Corambis (34 page)

Carey House is not my home. “Yes, but the intended . . .”
“What about the intended?”
“He offered to escort me back to Carey House. He went to fetch his coat.”
“How kind of him. Then we will wait to express our gratitude.”
I misliked the tone of his voice. “I am sure he would do as much for any in his dominion.”
“Assuredly,” said Murtagh.
Before the silence between us became unsupportable, the intended returned. “Your Grace,” said he.
“My dear Constant,” said Murtagh, as affable as a cat smiling at a caged finch. “I do apologize for the bother. A miscommunication, I fear.”
“Oh, no bother. But I’m glad it was only a miscommunication.”
“Quite,” Murtagh said, and were nuances and overtones to their words that I heard without being able to interpret. “Your concern is appreciated.”
“It is part of my duties as intended to care for the welfare of my dominion.”
“We are fortunate to have an intended who is so scrupulous in his attention to duty.”
“Your Grace is too kind.”
A silence, thick and jagged- edged. Hating it, hating that I could not see their faces to judge, I said sharply, “Murtagh? We were going?”
“I beg your pardon, Kay. Intended, your indulgence, please. I need to get my brother- in- law home.”
“Of course. I shall hope to see you both next Domenica.”
“Of course,” Murtagh said, and I mumbled something that might have been agreement or denial; I myself did not know which I meant.
Murtagh guided me patiently, fetching my shoes for me, warning me not only of stairs and curbstones, but also of more ambiguous obstacles, such as a pavement artist and an inquisitive brace of dogs. He warned me also of the fathom station, and I said, “Do you use it?”
“The fathom? No, I do not. But Tinder goes to visit his mother in Rhamant Dominion, and he tells me it is crowded and dirty and you must be careful of getting cinders in your eyes.”
“Is it worth it?”
“For whom? It obviously is for those who use it, and it brings considerable revenue to the city.”
“But it . . .”
“Yes, Kay?” He sounded amused.
“It is unnatural and blasphemous,” I said stiffly. Is the child of the Veddick who cries beneath the earth.
“So certain divines have been saying for years.” He
was
amused, damn him. I did not answer, knowing I could not do so civilly, and so we returned to Carey House, to my high prison, in silence.

I don’t know where Corbie was Savato or who she was with, and it was no business of mine. But Domenica morning, early, there was a tap on the door. Felix hadn’t slept— every time I’d woken up, he’d been laying there on his back staring at the ceiling— and as soon as it was daylight, I’d chased him off to take a hot bath, because it beat all fuck out of him killing me or me killing him, and I wasn’t sure which was going to come first.

So I opened the door, and it was Corbie, looking pink and scrubbed, and with her hair all flat again, and I hadn’t even got as far as
good morning
, before she blurted out, “You wanna come to church with me?”

“Church?” I said.
“Yeah. Mabel who works in the kitchen, she goes to Our Lady of Enduring Stone, and it’s only a couple of blocks. So I thought maybe you’d like to come.”
“I, um.” I didn’t even know what to say. “I mean, I don’t worship your Lady. You know that.”
“I know,” she said. “But you don’t have to. The Ygressine sailors go to Our Lady of Tides all the time in Bernatha, and I don’t even know what they worship. The Lady won’t mind.”
And, well, what else was I going to do? Wait around for Felix to pick a fight? “Okay,” I said. “Lemme get my coat and tell Felix.”
She looked worried. “D’you think he’d want to . . . ?”
“No,” I said. Felix didn’t have any religion, as far as I could tell, and he didn’t care. And when I told him I was going to church with Corbie, he just said, “Have fun,” all snarky, and I left before I said something I’d kick myself for later.
Corbie explained everything to me, about taking your shoes off and walking through the sacred pool— which was actually kind of nice, you want to know the truth. The church itself was round and humped, sort of like a Lundy loaf, and we sat in the back row of benches along the south wall. It was where I would’ve sat anyway, along of being close to the door, but Corbie said it was the visitors’ bench. The church was a lot smaller than what I was used to, but then I’d always stuck to the cathedrals in Mélusine when I felt a need for churchgoing. They were so big the priests couldn’t even see everybody there, never mind learn their names or anything, and that was the way I’d always wanted it.
