The Mirador (4 page)

And the eunuch came trotting back and said as how madame would see me, so I’d won the toss.

Elvire’s look wasn’t much warmer than Tiny’s, but she waved me to a seat. “What do you want?” She had that perfect flash voice that nobody knew if she’d come by natural or been trained like Felix had. I’d heard Felix slip a time or two, but never Elvire.

“I don’t want to make trouble,” I said, “and I ain’t here ’cause anybody sent me.”

She gave me the hairy eyeball. “I see. And how do you suggest we prove that?”

I very nearly said,
Why don’t you get out the thumbscrews?
but I was afraid she’d take me up on it.

“Look,” I said. "S’pose I tell you what I want. Then you can decide what you think.” She gave me a grudging sort of nod. I told her what I wanted.

“That’s old information,” she said. “You only want this for yourself?”

“Swear it on anything you like.”

“What makes you think,” she said—and she still sounded like a plate of icicles, but she couldn’t quite sound as bored as she wanted. Elvire loved the hunt. “What makes you think that anyone will remember?”

"C’mon, Elvire. It ain’t
that
old, and there were people watched Vey Coruscant’s doings pretty close.”

Elvire signed herself against hexes. “Is it true you killed her?”

“Yeah. Thought that was common knowledge.”

“Rumor is rumor,” she said. “What do I get out of this— aside from the pleasure of having you in my house?”

“I’ll pay you what I can, but it ain’t much.” Felix would give me all the money I wanted, but he’d want to know what it was for.

“To think the day would come when I would hear Mildmay the Fox say that.” She gave me a look like curdled poison. “I don’t need your money. Is it true that Felix Harrowgate is also Methony Feucoronne’s son?”

“Yeah.”

She smiled. I wondered how much somebody was going to pay her for that, and I wondered why the fuck they wanted to know. “I will look. Do you expect me to send you billets-doux in the Mirador?”

“I ain’t that dumb,” I said. “I’ll come back on Huitième and ask.”

She nodded. I’d given myself away—never,
never
let anybody know how bad you want something when you’re bargaining. But it was sort of okay with Elvire. She’d jack up the price—more secrets that weren’t mine to give, most likely—but she wouldn’t lie to me, whether she hated me or not. As far as things like that went in the Lower City, she was trustworthy.

That far and no farther.

Chapter 2

I thought we were going to make it out of court okay. Felix wasn’t stopping to pick a fight with nobody, and nobody seemed minded to pick a fight with him. But just as we got to the door, one of the pages comes trotting up and squeaks, “Please, my lord, His Lordship wants you.”

Although all the hocuses and flashies pretend like everybody’s title means the same, there’s only one “His Lordship” and that’s Stephen Teverius. “Thank you,” Felix said, and the two of us turned around and hiked all the way back down the Hall of the Chimeras to the dais, where Lord Stephen was waiting.

“My lord,” Felix said and bowed, and I stood there and racked my brains trying to think of what he could’ve done this time to make Lord Stephen mad. It turned out, though, it wasn’t nothing to do with Felix specially, just that somebody had to hold the baby—meaning the Bastion’s messenger. He was what the Bastion called a caefidus, somebody who had sworn oaths to the Bastion but was annemer, not a hocus. Kind of like the obligation d’âme and kind of a shitty hole to be stuck in, if you ask me.

Felix had other things to do Lundy afternoon and started to say so, but Lord Stephen said, “Don’t argue. Simon Barrister will talk to them for you.
You
’re going to be nice to Messire Perrault this afternoon. Don’t lose him.”

Felix opened his mouth, shut it again, and said, “Yes, my lord.”

Lord Stephen waved the messenger forward. He was a middle-aged Grasslander, dark and with lines on his face like he frowned a lot. Good hands. “Lord Felix has graciously agreed to put himself at your disposal this afternoon,” the Lord Protector said. He watched the two of them shake hands like he wanted to be sure it happened, and then left.

Mr. Perrault said, “I hope I do not inconvenience you, Lord Felix.”

“Not a bit,” Felix said. “What would you like to do with the afternoon?”

