The Virtu (4 page)

“Because we have an empire between us and Mélusine.” He looked at me and said, “What?”

“Nothing.”

He raised one eyebrow. Powers, I hated that look. And that’s probably what made me tell him the truth. “I just ain’t used to you doing the thinking.”

He went red, which was kind of satisfying in a nasty, mean-hearted way. For a second, we both thought he was going to chew me out up one side and down the other, but then he stopped and shut his eyes and made a kind of little pushing-away gesture, like he was just shoving it to the side. Then he looked at me and said, “Will you look at maps for me?”

“Sure. I mean, I got nothing better to do.”

He kind of flicked a frown at me, like I wasn’t supposed to be, you know, honest about it. “I’ll have the archivists send their maps of Kekropia to your room tomorrow. I know… that is, I didn’t think you’d want to come to the library.”

“Not ‘specially. What d’you want me to be looking for?”

“How to stay as far away from the Bastion as possible.”

My belly went cold clear back to my spine at the thought of what the Bastion would do to him if they caught him. “I hear you,” I said.

I dream of the Omphalos.

In the waking world it is a small and dingy structure, a pinched dome supported on weathered columns, the entire thing made dark and dank by the suffocating embrace of clematis vines. Many celebrants like to spend time there, but I don’t understand the attraction.

In my dream, the Omphalos is beautiful. The dome is vast, airy, the color of the sky; the columns are tall and straight and blindingly white. I feel drenched in peace, as golden and slow as sunlight. I step out onto the peripeteia and see the gardens spreading out around me, tapestries of green. There are no people anywhere in view, just these soft myriad greens shading in and out of each other in an endless dance whose steps I almost know.

I come down the steps of the Omphalos. The paths which spiderweb away in all directions are paved with white marble, the pieces fitting together as neatly and randomly as the scraps of fabric in a crazy quilt. I pick a path vaulted by the intertwining branches of the perseïd trees, begin walking.

There is no sense of urgency, no purpose, merely the pleasure of the smooth marble beneath my bare feet and the heady scent of the white perseïd flowers.

The first two or three times I pass a ghost, I don’t recognize them for what they are, dismissing them vaguely as heat haze, the mirages of my weak eye, even some strange property of the dream itself. But finally, I happen to see one head-on, come face-to-face with a red-haired, yellow-eyed, transparent woman, and as she walks indifferently through me, I realize the truth. The gardens are not deserted, but their paths are walked only by those who cannot see or hear or feel me.

I did not regard my isolation when I believed myself to be alone, but now I am crushed beneath a weight of loneliness so heavy that I wake.

I lay sprawled across my bed, chest heaving, staring at the ceiling without seeing it. Part of my mind was screaming at me to get up and go find another human being—Mildmay, Astyanax, Diokletian… anyone. But my body seemed too heavy to move, and there was a strange, chafing feeling of recognition.

I’ve dreamed about that garden before.

The thought seemed nonsensical, but I could not rid myself of it. I’d dreamed about the gardens several times since waking up here, but that wasn’t the source of this nagging, frustrating sense of déjà vu. I’d dreamed about
that
garden before, with its white marble paths and the Omphalos like the vault of the heavens. I could not remember that earlier dream; I could not remember
having
the dream. But I knew that I had dreamed it before, that radiant garden I had never seen.

I let my head roll to the side, and the window showed me the sky, awash in the luminous gray that was the precursor of dawn. I couldn’t quite stifle a groan. My fatigue crushed me to the bed like the
peine forte et dure
, but sleep was a dream as distant as the ghost-haunted garden, and it was no more than an hour or two before I would have to get up anyway.

I groaned again and dragged myself upright.

I bathed and dressed and wandered to the refectory, still puzzling over the strange familiarity of the dream. I made a detour to request that the acolyte who was opening the library have all available maps of Kekropia delivered to my brother’s room. The sun was up now, bathing everything in early-morning clarity. And there was something else nagging at me, as I became more alert, something Diokletian had said…

When I went into the refectory, the only person there, aside from the cheerfully yawning staff, was Diokletian himself. It felt like a sign. A portent, an omen, an augury. I exchanged good mornings with the shy child who brought me tea, yogurt, honey, and a half cantaloupe, and carried my breakfast to the table where Diokletian sat pretending he was so absorbed in his book that he had not noticed me.

