The Virtu (18 page)

Time crawled past. After an hour I couldn’t maintain my pretense of sleepiness any longer and joined Arakhne at the window. She had the wit not to say anything, and we stared out at Blue Lantern Street in silence, watching for her hat or his red hair or just a man with Mildmay’s slight awkwardness in his walk.

I wasn’t sure exactly how long it was—eternities, eons, maybe half an hour—before he appeared, a slow, stumbling figure at the foot of the hill.

“Stay here,” I snarled at Arakhne, cramming my shoes on, and bolted out of the room.

Up close, he looked dreadfully white. His eyes were strange, blurred, and the awkward, hobbled way he was moving, as if his torso were a solid block of wood without joints or hinges, suggested he was in a good deal of pain—more pain than I could expect him to admit to me.

“What happened?” I said, wanting to offer help but knowing I would be rebuffed.

He stopped, tilted his head back to look at me. “They thought they had a reason,” he said and continued on his dogged way up the hill.

I simply stared after him for a moment, baffled, before I remembered saying, earlier in the day,
They’ll have no reason to harm you when they realize they’ve made a mistake.

“But
what
?” I said, catching up to him. “What reason could they have?”

The look he gave me was withering in its contempt, but he said only, “You better get that damn girl out of town tonight.”

“You don’t mean you—”

“I didn’t tell ‘em shit,” he said, his voice flat with anger. “But they knew enough already that they’ll find her. And they ain’t gonna be happy when they do.”

“Mildmay, what—”

We had reached the entryway of the Pig-whistle. He stopped and said in Marathine, fast and low and hard, “I just killed a guy, okay? And they ain’t gonna give us trouble with the law, but we ain’t friends, neither. That enough for you?”

I managed to keep from shrinking back from him or letting my shock show on my face, but I found myself entirely bereft of words.

He looked away first, rubbing one hand over his face. “Sorry,” he said. “I just… if they catch up to her, they
will
kill her.”

It took me two tries to get my voice to work. “Then I guess… I guess I’d better get her out of town.”

I made Mildmay stay behind, made him lie down on the bed and promise to rest. I knew by the way his gaze followed me coldly around the room that this was not over, but he did not say anything in front of Arakhne and I was grateful for that.

Arakhne herself mercifully showed no disposition to argue. She was not thrown into any greater state of panic by the news Mildmay brought and did not evince any surprise. It did not make me like her better that, along with surprise, she also failed to show remorse or any particular concern for Mildmay’s injuries—which he would not discuss and refused to let me examine. She still thought of him as a hired thug, and this was neither the time nor the place to make her see her error. I hoped someone else would teach her before that way of thinking got her killed.

I spun a quick story for the hotel clerk about messages waiting for my young friend upon his arrival in Klepsydra; the clerk was sympathetic and obliging and lavish with advice. I argued with Arakhne all the way to the stage-post at the northern edge of the city whether she would do better to hire a horse and start for Aigisthos on her own, or to wait for the first stagecoach, which left at dawn. She had taken Mildmay’s story to heart; she refused to wait. I could have stopped her only by traveling with her. She was not a lost kitten, and my responsibility to Mildmay far outweighed my ridiculous and unfounded sense of responsibility to her.

She came out again. “Half an hour, they say.”

“Good. Then I’d best be getting back.”

“Felix…”

I raised one eyebrow at her. She said, “You could come with me.”

Perhaps if I hadn’t just had that same discussion with myself, I might not have answered so quickly or with such finality. “No.”

“No?” It was half a squawk, indignation and incredulity combined.

“No, I can’t. I need to get back to my brother.”

“Surely you needn’t—”

“Yes, I
do
need. You judge too much by surfaces.”

“Felix, please,” and somehow she had caught hold of my lapels and was pressed up against me, staring imploringly into my face. “I can’t live with the thought of never seeing you again.”

“I
beg
your pardon?” I removed my coat from her clutch and stepped back. She followed, although she did not grab me again.

“I never imagined this is what love would feel like. I never knew… I wasn’t going to say anything, but I can’t just walk away from you.”

“Yes, you can,” I said, wondering what it was that I was doing wrong that I kept attracting passion from persons I did not want, while the one person I did was never going to look at me twice. “Surfaces, Arakhne. I’m ganumedes and not interested.”

The Troian word was better than the ugly Marathine “molly,” and there was no doubt she understood me. Her face went blank, and she—finally, blessedly—took a step back. I was bitterly reminded of myself and Mildmay in the doorway of the Pig-whistle.

“Good-bye, Arakhne,” I said. “Good luck.” It seemed all too probable that she would need it.

Mildmay was waiting for me, sitting propped up against the headboard.

“Well?” he said.

“She’s off. Not our concern.”

“Good.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed and took off my shoes. While I was safely not looking at him, I said, “How are you?”

I could hear the half-shrug in the way he said, “I’m okay.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Ain’t like I never killed a guy before.”

“How many—” I brought myself up short.

“Dunno, exactly.” He knew what I’d been going to ask. He’d probably been waiting for me to ask that question for months. His voice was hard, careless. “First guy I killed for money, I had two septads and one.”

I looked around; he was staring at the window curtains, but I thought they weren’t what he was seeing. He said, “I was good at it.”

There was silence for a moment, all sharp edges and hard enough to splinter bone. Then he said, “You want me to kill anybody for you again, you pay me first.”

