The Virtu (23 page)

“It isn’t exactly illegality I’m worried about,” I said, leaning slightly away from her. “But you could make yourself a very wealthy woman by betraying me to the Bastion.”

“I would rather die,” she said, with such flat, venomous vehemence that I actually flinched.

“It sounds as if you speak from personal experience,” I said.

“I do. I want to leave the Empire, and I do not want to go north, where I run a substantially greater risk of being discovered by my family. I have been racking my brains for months to think of some way I could cross the Grasslands, and you and your brother seem like the answer to my prayers. Truly, that’s all.”

I was relatively sure that was
not
all—her explanation raised more questions than it answered—but I did not care for playing interrogator down here in the dark, when we were both tired and anxious and her expression and body language were half-hidden by the darkness. “I will talk to Mildmay,” I said. “I can promise nothing.”

“I understand. Thank you.”

We sat in mutually gloomy silence for a few minutes, and then she said, “He’s taking an awfully long time. Do you think he could be… ?”

“He hasn’t been gone as long as it feels like,” I said. “And his sense of direction is as good as he says it is. He doesn’t brag.”

“Yes, but this…” She waved one hand in a gesture that was as graceful as it was vague.

“We can’t do anything, even if he is lost.”

“Just sit here? That’s the plan?”

“Until Mildmay comes back, or we’re forced to think of a better one. At worst, one of us goes back up to get help, and the other stays here to wait. There is no sense in going after him. The fact that he hasn’t returned is enough to tell us that this
is
a labyrinth.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. It’s just—I hate waiting.”

“I understand.” And I did. There was something particularly hateful about the situation, sitting in the dark with nothing that we could do, nothing except wait.

Because anything was better than listening to the muffled but still audible noise of the Sim, I said, “Tell me about Jeremias Tantony.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Is he a good tutor?”

“Competent at best. He is very learned, but he is not noticeably interred in imparting that knowledge to others. Especially others he considers not as bright as himself.”

“And yet Florian came down here with him.”

“Florian…” Her sigh was more exasperation than anything else. “Florian is easily led and easily flattered. As Jeremias knows very well.”

“So you think he—”

The scream was bone-chilling, a banshee howl of anguish, the like of which I had not heard since the great Fire that ravaged half the Lower City when I was eleven. I could remember women keening over the charred bodies of their children, a man who had roamed Simside for days, calling his wife’s name until his voice was nothing but an ashy whisper.

Mehitabel and I looked at each other, both of us wide-eyed. Her face was ghastly in the green witchlight, and I was sure mine was no better.

She said, “Was that—”

Another scream; this time, ready for it, I could make out the word: “
Ginevra
!” And, of course, the voice, but that I’d already known, even though I’d been wishing desperately to be wrong.

“It’s Mildmay,” I said, as calmly as if I were speaking of a stranger, of a character in a romance. “Come on.”

She followed me without demur into the labyrinth.

It was not a pleasant place, that labyrinth, and it had not been designed by nice people. There were no booby traps such as Mildmay had been worried about, but I kept having the uneasy feeling that the labyrinth itself was a snare, and we were the foolish rabbits who had hopped right into it. The rooms were cramped, low-ceilinged squares distinguishable only by the number of egresses in each. Without anything to guide us, Mehitabel and I would have been hopelessly lost within minutes. As it was, we followed first those terrible, heartbreaking howls, and later, when he stopped screaming, we were close enough to follow the sound of his sobbing. The entire time, we did not speak.

We found Mildmay in a dead end, huddled against one of the blank walls, both hands pressed flat against the stone. No, not quite flat: the tips of his fingers were tensed as though he was trying to dig them into the solid rock. His head was down, and I was glad of it; I did not want to see his face.

“Mildmay?” I said hesitantly. I was afraid to approach him, afraid that his pain would rip me to shreds.

He made no response.

Mehitabel said in an undertone, “Do you want me to leave? I could wait in the next room.”

“No,” I said, more harshly than I had meant to. “No splitting up. Just wait. Please.”

“All right.” There was no space for retreat in this cramped room, but she did the best she could, backing into the corner farthest from Mildmay and sitting down with her legs curled under her. I wished I could have acceded to her idea and let her leave, but living in the Mirador had taught me to trust my instincts about the edifices built by dark-purposed men, and I knew that separating was the worst thing we could possibly do.

He’s never going to forgive me for seeing him like this, I thought. But that was past remedy.

I took a deep breath, let it out, and stepped forward. “Mildmay?” I said again. “What happened?”

Still no response, but I saw the muscles of his shoulders tighten defensively.

I took another step. “Are you hurt?”

He shook his head, but did not look up.

Another step, and I was standing beside him. I hesitated, excruciatingly aware of Mehitabel witnessing all this, then knelt down. “Please,” I said, “just tell me what happened. Did you see something? Hear something?”

“Heard,” he said. “Heard her voice. Calling me. From
here
.” He beat the flat of one hand against the wall, still not looking up.

I went cold all through with a sudden horrible suspicion about what had happened. “Mildmay. Look at me.”

He turned his head away, his left shoulder rising as if to ward me off.

