Corambis (26 page)

It was a good thing I had Felix, or I would’ve drowned in that fucking bathtub three times over. And it was a good thing he wouldn’t listen when I told him not to come along. Powers.

What was nice, though, and it was the first thing I’d felt really good about in a long time, was that he didn’t try nothing. He could’ve groped me, and he didn’t. He didn’t stare at me. He didn’t even say nothing, and I’d really been expecting he would. Because when he wanted something, he pushed. He pushed until you pushed back, and then he pushed some more. I mean, we’d
had
that conversation about how I didn’t want to sleep with him, and that hadn’t stopped him bringing it up again.

Maybe this time I’d pushed back hard enough.
Or maybe he was honestly trying not to be a prick about it. The way he did look at me when he looked— little sideways glances and no eye contact— was the way he got when he thought I was right to be mad at him. Because of course he never fucking apologized, even when he knew he ought to. So he’d do that twitchy no eye contact thing like he thought I was going to hit him until I gave up and forgave him for what ever the fuck it was he’d done.
But I wasn’t mad at him now, and he wasn’t acting like he thought I was, except for the way we just didn’t have eye contact no more and especially when I took my clothes off. And, I mean, it wasn’t like I could ask,
So why ain’t you staring at me while you got the chance?
And okay, I knew part of it was that he was embarrassed— that ain’t the right word because it was worse than embarrassed. He was ashamed that I knew what he’d done, although how he’d thought he was going to hide it I don’t fucking know. And he was even more ashamed that I knew he’d done it to punish himself. Because, you know, he’s a smart guy. If he’d had his head on straight, he would’ve seen that wasn’t his only option. But he’d
wanted
to make a martyr of himself, and powers and saints, I guess that’s a pun.
I didn’t figure that if I asked, he’d say anything to the point. He wouldn’t undress with me in the room, and leaving aside the scars on his back, he didn’t have no more modesty than a tabby cat. So he didn’t want me to see, and I got to admit I didn’t want to look. And it wasn’t like he wasn’t
talking
to me, in any of the Great Septad and six ways he had of doing that, including the one where he talked my ear off. No, we were having real conversations, and everything, and he even remembered his promise to help me learn to read better and we were actually working on it. It was just this one thing where he wasn’t saying nothing and I wasn’t saying nothing and it was like waiting for a thunderstorm to break.
And I’m pretty good at waiting— got a lot of practice, thanks— but I’m a fucking terrible liar, and that’s what this felt like, like we were lying to each other by not talking about it.
So the night before we left Bernatha— he’d gone out and bought train tickets and come back all flustered and red in the face because somebody’d been nice to him— laying there in the dark, I said, “Felix?”
I knew he wasn’t asleep, but setting out to have a serious conversation with him was kind of like planning a burglary. You did it step by step and you never assumed nothing.
“Yes?” he said. I rolled up on one elbow, and I could just make him out, laying on his back and staring up into the dark like there was something written on the ceiling and he was reading it.
“I’m gonna say this wrong,” I said, “because I always do, but— are you okay?”
At least I got his attention. He rolled onto his side, and I knew he was squinting at me. “Of course I’m o— all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“If you were hurt— I mean, really hurt— you’d tell me, right? You’d let me help?”
“I’m not hurt,” he said and sat up. “Are
you
all right? What brought this on?”
“Never mind,” I said, and I flopped back down on my back. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Do not
never mind
me in that tone of voice,” he said, sharpish but not nasty. “You’re worr . . . Oh.”
He got it. I was glad it was dark, because neither of us had to try to look at the other. I could just lay there and stare at the ceiling and feel like the world’s prize half- wit dog.
After a while, Felix said softly, “What are you really trying to ask?”
Powers and saints, why do I start these things? But he didn’t sound like he was getting ready to tear into me, so I said, “I ain’t trying to pry or nothing.”
“I know that,” and I thought maybe he was smiling a little.
“And maybe it’s just that I don’t know nothing about it. I mean, maybe it ain’t no big deal, and I’m just—”
“Mildmay. You’re babbling. Which you don’t do.”
Oh fuck me sideways. I took a breath and just said it: “What ever thing you got yourself into must’ve been pretty nasty. I mean, going by the bruises and all. And I just wanted . . . I mean, I figure you ain’t hurt too bad ’cause you’re moving okay and all and not feverish or nothing, but . . . I mean . . .
inside
, you know, in your
self
, are you okay?”
Felix said, “You’re asking about my feelings,” like he couldn’t quite believe it.
I put my arm over my eyes, because even in the dark I was blushing. “I guess so.”
“I’m not going to go crazy again,” he said, and I winced, because I’d been hoping he wouldn’t figure out I was worried about that. And, you know, I wasn’t worried a
lot
. But he’d told me what Strych had done and there was that stupid fucking dream about the wolves that wouldn’t leave me alone, and I didn’t know. I’d never been into the whole tarquins and martyrs thing, so I didn’t know how you could tell when it felt like rape and when it didn’t. But with the way he hadn’t been looking at me, I’d been afraid that maybe this had felt more like rape than otherwise.
“I know that,” I said, even though I’d been worried. “I was just . . .”
“Worried about me,” he said, and his voice was kind of funny, light and a little unsteady and even more breathless than usual.
“Felix?” And now I was worried all over again. I sat up, and would’ve got up and gone over to him, except that I saw the white blotch of his hand come up.
“I’m all right,” he said, like what he meant was
Leave me alone.
“I just hadn’t . . . well, I suppose I hadn’t expected you to care.”
My jaw dropped, but before I could figure out what the fuck to say, he went on: “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I know you care. I meant, I didn’t expect you to . . .” I heard him take a deep breath, the same way I had. “Prostitution is a filthy business.”
“So’s murder for hire,” I said, sharper maybe than I should’ve, but powers and blessed fucking saints, where the fuck was he getting the idea I thought I was better than him?
“I know,” he said. “I just meant, the details are . . . sordid and humiliating and I wouldn’t blame you if you were repulsed by me.”
He sped up as he went, so the last half of the sentence was basically one word. Which told me I’d better go slow and careful and think about what I was saying before I said it.
“This isn’t about—”
“No!” he said fiercely, although even if the lamps had been lit, I wouldn’t’ve been able to see his face, because he had his head buried in his hands. “I was . . . I was wrong. I have to respect your choices, and I forgot that.”
“You pushed,” I said.
“Yes. And I shouldn’t have. I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
You were lonely and scared and hating yourself.
But I didn’t say that. “So we’re not talking about why I won’t sleep with you.”
“No,” he said, not as fierce now. “Not that.”
“We’re talking about being friends. About why I’m your friend.”
“Are you?”
“Well, I try to be,” I said, and that made him laugh a little.
“I know. Sometimes I make it difficult.”
“Sometimes you do,” I said, not agreeing to be mean, but because it was the truth. “But what I was trying to say was, I
do
want to be your friend. And I’m not gonna change my mind or think less of you or something, just because you’ve done stuff you ain’t proud of. I mean, we can trade if you want. You tell me how much money you made fucking, and I’ll tell you how much money I made killing people.”
“I don’t know. I never saw the money.”
“Yeah, well, neither did I.”
I don’t know which one of us started laughing first, and I’m not sure how long it took us to calm down again. But finally, Felix said, “You know, for depraved and unnatural monsters, we’re not very good at it.”
“Prob’ly time to try something else,” I said and yawned— it’s the worst of the Winter Fever, how even when you can breathe again and you don’t feel like shit all the fucking time, you can’t lift a hairbrush without having to lie down for an hour. “I’m just saying, if you want to talk to me, you can. I’d . . .” And I was sleepy enough that telling the truth wasn’t as hard as it’d been. “I’d like to listen. If it’s what you want.”
“Thank you,” Felix said, and I knew for once he’d heard me right.

