The Virtu (22 page)

When the stairs stopped—well, that’s pretty much it. The stairs stopped. And so did the rest of the floor. Even with Felix’s little chrysanthemums skittering out ahead and back, I only just barely caught myself in time, and there was this long long second where I wondered whether my leg was going to hold or not, and then it was okay, and I was leaning against the wall and could find my voice to say, “Hold up.”

“What is it?” Felix said behind me, and I don’t suppose he’d‘ve sounded nervous to anybody who didn’t know what to listen for.

“Could use some more light,” I said, and his chrysanthemums got brighter and found some friends.

“Oh,” said Miss Parr, real small.

“Rather,” said Felix. “That’s quite an exciting new development.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Exciting.”

We were standing at the edge of a pit. I don’t think pit’s even the right word, ‘cause it sounds like something somebody could dig, but I don’t know a better one. So, like a pit dug by giants or something. Even with Felix’s witchlights, I couldn’t really see across to the other side, and I couldn’t see the bottom at all. And if I’d gone one step farther, I’d’ve found the bottom for myself, though I don’t reckon I’d‘ve seen much of it even then.

It took me a moment to look away from the pit, because a thing like that can get kind of hypnotizing, but I wasn’t going to believe Florian was laying down there somewhere with his neck broke, and that meant there had to be some other way to go aside from the long way down. So I cast around, and sure enough, there in the wall of the stairway, about five steps up, was a square sort of hole, about waist high on me. I’d gone right past it.

“Felix?” I said.

“What?” He sounded like he’d gotten a little distracted by the pit, too.

“Send your lights over this way?”

“Oh. Right. Yes, of course.” The little green lights went tumbling into the hole, and we saw, sure enough, more fucking stairs.

“Fuck,” I said.

“I beg your pardon,” said Miss Parr. Figured.

I said to Felix, “I ain’t sure I can do this.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Claustrophobia?” said Miss Parr, and I wasn’t about to give her the joy of asking what the fuck that was.

I said to Felix, although for preference I’d‘ve ripped my own tongue out first, “My leg. I ain’t sure it can take no more of this.” Because there was something about the stairs, the height or the unevenness or
something
, that just got right into the damaged part of my leg and gnawed away like rats. It was hurting worse than it had for two months.

A silence. He said, “It’s either go down or go back up. And surely it can’t keep going down
that
much longer.”

Wanna bet? But I didn’t say it, because he was right. If I didn’t go down, I’d have to go back up, and the mere idea was enough to make me sit down and cry.

“Would it be better if I went first?” he said, which was the nicest thing he’d offered to do for me in decads.

“Nah,” I said. “If I’m gonna fall, prob’ly better if there ain’t nobody to go with me.”

“How charmingly you put it,” he said, but more just teasing than being mean. “Do you want to rest a minute, though, before we go on?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that’d be good.” I went back up a couple of steps before I sat down, but then I sat down hard.

Felix and Miss Parr sat down, too, and we were all quiet for a while. The red-hot wire running through my leg had plenty to say, but I didn’t figure I’d share. Didn’t figure they’d want me to.

But Felix hated silence, and after a little bit he said, “The river’s louder. Do you suppose it’s… down there?”

“No way to tell without jumping,” I said.

“
Thank
you,” he said, and this time he was being nasty, but only just a little.

Some more silence, and then I thought of something. “D’you s’pose these folks went in for booby traps much?”

“For what?” said Miss Parr.

“What do you mean?” said Felix.

“Booby traps,” I said. “You know. Things that drop on your head if you step in the wrong spot. Trip wires.”

“Yes, yes,” Felix said, “I know what booby traps are. What I
don’t
know is what you
mean
.”

“Well, that’s kind of a booby trap, ain’t it?” I said and waved at the end of the stairs and the great big nothing after ‘em.

“Oh,” said Felix.

“And what if it is?” said Miss Parr. “So what?”

I was liking her less and less all the damn time. “So what if that ain’t their best effort?”

“I see your point,” she said after a moment.

“Do you have any experience with this sort of thing?” Felix asked me.

