“What’s the matter?” I said.
“I must look mad,” he said and got to his feet. “I’m trying to diagram a katharsis.”
“A what?”
“It’s an old Troian word,” he said, coming back to the table with his pieces of string snarled across it. “Translations vary, but it means something between ‘purification’ and ‘purgation.’ Both of those seem suitable to me.”
“What are you wanting to, um, purge?”
“Oh, this is just hypothetical.”
I waited, not asking, So how come you keep on running into that wall? Felix hated silence.
“Do you always know when I’m lying?”
I shrugged a little.
There was another pause before he said in a low voice, not looking at me, “Malkar had a workroom down in the Warren. No one knew about it but me.”
I only realized after I’d done it that I’d made the sign to ward off hexes.
“Exactly,” Felix said. “I don’t want anybody coming across it by accident and finding . . . well, finding what Malkar left there.”
“Sacred fuck. And you were just planning to sneak off all by yourself in the middle of the night?”
“I can’t . . .” His voice choked off, and it was a moment before he went on. “I don’t want Gideon to see it, and I can’t think of anyone else who wouldn’t laugh at me. The Mirador doesn’t believe in ghosts and miasmas.”
“I ain’t laughing,” I said. “Can I help?”
The piece of chalk he was holding snapped in half, like I’d startled him.
“I mean,” I said, and I could feel myself blushing, “I can’t do magic or nothing, but I can hold a lamp, or something. Or just be there.”
“Thank you,” he said. “That would indeed be a great help. But we’ll have to do it at midnight.”
“That don’t surprise me at all,” I said.
He managed about half a grin and said, “Doesn’t.”
We played Long Tiffany badly, both of us with our minds mostly somewhere else, until the sixth hour of the night. Mehitabel and Gideon left at some point, and it was only after they’d gone that I realized I’d forgotten to find out where they were going. I was mostly just glad we wouldn’t have to think up some fancy story for them. But finally Felix threw down his cards and said, “It’s time.” He called witchlight as we stepped out into the hall, the little green chrysanthemums circling his head like a crown.
“Could you change the color on them if you wanted to?” I said.
He gave me a puzzled look, but his chrysanthemums went yellow, then orange and red and purple and blue, and then back to green. “Most wizards develop, er, shortcuts for the spells they use most often,” he said. The green chrysanthemums began to spin in big figure eights around us both. “Mine for this spell just happens to make them green. Why do you ask?”
“’Cause I’m piss-ignorant,” I said and made him laugh. “Just wondered.”
“No harm in that. I’d never even thought about it. Malkar’s witchlights were always green, and I just never . . .” He snorted. “I’m not going to change them now.”
“I like the green. Better than Simon’s awful blue globes.”
“I’ll remember to tell him that. Malkar did globes, too. I learned chrysanthemums from Iosephinus Pompey. He died the year you killed Cerberus Cresset.”
“Oh.”
Something got into my voice that I hadn’t meant to let him hear. He said, “I didn’t mean that in a pointed way. It’s just that I associate Iosephinus’s death with the absolute gibbering panic that possessed the Mirador all autumn. He was very old, old enough to remember the end of Lord Malory’s reign, and I think he’d just outlived any care he had for what people thought or what the political fashions were that season. He said I was the most promising wizard he’d seen since he was a young man and was learning from Rosindy Clerk, and that it would be criminally stupid not to teach me everything I could learn. I was at least smart enough to listen to him.” He shook his head, maybe at the memory of Iosephinus Pompey or maybe at himself.
We were moving out of the everyday part of the Mirador, into the Warren between the Mirador and the Arcane. The bitter smell of the Sim began to crawl up around us. Felix was shivering a little, but his witchlights stayed calm.
