The Virtu (38 page)

“Who else do you have to talk to?”

:You do not want to talk to me.:

“I do not want to talk about certain subjects. I have no objections to talking to you.”

His body language was doubtful, wary, but he came a few steps closer. :If you are sure you do not mind… :

“As long as you don’t want to talk about me,” I said and gave him a wry smile, “I’d be glad for someone to distract me from my thoughts.”

He was close enough that I saw him return my smile. “Then what should we talk about, Messire Harrowgate?:

I hesitated, but there were only two topics that could hold my attention at the moment, and I did not want to discuss Mildmay. With anyone. “What do you know about divination?”

:You are worried about Messire von Heber’s rather remarkable story?:

“Yes—well, not so much the divination itself, but do you think he can help me mend the Virtu as he says?”

:This is truly your goal?:

“Yes. It is.”

:Frankly, I don’t know if such a thing is possible at all. If it is, I would imagine you will need all the help you can get.:

“Granted. But what he said—”

:I am neither Cabaline nor Fressandran,: he said with some asperity.

“You’re a wizard, and unless I am very much mistaken, there is no love lost between you and Mavortian von Heber.”

:Are you asking me to choose sides?:

“There are no sides to choose thus far. But I do not wish to believe things merely because Mavortian tells me they are true.”

:Yes,: Gideon said. :You are wise in that.: Old bitterness in his voice, but I could not ask without revealing that I did not know, and I was not entirely prepared to trust Gideon Thraxios, either.

He shed that dark mood like a snakeskin and said, :Explain to me what the Virtu is and how it was broken.:

My horror felt like the building lurching beneath my feet. But he was right. He couldn’t offer me any kind of opinion until he knew the parameters of the question. And I supposed, distractedly, that I should be grateful for the chance to practice my lies before I had to tell them to Mavortian.

Now if only I had had a chance to work out what my lies were going to be.

Reflexively, I stalled for time. “The Virtu was created by the Cabal in 2101, not quite two hundred years ago. They were trying—among other things—to find a way to convince the wizards of Mélusine to work together rather than preying on each other as had been their wont.”

:And did it work?: Gideon asked, dryly enough that I knew he knew the answer.

I thought of what I had done to Mildmay that evening, exactly the sort of thing the Cabal had been trying to eradicate; I remembered the look in his eyes when he’d said,
You could’ve warned me
. “As well as anything ever can, with wizards. The Virtu was—
is
—a thaumaturgical device with a dual purpose. It collects power from each wizard of the Mirador and uses that power to maintain a number of defensive spells, some attuned to the individual wizards, some guarding the fabric of the Mirador, some guarding other things. It would be heresy if they tried to do it now, of course. Though not as unforgivable a heresy as performing the obligation d‘âme.”

:It sounds like a monumental work of magic:

“There’s a reason the Cabal all died young. The problem, though, is that the Virtu has never failed in all this time.”

:The
problem
?:

“Let me finish. You see, as long as everyone swears their oaths and contributes their power, the spells don’t erode and the structure maintains its stability. The Curia is nominally responsible for the Virtu’s maintenance, but we’ve never needed to
do
anything.”

:We?: Gideon said, and I saw his eyebrow rise.

“I was a member of the Curia,” I said stiffly.

:Yes, and now you are not. Which I believe is also part of this explanation.:

I very nearly cursed him to his face for being so damnably right. As it was, I knew I had been silent too long before I said, “Yes, I suppose it is.”

:You did ask for my opinion.:

“Yes, I know that. Very well.” I looked out at the horizon, because it was the only way I could keep my head up. “The Virtu was broken via a working done on me by Malkar Gennadion.” That much was common knowledge; he must have known it before he made me say it.

:Specify,: Gideon said in the cool, dispassionate tones of a scholar.

“He found a way—he put together a working that allowed him to use my magic as if it were his own.” My nails were digging into my palms with the effort it took to keep my voice level. If I closed my eyes, I knew I would see the louring walls of Malkar’s workroom, the evil shine of the pentagram laid into the floor.

:I thought the Virtu protected the wizards of the Mirador against such spells.:

I felt like a man who had backed away from a bear trap only to fall onto a bed of swords.

:Well?: he said after a moment, when I still had not managed to speak. :How did Messire Gennadion do it?:

“I… I was…” His molly-toy, a cruel voice in my head finished, the voice of the teenage whore I had been. “He was never Cabaline,” I said, lamely and too quickly.

