Corambis (17 page)

That night, as I realized instantly I should have been expecting, Diokletian came dreamwalking to find me. It was actually something of a relief— which said far more about my state of mind than I wanted to contemplate, but at least I didn’t have to worry about fires or labyrinths. Diokletian’s disapproval seemed a small price to pay.

I wished— I had always wished— that my relationship with Diokletian were not so fraught with ugliness. But he had chosen certain roles for me at the outset, and they were not roles I was willing to play. I was not willing to be a perfect copy of my mother; I was not willing to be a dutiful son (on the off chance that he was in fact my father); I was not willing to be his damaged protégé. And he had no willingness to deal with me as I was. He found me threatening, outraging, disappointing. I had to be grateful to him, for without his intervention, I would still be helplessly insane, but I could not like him.

He entered into a dream of an argument with Shannon. There had been dozens of those arguments, stupid, stupidly vicious things that had gone on for days. In the dream, we were arguing over what to do with Mildmay. Shannon said,
Drown him like a kitten and have done with it,
and was infuriated by my objections.

Don’t be silly, Felix. It’s not like you can keep him.
In the dream, I knew that if I drowned Mildmay, he would turn into Keeper, and I was still trying to explain this to Shannon when I became aware of Diokletian.
I shoved Shannon into a con ve nient wardrobe and said to Diokletian,
What do you want?
Thamuris said he thought you visited him.
I did.
So what do
you
want? You must want something.
I told Thamuris. I made a mistake, and I want to correct it.
Do you really think it’s that easy?
No, of course not,
I said, irritated.
But I have to try.
Then why haven’t you?
The dream had been shifting around us as we talked, and we were now in the Omphalos. Not the Omphalos of the Khloïdanikos, but the Omphalos as it appeared in the waking world of the Gardens of Nephele: dank, dark, and claustrophobic. I walked out immediately onto the portico, and Diokletian followed me.
Yes, well, there’s a hitch.
What hitch?
he said, frowning out over the distinctly Mélusinien cemetery with which my mind had replaced the Gardens.

I can’t get to the Khloïdanikos,
I said.
The briars have blocked my way in.

Have they?
he said; he sounded almost pleased.
You refused my help once.
And I’m not asking for it now,
I snapped.
Aren’t you?
He raised his eyebrows in a supercilious manner I found intensely irritating.
You have a better plan?
Which of course I didn’t.
I’ll think of something,
I said, but the defensiveness in my voice was clearly audible.
How like your mother. Determined to cut off your nose to spite your face.
Don’t flatter yourself, darling,
I said.
It’s just that I don’t trust you, that’s all.
At least I had the satisfaction of making him mad. He lost his air of detached superiority in an instant and said,
He’s dying, you know.
I beg your pardon?
Thamuris. Is dying.
People with consumption usually do.
The Khloïdanikos was helping.
Yes, he told me.
It isn’t anymore. Because of what you did. And Thamuris is deteriorating more and more rapidly.
I could have pretended I was surprised, but it wasn’t worth it.
If you’re saying this situation needs to be resolved quickly, you’re still not telling me anything I didn’t already know.
So you admit you need my help.
No,
I said, and as I said it, I understood what my dreamwalking had been trying to tell me.
I need Thamuris’s help.

In the morning, Mildmay was no better, and I tried rather desperately not to think about what that might mean, keeping myself busy instead with the
Standard
and the old newspapers Mrs. Lettice had given me. I thought she felt it was her duty to help me educate myself about Bernatha.

And the newspapers were telling me a tremendous amount, even if Mrs. Lettice wouldn’t have liked some of the conclusions I drew. I learned that Bernatha had escaped the Insurgence largely unscathed, though somewhat incon ve nienced, due to the ineffable wisdom of the Seven Houses in choosing to side with Corambis rather than with the Caloxans who were the city’s neighbors (much hyperbolous blather here about the superiority of a “free city” to a “margravate city”). I learned that the Duke of Glimmering was an ornament to society whose charm and elegance would be sorely missed when he returned to Esmer. I learned that the men who had defended the railroad line against “the misguided and the savage” were glad to be back with their families. I learned that the Bernatha city council argued over the bud get much the same way the Cabinet and Curia did at home.

Not home, I reminded myself. I had lost the right to call the Mirador home, and I would do better to stop thinking of Mélusine as home, too. It wasn’t as if I was ever going to be allowed to go back.

