Corambis (31 page)

In the end, though, Felix decided to go ahead and let the Circle take their best swing. Because, he said, first of all, if he ever
was
going to get to go home again, it’d be because he’d done what Lord Stephen wanted and had plenty of witnesses to prove it. And besides, he’d been thinking along the same lines as me about money and us not having none. It would be much more comfortable, he said, to be exiled with a steady income than without. And, you know, I really couldn’t argue with him.

So I cleaned up his dark green coat as best I could, including darning a rip that Felix swore up down and sideways he hadn’t put there, and braided his hair for him, and when we collected Corbie from her little mousehole of a room and went downstairs, there were five more letters waiting at the front desk, and Mrs. Davidge looked kind of like she’d got slapped in the face with a dead fish.

Felix gave the letters the hairy eyeball and said, “I’m sorry to have been such a bother to you, Mrs. Davidge.”
“Oh, no bother, Mr. Harrowgate,” she said, and she was looking at him funny, but not like she didn’t like what she saw. “It’s nice to have a guest who brings such distinction to the hotel.” And she put a newspaper on top of the desk, with this weird picture of a guy and something like a walking clock, and I could read the letters across the top: “MONSTER MACHINE FELLED BY MAGICIAN HERO.”
Felix went tomato- red. I said before he could get his mouth open, “We need to get to the Institution.” And of course she didn’t understand me, which at least gave Felix something better to do than yell at her.
“Well,” she said, “the easiest way is to take the fathom to Greville Station.”
“The fathom?” Felix said, and he sounded like he was expecting another monster.
“Oh, I know about that,” Corbie said. “I figured ’em all out yesterday. C’mon, I’ll show you.”
So we followed her outside where we got to find out what being a carny freak was like. Because, I mean, there wasn’t no way to hide Felix— too tall and too pale and with the hair. So people stared. And whispered at each other. And I heard at least one kid yelling, “Hey, the foreign magician’s come out!”
Felix went stiff, and for a moment I thought he was going to bolt back inside the hotel. But then he said through his teeth, “How quaint,” and all at once it was like he didn’t even
notice
. He just went where he wanted to go and it was like nobody else even existed. Except that he went slow enough for me to keep up, which was nice of him and I sure as fuck appreciated it.
After he’d got into his stride, he said, “Corbie, what
is
the fathom?”
“Trains underground,” Corbie said. “It’s the niftiest thing
ever.
And we’re right near the station, too.”
And sure enough, there at the end of the street was a sign saying “SUNFLOWER STREET STATION” and a big flight of stairs going down right in the middle of the road. Corbie started down, then realized we weren’t with her, and turned to look up at us. Me and Felix gave each other this
you go first
look, and I finally said, “At least there won’t be the Sim to fall into,” and the way he tried not to laugh told me I’d read him right. He went down the stairs, and I went with him.
It was better lit than I would’ve thought, and not so much like a cave. Brick everywhere, and the floor was done in these little black- and- white chessboard tiles, and they’d plastered a big stretch of wall to put a painting on it. It was pretty, but all I can tell you other than that was that it had to be something important in Corambin history, because everybody was wearing weird clothes with these enormous white ruffs that made them look like a bunch of heads on platters. “Quaint,” Felix said at it and paid our pennies to a skinny little gal with a bad complexion in return for three pieces of stiff paper with “EMFR” printed on ’em in smudgy black ink. She read the newspapers, too. You could tell.
And then it was like the station for the other trains, and we followed the signs to a platform, and everybody there gawked like a bunch of half- wit dogs, too. Felix kept his chin up and stared straight across the tracks at the brick wall. Me and Corbie stood one on each side of him, like he was a spider and we were his hired goons. It was just as well we didn’t have to wait very long, because I could see somebody was going to get up their nerve to say something, and I didn’t have the first idea what Felix was going to do when they did. I was extremely fucking glad to see the train pull in, although it was dark and smoky and something that I otherwise would have thought twice about before I got into.
I herded Felix into the back corner, where I could sit between him and everybody else, and pointed Corbie at the seat opposite where she’d block at least some of the view. Felix let me do it, too, although he looked at me like there were some things he would’ve said about it if we’d been alone. That was fine. I sat next to him and glared black murder at anybody who looked like they were thinking about saying something. And once the train started up again, it didn’t matter nohow, because with the screeching and the rattling and the speed of the thing, everybody was too busy trying not to get knocked off their seat to say anything, and even if somebody had, there wasn’t no way we could’ve heard ’em.
Every station had a sign, and I really was doing better with the reading, because I read “GREVILLE” just as fast as Felix and Corbie did. Hauled myself up, got us off the train and onto the platform, and then we followed the signs that said “OUT” along a weird, square little passageway, and then the world’s narrowest staircase, couldn’t go more than one at a time even if you wanted to, and then we were out in this big glass birdcage sort of thing, and powers and saints, I hadn’t thought glass could
do
that.
