The Virtu (53 page)

I can’t feel magic, but I knew when Felix’s spell took, all the same. The ghouls quit beating themselves against the door.

There was a long silence, heavy and thick, and me and Felix staring at each other with our eyes as big as bell-wheels. And then a voice, a woman’s voice, low and moaning, and Kethe my skin was goosefleshing so bad it felt like it was trying to crawl right off my body, “Please. Let us in. Let us walk the maze.”

“Can…” Felix took a deep breath. “Can you open the door?”

I started toward it, then stopped myself. “Not without leaving the diamond. And, I mean, I will, but you said—”

“No,” Felix said, his voice tight and harsh.

“Please,” the dead woman said, and I could hear other voices behind her, mumbling and moaning, “please let us. Please.”

I stayed where I was, ‘cause Felix had told me to. He reached toward the door with one hand. His eyes were wide, and I could see sweat beading at his hairline and on his upper lip.

And I heard it when the top bolt on the door slid back.

I was praying, a kind of panicked babbling in my head that didn’t amount to much more than the ghouls’
please please please
. Please let this work. Please let this be the right thing to do.

The second bolt went back, and now Felix was leaning on John Cordelius’s tomb, and I could see his hand shaking. “Please,” sobbed the dead people, and there was the heavy clank of the latch, and the door shuddered open the tiniest fraction of an inch.

I had to force myself to take a choked little breath that hurt like fuck and then another, and Felix was kind of hanging on John Cordelius’s tomb like otherwise he’d be sprawled all over the floor, and the door swung open, first just an inch and then it
slammed
into the wall, and I had one moment where I thought, perfectly clear, This is it, we’re fucked. And then the ghouls were in the crypt.

They weren’t even looking at me. As far as they were concerned, I might have been so much marble and iron. And they didn’t head straight for Felix to rip his guts out, neither. They were all about the maze.

I stood there and reminded myself to keep breathing, and the ghouls walked the maze. And I’m pretty sure they weren’t the only ones walking it. They were just the only ones I could see. It kept getting colder and colder in the crypt, that much I know.

The ghouls didn’t move like ghouls anymore. They still looked like ghouls, all withered and black and with the crazy red eyes, and powers and saints they still
smelled
like ghouls. But they moved like they were alive again. Like they remembered who they’d been.

It didn’t take long. Felix moved so he had the tomb between him and the ghouls when they came into the heart of the maze. I didn’t blame him, but it turned out it didn’t matter. Because the ghouls didn’t look at him any more than they’d looked at me. They just reached for John Cordelius’s tomb, and when they touched it—I mean, the
second
they laid a finger on it—they kind of crumbled and fell apart into dust. I don’t know how many of them there were. Felix said later he thought there were only twenty or so, and it just seemed like more. And like me, he thought there were a bunch of dead people besides the ghouls using the maze.

After a while, I noticed it was getting warmer again, and then that my breathing had quit sounding so much like I was carrying something too heavy for me. And then the last ghoul touched John Cordelius’s tomb and Was gone.

Felix kind of staggered sideways, and I almost forgot and stepped out of the diamond to go to him. But I didn’t. I stayed where I was and called, “You okay?”

“Yes,” he said, although he didn’t sound sure about it. “I think it worked.”

“Well, yeah.”

“No. I mean the necromantic foundation. I think it’s truly gone. I think this insane idea really
worked
.”

He sounded pretty punchy. I said, “Hey. Can I get out of this diamond now?”

“Wait a moment. I have to perform the dispersal.”

So I waited, and he did his hocus-stuff. I knew he was done when all the chalk lines disappeared.

He pushed his hair back from his face and said, “All right. Do you think you can find your way back?”

“Watch me,” I said, and made him laugh.

Court the next morning was rendered hideous by Stephen’s saying, almost the instant the necessary business of ritual was out of the way, “Felix, I’ve been told by several people that you did something to the Mirador last night. Would you mind explaining?”

I managed to keep myself from answering honestly,
Yes.
What sleep I had gotten the night before had been restless and patchy, plagued, not surprisingly, by nightmares in which I was trying to reach the Khloïdanikos through the labyrinth of Klepsydra, and was prevented, first by ghouls, and then, when I had at last eluded them in the oldest and darkest corners of the labyrinth—which was somehow also the Mirador—by the Sim running black and cruel across my path. I said, “Were your wizards not able to inform you, my lord?” earning myself a black look from Vicky as well as Stephen.

“It’s
your
explanation I’m interested in.”

The temptation to tell the truth—the
exact
truth—was almost physical, like something stuck in my throat. But the envoy from Vusantine stood on the dais, his eyes sharp and cold and very watchful, and any truth I gave to court and Curia, I gave also to the Coeurterre.

And thus I shrugged and said negligently, “Just tidying up a few loose ends.”

“That’s an interesting way of putting it. You seem to have entirely rid the Mirador of ghouls.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Did you want to keep them?”

