The Mirador (25 page)

The Cerulean Antechamber was one of maybe three-septad-worth of little rooms scattered around the Hall of the Chimeras where the flashies and hocuses could collect before court. They were there to keep people from bunching up in front of the doors, because when they did that the stewards couldn’t get the doors open properly and everybody, Felix said, was mortified. So there were these little rooms with swanky names and fancy wallpaper, all of them within earshot of the doors, which always swung open with a crash loud enough to wake the dead.

Felix usually hung out in the Puce Antechamber or the Vermilion, with his particular group of hocus friends or some of the younger flashies, or sometimes in the Cerise when he wanted to get a rise out of somebody. The Cerise was where all the oldest, tightest-assed hocuses twiddled their thumbs. It wasn’t ’til I walked in that I remembered who liked the Cerulean.

Simon Barrister looked up from where he was fixing the hang of Rinaldo of Fiora’s bulging coat and grunted something that was probably “good morning.” Rinaldo looked about like usual—like ten pounds of flour in a five pound sack—and he wheezed out some fancy thing about a lady with rosy fingers and the color of my hair. The lady was a quote from something, Felix had told me, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain the rest of the joke. I gave them a nod and leaned on the back of another Jecquardin chair to wait for Felix.

“What brings Felix here this morning?” Simon asked when he was done with Rinaldo’s coat.

“Dunno,” I said.

“I’m sure he has his reasons,” Simon said, “even if mere mortals such as myself can’t grasp them.” He grinned. “I’m even more sure that if it’s anything to do with me, I’ll hear about it. How are you?”

“Me? Oh, I’m fine.”

Rinaldo said, “With your face
those
colors? What happened? ”

“Got in a fight. Where’s Lady Istrid?”

“Running late,” Simon said. “And, before you ask, Winifred has a vile head cold, and Cabot is deep in negotiations with several people in the Carmine Antechamber. You should never try to change the subject to avoid questions. You do it very badly.”

“Yeah, well,” I said and shrugged.

“I shan’t harass you. If Felix wants you harassed, he’ll have to do it himself.”

“After all,” Rinaldo said, “he does such a splendid job.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

Simon got me off the hook. He said, “Rinaldo, you look like a bag-pudding.”

“I always do,” Rinaldo said. “Hephestien says the only way I
won’t
look like a bag-pudding is if I wear corsets. I used to, you know.”

“You wore corsets?” Simon said, his eyebrows going up.

“When I was young and vain and foolish,” Rinaldo said with a shrug that almost undid all the work Simon had put in on the set of his coat. But his face was sad. “Dulcinea used to tease me about them.”

“Dulcinea?”

“All this flap over Stephen’s marriage makes me think of her,” Rinaldo said. “I swore my oaths the same year she married Gareth. There was a time when it seemed as if she might be able to charm Curia and court into bed together.”

“By which you do
not
mean—”

“No, of course not, Simon. Control the prurience of your imagination. But we all vied for Lady Dulcinea’s favor, wizards and annemer alike, and she had a gift . . .” He was quiet a second, staring off into space, then said, “It is a pity neither of her children inherited it.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. From the look on his face, neither did Simon. Lady Dulcinea, Lord Stephen and Lady Victoria’s mother, had committed suicide when Lord Stephen had had a septad and one. Nobody knew why. She’d slit her wrists in her dressing room an hour and a half before some major function. The story was that the blood had soaked through the carpet and permanently stained the stone floor. I might’ve believed it if any two people of the double-septad or so I’d heard tell the story had been able to agree on which room it had been.

Rinaldo said, changing the subject about as bald as an egg, “Gideon came to visit us yesterday afternoon.”

“Yeah?” I said. So that was where he had gone.

“And Mehitabel in the evening,” Simon said.

“Our popularity is becoming quite dizzying.”

I knew what Simon was fishing for, and I wasn’t going to give it to him. “What did Gideon want?”

