The Virtu (54 page)

“You’re a fine one to talk. How many pretty boys did you leave pining on your way across the Empire?”

“How long did you wait,” I countered, “before you found someone else to warm your bed? A week? Two?”

“What’s the matter, Felix?” Shannon hissed. “Jealous? Won’t your little gutter rat—what’s the appropriate expression?—
put out
?”

“He is
not
—” And I realized that my voice had risen, that the echoes were catching and multiplying in the darkness of the vault above us, that Mavortian, Bernard, Mildmay, and Mortimer Clef were all staring at me as if I had gone mad.

An unfortunate comparison.

It was a struggle to lower my voice. “Whatever it is you wish to say, my lord, say it and have done.”

“I don’t know that I wished to say anything at all,” Shannon said, with the smile I had once found charming, and sauntered away to join the envoy from Vusantine.

I stood a moment, feeling my nails bite into my palms, and then started for the doors. I waved Mildmay away savagely when he started to follow me, and said, “Don’t come after me,” using the obligation d‘âme without subtlety. I felt him stop, felt him run into my words as if into a wall, and I was glad of it.

I walked fast, head down, paying no attention to my surroundings, seeking only to outdistance the black snarling beast in my chest. A futile endeavor, and I knew it, but I did not want to pick a vicious fight with Mildmay, and that was the only other option I saw.

I looked up sometime later, out of a dark haze, and discovered that my feet had led me to the Mortisgate, to the Arcane—where I had always gone when the black fury in me was more than I could allow the Mirador to see. I shivered at the memory of some of the things I’d done, but kept my head up as I strode through the Mortisgate, not acknowledging the guards on duty. Once the men stationed there might have been my friends; at the least, I would have been able to greet them by name. But now the uniform of the Protectorate Guard made me think only of monsters with the heads of owls.

The guards, for their part, made no attempt to catch my eye.

I walked through the Arcane as I had walked through the Mirador, without heeding my path or my whereabouts. No one in Mélusine was foolish enough to interfere with a wizard emblazoned with the Mirador’s tattoos, and if I did become lost, a gorgon would serve to hire a child to lead me back to the Mortisgate. In truth, a handful of centimes would serve that purpose, but it did me no harm to pay generously.

I walked—not thinking, for in this state my thoughts would be only malevolent, incendiary—and did not wake to my surroundings until the stench of the Sim was strong enough to make me cough. And then I did not need to look to know where I was, although this was a part of the Arcane I had always been careful to avoid.

Keeper had had friends here.

Once, in ages long past, before the Arcane was the Arcane, this must have been conceived of as a pleasure walk, like the Queen Madeleine Garden among the roofs of the Mirador. I could not myself imagine
wanting
to walk along the Sim, but the evidence was all around me in the carved columns and the checkerboard stonework of the floor. There were the remains, too, of a wrought-iron fence, although it was a patchwork thing now: three different patterns of ironwork; a stretch of what must once have been a banister in a noble’s town house, the posts sawn off, the flourish of the newel sticking up foolishly and obscenely; a short length of masonry; bits of picket fence; even a section of what looked to me like woven bamboo. On the other side, forty feet straight down, the Sim ran swift and black and cold as death.

There was a bar on the inner side of the colonnade now, the Griffin and Pegasus, and the scene its sign depicted, a cruel mockery of the bourgeois and nobles who favored the card game, was crude enough to make me blush; I knew the sorts of people who would sit at its tables, knew the sorts of services you could buy if you knew whom to ask and what to say to them.

I thought, with horrible clarity, I could buy phoenix here. The heavy, sweet weight of it would keep me from thinking; that, after all, was why the procurers of the Lower City loved it, why Malkar had never tried to cure me of my addiction.

And for a moment, it seemed like a good idea.

Then I recoiled, so violently that I actually staggered sideways, catching myself against the clammy iron of the fence. And I was looking down at the dark, rushing water, at the tiny glints, like drowning stars, that were the reflections of the torches that stood on poles at intervals along the fence. My hands clamped against the iron railing hard enough to hurt, and I wrenched my head up.

