The Mirador (30 page)

“I have other lovers.”

“You won’t,” he said, face and voice suddenly hard. “He was the only one you cared about, and I will not share you.”

“You’re awfully possessive for a man who hasn’t heard the word ‘yes’ yet,” I said, both because I was irritated and because I needed to push this situation, find out what its limits were.

“Character flaw,” Stephen said. “If you turn me down, I won’t hold it against you. But if you accept, it will be exclusive until we tire of each other. I won’t hold you against your will, either.”

“I am relieved to hear it.”

“I’m jealous by nature,” he said. “Made more jealous by training. I’m not going to apologize for it, but I am
telling
you. I don’t like making uninformed decisions myself, and there’s no reason you should have to make them either.”

“Do you even
like
me?”

It was a ridiculous, childish question, but Stephen’s cold-bloodedness was unnerving me. That in itself was ridiculous, and I knew it, since I’d approached all of my affairs since Hallam with the same rigorous, dispassionate logic, but, no, I did
not
like being on the receiving end.

“Mehitabel.” He smiled. “If I didn’t want you in my bed, for company as much as for anything else, I’d hardly have gone this far. You aren’t an ideal choice by any means.”

“Being Kekropian.”

“And an actress. And damnably intelligent. Which I prefer, but it makes things more difficult.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Stephen, unlike Vulpes, wasn’t worried over possible irony. “It’s up to you.”

“If I say yes, I imagine it will be quite official?”

“Oh, yes. There’s a suite that belongs to the Lord—or Lady—Protector’s lover. It’ll be yours.”

“You won’t want me to give up the Empyrean.” I said it flatly, because I wasn’t asking.

“Of course not. Just your . . .” He was searching for a word, brows drawn down, and I knew suddenly what word he wanted.
Boy-toys.
Mildmay’s word. I wondered, not comfortably, how long Stephen had been watching and how long his jealousy had been festering.

“Quite,” I said. “I need some time to think.”

“I wouldn’t have expected you to answer right away. We— meaning the Mirador—will be holding a soirée on Mercredy. I’ll send you an invitation tomorrow. Yes to one is yes to both. Will that do?”

It wasn’t much time, but it wasn’t the sort of decision that was going to get easier for long contemplation. “Yes,” I said. “It’ll do.”

I couldn’t talk to Thamuris about ghosts. But there was another side to the problem, and maybe the Troian approach to the dead would help here. Because none of the Marathine approaches I knew of were any better than useless. Most of them were worse.

I had worked out what I wanted to say to him about Malkar and what I most emphatically did not. I said, “I have . . . a kind of relic of a powerful blood-wizard, and I need to put it somewhere. But I need it to be safe, and I have to find a way to nullify it thaumaturgically.”

“A relic?” Thamuris was frowning. “What sort of relic does a blood-wizard leave? And is a blood-wizard what it sounds like?”

“Yes. And just exactly as vile as you imagine, too. And the, um, the jewels from his rings.” Some schools of Troian wizards still used rings; although the diviners of the Euryganeic Covenant were not among them, Thamuris did at least understand the theory.

“And is there a reason you haven’t destroyed them?”

“He had these rings for a very long time.” As long as I’d known him, anyway. “And the consistent use of architectural thaumaturgy does some very strange things to gemstones.”

“Define ‘strange,’ please.”

Damn him for asking cogent questions. I ran imaginary fingers through imaginary hair. “They would be very difficult to destroy, and they would . . . well, think of it as staining the place where it was done.” Somewhere in the depths of the Mirador there was a bricked-up room in which Porphyria Levant’s emeralds had been destroyed. I had never sought it out, but I knew I had been close to it more than once. I had felt the stain of their magic, their mikkary, like the taste of burning metal in the air. It would disperse, given time, but no one knew how much time, and the Curia seemed determined to remain ignorant, as if refusal to acknowledge the problem could cause it to go away. All I could do, having argued myself hoarse on the subject until Giancarlo forbade me to mention it again, was not add to the problem. And thus I could no more destroy Malkar’s rubies than I could simply dispose of them. The mere thought of throwing them in the Sim made me feel as if my blood had been replaced by the river’s dark water.

“Ah,” said Thamuris. “You don’t want to talk about who they belonged to or how you got them, do you?”

“No,” I said, faster and harder than I’d meant to, and Thamuris controlled himself just short of recoiling.

“I wouldn’t tell anyone,” he said, and just as he had seen my semipanicked revulsion, I saw his hurt around him.

I shut my eyes, willing meaning into the gesture, using it to reassert my control over myself, both my construct-self and my own unruly emotions. It took me longer than it should have, long enough that when I opened my construct-eyes again, Thamuris was staring at me worriedly.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said carefully, crisply.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have pried.”

It was tempting to agree with that, too, but I said, “The important thing is to find a safe place to put these rubies. I want to be rid of them.”

“I can imagine. Are they powerful?”

“Not in their own right. They’re thaumaturgically charged, but it’s nothing as strong as a curse. It’s the synergistic effect with the Mirador that worries me.”

“Yes. You know, I wonder . . .”

“Yes?” I said, when the pause had stretched to an irritating length.

“Oh—just that I’ve been wondering about bringing something material across the boundaries of the Khloïdanikos, and—”

“You really think that’s possible?”

“I’m
wondering
. I don’t think it would work with ordinary objects, but something with a thaumaturgic charge, something that already casts a shadow into the world of the spirit . . . and it seems to me the Khloïdanikos ought to be able to nullify a mild charge such as you describe.”

My first impulse was to reject the idea utterly. I wanted to keep Malkar out of the Khloïdanikos, wanted to have one part of my life he could not touch. But then I caught myself. Malkar was dead. He couldn’t touch anything. Even the rubies weren’t actually imbued with Malkar’s spirit, only with the residue of the magic he had worked.