“Just to talk to someone who didn’t want to argue, I think,” Simon said. “He looked tired. Are he and Felix fighting again?”

“You know Felix,” I said. “He’s got to fight with somebody, and I won’t oblige him.”

“I wish he would find another hobby,” Rinaldo grumbled, and I was actually glad Felix came in then, because that conversation wasn’t going to go nowhere good.

Felix’s manner was particularly bright and hard, even for Felix in a temper. It was like he was wearing armor made out of diamonds. He gave me one knife-sharp look, and then turned his attention on Simon and Rinaldo, laying himself out to be charming and friendly, showing me, of course, that he was mad specifically at me and not just being cross-grained. Simon gave me a funny look, but him and Rinaldo went along with it.

Lady Istrid came haring in, but she didn’t have time to do more than stare at my face before we heard the thundering crash of the doors and it was time to go. Which I was grateful for.

I would not have wanted Mildmay’s company that afternoon, even if we hadn’t both been raw-tempered with the memory of last night’s argument—even if I hadn’t been able to hear him still, snarling,
So what were you getting in bed with Kolkhis for anyway?
I sent him away as soon as court was over, suggested he get some sleep, since he looked dreadful, his eyes bloodshot and his face so colorless where it was not bruised that the scar stood out like the afterimage of lightning.

He didn’t even look at me, simply went. I noticed his limp was worse than usual and wished I dared say something. But he wouldn’t let me help him—I knew that without making the experiment and getting my head bitten off for my pains—and I did have matters of my own to attend to.

Troia was barely more than a myth on this, the western borders of Kekropia; if I could not get Thamuris to explain a thanatopsis to me, I would not find information about it in the Mirador’s libraries. I could not find out how to
prevent
a ghost.

It might not be necessary. It might be too late.

I couldn’t tell. Gideon said Malkar was not haunting Mildmay, but Gideon couldn’t see ghosts, either, only the “signs” of haunting, whatever exactly those were supposed to be. And I couldn’t tell him that I wasn’t worried about Mildmay, but about myself. It was unforgivably selfish; even Gideon would find it so.

But I didn’t think Malkar was haunting Mildmay, though perhaps it was just my vanity telling me Malkar wouldn’t bother with him if I was available. I didn’t even truly believe Malkar was haunting me. Not
truly
.

Except sometimes I wondered. And I had no way of finding out.

I had been able to see ghosts once. In the Hospice of St.

Crellifer’s, when I was mad. I had seen them in the Mirador, too. Had talked to one. And then the healers in the Gardens of Nephele had mended the damage Malkar had done to my mind, and I didn’t see ghosts any longer.

But if I had been able to once, surely I could teach myself to do it again. And not send myself mad in the process. Either that, of course, or it had all been hallucinations, and I was already mad for imagining it had been real.

In which case, I couldn’t make things worse by trying, now could I?

I had been thinking about it carefully, and it seemed to me that the best place to experiment would be the crypt of the Cordelii. It was not a place that had any associations with Malkar, and I knew I had seen ghosts there before. And given the recent excursions and what they had found, I thought the chance was excellent that there would be a ghost there who wanted to talk.

Amaryllis Cordelia did not seem like the sort of woman who would choose to suffer in silence.

I had learned to navigate the Mirador by listening to what Ephreal Sand called
manar
in
De Doctrina Labyrinthorum
, the same way Thamuris and I had learned to observe the Khloïdanikos. It was not an infallible method, but it was better than relying on my nonexistent sense of direction. I found the crypt with no more difficulty than was to be expected. Mikkary, that sense of ancient festering fury, of death and despair and madness, permeated the abandoned levels of the Mirador, but in the crypt it was like water in the air. Antony Lemerius’s researches had certainly stirred something up.

Determining which of the crypts was Amaryllis Cordelia’s was painfully easy. Gideon had mentioned the candles. I called light to them and noted that they did nothing to reduce the sensation of being all but crushed by the darkness in the crypt. That feeling was mikkary and had nothing to do with the available light.

