The Virtu (31 page)

I hadn’t done much acting—it wasn’t hard to look like I was thinking of beating Miss Parr black-and-blue—but I was glad to be shut of the characters she’d made up until the morning. I asked her how far she thought we were from Aiaia.

“Probably another day or two,” she said. “Thank goodness you
aren’t
Ananias.” She was asleep almost as soon as she said it. I stayed awake for a while, wondering if that meant she sort of liked me a little, but I was too tired to really care. I fell asleep worrying about Felix.

The Khloïdanikos is beautiful at night, drenched in moonlight, leached of color. I find Thamuris standing beneath an arbor of clematis. His hair, almost black in this light, hangs loose past his hips; his lion-colored eyes are wide with delight. He folds his hands and bows when he sees me; I bow in return.

I say, not quite idly, “Where is Diokletian?”

There is a smile deep in Thamuris’s eyes. “He does not know that I do not need guidance to find the Dream of the Garden. Were he to ask, I would tell him, but…”

“You are serpentine,” I say.

“I have few other amusements.” He looks away, up at the brilliant stars. “These are the wrong stars, you know.”

“They are?” I look up. “I’ve never seen the Khloïdanikos at night before.”

“Really?” He looks back at me. “That’s odd. I find night here more often than not. Except with Diokletian. It’s always daylight when he’s here.”

“Strange,” I say. “But you’re right. These stars are very odd.”

“I know parts of the Khloïdanikos itself do not match up with the waking world, but astronomy has been a study in Troia for millennia. The oneiromancers would not
merely
get it wrong.”

“They would have a purpose, you mean?”

“Yes, but I can’t imagine what it would be.”

“Well, what was the purpose of the Khloïdanikos?”

“I don’t know that, either. Oneiromancy is a lost art in Troia.”

“So Diokletian said. But surely there are records. What good is having a library if it doesn’t keep
records
?”

He laughs, and I am reminded that he is closer to Mildmay’s age than my own, for all the power and death that surround him. “Oneiromancy was starved out,” he says. “Chipped away over decades. And I’m sure you know that the most fiercely contested resource of any library is shelf space.”

“Yes.” I think of the libraries of the Mirador, shoved in, like stickpins adorning a bloated dowager, wherever room can be found. “Yes, I do.”

“So the texts were culled. Gradually. And then, when oneiromancy was abandoned, and the oneiromancers retired, or died, or went into exile—as some of them did—there was no one left who cared, and many who feared to be accused of caring. The House of Hakko… has ways of making its displeasure felt.”

The House of Hakko killed him, I remember, even though he has not yet died, and I do not wonder at the slight tang of bitterness in his voice.

“But the Khloïdanikos has survived,” I say.

“Yes. Baffling, is it not?” His smile is wide with delight.

“Completely,” I say, and my delight answers his.

The walls of Aiaia scared the living daylights out of me.

They were huge fuckers—not so much with the height, where they weren’t a patch on Mélusine, but just the thickness, and blessed saints the size of the blocks. Each block was bigger than me. I wondered if the walls had been put up by giants or hocuses.

We came to Aiaia in the back of another fucking wagon, this one with a family. The father was looking for work, although I didn’t think he was going to find anything, and his wife didn’t think so, either. I hated having to be Ananias Wainwright around them, because I was scaring the kids, but the walls bulking up closer and closer made it easy to glower at everything. When we got into their shadow, I felt like I was walking into the Boneprince to meet Vey Coruscant all over again.

I helped Miss Parr down from the wagon in the market square just beyond the gates, and I wasn’t liking the city no better than I’d liked the walls. It was mud and garbage underfoot more so than cobbles, and the buildings were all tall and narrow and made of a wood I didn’t recognize. It weathered to a muddy purplish brown that was just as purely ugly as sin. Here and there, somebody’d tried to do something with whitewash and flower boxes, but really I think it just made things worse. The streets were narrow and crooked and looked like they’d been laid out mostly to keep rioters from getting any bright ideas.

