The Virtu (69 page)

On our own, we might well have stayed there, unmoving, unthinking, until the Eusebians or their soldiers found us. But Bernard stirred, moaned. Then his breath hissed in, and he said, “Ah powers, that poor stupid son of a bitch,” in a tone so mixed of bitterness and sympathy, contempt and grief, that I could not begin to categorize it. “He never stood a chance, did he?”

“Not really,” I said, straightening cramped limbs, encouraging Mild-may to do the same. He obeyed me, but his eyes seemed as empty as glass.

“What about the other one, whatever his real name was?”

“Dead.” There was no pleasure in saying it.

“Well, that’s something. You, um…” His gaze had found Malkar’s pathetic, smoldering remains.

“Yes. I burned him alive. It’s what he did to Jane Teveria, you know.”

“I wasn’t going to criticize.”

“Well, that’s a first,” I said, and he snorted. Almost laughter, almost friendship. But not quite one, and not quite the other. He stood up, slowly, clearly in pain, and hobbled over to Mavortian’s body, where he went down, slowly, onto his knees again.

“We can’t carry him out.” It wasn’t really a question.

“We have no way to explain a dead body. Especially one that died like that.”

“Powers.” I thought Bernard shuddered, although it was hard to tell in frail witchlight. “Yeah. Not an accident.”

“But we don’t have to leave him here,” I said. “If it matters to you, we can find somewhere in the tunnels, somewhere he won’t be found.”

“Yeah. Stupid of me, isn’t it? We didn’t like each other, and I know if it was me, he’d just walk over my body and keep going. But… yeah. Let’s.”

And it was at that moment that I realized I had no idea how to find the door to the tunnels again.

Felix was kneeling in front of me, looking worried. He said my name again, kind of sharp, but not angry or nothing, and I realized he wanted something from me, so I nodded to show I’d heard him.

He looked terrible, like he hadn’t slept for a month, and his voice was even more breathless than usual, almost not there at all, when he said, “Mildmay, can you find your way back to where you left Mehitabel and the others?”

“Others?” Bernard said, but Felix wasn’t paying attention. He was fixed on me.

I nodded, and Felix gave a long sigh of relief. “Good, for I truly do not want the Eusebians to capture us now. Bernard, can you manage?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Bernard had wrapped up Mavortian’s body and broken canes in his long coat, and was holding it slung over one shoulder, like a carpet or something. “You want to tell me why the Eusebians haven’t captured us already?”

“Beg pardon?”

“The way I understood you and Mavortian, the wizards here can feel your magic. Or was I wrong?”

“I would bet my rings—as I have in fact bet my life, and yours, and his—that Malkar told the Eusebians not to disturb him tonight, no matter what they felt or thought they felt.”

“I wish that didn’t make sense,” Bernard said. “He led us down here, you know. Mavortian couldn’t figure out what he was doing.”

“Malkar loved setting traps,” Felix said. Then he turned back to me. “Are you ready to go?”

I nodded and got up. It was hard. Everything ached, although the worst pain was in my throat. Felix steadied me, and I let him. “You all right?” he said, and I nodded again.

“Good.” And he let me go, kicked the pile of Strych’s ashes apart, and knelt down to sift through it.

“Powers,
must
you?” Bernard said.

Felix said, more or less to both of us, “We’re going to have to keep going. Leave Lamia tonight.”

“We won’t get far enough,” Bernard said.

“Oh, but we will. Because Malkar’s disappeared as well. And without these—” He stood up and held out a handful of dark lumps. Strych’s rubies. “There’s going to be nothing to say that he didn’t take the prisoners somewhere himself.”

“Oh,” Bernard said and signed himself, looking sick.

“I don’t imagine they’ll be in any hurry to find him, especially if they think he doesn’t want to be found.” He shivered hard. Then he kicked through the pile of ashes again, until there wasn’t a pile no more. He stuck the rubies in his pocket, although he didn’t look happy about it, and said, “Let’s go. Please.”

It wasn’t hard, getting back through the Bastion. There was nobody around, and it looked to me like Felix had guessed right about what Strych had done. After a while, when we were getting near the point that I’d have to lead us back to Simon and Rinaldo’s cell because it was the only thing I knew, Bernard grunted and said, “I know where we are now. It’s not far.” I was happy enough to let him lead. Powers, let somebody else do the work.

Mehitabel was waiting for us at the foot of that first narrow staircase.

“What are you doing here?” I said, somewhere between fury and overwhelming relief.

But her eyes were focused past my shoulder. “Oh, good. He did run off to find you, then.”

I wanted to slap her for her flippancy, but then I saw the naked worry in her face and realized she had not meant it the way it had sounded.

