Mélusine (29 page)
Authors: Sarah Monette
"The lunatic asylum." He snorts, amused. "I am glad they had the sense to bring you back where I could reach you."
"You can't…" I say weakly, not even finishing the sentence, as it becomes apparent that he
can.
can.
He takes my magic, as he has before, as Robert has, as well. The pain is like a flensing knife along my nerves, but I am cushioned by the dream in which we stand; this time I am not ripped free of myself.
The broken Virtu does not interest him; he goes after the spells weakened by its destruction and only imperfectly repaired, the spells of ward and guard that have protected the Mirador for close to two hundred years.
He sweeps them aside like a housekeeper attacking cobwebs. In a flourish of malice he kindles fire across the roofs of the Vielle Roche; the Crown of Nails gains its own crown, a halo of fire against the night. I am tugging fruitlessly against his grip, but his hands are like stone.
He is working deeper, searching for the spells of binding that were the first and best of the Cabal's reforms; they created spells that hold the wizards of the Mirador—the magic of the Mirador—together without any conscious effort on any one wizard's part. Those spells make the Mirador formidable, make it more than just a collection of squabbling academics and self-dazzled show-offs. With those spells, we are the Mirador; without them, we are a group of individuals of varying levels of ability and training, and we become, as the old saying has it, only as strong as our weakest link. If he finds those spells, we are doomed; the Empire will overrun us before summer.
He has my magic; I cannot touch it. I have nothing but the madness and damage Malkar himself has given me. But this is my dream, and I do not have to be able to do magic in order to use my dreams. I found the yellow-eyed man, the real one, through dreaming, not through magic.
I change the dream. Instead of Thaddeus's sitting room, we are now standing in the chapel of St. Crellifer. The darkness around us is full of ghosts, and on the walls, St. Crellifer writhes in the seven stages of his martyrdom. His blood drips down the walls to puddle on the floor.
I don't know if I truly believed this alteration would do anything, but it does. Malkar falters, the rhythm of
his magic-working broken. I have shifted the symbolism of his spell-casting, and for this one precious instant, his spells will not work.
He forces the dream back into the Mirador—not into Thaddeus's sitting room, which he has never seen in waking life, but into his workroom; my counter to that is reflexive, a frantic gesture of revulsion and fear. We are standing now in the Hall of the Chimeras, on the first step of the dais, but he has lost his perfect mastery of the situation. My right hand is free, and by the terms of his own spell, he cannot proceed until he has caught it again. I put my hand behind my back.
It is a ludicrous situation in the midst of this horror, and Malkar hates to look ludicrous. "Damn you, Felix." His grip tightens on my left hand, grinding the bones together. "Why did you do that?" His hand catches me across the face with blinding force.
But it isn't his hand. I blink, shake my head, realize Malkar's hands haven't moved. His entire attention is focused on the struggle to salvage his spell, and I can feel a ghostly pressure against my right hand, as he tries to reformulate the dream to meet the conditions of his working.
But the strange, invisible hand hits me again, and for a moment the dream doesn't even exist, only blackness and Malkar's desperate grip on my left hand. I can hear someone cursing—not Malkar—and I realize that the waking world is close.
I am slapped again, hard enough that my head rocks and slams against a wall that is not there. Malkar's grip wavers. I jerk back as hard as I can.
Malkar's fingers tighten as my fingers slide out of his grip, and I hear three distinct cracking sounds, as the bones of my fingers break. A long, rolling moment later the pain wakes me.
Mildmay
I woke up, and there was Bernard halfway through my door.
"What?" I said.
"The Mirador's burning."
"Motherfuck."
"Mavortian says we have to leave."
"Okay," I said, rolling out of bed, grabbing for my clothes.
"We'll be in the other room when you're ready," Bernard said. He put the candle he was carrying down on the table and left, moving like a man getting back to the important stuff. Hadn't been his idea to come wake me up—that much I was sure of.
I dragged my clothes on fast as I could, and only stopped long enough to stuff my clean shirt and clean linen in a bag—and all of 'em things Mr. von Heber had insisted on buying for me—because I knew I'd be sorry in a couple days if I didn't. Even the Great Fire of 19.7.2 hadn't been able to touch the Mirador. Not so much as a scorch mark.
