Corambis (50 page)

We could’ve gone straight from the Institution to the train station, but it seemed like a dumb idea when we could also take half an hour to go home and pack a bag. And while we were doing that— well, while I was doing that and Felix was pacing around muttering to himself— Corbie knocked on the door.

“Felix? You canceled class? Are you all right?”
“A bit of a crisis,” said Felix and gave her this smile that looked perfectly natural, but I knew he had it judged like a barrow wife and a pound of peaches.
“Can I help?” Corbie said, fast as winking.
It was kind of funny watching Felix fall over that— he almost did fall over his own feet.
“C’mon,” Corbie said. “You know you can trust me. And if it really is a crisis, you may need someone to do magic.”
Felix was frowning, and he opened his mouth. Then he shut it again hard, and after a second, Corbie watching him the whole way, he said, like he hated saying it,“You may be right. We’re leaving for Barthas Cross on the fourteentwenty- five train from Lily- of- Mar. Can you make it?”
“You betcha, guv,” Corbie said and disappeared from the doorway so fast you would’ve thought she’d fallen down a hole.
Felix paced around some more and I finished packing. Then I said, “You really think you might need a hocus?”
“Unfortunately,” Felix said, “I really do.”

Anselm Penny, the wizard in Barthas Cross, was a magician- practitioner second grade. He was in his forties, his hair mostly gray, his face lined and pinched and chronically unhappy. I was a little appalled that this had been the best Prince Gerrard Hume had been able to do.

He was first surprised to find another wizard on his doorstep, then alarmed— alarmed enough that he would have slammed the door in my face except that somehow Mildmay, who had been leaning on his cane beside me looking utterly harmless, stopped the door (with his foot? his cane? I couldn’t tell) and then simply kept going. I remembered him saying once that he didn’t want to be somebody’s hired muscle; apparently that hadn’t been idle speculation on his part.

Anselm Penny looked like he was about to cry.

“You might as well let me in, Mr. Penny,” I said. “It’ll be much easier than getting him out.”
There was really nothing else he could do.
Even when we were seated in his office, though, he remained profoundly unwilling to talk about the engine. But he must finally have realized that we weren’t leaving until he did, because he burst out with “I told him not to do it! And I don’t know what more I could have done.”
“Him?” I said.
“Prince Gerrard.” There was no real fight in Anselm Penny; I suspected there never had been. “I told him I couldn’t be sure what the engine would do once it was started. I
told
him it was unlikely to be what his childhood stories led him to believe. But I didn’t know it would do
that
!”
“Mr. Penny, I’m not trying to lay blame,” I said, as patiently as I could. “I just want to know about the engine. How did you figure out how to start it?”
Penny looked suddenly hopeful. “If I give you my notes, will you go away?”
“Your notes?” I said, feeling more hopeful myself.
“I may not be an adept,” he said, voice sharp with what was clearly a decades- old resentment, “but that doesn’t mean I’m incompetent. Will my notes satisfy you, Mr. Harrowgate? I assure you, I wrote
everything
down.”
“That sounds ideal.” There was no reason to pretend I was enjoying Penny’s company any more than he was pretending to enjoy mine. He turned immediately to the bookcase behind him and pulled down a fat quire bound in blue buckram. He all but threw it at me. I opened it— a neat, slanted hand, far more legible than I had expected and feared: an inquiry into the nature of the cymellunar engine said to reside under summerdown, undertaken by anselm penny, magician- practitioner of barthas cross, at the behest of prince gerrard hume of caloxa.
“If things had turned out differently,” said Penny, still resentful, “I could have published.”
“Indeed,” I said, because I could not think of a better response. “I’ll return this to you when my own inquiries are complete.”
“See that you do,” Penny said and moved pointedly toward the door.

We returned to our hotel room— Corbie, whom I’d sent out to ask at other hotels about Kay, had not yet returned— and I sprawled across the bed with Penny’s notes. Penny in the notes was much better company than Penny in person: competent as he had said, meticulous, unexpectedly thorough. He had drawn the engine from several different angles, taken every mea surement he could think of, copied down the symbols engraved on its various parts. He had written out Prince Gerrard’s stories about the engine; he had also written what the Intended of Howrack had told him, with notes on the etymology of
verlain
and how many generations back the natives of Howrack had been telling their own stories, which were very different from Prince Gerrard’s. He’d made detailed bibliographic notes on every book he’d consulted, and equally detailed notes on the three enginists he’d pestered (my word, not his) to get a better grasp on the mechanics involved. Not that it had done him— or Gerrard Hume— any good, but I couldn’t find it in myself to blame him for having failed to imagine the thing’s true purpose.

