The Mirador (14 page)

I said, “I can show you the way.”

And then I wondered what in the world had possessed me.

“Could you?” Antony said with unmistakable relief.

“I remember the route Mildmay took. When do you want to go?”

“Er, this evening? About nine?”

Not the ideal time for exploring a crypt, but in the great and windowless bulk of the Mirador, it hardly mattered.

“All right.” And then a thought hit me, mingled charity and malice, and I said, “Gideon, do you want to come?”

Gideon blinked. He pulled his tablet and stylus out of his coat pocket and wrote in his neat, swift, highly Kekropian hand,
Won’t I be in the way?

“Not a bit,” I said brightly, ignoring the appalled expression on Antony’s face that said otherwise. “And if you’re along we won’t have to worry about the candles going out.”

He made me a small, ironic bow.

“Good,” I said, and to Antony, briskly dismissive, “We’ll meet you at nine in the Stoa St. Maximilian.” Gideon was happily quick to pick up my cues, quicker than many actors I’d worked with, and we made our exit.

Back in Felix’s suite, he was still eyeing me with puzzled speculation. “What?” I said.

He wrote,
Why do you want me along?

“Can’t I enjoy your company?”

It embarrassed him; he looked away for a moment, then wrote,
I hope that you do. But that does not answer my question.

“Oh, God, Gideon, do you have to analyze everything to death? Look, that crypt isn’t a very pleasant place, and Antony is, um, uninspiring company at the best of times.”

His eyebrows went up; I said, “I know, I know—that being so, why did I offer?” I didn’t know the answer to that myself, so I chose a reason I thought he’d accept: “I didn’t want Mildmay to have to put up with Antony on top of everything else he has to put up with all the time. All right?”

He considered me a moment.
It is not a crime to love someone.

That depends very much on whom you love. But I didn’t say it.

Today was Jeudy in the Mirador’s reckoning, and Jeudy afternoons were when Felix locked himself in his workroom and did hocus stuff. Sometimes he told me to clear out. Sometimes he dragged me in with him, because he needed me for one reason or another, because of the obligation d’âme or just because he needed somebody to stand still at a particular spot on the floor. Every once in a while, he’d let me choose if I wanted to come with him or go off on my own. I always stayed with him. On Jeudy afternoons he was like a different person. He never said anything mean, and he’d talk to me sometimes the way he talked to his friends, like I was smart enough that it mattered to him that I understood him. I hoarded up those afternoons like a miser counting decagorgons. And it always seemed to make Felix happy, too.

This afternoon I was expecting him to run me off. But he stopped at the door and raised his eyebrows at me. “Do you want to come in?”

“Um. Sure. I mean, if you don’t mind.”

“If I
minded
, I would have told you to go away,” he said. But there was no sting in it. He unlocked the door. “Come on.”

We didn’t talk much for an hour or so. He was tangled up in some crazy thing that had him crawling around on the floor with lots of string and chalk. And it seemed like he kept running into the east wall, like it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Finally, he sat back on his heels and said, “Damn. Damn, damn, damn.”

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“I must look mad,” he said and got to his feet. “I’m trying to diagram a
katharsis
.”

“A what?”

“It’s an old Troian word,” he said, coming back to the table with his pieces of string snarled across it. “Translations vary, but it means something between ‘purification’ and ‘purgation.’ Both of those seem suitable to me.”

“What are you wanting to, um, purge?”

“Oh, this is just hypothetical.”

I waited, not asking,
So how come you keep on running into that wall?
Felix hated silence.

“Do you
always
know when I’m lying?”

I shrugged a little.

There was another pause before he said in a low voice, not looking at me, “Malkar had a workroom down in the Warren. No one knew about it but me.”

I only realized after I’d done it that I’d made the sign to ward off hexes.

“Exactly,” Felix said. “I don’t want anybody coming across it by accident and finding . . . well, finding what Malkar left there.”