But we didn’t have no trouble finding the kind of hotel we needed, with slatternly maids and a desk clerk so fucking drunk he wouldn’t have noticed if Miss Parr had been the Queen of Tambrin and me her dancing bear. The room he gave us was filthy, and the door didn’t lock.

“I love your taste in accommodations,” Miss Parr said to me.

“I been in worse,” I said and decided to save sitting on the bed for when I felt braver.

“I’m sure you have, but that wasn’t my point.”

“Nobody’ll bother us, and they won’t remember us two minutes after we’re gone.”

“The rats might,” she said, and flung the shoe in her hand at the wall. Something squeaked and skittered away.

“We ain’t gonna be here long enough for it to matter.”

“I’m glad to hear it. What do we do now?”

I looked at her.

“What?” she said.

“I thought you had a plan.”

“I had a plan to get us here.”

The whole hotel would hear me if I yelled at her. And there was no point in it anyway. Now that we were here, we had to go forward. I said, “Gotta find out where he’s being held, then. You’ll have to go scout.”

“Have to what?”

“Scout. Look around. Find stuff.”

“Me?”

“
Look
at me,” I said.

“Of course. Whereas I am drab and unremarkable. There are probably hundreds of women in this city just like me.”

“That ain’t what I said.”

“No, it isn’t. I’ll go scout.” She shoved her shoes back on, then jerked the ribbon out of her hair and started undoing the braids, throwing the pins down on the table like she could hurt them.

“I don’t like it no better than you do,” I said. “Rather go myself.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Oh fuck this for the emperor’s snotrag.” I did sit down on the bed. It sagged under me most of the way to the floor. “You know that ain’t what I meant.”

“Be damned if I do! You’ve made no secret of the fact you don’t like me, and you didn’t want me with you.”

“You’re the one wanted to come play hide-and-seek with the duke anyway. Wasn’t my idea.”

“You wouldn’t have done it, would you? You would have left your friend here to die.”

“Ain’t my friend. He’s a hocus.”

“So is Felix a ‘hocus.’ ” She dragged the comb through her hair, fast and hard, the way Keeper had combed Christobel’s hair. It had made Christobel cry. I couldn’t see Miss Parr’s face.

“That’s different.”

“Really?” she said. “You mean you wouldn’t leave Felix here if the Duke of Aiaia had him?”

She thought I would. She really did.

“Why do you care?”

She turned on me. Her face was like Margot’s had been on the roof of the Judiciate with all her little Badgers dead around her. “I had a lover,” she said and slammed the comb down on the table. “He was a wizard in the Bastion, and he tried to run. I couldn’t stop him, and I couldn’t save him. And I had to watch what happened to him when they brought him back. It took
all day
.” She turned away from me, because she was starting to cry, and she didn’t want me to see.

There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t be the wrong fucking thing.

“What?” she said after a minute and started pinning her hair up again. “Nothing to say? As usual?”

“I don’t know what you want from me! I’m sorry? I am, but that’s no fucking good, is it? D’you want me to say I wouldn’t leave Felix here? I wouldn’t, but you don’t believe that anyway. Why can’t you leave me the fuck alone?” Shit. I was shouting. I stopped and clenched my hands together and stared at the floor.

“You know,” she said, “I think that’s the most words I’ve ever heard you say at one time.”

“
Fuck
,” I said, and put my fist into the wall.

There was a long silence. I wrapped my handkerchief around my bleeding knuckles and sat and wished she’d just go away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was raised by men who thought bear-baiting was the epitome of spectator sports. We don’t have to like each other. What should I be looking for?”

She’d put her hair up. It was in a kind of a coil, like Ginevra’d used to wear to work, and she’d pulled some little tendrils forward around her face. She didn’t look like Nobbie Wainwright anymore, and she didn’t look like Mehitabel Parr, neither. She looked like a tired shopgirl, the kind that’s a septad to the centime in a town as big as Aiaia.