In the other room, Bernard was cramming things into packs while Mr. von Heber sat and watched, holding his canes awkwardly across his lap. "Good," he said when I came in. "I want a native guide. Which gate should we make for?"
"Which
gate
?"
gate
?"
"I want to get out of the city before the fire spreads. Which gate will be easiest to get to?"
"You're nuts," I said.
I caught the look on Bernard's face, like he wanted to smack me one for flipping off to Mr. von Heber, but Mr. von Heber just said, "What makes you say that?"
"The Mirador don't burn."
"I assure you, it is."
"Not that. I mean, it
don't
burn. Not ever."
don't
burn. Not ever."
"Are you trying to tell me that the city is in a state of panic? I know that already. It's why I want to get out."
"You and everybody else."
"Oh. You mean…"
"We won't get near the gates. Prob'ly, I mean, if we just stay up here—"
"No."
"No?"
"Let's just say this is going to be a very bad city to be a wizard in for the next several days. Things are coming loose."
"Oh," I said. "Okay. I believe you. You're saying you gotta leave town."
"Yes. If we can."
"There's ways," I said. But from Havelock, there was really only one way, because everybody in town would be doing the same figuring I was, and everybody who knew about the Arcane—and the half septad ways them tunnels offered to get under the city walls—was going to be down there already. Fuck, I thought, but there wasn't no force to it, because I'd known something like this would happen sooner or later. I'd felt it coming for decads, months… since 11 Messidor. "But I got to know how much money you got."
You could have chipped splinters off the silence in the room. I said, "Look. I don't care, okay? It don't make no difference. But the way I know about you got to pay for."
"I see," said Mr. von Heber. Him and Bernard gave each other a kind of look I couldn't rightly figure out, and he said, "About seventy-five gorgons. I have no idea how to translate that into this benighted city's arithmetical system."
Ten septagorgons and five. I wondered, just for a second, how much else he was lying about. "That oughta do. But we'd better hurry."
"We're ready to go," said Bernard. He'd got their packs slung across his shoulders, and now he knelt down in front of Mr. von Heber's chair, so Mr. von Heber could grab him around the neck. "Can I carry something?" I said. Because, I mean, I was pretty much stuck with the two of them anyway—the slower they went, the slower I went.
"These damn canes," said Bernard, who was getting smacked across the ribs with one and poked in the eye with the other.
"If you lose them," Mr. von Heber said, "I will string your intestines out through your eye sockets."
"I won't lose 'em," I said. "Promise." And he let me take them.
We made it down the stairs okay. The lobby was full of people yelling the desk clerk, and the streets were Hell. It was a good thing both Bernard and me knew all about getting through crowds and how you make people give you room even when they weren't planning on it, because otherwise we'd never have got off the square foot of sidewalk in front of the Anchorite's Knitting. The Mirador was burning like the world's biggest torch, and you could feel people panicking and feel it spreading like another kind of fire. The noise was like having somebody bash you in the head with a hammer, only it just went on and on and on without even a backswing to have half a thought in.
But finding Phoskis didn't need thinking. He hadn't left the church of St. Kirban in septads, not since he'd run the priests out and settled in. I couldn't recall offhand which god Kirban had gotten himself martyred for, but Phoskis didn't give a shit anyway. The only god he worshipped was the gold standard—Zephyr'd said that once and it'd stuck in my head like it was glued there.
Rue Courante was practically deserted compared with the rest of Havelock, and nobody got in my way up the steps to the church porch. I stopped there, so Bernard could catch up, and offered Mr. von Heber his canes back.
"You think?" he said.
"Yeah. This guy don't like me." Which was so much an understatement as to be most of the way to a lie, but I really didn't want to explain about Phoskis Terrapin and why we hated each other.
"Put me down, Bernard," said Mr. von Heber, and I knew he'd followed enough of what I hadn't said to get the picture.
Bernard didn't argue, for a wonder. Once Mr. von Heber had himself organized again, I pushed open the door. It wasn't locked. Phoskis never locked it, and I'd never figured out if he was making fun of the priests he'd chased out or if he was just too fucking lazy to bother. He knew nobody in Mélusine was stupid enough to make a try at him.
