Corambis (18 page)

Corbie arrived as Practitioner Druce was leaving; she barely waited for the door to close before she hissed at me, “That’s
Priscilla Druce
.”

“She didn’t tell me her given name,” I said. “If that’s what it is, I see why.”
“But—” She broke off and said, “Mildmay must be really bad, huh?”
“Yes,” I said and felt myself sag into the truth. “Practitioner Druce was kind enough to allow me to go into debt to her— a practice which I suspect is why Mrs. Lettice recommended her in the first place.”
“Oh probably,” Corbie said. “It’s all right, though. She won’t break your shins. But she’ll have you up in the House of Honesty if you don’t pay her back quick enough.”
“I know,” I said. “She warned me. And so I . . .” The words knotted and stuck in my throat.
Corbie looked up at me worriedly. “Felix?”
“Corbie, you said . . .” I couldn’t get it out that way, either. Corbie was looking even more worried.
“You said you’d be my patron,” I ground out finally.
“Oh,” said Corbie, her eyes going wide. “Well, yeah, I will, but are you sure? I mean, you seemed like you meant it when you said you weren’t going to do that no more, and I know I shouldn’t’ve pushed at it, but I just—”
“Corbie,” I said tiredly, “please shut up.”
We kept working that afternoon on color visualizations, and if I was distracted, Corbie was tactful enough not to mention it. Practitioner Druce had said the best thing now for Mildmay was sleep, and had reassured me that he could be left for a few hours. So I felt guilt, but no par tic u lar concern at going out into the cold eve ning air with Corbie.
“I guess,” Corbie said, “now I got to ask how much you know.”
“I lost my virginity when I was eleven,” I said, trying to sound matter- offact despite the fact that this was history I never talked about. “At auction, actually. I spent the next three years in a brothel that specialized in the tarquin trade.”
“Tarquin?”
“Oh, damn it all, of course you don’t use the same words. People who, um, enjoy other people’s pain.”
“Flame,” Corbie said; she was now looking at me very dubiously. “You were one of those?”
“No, I was a martyr,” I said, omitting my personal preferences from the conversation entirely. “The . . . the other side.”
“Shadow.”
“Shadow,” I echoed, thinking it was uncomfortably appropriate. “So, really, there’s very little I don’t know about what men will pay to do to other men.” My effort at a smile failed abysmally.
“Well,” Corbie said, a little skittish around the eyes, but standing her ground, “you don’t need to worry about that, because flames and shadows is the Black and White’s business, and nobody who ain’t pledged has a piece of it. And what we’re banking on is your tattoos.”
“My tattoos?”
“My friend Georgina reads all those Mélusine novels, and she tells me the plots on slow nights. And I know just how big they are. Everybody knows about the magicians with the tattoos, and even people who don’t have a thing about the books will think that’s worth paying for.”
“Oh,” I said weakly. She had it planned out, probably had from the moment she’d recognized me for what I was.
“Hold that thought,” said Corbie. “I’ll be right back.”
I stayed where I was, despite an increasing urge to run, as she ducked into a storefront. An apothecary shop, it looked like, and I wondered what she needed so suddenly.
She came back and said, “Here.”
I held my hand out reflexively, and she gave me a small glass bottle filled with pale pink pills. “You should take one now.”
“What are they?”
“Hecate,” Corbie said, as if it should have been self- evident.
“That didn’t help.”
“They make it so you can’t hex anybody.”
“
Hex
anybody?” I said incredulously.
“Not that you would. But. Well. People are a little twitchy about magicians. Like my gran.”
Twitchy like her gran, I realized she meant. “Because I might be a warlock,” I said.
“Yeah, exactly,” said Corbie. “And, I mean, they were worst for other magicians, but they did pretty nasty things to annemer, too.”
I thought of Porphyria Levant and the tale of her revenge on Creon Malvinius. “I understand. What exactly does hecate do?”
“It makes it so you can’t do magic. It don’t last long— you’ll be back to normal by tomorrow morning.”
“And you know this from personal experience?”
“You mean, have I taken it?”
“In a nutshell.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, no. Seeing as how you’re the first person I’ve ever told I could do magic. But lots of magicians use it.”
“Why?”
I could think of few things I wanted less than to take a drug that would make me annemer, even temporarily.
“Well, people used to take it all the time so the warlocks wouldn’t get ’em. Nowadays, magicians mostly take it when they’re running for office or petitioning a House. You know, before the vote so there’s no funny business. It really is safe.”
