The Virtu (36 page)

I sat on the bench, and after only a few minutes, I caught sight of Thamuris wending his way through the trees. He smiled as he came up to me, and said, “Shall we walk?”

“Yes, let’s.”

For a long time, I did not speak, and Thamuris let me hold my silence. It occurred to me that he and Mildmay were the most patient men I had ever met, though they came to their patience in very different ways. I wondered sometimes how much of Thamuris’s patience was laudanum, but it would have been cruel and unjust to ask.

And in the end I sighed and said, “How much do you know about the Fressandran school of divination?” I was a little uneasy at broaching the subject of divination with him, but there was no one else I could ask. I did not trust Mavortian von Heber to tell me the full truth.

“Fressandran,” Thamuris said, searching his memory. “A discipline of Norvena Magna, is it not?”

“Yes. They practice something called strong divination.” I said it in Midlander and offered the three different Troian translations I had been able to think of.

The third one was right. Thamuris’s eyes widened a little. “You know it,” I said.

“I know
of it
. We don’t practice it.”

“Then it isn’t the same as pythian casting?”

“No.”

“Can you explain the difference?”

“I can try.” He frowned, thinking. “How much do you know about divination?”

“Very little. The Mirador does not practice it.” It was not heresy, but it was considered vulgar and largely the province of foreign charlatans.

“Very well,” Thamuris said. “I will tell you the explanation I was given when the Celebrants Terrestrial were first teaching me augury.”

“Augury?” I said, because I was not quite sure of the connotations of the word in Troian.

“Even in the House of Hakko, we did not perform pythian casting
all
the time,” he said with a rueful smile. “Augury is closer to a form of meditation, except that what you meditate on is the huphantike.”

“The huphantike?”

“The pattern of the future. In the older texts, it’s called the labyrinth of fortune.”

“Of course it is.” I was becoming resigned to the idea that I was cursed with labyrinths.

“Beg pardon?”

“Nothing. Please continue.”

“What we learn when we are taught augury as novices is that the future has a pattern. The huphantike. We cannot know the future, but we can see the pattern.”

“When you say ‘pattern,’ what does that mean?”

“Every scholar has a different metaphor. Many of them are contradictory.”

“You’re a Celebrant Celestial. Surely you have a metaphor of your own.”

He blushed, the color rising in his pale face like a fire. “I am not a scholar.”

“I don’t care. Tell me how
you
think about it, and leave the scholars to quarrel amongst themselves.”

His smile was shy, uncertain, as if he thought I was teasing him. I made an encouraging gesture, and after a moment, he said, “To me it always seems like looking at a map.” He stopped short, staring at me anxiously.

“Go on,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense to me yet, but I don’t despair of it doing so eventually.”

“A map,” he said, with a better smile this time. “A map of a country you do not know. Most of the map is—not blank, but in darkness, illegible. But there are a few landmarks that show up clearly, and they indicate the path the future will take.”

He paused, looking at me again, and I nodded to show I had followed him that far.

“But just as the symbol on the map gives you no sense of the actual, material city you will enter, so too the landmarks—the
semeia
, the scholars call them, both markers and omens—do not tell you what will happen.”

“No?”

“We cannot know the future.”

“Now I’m lost. If you can’t know the future, then what’s the point of divination?”

“You misunderstand me. We cannot know the future, but we can know the pattern.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I am explaining this badly,” Thamuris said, downcast.

“No, you’re doing splendidly.” I reined in my impatience. “Just tell me: what’s the difference between ‘the future’ and ‘the pattern’?”

He thought about that for a while, then said slowly, “The future is the events that will happen, just as the past is the events that have happened. We cannot know the future until it becomes the past.”

“All right. Then what’s the pattern?”

“The range of possible events that may become the future. Given the past, there are only so many different directions the future can take. The landmarks in my map metaphor are those events that have the strongest likelihood of occurring.”

“But you don’t know what they are.”

“No, but I can know their shape.”

“Their
shape
? Perhaps if you gave me an example?”

“All right.” He hesitated, his face reddening again, then said grimly: “The pythian casting I did with your brother. The huphantike was spoken through me.” He tilted his head back, shutting his eyes, and recited, “Love and betrayal, the gorgon and the wheel. The dead tree will not shelter you, and the dead will not stay dead. Though you do not seek revenge, it will seek you all the same.”

“
That’s
the huphantike?”

“That is your brother’s huphantike. That is the pattern his future has. gut what events make up the pattern, that we cannot know until they occur.”

It sounded so horrible. I said, “You said the huphantike was the range of possible events. It may not reflect what will actually happen, correct?”

He lowered his gaze, becoming apparently fascinated by the square red tiles of the path we were following. “The nature of pythian casting,” he said and stopped.

“Yes?” I said, too anxious now about Mildmay to care about Thamuris’s feelings.

“The nature of pythian casting—the reason that it is such a powerful tool—is that by the act of divination, one increases the strength of the huphantike as one sees it.”

“You mean you make it happen?”

“Nothing so simple as that. But the pythian casting sets the pattern, like cold water sets a dye.”

And you did that to my brother? For no better reason than you
wanted
to?

I wanted to scream at him, curse him, but it would do no good, and there were too many ways in which it was not his fault. I pushed the anger and fear aside and said, my voice calm, if rather cold, “Then if that’s what Pythian casting does, what is strong divination?”

“Some scholars think it isn’t properly divination at all,” Thamuris said, his gaze still fixed on the red tiles beneath our feet, “but a kind of sorcery. In strong divination, once you’ve cast for the huphantike and gotten a sense of its variances, you cast again to ask what you must do to make the future follow the huphantike as you wish it to.”

