Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  “Yeah,” said Mildmay, and when I glanced at him, he shrugged. “A peacock ain’t a peacock without the feathers.”

  “Oh shut up,” I said, but I was grinning too hard even to pretend I meant it.

  In the carriage—provided by the Duke of Murtagh, naturally—Mildmay watched the streets of Esmer, and Corbie fidgeted with the drape of her skirt, the cuffs of her coat. Her hands kept moving toward her elaborately braided hair and then jerking back. Finally, I said, “Corbie. Spit it out already.”

  She jumped as if I’d stuck a pin in her. “Spit what out?”

  “Whatever it is that’s bothering you.” Mildmay gave me a look, but I shook my head. I was fairly sure this was my problem to deal with.

  “Oh. Well”—she jerked her hands back down to her lap again—“I know I pestered you and pestered you to be my teacher, and I know I said I’d do anything if I didn’t have to deal with the Women’s College, and that’s true, and it’s not like I can’t—”

  “Corbie.”

  “Right. Shut up. Fuck, I hate this.” She made a noise that was half sigh and half laugh, and then very visibly braced herself to meet my eyes. “I don’t want to go to Grimglass.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “I want to be a virtuer,” she said, the words bursting out as if she had been struggling to keep them unsaid for days. “I want to be a virtuer, and fuck the Women’s College and what women can’t do or shouldn’t do and all the rest of it.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  She gave me a wide-eyed, mistrustful look.

  “We’ve had this discussion. There’s no reason you can’t become a virtuer, and I think you should make the Institution eat every single reason they think they have to stop you.”

  As she believed that I meant it, she began to smile. Then her face fell. “But you’re my teacher. I shouldn’t—”

  “Oh, don’t start,” I said. “I promise you, my feelings aren’t hurt. If you’d wanted to come, I would’ve been glad to keep teaching you, but this isn’t a test of your loyalty, and you aren’t betraying me.”

  “Even if I ask Hutch . . .”

  “Even if you ask Hutch,” I said firmly.

  And Mildmay said, “Hey, I think we’re here.”

  The wedding was lovely, if mostly incomprehensible. Vanessa Pallister would never be beautiful, but the obviously antique fashion of her wedding dress suited her and someone had persuaded her to wear her hair off her face. While it was not that she was elated or radiant or any of the other adjectives traditionally associated with brides, it was clear that a tremendous strain had been lifted from her, and she looked pleased, like a cat who has found a way into the creamery. Kay looked somber as ever, but he was not actually scowling.

  After the wedding, when in Mélusine all the attendees returned to their own bedrooms to celebrate the marriage in the best and most private way, Corambins apparently threw a party. Murtagh had finagled St. Nath’s Tower, which was magnificent with flowers and crystal. Mildmay stuck to my side like glue.

  “Are you trying to make people think you’re still under the binding-by-forms?”

  “Hey, if it’ll keep them from talking to me. Look alive, here comes the duke.”

  Murtagh looked very nearly as pleased as Vanessa, but I felt revenged, even if only slightly, by the double take he did at my rings. He recovered quickly, said smooth as silk, “Virtuer Harrowgate, there are some gentlemen who would be very pleased to meet you.”

  “Of course,” I said. I followed him, being sure to smile brilliantly at anyone I noticed staring, and found that his “gentlemen” were two wizards and an annemer, all wearing sharply tailored uniforms in green and gold. The annemer was missing his right arm below the elbow, and I was not surprised when he was introduced as Captain Glew of the Convocate Navy, and his companions as Magician-Lieutenant Rastell and Second Magician-Lieutenant Edey.

  From my exposure to the Bastion’s methods—and results—I was inclined to be wary of wizards with military titles, but I quickly found that the Corambin navy was quite different from anything I’d encountered. While Rastell was clearly Edey’s superior, there was nothing in Edey’s bearing or occasional withering comment to suggest that he was being exploited and preyed upon in the way Kekropian wizards were.

  The reminder of Gideon hurt, but not crushingly, and then Edey made a dry comment that made both Rastell and Glew roar with laughter, and I jerked myself back to the conversation.

