The Virtu (41 page)

I kept on following Felix, because that was what I did now. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop staring at the Mirador, and even when I managed to drag my head around to look at something else, I couldn’t stop fucking
seeing
it. So I was only sort of noticing all the people coming to gawk at us, thieves and citizens and peddlers like a bunch of fucking pigeons, and I hoped there was a thief-keeper or two out there with the sense the powers gave a pineapple, because it seemed like
somebody
should be getting some good out of this.

I hate being stared at, as I may have mentioned, and although mostly people were gaping at Felix—and he could not have been happier—I was riding right next to him and I had the matching hair and everything and I should have gone out and got my stupid self eaten by a ghoul before I let Mavortian nag me into stripping the dye out. Although at least nobody who’d known me knew my hair was red—except Keeper and oh blessed saints and merciful powers
please
don’t let Keeper be in this crowd—so I supposed it meant people were less liable to recognize me, and that would be just fucking fine.

And I went right on supposing it until Rindleshin shouted my name.

We were almost out of the Lower City by then. Not close enough that I’d relaxed or nothing—although honestly I’d pretty much given up on relaxing anytime this side of the end of the world—but far enough up the city that the only person I was even a little bit expecting to hear was Cardenio, and that was mostly just wishing.

So at first I didn’t even recognize the voice. I just turned and saw him and felt my lungs cramp up in my chest like I’d been punched.

I reckoned it up later, and it must’ve been one indiction and two-thirds of another since him and his pack chased me from the Corandina to Ver-Istenna’s. And whatever they’d been doing since then, it hadn’t been no fun and hadn’t paid for shit, neither.

Rindleshin looked crazy. Skinny and dirty and sick, but mostly just crazy. The kind of crazy you can smell. He looked like those guys who stand on street corners in Engmond’s Tor and Dragonteeth and shout at people passing by.

And right now he was shouting at me.

I could see a couple of his pack members behind him, and the guy must’ve had something going for him because fuck those kids were loyal. They didn’t know how to stop him, because you could tell, clear as daylight, they would’ve if they did. They were only barely past their second septad, and they looked shit-scared. I didn’t blame ‘em. They couldn’t’ve seen this coming any more than I had.

Rindleshin’d elbowed his way to the front of the crowd. He was still shouting and people were getting the fuck out of his way. Didn’t blame them, neither. I was getting some words out of his yelling, “death” and “fire” and “hungry” and “motherfucker,” enough to know that, yeah, Rindleshin and his pack had pretty much been fucked over the last indiction and a half, and what had him pissed off right now as well as crazy was me looking mostly okay and like I’d had a bath anytime in the last three months.

I wanted to lie down in the road and howl like a dog. Either that or smack Rindleshin upside the head and tell him to just fucking forget about me. I was not the fucking problem, and even crazy as a drunk flea, I thought he knew that. But all I could do was try to keep my horse collected—it didn’t like Rindleshin, and I couldn’t blame
it
, either—and pray kind of hopelessly for some way out of this fucking mess that wasn’t me bleeding all over the Road of Chalcedony. And wondering how many other people I knew were in this kind of shape. How many people I knew had died.

Rindleshin was out in the road now, his knife in his hand, and if it’d been a throwing knife, I would’ve been dead already because I couldn’t get my brains to work, couldn’t get past how Rindleshin looked and the kids behind him and all the people along the road and the fucking Mirador up there like the world’s worst wart, and I was so fucking
sorry even
though it wasn’t my fault, and there was nothing I could do, and Rindleshin was shouting at me to get down off my fucking horse and face him, face him like a fucking man, and let’s settle this, you fuck, right now, let’s see who’s really got the fucking balls—

Felix nudged his horse sideways, flash as could be, so he was between me and Rindleshin, and said, “I must ask you to leave my brother alone, or you will not like the consequences.”

Kethe, never mind lying down or screaming or nothing. Right then I wanted to die. A nice plain apoplexy would do me just fine. Rindleshin was staring at Felix and staring at me, and then staring at Felix some more. And he wasn’t the only one, neither. Eyes as big as bell-wheels all up and down the fucking road, and if this hadn’t spread from one end of the Lower City to the other by the septad-night, I’d eat Felix’s waistcoat, brass buttons and all.

