The Virtu (51 page)

“Fuck,” he said. “Okay.” Then he stopped, looking at me with a different kind of wariness. “You sure you don’t remember it?” and his eyes slid, just slightly, sideways at Gideon.

I understood what he was asking, and I felt for a moment almost physical pain at the loyalty he was showing me, and the completely unexpected sensitivity to something I had never openly told him, but clearly he knew. He knew I was concealing the loss of my memory, and he was willing to help.

I smiled at him. “Let us merely say that I do not imagine my memory of events is at all, ah, reliable.” Which was perfectly true, if grossly misleading, and there was appreciation of that in the nod Mildmay gave me.

“Okay,” he said. “So, we made the maze and got outside it, and I didn’t see nothing, but I could tell you did. And then you…” Another pause, and he said slowly, watching my face, “You started for the maze.”

I had known this would be unpleasant; I nodded at him to continue.

“I stopped you,” he said, “along of how I didn’t know what might happen. And you started cussing me out. Said they—the ghosts—they said you could come with ‘em if you wanted. And I—”

There was a flash, as quick and bright and painful as lightning searing the sky: pouring rain and a monster pinning me to the ground and voices calling, pleading, promising…

“Joline,” I said, my voice barely more than breath.

Mildmay’s words cut off jaggedly. I realized after a moment that he and Gideon were both staring at me. Mildmay wouldn’t ask, of course, but Gideon would; I had to say something first, had to keep this matter under my control. “They said they could help me find—” But I couldn’t think of how to explain Joline. I finally said, inadequately, “Someone I knew as a child,” and Mildmay said hastily, as if he were trying to head off further questions, “And after a while you quit fighting me, so I knew the maze had worked and the ghosts were gone. That, um, that was it.”

I let my hands grip together beneath the table, welcoming the dull pain of bone struggling against bone, the sharper bite of my rings in the flesh of my fingers. Joline had died more than fifteen years ago; there was no need to allow myself to become overset. I said, “Then we have the testimony of a madman.”

:You sound as if you were hoping for something more.:

“It was just an idea,” I said and fled gratefully into theory. “I know very little about necromancy, and none of what I know has to do with… I believe the term is
laying
a ghost. So I thought, if there was a method that we knew worked—”

:For followers of a particular goddess.:

“Neither Mildmay nor I knew anything about your White-Eyed Lady.” :I mentioned her to you once,: Gideon said. :When I kept you from committing suicide off the Linlowing Bridge, if you recall.:

I had a moment of flat white panic. But he was testing; I saw that particular brightness in his eyes. I said, “Gideon, I know you have high standards, but surely even you cannot expect that someone… someone in that situation would be able to understand and remember every word you say. If you tell me you mentioned your goddess, I will believe you, but my own memory…” I shrugged, carefully indifferent, and did not let myself appear to watch his reaction. But I could see that he was thwarted, and said, as if this were the point, “Well, let’s ask the expert. Mildmay, are there any rituals native to the pantheon of Mélusine that bring rest to the dead?”

“Dunno,” he said. “You wanna try that with words for stupid people?” You aren’t stupid. But even if I said it, he would never believe I meant it. “What do people in the Lower City do to lay a ghost?”

“Go to the cade-skiffs. Or the Resurrectionists. Depending on how they died and who you want knowing about it.”

“You know perfectly well that’s not what I’m asking.”

“How can I, when I ain’t heard half the conversation y’all been having?” He flinched at his own words and said, “Sorry,” to Gideon. “I didn’t mean—”

“We have been discussing ways in which to lay the dead. Particularly the dead of the Mirador. Gideon seems to think his goddess’s rites won’t help.” Gideon glared at me, and I glared back; he did not speak.

Mildmay said, “Mostly that stuff’s cade-skiff mysteries. Or necromancy, which I ain’t into and never have been. But, if you mean that maze we did, ain’t that sort of like Heth-Eskaladen?”

I looked at him blankly.

“The curtain-mazes at the Trials. That’s what they’re for.”

“What do you mean, ‘That’s what they’re for’?”

“You walk the maze,” Mildmay said patiently. “That’s how you get to Hell.”