I am giving him too much power,
I thought. There was nothing talismanic about the rubies—nor anything talismanic about the Khloïdanikos, for that matter. It did not symbolize my lost innocence. It most certainly did not need me to protect it, and I needed to rein in my vanity if I was imagining it did.

And what Thamuris was suggesting was, in fact, an elegantly simple solution to a problem over which I’d been giving myself headaches for weeks. “And it’s not as if it would have to be permanent,” I said, feeling much lighter and more cheerful. “If it doesn’t work, we can always remove them and try something else.”

“Exactly. It would be quite a useful experiment for any number of reasons.”

“Including the question of whether it’s possible at all.”

“Yes. Quite.”

I considered the problem.

“It wouldn’t be difficult to create a construct-token,” I said and then broke off, my breath catching in my throat as the answer clicked into place like the tumblers of a lock.

“Felix?”

I shook my head sharply, as if that might clear it or settle it. “Nothing. I think I know how to do it.”

“Just like that?” He didn’t sound disbelieving, merely a little uneasy.

“It . . .” I made a futile shaping gesture with both hands. “It fits with something I’ve been working on. Working with. A way to link thaumaturgic architecture and architectural thaumaturgy. Anyway, I’ll have gotten it worked out by the next time we meet.”

“You sound awfully certain.”

I smiled at him, trying not to see Malkar bursting into flames behind my eyes. “I’ve done it before.”

I went to bed early that night. Felix let me go, but later, a couple hours after I’d heard him and Gideon go into their room, my door opened and he came in, crowned with witchlights.

“You’re awake,” he said. He stopped maybe a foot inside the door.

“You ain’t asking,” I said and sat up.

“Are you all right?”

“Sure, I’m fine.”

“I don’t suppose it
is
any of my business.”

That sat there for a minute, since I didn’t know what to say.

“Something’s eating at you,” he said. “If I promise not to lose my temper and not to say anything cruel, will you tell me what it is?”

“It ain’t Strych.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he said, calm and almost gentle, and that gave me the nerve to say it.

“I’ve been thinking a lot. About Ginevra.”

“Ginevra. She still haunts you.” He wasn’t asking that time, either.

“Yeah, I guess.”

There was another long pause. I couldn’t read his face. Then he heaved a sigh and said, “May I sit down?”

“Sure,” I said and made room for him on the bed. He sat beside me and looked the candle into flame. He said, “I have always been afflicted with what Gideon calls true-dreaming. The longer the binding-by-forms has been in place, the more that ‘true-dreaming’ has included awareness of your dreams. I’ve fought it and fought it. I was afraid it would backlash, and you would start having
my
nightmares. But I can’t block it out completely. I didn’t want to tell you—I knew how much you’d hate it—but, frankly, I don’t think it’s going to go away.”

“Fucking marvelous.” I’d heard—sort of, anyway—his dreams at first, but that had gone after Strych. I’d just been glad.

“You dream about her a lot.”

“Yeah.”

He looked at me for a moment, then looked away and said, “When I was eleven, I lost everyone I cared about. The person I loved best in all the world died in my arms. I’ve told you about her.”

“Joline.” He’d said I reminded him of her.

“Lorenzo—the owner of the Shining Tiger, the brothel where . . . Lorenzo found me in the aftermath. By the time I had recovered from the initial shock, I . . .” He stopped completely.

I remembered the first time he’d told me about this, in the Gardens of Nephele. I remembered the black cloud I’d been in, and how it had been all I could do just to listen to his light voice and pay enough attention that the words made sense. I remembered him making some half-joke about prostitution and moving on, like it wasn’t no big deal. And, powers, I’d been so fucked up myself, I hadn’t even wondered about it.

He looked at me. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know if he wanted me to. I stayed silent. He said, “It was years before I was able to grieve. Partly, that was because there was always some new and hideous thing to deal with, and partly because Lorenzo didn’t waste any time introducing me to phoenix. Phoenix really is splendid, you know. You put the things you don’t want to deal with in a drawer and phoenix closes the drawer for you. But I had dreams.”

He stopped again. This time he seemed to want me to say something. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“I’m saying that . . . your dreams . . . it’s like you’re snagged on something. And I wondered . . . if I could help you find it, maybe?” He gave me a look, a funny one, sort of shy and sideways, and I don’t know how, but all at once the words were just there, and I said them.

“It’s my fault she died. I didn’t tell her.” There it was, the thing I’d been trying not to think since I’d dropped my cane in the Grenouille Salon. I took a deep, painful breath and buried my face in my hands.

“Didn’t tell her
what
?”

“Ginevra didn’t understand about Vey,” I said. “We never talked about it, but I think she thought Vey would forget or something—you know, after a while it would be okay again. And, powers, I don’t know, but I guess my reputation was still enough that it wasn’t worth Vey’s while to come after me.”

“But when Ginevra left you, she lost that protection.”

“Yeah. I didn’t think she’d leave, so I never sat her down and
made
her understand. She wasn’t stupid—you got to understand, Felix, she wasn’t
stupid
—but she was . . . she wouldn’t believe something unless she’d seen it for herself.”

“But you said someone gave information to Vey.”

“Yeah.”

“So I really
don’t
see how it can be your fault.”

“Don’t you get it? Out of that whole fucking tangle, I was the only guy who knew the stakes. And I didn’t tell Ginevra. I never tell people things. That’s my whole fucking problem.”

“It
is
a persistent motif.”

My glare must have been just this side of murder. He said quickly, “I didn’t mean to be flip—remember, I promised I wouldn’t say anything cruel. But you
don’t
tell people things. Only stories.”