The Virtu (47 page)

I had never walked into the Hall of the Chimeras when it was empty. I had never imagined it empty.

No, that wasn’t true. I stopped where I was, fighting not to fall down, not to stagger, not to press the heels of my hands against my eyes. Above all, not to cry out.

I heard the thump of Mavortian’s canes go past me, but I was staring wide-eyed, blind, at the memory of darkness and brilliant blue-green light, and darkness again in the middle of it, a fracture, a chasm. Blood and shards of stone like glass and pain, pain that was darkness and breath and all the world.

A voice, not part of the darkness: “Felix? You okay?”

I took a breath that felt like a scream, and found the real darkness or the Hall of the Chimeras, candlelit and thick with shadows.

I called witchlight in a blazing crown, as if I could force the shadows to fail and die by nothing more than strength of will. Mavortian glanced back, and I could read the look he gave me; I had seen it a thousand times before--
peacock
. I gave him my best and most infuriating smirk in return.

And Mildmay, still beside me, like Griselde la Patience, said, “Felix?”

“I’m all right,” I said, although that was hardly the truth. I groped and came up with something that was at least not a lie: “I don’t like the dark.”

“Then brother did you pick the wrong place to live.”

He surprised me into laughing. The sound echoed strangely among the metal and stone, but I didn’t care. When I looked at Mildmay, I saw laughter in his eyes, although his face was as solemn as ever.

Mavortian had come to a halt before the dais; as we came up beside him, he said, “I need a piece of—what
is
it made of, anyway?”

“Stone. At least, that’s what it started out as. It responds like glass.”

“Does it?” His eyebrows went up; he knew enough about Cabaline theory to recognize how strange that was.

“Actual glass wouldn’t have withstood the stresses of the working. You see how friable it made the stone.”

“Yes,” Mavortian said with something that was almost a wince. “Then I need a piece of stone, and it would help if I had somewhere to lay out my cards.”

“Thought they were for fortune-telling,” Mildmay said.

Mavortian gave him an indecipherable look. “They can be. They can also be used for other things. In this case”—he turned to me—“I need to cast for the anchor.”

“You say that as if it should mean something to me.”

“Any pattern meant to hold for longer than simply the duration of the spell-casting has to be anchored. I can tell that the Virtu was anchored by its materials—the… stone or glass?”

“Either. Both, thaumaturgically speaking. Call it glass, and the stone of the plinth.” Although “anchor” was not the preferred term, it described exactly the purpose that stone served in Cabaline wizardry. It was why the Mirador suited us so well, and why Cabalines outside of Mélusine were drawn to stone towers. Air and glass for working, gems for focus, rock for grounding, water for cleansing. And fickle wood playing each part in turn. Cabaline wizards were never comfortable in wooden houses.

“And by the daily oaths,” Mavortian continued. “But that wouldn’t be enough to hold it stable. We need to find out what the other anchors are and whether they are still intact.”

“And you can do that with your cards?” Mildmay asked.

“Given a focus,” Mavortian said and looked pointedly at me.

I sprang up onto the dais, onto Lord Michael’s Chair, up onto the arm; snatched up a shard of stone like a dagger; felt the power jolting up my arm, numbing my fingers. The Virtu was broken, but it was not dead. I jumped down again, demanded of Mavortian, “Do you have your cards with you?”

“Always.”

“Then come,” I said. “Let us find you a place to lay them out.”

It wasn’t hard to do; there were a score of small parlors around the Hall of the Chimeras, and that not counting the wizards’ antechambers. I found one that contained a marquetry chess table and stared out of countenance the group of young wizards who were in possession. They fled, mumbling something that might have been an apology or a promise of dire vengeance, and I put the shard of the Virtu on the table, rearranged the chairs to suit, with two at the table and the others along the wall where they would not get in the way.

“You are ruthless, Messire Harrowgate,” Mavortian said, smirking again.

“I consult no one’s comfort but my own,” I said, pointing Mildmay emphatically at a chair. He gave me his half snarl, but he sat. “So has it ever been.” I sat down myself in one of the chairs at the chess table and looked brightly at Mavortian. “Call me Felix, Mavortian, and show me what your cards can do.”

He wanted to refuse, to balk—to put his ears back like a mule and decline to move. But he had no reason to, except our cordial dislike of each other, and I had been careful to be provoking enough that to refuse would be to allow me to win. Power games and manipulation were like air in the Mirador, and despite a new distaste for their childishness, I was breathing deeply.

Mavortian sat, handed his canes to Bernard—who carefully chose a seat that was not next to Mildmay—and then produced a rectangular box from the inside pocket of his coat. It was about the length of my hand, made of a glowingly pale wood, carved in labyrinthine profusion with stylized vines and flowers. There was neither catch nor hinges visible.

“Moonflowers,” Mavortian said. I did not see what he did to release the catch, but he lifted the lid. The interior was padded and lined with midnight-blue silk, on which rested the deck of the Sibylline. Mavortian drew the cards out, set the box aside, and began shuffling them, his hands quick and agile. He said, “How much do you know about the Sibylline?”

“It is a method of divination. Believed to come from Cymellune of the Waters, although I understand there is evidence to disprove that. Not unlike a deck of playing cards, except for the trumps. Rich with symbolism, and thus much beloved of artists and poets.” I shrugged. “The Mirador does not dabble in fortune-telling.”

That got me a glare from under his eyebrows. He fanned the cards out, facedown. They were old, battered; what once must have been a striking pattern in black and scarlet on their backs was now faded, worn, the black gone to sepia, and the scarlet almost gone entirely. Mavortian ran his hand back along his fan of cards, nipping them faceup. A cardsharp’s trick: I glanced at Mildmay, and he rolled his eyes at me.

