Chapter 197 The Old Hag and the Resurrection Man
POV: Jack | South London, neutral ground
Violette finds me, which is not how I expected this to go.
I have been tracking Mordaunt's network in the peripheral way that Silas's operation always tracked everything, which is to say I maintain records and update them and occasionally one of the records becomes relevant in ways it was not previously, and Violette has been in my records for two years as Mordaunt's longest-serving thrall, his personal assistant in the specific sense that means she knows everything and is bound by the venom bond to keep it.
She finds me on a Tuesday evening in a pub in Bermondsey that I use for meetings that I do not want anyone to know are meetings, which means either she has better intelligence than I realized or she has been watching me for longer than I realized, and both possibilities tell me something.
She looks bad. Thrall bad, which is its own specific kind of bad, the particular quality of someone whose body has been maintained by venom for so long that the absence of venom shows immediately in the skin and the eyes and the specific texture of how a person holds themselves when they no longer have the thing that has been holding them together.
"He's losing," she says. She does not sit down first. She stands across the table from me and delivers it as a fact, the way people deliver things they have been building up to for a long time and which come out abruptly when the moment finally arrives. "Mordaunt is losing the war and he knows it and he is going to whatever ground he can find and I am not dying with him."
I look at her. "Why me?"
"Because you move information," she says. "And because you're not aligned with any side, which means you don't have a reason to use what I give you against me specifically." She sits down. "And because Silas vouched for you once, three years ago, in a conversation I overheard. He said you were developing a conscience. I am hoping he was right."
Silas. She knew Silas. The specific web of this city's underground connections is something I am still mapping and every new connection in it is a reminder that the map is not finished.
"What do you have?" I ask.
"All of it," she says. "Thirty years of Mordaunt's records. Financial records, property records, blackmail files on Parliamentary members and Covenant officials and dragon intermediaries and everyone else he has spent three decades building leverage against. Documentation of the hybrid program's funding structure going back to 1963. Names. Amounts. Correspondence." She puts her hands flat on the table. "Everything he has used to stay standing this long."
The weight of what she is describing is large enough that I sit with it for a moment, because large things deserve a moment.
"What do you want?" I say.
"Freedom," she says. "Break the thrall bond."
I look at her and I think about the thrall chapters, about Clara who died after four years and about the architecture of what the venom does to a body over time, and I think about my necromancer contacts, specifically about the one in Shoreditch who has been researching venom bond disruption for the past two years and who told me last month that he had made progress.
"That might be possible," I say. "It's not simple and it's not guaranteed and it will not be comfortable."
"I know what it won't be comfortable," she says. "I have been in this bond for thirty years. I know what discomfort is."
We sit in the specific silence of two people who have both been in the city's underground long enough to understand what this kind of agreement costs and what it is worth and who are deciding whether the trade is real.
"Bring me the records," I say. "I'll make the call about the necromancer."
She reaches into her coat and produces a drive and sets it on the table. Then she reaches in again and produces a second document, handwritten, a single page.
"The records are on the drive," she says. "That is something else."
I read the document. It is short and precise and it contains two pieces of information that land differently from everything else she has brought to this table.
The first is Fell's exact location. The building, the floor, the specific room where the preservation equipment is running.
The second is the Lucia embryo's current status: viable, developing normally, three months from full gestation.