  They wanted to know about Mélusine, of course. I was glad to oblige, and all three of them pelted me with eager questions until I said in self-defense, “But what about Ygres? Surely it’s every bit as exotic as Marathat?”

  They stared at me as if the idea had never occurred to them. Glew and Rastell were both embarrassed enough to become incoherent. It was Edey who managed to say, “I’m afraid you’ve fallen afoul of our national infatuation with Cymellune.”

  “As has happened to me many times before,” I said, smiling to take the sting out of it.

  “You must curse the name of Agramant the Navigator,” said Rastell.

  “Sometimes,” I said lightly.

  “Oh, don’t lay it on Agramant,” said Edey. “The myths that have built up around him aren’t his fault.”

  “Myths?” protested Captain Glew.

  Edey startled, and I suspected Rastell had just kicked him. “Sorry, sir,” said Edey. “I just don’t see how Agramant could have ended up here, when the prevailing current is toward Ygres.”

  “And we’ve had this argument so many times I swear sometimes I do have it in my sleep,” Rastell said. “Besides, I’m afraid most of my memories of Ygres are unpleasant rather than romantic. But truly, Virtuer, is your city as beautiful as Challoner says?”

  “More so,” I said promptly, and described the great cathedrals to them. Then Glew had a question about the Sim, and I was trying to explain the river’s course to men who knew far more about water and its ways than I ever would, when Murtagh returned and bore me off to be introduced to someone else—a plethora of someone elses—until I began to wonder if the best cure for homesickness was to talk the thing to death. Mildmay continued to shadow me until I finally said, “Look, why don’t you go talk to Kay? It’s got to be more interesting than this.”

  “You sure?”

  “I don’t actually need a bodyguard,” I said.

  “The way them ladies are looking at you, I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “Darling, please. I’ve dealt with worse than them. Go on.”

  He went, and I thought it was not coincidental that the next time Murtagh extracted me from a conversation, he said, “Let’s take a turn in the gardens, shall we? The rose garden in particular is worth a look.”

  “All right,” I said. I knew an excuse when I heard one.

  The roses were beautiful, though, and I got a little distracted from Murtagh’s agenda until he said, “Virtuer Harrowgate.”

  “You could call me Felix,” I said, straightening from my inspection of a richly red rose named, according to the neat plaque in front of it, Glory of Cassander.

  Murtagh actually blushed. “I, ah, I wanted to apologize.”

  “For what?” I said; I honestly couldn’t think of anything.

  “In Bernatha,” he said.

  “You want to apologize to a prostitute for hiring him?” I said blankly. “Shall I tell you how badly I needed the money?”

  If anything, that disconcerted him further. “I shouldn’t have . . .”

  “Your Grace,” I said, “please believe me when I say you have nothing to apologize for. You were . . .” And then I suddenly realized what this was about. “You were nothing like Edwin Beckett and his . . . his cult. You did nothing to me that I didn’t agree to. Honestly, you did nothing to me that I didn’t want. I am a martyr. A shadow.” And this time, the admission didn’t hurt; it was just the truth, like the rings on my fingers were the truth.

  “I am glad,” Murtagh said
, staring fixedly at a yellow rose named Gartrett Aggas. I’d have to remember to get Corbie out here and show it to her. “I didn’t want to think that . . .”

  “No,” I said firmly. Movement near the doors of the tower caught my eye. “I think your duchess is looking for you.”

  I saw the moment’s painful conflict on his face—he loved her, although she was bitter and barren and although there was so much about himself he could not show her—and then he smoothed it away and said, “Thank you for your indulgence.” And then he gave me a smile, a tarquin’s smile. “Felix.” And he strode off.

  I returned to the party and this time searched determinedly until I found Kay. He was sitting in a corner, Mildmay beside him. They were, of course, not even talking to each other. I rolled my eyes and set to work. Within a few minutes—and with some judicious nudging—I had Kay involved with Edey and a nobleman whose name I’d forgotten, arguing amiably about whether the eastern or southern Perblanches had the higher peaks, with a good deal of ancillary discussion of waterfalls and caves and suchlike, leading the conversation eventually to the Usara.

