The Mirador (57 page)

How many times? I asked myself, leaning my hot face against the cool stone of the wall on my bad side. How many times are you going to have to learn this same, simple, stupid lesson?

I didn’t have an answer.

Mehitabel

I couldn’t get back to my suite until eight, and when I did, Vincent was there, sitting in the chair nearest the fire. I sat down in the chair across from him and said, “I got a rather odd letter today. From Lord Ivo.”

Vincent said nothing for a moment. “What does he want of you?”

“Here.” I handed him the letter. As he read it, his face became stiller and stiller, until it was as lifeless as a mask. He handed the letter back, and I thought only his phenomenal self-control had kept him from throwing it into the fire.

“What does he want?” I said.

“To humiliate me,” Vincent said.

I said nothing.

“Oh, he’s right enough. I would like to meet Lord Shannon, and even more to meet Athalwolf Toralius, the poet, who I know is a friend of his. But introduced by you, with what I am so clearly marked”—and he spread his hands so that his long black nails gleamed in the firelight—“that defines me in ways which Ivo has no desire to allow me to escape.”

“Shannon isn’t like that,” I said.

“Maybe not,” Vincent said in polite disagreement.

“What do you want me to do?”

“As Ivo asks you, if you will. I am used to humiliation.”

“I can tell Lord Ivo I have no influence with Shannon.”

“No, he’ll know it for a lie.”

“All right. But I’m doing it because you’ve asked me to, not because Lord Ivo did.”

That got his beautiful smile. “Thank you, Mehitabel.”

“Do you attend court?”

“Yes, although well to the back. Ivo and Lord Stephen do not care for each other.”

“Then catch me afterward. It will have to be quick, because I have to get to the Empyrean, but I can introduce you to Lord Shannon. But you know Felix won’t like it.”

“That is far more Felix’s problem than mine.”

I raised my eyebrows at the unexpected ruthlessness.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I did not mean that as harshly as it sounded.” And he firmly turned the conversation to Athalwolf Toralius’s poetry. I’d read some of it over the winter, so we kept the conversation from flagging until Felix came, but I don’t think either of us had more than about half our mind on it. And Felix was preoccupied, frowning. His blue eye seemed cloudy with grief, but the yellow eye was sparking, dangerous.

“What is it you want to try, Felix?” Vincent asked as we started for Grendille Moran’s suite.

Felix shook himself a little. “Call it a practical application of rather abstruse theory.”

“All right,” I said, “but what are you going to do?”

“You don’t want the theory, do you?”

“Not especially.”

That got me about half a grin. “If it works, I’m going to make us—you and me—briefly able to see ghosts.”

He didn’t seem to be kidding. “Maybe we’d better have some of that theory after all, sunshine.”

He made an exasperated noise, halfway between a sigh and a snort. “All right. Imagine that magic has a kind of polarity, like a lodestone, and call the two poles noir and clair. Clairant magic is magic involved with life and light, with straightness and cleanliness. Noirant magic is the magic of labyrinths, of things that are tangled and lost and dark.”

“And dead,” Vincent said, and Felix gave him an approving nod.

“Exactly.”

“But is any of this true?” I asked. “You said, ‘imagine.’ ”

He grimaced. “It doesn’t work quite like that. Let’s say that it can be true.”

“You’re the wizard,” I said lightly, to hide how uneasy the idea made me.

“Magic is all about metaphors. In any event, one way to understand Vincent’s ability to see ghosts is as a . . .” He broke off, searching for a word. “. . . a receptiveness to certain manifestations of noirant energy. What I want to do is tap into Vincent’s ability—redirect the noirance, if that makes any sense—and—”

“Could you make it stop?” Vincent’s voice was harsh, eager, maybe not quite sane.

I saw Felix come back to the world, with a startle and a wince. “Vincent, this is just theoretical. I don’t even know if—”

“But could you make it stop?”

There was a pause, long enough that Felix’s answer was obvious before he spoke, and Vincent’s shoulders slumped fractionally. “Not without knowing what made it, er, start in the first place. And even then—it’s not something someone did to you, it’s something you were born with. It might be the equivalent of ripping out your eyes. Or your heart. And it would be gross heresy, of course.”

He didn’t sound like that would bother him; I said, “Isn’t this heresy, what you’re doing here?”

“Well, the trial would be interesting, let’s leave it at that. Tabby, are we not there yet?”

Mocking plaintiveness. “Down this side-hall,” I said and waited a beat. “Brat.”

I startled a laugh out of Vincent, and was glad to hear it; Felix just beamed at me beatifically. “I gather you have the key?”

“Yes.” I unlocked the door with the key Leveque had given me. The hinges of the door did not squeak. I’d brought a lantern, and Felix’s witchlights were clustering around his head like tame stars. We went in.

The suite had been stripped at some point, probably long ago. No hangings remained, no furniture, no carpet—nothing to give a sense of what Grendille Moran had been like alive. The rooms were dark and desolate and bone-cold; we explored them in a clump, with Felix’s witchlights darting and wheeling into the corners to get rid of the shadows. Then we returned to the first room, and Vincent said, resigned, “What do you want me to do?”

Felix said, “Do you see anything?”

“Traces,” Vincent said, with a half-shrug.

“Good,” said Felix. “Then all I want you to do is relax and hold still.” He came up behind Vincent, the eight-inch difference in their heights emphasizing Vincent’s slightness, and placed his fingers against Vincent’s temples, his rings gleaming evilly against the blackness of Vincent’s hair. Vincent might have flinched a little, or it might just have been the cold in the room.

At first it seemed only as if the shadows in the room were darkening, the air getting colder. But then I began to see patterns in the shadows, patterns that weren’t stone and cobwebs. They were inchoate as they emerged, things that might have been faces, might have been hands. They coalesced gradually, becoming clearer, and then Felix said, “Grendille Moran, are you there?”

