“Did you find the professor-guy?” I said and heaved myself up out of the chair. Mr. Brightmore stood up with me, and the kid came around and took his arm.
“Yes,” Felix said. His hair suited him short. Made everything stand out more—his cheekbones and the white in his hair and the rings in his ears and his spooky eyes. People couldn’t take their eyes off him. Even here, I could see professors doing double takes, and some of the students were just staring. I mean, staring. And I knew Felix knew it, and liked it, but he was real good at pretending he didn’t notice. Now, he just rolled his eyes and explained: “He was trying to find some student of his who’d wandered off. Annemer academics are no better than wizards.” We started for the train.
“And you thought they would be?” I said.
He laughed, although he sort of turned it into a cough, and said, “Julian, you and Mr. Brightmore are welcome to sit with us if you like. The compartment seats six, and it’s only us and Corbie and possibly Virtuer Hutchence if he can be pried out of the enginists’ compartment.”
“We’d like that,” said the kid. “Wouldn’t we, Kay?”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Brightmore. “Mr. Foxe has been telling me about Mélusine, and I confess I am finding it more interesting than I expected.”
Felix shot a look at me. “More of your bedtime stories?” And I was saved having to come up with an answer because we were at the train, and they went on ahead so I could drag myself up the steps in peace.
Corbie was already in our compartment, which was first class along of how we were traveling with Virtuer Hutchence. She was bright-eyed and excited, and I was glad her and Felix had worked out the knot in Felix’s tail because he’d go batfuck nuts in a decad if he only had the Institution kids to teach. She flirted with Julian Carey, just a little, and I thought it was funny. She couldn’t be much older than him, but she was a grown-up and he was still a kid and kind of awkward with it to boot. So it was Corbie and Julian and Mr. Brightmore on one side, and then Felix and me and Jashuki and Virtuer Hutchence if he showed on the other, but I figured Felix was right and Virtuer Hutchence would stay talking with the enginists all the way to where we got off.
Felix let me have the window along of, he said, me missing all the scenery the first time. And I was glad of it, firstly because I did want to watch and secondly because it meant Corbie could talk to Julian and Felix could talk to Mr. Brightmore and I could sit and look out the window and not have to talk to nobody. So I sat and watched when the train started moving and I watched Esmer come rushing to meet us, and I never seen nothing like it, except maybe in dreams.
Felix
If nothing else, I decided, this excursion was worth it for the chance to talk to Kay Brightmore. I had never met anyone quite like him, intelligent—sharply so—and not uneducated, but a creature of the physical, rather than the mental. He had campaigned against the Usara since he was fourteen, he said when I asked. When he was fifteen, he became the commander of those annual campaigns, having buried his father the winter in between. He had never had time for formal education
I did not think he had regretted it, for he was clearly not a man much interested in the life of the mind, and a man less suited to the confined life for which he seemed now destined it was hard to imagine: too much physical strength, too much stamina, too little patience, and as far as I could tell, no inner stillness at all. Serenity for Kay Brightmore, I was willing to bet, came in the midst of the maelstrom and nowhere else.
He was interested in my view of the Insurgence and answered quite readily when I asked him about it. About its outcome he was bleakly realistic, and rather savage: “Caloxa is dead,” he said. “Long rule to the Convocation and may they choke on their spoils.” But when I asked him about causes instead, he proved to have a quite sophisticated grasp of the politics.
The last king of Caloxa, James Hume, had been deposed forty years ago in a war that had been primarily about magic reform. Unlike the Wizards’ Coup, however, the reformers were annemer, and what they objected to was the Mulkist school of wizardry, in which one class of wizard was treated by another class of wizard essentially as slaves. “Chattel,” said Kay.
“Ereimos,” I muttered. The Eusebians’ word for a wizard who was prey instead of predator.
“What?” said Kay, and Mildmay nudged me.
I looked up and realized that both Julian and Corbie were listening intently. “Nothing. Go on, please.”
For the Mulkists, however, the distinction wasn’t about power—well not about magical power. Whether a wizard became a shadow or a warlock depended entirely upon the accidents of birth.
“Is no different,” Kay said, perhaps a shade defensively, “than the system of government in both countries.”
“Is that an exculpation of the wizards or a condemnation of the lords?” I said, amused.
“Is . . . oh, never mind. My point was that it was not, despite the Grevillian rhetoric, inherently evil.”
“Open to abuse,” I suggested.
“And the Convocation isn’t corrupt at all,” he said scathingly. “But you’re distracting me. The point is that the Corambins invaded and defeated us, allegedly on behalf of the magicians, and then very conveniently forgot to go home. I don’t deny the sincerity of the reformers, for indeed Grevillian magic has been promulgated throughout Caloxa, but they did not protest the decisions made by other interests which resulted in one injustice taking the place of another.”
“How so?”
That got the first spark of real animation I had seen out of him, as he sat up straighter and made a frustrated, impassioned gesture with both hands. “Margraves are not dukes. Our loyalty is not based on the mathematics of power. Is personal, and deeply felt, and you cannot have that kind of loyalty to a committee, even an you choose to be ruled by them, which we did not.”
