Corambis (13 page)

It was actually a less distasteful solution than using magic against them, and certainly better than being beaten and robbed, but I couldn’t keep back a ridiculous, bleating protest: “But I’m not—”
A prostitute,
I would have said; later, it occurred to me that the interruption saved me a good deal of embarrassment along with everything else, for they would never have believed me.
But a voice called out, “Hey! Sunny Pingree! Is that you?” It was a woman’s voice, and a group of women approaching us, six of them, wearing clothes quite unlike what I’d seen women wearing during the day. Gaudy colors and alarmingly slit skirts and lace and ribbons.
“Ahhh,” said one of the pale- haired men, “what do you jezzies want?”
“To remind you of the deal,” said one of the women, front and center of their little pack; from her accent, I guessed she wasn’t a native Bernathan. “Seeing as how you’ve
apparently
gone and forgotten it. You don’t roll our fish, and we don’t jack our prices so high you and your boys never get laid again. Right?”
Sullen silence, rather abashed.
“Right?”
“Right, Miss Emily,” somebody muttered.
“Good,” she said. “Now clear out before I call the Honest- men on you for disturbing the peace.”
They slunk away down the alley, very like the losing side in a dogfight, and one of the other women said, “Mr. Harrowgate, are you all right?”
“Corbie!” I said. “How—?”
“Going out for dinner before work,” she said with a shrug. “Oh, Emily, this is Mr. Harrowgate, the guy I was telling you about.”
“Holy shit,” somebody said, almost low enough for me not to hear. “You weren’t kidding, Corbie.”
I didn’t even want to imagine what that might be in reference to, and said distinctly to Emily, “Thank you for your very timely intervention.”
Emily’s eyes, wide and brown and not soft at all, summed me up, and then she snorted and said, “That Sunny Pingree. No more manners than a pig. Won’t bother you again, though, or I
will
have the Honest- men on him.”
“But what are you doing in this part of town by yourself?” Corbie asked me.
“I, um.” I could feel my face heating. “I got lost.”
“Oh dear,” Emily said, with sufficient lack of surprise that I gathered this was not an uncommon happenstance with strangers to Bernatha. “Corbie, we gotta get going, but you want to see your friend home? Will square it with Honeyball.”
“Oh, I’m fine now,” I said, too quickly. “You needn’t—”
“It’s no trouble,” Corbie said. “You went to the Fiddler’s Fox like I said?”
“Yes, but—”
“All right, then.” She said to Emily, “Tell Honeyball I’m giving the Straw Market a whirl.” And to me, tucking her arm through mine, “Come on.” Further protests seemed foolish as well as futile.
After half a block, when I was sure the other women were out of earshot, I said, “Can you tell me something?”
“I can try.”
“Those men, they assumed I was a—” I wasn’t going to be able to get the word out without my voice cracking, but mercifully Corbie knew exactly what I meant.
“A jezebel? Well, yeah. You’re wearing colors.”
I looked down at my coat—bottle- green and much the worse for wear. “Only prostitutes wear color in Corambis?”
“Pretty much. At least in Bernatha. I don’t know about anywhere else. And, I mean, most people will figure you’re just a stranger, but Sunny Pingree and his boys, they ain’t too bright.”
“I’ll have to get a new coat,” I said, although I knew we couldn’t afford it.
“Um,” she said, was silent for three paces, then burst out with “Can I ask
you
something?”
“Certainly,” I said, then hedged: “I don’t promise I can answer.”
She waved that away with her free hand. “You’re a magician, right?”
“I, um.”
“No, I mean, you
are
. I know.”
“You recognized the tattoos,” I said with a sigh.
“Well, yeah, but that ain’t— I mean, that wasn’t what— I mean— oh fuck it.” She stopped, gripping my arm so that I was turned to face her. She looked up and down the street swiftly, but it was perfectly deserted. “Like this,” she said, tilting her head to lock gazes with me, and as I watched, something shuttered behind her eyes came open.
She was a wizard.
She pulled away from me almost immediately, breaking eye contact as if it were a dead stick, and her wizardry vanished again completely. She might have been annemer. “I’m trusting you here,” she said, and there was a wobble in her voice. “And may the Lady protect me, because I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do or not, but I just don’t know what else to do. I don’t know where else to—”
“Corbie,” I said. I saw her swallow hard. “What is it exactly you’re trusting me with? It’s not illegal to be a wizard in Corambis, or I would have been arrested days ago. And you’re not— that is, I didn’t think the Grevillians prosecuted heretics.”
