Free The White City by Elizabeth Bear

reassuring. “Jack?” he said.
    Jack nodded.
    “May I speak with you alone for a moment?”
    Jack excused himself to Irina and stood. As he followed Sebastien into the other room, she reached for more tea. He imagined she knew better than to try to eavesdrop on a wampyr.
    Sebastien drew him around the corner and lowered his head close to Jack’s ear. “It is not comfortable to me for you to consort with revolutionaries.”
    Jack straightened his spine. “Will you forbid it?”
    Sebastien had expressive eyebrows. “You know better than that. You are your own man. But these things—Jack. It’s ephemera. Human governments, social contracts, they inevitably fall and are replaced by something else just as terrible. If not more so. It is your nature to exploit and abuse one another. It is not safe to meddle in such things.”
    Jack nodded. “I know,” he said. He hadn’t realized until Sebastien attempted to intervene that he was becoming interested in the cause for its own sake, and not merely for Irina. “And it would be inhuman of me to let something awful happen without protest, simply because it is inevitable.”

Moscow
    Hotel Bucharest
    May 1903
     
    Abby Irene had a particular, aristocratic thinking pose Sebastien thought of as characteristic: left wrist draped over right, shoulders back, chin lifted. When she assumed it, as she did now, lounging behind the breakfast table in their hotel suite, he felt an inner calm steal through him.
    Somebody was going to regret ever having picked up a canvas knife.
    She fiddled the edge of her juice glass with a fingertip and ignored the dustmop terrier nosing about her feet for breakfast crumbs. Jack’s orange cat was nowhere in evidence. The cat and the dog had worked out some détente that only rarely allowed for colocation.
    “So what you’re implying is that this is not the first time your courtesan was framed for murder.”
    Sebastien steepled his fingers. “My courtesan…yes. Or no, rather. It does seem likely that the two incidents are related, doesn’t it?”
    Phoebe was frowning at him. “When you left here, you left her behind. A second time.”
    Sebastien ducked his chin, accepting the censure. But after a moment, his mulish streak emerged.
    “I was only ever here on holiday. Bringing her to Spain would not have been fair. She had a life here,” he said. “She had become a successful artist.”
    With my patronage , but it wasn’t his patronage that had made her. Her own talent and diligence had managed that. He had only given her a place to stand—finishing what Starkad had begun.
    And he had cut loose from all his court and courtesans after Evie died, when he went to America. Since then he’d had a type—fair and pale, as different from Evie—as
different from Irina—as could be.
    Jack had kept him from burning, in that terrible time. And now Jack was gone, and somebody else Jack had cared for was in trouble.
    “The trouble with having a past is being tethered to it,” he said, to watch the women explode with laughter.
    “So our first step is to find Irina Stephanova,” Abby Irene said. “As it seems likely she may be in danger. Was the murder of Sergei Nikolaevich Vasilievsky ever solved?”
    “Oh yes,” Sebastien said. “A young man swung for it. And Irina testified at his trial.”
    He paused, composing himself to say more, but was interrupted by a sharp and steady rapping. Phoebe, still on her feet, crossed the carpets to answer. Before she opened the door, she glanced at Sebastien.
    Recognizing their visitor through the panels, he nodded and stood to greet Inspector Dyachenko.
    The wiry little man had loosened his muffler and tugged off one mitten, but otherwise looked entirely ready to turn around and march back down the stairs. He was alone.
    Mike the terrier ran to the door to investigate, uttering a rapid-fire string of barks. Dyachenko blocked him gently with a shoe. “May I enter?”
    Sebastien spared a moment’s amusement for