Outside St. Crellifer's, the world glows with midmorning sunshine. It occurs to me dimly that the monsters must have ducked out of court to come get me, but I cannot get the thought to have any deeper meaning. I'm not even sure I know what I mean by "court." It meant something to me once.
Coming into the Mirador hurts, like being shut in an iron maiden. But I remember that the monsters with me are kind. The raven disappears; the statue leads me through the Mirador to a small room hung with canary yellow silk. I don't know how long we wait. I have no time sense; clocks have become a bewilderment and a misery. I don't think it can be too long, because the statue does not seem impatient.
The door opens, and more monsters come into the room, the raven with them. One of them has a hawk's head. The others are a dark jumble; I try not to look at them. They are booming back and forth, and the colors show they are angry. The statue joins the argument. Finally she takes my arm, dragging me forward; I am almost used to the thunderclap by now.
"Look for yourself!" she says, not quite shouting. "Dammit, Giancarlo, just look!"
"Oh, very well," the hawk says, exasperated; its voice is deep and strong and rough. It touches my forehead. It takes all my courage, but I do not flinch.
After a moment, its hand drops again; it says, "Powers."
"It's a compulsion," the raven says. "And that's not Cabaline working either."
"It's Malkar," the hawk says, dry with distaste. "I recognize the style."
"We have to get it off him!" says the raven.
"Gently, Lord Thaddeus," says the hawk. "I agree. This may change… many things. But for that reason, Lord Stephen and the Witchfinder Extraordinary had best be present. I'll call an emergency Curia meeting for this afternoon. I fancy that the wait could be put to good use."
His voice is loaded with meaning.
"Oh," says the raven. "Rather. We'll, er, clean him up."
"And find him something decent to wear. He
is
a wizard of the Mirador, after all."
"Yes, my lord," the raven and the statue say in chorus.
The hawk and the jumbled entourage of others leave the room. I can feel the raven and the statue looking at each other.
"Well," says the raven, "your place or mine?"
The statue snorts with laughter. "Yours."
She keeps her hand just behind my elbow as we walk. I should know where we are going; I should be able to understand the maze around me, but I cannot. I can't hold the sense of the world together long enough.
The rooms we come to are deep in the Mirador; I feel the weight of stone and wood and plaster above us like a curse. They are low, rectangle large rooms, austere with whitewash. The rugs on the floors are dark and thick, and the few pieces of furniture are likewise dark and heavy. As we come in a green shape rises from one of the chairs. I can't see it clearly, as if it moves in a trailing cloud of fog, just the greenness and a sense of ferocity carefully held in check.
It and the raven and the statue roar back and forth at each other for a while and then there are small monsters in the room with a big copper They pour water into the tub and bow to everyone nervously and scurry out.
"Oh powers," says the statue, her hand on my arm, "here we go."
"Come on, Felix," says the raven. "Gideon, will you go get the soap?" The green shape leaves the room; I watch it, anxiously, because it is strange.
"It's just Gideon," the raven says. "Come on, Felix. You need a bath."
The raven and the statue are both gently, uneasily, urging me toward the tub. It is not the Sim; I remember I saw the small monsters pouring the water. It is safe. And I am filthy. I take off my clothes and climb into the tub.
The green monster returns with the soap, which I accept gratefully. The three monsters stand close together at the other end of the room. I know that they are whispering, but the roar and boom of it still hurt my ears. I would tell them that they don't have to whisper, that I can't understand them, but I still can't find any language in my head.
I wash thoroughly, scrubbing my fingers through the ugly short curls of my hair. When I am done, the water is brown. But there are towels laid out, left by the small monsters, and the raven brings me clothes. They don't at very well—two inches of wrist protrude from the cuffs of the shirt, and the trousers threaten to fall off my hips until the green shape offers a belt—but they are clean, and I am grateful.
The monsters are all watching me, the colors around them purple and smoky green. They are troubled, upset. But they don't seem angry, and I am glad enough to sit quietly in a chair. The green monster sits near me, and I can feel its brilliant gaze on me. I stare at my hands, and I suppose time passes, although I cannot tell.
The green monster touches my arm, gently; I wish I could explain my flinch was for the thunderclap, not for him. But I get up and follow the en and the statue. The green shape does not come with us. It is one fewer monster to worry about; it is bad enough that the raven is walking on my bright side.
