Mélusine (3 page)

I slammed the door behind me.

Shannon turned. His blue eyes were as cold and distant as the stars. "Is it true?"

"Of course it's true. You knew that as soon as Robert said it."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Why do you
think
, my lord?"

"Don't call me that."

"Then don't ask stupid questions."

"It's not a stupid question! Why didn't you tell me? Didn't you think I had a right to know? Or didn't you trust me? Did you think it would change how I felt?"

"Clearly it has," I said. I crossed to the sideboard, splashed bourbon into a glass, swallowed smoke and bitterness.

"Damn it, Felix, you
lied
to me!" His face was bleak, white as bone. "Are you even from Caloxa?"

"I don't know. I might be."

"
Might
be? And what else
might
you be? What else are you that I don't know about? Who are you, really?"

"You know who I am."

"How can I? You've been lying to me for five years about your past. What else have you been lying about? How do I know that any of it was real?"

emerald-green drapes. "Go ahead and say it. Call me a whore.
Say it
!"

"Felix, I—"

I hit him, an open-handed blow across his right cheek. He staggered back against the wall, his hand going up to his face.

"Is that how they do it in Pharaohlight?" He was panting, his face blotchy, his eyes like fire and ice. "Does that settle the argument? Or is it just supposed to make me shut up?"

I wanted to hit him again, harder, to backhand him and let my rings tear fierce gouges in his alabaster skin. I wanted to hurt him, as I had been hurt. I wanted to show him "how they do it in Pharaohlight," to beat him bloody and drag him down on the floor and rape him. I wanted to show him what I had protected him from, all the five years that we had been lovers, the blackness, the rage that festered in me like power.

I slammed back out of the suite instead, flung myself out into the night-infested fortress to find a whore.

Once through the Mortisgate, where the guards eyed me sidelong but did not speak, it did not take long. The Arcane was home to a great many people of whom the Lord Protector did not admit awareness, knowing that with awareness came the onus of responsibility: procurers and drug dealers, prostitutes and thieves. I had been down there many times before in my black moods, and I knew exactly where to find what I sought.

The procurer was a burly, swarthy, hirsute man with one eye; he and his prostitutes catered to tarquins, the men and women who could only reach sexual release through another person's pain. He was happy to oblige me when I told him what I wanted. The boy he produced was fifteen or so—the age Shannon had been when we first met—blond and blue-eyed, although the hair was dyed and the boy rat-faced and half-starved. I assured the procurer that I would not kill the boy—"I can give you the name of a man in Simside if that's what you're after, m'lord," he said, scratching his chest, but I just smiled and shook my head and paid him—and he waved us into a dingy box of a room with a filthy mattress on the floor.

The boy stood in the middle of the room, with neither fear nor life in his eyes, and waited to discover what I would do to him.

My hand rose, as if of its own volition, and then, all at once, my howling rage burned itself out, so that I was left standing in an ashy bewilderment, unable to think, unable to move. I felt filthy, beslimed, and the worst part was knowing that the cause of my contamination was myself. I had paid a man for a boy's body, and I was about to… was I? I looked inside myself, at the fury, the snarling monster, and I knew that it was true.

I shut my eyes, putting one hand out to brace myself against the wall.

The blackness within me rose up, closing over my head like the black water of the Sim. I must be damned, I thought, though I wasn't sure there was any god who would be willing to claim me long enough to pronounce sentence. If no god would do it, I would willingly damn myself, and if I knew one thing in all the world, it was where to find the man who would help me.

I left the boy standing where he was, fled him as if he were my enemy, the undead specter of my childhood, fled back into the Mirador to find my damnation.

long-dead Ophidian kings. The walls were faced with white marble and hung with gold brocade. Statues of ancient heroes stood in niches, watching me with painted eyes. I knew all their names, all their histories, and their very indifference woke me, alarmed me, and I was caught frozen, able neither to walk forward into Hell nor to turn and walk away.

I stood in that white and gold hall, the last approach to Malkar's door, my hands clenching and my nails digging into the skin of my palms, fighting myself, so intent that I didn't realize anyone was there until a voice purred in my ear, every word an obscure mockery, "Why, Felix! Fancy seeing you here! What a…
pleasant
surprise."

I turned. It was Malkar, smiling a horrible, complacent smile. He knew why I was in his hall. He had not changed, in the six years since last we had… had been intimate. His mahogany-dark hair was untouched by gray, his broad, harsh-featured face still unwrinkled. His light brown eyes were clear and open and as false as glass.

"Come along," he said, sliding his arm through mine with easy, poisonous familiarity and assailing me with the scent of musk. "Let me help you."

The damnation I sought had come to find me. If I closed my eyes, I could see Shannon's face, the mark of my hand on his cheek, the tears standing in his eyes like diamonds. And I could see that poor, hopeless boy, waiting to be beaten, waiting to be raped, waiting to be hurt. I went with Malkar.

He locked the door of his suite behind us and bade me sit down. I accepted the wineglass he offered, knowing without needing to taste it that the wine, a heavy southern red, was laced with phoenix. I had been addicted to phoenix six years ago, just as I had been addicted to Malkar. I had beaten the addiction and not taken phoenix since. I was horrified by how comforting the taste was. I had known people, in Pharaohlight, who had insisted that phoenix was tasteless, but they were wrong. It tasted like tears.

This is what you wanted, isn't it? a voice said mockingly in the back of my mind. I downed half the wine in one gulp, shamefully aware of Malkar sitting opposite and watching with his abominable smile.

He said something I didn't catch, my pulse pounding in my ears; I said, "I beg your pardon?"