“Sacred
fuck
. And you were just planning to sneak off all by yourself in the middle of the night?”

“I can’t . . .” His voice choked off, and it was a moment before he went on. “I don’t want Gideon to see it, and I can’t think of anyone else who wouldn’t laugh at me. The Mirador doesn’t believe in ghosts and miasmas.”

“I ain’t laughing,” I said. “Can I help?”

The piece of chalk he was holding snapped in half, like I’d startled him.

“I mean,” I said, and I could feel myself blushing, “I can’t do magic or nothing, but I can hold a lamp, or something. Or just
be
there.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That would indeed be a great help. But we’ll have to do it at midnight.”

“That don’t surprise me at all,” I said.

He managed about half a grin and said, “Doesn’t.”

We played Long Tiffany badly, both of us with our minds mostly somewhere else, until the sixth hour of the night. Mehitabel and Gideon left at some point, and it was only after they’d gone that I realized I’d forgotten to find out where they were going. I was mostly just glad we wouldn’t have to think up some fancy story for them. But finally Felix threw down his cards and said, “It’s time.” He called witchlight as we stepped out into the hall, the little green chrysanthemums circling his head like a crown.

“Could you change the color on them if you wanted to?” I said.

He gave me a puzzled look, but his chrysanthemums went yellow, then orange and red and purple and blue, and then back to green. “Most wizards develop, er, shortcuts for the spells they use most often,” he said. The green chrysanthemums began to spin in big figure eights around us both. “Mine for this spell just happens to make them green. Why do you ask?”

“’Cause I’m piss-ignorant,” I said and made him laugh. “Just wondered.”

“No harm in that. I’d never even thought about it. Malkar’s witchlights were always green, and I just never . . .” He snorted. “I’m not going to change them now.”

“I like the green. Better than Simon’s awful blue globes.”

“I’ll remember to tell him that. Malkar did globes, too. I learned chrysanthemums from Iosephinus Pompey. He died the year you killed Cerberus Cresset.”

“Oh.”

Something got into my voice that I hadn’t meant to let him hear. He said, “I didn’t mean that in a pointed way. It’s just that I associate Iosephinus’s death with the absolute gibbering panic that possessed the Mirador all autumn. He was
very
old, old enough to remember the end of Lord Malory’s reign, and I think he’d just outlived any care he had for what people thought or what the political fashions were that season. He said I was the most promising wizard he’d seen since he was a young man and was learning from Rosindy Clerk, and that it would be criminally stupid not to teach me everything I could learn. I was at least smart enough to listen to him.” He shook his head, maybe at the memory of Iosephinus Pompey or maybe at himself.

We were moving out of the everyday part of the Mirador, into the Warren between the Mirador and the Arcane. The bitter smell of the Sim began to crawl up around us. Felix was shivering a little, but his witchlights stayed calm.

Felix argued with the other hocuses—Rinaldo and Edgar and Charles the Dragon and Lunette—about the building of the Mirador. There weren’t any records. They’d all been lost or destroyed or never written in the first place. Charles the Dragon insisted that the lowest level of the Arcane had to be the oldest part of it. Charles the Dragon was a great one for logic and being rational and shit, and I didn’t much like him. Felix said the Warren was older. Lunette and Edgar agreed with him. Rinaldo said firmly that the mazes around the Iron Chapel were older than anything else in Mélusine, and I thought Rinaldo had the right of it.

But leaving that aside, I agreed with Felix—not that any of ’em ever asked me. The Warren was older than the Arcane. The passages were lower and narrower, and the stonework was weird. The stones lay in these thin, sort of wavery courses, and Felix called them alien. They weren’t quarried from either Rosaura or Mutandis, the way the Mirador and the Arcane were. They were from some other quarry, one that had been used up or lost or something. The Warren
felt
old, old and twisted and mean. Mikkary fucking everywhere. I’d never liked it, and I liked it even less now.

