Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  Mildmay repeats himself, his voice growling and grinding in his throat. And twice more before Malkar affects to understand and agrees affably, Of course you have, my child. I saw what you did to Vey, remember? But you won’t do that to me. You can’t. He advances a step. Just think of what will happen to Felix when you fail.

  Don’t care about Felix, Mildmay says, and it should be true. If there are gods, they can bear witness to that much. Mildmay should not care about me. But he’s lying. The bar is shaking in his grip.

  Did anyone ever tell you you’re a terrible liar? Malkar says. Poor little murderer. Poor little monster. He’s almost crooning.

  Mildmay doesn’t protest, doesn’t do anything but watch Malkar with fear and hate and hopelessness in his eyes.

  I could make you give me your weapon, Malkar says, with just enough mocking emphasis on the word “weapon” to make it clear he doesn’t regard it as a threat. You know that.

  Mildmay’s shaking gets worse.

  I don’t know if I could make you hit yourself with it—it depends on your willpower. But it might be fun to find out. He takes another step closer. I could make you blind and deaf and helpless and leave you that way. I could take your body away from you again, the way I did in Mélusine. I could make you drop that crowbar and go down on your knees right here. He pauses, tilts his head, making a show of it. But I think I’d prefer you do it yourself.

  Mildmay snarls soundless defiance, a ratting terrier cornered by a much larger dog.

  Oh you will, little monster. I wonder, does Felix know what you did? Is that why he keeps you around? It’s certainly not for your looks or your conversation. Does it amuse him to have a tame killer on his leash? His voice is low, intimate, dripping poison. Does he understand what you are? You hide it well, but I see it. And you’ll never be rid of it, you know. Never. There is a terrible weight to that never from Malkar Gennadion, who is also Brinvillier Strych—and who knows how many other names he may have had? Who knows how many lives he may have held and used and discarded, how many other lives he may have left ruined in his wake? I wonder if even Malkar himself knows any longer.

  Knew any longer. This is a dream. Malkar is dead.

  Malkar’s hand reaches out, and Mildmay flinches hard, but he’s up against the wall. Malkar’s purring chuckle, and he reaches again. And Mildmay swings the crowbar. But his strength and speed are gone; he’s shaking so hard it’s a wonder he doesn’t simply drop it. Malkar catches the bar easily, and they are frozen for a moment, staring at each other. Mildmay’s face is twisted and inhuman, painfully ugly, but I’m glad I can’t see Malkar’s.

  Malkar twists his wrist, a contemptuous flick of a gesture, and Mildmay crumples, landing hard on his knees, his hands going to cover his face. His sobs rack his body, but make no sound. Malkar stands over him, watching. He says, You will learn, my child, that it is better to obey me, and, a cruel parody of kindness, lays his hand on Mildmay’s bowed head.

  I have to stop this. I don’t care that it’s a true dream, that this is something that has already happened, something unchangeable, something I am only a witness to. I have to make it stop. I have to make him stop. As Malkar’s hand fists in Mildmay’s hair, I lash out, knowing nothing will come of it but unable to stay still, and the dream changes, a different sliver of the past, no less true, as Malkar burns into greasy ashes before my eyes. Burns and burns, and it isn’t Malkar any longer, isn’t the Bastion; Juggernaut’s relentless ticking becomes the crackle and pop of burning timbers, becomes the faint terrible keening of a person being burned alive, and I am one of the dark men who stand and watch and am satisfied with what I see.

  What Malkar did not tell Mildmay is that I am a monster, too. But Mildmay knew; he knew that long before I sent him into Malkar Gennadion’s trap. I woke with the taste of ashes in my mouth and did not move for a long time, feeling Mildmay’s warmth against my back and thinking about monsters. Thinking about Malkar, and Mildmay. And myself.

  Finally it was close enough to dawn that I didn’t have to pretend to try to go back to sleep. In fact, I could have claimed, if anyone had asked, that I’d gotten up that early on purpose. I needed to find a priest.

  One of the Fawn daughters was on duty at the front desk, and she looked at me oddly but answered my question. The Arbalest priest—whom she called the intended—could be found in Our Lady of Floodwaters. She gave me directions, although Arbalest was almost small enough that I didn’t need them.