  Here the argument became rather less amiable, as Kay and the nobleman had radically differing views of the Usara and even more radically differing opinions over what ought to be done about them. Kay seemed to see them as honorable enemies. He’d fought them, from what he said, all his life, and what he wanted was for the far south of Caloxa and the far east of Corambis (he distinguished scrupulously between the two) to be properly defended. The nobleman thought that hostilities should be stopped and the Usara be given help.

  “Help? They neither want nor need your help—nor will thank you for offering.” Kay’s tone was derisive and supremely confident; I couldn’t even blame the nobleman for being offended, as he very clearly was.

  I intervened, playing the Ignorant Foreigner card. “So who are the Usara, exactly? I know they live in the mountains, but—”

  I was inundated with people trying to explain. The Usara were the elder people according to one informant, savages according to another. They lived in great halls beneath the Perblanches, or in squalid camps in “any cave they can drive the bears out of.” They had their own language—“crude” said some, “ancient” said others—and their social system was a complete mystery to outsiders. “They’re all up there marrying their sisters,” one woman said with a comprehensive shudder.

  “And why are you fighting them?” I said politely.

  “Mineral rights,” said Lieutenant Edey and looked immediately abashed.

  “Pastureland,” Kay said gloomily.

  “We must secure the passes,” said a choleric gentleman.

  Kay sighed and actually leaned back in his chair. “The Usara don’t harass travelers,” he said, in the tones of a man who had said this so many times he was sick of the sound of his own voice. “The problem is the cattle raids. And slave raids.”

  “Slave raids?” I said, appalled.

  “Oh, yes,” Kay said. “Children between six and fourteen and any young woman who isn’t visibly pregnant or nursing. We do not fight them for the joy of it.”

  “Where I come from,” Edey said somberly, “they don’t take slaves. They just kill the miners.”

  “Thieves,” Kay said in explanation. “My great-grandfather hanged thieves, too.”

  “But the copper mines aren’t stealing from the Usara,” the choleric gentleman said.

  “By our reckoning,” Kay said. “By theirs, the wealth of the mountains belongs to the usar, the . . . We haven’t a word that means anything similar. ‘Descent’ is close, but wrong.” He added after a moment, “They work in copper. Quite magnificently.”

  “Greedy beggars,” said the choleric gentleman.

  “Yes,” Kay said. “Of course, so are we.”

  I bit down on a crow of laughter as the group, after a stunned pause, exploded in protests and justifications. Kay refrained from smirking, but I could see his satisfaction, and he did not lose it even when Vanessa approached.

  “Is time?” he said before she’d even spoken. Of course, I realized: the scent of her perfume was almost as good as being able to see her.

  “I think it is,” she said. He rose and took her arm. I didn’t think they were more than friends, but at least they had that much.

  “Felix,” he said. “Mildmay. Will welcome you at Grimglass with great happiness. Now—and I ask it as a personal favor—if you would not participate in the traditional farewell to the newlywed couple . . .”

  “What is the traditional farewell to the newlywed couple?” I asked Vanessa while Mildmay leaned over and said something in Kay’s ear that actually made him laugh.

  “A gauntlet of rose petals,” she said. “It offends his dignity.” Then she tugged on Kay’s arm. “Come on, bonehead. Let’s get it over with.”

  Mildmay and I didn’t participate. But we did watch.

  One sunny Savato morning, a very few days before we started west for Grimglass, I took the rubies out of their hiding place beneath a floorboard in the closet, and walked to the Institution. The rubies were a lump of mikkary and unease in my pocket; I felt as if ruby bees were crawling very slowly up and down my spine.

  The Experimental Nullity was housed in the basements of Venables Hall. As I started down the basement stairs, my magic was gone, as sudden as a snuffed candle. I stopped and clutched at the bannister—it wasn’t that I hadn’t believed Hutch about what the Nullity did, but I hadn’t . . . Well, I didn’t know what I hadn’t, and I very nearly turned around, but then I realized I couldn’t feel the rubies, either.

