Corambis (22 page)

I can’t breathe, I can’t see, the world is burning around me. Fire is pouring out of me, from my cock and my hands and my eyes, and the darkness takes it in greedily. I can’t stop it. It’s Malkar again, taking my magic from me, and I can’t use my magic to fight back. And this is worse, although I didn’t think anything could be worse, because it isn’t stopping; the darkness is drawing more and more out of me. It could drain me entirely and still want more. And I can’t fight it. I don’t have anything to fight it with.

I can fight it.

At first I think I imagined it, but it speaks again:
An thou wilt let me, I can fight it. Needst but give me permission.
I drag in a breath to say yes, to give the voice anything it wants, and choke on the scent of rotting lilacs.
Fantôme. All my dreams of fire. The burning woman with her burning child. Revenge and fury and now I know why. Now I know what I crossed in the ruins of that long- gone house.
Now I am screaming, screaming without breath, and the voice is still speaking, promising me darkly,
They will die. They will all die for what they have done to thee. Do thou but let me in, Felix, most beloved, and no one will ever hurt thee again.
“No!” I howl, and I hear someone laughing, but they don’t know; they don’t have any idea.
I’m shoved forward, my hands clamped at the small of my back by someone’s grip, and someone’s body is pinning me down, someone’s cock is tearing me apart, the darkness is dragging all the life and truth and strength out of me, and the fantôme is still saying,
Let me in, Felix. Let me in and I will protect thee. Let me in and I will punish them. All of them. All those who have hurt thee. I will kill them for thee, most beloved, wilt thou but let me in.
Someone’s hand is fisted in my hair. Someone is thrusting, hard and harder. Darkness before me and the fantôme behind, and I cannot defend myself from both, not splayed and helpless and devastated as I am. I will fail, fall to one or the other, and there will be nothing but death and destruction, blood and fire and—
Someone stiffens, his grip agonizingly tight on my hair. I feel his climax, feel the throb and pulse; it shakes me like a terrier with a rat. Shakes me hard. And then again. And again. And I realize dimly, painfully, that it isn’t a human pulse, that it isn’t the body brutalizing mine that shakes me.
The darkness no longer pulls at me; the fantôme, baffled, retreats, although I know it’s there now, I know that deep current of fire and malice. Someone pulls away from me; my hands are dragged back to the shackles, but I barely notice, caught in the ratcheting mechanical pulse of the heart that surrounds me.
The Clock of Eclipses is running again.

I woke up coughing. I fucking hate the cough you get with the Winter Fever. What it feels like is that somebody’s grabbed your spine, right about the middle of your back, and is using it to shake you like a baby’s rattle. It hurts, but what’s worse than that is it’s scary.

When I could finally catch my breath, I looked for Felix, and found his little hooker friend staring at me like she thought I was going to cough up my liver or something. I said, “Where’s Felix?”

“Out.”
“Yeah, I can see that.
Where?
”
“I don’t know,” she said.
I pushed myself into a sitting position, although it hurt like a motherfucker.

“What are you doing?” Corbie said.
“I gotta find him. Something’s wrong.”
“What? No!” She bounced up off the cot and tried to shove me back

down. “You’re sick!”
“Don’t matter. I gotta find him.” And let’s not even talk about how much I hated that that little tiny gal could just shove me back down on the bed like I hadn’t sat up at all.

“He’s fine,” she said. “Really.”
“No, he fucking isn’t.
Where is he?
”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t
know
? Sacred bleeding scabbed- over fuck, what kind of

fuckhead are you? You can’t let him out on his own. Powers and saints, he can get lost in a
rain barrel
, and he don’t have no common sense at all, and Kethe only knows what he’s getting himself into, and fuck it, he’s in trouble and I have to help him before the wolves get him!”

And then, wouldn’t you know it, I started coughing. And I couldn’t stop, and I brought up some stuff in a really putrid shade of green, and I couldn’t even try to fight Corbie off when she started rubbing my back.

