Corambis (35 page)

So I convinced Felix I was okay to go out on my own while him and Virtuer Ashmead talked about hocus stuff, and I didn’t tell him why, along of not wanting to have the fight—
any
of the fights— that would just boil down to Felix having to be the boss of everything. And mostly, you know, I didn’t mind, but it sure could get in the way of getting things done. So I picked his pocket for the card the student had given him because I figured if anybody knew where you could hire rooms for cheap, it would be these kids. And that was the thing I most principally wanted. I was
done
with hotels.

The card said
Robin Clayforth, The Mammothium, Room 322
. I wasn’t sure I’d read it right, but I flagged down a guy outside of Arkwright Hall, and he told me how to get there, no problems.

The Mammothium looked like it’d started out in the world as a flashie house, and I liked it for not looking so much like the Butchers’ Guild. I thumped up onto the porch, and since there wasn’t nobody around, and no signs to say otherwise, I went in.

And stopped dead. I knew my mouth was hanging open, but for the longest time I couldn’t seem to do a thing about it.
Smack dab in the middle of the front hall, where flashie houses would’ve had a statue or a fountain or a big fucking vase of flowers, the students had a skeleton. And it was the skeleton of some animal I’d never even seen before.
And it was fucking enormous. I mean, they’d
had
to put it in the front hall, because there was nowhere else it would’ve fit. And powers and blessed fucking saints, the
tusks
on the thing. I mean, I’d seen wild pigs. But they were nothing—
nothing
—compared to this thing, what ever the fuck it was.
And I was still standing there, gawking at it the way Felix had told me not to gawk at the glass birdcage, when somebody came clattering down the stairs. It was the student who’d come in to talk with Virtuer Hutchence on Savato, and I said, “What the fuck
is
this thing?” before I caught myself. Can’t take you anywhere, Milly- Fox.
But he took it in stride. “It’s a mammoth. Mr. Foxe, isn’t it? Mr. Harrowgate’s brother?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You were with Virtuer Hutchence. Sorry, but I forget your name.”
“Cyriack Thrale,” he said. “Is Mr. Harrowgate with you?”
“Nah,” I said, and his face fell. “He’s with Virtuer Ashmead. But what’s a mammoth? I mean, I ain’t never seen one.”
“Well, you wouldn’t,” said Mr. Thrale. He came around the mammoth to stand beside me. “Given that the last of them died several thousand years ago.”
He didn’t look like he was kidding, but— “Several
thousand
? You can’t know that.”
“That,” he said, “is what the magic is for.”
And, okay, it was absolutely the answer I deserved for sounding like I didn’t think he knew what he was talking about. “Sorry,” I said. “None of my business. I just meant to ask—”
“No, honestly,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound flip. It’s why we’re the Mammothium.” Brown eyes, dog- earnest, and either he really wasn’t yanking my chain, or he was the best actor I’d ever seen, including Mehitabel Parr.
“Okay. So how does it work?”
His eyes lit up and he told me. In detail. Now, mind you, I didn’t understand more than half of it, but I got enough to be sure it was for real, that this enormous fucking thing in front of me had died so long ago I couldn’t even begin to imagine it. Then he stopped and cleared his throat and said, “Of course, I don’t really know much about the mammoths.”
“You don’t?” Because it didn’t look that way from where I was standing.
“No. I work on bog people.”
“On which people?”
“Bog people?” he said, like he expected me to know what he meant. I guess I looked blank enough to convince him I didn’t, because he said, “Oh. Well, there are peat bogs. North of Esmer, mostly, but really all over the western part of the country. And people cutting peat— it burns, you see, and it’s quite cheap, cheaper than coal— well, sometimes they find bodies in the bogs.”
“Sure,” I said. After all, it was what the St. Grandin Swamp was for, only it sounded like these bog things were a fuck of a lot more useful.
Only it wasn’t the same, because nobody knew who these dead people were. And somebody got curious, and they asked somebody, who asked somebody else, and it ended up here, where they figured out these bog people were really old— not as old as the mammoth, Mr. Thrale said, but older than Cymellune of the Waters. So the hocuses started studying them, the way hocuses do.
I said, “You don’t mean necromancy, right?”
“Blessed Lady, no! That would be . . .” He shuddered and said, “Disrespectful,” although I was pretty sure that wasn’t the first word he’d thought of.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just worried.”
“Are there necromancers in Mélusine?” he asked.
“Yeah. You could say that. But if you ain’t doing necromancy, what are you doing?”
And he smiled at me, kind of shy which made him look a lot younger all at once, and said, “Would you like to come see?”
The first thing they’d had to do, Mr. Thrale said as he led me up the stairs, was keep the bodies from decaying. “The bogs preserve them frighteningly well, but once you take them
out
of the bog . . . We had one decay to bits even while we were unpacking it. We have some spells that work all right. But this is where we keep them.” He unlocked a door. The sign on it said something about keys.
“You keep it locked all the time?”
“Some people,” he said, “have very primitive senses of humor.”