The schedule by which trains ran in Corambis was so complex that they published it in a book, a neat little sextodecimo volume bound in green leather. It was called
Ottersham’s Compendium of the Corambin Railway System
and referred to in conversation as if it were itself a person, as in
Ottersham says the train to Copperton only runs on alternate Venerdies
. I was told by the clerk at Waddilow & Berowne that the Usaran savages consulted Ottersham as an oracle; although I wasn’t sure I believed it, I would have liked a detailed explanation of the numerological system of divination they allegedly used.

I purchased Ottersham, and with it, a smaller, paperbound pamphlet entitled
Ottersham’s Errata for the Second of the One Hundred Fifty- second
, which was an appendix detailing all the points at which Ottersham was wrong. “It’s mostly the Insurgence,” said the clerk, “and things will probably get back to normal fairly soon now that we’ve got a governor again and everything. But for now, you’d better check the
Errata
.”

The journey Mildmay, Corbie, and I were facing— and for which Corbie was little better prepared than we were, as she had never been out of Bernatha in her life— was a complicated one. We had to take a train from Bernatha to Wildar, and then take a different train from Wildar to Esmer. Trying to coordinate the schedules of the Bernatha– Wildar and the Wildar– Esmer trains simply in Ottersham was hard enough; adding the
Errata
to the mix made the whole thing so nightmarish I had surrendered and thrown myself on the mercy of the ticket clerks at Clave, Bernatha’s train station, where it had turned out the conundrum was even more complicated than I had realized, for Esmer had three train stations, Lily- of- Mar, Fornivant, and Pollidean, and I had no idea which one I wanted.

