Mélusine (15 page)
Authors: Sarah Monette
For a moment, my hearing clears. The monster beside me, hawk-headed, says, "Don't you see? It's too late for that." And then sense is swallowed up again by terrible noise.
I lose, I think, a fragment of time. A new monster appears. It is small and dark and quick, like a cat. Its colors are different; they don't hurt. The bear roars at it; it answers. Then it comes and takes my arm, its touch as soft as a cat's paw. It leads me out of the room. I am glad. Wherever it takes me will be better than that room, with all the anger in it.
I walked through the spiked, gaping maw of the Harriers' Gate, and it was as if I'd taken off a topcoat forged of iron and lead. My mind cleared; my eyes cleared. I recognized the man with me: Stephen's steward Leveque. There were still colors clouding him, but they did not make him monstrous. I saw that he did not care for the task Stephen had assigned him.
I could no longer hear the Virtu. I could no longer feel the Mirador's broken magic.
I said, "Where are you taking me, Leveque?"
He shrank together, startled. "L-Lord Felix," he said.
"I'm not a lord," I said. Had I said that recently, or was it just that it echoed in my head like a leaden death knell, a requiem for the person I had been?
"Beg your pardon. We're…" He broke off to flag down a hansom. The Plaza del'Archimago was, as always, full of them.
I got in obediently, and did not hear what Leveque said to the driver. When Leveque climbed in next to me, I said, "Where are we going?"
"Oh, blessed saints," said Leveque. "I'm sorry, my lord, truly."
"Don't be, please. I just want to know."
I caught the twitch of Leveque's fingers, as he restrained his impulse to sign himself. He said, quite clearly but without meeting my eyes, "St. Crellifer's, my lord."
"Oh," I said. I thought about that as the hansom rattled through its turn out of the plaza. "Am I mad then?"
"Saints and powers," said Leveque, in a kind of strangled moan, but did not otherwise answer me. The
colors around him showed me I was frightening him; I did not repeat my question.
We traveled in silence to St. Crellifer's. I looked at the sunshine and tried to believe in it. But behind every sunbeam I saw darkness, and I knew that the darkness was true.
St. Crellifer's was a massive presence of soot-stained brick, with barred windows like blind eyes. I stood in the courtyard, craning my neck at its façade while Leveque pattered up the steps and rang the bell.
A spy-hole in the left-hand door slid open. I did not hear what Leveque said to the person on the other side, nor what they said in answer. After a minute, the spy-hole slid shut again. Leveque came back down the steps. He approached me cautiously, like a half-feral cat. I looked away from the sullen windows of St. Crellifer's; his eyes were dark and bright. He said hastily, whispering, "Lord Felix, it was that Malkar, wasn't it?"
Malkar's compulsion slammed down on me. The world convulsed; for a moment I was standing before a great bank of lightning-lit clouds, black as ink, and there was a monster touching my wrist, a monster with the sleek fur and luminous yellow eyes of a cat. Then I was in the courtyard of St. Crellifer's, brick and glass and iron, and Leveque's eyes were brown again. But I could not answer him; I could barely keep my knees from buckling.
Before Leveque could even begin to look puzzled at my silence, the front doors of St. Crellifer's swung open. I flinched back as a wave of boiling, rioting colors poured down the stairs. They were dark and violent, angry and fearful and insane, a turmoil of violet and crimson and green with great terrible streaks of darkness through everything. Leveque's fingers tightened on my wrist.
"Please," I said, knowing it was useless, knowing my fate had been decided in the Mirador and that Leveque could do nothing other than what he was ordered. "Please, don't—"
A great booming voice came rolling out of the open doors like the seething colors. "So this is our new guest. Splendid!" The voice's owner followed it out of St. Crellifer's, a massive figure, as tall as I but at least three times as wide, the sparse brown hair on its scalp looking like nothing more than an ill-advised joke or a desultory attempt at camouflage, at pretending that this monstrous creature was human. It wore the robes of a friar of Phi-Kethetin; I wondered in dizzy panic if St. Crellifer had his own separate order, or if this hospice was maintained by the brothers of St. Gailan. I was still trying to break Leveque's grip and had actually succeeded in dragging him backwards a pace or two.
"Now, no need to fear," said the monster, coming down the steps. "No one here wishes to harm you." But the colors of madness and pain were still swirling around us, and I knew it lied. It reached us in two huge strides and caught my other wrist. Leveque let go of me in palpable relief.