Felix argued with the other hocuses—Rinaldo and Edgar and Charles the Dragon and Lunette—about the building of the Mirador. There weren’t any records. They’d all been lost or destroyed or never written in the first place. Charles the Dragon insisted that the lowest level of the Arcane had to be the oldest part of it. Charles the Dragon was a great one for logic and being rational and shit, and I didn’t much like him. Felix said the Warren was older. Lunette and Edgar agreed with him. Rinaldo said firmly that the mazes around the Iron Chapel were older than anything else in Mélusine, and I thought Rinaldo had the right of it.
But leaving that aside, I agreed with Felix—not that any of ’em ever asked me. The Warren was older than the Arcane. The passages were lower and narrower, and the stonework was weird. The stones lay in these thin, sort of wavery courses, and Felix called them alien. They weren’t quarried from either Rosaura or Mutandis, the way the Mirador and the Arcane were. They were from some other quarry, one that had been used up or lost or something. The Warren felt old, old and twisted and mean. Mikkary fucking everywhere. I’d never liked it, and I liked it even less now.
Felix stopped in front of a low, ironbound door. It looked like all the other doors we’d passed. He touched it lightly, almost like he was afraid it would burn him. I heard the tumblers shift, and he pushed the door open.
For a moment, I thought he’d been turned to a pillar of salt, like the woman in the old story who looked at Cade-Cholera’s face. Then he said, “Someone has been here.”
Powers and saints, that can’t be good. “I thought you said you—”
“I did say. I thought I was.” He sent his witchlights through the door. They settled to roost like crows on the braziers that circled the room. “It appears that I was wrong.”
He stepped into the room. My mind was full of all the places I’d rather’ve been, but I followed him.
It was an ugly room. You could feel the Sim in it, which ain’t a compliment. The floor was Rosaura marble, and the bright, wet, blood-red of the mosaic pentagram was Stay Hengist’s work for sure. Hengist had repaired the mosaics in the Hall of the Chimeras for Charles Cordelius, and he’d never told nobody how he got his colors. There were manacles bolted to the points of the pentagram, and I didn’t want to ask what they’d been used for. Felix’s witchlights weren’t much use against the dark in this room, but I wasn’t going to light the coal in the braziers or the candles in the sconces any more than he was.
“Powers,” I said, mostly to prove that I hadn’t been struck dumb. “I didn’t think there were rooms like this outside of all them stories about evil hocuses.”
Felix laughed, but not like anything was funny. “You have no idea of how pleased Malkar would be to hear you say that. He loved playing the part of the evil wizard when he could get away with it. He had a monster’s vanity. A monster made of vanity.” His voice had gone weird and dreamy, and his spooky eyes—even worse by witchlight—were wide and bright. I’d learned the signs. His attention was on his magic now, not on me or the room or even on himself.
If you were going to be a hocus, you had to be able to concentrate like you were made of stone. Simon had told me that once, though I couldn’t remember what he’d been trying to explain. But I’d understood, because when Felix was doing magic, it was like he was somewhere else, where nothing—not thunderstorms or screaming fights or even the hullabaloo of a kitchen boy falling down the servants’ stair with a tray of china—nothing could get to him. It made me understand why they might have started doing the obligation d’âme in the first place and why maybe it had been a good idea when they did. Because if you were going to get like that, you needed somebody guarding your back.
“Light your lantern,” he said, and I did. When the nice, ordinary yellow flame caught and held, his green witchlights disappeared. The shadows in the room were immediately a septad-times worse. “I’ll need you to follow me with the lantern,” he said, fishing a piece of chalk out of his coat pocket. “Don’t step on the chalk lines, and I’ll draw you a circle of protection when I’m done.” I couldn’t tell if the circle of protection was just the next step or a reward to me for not smudging his lines.
I don’t understand magic at all, but I could see that the pattern Felix chalked on the floor was the same one he’d been working on earlier—this time, the east wall was where he wanted it. I followed him and didn’t step on his lines. He drew a quick circle across the doorway, surrounded by symbols. He’d told me once that the Mirador didn’t believe in runes and diagrams. I thought anything that would keep Brinvillier Strych away from me was a good idea.