“Depending on your definition,” I muttered, but I didn’t need Corbie to tell me I didn’t have a choice. I shook one of the pale pink pills out and dryswallowed it, then stoppered the bottle firmly and put it in one of my inside pockets.
“It’ll take about half an hour to work,” Corbie said. “C’mon.”
Corbie did have a plan, and she explained bits of it to me as we walked.
Prostitution in Bernatha was in some ways very similar to prostitution in Mélusine and in some ways radically different. For one thing, it wasn’t merely legal— or mostly ignored, which was a better description of the situation at home— it was a flourishing and vital part of the Bernathan economy. All brothels had to be pledged to the House of Chastity; individual prostitutes might be pledged to Chastity, as Corbie was, or they might be unpledged. You could not— Corbie said and seemed shocked that I had to ask— be a prostitute pledged to a different House, although you might work in, or even for, one of the other six.
As an unpledged prostitute, I couldn’t work in a pledged brothel, and therefore not in a brothel at all. There were what Corbie called blacklight brothels, but she said the House of Chastity always caught them, and when it did, it blackballed the clients as well as the prostitutes. “Not worth it,” she said emphatically.
So I had to work the streets, which I’d done for Keeper but never since, “except it’s better,” said Corbie, “if you can work out a deal with a bar.”
“Can I?” I said curiously.
She looked up at me and then grinned. “Yeah, you can.”
The bar was called Crysolomon’s, and the bartender was a close friend of Corbie’s— close enough, from the way he greeted her, that if he wasn’t one of her clients, he wanted to be. The look he gave me was not entirely friendly, but Corbie whispered something in his ear out of which I only caught the word “violet,” and he relaxed considerably, enough to say, “Any friend of Corbie’s is welcome here.”
Corbie established me at a table in the back, said, “Fish will find you, so don’t go trolling,” and “don’t take less’n five hermits,” and left. The rest of it was up to me.
Her bartender brought me a drink—“on the house,” he said when I looked alarmed. “If Corbie’s right, you’re going to be bringing in some custom.”
Fish will find you,
Corbie’d said; I decided not to think about it any further and took a swallow of sweet white wine. I was starting to feel the hecate. The absence of my magic didn’t hurt, but I felt a little light- headed, a little dulled, as if I couldn’t see or hear properly. And at the same time I felt raw and naked and utterly helpless. It was not a nice sensation.
The first fish found me three- quarters of an hour later, and it was like I’d never left the Shining Tiger. I knew how to do this; there was even a feeling it took me some time to identify as relief. For the first time in twenty years, I wasn’t lying.
Crysolomon’s had a back room— a storeroom reeking of beer and rats, but the door locked and that was good enough. By the time Corbie came back for me, I had made fifteen hermits and been bought enough drinks to put a buffalo under the table.
Happily, I was not a buffalo.
Corbie sat down across from me and said without preamble, “Are you drunk?”
“Not so’s you’d notice,” I said and gave her my best smile. “And this way I don’t mind the hecate.”
“Darren said he’d been watering the drinks, but you look . . .”
“Relaxed?” I suggested. “Happy? Darling, trust me. I am not drunk.” I pushed the fifteen hermits across the table to distract her.
“Not bad for the first night,” Corbie said and proceeded to subject my poor hermits to some truly alarming mathematics.
Five hermits went to the House of Chastity. Corbie called it the tithe, and it was the price of working in Bernatha without being pledged. “A third?” I said. “Of everything?”
“Believe me,” Corbie said, “it’s cheap at the price. Jezebels who don’t tithe . . . Well, you don’t want to know.”
That left ten hermits. Five were mine; two and a thrustle went to Darren to keep Crysolomon’s sweet, and the rest went to Corbie, although she turned around and gave them straight back, minus two pennies for the hecate.
I walked back to the Fiddler’s Fox seven hermits and three pennies richer, with the strange- familiar taste of semen in the back of my throat. I checked on Mildmay— still sleeping, but even I could see the improvement since this morning— washed up carefully, locked the door, extinguished the candle, and lay down. And burst into tears.
It was, truly, like being caught in a cloudburst; it was that violent and that abrupt. I knew part of it was the hecate and this flayed feeling of vulnerability; part of it was the alcohol. And I knew the root of it was the way I’d spent the eve ning and all the memories that had been stirred up. But what I felt was grief. I missed Gideon so much it felt like I’d been crippled. To say my heart was broken was trite, and in fact it didn’t feel broken. It felt
gone
, as if it had been wrenched from my chest, and though it continued to beat, it did so from some great, cold distance, like the moon in eclipse. I rolled over, burying my face in the limp pillow, and as I’d done in the days after Joline’s death, I cried myself to sleep.

