The Virtu (29 page)

I did not intend to dream of the Khloïdanikos and its beautiful ghost-infested paths. If anything, I’d meant to stay away from it. But finding myself among the perseïdes was not a surprise. It felt somehow inevitable.

I avoid the Omphalos, but otherwise I simply wander, exploring. There is a stream, clear and peaceful and nothing that exists in the waking world, canopied by willows that lean to trail their branches in the water. I cross it one way on a set of stepping-stones, each carved with a different flower: a lily, a rose, a chrysanthemum, a snapdragon, a branch of cherry blossoms.

A little later, I cross the stream again, this time on a graceful bridge, arched like the back of a cat demanding to be petted. I walk through a rose garden, the roses blazing in shades of red and orange and yellow. There is a sundial in the middle, but its gnomon casts no shadow. The path changes from warm red brick to squares of glossy black slate, and I find myself in a water garden, boasting small artificial waterfalls and a great green pond, with water lilies the size of my two fists floating on it like the barges of ancient queens. I catch a flash of red-gold beneath the surface of the water, and realize that there are koi in the pond, massive, serene, and I wonder: are they dreams of fish, or fish who dream?

I investigate the windings of a path tiled in white and blue. Perhaps it is the nature of the Khloïdanikos, as it is of the Mirador, to encourage meetings, and most especially with the people one most wishes to avoid, for I come around a stand of perseïd trees, and there, sitting on a bench amid the heartbreakingly verdant grass, is Diokletian. There is another man with him, younger, with eyes like gold coins in his paper-white face. I recognize him as the diviner who nearly killed Mildmay, and after a moment remember his name: Thamuris.

If I were able to break the dream, I would. But as I did not choose to enter the Khloïdanikos, so I cannot choose to escape it. True-dreaming is not like magic; it has its own rules and its own rhythms. And the Khloïdanikos—I cannot even begin to guess what powers the Troian oneiromancers might have used to create it, or to maintain it. I am becoming more and more aware that it, too, has its own rules, perhaps even, in a nebulous way, a set of priorities that no one now alive understands.

Diokletian leaps to his feet. “YOU!” he cries, as dramatically as any pantomime hero.

I know I should not, but I cannot help laughing. “What? Will you forbid me the Khloïdanikos?”

“Could you?” the other man asks Diokletian.

“Thamuris!”

Thamuris’s tone is one of scholarly interest; he seems not at all threatened by my sudden appearance, nor disturbed by the hostility between Diokletian and me. I look at him more carefully, seeing in his dream-self the sharp and questing intellect that in the waking world is debilitated by his disease and deadened by laudanum. Here is one who will share my interest in the Khloïdanikos for its own sake, and that thought—the thought of having someone I can talk to as an intellectual equal—is like rain after a long drought.

I say to the diviner, “I don’t think he can. I certainly wouldn’t know how to go about such a thing.”

“It is not a private world,” the diviner says.

“No, clearly it was not intended that way.”

“Thamuris!” Diokletian says again, strident with jealousy and anger.

The golden eyes, dispassionate as a lion’s, turn to him. “Yes, celebrant?”

I remember that Thamuris is a Celebrant Celestial. He outranks everyone in the Gardens of Nephele, including the Arkhon. The consumption does not care.

“This man,” Diokletian says and flounders to a halt.

“Is what?” I say. “A foreigner? An ungrateful wretch? The low and sordid child of a fabulous mother?”

“Is not to be trusted,” Diokletian says, giving me a triumphant glare.

“Nor am I,” Thamuris says. “As he knows. But I do not think that, in the Khloïdanikos, we can do each other any harm.”

It is the nature of the Dream of the Gardens that I can see Diokletian’s hurt around him. I say, “I do not wish to drive you away. Nor to quarrel.”

