The Virtu (11 page)

Ingvard’s guidebook provided directions for finding the palace, which proved to be fortunate as the ruins were not visible from the road. The palace was nothing more than paving stones. I left Ingvard and Florian in earnest speculation about its original dimensions and layout, and made my way toward the stumps of columns like half-rotted teeth which marked the temple.

As the other ruins had been, this too was silent and deserted, just the double row of eroded columns and the moss-grown paving stones in-between. And, I discovered by painful experience, a thriving population of briar bushes. I disentangled myself from them at the cost of several raking scratches on my hands and wrists, and found myself standing in what was nearly the geometric center of the colonnade.

My heartbeat pounded in my ears; the air was heavy with smoke, with the stench of blood. Blackness, the lurid light of fire, voices screaming, sobbing, cursing.

The temple is Nera.

Before the thought was even clear in my head, I had bolted back out of the ruins, acquiring several more scratches and a torn trouser leg. And then I stood, my chest heaving like a bellows and my whole body damp and prickling with sweat, and thought, The temple is
Nera
? What in the world is
that
supposed to mean?

But there was no explanation, the panic gone as suddenly as it had come, taking the hallucinations with it—if “hallucinations” was the correct word. I had gathered from what Mildmay had said that there wasn’t even as much left of Nera as there was of Huakinthe, so surely I could not have been
reminded
of Nera. But I could think of no theory that was not even less plausible.

Somehow, I was certain that the goddess worshipped here had not been interested in fertility.

I saw Ingvard and Florian approaching and called out to warn them of the briars before I started slowly and abstractedly back toward the buggy. The shadows were lengthening; we would need to leave soon, and besides, I did not want to be anywhere near the temple of Graia as it welcomed in the night.

Felix was in a mood by the time he got back to the
White Otter
. Florian Gauthy and Mr. Vilker were giving him these weird looks, like they couldn’t tell if it was their fault or not, but he didn’t even seem to notice. I kept my mouth shut and went to bed early.

Only, of course, that didn’t get me out of trouble, because the Troian kid was already in the cabin we were sharing, and he looked mightily put out to see me.

I got as much right to be here as him, I told myself and said, “You okay with the top bunk?”

“I
beg
your pardon?”

“You planning on keeping that stick up your ass all the way to Klepsydra?”

He went first white, then bright, blotchy red. Powers, Milly-Fox, why did anybody bother with teaching you to talk? “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t‘ve said that.”

Phaëthon had turned away, and for a minute I thought I wasn’t going to get no answer at all and wasn’t
that
going to be a fun way to spend a month? Then he said, without turning around, “I will take the top bunk.”

“Thanks.” I sat down on the lower bunk and couldn’t quite keep back a sigh of relief at getting my weight off my leg. But it was okay. I mean, it was sore, but nothing out of the ordinary. You’re gonna be okay, I said to myself and almost believed it.

The kid didn’t say nothing and I didn’t say nothing, and after a while he climbed up to the top bunk, still wearing his shirt and trousers. Well, I’d pegged him for a flash kid, and if he was that kind of prude, I was probably right.

The lamp was up at his level, wired to the wall in this sort of cage arrangement. After he’d been up there a little while, he said, “Are you… I should like to go to sleep now.”

“Sure. I can take my shoes off in the dark just fine.” There was stuff for my leg, stuff to keep the scarring from binding in like creepers smothering a tree, but I could do that some other time, sometime when I could get the cabin to myself for a septad-minute.

“Oh. Oh, yes, of course.” And out went the light.

He didn’t so much as move a muscle while I was unlacing my shoes and taking my trousers off—I mean, just because he was a prude, didn’t mean I had to be uncomfortable. I lay down. The bunk was narrow and hard, but at least it wasn’t too short for me the way it would be for Felix. And better this than that nice soft bed in the Gardens, regardless.

And then Phaëthon said, “Mildmay?”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing. I was just… it’s an odd name.”

And Phaëthon ain’t? I thought, but the kid hadn’t meant anything nasty by it. It was even sort of, in a funny way, an apology, like Felix’s apologies that weren’t, and I figured whatever this kid’s story was, he’d probably been having one fuck of a bad day, if not a whole bad decad. So I said, “Yeah. My mother had some weird ideas.”

“Oh. Well, good night then, Mildmay.”

“G’night,” I said back, and if the kid said anything else, I was asleep before I heard it.

I dreamed about fucking.

Keeper first, the woman who’d raised me from my third indiction and started fucking me before I’d quite finished my second septad, and you’d think after three indictions, some of it would start to fade, but everything was clear and sharp, like it had only been this morning that I’d gotten up out of that bed for the last time. Her long white body, her little tits and narrow hips. Once when I’d had two septads and two, she’d waited until I was all the way inside her, then locked her legs around the backs of my thighs and said, “Imagine I’m a boy. Imagine you’re fucking a
boy
, Milly-Fox,” and then laughed when I tried to pull back and couldn’t. Whenever I couldn’t get hard, she’d tell me I was going molly, that pretty soon there wouldn’t be nothing left for her to do but send me to one of the boy brothels in Pharaohlight. I never quite believed her—I mean, no madam in their right mind would take me, for one thing—but I knew she could do it if she wanted. I knew Keeper could do anything.

Keeper liked a lot of light when she fucked, so there were candles everywhere. I didn’t dare close my eyes, even though I didn’t want to look at her, because she was watching my face and I had to keep my guard up. She didn’t like me to kiss her, because of the scar, and she wouldn’t let me hide my face in her shoulder. “I want to
see
, Milly-Fox,” she’d said once, yanking my head back by the hair hard enough to make my eyes water. So I had to keep my face from giving anything away, giving her anything she could use.