I contemplated him as I stirred honey into the yogurt. He was in his early fifties, slightly less than twice my age. He was one of the many men who might have been my father; my mother, Xanthippe had told me, had always refused to say. I was conscious of an unworthy hope that it was not Diokletian. He was kind enough, but he was so stiff, so repressed. And it was clear—despite the fact that he was married, with two daughters—that he had never gotten over my mother. I had come to hate the way his eyes searched my face for signs of her.

I ate most of my breakfast with only a view of his hair and forehead as he stared at his book. At last, he could stand it no longer and looked up, meeting my eyes. I smiled at him and said, “You said something about oneiromancy.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oneiromancy.” I said it slower, dragging out the syllables as if I believed he hadn’t understood me or didn’t know the word. His face twitched with irritation. “When I woke up here, you said you’d been experimenting with oneiromancy.”

“Yes.” Cautious now, not trusting where I might be going.

“Tell me about it.”

“What?”

“Tell me about Troian oneiromancy.”

“Why?”

“I hunger for knowledge.”

He reddened, scowled. “You’re mocking me.”

“No, I’m perfectly serious. I want to know about the Troian magic of dreams. Tell me.”

“I don’t understand what you want to know.”

“Did I not make it plain enough? Oneiromancy. The theory and understanding thereof as practiced in Troia.”

“It isn’t.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oneiromancy is not practiced in Troia.”

“But you said… I didn’t imagine it!”

I winced at my own vehemence, and Diokletian said, “No, no, it’s quite true.
I
was practicing oneiromancy. But that was… Let’s talk about this somewhere else.”

“As you wish,” I said and followed him back to his room.

We did not speak on the way there, and he must have used the time to collect and order his thoughts, for as soon as he had closed the door behind us, he said, “The practice of oneiromancy was discontinued in Troia one hundred and thirty-nine years ago.”

We sat down. “Forbidden?” I said.

“No. Not exactly. It was deemed… ineffective, unnecessary.” One corner of his mouth quirked up bitterly. “A waste of time.”

“And you disagree?”

“I believe that the great past practitioners—oneiromancers like Tigranes and Galinthias—could work with dreams in ways that no other kind of magic can copy. The whole of the Euryganeic covenant followed Hakko and abandoned dream-casting in favor of pythian casting almost three hundred years ago, and I think knowledge was lost that we cannot even begin to imagine.”

“Why did they abandon dream-casting?” I said, thinking of that white-faced Euryganeic, those bruises on Mildmay’s hands. “Pythian casting seems unacceptably dangerous.”

“It’s reliable. The Euryganeics were losing favor with the Aisxime—the Parliament and the court. They believed, whether rightly or wrongly I do not know, that their covenant would not survive if the Aisxime turned away from them. They sacrificed much to keep the approbation of fools.”

“You sound bitter.”

His face was set, grim. “I was an acolyte of the Euryganeic Covenant, but I did not have the strength for pythian casting. I endured convulsion after convulsion, splitting headaches, nosebleeds, until the celebrants finally admitted that it was not laziness or malingering. And then they told me that I could stay, swear the covenant of Euryganeia, be raised to celebrant—as a bookkeeper, a caretaker, a servant to those of my peers who could withstand what could not. I asked about other methods of divination and was laughed at.”

“So that’s why you came here.”

“Yes. I have some talent for healing—and I have come to see, with age and distance, that I am better here than I would ever have been as a Euryganeic.”

“Indeed,” I murmured.

“But my dreams… my dreams have always been prescient. I know there’s something there, if I could just learn to wield it. I believe I have read every text the library has that mentions oneiromancy, interpretation of dreams, anything of the sort. There is frustratingly little, but I found references over and over again to something called the Khloïdanikos, the Dream of the Garden. Later books describe it merely as a mental construct, such as clerks use… ?”

“I am familiar with the idea.”

“But the earlier texts talk about it in very different terms. A construct, yes, but an
oneirotnantic
construct.”

“For what purpose?”

“I don’t know. That was one of the things I wanted to discover.” He sighed, the fierce energy seeming to drain out of him. “But all I ever discovered was you.”

“Me?”

He continued as if I had not spoken. “I found the Dream of the Garden easily enough, but I could do nothing with it. It was merely…” He waved a hand. “The Gardens. As they were hundreds of years ago, when the Dream was created by the oneiromancers. I walked in the Dream, I don’t know, twenty times? Twenty-five? It remained unchanging—unapproachable, for all that I stood within it. When I saw you, I thought at first…” But he did not tell me what he had thought, and I found that I did not want to know.