Chapter 43 - Part 1: A Good Joke Never Dies

The table in the east reading room had nothing left on it but two stacks of parchment and the inkwell. Valentina had rolled the diagrams an hour ago and tied them with a black ribbon she must have brought from home, because the library only gave out string.

"So." She squared her stack against the table edge. "Order."

"I'll take the first part. Ambient against internal, the taint, why nobody casts from the air." I tapped my own pages. "You close. Cultivation, the pool, perception. You wrote it, so you'll say it better."

She looked at me over the top of her parchment. "The closing carries the grade."

"I know."

Her pages went down flat. One nail traced the corner of the top sheet, back and forth, and stopped. "Acceptable," she said. "That's acceptable."

"Then it's settled."

I capped the inkwell. She watched me do it, and then she watched the ribbon on the diagrams, and then she said to the ribbon, "Try not to stammer through the opening. If you trip, I'll have to carry you, and I'd rather not exert myself on your behalf."

I waited for the rest of it. There wasn't any. She picked up the diagrams and held them against her chest.

"Oh," I said. "Okay. Thanks."

"I didn't say anything to thank me for."

We went down the brass ladder one after the other, her first. A book drifted across the gap at the bottom and she swatted it aside without looking, and it bobbed off towards its shelf with its pages flapping. Meridia didn't raise her head from the desk as we passed.

The doors were heavy. I put my shoulder to one and held it, and Valentina walked through under my arm.

Outside, the evening had gone warm and red. The path to the main building was busy with girls coming off the late seminars.

"Are you really that scared of a bad grade?"

She didn't break stride. "Scared."

"Aria thinks so."

"Aria thinks with her hips." Her heels clicked twice on the flagstones. "Our grade has my name on it. It reflects on my house. Naturally it matters." She shifted the diagrams to her other arm. "But you've done a passable job. You won't sink us. There's no reason to worry about it."

"Passable."

"Don't fish."

"Then why the difference?"

She turned her head.

"In there you're easy to work with," I said. "Out here you're you. The dining hall yesterday. Every other time I've met you without a table between us."

Her mouth opened, and closed. A group of first-years came up the path towards us and split round her without being asked, and she let them, and said nothing until they'd gone.

"Working with you is an obligation. I'm thorough with obligations." Her chin lifted. "And arguing over every line would have taken twice as long, and I have better things to do with my evenings than spend them in a reading room with you. I simply made the efficient choice. If you mistake efficiency for... anything, that's a failing in your upbringing, not my conduct."

Her tail had wrapped once round her own ankle. She saw me looking and it unwound.

"Right," I said.

I stepped off towards the dormitory path. I'd gone three steps when she spoke behind me.

"Nightstar."

I stopped.

"You told me I could join your group." She had the diagrams in both arms again, the ribbon trailing over her wrist. "For Kara's assignment. In front of the whole hall. Your words."

I turned round.

"What?"

*

Valentina's arms were empty by the time we reached the north gate. Somewhere between the campus path and here she had handed the diagrams to one of her girls, and the ribbon had gone with them. She walked half a step behind my left shoulder, which put her exactly where Aria would see her first.

Aria was sitting on the low wall beside the gate post with her legs crossed at the ankle, swinging one foot. Isabella stood beside her with her hands folded. Neither of them had changed out of uniform, and Isabella had the map I'd bought rolled under one arm.

Aria's foot stopped.

"Hey, Lils." She hopped down and landed light, and her eyes went past me. She tipped her chin at Valentina. "What's she doing here?"

Valentina stopped beside me instead of behind. "I decided to lend you my expertise." She smoothed a crease from her skirt that wasn't there. "You should be grateful, honestly. It isn't every day someone competent takes an interest in your little outing."

"Grateful," Aria said.

"She said she wanted to join," I said.

Aria looked at me. "Okay, and? Couldn't you, like, say no? That's a word. One syllable. I've heard you use it on me literally all the time."

Valentina drew breath. I got there first.

"I made the offer already. In the dining hall, with half the year listening, you were there too." I kept my eyes on Aria. "Taking it back now costs more than she does."

Isabella's head tilted. She said nothing.

"That's right." Valentina's voice had lifted. She shook her hair back over one shoulder. "A Morgenstern doesn't let a public offer go to waste. And I thought I might as well see what insignificant things the three of you get up to when nobody's watching. Educational. For me."

Aria scoffed, loud, and turned half away to kick a pebble off the path.

I faced Valentina. She was close enough that I could smell the ink still on her fingers.

"Still, if you want to come, you play by our rules. We say move, you move. We say wait, you wait." I held her eyes. "If that doesn't suit, your entourage is back there, and they'll be pleased to have you."

Her pupils went wide, then narrow. Her tail lifted behind her and settled again.

"Fine." She looked past me at Aria. "But the peasant stops trying to get under my skin every time she opens her mouth."

Aria spun back round. "Fine. But you stop pretending you're better than all of us."

"I don't pretend."

"By the hells—"

"But fine." Valentina folded her arms. "I'll humour her."

Aria opened her mouth again, then shut it, and rolled her eyes so hard her whole head went with them.

Isabella shifted the map from one arm to the other.

"Are you finished?" she asked. She asked it of Valentina, and waited, and did not blink.

Valentina's chin came down. She nodded once.

"Good." Isabella turned towards the gate. "The light will not wait for any of us."

Aria fell in beside her and immediately linked her arm through Isabella's, talking low and fast. Valentina took the place at my shoulder again without being told, close enough that her sleeve brushed mine on every other step.

