Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  The Corambin magicians were nervous—obviously so, and I remembered Miss Bridger saying a virtuer wouldn’t have been able to deal with the Automaton as I had. I had dismissed that claim as ignorance and excessive enthusiasm, but perhaps I had been wrong to do so.

  Virtuer Hutchence was my own age, more or less; he was stocky and cheerful and seemed not terribly impressed with his own rank. The adepts were Lillicrop and Rook, and they were some ten years older. They were professional men where Hutchence was an academic, and were very dignified and dour. I couldn’t tell them apart.

  They let Hutchence do the talking at first, which suited me very well. I knew how to deal with academic wizards. We exchanged credentials and chatted briefly about the relationship between the Coeurterre, with which the Institution was familiar, and the Mirador, with which it was not.

  “What about your companion?” said Virtuer Hutchence.

  I smiled. “He isn’t a wizard.”

  And Hutchence simply nodded and said, “Now, about the incident in Nauleverer . . .”

  I described what had happened, to the best of my ability—I had no basis on which to speculate about what the monster had been, except that it had been mechanical, twice the size of a man, and clearly hostile. Hutchence nodded and took notes and was settling comfortably into a disquisition on the flora and fauna of the Forest of Nauleverer and its reactions to the railroad when one of the adepts interrupted: “And you killed it with a lightning bolt?”

  And, reminded, Hutchence was nervous again.

  “Not a lightning bolt, exactly,” I said. “The experiments I know of in calling lightning all ended very messily.”

  “Then what was it?” said the other adept.

  “Do you want the entire theoretical framework of Cabaline luxomancy?”

  “That hardly seems necessary,” the first adept said, sneering.

  “What Mr. Lillicrop means,” Hutchence said hastily, “is that we don’t need a full explanation now. Merely a broad outline.”

  As a placatory gesture, it was a failure. Lillicrop and Rook looked offended, and I myself resented the implication that I was accountable to the Institution, even though that was exactly why Stephen had sent me here.

  “I did this, only amplified.” I summoned witchlight, hard and fast and aimed very precisely. The corner of Hutchence’s quire glowed briefly, brilliantly green, and caught fire.

  He yelped and dropped it; he and the adepts backed away, and I couldn’t tell whether they wanted distance from the flame or distance from me. Mildmay nudged me aside and stamped out the fire before it had a chance to really catch.

  “Does that answer your questions, gentlemen?” I said.

  Hutchence picked up the quire and examined the singed edge. His entire face had become round with astonishment. “Luminiferous aether!” he said. “I had no idea it could do that!”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “We can all manipulate aether,” he said and called witchlights of his own, very small and not very bright, but a veritable constellation around his head. “But since it is heatless and has no mass, it never occurred to anyone that it could be made to have an effect on material bodies. How very astonishing.”

  “Aether?” I said. I sorted through five different ways of saying, I have no idea what you’re talking about, and settled for the most dignified: “I’m not familiar with that term.”

  “The old term is vi,” Lillicrop said, sneering again.

  “I thought that was something only people have.”

  “Oh, no, no, no, not a bit,” Hutchence said brightly. “Aether, or vi, is the substance of magic. People have it, animals have it, objects have it. It’s just that only magicians can use it.”

  “Manar,” I said inadvertently. Ephreal Sand wrote a great deal about manar, the world of the spirit, in De Doctrina Labyrinthorum, but it had never occurred to me to connect manar to my witchlights. It had never occurred to me, I realized, to think about my witchlights at all.

  “I’m not familiar with that term,” Rook said, and I turned quickly enough to catch the mockery on his face.

  “You wouldn’t be,” I said and smiled at him as if I hadn’t noticed. “It’s Kekropian thaumaturgy.”

  “How quaint,” said Rook.

  Lillicrop and Hutchence were muttering together, and Hutchence looked up to say, “I’m quite sure the Circle will want to speak to you in person, Mr. Harrowgate.”

