Garrett Investigates - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,3

and lemon with which he’d washed his insides since the night before.

The Enchancery’s doorman might have been chosen to look the part. A tall man who hunched like a question mark, he wore his lank dark hair combed across a freckled pate, a crisp black suit buttoned over a spare midriff. “Good afternoon,” he said, with a glance at the sky.

Cuan, not tall and at a disadvantage due to the doorstep, craned his head back. “I’m expected,” he said, fumbling inside his coat for a visiting card. “Detective Sergeant Coen, for DCI Garrett.”

The doorman extended a gilt tray for the card. Cuan laid it gently across the concerned-seeming face of an embossed Narcissus and stepped through the door as the doorman stood aside.

“Please wait in the receiving room,” the doorman said, indicating the appropriate doorway with a white-gloved flourish.

Cuan stepped through, and stood just inside the threshold with his elbows cupped in the palms of his hands. The receiving room was not large, but it was comfortably appointed, with militarily pleated drapes that reminded Cuan of coffin velvet. He could sit on one of the needlepoint chairs, but that seemed like an unnecessary risk.

He was still standing when Garrett appeared in the doorway.

Cuan had expected the doorman again, someone come to usher him deeper into the bowels of the former mansion. The sorcerer herself, clad now in a plain blue dress with sleeves that buttoned to the elbow, came as something of a shock.

“DCI—” he stammered, heat spilling across his face. “I—”

“You didn’t need to deliver those personally,” she said, extending a pale hand. “A messenger would have sufficed.”

He slipped the documents in their oilcloth case out from under his arm and handed them to her. “I chose to assume the responsibility. I wanted—”

Her eyebrows rose, her thumb slipped under the flap of the case but hesitated before she lifted it. Though she said nothing, he read her regard as skeptical.

“I wanted to speak to you away from the DI,” he finished, limping. Groping after anything else to say, he added, “Did you have any luck with the knife?”

She’d been freezing over, a chill spidering through her manner like frost elongating toward the center of a pool. Whether despite or because of its awkwardness, his question broke that ice. She smiled faintly, the appling of her cheeks making more evident the bruised shadows under her eyes. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I’ve had some exceptional success. Come along.”

She turned, black boots that vanished under the hem of her skirts clicking on marble until she mounted the heavy figured runner in the hall. She moved like a whippet, so Cuan hurried to match her, almost breaking into a trot before he drew up alongside. His heart thumped hollowly, but it wasn’t the woman or the exertion. It was the place.

He was here, in the Enchancery itself, on official business. He kept his eyes front and his expression professional, but there was a twelve-year-old inside him who hung on every sound, every image, every scent.

The long hall smelled of tobacco smoke, nitre, and saffron. The walls on both sides were hung with portraits of men in plain frames, each dark beveled rectangle chased with a narrow thread of silver. The oldest were in oils or tempera; the newer ones silver-process on tin. Each one bore a plaque beneath with the name of one of the Crown’s Own, and the circumstances of his death in the line of duty.

By the time Garrett and Cuan came to the far end of the hall, there were no more portraits. But the smell of saffron lay musty and heavy on the air, leading Cuan to speculate that dinner was likely to be curry.

The stair Garrett led him to was wide and plain—not a grand stair, but not a servant’s runway either. He thought they would climb, but she turned downwards, still wordlessly, and so they descended together. Cuan’s palms sweated badly enough that he wished he could ball his fists in his pockets.

The emotion filling him up was a peculiar one, a ribbon snarl of melancholy and longing he was more accustomed to associate with unattainable women than with government offices. He was here, finally, inside these gray walls and walking these worn floors—but he was not here as a Crown Investigator, or even as a hopeful supplicant.

At the bottom of the stair, Garrett unlocked a second door and swung it wide. Cuan expected the dankness of a London basement, but they entered into