A bleak thought, and one I tried not to dwell on.
I noted the air of self- congratulation with which the newspapers reported the profits of aiding the Corambin army; the obsessive lavishness of the discussions of the Houses’ annual bud gets; the advertisements that framed each page, selling everything from ladies’ hand soap to the ser vices of a physician- practitioner third grade who specialized— reading between the lines— in abortions. And then there were the advertisements for livestock and used gondols and tin guttering, which took up pages all by themselves. This was a society in which everything was for sale.
There was a very long essay about relations with Ygres, the country across the sea to the west. Corambis was at war with part of Ygres, and Bernatha deplored it. Bernatha was maintaining trade with the rest of Ygres and was trying to claim neutrality in Corambis’s war. “We are only honest merchants!” seemed to be the refrain, and I could not help wondering what the Caloxans made of that.
The discussions of the Insurgence made it very clear that Bernatha did not consider itself Caloxan and probably never had. Bernatha had supported Corambis from the first, meaning that even if the Caloxan forces could have controlled the railways, which apparently they had never entirely managed, they still couldn’t have blocked Corambin movement, for Bernatha’s was the only decent harbor on the Caloxan coast. There was no Caloxan navy. Why, I wondered, had Gerrard Hume thought he could fight this war at all? But with that question, the Bernathan newspapers could not help me.
Corbie brought lunch again, and while we ate, she told me how she had practiced the night before by lighting and extinguishing the candles in her room after every client. I suspected it had improved her business as well, for even telling me about it put life in her face and made her long nose and dark eyes lovely rather than merely interesting.
She was eager to know what I would teach her today. I called witchlight, and her eyes went wide. She was facing the window, and I saw for the first time that her eyes weren’t brown as I had thought but a fantastically deep blue, so deep it was actually more accurate to call it violet. “I can’t do that,” she said.
“Of course you can. It’s no harder than lighting a candle.”
“But it’s real
magic
.”
“I thought that’s what I was teaching you,” I said.
She went red and said half- angrily, “Don’t tease me, Felix, all right?”
“My dear Corbie, I assure you—” I cut myself off, realizing that to her that would sound like I
was
teasing her. “Look. I promise I’m not teasing you. But why would you think I was?”
She got up and stalked over to the window, more to avoid having to meet my eyes, I thought, than because she was truly angry. “I know what I am. I’m a jezebel, not a magician. I figure maybe I can learn enough to get a third- grade practitioner’s license, and then, you know, when I’m too old for the fish, I’ll have something to fall back on. But I’m not expecting anything more.”
I blurted, “Why in the world not?” and startled her into turning to face me.
“What?”
“Corbie, you’re . . . How old are you?”
“Twenty- three,” she said, her chin going up so defiantly I knew it was a lie. I gave her my most severely skeptical look and waited. She folded fairly quickly: “Oh, all right. Seventeen.”
“Better,” I said. “Some wizards don’t come into their powers at all until they’re eigh teen or nineteen, you know, and although I don’t know the Corambin system, I can’t imagine you’re starting
ruinously
late; you’ve certainly got enough power to do what ever you want. And you
know
I was a prostitute. So why would you think you can’t . . . ?”
She muttered something at the floor, for a moment uncannily like Mildmay.
“What?”
“I said, you don’t sound like it. Even being foreign and all.”
“I was taught not to,” I said. “I’m sure you could learn likewise.” She gave me a look that went beyond skepticism and into outright disbelief. “No, really. It’s a matter of learning how to hear yourself more than anything else.”
“Could you teach me
that
?”
“Um,” I said. Malkar’s pedagogical methods had not been ones that I would want to use. And the learning pro cess had been very slow, although possibly Corbie would not be as stupid a student as I had been. “Let me think about that. Right now, let’s just work on witchlights.”
For all her protests, Corbie listened avidly, and she mastered the trick of witchlights far more quickly than she’d learned to extinguish a candle the day before. The rest of the afternoon was easy, for the color visualization exercises were simple but time- consuming—and more important than they seemed. By the time she left, Corbie had lost the hangdog expression that said she thought she wasn’t good enough to learn “real magic,” and I was profoundly glad to see it go.

In my dream, I am walking down the hallway in the Mirador that leads from the Hall of the Chimeras to the Lesser Coricopat, a hallway I know as well as I know my own hands. Except, in my dream, the hallway is longer, darker, as if someone has come and taken away half the candles, and I am ner vous, walking fast.

There is someone walking ahead of me, a man with long red hair, dressed in black. I think that I know him— certainly, his gait is familiar, that easy, powerful stride like a panther’s. But he will not look back, even though I know that he knows I am behind him, and I cannot think of his name. I know— the way one does know things in dreams— that if I can just see his face, I will remember his name, and I lengthen my stride to catch up.

