Clef said very little; he was annemer, and although he had a remarkable grasp of thaumaturgic theory, having served as the liaison between the High King and the Seigneur de la Coeurterre for over twenty years, he was quiet by nature, preferring rather to observe than to perform. When he asked a question, it was almost always of Giancarlo, who had been saddled with the logistical nightmare of herding wizards in three different cities.
The secretaries were dutiful and silent.
Which left, center stage, myself and Arsène L’Hiver.
I could not help thinking of it as a stage play, partly because the location chosen for these meetings was the Allegoria, where—some two hundred and fifty years ago—Violet Novadia had repudiated her husband. Mildmay had told me that story, and it had impressed itself indelibly into my mind. It appealed to my sense of the dramatic almost as much as L’Hiver did.
L’Hiver hated me. He had hated me before he laid eyes on me, considering ganumedes such as myself to be not merely perverse, but also repulsive—disgusting, like a carrion-fed rat. He couldn’t look at me without his lip curling. Unfortunately, he was the Coeurterre’s nonpareil on the subject of thaumaturgic architecture; we had no choice but to deal with him.
I had expected Giancarlo to do the sensible thing and ban me from his meetings with the Tibernians. After all, he had no great opinion of me. But he had refused, categorically and irately, to do any such thing. “The Coeurterre does not own us,” he had said, glaring at me as if daring me to argue. “And if Arsène L’Hiver is their expert, you are ours.”
“I’ve made no study of—”
“You mended the Virtu. That makes you our expert. Don’t argue with me, Felix. Save it for L’Hiver.”
“Yes, my lord,” I had said meekly and made him smother a laugh in an unconvincing cough.
Some days these meetings went smoothly. Giancarlo and I explained what we had been doing, L’Hiver made some remarks from the Coeurterre’s perspective, Mortimer Clef asked an occasional question. I refrained, every time, from saying that, since Cabaline and Coeurterrene wizards were working together in Hermione on a daily and doubtless first-name basis, there was really no point to this grave little diplomatic gavotte.
Today was not one of those days. L’Hiver snarled at me before I was even through the door, “You’re late.” Since on his more amiable days he ignored me entirely, this was a bad sign; I glanced past him at Giancarlo, whose face was bleak. Beside him, Clef looked troubled, and the three secretaries were trying to become invisible. Worse and worse, and it was clear there would be no help forthcoming.
“Perhaps my pocket watch is slow,” I said, making no move to consult it.
Clef and Giancarlo had done this before, on days when L’Hiver was ripe for murder. Turning me loose like a mastiff in a bear-baiting pit, and there was another reason I was glad Mildmay wasn’t with me: I didn’t enjoy having him watch me provoke L’Hiver. I was good at it—and I could hardly fault Giancarlo for exploiting a talent I had so often used, to deleterious effect, in Curia meetings—and on my worse days I quite relished it, privately timing the onset of the tic in his right eyelid.
But it made me sick with myself, the same way I’d been sick with myself for taking that stupid bet of Edgar’s. I wasn’t even sure which of the three secretaries it had been. They all avoided my eyes now with the same shamed alarm, and at the time I had been drunk. More drunk than I should have let myself become.
Or, possibly, not quite drunk enough.
And L’Hiver rose, perfectly predictably, to the bait. “Oh, it’s all of a piece. Careless, undisciplined”—depraved, said the sneer on his face—“evading responsibilities whenever—”
“I do not evade my responsibilities!” I said, and then hoped L’Hiver couldn’t recognize honest outrage when he heard it.
“No? Then why, pray tell, did I not find out until today—and from one of my own wizards—about the fantôme in the Hermione tower?”
“There is no fantôme in the Hermione tower. It was dispersed three years ago.”
Now that L’Hiver’s fire had been drawn, Giancarlo and Clef were proceeding as they usually did: using me as a stalking horse and getting the work of the meeting done via notes passed between the secretaries. I tried not to wonder if they’d arranged it between them before they even appointed these ridiculous meetings—if what Clef had really needed was a safe outlet for L’Hiver’s poison. Certainly, I was never chastised for fighting with L’Hiver—no mention was made of Imari slavers—although the single time I’d been a little short with Clef, I’d gotten one of Giancarlo’s most impressive scowls.
I tried not to wonder if the entire Curia saw me as a badly-trained bear-baiting dog. I tried desperately not to wonder if they didn’t have the right of it.
“By a bunch of Cabalines—and if they knew anything about repolarizing the leys, I’ll eat my boots.” The look L’Hiver gave me felt like it was scouring the flesh off my bones. “Did it not occur to you it might be important?”
“I had forgotten about it,” I said, my voice gone dull, as colorless as any of the secretaries.
“Forgotten?” L’Hiver howled. “How, for the sake of all the powers, could you possibly forget about a fantôme?”
All too easily, my lord, if you want not to think about it badly enough.
I had to pull myself together. Giancarlo had noticed my inadvertent retreat, even if L’Hiver hadn’t.