The next night was easier— also more profitable. Mildmay woke up when I came in, although he didn’t stay awake long enough to do any more than mutter, “There you are,” before he was asleep again. But it was a good sign, and a reminder that the banshee and seven hermits I now had toward Practitioner Druce’s saint were necessary for reasons larger and more important than myself. I slept heavily and woke remembering only vague fragments of my dreams: fire again, and anger. I thought I’d been dreaming about Keeper, although I wasn’t entirely sure.

When I came back from the bathroom, Mrs. Lettice was blocking the door.
“Good morning,” I said warily.
“Is Lunedy morning,” she said. “And I hear you’ve found a source of income.”
“I . . .”
“Charity to the indigent is one thing,” she said, “but indigent you are not, from what I hear. A banshee for the week.” I opened my mouth to protest, and she said, “And that’s at discount, your brother being so ill. I charge Chastity- girls a banshee and twelve, and that’s just for the room.”
“I’m not seeing clients here,” I said.
“And how am I to know that?”
“I just told you?”
“Anyone can tell a lie, Mr. Harrowgate,” she said, her eyes bright and hard. “A banshee for the week, if you please. Now.”
A banshee and seven hermits became seven hermits on their own, and paying off my debt to Practitioner Druce looked suddenly much farther away. I was glad Mildmay slept through the whole sordid thing.
Practitioner Druce’s was not the only debt I needed to pay, and with taking hecate nightly, my opportunities to deal with the Khloïdanikos were limited— especially as I was not about to add oneiromancy to Corbie’s lessons.
Now? I thought wearily, but I remembered what Diokletian had said about Thamuris, and I knew I couldn’t put it off. I straightened the bedcovers and lay down on top of them, folded my hands carefully, and slowed myself into a trance.
Oneiromantically, it was always easier to find one’s way back to a place one had been before. The door with the horn lock led me to Thamuris’s room, and I wasn’t surprised to find that he was there. Laudanum dreams.
He was standing at the window, looking out at a landscape that I did not recognize and that certainly had nothing to do with the Gardens of Nephele. He turned when he became aware of me. “You’re back.” He didn’t sound surprised, but he also didn’t sound particularly pleased.
“I, um . . .”
“No, don’t tell me,” Thamuris said wearily. “Diokletian has explained to you my tale of woe, and you are
sorry
. You feel
terrible
. You didn’t
mean
to.”
His imitation of my speech at its most affected was cruelly accurate, and since the things he accused me of feeling were exactly what I felt, he left me with nothing to say.
He came closer. “And I think you
did
mean to. I have had a great deal of time to think about it, Felix, and I think you got exactly what you wanted.”
“Thamuris—”
“You wanted to be rid of those rubies. You wanted to be rid of your spirit- ancestor. Did you want to be rid of me as well?”
“No!” I said, horrified. “I swear. I didn’t mean— that is, I admit it was stupid and selfish and wrong, but I wasn’t trying to . . . I didn’t intend to . . . I didn’t want to hurt anybody.”
“Congratulations,” Thamuris said, his voice as scouring and bitter as sea salt.
“Thamuris, please. I don’t deny I deserve it, but please. Don’t.”
He stared at me for a span of time that felt cruelly endless, then said, “Why not?”
“Because I’m going to take the rubies back. Right now. If you’ll help me.”
He considered that with the deliberation of laudanum and finally said, “Very well. That seems fair. What do you need?”
“I can’t get into the Khloïdanikos. The briars are blocking Horn Gate.”
“How appropriate,” Thamuris said, then held his hands up. “No, I promised. I’m sorry. Then you need me to bring you in.”
“Yes. And I may need your help with the briars,” I said and added humbly, “Please.”
“All right,” said Thamuris. “Give me your hands.”
It was hard to do, both because I had learned to dislike touching Thamuris for the consumption that burned through him, and because Malkar had trapped me that way once. But I gritted my teeth and extended my hands. His touch was as fever- swampy as I had expected, but he was gentle even though I would have understood if he wasn’t. He laced his fingers through mine and squeezed, very slightly, and around us, the dream of his room dissolved into the Dream of the Garden.
I jerked back from Thamuris, and almost immediately tripped over a strand of briars, landing hard and with a yelp. The briars’ thorns were as vicious as their vines were tough. I disentangled myself painfully and looked around, my breath coming shorter as I saw the damage I had done.
The briars were the only things flourishing. The flower beds were full of withered petals and broken stalks; the grass was yellowing; the perseïd trees had shed their flowers. Everything looked ill and weak.
“Are you all right?”
