Mélusine (40 page)

"And what is your explanation of this?"

"Don't got one," I said. "He hired me."

"Why?" she said to Mavortian.

He'd seen it coming, because he didn't hesitate or nothing. "He has certain skills that I believed would be useful. Fm afraid it is just a coincidence."

He lied well, now that I could watch him doing it where I knew that was what was going on, and I thought Fd better remember that. I didn't blame him, mind. The Mirador might not call divination heresy, but they'd feel different about the calling spell he'd done on me, and there was something in the air like people looking for somebody to throw stones at. I looked at Felix again, and I remembered Mavortian saying the Spire card meant a scapegoat.

I can't explain quite why I said what I did next. I mean, I figure I Would've said it sooner or later, 'cause the curiosity would've killed me otherwise, but I don't know why I was in such a fucking hurry about it.

Except maybe that feeling like the hocuses were getting ready to throw stones—or maybe start biting. I said, "Felix, was your mother's name Methony?"

He looked at me, and this time I didn't make a hex sign, although my fingers twitched. It ain't so bad, I told myself, even though I was lying. Because it wasn't just the skew-eyed thing. You could see in his eyes that he was crazy, and that ain't nothing to have looking you in the face.

"Methony?" he said. He wasn't sure he'd understood me.

"Yeah. Your mother's name. Was it Methony?"

There was this long, long silence. He went white, then red, and finally said in almost a whisper, "Yes."

"Shit. Then we're brothers. Half brothers, I mean." Because no respectable bookie would have given you odds on the chance we had the same father.

"Half brothers," he said, and I really did think for a second he was going to pass out. Which—I mean, I know I'm no prize, but I hadn't thought I was as bad as all that.

"Fascinating," said the smuggler-looking Kekropian, not meaning it even a little, and made Felix jump. "But can we return to more important matters, such as—"

"The fantôme in your tower," Mavortian said, quite nicely, but with just enough edge that I knew he didn't like the smuggler-type either.

"There is no fantôme!" the smuggler shouted. "They're fairy tales, bogeymen to scare children!"

"You know better than that," the choirboy-clerk said and then switched into Kekropian. I knew a little Kekropian, but I couldn't follow much of the fight they had then, because it was all hocus-talk, and I ain't ever been into that end of the dictionary. But when I noticed that the smuggler had the Mirador's tattoos and the choirboy-clerk didn't, I figured I could get the gist of it anyway. And I was more interested in the way Felix had got himself behind a chair and was gripping the back with both hands, like he was afraid it was going to buck him off.

Both Kekropians stopped and looked at her.

She said, slowly and carefully, like somebody picking her way across a river on wobbly stepping-stones, "We have recently had a demonstration of some of the ways in which the Cabal's teachings may be… inadequate. I no longer know what to believe in this case, and therefore I wish to know: is there some spell, some test, that we can perform in order to determine once and for all whether there is something in the tower or not?"

"There is noth—" the smuggler began, and Mavortian said loudly, "Yes."

Lady Victoria looked at him. The smuggler might as well have been a snuffed candle for all the attention she was giving him.

"I know of three spells that would do what you ask. I imagine that the Kekropian gentleman—" He nodded at the choirboy-clerk, who bowed back and said, "Gideon Thraxios."

"That Messire Thraxios," Mavortian went on, "knows several others just as efficacious. Since I understand that you are in some doubt concerning my truthfulness, I would suggest that we both perform such spells as we know, and you may judge the results."

There was this pause, where none of the hocuses were quite looking at each other.

"What?" Mavortian said.

"I have already done as you suggest," Gideon Thraxios said. "This morning."

"And your results?"

"Unambiguous," he said, and that thin little smile made him look for a second like somebody who wasn't a choirboy and wasn't a clerk. "We have been having doctrinal differences since then."

"I see," Mavortian said. "Lady Victoria?"