Fuck me sideways, I thought in pure despair, and Rindleshin snarled at me like a dog and said, “Hiding behind a hocus now, Mildmay? Hope you’re proud of yourself.” Anybody else—anybody who wasn’t completely crazy, I mean—would’ve backed off then. Made another couple cheap sneers, talked big, but, you know, got themselves the fuck off the road and into the crowd quick as they could without looking yellow. But Rindleshin, being—like I said—stark barking batfuck, ducked around Felix’s horse and made a lunge at me with his fucking knife.

My horse, not being a fool, shied away pretty hard, and I was busy not getting dumped on my ass, never mind something fancy like reaching for the knife in my boot. But all the same, I saw what happened next.

Felix had turned, keeping his good eye on Rindleshin, and what happened was, he said something, just a word or two under his breath, and made this tiny nothing of a gesture with his left hand.

And Rindleshin screamed and dropped the knife.

Which hit the ground and lay there, the wooden hilt smoking a little and the blade glowing red.

And Felix said, mild as mild, “I
did
warn you.”

Rindleshin screamed again and kind of staggered past me and into the crowd on the other side of the road. His pack kids gave each other this oh-powers-we’re-so-fucked look and bolted after him.

I got my horse under control again and said to Felix, more or less under my breath, “Thought that was heresy.”

The others bunched up with us in time to hear him say, “I cast a spell on the knife. It was entirely up to him whether he let go of it or not.”

“Casuistry,” Mavortian said. Which was a word I didn’t know, but I figured I had a pretty good guess what it meant.

And all the more so when Felix gave him a smile fake as a gilt gorgon and said, “Nature of the beast, my dear Mavortian.” Then he clucked at his horse, cool as if there weren’t Kethe knows how many people watching, and started on up the road to the Mirador.

I followed him because there wasn’t a fucking other thing in the world I could do. Between us, me and him, we’d seen to that.

I remembered the last time I’d been on this road, after Malkar had broken the Virtu, remembered being led along it on a rope like a wild animal. Probably, some of these same people had been watching then, jeering and shrieking and throwing things. They would have torn me apart limb from limb if Stephen had let them, and I could still taste their hatred, thick and cloying in the back of my throat.

It was a relief to be able to release some of that anger, even if it was only on a wretched creature like the boy who accosted Mildmay. It did not entirely exorcize my urge to burn the whole filthy gawking mob of them to ashes where they stood, but it made it possible to bear. Made it possible to keep my back straight and my expression pleasant, to behave like a wizard of the Mirador instead of the Pharaohlight whore I once had been.

I was aware of the others behind me, aware particularly of Mildmay in his self-decreed black, his face white and set and as expressive as a block of stone. I would have to ask him later about the boy who hated him, ask him about the history that lay between them. I knew so little about him; my long madness had given me trust but not knowledge.

We were approaching the Mirador: Livergate, where Mildmay had expected to be hanged and where I would be burned if I was not careful. I wondered what they would do to Mildmay then and thought bitterly that Mehitabel was right about me. Only the vilest and most egregious kind of selfishness could have made me agree to anything that would bring Mildmay within the Mirador’s reach. The spikes above Livergate were a cruel reminder that his life now depended on mine, and it was by no means a foregone conclusion that I would live to see sunset tomorrow.

I did not know either of the guards on duty at the gate, which I decided to take as an auspicious sign. I was not ready to find out if those among the Protectorate Guard who had once been my friends were friends still, or foes—or even alive. These two were young, barely more than boys for all their hard expressions and long mustaches. I smiled at them and said, “My name is Felix Harrowgate. I seek an audience with the Lord Protector.”

They were too young to be able to keep the surprise off their faces. They, like the guards at Chalcedony Gate, knew who I was—I was too easily described for it ever to be wise for me to assume otherwise—and they had obviously expected me to claim honors I no longer had any right to. That, they were prepared to deal with. Simple and relatively honest politeness left them baffled.

I smiled even more brilliantly and waited for them to find a course of action.

After a long, paralyzed moment, one of them said, “Yes, m’lord,” only to jump quite visibly when his colleague’s booted foot swung into his ankle. “I mean, yes, Mr. Harrowgate. And who are these people with you?”

