odsdamn me.”
A clatter of porcelain; he hissed between his teeth. There was already a streak of tea on his waistcoat, a patch of darker on dark. He sat still in the armchair with the saucer in his lap, a little chilly tea pooling round the base of the cup, his trembling fingers perched on the rim.
He took a deep breath, like he knew how to do, and shut his eyes. There. He listened: the crackle of fire in the grate; the even tick-tock of the grandfather clock, even now, where he’d had the natt with a shop in the Painted Ladies come look at it and fix the lurch of its rhythm, the fifteen-minutes-fast. It was even, now. All the clocks in the house were even, now, all three floors. Everything slid into the pattern.
The scratch and rustle of bare branches together, out the dark glass doors to the atrium. He thought he could hear – if not hear, then imagine – the dry husky voices of leaves skittering across the stone path.
His old copy of Brellos pez Hirtka sat on the arm of the chair. He’d’ve been happy enough, tonight, to whisk it back off upstairs, to forget this whole damned affair. He took off his glasses, rubbing at his dry, burning eyes. Swallowing thickly, porcelain a-clatter in his shaky hands, he set the teacup on the end table. The silk at his throat, feather-soft, nagged and pressed painfully on the bruises as the muscles moved.
Funny enough, Tom couldn’t say he’d ever been choked out before.
If all this vodundun was about experiences – about having a unique perspective, as Ezre might’ve said – then he’d had a new experience, at least. Rather hard to put a man like Tom, the Tom he’d been in life, in a sleeper hold; hard to keep him there long enough.
He’d looked at them that morning, shaving. The color of old wine. Dark prints at his throat, strangely-shaped, broken up with lines following the folds and wrinkles of a collar. He’d probed them with careful fingertips, then looked at himself, a little tireder, a little more sallow, with the scuff at his right cheekbone where he’d woken up with it pressed to the cobbles.
And a familiar weight gone from his waistcoat pocket. Ezre, he thought, with a guilty ache. Oes, he’d’ve been happy enough to crawl upstairs with his love poetry, to break out the Gioran whisky, to lose himself in more tender memories. Happy enough, if it’d been anything else stolen. There was no amount of ging, no amount of jinga, could’ve convinced him to file a report otherwise. Flooding brigk’d never been worth much.
Especially not with where he’d been, when it’d happened. Not with what he’d been doing.
He still didn’t know if he should’ve. He still couldn’t see through the mist. He didn’t know Constable Inspector Louis-Armand Truart, but he knew the man’s reputation – a blunt instrument. He couldn’t imagine a man like Truart taking a case like this with an eye to detail, or a careful hand. On the one hand, one of Vienda’s Incumbents was not someone to be ignored, especially not the friend of a certain co-captain’s; on the other, Tom knew, as well as anybody, the whispers. He wouldn’t’ve been surprised if Truart wanted to wash his hands of this quick as possible.
And yet he’d still gone to the brigk. There was no doing otherwise. He swallowed thickly, again, and the raw, irritating pain of it sent a thrill of anger through him, brought him down to Vita; he shut his eyes for a few precious moments. He felt it ripple through the clairvoyant mona around him, still tender and strange. There was no asking them what would come of this, but he was achingly glad of them.
He heard voices, boots on carpeting, low underneath the crackle of the fire. Steadying his breath, he opened his eyes.
“Constable – Inspector,” he said haltingly, wincing as he pushed himself up out of his chair.
There was a trick to using Anatole’s voice; in theory, he’d’ve traded it for his old one any ten of the week, but on the whole, it was useful. He’d got used to living in the range of a man who’d spent forty years taking damn good care of his vocal cords, practicing and testing their edges.
It wasn’t any less deep, but it was labored, with a scratchy waver that made him sound, he thought with chagrin, like an old man.
But he pulled himself to his straightest, as if shrugging off the pain in his shoulders, as if shrugging off all of it: he found the shape, in the upright line of his spine and the set of his jaw. He thought he was beginning to understand the strength Anatole must’ve drawn from posture; he thought he was beginning to understand a little of all of it.
He fit a neat, thin smile to his face, and he found he could draw strength from that, too.
And he looked at the first uniform, deep green, heavy winter wool, that Morris brought through to the parlor. “Please, come in,” he said, and bowed deeply himself. The motion rattled something in his head, and he resisted the urge to hold onto the arm of the chair.
When he rose up, there was somebody else in the room, too. He raised his brows and blinked, hesitant, as if he wasn’t quite sure how to parse what he saw where he was seeing it. “Anatole,” he said after a moment, “Vauquelin,” and bowed deeply again. "It’s a pleasure to meet – the both of you."