Mavortian said, “Four suits: staves, wands, pentacles, and grails. As you say, like playing cards. Deuce through ten, the court cards: Lady, Knight, Queen, King.” He edged them forward as he spoke: the Lady of Wands, the Knight of Pentacles, the Queen of Grails, the King of Swords. “And the Sibyls. These, you will
not
find in a deck of playing cards.”

He pulled them out of the fan entirely and pushed them across the table to me. Wands, Pentacles, Grails, Swords. Four blindfolded women, each with a two-handed grip on the symbol of her suit.

“They are the diviners’ cards,” he said and motioned for me to push them back. “The alt-cards, both highest and deepest. They stand between the common cards and the trumps.”

He drew the entire deck of cards back into his hands, shuffled three times, and began laying the trumps out from the center of the deck. If nothing else, this demonstration was convincing me never to play cards with him for money.

“The twenty-one trumps,” he said, “are the cards we will be using, since this is not exactly divination, and we want the cards that respond to patterns most strongly. It would probably be best if you familiarized yourself with them.” I looked at the garish, morbid pictures, and could almost near Malkar laughing at my gullibility. Mavortian named them as he went, but only a few of the images caught in my mind: the Dead Tree, the Beehive, the Nightingale, the Heart of Light. Mavortian did not explain their meanings, and I did not press him. If he needed to keep some superiority, some exclusive knowledge, I did not care, so long as he could do what he claimed.

Instead I asked, “And how are these cards going to help with our particular problem?”

“We’re casting to find the anchors,” he said with odious patience. “We know two of them.” He laid two trumps faceup on the table: the Dog—an enormous shaggy creature, black as night and far more like a bear than any dog I had ever seen—and the Rock, lurid red against its murky background.

“Loyalty and stone,” Mavortian said and gathered them up again. “It is the others we want.”

“Probably only one,” I said. “It would be either three or five, and I cannot imagine maintaining a working like that long enough to lay five foundations.”

Mavortian nodded; he pushed the stone shard into the exact center of the table, although I could tell by the way he rubbed his fingers together that he didn’t like the feel of its magic any better than I did. Then he handed the twenty-one trumps across the table to me. “Shuffle, please.”

“How many times?” The cards felt smooth, slightly furry around the edges, and powerful. I could feel the residue of the magic that had been channeled through them, and there had been a lot of it.

“As many as feels necessary,” Mavortian said, and I heard Bernard snort.

But it was not a useless answer, at least not from one wizard to another. I shuffled once, my fingers stiff and awkward, and felt the old power in the cards shift and darken and clarify. The word “awaken” was not quite right, and I was glad of it.

I shuffled again, felt the power move, obedient to my hands. Kept shuffling until the dark clarity ran from hand to hand like water, then gave the cards back to Mavortian.

He nodded, and I did not think I was imagining the slight possessive-ness of the way his fingers curled around the cards. He cut the cards twice—and having held them I knew why—and began to lay them out around the shard of stone.

The first two were the Rock and the Dog, and I would have suspected him of more cardsharping tricks except for the fact that there was no point. He could not hope to fool me long-term, and it was the long term he cared about.

The third card was the Dead Tree; Mavortian and I both drew back instinctively and glared at each other.

“The worst-aspected card in the deck,” he said, almost spitting the words at me.

“You would know.”

We hovered for a moment on the brink of a true quarrel, and then he put down the fourth card.

Death.

I felt myself become cold, as if ice was forming along my spine and in the bones of my hands. Scraps of memory fluttered through my mind: the death of Sherbourne Foss, cold marble roses, a brick-lined tunnel beneath the city, a pale faded boy with inhuman eyes.

I said, my voice steady enough, but very thin, “I know what the third foundation is.”

Mavortian did not want to believe me. He said it was monstrous, abominable; I said that, yes, it was, but that did not mean it was not true.

“And it explains a great deal,” I said. “Including the Cabal’s behavior in allowing this knowledge to be lost.” I sighed and pushed my hair off my face. “The Mirador has such a troubled relationship with heresy.”

“You would know,” Mavortian said nastily.

I ignored him. “I don’t know very much about necromancy—though I know more than I would wish to—but I can see why they did it.”

“And why is that?”

“They were trained necromancers, and what they needed—and needed, moreover, in a dreadful hurry—was stability.”

“Stability?” Mavortian was frowning, but I thought that now it was in an honest attempt to follow my explanation.

“That,” I said and pointed at the Dog, “takes years, if not decades, to gather enough power that it can truly function as a foundation for spell-casting of any magnitude. And especially in the early days, they couldn’t
count
on it. Many of the wizards did not trust them; some paid only lip service to the new regime and were merely waiting for the chance to replace them. And nothing would undermine what the Cabal was working for more swiftly and catastrophically than the failure of their principal and most symbolic working.”

Mavortian understood me now. “Expediency.”

“Yes. I am sure the Cabal did not intend the Mirador’s dead to be a permanent part of their working, but they would have had to wait until the oaths of loyalty had built some strength, and then they would have had to find a suitable replacement, and then find a time when it would be safe to disrupt the Virtu’s energies and not have to worry about political unrest or thaumaturgie attacks. And then the members of the Cabal started dying…” I let my voice trail off and shrugged dismally.

“And now you are left with the question of how to duplicate their spells.”

“No,” I said, feeling inexpressibly weary. “Now I am left with the question of whether I
should
duplicate their spells.”

The way he stared at me—as if I’d suggested we strip naked and paint each other with woad—did not improve my temper. “Perhaps I missed something,” he said. “Did I not understand you to tell me that repairing the Virtu was a matter of the most paramount importance?”

“It is.”

“Then how can you seriously be entertaining the thought of leaving it broken?”