I clasped my hands behind my back, where I could drive the rings on my left hand into my right palm without anyone seeing, and said, in a much better approximation of my natural tone, “As I’m sure you’re aware, Arsène, I was not thaumaturgically competent when I was in Hermione. I was in fact, in technical terms, not even a Cabaline, and I wasn’t reinstated until nearly a year later. So I apologize for the oversight, but I will not be your whipping boy for it.” I did not give him the opportunity to respond to that, but said, “Now tell me, what is it that needs to be done? You said something about ley energy.”
It rocked him, almost physically, and it was a moment before he said, grinding the words between his teeth as if they were my flesh: “Adrien has dealt with the problem. He wrote merely for my information.”
“How very kind of Adrien,” I murmured, then said brightly, knowing exactly the effect it would have, “Then you’ve made this tremendous and unseemly fuss over nothing at all?”
I was not disappointed; L’Hiver exploded: “A nexus of noirant power such as a fantôme is not nothing, and you should not speak so dismissively of matters you patently do not understand! ”
“This must be Coeurterrene theory. What, exactly, is ‘noirant power’?” I let him hear the disdainful quotation marks in my voice, and that was all it took.
I understood perhaps half of the ensuing lecture. The Coeurterre did not practice necromancy, but—signally unlike the Mirador in this regard—they had built their theories to accommodate it. They envisioned magic as water, flowing along channels they called leys, and its flow could be either “noirant” or “clairant,” dark or light. They also believed that each wizard was naturally better suited to working with one or the other type of power, and much of the Coeurterre’s institutional energies were devoted to trying to maintain a balance between them. One reason the Coeurterre, normally as territorial as a cat—or a wizard—had been so willing to help the Mirador in the wake of our disaster was that in their thinking the Virtu was remarkable for weaving noirant and clairant power together.
L’Hiver’s explanation of why it was foolish to think of a fantôme simply as a spirit of the malevolent dead, I did not follow at all, but I did grasp the Coeurterrene belief that summoning a fantôme would change the “polarity” of the architectural thaumaturgy—such as the tower in Hermione—that was used. “Now that I consider the matter,” L’Hiver said, “it is no more than reasonable that you would not have noticed. You are a noirant wizard if ever I’ve seen one.”
“I shall choose,” I said, baring my teeth b
ack at him, “to take that as a compliment.”
“I’ve often thought,” Giancarlo said, “that you would have been magnificent in the days of the great court necromancers.”
It was a signal: he and Clef had finished their work. And Clef confirmed it by saying mildly, “Noirant and clairant aren’t value judgments, Lord Felix. Simply descriptions.”
“Noirant power is a good deal more dangerous if not properly controlled,” L’Hiver said.
“And that is why it is a good thing that Adrien observed and cleared the fantôme’s residue,” Clef said, not budging an inch. “If you are interested, my lord, I imagine there must be a copy of Ynge’s Influence of the Moon on the Energy of Souls somewhere in the Mirador.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I shall look for it.” It would be comforting to reduce my memories of the fantôme to the cool precision of Coeurterrene diagrams. And—I lost L’Hiver’s parting barb entirely in scribbling down the reference Clef had given me—another way of looking at the matter might also help with my niggling uncertainty about the success of the katharsis I had performed.
It would be a great blessing to be certain. And maybe Ynge’s book could help me find that.
Mildmay
Simon and Rinaldo were both waiting when I showed up with Gideon.
“You coming?” I said to Rinaldo.
He laughed. “Even if you could fit me into any cab in this city, you certainly couldn’t get me out again. No, I am going to wait here and demand full details upon your return. That, I think, is my function in this little adventure.”
“You sure you want to do this?” I asked Simon.
Simon said, “I’ve always wanted to visit the Lower City.”
I was opening my mouth to say something, Kethe knows what, when Simon shoved his hands in his pockets, and I shut up. Simon might not know the first thing about the Lower City, but he’d been in worse shit than anything we were likely to find today. So I just said, “It ain’t pretty,” and stood aside for him and Gideon. I wasn’t comfortable walking with a hocus at my back. I liked having ’em where I could see ’em.
We went out Livergate, across the Plaza del’Archimago, and Simon flagged down a fiacre. All it took was the rings on his hand, and the cabbie just about turned his horses upside down jerking them to a stop. We climbed in, and the cabbie said through the trap, “Where to, my lord?”
Simon looked at me.
I kept my mouth from twitching into a grin and said, “Ruthven. Corner of Knackers Lane and Dimity.”
“Ruthven?” said the cabbie. “My lord, I don’t—”
“Ruthven is where we want to go,” Simon said and shut the trap.
“You’ll have to bribe him to wait,” I said.
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. Cab drivers don’t like the Lower City.”
“Then I’ll bribe him. How much, do you think?”
I looked around at the fiacre’s shabby upholstery and splintered panels. “A gorgon oughta do it.”
“That certainly won’t break the bank.”