She looked at me and smiled, an impressive effort. “I came back to find you, sunshine. Since you weren’t very well going to be able to do your homing pigeon trick if he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.”

“I would have…” But I was too tired to keep up the pretense. “Thank you.”

Her smile got a little more real. “You’re welcome. Come on. I left the two other wizards just short of Irene’s cellar.” Bernard came into the pool of mingled lantern- and witchlight, and Mehitabel’s eyes widened. “Oh. Is he…”

“Very dead,” Bernard said. “I didn’t want to leave him there.”

“No, of course not.” She bit her lip. “We can’t bring a dead body into the tearoom.”

“Felix said we could put him down here somewhere. Where he wouldn’t be found.”

“Yes,” Mehitabel said slowly, thinking. “Yes. We won’t have to go far from the marked route.” Her mouth twisted. “And I doubt anyone will be coming down here for quite some time.”

I explained Malkar’s “disappearance” to her as we walked, and her face lightened. “That’s good, then. Good that he’s dead—and good that perhaps Irene and Barbara won’t suffer for this.”

“We paid them extremely well.”

“And they earn that money, every day they sit up there and don’t have the cellars bricked up.” She said over her shoulder to Bernard, “Here. Down this corridor.”

“How do you know these tunnels so well?” I asked her as we turned aside, a strange parody of a funeral cortège. “Is this how you left the Bastion?”

She hesitated just a split second too long, and I knew she lied when she said, “Yes.”

We could not give Mavortian much of a funeral, but at least, as Bernard said, he would be left alone. Then back through the tunnels, collecting Simon and Rinaldo, up into the tearoom, deserted now except for the elderly lady by the tea urn, who clucked and fussed in a completely impenetrable Midlander dialect, and would not let us leave without washing our hands and faces. She insisted on giving Mildmay a coat, made for a much larger man; he blinked at her, green eyes still distant, still dazed, and nodded his thanks. If the elderly lady noticed the tattoos on Simon’s hands, on Rinaldo’s, on mine—I remembered, and fetched out my gloves, wincing as my fingers brushed the dull, slightly greasy lumps of Malkar’s rubies—she gave no sign.

Out into Lamia. I stayed outside the hotel with the two wizards and my brother while Mehitabel and Bernard went in to collect our belongings and settle the bill. I wondered how many people in this city made their careers out of not asking questions.

Not much of my “traveling expenses” remained, but enough to buy tickets on the diligence to Medeia. Tickets for five, not six: Bernard caught my arm in the yard of the posting house and said, “There’s no reason for me to travel farther with you. And I think we’ll both be happier if I don’t.”

I didn’t have the strength to pretend to disagree with him, but I was worried. “Are you sure? I mean—”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think I’ll be safer on my own.”

I grimaced at the truth of what he said. Mehitabel and I had done our best—and Bernard had given us permission to ransack Mavortian’s effects—but there was no denying we were an eccentric lot, nor that we were safe only so long as no one was looking for us.

“If we’re very lucky,” Bernard said, “we’ll never see each other again. But I think you should have this.”

I looked at what he was holding out to me, and for a moment didn’t recognize it. A box, inlaid with vines. Moonflowers. “The Sibylline? You—”

“I don’t know if he’d want you to have it, or if he would have wanted me to leave it to rot with his corpse. But I know they’re not
his
cards.” He looked me dead in the eye, daring me to say anything.

I looked down, watched my hands take the box from him. Forced myself to say, “Thank you,” because I knew I would regret it if I did not.

“Like I said, if we’re lucky, we’ll never see each other again. And I wish you the very best of luck.”

“Luck,” I said, but I didn’t know if he heard me. He’d already turned and was disappearing into the maze of canvas.

I shook myself, put the box in my inner coat pocket, and went to join the others.

We bought our tickets and boarded the diligence in two groups: Mildmay and I together, since our blood-kinship was too obvious to be denied; Mehitabel and Simon and Rinaldo as a group of father, son, and daughter-in-law. Mehitabel was effortlessly convincing, and Rinaldo played up to better effect than I would have expected. Simon was rather stiff, but since Mehitabel and Rinaldo bickered like a pair of spoiled children around him, it was not to be wondered at.

Mildmay said nothing. He slept for much of the two-day journey to Medeia, but even when he was awake, he was silent. I reminded myself that he had spoken, both to me and to Simon, and that there was nothing I could do but wait. There was at least awareness in his eyes, although it was that feral watchfulness rather than the deep, accepting observation I had grown accustomed to and now missed terribly.

In Medeia, Mehitabel took charge again, choosing a small and inexpensive hotel, and at once set about discovering which acting troupes were in the city and whether any of them could help us. “You’re lucky I’m with you, sunshine,” she growled more than once, and I could only agree with her.