I had to do a lot of explaining before Felix was satisfied, including telling most of the story of Heth-Eskaladen’s Trials, with both of them sitting there watching me and Gideon taking notes. Which I got to say I didn’t care for.

But I told the story, and Felix sat there and drank it all in like he’d never heard it before.

“Didn’t you go to the Trials as a kid?”

He shrugged. “Once or twice,” and then him and Gideon got going again, and I followed as best I could from Felix’s half—which is to say not hardly at all—but I got enough to figure that Gideon thought Felix’s idea was a really bad one, and Felix got his jaw set and that look in his eye like a bad-tempered mule, and I knew Gideon would’ve had better luck getting him to go to court naked than to let go of this thing he wanted. But it would only piss them both off if I said it, so I didn’t.

Finally—sometime after dinner this was, and they’d been going round and round for hours—Gideon stood up, sudden enough to make me jump, bowed to Felix, real stiff-like, bowed to me, and stalked out of the room like an offended cat. When the door had closed behind him, I raised my eyebrows at Felix.

Who had the grace to look embarrassed. “I shouldn’t have called him that, should I?”

“I don’t even know what all them words mean, and it didn’t sound good.”

He laughed. “I’ll make it up to him later. But just at the moment…” His voice seemed to go back on him. He looked away, twisting his rings. “Do you
truly
believe in ghosts?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Straight up.”

He nodded, still not looking at me, and said, “I need to tell you about something.”

“Okay,” I said after a moment when he hadn’t gone on. “What?”

“Something that happened—something that I
think
happened—when I was mad.” His voice got softer and softer all the way along, until at the end he was barely whispering.

“I thought you didn’t remember anything from then,” I said, trying to be practical because it wouldn’t do to have both of us making an opera about it.

“Bits and pieces,” he said, pushing his hair back from his face with both hands but still not looking at me. “No, not even that much. Scraps. Four or five sentences chosen at random, each from a different chapter of a very long romance. So I haven’t any context. I can’t tell you why I was by myself in the lower levels of the Mirador or what I thought I was escaping from, although I know I was escaping from
something
. But I think I met a ghost.”

“
Met
a ghost?”

“Yes. I cannot remember… it’s all warped somehow, but I know he showed me the crypt of the Cordelii.”

“Wow,” I said. “I mean, um, why?”

“Presumably he was a Cordelius,” Felix said. He sounded tired. “And I know he needed me to do something for him.”

I waited, along of being pretty sure he wasn’t done. He did look at me then, a quick glance and away, and said, “I think he wanted me to lay him.”

Another long pause, and I didn’t say nothing because I didn’t know what the fuck to say. Then Felix said, his words coming faster, “And of course, I couldn’t help him at the time, being mad and under interdict, and of course the Virtu’s binding on its necromantic foundation hadn’t been broken yet. But that isn’t true anymore, and I honestly think the maze might work. And if I am not wrong about as many things as Gideon thinks I am, it might solve the entire problem of the Mirador’s dead. The only hitch being…” He raised his eyebrows at me, like he was inviting me tell him what the only hitch was—except I saw so many hitches I didn’t know where to start.

Felix rolled his eyes. “The only hitch being the location of the Cordelius crypt.”

“You mean they don’t
know
?”

“It was lost. On purpose, I now suspect.”

“I don’t get it. Why would you want to lose a crypt?”

“The same reason they chose to lose the knowledge of the Virtu’s foundations. Because it was so much more convenient not to know.”

“And you want to find it?”

“The more I think about it, the more certain I am that that’s where the Virtu’s foundation was laid.”

“Sorry, what?”

“The foundations for a spell-casting of this nature have to be physically located. Two of the Virtu’s three foundations are obviously in the Hall of the Chimeras—the plinth and the oath-taking—but, well, speaking as a Ca-baline wizard, if the Cabal was going to use necromancy on the dead of the Mirador for anything, they’d do it in the crypt of the Cordelii. So that’s where I need to go.”

I still wasn’t sure that made sense, but I said, “Okay. So if nobody knows where this crypt is…”

“I found it once,” Felix said, with a grin that scared the living daylights out of me. “I want to see if I can do it again.”

He came with me.

