Although I had asked about bookstores simply because it was the first and most incongruous thing to come into my head, I was certainly not going to discard the opportunity thus presented. For there was at least one piece of information a bookstore could provide that I very badly wanted.
What was it, exactly, that had started this “craze,” as Mrs. Fawn called it, for novels about Mélusine?
The nearest bookstore was called Waddilow & Berowne; I found it easily, though for a moment I was sure I had somehow come to the wrong place. This building was simply too big. But the gilt lettering on the window read, very plainly, “WADDILOW & BEROWNE, BOOKSELLERS,” and when I went inside, there were bookshelves everywhere. Books everywhere.
I realized after a moment—two seconds? ten seconds? as much as a minute?—there was a clerk standing in front of me, and he’d asked twice if he could help me. And I was gawking like any dowdy provincial. My first impulse was to bolt, but that was silly. I hadn’t been put out of countenance by a shop clerk since I was sixteen, and this weedy young man with his bad complexion was not a threat. “Yes,” I said briskly. “I’m looking for a book by a man named Challoner. A travelogue of some sort?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” the weedy young man said with great enthusiasm. He led me on a circuitous path into the depths of the store, stopping in front of a bookcase against the back wall. “We keep all our travel literature together—it saves time. Now, was there a particular Challoner you wanted, or . . . ?”
“Actually, I’d like to browse a bit, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course!” he said, and very nearly bowed. I couldn’t tell if he was merely trying to flirt with me or if he, like Mrs. Fawn, had recognized me for what I was. I found that I didn’t want to know.
He did at least leave me alone, and I was able to contemplate the bookcase in peace. Corambins printed titles along the spine rather than abbreviating them across, a habit which made books easier to identify although I foresaw that it would quickly lead to a crick in the neck. Challoner took up most of one shelf; they had several copies of each of his books. Happily, it was immediately apparent which one I wanted: The Daughters of Cymellune was an old-fashioned and fanciful way to refer to Tibernia and Marathat, but it did, I supposed grudgingly, make for an eye-catching title.
All the more so, I discovered upon opening the book to the preface, because the Corambins believed themselves to be descended from Agramant the Navigator.
Sternly, I forbade myself to get sidetracked, although I did rather badly want to know how an entire nation could be descended from a king who was historically without issue. I would have plenty of time for such inquiries later. I turned to the section on Mélusine, and in less than five minutes had to put the book back before I disgraced myself.
This Challoner had self-evidently never been in Mélusine in his life. His “report” was based on Virenque’s L’Histoires des Cités Magnifiques, which was a great work of scholarship and over a hundred years old. I recognized Virenque’s ornate turn of phrase; Challoner had cribbed the entire passage on the Arcane directly. I supposed that meant I would not find Virenque anywhere in Corambis, and that was a pity.
But at least now I knew more or less what Challoner must have said to conjure such enthusiasm. Virenque did talk a great deal about Cabaline wizardry, in pursuit of an argument that the Curia was of far more influence and importance in shaping the city than the Lord Protector’s annemer Cabinet. Since Virenque was annemer himself and viewed Cabalines with no little suspicion, he had made much of the tattoos and oaths and the mystery of the Virtu. Virenque had been disparaging; Challoner—or at least his readership—was fascinated.
I did not bury my face in my hands and howl, but it was a near-run thing.
A moment’s inward contemplation convinced me that I didn’t have the strength to investigate the novels Challoner had inspired, but the sheer size of Waddilow & Berowne prompted me to wonder if they had a thaumatology section analogous to the travel section, and I went looking.
Happily, the bookcases were taller than I—there were step stools scattered here and there about the store for the use of clerks and customers—and I was able to avoid attracting the weedy young man’s attention. I found their books on magic between an impressive array of books on natural history and a smaller but quite wide-ranging selection on mathematics.
They had more thaumatology books than I had expected; in Mélusine, if a bookstore didn’t specialize in thaumatology—though several did, all run by annemer—it was unlikely they would have more than one or two thaumatological books, and those probably the result of trade rather than intent. But Waddilow & Berowne had half a bookcase worth; I crouched down to examine them.
