The Virtu (59 page)

She saw me in the mirror, turned, started to get up, but kind of stuck halfway. “What
happened
?”

I looked at my own reflection and saw what she meant. Powers, I looked like I’d been dead three days and it hadn’t been no nice death, either. “I won’t keep you,” I said. “I just wanted to…”

Well, what did you want to do, Milly-Fox? Do you even know?

“Mildmay.” She got her dress, yards and yards of this gorgeous indigo crushed velvet, free of the little vanity stool, and came over to me. She was beautiful. I don’t know how she did it, because, I mean, I knew what she looked like, I knew her sallow skin and the way her upper lip overhung her lower, and I knew what she was, and all the same—Kethe. She was so beautiful it hurt.

“Mildmay,” she said again, kind of gentle, like she was afraid I was going to spook and run. “What is it?”

“I wanted to say good-bye,” I said.

“Good-bye? Where are you going?”

Deep breath, and the words still kind of stuck, like there was rust and sand in the gears. “Felix is sending me to murder Vey Coruscant.”

Her eyebrows went up, and I saw the sharp teacher-lady in her face, the one I’d met in Klepsydra. “I’ll assume he has a good reason for it. Who’s Vey Coruscant?”

“She’s a blood-witch. And she’s in with Felix’s old master, the one who drove him crazy, and it turns out he’s the same guy that Mavortian’s been after all this time, and fuck, I think they’re
both
crazy now, if you really want to know.”

“Slow down,” she said. “Come on—
sit
down. Tell it the right way round and from the beginning.”

“Can’t,” I said. “I got to go. He, um...”

The way she frowned should have been funny. I mean, here she was, beautiful lady, with the dress and the maquillage and her hair up and everything, and with her big eyes and soft little mouth that made her look like she’d
maybe
finished her second septad, and that scowl should have looked plain ridiculous. It didn’t. She said, “He used the whatsit, didn’t he?”

“The obligation d‘âme,” I said. “Yeah. He, um. He kind of did.”

“That
asshole
. You wait here. I’ll go—”

“No!” My hand was clamped around her wrist before either of us realized I’d meant to move. “You can’t. I mean—you
can
, but it won’t change his mind. And it’ll just make him pissed off at me. More pissed off, I mean. And I can’t…”

But I couldn’t find the end of that sentence, either.

She said, “You’re hurting me.”

I let her go like she’d caught fire. “Oh, powers, sorry! I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“I know you didn’t. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to. But if you’re coming to say good-bye, does that mean you think you won’t succeed?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about it,” I said. “I get ‘em sometimes, and I got one now.”

“What kind of bad feeling?”

I shrugged. “Just… it’s gonna go wrong. That’s all.”

“Did you tell Felix?”

“He didn’t give me the chance.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to talk to him?”

“It’s really nice of you. But, no. I swear to you, it won’t help. I’ll just be extra careful, is all.”

“Do you think that’ll be good enough?”

“No. But it’s all I can do.”

“Mildmay.” I looked at her. She put one hand very gently on my shoulder and leaned in to kiss me on the mouth.

“What was that for?”

“Luck,” she said. And she smiled at me like nobody had smiled at me in I didn’t even know how long.

“Um, thanks,” I said, and, powers, I was blushing. I backed up a step, couldn’t think of anything to say. “Thanks. I, um. I mean…” But, Kethe, whatever I meant, I couldn’t say it. I said, “Thanks,” again, like a half-wit dog, and then just turned and went.

Off to kill Vey fucking Coruscant, may all the powers and saints preserve me.

If I tried, I could remember the last time I had been in the Hall of the Chimeras for a soirée: the night I went to Malkar, the night I hit Shannon, the night Robert told the Mirador what I was.

I did not try.

In truth, I did not have time for morbid reflections on the past. It had been left carefully unclear whether the soirée was being held in my honor or the Virtu’s, but it was not a secret that I was the person who had mended what was broken, and I was all but besieged with well-wishers, sycophants, wizards and courtiers jockeying for interest. Mavortian was similarly occupied, and I was glad of it. I did not want to think about Malkar tonight. There would be time enough for that tomorrow.

