The Mirador

Part One

Chapter 1

So to begin with, General Mercator was dead.

There’d been rumors for months that he was sick and then that he was failing and then that he was dead, but the news had come for sure that morning. General Mercator’d been in charge of the Bastion for longer than I’d been alive, so I guess it wasn’t no surprise that nobody in the Mirador quite seemed to know what to do now that he was dead.

So Lord Stephen had cancelled all the committee meetings and soirées and stuff that was what the Mirador normally did with its time. Me and Felix had gone back to the suite, and Felix and Gideon had talked the thing to death, because that was how Felix was, either you couldn’t get him to say nothing, or you couldn’t get him to shut up. They’d been reading since dinner while I played hand after hand of Hermit’s Pleasure, but all at once Felix shut his book and said, “Do you want to go see
Berinth the King
tonight?”

“I don’t mind,” I said. Mehitabel was in it.

“Well, I don’t mind either,” he said—teasing me, but only a little. “It’s a nice change from arguing with Edgar and Simon about the nature of the stars.”

“You could wear your new coat,” I said, hoping I could keep his mind off me. “The one Rinaldo says—”

“Is an affront to seven hundred years of aesthetic philosophy. I could, couldn’t I?” He loved to wear this red-violet color that clashed with his hair something awful. He said enough people stared at him, they should suffer for it. The new coat, aside from the color, had gold bullion around the cuffs and down the lapels. “Loud” don’t quite begin to cover it.

A little pause, and he looked at Gideon. “Do you want to come?”

It wasn’t no big secret that you could hardly get Gideon out of the suite with a crowbar and an ox-team. I don’t blame him— powers and saints, if I’d had the choice, I’d’ve been right there with him, and I don’t know which one of us had the worse deal. I mean, there’s me with the obligation d’âme and being the guy that offed Cerberus Cresset, and then there’s Gideon being Kekropian for one thing, and having had his tongue cut out by the Duke of Aiaia for another. And then there was the fact that he was sleeping with Felix and everybody and their dog knew it. And the Curia wouldn’t let him take the Cabaline oaths. No, I don’t know why. Felix and Gideon were both so pissed off about it that I didn’t even want to ask. So, anyways, he didn’t go out much, and like I said, I didn’t blame him.

But Felix kept trying, first one way, then another, and mostly Gideon said no, but sometimes he said yes. And tonight, he gave Felix a crooked sort of half-smile and nodded, and got a smile back, too.

“All right,” Felix said. “Let’s go see
Berinth the King
.”

After the worst rehearsal in the history of the world, I went back to my dressing room. Well,
fled
back, to be perfectly honest, and if I had a plan at all, it was to make faces at myself in the mirror until I felt better.

But when I got to my dressing room, there was someone already there. He was about my age, Kekropian-dark, not like the people in Marathat with the leaven of Tibernian blood, well-dressed and as sleekly self-pleased as a cat with a songbird pinned beneath one plump paw. He would have been perfectly cast as Uriel Glabney in
The Siege of Kerchesten
.

I drew myself up on the threshold like every outraged cuckold in every comedy de Ferric ever wrote and said, “You have the wrong room.” Corinna’s taste in men was frequently ghastly.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. And paused. And smirked. “Maselle Cressida.” Cressida was the code name I’d had in the Bastion, when I’d been a spy; anyone who used it was therefore a spy from the Bastion himself, and oh didn’t that just put the hatpin through an already foul day.

The door swung shut behind me, and I heard the bolt thump home.

I could have screamed, like a good little bourgeoise, or fainted, like the ingenue I was getting too old to play. I said, “Who are you?” and made sure I said it crossly.

“Come now, maselle,” he said in Kekropian. “Surely you do not believe I will give you my real name. Why don’t you call me Vulpes?”

The Midlander word for fox. So he knew about Mildmay. “Very well, Messire Vulpes,” I said and swept him a curtsy, more to relieve my feelings than out of any real hope it would annoy him. “Now that I know who you are, may I ask what you’re doing in my dressing room?”

“
Lieutenant
Vulpes, please,” he said finickingly. “And I should think that would be obvious, Maselle Cressida. I have come from Major Goliath.”

“Of course you have,” I said, all weary irony;
he
couldn’t tell that my mouth had gone dry. “General Mercator is dead, then?” I had prayed—actually
prayed
—that when Mercator died, his spymaster Louis Goliath would be caught in any purging Mercator’s successor decided to do. Clearly, I was not that lucky.

“General Parsifal’s
caefidus
arrived this morning.”

Gemma Parsifal. A great many people must still be smarting from the debacle of Malkar Gennadion, if Gemma Parsifal had been appointed to the generalship.

“What do you want?”

Vulpes shrugged fussily and said, “Information.”

“What sort of information?”

“
Useful
information. Will anyone bother us in here?”

“No,” I said. “And if you’re waiting for me to invite you to sit down, you’re going to be standing an awfully long time.”

“Temper, temper,” he said and wagged a chiding finger at me, sitting down on the less rickety of my two chairs. I wanted to force-feed him that finger, and the hand it was attached to, but he was a wizard. I’d never even get close to him. And coming as he did from Louis Goliath, anything I did to harm him would only rebound tenfold onto my own head. Or someone else’s.

But I didn’t have to roll over and show my belly, either. And there was some value in playing the thing grimly out—no shortcuts. “Can you prove that you are what you say you are?”

“And what is it that I say I am, Maselle Cressida?”