“Don’t gawk,” Felix said in my ear, and it was him herding me now with Corbie trotting along ahead of us, out of the birdcage and across this ironwork bridge over the street and through an arch with words on it that Felix said, when Corbie asked, were in Cymellunar. Past the arch, there were more stairs. These weren’t as bad on my leg, but I was still not liking them at all. We came to a landing with a bench, and Felix stopped and fidgeted a little and said, “You don’t have to come with me, you know. You could just wait here. It’d be all right.”
I stared at him, and he went red and fidgeted some more and wouldn’t meet my eyes. Finally, I said, “I’m gonna pretend you didn’t say that,” and started up the next fucking flight.
At the top of the stairs, where I could look back the way we’d come and see the dome of the glass birdcage and pick out ways I could climb it if I had to, Corbie said, “I got most of this sussed out. Where’re you supposed to go?”
“You’ve been very busy,” Felix said in that way he had where you couldn’t tell if he thought it was a good thing or a bad thing, and consulted his letter. “Arkwright Hall.”
“Yeah,” said Corbie. And she pointed at a building that looked to me like the Butchers’ Guild in Mélusine. It was also about as far away from us as you could get and still be in pointing range. Which figured.
So we started off, and Corbie told us about looking around the Institution. “The boys here are nice,” she said, kind of smirking, and just for proof, a kid going the other way stopped so fast he almost ruptured something and said, “Corbie! Can I help you . . .” And then he registered me and Felix, and his eyes went round and a little glassy
He was my age, so he was probably a student, and he seriously needed to shave because that beard wasn’t doing him no favors. But Corbie smiled at him like he was gold- plated and said, “Robin, this is Mr. Harrowgate and Mr. Foxe. We’re going to Arkwright Hall.”
Which was the opposite direction to where he’d been going, but he turned right around and came with us. And he handled Felix okay, making out like he didn’t know just
exactly
who he was, and Felix got him to talk about the classes he took, and his teachers, and how he’d passed his practitioner tests that winter and was starting work for the adept level, and I limped along behind and listened and, honestly, was pretty impressed with how or ga nized these hocuses had got themselves. Nothing like the catch- ascatch- can way things worked in the Mirador, and it didn’t sound as mean as the Bastion, where all the hocuses had to be soldiers, too, with kids at their second septad being told they were lieutenants and basically used like fodder for the majors and col o nels. Gideon’d talked a little about the Bastion. It gave me the creeping crawling screaming horrors, and I wasn’t even a hocus.
So it seemed like the hocuses here were getting taught right and nobody was using them the way Gideon had been used and Mehitabel’s sweetheart had been used— and Felix had been used, for that matter. Felix asked a couple kind of delicate questions, and yeah, it turned out they were really careful about that, along of the Caloxan warlocks who they’d only gotten rid of with the war five or six septads ago.
By the time we got to Arkwright Hall, Felix had charmed Robin completely, and that was good. Because when Felix mentioned as how he might be teaching, Robin lit up and said he’d want to take that class, and he was sure his friends would want to, and basically made it sound like they could start the cult of Felix anytime Felix gave the word. And, okay, I ain’t no big fan of the cult of Felix, but it was sure as fuck better than that Mr. Lillicrop and Mr. Rook looking at him like he was a wild animal that had been taught to do a trick.
So Robin gave Felix a card with the address of the room he had on campus, and Felix kind of squinted at it and said, “Would you mind showing Corbie? I’m terrible with directions, but if she knows the way . . .”
Corbie opened her mouth, but Robin said, “I’d be delighted,” like he’d just been given a present. And I saw her figure out that Felix didn’t want her to see what happened with the Circle, and she went from pissed off to hurt to okay with it in about half a second and said, “You want to meet me back at the Golden Hare, then?” She went off with Robin and left me and Felix standing between the big ugly columns on the front of Arkwright Hall—
exactly
like the Butchers’ Guild— and both of us ner vous and not wanting to say so.
“I hope I didn’t just talk him into cutting a class,” Felix said.
“He’ll just say he met you,” I said, and he made a face at me, but it was only for telling him what he knew was the truth anyway.
“You sure you don’t want to bail?” I said, and he straightened up and quit looking so dithery.
“I’m quite sure. Come. Let us face the lions.”
“Lions?”
“In Cymellune, in the late empire, heretics— who were legion— underwent trial by lion. They shut you in a cage with a certain number of lions— the number was theologically significant and thus varied from heretic to heretic— and if the lions didn’t eat you, your heresy would be granted what was called a Lien of Orthodoxy, which meant that the priests and scholars would reassess it and decide if perhaps it wasn’t heresy after all.”
“How many times did it happen that way, that the lions didn’t eat the heretic?”
He gave me a smile that was all teeth and nerves. “Once.” And pushed open the door of Arkwright Hall.

I had always been vain, and I was well served for my vanity with that appalling story in the newspaper and the way the Corambins looked at me now, as if I were a cross between a saint and a medical curiosity preserved in brandy. It had been not merely pleasant, but almost desperately satisfying to get Corbie’s new friend Robin to talk to me, to see him warm from awe to something more like friendly interest. Inside Arkwright Hall, I was alarming and freakish again, and they watched me ner vous ly as they tried to figure out what they ought to do with us. The Circle— as was explained to us by students and magician- practitioners and annemer clerks— was in session, and no one wanted to disturb them. But at the same time, Virtuer Ashmead and Virtuer Hutchence had both apparently mentioned that they were expecting me, and so no one wanted to send us away, either.

