The Virtu (5 page)

After a time, he seemed to shake himself out of his dismal reverie and said, “So if you want to know about oneiromancy, I am afraid you will have to ask someone else.”

“But it seems, from what you have said, that there is no one else to ask.”

“True.”

I took a deep breath, gathered my resolve, and said, “Let me tell you about my dream.”

Once he had absorbed the implications of what I had dreamed, it took very little time for Diokletian to tell me everything he knew about the Dream of the Garden. It wasn’t very much. It took more time for him to describe the mental exercises he used to send his sleeping or entranced mind into the Dream of the Garden. They sounded insanely complicated, and I said so.

“Oh, I can bring you in.”

“No,” I said. “You can’t.”

“I did before,” he said, offended.

The thought made me ill. “That was… different. I assure you, whatever techniques you used before will prove ineffectual now.”

He bridled, but I went on before he could speak: “I can find my own way in.”

“But you haven’t been trained to—”

“Neither have you.”

I had spoken more sharply than I had intended to; his silence was both hurt and reproachful.

“Trust me,” I said. “I’ll get in. Shall we try it now?”

“Now?”

“Why not?”

“I scarcely think you know the meditation techniques necessary to reach the Khloïdanikos without being in deep natural sleep.”

“You have no idea of what I do or don’t know,” I said, catching his gaze and holding it. After a moment, he looked away uncomfortably.

“If you insist,” he said, trying to sound as if he was merely humoring my delusion.

I made myself comfortable in the chair. “I do. I’ll see you there,” I said and shut my eyes.

Malkar had trained me in certain kinds of meditation, but most of what I knew I had learned from Iosephinus Pompey, a tremendously ancient wizard who had himself been taught by wizards who remembered what magic had been like in the Mirador before the Wizards’ Coup. He had been taught principles of oneiromancy, although it was heresy, and he had taught them to me because I confessed my nightmares to him. He told me that his own teacher, Rosindy Clerk, had believed that the magic of wizards with great natural talent—like me—often bled into their dreams, whether they had training in oneiromancy or not.

Iosephinus had taught me well, after swearing me to secrecy with a barrage of frightening oaths, and the steps of the ritual felt as comfortable and familiar as an old, much-washed shirt, even though I could not remember the last time I had performed it.

I called up my mental construct of Mélusine, and then imagined myself opening my eyes. Iosephinus called it “opening the third eye,” but I had always shied away from such blatantly mystical language; Malkar would have laughed himself sick if he’d ever heard me talking about third eyes.

I was fully in trance; when I opened my eyes, my schematic of Mélusine lay spread around me, as if I stood on the Crown of Nails. It had been so long since I had done this that for a moment I couldn’t identify what was wrong, although my nerves were screaming with it. And then I saw: the river.

I had never loved the Sim, although my childhood fear of it had waned once I was safely established in the Mirador. My mental representation of it had always been as a thin, sinuous blue line, like a river on a map. But now it was wide, black, a trail of ichor left by some unimaginable wounded beast. Although I knew I could not, I seemed to smell it, the Sim’s own bitter metallic reek mixed with a scent of rot and corruption and death.

Perplexed and beginning to be frightened, I traced the vile river’s course from its entry into the city from the northwest, southeast to the Mirador, where I myself stood, and then south from the Mirador through the Lower City and…

I stared, aghast. In the real Mélusine, the Sim flowed out of the city beneath a tremendous arch, which the denizens of the Lower City called the Septad Gate, and into the St. Grandin Swamp. In this construct-Mélusine, the river had torn a horrid, jagged, weeping hole in the city wall; beyond it I could see a festering, noxious darkness, and whether I could smell it or not, I knew the stench was there. Swamp, graveyard, abattoir: it was all those things, and still nothing that I had created—at least, not on purpose.

If it had not been for Diokletian, I would have broken my trance. But I had told him I would find my own way into the Dream of the Garden, and I was not willing to prove myself a liar merely for some unexpected garbage in a mental construct. Iosephinus had told me that properly constructed oneiromantic portals were in a sense alive—that they would change to reflect everything along their borders, the dreaming self as much as the waking. If I did not fully understand the demonstration, I was entirely cognizant of the theory. There was nothing here at which to take alarm.

Or so I told myself.

I knew which gate I wanted; Horn Gate was the gate of true dreams, oneiromantically charged dreams. I wrenched myself away from my horrified contemplation of the Septad Gate and turned to the northeast. There was Horn Gate and there was the Dream of the Garden. I could see the perseïdes, and the memory of their smell helped to counteract the imagined stench of the Sim. Without hesitation, I left the Crown of Nails and walked through Horn Gate into the Dream of the Garden.

It was as it had been in my dream: verdant, idyllic, deserted except for the Troian ghosts who roamed its paths. I wondered, now that I knew what this garden was, what
they
were. Were they true ghosts, or traces of the oneiromancers who had once used this construct? Or, speculating more wildly as my search for Diokletian ranged farther and farther, were they those oneiromancers themselves, coming to the Khloïdanikos from their own time? Did I appear a ghost to them, as they did to me? That thought became more unsettling the longer I contemplated it. I was glad, when I came in sight of the Omphalos, for the notion to search for Diokletian there.

I made my way to the Omphalos; sure enough, he was standing beneath the center of the dome. He turned to face me as I came between the columns, and I stopped short. We stood, staring at each other.

“Oh,” he said, sounding vaguely surprised. “You look like yourself now.”

“I…
what
?”

“Well, you didn’t. Before.”

“Before what?”

“When I first found you, before we healed you. You looked quite different.” He tilted his head, appraising me. “It must have been what you thought you looked like.”