“Oh. Right.”
“We’ve actually had to put warding spells on Henry.”
“Henry?”
“The mammoth.” He called witchlight as he stood aside to let me in. “We named it for the last king of Corambis. Inappropriately, actually, since Adept Gower thinks it’s female, but you know how things stick.”
The room was long, and it felt narrow, but I thought that was just because of the shelves on either side, which were deep enough to fit a person on and so cluttered with boxes and papers and jars that you couldn’t even see the walls. There was a box on the table that ran down the center of the room.
“This is our best specimen,” Mr. Thrale said and flipped the catches.
It was a nicer box than the Kennel had put Luther Littleman in, and the guy in it was in better shape than Luther Littleman had been, too. He was a funny color, and he looked a little squashed, but he was all curled up on himself like he was sleeping, and you could almost believe he’d open his eyes and cuss us out for bothering him. His hair was braided up in these fancy knots, and he was wearing sandals that laced up around his calves. There was a blanket covering his middle, but since it was dark blue and everything else was the same sort of rusty orange color, I figured the hocuses had put it over him.
Lined up alongside him, there were a bunch of sticks: three long ones and six shorter ones split into y-shapes. “What’re those?”
“Ah,” said Mr. Thrale. “We think he was a warlock.”
“Okay. And?”
“It’s a very old punishment— it was outlawed centuries ago. But if you had to get rid of a warlock, the only way to do it was to drown them in a bog and then stake them down so they couldn’t come back.”
“It’s not like that’d help,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry. Thinking of something else. So this guy was bad news?”
“We think so. Adept Gower has a friend who’s spending his winters going around and asking all the old grannies for the oldest stories they know about bogs, and they’re fairly conclusive. If you have something— or someone— evil, you throw it into the bog, and the bog swallows it.” “And then it gets dug up later to be somebody else’s problem.”
I had to say it twice, and then he frowned at me. “If he was evil— there’s none of that left now.”
“No, course not. Sorry. You were gonna tell me what else you know about this guy.”
“Yes,” he said, and brightened right back up. A lot of it wasn’t even magic, just looking at things. Like his sandals were made out of leather. I asked about his hair, and Mr. Thrale said they weren’t sure.
“Adept Gower thinks maybe it has something to do with his magic, but really that’s just a guess. This isn’t, though.” He touched the dead man’s face, and I watched the weird orangy color just clear away like spilled water in a circle about the size of my palm. His skin was still darker than Mr. Thrale’s, but his hair was a lot lighter, almost white- blond. Mr. Thrale lifted his hand, and the dead guy went back to orange.
“Wow,” I said. “So, can you tell by magic that he was a warlock?”
I had to repeat myself, but then he shook his head. “No. What makes someone a magic- user . . . well, no one really knows what that is or where to find it.”
“Then how can one—” I stopped myself using the word “hocus.” Mr. Thrale wouldn’t know what I meant, and it wasn’t fair to him. “How can one magic- user use another’s magic? And how can the Circle shut somebody’s magic down, if they don’t know where it is?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really didn’t catch very much of that.”
I’d gotten too worked up for anybody but Felix to be able to understand me. I said it all again, slower. Mr. Thrale listened intently and nodded and said, “With living magicians, it’s a matter of aether and controlling its flow. But dead things have no aether.”
“What about annemer? Do I have this aether stuff?”
“Of course you do,” he said, like he was shocked I could think I didn’t. “What magicians can do that annemer can’t is
move
aether— take it from one thing and put it in another. That’s what necromancy is. Putting aether in something that shouldn’t have it.”
I wished Felix was here because he’d know what questions to ask and whether this was all as crazy as it sounded like to me.
“So you don’t really know this guy was a warlock?”
“It’s an educated guess.” Mr. Thrale was giving me the hairy eyeball in a really polite way. He knew he’d hit me on the raw somehow that didn’t have nothing to do with his dead guy, but I wasn’t going to spill my guts.
I mean, it wasn’t even my business, really. It was Felix’s, and I didn’t know how he wanted to handle it. Just because it drove me batfuck insane that he’d let the Circle do that to him, didn’t mean I had any right to go around telling the world. But before I’d figured out anything I could say to get past it, Mr. Thrale blinked and actually rocked back on his heels a little. “I’m so sorry. This can’t be why you came here. I just—”
“It’s your work. You’re excited about it. I get it.” I would’ve smiled at him, but that’d just make everything worse. “Actually, I was looking for Robin Clayforth, but maybe you could help me?”
“If I can. With what?”
“I’m looking for a place to live. For me and Felix. Cheap is good.”
He was nodding. “Yes, of course. I know of some places.” He gave me a considering sort of look. “I was on my way home when I ran into you, so if you wanted to go now, that would be very con ve nient.”
“Okay, yeah. Let’s.”
“Excellent,” said Mr. Thrale and closed that dead and drowned warlock back in his box.

