Corambis (56 page)

One sunny Savato morning, a very few days before we started west for Grimglass, I took the rubies out of their hiding place beneath a floorboard in the closet, and walked to the Institution. The rubies were a lump of mikkary and unease in my pocket; I felt as if ruby bees were crawling very slowly up and down my spine.

The Experimental Nullity was housed in the basements of Venables Hall. As I started down the basement stairs, my magic was gone, as sudden as a snuffed candle. I stopped and clutched at the bannister— it wasn’t that I hadn’t believed Hutch about what the Nullity did, but I hadn’t . . . Well, I didn’t know what I
hadn’t
, and I very nearly turned around, but then I realized I couldn’t feel the rubies, either.

The basements were brick, high- vaulted, dry and clean and very well lit. There was a student, clearly on duty as a sort of porter, and when I asked, he blinked owlishly up from his books and told me that the Automaton had had to be put in the subbasements, it being too large for the Nullity’s area of the basements. He pointed me at an iron hatch, standing open, and a ladder leading down into the darkness. “Hutch went down there an hour and a half ago, and I don’t think he’ll come up before dinnertime.”

I wished, with painful acuity, to be able to call witchlights— the Nullity was an ugly reminder of the choke- binding—and started down.
Gripping the rungs of the ladder was difficult and uncomfortable, but I spoke firmly to myself about how much more uncomfortable falling would be and persevered. Ten rungs, twenty rungs, twenty- eight, thirty- five, forty- two, and just as I realized I’d fallen into the old childhood habit of counting by septads, I reached the bottom of the ladder and the positively miraculous light of a phalanx of lanterns, standing about the sprawled bulk of the Automaton like funeral candles and illuminating the brick vault of a tunnel similar to those of the fathom.
“Felix!” Hutch said cheerfully, looking up from where he was patiently cleaning some of the more delicate mechanisms of the Automaton. “That’s right, you said you had something you wanted to talk about.”
I had dredged up all my courage and mentioned it to him at the wedding reception, both of us half- drunk. “Um. Sort of a favor I wanted to ask, actually.”
“Well, ask,” he said, raising his eyebrows at me.
“The, um. The Nullity. It’s working now, yes?”
“You know it is,” he said, sitting back on his heels to regard me more attentively. “What ever made this thing wake up, it can’t happen again.”
“Good,” I said, realized I was wringing my hands ner vous ly, and made myself quit. “I, um. I wondered if . . .”
“Lady love you,” said Hutch, frowning. He straightened and came around the Automaton toward me. “You look like you’re about to be sick. What is it?”
I took a step back, for if he touched me, I knew I’d bolt. Except of course that there was nowhere to bolt to. I had to say it. I took a deep breath, although I couldn’t make my voice stay steady: “I wondered if I could put something down here.”
“Well, certainly,” Hutch said. “But why would you want to?”
My face went immediately burning red. “I, um . . .”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Hutch said quickly. He stepped back, palms raised. “It’s all right.”
“No, I should,” I said. “I just . . .” And then a horrible thought struck me. “What about when you end the Nullity? What happens then?”
“Everything goes back to normal?” Hutch said slowly, as if he wasn’t sure what he should say. “But we’ve no intention of closing the Nullity. Certainly not until we understand the Automaton. I’ve no desire to reenact the destruction of Corybant, thank you very much.”
“But then it would be down here with them . . . Oh, I can’t do this. It’s just the Khloïdanikos all over again, and I can’t—”
“Felix.” Hutch caught my arm, and I jerked back. He was staring at me, his eyes— dark for a Corambin’s— deeply worried. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but what ever it is, it can’t be as bad as . . . well, as bad as you look like it is. Tell me about it. Please?”
“I
can’t
,” I said. Had I thought I could be rid of Malkar? More fool, I. I would never be free of him. Killing him hadn’t done it. The
katharsis
hadn’t done it. Reflecting what he had done to me onto Isaac Garamond certainly hadn’t done it. Trying to leave his rubies in the Khloïdanikos had made it worse, and now I was trying to make the same mistake again. The same stupid selfish mistake. “I’m sorry. I was stupid. I should just—” But my fingers skidded off the rung; I pounded the flat of my hand against the wall.
“Damn.”
“It sounds to me,” said Hutch, “like you need to tell
someone
. Have you talked to your brother?”
That was almost funny. “He knows,” I said. “But it is a peculiarly thaumaturgical problem.”
“Well, it must be, if it’s something you want to put in the Nullity.”
“It’s these,” I said, in a sudden savage access of fury. I pulled the wash- leather bag out of my pocket, spilled the rubies out across my palm.
“What are they?” said Hutch.
“Rubies,” I said. “The rubies from the rings that were worn by my master Malkar Gennadion. And they . . .” There was no word for this, not in Ynge, not in all the Mirador’s treatises about architectural thaumaturgy, certainly not in Grevillian thinking. “They’re haunted.”
“Haunted,” said Hutch.
“Not literally,” I said. “But the magic that was done with them has left a . . . call it a residue. Or a curse, if you like.”
Hutch looked as if he would like nothing less.
“Poison?” I said. “Can you believe that something can be thaumaturgically poisonous?”
“I . . . I’m not sure,” he said, and I saw his gaze slide to the Automaton. He felt some of its noirance, then, even though he didn’t know what it was. “But I believe that you are serious about what you’re trying to tell me. And, yes, you may put the rubies here.”
“But—”
“We have documentation,” Hutch said patiently. “Even if I’m not here when this nullity is closed—
if
this nullity is closed— it will be in the documentation that these rubies are to be put in another nullity, or kept separate from the Automaton, or what ever instructions you want to leave. And they’ll be followed. I know you don’t think much of our imaginations,” and he smiled crookedly, “but I promise you, Corambins are very good at following instructions. And maybe by then, you will have figured out a better answer.”
I poured the rubies back into their bag. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.” He moved one lantern out of a niche in the wall. “Put them here.” And when I hesitated, he said, “Felix. What ever magic they have, poison or curse or what ever it is, I swear to you, it is completely inert down here. It’s like . . . like trying to kindle a fire underwater. You
can’t
.”
“All right,” I said. “All right.” And I put the bag in the niche.