It was dark and quiet and musty in St. Kirban's, and you could smell the river. No panic, no ruckus. The walls were two septad-feet thick, and the world didn't bother Phoskis. There was one branch of candles lit, and I stopped under them.
"Phoskis?" I called.
"Will wonders never cease," said Phoskis, thick and deep, like a giant chewing on gravel, and way too close. Sacred fuck, what was the matter with me that I couldn't smell Phoskis coming? "It's Mildmay the Fox. What are you after, Foxy dear?"
"Passage for three out of the city. What's your price?"
A rumbling, wheezing chuckle. Kethe, I hated him. "Five septagorgons a head."
"You're nuts," I said, and I wasn't just haggling, either. "Ten gorgons."
"I have what they call a monopoly on the market, but I've always liked you, Foxy my boy. Four septagorgons."
"Two septas," I said, because Phoskis was hoping I'd beg and I wasn't about to.
"Three septas. Take it or leave it."
And that was damn near all of Mr. von Heber's money. I glanced at him.
"We'll take it," he said.
"Got a new keeper, Foxy?" Phoskis said, and then to Mr. von Heber, "Stack the gorgons on the hexagonal table to your right."
Mr. von Heber counted them out like we had all the time in the world, and even if he was lying to me about everything including the color of the sky, I loved him for it. No matter what Phoskis said, he hated me just as much as I hated him, and we both knew it. But paying customers were paying customers, and he was too greedy to turn nine septas away, even on account of me.
"Very well," Phoskis said. "Foxy knows the drill." Something skittered out of the darkness and fetched up against my foot. It was a key. I picked it up and said, "Come on," to the other two. I knew the drill, sure, and that was why Phoskis hated me. I led Bernard and Mr. von Heber into the darkness, pretending everything was okay, everything was normal, pretending I couldn't feel Phoskis hating me out there somewhere in the dark. Kethe, he made my skin crawl.
We came to a little, ironbound wooden door, sunk back in the wall like Phoskis's piggy eyes in his ugly face. I unlocked it, and waved Bernard and Mr. von Heber through. You could have curdled milk with the look Bernard gave me.
I stepped through the doorway, took hold of the door handle to pull it shut "Here" I said and tossed the key toward the sound of Phoskis breathing. I heard him miss the catch just before I slammed the door shut.
Bernard said, "Where in the name of all the powers are we going?"
"The river," I said. There was a shelf of cheap lanterns just to the left of the door. I took one and dug the lucifers out of my pocket to light it.
"The river," Bernard said, like he was sure he'd misunderstood me.
"You just paid Phoskis for a boat. Come on."
Mr. von Heber couldn't manage the stairs—they were too narrow and too slick. So we loaded him up on Bernard again, and I took his canes, and we started down.
I was wondering all the way down—without wanting to, you know how that goes—if Ginevra had still been alive at this point, if she'd heard the scary echoes of her own footsteps, if she'd still thought she was going to get away. Or had they killed her first, wherever they jumped her, and carried her down here like a load of dirty laundry? Stop fucking
thinking
about it, I said to myself, but I couldn't.
thinking
about it, I said to myself, but I couldn't.
The stairs went down a great-septad foot, and you were pressed up against St. Kirban's foundation wall on one side and had nothing but air to hold you up on the other. I could hear Bernard behind me, cursing just under his breath—not panicked or nothing, just muttering. And the farther down the stairs we got, the smaller my lantern looked, because we could see more and more of St. Kirban's huge flooded vaults opening up around us. St. Kirban's ain't the only place where you can hire a boat and not get asked a lot of questions you ain't in the mood to answer, but it's the only one you can get to without going down in the Arcane first. And sometimes that's worth the price Phoskis charges.
Normally, when you go down in the vaults of St. Kirban, you come to a kind of half-assed dock built off the stairs, with Phoskis's little boats tied to it. What with all the rain, you couldn't even tell the dock was there tonight, and the boats—all two of 'em that were left—were bobbing around well past the spot where them dark, narrow, nasty stairs disappeared under the water.
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