The Mirador (19 page)

It was a long time before I could calm down, and that was kind of scary. I’m losing it, I thought. I’m really, really losing it, and I don’t know what the fuck to do about it.

Pull yourself together, Milly-Fox, Keeper’s voice said in my head, cold and hard, like she got when I was about to fuck up something stupid and simple. It worked like a slap. I knew it wasn’t going to work for long—I didn’t trust Keeper enough now for her voice to do much—but it lasted at least long enough for me to think, I need to get out of this fucking walk-in tomb.

I found my lucifers and lit one. The clock said it was the last hour of the night. Getting up now wouldn’t be a sign of going crazy or nothing. I could go down to the public baths in the Warren—St. Dismas was their patron saint, so of course they were called the Dismal Baths—and maybe soak some of the jitters out. Felix wouldn’t be getting up for another two hours. I had plenty of time to get back so he wouldn’t know I’d gone. Felix didn’t like me using the Dismal Baths, although he wouldn’t ever say exactly why. But, then, he hated public baths just on principle because he was so uptight about the scars on his back.

The Dismal Baths were Lower City baths. I thought that was probably one of the reasons Felix didn’t like them. They were right on the border between the Arcane and the Warren. The Mortisgate was actually the entrance to the baths from the Warren side, and the guards watched real close about who used the Mortisgate—it was a shitty way to try to sneak in or out of the Mirador. There were other, better ways, if you knew what you were doing. Lots of people came up from the Arcane to use the Dismal, but none of them were stupid enough to try waltzing out the Mortisgate—or, at least, not stupid enough to try twice.

I knew the guys on duty at the Mortisgate—I’d gotten to the point where I knew most of the Protectorate Guard. They didn’t much like Felix, but they weren’t stupid enough to fuck with him, and they didn’t hold him against me. I don’t think they liked any of the hocuses much, and they knew all about working for people ’cause you had to, not ’cause it was anything you wanted.

Winn and Josiah gave me a wave, and I waved back and kept moving. I didn’t think I could talk to anybody like a normal person, not with that dream still banging around in my head.

At this time of day, it was no surprise to find the changing rooms full of whores. They all looked at me funny, but nobody said nothing. I wished I’d never let Mavortian talk me out of dyeing my hair.

But at least it was safe here. I didn’t have to worry about people trying to pick fights or nothing. Nobody did that kind of thing in the Dismal Baths—or St. Veronique’s Baths in Pharaohlight, or the Tunny Street Baths down in Gilgamesh. People wouldn’t put up with it. I mean, not only do you not want to worry about being knifed just because you want to wash your hair, you particularly don’t want somebody else getting knifed in the same water with you and your soap. Crime in the Lower City ain’t exactly organized, but it’s organized enough for that. Dunno what the flashies and the bourgeoisie do in their baths— the Caliphate Baths in Verdigris or the St. Nebular Baths in Shatterglass or any of the others—but people in the Lower City just use theirs for bathing in.

I paid a septad-centime for towels, and another three centimes for soap—you could fork over a half-gorgon and get the fancy soaps imported from the south, the ones that smelled like lavender or lemons or roses, but the common soap, the stuff people just called “pig,” was good enough for me. I’ve never been real big on perfumes. Felix wasn’t, either. I think perfumes brought back too many memories of Pharaohlight on him. He was such a dandy otherwise—and got such a kick out of twisting the flashies’ tails—that I couldn’t think of much else that would make sense of him not using ambergris or one of the other fancy flashie perfumes.

The calder at the Dismal Baths was a long, vaulted room with a walkway down the middle and the hot pools on both sides. There was a bench built into each wall. I found a place to put my towels and slid down into the water.

I scrubbed myself with the pig until my skin was red and I’d worn the cake down to a handful of slivers. Then I lay back in the water and floated for a while, but I get nervous when I can’t see everybody in the room with me, and I stood up again before long. I climbed out and went to the froy. A two-second plunge was about all I could stand, but I came out with my head feeling a lot clearer and not so much like I was working on four hours of bad sleep. I went back, got my towels, and put myself together to face the day.

