The Mirador (52 page)

But that didn’t change nothing.

I lay there on the bed and stared up at the ceiling and tried not to think about fucking Mehitabel. Which went about as well as you’d expect.

But the third or fourth time I forced my jaw to relax, I realized something funny. It wasn’t the fucking I missed—there’s plenty of that around, and powers, I got hands, don’t I?—and it wasn’t even Mehitabel herself. Not exactly. I mean, I
missed
her, but I wasn’t lying here pining or nothing. What was wrong with me was that I didn’t have nothing to do and nothing to think about. Except me. And everything I’d fucked up.

Because, you know, Mehitabel hadn’t trusted me, but why in the world should she have? I mean, sure, I’d fucked her brains out whenever she wanted, but powers and saints, I knew better than anybody that didn’t mean nothing.

Hadn’t talked to her. Hadn’t talked to Ginevra, neither. What had Felix called it?
A persistent motif.
He was fucking well right about that. So what did I think I was doing, talking like I loved Ginevra? What the fuck did I think love was, anyway?

I rolled over and punched the pillow instead of the wall.

Well, okay, maybe I had loved Ginevra. Her death had fucked me up bad enough I could give myself that much. But I hadn’t acted like it. I hadn’t
tried
. And maybe it wouldn’t’ve worked if I had—there wasn’t no sense pretending Ginevra hadn’t been exactly what she was—but we’d never fucking know now. Because I hadn’t tried. I’d looked at it and decided it wasn’t worth the risk. No, Mildmay the Fox don’t stick his neck out for nothing. Except for money.

Well, or Felix.

But that ain’t the same kind of love, I said to myself, and then I couldn’t think of a reason why that ought to matter. If I didn’t care about somebody enough to take a risk for ’em, I didn’t have no business saying I loved them, whatever I thought that damn word meant.

And I didn’t. I realized that, laying there. I mean, I’d thought I’d loved Keeper—Kolkhis like that. Thought I’d been
in love
with her. You know. And if that was what it was, I didn’t want no part of it. Certainly didn’t want to make nobody feel that way about me. I didn’t want power like that.

Well, and you ain’t no good at it anyway, I said to myself and settled in to try and sleep. Maybe you should just leave it the fuck alone.

I thought, I can do that. And it was such a huge fucking relief that I never even noticed when I fell asleep.

I’d worked out the thaumaturgy as well as could be hoped for. Once they’d quit insisting on Death, the Dog, and the Prison, the Sibylline had given me the Unreal City, the Nightingale, and the Wheel. Attempts at clarification had all been threaded through with Death, and I cursed Malkar in my heart. But the Unreal City, the Nightingale, and the Wheel were enough to show me how to proceed.

If I’d read them correctly, of course.

It was both the gift and the curse of the Sibylline, that its symbols, its semeia, could be interpreted in so many different ways. This property made it beautifully flexible as an instrument of thaumaturgic architecture, but frustratingly ambiguous when one was trying to use it for divination, whether of the future or of extant thaumaturgy. Mavortian had laughed at me and claimed that reading the cards was an art, requiring “card sense” just as ordinary card games did, but I had suspected then and suspected now that that had been a smoke screen intended to keep me from seeing that he was no more certain than I was.

But I could put the semeia together in a way that made sense for my purposes. The Unreal City was as good a description as there was for the Khloïdanikos. The Nightingale—“A gift from the night,” Mavortian had said. “Balance, generosity, unexpected strength.” And that was Thamuris, both in himself and in his relationship with the Khloïdanikos: it was almost always night for him.

The Wheel was trickier. But I’d thought about it, in and around other things, and I thought I understood. The Khloïdanikos had a rhythm, a cycle—“a single day,” I had suggested, and that still seemed true, but it wasn’t strictly linear. It didn’t have to be, as long as the deeper rhythm held. The deeper rhythm was the Wheel, and if I could wed the rubies to the Wheel, it would hold them. If.