Felix went back to the middle of the room, where his chalk and Strych’s pentagram seemed to come together, and drew some more symbols. He took a little wash-leather bag out of his inside pocket and emptied it out onto his palm. Dull greasy little lumps of something-or-other, and he put two of ’em in each point of the pentagram, lining ’em up real careful, although I don’t have the first idea with what. When he was done and standing in the middle of the pentagram again, he said, “Sit down if you like. This may take a while.”
I sat, carefully, and put the lamp where I wouldn’t be blocking it. Then I waited.
Nothing happened that I was fitted out to sense, though after a while I could see sweat on Felix’s face. But he just stood there, not saying nothing, not doing nothing. I began to think I could see shadows gathering around him, like the darkness was actually getting heavy and would smother him if it got the chance.
All at once, suddenly enough that it scared me, he let out a shout and flung up his arms. Light, whiter and harder than anything I’d ever seen his magic do before, shot out from his fingertips to fill every corner and crack. There was a loud, sharp snap like a firecracker. When I looked, I saw that the manacles in the pentagram had all broken in half, right where he’d put those little greasy lumps. Every candle and piece of coal, even the candle in our lantern, burst into flames, burning so fast and hot that they went out again seconds later.
But there was nothing scary about the darkness they left, excepting of course where we were and what we were doing. I didn’t hear nothing strange or feel like anything was reaching for me. And it was probably only a second or two before Felix’s green witchlights woke up again. By their light, I saw that Felix’s chalk lines had disappeared, and the mosaic glass of the pentagram was all dull and cracked, like it’d been in a fire.
Felix was swaying where he stood. I scrambled up and got to him just before he fell. I had his full weight for a second before he got his feet under him again. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ve been facedown in this damn pentagram too many times already.” We staggered together out the door, where he leaned against the wall while I fetched the lantern.
“Let me see that a moment,” Felix said. I handed it over. He examined it from all sides, even touching the puddle of tallow with one finger. “That’s odd,” he said. “No magic is supposed to be able to cross that circle of protection—at least, according to the grimoire I found it in—but that spell certainly did.”
“Did it work—your spell, I mean?”
“I think so,” he said. “It’s a nebulous sort of thing to try to do, but I am at least sure that Malkar’s spirit—if there is anything left of it—can’t use this room as a focus to . . . restructure itself.”
“Restructure? You mean, like, come back? Could he have?”
“There are records of such things happening,” he said, pushing himself slowly off the wall. We both waited for a moment, but his legs held him. “Oh damn. The rubies.”
“The which?”
“Malkar’s rubies. I can’t leave them there.”
He went back into the workroom, moving about as fast as a slow turtle, and picked up his little greasy lumps of something-or-other, two at a time. Strych’s rubies. I swallowed hard, remembering like a fever-dream him kicking through Strych’s ashes, picking them out.
“How long you been carrying them around?” I asked when he came back into the hall, the rubies already back in their little bag and it already back in his pocket.
He shrugged. “I won’t have to any longer.”
“What’re you gonna do with ’em?”
He gave me a look, sidelong and very bright-eyed. “Oh I thought I’d give them to the necromancers down in Scaffelgreen. What do you think, dimwit?”
“Well, I dunno. Dunno what you’re s’posed to do with something like that.”
“There isn’t exactly an established protocol,” he said, real dry but not mean this time. “But I have some ideas.”
I didn’t want to know. Really didn’t.
He closed and locked the door, muttering a word to it that I didn’t catch. “That will be a surprise for whatever weasel has been sneaking down here.” I didn’t like the glint in his eye when he said it, but I didn’t like the idea of somebody poking around in that room, neither.
We started back up the hall together. “Who d’you think it was?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said, “and that worries me. Up until an hour ago, I would have said I was the only person in the Mirador Malkar trusted his hold on sufficiently to bring to that room.”
