Corambis (38 page)

I realized as I was climbing the stairs up Caliban Hill on a sharp, windy Mercoledy, trying to think of another way to explain the meta phorical nature of magic to my earnest, industrious, uncomprehending Corambin students, that I wished Gideon were here, not in the guilt- and grief- stricken way I wished I had been able to save him, the way I wished I could speak to him just once more, to tell him how sorry I was, but simply because he would love this challenge, would love discussing it— and arguing about it— with me.

I didn’t know how long Gideon had been dead. I had lost track of time somewhere in the rain and mud between Mélusine and Bernatha. Mildmay would know, but I wasn’t going to ask him. It was better if I didn’t try to keep track of the time. Better not to know how many months Gideon had been dead; better not to know how many days I had lived with the bindingby- obedience like a smothering weight on my chest. I kept myself focused on my teaching, on my reading, on not sliding back into the bad old habit of taking my frustrations out on Mildmay.

As a lecturer at the Institution, I was given an office in a building called, for no reason that I could discern, the House. It was a nice room, large- windowed, and its primary purpose was as a place where the students in my classes could find me if they needed to. Thinking of the hours one could spend in the Mirador trying to track down an errant colleague, I quite saw their point. There was a flaw in the design, however, namely that if the students could find me, so could other people. Letters started arriving before the brass plaque with my name on it had been fastened to the door— mostly invitations to events I did not wish to attend, although some of them were even more bizarre— and later that Mercoledy, I looked up at a knock on the door and found a complete stranger saying, “Mr. Harrowgate?”

He was a middle- aged Corambin, indistinguishable from the multitudes save that his tailoring was better than average, though not as good as, for instance, the Duke of Murtagh’s.

“Yes?” I said warily.

He came in, shutting the door behind him, and leaned across my desk to say fervently, “You have to help me!”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, leaning away from him.
“You can explain it to them,” he said, still fervent. “
You
know that it worked.”
“That what worked?” I said. “Who
are
you?”
And he looked at me reproachfully and said, “Edwin Beckett.”
I shoved to my feet in a strange mixture of fury and panic and blistering humiliation. “What are you doing here?” I said, my voice a hiss instead of a shout. “What do you want?”
“They’re going to take the Clock of Eclipses away from me,” he said. “You can’t let them.”
“Take the . . . It’s a Titan Clock! You can’t
take
it anywhere.” “The Institution,” Beckett said in a thin, precise voice, “is forming a research committee to investigate the Clock of Eclipses. They inform me that no one of lesser rank than an adept second grade will be a member. They
tell
me this is to ensure that only the highest standards of research and thaumaturgy are met. They say they are concerned about amateurs endangering themselves.
Amateurs.
” He snorted. “You can see what they’re doing, can’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, “and I approve.”
It almost literally staggered him; he stared at me, mouth agape, as if he had never imagined I might side against him.
“Mr. Beckett,” I said, “I don’t know why the Clock of Eclipses started again
and neither do you
. What I do know is that you and your friends nearly killed me, or at the very least burned my magic out of me like a spent lucifer. And I furthermore know that no responsible act of magic is predicated on rape. And I know that I want you out of my office. Now.”
He stared at me, forehead wrinkling. “Rape? But you’re a shadow. You like that sort—”
“If it hadn’t been rape, it wouldn’t have worked,” I said. Abruptly, I could bear the conversation— could bear
him
— no longer.
“OUT.”
I strode around the desk, past him. Yanked the door open.
He left the office, then turned. “I’ll speak to Virtuer Ashmead. Tell him what sort of person he’s—”
“Is that a threat, Mr. Beckett? Funny how it sounds exactly like what you came here to ask me to do.” And I slammed the door in his face. Then leaned against the door, feeling myself trembling, and slowly slid down it, for my knees would not support me. I wished Mildmay were here, not least because he would have broken Edwin Beckett’s nose. But I had told him not to come with me, knowing that he would be bored, and I was a grown man, wasn’t I? I could take care of myself.
“Oh quite,” I said in a bare wobbling whisper and swallowed hard against a giggle that I knew would turn hysterical.
I was still sitting there when there was another knock on the door.
“What?” I said; there was a rough edge to my voice that might have been temper or might have been tears, and I myself wasn’t sure which.
“Felix?” Not Edwin Beckett. Corbie. I picked myself up in a scrambling hurry and opened the door. She was standing in the hallway half- poised, it looked like, to flee.
“Come in,” I said and raked my hair out of my eyes. “I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
“I don’t want to bother you,” she said.
“No, please. Come in.”
She did, hesitantly, giving me quick uncertain glances under her pale eyebrows, and perched on the edge of the room’s second chair. I made my way back behind my desk and sat down and said, “You were right. I should have brought charges.”
“Sorry?”
“Edwin Beckett. He was just here.”
“He was
here
?” She looked around as if she expected him to jump out of a corner at her. “What did he want?”
“Nothing I could help him with. But enough of my ridiculous little melodramas. What brings you here?”
Although she attended my class faithfully, I hadn’t otherwise seen much of Corbie; the Circle, in the person of Virtuer Ashmead, had insisted that if she was to study magic at the Institution, she had to take classes at the Women’s College. It was too late to enroll her for this quarter, so I had argued that it was unfair to charge her tuition, and Ashmead had agreed. I had been sad, but also relieved that she was getting proper instruction, and I had hoped that her failure to seek me out meant that she was happy and learning, but now her chin came up and she announced flatly, “I’m not taking those stupid classes anymore.”
I must have looked as if I were going to argue, because she plunged on, “I don’t fit in, and they all know I don’t fit in, and they’re
stupid
, and if this is what learning magic is, I might as well go home. At least at home, I’m just a jezebel. I’m not a performing
dog
.”
“Who’s making you feel like a performing dog?” I said, grasping for something I might be able to help with. “Is Olive Bridger—”
“Oh for the Lady’s sake, Felix, it’s all of them! And Bridger ain’t the worst—not by a long shot. All the girls can tell I don’t have enough education for this, and the teachers are worse. They look at us
all
like that, like girls doing magic is just kind of funny, and they’ll pat us on the head and when we get bored, we’ll run along home and do our
sewing
.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” I asked, for this was clearly no new problem.
“You got enough to deal with,” she said and added with clear discomfort, “I mean, the choke- binding and everything.”
“It’s not
that
bad,” I said. She looked as if she might argue, so I said quickly, “Look. I’ll talk to Ashmead and see if we can come to some sort of accommodation— I want you to be able to qualify as a practitioner if you want to— but they
still
can’t prevent you from attending my class. I suppose they
could
forbid me to meet with you here on campus, but they have no control over visitors I choose to entertain in my own home. So you don’t need to give up. Unless”— for it suddenly occurred to me that there might be other reasons for her to want to go back to Bernatha—“are you all right for money?”
“Oh yeah,” she said, carelessly enough that I thought she was telling the truth. “I got a whatchamacallit— an accommodation with Mrs. Davidge. I do mending, and I got room and board. So I’m all right.”
“Good,” I said. “I will talk to Ashmead, but in the meantime, keep coming to class. And for goodness’ sake,
tell
me next time you have a problem.”
She nodded and gave me a relieved smile, and we talked about other things for a while— Corbie was having no significantly greater success in grasping the theory of thaumaturgic architecture than my other students— but as she was getting up to leave, she hesitated. “Are you gonna have more problems with that Mr. Beckett?”
“No,” I said and felt the lightness of truth as I said it. “There’s nothing he can do to me now.”