I emerged into my construct-Mélusine holding the Parliament of Bees balanced on one palm. The bees were crystalline, faceted, glowing brilliant red as they caught the sunlight. They flew in wary circles around me, returning to their hive periodically: a dance, a ritual. I moved very carefully toward Horn Gate, concentrating on holding the beehive steady. Dropping it seemed like a truly terrible idea.

The bees did not trust me, but they did not attack me, and when we reached Horn Gate, bedecked as it was with wisteria, they became less interested in me, crawling thoughtfully among the trailing blossoms. Thamuris was there almost as soon as I was, his anxiety visible around him in an indigo and cerise tumult.

“Are you—oh. Is that them?”

Neither grammatical nor particularly lucid, but I knew what he meant. “Yes. Come with me. I’m going to need your help.”

He followed me, anxious but not arguing, and the bees followed us both. I had chosen a place for the rubies amongst the settled geography of the Khloïdanikos: a patriarchal oak that was ringed by brambles. The brambles had been trained over a trellis to form a gateway and now hung like a curtain. Their flowers were yellow, small and musky, and their thorns were fierce, jealous claws. The oak was strong enough to withstand the last lingering taint on the rubies, and the brambles would contain their malice.

Thamuris held the curtain of brambles aside for me; we were both bleeding from several long scratches by the time I knelt in front of the oak, the bees flying in their silent circles around my head and hands.

“Guard,” I said to the oak, to the brambles. “Hold.” I set the beehive that was also a gray wash-leather bag down on one of the cracked paving stones, placed my hands carefully to either side, palms flat against the rock.

The Parliament of Bees. The Unreal City. The Nightingale. The Wheel. I drew the rubies through the symbols, from one to the next to the next, winding them onto the Wheel, ringing them with brambles. I felt it, when it took: a jar against my hands, and the beehive was a wash-leather bag with a shining ruby bee crawling across its drawstrings. I turned my attention toward my sleeping body and knew that the bag was no longer clutched in my left hand.

“There,” I said, and got to my feet. “It worked.”

I emerged back out of the brambled circle of the oak, and Thamuris let go of the trailing briars. “I wish,” he said, “that you would tell me a little more about the wizard those gems belonged to.”

“What do you want to know?” I said, starting away from the oak and toward the ruined orchard wall.

Thamuris followed me. “Well, if he were—and I know this is silly, but
if
he were to . . . well, to
manifest
, what would the signs be?”

“That isn’t silly,” I said reluctantly as we entered the fallow orchard. “If he manifests
himself
, you’ll know him because he doesn’t—didn’t—look in the least Troian. Phenomena . . .” I ran through a rapid mental survey of everything I knew about Malkar, everything I’d watched for in the shadows and dreaded. “He always wore musk—at least when I knew him. He murdered a woman by burning her alive, by magic. He was very old—I don’t even know how old. He died by burning. And he was a blood-wizard, as I told you, so anything bleeding, any sign or smell of blood . . .”

“You know a great deal about him,” Thamuris said. “And I would guess that he did not leave you these relics in his will.”

I had betrayed myself. I should, I thought, have known that I would.

The perseïd tree was still not dead. I reached out and laid my palm on its trunk, feeling the cold of the bark and beneath it the faintest sense of brightness. Of hope? “What is it you want to know, Thamuris?” I said wearily.

“What I’ve just helped you put in the Dream of the Garden, for one thing.”

“A little late to be asking that, don’t you think?”

“I trusted your judgment.”

“And now you don’t?”

“I would like some more information,” he said, very levelly.

I turned away from the perseïd tree. “Look. How I know him isn’t . . . it isn’t relevant.”

“No? Then why does the phrase ‘death by burning’ have such a violent effect on you?”

He was watching my emotions, damn him. And I was failing to control them.

“It
is
how everyone I knew in my childhood died,” I said, both to defend myself and for the vicious, unworthy satisfaction of seeing him flinch.

He did flinch, but he recovered and said, “That’s nothing to do with this man whose name you won’t tell me.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s dead.” Strange, how much of my time I seemed to spend these days telling people Malkar was dead.

