I knew I was wrong—that's the bitch of it. I
knew
I was being stupid but I was also feeling like I'd run out of smart options. And then Gilles cousin Claude showed up needing a job, and Gilles didn't like me anyway I expect I could have hung on if I'd tried, but the dreams and the aches and the worries were getting to me, and I didn't feel like sucking up to Gilles for a shitty job like that one. So I left with half a gorgon in my pocket and the. clothes on my back and nothing else. I'd lost the rest of it somehow—I can't even tell you how anymore.
I went up into Havelock, where they got nice hotels and lots of out-of-town custom. I walked around in
the rain for I don't know, an hour or two, and finally picked a hotel called the Anchorite's Knitting. I liked the sign.
I got up onto the roofs, about three blocks away from the Anchorite's Knitting, and worked my way back. The bells were just tolling the septad-night when I dropped onto the roof. We'd turned the corner of the night and were starting back uphill toward day—not that it made all that much difference, what with the rain and all. You got just as wet regardless.
I listened at the roof door for as long as it took me to do all of "Jeniard's Lover" in my head. It was something Keeper'd taught me. I was scared to death I'd lose my place and end up standing out there all night in the rain while the first half of "Jeniard's Lover" went round and round in my head like a broken music box. But I did get to the end, although it seemed to take forever and a half, and by the time I did, I hadn't heard a sound from the other side of the door. So it was about as safe as you could ask for to go picking a lock.
I was shivering, but the lock opened practically just for breathing on it. I got through and closed the door again, and then I had to sit down and catch my breath. That took a while, and I was still sort of panting, and I could hear my breath rasping in my chest. Kethe, that's a nasty noise. The Fever Dog had a lock on his end of the bone. I got up again and went downstairs, hanging on to a banister that was wobbling about as bad as I was.
I felt better once I made it to the third floor and so wasn't going to go pitching down the stairs on my head. I prowled down the corridor a little ways, but all the rooms were dark, and there wasn't no sound like people talking or fucking or even snoring. So I picked a door. It wasn't locked, and I went in wondering, even though I knew better, if this was going to be as boring as it looked like.
Kethe always gives you what you ask for.
There was a guy in the chair by the window. He had a dark lantern by him, open just a little, and he was watching me with a sort of bright, perky look like I was his entertainment for the evening and he'd been looking forward to me for hours. He was a spare sort of guy, wearing a half beard that said he wasn't Marathine, and dressed in clothes that were clean, neat, and secondhand. His eyes were this amazing deep blue, clear as water.
"Good gracious," he said. "I don't think
you
were what I was expecting."
I'd never been caught so flat-footed in all my life. If I'd been well, I'd've been back out the door in a hot second, before he'd even got his mouth, open, but I was still standing there, gaping at him like a half-wit dog, when the door swung shut and locked behind me. I heard the bolt go over.
I must've jumped a foot. It made him laugh. "Now," he said. "Who are you? A common thief?"
That "common" stung, but there wasn't no point pretending I was a chambermaid, so I nodded.
He was frowning. "Come here," he said.
The door was locked, and the way it'd happened said this guy was a hocus. If there was anything in my head at all, it was this kind of panicky prayer that he wouldn't turn out to be a close personal friend of Vey Coruscant's. So I went over to the table. There was some kind of diagram drawn on it in chalk and a big silver watch fob laying in the middle on top of a piece of pasteboard that looked like a playing card. Shit. Hocus-stuff.
"What's your name?" he said.
"Mildmay." I don't know if he levered it out of me somehow, or if I was just too stupid and sick to give him one of the others.
His eyebrows went up. "How… unusual."
"I can't help that," I said. The indiction before I was born, my mother converted into one of them faddy little cults that come and go in the Lower City like mayflies. This particular one died in the Fire, along with all its members, so all I know about it is my jaw-breaking name:
Mild-may-your-sufferings-be-at-the-hands-of-the-wicked. I don't even know if she meant it for me or for her. Keeper axed it right off, which I've always been glad about. I knew a gal in Pharaohlight once named Fly-from-fornication-and-blasphemy. She went by Butterfly, which went down a whole bunch better with her tricks.