When I was coming back through the Mortisgate, Josiah said, “Hey, Mildmay!”

Sunrise, I thought. They were coming off shift. Winn would be going into the Arcane to find that whore he was crazy about. I stopped and waited for Josiah.

“Hey, Josiah,” I said when he came up to me. “What’s new?”

“Not much,” he said. “How ’bout you?”

“You know,” I said. “Same old.”

He nodded and laughed. We started back up into the Mirador.

“I’m glad to be done for tonight,” he said after a while. “It’s getting weird.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“Oh, I dunno. Just weird. The news is getting out about the Bastion, and people are getting kind of twitchy.”

“Scared?”

“Nah, not scared so much. Just, like . . . twitchy.”

“Don’t blame ’em.”

“Me neither, but it gets on your nerves after a while. You hear about Lord Thaddeus?”

“What about Lord Thaddeus?”

“He says it’s all a trick,” Josiah said, and I saw his sideways look at me, like he wanted to see if I would say so, too. “He says the Bastion don’t want peace with us, they just want us to
think
they want peace with us, so we’ll do something dumb and they can get in.”

That sounded like something Thaddeus would say, all right. “I think Lord Thaddeus thinks too much,” I said.

“Yeah, but do you think . . . ?”

“I don’t know what to think. But Lord Thaddeus ain’t on the Curia.”

“That’s a fact.” He gave me another sideways look. “What does Lord Felix think?”

“You know Felix ain’t in no hurry to trust the Bastion,” I said. We’d reached Ucopian’s Cross by then—where Josiah had to head northeasterly to the guard barracks and I had to tack off northwest to get back to Felix’s suite—standing under the dome painted with a fairly hardcore take on the martyrdom of St. Ucopian. Our voices were echoing up and around, and the shadows made Josiah’s face look like a bad mask. I didn’t like to think what they must’ve been doing to me.

“Yeah,” he said, like he’d needed to hear me say that. “I know.” There was a little pause, prickly with things we weren’t saying. “Igny says the Tibernians are just about shitting bricks. In case Lord Stephen
does
start signing treaties and stuff.”

“Worried he’ll find a way to give ’em the boot.”

“Yeah. Igny says that Mr. Clef has a tongue on him it’s an honor to listen to. Him and that hocus going at it hammer and tongs, up one side and down the other.”

“Hocus’s a nasty piece of work.”

“Sorry?”

I said it again.

“Yeah. Seems like he wants us to be all grateful and shit, and it sure is getting up his nose that we ain’t. Igny says Mr. Clef says they got to find a way to make friends proper-like or Lord Stephen’ll throw ’em over for the Kekropians.”

“Powers. He ain’t a gal looking for a dance partner.”

Josiah laughed. “Well, he got people want to dance with him, that’s for sure.” We heard a clock strike, somewhere off in the dark, and he sighed. “Better be going.”

“Yeah, me too. See you ’round.”

“Later,” he said and headed away at a brisk march, his chain mail jingling and his boot heels smacking sharply against the flagstones. He turned a corner and was gone, swallowed by the Mirador.

“Where have you been?” Felix said the instant the door opened.

It was a good half hour before he normally got up, and I was so startled I said, “How the fuck did you know I was gone?”

He shrugged, sort of embarrassed and sort of impatient, and said, “I woke up, and you weren’t there. Where did you go?”

“Down to the Dismal.”

“The . . .” He looked for a second like he’d swallowed a spider, but he recovered fast. “You know I don’t like you going there.”

“Yeah, you’ve said so often enough. But I didn’t drown nobody or nothing.”

“
Any
body or
any
thing,” he said. “And I didn’t imagine you had.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The Dismal Baths are not a nice place.”

I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing. “What? You think I can’t take care of myself?”

“Look, I don’t like you going there, all right?”

“You gonna forbid me?”

