The Virtu (35 page)

Which Mavortian needed to catch on about pretty fucking quick, or his life was going to be a misery to him. I wanted to tell Felix to quit running Mavortian and Mavortian to quit letting Felix run him, but it wouldn’t help none and would get them both mad at me to boot.

So I waited and everybody else waited and Felix just sat there, not smirking exactly—or not so as you could call him on it—but clearly happy with how unhappy he’d managed to make all of us. And finally Mavortian took a deep breath and said, “Are you quite sure?”

“Absolutely,” Felix said, and I thought he was even telling the truth. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“But the strong divination…” Mavortian sounded a little dazed now.

“The what?” Felix leaned forward, and he had that look on his face that could be real interest, or could just be him deciding to yank your chain.

“I did a strong divination at the death of the year, and it gave me your name.”

“What did you ask it?”

“The name of the man who could help me find Beaumont Livy. So how can you not know who he is?”

“Perhaps,” Felix said carefully, like now he wasn’t sure what kind of gator pit he’d fallen into, “you should start from the beginning and tell me who Beaumont Livy is and why you want to find him.”

I’d heard it before, but I listened anyway. Wanted to know if Mavortian’s story would change now that he was telling it to somebody who mattered. It didn’t, though. The gal in the miniature—except he didn’t have it anymore, the Duke of Aiaia or his goons must’ve taken it—Anna Gloria Pietrin. Mavortian’s fiancée. Seduced and abandoned by this Beaumont Livy that Mavortian wanted to find so bad you could practically see him drooling. Her committing suicide in some half-horse town up in Skaar. Livy being a hocus, being the one that’d crippled Mavortian up so bad he couldn’t stand on his own no more. And Felix listened, taking it all in, and when Mavortian was done, all he said was, “Now tell me about strong divination.”

The rest of us sat and listened while him and Mavortian got into it. Me and Bernard and Miss Parr just kind of shrugged at each other. We were annemer, and we didn’t expect to get it. Gideon was listening hard, though, and I wondered what was going on upstairs with him.

I’d been wondering that a lot, the past decad.

He wasn’t crazy. That much I was sure of, although powers and saints I wouldn’t‘ve blamed him if he had been. But, no, his eyes were the same as I remembered them, sharp and bright and watchful. More watchful even, but I sure as fuck understood where that was coming from.

If I’d been him, I wouldn’t‘ve taken my eyes off Mavortian von Heber either.

He didn’t want to talk to us. When Mavortian had offered him paper and a pen, he’d just
looked
at him, like he wasn’t just an asshole, but stupid as well, and somehow Gideon’d thought better of him. Fuck of a look, and that was the last time anybody tried to get him to tell us what was going on in his head.

Now he was watching Felix, with this little line between his eyebrows, and I remembered how most of an indiction ago I’d thought maybe Gideon was in love with Felix a little bit. Hadn’t understood it at all, mind you, but I figured if it had been true then, it had to be like a septad times worse now.

But he wasn’t mooning over Felix just then, don’t get me wrong. He was
listening
. He understood what Felix and Mavortian were talking about, no question. Understood—and didn’t much like it. Which I figured wasn’t good news, because no matter how you looked at it, of the three hocuses in the room, Gideon was the only one with enough common sense to be trusted to cross the street on his own. That was something else I remembered about him.

Felix was frowning, too, and his frown was getting blacker and blacker with every word Mavortian said. Which was some comfort. I hadn’t realized how nervous I’d been about Mavortian talking him into something.

Just because
you’re
a pushover, Milly-Fox.

Mavortian must’ve noticed Felix’s expression, because his sentence kind of trailed off into nothing, and he said, “Messire Harrowgate?” like he thought Felix was going to bite him.

“No,” Felix said.

Everybody in the room twitched.

“What do you mean by that?” Mavortian said.

“Exactly what I said. No. I don't know Beaumont Livy, and I am not going to help you find him.”

“Why not?” Mavortian had his voice mostly under control, but something pretty raw was leaking out around the edges.