I stared across the river, squinting hard, trying to make out the opposite bank. And at the same time I caught up with myself enough to wonder what I was trying to see, when all that would be over there were smugglers’ caches and businesses even more dubious than the Griffin and Pegasus, I realized that I was looking for the white flowers of perseïdes, for the Khloïdanikos, and I remembered my nightmares.

And I wondered if the Arcane partook enough of the nature of the Mirador that it was a mistake to assume anything was coincidence.

I took a deep, unwilling breath, the bitter metal scent of the Sim biting at my nostrils. First ghouls, and then the Sim, keeping me from something I wanted. First ghouls, and then the Sim. First necromancy, and then…

I might have screamed. If I did, it was a thin noise, inaudible over the river. My hands were cramping tighter and tighter, and I thought for a moment I was going to vomit.

The Mirador is a labyrinth.

It was so clear, so terribly clear. That was what my dreams were trying to tell me: the Mirador was a labyrinth with the Sim at its heart, just like the labyrinth of Klepsydra. Or, to turn it around—and I was laughing now, tiny hysterical shrieks under my breath—the Sim was the heart of the Mirador.

Or to put it still another way, the Sim was the
foundation
of the Mirador, and I knew how to mend the Virtu, and I would have given anything not to have that knowledge.

I leaned over the railing, half-sick with terror and inevitability, and swore, all the worst words I knew, all the words Malkar had taught me never to say, never even to think, a whispered river of invective and filth, like the river which, unheeding, poured itself through the rock and darkness beneath my feet.

When Felix came in, he looked like sixty-nine different kinds of death.

Me and Gideon were playing Long Tiffany—because what the fuck else did we have to do?—but we both put our cards down when we saw him. “You’re here,” he said to Gideon. “Good. I need your help.”

Gideon’s eyebrows went up, and he must have said something pretty snarky, because Felix said, “Don’t start,” and he sounded so tired, so
beat
, that Gideon’s face softened and he stood up.

“Thank you,” Felix said. “Hydromancy. Anything you can find about it.” This time Gideon’s eyebrows practically hit his hairline.

“I know,” Felix said. “Believe me, I know. But…” He shook his head, like a bear that’s been in the baiting-pits a long time, trying to shake the flies away from where it’s bleeding. “I figured it out. I know how to mend the Virtu, but it all depends on whether I can cast a foundation on the Sim and make it stick.”

I didn’t need to hear Gideon to know what he said. It was all over his face. And I guessed that meant that knowing about magic didn’t make Felix’s idea sound any less crazy.

“It will work,” Felix said. “If I can figure out how to do it.”

Gideon said something. Felix laughed. When he pushed his hair off his face, I could see his hands shaking. “Then I suppose I’ll die trying.”

And of course the next afternoon, Felix had to have the whole conversation all over again. Mavortian was still pissed at him for undoing the spell on John Cordelius’s tomb without asking first, and this new thing didn’t help at all. Mavortian said it was crazy, and had a list of reasons as long as your arm, and Felix just stood there and heard him out and then said, through his teeth, “Yes, but will it work?”

Mavortian said, “Did you hear me?” and I couldn’t stand it no more and said, “Just give the fuck up already.”

“I beg your pardon?” Felix said and gave me the mother of all nasty looks.

“Not you. Him. He ain’t never going to get you where he wants you, and I’m sick to death of listening to him try.”

Felix looked from me to Mavortian and back at me again. “And where is it he wants me?”

“Under his thumb.”

“Ah,” Felix said and gave Mavortian a thin little smile. “He’s right. I don’t follow orders well. And in any event, I will do this with or without your help. I would merely
prefer
it to be with.”

Mavortian had gone red, and Bernard was giving me this look like I was dead the next time he had a moment to spare. But I’ll give Mavortian von Heber this much: he bounced back quick. He said, “You’re far more likely to bring the Mirador down around your ears, but, no, I can see no reason in theory why it
couldn’t
work.”