“Heretics?” She sounded like she’d never heard the word before.
“Never mind. What is it you’re frightened of?”
“You ain’t a warlock, are you?” she said, and then buried her face in her hands. By the street lamps, I could see her ears turning red. “Cry your mercy. Strewth, what a question to ask somebody.”
She was mortified; I was bewildered. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what a warlock is.”
That got her head up; she was all but gaping at me, her eyes round as saucers. “There aren’t warlocks where you come from?”
“Not by that name. Look, do we
have
to talk about this in the street?” I realized as the words left my mouth that I could have been more tactful about it. “What I mean is, come up to my room and tell me about warlocks. And you haven’t asked your question, you know.”
“What?”
“You said you wanted to ask me something.”
“Right. Yeah, I do. Your room?” Her look was openly dubious.
“I told you, I don’t do women. Besides, my brother has very high moral standards. He’d never let me rape you.”
That made her laugh. “All right then. We’re almost there anyway.”
Another block and a half brought us to the Fiddler’s Fox, where Corbie stopped and tugged on my arm. “We don’t have to go in together. Just tell me which room.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“If you don’t want to be seen with a jezebel.”
“My dear child, I don’t care what the desk clerk thinks of me.”
She grinned. “Just checking. Some fish get themselves all bent out of shape.” We went up the stairs together.
Mildmay was awake when we reached the room, and inclined to regard Corbie with suspicion. I couldn’t tell if it was the fever making him more than usually unfriendly or some ramification of his habitual turtle- like reaction to the advent of any young woman. I refused to believe there were any actual grounds for concern. If Corbie had wanted to do me harm, she’d already had all the chances she needed.
Corbie herself was only slightly taken aback by Mildmay’s hostile, glowering silence. Looking at him, I thought he was too obviously ill to need apologizing for. His color was bad again, and his breathing was audible across the room where Corbie and I, lacking chairs, sat on the cot Mrs. Lettice had had her man- of- all- work assemble for me.
I had to prompt her to get her started: “All right. Warlocks.”
Her explanation was extremely difficult to follow, for what she could tell me was based entirely on what her grandmother had told her, and over the course of Corbie’s tangled narrative, I came to have grave doubts as to that lady’s sanity, redoubtable though she clearly had been.
Corbie’s “gran” had been a wizard, too, and had received what little training she’d had in the days before the Corambin thaumaturgical reforms. The wizards then had been warlocks, and it had been Corbie’s gran’s abiding fear that one of them, having survived in hiding for thirty years, would come and enslave her. “It’s what warlocks do,” Corbie said earnestly, a much younger girl showing through her adult hardness. “It’s why you gotta hide. Gran taught me how. She said the Corambins couldn’t’ve found all of them, and they were probably training more.”
Like Mélusine’s fear of Obscurantists, I thought. And although Corbie’s tale wasn’t what one might call thaumatologically informative, I knew of other cases of wizards enslaving wizards. That wasn’t what the Eusebians called it, of course— just as I was sure the warlocks Corbie was frightened of had had some elegant term— but that was what it amounted to. And it was what Malkar had done to me— though I was sure he, at least, would have been happy to call it slavery.
“Well, I’m not a warlock,” I said. “Now, what is this question you’re so anxious to ask me?”
“Oh. I, um . . .” She was going red again.
“Spit it out, Corbie,” I said, and she did, a rush of syllables which it took me a moment to separate into sense:
I was wondering if you’d teach me.
“Me?”
I said. “That is, there must be wizards in Bernatha you know are Grevillian.”
“I can’t afford the apprentice fees,” Corbie said, embarrassed but dogged. “I been saving and saving, but I just can’t ever get there.”
“So you want me to teach you for free.”
She winced. “Not like— I’ll give your banshee back. I ain’t spent it, and it’s gotta be worth a lesson or two anyway. See, with the Grevillians, they got a system. You pay the ’prenticeship or you go to their school up in Esmer. But if you don’t got the money . . .” She shrugged comprehensively. “I figured you wouldn’t be Grevillian, so you wouldn’t mind that part, but then I didn’t know you weren’t . . . I mean, I’m sure you wouldn’t, but I didn’t—”
“Shut up, Corbie,” I said, and smiled at her to show I didn’t mean it unkindly.
And then Mildmay said, “Just like at home.”
I startled— I hadn’t thought he was listening— and said, “What do you mean?”
“Like them kids you were teaching,” he said, his voice slow and slurred and drawling; he sounded half- asleep. “Don’t got the money, don’t nobody give you the time of day.”