I decided I didn’t want a description. “Many things were different then.” And, because a jibe was the best distraction: “I told you I could manage for myself.”

“Yes,” he said, although he scarcely seemed to hear me. Then he shook his head and said more vigorously, “Yes, and now that you are here, what do you propose to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said, annoyed. “I suppose I’d like to find out why I was dreaming in your construct.”

“It isn’t
my
construct—”

“You’re the one who was experimenting with it.”

He glared at me.

“Look,” I said. “What is the Khloïdanikos
for
?”

“I told you. The oneiromancers—”

“No. Not who built it or what they thought their reasons were. What is it
for
?”

“I don’t understand you,” he said stiffly.

“No, probably not.” I felt more cheerful with a thaumaturgie riddle to solve. “The man who taught me what I know of oneiromancy told me that all good constructs have a life of their own.
That's
what I’m after: what is the life of the Khloïdanikos?”

“I have no idea.”

Somehow we were at cross-purposes. Diokletian seemed to be having a different conversation, in which all the words meant something else and every word I spoke was an insult.

I tried again. “Why was I drawn here when I was mad?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Oh, I don’t know—because there’s no one else to ask?” I waved an arm furiously at the empty, ghost-ridden Khloïdanikos. “Because I thought, silly me, that you were interested? Because if we put the little bits of oneiromancy each of us knows together we might
learn
something?” He was staring at me wide-eyed, as if I’d thrown my head back and howled at the moon; he looked uncommonly half-witted. “
What
?”

He said in a vague, dazed voice, “She would never care so much about…”

I resisted, with difficulty, the urge to employ some of Mildmay’s more colorful vocabulary. I closed the distance between us, took him by the shoulders with a slight shake, and said distinctly and emphatically, staring him in the eyes, “
I am not Methony.”

He looked back at me, his gaze more unguarded than it had ever been in the waking world, and I found myself backing away from him before I’d even fully identified what I saw in his face.

“No,” I said. “Oh, no. You
can’t
.”

“Why not?” said Diokletian, not moving but still watching me hungrily. “Isn’t it what you want, to have every man who sees you desire you?”

“Me! Not my mother’s ghost! You don’t want me—you can barely tolerate me. You want
her
, and I am not flattered at being deemed an acceptable stand-in.”

“You are so like her,” he said dreamily, “your looks… your voice…”

“My career as a prostitute,” I said, desperate to shake him out of his strange, abstracted absorption. I wasn’t frightened of him physically, but the way he looked at me made me feel insubstantial, as if I were merely a veil between him and the woman he had desired for nearly thirty years.

His head jerked back as if I had threatened to slap him.

“Besides,” I said, letting my voice become throatier, a parody of seduction, “I understand you could be my father. I wouldn’t mind, but I think you might.”

He backed up a pace, raising his hands as if to ward me off. I saw horror, revulsion, self-loathing on his face, and then all at once, like a soap bubble, he vanished. He had broken his trance, and I wondered if it had been intentional.

I did not care to remain in the Khloïdanikos alone, and with my body unprotected from whatever Diokletian might choose to do. I took a deep breath and started back toward the ungainly bulk of Horn Gate, alien among the perseïd trees.

Whatever else you could say about him, it did seem like Felix kept his promises. I was up and dressed and peeling an orange when there was a tap at the door. Khrysogonos still didn’t knock, and Felix always banged on the door like he was ready to break it down if I didn’t answer fast enough. My mouth dried up, along of suddenly being afraid it was Astyanax. Astyanax who hated me and was fucking Felix—or being fucked by him, and that was just one of those questions I was never going to ask. He’d looked through me good and hard the first time we came up against each other when Felix was around, and I’d gotten the message. And that was fine with me. Wasn’t like I wanted to talk about it or anything. All I wanted was to keep the fuck away from him.

But even if it was Astyanax, I couldn’t hide in here all day. So I said, “Come in.”

And it wasn’t Astyanax, just a skinny little acolyte with braids most of the way to her knees, carrying a big clumsy stack of parchments.

She dropped me a kind of curtsy—best she could do with all that Parchment—and said, “Your brother said that I should bring these to you.”

“Maps?” I said, and she nodded.

“Grand. Put ‘em here,” and I cleared off a space on the table. She put ’em down and skittered away before I could even say thank you.

I finished the orange—love ‘em—got my hands cleaned off and started in with the maps.

A bunch of ‘em were written in Troian, which made them not much good to me. I can limp along in Marathine, ’bout as fast as a slow turtle, and I can recognize names in Midlander, but Kekropian and Troian have this whole different alphabet, and I can’t tell a gorgon from a wheel. But one of those had the best drawing on it, and I put it on one side while I looked through the ones with the Midlander writing.

I’d had a map myself when me and Felix had been going across Kekropia. It’d been lost with everything else when the
Morskaiakrov
sank. But I remembered it well enough to sort of hold it up against these maps and see the places where there were some serious differences of opinion. Mostly, these Troian maps didn’t make Kekropia look anywhere near wide enough, and only one or two of ’em had even a feeble guess on where Mélusine and the Mirador was at. That didn’t matter so much though as where they thought the Bastion was, it being the place where all the Kekropian hocuses hung out and the thing we principally wanted to avoid. I figured if we got that far, we could find Mélusine on our own.

If we got that far.

The maps all put the Bastion around about the middle of Kekropia, but you could tell the mapmakers were basically just guessing. They knew it was out there somewhere, and I don’t suppose anybody but the Eusebians themselves can actually pinpoint it any better than that. So exactly how far north it was from anything, or how far west… well, I couldn’t tell, and I stared at those damn maps until I swear I could feel my eyes crossing.