“I need to go to the Institution,” I said helplessly, bracing myself for the inevitable
Which Institution?
But in fact the clerk, a plump young redheaded woman with tawny, freckled skin, said, “Oh, then you want Lily- of- Mar,” and proceeded with perfect aplomb to book three tickets from Clave to Dennifell Station in Wildar, and then from Dennifell to Lily- of- Mar, as if navigating Ottersham and its
Errata
were the simplest thing in the world. “There. The train leaves Clave at nine- thirty- two on Martedy, and you’ll reach Lily- of- Mar at twenty- twenty- seven,” she said. “If you’re going to the Institution, you’ll want a hotel in Ingry Dominion, which is cheaper than anything in Mar anyway. Would recommend the Golden Hare, if you don’t already have somewhere in mind. Is clean and cheap and the landlady’s the widow of a railroad man.”
She handed me a folder with the tickets: crimson pasteboard printed with black. “Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been very kind.”
Her smile was beautiful. “Is why I like my job.”

I’d told Corbie to meet us at Clave, for I suspected Mildmay would be as much as I could manage, if not rather more. Not that he had any wish to be difficult, but it was still as much as he could do to get to the lavatory and back unaided. I wasn’t sure we should be making the journey to Esmer so soon, but Mildmay was determined. And I could not help admitting, when he asked me outright, that I wanted desperately to get away from the ticking of the Clock of Eclipses. Every time I tried to go into a trance, the ticking shook me out again. I couldn’t ignore it; I couldn’t work with it— I’d tried that once. But not a second time. It showed me everything drenched in noirance, showed me the rubies, still hidden in Mildmay’s boot, pulsing to the rhythm the clock laid down.

Mildmay said, and his dreams concurred, that the Clock of Eclipses reminded him too much of Juggernaut and the Bastion. “I ain’t gonna get better with it ticking at me all the time, so let’s just
go
, okay?”