He was right. And even at that, those children—“children” I called them, though most of them were Mildmay’s age or older— had been better off than Corbie, or any of the Corbies trapped in the Lower City. No prostitute was going to be admitted to the Mirador. Unless, as I had, they lied, and lied convincingly. At home, Corbie would have had no option except to learn from a heretic and spend the rest of her life waiting for the witchfinders. Here, she didn’t even seem to have that much.
Mildmay said something else.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You like teaching,” he said.
That was true and, I thought, was Mildmay’s way of giving me his blessing. I looked at Corbie— hopeful, scared, embarrassed, stubborn. “Bring the banshee tomorrow afternoon,” I said, and when her jaw dropped, I deliberately misread her surprise. “Well, we can’t start
now
.”
Corbie came back to herself with a bump. “Oh, lumme, the
time
.” She bounced to her feet, said, “I
will
come tomorrow. Um. Half- past thirteen, probably.” She was halfway out the door when she remembered to say thank you. And then she was gone, her heels clattering down the stairs.
“What have I let myself in for?” I said, getting up.
“Good for you,” Mildmay said. “Keep you out of trouble.”
“Oh
thank
you.”
He raised his eyebrows at me. “You wanna tell me you came back after dark with a hooker because you
didn’t
get in trouble?” He coughed, a slow, thick, ugly sound.
“You have such a suspicious mind. Let me tell you about the part of my day that didn’t involve this hypothetical trouble I may or may not have gotten into.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Rather,” I said and told him about, first of all, the Clock of Eclipses, and secondly, the Margrave of Rothmarlin. He listened the way he always listened, his attention deep as a well, and when I’d finished, he said, “Y’know, in Aiaia, when we were rescuing Gideon and them, we had to get Bernard out of the stocks. That was ugly. Least the sanguette’s quick.” After a moment, he added, “Don’t like menageries, either. All that
staring
.”
“I admit to some fellow feeling. I was . . . after the Virtu was broken, Stephen . . . that is to say, it’s a long- standing custom . . .”
“Felix,” Mildmay said.
I twitched.
“I know that. I was there.”
“You
what
?” My voice skied and cracked.
He met my eyes. “They brought you up the Road of Chalcedony on a rope. People threw rocks. That’s where you got that scar over your eyebrow, ain’t it?”
I felt naked— worse than naked. Exposed. “You . . . you
saw
me?”
“Not up close,” he said, as if that made it better. My face was burning; my hands were clammy. I wanted to run, but there was nowhere I could go. I paced the width of the room, but it didn’t help.
“Felix.” Mildmay pushed himself into a sitting position. “Calm down, would you? This ain’t . . .” He coughed, painfully and long. I sat down next to him on the bed, feeling suddenly, deeply exhausted.
“That was
before
,” Mildmay said finally. “It don’t matter. It’s
never
mattered.”
I understood what he was saying, but I couldn’t believe him. “I didn’t know,” I said, although it was a stupid thing to say.
“Hey,” he said, and he touched my forearm very lightly. “I know you didn’t deserve it.”
I wasn’t sure I believed that, either. I pressed thumb and forefinger against the corners of my eyes, against a ridiculous, burning prickle of tears. “You need to rest.”
“Ain’t got much choice,” he said wryly. “But, look— you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine.” I raised my head to meet a severely skeptical look. “Really. You’re right. It doesn’t matter.”
“I meant it don’t matter to
me
. Not that it don’t matter. But it don’t change— it can’t change because it didn’t— oh fuck it.” He lay down again, and I could see he was struggling for breath.
“No, I understand,” I said. “Truly. I shouldn’t have—”
“I shouldn’t’ve laid it on you like that,” he said and coughed again.
“It’s all right. Don’t worry about me.”
“Can’t help worrying,” he said, but he was already fading. I touched his hair gently, and that seemed to reassure him, for I felt the last tension leave him and he was asleep.
Corbie’s banshee would keep a roof over our heads for another week, but rest was the only medicine we could afford. I hoped wretchedly that it would be enough.

G

I realized that night, pacing the width of the room while Mildmay slept, that I was actually afraid to sleep, afraid of finding myself in St. Crellifer’s or in the Bastion or in the Caloxan woods watching a cabin burn. It was an insupportable state of affairs. I had to regain control of my dreams, and the oneiromantic symbolism told me as plainly as it could that the only way to do that was to purge my construct- Mélusine of the briars that had invaded and blocked it from the Khloïdanikos.