I looked up at Thamuris. He looked as yellow and ill as the grass.
“I’m fine,” I said, swallowing hard. “Let’s get this over with.”
Thamuris and I went together to the oak in the circle of briars. Though I did not stop, I glanced in passing at the mostly dead perseïd tree against the ruined orchard wall— the perseïd tree that had been linked to Mildmay by Thamuris’s long ago divination— and saw that although it, too, looked sickly, it had not shed its leaves. Perhaps it was unreasonable, but I felt more hopeful after that.
The briars were just as lush and wicked around the oak as they were everywhere else. The oak tree looked mange- ridden, but like the shattered perseïd, it was not yet dead.
It was not too late, no matter how stupid and selfish I had been.
As we stopped in front of the overgrown trellis, first one ruby bee, then another emerged from the depths of the garden to circle hostilely about my head.
“I don’t think they can sting,” Thamuris said. “Otherwise, they would have stung me when I was trying to reach their hive.”
“The briars sting for them,” I said without thinking, and we both winced at the truth of it.
Both of us were bleeding by the time I made it into the circle, and the ruby bees were crawling angrily on my face and hands. But they could not sting me, or impede me, and I thought I understood this piece of symbolism as well. They could do harm only to a construct like the Khloïdanikos; they could not touch me if I wasn’t stupid enough to let them.
I picked up the hive and watched the bees crawl into it, one by one. The truth of their nature, I thought, and the truth of their nature when I held their hive was that they were ten smoke- stained rubies in a wash- leather bag. That was the truth.
I rested my palm for a moment against the trunk of the oak tree and whispered, “I’m sorry.” And then I made my way back out of the circle. This time, it almost seemed as if the briars were fighting me, and Thamuris said in a strained voice, “I’m starting to wonder about these briars.”
“Do you think I brought them?”
“No, not that. Hold still.” I held still while he very gently removed a trailing whip of thorns from its clawed hold in my hair. “But I don’t imagine we’re the first wizards to think of, um, storing problematical materials here.”
I shut my eyes, only partly to avoid having them ripped out by the vine Thamuris was struggling with. “And like does, in fact, call to like, at least on the thaumaturgic level. So of course this would present itself to me as the perfect place to put these damnable rubies.”
“I don’t know,” Thamuris said. “But these briars— ow!”
We gave up on trying to have a conversation until we were both free of the briars and several feet away. “Hopefully,” I said, “they’ll quiet down now.”
“I expect the Khloïdanikos can tame them, now that they don’t have help. What will you do with . . . ?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The same way I didn’t know before this recklessly stupid experiment.” We started walking, a mutual, tacit decision to get away from the center of the damage. “At least I don’t have to worry about them interacting with the Mirador any longer.”
“You don’t?” He sounded alarmed.
Of course, I thought. There was no reason he
would
know. “I’ll tell you later,” I said. “I’m with Mildmay. We’re fine.”
“But, Felix—”
“Don’t worry. It’s all right, really.”
“It’s not anything good, is it?” he said quietly.
“No,” I said and sighed, defeated. “Not really. My lover is dead, and I’ve been exiled for destroying the mind of the man who murdered him.”
Thamuris’s breath caught, and I felt even worse; there was no call to be cruel to him, just because I was tired and unhappy and burdened again with this last reminder of Malkar, like a bloodstain that would not wash out of a handkerchief.
“And I’ve been so mean to you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“No. You were right. The other circumstances don’t change that.”Thamuris hadn’t the least idea of how to go about being mean, but I didn’t say so and especially did not remark that I could give him lessons if he wanted.
“Still. I
am
sorry. And I’m sorry for your loss.”
Grief howled up, black and choking in my throat, and I fought it back down. “Thank you,” I said. “I . . . I appreciate it.”
“Are we still . . .”
“Still?”
He stopped walking, and I turned to look at him, raising my eyebrows. “Friends?” he asked.
“I don’t think I get to make that decision,” I said. “You have every reason to be angry at me.”
“I don’t like being angry at you,” he said, rather plaintively, and I was reminded of how young he was. “Diokletian says I shouldn’t be too quick to forgive you, but I don’t see
why
.”
“Diokletian doesn’t trust me.”
“I know
that
,” Thamuris said, and managed something that was almost a smile. “He says you’re trying to corrupt me.”
“I’m what?”
“He says that you would never spend this much time with anyone if you didn’t want them sexually.”
“I’m flattered,” I said sourly. “Don’t worry, darling. I only want you for your mind.” That actually made him laugh, and I felt something unfurling in me, as fragile as a perseïd blossom: hope.