“I didn’t
want
you to kill anybody.”

“Yeah? And that’s why you sent me out there like a Trials lamb?”

“I didn’t know—”

“Would it’ve mattered if you had?” I wasn’t sure which was more painful, the contempt in his voice, or the resignation.

“I don’t know,” I said after a moment, and was terrified by my own honesty. “I don’t… I’ve never…”

“We don’t all got to be murderers,” he said, and if I’d hated his contempt, I hated his gentleness more.

“How badly are you hurt?” I said, forcing my voice to be cold and disinterested, like a stranger’s.

“I’ll live,” he said, his voice flat again. It occurred to me that it said something very unpleasant about both of us that we saw concern and kindness as attacks.

I got up, paced over to the window, stood and looked out at the late afternoon traffic.

He burst out, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What?” I turned back. His face was white and set.

“You knew she was a girl. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It needed to be kept secret.”

“And you didn’t trust me not to roll over on her?”

“That’s not it at all. But Arakhne—”

“Did she ask you not to tell me?”

“Not in so many words, but—”

“You didn’t trust me,” he said, bleak as winter.

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“Then what does? Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”

Because I was trying to avoid talking to you at all. “It just seemed simpler—”

“Simpler!”

“Look, this is no big deal.”

“Easy for you to say. You got them all falling over each other to make you happy anyways.”

Arakhne’s pleading face was suddenly in front of me again, with Ingvard and Astyanax swiftly following. “Jealous, little brother?”

“You’d like it if I was.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, half angry, half afraid he’d realized the truth, realized that I desired him.

“You like jealousy. You like knowing people want you.”

He wasn’t talking about sex, and my heart slowed a little. “Is it not natural to want to be liked?”

“That ain’t what you want. It’s like you got to have everybody’s heart, and if they don’t give it, you rip it out and watch it bleed.”

I flinched from his acuity, and made a desperate stab to regain the offensive: “Maybe I wouldn’t have to
take
, if you’d
give
a little more. Give me some trust. It isn’t as if—” I could not keep going against the look on his face. It was as if he had died and been petrified into marble.

There was a terrible, frozen silence. He grated out, more like a dog’s snarl than a human voice, “Like you gave me the truth?” He stood up, found his shoes, put them on, and tied them, all in perfect, brutal silence. He started for the door.

“Where are you going?” I said, more shrilly than I would have liked.

He opened the door, stepped through, and only then glanced back at me. His eyes were green and cold and brilliant with murder. “Find a whore,” he said and slammed the door shut.

I didn’t have no trouble at all finding a brothel. The night-clerk was more than happy to point the way. He had a couple recommendations, too, but those I didn’t pay no mind to. The sort of brothel he’d say was a “nice time” was really just not what I was looking for. Also not the sort of place that’d take me.

But I guess every city has its Pharaohlight. Klepsydra’s was a long, snaky street near the docks called Eleusis Row. The nice places were on the city-side, while the closer you got to the water, the lower and skankier the dives got. I wanted clean, cheap, and not too fussy, and I’d done enough work in Pharaohlight, both for Keeper and on my own, that I knew what to look for. I picked a house that had its front steps brick-batted and real curtains in the window, but hadn’t seen a new coat of paint probably since I’d been born. The sign’d been touched up recently, though. It showed a smiling dog fucking a lady chimera, and I decided to take that as a good omen. They had a bouncer—another good sign—and he didn’t like my face, but he let me by when I flashed a Kekropian imperial at him. Which was just as well, ‘cause it was the only one I had.

Inside was about the same: old and shabby, but well-cared for. The madam reminded me of Elvire, who ran the Goosegirl’s Palace in the Arcane, or what Elvire would have been if she hadn’t had the brains she did. She was put a little off her stride by her first good look at my face, but she got herself back together like a champ and asked me my pleasure. Exactly like that, too: “What is your pleasure, sir?”

And that put me a little off, so I guess we were even. I said, “Um.”

She gestured with her fan at the door on one side of the hall. “Ladies?” And at the other. “Or gentlemen?”

“Oh. Um. Ladies.”

“After you, sir,” she said.

There were four girls in the parlor—if that’s the right word. Anyway, in the room. Two of ‘em were septad-to-the-centime brunettes, one was a Norvenan-type blonde, and the fourth was a Troian gal looked more than a little like Felix. They sat up and acted interested when I came in, but it was a professional thing, and I didn’t care.

The madam was looking kind of sideways at my face, and she said, “No blood-letting and no bruising.”

“I ain’t aiming to hurt nobody,” I said. And I wasn’t. I just wanted to get rid of it, the guy I’d killed, and the dreams I’d been having about Ginevra and Keeper, and the way I felt about Felix, where I just wanted to slam his head against the wall until it crunched.

The blonde had blue eyes, like Ginevra’d had. I said, “Her.”

“Anna Sylvia,” the madam said, like I cared what the whore’s name was. The blonde stood up. She was a skinny little thing, not like Ginevra at all except in the eyes. That was okay. She and the madam gave each other a look, and then the whore said, “Sir? Will you come with me?”

“I hope so, darlin‘,” I said. She looked at me blankly, like she didn’t get the joke—which was lame, I admit it. A crip joke. Like me. Or maybe she just didn’t know what to do with it.