The Virtu (48 page)

“Necromancy is heresy.”

“Much you care.”

My hands tightened their grip on each other in my lap. “The fact that I have committed heresy does not mean I approve of it.”

“A convenient argument. You may do whatever you please while everyone else must toe the line?”

“
No
. I… regret what I did.” Stiff, ungraceful words, and I was not even sure they were true. “But surely just because I have committed heresy once does not mean you have to imagine me fool enough to commit it twice.”

“Leaving the Virtu unmended?”

“No. No, there has to be another way.”

“Really?” Mavortian’s expression was openly and profoundly skeptical. “If there were, do you not imagine the Cabal might have thought of it?”

“They were trained necromancers,” I said, as I had said before. “It was only natural that the necromantic solution would occur to them first.”

“But you, of course, can see more clearly than they.”

“I didn’t say that. But I will not… I
cannot
make the dead of the Mirador support this weight. Not unless there is no other choice.”

“And if, in fact, there is not?” His blue eyes were bright, unkind, but genuinely curious.

“I will find one,” I said and met his gaze squarely, daring him to tell me otherwise.

And whatever his thoughts on that matter were, he had the sense to keep them to himself.

He regretted what he’d done.

He’d said so.

Well, fuck, I said to myself, it ain’t like I don’t regret it, too. Which, you know, true. But it still hurt, having him say it like that—not even looking at me, like it didn’t matter that it was me he’d done it with. Me he’d done it
for
.

We went back to his rooms, and he said something to Gideon that got him out of that armchair like he was on springs, and they both started dragging books off the shelves and spreading ‘em out on the table, and Felix got paper and ink out of his bedroom, and they settled in to do hocus-stuff. Something to do with the Virtu, for sure, but I didn’t know what, and I couldn’t’ve been any help even if I did.

I watched for a while, but I just felt stupider and more useless by the second, so finally I said, “D’you need me for anything?”

Felix looked up from his scribbled papers. “Why?”

“I want to go visit a friend.”

“Well, I certainly don’t… wait a minute. Since when do you have any friends in the Mirador?”

Yeah, go ahead, slap me in the face with it. “I didn’t say it was somebody in the Mirador.”

“So where is this friend of yours?”

“The Fishmarket,” I said sullenly.

“The… ?”

“Fishmarket. In Havelock. The cade-skiffs’ guildhall.”

“You want to go to
Havelock
? Are you out of your mind?”

“No,” I said, even more sullenly.

He put down his pen and heaved a sigh that might’ve been real, or might’ve just been look-at-me-being-long-suffering. Because the saints and powers know he’s good at that. “Mildmay, you know you can’t.”

“The cade-skiffs won’t give me no trouble. They wouldn’t, even if me and Cardenio wasn’t friends.”

He glared at me. “You’re the one who insisted that the Lower City is a danger to you.
You’re
the one who had people come bounding out of the woodwork to kill you.”

“That was just Rindleshin. He don’t—”

“No. I can’t let you go unless I can go with you to protect you. And I can’t go.”

“
You
? Protect me?” I didn’t mean it to come out sounding as nasty as it did.

“I protected you from that Rindleshin creature.”

I snorted. “Please. Like he had a fucking chance.”

“Oh, he had a chance, all right. One good kick and down you’d go.”

“You don’t know the first thing about it.”

“Maybe I don’t, but I know one thing. You
asked
for my protection, little brother. So don’t complain now that you’ve got it.”

“So it’s all my fault?”

“I wouldn’t have said that,” he said, so sweetly that I knew he also wasn’t going to say I was wrong. “Now, if you don’t mind, I am rather busy here.”

“Fine.” I started for the door.

“Don’t leave the Mirador without my permission.” And the bastard hit the binding-by-forms when he said it, like he thought he couldn’t trust me.

“I won’t,” I snarled and left.

I ended up going to find Mehitabel Parr. I didn’t have any real friends in the Mirador, but she was close, and she was annemer, and right then if I never saw another hocus in my life, it would be too fucking soon.