“Oh, I could list you my reasons, but perhaps you should answer this instead: why should I?”

And Kethe that just
sat
there. Me and Bernard met each other’s eyes by accident and looked away in a hurry. And then Mavortian said, “I can help you.”

“You? Help me?” Felix snorted. “And just how do you think you can do that?”

“I know what you want to do.”

Another silence, this one big enough to swallow a small dog. I don’t know about anybody else, but I was staring at my hands. Because I didn’t want to risk catching Felix’s eye by accident.

“Enlighten me,” he said in that smooth, purring, mocking voice that I hated more than just about anything. “Tell me what it is I want to do. Since clearly you know that better than I.”

And Mavortian rapped right back at him: “You want to mend the Virtu.”

We cleared out. Us annemer. Gideon wouldn’t come, but the air in that fucking room was getting too thick to breathe, and it wasn’t like Felix and Mavortian needed us around. They barely even noticed when I got up and jerked my head at Bernard and Miss Parr and we got the fuck out of there. We didn’t go far, just down to the hotel’s back garden, where there were rosebushes and a bench and I could sit down and wait for the whole fucking thing to make sense.

Felix wanted to fix the Virtu.

I couldn’t even
start
to explain how fucked up that was.

Which was bad, because Bernard and Miss Parr both wanted to know. I did my best, but Kethe knows how much of it made sense to them, because I’d be fucked if I understood it myself.

Here’s what I knew. The Virtu was a big blue ball made out of something that looked like glass. Down in the Engmond’s Tor Cheaps you could buy bad reproductions of Clementine Nesbitt’s painting of
The Cabal Creating the Virtu
, with everyone looking all mystical and uplifted and shit. The Virtu was magic, no fucking question about that, but what exactly it did… powers, I ain’t no hocus, and some days I think it wouldn’t make sense even if I was.

Before it’d been broken, every hocus in the Mirador had sworn oaths on it every day. I didn’t know what kind of oaths—and I wondered if Felix would tell me if I asked—but I knew they were part of why there hadn’t been no more coups like the Cabal’s and why the Empire hadn’t rolled over us like a fiacre over a frog. After the Virtu was broken, the Lord Protector had held things together as best he could, but things had been bad in the city, even before the Mirador got set on fire, which was one of those things that wasn’t supposed to happen. Ever.

And there was one other thing I knew about the Virtu. Felix was the guy who broke it.

Or, to get at the story behind the story, some motherfucker of a hocus named Malkar Gennadion had used my brother to break the Virtu and sent him crazy doing it. And if I ever got my hands on Malkar Gennadion, we were going to have words about that. But I knew, the way Felix felt, it might just as well have been him that did it, and thought it out for a decad beforehand. So what Mavortian said made sense—except for the part where I couldn’t get my fucking head around it, the idea that somebody was going to
fix
the Virtu. Like somebody saying they were going to fix the sun after it went out.

I don’t think Bernard and Miss Parr understood that part at all, but they got the idea that this was big witchery, and they didn’t like it any more than I did. I thought about asking Bernard if there was anything he could do to shut Mavortian up, but a look at his face told me there wasn’t.

Shit, I thought, and we sat there not talking for a while.

It was getting dark by the time Felix came out to find us. We were still sitting there not talking. I don’t know about the other two, but I couldn’t think of a thing in the world worth saying. Me and Bernard both knew how things were going to play out, and we didn’t want to talk about it. And I guess I could’ve asked Miss Parr what she was going to do, but I couldn’t get up the gumption.

So Felix came out and she was the one who stood up and said, “Well?”

He looked past her at Bernard and said, “Mavortian wants you.”

Bernard kind of grunted and got up and went inside. Felix looked at me a moment, but I didn’t have nothing to say, and he looked back at Miss Parr.

“As I told you, I am returning to the Mirador. You are welcome to continue traveling with us if you wish.”

Like I was so much stew meat. But that wasn’t telling me nothing I didn’t already know.

“What about Messire von Heber?” she said. “And Messire Thraxios?”