“Fuck me sideways ’til I cry,” I said, but it was kind of a wheeze and really fucking feeble.
“It’ll be all right,” Corbie said. “Really. You’ve been really sick and kind of out of your head, and I think maybe you’re confused—”
“I am not fucking confused,” I said, and this time I did manage to push her away and get up on one elbow.
“Before the
wolves
get him?” she said, and it just figured that the one time I wished somebody wouldn’t understand me, she heard me plain as daylight.
“Listen,” I said, “and never mind the fucking wolves. I swear by all the powers, I can find him, and I need to, because something seriously bad is happening and I gotta—”
At first, I didn’t even know what it was, but then it came again, and I did.
“What the fuck?” said Corbie. “What the fucking fuck?”
“It’s that clock,” I said, because I remembered what this was like, remembered it from the Bastion where you couldn’t get away from the ticking, even when you just wanted to beat your head against the nearest wall, beat it to a pulp, just to make it fucking stop. But nothing helped.
“Clock?” And her eyes went big as bell- wheels. “You mean the Clock of Eclipses? Somebody’s started the Clock of Eclipses?”
“That’s my guess,” I said. It was too late. Too fucking late. What ever it was, it’d happened, and I hadn’t saved Felix from it. I slumped back down on the bed, feeling like shit, my head pounding in time with the tick of the clock. “And what d’you wanna bet, what ever’s going on, Felix is right in the fucking middle of it?”
She hadn’t known him long, but she’d figured him out. “No takers,” said Corbie.

At first, I knew not what had woken me. I lay and hated my blindness, for noon and midnight looked now the same to me, cereus and passion indistinguishable. But the sound I was hearing— was not a dream, was not my own heartbeat. Was a
clock
. But was no clock in my room. Had there been, I would have heard it before. Would not have been woken by it as a sound I did not know.

Could not believe, no matter how closet- demented I became, that Tinder was sneaking in while I slept to leave clocks in my room.
But that meant this noise came from somewhere outside. I got out of bed, crossed to the door— easy enough now, for I had the room memorized whether I wished it or no— opened it. The ticking was neither louder nor softer in the hallway, and other than the ticking, the hallway was silent, meaning that it was probably closer to midnight than noon. Murtagh’s house hold, I had learned, was rarely still if His Grace was awake.
And the ticking persisted, not tremendously loud, but clearly audible, steady, directionless.
Edwin Beckett had wanted to start the Clock of Eclipses again, the gigantic, unnatural clock that lay beneath and through the Clock Palace. Blessed Lady, had he succeeded? Had his orgies succeeded where Gerrard had failed and died?
I knew the steps from my room to the sitting room, and I knew Murtagh’s room lay beyond that. I turned, counted, letting my fingertips brush the wall, for I had learned also how quickly I became disoriented. Found the sitting room. Knew how many steps it took to cross it with Tinder guiding me; knew it should be no different an I guided myself. Took one step, hesitated. Told myself not to run craven, took another step. Stopped dead, the world falling away from me again, with no company save that monstrous ticking.
“Kay?” said Murtagh. “What are you doing out here in the . . . oh never mind.”
“The ticking,” I blurted. “Dost hear it?”
“I do, yes,” Murtagh said. “That’s why I’m up, which I would not normally be at two- thirty in the morning, I assure you.”
I caught myself, reasserted some self- control. Was neither a child nor a woman to behave thus. “Is the Clock of Eclipses, think you?”
“I’m having trouble thinking of anything else it could be,” Murtagh said; his voice came closer as he spoke. “You should go back to bed. You didn’t even put your slippers on.”
They were, of course, Murtagh’s slippers, as everything I wore now belonged to Murtagh in truth.
“Am not cold,” I said.
“You’re mule- headed, is what you mean,” Murtagh said. “Come sit down anyway.”
I let him guide me to a chair. “It seems Edwin Beckett succeeded.”
“Yes,” said Murtagh. “And I would dearly like to know how.”

I lost most of the night. I didn’t know how many times I was fucked, or how many of them took their turn. They made me come again and again until I was racked with dry agonizing spasms, until my entire body felt raw. When they let me go, I slid down the wall— and I didn’t know how I’d gotten there, when I’d been unshackled, anything— and crawled, shivering wretchedly, until I found a corner, where I curled as tightly as I could and hoped to go unnoticed. I could, at that point, have taken the blindfold off— no one would have stopped me, or even cared— but that thought didn’t occur to me until much later.