Mehitabel wasn’t in her room, and I stood in the hallway feeling stupid. Because if you’d asked, no, of course I didn’t think she was going to be just hanging around, hoping that I’d decide to drop by, but I also hadn’t thought… well, I hadn’t thought. Leave it at that.

I was going to give it up as a bad job, just go back to Felix’s rooms and sit in my fucking closet and, I don’t know, draw rude pictures on the walls or something, when I heard people laughing farther down the hallway. And I recognized Mehitabel’s laugh. Or, I guess I should say, one of her laughs. She had two, one that was deep and kind of back in her throat and sounded like sex dipped in chocolate, and another that was more like a real laugh, and you almost never heard it. This was the first one, and that probably meant whoever she was with wasn’t nobody I wanted to talk to, but Kethe I didn’t even care.

I followed the sound, and figured out what had happened. Mehitabel had just taken over one of the unused rooms along the hallway. Which made sense—I mean, it wasn’t like anybody else was even going to notice, and it let her talk to people without having to have them all hanging out in her bedroom.

Three people I didn’t know, two gals and a guy, all of them with their hair dressed back and their eyes lined in kohl and none of ‘em wearing much more than their stockings. Mehitabel was at least decent, although I’d never seen her in a dress that low-cut before.

“Oh,” I said, “sorry, I didn’t—”

“Come in, Mildmay,” Mehitabel said, although the other people looked kind of doubtful. “These are Jeanne-Undine and Iago and Harriet. They’re dancers with the Opéra Ophide.”

“Giving a private performance this evening for Lord Paul Corvinius and his friends,” the guy chimed in.

“
Very
private,” one of the girls said, with a giggle.

“Oh, we hope so. Very much,” the guy said, and they all kind of grinned at each other.

“You’re shocking poor Mildmay,” Mehitabel said. Which they hadn’t been—I mean, I was never one for ballet dancers myself, and they wouldn’t have looked twice at me anyway, but I heard the stories same as everybody else—but you could never have told it now from the way my face was going bright red. I glared at Mehitabel, and she made a quick, half-apologetic grimace and said, “I did mean it when I said, come in. And I meant, sit down, too.”

“I don’t like to bother you,” I said.

“You aren’t.
Sit
.”

I sat. And after a little, they forgot I was there, the way people do if you let ‘em, and I sat and listened while they gossiped back and forth, all about the rivalry between the two Pharaohlight theaters, the Empyrean and the Cockatrice, and the things the prima soprano for the Opéra said about the conductor, and what happened to it all when it got down into Scaffelgreen and the pantomimes got ahold of it. And around the edges I caught bits of what had been going on in Mélusine the past indiction or so, and especially how things were in the Lower City. And they weren’t as bad as I’d been afraid they were, although powers and saints, they weren’t all that good, either. The Mayor was about as much help as he ever was, but apparently the Lord Protector had been leaning on people to get things rebuilt and make sure the drinking water was clean and stuff like that. Which was more than I’d expected anybody to do.

The Engmond’s Tor Cheaps were still open. The Hospice of St. Cecily in Candlewick Mews had been overrun for months, but was getting things sorted. There were like a hundred septad questions I wanted to ask, and I sat there and kept my fucking mouth shut. The Lower City wasn’t my home anymore, and I’d better learn to live with it that way.

The clock on the mantelpiece rang the hour. Flashie clock, and I hate doing the math in my head, but I figured it was along about the ninth or tenth hour of the day. “We’ve got to run, darling,” said one of the girls. “Practice.”

“And let’s hope this lot of musicians can keep time,” Iago added. You could tell they were dancers by the way they moved from sitting to standing, like they were water. They made promises with Mehitabel to meet up later, sort of waved to me—awkward, but it was nice of them—and they were gone.