“Ah,” I said. “And your, er, subjects?”
“They are loyal to their margrave,” he said, and I could not tell if it was mere arrogance that made him state it so simply.
“I see.”
He heard my skepticism; his head came up, and for a moment it was as if he was actually glaring at me. He must have had a truly arresting gaze when he’d been able to direct it; now it was merely disconcerting. “I know every man, woman, and child in Rothmarlin. I fought the Usara with them. I danced at their weddings and wept at their funerals. I lit candles with them for the Lady. And that is more than our Corambin masters can say of any of us.”
“And yet you left them for Prince Gerrard.”
His shoulders sagged. “I thought it was right,” he said, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. I wondered if he had been doing that frequently since . . .
“How were you blinded?”
At once he was as sharply hostile as a porcupine. “What did you say?” Every word was edged in glass. Julian made alarmed shushing motions at me, but I ignored him.
“Is it so unreasonable a question?”
“No, not unreasonable at all. Merely uninvited.”
“Then you don’t have to answer it.”
He looked suddenly helpless. “I . . .”
There was a silence; Julian and Corbie were watching us with oddly similar wide-eyed expressions. To all appearances, Mildmay was absorbed in the view out the window, but I knew better than to think he wasn’t paying close attention. Kay said abruptly, “There is an engine in the heart of the labyrinth under Summerdown.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“How I was blinded. The engine under Summerdown.”
“Engine? Like the train engine?”
“No, a thaumaturgic engine. Not, I suppose, unlike the Automaton of Corybant.”
I thought of the penultimate trump of the Sibylline, the Two-Handed Engine. “How did it work?”
“Surely you would know better than I. Are not a magician?”
“A wizard,” I said, feeling that there might be more than mere nomenclature in the distinction. “I have no
thing to do with machines.”
“Oh.” He was frowning. “Then you’re a Mulkist?”
“I most certainly am not. I am a Cabaline, and we do not treat anyone as chattel.”
Except Mildmay.
Not. As. Chattel. And not any longer, in any event.
“I cry your mercy,” he said. “I meant no insult.”
“You can hardly have meant it as a compliment.”
“No, I didn’t . . . I suppose I don’t understand magic very well.”
“Annemer generally don’t,” I said cuttingly and was pleased when he ducked his head.
And then I was ashamed of myself. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be so short. But perhaps we should choose a new topic of conversation. It is, I believe, your turn.”
And he responded promptly: “How do you come to be a party to this journey? Did they seek you out as the slayer of the machine?”
“I’m teaching at the Institution. And Virtuer Hutchence asked if I wanted to come.”
I was half-expecting him to keep needling me about having “slain” the Automaton, but his interest was caught by something else. “Teaching? What do you teach?”
“It’s a class on theory, of which Corambin wizards apparently have none.”
Kay said, “When you say ‘theory,’ what exactly do you mean?”
I hesitated.
“Truly,” he said. “I would like to know. Unless is something annemer cannot understand.”
Touchy pride, and I said quickly, “It isn’t that. I’m just not used to annemer being interested.”
“Better off not knowing,” Mildmay muttered without turning from the window.
Kay’s head tilted toward him, but he did not ask, saying instead: “I cannot pretend I have ever been interested before, or that I would be interested if . . . if circumstances were different.” His mouth quirked. “My father found curiosity unseemly in a man, and I was cuffed more than once for asking too many questions. But as my father is many indictions dead, and would certainly have disinherited me already were he alive, I pray you indulge me.”
“All right,” I said. “Just tell me to stop when you’ve had enough.”
“Or when we get to where the thing is,” Mildmay said pointedly.
“Whichever comes first,” I said.
Kay was smiling, clearly amused by the byplay. In the bright morning light, his face looked unaccustomed to smiling; the lines were all frown lines. He had been a soldier all his life, and he was older than I was.
“All right,” I said. “What do you think magic is?”
“I cry your mercy,” Kay said. “What do you mean?”
“Magic,” I said, and if I’d been able, I would have demonstrated. “What is it?”
“I know not,” said Kay, frowning.
I looked at Mildmay, raising my eyebrows, and then remembered that for Kay’s benefit, all of this would have to be spoken. “Mildmay?”
“Me?” He looked more than taken aback, very nearly alarmed.
“What do you think magic is?”
“Powers and saints, how should I know?”
“You lived in the Mirador for two years, surrounded by wizards. You’ve had magic used on you. If anyone should know, you should.”
Scowling, he said, “Fine. Magic is doing things you don’t want to do.”
He was obviously thinking of the obligation d’âme, and I remembered, belatedly, the compulsion that had been used on him in the Gardens of Nephele; I might not like his summation, but I couldn’t argue. “Julian?”
He looked every bit as alarmed as Mildmay. “I’m annemer. I don’t know.”
“Guess,” I said.
“Power,” said Julian.
“All right. Corbie?”
She’d had time to think and said promptly, “The manipulation of aether.”