G

That night, I was woken out of a sound sleep— and one thing I will say about having the binding- by- forms gone, I sure was sleeping better— by Felix saying, “Mildmay. Mildmay, I need you to do something for me.”

“What?” I said. I sat up and after a second where I couldn’t think why it was so dark if Felix was awake and talking to me, I remembered about the binding- by- obedience and reached for my lucifers to light the bedside candle.

He was crouched on the floor beside the bed, staring at me, and his hair was wet.
“What is it?” I said, and I was thinking fire or machine- monsters or something, but I couldn’t figure out why his hair was wet— and not just his hair, but the whole top half of his nightshirt.
And he looked at me with his wide, panicky, spooky eyes and said, “The fantôme.”
At which point I started feeling pretty panicky myself.
I knew what a fantôme was. Sort of. Well, no, not really, except what Mavortian von Heber’d said, that it was a ghost that had managed to possess somebody. And I remembered it taking a whole roomful of hocuses to get rid of the one in Hermione. Four indictions ago or more. When Felix had been batfuck crazy, and oh merciful powers, I did
not
want to be dealing with that shit again.
I said, very carefully, “That was a long time ago. D’you think maybe you just had a bad dream or some—”
“Not
that
fantôme,” he said. “The one in the ruined house.”
“What the
fuck
? What fantôme in the ruined house?”
“I thought it was just a ghost,” he said, hugging himself and shivering, and I could see water dripping off his hair onto the floor. “But it tried to . . .”
I saw his throat work and could fill in the rest. No good. No fucking good at all. But seeing as how I wasn’t a hocus, there wasn’t nothing I could do about that part.
“So what are you doing?” I said. “Why are you all wet?”
“Water,” he said, like it was any kind of a useful answer. For all that his eyes were open and he was talking to me, he wasn’t really awake. Because if he’d been awake and himself, I would’ve gotten a fuck of a lot more words, even if not more sense.
“Yeah, okay, never mind. You said you needed me to do something. What is it?”
And he looked at me, wide spooky scared as fuck eyes, and said, “Drown me.”
“What?”
I realized I’d grabbed a double handful of his wringing wet nightshirt and dragged him halfway onto the bed. “What the
fuck
are you talking about?”
“Drown it,” he said, cold water dripping down my forearms. “I tried, and it didn’t work, so do it this way. Drown me, and it’ll be gone.”
“We are not drowning you, you stupid fuck!”
“But it found the rubies. We have to get rid of it.” His teeth were chattering.
“Fuck this for the Emperor’s snotrag,” I said. I struggled up, dragging him with me, and started stripping that soaking wet nightshirt off him. He fought me, but not very well.
“People can be revived,” he was saying when I got it off over his head, all earnest and patient like he thought it was going to make the least bit of difference to me. “From being drowned. Keeper revived Rhais once. Not twice, though.”
I gripped his shoulders, looked him square in the eyes. “We. Are. Not. Doing. That.”
“But I can’t fight it. It found the rubies, and they took my magic, and there’s nothing left. Mildmay, there’s
nothing left
.”
Powers and saints, I didn’t know how to deal with this. He was shivering and he was so fucking skinny I could count every rib, and he was looking at me the way he’d looked at me when he was crazy, like he knew I could make things better, but he wasn’t sure I’d
bother
. I fucking hated that look.
But there was one thing I knew. “Yes, there is.
You
’re left.”
“Me?”