“And I thank you for your vote of confidence,” Felix said. “Now, if you please, let us get to work.”

I thought they’d been working before, but not the way Felix saw it. I don’t think he slept four hours a night for the next half decad. Him and Mavortian spent hours in the Hall of the Chimeras, and he made them light the candles for him so he wouldn’t have to bother with witchlights. And then he’d come back and spend hours with Gideon and piles of books that I swear got bigger every time I turned around.

He gave me the maps.

“They aren’t complete, and they probably aren’t accurate,” he told me, “and if they aren’t helpful, for goodness’ sake don’t say so, since Stephen seems to value them rather more than he would his firstborn child if he had one. But I need you to find me a way to get down to the Sim as near to directly beneath the Hall of the Chimeras as you possibly can—if it’s possible at all. I’m afraid it may not be.” And he gave me a kind of distracted smile.

Powers, I was just so glad there was something I could do to help, I didn’t care
how
hard it was. And I knew about the city and the Sim. There’d be a way.

It was a real bitch of a job, though. Because it wasn’t just that the maps weren’t complete, it was that there was five different sets of them, plus a bunch of single maps that didn’t match up with anything else, and they’d all been drawn by different people at different times for different reasons, and I swear some of them were drawn by spiders who’d taken a bad hit of rose-blood. I ended up a lot of the time, when Felix and them were in the Hall of the Chimeras doing hocus-stuff, wandering around in the lower levels of the Mirador and scaring the daylights out of the maids. But when I got up the nerve to ask them what they knew about the Mirador, they answered me perfectly polite, and told me who else to ask, and even found out some answers for me. And I spent a long afternoon with Master Architrave and
his
maps, which weren’t at all like Lord Stephen’s maps along of how the maps Master Architrave had were the ones drawn by people who were actually trying to figure out how to get from one place to another without getting lost six times along the way.

And I found out where the flashies’ lights of love hung out, and where the servants slept, and the chunk of rooms they’d given over to the musicians. That was one of those weird little pockets where two different buildings had rammed up against each other—in a sort of historical sense, I mean, not for real. It was called the Mesmerine, and it was a good place to keep the musicians out of everybody else’s hair.

And of course, I spent two hours there, didn’t see a soul, turned to leave, and came face-to-face with Hugo Chandler. He wasn’t no happier about it than I was. Went bright red, made a noise like a sheep, and started stammering.

“What?” I said.

Hugo stammered and made noises like a sheep some more.

“What?”

“Is it true you’re Felix Harrowgate’s—”

“Brother? Yeah.”

“Lover,” Hugo said, although the end of the word pretty much got lost in the sort of noise a sheep would make if it found out it’d just said something rude to a wolf.

I tell you, he was lucky I didn’t fall down dead on the spot and leave him to explain it to Felix. I said, “No! Fuck! Where the fuck did you hear that?”

“I, um, everybody’s saying it.” And he mumbled something I couldn’t follow. But I heard the word “lord” all right.

“Who?” I said, and only realized when Hugo backed up that I’d started to move in on him.

Hugo shut his eyes. “Lord Shannon. He keeps asking for the ‘Lai of Mad Elinor.’ ”

Not very fucking subtle. But I remembered that fight him and Felix had had in the Hall of the Chimeras, and I had a sick feeling I knew what it’d been about. Who, I mean. “It’s not true,” I said, and yeah, I was up in Hugo’s face about it, but powers and saints, I remembered standing in the river under Klepsydra, and I remembered that kiss in Farflung, and Kethe, it was just too close to being true to be funny. “Not. Fucking. True.”

“Okay, Mildmay. I believe you. Really.” And I couldn’t tell if he did, or if he just wanted to get away from me, but it wasn’t like there was anything I could do about it either way. So I stepped back, because it wasn’t Hugo’s fault after all, and he sort of squeaked, “Sorry!” and bailed. And I stood there and didn’t say none of the things I was thinking out loud, because I didn’t want to scare the musicians.