"I said it's been a long time, Felix." He came to stand beside me. I took a nervous swallow of wine and felt his fingers teasing themselves through my hair, flicking gently against the rings in my ears. He had always had that habit; it was as comfortable and vile as the taste of phoenix. "Six years." I could hear the smile in his voice when he added, "Almost a septad."

Malkar was not from Mélusine; he used the old-style reckoning only to taunt me, to remind me of the months it had taken him to teach me to use weeks and years and decades instead of decads, indictions, and septads, to remind me of the punishments he had inflicted when my tongue had slipped.

My hands were shaking. I put the glass down.

Malkar crouched down beside the chair, one hand still cradling my skull, making it impossible for me to turn my head. He knew—the only person in the Mirador who knew—how close to blind my right eye was. He knew how much I hated having anyone on my right, just as he knew how much I hated being touched. "I was beginning to think," he said, "that I'd lost you for good."

"I haven't—"

But the words wouldn't come. I couldn't find them in the blackness and morass. Malkar laughed, the low, purring chuckle that I had once thought wonderful, and leaned over to kiss me, pressing his mouth against mine. The familiarity of his mouth, of the situation, was itself erotic, a groove worn by the patterns of the past; I could feel my body wanting to respond and fought it.

"Coy?" Malkar said, raising his head, though he did not loosen his grip on my hair. "Well, that will pass."

I flinched back, though the movement hurt my scalp. His look was predatory, gloating. All the power in this room was his, and he Knew it. "Malkar, please," I said, hating the weak, fearful breathlessness of my own voice, "let me go. You know you don't really want me—"

"On the contrary, my darling," he said, using his free hand to caress the side of my face. "I know no such thing." He lowered his lips to mine again, forcing his tongue into my mouth. And my body was responding, drugged on phoenix, drugged on the past, drugged on my own self-hate. His smile curved against my mouth.

"No!" I gasped, bringing my hands up and pushing him away, a few strands of my hair torn free in his fingers. "No!"

But he had moved around so that his bulk was blocking me in the chair, and he could see me shaking, knew how thin and pathetic my defiance was. "Felix," he said, catching my jaw with one hand, so that I could not look away from him, "why are you fighting? Do you think it's going to do you any good?"

We had played this scene again and again, in every possible variation. Malkar knew how it ended; I knew how it ended. I had known what I was doing to myself when I chose to come to him. There were no words left to me. I shook my head; Malkar's fingers relaxed to let me do it.

"Then why play the shrinking violet, dearest? We both know what you are." His smile added,
The whole
Mirador knows what you are
. "Come along."

His hands, his blunt, brutal, powerful hands, closed around my wrists, dragged me out of the chair. It was getting harder to remember why I was frightened, why I was angry, why I wasn't doing what Malkar told me. That was what phoenix was good for; that was why procurers loved it. Probably the boy in the Arcane had been flying on phoenix himself.

Malkar led me to his bedroom, helped me undress, his fingers lingering on my back. I made a choked, whimpering noise, but that was my last crumbling resistance. The phoenix was making everything blurred and soft, like fog. It was all right, the phoenix told me. There was nothing to be frightened of, no need for concern. Let go, it said. Just let go.

I was aware of hands on my body, touching and teasing, aware of a mouth pressing against mine, of the scent of lavender oil everywhere around me. I felt softness against my chest and stomach and legs; I felt Malkar's weight pinning me down. "If you scream," he said in my ear, "I will gag you."

"Malkar,
please
," I said. I couldn't move, except to shut my eyes against the tears in them.

"Don't be silly, my darling," he said and caressed my face.

And then, as they said on the streets of the Lower City, the phoenix screamed.

Pain, then, but not too much.

Pain and phoenix and arousal all woven together like a tapestry. I was moaning, gasping; the only words I could form were "Please, Malkar, please, please," and I didn't know if I was begging him to stop or to continue. Not that it would have made the slightest difference either way. Pain and phoenix and frenzied arousal, and when the scream finally tore free, though I fought it until I drew blood from my lower lip, it was a scream of climax, of pain, of release, of loathing for what I was, for what Malkar made me.

He drew away from me; I rolled over and lay gasping, spread-eagled on his bed, and fell into a thin, uneasy dream.

I am lost in an enormous maze, made of great carved stone blocks. I can't find the heart of the maze; I can't find the way out. Maybe it has neither; maybe it is like the great serpent Yrob, who has neither beginning nor end.

It's dark and cold, and the stone is wet beneath my hands. I can hear rats and other, bigger creatures in the darkness, and I know that if I stop moving, they will find me. I'm bitterly cold, and my entire body aches with exhaustion, but I have to keep moving. I daren't stop. And I think I know—or maybe I only believe—that if I can find the heart of the maze, Shannon will be waiting there, and he won't hate me.

I keep moving, although there's almost no light. I fall and pick myself up, fall and pick myself up. I hurt, and it's endlessly dark, and the padding creatures are getting closer, and I—

Someone slapped me.

"Felix!" Malkar's voice.

I opened my eyes and saw Malkar's dark, blurry shape looming over me. "Get up, slut. I won't have
you
in my bed."

I remembered him dancing with Vicky, the candlelight making prisms of their intertwined hands.

I crawled to my feet, shaking with phoenix and fear and weakness. He shoved my clothes at me, and I managed to put them on, more or less straight. I was afraid that he would make me stay, but he seemed to have lost interest in me, merely watching like a bored cat while I stumbled across his sitting room and out into the hall. I shut his door behind me and leaned against it, almost sobbing with relief. I knew Malkar; this wasn't over, but at least, for now, he had let me go.

I started away from his door. I didn't know where I was going to go, only that I could not stay there, so close to Malkar. I was trying to think of someone I trusted, someone I could go to as I was, with my hair hanging around me like a lunatic's and my pupils contracted to pinpoints, someone who would let me in and not ask questions and not spread gossip.