So I felt kind of exposed, with this little church and all these people who knew each other by name. The priest was a fat guy wearing this long blue veil, and he actually came over and said hello and had we been in Ingry Dominion long and where did we worship at home and all the rest of it. I let Corbie do the talking, and she managed to make it sound like she was answering for both of us without telling any actual lies, and I could’ve kissed her for it.
The ser vice was sort of weird and sort of interesting. The Corambins’ prayers to their Lady were really pretty, although also creepy. They called her things like Lady of the Dark Waters and Lady of the Patient Hands, and I couldn’t quite figure out what it all meant. I liked the singing, though, and then the priest, who was called an intended, talked for a while about charity and being aware of your blessings, and then it was over and we were wading back through the pool again.
Corbie was quiet for a little on the way back to the hotel, but then she said, “So your brother says he doesn’t do women.”
“Won’t touch ’em,” I said.
“What about you?”
“Sorry?”
“What about you? Do you do women?”
“Um, yeah,” I said. I couldn’t see why she wanted to know, but there wasn’t no point in lying about it.
“So, do you want to do me?”
I knew I was gaping at her like a goldfish, but I couldn’t fucking believe I’d heard her right.
“C’mon,” she said. “If I’m not your type, I ain’t gonna get mad about it.”
“It ain’t that. I mean, you’re pretty and all. I just . . .”
“What?”
she said, and she stopped walking so I had to turn and face her.
“Why’re you asking?”
Her head jerked back a little. “I ain’t gonna charge you, if that’s what you mean.”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, sort of. Just . . . you want to fuck me?” “There some reason I shouldn’t?”
I waved my hand, kind of at my face and kind of at my leg and kind of just at me in general. “I ain’t no prize.”
“I ain’t talking
marriage
,” she said. “Look. Come on up to my room, ’cause I got the feeling you and Felix weren’t real happy with each other this morning. If you don’t want to do anything more, you don’t want to. It’s fine.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to,” I said, and I felt my face go bright hot red.
“Well, then we do,” she said. “Look. It’s a quick fuck, that’s all. You don’t got to think it to death.”
So I went with her up to her room, which was this sort of cubbyhole on a half landing. Barely enough room for two people and the bed with the door closed. But Corbie didn’t seem to mind.
She sat down on the bed and tilted her head at me. “You still look like you’re thinking way too hard.”
“I got, um. History.”
“You wanna tell me about it?”
Well, I did, and I didn’t. And there wasn’t no good way to say most of it.
“I know about Felix,” she said. “It ain’t like that, is it?”
You know
some
about Felix, I thought, but I wasn’t going to say it. “No. It ain’t like that. I just . . . Look. I’ve fucked whores, and I’m okay with that. But every time it’s more than that, it just . . .” Kolkhis. Ginevra. Mehitabel. “It’s bad, okay?”
Corbie thought that over. “So if you don’t pay me, it must go bad, is that it?”
“Not like that,” I said, because put that way it sounded fucking dumb. “I just don’t want to get into nothing big, okay?”
And she grinned. “Only thing I want to get you into is plenty small, believe me.”
And there I was blushing again, may Kethe save me from my own damn self.
“Mildmay, c’mon,” she said. “You really never fucked for fun before?”
“No,” I said slowly. “I guess I never did.”
“So let’s,” she said. And I just didn’t have no arguments left.

Savato night, I did not sleep. Domenica night, too tired to stay awake, I slept, and I woke up three times from dreams that the Automaton of Corybant was attacking and I had no magic to fight it. Each time, Mildmay woke and got his arms around me and murmured things like “It’s okay,” and “Just a dream,” until I stopped shivering and panting. If he was worried about being that close to me, both of us nearly naked, it didn’t show. And all I wanted was for him to stay.

“We never said it,” I said into the darkness, for I had no witchlights to call.
“Who?” said Mildmay.
“Joline and I. We never said it. We didn’t dare.”
