The Virtu (62 page)

“You are not Sherbourne. Nor are you my friend.”

“That won’t save me if you run amok again.”

“I did not—!” I bit the inside of my lower lip, let my nails dig just a fraction harder into my palms before I relaxed my hands. “What do you want, Robert?”

“I told you. I’m worried about you.”

“Your concern gratifies me. What do you
want
?”

“I want you to come to St. Crellifer’s with me.”

I stared at him for a full five seconds before I could find anything to say, and even then it was an inelegant, “
What
?”

“The monks there have a great deal of experience with illnesses such as yours. They may be able to help.”

“I am not insane,” I said through my teeth.

“Then you lose nothing by a visit except an hour or two of your time.”

“And if I refuse, you’ll go to Giancarlo and tell him I’m being unreasonable.”

His smile widened. “It would be nothing but the truth. This is not a great deal to ask.”

I eyed him, wishing—and not for the first time—that murder were a viable alternative. “It is ridiculous.”

“You may find it so, but I assure you there are many in the Mirador who would not.”

It was a threat, and we both knew it. And although I did not think Robert could get me reconfined to St. Crellifer’s as he clearly wished to, he could create a nearly infinite series of blocks and impediments, eroding time away from me one frustrating minute after another. And that probably
would
drive me mad.

“Very well,” I said levelly—an elaborate pretense of nonchalance would gratify Robert nearly as much as spitting rage.

Robert smiled, poison-bright, and said, “I knew you’d see reason eventually.”

The trip to St. Crellifer’s was made in stony, frozen silence. The first thing either Robert or I said was when I told the hansom driver to wait, adding pointedly in Robert’s direction, “This won’t take long.”

I had seen the madhouse before, driven past its high wall with Shannon on some junket of pleasure or another. But I had never…

Only, of course, I
had
.

Seething, I followed Robert across the courtyard, up the grim gray steps. The door swung open as we approached, and I knew that the denizens of St. Crellifer’s had been waiting for us. The porter, a ghastly, gnarled, yellow-toothed creature, bowed us in, fawning at Robert, saying something about the warder being very pleased.

And the smell hit me like the stroke of a hammer against my breastbone.

It was foul enough on its own—sweat and rot and fear, urine and excrement and death—but what was worse was that I
remembered
it. It was the memory I choked on, not the stench itself; my muscles twisted in a violent shudder, and I found my hands knotted in my hair as if I were trying to keep my skull from flying apart.

“Felix?” Robert said, his tone a parody of concern. “Are you all right?”

I forced my hands away from my head, forced my spine to straighten, gave Robert a smile that was close kin to one of Mildmay’s snarls. “Fine,” I said. “I merely find the… atmosphere… a bit oppressive.”

Before he could decide how to respond, a cold, colorless voice said, “Lord Robert, Lord Felix. Welcome back to St. Crellifer’s.”

I turned. A small, spare, balding man, dressed in the habit of a monk of St. Gailan. Cold eyes, a cold, composed face. There was no irony, either in his voice or in his face; he was clearly one of those men for whom the concept was alien and incomprehensible.

“Brother Lilburn,” Robert said, smiling widely. “You remember Brother Lilburn, don’t you, Felix?”

But there was nothing familiar about the monk—nothing I wanted to be familiar, either.

“Perhaps you don’t,” Robert said; I could hear the smirk in his voice without needing to see his face. “Brother Lilburn remembers you, though, from your stay at St. Crellifer’s. Right, Lilburn?”

“Yes, my lord,” the monk said in a cold, flat voice. I knew that he was telling the truth—that nothing Robert had to offer could have induced him to lie. And a hysterical voice in the back of my mind whispered, He’s still dead.

It made no sense, but at the same time it made all the sense in the world.

“You see why I am concerned,” Robert said loudly, carefully, like a man reciting from a script.

“Yes, my lord,” the monk said in his cold, colorless—dead—voice. His gaze had me pinned; I didn’t remember him, and I didn’t want to, but he terrified me all the same. “I’m sure the warder will wish to speak to you both. This way, please.”

I wanted to bolt—to turn like a fox doubling back under the noses of the hounds and run—but I couldn’t. I followed Brother Lilburn, and the obedience was familiar even if the man was not.

The Hospice of St. Crellifer’s had once been a nobleman’s town house; I could see its history in the sweep of the staircases, the lovely arches of the doorways. But it was dark and fetid now, and instead of the sounds of a hired orchestra or the murmur of gossiping ladies, I heard screams from some distant part of the building, screams of such grief and rage that they scarcely seemed human.

“Jeanne-Chatte’s at it again,” a voice said near my feet, the right side, and I had been focused on Brother Lilburn, not on my surroundings. “Noisy bitch.”

To say that I jumped would be a gross understatement. I shied sideways, as violently as a spooked horse, slammed up against the wall hard enough that I was momentarily breathless. And the thing that I had taken for a clot of shadows or a pile of discarded bedding—or a ghost, a voice whispered in the back of my mind—raised its head, its eyes nearly as wide as my own. “Beg pardon, sir. I thought you were—”

One hand went up to its mouth. It was a young man, I saw, skinny, dark, dressed in ragged layers of cloth washed to colorlessness. “But you
are
Felix!” it—he—said. “What—”

“Wallie.” Brother Lilburn’s voice, cold and flat and hard as iron. The madman and I both flinched. “You have work to be doing, and it does not involve bothering visitors.”

