The Virtu (66 page)

“Something like that. I assure you, I wouldn’t go anywhere near the Bastion if I didn’t know for a fact my brother is there.”

“Your… brother.”

“Is the family resemblance not strong enough for you?”

“Oh, I believe you’re brothers. I just find the fraternal concern a little overdone.”

“And what is
that
supposed to mean?”

Her smile made my blood run cold. “Leaving aside the indictions when he could have used a brother and you were… somewhere else, I didn’t raise him to be stupid. If he went after Vey Coruscant when and how he did, it was someone else’s idea. At a guess, yours.”

“And sending him after Cerberus Cresset was a stroke of genius?”

“He got out again.”

“With a curse on him that nearly killed him!” After a moment, I was able to straighten the fury and tension out of my fingers. “That is neither here nor there. If I have made mistakes, I am trying to rectify them. Will you do as I ask?”

“It depends,” she said and smiled, an ugly smile, cruel and thin.

“Depends on what?”

“On what you’re willing to do for me in return.”

For one ghastly moment, I thought she was propositioning me, but she continued: “The Mirador confiscated certain of Vey Coruscant’s personal effects, including something that I want.”

“Something that
you
want?”

“Yes,” she said, unperturbed. “For a client.”

“And what is this object?”

“A book.”

At once, I understood why she wanted my help. The Mirador did not confiscate books so much as absorb them; no outsider had a chance of success, even knowing exactly what they were looking for. “Which book.”

“It is a Midlander book—” She produced a piece of paper from a hidden pocket, consulting it with a slight frown. For a moment I was convinced she was going to say
The Doctrine of Labyrinths
, and bit my lip against a hysterical shriek of laughter. “Artemisia de Charon’s
Principia—”

“
Principia Caeli
,” I finished in relief. “Yes, I know it. It’s not exactly an uncommon book. It’s not even heretical.”

“My client wants Madame Coruscant’s copy, and no other. And I am assured the book is identifiable as such.”

“And you want me to fetch it for you?”

“Not the word I would have chosen, and I certainly wouldn’t insist you deliver it in person. But if you want my help getting out of Mélusine unobserved, that is my price.”

“I shouldn’t have expected you to do it out of the goodness of your heart,” I said, choosing my inflection carefully to suggest that both
goodness
and
heart
were words I did not expect her to know.

“No, you expected me to do it for your brother’s pretty green eyes. But that isn’t how things work. You send your bruiser with the book, and I’ll see what I can do. He can leave it with Byron at the bar.” She stood and turned on her heel in one smooth motion, and was gone with barely a ripple through the crowded tavern.

Now I know where Mildmay learned to move like that, I thought stupidly; I was aware of something leaving the room with her, something like the oppressive miasmas that brought fevers to the Lower City in summer.

Bernard said thoughtfully, “That woman could have your balls off before you even knew she had a knife.”

De Charon’s
Principia Caeli
was a book on weather-working, the sort that most wizards referred to as a “classic in the field” without ever having bothered actually to read it. I
had
read it; it was dull, methodical, and utterly harmless. Even Vey Coruscant’s marginalia seemed unlikely in the extreme to change that, and it was not as if the Mirador did not have a half dozen copies already.

I was rationalizing, I admitted to myself that night as I opened the door to the Archive of Cinders, having left Gideon asleep in my bed, frowning slightly as if he sought for a lost earring in his dreams and could not find it. But whether I rationalized my actions or not made no difference. I did not know any other way to make contact with someone who could bypass Mélusine’s ever-guarded gates, and the problem with knowing that Mildmay was alive was knowing that he might not stay that way for long.

The Archive of Cinders was not the only place confiscated books were stored—the Archive of the Chamberlain and the Archive of Brocades were also used for that purpose—but the Archive of Cinders was the most likely place to find a book that had interest only by association. I had to drag a chair over to reach the top shelves, for the Archive of Cinders was far taller than it was wide, lending credence to the story that it had gotten its name from having once been a chimney, but up there, on a quite recently dusted shelf, I found what I was looking for.

It was an octavo volume, bound in dark red leather, embossed and gilded, more suited to a nobleman’s library than a blood-wizard’s. But I thumbed through it quickly—my witchlights providing enough light to see, although I would not have wanted to try to read without a good branch of candles—and observed writing in the margins with the same distinctive looping tails I had observed in Vey Coruscant’s letter to me. And on the back flyleaf I found her seal, impressed without wax. As Kolkhis had said, it was unmistakable, and I slammed the book closed with a shiver.

Regardless of what Kolkhis’s client wanted the book for, I was not sorry that it would not be in the Mirador, would not be adding its mite to the weight of mikkary we all lived under.

Although I would not have been surprised if she had betrayed me, Kolkhis was as good as her word. The smuggler’s name was Theodore d’Erda; I did not ask what he and his cousins and their patient oxen were taking to Lamia, and he in return did not ask about our plans and did not so much as raise an eyebrow at our patently false names. I had expected smugglers to be a rough and vulgar lot, but d’Erda and his cousins were perfectly polite.