Thamuris’s breath hitched; I looked at him and saw his eyes widen. “He is your spirit-ancestor.”

“No, he is
not
.” But if he wasn’t, why had I been so eager to find out how to do a thanatopsis?

Of course Malkar—Brinvillier Strych—was my spirit-ancestor, my patron saint. Who else could it possibly be?

Thamuris had quite rightly ignored my futile outburst. “I thought I understood what you were doing, but I don’t. You can’t treat a spirit-ancestor like a contagion—”

“That’s what he is!” The banshee fury of my voice surprised me just as much as it did him, and for the first time in years, my concentration broke, splintered, shattered, and I lost the Khloïdanikos entirely in a nightmare, an old terrible nightmare of the Fire and pain and Malkar’s laughter until my own half-shrieking sobs woke me.

Chapter 13

Mehitabel

There was, of course, a soirée in honor of Stephen’s impending marriage. Stephen was dining beforehand with the amassed Lemerii, and it was a good thing I wasn’t expected to join them, both because I couldn’t offhand think of a more dire way to start the evening and because if I had been, I would have been horribly late.

Mrs. Damascus caught me after rehearsal for a final fitting of my costume—at this stage of the game, she took over almost entirely from Corinna. By the time she left, Jean-Soleil, Corinna, and Semper were all standing outside my door. Jean-Soleil looked apoplectic, Corinna anxious, and Semper wretched. Jean-Soleil barely waited for Mrs. Damascus to clear the door before he came in, shutting it behind him with a bang.

“Harlot!”

“Me?”

“Great powers, no! Susan.”

“What’s she done now?”

“She came calling, all great lady and lah-di-dah, the narcissistic cow.” He stomped in a circle, muttering obscenities.

“What did she want?”

“For us not to put on Edith Pelpheria, of course. I couldn’t make out if Jermyn had sent her or it was her own idiocy.”

“It sounds like Susan all the way down. Did she say what ought to motivate you?”

“She said we were being dreadfully cruel to her.”

I started laughing, relieved not to have to censor my reaction. Jean-Soleil’s mustache twitched, and then he burst out laughing, too. “Thank you, Belle. I was too mad to laugh at her.”

“Susan’s particular gift is to make people take her most witless actions seriously. She can make a five-act tragedy out of dropping a handkerchief, and for God’s sake don’t let it get under your skin now.”

“I couldn’t afford to get angry with her before. Have to keep the leading lady happy, you know. You have no idea how great a relief it is to be able to call Susan a harlot at the top of my lungs.”

“You might be surprised,” I said dryly and made him laugh again.

“I don’t think you need to worry about her coming near you. She seems to dislike you nearly as much as you dislike her.”

“If that was news to you, it certainly wasn’t to anyone else in the Empyrean.”

“No? Oh, dear.” Jean-Soleil worked hard to believe in the acting troupe as happy family, and in general we did our best not to disabuse him.

“It’s all right, Jean-Soleil. She’s gone.”

“Thank the powers,” Jean-Soleil said and left, only to be replaced by Corinna, who wanted to talk about Drin.

“I can’t make him stop,” I said to her. “You know that. I can never make Drin do anything.”

“You made him sleep with you pretty easy.”

“Oh, please. You don’t imagine I had to work at that, do you? Why don’t you talk to him? He’s scared of you.”

Corinna snorted.

“No, he is. He’s a lot more likely to listen to you than to me.”

“I just wish he wouldn’t be such a pig.”

“I do, too, but I’m afraid that’s past praying for. Look, Corinna, I’ll back you up, but I am not opening the subject with him.”

“Oh, all right, but I’ll hold you to that.”

“Just not tonight!” I said to her at the door, which she acknowledged with a wave.

I expected Semper to be upset about Drin, too, but he had a different thorn in his paw. He sat down at my invitation, his long, beautiful hands twisting in his lap, and furrows in his forehead you could have planted seeds in.