“Yes, Brother Lilburn,” the madman said, lowering his head. He was scrubbing the flagstones, I saw, a bucket of the Sim’s dark water at his side.

Brother Lilburn watched him a moment, expressionless. “Better,” he said, and gestured to Robert and me to resume walking.

It was all I could do not to stumble as I followed in his wake. My hands were starting to shake, and I laced them together tightly for a moment, feeling the cold weight of my rings, before letting them fall back to my sides as if I were unconcerned. Desperately, selfishly, I wished Mildmay were here. With him on my right, I wouldn’t have had to worry about what might be lurking where I could not see it.

And if Mildmay were here, it would have been because I had not betrayed him.

I swallowed hard and climbed a seeming infinity of stairs behind Robert’s boots and Brother Lilburn’s flat sandals. Then Brother Lilburn stopped, opened a door, said, “In here,” with no more inflection or interest than he had said,
Welcome back to St. Crellifer’s
.

The room was circular, the plaster yellowed, cracking. The man rising from behind the desk was monstrous, surely the biggest man I had ever seen in my life.

“Robert!” he said. “Felix! How lovely to see you again!” And in his voice was all the irony Brother Lilburn had not used.

My heart was slamming itself against my ribs like a bird trying to escape a windowless room. This man, I knew; this man was the monster of my nightmares, the monster whose heart was the table fitted with straps in that dark, dank room…

… which lay beneath St. Crellifer’s.

I knew it, as surely as I knew the magic coiled about my bones and beating heart.

I lost several moments to a wild, bleeding kaleidoscope, a cyclone of glass, and when the dust settled, and the pieces lay in a quiet mosaic, shards of memory connected now by understanding, I knew things, too many things, and I wanted to scream like the madwoman Jeanne-Chatte.

I remembered her, too.

I was leaning with one hand braced against the tacky, sweating plaster of the wall, Robert and Brother Orphelin staring at me like a pair of coyotes watching a lost buffalo calf. Robert opened his mouth to say something—no doubt along the lines of,
He’s clearly unstable, don’t you agree
? as if there were a wizard in the entire Mirador who could claim more than a passing acquaintance with “stable” to begin with.

I cut him off. “What did you think you were doing?” I straightened away from the wall, dusted my hands against the legs of my trousers, smiled at him pleasantly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Last year, Robert, in the basement of this very building. I’m sure you remember. What
did
you think you were doing?”

Robert’s face turned very nearly the color of the walls. “Felix, I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’ll have to do better than that,” I said. “Or perhaps Brother Orphelin can explain.”

The warder wasn’t monstrous anymore, just a grotesque, petty creature as trapped in this madhouse as his charges were. Still dangerous, and I was not fool enough to forget it, but not the all-powerful malevolence of my memories. He could not hurt me unless I gave him the power to do so, and the wariness of his tiny stone-chip eyes indicated that he knew I was not about to do any such thing. He made a broad, helpless gesture and said, “I am annemer and know nothing of these matters. If Lord Robert told me he was trying to cure you, I would believe him.”

I could not help admiring the deft coupling of that total disavowal of responsibility with a suggestion to Robert of how to defend himself. “
You
might,” I said, and there was satisfaction in being able to load my voice with contempt, “but I wouldn’t. Well, Robert?”

“You can’t prove anything,” Robert said. “You can make as big a stink as you want, but you can’t prove anything, and you know Stephen won’t believe you. And if you think I care what
you
say, you are very much mistaken.”

The things I wanted to say in response crowded my mind, and even with Brother Orphelin listening greedily I might have said them. It would have been a relief, a terrible, glorious relief, to express some of the fury that had been building for days—fury at Malkar, fury at Mavortian, fury above all at myself and my stupidity and my pride.

But it would also have been a waste of time.

Perhaps my researches were also a waste of time, but even if they were, at least I was
trying
. I didn’t believe in redemption, or atonement; if anything existed beyond this frail and sordid mortal life, I knew I was damned. Knew, and no longer cared. I couldn’t make right what I had done wrong. But that did not exempt me from dealing with the consequences of my stupid, evil, selfish behavior. And that responsibility, even if it was futile, was more important than anything else. And especially more important than Robert of Hermione.

“Then we’ll call this a draw then, darling, shall we?” I smiled at him and Brother Orphelin, beautifully but insincerely, said, “I’m sure you two have lots to talk about,” and turned on my heel and left. Not running, my head up and my face composed, nothing in my bearing to indicate the horror I felt, horror and revulsion and pity for the men and women trapped here by their own minds.

The hansom driver wasn’t inclined to argue with me when I told him we were leaving.

By the time I returned to the Mirador, my head was throbbing with the tangle of half-understood memories St. Crellifer’s had uncovered. I was still missing more than I had recovered, but I had a framework now. I knew what had happened to me.

I paused just inside the Harriers’ Gate. The impulse to return to my suite, to hide like a hurt animal and lick my wounds, was painfully strong, but there was something I needed more. Robert had said I couldn’t prove anything, and I needed to know if that was true.

And I remembered enough now to know that the person who could tell me was Thaddeus de Lalage.

We had been friends. Thaddeus seemed still to think of me as a friend, and although I no longer trusted him, for reasons that remained murky, I owed him a meeting. He had gotten me out of St. Crellifer’s.