The tunnel branches and spreads like the root of a hollow tree. They turn right, then right again; twice Quinn stops to sing them past locked doors or other, less visible barriers, and once she pricks Beatrice’s finger and daubs her blood on a pale stone before they walk on. The walls turn slick and wet for a while, cold as a river-bottom, and then they climb upward again. They pass steps leading up to every possible entryway: sewer grates, narrow closets, trapdoors, granite slabs that would take witchcraft to move aside. The doors are marked with strange signs, arrangements of stars and lines rather than words.
Beatrice is aware that she ought to be investigating and questioning, possibly taking notes, but she feels dull and heavy, as if the line leading to Juniper is an anchor pulling her under.
Quinn rises in front of her and Beatrice follows her up a narrow staircase. The steps are stone, softened and scooped with years of use, leading to an ordinary-looking door.
Quinn hesitates before it, glancing back at Beatrice with a calculating expression. She unfastens her cloak and tosses it over Beatrice’s shoulders instead. Bella tries very hard not to notice the heat of her fingertips as she pulls the hood high and tucks stray hairs beneath it.
“Tuck your hands in your sleeves, please. No need to start talk.”
The door opens into an alley, velvet-blue and fresh-smelling after an hour spent deep beneath the city. It’s not yet dawn, the moon still a silver dollar above them, but the alley is crammed full of people. Women with white wraps over their hair and gold-flashing bangles on their wrists, men wearing linen cloaks and swinging canes, the white flash of teeth and the blue shine of skin. Stalls line both walls, overflowing with wares, clinking with coins: a marketplace, held by moonlight.
Beatrice is too busy staring and blinking to hear what Quinn is saying. She gives her hood a sharp tug. “The Daughters ought to know what happened at the cemetery tonight. May I make another report?”
Beatrice nods and Quinn catches the eye of a woman standing just outside the door, arms crossed. “Is she in?”
The woman gives a half-bow that must mean yes. Quinn turns left and Beatrice trails behind her, head bent to hide the freckled milk of her face. During her daylight visits to New Cairo she’s felt noticed, perhaps a little out of place, but she’s never felt so thoroughly foreign. She wonders if this is how Quinn feels on the north end, as if her skin has transformed into an unreliable map, bound to lead people to all sorts of wrong conclusions.
The stalls they pass seem to contain both ordinary contraband—home-brewed liquor and home-cooked remedies in brown glass jars, crates of cigars that look like they’ve never met a customs agent—and much less ordinary goods: curled leaves and pale roots; furs and feathers; the black glisten of beetles’ wings and the ivory gleam of bone. Witch-ways, sold by wizened grandmothers and laughing girls, women with neat aprons or sweeping skirts or babies wrapped and bound to their chests, sleeping through the moonlit market.
Quinn moves easily down the alley, receiving nods and waves and tips of more than one hat. She seems subtly different, taller and grander. Nothing about her has ever struck Beatrice as fearful, but there’s always been something armored about the way she moves on the north end. Here she is a queen, and royalty requires no armor.
Quinn steps sideways through another door. It’s only as Beatrice follows her and sees the sign—ARAMINTA’S SPICES & SUNDRIES—that she realizes it’s the same shop she visited only hours before.
Araminta’s Spices & Sundries is a very different sort of establishment by moonlight. There are black wax candles dripping onto bronze saucers and green bottles lining the shelves with labels likeHellebore, collected after rainandHen’s teeth. The other-smell has grown stronger, wilder and darker, unmistakable for anything except what it is: witching.
“Does this happen every night?” Beatrice doesn’t know why she whispers it.
“Lord, no. Only on full moons.” Quinn leans an elbow on the counter and dings the brass bell three times. “It’s famous, in certain circles. People come up from miles away, hoard their goods and recipes all month . . .”
A small, regal woman shuffles up to the counter wearing a wide-brimmed hat hung with lace. Her face behind the veil is all cheekbone and chin, bones and angles, but the cheeks lift in a smile when she sees Quinn.
“Evening,” Quinn greets her. She nudges Beatrice, who lowers the dark drape of her hood.
The woman stares at Beatrice for a long, still second before sighing, “Oh,Cleo,” very much like a mother whose daughter has brought home a particularly unlovely pet and begged to keep it.
Quinn answers with crisp formality. “The third spectacle was an ambush. I saw at least four of the Sisters taken into custody, including their leader. Her blood-sister.” She tilts her head at Beatrice. “When I understood what was happening I . . . intervened.”
The woman behind the counter—Araminta?—murmurs something likeobviously.
“With your permission, we’ll stay here till dawn.” The woman’s eyes slide between them again, a little too knowing; Beatrice squirms. “And then in the morning I’ll take her . . . wherever she likes.”
“The Hall of Justice, I suppose,” Beatrice sighs, and finds herself the object of two identical yellow stares. “T-to sort all this out.”
Araminta begins to laugh then, a rolling cackle, and does not stop for a long time. “Oh, sweet Saints preserve us. You’re going to march straight into the lion’s den and do what? Ask them real nice to give your sister back?This”—she waves a knobbed knuckle at Beatrice but addresses Quinn—“is exactly the kind of foolishness I was talking about.Thisis why we’re better off keeping to ourselves.”
“Excuse me,” Beatrice says stiffly. “My sister has been arrested on false charges”—well, probably false—“and they can’t hold a woman indefinitely without hard evidence.”
This only provokes an even longer, more extravagant laugh from Araminta. She’s thumbing actual tears from her eyes by the time it subsides.
Araminta turns away to face a gilded cage that sits behind the counter. She extends two fingers through the bars to stroke the creature inside it: a rabbit, whose fur is such a deep and starless black that it seems to swallow the candlelight like an open mouth.
Araminta addresses Beatrice over one shoulder. “They can do exactly whatever they want, child. I’d bet my eye-teeth your sister is already in the Deeps.” She catches sight of Beatrice’s face and the carved lines around her mouth soften very slightly. “I’m sorry for it. Truly, I am. But it’s too late for her now.”
It’s not the harshness of the words that undoes Beatrice; it’s the pity lurking beneath them. Terror closes like cold water above her.
If Quinn or Araminta says anything further, Beatrice doesn’t hear it. She is distantly aware of an arm around her shoulders, shepherding her behind the counter and up a narrow flight of stairs; a warm room that smells of spice and skin; a bed spread with saffron quilts.
She lies awake listening to the murmur of voices in the street and the tocking of a clock somewhere in the house—too-late, too-late—until Quinn’s voice tells her to sleep, and she does.