The hocus had that look on his face like he was going to ask, so I said in a hurry, "What's yours?"
He gave me this kind of bow, like a joke, without getting up. "Mavortian von Heber, at your service."
Well, that was obviously a lie, but I didn't say nothing.
He was still frowning at his chalk lines and his watch fob and his playing card. "I know it worked," he said, and looked at me, "but why earth are you here?"
"Sorry?" I said and coughed.
"Here. Sit down." I sat in the table's other chair, because it beat ending on the floor. He opened the lantern wider and looked at me. "You are quite phenomenally wet. I would offer you a towel if I had one to hand."
"I'm okay," I said. This time I didn't cough. "What's the chalk for?"
"Well, that's just it. It seems to have brought you to me, but I'll be damned if I know why."
"It did what?"
"Here," he said and handed me a handkerchief. "At least dry your hair. This"—and he pointed at his chalk lines—"is a calling charm. I set it up to call the person who would be most helpful to me in solving a particular problem, and that person seems to be you. Any ideas why?"
"Not without you tell me what your problem is." I used his handkerchief on my hair, and at least it quit dripping down my neck.
"Come now. What do you do besides petty larceny?"
"I'm a cat burglar."
"A cat burglar," he said, like he thought he hadn't heard me right.
"Petty larceny," I said.
There was a pause. He was looking at me funny. I sat and dripped into the hotel chair and tried not to cough.
Then his face changed, all at once, like he'd been hit by lightning or something. He said, in this kind of awed, hurried voice, like he had to get it said before anything happened, "Can I
hire
you?" "Sure. I mean, depending on what you want."
He brought his hand down on the table, hard enough to make me twitch, and shoved it sideways across his chalk lines, like he figured he didn't need
them
no more. He stopped just short of knocking his watch fob off the table. He tucked it and the playing card away in his waistcoat pocket and said, "I'll tell you. I'll tell you
exactly
what I want."
I waited while he got his thoughts organized. It was kind of comfortable, in a weird sort of way, watching a client's face while he decided how he was going to lie to me. He said, "I want to get a man out of St. Crellifer's. Can you do it?"
"St. Crellifer's? You mean the bat-house?"
"If you like to put it that way. Can you do it?"
I was beginning to wonder if he didn't belong in St. Crellifer's himself, hocus or no hocus. He had this light in his eyes that was spooking me out.
"Why can't you do it yourself? Last I heard, St. Crellifer's don't look too hard at anybody offering to take a crazy off their hands."
"I'm sorry. I didn't quite…"
Kethe, I thought, and this time the cough got past my guard. When I could talk again, I said, "Why don't you go get him yourself?"
"I can't. I can't go myself for various reasons, and they won't talk to my… colleague."
Shit, I thought. Looks like you've walked into another prize mess Milly-Fox. "Why not?"
He took his watch fob out and gave it a look like it had said something he was thinking was a lie. Then he looked up at me and said, "The man I want to talk to is Felix Harrowgate."
After a while, I said, "I didn't know he was in St. Crellifer's."
"He's apparently quite mad, from what I hear," Mr. von Heber said, tilting his watch fob so the light from the lantern showed up the lines of engraving—some kind of pattern, I couldn't quite make it out—and staring at it now like it could tell him something he really wanted to know.
"Then what good…"
"That, I think"—and he looked up and caught me just with the force of his bright blue eyes—"is my business rather than yours. I will pay you to get him out of St. Crellifer's. What more do you need to know?"
"Well. I mean, he broke the Virtu. And I don't know nothing about you. I mean…"
"I assure you," he said, with this snarky little quirk at the corner of his mouth, "I do not seek to topple the Mirador."
Which was what he'd say anyway. But my head was starting to pound, and it had sort of occurred to me that if I said I'd do what he wanted, he might not throw me back out into the rain.
