Corambis (49 page)

“Kay,” said Julian on Lunedy morning, coming into the room without knocking, “the man we met at the train station brought a letter for you.” I stopped pacing. “Lucas brought a
letter
?”

“Yes, and he says he has to wait for your answer. He says it’s tremendously important.”
“Lucas is in the house?” I said, alarmed.
“No. He stopped me on my way back from— well, I was talking to Intended Godolphin. Lucas said he’d wait in the fathom station.”
“Thank the Lady,” I said and meant it. “Had best read me the letter then.”
“Me?”
“Am not going to ask Isobel.”
“Right,” said Julian, and paper crackled as he unfolded it.

To Kay Brightmore, the former and true Margrave of Rothmarlin, greetings from your most loyal and devoted servant, Geoffrey Trant.

“’Sdeath.” I found my way to the chair and sat down heavily. Geoffrey Trant was indeed my armsman and had been my father’s, but he was also the leader of the Primrose Men, who were the most radical of the various populist groups which had supported Gerrard. The Primrose Men favored not merely in de pen dence, but complete separation from Corambis, along with a number of other impracticable ideas. I had always deeply appreciated their loyalty to me— several of them were Rothmarlin men by birth— but also found it somewhat of an embarrassment. And now that I thought about it, I wondered why I hadn’t heard from Geoffrey Trant before now.

“Kay?” said Julian, sounding somewhere between doubtful and worried.
“Go on, please,” said I.
“All right,” said he, still doubtful.

My lord, I pray you forgive me writing to you in such a fashion and for such a reason. And I pray your forgiveness further that I was not at your side at Summerdown and left you prey to the Corambin jackals.

“Trant has no love for Corambins,” I said in Julian’s uncomfortable pause.

But I could not come to you then, as we were pinned down by the Usara at Cinderfold, and I have not been able to come to you since, as I have been prisoned by the Usara in a place of which I can tell you nothing, save that it was dark and foul and most full of despair, for our captors told us of your fall, and we wept.

“He was fighting the Usara?” Julian said. “But I thought . . .” “The great danger of the Insurgence,” said I, “aside from our inevitable defeat, was that the Usara would take the opportunity to burn and plunder our lands. So certain of our forces”— those whose hatred for Corambins was so fervent as to make them a liability in battle, but I had not said that to Trant, and I did not say it to Julian—“ were ordered to defend against such incursions. Apparently, they, like us, were not successful. I pray you, continue.”

I write to you now, my lord, from Summerdown—

“Summerdown?”
“I’m sure that’s the word,” Julian said ner vous ly. “Should I go on?” “Yes, I cry your mercy. Do.”

—from Summerdown, at the behest of the cephar Dothaw. He says that you will remember his name.

“Keep reading,” I said grimly. I did indeed remember Dothaw’s name, for he had held me captive for two months the summer I was twenty- four. None of my memories of that time was fond, but I knew that Dothaw was honorable.

The cephar Dothaw says that he will negotiate our release— that of myself and the five men who were captured with me— but only with you, and that if you will not negotiate, he will have us put to death. I believe that he is interested in further negotiations, but he will not speak of his intentions to me.

“Dothaw must be mad,” I said, getting up again and pacing savagely. “I have no power to negotiate anything, and the Usara may be many things, but they are not
ignorant
. Finish reading, Julian.”

Dothaw permits me to send Vyell and Leadbitter to Barthas Cross to await you. Vyell assures me he can find a way to get this letter to you, despite being unable himself to come to Esmer for reasons I am sure your lordship will remember, and he and Leadbitter will meet every train. My lord, I am sorry to put this imposition upon you, but the cephar Dothaw is unyielding, and while I care not for myself, I cannot wantonly sacrifice these five brave and honest men.

“And that’s it,” Julian said. “Kay? What are you going to do?”

I only half heard him. Trant knew not that I was blind; had he known someone would be reading it to me, that letter would have been much more circumspect. And he knew not what he was asking. Was one thing for a sighted man to escape a soft prison like Carey House and make his way to Barthas Cross, but I could not simply . . .

“Kay?” said Julian.
And then I knew.
“Julian,” said I, “wilt come with me to Barthas Cross?”

Lunedy, I went to Carey House only to find out Mr. Brightmore had gone out with Julian. Which, you know, okay, and I suppose he didn’t have no way of getting a message to me, but it still kind of stung. Martedy morning, I was watching Felix wander around the apartment the way I’d watched him wander around his suite in the Mirador, with his waistcoat unbuttoned and his tie shoved into one pocket, drinking tea and arguing with the newspapers, his hair hanging in his eyes because he wouldn’t use the cream stuff the barbers had recommended, when there was a knock on the door.