For some reason it disturbs me that I have to work so hard to catch him; I am nearly trotting by the time I come abreast of him. He turns to look at me, his eyes green and cold, and I do know him— he is Mildmay, my brother— but there is no scar on his face.

Mildmay,
I say, and then falter to a stop. I can’t mention the scar and say instead, feebly,
You . . . you aren’t limping.
The look in his eyes is hard impatience, like flint and iron, and he says,
Of course not, you stupid fuck.
Except that he doesn’t sound right, not like himself, his consonants as clear and hard as his ice- green eyes.
I’m dead, ain’t I?

I flailed out of bed in a tangle of blankets, my breath coming in hard sobs, and lurched, half- crawling, across the room. For a moment I thought my dream had been a true one; Mildmay’s face was waxen and the quilt was not moving with his breath, but then I was near enough to hear the rasp of air in his lungs. I touched his face, my fingers shying away from his scar, remembering despite myself how he had looked in my dream, how different he had seemed without that harsh livid line. His skin was still fever- hot. I found the pulse in his neck; it was labored but still strong.

It had not been a true dream, then. Not yet.
I barely waited for dawn before I was down at the front desk, begging Mrs. Lettice for the name of a doctor.
“You can’t afford a pledged practitioner,” she said, not as a question.

I couldn’t afford a piece of horehound, but I didn’t say that. Mrs. Lettice consulted a small black notebook, giving me a thoughtful look, and said, “I’ll send Joanna for Practitioner Druce.”

Practitioner Druce turned out to be a woman, middle- aged and fierce. She examined Mildmay thoroughly; asked a cogent series of questions, some of which I could not answer due to Mildmay’s habit of never talking about himself and especially not to complain; then brought chalk and a straightedge out of her bag and began marking symbols on the floor.

She was a wizard. A magician to Corambins. A heretic back home. I wavered for a moment between three different kinds of hysterics, and then said, quite reasonably, “Will you explain the theory of what you’re doing?”
She gave me a slow, sidelong look. She knew I was a wizard— of course she knew I was a wizard. I realized she suspected me of mocking her, and said more hastily than tactfully, “It’s heresy at . . . in Mélusine. So I don’t know how it works.” And then I held my breath, waiting for her response. If she took offense at being called a heretic, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to persuade her to stay. I didn’t need anyone to tell me my charm was at low ebb.
But after a moment, her face relaxed into the first real smile she’d shown. “I wondered why you were calling on me, when I’m only a magicianpractitioner second grade and you’re . . .” She waved a hand. “You’ve never studied healing at all?”
“No. Is a magician- practitioner different from a physician- practitioner?”
“Many physician- practitioners are annemer. Many magician- practitioners aren’t physicians. I happen to be both. Third grade and second grade.”
“But not pledged,” I said cautiously.
“The House of Mercy and I do not see eye to eye on certain matters,” she said, and that was all the answer she was going to give. “As to what I’m doing . . .” Her explanation was lucid and straightforward but more mechanical than theoretical. She knew what she was doing and on a very elementary level, the level of cause and effect, why she was doing it, but not any more than that. I reminded myself that she was here to treat Mildmay, not to satisfy my curiosity, and contented myself with listening and watching and extrapolating privately where I could. I understood why the Coeurterre found the magicians of Corambis so congenial: Practitioner Druce talked a great deal about balance and flow, although the flow she meant was not of magic, but of something else.
She called it
vi
and said it was stagnating in Mildmay’s lungs.
“But what
is
it?”
She shrugged and leaned across Mildmay to chalk a series of symbols on the wall. “It’s what magic works on. You can’t mend bones with magic, but you can use vi to encourage the bone to mend. Or here, with your brother, I can’t magically expel the congestion from his lungs or the invaders from his blood, but—”
“Wait, invaders? What invaders?”
She seemed more amused by my alarm than anything else. “The invaders that are making him sick. The invaders that his body is trying to burn out with this fever.”
My mouth was probably hanging open in an unbecoming fashion, I realized. “I don’t— but how can he have invaders in his
blood
?”
She straightened, dusted the chalk off her hands. “Mr. Harrowgate, have you ever used a minusculium?”
“A what?”
“A magnifying glass?”
“Well, yes, of course.”
“A minusculium— think of it as an incredibly powerful magnifying glass. If I had one here, I could take a drop of your brother’s blood and show you what I mean.”
“He has . . . creatures in his blood? Like parasites?”
“No, no. Like machines. Tiny machines that tell his body to do the wrong things.”
The idea was more than a little abhorrent. “But how did they get into his blood in the first place?”
“If I could tell you that,” said Practitioner Druce, “I could blackball the House of Mercy instead of the other way ’round.”