"I am Brother Orphelin, Warder of St. Crellifer's." His eyes were small, gray, like tiny chips of polished stone set deep into the swollen dough of his face. I could see the gloat in them as he said, "I understand that this guest is consigned to our care by the Mirador—by the Lord Protector himself ?"
"Yes," said Leveque.
Brother Orphelin lifted my arm; his hand was like a pillow wrapped around a set of iron rods. "And a wizard," he said. The little gray eyes took in my hair, my mismatched eyes; he knew who I was.
"His… his powers are bound," Leveque said.
"Of course they are," said Brother Orphelin. He knew I was frightened of him. I looked at Leveque, but
he avoided my eyes. He was backing away, eager to be gone. The colors around him spoke of embarrassment and dread.
"What's your name?" said Brother Orphelin, booming with fake bonhomie. By mistake, I met his eyes; I had to look away quickly from their gray malice.
I wanted to say, angrily, that he already knew and that I did not appreciate being toyed with. But I was too scared; he reminded me too much of deeper. "Felix," I said and was pathetically grateful that my voice did not squeak or shake.
"Then, Felix, why don't you come with me? I'm sure Mr. Leveque has duties to attend to."
Leveque mumbled something—gratitude and urgency and I thought I caught Stephen's name—and bolted. He might not believe that I was guilty of the crimes laid at my feet, but he surely did believe that I was mad.
Am I mad? I wondered. But before I found an answer, Brother Orphelin said, "Come, Felix," and started toward the doors of St. Crellifer's, my, wrist still enveloped in his hand. His size and strength were terrifying; I did not even have a chance to brace my feet before I was off-balance, stumbling after him, desperately trying to keep from falling on the stairs.
My first impression of St. Crellifer's was the smell. It stank of urine and sweat, with an underlying tang of excrement and rotting garbage and death When the doors slammed shut behind us, it was nearly as dark as the Mirador; only dim smears of daylight made it through the barred and filthy windows. Somewhere, distantly, I .could hear someone sobbing, and as Brother Orphelin turned to speak to the porter, dragging me after him like a stick tied to his tail, there was a shriek that sounded only dubiously human, Brother Orphelin and the porter both laughed at the way I jumped.
"You'll grow accustomed soon enough, Felix," Brother Orphelin said.
He and the porter had a brief, lazy argument about who was on shift, and when the porter's relief might show up. Then Brother Orphelin said, looking at me, "I'll be downstairs." The evil omen of the porter's yellow-toothed smirk followed me as I perforce followed Brother Orphelin, who had not yet let go of my wrist.
The staircase was immediately off the vestibule, a narrow dank shaft whose wooden treads quickly shifted to stone, slick and treacherous. "Fall on me and I'll break your thumb," said Brother Orphelin. I concentrated on my footing and wished that the lanterns were hung at more regular intervals. The darkness was crowding up around me, and, while I couldn't hear the Virtu any longer, I was becoming fretfully aware of something else, a noise like some vast heartbeat, only with too many pulses. Mélusine, breathing.
Then Brother Orphelin towed me out of the stairwell, down a short corridor, and into a broad, stone-flagged room with a drain set in the center of the floor and a cistern tap on the wall opposite the door, with a bucket set beneath it. He let me go with a shove, so that I staggered a couple of steps into the room, ending up far closer than I wished to the gaping mouth of the drain.
"We believe in hygiene," said Brother Orphelin. "Take off your clothes."
I turned, hoping futilely that I had misheard; the air around him was seething with violet and red, orange streaks shooting through the mass like greedy fire.
"You heard me," he said, crossing the room with his rolling stride to open the cistern tap. "Get rid of
those disgusting rags you're wearing."
The water poured into the bucket. My breathing was getting faster and shallower. I had no thought of defiance, but I could not remove my clothes in front of this gelid giant.
He snorted. "Do you think I won't make you?"
I shook my head, but I couldn't move. I couldn't make my hands betray the last shreds of my dignity, my privacy, my pride.
Brother Orphelin turned off the tap and started toward me. I stood, blank with panic, watching him approach. He took a good long look at me and said, "You aren't going to give me any trouble."
It wasn't a question. I couldn't have answered if it had been.