And I’d said yes.
I’d hired a vinagry, paying extra to cross the causeway rather than having to negotiate Mildmay in and out of a gondol— even though I found vinagries both ridiculous and disturbing. I perfectly understood the satirical engraving I saw in one of the newspapers, of a man, in harness and blinkers, pulling a vinagry in which a horse, elegantly dressed, reclined at leisure. But it was an eco nom ical mode of transportation, and sensible for Bernatha, and it would get Mildmay to Clave Station without exhausting him.
Getting him down the stairs was disaster enough. We’d known his lame leg was going to be worse after all this time confined to bed, and thought we were prepared. He had the cane Rinaldo of Fiora had given him, and I was right beside him, ready to support him if he needed it. But with the first step down, his knee joint made an ugly popping noise, and his leg simply buckled. I made a frantic grab and caught his coat collar, but if he hadn’t had the reflexes and sense to throw his weight backwards, all I would have accomplished was falling down the stairs with him, and while misery might love company, that seemed a bit excessive.
“Fuck,” Mildmay said shakily after a moment. “Sorry about that.”
“Are you all right?”
“I think so. Powers. Ain’t had that happen in a long time.”
“It’s happened before?”
“Back in Troia,” he said, as if it hardly mattered, and Mrs. Lettice appeared at the bottom of the stairs with a cluster of maids behind her, wanting to know if we were all right.
In the end, the vinagry man came inside, and he and I carried Mildmay down the stairs. Mildmay hated it but endured, his face red and his teeth digging into his lower lip in a way that made his scar even uglier. He was delighted, though, by the vinagry, saying, “Wouldn’t this make the Handsome Men as sick as dogs?” as we steadied him into it. I had no idea what he meant, but I was glad for anything that made him happy. I noticed when I climbed in after him, though, that all the color had gone from his face, and he leaned back into the cushions and shut his eyes.
“We don’t have to leave today,” I said guiltily, “If you’d rather—”
“What, go back up all them stairs? No thanks.” He opened his eyes and frowned at me. “I’m fine. I mean, all I got to do is sit down all day anyhow, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Felix,” he said, in a particularly long- suffering tone. “Let me make my own choices here, okay?”
“Right,” I said, and was glad to be able to turn away and watch the vinagry man strapping our carpetbags onto the back of his cart; I’d hidden the rubies in the bottom of one, bundled into the toe of a sock. Mildmay muttered something under his breath, but I didn’t hear it clearly and I didn’t ask him to repeat himself.
Mildmay looked eagerly at everything, even if he didn’t have the energy to lean forward, and I told him about the things I could— things Corbie had told me and things I had read in Lilion. As we rattled across the causeway, he frowned. “Weren’t we in a boat on the way over, or did I just dream that?”
“No, we were in a boat. A gondol.” I pointed at one sculling past toward the Crait.
“You must’ve hated the fuck out of that,” he said.
“Oh, don’t sound so gleeful about it.”
“Well, considering what I had to do to get you in the boat out to the
Morskaiakrov
, I’m thinking this is payback. I’m just sorry I missed it.”
“You should be,” I said darkly. “Because it will never happen again.” And I felt rewarded sevenfold for the misery of that crossing by his laughter.
Clave was a vast brick building, like a tunnel with all the surrounding earth removed, people streaming in and out of it as steadily as ants. “Good thing I left plenty of time,” I said, once we were standing on the pavement with our bags and the vinagry man had been hailed by another patron and trotted off.
“Um,” said Mildmay. “Yeah.” He edged a little closer to me.
“Are you all right?”
He glowered at me. “Ask me that again, and I swear by all the powers I’m gonna break your nose.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said and grinned at him.
He lost hold of his glower, said, “Yeah, okay. I’m good enough to get by on— just ain’t looking forward to this none, you know?”
I did know, could imagine what an ordeal this must represent in his fragile state. But we were already beginning to attract stares. I picked up our bags, hesitated a moment— but the worst he’d do was curse at me— and said, “If you want to, er, hold my arm, I won’t take it amiss.”
“Powers, do I look that bad?” He seemed astonished more than anything else; I winced a little at the evidence that he knew just how much I disliked being touched.
I said, “I don’t want to get separated,” which was true.
“Okay,” Mildmay said, eyeing the crowds. “I can see that.” He tucked his free hand neatly under my elbow, and I had to admit I was heartened by the contact, too.
Inside, there were people everywhere, rushing from one unknown place to another, arguing with ticket clerks, haranguing men in crimson and black uniforms with gold trim, exchanging greetings or farewells, standing in clumps and staring at us, which made Mildmay’s grip on my arm tighten until I said, “Ouch,” and he eased off.
Corbie found us— I was, as Fleur had once remarked, as good as a burning torch in a crowd— and came rushing over. “The Duke of Murtagh’s taking our train!” she blurted. “And I think he’s got Lord Rothmarlin with him!”
“Good morning, Corbie,” I said dryly. “Did you sleep well? And what in the name of the Virgin of Sothen did you do to your hair?” Instead of the untidy curls I was used to, Corbie’s hair was slicked flat against her skull and pulled into a smooth and complicated knot at the back of her head. It was also several shades darker. She was wearing a dark coat and a dark sheath skirt, none of the lace or exuberant colors of her normal wardrobe; she looked, in fact, nearly indistinguishable from any other woman in the station.
“Hair pomade,” she said, a trifle guiltily. “Didn’t want to go off to Esmer looking like a half- breed jezebel.”
“Half- breed?” Mildmay said.
“Yeah, you know. Half Ygressine. With the hair and the nose and all.” She looked from Mildmay to me very doubtfully. “You guys hadn’t noticed?”
Mildmay and I exchanged a glance. “We’d noticed your hair and, er, so on,” I said, “but I suppose we didn’t know what it meant.”
“Means my daddy was a sailor off one of the Ygressine ships that come in and out of Patient Harbor every damn day. It’s all I know about him.”
“I don’t even know that much,” Mildmay said matter- of- factly, and from her puzzled look, he turned to me. “Didn’t you tell her?”
“It didn’t seem relevant.”
“Powers,” he said. “You mean you didn’t want to talk about it.” He turned back to Corbie and said, still perfectly matter- of- fact, “Our mother, his and mine, was a whore. I don’t know nothing about my father except maybe he had green eyes.”
“We should get to the train,” I said, knowing it was obvious I was changing the subject and not caring.
But Mildmay said, “Oh powers and saints, with the crowds. Yeah. We’d better.”
It was easier than we’d feared. Mildmay and I were such obvious foreigners— even in Corambin clothing— that people’s inclination was to stop and stare, thus impeding other travelers, but giving Mildmay, Corbie, and me a clear path. And when someone saw and recognized the tattoos on my hands, people began actively getting out of my way, although I couldn’t even guess what they thought I might do. I’d have to ask Corbie about those Mélusinien novels her friend had recounted to her.
“Just like home,” Mildmay said, only loud enough for me to hear.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You think people in the Lower City don’t scramble to get out of y’all’s way? Only difference is, they don’t stop and gawk.” He was glowering again, this time in disapproval of the Bernathans’ bad manners; for no reason I could explain, that cheered me up im mensely.
There were signs pointing the way, handsomely painted in crimson and gold: “DEPARTURES FOR WILDAR.” They led us to a hall running the length of the station building, open to daylight at both ends. The train, the same brilliant crimson and gold as the signs, was perfectly alarming, a manufactory’s dream of Yrob the World Snake. The head of the train was jet- black with crimson and gold trim, long- snouted with a wide- mouthed chimney sprouting like a tree from its middle. I supposed it had to be the engine, the thing which somehow moved without horses to pull it, and which would, in its turn, pull all these carriages after it. It was making terrible noises, as if it had to give birth before it could start and its child had iron claws.
“Sacred bleeding fuck,” Mildmay said very softly. I was inclined to agree.