  Intended Mallett, a blue-veiled, barefoot old man, was out in front of his church, pulling weeds. He listened carefully to what I had to say and nodded sadly when I was done. “Is the Gann place you found, where Verena Lesley met her end. I know of it. Is considered a bad place—verlain, the mountain people call it—and maybe these ghosts are why.” I would have liked to ask him about Verena Lesley and the Ganns and verlain places, but I didn’t want to leave Mildmay alone—not that he needed my protection. I thought I could trust Intended Mallett to do what was necessary, and that would have to be enough.

  As it turned out, Mildmay was still asleep when I returned to the Five Dancing Frogs, and he slept on and off for a great deal of the day. I reread Ynge and wished—a tired, stupid itch of desire for something I didn’t even want—for a teaspoon’s worth of phoenix. It would be better than being stuck in this little room with myself. But it would also be worse, and at least I was smart enough to know that.

  Around sunset, a knock on the door startled Mildmay awake. It was one of the Fawn daughters with an invitation to join the family for dinner. I didn’t want to, and I could see Mildmay didn’t want to, but neither of us—we agreed with a glance—wanted to offend the Fawns by refusing. We followed the Fawn daughter downstairs and into the back of the building, where the family lived.

  The people of Corambis, as I had observed during my brief foray that morning, were short, square-built, tawny and red, lions and foxes. A group of them like Mrs. Fawn’s daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren were bewildering simply for the sameness of them. I hadn’t ever thought about the variations among Mélusiniens—except for my own freakish coloring, which I had been trained to be aware of from a very early age—but I realized now how accustomed I had become to a range of browns, from the velvet near-black of Islanders like Vida Eoline, through red browns and ocher browns, to the light honey brown of Mehitabel Parr. And certainly there were differences in skin color and hair color among even these closely related Corambins, but if I didn’t concentrate carefully, the distinctions blurred into a muddle. I foresaw the potential for getting myself into a great deal of trouble and resolved for this evening to say as little as possible.

  At first, that strategy worked admirably, for we walked into the middle of an argument between several of Mrs. Fawn’s sons-in-law and grandsons. They were discussing, heatedly, what would happen to Caloxa—and it was very definitely Caloxa, not merely southern Corambis—now that the Insurgence had been defeated.

  The principal combatants, I managed to get fixed in my head. One, Peter Finesilver, was the husband of Mrs. Fawn’s eldest daughter and the father of at least two of the children swarming about the room. He had the self-satisfied air that came from a combination of prosperity and a certain native thick-headedness. The other, who carried one shoulder in an odd hunch, was another son-in-law, Sholto Ketteller; he was obviously, from the moment he opened his mouth, the fire-eater of the family.

  Finesilver’s position was that with Gerrard dead, it could be as if the Insurgence had never happened. The Corambin governor could come back to Wildar and everything (he said naïvely) would be fine again.

  Ketteller practically hooted with laughter at this statement, but the interesting thing was that the other men disagreed with it, too. They didn’t want Governor Jaggard back, his time in office having been marked by a significant upswing in both taxes and corruption. James Fawn, Mrs. Fawn’s dead husband’s brother—unlike the other parties—was old enough to remember the Corambin conquest of Caloxa; he mere
ly felt that a new governor should be appointed—“Is not like the margraves will listen to Jaggard now, is it? After the fool the man made of himself.” The others seemed to be in favor of a more moderate version of Ketteller’s fierce separatism. Let the Moot rule, said one of the grandsons, like the Convocation did. And when Ketteller, and oddly enough, Finesilver, protested this idea, he shrugged and said, “Well, then, let the Humes be governors.”

  “But Prince Charles is only a baby,” one of the younger boys protested.

  “Can’t do any worse than Jaggard,” James Fawn said and finally provoked a laugh.

  I was surprised to learn an heir to the house of Hume had been left alive, and more so seeing the enthusiasm with which the teenage children in particular supported his right to rule Caloxa. They were rather vague on his hypothetical government’s relationship with Corambis, though they seemed to envision a sort of vassal state, much like Marathat’s ostensible relationship with Tibernia. I wondered if they’d gotten the idea from their grandmother’s Mélusinien novels.