  “The Circle?” I said. “I understood your governing body was the Congress.”

  “The Congress is all of us,” said Hutchence. “The Circle is like our Convocation. I imagine you’ll be asked to appear before the Congress as well, but the Circle first.”

  “Um,” I said. “Mildmay, do you have those letters?”

  Of course, he did. Mildmay kept track of everything.

  “Letters?” said Hutchence, accepting the oilskin packet. “You didn’t say anything about those earlier.”

  I only wished I thought I could have gotten away with not mentioning them at all. “They’re for your Circle,” I said, and I was feeling unsettled enough to be deliberately nasty. “Not for their flunkies.”

  Hutchence took it in perfectly good humor, although I could see him, sharp behind his amiable, slightly naïve façade, noticing I’d been put out of countenance and wondering why. Lillicrop and Rook were simply offended; before they could say so, Hutchence said, “I will be sure Virtuer Ashmead receives them. Mr. Lillicrop, Mr. Rook, I recall your urgency to return to your offices.”

  He shepherded them out, closing the door behind himself with a politely definite click.

  Mildmay gave me one of his unreadable looks and said, “Next time you’re gonna set something on fire, you wanna warn me first?”

  “It could have been worse,” I said. “My first choice of target was Mr. Lillicrop’s cravat.”

  I had not sought the Khloïdanikos since the night in Bernatha when I drowned the fantôme, afraid of what I might find there—or what I might bring with me. But that was a wretched way to repay Thamuris for his help and kindness, and so finally, lying that night in the Golden Hare, I gritted my teeth and reached. Horn Gate was, most thankfully, still open; I plunged through it without stopping.

  The Khloïdanikos was green again; though it was not as vibrant as it had been before I had brought Malkar’s rubies into it, it was clearly repairing itself, returning to its centuries-held equilibrium. Thamuris was there, sitting on the bench we had always favored, and he, too, looked better. He turned his head sharply as he sensed me, and bounded to his feet. “Felix! Where have you been? What happened to you?”

  “It’s very complicated,” I said, rather weakly.

  “Yes, I can see that,” he said. I looked down at myself and saw tatters of noirance whipping about me. “Is there something . . . with you?”

  “Not any longer, I hope. It’s called a fantôme.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a kind of revenant. The old necromancers used them.”

  “A spirit-ancestor?”

  “A dead wizard. My understanding is that by allowing the ghost to possess them, the caster could make themselves immeasurably more powerful.” Certainly that had been the aim of the foolish wizard in Hermione. The murdered Caloxan wizard had simply not been picky about her means of revenge.

  I could see Thamuris’s revulsion. “And you sought to increase your—”

  “Not me!” I cried out, revolted in turn. “I wouldn’t . . . I don’t . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” Thamuris said, and was my friend again, not the stone-eyed judge. “I’m sorry, truly. I know you wouldn’t. But why did it—”

  “Hunt me? I . . . I attracted its attention. Inadvertently. And it is—it is the nature of fantômes to be—hungry.”

  “Like a fire,” Thamuris said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Like a fire.”

  “Can I do anything to help?”

  “No, it’s gone. I just need some time.”
/>
  “Well, let me show you something that maybe will help. At least, I think it is encouraging.” I followed him, and by the ruined orchard wall, the perseïd tree was . . .

  “It’s budding?” I said; I wasn’t sure I dared to believe it.

  “I’ve been watching it for you. Not that I would be able to do anything if—”

  “Thank you.” I touched one of the tiny white buds, laid my hand gently against the tree’s black bark.

  “Is Mildmay . . . all right? I know you said he’s with you, and if the perseïd really is linked to him somehow . . . I didn’t know, but I was hoping.”

  “I think maybe Mildmay is all right,” I said, and it occurred to me that this might be the first time in all the years I’d known him that that was true.