I frowned at her, not entirely teasing. “We just had this discussion in class yesterday. Give me another answer.”
“All right,” she said with a shrug. “It’s the thing inside you that has to come out.”
“Better,” I said and finished my circle by asking Kay again: “Kay? What is magic?”
“All I know of magic is the engine beneath Summerdown. And if that is magic, then magic is death.”
“That was the end result,” I agreed, “but how did it work?”
“You want me to describe the deaths of my dearest friends?”
The only possible response was to strike back. “No. I want you to tell me how the magic worked. Or what, you walked into the room and everyone died?”
“Felix,” Mildmay said, warning.
But Kay didn’t seem to mind. “No, there was a ritual.” He described it very clearly.
“And none of you were wizards,” I said.
“No. The magician would not come with us. He was wiser than we, the little rat.”
“I have to admit, I don’t know how that could possibly have worked.”
“Do you doubt—”
“No, don’t be ridiculous. I’m not saying it didn’t work, just that I don’t understand it. So it’s not a very good example for my purposes.”
“Oh, yes,” said Kay. “You were going to explain what magical theory was. I note that you have yet to do so.”
“I asked the four of you what magic is, and got five different and unhelpful answers. If I went to the Institution . . . well, actually, what I’m afraid of is that they would tell me exactly what magic is, and they’d all agree. But if I went back to the Mirador and walked in on a meeting of the Curia and asked them to tell me what magic is—”
Mildmay started laughing.
“—every wizard in the room would have a different answer. At least two answers would directly contradict each other. And there would be three screaming matches within fifteen minutes.”
“Your wizards are a quarrelsome lot,” Kay said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Mildmay said.
“But,” I said, before Mildmay could start telling stories in which I would cut a most unattractive figure, “my point is, every one of those answers would be right.”
Kay frowned. “Even those that contradicted each other?”
“Yes!” I said, delighted that he understood. “The most important thing about magic is the metaphors we use to understand it, and a metaphor that is wrong is a metaphor that doesn’t work. No wizard who successfully performs any piece of magic can possibly be using a wrong metaphor. There are bad metaphors, dangerous metaphors, destructive metaphors—but no wrong metaphors. Thaumaturgical theory, in the broadest sense, is about manipulating our metaphors and, ideally, making sure that the metaphors we use are good ones.”
“There must be some sort of consensus,” Kay said.
“That’s what schools of wizardry are.”
“But if it’s all whatchamacallits, metaphors . . .” Mildmay was frowning, and he looked up at me suddenly. “Then what is magic?”
And all I could do was shrug and tell him the truth: “Nobody knows.”
At ten-thirty we reached the place where the tree had blocked the railroad line. Corbie took Julian and flitted off to join a group of young magicians I recognized from lecture; they included Robin Clayforth and Cyriack Thrale, whom I observed Julian seemed to know and to be far more comfortable with than he was with Corbie. Kay and Mildmay and I stayed together; the weight of Kay’s broad, blunt hand on my arm was not unpleasant, anchoring me against the screams of the dead of Corybant.
I had hoped the pattern in the noirance might have dissipated with the destruction of the Automaton, but if anything, the screams were louder. It was, however, interesting to be back here under less fraught conditions. Hutch had brought an abundance of lanterns and by their light, what was left of Corybant emerged from the shadows of Nauleverer.
There was precious little: a few crumbled stones, the very dim remnant of what—knowing that this had been a city—might have been a road. The trees were moss-grown and gnarled, so v
ast in circumference that it took three students to join hands around one. Beside the straight lines of the railway, the Automaton lay where it had fallen. Hutch gave me a nod and waved me forward. My impressions of the Automaton had mostly been of a great shadowy bulk with glints of metal here and there and the evil red gleam of its eyes. I had aimed my witchlight at the eyes, reasoning that if there was a thaumaturgic converter or some other central magical device, they would have to be connected to it. It had worked, but that didn’t mean the theory was correct. Now, looking at the Automaton in the light of the lantern Mildmay was patiently holding, I saw that it was encrusted with moss and lichen and wound about with vines. “No wonder no one ever noticed it before,” I said. “It was busy doing a magnificent impression of a dead tree.”
“Then what woke it?” Kay asked. He had knelt down with me, and his hands were delicately traversing the spikes that marked the Automaton’s spine.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wish I did, or that we could tell how long it was awake before it pushed that tree over.” I cleared away the vegetation from the Automaton’s head, having to pull to free the vines from what were apparently the thing’s . . . horns?
I sat back on my heels. “Mildmay, does this look like a bull’s head to you?”
“Maybe,” Mildmay said. “If you squint.”
“A bull?” said Kay. “Why . . . ?”
“In the religion of Cymellune,” I said, “the guardian god—he who watched over and protected his people—was represented as a man with the head of a bull.”
“So when they went to build their own guardian,” Mildmay said softly.
“Yes. Even if they didn’t worship him any longer, they remembered.”
“And then,” Kay said, “their guardian went mad.”
“Do you know any stories that say why?” I asked.
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