The journey was torture, and knowing I deserved it did not make it easier to bear. After three nights of patchy sleep and horrific dreams, afraid to resort to methods of gaining deeper sleep lest it should disrupt the spells of concealment Gideon had taught me—I decided that I no longer had enough pride to worry about, and went to Mavortian.

“Teach me the cards,” I said.

He gave me a look of polite incredulity and said, “I beg your pardon.”

I sat down opposite him. “I am going mad by inches. And since there is nothing I can do, and no way on earth to make these damnable oxen walk faster… teach me the cards.”

“Very well. Now?”

“Please,” I said. “Now.”

Small room. Stone walls. No windows.

Ironbound door. Hinges on the outside. Keyhole you could drive a coach and four through.

One lamp wired into a bracket on the wall.

Fucking clock. Fucking binding-by-forms, like a guy yanking on a leash.

Two cots, sagging mattresses, threadbare dirty blankets. Better than nothing.

Two men, one tall and skinny, the other older and fat. Both with the tattoos. The skinny one wears spectacles, all held together with bits of wire. The fat one—well, he don’t look too good. Gray-faced, and he breathes like a bunch of carnival rattles being shaken in a bag. He ain’t a threat, and the skinny one don’t have but three whole fingers on both hands put together. So he ain’t a threat either.

That’s good.

They talk a lot. Skinny one’s named Simon, fat one’s Rinaldo. They been prisoners here a long time, long enough that the guards talk to them, give them all the good gossip. Guards are annemer. Don’t matter as long as they don’t let the hocuses out the door. Magic don’t work in here.

The hocuses do their best to help, but there ain’t much they can do. Wait for the bruises to fade and the cuts to heal. No bones broken. Small favors.

“Stop pacing,” Simon says. “Rest. You’ll never heal if you don’t rest.”

Rinaldo says, “Obviously, he can’t.”

“You could sit on him.”

“I doubt I’d survive the attempt.” Rinaldo don’t miss much.

“But
why
?” He sounds like he really wants to know. “
Why
can’t you rest?”

“At a guess,” Rinaldo says, “egregiously unfinished business with someone on the other side of that door.” They’re both quiet a minute, then Rinaldo says, “Whoever he is, I’m not going to stay up nights praying for him.”

He’s sure as fuck right about that.

The Bastion loomed over us for three days, gradually eating more and more of the horizon, before we reached the outskirts of the “city” of Lamia, where we parted from Theodore d’Erda and his cousins and their unmentioned cargo.

Lamia had been a true city once, a sister to Mélusine, but one of the early Eusebian generals, declaring it to be nothing but a breeding ground for sedition and disease, had put the entire city to the torch.

It had grown back, of course, like the many-headed Hudra of Kekropian legend, but only as a tent city, something the generals could pretend was ephemeral, even if some of those tents—loosely so-called—had been standing longer than the oldest wizard of the Bastion had been alive. Certainly the population was in constant flux—merchants and smugglers and craftsmen and prostitutes—but I suspected Lamia remained a breeding ground for all sorts of things, in this incarnation just as much as in the last.

When we left the d’Erdas, Mehitabel rather grimly took over. I was certain within five minutes that I had done the right thing in convincing her to come. We had entered Lamia, as we had left Mélusine, in the dead of night, but Mehitabel led us directly to a sprawling canvas-sided hotel where the night clerk asked not a single question beyond how many rooms we wanted.

We went to our rooms through a confusing tangle of tent flaps and ropes, Mavortian and Bernard in one, Mehitabel and me directly adjacent. Mehitabel put down her valise, said, “All right, sunshine. Here we are in Lamia, just like you wanted. I’m going to go find out just how out of date my information is, and I suggest you and your coconspirators give some thought to what you’re going to do now.”

“Mehitabel.”

She stopped and turned to face me, her spectacle lenses glinting in the lanternlight. She said nothing, simply waited as she must have waited for Delila or Angora to come up with the right answer.

“I told Mildmay not to trust me,” I said at last.

“I wish he’d listened to you,” she said, and was gone.

What we did, for most of that day, was read the cards.

Our success depended on so many factors that it seemed almost ridiculous to plan in any greater detail than agreeing that we had to get into the Bastion, find and rescue Mildmay—and although I had expected him to, Mavortian did not argue about that being our first priority—find and kill Mallear, and get out. Mavortian seemed confident, now that he knew Malkar’s true identity as Brinvillier Strych, that he could use his silver focus to find him. “It is, after all,” he said with a thin smile, “what it is
for
.”

But the rest of our plans seemed to depend almost entirely on Mehitabel. According to the research I had done, I should have been able to find Mildmay using the obligation d‘âme, but although I had learned to feel him consciously, the feeling refused to localize. The only certainty I had was that he was not dead, and while that was a comfort, it was not terribly helpful.