Mr. Perrault looked a little sheepish, but he brought it out anyway. “I should very much like to walk around the Mirador with someone who knows it.”

“Nothing could be better,” Felix said. “Just a moment.”

He flagged down a pageboy and dragged him aside. It wasn’t a long message, whatever it was, because in less than a minute the boy went haring off and Felix came back. He picked up the conversation right where he’d left it. “Roaming around the Mirador is my favorite hobby. Anything of special interest?” He started toward the door, Aias Perrault keeping step and me a couple paces behind, just like always.

Mr. Perrault laughed a little. “Considering that I cannot find my way from my room to this hall without the guidance of an adolescent boy, I scarcely feel qualified to say.”

“People say us and the Bastion are on the same plan,” I said. Because they did.

Mr. Perrault looked at me funny, like he hadn’t thought I knew how to talk, but he said, “I do not know. Certainly, if it is true, it is not helpful.”

“The Mirador is strange,” Felix said. “Wizards who’ve lived here for twenty years get lost occasionally. And although it and the Bastion might once have been twins, they are no longer. Let’s start at the top.” He’d led the way to one of the narrow, twisty staircases that went to the Crown of Nails, the Mirador’s highest ring of battlements. Oh fuck me sideways, I thought. I hated those stairs.

At least it was a pretty day. I sat down in a patch of sun, and Felix pointed out interesting bits of Mélusine to Mr. Perrault: the two cathedrals to Phi-Kethetin, the one in Spicewell, and the big fucking brick one up in Dimcreed. Ver-Istenna’s dome. The Vesper Manufactory. Bercromius Park, which the Bercromii were hanging onto like bear-baiting dogs. Last open land of more’n about a septad-acre in the whole city. You could get in for a decacentime on Cinquièmes, and a tour of the house was another septacentime. Only place in the city where the Sim looked like a river instead of just like death.

And then the other flashie houses in Roy-Verlant and Lighthill and Nill, and Mr. Perrault said, “A strange name for a city district. I understand the word means ‘nothing.’ ”

Felix gave me an eyebrow.

“Nighthill,” I said, " ’cause it’s on the west.”

“My brother doesn’t speak in riddles on purpose. The extended version would be that ‘Nill’ is a contraction of ‘Nighthill’ and the district was so named because it is, as you can see, on the west side of the Mirador.”

“I see,” said Mr. Perrault. “And which part of the city is it that you call the ‘Lower City’—it is all lower than the Mirador, yes?”

“Um,” said Felix. “That’s not exactly what ‘lower’ means in this context, although”—and he waved an arm out vaguely southeast—“the ground does descend toward the St. Grandin Swamp as you go south. The Lower City is the oldest, poorest, and most crime-ridden quarter of Mélusine. I don’t suggest going there without a, er, native guide.”

“I have no intention of leaving the Mirador,” Mr. Perrault said. He gave Felix a funny look. The pause was just long enough for me to know what he was going to ask next: “Is it true you yourself are from the Lower City?”

Felix had seen it coming, too. “Both of us are,” he said, like it didn’t cost him nothing to admit it. “Mildmay retains the native dialect.”

Thank you so very fucking much, I thought.

“I meant no insult,” Mr. Perrault said. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or Felix. “As the child of sharecroppers, I have no high place from which to throw mud. I was merely curious.”

“Curiosity is popularly agreed to have killed the cat,” Felix said. I couldn’t tell if it was a real warning, or if he was just fencing to see what Mr. Perrault would do.

What Mr. Perrault did was laugh. “Do you have any idea of the stories that are told about you in the Bastion?”

I don’t think he could’ve shocked Felix more if he’d done it on purpose.

“Messire Gennadion made no secret of how he had contrived to break the Virtu,” Mr. Perrault said, “and your Lord Protector has made no secret of how it was mended. Can you blame me for being curious?”

“How appalling,” Felix said, and he sounded like he meant it. “I hope you don’t believe everything Malkar said about me.”

“I myself never met him—my duties keep me mostly away from the Bastion—but I know there is still debate over how much Messire Gennadion should have been listened to.”