"Mr. von Heber," she said, "I would appreciate it if you would perform the spell you know, once I have summoned the other wizards of our party to observe. I believe Chloë knows something of Fressandran theory, and will be able to judge whether the spell does what you say or is an illusion."

"Gladly."

She gave him a little nod and said, "Please, come with me."

So we followed, Bernard sticking close to Mavortian, and me behind them. I noticed the way Felix hung back, the way his hands were shaking when he pushed his hair off his face, and so I kind of hung back myself to walk with him.

I didn't mean for it to unnerve him, but I could see that it did, and after a moment he burst out with, "What do you want?"

He didn't mean it in a nasty way. He just honestly didn't know, and was frightened. I was getting the idea he'd been frightened for a really long time. I said, "I didn't mean to scare you."

"Oh. No, it isn't… I just…"

"I didn't… I can't…"

"Can't what?"

"The past," he said. Then he shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and said, "Do you really think we're brothers?"

"Two red-haired whores named Methony? 'Less you know something I don't, I'm thinking, yeah, we are."

He went red as a lobster and said in a hurry, "No. No, I'm sure… but, but how old were you when she died?"

"Kethe. Four or five, I think. But I got sold in my third indiction, so it wasn't like…" I wasn't sure what it wasn't like, and the sentence didn't get finished.

He stopped where we were, at the foot of the stairs and still a good distance from the door the others were going through. His eyes focused on my face, and for a second I saw what he would've been like when he was on top of the Mirador's food chain instead of at the bottom, and I went back a step without meaning to. "How old
are
you?"

"Third septad almost." I stopped and did the math. "Twenty, I guess, by the flash calendar. How old are you?"

The sharpness went, all at once. "I… I don't know. What's the date?"

"Nine Frimaire, twenty-two-five," I said. "But that don't help you none."

"No," he said, and managed something that was almost a smile. "I suppose I must be nearly twenty-seven by now. I'll have to ask Gideon… later." He shook his head, like he was trying to jar something into place, and some of the sharpness came back. This time he did smile, but there wasn't nothing nice about it. It was the smile of somebody about to spring a trap. "Tell me, little brother, what are you, by profession?"

"Running dog for a hocus, right now."

"And what were you the summer Cerberus Cresset died?"

He nailed me with that one. I couldn't even think of a lie, not that I would have fooled him for a second. He knew. Hocuses always know things like that.

He said, like it was normal and made sense and everything, "You are circled about with thorns."

And before I could get on top of it, ask him what he meant, shit like that, the smuggler-type hocus stuck his head out and said, "Felix, are you coming?"

I saw it give way in his face. The sharpness wasn't just gone. It was crushed flat. He'd been baiting me, sure, but I saw why, all at once, saw how he'd been fencing off this… this… I don't know the word I want. Zephyr would've had one, I guess, but all I can say is that I saw how bad he was hurt, and how it was worse than just being hurt, it was more like somebody being tortured with the red-hot pokers and the rack and everything, only it was all inside, and there wasn't no torturer that you could kill or reason with or nothing. It was just there.

nothing but a kind of tightening-up, but I was right behind him, so the smuggler-type couldn't shut me out. Whatever I'd walked into here, I wasn't letting go of it yet.

Another fragment of the wall barricading my past had fallen away. I could not have denied my kinship to this man, not when our common blood was stamped so plainly on our features. I could not deny, either, what he was, the worst kind of Lower City tough. His stance, his feral eyes, his drawling, hard-edged vowels: he was the avatar of all the men I had feared and hated as a child.

And at the same time, he reminded me in some distant aching way of Joline, and so I could not repudiate him, denounce him as the murderer of Cerberus Cresset and let the Mirador's justice sever the bond between us.

I could not pretend that I did not know. I saw the spells of the Mirador ringing him about with black thorns, and the only person who could have such a curse laid on him and still be at large was the one who had murdered the Witchfinder Extraordinary three years ago.