“It was a spell, all right? Just a spell. But I need to know if it was cast on you, or if it resides in the walls of the labyrinth. I need to see your eyes.”

I hated myself for saying it, for bullying him, but it was absolutely true. If the spell had been cast on him, that would be one thing—a more sophisticated definition of “booby trap” than I had been prepared for, for one—but if it was part of the fabric of the walls… I thought of Nera, of the temple of Graia, and could not quite repress a shiver. Architectural thaumaturgy was all very well, but not even the specialists in the Mirador could predict with any certainty what would happen when it had been abandoned for several hundred years.

“Okay,” Mildmay said, his voice thick, wavering, and somehow terribly empty. He brought his hands down and rubbed his face, then straightened his shoulders and turned to look at me.

I was grateful that the light was bad; it let me pretend that the twisted, ravaged mask of his face was the effect of the unnatural witchlights and the shadows they cast. And what I needed to see had very little to do with light anyway.

The spell hadn’t been cast on him.

“Oh damn,” I said.

“What?” Mehitabel said; she sounded nervous.

Mildmay lowered his head again, and I wished I could tell him not to be ashamed, either of his grief or of his face. But this was not a good place for truth, and anything I said to him in front of Mehitabel Parr, he would not hear.

“It’s a property of the labyrinth. Mildmay, what did you hear?”

“Told you,” he said, not looking up. “A voice.” I knew he was deliberately letting his words slur; I’d noticed before that he did that when he wanted people to leave him alone and that frequently it worked.

“Yes, but
whose
? Who is Ginevra?”

His head came up, eyes flaring to life with anger and hurt. “Say her name again, and I’ll break your fucking nose.”

I flinched back, more from his intensity than from the threat. He glared at me a moment longer, then dropped his gaze again. “Sorry. She was my girlfriend couple indictions back. We split up and… and she got killed.”

And that wasn’t the whole story, not by any stretch of the imagination. But prying it out of him would have to wait.

“So you heard her voice? Calling you?”

“Yeah.” He met my eyes again, although it was clearly nothing he wanted to be doing. “And it was
her
. I mean, it wasn’t, I know that, but it
was
.”

I nodded, although it felt very far away. I had been right to think of Nera. “I think I know whose cult this was. And I know why it was proscribed.”

“Please don’t be gnomic and portentous,” Mehitabel said. “Which god was it?”

“I don’t know her name,” I said. “No one does. A Troian archivist told me her worship had been eradicated three thousand years ago. She was the goddess of Nera.”

Mildmay’s eyes were wide, and I saw him make the sign to avert hexes.

“So what kind of goddess was she?” Mehitabel demanded.

“She was the goddess of labyrinths,” I said. “The goddess of death. Do you know the word
mikkary
?”

“Yes,” said Mehitabel. “Why… oh.”

“Mikkary?” Mildmay said.

“Madness, corruption, and despair,” Mehitabel said. “I felt it once, when I was a little girl—the starving wells. Do you know about those?”

Mildmay shook his head; I said, “No.”

“They’re old,” she said. “Not as old as this, but my great-grandfather could remember his father telling him about the last time they’d been used. One of the petty dukes—one of the northern ones, and the duchy doesn’t exist any longer—had these holes dug, thirty, maybe forty feet deep. And he had them lined with stone. And if you crossed the duke, they’d lower you into the well with a machine the duke had had made specially, and then you stayed there until you died, or until the duke decided to have you lifted out. They
stank
of mikkary. Two of my cousins tried to dare each other to look into one, but they couldn’t do it. Not even on a dare.”

There was a small, cold silence. I said, “We’d better keep moving.”

“That would be easier if we knew where we were going,” Mehitabel said.

We looked at Mildmay, who was rubbing his face with both hands, as if he was trying to restore feeling to something numb. I wondered how much feeling he had on the scarred side of his face. After a moment, he looked up.

“Oh. Forward or back?”

Mehitabel said, “The more I learn about this labyrinth, the less I like the idea of Florian’s being trapped down here. And if we go back without him, Keria Gauthy will most likely have all three of us arrested.”

“Good point,” I said, realizing belatedly with her use of the word
keria
that we were still speaking Marathine. I had not thought about switching back, and apparently she had decided not to try to put that particular cat back in its bag.

“Go on, then?” Mildmay said to me. I contemplated without any anticipatory pleasure the moment when I would have to tell him Mehitabel Parr wanted to travel with us.

“Yes,” I said. “If you can.”

“Oh sure,” he said, as if it wasn’t even worth asking about.

Mehitabel and I stood up. Mildmay remained where he was, in that awkward huddle like a broken-stringed marionette. I extended a hand to help him up. He growled, “No thanks,” under his breath and stood up on his own, only using the wall for balance.

Mule-headed idiot, I thought, but I knew I was no better.

“Okay,” he said and limped across to the room’s single egress. His limp was getting worse, I noticed, and I wondered how long he’d be able to keep going, mule-headed or not.

He glanced over his shoulder at me and said, “Guess we’d better keep together.”

“Yes,” I said, “I think that would be wise.” And one by one we left that dead-end room and the mikkary that hung like dust in the air.