“Gideon has been granted asylum by the Curia. And I do not believe he has anywhere else to go.”

Poor little fuck, I thought.

“And Messire von Heber?”

Felix gave her a look, but she wasn’t impressed. He sighed. “Messire von Heber claims he can help me with my problem, and he seems to know what he’s talking about. Anything more will have to wait until the Virtu is mended.”

“You really think you can?”

My voice came out ugly and made them both jump.

Felix looked at me without answering for a second, and then said, “Yes.”

As simple as that.

I waited for Thamuris in the Khloïdanikos.

We had agreed to meet on my schedule. The only hostile country he was trapped in was his own body; no one would remark or wonder if he kept strange hours. And he could feel the Khloïdanikos far more clearly than I could. Even awake, he could feel my presence in it.

Our small experimentations had kept me from driving myself to distraction while I waited for Mildmay and the others to reach Julip, and for that alone—and for the fact that he never commented on my anxiety although he was certainly aware of it—I would have counted Thamuris as a friend.

And he had rapidly become a friend in other ways. It was rare to find a wizard whose intellectual curiosity was stronger than their ambition, than the desire for power that gripped us all like a disease. Malkar had hated my curiosity and had done his best to beat it out of me, but all he had been able to do was teach me to hide it from him. Once I escaped his hold, it all came surging back. I was the most powerful wizard the Mirador had, the lover of the Lord Protector’s brother; I had all the material for power games I needed. My research, my
work
, was bounded by nothing but my own intellectual abilities, and many wizards looked at me askance for it.

My friend Sherbourne Foss understood, before I betrayed him. Before the Mirador’s wards were broken, and he was killed by the dead things those wards no longer bound.

I doubted that Thamuris had always been this pure a scholar. In fact, between what Xanthippe had told me of his past and what he had said himself, I was quite sure he had not been. But, his health shattered and his chosen life closed to him, he had accepted the new path opening up before his feet, even knowing he might not have very long to walk it.

I admired him quite dreadfully for that.

We had explored the Khloïdanikos together over the past few weeks. Diokletian did not join us; I had not asked why and didn’t intend to, any more than I had asked how Diokletian had come to show Thamuris the Dream of the Gardens in the first place. Thamuris and I had found many ways in which the Khloïdanikos was not the same as the Gardens we both knew in the waking world, and one strand of our research—perforce almost entirely Thamuris’s alone—was in trying to discover if those differences were due to changes in the material Gardens over the centuries. He promised me that he was not overexerting himself; apparently, Khrysogonos was a willing assistant.

“
Khrysogonos
?” I’d said when he first told me.

And Thamuris shrugged and smiled his slow, laudanum-drenched smile. “We both miss Mildmay,” he said as if that explained everything, and I made a spur-of-the-moment decision not to broach the subject of Mildmay’s feelings about Khrysogonos.

In the Khloïdanikos, Thamuris had nearly the stamina of a healthy man. We spent most of our time together walking, exploring the reaches of this strange little world. And because we were wizards, we talked about thaumaturgie theory, deeply, obsessively, and without any signs of the topic’s being exhausted. Some nights I could almost see Mildmay rolling his eyes.

I always entered the Khloïdanikos through Horn Gate, even if my dreaming mind had not fully visualized my construct-Mélusine. But as Horn Gate never led me to the same place in the Khloïdanikos twice, Thamuris and I had decided the sensible thing to do was to choose a meeting place so that we would not waste precious time trying to find each other.

I did not like the Omphalos, although it was the Khloïdanikos’s most obvious landmark. For reasons I did not fully understand, it reminded me of Nera—and of course I did not care for the memory of the tawdry and embarrassing confrontation between Diokletian and me. Thamuris did not like it, either; it worried him because it was so aggressively unlike the real Omphalos and because the differences did not (he said) entirely make sense. We met instead in a stand of persei’d trees, which was distinct from its waking counterpart only in that the trees were younger. There was a bench to sit on, and the scent of the trees was like the blessing of some faded and forgotten god.