Clearly he'd had practice; he had my clothes off with ruthless efficiency, heedless of the tearing fabric, nearly dumping me off my feet onto the floor. His gaze didn't linger on my genitals; that wasn't what interested him. He walked slowly around me; I could feel him staring at my back. He whistled, long and low.
"
That's
not ornamentation you see on a Cabaline wizard every day in a decad. Who'd you aggravate, and how often?"
That's
not ornamentation you see on a Cabaline wizard every day in a decad. Who'd you aggravate, and how often?"
I shook my head again. I couldn't answer; I didn't have the words.
"You'll tell me soon enough," he said with gruesome cheerfulness. His thick fingers brushed across my back, and I shuddered. But his attention was on my hair. He took a handful of it, tugged—not gently—and said, "This has to go."
"What?" I said, shrill and shaky, my voice mostly breath.
"There's no point trying to get this mess clean. Stay here while I get the shears." It was his idea of a joke; his volcanic chuckle told me that.
He waddled out. I stood, shivering, feeling my hair with both hands, feeling the mats and the dirt and the terrible dead heaviness of it. I began reckoning back frantically, but I could not remember the last time I had bathed—or for that matter, the last time I had eaten or laughed or picked a fight with someone just because I felt like it. Then I realized I did not know what the date was. I was still trying to remember if it had seemed like summer or winter in the courtyard of St. Crellifer's when Brother Orphelin returned with a pair of shears that looked more like a murder weapon than a household tool.
"Hold still," he said, "and you won't get cut."
I held still; he hacked my hair off, long snakelike mats, no color but dirt, falling to the floor around my feet. He cropped it ruthlessly short, and I was grateful that there was no mirror. I felt now not merely naked, but vulnerable, exposed.
"Better," he said and lumbered away to get the bucket.
I watched his return toward me like the commander of a battered fortress watching the approach of the siege engines. He lifted the bucket off his shoulder with a grunt and tipped it forward.
For a moment, as fast and brutal as a lightning strike, I was a child again, drowning with Keeper's hand clamped on the back of my neck. The bitter taste of metal was in my mouth and nose, and the cold was eating its way in toward my bones. Then I blinked the water out of my eyes, gasped for breath, and was back in St. Crellifer's basement. Brother Orphelin was rolling back toward the cistern tap. I would have fled, dripping and naked as I was, except that I knew the outer doors were guarded. And this swollen, sullen building was Brother Orphelin's domain. There would be no inch of it, no crevice, no crawl space, that he did not know.
He refilled and emptied his bucket twice more before he was satisfied. By then, no matter how I shook my head or rubbed at my eyes, I saw the whole room underwater, full of darkness. Brother Orphelin became a sea monster, vast as the whales I had read about in books from Lunness Point, vast as a cloud. I stood and shivered and did not scream.
"Come on, then," he said, setting the bucket back under the tap and starting for the door. He turned, saw my face, and burst out laughing. "Your eyes are as big as bell-wheels. We're going next door, to get you some clothes."
"Oh," I said, a bare whisper.
"Don't worry. I won't parade you bare-ass naked through St. Crellifer's unless you aggravate
me
. Now come on."
me
. Now come on."
I followed him, shivering convulsively and leaving a trail of footprints black as murder, black as guilt, behind me.
The storeroom was musty and dark, its shelves heaped with piles of rough smocks and trousers. Brother Orphelin shoved a set at me. I Put them on as fast as I could. The clothes St. Crellifer's provided were coarse baggy, made of undyed cloth, but they were clean. In some small way I was glad to be rid of those ragged, stained, dirt-stiffened garments that had once been a white cambric shirt and my best court trousers. And even these clothes—too short, too loose, scratchy and ugly and not warm enough were protection.
"And now no one can tell you've got those wicked scars on your back," Brother Orphelin said. He had echoed my thoughts uncannily, and I could not help staring at him. "Only you know, and I know, and it can be our secret, can't it?"
I understood him then, as tendrils of the violet-red miasma that surrounded him reached out hungrily toward me. He was not interested in my body, as I'd already realized; for Brother Orphelin, celibacy was not a difficult discipline. His lust was for secrets, for shame and guilt, for petty darknesses. More and worse, he was a sophisticate; his pleasure was not in the secret itself, but in the power it gave him over me, in his knowledge of what it did to me to know that he knew.
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