“I will if I have to.” He meant it. I could see that in the way his face reddened and he wouldn’t quite meet my eyes. When he was bluffing, he’d look me straight in the eyes and not so much as turn a hair. He hated using the binding-by-forms like that. He said it made him feel sick. Which mostly was fine by me.

But this was just weird. “I don’t see what you got against the Dismal.”

“Do I have to give you reasons for everything I do?”

“But this ain’t something
you
do. I ain’t making
you
go down there, so what does it matter if I go every once in a while?”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Powers, I done figured that part out. I just don’t understand
why
.”

He caught my eyes. “Don’t go down there. And don’t
argue
about it.” Commands, both of them. Whatever it was that had got him, it had him by the short hairs.

“You’re the boss,” I said, and I didn’t care if I sounded sullen.

He looked at me for a moment, like there was something he wanted to say—but he never apologized for nothing. He went back into his and Gideon’s bedroom to start getting ready for court.

And I stood there with that fucking dream still like wet shiny paint in my head, and I started to wonder if maybe I needed to go talk to Keeper after all.

Chapter 5

I thought about my mother a lot that night, as I lay in the bed Mildmay and I had occasionally shared and tried not to think about him, not to think about Vulpes, and above all else not to let my memories of Hallam overwhelm me. Her name had been Dorothea. She had been from Skaar, the daughter of a carnival sword-swallower, and she’d had broad, flat cheekbones that had given her face the perfect, watchful stillness of a mask. She had been breathtakingly beautiful. She’d always said she lost her virginity to a snake-handler when she was thirteen.

She had been fifteen when the Zamyatin-Parr troupe came through the village of Tumbril, where her carnival was playing. She had helped her father, a drunken gambler whom she hated, with his act since she was old enough to walk, and since her body had matured, she’d had an additional act of her own as a dancer. When I was a little girl, she’d danced sometimes before the troupe performed, if Gran’père Mato thought the crowd needed “softening up,” and I remembered the amazement with which I had watched her, knowing that this was my mama. My father, Ephesus Parr, had gone to the carnival in Tumbril, seen my mother dance, and fallen instantly in love. Or so the story went.

I did in fact believe that my father had loved my mother madly; she died in childbirth when I was twelve, and my father might as well have died with her for all the interest he showed in life after that. His children—me, my sister Elisabeth, and our little brother Damian—became scarcely more than ghostly shadows to him, things that hurt him to think about because they reminded him of Dorothea. I’d remember all my life the night I’d finally gone to him and said I didn’t like the way Uncle René was staring at me. Even then, Uncle René had gone considerably beyond staring, but I hadn’t wanted to tell my father that. I wondered sometimes, as an adult, whether if I’d told him everything, he might have responded differently, but I couldn’t have done it. I was only fifteen, and Uncle René terrified me. And my father had looked at me as if I had no right to remind him of my mother if I wasn’t going to be her and said, “Tabby, don’t make up stories.”

I’d run away that night, knowing that if my father wouldn’t believe me, no one would, and the only thing I regretted was that I’d left Libbie and Damian on their own.

So, certainly, Ephesus Parr had loved Dorothea Stillman Parr, but I’d never been sure what she felt for him. She had been a very catlike person, affectionate when she wanted to be but entirely self-sufficient; I’d been old enough when she died to understand that she never allowed anyone to touch her very deeply.

And if I’d learned that lesson from her properly, I wouldn’t be in the bind I was in now.

I knew for a fact she had been unfaithful to my father, that she’d had lovers in every town we toured regularly; it had been an open secret in the troupe that Damian was the son of a bank clerk in Iver, and it was anybody’s guess who had fathered the poor little girl that died with her.

Gran’père Mato had hated her. “Whore,” he called her, and worse things, and my father went red in the face and shouted and raved, and my mother just sat and smiled her tiny, secret smile, and went her own way. She’d left pain and destruction in her wake, but she’d taught me how to be what I was. My Aven in
Berinth the King
was almost entirely my memories of my mother; any situation that required brass-faced flaunting called her up in me, and I needed that now.