They were celebrating, for they had started the Clock of Eclipses. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing, that that had been their
intention
, that they had brought me here and fucked me for the purpose of starting the clock, but since they couldn’t stop talking about it, I was eventually forced to accept that it was the truth. They had used me, not for plea sure, but in a thaumaturgical working that made not even the most minimal amount of sense. I remembered the Cymellunar Union of Angels, and wondered if any of these people expected to grow wings.

And then I tucked myself tighter into the corner and bit my lip until it bled to keep from shrieking with laughter.
Sometime later, there were hands. “Come on, morning glory,” someone said. “Time to go.”
I obeyed them because all I wanted was not to be hurt anymore. We climbed more stairs than I remembered coming down, and then there was a smell of damp and someone pushed a wet cloth into my hand. “Clean yourself up. Quickly now.”
I did the best I could blindfolded, and someone helped me with rough impatience, and then they gave me clothes— my clothes— and I dressed in frantic haste, although I couldn’t manage the buttons of my shirt. It didn’t matter; I dragged my coat on over it, and then there were hands again and more stairs, and then, “Come on, up you get,” and I was pushed up into a carriage.
It was probably the same carriage I’d ridden in the night before; I wondered if it was the same man sharing it with me. Then I wondered if he’d fucked me, and how many times, and turned my face toward the window just to be sure he couldn’t see it.
And the Clock of Eclipses was still pounding beneath us, the vibrations making me dizzy as the carriage descended the Crait. I’d been dizzy going up, I remembered, and it occurred to me that the hecate should be wearing off by now. I felt for my magic and did find it, but it was low and feeble and sullen, not strong enough to light one of Corbie’s candles.
We rattled across the causeway, and I found myself thinking, Please don’t let it be much farther because I don’t know how much longer I can keep from screaming. I couldn’t remember how long it had taken from Our Lady of Fogs to the causeway the night before. It hadn’t seemed like long then, but that had been a different world.
And then the carriage stopped; I was groping for the latch before the man touched me, and I managed to get out without falling. He descended, too, and caught my hand; I stiffened, but he said, “You did well,” and pressed a coin into my hand. “Your master’s on her way over.” And then he was gone, the carriage rattling away, vanishing into the early morning sounds and smells of a produce market.
Corbie’s voice: “Felix? Sweet merciful Lady, what did they do to you?”
I blurted, “You’re not my master.”
“No, of course not,” she said. “Are you all right? Do you, um, want to take the blindfold off?”
Which was the first time in hours that I remembered that I could. I clawed it off one- handed and dropped it; the sunlight made me squint, but it was worth it. Corbie, when I could make out her face, looked like she hadn’t slept at all. “Felix?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “And they paid me, at least.” I held my hand out, and Corbie’s face went slack with shock.
“Holy Lady,” she said breathlessly. “I thought I’d die and never see one of those.”
I looked down. There, in my palm, high relief on a silver coin, a golden angel saluted me with a golden sword.

After the Clock of Eclipses awoke, Murtagh evidently felt there was no longer any need to hide me, whether for my sake or anyone else’s. I was allowed to stay in the sitting room after breakfast, and thus to hear much of Murtagh’s concerns and his business in Bernatha.

Principally, his purpose seemed to be to prevent Glimmering’s clumsy intrigues from making matters in Caloxa worse than they already were. Glimmering— and his supporters in Corambis— wanted to make Bernatha the seat of Caloxan government; thus he had moved his headquarters here, brought cows, attempted to form an alliance with Clara Hume. Because of the rather peculiar laws pertaining to the Corambin army, Glimmering, as the conquering general, maintained considerable autonomy until the civil government was restored, thus Murtagh could not order Glimmering to move his headquarters to Wildar, nor could he compel him to do any number of other things, including releasing Gerrard’s body for burial. And he could not countermand Glimmering’s standing order that all matters pertaining to the Insurgence were to be dealt with in Bernatha. The governor would be able to, but the governor hadn’t been appointed yet. And thus Murtagh stayed in Bernatha, for he was not willing, he said, to leave the fates of Caloxan soldiers in Glimmering’s clumsy hands.

“It’s actually a rather delicate legal question,” he told me on his return from yet another adjudication. “Because of the nature of Caloxan kingship and the oaths sworn to a king, there’s some dispute whether it isn’t the
Corambin
oaths of loyalty that constitute treason for Caloxans. In any event, my feeling is that you are defeated enemies rather than suppressed traitors, and Corambis treats her enemies honorably.”