“Joline? The little girl you said—”
“You remind me of. Yes.” I was surprised, and touched, that he remembered. “We both knew what happened to someone if you loved them. If you
said
it.”
“They went away,” Mildmay said. He understood, absolutely.
“Or they changed. They hurt you. Or you hurt them.” I sat up, wrapping my arms around my knees. “Keeper said he loved us, you know.”
“Before or after he drowned you?” Mildmay asked savagely.
“Both. We figured he was lying, but how could we be sure? So we didn’t say it. And Joline . . .”
“She went away anyway.”
“She died,” I said.
“What’s the difference if she didn’t come back?” he said, with a sort of horrible reasonableness that made me shudder.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t . . . I’m not a child. I know the difference between leaving and dying.”
“Yeah. How ’bout the difference between loving somebody and hurting them?”
I shut my eyes hard, tears stinging. “You really think I’m that . . .” There was no other word. “That fucked up?”
I startled him into laughing, a half- pained exhalation. “I think you’re seriously fucked up, yeah.”
“Do you think that about everyone who plays the martyr? Do you think all tarquins are like Malkar?”
“Whoa,” he said, and he sat up beside me. “When’d we start talking about sex?”
“We were talking about love.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We were talking about you and Joline.”
A cold hand crushed my chest, stealing my breath. “I . . . I . . .” But I couldn’t say anything. There weren’t any words, there wasn’t anything except this icy, dragging pain.
“Felix.” Mildmay’s hand was on my arm. “I
thought
maybe . . . Do you think you have to let people fuck you for them to love you?”
“No, of course not,” I gasped. “What a stupid notion.”
“Yeah,” he said, with such profound sarcasm that I knew he knew he’d caught me. “You got that right.”
I rested my burning face on my knees. He sighed and stretched; his breath caught, and I knew his lame leg had given him a twinge.
“Almost dawn,” he said. “Might as well get up. You get paid today, right?”
“You say that like you have plans for my money,” I said.
“Oh fuck yes,” he said cheerfully, and even in the mostly- darkness of our room, I knew the movements of him reaching for his cane and standing up. “First up is the hotel bill, and then I figure we ought to look into finding someplace to live.”
“I’m getting an
advance
on my salary, not—”
“I been asking around,” he continued over me, “ ’cause I figure if we get close enough to the Institution you can walk, you won’t have to use that fathom thing all the time. And that’s where all the students live, between the Institution and that other thing, the Universal- whatsit, so it’s cheap anyway.”
“University,” I said. “The University of Esmer.”
“Yeah, that. Hey, d’you know, was it or the Institution here first? ’Cause I’ve been wondering if the hocuses followed the professors or the professors followed the hocuses.”
“Universities are an ancient and honorable institution,” I said, so grateful for a neutral topic I could barely keep my voice steady. “There was one in Cymellune. There’s one in Aigisthos. And the Universitat in Igensbeck, of course. Most places that have universities, the wizards are part of the faculty. I don’t know why it’s separate here.”
“Probably something to do with them warlocks. Most everything is, seems like.” A scrape as he lit a lucifer and touched flame to the candle. “How come Mélusine don’t have one?”
“A university?”
“Yeah. Does Vusantine have one?”
“Not exactly, although I imagine many people would tell you the Library of Arx is the same as a university. Tibernia and Marathat and the western Grasslands follow an even older tradition of scholarship which rejects the idea that learning can be regimented and mea sured. It’s a personal matter, you see, between a scholar and his teacher and his . . .” I laughed, startled. “I suppose Thamuris would call them his spirit- ancestors. The authors of the books he reads.”
Mildmay paused in the middle of braiding his hair to make an interrogative grunt around the ribbon he was holding in his mouth. He had exceptionally high standards for decency before he’d even go as far as the lavatory in the morning. I hadn’t understood why until I’d realized how many of the maids seemed to loiter in our hallway, or on the landing. I’d asked him, and he’d gone red and muttered something about the things people read in novels.
I did not, however, want to tease Mildmay about it, so I said, “The west tends more toward communities of scholars than schools per se, although naturally a good deal of teaching goes on.”