“Could somebody’ve found it by accident?”
“Not a chance. The spell on that door was specially tailored. I got past it because I helped him cast it—anyone trying to pick it, whether magically or physically, wouldn’t do anything but fuse the entire lock mechanism straight into the wall. No. Malkar trusted somebody enough either to teach them the spell . . . or give them the key.”
“Powers,” I said.
“What really worries me, though,” Felix said, “is if there’s anything in the Mirador that Malkar told this weasel about, and didn’t tell me.”
I didn’t have any kind of answer to that, but we walked a little closer together, like sheep who hear a wolf howling.
Mehitabel
Dinner that evening was a peculiar meal. Felix and Mildmay were preoccupied with something which they weren’t sharing.
Sometimes you could feel the bonds between them, their blood-ties and the obligation d’âme, like a kind of wall—or the borders of a kingdom, as I’d thought that morning—and that was how it was tonight. Felix barely even seemed to notice when I remarked that Gideon and I had plans for the evening and would be out late; I saw Mildmay register the news, but he didn’t so much as lift an eyebrow at me. I hadn’t intended to keep it secret from him, exactly, but there seemed no point in discussing it when he and Felix were so clearly somewhere else. I could see in Gideon’s face when we closed the door behind us at quarter of nine that he was as relieved as I was.
We met Antony in the Stoa St. Maximilian and made our way down through the shadowed and derelict halls of the Mirador. Despite my crack about Gideon’s usefulness, Antony had brought a lamp, and I was glad of the homely light.
“So what is this theory you want to test?” I asked Antony.
“I did some checking. And reconfirmed everything I already knew, including the fact that Amaryllis Cordelia never returned to the Mirador after her husband lost his post. Not that she had much time to, since she died in childbirth two years later.”
“What was his name?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“His name. Mildmay couldn’t remember it.”
“Wilfrid, if you truly want to know. Wilfrid Emarthius. But my point is that that tomb has to be a blind. It must be concealing something.”
“Ah,” I said warily, but Gideon interrupted with a touch at my sleeve. His witchlights illuminated his tablet very nicely: Who was Amaryllis Cordelia?
It was a fair question. It wasn’t hard to get Antony started, either,
and the rest of the way to the crypt, we regaled Gideon with the sordid history of Amaryllis Cordelia.
The door was still unlocked. Antony led the way directly to Amaryllis Cordelia’s tomb. Gideon read the inscription and wrote thoughtfully, Is this a common sentiment for memorials?
Antony considered a moment, taking candles from the sack he had brought and lighting them to let their wax anchor them to the freestanding tombs nearest Amaryllis Cordelia’s plaque. “I know of three or four variations on that same platitude. Why?”
Gideon shrugged, running his fingers over the deeply carved letters of her name, and then wrote, Only a folk belief common in the Grasslands, that ghosts are the dreams of the dead.
“You mean someone was trying to avert haunting?” I said.
Possibly. From what you said of her life, I can understand not wanting her ghost to walk.
“It’s an interesting idea,” Antony said, “but it hardly matters, because she isn’t here.”
“Do you think it’s just a fake, then? Nothing but the slab?”
“I think it’s a riddle,” Antony said, and the unsettling light in his eyes wasn’t all reflections from the candles.
Gideon and I exchanged an uneasy look. “What kind of riddle? ”
“What better place to hide secrets than in a crypt?” Antony said, flourishing a crowbar he’d pulled out of his sack.
“Don’t answer questions with questions, Antony,” I said.
He glared at me. “You need not help if you don’t want to, but kindly don’t get in the way.”
I promptly got in the way. “I want to think this through again.”
“What is there to think through? An obviously, demonstrably false tomb—it’s only logical to assume that it’s a hiding place for something.”
“But what in the world—”
“That,” said Antony, stepping around me, “is what I intend to find out.”
The Mirador Page 11