Principles of Magical Healing, Force and Balance, a Magician’s Primer, a number of books on magic and mathematics, a disturbing little volume entitled Magic for the Mechanist: their selection told me a good deal about Corambin magic in a very short time, and left me confounded. I had expected, foolishly perhaps, that given the apparent obsession with Cymellune, Corambin magic would not be so different from the magic of the Mirador and the Coeurterre, but nothing, it seemed, could be further from the truth. They were materialists, but not as Cabalines were; they seemed to think magic itself was a material force, an idea which I found as alien as any I’d ever come across, and that included the teachings of the Union of Angels, a Cymellunar sect who had believed firstly that magical energy was generated by sex, and secondly that if one practiced magic—and sex—long enough, one would be invited into the angelic orders and would grow wings as naturally as a tree puts forth flowers. None of them had succeeded by the time they were, all five of them, burned for heresy.
I could see, I supposed a little dubiously, how one might get from Titan Clocks—which were, after all, mechanical objects in their most literal aspect—to this kind of dry, methodical, lifeless magic, but then I remembered the spontaneous manifestation of blood Lilion had mentioned, and I was not so sure.
In any event, it was pointless to try to theorize further on the basis of a random sampling of books in a bookstore. And a sharp stab of guilt reminded me that I needed to get back to Mildmay. No matter what he said, I had left him alone more than long enough. I straightened and thoughtfully went in search of my weedy clerk again. He was in the front of the store and quivered like a hunting dog on point when he saw me. I gave him a carefully judged smile. “As I’m sure you can tell, I’m a foreigner, and I’ve only recently arrived in Bernatha.”
He made an encouraging sort of mumble, and I went on: “I don’t even know if you have such things as broadsheets?”
He looked discouragingly blank.
For a moment I was perfectly blank myself, trying to think of a way to explain broadsheets. I’d learned to read from broadsheets; Joline and I had made paper crowns out of broadsheets; the best barbecued mutton in Simside came wrapped in broadsheets. Finally, I said, “How do people learn about important things in this city? New laws? Demolitions? Play performances?”
“Oh, you mean newspapers! We only carry the Bernatha papers, but Emblem’s has the Esmer Times, if you want that. They’ll have today’s by now.”
“Let’s start with Bernatha,” I said and hoped my nonchalance was convincing.
Bernatha had three newspapers. They looked reassuringly like Mélusinien broadsheets, though with many more pages, and were correspondingly cheap. I bought one, the Standard, for a penny-obol; the other two, the clerk said, were “partisan,” and I definitely wasn’t in the mood for anything of the sort. I extracted myself from his clutches as gracefully as I could and started off from Waddilow & Berowne as if I had the least idea of where I was going.
I had by this time overreached myself most dreadfully. I might have been able to find my way back to the Fiddler’s Fox from the Clock Palace—or, then again, I might not—but from Waddilow & Berowne, I couldn’t even hope. I did try to retrace my steps to the Clock Palace, which seemed like a reasonable thing to do, but I wen
t wrong somehow and found myself going downhill without ever having, so far as I could tell, stopped going uphill. And while that didn’t seem like it should be possible, I was not philosopher enough to argue with my own experience, and my experience said that I was, quite plainly, going downhill on the west side of the Crait, toward the harbor. I wished, unworthily but sincerely, that Mildmay were with me.
The sun was sinking rapidly—I’d spent rather longer in Waddilow & Berowne than I’d meant to—and the streets were nearly deserted. I tried approaching fellow pedestrians, but the first pretended not to hear me, and the second actually recoiled, hissing, “I have no business with violet-boys,” as he hurried away. I wasn’t sure what “violet-boys” were—did Bernatha have street packs as Mélusine did?—but clearly I looked like one.