“I don’t think I like the ancient Corambins,” I said to Mildmay, who was sitting by the window darning one of my socks.
“Um,” he said. “Do you think they were really from Cymellune like everyone says?”
“Oh dear. You never ask the easy questions, do you?”
“Sorry. Never mind.”
“No, it wasn’t a complaint! Just a warning that I don’t have a satisfactory answer.”
“Oh. Well, okay then.” And he gave me a stone- faced look that I knew to accept as a smile. “What do you think?”
I sighed and stretched the cramped muscles in my upper back. “It’s obvious that Corambis had contact somehow with Cymellune, and I suppose Agramant the Navigator is as good a candidate as any, since they certainly didn’t go overland. But I don’t think the Corambins are the lost heirs of Cymellune, either.”
“I didn’t mean like that.”
“What did you mean?”
He concentrated on his darning for a moment, then said, “Well, you been talking about how the ancient Corambins were sacrificing people and stuff, and I was just wondering if that’s what they did in Cymellune, too.”
“Ow,” I said and sat up straight. “That’s a very good question. I hadn’t thought to turn it around like that.”
He gave me a shy flicker of a glance.
“I’m perfectly serious,” I said. “We know there were labyrinths in Cymellune— there was one made of mirrors that Ephreal Sand talks about.”
“And the one in Nera. Or was that a different empire or something?”
“Um. The relationship between Lucrèce and Cymellune is not, to my knowledge, perfectly understood, although no doubt there’s some aged scholar in the Library of Arx who’s figured the whole thing out. But let’s say you’re more right than wrong. Certainly, I don’t think we can ignore the possibility that labyrinths and death being connected in Lucrèce— and in Klepsydra, don’t forget, which is much later— and labyrinths and death being connected here . . . where was I?”
“Possibility of something.”
“Right. Thank you. We can’t ignore the possibility that labyrinths and death were connected in Cymellune.”
“Fuck,” he said. “We know they were connected.”
“We do?”
“Heth- Eskaladen. You made me explain it all to you, so don’t go telling me you forgot.”
“The Trials,” I said. I almost had forgotten, but he was right. All of Mélusine’s theology was Cymellunar in origin— a fact which made the Corambins’ goddess even more of an oddity.
“You have to walk the maze to get to Hell,” Mildmay said solemnly. “And that don’t seem so far off from dragging someone through the maze to
send
’em to Hell. It’s sort of what the ghosts in Nera wanted, ain’t it?”
“How do you mean?”
“A sacrifice,” he said, taking care over his consonants.
It took three slow, dull beats of my heart before I comprehended his meaning, and then I ended up with my knuckles pressed against my mouth as if to hold in a scream. Finally, shakily, I said, “Couldn’t you have kept that charming notion to yourself?”
“Sorry,” he said with a one- shouldered shrug.
“It does make sense, though,” I said, so that he wouldn’t think I meant for him to stop telling me what he thought. “A sacrifice, a labyrinth, a goddess of death. Their goddess here doesn’t
seem
to be the White- Eyed Lady, but I’m a little reluctant to go prying around in their beliefs to find out.”
“Well, the White- Eyed Lady ain’t always the same, right? I mean, the White- Eyed Lady in Klepsydra— she wasn’t the same White- Eyed Lady that Gideon followed.”
“It’s a good point. But, also, I am beginning to wonder whether modern Corambin beliefs have any great similarity to ancient Corambin beliefs.”
“How d’you mean?”
“I haven’t seen any significance to labyrinths for
modern
Corambins. The people we’ve met.”
“Only Miss Leverick’s crazy friend,” he said, and I heard the grin in his voice.
I threw a pillow at him, which he caught without either looking up or dropping his needle. He threw it back, but softly enough that I could catch it.
“So what d’you think happened?” he said. “They just got tired of it?”
“I don’t know. But I wonder.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I wonder about the Automaton of Corybant. No one now could build a machine like that, although they’re clearly working their way back to it. And I wonder about the lack of rec ords. I wonder how much was lost on
purpose
.”
“Huh.” He thought about that for a few moments while he finished his darn and turned the sock back right side out. Then he said, “Hey, Felix, what
is
the Doctrine of Labyrinths?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it’s that book of yours, and the guy went crazy writing it, right? But what
is
it? I mean, is it just that the mazes drove him nuts, or is there something there?”
“Oh. I see what you mean. Well, given that Ephreal Sand was in fact mad—”
“Yeah, yeah, I got that part.”
“His theory— his postulated doctrine of labyrinths was that labyrinths act to collect and intensify what he calls manar, which is roughly analogous to what Corambin wizards call aether.”
“Anna- what?”
“Analogous. Similar. Can be used as an analogy for. You know what an analogy is.”
I knew he did, and he nodded. “Zephyr taught me that. Okay. So he calls it manar and the people here call it aether, and it’s really what? Magic?”