"Okay," I said, "but—"
That's when the other guy came in. He was a big guy, blond, dripping wet just like I was. His eyes were the same blue as Mr. von Heber's, but he wasn't no hocus. He was a for-hire bruiser. I didn't need the leather jacket or the braided mustaches to tell me that. It was in his eyes and the way he carried himself and the way his nose had been broken at least once. Like mine.
I was on my feet before I'd even got a good look at him. He stopped dead where he was, kicked the door shut behind him, and said in Norvenan, "Who the fuck is this?"
"This your 'colleague'?" I said—in Marathine because I didn't feel, all once like I wanted to let them know I understood Norvenan.
"Yes," Mr. von Heber said. He said, also in Marathine, "Bernard, this Mildmay. He's going to help us with our, er, problem. He's a cat burglar."
Bernard snorted. He wasn't no more impressed with me than I was with him. "It's a novel approach," he said, "recruiting riffraff."
"I haven't noticed you coming up with any bright ideas."
That's when I started coughing again. It felt like the fever had filled my lungs up with dry grass. I ended up leaning over the chair, gasping for breath, with the room going round and round like a waltz I couldn't hear. "Sit down, you fool," Mr. von Heber said in a voice I hadn't heard out of him before.
It was smart advice. I would've taken it, except I was too dizzy and I couldn't let go of the chair. And then I couldn't feel the chair no more, and I fainted. The last thing I heard was the hocus swearing.
Felix
Darkness.
I'm alone.
I know I'm in the Mirador because I can feel it. It feels like people beating me with hammers, except that the blows come from everywhere, and fore from inside my head than anywhere else. But nothing about this room, this darkness, feels familiar, and I have no idea how I got here. I get up and feel my way around the room. It's a small room, and there isn't anything in it except the cot and a washstand. But I find the door, and it isn't locked.
The snake and the corpse must be somewhere. I remember that they hurt me, and I don't want them to find me again. I open the door. I don't recognize this hallway, either, but there's no one here, only a lantern on a bracket.
I take the lantern and start down the hall. I move quickly, afraid that the snake and the corpse will come back. I come to a staircase leading down and take it, almost running. At the bottom I turn left, still away from the room I woke up in. For a long time I walk without any greater pattern than that—taking every staircase I can find that will lead me deeper into the Mirador and always, as best I can, getting farther away from that lightless room. The farther I go, the clearer my head becomes. I can still feel the broken magic of the Mirador pounding in my temples, but it is no longer overwhelming; it is as if these older, deeper levels are not beholden to the magic of the Virtu and resist its influence.
There are ghosts everywhere, in every imaginable style of clothing ghosts fighting duels, ghosts kissing, ghosts dancing, one ghost kneeling the middle of the hallway, striking over and over at one particular flap stone. Like the mad ghosts in St. Crellifer's, they do not seem to notice me As I pass through an ancient, dust-swagged ballroom, I notice one ghosts a boy, tall, dark, beaky-nosed, wearing strange, stiffly padded clothings who is standing in a corner, apart from the other ghosts. Our eyes meet I am jolted so badly I almost drop the lantern, and the boy disappears as quick as snuffed candlelight, into the wall.
After a minute, shaken, I go on. He saw me. No ghost since Joline has actually seen me, but he did. It makes no sense. But then, I do not know very much about ghosts. The Mirador does not believe in them, and even the old man who taught me about dreams would not discuss ghosts. Maybe there are rules and patterns that I simply don't know.
A few hallways later, I look over my shoulder, mostly because I am still afraid the corpse will find me. The boy is there, following me. His eyes are pale and patient and sad.
I know the boy means no harm, but fright closes over my head like the dark waters of the Sim. I am running without meaning to, chased by my panic and nightmares, running and running. When my strength gives out, I slump against the wall, end up sitting in a sort of huddle, the lantern beside me on the floor. My breath is coming in great tearing gasps; I am not quite sobbing, and I am working hard to keep it that way. Gradually my breathing slows and quiets, and my hands relax from their tight fists against my chest.
I am sorry. I did not mean to frighten you.
I jerk around, my shoulders slamming flat against the wall. The boy is there, maybe five feet away, standing straight and grave and quiet.