“The correct answer being:
not at all
. Malkar would never tell the truth if a plausible lie was available. I assure you, from fifteen years’ experience of him, you should not believe anything for which he was your sole authority.”

“Such as the idea that you are the linchpin of the Mirador’s strength?”

“Me?”
Felix burst out laughing. “Good gracious, no. I’m nothing more than a troublemaker. Ask Lord Stephen. Ask Lord Giancarlo.”

“Messire Gennadion swore that your destruction would be the downfall of the Mirador.”

“Did he?” Felix’s mouth twisted. “I imagine he wanted to believe so, since it would provide a magnificent rationale for his desire to . . . destroy me. But it’s certainly not true. Oh, I grant you that I’m the most powerful wizard in the Mirador, and I do sit on the Curia, but if I died tomorrow, the Mirador would go on without so much as a wobble. I’m afraid Malkar was merely telling you all what he wanted you to believe—an art he excelled at.”

“But why did he want you dead?”

“I’m sure he hated me as much as I hated him. I’d given him reason.”

“You are frank.”

“About Malkar? I have no reason to be anything but. As I said, I hated him.”

“And yet—”

“I know, I know!” Felix threw a hand up, like he was warding off a blow. “And yet I was his apprentice and his lover. If you had known him, Messire Perrault, you would understand that these were reasons to hate him.”

“From what I know, I have never considered him anything other than reprehensible.”

“I see. What you wanted to know was if I am like him. I am not.”

Mr. Perrault actually went back a step, and I didn’t blame him. Felix looked about ready to bite. I supposed I’d have to step in if things got really ugly, but I was hoping like fuck it didn’t come to that. Because I didn’t want no part of this conversation. Didn’t want to think about Malkar Gennadion at all.

Or, to give him his real name, Brinvillier Strych.

Brinvillier Strych had been Mélusine’s nightmare for a Great Septad, since he killed Lady Jane Teveria. By burning her to death in the middle of the Hall of the Chimeras. I’d heard they’d had to replace some of the mosaic, but I’d never yet been bored enough to see if I could spot the patch. The Mirador had caught Strych, and they
said
they’d killed him, but it didn’t seem like that had worked so good. He’d got out somehow—or maybe he really had died and had found a way back—and gone north to the Norvenas, where he’d fucked up Mavortian von Heber’s life. And when it’d been long enough, he came back. This time round, he called himself Malkar Gennadion, and he found Felix in a Pharaohlight brothel and bought him and trained him and got him into the Mirador.

And used him to break the Virtu.

Which Felix had fixed again, later, after we’d been all the way across Kekropia and back. And I figured Felix was right about Strych hating him, because that had drawn him back to Mélusine, so as to be able to lay a trap for Felix.

Only he caught me instead.

And what he did to me . . .

Well, look. There’s this thing in the Arcane called the Iron Chapel and it’s where you go for a meet if you want to absolutely guarantee that nobody’s going to come across you by accident. Because people don’t go there. Nobody knows anymore who it’s a chapel
to
, although we all got our ideas. There’s a grate in the middle of the floor, iron, probably older than most of Mélusine and rusting to pieces one flake at a time. People tell stories about what happens when the grate rusts through, and they ain’t the sort of stories that end with hugs and kisses and happily-ever-after. But, I mean, since each bar is as thick around as my arm, it ain’t nothing I’m ever going to have to worry about. Somebody built that fucker to
last
.

You don’t touch the grate. But if you lay down on the floor and look through it, you can see this kind of crack in the stone. Not dressed. Nobody made it or meant for it to be there or nothing like that, and how far down it goes . . . well, your guess is as good as mine. If it wasn’t for the grate, somebody would’ve found out by now, but I’ll tell you right now they wouldn’t be coming back to talk about it. The sewermen call it Mélusine’s cunt, and there are days when I figure they ain’t so far wrong. Because for sure if you try to fuck with Mélusine, you ain’t getting your cock back.

And that’s what the inside of my head was like, around where my memories of Strych should’ve been. I didn’t know, and I didn’t
want
to know, and I most especially didn’t want to talk about it.