  The basements were brick, high-vaulted, dry and clean and very well lit. There was a student, clearly on duty as a sort of porter, and when I asked, he blinked owlishly up from his books and told me that the Automaton had had to be put in the subbasements, it being too large for the Nullity’s area of the basements. He pointed me at an iron hatch, standing open, and a ladder leading down into the darkness. “Hutch went down there an hour and a half ago, and I don’t think he’ll come up before dinnertime.”

  I wished, with painful acuity, to be able to call witchlights—the Nullity was an ugly reminder of the choke-binding—and started down.

  Gripping the rungs of the ladder was difficult and uncomfortable, but I spoke firmly to myself about how much more uncomfortable falling would be and persevered. Ten rungs, twenty rungs, twenty-eight, thirty-five, forty-two, and just as I realized I’d fallen into the old childhood habit of counting by septads, I reached the bottom of the ladder and the positively miraculous light of a phalanx of lanterns, standing about the sprawled bulk of the Automaton like funeral candles and illuminating the brick vault of a tunnel similar to those of the fathom.

  “Felix!” Hutch said cheerfully, looking up from where he was patiently cleaning some of the more delicate mechanisms of the Automaton. “That’s right, you said you had something you wanted to talk about.”

  I had dredged up all my courage and mentioned it to him at the wedding reception, both of us half-drunk. “Um. Sort of a favor I wanted to ask, actually.”

  “Well, ask,” he said, raising his eyebrows at me.

  “The, um. The Nullity. It’s working now, yes?”

  “You know it is,” he said, sitting back on his heels to regard me more attentively. “Whatever made this thing wake up, it can’t happen again.”

  “Good,” I said, realized I was wringing my hands nervously, and made myself quit. “I, um. I wondered if . . .”

  “Lady love you,” said Hutch, frowning. He straightened and came around the Automaton toward me. “You look like you’re about to be sick. What is it?”

  I took a step back, for if he touched me, I knew I’d bolt. Except of course that there was nowhere to bolt to. I had to say it. I took a deep breath, although I couldn’t make my voice stay steady: “I wondered if I could put something down here.”

  “Well, certainly,” Hutch said. “But why would you want to?”

  My face went immediat
ely burning red. “I, um . . .”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Hutch said quickly. He stepped back, palms raised. “It’s all right.”

  “No, I should,” I said. “I just . . .” And then a horrible thought struck me. “What about when you end the Nullity? What happens then?”

  “Everything goes back to normal?” Hutch said slowly, as if he wasn’t sure what he should say. “But we’ve no intention of closing the Nullity. Certainly not until we understand the Automaton. I’ve no desire to reenact the destruction of Corybant, thank you very much.”

  “But then it would be down here with them . . . Oh, I can’t do this. It’s just the Khloïdanikos all over again, and I can’t—”

  “Felix.” Hutch caught my arm, and I jerked back. He was staring at me, his eyes—dark for a Corambin’s—deeply worried. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but whatever it is, it can’t be as bad as . . . well, as bad as you look like it is. Tell me about it. Please?”

  “I can’t,” I said. Had I thought I could be rid of Malkar? More fool, I. I would never be free of him. Killing him hadn’t done it. The katharsis hadn’t done it. Reflecting what he had done to me onto Isaac Garamond certainly hadn’t done it. Trying to leave his rubies in the Khloïdanikos had made it worse, and now I was trying to make the same mistake again. The same stupid selfish mistake. “I’m sorry. I was stupid. I should just—” But my fingers skidded off the rung; I pounded the flat of my hand against the wall. “Damn.”

  “It sounds to me,” said Hutch, “like you need to tell someone. Have you talked to your brother?”

  That was almost funny. “He knows,” I said. “But it is a peculiarly thaumaturgical problem.”

  “Well, it must be, if it’s something you want to put in the Nullity.”

  “It’s these,” I said, in a sudden savage access of fury. I pulled the wash-leather bag out of my pocket, spilled the rubies out across my palm.