She was right. We didn’t have to like each other at all. “We got to find out where he’s being kept.”

“Right,” she said, and added in the most teeth-grindingly sweet voice I’d ever heard out of her, “Don’t wait up, dearest.” She left. I kept ahold of myself and didn’t put my fist into the wall again.

She came back four or five hours later, looking like a thundercloud. She swore under her breath the whole time she was jerking the pins out of her hair. Didn’t repeat herself much, either. When she ran down, she said, “There’s a man in the pillory as a collaborator—I think he tried to rescue your ‘hocus’ a couple days ago.”

“He did
what
!”

“As you may be able to imagine, I didn’t want to seem unbecomingly curious. But apparently he tried to free the wizard who’s going to be burned. And another wizard who was imprisoned with him, although I don’t know what they’re planning to do with him.”

“Fuck me sideways,” I said. “The guy in the pillory. Big blond guy? Braided mustaches?”

“Yes.” She was giving me the hairy eyeball in a serious way, but I didn’t even care.

“Sacred bleeding fuck, that’s
Bernard
.”

“And who is Bernard that we should care?”

“Him and his brother were the other people we were traveling with before we got… never mind. But the other hocus is probably Mavortian. His brother.”

“So we’re now rescuing three people instead of one, and two of them wizards?”

“If we’re gonna do it, we might as well do it right.”

She stared at me for a moment, and I thought I was in for a chewing out like Felix would’ve been proud of, but then she laughed. “Your logic is impeccable. All right.”

“Did you find out where they’re holding Gideon?”

All the light went out of her face. “I did.”

“And?”

“I found out some other things.”

“Like?”

“I didn’t want to say anything until I knew, because—well because it’s so horrible. But, the cult that your friend is part of, when they catch them…” She couldn’t seem to find the words she wanted; her face had gone almost gray, and she was wringing her hands.

“Cough it up.”

“They cut out his tongue.”

“Kethe,” I said. I was glad I was already sitting down.

“Yes, and he’s only in Aiaia because the Bastion didn’t want him back.”

“What?”

“Usually, they drag defectors back to the Bastion. But they couldn’t be bothered. They let the duke have him.”

“Might be the worst thing they could think of to do to him.”

“God.” She shuddered, then turned away and started dressing her hair again. “The other wizard—Mavortian, you said?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s being kept in the duke’s house. I’m not quite sure why. Nobody seemed to know.”

“Well, he’s crippled. So they don’t have to worry about him running off.”

She wasn’t buying. “Somehow I did not gather the impression that the Duke of Aiaia does anything out of the kindness of his heart.”

“About all we can do is go find out.”

She turned and gave me something that was almost a smile.

“Right,” I said. “How long we got?”

“The execution’s in three days.”

“First day of the Trials.” And a fuck of a way to celebrate it, too. I didn’t like this—I hated the shit out of it, to be perfectly frank—but I could feel the old excitement starting to kick in. It was like having a commission, only this time I was trying to
keep
somebody from getting killed. Thinking about it like that made things sort of okay.

“I don’t figure we want to wait around,” I said.

“No, I don’t think so. I’m not quite sure what the authorities have planned for your friend Bernard, but the things I was hearing suggest that the good citizens of Aiaia may not wait for justice to be served.”

Fucking perfect. A lynch mob. “Better spring Bernard tonight, then.”

And this time she did smile. “I didn’t like this room anyway.”

I had to hand it to her: she knew about disguise. She’d bought a black scarf while she was out, and before we left, she got my hair covered by it and put soot in my eyebrows. “You look like a pirate,” she said. “You’ll fit right in.”

I thought that had been sort of a joke, but she wasn’t far wrong. There wasn’t anybody out on the streets that I would have trusted to watch a baby for as much as a second. After I saw three guys with uglier scars than mine on their faces, I quit counting.