The Mirador (3 page)

You got together with other folks what knew them and had a wake, but even if any of Ginevra’s friends were still alive, they sure as fuck wouldn’t want to talk to me.

You settled your debts with them. You did things they hadn’t gotten finished. You found answers to questions they’d been asking.

And there, finally, I caught hold of the end of something I could use. Because there were questions, oh fuck were there questions, and they all clustered around when Ginevra had died. Somebody’d sold me to the Dogs. I didn’t know who. But it got me out of the way real neat. Somebody’d sold Ginevra to Vey Coruscant. I didn’t know who’d done that, neither. I didn’t know if it was the same person had done both. Or not. And I didn’t know which idea I hated worse.

And well, fuck, Milly-Fox, if you got questions, then you need to talk to somebody with answers.

I knew right where to go, too. There wasn’t no problem about that. The
problem
was that it meant going down in the Arcane and, well, me and the Lower City weren’t exactly on speaking terms no more.

How bad you want them answers, Milly-Fox?

But I knew ways to go—secret or forgotten or just not used— and I figured I could get where I was going without getting lynched.

I could probably even get back again.

Gideon sighed, his body tensing in climax, his hands knotting in the sheets. He was very good; he never tried to touch my head when I did this for him. I swallowed copper-salt warmth, my throat muscles working around him, and then eased slowly back, kissing his thigh, the line of his hipbone, buying myself what time I could.

Gideon touched my shoulder gently, almost shyly. :Do you want to . . . ?:

Neither of us ever said the word.

I
didn’t
want to, particularly, but saying so would only lead to another of our increasingly frequent, futile arguments, and I wanted that even less.

I went carefully, slowly, biting the inside of my lower lip when the urge for power got too strong. Gideon was sacrificing as much of his autonomy as he could in submitting to me—and he could not think of it in any other way. I could not be so ungrateful as to tell him it wasn’t enough, especially when the one time I had dared hint at the ways of tarquins and martyrs, his revulsion had been all too palpable.

Gideon thought submission was demeaning. I knew it disturbed him that he enjoyed it, that I could make it good for him. He never asked me to submit in return, and it was something I could not offer. The words jammed and died in my throat even in imagination.

He achieved no more than half-hardness, although I kissed the knobs of his spine, stroked him, used clever caresses I’d learned at the Shining Tiger. Finally, he said, :Don’t bother about me. Once is all I’m good for tonight.:

:Are you sure?:

:Please. Just go ahead.:

My teeth sank into my lip until I tasted blood. Bright pain kept my hands gentle against Gideon’s hips as I thrust and strove and finally climaxed. We cleaned up silently, and then, finally, I could escape into sleep.

In my mental construct of Mélusine, Horn Gate was now bound open by wisteria vines. It led to the Khloïdanikos and nowhere else. I kept the other gates closed and tried to ignore the so-called Septad Gate, where even in my construct, the truth bled through and the Sim exited the city. The Khloïdanikos was the only oneiromancy I was interested in.

Thamuris and I had been meeting for two years, and the Khloïdanikos’s geography was warping itself very slowly around us. Horn Gate had a stable location now, a brisk walk past a ruined orchard wall to the bench which Thamuris and I had chosen as our meeting place.

I stopped, as I always did, to check on the mostly dead perseïd tree that stood against the ruined wall. I didn’t know if the tree still retained any symbolic connection to the waking world, but it had been linked to Mildmay, to the huphantike that Thamuris had cast and that I, in my blind arrogance, had enacted. It might have been superstition or it might have been penance—either way, I could not enter the Khloïdanikos without making sure that the perseïd still had some life in it, even if only a bare handful of green leaves.

I had learned not to hope for more.