On Geovedy I expected no visitors, it having been made clear to me that the negotiations over my marriage were between Murtagh and Vanessa. I was merely a necessary incidental.

I paced the main room of the nursery, wondering if this was what the rest of my life would entail. Murtagh said he intended to make me Warden of Grimglass, but what meant that truly? That I would pace a room on the far western coast of Corambis instead of in the heart of Esmer? No Corambin community would want me as their lord, but perhaps they would accept, were it in name only, were they dependents in truth of— as for instance— His Grace the Duke of Murtagh. He would send Wyatt or another of the young men of Roderick Lapwing’s ilk, and I would be prisoned there just as truly as I had been prisoned in Bernatha.

Had reached this stage in my profitless meditations when the door creaked open and Julian Carey said, “Mr. Brightmore?”
“I think,” said I, “that you might call me Kay.”
“Kay,” said he and added shyly, “Thank you. I, um, I was wondering if you might like to go somewhere today.”
“ ‘Somewhere’?” said I.
“I thought you might like to choose.”
“Is a kind thought, but I know nothing of Esmer. Could not even begin to make such a choice.”
“Then would you like . . .” A faint jingling, as if he shifted from foot to foot.
“Yes?”
“Cyriack said if I brought you to the Mammothium, they’d lift the spells so that you could touch the mammoth.”
“I cry your mercy. The mammoth?”
Julian explained eagerly and at length, although his explanation made very little sense. “An ancient monster?” I thought of the Veddick.
“You won’t believe the tusks,” Julian said gleefully.

G

The Mammothium was part of the campus of the Grevillian Institution, the magicians’ university. “We’ll take the fathom,” Julian said as we started down the front steps of Carey House.

“The fathom?” I said and nearly missed a step.