This is the best story I know about hocuses, and it’s true.

Late in the summer, me and Felix went out to Grimglass. Instead of the train we took a boat called a paddle- steamer, and I got to say, the
Lilibet Sawyer
is the neatest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. It was slower than the train, but we weren’t in no hurry.

We’d finally finished with d’Islay, and although I thought he was a fuckhead about a lot of things, I agreed with what he was really trying to say down at the bottom of it, that bravery wasn’t about killing people or dying for a great cause or what ever it is the stories make it out to be. D’Islay said it was two things. One was doing what you knew was right, and the second was figuring out what “right” meant. Most of his book was about that, actually, about how you judged what was right and wrong and about facing yourself down when you’d done something that you’d thought was right but now you were kind of thinking was wrong. Or, Felix said, how you dealt with yourself when you’d done something you
knew
was wrong and whether you could ever honestly do something right after that. And I knew he was thinking about Isaac Garamond, but also about what he’d done to me. And I couldn’t lift that off him, but I did finally tell him about Bartimus Cawley and the fuckload of wrong stuff I’d done in my life.

“How did you figure it out?” he said. We were standing at the rail of the 
Lilibet Sawyer
, watching the long, slow Corambin countryside go by. It was kind of like Kekropia to look at, but greener. “How did you figure out it was wrong?”