I sat down with my back against the nearest freestanding tomb and contemplated the act of seeing a ghost. Cabaline theory was of no use to me here. What little I did know, picked up from Malkar and from reading heretical books, was rather less slanted toward merely
seeing
ghosts and much more toward bending the dead to one’s will. I thought I would do better—in this as in so many other things—
not
to emulate Malkar. And that meant I was essentially reduced to making up the theory as I went along.

Not an unusual position, but not any the more comfortable for its familiarity.

As a matter of habit, I did everything I could to avoid thinking about the time I’d spent in St. Crellifer’s, but at the moment those memories were the closest thing I had to guidance. I had been able to see ghosts then, and if I could remember what it felt like, maybe I could reproduce the necessary shift.

And maybe I could drive myself mad in the process, too.

That was the mikkary talking, I told myself firmly. I pulled my knees up against my chest; the marble was cold even through my coat. Most of what I remembered simply made no sense: animal-headed monsters, a relentless throbbing, not quite pressure, not quite sound, like being trapped inside a beating heart. I had gone days without saying a single word, without understanding anything that was said to me.

I had been afraid, and I wrapped my arms around my knees, hugging myself. I was shivering, and I no longer knew whether it was with remembered fear or present cold.

This wasn’t going to work. I was drowning. Even if there was an answer in that painful chaos, I wasn’t going to find it. Not like this. A convulsive shudder racked me, and I clenched my teeth against the noise that tried to escape. I didn’t want to hear it.

I pushed to my feet, began to pace. From light to shadow and back again. Approach this logically. In purely hypothetical terms, how would one go about seeing ghosts? Where would one begin?

And I found I knew the answer to that. Openness. Thamuris called it “surrender,” though that was not a word I liked. It had occurred to me more than once that if one of us had come from a less strident school—mine denying that the concept of openness had any validity, his privileging it above all else—we might have had better terminology, better frameworks with which to understand what we were trying to do. Some guidance as to what the dangers were, what damage we might do ourselves.

I had tried to talk to Gideon about it. Gideon was terrifyingly well-read; I had thought if anyone would know where I might track this idea down, it would be he. But my poor, halting explanation was made worse by my selfish desire to keep the Khloïdanikos to myself; it was the one thing I had that I did not have to share, not with Mildmay, not with Gideon, not with my foul haunting memories of Malkar. And so I had explained badly and had been unable to distinguish the kind of openness I meant from the Eusebian understanding, which was far closer to the Euryganeic theory Thamuris had been taught. Openness—what the Eusebians called
ereimos
—was a quality in younger wizards which older wizards exploited ruthlessly. One tried to learn to be
anereimos
, closed (“properly bounded in the self ” was how Gideon put it), as quickly as one could, so that one could become a predator in turn, instead of remaining prey. There was also some sexual connotation to the word, which Gideon was profoundly unwilling to discuss, but I thought it had to do with why he framed intercourse between two men always and only in terms of one man’s submission to the other.

I knew it didn’t have to be like that, just as being open did not have to mean being ereimos, being prey, but I didn’t know how to explain it. I didn’t know how to change the terms of our relationship. And I was afraid. Afraid of giving up control, afraid of letting Gideon see what I truly was. I trusted him not to hurt me, but I couldn’t trust him to understand. I couldn’t trust him not to leave.

I leaned against the tomb of Leonor Cordelia, bracing myself on my palms. She’d been somebody’s sister; I couldn’t remember whose. Openness, I said to myself, sternly redirecting my wandering thoughts. You can do that much, anyway.

And I did. I opened myself to the crypt of the Cordelii the same way I’d learned to open myself to the Khloïdanikos. I felt mikkary like spiders along my spine, felt death and grief and the strange iron bitterness of murder unrecognized and unrevenged.

I gave myself a pounding headache, but I did not see any ghosts.