Her long fingernails were digging into my shoulders. Sometimes she left welts, and if the other kids saw them, they didn’t say nothing. Her thighs were like a vise against my hips, and she was hot and tight and I knew she’d be pissed if I came too soon. If you were one of Keeper’s kids, you learned to do things her way, and that didn’t change just because she decided to fuck you.

“Talk to me, Milly-Fox,” she said, one hand tracing up the back of my neck and grabbing my hair.

“What?”

“Talk to me. Tell me how it feels.”

“You know I don’t—”

The hand in my hair tugged hard, just once, and then slid around to my face, running along the scar where I couldn’t really feel it.

“You used to be such a chatterbox. I miss it. So talk to me.”

“Keeper, please…”

“Mildmay.” She almost never used my real name, and it was always a bad sign when she did. She was watching my face now, greedy like a kid at a pantomime. I wanted this to stop. I wanted not to be touching her, not to be fucking her, not to be trapped in this thing with her like a fly in a spiderweb. But, you know, my hips were still moving, and my cock didn’t care about my pride.

“I’m waiting,” said Keeper.

I said, hoping she’d think I was gasping because of the sex, “Hot… smooth… tight…”

“You can do better than that, darling.” And she sounded so cool and amused, like she didn’t even care about what we were doing.

I shut my eyes, because it didn’t matter now anyway. And somewhere in my head, I was shouting at myself, This is a dream! You don’t have to do this, you stupid fuck! You’re dreaming, and it don’t have to be Keeper!

I thought of Ginevra. Remembered her eyes and hair and skin, how different her body was from Keeper’s, how it had felt fucking her on that old swaybacked bed in Midwinter—back before she’d dumped me, before she’d been murdered on the say-so of Vey Coruscant, the bloodwitch who ran Mélusine’s Dassament district—and the dream stretched and pulled like taffy, and I was still in Keeper’s bed with all them stupid candles, but it was Ginevra under me making those amazing throaty little noises, and the scent of her was like honey, and I could rest my head against the pillow and not think about nothing except her, about the softness of her skin and the pressure of her tits against my chest, how easy it was to fuck her and not worry about… wetness and heat against my shoulder.

I jerked up. It was blood. Ginevra’s throat was cut, and there was blood everywhere—blood in her hair, spreading across the sheets, blood running down her stomach and between her legs, oiling our fucking like some kind of terrible clockwork. And suddenly Ginevra’s legs were clamped around mine, and when her eyes opened, they were full of blood, and she said, laughing, “Fuck me harder, Mildmay. I’m dead now, so I can’t feel it unless you fuck… me…
harder
.”

I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. And the blood made it so smooth, like flying, but there was no heat except the blood, because she was dead and I could smell the rot starting. I wanted to get away from her even more than I’d wanted to get away from Keeper, but I couldn’t stop, slamming into her harder and harder and I could feel her body starting to fall apart under me, and she started laughing, and I still couldn’t stop, and she brought her hands up and touched her cheeks, and then reached out with her bloody hands toward my face.

And I woke up. With everything throbbing. Cock, balls, head, every separate muscle in my back and neck. I was face-down on the mattress, and I knew if I moved, I’d either come or puke. Maybe both.

I didn’t want to come from having a dream like that. Stupid, I know, but there it was. Plus there was the whole embarrassment part, and what kind of disgusting freak would Phaëthon think I was—

Oh, shit. Phaëthon. I kept perfectly still, praying I hadn’t made enough noise to wake him up. I was dripping with sweat. The cabin felt like a potter’s kiln, and the darkness was like this hot, wet blanket pressing me down.

I stayed like that for I don’t know how long, my heart hammering in my chest like I’d run from Chalcedony Gate up to the Plaza del’Archimago. No sign that Phaëthon was awake and wondering what the fuck was wrong with me. And the crazy pain in my balls and cock settled back to just, you know,
pain
, and I could roll over and lay there and feel stupid and dirty and disgusting.

And there I lay ‘til morning.

The
White Otter
sailed out of Endumion at noon. Ingvard, like the other passengers, was on deck, watching raptly as the distance widened between Troia and this, our small, floating world. He had not pressed me when I had said I preferred to stay in our cabin, but I knew he thought it odd.

He could think me as odd as he liked; he would think me odder still if I lost my self-control on the main deck of the
White Otter
. Better to stay below and pretend it was not happening, that safety was still almost within my reach. I lay on the top bunk and stared at the ceiling—if that was what one called it on a ship—trying very hard not to think of anything and succeeding only in thinking about the temple of Graia and the dim horror of Nera which I could not see clearly but which thronged my mind with shadows.

Mildmay had not, I suspected, told me quite everything about Nera. He had been nervous, disquieted, uncomfortable, and I knew him well enough to understand that those feelings would make him try to close down the discussion as quickly as he could. I did not think he had lied to me, but I thought he had probably edited the story considerably. It infuriated me that I could not draw on my own memories for corroboration, but all I could consciously remember of Nera was blood and smoke and the thick taste of terror.

The ship lurched beneath me; after a moment of incandescent panic, during which the ship lurched again in the identical fashion, I reasoned out that it was not a sign that we were sinking, merely that we had come out past the breakwater and were starting into the open sea. I had never heard a phrase in my life which I detested as much as I detested ‘the open sea’ at that moment. Would it have been so bad, a voice whispered treacherously in my mind, to have stayed in the Gardens? Astyanax was right, you know, you could have been perfectly happy there.

Mildmay, I thought, a little desperately. I couldn’t have asked Mildmay to stay there. It would have killed him.

And, as if on cue, Mildmay said from the doorway, “Felix?”

Without the cane, he moved as silently as a cat—perhaps another reason he was determined to do without it—and he made me jump so that I nearly brained myself. “What?” I said, and my voice was sharp with startlement and guilt.