Tying his ribbon, Mildmay said, “Yeah, but Mélusine don’t even have that. ’Cept the Mirador, and that’s just you hocuses.”
“Mélusine has scholars,” I protested.
“Yeah, but no
communities
. I mean, even the musicians have a school, but . . .” He said harshly, “It’s the witch hunts, ain’t it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Hard to be a community when people are calling you a heretic every time you open your mouth to tell somebody else what you think. ’Less you’re a Cabaline, of course.”
The witch hunts were a painfully sensitive issue for him, and I had learned we could not discuss them without arguing viciously. My fault as much or more so than his, and I did not want to have that argument again. Not now. Possibly not ever.
So I took a deep breath and surrendered. “You may be right.”
“I
what
?”
“You may be right,” I said again, not sure whether I was pleased or hurt by his obvious shock. “It’s a plausible theory, in any event.”
He stared at me a moment longer, then said abruptly, “I’m gonna clean up,” and left the room.
I lay down again, intending only to rest until he returned, and woke up several hours later to a room flooded with sunlight. I had a moment of disoriented panic, and then I remembered. The binding- by- obedience. I felt like I was strangling, but it was only my magic that couldn’t breathe. I would become accustomed, in time.
Mildmay was in the chair by the window, frowning over one of the newspapers.
“What time is it?” I said.
“Whose timekeeping you want it in?” he said without looking up. “I’d call it the fourth hour of the day, you’d call it ten o’clock. The people here call it some damn thing with flowers in it.”
“They also call it ten o’clock.”
“Yeah,” he said irritably.
“Anything interesting in the papers?”
“Depends. What’s a pestilence?”
He pronounced it slowly, but correctly, although I heard the hesitation as he wondered what to do about the final
e
.
“Plague,” I said and sat up. “The newspaper’s talking about plague?” “No. I mean, yeah, but not like you mean. They’re talking about sheep.” “Sheep?”
“Yeah, the sheep in, um, Murrey Margravate are all dying, and they’re calling it a pestilence. Although, I kind of think that’s just because it sounds better than saying nobody knows what the fuck is going on.”
“Cynic.”
He shrugged. “These newspaper guys get awful excited about stuff.” I knew he was thinking of the stories printed about the Automaton of Corybant, and the accompanying shameless speculations about me.
“They’re in competition with each other. Whoever tells the most grandiose lies wins the readers.”
“So it’s just like gossiping, only on paper.”
He sounded so disgusted I couldn’t help laughing. “It does seem that way. I’m going to go bathe, and then let’s go to the Institution and see about that advance.”
“You got it,” he said. “I’ll find more words to bother you with.”
He did, in fact, have three more additions to his vocabulary when I returned, and we ended up discussing the word “cleave” all the way to Arkwright Hall. (“They’re talking about this woman cleaving her husband like it’s a good thing,” he said, “and, you know, I guess it could be, but it don’t seem like the kind of thing the newspapers would get behind.” I bit my lip to keep from laughing and said, “Did they perhaps say, ‘cleaving
to
’?” “Oh,” said Mildmay. “It makes a difference?”) I wondered what the real reason was that Kolkhis hadn’t properly taught him to read; it certainly wasn’t the reason he always gave, that he was too stupid to learn.
He didn’t want to come into Arkwright Hall with me, although he didn’t want to tell me why. I finally let him go because I knew from experience that if he was determined to, Mildmay could communicate a bad mood to everyone who came near him like some sort of plague. I found my way to Virtuer Ashmead’s office alone.
It was not a large room, and it seemed smaller than its actual dimensions because it was crammed with shelves of books and a hulking monstrosity of a desk, itself nearly invisible beneath stacks of paper. Virtuer Ashmead stood up when I tapped on the half- open door, and beckoned me in.
“How are you doing?” he said.
“Oh, I’m fine,” I said.
He looked at me as if he could tell that my smile was fake. “In the old texts, the binding- by- obedience is called the choke- binding. Its effects are not pleasant.”
“Unless you’re offering to lift it, this conversation is pointless,” I said. “Please, let us talk about other things.”