Baiting Stephen had once been my favorite hobby. And even though I no longer enjoyed it as I once had, there was a certain bitter satisfaction in seeing I hadn’t lost my touch. He quite visibly repressed his first response—and possibly his second—and said, “What I
want
is for you to tell me what you did.”

“Entirely rid the Mirador of ghouls.” And I smiled at him brightly to hide my wince as Mildmay kicked my ankle.

It hung in the balance for a moment; then Stephen snorted and said, “All right. I’ll leave it to your colleagues to get the truth out of you.” And turned his attention to the next item in the day’s docket.

I did in fact have to endure a rather unpleasant half hour with Giancarlo, but ironically, because he was a wizard and understood what had caused the problem—if ghouls might be so lightly described—it was easier than it would have been with Stephen to avoid deeper questions, the answers to which would only cause pain and distress. There was no need to burden the Curia with the truth, and I reminded myself that I wanted to prove myself better than they thought me, not indulge in an unending succession of petty acts of revenge. I told Giancarlo it was necessary work before mending the Virtu, and made up some persiflage about old and disrupted magic interfering with the patterns my Fressandran colleague was looking for. Giancarlo leapt at the bait and lost sight of the ghouls entirely in bombarding me with questions about Fressandran theory and praxis in general and Mavortian von Heber’s probable intentions in particular. I lied extravagantly when I could not answer with the truth, and Giancarlo finally let me go—mollified, if not actually satisfied, by my explanations.

I was left in peace for several days thereafter to do the work I had been appointed. Wizards and courtiers alike skirted me as widely as if the broken state of the Virtu might be contagious; Stephen glowered, but did not speak. Mavortian, like any wizard worth the name, would let personal considerations go in the pursuit of a conundrum; Gideon, too, threw himself willingly into research among the Mirador’s scattered libraries, although we had had no personal exchanges since I had called him a reactionary close-minded intellectual coward. He would probably have forgiven me if my attempt to lay the Mirador’s dead had failed, but it is hard to be generous when events have conspired to prove an unflattering estimation of one’s character to be, even partially, correct. Mildmay stayed at my side, unquestioning, uncomplaining, as if he’d been born to it.

My dreams continued to harp tiresomely on ghouls and the Sim and the labyrinth of Klepsydra, but nightmares were nothing new or surprising.

It was too good to last, and, of course, it didn’t.

The afternoon of our fifth day of work, we were afflicted with visitors. Mortimer Clef, the envoy from Vusantine, wished to see what progress we were making, and Stephen had been prompted by some malicious urge to deputize Shannon to accompany him.

Even so, at first it wasn’t too bad. Mortimer Clef seemed as willing to answer questions as to ask them, and for an annemer, he had a remarkable grasp of thaumaturgy and its theory. He was able to satisfy my curiosity about the work that had been done in Hermione and what part the wizards of the Coeurterre had played in repairing and rebuilding the magical defenses of the Mirador. I imagined he could also have told me a good deal about the part the High King’s treasury had played in repairing the physical structure if I had been inclined to ask, which I was not.

But then he desired to speak to Mavortian, and I was left standing face-to-face with Shannon Teverius.

It would have been a lie to say I did not want him. I wanted him as desperately as I ever had, wanted that fragile gold and alabaster beauty to be mine. What I did not want were the memories, of my cruelty, of his. I remembered striking him, so vividly it might have happened yesterday, but I also remembered, as one remembers things dreamed in a fever, flinching from his words, from the vicious triumph in his voice.

We had hurt each other, and the weight of that pain was simply more than I was willing to take up again.

“Good afternoon, my lord,” I said, voice pleasant, face neutral.

“
You’re
awfully formal,” he said, and my heart sank. “Trying to keep your distance? Afraid I might bear tales to your new light of love?”

Of all the things that worried me, that surely was not on the list. I could not imagine Shannon, whose sheltered life had left him deeply uncomfortable with deformity, with incapacity, talking to Gideon, and even if he did, Gideon was far too canny to listen.

He must have seen in my face that his shot was wide of the mark, for he said, “But then, your standards aren’t as exacting as they used to be, are they, darling?” His imitation of me was devastatingly accurate; I had to fight to hide my wince. “Honestly, Felix, even for you, isn’t this a bit much? Slumming is one thing—we all do it, powers know—but
incest
? One would think you were living in the days of the Puppet Kings.”

It took me a moment to realize what he was implying, and then all my resolution, my calm, my self-control went up in a scouring white blaze of fury—all the worse for the fact that it was by no wish of mine that Shannon’s allegations were false.

“Truly,” I said, “you are your mother’s son, aren’t you?”

Shannon went stark white. His mother, Gloria Aestia—the only an-nemer ever burned at the stake for treason—was more than a sore spot with him; she was a raw, still-bleeding wound. The Lower City had called her the Golden Bitch, and she had earned that soubriquet seven times over. Legally, Shannon had no connection with the House of Aestius, as if Gloria Aestia had never existed, but the fact that he was as uncannily like his mother as I was like mine meant that she could never be entirely forgotten. She was a byword for faithlessness and slander, and I added before Shannon could find his voice, “But then, there’s never been any doubt of
that
.”