Corambis (12 page)

“And you do penance for
sins
,” the other woman said earnestly. “You can’t deny his sins, Meriel.”
“I’m not trying to. I’m saying the Hall of the Seven Virtues isn’t the place for it.”
“What better place could there be?”
“An abbey,” Meriel snapped. “A hermitage. Our Lady of Fogs, for that matter. Let him do penance as an anchorite. It’d be more seemly than this . . .” She broke off, waving a hand inexpressively.
The guard saw his chance and said, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I think this gentleman—”
But I was not in the mood to rescue him, and if he couldn’t answer their questions, he certainly couldn’t answer mine. “I was just leaving,” I said and suited the action to the word.
I retraced my steps back to the foyer and its sign, and there I stopped, stuck fast between my curiosity and what little sense of compassion I could be said to possess. For surely it was, as Meriel said, cruel to gawk at a man like a carnival beast. On the other hand . . .
I sighed and gave in to my curiosity, taking the right- hand corridor.
There was another young man in brown livery at the door to the Hall of the Seven Virtues. He gave me a highly dubious look, but I must have seemed harmless even if patently foreign, for he nodded me in.
The Hall of the Seven Virtues was nothing compared to the Hall of the Chimeras, into which it would have fit five times over. But for this city, with its steep, cramped architecture, it was very impressive. One side was a series of arched windows looking out west over the sea; opposite were the allegorical frescoes Lilion had spoken of so highly. They were rather stiff and spikily angular, quite unlike, for example, the sign of the Fiddler’s Fox, which I had noticed for its elegantly stylized curving lines, at once sly and inviting. The frescoes’ colors, though, were rich, deeply saturated, and vibrant, as if in reaction to the monochrome of the city’s exterior and her citizens’ clothes. The ceiling— I tipped my head back for a quick inspection— was likewise beautifully colored, though I found the subject matter unfortunate.
But perhaps that was due merely to the proximity of the black- draped bier like a blot of ink. The body on the bier, surely the Prince Gerrard of whom Sholto Ketteller had spoken so passionately, looked like wax, its features sunken and ghastly, but the man crouched before it looked almost worse.
He was wearing only a sort of nightshirt— that and chains. His manacled feet were bare, and I could see the raw welts on both wrists and ankles. There was a collar around his neck, and it was that which was fastened by a length of chain to the bier. The guards, two strapping young men, were so clearly unnecessary as to seem almost ludicrous. They gave me a look, dismissed me as their colleague at the door had, and returned to a low- voiced but quite intense conversation the subject of which I did not attempt to discern.
The prisoner did not raise his head at my approach. His tawny skin had gray undertones; his face was stubbled; his hair was lank and becoming matted. Since the guards weren’t watching, I knelt down and whispered, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
That brought his head up with a startled jerk. He was square- jawed, snub- nosed, not at all handsome and even less so with lines of fatigue and strain bracketing his generous mouth and deepening the crow’s-feet around his eyes. They were odd eyes, pale amber striated with gray, and I realized after a frozen moment that they were sightless.
No one had mentioned that Rothmarlin was blind.
“Is Glimmering reduced to petty tricks now?” he said.
“Tricks?” I said. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t even know who Glimmering is. I’m a foreigner.”
He frowned as he listened to me. “An you are a foreigner, why would you want to help me?”
“Common decency?” I suggested. He lowered his head, making an awkward, clanking gesture, as if to push my words away. And I supposed it even worked; it attracted the attention of the guards.
I straightened as they approached; I didn’t hurry, which seemed to discomfit them. And then I smiled and said, “I wonder if either of you could tell me the way to the nearest bookstore?”

G

The two strapping young men had been surprisingly helpful; I had ended up with directions to three different bookstores and a quite enlightening difference of opinion as to which of the three was the best. In return, I had had to allow myself to be escorted out into the cobbled plaza— broad for Bernatha— fronting the Clock Palace, so that they could point me in the right direction, but that was better than being arrested and I hoped had distracted them sufficiently that their prisoner would not get in trouble.

Although I had asked about bookstores simply because it was the first and most incongruous thing to come into my head, I was certainly not going to discard the opportunity thus presented. For there was at least one piece of information a bookstore could provide that I very badly wanted.