The pattern snapped closed, as if, until that moment, any one of a number of ghosts might have shown themselves and spoken to us. But now there was only one, a figure in an old-fashioned, narrow-skirted dress, her shoulders ending in a ragged stump, her head cradled in her hands, like any ghost out of a lurid folktale.

She hadn’t been a beautiful woman when she was alive; her jaw was too heavy, her eyes too small. But she’d clearly been a woman with appalling force of character; the heavy jaw was almost balanced by the uncompromising line of her mouth, and those small, flat, gray eyes reminded me of the one time I had come face to face with a rattlesnake somewhere out in the Grasslands to the west of the Bastion.

I am Grendille Moran, she said, although the lips of her severed head did not move, and I didn’t think her words were audible, exactly. What do you want of me?

Vincent’s eyes were shut, but he had relaxed a little against Felix’s hands. Felix didn’t seem to have turned a hair. He said, “We are seeking the truth.”

A dangerous pastime, Lord Wizard, she said. If a dead rattlesnake could be amused, she was. What truth do you seek?

“The truth about Amaryllis Cordelia’s death.”

The truth is that she is dead, as I am. What more do you need?

“Who killed her?”

I did.

“Who put her in the crypt of the Cordelii?”

The man who hired her death from me. It was the safest hiding place in all the Mirador.

“Who had her stone engraved?”

I did. That lying stone at Diggory Chase angered me. The stonecarver was dying. There was something growing inside him, a poisonous child. I gave him a quick and painless death, and in return he made sure that she would not be forgotten.

“Why?”

Because she belonged there, and the man who paid me to kill her knew it as well as I did. That, of course, was why he killed me.

“What do you mean?”

It was foolish of me, but I had not imagined that he would notice. Her lips quirked in something I was loath to label a smile. It did not occur to me that Wilfrid Emarthius would make pilgrimage to his victim’s tomb.

“Who?” I said.

The ghost’s eyes cut my direction, a dreadfully unnerving trick. Wilfrid Emarthius, Amaryllis’s husband. He had her killed, but he had the guts to kill me himself.

“But why would Wilfrid want Amaryllis dead?” Felix asked.

She was profoundly unfaithful to him, the ghost observed dispassionately, as one who has noticed that this provokes rage in others. Laurence and Charles were far from her only conquests. And he saw his way to power through Charles’s advisors. Amaryllis would never listen to him. If she controlled Charles, there would be nothing in that for Wilfrid. He had good reasons, my lords and lady, I assure you.

Felix said, “Why did you care whether Amaryllis was forgotten or not?”

The ghost shrugged; even Felix seemed a bit taken aback at how that maneuver looked with no head above the rising shoulders. She deserved better than to die at the behest of her paunchy toad of a husband. She was beautiful and vibrant. I wanted her remembered, and I see that I have succeeded.

“Did you kill Laurence for her?”

Me? the ghost said, her eyebrows going up. No, that wasn’t me. I think—

Suddenly, Vincent reached up, jerking Felix’s hands free of his head even as his knees buckled, and he collapsed onto the floor. Grendille Moran vanished like a popped soap bubble, and the thought that she might still be there, observing, sent a cold shudder the entire length of my spine.

“Vincent?” Felix said. He went down on one knee. “Did I hurt you?”

“Too much,” Vincent said in a thin, strained voice, not moving. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll be in the hall,” I said and escaped.

The corridor was blessedly uninteresting. I stood and thought and composed about half a letter to Antony in my head—knowing he wouldn’t believe any of it, knowing I’d probably never send it—before Felix and Vincent came out.

Felix said preemptively: “Wilfrid!” He was supporting Vincent with a hand under the elbow, and Vincent was leaning into him, shivering a little.

“Which will teach us never to judge a man by his name,” I said, following his lead.

“Yes, indeed. Here we were thinking he was a poor, put-upon rabbit, when all the while he was the mastermind.”

“And a paunchy toad into the bargain.”

“Lock that door again, Tabby, would you? My mental picture of Wilfrid Emarthius never quite included him beheading Grendille Moran.”

“I imagine hers didn’t either. She looked to me like a woman it would be difficult to catch off-guard.”

“Oh, very,” Felix said, and we started back toward my suite. He was still supporting Vincent, and Vincent obeyed his guidance like a blind man.

“She must have found her head, though.”

“Her head?”

“Stephen said it turned up somewhere unlikely several days later.”

“How fittingly grotesque. And who do you suppose did murder Laurence?”

“What’s to say it wasn’t Amaryllis herself?”

Felix considered that. “Well, nothing, I suppose.”

“Do you think Grendille Moran would admire anyone not smart enough and tough enough to do her own dirty work?”

“A very cogent point.”

Vincent said, his voice rather shaky, “What a profoundly unpleasant woman.”

“She was a court poisoner,” I said.

“Grendille Moran would have been nasty as a nun,” Vincent said. “Powers and saints. Well, at least now I can imagine how Ivo could be worse.”

That killed the conversation, and we were silent the rest of the way back. I opened my door, calling to Lenore to bring the brandy from the sideboard, and made Vincent sit in the chair nearest the fire. He was still shivering. I took the opposite chair, to act as a buffer between Vincent and Felix—and if I’d been asked who I was protecting from whom, I wouldn’t have been able to say.

We were still silent. Lenore poured brandy. Felix brought a glass to Vincent before taking one for himself; I knew it for an apology, and wondered if Vincent could read Felix well enough to see that.

Vincent knocked the brandy back, shuddered profoundly, and shut his eyes. He stayed that way for some time, and finally, I asked, “Are you all right?”

“Thank you, yes.”

And I didn’t want to know, but I was asking all the same, “What happened?”