Felix raised his eyebrows at me. “Are we expecting anyone?” “I wasn’t,” I said, and it wasn’t Corbie’s knock. So I went and answered the door and it was the fucking Duke of Murtagh, large as life and twice as natural, and behind him was the lady Kay was going to marry.
“Good gracious,” said Felix. “Come in, Your Grace, and— I don’t believe I know the lady?”
“Vanessa Pallister,” she said, and I stood aside because otherwise it looked like she’d just walk straight through me. “Kay Brightmore’s fiancée.”
“Ah,” said Felix, his eyebrows going up even higher. “Charmed to meet you, I’m sure.” She was a big lady— taller than me and heavy- built—and she wasn’t no looker, with her jaw as heavy as a man’s and her eyes too small for her cheekbones, and it didn’t help that she wore her hair with these heavy bangs hanging over her forehead. All in all, she really did look like a bear that somebody’d taught to stand up on its back legs and wear a dress.
Which wasn’t no nice thing to be thinking, and powers and saints, it wasn’t like I had
any
room to talk, so I turned back and said, “Come in, Your Grace,” as polite and not mush- mouthed as I could.
The duke came in, and I closed the door. Mrs. Pallister turned to me and said, without wasting no more time, “Have you seen Kay?”
“Um. Not since Domenica.”
“He didn’t come here? Or say anything about where he might go?”
“Have you misplaced him?” Felix asked, and she gave him a look like bottled poison.
I said, “On Lunedy, they said as how he’d gone out with Julian. But that’s all I know.”
Felix said, past Mrs. Pallister and me, to the duke, “What’s going on?”
The duke said, polite and precise, and oh yeah, he was mad as fuck about it, “Kay left Carey House sometime before twelve yesterday, in company with Julian. Neither one of them has been seen since. Julian left a note, but it is a deplorable example of its kind, being firstly, nearly illegible, and secondly, utterly uninformative. He says, in essence, that he has to go with Kay, but that they’ll be back soon, and we aren’t to worry. And he adds, very scrupulously, that he has taken a saint from my desk for traveling expenses, but that he will pay me back as soon as he can. Feckless idiot.”
“We’ve already asked at the University and the Institution, and no one’s seen them,” said Mrs. Pallister. “But I remembered you were reading to him, Mr. Foxe, and he’d told me a little about you, so I thought maybe . . .”
“Sorry,” I said.
“If Julian needed traveling expenses,” Felix said, “it sounds like they were planning to leave Esmer.”
“But that makes even
less
sense,” said Mrs. Pallister. “Where would they go?”
“Not to Rothmarlin,” Murtagh said. “Kay is not close to his mother, and he loathes his cousin Cecil. And not, I think, to Julian’s personal holdings, for Swale has been closed up since he came to live at Carey House, and in any event, there is absolutely nothing there. None of Kay’s close friends survived the end of the Insurgence, so . . .”
“Would he return to Summerdown?” Felix said. “I know it preys on his mind.”
“It seems unlikely,” said Murtagh, frowning. “Although I suppose, if he had a maggot in his head, he might have gone to talk to that magician- practitioner in Barthas Cross, the one who figured out the ritual for Hume. What is the dratted man’s name?”
“Don’t look at me,” said Mrs. Pallister. “He hasn’t said a syllable on the subject.”
“Oh, I didn’t learn about him from Kay,” said Murtagh. “Penny! That’s it. Anselm Penny. That’s a good thought, Mr. Harrowgate. I’ll send a message to my agent in Barthas Cross. Vanessa, there’s no point in taking any more of these gentlemen’s valuable time.”
“Oh, you’re very welcome,” Felix said, and there was a fucking weird note in his voice. Mrs. Pallister didn’t seem to notice, and Murtagh just gave him this look that I couldn’t make any kind of sense out of, and him and Mrs. Pallister took themselves out.
“What the fuck was that?” I said.
“What was what?” said Felix, but his color was high.
“You gonna tell me what your thing is with the Duke of Murtagh?”
“No,” Felix said, and grinned at me. “I have to have
some
secrets from you, darling.”
“Drink your tea,” I said, because it was no use talking to him when he was in that mood. And I hoped Mr. Brightmore was okay.

Mildmay came to my office with me, to sit in the corner and work on d’Islay while I did work of my own in the shape of frantically cramming Grevillian thaumatology so as to be able to keep ahead of my students. Hutch and Ashmead had lent me their personal collections, and I was passionately grateful.