  At breakfast, as if to refute my hopeful dreaming, Mildmay was frowning and silent—not that he was ever talkative, but there was a weight to this silence that made me uneasy—and finally, I said, “For the love of cats, what is it?”

  The green eyes flicked up at me and away. “I had this weird dream last night.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You were in it. So was Thamuris.”

  I’d never had any ability to hide things from him, and the evidence indicated I wasn’t going to start now. I felt my own guilty flinch, and Mildmay said, “It wasn’t just a dream, then.” He sounded grimly unsurprised.

  “The obligation d’âme,” I said. “I did warn you about—”

  “And I heard you. That ain’t the part I’m interested in. Was it really Thamuris—not just you dreaming him, I mean?”

  “Yes, it was really Thamuris,” I said dully, braced for the next inevitable question: what was this fantôme we were talking about?

  But Mildmay said, “How long you been talking to him in your dreams?”

  “Since we left Troia, roughly.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment; when he did speak his voice was quiet, almost reflective: “You motherfucking cunt.”

  “Mildmay, what—”

  “I figured he was dead,” he continued over me. “I figured he died three fucking indictions ago, and all this time you been talking to him?”

  “You didn’t say anything about—”

  “For fuck’s sake, Felix!” He’d never turned that look on me before, impatience, almost contempt, like flint and iron. Like that terrible dream of him dead. “How was I s’posed to know you and him were doing hocus things in your sleep? And does it really take that much to figure I might want to know?”

  “You hate ‘hocus things.’ ”

  “That he’s alive!” Mildmay all but howled. Then he caught himself. “No, never mind. No point. If you’d realized, you would’ve said. Just—is he okay? I mean, aside from the consumption?”

  His forgiveness almost hurt more than his anger, especially because I wasn’t sure he was right. I hadn’t realized, but even if I had . . . I’d known I was being selfish, even before Thamuris’s indictment, but just how deep had that selfishness run?

  I took a deep breath. “I think he’s all right. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  “Well, he must be sort of okay. I mean, if he’s meeting with you regular.”

  “I think he’s surprised the celebrants, that he’s doing so well.”

  “That’s good,” Mildmay said, and to my great relief he let the subject drop.

  I tried all that day to think of a way to tell Mildmay about the fantôme, and I couldn’t. It was—well, it was ridiculous, wasn’t it? As if my life was nothing but one catastrophe heaped on top of the next, without even the decency of a layer of tissue in between. I remembered Mehitabel comparing my life to a romance, and that was exactly, horribly right.

  The fantôme is gone, I told myself. No need to distress him. And I did my best to believe it.

  Mildmay

  The letter from the Circle came the next morning.

  “I expected as much,” Felix said, but not like it made him happy or nothing.

  I watched him open it and read it—after a moment, his eyebrows went up. “Well, I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “What?”

  “They say that if the inquiry goes well, they’re prepared to offer me a lectureship at the Institution.”

  “You mean like a job?”

  “Yes. Exactly like a job.”

  I didn’t even care he was being snarky at me. Because, you know, I’d been trying not to worry about money and us not having none and what Felix might think he had to do about it this time, but I hadn’t been doing real well. So all at once it was like I could breathe again, except for the part where Felix was still frowning.

  “What’s this inquiry thing?”

  He made an unhappy kind of coughing noise, and I was right back to not breathing. “They, ah, they’ve read the letters from Stephen and Giancarlo. They’re concerned.”

  “Yeah?”

  He shut his eyes for a second. “Stephen gave them authority over me.”

  “Okay. And?”

  “They are concerned about what they call ‘a clear and blatant abuse of power.’ I think I’m on trial. Sort of.”

  “Sort of?” From what I knew, you were either on trial—and most likely going to get yourself hanged—or not. It wasn’t a thing you could do “sort of.”

  “Well, it’s not a real trial. They’re quite careful to explain that neither the Circle nor the Congress is a judicial body. They can’t send me to prison or have me executed or anything like that. Although I imagine they could make strong recommendations to whatever ‘judicial body’ there is here.”