“Um. Sort of. But it’s also what mikkary is formed out of.”
“Oh.
That.
Okay. I get it. So Sand wants to collect magic the same way the ancient Corambin people were collecting badness, right?”
I opened my mouth to say no, but then realized he was exactly correct. Both Sand (in theory) and the ancient Corambins (in practice) had used labyrinths as— I looked wildly at Mildmay’s needle and thread— as a spindle. Or, more properly, the labyrinth was the spinning wheel, the person who walked the labyrinth the spindle. Exactly like that poor dead girl in the Mammothium. So the manar, the aether, was drawn into the heart of the labyrinth . . .
“Hold on a moment,” I said, diving for Penny’s notes. The aether was drawn into the heart and there given to the engine via the sacrifice of seven men. But what did it do with its power then?
“It saves Caloxa,” I muttered, flipping back to the stories Gerrard Hume’s nurse had told him when he was a little boy. “But
how
does it save Caloxa? It’s not a fairy tale. There has to be something that it
does
.” The people of Howrack said that the labyrinth under Summerdown was
verlain
, meaning sacred or possibly obscenely, filthily profane. Meaning dangerous. Meaning bad.
The ancient Corambin people were collecting badness,
Mildmay had said.
It was possible to turn noirant power into clairant, but not in an abattoir, full of blood and pain and the psychic stench of violent death. So they were collecting badness to . . .
To do something bad with it.
I looked at Penny’s pictures of the engine again, looked at the way everything focused down on that small oblong plate where (Penny’s neat handwriting said) the caster doth exhale to mist the metal. Gerrard Hume had done that and died. I remembered what Corbie had said about the Mulkists and the Sacrifice of the Caster, and I crossed out caster and wrote above it in my looping scrawl,
sacrifice
.
And then I sat there and thought about sacrifices and about what the people who considered seven men an acceptable sacrifice— who could design and build a machine for the purpose of collecting seven sacrifices— might think “saving Caloxa” meant. I thought about the fact that the engine, improperly and insufficiently primed, was killing sheep and stopping trains and causing suicides.
Mildmay said, “Felix? You okay?”
“How do you save
anything
with noirant power?” I said.
“Um.”
“You don’t.” I couldn’t sit still any longer. I got up, paced the inadequate length of the hotel room and back. “Noirance is the magic of death and darkness and twisted things. It doesn’t
save
. It
destroys
. So if they were collecting seven men’s lives’ worth of noirant power, it wasn’t going to save anything. It was going to destroy what ever it was aimed at.”
“You can aim something like that?”
“I don’t know. Penny doesn’t know— Penny doesn’t have the least idea, and neither did that poor stupid fool who got himself and all his best men killed. What ever it’s aimed at is what its builders aimed it at.”
“And it’s trying to fire itself, right?” Mildmay said. “That’s the big trouble that Intended Whatsisface is so worried about.”
“Marcham. Yes. It doesn’t have enough power and it’s trying to collect power itself.”
“And if Kay . . .”
“He’s the last part of the sacrifice. The part that didn’t work. And if he goes and—”
“Does something stupid.”
“Yes, thank you. If he finishes the engine’s ritual . . .”
“Well, then what? It fires itself and, what? Like your big green lightning bolts?”
“I don’t know. Maybe more like the ‘pestilence’ that’s killing the sheep. Maybe mikkary like a miasma to drive an entire city mad. Maybe the twisting of all Corambis’s clairant workings into noirance, which would . . . I don’t even know what it would do, but the wizards of this country are utterly unprepared to deal with it.”
“Maybe that’s what made Nauleverer,” Mildmay said. “The last time they set it off, I mean.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh
damn
. Of course. It drove the Automaton of Corybant mad. And that’s why the Automaton woke again. Because the engine was awake and called to it.”
“And the other one? The Clock of Eclipses?”
“No,” I said absently. “That was me.” And then I sat down hard on the bed.
“Felix?”
“
That
’s what Beckett did. He sacrificed me to the Clock of Eclipses.”
Mildmay was looking at me with visible alarm. “But you’re alive. Right?”
“Yes, yes. Sorry. Not a ghoul or a ghost. Because he twisted it. He made an analogy. Between sex and magic and death. And because Titan Clocks are, relatively speaking, small engines— not like this monster under Summerdown— it worked. I knew it almost killed me, but I didn’t understand
why
any more than Beckett did.” I was twisting my fingers together because otherwise I was going to start screaming.
“But what you’re saying is, that wouldn’t work on the engine under Summerdown, even if somebody knew to try it, which they don’t.”
“And even if they did, we don’t
want
to start that engine again,” I said.
“Right. So what it comes down to is, we gotta stop this thing, regardless of whether it helps Kay or not.”
The kindness in that
we
nearly undid me. I stopped pacing, ran my hands through my hair. “Yes. I think we’d better leave for Summerdown tonight.”