Two hours later, I shoved violently away from my desk and stalked out into the hallway. I wanted someone real to argue with, instead of these dry smug paragraphs, so certain of their truths they were blind to their own fallacies. And I was not going to argue with Mildmay, who followed me patiently.

Hutch wasn’t in his office— he was probably off with the Automaton, as he had been most of his waking hours— and I was standing, debating whether I really wanted to pick a fight with John Ashmead, when I realized someone had beaten me to it.

I followed the sound of raised voices and found Ashmead glaring from behind his desk at a blue- veiled intended, like a deerhound brought to bay by a stag.

I wanted an argument, and Ashmead looked like he needed some support. “Virtuer?” I said. “Is everything all right?”
They both turned. The intended was, by Corambin standards, skinny and dark, with a wide, thin- lipped mouth and bulgy, glaring eyes. He looked like a dried- out toad who knew all one’s darkest secrets and condemned them.
“Mr. Harrowgate,” Ashmead said with audible relief. “This is Intended Marcham, from Our Lady of Marigolds in Howrack. He has a . . .” He wrestled for a moment with a polite phrasing. “A most remarkable story.”
“Is not a story,” the intended said; his voice was peculiarly strident, even when not raised. “Is truth, and something must be done.”
“And what did you have in mind?” I said.
The disapproving eyes raked me from head to toe. “You are the foreign magician all the papers blather about.”
“Yes, I suppose I must be.”
“And that’s your shadow,” he said, with a jerk of his chin at Mildmay.
“My brother,” I said, less pleasantly.
“Are Mulkist?”
The question was deliberately offensive, and perversely, I felt better. “No, if you’re looking for a Mulkist, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”
In the moment in which Intended Marcham was bereft of words, Ashmead opened his pocket watch, displayed only slightly exaggerated surprise, and said, “I’m sorry, I really have to run. Felix, if you would . . . ?” and had dodged past Intended Marcham, me, and Mildmay out the door.
Intended Marcham glared at me balefully; I smiled back. “Intended? I would be glad to hear your concerns.”
“Have not come all this way to be mocked by heathen foreigners,” he grated. “I expect no better from annemer, but I thought magicians would have the motherwit to listen.”
“Are you an aethereal?” I said, puzzled.
This look was withering. “I am a magician, bound- by- obedience in the ser vice of the Lady. So don’t think you can condescend to me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, trying to conceal my shudder. I might have orchestrated my own binding, as Mildmay had said, but it was a punishment I deserved, not this deliberate, unnecessary sacrifice. And I remembered the anchorite of Our Lady of Fogs. “Really, you might as well tell me. Since I’m a heathen foreigner, I’m actually more likely to believe you than my Grevillian colleagues.”
He regarded me narrowly, but in the end, his need for someone to listen won out over his enmity for me. I discovered, as I listened, that I knew much of the story already: the engine beneath Summerdown and Gerrard Hume’s folly; the stoppages on the Barthas Cross line, which Hutch bemoaned almost daily; the pestilence among the sheep which Mildmay had read about in the newspaper. But Intended Marcham was much more specific. “Not all sheep,” he said. “Not all sheep in Murrey, nor even all sheep belonging to men of Howrack. No. It is the sheep who are grazed on Summerdown that die.”
“And what is it you think is happening?”
“Thought at first was a curse,” he said. “But I think now is worse than that. Is the engine. It seeks to finish that which Prince Gerrard began and failed in, by drawing vi—‘aether,’ they call it here— from the sources it can reach.”
“The trains,” I said, understanding. “The sheep.”
“Yes. And now the suicides have begun.” He glared at me, daring me to say I didn’t see the connection. But I did.
“Sacrifices,” I said, my body becoming cold with the truth. “Kay said the engine is at the heart of a labyrinth, and we have just quite recently discovered—”
“The bog body,” Mildmay said, and I knew from the horror in his voice that he understood as well. “You mean all them people died on
purpose
?” I knew what he meant, although he’d said it badly. “It’s a sacrifice machine,” I said, as certain of that truth as if I’d designed the damned thing myself. “Which means, if Kay
has
gone to Summerdown . . .” I couldn’t finish that sentence; one look at Mildmay told me I didn’t need to.
“Intended Marcham,” I said, giving him the best smile I could muster, “do you happen to have Ottersham handy? And I’m going to have to cancel class. There’s a magician- practitioner in Barthas Cross I believe I need to talk to.”