  Ketteller had fallen ominously silent during the discussion of Prince Charles. Finesilver noticed, too, and said with deep scorn, “Yes, and Sholto’ll be off to join the Primrose Men in the morning.”

  “Would be, an they’d have me,” Ketteller said, flaring up immediately. “Is the only answer.”

  And they might have been off again except that one of the women—I thought Ketteller’s wife, although I wasn’t sure—emerged from the kitchen and said loudly, “May the Lady have mercy on this house and all the brawling numbskulls who live in it.” And when everyone was looking at her, she grinned, showing dimples, and said, “Leave the argument and come have dinner instead.”

  Mildmay

  You got to understand, I went into that dinner expecting Felix to throw me to the wolves. As soon as the questions started—how’d you become a wizard, how old were you, did the tattoos hurt, what was doing magic like, and hey, what’re y’all doing in our horse-and-a-half town anyway?—I was braced for it. I mean, I could practically hear him do it. Because he’d done it before and for less reason. But he didn’t. He sat there and smiled and told lies instead.

  I’d got used to thinking of Felix as a terrible liar, about as bad as me, but that wasn’t right. He couldn’t lie to me worth shit, but that night he trotted out a pack of lies that weren’t even within earshot of the real story, and he didn’t turn a hair.

  I asked him about it later, and he blinked at me like he didn’t even know what I was talking about and then said, “Oh, I can’t tell lies for myself.” That was all he said, and it took me a while, lying there in the dark trying not to cough, to work through it to what he meant, which was that he could tell lies just fine as long as it was somebody else getting the benefit. Like Strych. Or me.

  And if you want something to make you feel as sick as a drunk dog, give that one a try. Powers. And what made me feel especially sick was that I couldn’t even pretend I wished he hadn’t done it.

  Nice, Milly-Fox. Very fucking classy. But I felt too lousy even to be really mad at myself about it. Mrs. Fawn had given me extra pillows and made me drink a tisane that tasted like dead leaves and licorice, and you know, I was better than I had been, but I still felt like somebody’d been beating me with an invisible stick all day long.

  Beside me, Felix twitched and muttered in his dreams, and I fell asleep myself hoping that telling all those lies didn’t make him dream about Strych.

  Felix

  Dark and stone and dripping water. I am so tired of dreaming of labyrinths. But I don’t dare try to change the dream. Burning is worse. The briars are worse.

  I wish I could just sit still, but my dreaming self knows I can’t do that, either. The monster is hunting; I have to keep moving so it doesn’t find me.

  I fall and fall and fall again. There’s blood on my palms, slick becoming sticky, and I know I’m never going to get out this way, but I can’t stop.

  And then I fall over something that cries in protest. I almost scream; for a moment, I can’t breathe. But nothing attacks me, and when I can calm myself enough to listen, I hear something whimpering. I can’t tell if it’s an animal or a person, although there’s just enough light to see a bulk of shadows. I reach out carefully, slowly, and my fingers encounter cloth. A person, then, who flinches back with a wordless cry.

  “I won’t hurt you. I’m . . .” But I don’t know what I am, and I finally say, “Lost.”

  “Lost,” echoes the other in a raw thread of a voice.

  “Who are you?”

  “Lost,” and I can’t tell if it’s echo or answer.

  “Where are we?” I ask, for I can’t tell any longer what labyrinth this is. But the other says only, “Lost, lost,” in its ruined voice and begins to sob.

  The desperate need to move is cramping my limbs, but I can’t bring myself to abandon this wretched stranger. “Come on,” I say as gently as I can. “Come with me.” I’m more than a little surprised when it stands up with me, but we link hands like children and I continue on my miserable, groping progress.

  I can’t tell where the light is coming from; it waxes and wanes with no logic I can follow. I stumble frequently, but mostly manage to keep my feet. My companion sobs drearily; I still can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. After a while, I realize that there’s a light ahead of us that isn’t waning, but growing steadily stronger, the oblong shape of a doorway. I urge my companion to walk faster. It says, “Lost,” dolefully, but follows me.

