioned that Rose and Lily had been murdered in one of his letters. Were there others?" I asked.
"Dozens. Members of Good Commons have been going missing or turning up in pieces for nearly a decade. One or two a year." Sariel flipped out another cigarette. He lit it and took a deep drag. "Recently, it's gotten worse. We used to make reports of missing persons. But since Peter was killed in custody, I think it's obvious that the Inquisition abbots don't give a damn."
Sariel's voice almost trembled with anger, then he stopped speaking. He simply stared up into the sky and drew in breath after breath of cigarette smoke. He had probably known all of the Prodigals who had been murdered. They would have been his friends and companions in Good Commons.
"I'm sorry," I said.
The words were embarrassingly worthless. My sympathy was as little good to Sariel as his forgiveness was to me.
"It happens," Sariel replied.
"Are you safe?" I couldn't help but ask. There was nothing I could offer him if he wasn't.
"No." Sariel smiled and shook his head. "None of us are ever safe, really. I've heard there's a sorcerer who sells potions made from Prodigal's bodies. He lures children away with candy and then chops them up and cooks them. There's also supposed to be a lord's club that requires every new member to kill a Prodigal as proof of his valor. Then there's always the Inquisition, over-zealous nuns, and simple, sick bastards. A lot of people seem to want Prodigals dead. The only protection we really have is each other." Sariel glanced over to me. "So, I'm safer than you, aren't I?"