“Nothing ‘specially creative. There’s a couple flash houses in Nill got themselves some clever ideas, and I seen the ones in the Arcane that don’t work no more. But…”

“There can’t be anything too dreadful,” Miss Parr said, “or Jeremias and Florian would have been caught by it.”

“Maybe they were,” Felix said.

“No, they must have been coming down here for some time. It explains too many things that were puzzling me about Jeremias’s behavior, and you know the Gauthys took Florian to Haigisikhora with them because he was looking ‘peaky.’ ”

“Too much late-night adventuring?”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Him and Mr. Tantony, they had a thing before. ‘Cause he almost told me about it one time.”

“I see,” said Miss Parr, and I didn’t want to know what she meant by that, so I didn’t ask.

“In that case,” Felix said, “I suppose we may indeed assume that whatever traps there may be will not be too terribly subtle… at least not at first.”

“Just be careful, is all,” I said and dragged myself back up to my feet.

“Are you ready?” Felix said.

“No, but I ain’t gonna be. Let’s just do it.”

“All right.” His witchlights clumped themselves just inside the entrance to the new staircase. I bent myself over double and started down.

After two steps, I hated them stairs. After four steps, I hated the people who’d built ‘em. Six steps and I hated Florian for being dumb enough to get lost down here so I had to follow him. I lost count somewhere around the first decad because by then I was hating the whole fucking world.

So I don’t know for sure how long that staircase went on. Not as long as the first one, and probably not more than a Great Septad stairs, but Kethe it felt like being crucified upside down with dowel rods. I was seriously considering just getting down and crawling, or sliding down on my ass or something, and never mind the snarky comments Felix and Miss Parr would make, when Kethe took mercy on me in his own particular way, and the stairs ended.

Now, the thing about Kethe’s mercy is that when you get it, you mostly wish you hadn’t. So there weren’t no more stairs, but instead we were in this little room, just barely big enough for me to stand up straight in, and there were three different ways we could go. Which was two too many for what we needed.

Felix and Miss Parr came into the room behind me, and I said to Felix, “Well, now what?” And yeah, it was a snarl, and I didn’t care. Let him get mad at me. ‘Cause as far as I was concerned it was either snarl at somebody or sit down and start cussing and just not ever stop.

“Well,” Mildmay said, “now what?”

I was taken aback by the hostility in his voice. I hovered for a moment on the verge of answering in kind, but remembered Mehitabel behind me. Whatever this was about, I felt sure we did not want to discuss it in front of her.

To give myself time to think, I looked around. The room was a small one; I had to bend my head to keep from braining myself on the solid rock of the ceiling. The staircase took up one wall, and each of the other three was centered by a square hole big enough for a man of my size to climb through, but not very much bigger. There was a pattern on the floor; I directed my witchlights down, and they illuminated an elaborate twining knot, the sort of design that is impossible to trace with the naked eye for more than an inch or two.

“How likely is it, do you suppose,” said Mehitabel, “that that mosaic is merely decorative?”

I looked at those three square holes. “Not very.”

“It certainly opens up a whole new realm of possibilities as to why Jeremias and Florian have not returned.”

“Yes, but does it help us figure out which way they’ve gone? Did they have enough sense to mark their path?”

“Don’t see no marks,” Mildmay said. I sent my witchlights to aid him in his search, but to no better result.

“Jeremias has the common sense of an exceptionally stupid peacock,” Mehitabel said, sitting down on the bottom step.

“D’you s’pose if we shouted for ‘em… ?” But Mildmay sounded unhappy with his own suggestion, and my nerves shrieked in protest against the idea of making any noise loud enough to penetrate beyond the room in which we stood.

“There are three of us,” Mehitabel said after a moment. “If we split up—”

“No,” Mildmay said.

“No?” she said.

“Felix ain’t got no sense of direction.”

“
Doesn’t have any
,” I said irritably, because I could not deny the truth of what he said.

“Yeah,” Mildmay said, shrugging away the finer points of grammar as he always did. “And I dunno about you, keria. So maybe y’all’d better sit tight here, and I’ll go look.”