What was it, exactly, that had started this “craze,” as Mrs. Fawn called it, for novels about Mélusine?
The nearest bookstore was called Waddilow & Berowne; I found it easily, though for a moment I was sure I had somehow come to the wrong place. This building was simply too big. But the gilt lettering on the window read, very plainly, “WADDILOW & BEROWNE, BOOKSELLERS,” and when I went inside, there were bookshelves everywhere.
Books
everywhere.
I realized after a moment— two seconds? ten seconds? as much as a minute?— there was a clerk standing in front of me, and he’d asked twice if he could help me. And I was gawking like any dowdy provincial. My first impulse was to bolt, but that was silly. I hadn’t been put out of countenance by a shop clerk since I was sixteen, and this weedy young man with his bad complexion was not a threat. “Yes,” I said briskly. “I’m looking for a book by a man named Challoner. A travelogue of some sort?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” the weedy young man said with great enthusiasm. He led me on a circuitous path into the depths of the store, stopping in front of a bookcase against the back wall. “We keep all our travel literature together— it saves time. Now, was there a
par tic u lar
Challoner you wanted, or . . . ?”
“Actually, I’d like to browse a bit, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course!” he said, and very nearly bowed. I couldn’t tell if he was merely trying to flirt with me or if he, like Mrs. Fawn, had recognized me for what I was. I found that I didn’t want to know.
He did at least leave me alone, and I was able to contemplate the bookcase in peace. Corambins printed titles along the spine rather than abbreviating them across, a habit which made books easier to identify although I foresaw that it would quickly lead to a crick in the neck. Challoner took up most of one shelf; they had several copies of each of his books. Happily, it was immediately apparent which one I wanted:
The Daughters of Cymellune
was an old- fashioned and fanciful way to refer to Tibernia and Marathat, but it did, I supposed grudgingly, make for an eye- catching title.
All the more so, I discovered upon opening the book to the preface, because the Corambins believed themselves to be descended from Agramant the Navigator.
Sternly, I forbade myself to get sidetracked, although I did rather badly want to know how an entire nation could be descended from a king who was historically without issue. I would have plenty of time for such inquiries later. I turned to the section on Mélusine, and in less than five minutes had to put the book back before I disgraced myself.
This Challoner had self- evidently never been in Mélusine in his life. His “report” was based on Virenque’s
L’Histoires des Cités Magnifiques
, which was a great work of scholarship and over a hundred years old. I recognized Virenque’s ornate turn of phrase; Challoner had cribbed the entire passage on the Arcane directly. I supposed that meant I would not find Virenque anywhere in Corambis, and that was a pity.
But at least now I knew more or less what Challoner must have said to conjure such enthusiasm. Virenque did talk a great deal about Cabaline wizardry, in pursuit of an argument that the Curia was of far more influence and importance in shaping the city than the Lord Protector’s annemer Cabinet. Since Virenque was annemer himself and viewed Cabalines with no little suspicion, he had made much of the tattoos and oaths and the mystery of the Virtu. Virenque had been disparaging; Challoner— or at least his readership— was fascinated.
I did not bury my face in my hands and howl, but it was a near- run thing.
A moment’s inward contemplation convinced me that I didn’t have the strength to investigate the novels Challoner had inspired, but the sheer size of Waddilow & Berowne prompted me to wonder if they had a thaumatology section analogous to the travel section, and I went looking.
Happily, the bookcases were taller than I— there were step stools scattered here and there about the store for the use of clerks and customers— and I was able to avoid attracting the weedy young man’s attention. I found their books on magic between an impressive array of books on natural history and a smaller but quite wide- ranging selection on mathematics.
They had more thaumatology books than I had expected; in Mélusine, if a bookstore didn’t specialize in thaumatology— though several did, all run by annemer— it was unlikely they would have more than one or two thaumatological books, and those probably the result of trade rather than intent. But Waddilow & Berowne had half a bookcase worth; I crouched down to examine them.