I talked and drank and danced. Shannon and I were scrupulously polite to each other; Vicky gave me a cold, formal nod. Every time I turned around, it seemed that Stephen was glowering at me, but having given his official speech, he did not approach me. The Virtu, blue and beautiful and serene, presided like a bride.

I talked to Thaddeus de Lalage, still uncertain whether I counted him as friend or foe. He seemed equally uncertain of me; our conversation was stilted with caution and mostly about politics. He did not mention Gideon, nor did I.

I saw Mehitabel Parr once, in the glittering, swirling crowd, and she looked straight through me as if I didn’t exist. It was her prerogative, and I hardly cared—certainly not enough to try to find out what it was I had done this time to invite her wrath.

Gideon was not there at all.

I talked to wizards I knew, wizards I didn’t know; made polite conversation with one of the painstaking junior envoys from the Coeurterre; danced with noblemen’s wives and lovers and daughters; in two cases danced with the daughters’ lovers. I was standing by the bust of an early Ophidian king, drinking lemonade and flirting absentmindedly with Edgar St. Rose, who knew better than to take anything I said seriously, when I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I didn’t turn, but leaned closer to Edgar and said, “Who’s staring at me?”

Edgar was a veteran of Cabaline politics; he glanced around without seeming to, then grimaced expressively and said, “Robert.”

“Oh, marvelous. Does it look like he’s going to come over here?”

“Yes. In fact, here he comes, and if you don’t mind, I think here I go.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said. Edgar ducked into the crowd; I sighed and shifted my weight, and managed to time it so that I turned just as Robert opened his mouth to demand my attention. Anything to wrong-foot him.

He recovered swiftly, with an entirely insincere bow, and said, “Lord Felix. You are much to be congratulated.”

“Thank you, Lord Robert.”

He gave me a sly look. “Do you find yourself quite recovered from your, ah, ‘indisposition’?”

“I beg your pardon?”

He widened his eyes at me in that mock-innocent way of his I particularly loathed. “We were all very worried about you, you know. Especially after you disappeared from Hermione like that. Brother Orphelin was most anxious.”

“You’re babbling.” I wanted only to get rid of him, to end this conversation before anything regrettable happened. But his head jerked back; his eyes widened, then narrowed in an expression I was all too familiar with: I had just given Robert the gift of ammunition.

“Am I?” He smiled, slow and wide. “Have you
forgotten
your stay in St. Crellifer’s? They will be most disappointed to learn of your ingratitude.”

“I don’t have time for this,” I said and left him there, desperate to disengage before he could mire me further.

St. Crellifer’s.

The madhouse.

A year of my life I did not remember.

Although the Hall of the Chimeras was stuffy and overwarm around me, I found that I was shivering.

I could find Vey Coruscant all right. Not that I’d ever been crazy enough to want to, but I knew where her house was. When I was a kid, we’d used to dare each other to go over to Dassament and walk along Sonnet Street—on the other side of the street from her house. We were stupid kids, but we weren’t, you know, suicidal.

And if she wasn’t there, there’d be somebody who could tell me where to look. Whether they wanted to or not.

I’d done this sort of thing for a living. And I’d been good at it. And the fact that I didn’t want to be doing it now, and I had that terrible crawling feeling that it was all fucked in ribbons, well, in a weird way, it helped. Because it made it fucking easy to just concentrate on getting the job done.

I could remember feeling like this a lot, the last half indiction or so I was with Keeper.

And, you know, I think the worst thing was that I knew what to do. I didn’t have to think about it. Didn’t need to plan or ask questions or nothing. It was just there, all them ugly facts, just waiting for me to pick ‘em up again.

You want to kill a hocus, you got to take ‘em by surprise. Miriam had told me that, when she sent me to kill Cerberus Cresset. ’Cause where hocuses are different from annemer ain’t in their bodies, in their flesh and blood and the way they breathe. It’s somewhere else, and I don’t know if you call it mind or soul or spirit or what, but it ain’t the body. Body’s just as vulnerable as anybody else’s. Now the Mirador tries to get around that with all their oaths and warding spells and the fucking curse that had crippled me, but blood-witches don’t have that kind of thing. Most people would agree as how they don’t need it. Most people aren’t stupid enough to go and fuck with a blood-witch, but here I was anyway.