But my own experiences of being accused of treason and heresy were raw and throbbing, and I could not help thinking that, just as Thaddeus had been wrong about me, so might I be wrong about this man. The colors surrounding him, although bleak and dark, were not the colors of a man bent on evil, and his wariness, the way he watched the men with whom he had arrived just as carefully as he watched the Cabalines, suggested that his story was more complicated than it appeared at first glance.

And I, in turn, watched him, trying to make sense of who he was searching for clues that would tell me whether he was Keeper or Joline. But he was remarkably hard to read. I would never have guessed he was as young as he said, and I was sure the wizard who had hired him would be equally shocked. His face was like something carved out of stone, expressing nothing except watchfulness. And the scar made everything worse. It ran from the left side of his mouth up across his left cheekbone to scrawl jaggedly into his hair at his temple. The scar tissue had twisted his upper lip, giving that side of his face a slight snarl, even in repose. He was like a fox who has learned about traps the hard way, who knows that the world is dangerous.

The wizards had clustered together by the window, where the Fressandran seemed to be using the last of the sunlight to work his spell. Shannon had vanished quietly. Doubtless he was telling the guards about these newest developments, but even that thought was better than having him here, looking past me as if I did not exist. I sat down at one end of the settle and rested my forehead against one hand. The argument between Gideon and Thaddeus—which had begun when Gideon had brought me back to the Chimera Among the Roses the night before—had been both protracted and vicious, and between that and my own state of nerves I had gotten almost no sleep before the equally protracted scene this morning as the wizards began to debate in earnest the existence of the fantôme. I had never hated my own school so much, or been so ashamed of our belief in tradition, our reliance on doctrine. It seemed to me now that the Cabal's teachings produced nothing but closed-minded and ineffectual parochialism; if this was the best the Mirador had to offer, I was not sorry to have been thrown out.

"You okay?"

I recognized his voice before I looked up—those terrible vowels. "I'm fine," I said.

He nodded, but I couldn't tell if it was because he believed me or because he wasn't going to argue with me. He glanced at the wizards; at the blond man who'd come in with him and the Fressandran; at the door; and then sat down beside me. I felt myself tense, but he made no conversational gambits, simply sat and watched, leaning forward a little, his long-fingered hands hanging quietly between his knees. His eyes were green, an unusual color in Marathat, although not as unusual—meaning unique—as my own unnatural combination. The colors around him were dark with death and grief and guilt, with the briars of the curse tangled through them. I wondered if he could feel it at all, if he even knew it was there. I wondered why he had killed Cerberus Cresset and how he had escaped, even provisionally. But I was too aware of the wizards' proximity to ask.

I hoped the crippled Fressandran wizard knew what he was doing; I hoped he could convince Vicky of the fantôme's reality, because everything that Gideon and I between us had tried had crashed into the wall of Thaddeus's antagonism and Vicky's orthodoxy and, like weak siege engines, had shattered. There was fear now in the colors around her, fear and real uncertainty; she was wise enough to recognize that there was trouble somewhere, wise enough to see that it was larger than I was. The Fressandran's uncomfortably serendipitous appearance had at least accomplished that much.

There was a murmur around the table, and Peter Jessamyn backed away a step, so that I had a clear line of sight. There was a bright blurry spinning shape in the middle of the table. I could see it throwing skeins of light off, splashing the table and the window and the faces of the wizards.

"That mean anything to you?" Mildmay said quietly.

"Not a great deal, no," I said. "I think it worked." The wizards pulled into a tight cluster again. They were probably arguing, but I was losing their voices in the bright singing of the Fressandran's spell. I looked at Mildmay, and for a moment he had a fox's head.

"I have to go," I said. I got up, hoping desperately that my shaking wasn't visible. Mildmay tilted his head back to watch me, his face still completely unreadable.

"You ain't okay," he said. It wasn't really a question.

"I'm fine. I just need…" But what I needed wasn't anything I could explain. I turned and left. I felt his gaze on me all the way to the door, but he did not come after me.