What am I doing here? he wondered again, looking around the dingy room, an incongruous background for the crowd of well-dressed nobles that filled it from end to end. Miles was by no means young, but he was certainly the newest lord here; his father had died unexpectedly four years before, launching him into the family lands and titles at the age of thirty-eight. Miles had never been to the Creche before, for his vices were minimal—cards and an occasional drink—and they could be well serviced in the Gut. As the group traveled through the endless warren of tunnels and intersections—Miles praying, all the while, that they would not get lost, for he could think of nothing worse than wandering directionless in this dark, dank hell beneath the streets of New London—he had begun to understand that the Creche was another animal entirely. He tried not to look, but he had never had that gift some had of turning away from degeneracy entirely, and so he saw them: children, rooms and rooms full of them, their eyes big and dark with want. Some of them were skinny to the point of emaciation, and many looked as though they hadn’t bathed in weeks. In one room, Miles had seen a girl no older than his youngest daughter, doing a strangely sinuous dance for a group of men, and that single glimpse had convinced him that all of the stories about the Creche were true.
Now there was a shuffling and murmuring at the far end of the room. The crowd of nobles parted to admit the old woman, who walked with one hand on a cane and the other wrapped around Lord Williams’s arm. As she came closer, Miles saw that she was blind, both of her eyes milky with cataracts. As her sightless gaze passed over him, he shuddered.
“Ellens!” Williams deposited the old woman gently into a chair that had been placed beside the six-foot slab of stone in the center of the room. “You have the girl?”
Ellens came forward, leading a slight figure in a hood and cloak. When Ellens pulled back her hood, Miles saw that she was very young, surely no more than fourteen. She had a peasant’s simple face, her nose dotted with freckles. Her eyes rolled vacantly toward the ceiling.
Drugged, Miles realized.
“Well, let’s get on with it!” someone barked from the back. Miles thought it was Lord Tare. “I don’t want to spend a moment more in this shithole than I have to!”
“No one begged you to come, Tare!” Williams snapped back. “In fact, I seem to recall lifting a hundred pounds from you for the privilege.”
Tare muttered something inaudible but venomous. Ellens removed the girl’s cloak and helped her to lie down on the stone slab. Now that Miles’s eyes had adjusted to the light, he saw that the slab itself was covered with odd symbols that had been etched into the stone: sun and moon, the crude rendering of a ship, even a five-pointed star. That last was a pagan symbol, Miles knew, and he wondered—not for the first time—what Bishop Wallace would say if he could see Miles here, in the Creche. In this room.
Best not to think about it. Best to just get it done.
“Light,” the old woman croaked, froglike. She wasn’t really so old, Miles saw now; it was only her sight and the cane that gave the illusion of age. She might be as young as fifty. She stood patiently, waiting, while three of Williams’s men brought torches and stationed them in the stands around the slab, creating a bright circle of light around the young girl in the center of the shadowy room. The girl wore a thin white dress, little more than a shift, and Miles had the unwilling thought that she must be cold, drugs or no. It was early April, warming outside, but in this dank, mold-dripping hell, there was no warmth.
“Go ahead, Orra,” Williams told the old woman, his voice deep and solicitous, and Miles felt a sudden, poisonous envy. Williams wasn’t even a good Christian; he went to church, certainly, as they all did, but that didn’t stop him from keeping two mistresses in his manse. Rumor said that Williams was so brazen about it that the mistresses slept on the same floor as his wife.
He will get his reward in the hereafter, Miles thought, feeling a grim satisfaction at the idea. And there won’t be any seers to grease the skids there.
The old woman had bent over the younger one now, pulling her arms from her dress. She rolled the bodice of the dress down to the girl’s waist, revealing her breasts and the milk-white skin of her torso. Miles crossed himself and looked away, but a moment later his eyes had gone back, almost unwilling.
The old woman began murmuring, low words that Miles could not hear, and the young woman began to writhe. As she twisted on the slab, her eyes rolled up into her head, showing the whites. Miles was growing more uncomfortable by the second, and he didn’t think he was the only one; there was an almost imperceptible movement in the crowd of nobles, shifting and fidgeting, as though they all wished they were anywhere else. When Miles first heard about Williams’s offer, it had seemed a downright bargain: one hundred pounds to find out the year’s forecast! His acres had been devastated in the drought, and the hundred pounds would bring the family treasury down to its last thousand, but a man who knew the year’s weather could make ten times that much, not only by planting the right crops but by hoarding his own long-term stores to create a shortage. Paying Williams had been the easiest decision that Miles had ever made; only now, in this dank room, did he understand that there might be an additional price. His fellow nobles knew it too; they shifted uncomfortably, none of them willing to look at each other, all of them trying not to look at the girl. She had arched her back now, lifting her torso off the table, and her eyes continued to gaze whitely at the ceiling, almost as whitely as those of the old woman who stared down at her, her palm placed flat between the girl’s breasts. The woman’s other hand emerged from the shadows, and Miles saw that she held a dagger.
“God save us,” someone muttered nearby, and several of the lords who stood opposite Miles crossed themselves. But none of them moved to interfere, not even when the old woman made a shallow vertical cut along the line of the girl’s breastbone. Blood welled immediately, a red river cutting a ravine between mountains, almost shockingly scarlet in contrast to the girl’s white skin. Several of the lords in the audience cursed, and behind Miles, someone drew a shaking, hissing breath. As the old woman removed the dagger, the girl stopped writhing and lay still, so still that Miles could not even see her breathe.
“Is she dead?” Lord March asked timidly.
“Shut up, March!” Lord Williams hissed, his eyes focused on the old woman.
My God, Miles thought, he has seen all of this before. How many times?
“I come to speak before you now,” the old woman said, and her voice made Miles jump. It was not the voice of an old woman, or even of a woman at all. The words were hollow and cold, less than human. That night, and for many months afterward, Miles would wake gasping from dreams he could barely remember, dreams in which that voice spoke to him, taunted him, stalked him, coming closer and closer in the dark.
“The stars change,” the old woman intoned hollowly. “The moon falls. The tide surges, then ebbs.”