“Won’t
you
get lost?” Mehitabel said.

“Nope.” He ducked into the hole directly across from the stairs. I hurriedly sent half my witchlights after him, and then sat down on the step next to Mehitabel.

We listened as Mildmay’s limping footsteps echoed and died away, and Mehitabel said, “Your brother—he
is
your brother, is he not?—doesn’t seem to like me very much.”

“Half brother,” I said. “And I’m the one he’s angry at.”

“What have you done to make him angry?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and wondered if I was lying.

“Ah. He’s not very communicative, is he?”

“No, he isn’t,” I said, trying hard not to imagine the weeks it would take to cross Kekropia, with only Mildmay for company.

“And the two of you are a very long way from home,” she said. In Marathine.

She couldn’t have horrified me more if she had turned and bitten me. I gasped, floundered, and failed utterly to say in my best Troian,
I beg your pardon
. What
did you say
?

She let me flop on the end of her line a moment longer and then added, still in Marathine, “I recognized the tattoos.”

“How?”

“I worked in the Bastion for a time,” she said, with enough chilly distaste to indicate that, whatever she had done there, she had not enjoyed it.

“Oh,” I said feebly and cursed myself for an idiot. I had let myself blindly believe that I would be safe until we left Klepsydra and started traveling west, like a child hiding under the bedclothes—not from monsters, but from a drunken, belligerent adult. And I had been well paid for my willful naïveté.

I pushed my hair away from my face, feeling tired, defeated. “What is it that you want?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Miss Parr, please. You have picked your moment with considerable care, and you can’t really think I’m too stupid to understand the implications. I congratulate you.”

“On what, exactly?”

“You were right to say that you did not need to stoop to entrapment. You are holding a much better card.”

“Are you accusing me of blackmail?”

“Is that not your purpose?”

“No!” She sounded genuinely indignant, although my witchlights were not strong enough to show her face clearly.

“Then what
do
you want?”

“Are you returning to Marathat?”

“Yes,” I said, and added to myself, I hope.

“I want to go with you.”

“You want
what
?”

She looked down at her hands and said, “I want to go with you.”

“Why?”

“My reasons are my own,” she said, much as she had said in the Gau-thys’ courtyard.

“You’re going to have to do better than that this time.”

“I wish to leave Kekropia.”

“By going west? Isn’t that a trifle unintuitive?”

“I have not been to Marathat since I was a small child, and I have never seen Mélusine. I wish to broaden my horizons.”

“Your mendacity is shocking.”

“It’s perfectly true.”

“Yes, but that’s not why you want to travel with us.”

“A young woman traveling alone across the Grasslands will be assumed to be… available. And I am not.”

“Our route is through the duchies.” It was the first time I had admitted that, to myself or anyone else, and my hands were suddenly as cold as ice.

“Through the duchies?” she said, her voice rich with polite skepticism. “You know what they’ll do to you if they realize you’re a wizard?”

“Yes, and I also know what the Bastion will do to me if they catch me. And in any event, you haven’t answered my question.”

“Which question was that?”

“Why do you want to go to Marathat, and why do you want to travel with us?”

“I told you, I cannot comfortably travel across the Empire on my own.”

“Which does not answer either half of the question I asked.”

“Why does it matter?” she said in frustration; she took off her spectacles to pinch the bridge of her nose.

“Aside from the inherent folly of taking as a traveling companion someone whose motives and agenda one does not know?”

She was silent.

“Mildmay will never agree to it unless you give us some kind of answer.”

“Mildmay? But surely you—”

She stopped, with a noise that was almost a gasp, realizing her mistake. I let the silence hang a moment and then said, “He is my brother, not my servant. And I would trust his good sense over my own any day of the week.”

There was a long silence before she said, in a small, desolate voice, “I thought perhaps I could trust you
not
to ask questions.” She turned to me, and even my dim witchlights were enough to show her wide eyes, the soft and desperate vulnerability of her mouth. “Mr. Harrowgate, please. I promise, I have not done anything criminal, and you will suffer neither harm nor inconvenience by helping me.”