Principles of Magical Healing
,
Force and Balance
, a
Magician’s Primer
, a number of books on magic and mathematics, a disturbing little volume entitled
Magic for the Mechanist
: their selection told me a good deal about Corambin magic in a very short time, and left me confounded. I had expected, foolishly perhaps, that given the apparent obsession with Cymellune, Corambin magic would not be so different from the magic of the Mirador and the Coeurterre, but nothing, it seemed, could be further from the truth. They were materialists, but not as Cabalines were; they seemed to think magic itself was a material force, an idea which I found as alien as any I’d ever come across, and that included the teachings of the Union of Angels, a Cymellunar sect who had believed firstly that magical energy was generated by sex, and secondly that if one practiced magic— and sex— long enough, one would be invited into the angelic orders and would grow wings as naturally as a tree puts forth flowers. None of them had succeeded by the time they were, all five of them, burned for heresy.
I could see, I supposed a little dubiously, how one might get from Titan Clocks— which were, after all, mechanical objects in their most literal aspect— to this kind of dry, methodical, lifeless magic, but then I remembered the spontaneous manifestation of blood Lilion had mentioned, and I was not so sure.
In any event, it was pointless to try to theorize further on the basis of a random sampling of books in a bookstore. And a sharp stab of guilt reminded me that I needed to get back to Mildmay. No matter what he said, I had left him alone more than long enough. I straightened and thoughtfully went in search of my weedy clerk again. He was in the front of the store and quivered like a hunting dog on point when he saw me. I gave him a carefully judged smile. “As I’m sure you can tell, I’m a foreigner, and I’ve only recently arrived in Bernatha.”
He made an encouraging sort of mumble, and I went on: “I don’t even know if you have such things as broadsheets?”
He looked discouragingly blank.
For a moment I was perfectly blank myself, trying to think of a way to explain broadsheets. I’d learned to read from broadsheets; Joline and I had made paper crowns out of broadsheets; the best barbecued mutton in Simside came wrapped in broadsheets. Finally, I said, “How do people learn about important things in this city? New laws? De mo li tions? Play per formances?”
“Oh, you mean
newspapers
! We only carry the Bernatha papers, but Emblem’s has the Esmer
Times
, if you want that. They’ll have today’s by now.”
“Let’s start with Bernatha,” I said and hoped my nonchalance was convincing.
Bernatha had three newspapers. They looked reassuringly like Mélusinien broadsheets, though with many more pages, and were correspondingly cheap. I bought one, the
Standard
, for a penny- obol; the other two, the clerk said, were “partisan,” and I definitely wasn’t in the mood for anything of the sort. I extracted myself from his clutches as gracefully as I could and started off from Waddilow & Berowne as if I had the least idea of where I was going.
I had by this time overreached myself most dreadfully. I might have been able to find my way back to the Fiddler’s Fox from the Clock Palace— or, then again, I might not— but from Waddilow & Berowne, I couldn’t even hope. I did try to retrace my steps to the Clock Palace, which seemed like a reasonable thing to do, but I went wrong somehow and found myself going downhill without ever having, so far as I could tell, stopped going
uphill
. And while that didn’t seem like it should be possible, I was not phi los o pher enough to argue with my own experience, and my experience said that I was, quite plainly, going downhill on the west side of the Crait, toward the harbor. I wished, unworthily but sincerely, that Mildmay were with me.
The sun was sinking rapidly— I’d spent rather longer in Waddilow & Berowne than I’d meant to— and the streets were nearly deserted. I tried approaching fellow pedestrians, but the first pretended not to hear me, and the second actually recoiled, hissing, “I have no business with violet- boys,” as he hurried away. I wasn’t sure what “violet- boys” were— did Bernatha have street packs as Mélusine did?— but clearly I looked like one.
I stopped at an intersection and considered my options, meager as they were. I could continue wandering aimlessly, but although that was actually a highly effective strategy in the Mirador, it seemed unlikely to help me here. I could try to retrace my steps to Waddilow & Berowne, but I was suspicious that that would work no better than retracing my steps to the Clock Palace had. I could try to navigate by the sun, while it lasted: I was on the west side of the Crait now, and I knew the Fiddler’s Fox was on the south . . .
But that was nonsense, and I knew it even as I thought it. Nonsense and a pathetic attempt to avoid the one recourse I knew would work: the obligation d’âme.