  For a moment when we reach the doorway, what I’m seeing makes no sense. A wooden table fitted with straps to hold a human body. And then I do know; this labyrinth is St. Crellifer’s, and in that case . . .

  I turn, and the mad wretched creature that was once Isaac Garamond raises its head to look at me and begins to scream.

  No wonder I couldn’t rest. I am the monster I was trying to flee.

  I woke with a violent jolt, almost enough to send me off the bed, and lay for more than a minute while my heart slowed, staring unseeingly at the sunlight pooling among the rumpled covers. And then I blinked and focused and thought, Where is Mildmay?

  I shot to my feet. He wasn’t in the bed, or even in the room. His cane was gone, too—and I wasn’t really stupid enough to believe that anyone could have gotten him out of the room without his consent. I wasn’t.

  This was an overreaction, I told myself, and put my trousers on. Mildmay couldn’t be in any kind of trouble, and if he’d gotten worse, either his coughing would have alerted me or, surely, he would have woken me himself, not just crawled off somewhere to die like a wounded animal.

  On second thought, that sounded like exactly the sort of stupid thing Mildmay would do. I didn’t bother with socks or shoes.

  But the Fawn daughter I encountered in the hallway told me that he’d gotten up early and asked about their bathhouse. “Said you might be interested, too,” she added and told me how to get there.

  He was in one of the bathtubs when I opened the door, the steam rising in faint coils off the water. He glanced at me—making sure I was who he thought I was and not a threat—and closed his eyes again. His hair was unbraided, but he hadn’t ducked his head yet, and the oil lamps mellowed the harsh fox-red to auburn.

  He was beautiful. He was beautiful, and he did not know it and would have laughed at me if I’d tried to tell him so. I turned away, making sure the door was latched before I began to undress.

  “Nobody here’ll know what kept-thieves are,” Mildmay said, his voice simultaneously lazy and sharp. “It ain’t no fucking big deal.”

  “It’s still ugly,” I said and hoped he hadn’t seen my flinch. “And people will still ask what happened.”

  “They don’t ask about my face,” he said.

  “You frighten them, the way you scowl.”

  He snorted, but it was perfectly true. I’d watched hotel maids, shop-keepers, bartenders fold and fail under the unrelenting weight of that scowl. If he recognized flirta
tion, he never welcomed it, and I thought he mostly didn’t recognize it. When I’d been trying to flirt with him, in Klepsydra, I’d had to resort to the broadest and most caricatured version of myself to get him to notice. And then he’d blushed and looked at me as if I terrified him.

  I had, eventually, stopped trying.

  It was an effort to take my shirt off, even knowing that Mildmay had seen my back dozens of times before and was not bothered by it. I untied my hair, ran my fingers through it. Bent to take off my boots and Mildmay said, “I knew a gal once had scars like yours.”

  I hadn’t thought he knew how to do this, how to wield a conversation like a knife. On the other hand, he’d had all the time he needed to learn from my dreadful example. “What was her name?” I said tiredly.

  “Jeanne-Zerline. She worked in the Goosegirl’s Palace down in the Arcane. Died of smallpox about a septad back.”

  I took the rest of my clothes off and climbed gingerly into the second tub. Mildmay wasn’t watching me. Of course he wasn’t watching me. He wasn’t interested, and I knew it. The hot water was blissful; I felt my spine relax by slow degrees, and finally I could say, “I remember her. She was older. Keeper’d sold her on already before the Fire.”

  He didn’t say anything, and I would have let it drop, except that a horrible thought occurred to me: “How did you know about her scars?”

  He didn’t open his eyes. “How d’you think?”

  The water was turning my skin red, but I was achingly cold. “Did you pick her for her scars? Did they excite you?”

  “No, fuckwit. And that ain’t how I knew.”

  “But—”

  He silenced me with a glare. “The St. Dismas Baths. Remember? Where you decided I didn’t get to go no more?”

  “Oh,” I said stupidly, uselessly.

  “Jeanne-Zerline never cared about them fucking scars,” he said, grabbing the soap and working up a savage lather. “She had one made her left tit lopsided, and she didn’t fucking care.”