I had not expected him to, certainly wouldn’t have dreamed of asking, but when I said he didn’t have to, he just gave me a one-shouldered shrug and said, “You’re gonna need somebody to find the way back.”

I couldn’t argue with that, and I was too selfish to try.

Mildmay didn’t even balk when I said we had to go now. I had my arguments marshaled—the fact that there was court in the morning and I would be expected to work with the Virtu in the afternoon, the need to keep secret how close I was skirting to the edge of necromancy, my bone-deep desire to discuss none of this with Mavortian von Heber—and I felt absurdly deflated when none of them was necessary. Mildmay just said, “Okay,” and waited for me to lead him where I would.

I wanted to yell at him not to trust me, to take him by the shoulders and shake him until he understood that I was treacherous and fickle and as cruel as a cat playing with a half-dead mouse. But he knew all of that already, and he trusted me anyway.

“To start, we need to go down,” I said and led the way to the nearest staircase that would allow us to do so, deliberately ignoring my own knowledge of how hopelessly farcical this idea was. Because there was one truth about the relationship between thaumaturgy and architecture that I did not need Gideon to tell me: the Mirador, a citadel of wizardry for all the long centuries of its existence, had… not magic of its own, but something that might be called sensitivity. It spawned coincidences in its halls like maggots from a dead dog—and it occurred to me as we emerged into a narrow corridor, dust-shrouded except for a blurry track down the center, that perhaps the Mirador’s coincidences were somehow related to the huphantike, the labyrinth of fortune. There were three places on the floor of the Hall of the Chimeras, each about the size of a gorgon, that were always ice-cold. There was a room along the Stoa Errata—I had forgotten which one, but I could find it again with five minutes’ exploration—that smelled of smoke and burning flesh, no matter how many cleansings were performed. Books fell off the shelves of the Février Archive, randomly and without cause. There were other such phenomena, others and others; to list them all would take the length of a night.

And if you went about looking in the right way, in the Mirador you would often find what you sought.

It had been many years since I had done it, as it made Shannon nervous and unhappy when I disappeared into the abandoned levels of the Mirador for hours on end, but I thought I could still remember the trick of it. It was not so different, in its way, from the methods Thamuris and I used to explore the Khloïdanikos.

It involved a good deal of what Thamuris called surrender and what I preferred to call openness. I had not known what this necessary state was before—probably if I had, I would have been unable to achieve it. To anyone taught by Malkar Gennadion, this sort of deliberate vulnerability seemed a suicidally stupid idea. And Malkar had proved how damaging it could be by forcing me open in his destruction of the Virtu. I thought, as Mildmay and I crossed a great pentagonal room with running hounds inlaid in seven different woods as a border around its marquetry floor, that I had more to be grateful to Thamuris for than I had realized. He had taught me that openness had a purpose, that it was an asset, not merely a weakness.

Without him, I doubted I would have understood what the Khloïdanikos showed me.

We moved deeper and deeper into the Mirador, Mildmay, my witch-lights, and I. Mildmay padded silently at my heels—like a familiar in the stories about wizards I had heard as a child, though I’d never met a wizard who had a familiar or had the first idea how one would go about acquiring such a thing.

Simple, I thought bitterly. Just cast the obligation d‘âme.

Every time I looked back, Mildmay’s eyes were wide and unearthly in the glow of the witchlights, and he was staring around with the unself-conscious wonder of a child. I nearly jumped out of my skin when, after an hour or more, his deep voice said behind me, “That’s the Raphenius crest.”

We were passing through a ballroom, the floor a vast black and white checkerboard sweep, the plaster on the walls cracked and fallen away in patches to show the unforgiving stone of the Mirador. I followed the direction of Mildmay’s pointing finger and saw on a piece of plaster that was cracked and flaking but not yet fallen, a crest of two lions rampant, back to back, the interlaced feathers of their wide white wings like armor along their flanks. I had never seen it before in my life.

“Raphenius?” I said and was pleased it didn’t come out in a squeak.

“It would’ve been them instead of the Cordelii if Claudine Raphenia had just been born Claude. She gave it a good try, though. Which is why you ain’t heard of ‘em. Paul Cordelius wasn’t a nice guy.”