Mildmay had used it to find me, the terrible night of Gideon’s death, and since then I had been rawly aware of it, as one is aware of the new skin left behind by a healing burn. I had drawn away from it as much as I could, perversely becoming more and more uncomfortable with it the more Mildmay seemed to accept it. I’d thought that was why my awareness of his dreams had suddenly and sharply fallen off, although now I suspected that had far more to do with the briars enclosing my construct- Mélusine than my strength of will and purity of heart.
But there was one thing the obligation d’âme was genuinely good for— as opposed to all the myriad things it was
bad
for, like my selfishness and arrogance and cruelty— and that was in allowing one party to the bond to find the other. And it was stupid to stand here dithering about it as if it were some sort of injury to Mildmay. I’d used the obligation d’âme to inflict those, too; I damn well knew the difference.
All I had to do was let myself look and he was there, fox- red and jade- green and
that
way. Not quite directly behind me, but a good thirty degrees off from what I would have guessed. I turned, chose the street that most closely approximated the direction I wanted, and started walking again.
The shadows were long and threatening; it was already nearly dark, and the street lamps were lighting themselves with an odd hissing sound and a distinct crack of magic. Some sort of machinery, I guessed, thinking of the book called
Magic for the Mechanist
in Waddilow & Berowne, but I had not the faintest idea of how such a thing could be constructed. I was wondering about that, imagining keeping magic in a box ready to strike, like a lucifer, and so it was some time before I realized I was being followed.
In fairness to myself, it had been fifteen years or more since I’d had to worry about difficulties of that kind. Malkar had taken me away from the par tic u lar perils of a city, and when I returned to Mélusine, I had almost immediately gotten the Mirador’s tattoos and become, as far as the Lower City and its criminal denizens were concerned, predator instead of prey. In some districts, as I remembered from my childhood, it was considered bad luck even to walk in the same direction as a wizard, and I had never once been accosted, not for any reason.
But Bernathan criminals had no reason to fear me; I was merely a foreigner walking alone: an easy target.
“Oh damn,” I said, very softly, because of course they were right. I had been stripped of the Mirador’s protections, magical as well as po liti cal, and I’d never been any good in a fight, half- blind and clumsy. It had always been Joline who had protected me— and there, I thought bitterly, was another way Mildmay was like her. I had a knack for finding protectors.
But I was now, if possible, even worse equipped for a fight than I’d been as a child. Not as clumsy, no, Malkar had dealt with that. But half- blind, and although the stiffness in my fingers didn’t normally bother me much, I couldn’t even make a fist comfortably, much less hit someone with it. And there was magic, but that was heresy, and I didn’t even know why I cared, but I did. Maybe I had learned something from my stupid, vicious mistakes, after all.
I was walking fast, still tracking toward Mildmay and the Fiddler’s Fox, and given my height and the length of my stride against that of the average Corambin, I thought there was a reasonable chance I’d simply outdistance them. But apparently they’d thought so, too, and utilized their greater knowledge of Bernatha to take a short cut. Three men— two Corambin in type, the third of the taller, paler breed— stepped out of an alley directly in front of me. I took a step back, half turning for unabashed flight, and two more men, both pale- haired, closed the distance from behind.
“Now, guv,” said one of the shorter, “this don’t have to be ugly.”
“No?” I said, trying to get the wall at my back, but they flanked me neatly, and I remembered my earlier notion about predators.
“Naw,” said their spokesman. “You just hand over your purse and any other small valuables you might have con ve niently to hand, and we’ll let you go. Not a scratch on you.” He smiled widely, like a parody of the morning’s gondolman.
“I really don’t have enough to make it worth the bother,” I said, knowing perfectly well it was useless.
“Oh, no bother at all,” said one of the others. “Leastways not to us.” And they all sniggered and moved a step closer.
I was weighing my options despairingly when one of them said from my blind side, “Course, if you wanted to give us something
else
, we might be persuadable. I bet that pretty mouth of yours has persuaded people to do sillier things.”
I turned my head to stare at him. “You want me to . . .”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said one of the others.
“Think of it as a warm- up for to night’s business,” said a third, from behind me.