I stopped at an intersection and considered my options, meager as they were. I could continue wandering aimlessly, but although that was actually a highly effective strategy in the Mirador, it seemed unlikely to help me here. I could try to retrace my steps to Waddilow & Berowne, but I was suspicious that that would work no better than retracing my steps to the Clock Palace had. I could try to navigate by the sun, while it lasted: I was on the west side of the Crait now, and I knew the Fiddler’s Fox was on the south . . .
But that was nonsense, and I knew it even as I thought it. Nonsense and a pathetic attempt to avoid the one recourse I knew would work: the obligation d’âme.
Mildmay had used it to find me, the terrible night of Gideon’s death, and since then I had been rawly aware of it, as one is aware of the new skin left behind by a healing burn. I had drawn away from it as much as I could, perversely becoming more and more uncomfortable with it the more Mild-may seemed to accept it. I’d thought that was why my awareness of his dreams had suddenly and sharply fallen off, although now I suspected that had far more to do with the briars enclosing my construct-Mélusine than my strength of will and purity of heart.
But there was one thing the obligation d’âme was genuinely good for—as opposed to all the myriad things it was bad for, like my selfishness and arrogance and cruelty—and that was in allowing one party to the bond to find the other. And it was stupid to stand here dithering about it as if it were some sort of injury to Mildmay. I’d used the obligation d’âme to inflict those, too; I damn well knew the difference.
All I had to do was let myself look and he was there, fox-red and jade-green and that way. Not quite directly behind me, but a good thirty degrees off from what I would have guessed. I turned, chose the street that most closely approximated the direction I wanted, and started walking again.
The shadows were long and threatening; it was already nearly dark, and the street lamps were lighting themselves with an odd hissing sound and a distinct crack of magic. Some sort of machinery, I guessed, thinking of the book called Magic for the Mechanist in Waddilow & Berowne, but I had not the faintest idea of how such a thing could be constructed. I was wondering about that, imagining keeping magic in a box ready to strike, like a lucifer, and so it was some time before I realized I was being followed.
In fairness to myself, it had been fifteen years or more since I’d had to worry about difficulties of that kind. Malkar had taken me away from the particular perils of a city, and when I returned to Mélusine, I had almost immediately gotten the Mirador’s tattoos and become, as far as the Lower City and its criminal denizens were concerned, predator instead of prey. In some districts, as I remembered from my childhood, it was considered bad luck even to walk in the same direction as a wizard, and I had never once been accosted, not for any reason.
But Bernathan criminals had no reason to fear me; I was merely a foreigner walking alone: an easy target.
“Oh damn,” I said, very softly, because of course they were right. I had been stripped of the Mirador’s protections, magical as well as political, and I’d never been any good in a fight, half-blind and clumsy. It had always been Joline who had protected me—and there, I thought bitterly, was another way Mildmay was like her. I had a knack for finding protectors.
But I was now, if possible, even worse equipped for a fight than I’d been as a child. Not as clumsy, no, Malkar had dealt with that. But half-blind, and although the stiffness in my fingers didn’t normally bother me much, I couldn’t even make a fist comfortably, much less hit someone with it. And there was magic, but that was heresy, and I didn’t even know why I cared, but I did.
Maybe I had learned something from my stupid, vicious mistakes, after all.
I was walking fast, still tracking toward Mildmay and the Fiddler’s Fox, and given my height and the length of my stride against that of the average Corambin, I thought there was a reasonable chance I’d simply outdistance them. But apparently they’d thought so, too, and utilized their greater knowledge of Bernatha to take a short cut. Three men—two Corambin in type, the third of the taller, paler breed—stepped out of an alley directly in front of me. I took a step back, half turning for unabashed flight, and two more men, both pale-haired, closed the distance from behind.
“Now, guv,” said one of the shorter, “this don’t have to be ugly.”
“No?” I said, trying to get the wall at my back, but they flanked me neatly, and I remembered my earlier notion about predators.
“Naw,” said their spokesman. “You just hand over your purse and any other small valuables you might have conveniently to hand, and we’ll let you go. Not a scratch on you.” He smiled widely, like a parody of the morning’s gondolman.
