Reign of Beasts (Creature Court) - By Tansy Rayner Roberts Page 0,8

nox after the show ended and I could smell her in the alley out the back. Tasha. The scent of her was so strong and certain, I didn’t have to inhale from the silk cloth in my pocket to be sure of it.

I followed her scent up the Via Delgardie and all the way to the Lucian district, which was still full of people at this time of nox — their musettes and theatres stayed open later than ours. I tracked her through a maze of side streets, and then she disappeared somewhere near the Circus Verdigris. Only she didn’t disappear, her scent went in and down between buildings, somewhere I couldn’t follow.

‘Good enough,’ said a voice. A dark lad slipped down off a wall to face me. He was as tall as Garnet, broader in the shoulders, and he wore his fancy clothes better. Another came out of the darkness, a blond lad with curly hair, and then Garnet himself.

‘Bring him down to her,’ said Garnet.

The lads grabbed me and hauled me down into the darkness, into a space between buildings that I’d never seen for myself, down a path that shouldn’t exist, deep into the undercity of Aufleur.

I didn’t fight. This was what I wanted.

Tasha had a sort of den deep in the ruins beneath the real city. It was cozy, lit with oil lamps, and her scent was everywhere.

‘Impressive,’ she said, stretched lazily across a bed covered with cushions. ‘See how the little rat burrows. One of us, boys. You can taste it on his skin.’

‘What do you want with him?’ demanded the dark lad, whom the others called Ash. ‘He’s a sprat. Is he going to hang around and pour drinks for us for the next five years?’

Tasha grinned. ‘Not that. I have a better idea.’ She reached out and took my chin in her hand. ‘Do you want your revenge against Saturn, ratling? Do you want to know all his secrets?’

I forgot that I blamed her for Madalena’s death, forgot that I had to be back at the theatre by sun-up or the stagemaster would beat me, forgot that she was a lion. I just leaned into her, trusting her, because there was something about her that reminded me of what it was like to have a mother, of how it felt to be loved.

Tasha embraced me lightly, as Madalena had sometimes when she was feeling her years. ‘Do you like me, little rat?’

‘You smell of sunshine,’ I muttered, half out of my senses. I had no idea what was happening, but everything about her drew me in, making me trust her.

Tasha laughed. ‘Hear that, my cubs? The boy’s a poet.’

And she tore me into pieces.

PART II

A Surfeit of Kings

4

One day after the Ides of Bestialis

Sunlight shone into the broken theatre through holes in the walls and the sagging ceiling, catching motes of dust. The last of the bodies had been carried out by daybreak, but the place still smelled of death.

Isangell, the Duchessa d’Aufleur, had awoken to the news that there had been a disaster in the Vittorine. The Proctor of that district was overwhelmed by distraught and protesting citizens, and had sent to the Palazzo begging for more lictors to protect himself and his family.

The day after an Ides was traditionally nefas: ill luck. It was hard to argue with that tradition on a morning like this.

Isangell stepped into the ruined theatre, shivering at the sight of the damage. Broken glass was everywhere, thick slabs of it, some of the edges still black and crimson with dried blood.

‘We will need to perform a cleansing ritual,’ said the Matrona Irea in a solemn voice. By virtue of her senior position in the Priestesses of Ires, she was the only woman apart from Isangell herself who served as one of the City Fathers.

The Master of Saints, an elderly thin man with a hooked nose who had terrified Isangell when she was a child, snorted. ‘Raze it to the ground,’ he suggested. ‘No amount of ritual can return fortune to this place.’

‘A blood sacrifice could do it,’ grunted Brother Typhisus of the Silver Brethren.

‘Hasn’t there been blood enough?’ demanded Matrona Irea, and promptly launched into a lecture about the healing properties of honey cakes and blessed water while the other priests scoffed at her.

Isangell ignored the three of them, walking further into the theatre. She had dreamt of such places as a child, had begged her mother to let her attend a pantomime or a harlequinade.