“What right have you to speak of driving me away?” Raw, thwarted fury, and in the waking world he would never show it—would barely even know he felt it—but here, dreaming, it is a palpable presence. It is not about Methony any longer, except insofar as he sees me as a betrayal of her memory. This is the wizard’s occupational disease: envy. Deadly, grinding envy, which looks at my power and my person and argues that the one does not deserve the other. I have heard it, seen it, felt it, ever since the moment at which I first learned I was a wizard at all. I reveled in it in the Hall of the Chimeras, flaunted my looks and my tastes and my cruelty. But I was powerless for over a year, powerless and helpless and frightened, and somewhere along the way I lost my appetite for this particular poisoned feast.

I say, “None. But since you cannot drive me away either, cannot we… can’t we just let this rest?”

“What possible reason can you have to stay?”

“I made no secret of my interest in the Khloïdanikos. And I would like to hear Thamuris’s opinion of it.”

I see Thamuris’s surprise, just as I see Diokletian’s anger. Here at last, in this lion-eyed diviner, is someone who believes that I care about Mildmay and believes that I should—someone who recognizes his own mistakes, his own thoughtlessness. He knows too much about his own flaws to sit in judgment on others. I realize, or perhaps the Khloïdanikos shows me, that I wanted Diokletian to be that person, wanted him to be the wise teacher he seemed. But that is not what he is, any more than I am a version of Methony who can be tamed.

I sit down beside Thamuris. He looks at me curiously, sidelong, and I know he sees something of what I feel, just as I can see his feelings not quite staining the air around him.

Diokletian is blind to this other not-quite-sense. He does not have the openness to which Thamuris has been trained and into which I was forced by Malkar’s terrible working. It is not a matter of power, although I know he would never believe me if I tried to tell him so, nor a matter of willingness or interest or anything else that can be explained or understood. It is what the Khloïdanikos demands, a token of surrender. And thus, entering the Khloïdanikos from a controlled trance, I was as blind to it as Diokletian was. I wonder how and why the Khloïdanikos acquired that quality, and if it was any part of the original creators’ plans.

Diokletian struggles with his anger and wins. He sits down on Thamuris’s other side and says, “If you would have the kindness not to interrupt…”

But before I can say anything, sarcastic or otherwise, the Khloïdanikos dissolves in a wash of green around me, and I wake.

Gray streaks in the darkness showed me where the shutters were, and that beyond them the sun would be rising soon. Mildmay was a huddled mass beside me; he slept always as if he had had to be beaten into submission. He snored, very slightly, a legacy of the times his nose had been broken; I did not know if he knew that, and I was reluctant to tell him. I was afraid it would embarrass him, and I found myself curiously protective of that slight rattle. It was a comfort, when I woke in the middle of the night from one or another of my bad dreams, to know that there was a living person beside me in the bed, that if I had to, I could wake him.

I lay, watching my brother sleep and wondering about the Khloïdanikos, until the sun came up.

We’d been hearing for most of a decad about the hocus they were going to burn in Aiaia to start the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen. Even with my head full of Ginevra’s voice I hadn’t been able to miss it, and once Felix cleared that out, powers, it seemed like that was all people were talking about. And not just the players, neither, although they gossiped like a pack of old ladies, but hotel clerks and guys getting drunk in the bars and the people who came to watch the plays—
everybody
talking about this poor fuck that the Duke of Aiaia was going to burn at the stake.

Nobody seemed to mind very much. Or to care what he was being burned
for
. It got to the point—well, I ain’t as bad as Felix, but I did get to where every time the thing came up, I said, “So what’d he do?” Hard and bright and a little nasty, and even though nobody ever answered me, it took the edge off the conversation a little, and I was glad of it. I’d seen a hocus burned at the stake. Least the sanguette’s clean.

But nobody knew. He was a hocus, and the southern duchies hated hocuses, and apparently that was all there was to it.

There was a whole bunch of other stuff the southern duchies hated, including molls and people with funny religions and most all foreigners. Felix was getting twitchier and twitchier by the day, and I couldn’t blame him. All it would take was somebody wondering about whether
maybe
they should suspect him—hocus or moll, either way, and he’d end up decorating a woodpile himself. He wasn’t flirting. He wasn’t hardly talking to nobody but Mehitabel Parr, although the manners on him when he decided he had to use them—powers, it was a sight.