“And how is that different from pythian casting?” My anger escaped my control to become clearly audible.

“I didn’t—!” He stopped, backtracked, recast his response impersonally: “In pythian casting, the diviner has no control over the huphantike they receive. They simply set it. But in strong divination, the
point
is to control the huphantike. To make the future be what you want.”

“I see,” I said, and I did. I wondered why this future that Mavortian von Heber wanted so badly had led him to me. It was not a comfortable question.

“I’m sorry,” Thamuris said after a while. “I really didn’t know.”

“Then why did you do it?” I asked and was astonished at how mild I sounded.

“Have you ever been the channel through which the future speaks?”

“No.”

“Then I cannot explain it. But I understand why early pythian casters made a practice of castrating themselves. And I understand why I let it kill me.”

There was nothing I could say in response to that, but the silence between us was amicable again, and we walked along the red-tiled path together until it was morning in Julip and Mildmay was telling me to wake up.

We headed out the next morning, along of not really wanting to wait and see if the Duke of Aiaia was going to catch up with us or not.

We’d staggered into Julip with Bernard carrying Mavortian, and Miss Parr more or less carrying me, and Gideon carrying himself but only barely. I’d been dreading the fight about how we were going to get ourselves
out
of Julip again, and was just about knocked sideways when it turned out Felix had already thought of that and arranged to hire transportation from Julip to the next big town, which was Wassail. He hadn’t been banking on two extra people, but since the only thing he’d been able to get for what was left of the money Mr. Gauthy’d paid him was a broken-down old diligence, it turned out to be just fine. Only two horses, but seeing as how I was the only one knew anything about driving, and I wasn’t sure I could’ve handled a team, that was okay, too. So Bernard and Mavortian and Gideon got stashed inside where nobody could see ‘em to remark on how much they looked like the Duke of Aiaia’s escaped prisoners, and Felix and Miss Parr climbed up on the roof behind me.

And I drove, trying to pretend like I wasn’t nervous about the Duke of Aiaia’s goons and wasn’t nervous about going back to Mélusine and wasn’t even a little bit nervous about what was going to happen to me when I did. Too much time to think and too much to think about, and Felix behind me where I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him, and, powers, it seemed like I could
feel
him, and everything I thought came back around to: I don’t want to leave him.

Which was stupid and useless and embarrassing besides, but it was the truth. He was all I had anymore, the only person in the world who cared about me even a little—the only person left that I… loved.

Going molly, Milly-Fox? Keeper drawled in my head. But I wasn’t. I didn’t want to fuck him or nothing like that. I just kept remembering how it had been going across Kekropia the first time, just him and me and the bat-fuck crazies. And mostly it had been pure Hell, don’t get me wrong. But he’d needed me, and he’d trusted me. He’d saved my life, too, because if he hadn’t come and got me out of that farmhouse cellar before the hired man got back with the sheriff, I would have been hanged for sure and certain. And it had broken my heart, all the way across the Grasslands, watching him trying to cope with this thing that was tearing him up from the inside out. It had been a losing battle all the fucking way, but he just wouldn’t lay down and let it walk over him. I loved him for that. I loved him for helping the dead people in Nera. I loved him for all the times he’d made some smart-ass remark like him and me were really brothers, like we’d grown up together and knew each other and had that thing between us that there ain’t no good words for.

I loved him. I loved him the same way I’d loved Christobel and Nikah and the other kids I’d grown up with, the ones who were mostly dead now. And I wanted to be with him, to get up in the morning and know that whatever shit the day had waiting for me, at least he’d be there, too.

But there was no fucking way I could have that. He was going back to the Mirador, and even if I’d thought I had the right to, there was no way I could stop him. And if I went with him, it’d take a decad tops before the Mirador found out who I was and hanged me. And not that I didn’t deserve it, but I didn’t want to die. And I couldn’t bear the thought of Felix being in the crowd watching.

I shoved the whole mess away again, the way I’d been doing for days, and concentrated on the horses and the road and not listening to Felix and Miss Parr laughing at each other.

But I knew it would come back.

That night, I didn’t dream about Keeper or Ginevra for a change. I dreamed about Porphyria Levant.

Porphyria Levant was a blood-witch, the woman who taught Brinvillier Strych everything he knew. I don’t remember much of that dream—just remember coming awake and laying there, staring up at the ceiling and breathing like I’d been in a fight. And thinking about Porphyria Levant. Remembering that old story about her and Silas Altamont and the obligation d‘âme and what she’d used it to make him do.

Please, let me stop or I’m going to go out and slit my wrists.

Silas, I forbid you to kill yourself.

And after a while I figured out what the dream was trying to tell me.

I didn’t sleep the rest of the night, and all the next day I was watching Felix like a first-time pickpocket watching the mark. Felix noticed—of course Felix noticed, and of course it pissed him off, but Kethe I couldn’t help it. Because things were lining up in my head.

If I went back to the Lower City, I was going to end up dead. I could feel it, the way sometimes I’d felt when a job was going to go bad and known not to take it. Couldn’t explain it, couldn’t argue with it. Sometimes I just knew. And that was the way I knew this. The Lower City would kill me. Someone with a grudge would come after me, or give me to the Dogs, or I’d go to Keeper, or I’d starve to death or kill myself or just plain
die
.

I hated myself for it. Hated myself for being so fucking weak. Hated myself for having got into this situation where somehow there wasn’t nothing I could do that wasn’t stupid. But there was only one choice that didn’t seem to lead straight to the Ivorene—or worse, if the Dogs got me, the Boneprince. And that was Felix and that old story about Porphyria Levant and Silas Altamont. The moral of which was, don’t do exactly what I was thinking about doing.