Felix stopped in front of a low, ironbound door. It looked like all the other doors we’d passed. He touched it lightly, almost like he was afraid it would burn him. I heard the tumblers shift, and he pushed the door open.

For a moment, I thought he’d been turned to a pillar of salt, like the woman in the old story who looked at Cade-Cholera’s face. Then he said, “Someone has been here.”

Powers and saints, that can’t be good. “I thought you said you—”

“I did say. I thought I was.” He sent his witchlights through the door. They settled to roost like crows on the braziers that circled the room. “It appears that I was wrong.”

He stepped into the room. My mind was full of all the places I’d rather’ve been, but I followed him.

It was an ugly room. You could feel the Sim in it, which ain’t a compliment. The floor was Rosaura marble, and the bright, wet, blood-red of the mosaic pentagram was Stay Hengist’s work for sure. Hengist had repaired the mosaics in the Hall of the Chimeras for Charles Cordelius, and he’d never told nobody how he got his colors. There were manacles bolted to the points of the pentagram, and I didn’t want to ask what they’d been used for. Felix’s witchlights weren’t much use against the dark in this room, but I wasn’t going to light the coal in the braziers or the candles in the sconces any more than he was.

“Powers,” I said, mostly to prove that I hadn’t been struck dumb. “I didn’t think there were rooms like this outside of all them stories about evil hocuses.”

Felix laughed, but not like anything was funny. “You have no idea of how pleased Malkar would be to hear you say that. He
loved
playing the part of the evil wizard when he could get away with it. He had a monster’s vanity. A monster made of vanity.” His voice had gone weird and dreamy, and his spooky eyes—even worse by witchlight—were wide and bright. I’d learned the signs. His attention was on his magic now, not on me or the room or even on himself.

If you were going to be a hocus, you had to be able to concentrate like you were made of stone. Simon had told me that once, though I couldn’t remember what he’d been trying to explain. But I’d understood, because when Felix was doing magic, it was like he was somewhere else, where nothing—not thunderstorms or screaming fights or even the hullabaloo of a kitchen boy falling down the servants’ stair with a tray of china—
nothing
could get to him. It made me understand why they might have started doing the obligation d’âme in the first place and why maybe it had been a good idea when they did. Because if you were going to get like that, you needed
somebody
guarding your back.

“Light your lantern,” he said, and I did. When the nice, ordinary yellow flame caught and held, his green witchlights disappeared. The shadows in the room were immediately a septad-times worse. “I’ll need you to follow me with the lantern,” he said, fishing a piece of chalk out of his coat pocket. “Don’t step on the chalk lines, and I’ll draw you a circle of protection when I’m done.” I couldn’t tell if the circle of protection was just the next step or a reward to me for not smudging his lines.

I don’t understand magic at all, but I could see that the pattern Felix chalked on the floor was the same one he’d been working on earlier—this time, the east wall was where he wanted it. I followed him and didn’t step on his lines. He drew a quick circle across the doorway, surrounded by symbols. He’d told me once that the Mirador didn’t believe in runes and diagrams. I thought anything that would keep Brinvillier Strych away from me was a good idea.

Felix went back to the middle of the room, where his chalk and Strych’s pentagram seemed to come together, and drew some more symbols. He took a little wash-leather bag out of his inside pocket and emptied it out onto his palm. Dull greasy little lumps of something-or-other, and he put two of ’em in each point of the pentagram, lining ’em up real careful, although I don’t have the first idea with what. When he was done and standing in the middle of the pentagram again, he said, “Sit down if you like. This may take a while.”

I sat, carefully, and put the lamp where I wouldn’t be blocking it. Then I waited.

Nothing happened that I was fitted out to sense, though after a while I could see sweat on Felix’s face. But he just stood there, not saying nothing, not doing nothing. I began to think I could see shadows gathering around him, like the darkness was actually getting heavy and would smother him if it got the chance.