:Surely
that
shouldn’t make any difference.:

“No, no, it—I just meant, it wasn’t heresy to him.” And he wouldn’t have cared if it was. I was babbling and I knew it, but seemed entirely helpless to stop myself.

Gideon’s head tilted; I was puzzling him. :What has heresy to do with it?:

“Nothing.” I turned away from him, pushed my fingers savagely through my hair, bit my lower lip until I was focused on that small pain instead of the panic baying in my mind.

:Messire Harrowgate?: I felt Gideon coming closer. :Felix?:

I turned, sharply enough that he stepped back a pace. “Unpleasant memories,” I said and managed a thin smile. “And I am more tired than I realized. Malkar Gennadion was my teacher in magic before I swore my oaths to the Mirador. Doubtless he found some occasion to cast a spell that would circumvent the Virtu’s warding.” Doubtless while he held me with the obligation de sang, but I did not want to talk about that, either, nor think about its kinship to the obligation d‘âme. Thus, I did my best to make circumventing the Virtu’s warding sound like a simple matter rather than something I had no idea how Malkar had accomplished.

Gideon’s disbelief was palpable, but he said nothing, simply stood and waited. His air, that of a schoolteacher faced with a recalcitrant pupil, was enough to push me from fear to anger, and somewhere underneath the wave of fury, I was glad of it.

“That part doesn’t matter,” I snapped. “What matters is that the Virtu was broken by the raw application of thaumaturgie force. I was only the hammer.”

:You’re saying he just… hit it?:

And now I was angry at Gideon for so readily dropping the subject of what Malkar had done to me. “There was no subtlety in that spell. Trust me. I was there.”

:I suppose that
is
the easiest way to deal with something one does not fully understand,: Gideon said thoughtfully, as calm and conversational as if he had not noticed my hostility. :Not the safest, but the easiest.:

I could feel myself floundering, so wrong-footed that there seemed no response I could make. It was a mercy that Gideon did not wait for a reply from me. :And that being the case—it explains why the physical structure was shattered. And if the thaumaturgie structure was shattered in the same way… then a wizard trained to read patterns, as Fressandran diviners are trained, might indeed be very useful to you.:

Mavortian. Yes. We had been discussing Mavortian. “Do you think… do you think he understands how it happened? What Malkar did?”

:I doubt it,: Gideon said. If there
were
sides to be chosen, Gideon of Thrax had already made up his mind. :But his techniques may help
you
to understand it.:

“Oh,” I said, with woeful inadequacy, realizing clearly for the first time that here was another, like Thamuris, who could keep up with me intellectually, and possibly even outdistance me.

:I do not know what Messire von Heber imagines he can offer you, Messire Harrowgate. But I do think he may be useful.:

To which I said the only thing I could: “Please. There’s no reason for you not to call me Felix.”

You want to know what the obligation d‘âme is like?

I only wish I could tell you.

In some ways, it didn’t feel like anything had happened at all. I mean, I was still me, and Felix was still Felix—powers and saints was he ever—and sometimes I could almost think I’d dreamed the whole fucking thing.

But then there was the stuff that
did
change, and that’s the stuff I don’t got the right words for. All I knew about the obligation d‘âme, the binding-by-forms, was what I’d learned from stories, and stories didn’t help. Stories didn’t talk about what it was
like
to be bound by the obligation d’âme. They just talked about why you shouldn’t do it, and fuck I knew that part already.

So the stories didn’t give me words for the way my heartbeat seemed to have picked up an echo, or the way I’d find myself looking at Felix all the time, even when I didn’t mean to be. The stories didn’t tell me what to call it when Felix told me to do something, and I could
feel
it like a fucking lead weight in my head. The stories didn’t tell me about the dreams.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Compared to the nightmares I’d been having, these were nothing, and I knew it. But they were spooky. And it wasn’t nothing as simple as me dreaming about Felix or dreaming Felix’s dreams or anything like that where I could’ve explained it. It was just that no matter what I was dreaming about, there was this kind of
muttering
all through it. It was Felix’s voice, but no matter how hard I listened I could never make out the words.

Spooked me right the fuck out, let me tell you.

I’d already given Felix all the power over me he was ever going to need, and I figured whatever the fuck was really causing those dreams, I could take them as a reminder not to give him more. So in the hotel a couple days’ ride from Mélusine, when I shoved my hands in my pockets and found Florian’s letter
again
—I don’t even know how often I’d done that since we’d sprung Gideon and them from Aiaia—and thought, Well? What
are
you going to do about this fucking thing?, it wasn’t Felix I went to.

It was Mehitabel Parr.