The tree looked as bleak as ever tonight, and I did not linger. Thamuris was waiting, stretched out on the bench and staring up at the stars. He preferred the Khloïdanikos at night, when myriad paper lanterns stood beside the path, hung from the bridges, floated on the koi pond, nestled in the branches of the perseïd trees. The moon did not wax and wane here, but bloomed always full and beautiful in the sky; the stars, against the velvety blackness of the sky, glittered in constellations that neither Thamuris nor I could recognize.

The astrologia of the Khloïdanikos was an abiding mystery, one we returned to again and again. “Any progress?” I asked, by rote.

“Well,” Thamuris said, swinging upright with an ease he hadn’t had in the waking world for three years or more, “I found Astrape.”

I goggled at him unbecomingly. “You’re joking. Where?”

“Where Hydrastra should be.”

“You
are
joking.” But I looked south, to where the cluster of seven stars should have been, and sure enough, recognizable now that I knew what I was looking at, there was the bright cruel light of Astrape, named for the lightning the ancient Troians had thought she governed.

“And Hydrastra?” I said after a moment.

“Yes. Where Astrape should be.”

“So they put the sky in upside down.”

“And backwards. It’s harder to tell, but I’m pretty sure
that
”—and he pointed to the west—“is the upside down mirror image of Arktidion.”

“This is going to give me a headache,” I said. “Have you a theory yet as to
why
?”

“It seems to me that it might have something to do with, um . . . well, with why the Khloïdanikos has remained extant— remained
stable
—for centuries.”

“Which is certainly a question deserving of an answer. Go on, Thamuris. Tell me.”

For all that he was a Celebrant Celestial, Thamuris was self-deprecating to the point of insecurity about his intellectual abilities. I had learned to tread carefully, not to say things that would sound condescending or as if I were merely humoring him when I listened to him.

He said, “From what Khrysogonos and I have been able to find, which isn’t much, the weakness of most oneiromantic constructs was that they needed periodic reinforcement. Otherwise they collapsed into the dreams of the person who made them or—if I understood the passage correctly, which I may not have—just dissolved back into the waking world. Or both, maybe. The monograph I’ve been reading is written in a dialect I’m not very good with.”

“Either, or even both, would make a certain amount of sense. But what does it have to do with this lunatic sky?”

“Well, those stars aren’t going to collapse back into the waking world, are they?”

“No,” I said, looking at Astrape so egregiously out of place. “And you couldn’t just
dream
them, either. It must have taken a great deal of work.”

“Oh yes,” Thamuris said. “And I think it works like . . . like an armature. Once they set the stars, it didn’t matter if the garden shifted a little here and there. Because those stars—”

“They’re not a dream,” I said. “They’re thaumaturgic architecture. ”

“If you say so,” Thamuris said doubtfully.

“No, really. It makes sense. And you’re right. It explains why the Khloïdanikos doesn’t seem to need . . . anything. And why there are ghosts.”

“You lost me.”

“Think about it! The stars—to get them like that, they must have picked a particular day, mapped them all out, transposed them. It’s why the moon doesn’t have phases, either. There’s
one day
in the Khloïdanikos. Well, one day and one night, but you know what I mean. So everything that happens in it, happens at once.”

“Now I’m getting a headache,” Thamuris said. “So why haven’t we run into ourselves, then?”

“Who’s to say we won’t? I think it’s a very
slow
day, and since we can find either night or day . . . I don’t know.”

“You think I’m right, though?”

“I’m sure of it. Those stars are what keep the boundary. And that’s why we’ve never found the walls, either.”

“Sorry?”

“When we went looking for the boundaries. We didn’t find them, because they’re up there.” I jabbed an emphatic finger at the night sky. “The gardens can go on forever, as long as they’ve got that sky overhead.”

“That’s . . . very odd.”

“It’s
brilliant
. I would never have thought of holding a boundary that way.” I sat a moment, contemplating. “Do you suppose we can work out what day they used?”

“The astrologists have charts—I know that much. I can send Khrysogonos to plague them. Does it matter?”