I looked around, snagged one of the hotel towels, started drying his hair, trying not to be rough, although I was too mad and too scared to be really gentle. “Yeah. You. Felix Harrowgate.
You
.” I jabbed a finger at his breastbone. “You’re more than just your magic, ain’t you?”
“Am I?” He sounded like he really didn’t know.
“Powers,” I said through my teeth. “Yes.
Yes
, okay? Them hocuses can’t take that away from you, and neither can no fucking ghost- hocus, so don’t give me this shit about there being nothing left.” I flung the towel across the room. “Look at me.”
It took him a moment, but he did finally raise his head.
“You see me? Me? Who am I?”
He licked his lips. “Mildmay,” he said in a rough whisper.
“Good,” I said. “And you trust me?” My hands closed on his cold shoulders, and I shook him once, not hard but sharp. “Do you?”
“Yes,” he said, a little stronger. “Yes, I do.”
“Okay,” I said. “Then you trust me about this. There’s
everything
left, and the fantôme can’t have you. You hear me?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.” And he shuddered, shuddered hard, his face twisting. When he opened his eyes, they were clear again. He frowned at me. “Mildmay, what—”
“You awake?” I said.
His frown turned into a squint; then he looked down at himself and back up at me, and I think he would have bailed if he hadn’t been buck naked and with no place to go. “Did I . . . What did I do?”
“You were trying to talk me into drowning you. Along of this fantôme you apparently got and ain’t seen fit to mention before.”
“Oh.
Oh.
” He turned away from me, went wandering around the room like he was looking for something, only if he’d really been looking for something, he couldn’t’ve helped finding it in about a second and a half, because the room was just not that fucking big. “I, um . . .”
“You gonna try and tell me it was just a bad dream?”
“No,” he said, his shoulders hunching a little. His back really was a mess, scars on top of scars and crossing scars and the worst one like this dead gray rope knotted across his left shoulder blade and most of the way down to his hip. Every time I looked at it, I thought it must’ve laid him open to the bone, and every damn time, I wanted to find his keeper, even though I knew the fucker was dead, and beat him to death with his own fucking whip.
Felix got himself turned around again, although he wasn’t even trying to meet my eyes. “I was trying to find a way to tell you.”
“Next time, you might try just
saying
it. You know. Instead of waiting ’til you’re sleepwalking or what ever the fuck that was. Because that ain’t no fun, if you were wondering.”
He kind of flinched.
“What?” And then I knew, because it was Felix, and powers and saints, it made too much fucking sense. “There something else you ain’t been telling me? About them fucking rubies, maybe?”
“I, um . . .”
“Fuck me sideways, Felix, just spit it out already.”
He kind of stuck for a second where he was, and then he started talking. And, you know, most of what he said didn’t make no sense to me, but I got enough of it.
And it wasn’t like I’d needed telling that anything that had
anything
to do with Brinvillier Strych was bad fucking news.
“So you’re stuck with them,” I said when he finally ran down.
“Yes,” he said, and he went to get his other nightshirt out of the carpetbag.
“And the fantôme?”
“I thought I’d gotten rid of it. But I hadn’t.”
“You said it found the rubies.”
“Did I?” he said, like it didn’t matter, but I knew better.
“Yeah. What’s that mean exactly?”
“Nothing good.”
And, yeah, I’d figured that out already, but he sounded so tired— so fucking
beat
— that I let it go. He didn’t need me nagging at him. If there was something I could do, I had to trust he’d tell me.