And we were at least a little safe—safer than we’d‘ve been if we hadn’t had Miss Parr along, and you can imagine how much I hated having to admit that. But I’d thought we’d seriously been hung out to dry, after we reached Mukenai with Mr. Gauthy’s caravan. They were going on south to Lunness Point, and it was pretty clear from what the caravan guards told me that they thought we were completely fucked in the head for going west.

And I was getting to where I agreed with them. I know it was my idea and everything, but the longer I thought about it, the more I couldn’t believe we’d made it across the Grasslands
once
, and crossing it again felt like walking back into a lion’s den, only this time with a slide trombone.

I was a little nervous, thanks for asking.

But then Miss Parr played her trump—I figured she’d been saving it until she was sure she wanted to be stuck with us for the long haul. Turned out she’d been born in a players’ troupe and was related to half the actors in the Empire. And since even in Kekropia, people are glad to see actors most everywhere, there weren’t no problems finding troupes going the direction we needed. And what was even better, they took me and Felix along without even blinking. Friends of Miss Parr seemed good enough for them.

And if you’re going to be stupid enough to try to get across the duchies with a brother who’s a hocus and has the tattoos to prove it, then a players’ troupe turns out to be right exactly what you want. They all dressed funny themselves, and it seemed like half of them were redheads. Which, the farther west we got, was a bigger and bigger favor.

I hadn’t thought there was anything about Troia I’d liked, but that was one, not having to worry that my red hair would get me into trouble. I’d dyed it for most of two septads, until Mr. High-and-Mighty Mavortian von Heber—who was probably dead and I should quit being nasty about him—had made me stop. If I’d been thinking in Klepsydra, I would have dyed it again, and made Felix dye his, too, no matter
what
he said, but I hadn’t been thinking, and the kind of hair dye we needed was just not something we were going to find out here in the absolute ass-end of nowhere. So the fact that a lot of actors apparently had Troian and Merrovin blood—well, it didn’t exactly make us inconspicuous, but it did at least make us less of a target.

And actors don’t ask questions. This is the thing I learned about them, and I had days where I wanted to kiss them for it, every man, woman, and child. I mean, they gossiped and all, but if you didn’t bring up the subject of what you’d done with your life or why you were so interested in getting across the Grasslands, they didn’t either. I returned the favor and didn’t go prying around myself, even about Miss Parr, although my curiosity on that subject was getting pretty fierce. Especially on how a gal like her had ended up a governess in Klepsydra. But she wasn’t telling, and it wasn’t like it was any of my business anyway.

We didn’t stay with any one troupe for long. They had their little territories, like the alley cats in the Lower City, and we’d generally end up walking for a day or two from where one troupe wasn’t going no farther west to where we could find the next one. And it was okay—the walking, I mean—but I had to admit it to myself, I couldn’t have walked all the way to Mélusine. Crawled, maybe, but not walked.

And of course, the more that got hammered into my stupid thick skull, the more I worried about what I was going to do with myself when I got back home. And I don’t know how long it took me, but one day it was like I woke up and thought, Fuck me sideways. Why didn’t
I
go to Aigisthos?

The answer came back, quick as a smart remark: because Felix couldn’t. And then I spent the next half mile or so trying to pretend I hadn’t thought that.

You ain’t nothing to him, Milly-Fox, and don’t even try to make like you are. You think he’s going to take you to the Mirador with him when y’all get back to Mélusine? Do you even
want
him to?

And, of course, no, I didn’t. Didn’t want to have nothing to do with the Mirador. Ever. But if we were both in Mélusine, there was a chance maybe we could see each other occasionally. I tried to imagine going out to a bar with Felix, say the Hornet and Spindle or the Green Pig, and then thought, Who the fuck do you think you’re kidding?