So you got to take a hocus by surprise, to kill them. You got to be fast, and you don’t want to give them time to say nothing. Not even a word, Miriam said, so I’d gone straight for Cerberus Cresset’s heart, and nailed it, too. And he hadn’t made so much as a squeak. But blood-witches—and my friend Zephyr had told me this, because he was worried about me and the shit I was getting into, and Kethe he’d been right and I only wished I could tell him so—you also got to watch out that nobody starts bleeding. Not you and not them. Because they’re called blood-witches for a reason, and it ain’t for the poetry of it.

Knives are right out.

First job I ever did, I garotted a guy. What goes around fucking well comes around, Milly-Fox. And I’d kited a scarf from Mehitabel’s room.

I could get it done.

I got into Dassament through the Arcane. It was better than going through the streets, although I didn’t think anybody in the Arcane was going to like me anymore. People in the Arcane don’t make eye contact, and they don’t look you in the face, and I’d hidden my hair under Mehitabel’s scarf, and I figured I probably had about enough leeway to get me where I was trying to go. Never mind about getting back. Most of me didn’t think I was going to last long enough to worry about it.

I went the back ways, down on the levels where nobody much goes. Because even when a job’s going to be bad, you don’t need to be stupid about it. Came up the Thimblespring Spiral, dark and dank, with the iron of the banister rusty and wet under my hand, and out into the old Clockmakers’ Guild that ain’t been used—at least, not by clockmakers—since sometime back in the reign of Mark Ophidius. The Nemesis Clock was pretty much the end of that guild, and clockmakers now call themselves horologers and have a nice shiny new guildhall over in Sunslave.

I didn’t go out the front door. Went up to the roof—nobody ran Dassament’s roofs along of not wanting to fuck with Queen Blood, and, Kethe, what the fuck am I doing here?

But I didn’t even think about turning back, even though I wanted to so bad I could taste it. I knew I couldn’t do it. Even if I tried, the obligation d‘âme wouldn’t let me. I could feel it, like an iron plate at my back, pushing me forward. Fighting it wouldn’t do me no good, and it’d just fuck up my concentration. Which I needed for other things, thank you very fucking much.

Along the roofs, tenements and warehouses and the big ugly wart of the Vespers Manufactory, where most of the girls who didn’t die in Lornless’s over in Dragonteeth came to die instead. I went down the fire escape of the Pinchbeck, a gambling hell that’d been running longer than I’d been alive, cut across two alleys and a courtyard, and there I was on Sonnet Street, with Vey’s big ugly house looking like it was about to fall down and smash us all flat.

There was this fad, two, three Great Septads ago, for houses built like the Mirador, big high walls and no windows fronting the street. Great for a blood-witch, I reckon. Lousy for a cat burglar. I looped the block. Vey’s house was the middle third of the block, from Sonnet Street on one side to the Boul’Neige on the other. And I wasn’t real surprised to see that the rest of the buildings on the block were vacant. Who’d want Queen Blood as their neighbor?

So it was easy to get into one of them buildings, get up to the roof—give or take a couple nasty minutes with some rotted treads on the stairs—and vault across to Vey Coruscant’s roof. My bad leg didn’t like the landing, but it held up okay.

You just don’t find buildings in the Lower City without a door onto the roof. Vey’d bothered to put in a decent lock, but a good hard kick just under the plate was enough to break it. I wasn’t feeling subtle, and it wasn’t like they weren’t going to know I’d been here.

The stairwell was a weird sort of tower thing—I guess trying to imitate all the Mirador’s towers—and had stairs going up as well as down. I checked up first, but there was nothing there but a skylight and an astrologer’s glass, so I went down.

Top floor was storage and stuff, dusty and closed off and not where you’d hang out if you had better choices. Next floor down was servants’ rooms—no joy there, either. Then things started looking better. Carpet and nice furniture and paintings and shit. I found a room I was pretty sure was Vey’s dressing room. Seriously flash ladies’ clothes, and some of the stuff in the back of the armoire had these stains around the cuffs, and even though I wanted to, I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what they were.

And I was just wondering what my next move was when I heard the door to the hall start to open.

Which meant my next move was straight into the armoire. I tugged the door to behind me and heard the rustle of a lady’s dress against the carpet as somebody came into the room.