Mehitabel sat down, letting her breath out in a huge sigh, and said, “I’ve never been in a city like this in my life.
Two
theaters
and
the opera
and
the pantomimes—”

“And that ain’t even half of it,” I said. “But most of the rest ain’t respectable.”

“Well, only respectable will do for me, darling,” she said, mocking the ballet dancers’ languid drawl, and suddenly burst out laughing, her own laugh. “They’re like sparrows, aren’t they? Twitter, twitter, twitter—all of it malice and nonsense, but it’s the only way I can start to understand.”

“Understand what?” I said, because I wanted her to keep talking. “What’re you trying to do?”

She looked at me a moment, and I’d never been more aware that her wide-eyed childish look was nothing but a lie. Then she said, “You were right when you said I wasn’t a governess, you know.”

“I was?” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been right about anything.

“Oh, yes. I was born in one of the troupes of players that crisscross the Empire, and I grew up acting. I acted in Aigisthos for a while, but that was too risky. I didn’t mean to be a governess when I went to Klepsydra, but a friend offered to pull strings, and I was qualified, and it was…” She shrugged. “It was safe. Madly boring, but safe. But now that I’m out of the Empire, I want to be an actress again. It offers a better kind of safety.”

That was some friend, but I didn’t want to push. “So you’re gossiping with the ballet dancers.”

Her smile was as bright as a handful of diamonds in the sun. “Exactly! I don’t want to make waves, you see, and that means I had better know what’s in the pond before I go jumping in.”

“Oh.”

“As soon as I can find a place to live, I’ll get out of the Mirador, too. How do they
stand
it?”

“Dunno.” I told myself not to be stupid. I didn’t care if Mehitabel stayed in the Mirador or flew to the moon. And she didn’t have no reason to care about me, either, or about Felix, or nothing. She had plans, and I could see as how we’d done our bit for those plans by getting her here, to Mélusine—to the Mirador, even, although I didn’t blame her for wanting to get the fuck out of it. But if you’re going to try to work your way in among the artists or the musicians or the actors or the dancers, the Mirador is the place you want to be hanging out. Because it’s where all of them want to get to.

“I love this city,” Mehitabel said. “And what I love most is I’m not related to a single solitary actor inside its walls.”

“Um,” I said. “Okay.”

She almost seemed to shake herself, like a dog coming out of the water, and grinned at me. “Sorry. I’m a little…” She made a wide gesture with her hands.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I get it.” And I did, a little. I remembered the rush I got from the good jobs, and I figured it couldn’t be too far off—although I also figured I’d keep my mouth shut about just what it was I was comparing her to.

Her grin turned into a smile. It even looked like a real one. “And how are you? Did you come hunt me out for a reason?”

Well, yeah, but it wasn’t anything I wanted to tell her about. “Nope,” I said. “Felix is chasing after some hocus-thing, and I was just gonna get in the way if I hung around.”

She heard something in what I said that I honestly hadn’t meant to put there, because the smile shifted into a frown, and she tilted her head a little. “And
how is
Felix?”

“Fine.”

“‘Fine.’ ”

“Yeah. He’s working on how to fix the Virtu.”

“That being the ‘hocus-thing’ you were getting in the way of?”

“Yeah.”

She sighed, made a gesture I recognized after a moment as pushing her spectacles up on her nose, even though she wasn’t actually wearing them, and said, “Do you want to play here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-bush for another hour, or do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

Powers and saints, I must’ve gone red as a bell pepper. “I didn’t mean… I wasn’t… I’m sorry, I shouldn’t‘ve bothered you.” I got up, like a buffalo getting up out of a mud wallow, but I hadn’t moved two steps away from the chair before she’d leaned over and grabbed my sleeve.

“I didn’t say you were bothering me. You aren’t. Sit down, Mildmay. Please. You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”

Worse and worse. I sat, said, “It’s nothing. Just, you know, me being stupid.”

“You aren’t stupid.” She let go of my arm, but kind of slow, like she thought she might need to grab me again in a hurry. “What’s Felix done this time?”