The streets weren’t paved no better than I remembered, and I think the cabbie was hitting the potholes hard on purpose. We jostled and jounced. Simon and Gideon got thrown against each other a time or two. I had the back-facing side all to myself, along of my leg and my cane. By the time he pulled up, we were ready to get out. Simon went up to talk to him about staying, and what was in it for him. Me and Gideon stood and looked around.
Ruthven ain’t as bad as Queensdock or Simside, but it ain’t a nice part of town. We were surrounded by crumbly brick tenements, and you didn’t have to see anybody in the windows to know you were being watched. There was a group of guys hanging out on a stoop. The local muscle, and if I’d been here on a normal sort of job, I’d’ve gone over to them and had a word. Little power like this, you want to let it know it don’t want to fuck with you. But I wasn’t here on a normal job, and they weren’t watching me anyways. They were watching Simon, and I saw it when they figured out for sure he was a hocus. It wasn’t anything big, but everybody shifted a little, so that they were all leaning away from Simon and Gideon and me. They wouldn’t bug us.
Simon came back and said, “I think he’ll wait, but he’s not happy about it.”
“Nobody’ll bother him,” I said. “They’ve got you pegged.”
Simon glanced over. One of them made the sign against hexes, down by his side where he thought Simon wouldn’t notice.
“So they do,” Simon said with a sigh. “All right. Where are we going?”
“There,” I said and pointed.
There wasn’t much to tell the resurrectionists’ building apart from the others. It was made of the same kind of brick and had the same sort of dismal look about it. It was lower and wider, and if you knew what you were looking at, you knew it had started out as a church, a poor stepchild cousin of churches like St. Kirban in Havelock and St. Rose in Candlewick Mews. I glanced at the cornerstone as we went past. The little lantern carved on it showed it’d been dedicated to St. Lemoyne Harkness, and I made up my mind right then that that was a good omen. St. Lemoyne Harkness was the patron saint of dark places and confusion, and you couldn’t’ve described better how I was feeling if you’d written a book.
The huge front doors were unlocked, just like this was still a real church. In the vestibule, Simon came up short and said, “I’m sure there’s all sorts of protocol involved here that I don’t know about. What should we do?”
“Well, let me do the talking.”
“Oh quite.”
“I know you don’t like to, but if you could leave your hands out where they can see ’em—we don’t want anybody forgetting you’re a hocus.” It was a little more complicated than that, but I didn’t want to get into the details with Simon about why people in the Lower City didn’t like hocuses from the Mirador who looked like they were trying to pretend they were something else.
Simon made a face. “All right. I agreed to help.”
“Other’n that, just stick close, both of you. Nobody wants anything, um, unfortunate to happen, but they’re gonna be nervous, and nervous people do stupid things.”
“All right. Ready, Gideon?”
Gideon nodded. His clerky, choirboy face was as hard to read as ever, but his eyes were bright. He looked better than I could remember him looking in a long time, and I wondered if maybe he hated the Mirador as much as I did.
“Okay,” I said and opened the inner door.
The resurrectionists had remodeled pretty extensively inside. The huge openness of the nave was gone, except for a narrow corridor that went straight up for three stories. It was like being stuck in a crack. The rest of it they’d partitioned off with a hodgepodge of stuff: bricks, boards, stone columns from somebody else’s church. The doors looked like they’d tried to get one from every district in the city and had mostly succeeded. There was nobody in the hallway at all.
“Now what?” Simon whispered.
“We knock,” I said. I picked a door, a good big mahogany one that had probably come off one of the abandoned townhouses in Lyonesse, and used the knocker. It echoed like a thunderclap. Simon winced.
“They know we’re here anyway,” I said. “They ain’t stupid. There was a guy watching from the roof when we got out of the fiacre.”
Both of them gave me a weird look, but it wasn’t my fault if they’d never learned to be nervous about what was over their heads.
I could feel the resurrectionists watching. There were probably a double-septad of spyholes in their makeshift walls. More so than most guilds, they had reason to be twitchy about unexpected visitors. And I could feel them thinking, trying to figure out what to do with us. They knew who I was, and they knew Simon was from the Mirador, and they probably didn’t have a clue about Gideon at all.
But they also knew that if we’d come this far, they couldn’t outwait us. You come down to Ruthven from the Mirador, you ain’t gonna get bored and go away. They waited long enou
gh to let me know they weren’t happy about it, and then the door I’d knocked on swung open. The guy behind it looked like some of his own merchandise, he was that thin and his eyes that far back in their sockets. I was glad he was wearing a knitted cap, because I didn’t want to know if the rest of his head was as skull-like as his face.
“Yeah?” he said.
“I wanna talk to somebody knows about Laceshroud,” I said.
It threw him. Dunno what they’d been expecting—probably to find out that the Mirador was either coming down on necromancy like a ton of bricks or taking it up as a hobby—but for sure I was asking about the wrong end of the business. “Laceshroud?”
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