It was not comfortable. We ended up in an antechamber which, despite differences in decoration and furniture styles, was spiritually indistinguishable from the antechambers around the Hall of the Chimeras: the Cerise, the Cerulean, and all their cohort. Mildmay sat down with ill- disguised relief, and I dissipated my ner vous energy by pacing. Seven steps up and back, which wasn’t really enough, but it was better than trying to sit still. Mildmay watched me pace until the door opened and a ner vous clerk peered around the edge of it. “Mr. Harrowgate? The virtuers are ready for you.”

“Marvelous,” I said and smiled at him to make him flinch. I waited deliberately for Mildmay to get up. Waiting games were familiar territory. Mildmay gave me a doubtful look but said nothing. He would follow my lead, and the comfort of knowing that was tremendous, like a bulwark I could rest my weight against. No matter what the Circle said, Mildmay would not turn against me.

The clerk led us through a series of high- ceilinged and commensurately echoing hallways, all very clean, as if they were never used. The doors he brought us to were clearly meant to impress, but next to the bronze doors of the Hall of the Chimeras, they were merely large. I was glad to find something in Corambis that did not make me feel like an ignorant provincial.

The clerk tapped on the door, then opened it to slip inside, closing it again before there was even time to wonder if we were supposed to follow. I looked at Mildmay, who gave me a one- shouldered shrug and said, “We can wait here as easy as there.”

“Only without somewhere you can sit.”

His gaze went flat and annoyed. “I’m a cripple, not a fucking invalid. I’m fine.”

“That isn’t actually the point,” I said, which made him relax. “I’m
merely noting that their hospitality leaves something to be desired.” “Oh, okay,” he said and looked around assessingly at the tall, clean, barren hallway. “Yeah. I see what you mean.”
“It’s information,” I said.
“And we need all of that we can get. Yeah.”
It was fifteen minutes before the clerk reappeared to beckon us inside.
Like the other rooms in Arkwright Hall, this one was large and clean and nearly empty, save for the table around which the virtuers sat. There were ten of them, all men and most of them older than I. They were well dressed by Corambin standards, which made them look like a funeral party to me, even though I knew that the oppressive, somber colors were simply what Corambins considered normal. They watched us in impassive silence as we crossed from the door to the foot of the table.
When I reached the foot of the table, the wizard at its head stood up.
“Mr. Harrowgate? I am John Ashmead, Dean of the Institution.” He was nothing like Giancarlo to look at, being small and spare and wearing his dun- colored hair cropped very close, but his dark eyes were sharp and intelligent, and he had Giancarlo’s air about him, a forthright man professionally accustomed to compromise.
I nodded respectfully and watched with careful attention as he introduced the other men around the table. Next to him was Virtuer Giffen, who was the President of the Institution and thus— I guessed from their behavior— more important than Virtuer Ashmead. He glowered at the air in my vicinity without any direct ac know ledg ment, as did Virtuers Gotobed, Tandy, Wooller,Pluckrose, and Bullinger, while Hutchence, Simond, and Maycock at least made eye contact. Virtuer Hutchence even offered a smile, and I was glad he wasn’t holding his singed quire against me.
“And who is your companion?” Virtuer Ashmead asked.
“My half brother, Mildmay Foxe. I would count it as a great kindness if you would find him a chair.” Behind me, Mildmay made a noise of protest, but my attention was on Ashmead. And Ashmead acquitted himself admirably, saying without hesitation, “Yes, of course,” and directing one of the clerks lurking along the wall to bring a chair for Mr. Foxe.
Mildmay might be annoyed with me— by the very flatness of the look he gave me, I suspected I would be hearing about this later— but he wasn’t obstinate enough to refuse to sit down. And I was standing close enough, and knew him well enough, to see that it was a relief to get his weight off his bad leg. He muttered something that might have been “thank you” to the clerk, and I said, “Thank you,” more audibly to Ashmead.
He said, “Yes, well,” cleared his throat, and began the inquiry. The Circle was better at this sort of thing than the Curia had ever been.The Curia could be distracted, embarrassed, turned against itself. The Circle simply kept asking questions until it got answers, and then it asked questions about the answers it got. It could be distracted, but never for long, and Ashmead was always there to be sure the point at issue was not forgotten. I hated him for it before I’d even finished explaining the historical enmity between the Bastion and the Mirador.
Because they wanted to know
everything
. They refused (said Virtuer Ashmead) to make an ill- informed judgment, and I was glad I’d insisted they give Mildmay a chair. They made me explain the politics and the thaumaturgy, and they wanted to know what would have happened to Isaac Garamond if he’d gone to trial, and then Virtuer Simond said, “Then I don’t understand. If he would have been executed anyway, why did you do . . .
that
?”
I felt Mildmay’s sudden, perfect, unbreathing stillness behind me, but there was nothing in the world that could induce me to lie about this. I said deliberately, “The man he murdered was my lover.”