I looked at the road north, and the dark line of hills where the caves were.

*

"Why bother with runes at all?" Valentina said. "If something is stirring the dead up, we go and deal with it. Fixing rune stones to walls is what imps do."

Isabella did not slow. The road had left the last houses behind, and the basalt on either side lay flat and black to the foot of the hills, still giving off the day's heat.

"They are scanners. Each one reads the rock around it for a good distance." She tapped the rolled map under her arm. "The map shows the upper tubes as they were when someone last walked them. The scanners will show what is there now: the levels underneath, the passages that have been dug or collapsed since, and where the movement gathers. Three placed well, and we can work out where the dead are coming from without going down to find it."

"And the other groups?"

"Will go in loud and blind, and draw everything that walks. We will be busy elsewhere."

Valentina's mouth tightened. "It still sounds like a great deal of crouching in the dark when the answer is plain."

"Do you know where the source is?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

"Then where is it?"

Valentina looked at the hills, then at the road, then at the map under Isabella's arm. Her tail flicked once against the back of her knee.

"Fine," she said. "We'll place your scanners."

She lengthened her stride until she drew level with Isabella, on the side Aria wasn't, and asked something about the range of the scanners in a voice pitched for everyone. Aria unhooked her arm, let the two of them go on a few paces, and dropped back until her shoulder bumped mine.

"Does she always have this much trouble saying 'I don't know'?" she whispered.

"Most of the time." I kept my eyes on the back of Valentina's head. "You learn to go round it."

"Ugh. Babysitting her for that whole project must have been so annoying."

"You have no idea." A loose stone rolled under my heel, and I kicked it off the road. "I think I've worked her out, though. You let her believe it was her idea from the start and she stops complaining."

Aria laughed into her hand, a snort that got out between her fingers anyway. "Of course that works. Of course it does."

Valentina turned round, walking backwards for three steps over the uneven ground without looking down. "What's so funny?"

"Nothing much." Aria swung her arms wide. "Just jokes between us. Not that you'd know what one was."

Valentina turned to face forwards again, and her voice carried back over her shoulder, light and easy.

"What would a commoner know about proper humour? Something crude, I expect. Whatever's said over the bones of a market supper. Who sucked off whom behind the stalls." She sniffed. "I'm sure it brings the house down in your dormitory."

I opened my mouth to tell her to leave it. She was already two steps ahead, arms spread at Valentina's back.

"Oh yeah? Go on, then. What does a proper noble joke sound like? Do you even laugh, or just send a servant to do it for you?"

Isabella kept walking and did not turn her head.

Valentina's shoulders went up, and she slowed to let Aria catch her.

"Tell you what," Aria said, already grinning, and dropped her voice so I'd have to walk faster to hear the rest.

I didn't. I pressed the heel of my hand into my eyes and walked the next few steps blind over the warm stone.

*

The mouths of the caves opened along the hillside in a ragged row, five of them, with old barricade stone heaped at their lips where some purge had last piled it. Lamps hung from poles at the widest. Under them stood thirty or forty students in knots of three and four, uniforms and horns and one or two drawn blades, and every voice they raised went into the first tunnel and came back late.

Aria had said nothing since the last bend in the road. She walked a full pace off my shoulder with her hands behind her back.

For the mile before that she'd worked hard. She did faces and voices, and told a long story about a centaur and a laundry basket that got the corner of Isabella's mouth and nothing out of Valentina. Then, at the bend, Valentina had leant over and said one sentence into her ear, flat, without breaking stride. I didn't catch it. Aria had stopped dead in the road with both hands over her mouth, and laughed until she had to hold on to Isabella's arm.

Isabella steered us left, towards the one guard standing alone. He leant on a halberd by the far end of the barricade, a big demon with goat legs, ridged horns curling back from his temples, and a belt and baldric and nothing else from the waist down. His cock hung past his knees, and it swung when he shifted his hooves on the rubble.

Aria's pace changed. Her head tipped to one side and the tip of her tongue came out to the corner of her mouth.

I brought the edge of my hand down between her horns.

"Ow."

"Information," I said. "We're here for information."

"Boo." She rubbed her scalp. "Why can't we do both?"

"Because we both know it won't stop at a few words in his ear."

She grumbled something into her collar and looked at him anyway.

Valentina stepped in on my other side, close enough that her wing brushed my arm, and did not move it away.

"Listen to Nightstar," she said. "That sort of thing is for lesser succubi who can't keep their instincts on a lead."

Aria's mouth fell open. She shut it, and her chin came up.

"Just because you know one good joke doesn't mean I have to listen to you."

Valentina smiled at her. "'If you make me laugh first, I'll let you order me about for the whole expedition.'" She pitched it high and quick, with a bounce on whole, and it was Aria's voice to the breath. "Whose words were those?"

Aria went red under the tan.

"You shouldn't have made the bet," I said. "That one's yours."

Aria turned on me. "Not you too."

"Quiet." Isabella had not looked round. She shifted the map further up under her arm. "We have work to do."

She walked across the rubble to the guard without hurrying, and the three of us followed a step behind. Aria fell in on my left again, closer this time, her knuckles against mine. Valentina kept my right.

The guard straightened off the halberd when Isabella stopped in front of him. He was a head and a half taller than her. He looked her over, then past her, at Valentina's horns, at Aria, and at me.

His eyes stayed on me. His free hand closed on the halberd's shaft, below the head.

Isabella waited, her hands folded in front of her, and said nothing.

Neither did he.