  “So what can they do to you?”

  “What Mortimer Clef said. At my real trial.” His mouth twisted, and he shoved his fingers through his hair, which was always a sign he was fretful. “They can bind my magic.”

  “And you’re gonna let ’em?”

  It was a real question. I meant it, and after a moment where I thought he was going to skin me alive, he saw that I meant it, and his frown went from pissed off to just kind of thoughtful.

  “Because,” I said, “you don’t have to.”

  “We’ve come all this way,” he said, not disagreeing exactly, but like it hadn’t occurred to him that he had a choice.

  “I know. And I ain’t saying we should bail. Just . . . well, we don’t really know nothing about these hocuses, and I don’t know, it seems like maybe you shouldn’t be in a big hurry to let them do shit like that to you.”

  His eyebrows went up. “That was quite the speech.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t try and change the subject by picking on me. It won’t help.”

  He kind of flinched. “Old habits,” he said, and I knew what he meant was I’m sorry.

  “I know that,” I said, to both what he said and what he meant. “I’m just saying, don’t do it. Because I ain’t gonna play, and there just ain’t no fucking point, is there?”

  “I suppose there isn’t,” he said. Then, abruptly, “If I didn’t . . . if we left, where would we go?”

  “Where d’you want to go?”

  “Home,” he said before he had a chance to catch himself. And then we just both kind of sat there for a while, along of there being nothing anybody could say.

  In the end, though, Felix decided to go ahead and let the Circle take their best swing. Because, he said, first of all, if he ever was going to get to go home again, it’d be because he’d done what Lord Stephen wanted and had plenty of witnesses to prove it. And besides, he’d been thinking along the same lines as me about money and us not having none. It would be much more comfortable, he said, to be exiled with a steady income than without. And, you know, I really couldn’t argue with him.

  So I cleaned up his dark green coat as best I could, including darning a rip that Felix swore up down and sideways he hadn’t put there, and braided his hair for him, and when we collected Corbie from her little mousehole of a room and went downstair
s, there were five more letters waiting at the front desk, and Mrs. Davidge looked kind of like she’d got slapped in the face with a dead fish.

  Felix gave the letters the hairy eyeball and said, “I’m sorry to have been such a bother to you, Mrs. Davidge.”

  “Oh, no bother, Mr. Harrowgate,” she said, and she was looking at him funny, but not like she didn’t like what she saw. “It’s nice to have a guest who brings such distinction to the hotel.” And she put a newspaper on top of the desk, with this weird picture of a guy and something like a walking clock, and I could read the letters across the top: “MONSTER MACHINE FELLED BY MAGICIAN HERO.”

  Felix went tomato-red. I said before he could get his mouth open, “We need to get to the Institution.” And of course she didn’t understand me, which at least gave Felix something better to do than yell at her.

  “Well,” she said, “the easiest way is to take the fathom to Greville Station.”

  “The fathom?” Felix said, and he sounded like he was expecting another monster.

  “Oh, I know about that,” Corbie said. “I figured ’em all out yesterday. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

  So we followed her outside where we got to find out what being a carny freak was like. Because, I mean, there wasn’t no way to hide Felix—too tall and too pale and with the hair. So people stared. And whispered at each other. And I heard at least one kid yelling, “Hey, the foreign magician’s come out!”

  Felix went stiff, and for a moment I thought he was going to bolt back inside the hotel. But then he said through his teeth, “How quaint,” and all at once it was like he didn’t even notice. He just went where he wanted to go and it was like nobody else even existed. Except that he went slow enough for me to keep up, which was nice of him and I sure as fuck appreciated it.

  After he’d got into his stride, he said, “Corbie, what is the fathom?”

  “Trains underground,” Corbie said. “It’s the niftiest thing ever. And we’re right near the station, too.”