“Probably not. But I
would
like to know just how long this has been . . .” Not “here,” because this wasn’t a place. Not exactly. “Has been extant. It might help us figure out how and why the Khloïdanikos
does
change. Because it does.”

“Yes,” Thamuris said. “And I admit, I have been wondering a little if the boundary is, um, permeable both ways.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t explain it. Not yet. Let me marshal my thoughts first.”

“You don’t have to mount a defense against me.”

“I know.” But his smile was nervous, fleeting. “You’re just . . . you can be a little overpowering, you know. And I don’t . . . I should go.”

“Thamuris!” I caught his wrist, and then flinched back. I was usually careful not to touch him, for I could feel the consumption in him when I did. I risked a smile, half in apology. “I know I get excited about things. But I’ve never wanted to make you feel . . .”

“Crushed beneath your advance?” he said dryly. “It’s all right, Felix. Just let me take things at my own pace.”

“All right. If you’re sure—”

“It’s who you are. I don’t expect you to change.”

He couldn’t know why that made me wince—an echo of Gideon I did not want, a reminder of my own foolishness in believing it could be true—and I said hastily, “I’ll try to remember not to browbeat you in the future.”

That got a proper smile. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep. But I really do need to go. Xanthippe wants to show me to a healer visiting from Theodosia.”

“But I’ll see you Jeudy?” I couldn’t keep the anxiety out of my voice.

“Of course,” he said and strode away with a vigor and brisk-ness he only had here, in this garden of dreams.

I stayed until the Mirador’s dawn, watching the twisted constellations in the Khloïdanikos’s immutable sky.

Felix hated the Lower City. For him, it was all about hate, the way he hated Pharaohlight and Simside, the way he’d hated his keeper and his pimp. He didn’t get why I missed it, didn’t get how I could ever have been okay with my life there. And he didn’t get that I’d been brought up to hate the Mirador the same way he hated the Lower City. He hadn’t lived in the districts where the Mirador went witch-hunting. He’d only seen that from the Mirador’s side, where it got called “necessary purging”—and you want a phrase to spook you the fuck out? Think about that one for a while. Nobody in the Mirador really understood that Cerberus Cresset being the Witchfinder Extraordinary was a reason for somebody to want him dead. And I was only in the Mirador because of Felix. Last fucking place I’d ever thought I’d end up. He didn’t get that, either.

I was sort of wishing I did hate the Lower City the way Felix did, because then walking through the Arcane wouldn’t’ve hurt so fucking much. Wouldn’t’ve been like a list of things I couldn’t do no more, places I couldn’t go, people I couldn’t talk to. And, you know, it did hurt. And it hurt worse because I couldn’t tell nobody about it. Nobody who’d listen to me could understand what I meant. And the people who’d understand were never going to fucking listen. They’d say I’d made my choice and it was too fucking bad if I didn’t like it.

Three hookers and two pushers gave me the come-on in the three blocks I walked down Rue Souterraine between the back alleys of the Limerent and the Goosegirl’s Palace. I guess they figured my money was good anyway.

The bouncer on the side door of the Goosegirl’s Palace recognized me straight off. I knew him, too. Tiny d’Orisco. Biggest guy I’ve ever laid eyes on—six and a half feet tall and almost as broad.

“You,” he said.

“Me,” I said and waited, not in grabbing distance. I could hurt Tiny in a brawl, but he could hurt me way worse.

“Whatcha want?”

“Talk to Elvire.”

Tiny grunted. He gave me the sort of look he gave drunk guys just before he bounced them, then stuck his head in the door and yelled at one of the eunuchs to tell Elvire that Mildmay the Fox was on the doorstep.

“If she tells me to joint and gut you, you know I’ll be happy to oblige,” Tiny said while we were waiting.

“I know,” I said. She could, too. I was betting she wouldn’t, because the thing I knew about Elvire was that she was a junkie for information. She wouldn’t turn me away if she thought I had something she could use. I hoped, anyway.