“I dunno. How’d you figure out that what Malkar taught you was wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t think I ever really did figure it out until he broke me in half and abandoned the pieces. I know I’m still a terrible person, but I’m better than I used to be.”
“You ain’t that bad,” I said.
He gave me a sidelong look that called me a liar clear as daylight. Then he shrugged and looked back at the shore, where there was a herd of something- or- other watching the boat go by. “At least now I
care
that it’s wrong. For a long time, I didn’t.”
“I did some awful things,” I said. “I mean, really awful. Worse’n what you done.”
“I think we should avoid turning that into a competition,” he said, real dry.
“Yeah, well. But what I mean is, I figured out finally that it was something wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said, sharp like I’d insulted him.
“The fuck there ain’t,” I said. “I mean, I don’t do it no more, but that ain’t because I
can’t
.”
“You would have killed the virtuers for hurting me,” he said. He was looking down at the Crawcour now, brown and fast and nothing like the Sim.
“Yeah,” I said. “I would’ve. And I wouldn’t’ve been sorry. I mean, I know it’s wrong, killing people, and I ain’t gonna do it, but that’s because I worked it out. I ain’t proud of what I was, but I ain’t . . .”
“You don’t feel guilty?” he said.
“Not the way I do about Ginevra.”
“Ah,” he said, and we watched the river for a while longer before he said, “But you don’t want to be that anymore.”
“No,” I said. “I really don’t.”
“Good enough to get by on,” he said, and grinned at me sidelong.
So we’d finished d’Islay, and Felix hadn’t even really asked if I wanted to start another one. Now we were reading a book Miss Leverick had given me along with a letter to the President of the Society chapter in Whallan. This was a book about Corambin religion, and we were going kind of carefully, along of not being quite sure what we might run into. And Felix was reading three different books on Mulkist magic that Corbie’d dug out of the University library for him.
“You think she’s gonna be okay?” I asked him on a different day. We were in a hillier part of Corambis now.

Corambis

“I had very long discussions with both her and Hutch,” Felix said. “I think Hutch wants her to succeed almost as badly as she does.”
I remembered Virtuer Hutchence sitting on the Circle’s table and grinning at me. “He said something— I think maybe they gave him a hard time about becoming a virtuer. So maybe he understands.”
“Yes,” Felix said. “I think he does. And anyway, you heard her. She doesn’t want to live at Grimglass.”
“Not even for you,” I said and bumped him real soft.
He gave me a look. “I thought she’d be more upset at your leaving.”
“Me?”
His eyebrows went up. “You mean you
weren’t
sleeping with her?”
Which was what I got for needling him. “Once or twice,” I said. “But it was just for fun. And, you know, I think she was only fucking me because she couldn’t fuck you.”
He went bright red, and I figured I won that round.
And I went and hung out with the enginists some, and they explained how the
Lilibet Sawyer
worked, and Felix flirted with the ship’s captain, whose eyes had just about fallen out of his head when we came on board. And we stayed up too late at night, reading and talking with Felix’s little green witchlights everywhere around the bed.
And when the countryside leveled out again, I saw something standing up like a spike on the horizon. “Look,” I said to Felix and pointed. “You think that’s Grimglass?”
He squinted, and if he couldn’t make it out, he wasn’t going to admit it. “Well, really, what else could it be?”
“D’you think it’s gonna work out?” I said. “I mean, do you think you’re gonna be happy?”
“I
hope
,” he said, giving me a stern look, “that
we
will be happy. But I don’t know. All we can do is try.” And then he smiled at me, the real smile, the rarest one, and said, “But I’m glad we’re trying together.”
And all I could say back was “Yeah. Me, too.”

The writer of a four- book series inevitably accumulates more debts than she can count, but I want to say thank you especially to Jim Frenkel, who gave me some of the most valuable advice I’ve ever received, and to Jack Byrne, Anne Sowards, Judy York, Judith Lagerman, and everyone else involved in the arduous pro cess of turning my airy nothing into an actual series of actual, and beautiful, books. Thank you all very much.

Thanks are also due to Allen Monette and Sarah Wishnevsky for bearing with me, and bearing me up, through some very ugly months of angst and fraughtness. And special shiny thanks to my friend Tisha Turk, who let me invade her house for a three- week DIY writer’s retreat, without which this series might never have been finished at all.

And I couldn’t have done it without Earl the Writing Frog.