“I’ve got enough pennies,” Julian said, which had not at all been my concern.
The cursed Brightmore pride rose up again. “Good,” said I.
I did not let myself clutch at Julian’s arm as we started down the stairs of the fathom station. But then it occurred to me, horribly, that if he had been nursing a grudge, the most perfect revenge he could choose would be to abandon me here, beneath the earth, with the uncaring crowds and the howls of the trains, and my fingers tightened spasmodically.
“Kay?” said Julian. “That— ow!”
My common sense returned to me. Julian Carey couldn’t carry a grudge in a bucket. “Sorry,” I said, straightening my clawed fingers. “I just . . .” But there was no way to explain without humiliating myself and hurting Julian, who had more than atoned for abandoning me in Our Lady of Mirrors. “Sorry.”
“Here’s the platform,” Julian said. “It won’t be long.”
The rush and howl of the trains was all around me, directionless. The Veddick called for its brethren and was not answered. Was that better or worse than to hear your kin answer you and yet never find them? Or to find them, and in that finding crash and rend, to kill those you loved even as you were killed by them?
Would be fit for nothing save the lunatic asylum an I did not find some less morbid imaginings. I said to Julian, “How came you to this Mammothium, then, if it belongs to the magicians?”
I attended most carefully— as we boarded the train and rode in rattling, bucketing chaos beneath the city, and disembarked again— to Julian’s explanation about his Professor Dombey and an Adept Gower and the mammothmonster and how once they had learned how old it was, that was apparently not the end of the matter— as I would have thought it, for what more did one need to know about such a creature if one was assured it and its kind were no longer living?— but merely the beginning of all the questions which the professors and the magicians could think to pose. Julian had attended Professor Dombey’s lectures on the mammoth and been smitten, whether with the mammoth or the professor I could not quite discern, and had pursued his own questions from the University to the Institution and to the young magicians of the Mammothium. His enthusiasm about Cyriack Thrale was more rather than less deserving of Isobel’s word “soppy,” and I found myself unworthily hoping that Mr. Thrale would not be in evidence when we reached the Mammothium.
I followed Julian’s guidance off the train and out of the station, and followed still, obedient as any dog, across the campus of the Institution, through the strong heat of sunshine and the rising and ebbing babble of young men arguing, and up more steps and into the Mammothium.
Julian was greeted cheerfully by a baritone who said, “Thrale said I should lift the wards on Henry for you, right?”
“If it’s not a bother,” Julian said, shy again.
“Not a bit,” said the baritone. “I wanted to tinker with them anyway. Something Mr. Harrowgate said in lecture made me think I could do a better job with them.”
“Mr. Harrowgate?” said I.
“Dean Ashmead hired him to teach,” said the baritone. “About how magic works in Mélusine. It’s very interesting, and I think there are some applications—”
Had heard someone thump up the stairs outside; now the door opened, and Julian said, “Thrale!”
“Hello, Carey,” said a voice I remembered from Our Lady of Mirrors a week and a half ago. “And this must be Kay Brightmore.”
I disliked the way he said it. “And you are Cyriack Thrale. Have heard much about you.”
“I was just going to take the wards down,” said the baritone. “Unless you want to do it?”
“Yes, I’ll take care of it, thanks, Clayforth,” said Thrale. “You must be busy.”
“Oh, a trifle,” said Clayforth. “Just let me know when you’re ready to put them back up. I’ve got some ideas.”
“All right.” A confused noise of footsteps— one set going away to the left, and another circling clockwise in a fashion which told me this room was very large, but otherwise made no sense.
Then Thrale said, “There. The wards are down, so you can do what ever it is you wanted, Carey.” And I still disliked his tone.
But Julian said, “Come on, Kay,” and led me forward, within the ring of the circle the footsteps— Thrale’s footsteps— had paced out. He put my hand on something and said, “This is Henry- the- Mammoth.”
It was slick and grainy and hard; I found I could barely close my hand around its circumference. I followed the length of it down as it curved extravagantly and tapered into a point that was blunt but no bigger around than my little finger.
“That’s the tusk,” said Julian.
I reversed direction and followed the sweep of the tusk back up and up, and up, until finally, well above my head, I found the spread of the skull.
“A monster in truth,” I said. I worked my way slowly from what I could reach of the skull, around and down to the shoulder. Followed the massive bones of the leg down to a foot with four strangely delicate toes. Then retraced the leg to find the ribs like the slats of a garden fence.
Thrale broke away from a quiet- voiced conversation with Julian to say, “Some of those we actually had to make— carved them down from whale ribs.”
I had begun this mostly to please Julian— and because it was of a certainty more interesting than pacing the nursery floor. But now I found I did wish to
know
, to be able to imagine this beast in its entirety. I went back carefully to its skull. “Julian?”
“Yes, Kay?”
“How much more of its skull is there above my hand?”
“At least two feet,” said Julian
Not like the skull of a pig, then. “Has it a neck more like a horse or a cow?”
“Much more like a cow.”
“Thank you.”
I felt the width of its skull, found its jaw behind and beneath the rack of its tusks. The jaw seemed almost ridiculously small, but with those monstrous tusks— I put my hands out, feeling one tusk to each side of me, here as much around as young trees— perhaps this creature had had no need for impressive teeth.
Julian said, “Kay, if you’d like, Cyriack has offered to show us his bog people.”
“His what?”
Another of Julian’s explanations more notable for its excitement than its cogency: dead people brought out of peat bogs. “And you
study
them?” I said. “Why not just give them decent burial?”
Thrale and Julian both tried to answer me at once.
I turned around— still between the mammoth’s tusks so that I did not need to fear becoming disoriented— and said, “Let us go examine your dead people then.” Was
still
better than pacing the nursery of Carey House.