I said, with bland disregard for the guards’ widening eyes, “Mehitabel Parr, late of Klepsydra; Mavortian von Heber, a wizard of the Fressandran school, and his man-at-arms, Bernard Heber; Gideon Thraxios, a wizard of the Bastion granted asylum by the Curia; my brother, Mildmay Foxe.” By the strict etiquette obtaining formerly to the obligation d‘âme, I ought not to have introduced Mildmay at all; that, however, would involve me in explanations I had no desire to make, and in any event I was, in the old parlance, the obligataire. To a fairly large extent, the rules were what I chose to make them.

The guards gave each other an appalled look, and the same one, either braver or more foolhardy than his fellow—or simply more keenly aware that this tableau vivant had to be ended
somehow
—said, “Thank you, sir. I will go ask the Lord Protector his wishes in this matter.”

To have me thrown in the Sim in a sack, no doubt. But I curbed my tongue, and the remaining guard and I, and those arrayed behind me, waited in silence to learn Lord Stephen’s pleasure.

The fiacre drivers gaped at us as they drove past, but not more so than their passengers.

I had not replaced the watch that Shannon had given me and that I had lost somehow in the year of my madness; I would have scorned to consult it in any event. Malkar had taught me to play waiting games and to disregard the amount of time spent in waiting. It might have been anywhere from five minutes to half an hour before the first guard returned and bowed rather stiffly, saying, “His lordship will see you.”

“Thank you,” I said and dismounted. The others copied me, and we led our horses beneath the grim lintel of Livergate.

And it was only by the grace of the powers I did not believe in that I did not immediately stumble and fall to my knees. There was a sound in my head, a song. But I heard it, not with my ears, nor even with my mind as I heard Gideon’s voice. I heard it with my blood, with my bones, with the magic that lay coiled within me like a nest of half-sleeping dragons. I heard it with the remnants of my madness that not even all the wisdom and care of the celebrants of the Gardens of Nephele had been able to eradicate, and it was through my madness that I recognized that mournful, broken little melody: the sound of the Virtu singing to itself.

My face must have been ghastly, for Mildmay caught my arm and said, “You okay?” in a tone of sharp concern.

“Fine,” I managed, then took a deep breath and straightened, shaking him off. Now was not the moment to admit weakness. “I’m all right.”

We both knew he didn’t believe me for an instant, but he let it go, let me go, followed me unprotesting into the courtyard behind Livergate, where grooms flocked to take our horses, and Vida Eoline was waiting.

Tall, beautiful, imperturbably soignée, Vida had come to the Mirador from the far southern islands, as her ebony skin and malachite-green eyes attested. Her coldly, ruthlessly rational intellect meant that she and I had often been allies, less often friends. I did not think, looking at the grim set of her features, that we were friends now.

“Felix,” she said.

“Lady Vida,” I said and bowed deeply enough to be mocking.

Her lips thinned. “Your gall never ceases to amaze me. Why are you here?”

“To speak to Stephen. Did that nice young man not say so?”

“Don’t play games. Why are you here?”

I smiled at her. “To mend the Virtu.”

It threw her, the only thing I could have said that would. A declaration of undying love would not have fazed her in the slightest; she would have known I did not mean it. This, she knew I meant.

She gave me a searching, almost anxious look. “Do you really think you can?”

“Yes,” I said with a confidence I did not entirely feel. If I was going to fail, it was not going to be before I even got within sight of the Virtu.

She stared at me a moment longer and then nodded; we were allies again. “Follow me.”

I gathered the others with a look, and we followed Vida into the Mirador.

Kethe. Like being stuck in a fucking nightmare. I mean, I was
in
the Mirador. The only other time I’d been in the Mirador, it was to kill Cerberus Cresset. And I kept thinking about Zephyr. He’d died just outside Livergate, burning, screaming, choking on his own fucking ashes if you want to get morbid about it, which—I was there, so, yeah, I guess I kind of do. And I felt like I should’ve let them hang me or send me to the sanguette—they don’t burn annemer, which is a pretty small fucking favor if you ask me—before I came in here, but I hadn’t wanted to die and I still didn’t want to die, and somehow that meant I’d ended up in the Mirador.