“I really don’t have enough to make it worth the bother,” I said, knowing perfectly well it was useless.
“Oh, no bother at all,” said one of the others. “Leastways not to us.” And they all sniggered and moved a step closer.
I was weighing my options despairingly when one of them said from my blind side, “Course, if you wanted to give us something else, we might be persuadable. I bet that pretty mouth of yours has persuaded people to do sillier things.”
I turned my head to stare at him. “You want me to . . .”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said one of the others.
“Think of it as a warm-up for tonight’s business,” said a third, from behind me.
It was actually a less distasteful solution than using magic against them, and certainly better than being beaten and robbed, but I couldn’t keep back a ridiculous, bleating protest: “But I’m not—”
A prostitute, I would have said; later, it occurred to me that the interruption saved me a good deal of embarrassment along with everything else, for they would never have believed me.
But a voice called out, “Hey! Sunny Pingree! Is that you?” It was a woman’s voice, and a group of women approaching us, six of them, wearing clothes quite unlike what I’d seen women wearing during the day. Gaudy colors and alarmingly slit skirts and lace and ribbons.
“Ahhh,” said one of the pale-haired men, “what do you jezzies want?”
“To remind you of the deal,” said one of the women, front and center of their little pack; from her accent, I guessed she wasn’t a native Bernathan. “Seeing as how you’ve apparently gone and forgotten it. You don’t roll our fish, and we don’t jack our prices so high you and your boys never get laid again. Right?”
Sullen silence, rather abashed.
“Right?”
“Right, Miss Emily,” somebody muttered.
“Good,” she said. “Now clear out before I call the Honest-men on you for disturbing the peace.”
They slunk away down the alley, very like the losing side in a dogfight, and one of the other women said, “Mr. Harrowgate, are you all right?”
“Corbie!” I said. “How—?”
“Going out for dinner before work,” she said with a shrug. “Oh, Emily, this is Mr. Harrowgate, the guy I was telling you about.”
“Holy shit,” somebody said, almost low enough for me not to hear. “You weren’t kidding, Corbie.”
I didn’t even want to imagine what that might be in
reference to, and said distinctly to Emily, “Thank you for your very timely intervention.”
Emily’s eyes, wide and brown and not soft at all, summed me up, and then she snorted and said, “That Sunny Pingree. No more manners than a pig. Won’t bother you again, though, or I will have the Honest-men on him.”
“But what are you doing in this part of town by yourself?” Corbie asked me.
“I, um.” I could feel my face heating. “I got lost.”
“Oh dear,” Emily said, with sufficient lack of surprise that I gathered this was not an uncommon happenstance with strangers to Bernatha. “Corbie, we gotta get going, but you want to see your friend home? Will square it with Honeyball.”
“Oh, I’m fine now,” I said, too quickly. “You needn’t—”
“It’s no trouble,” Corbie said. “You went to the Fiddler’s Fox like I said?”
“Yes, but—”
“All right, then.” She said to Emily, “Tell Honeyball I’m giving the Straw Market a whirl.” And to me, tucking her arm through mine, “Come on.” Further protests seemed foolish as well as futile.
After half a block, when I was sure the other women were out of earshot, I said, “Can you tell me something?”
“I can try.”
“Those men, they assumed I was a—” I wasn’t going to be able to get the word out without my voice cracking, but mercifully Corbie knew exactly what I meant.
“A jezebel? Well, yeah. You’re wearing colors.”
I looked down at my coat—bottle-green and much the worse for wear. “Only prostitutes wear color in Corambis?”
“Pretty much. At least in Bernatha. I don’t know about anywhere else. And, I mean, most people will figure you’re just a stranger, but Sunny Pingree and his boys, they ain’t too bright.”
“I’ll have to get a new coat,” I said, although I knew we couldn’t afford it.
“Um,” she said, was silent for three paces, then burst out with “Can I ask you something?”
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