“A creature of Louis Goliath’s.”

His smile disappeared, and I was glad to see it go. “I am no one’s creature, maselle. But I am here on Major Goliath’s behalf. Will his seal be sufficient proof?”

“It will do,” I said negligently, as if he bored me.

He took a folded half-sheet of paper out of his pocket; he had lifted the seal cleanly, and it was Louis Goliath’s signet all right, that thing that looked like a badly drawn wheel but was really a spiderweb. “And I have a token for you.”

He was smirking again as he handed me a grubby slip of paper. I gave it only a glance, only enough to know who had written those straggling words. Nothing more.

I inspected the seal with far greater care, then gave Vulpes a long, slow, considering look, the sort my grandfather had used to spectacular effect on wives and children and intransigent players. It made Vulpes fidget. “Oh very well,” I said, turning away from him indifferently. “I don’t suppose you have either the skill or the balls to have forged Major Goliath’s seal.” And then, as if I’d forgotten about him entirely, I sat down at my dressing table and began repinning my hair.

Vulpes’s face, as reflected in my mirror, was a treat. I’d learned a lot about wizards from observing Felix Harrowgate over the past two years, and one thing I’d learned was that wizards were completely unprepared to have an annemer ignore them. They didn’t know what to do with it—especially wizards who had spent any amount of time in Mélusine, where the Cabaline wizards were marked by their rings and barbaric tattoos, and where the common people were deathly afraid of them.

I’d found, though, that compared to old-school Eusebian wizards, Cabalines were a collection of indolent and good-natured tabby cats. And Vulpes, for all his swagger, was not a Eusebian of the old school. He was not Louis Goliath.

If he
had
been Louis Goliath, he would have had the sense to outwait me. I was the one with a performance of
Berinth the King
that evening;
I
was the one who had to placate
him
to get him out of my dressing room. But he let himself be rattled into forgetting that. He said, in a hard, falsely nonchalant voice, “I believe you know Gideon Thraxios?”

“I do,” I said. I did not turn away from the mirror.

“What do you know
about
him?”

“He’s a refugee from the Bastion. His tongue was cut out, so I assume he’s one of those cultists.” I made sure I continued to sound bored, half-distracted, as if it all meant nothing to me.

“And?” Vulpes prompted, confirming my suspicion that he had come from the Mirador. He knew perfectly well what “and,” or he wouldn’t be trying to make me tell him.

“I didn’t realize your curiosity was vulgar,” I said—dear God, if I sounded any more bored I’d have to pretend to fall asleep. “He’s Felix Harrowgate’s lover.”

“Is it a relationship of long standing?”

“They’ve been lovers for as long as I’ve been in Mélusine. Nearly two years.”

“Is the relationship a, er, happy one?”

I slewed round to stare at him, the gesture just exaggerated enough to sting. “In what sense, lieutenant? As the knight and his lady in a romance? Or are you asking me if Messire Thraxios is sexually satisfied?”

He was too swarthy to show a blush, but I knew I’d offended his prudish Eusebian soul. He said stiffly, “Do they quarrel?”

I didn’t try to bite back a shout of laughter. “Do they
quarrel
? You realize that’s the same as asking if Felix has a pulse?”

He glared at me. “Do you think their quarrels are serious?”

“Meaning, do I think Felix would ever throw Gideon out? Not a chance.”

“What about Messire Thraxios? Might he leave?”

“Where would he go?” I said callously.

“I . . . see.” He changed the subject briskly: “Why has Messire Thraxios not sworn the Cabaline oaths?”

“Surely you’re better qualified than I am to answer that question.”

“But I’m asking you, Maselle Cressida. Why?”

“I don’t know. I try not to have anything to do with Cabaline politics.”

“That will have to change.”

“You would do better to cultivate a wizard.”

“Who says I’m not?” His smile was sharp and ugly. “But still, maselle, I have asked you, and I should like you to answer.”

“And I did. I told you. I don’t know.”

“Oh, come now. Your lover has told you nothing? I find that hard to believe.”

I said lightly, “Mildmay doesn’t like to talk about what he calls ‘hocus-stuff.’ ”

“Then you will have to induce him.” But at least he seemed to believe that I didn’t know anything, for he stood up, saying as he moved unhurriedly toward the door, “I will expect you to be a good deal more informative next time, Maselle Cressida. ”

“But what do you want to know?” I said. The exasperation in my voice was quite real; I only hoped it was adequate cover for the equally real desperation that was cold lead in the pit of my stomach. “Why Gideon hasn’t become a Cabaline—”

“You have a wide
acquaintance
among the court,” he said with a sneer. “Use it. Go trawling. I will tell you if you find anything interesting.”

The door shut behind him with a small, decisive snick. I waited, but when a full minute had passed and he had not popped back in like the Necromancer in the pantomimes so popular in the Lower City, I concluded he had really gone.
Then
I let myself look at that grubby slip of paper and touch the inky blotches of Hallam Bellamy’s fingerprints.

I’d let Mildmay believe Hallam was dead, and God forgive me, sometimes I wished he was. They had broken his fingers, cut off both his thumbs; I was trying not to wonder how he’d held a pen at all.

SO SORRY TABBY
was all he’d written, in sprawling, clumsy letters I didn’t need my spectacles to read, that and a squiggle that was a sad travesty of his wizard’s sigil. I sagged down across my dressing table, pillowing my head on my forearms. Once you sell your soul to the Bastion, you never get it back.