We come to a room, high-ceilinged and light; it almost seems as if the windows painted on the walls are real, although I know they are only frescoes. There are monsters around the table that dominates the room: the hawk-headed monster, a bear, a silver wolf, others and others. I look at the floor. They roar and howl; the room is full of red. Finally, the bear booms out a phrase that cuts through the din. There is a moment in which I can feel something rising, swelling, advancing, and then the thunder cracks across me. My knees buckle, and I feel the inside of my head tearing, Spinning, burning.
I was on my knees in the Lesser Coricopat, and the entire Curia was staring at me, as was Lord Stephen Teverius and a wizard I didn't know, who a moment before had been a silver wolf. Vida Eoline was standing on my left; I turned my head to the right, almost before I realized that the clouds had cleared from my mind, and saw Thaddeus de Lalage, whom I had last seen five years previously, when he was sent to the wizard's tower in far northern Aurelias.
I got to my feet, all of them staring at me like a taxidermist's gallery, pushed my fingers through my hair. I opened my mouth in a spirit of academic curiosity, and the words "Thank you," emerged as if there had never been any reason that they could not. The colors in the room were throbbing with disbelief and distrust.
"
Was
that a compulsion laid by Malkar Gennadion?" said Giancarlo; he was glaring at me horribly beneath his eyebrows, but that was no different than Giancarlo had ever been.
"Yes," I said. "He laid it on me so that I could not tell anyone what he had done."
"And what
had
he done?" said Stephen, smoldering like a charcoal-maker's fire. Stephen hated histrionics. I was so deeply relieved to know that, to be able to look at him and recognize him, even with the bear hanging around him like a pall of smoke, that his tone did not bother me.
"He broke the Virtu," I said. "He used me."
"How could he?" said one of the other Curia members. "You are a wizard of the Mirador. No one can lay compulsions on you."
Except the interdict, I thought, but did not say. "I don't know. He got past the Virtu's wards somehow, but I don't know how."
"Interesting," Giancarlo said, his eyebrows pulling together in an alarming frown. "So if we ask you again all those questions we asked you back in Théoc, will you now answer them truthfully?"
"I'll try," I said. "I'll do my best."
Hours later, after the Curia released me and after a particularly excoriating interview with Stephen, Thaddeus and Vida took me back to Thaddeus's suite. I felt as if I'd been run through a mangle. My memory was not good enough to please them, and we found, Giancarlo and I snarling at each other in a duet of frustration, that the intervening months of madness had rather violently colored and reinterpreted what I did remember of what Malkar had done. They had all been shouting questions at me by the end, and I had waited and waited, shaking with tension, for someone to ask about the physical aspects of Malkar's ritual, but no one did. They were Cabalines; the right questions simply did not occur to them, and although the truth beat at the inside of my skull, I could not say it. I didn't know why: shame, fear, some twisted kind of pride… a last poisonous legacy from Malkar. In Arabel, even before he began teaching me to do magic, he had forbidden me to tell anyone that we were lovers, just as he had later forbidden me to tell anyone of the magics he worked with my help in that workroom in the Warren. That later injunction I had found myself able to defy, but the older one was stronger. If I let myself think about it, I knew I would be able to remember exactly what Malkar had said he would do to me if I ever told anyone, and even the thought of the memory was enough to make me shudder. If someone had asked, point-blank, maybe I would have been able to say it, but I could no more volunteer the information than I could fly to the moon.
In the halls, trying not to watch the courtiers and servants and wizards as they saw me, recognized me, and tried to pretend they weren't staring—too conscious of my ill-fitting clothes and my ragged hair to enjoy their confusion—I said to Thaddeus, "So, how long have you been back in Mélusine?"
"A couple of weeks. They called us all back when the Virtu was broken." He had not changed in the five years he had been gone; he was still Thaddeus, his eyes dark and bright in his swarthy pirate's face. His hair stayed in a queue more tidily than mine had, even before Brother Orphelin hacked it off. I realized I had a headache, a slow dull pounding that had been there for hours.
"And he wasted no time in finding a new crusade," Vida said, "You should be grateful to him, Felix. First he wouldn't rest until
he'd
seen you, and then he wouldn't rest until
I'd
seen you."
Thaddeus waved this away. "The story didn't make any sense. You'd broken the Virtu and then gone to Malkar of all people for protection? It sounded backward, and I couldn't help noticing who'd gotten all the benefit."
"Malkar," I said. "Do they know… ?"
"He's in the Bastion," Vida said. "General Mercator seems to think highly of him."
"Wonderful," I said.
"That would have made me suspicious, if nothing else," Thaddeus said. He said it lightly, as if it were a joke, but I knew it wasn't. Thaddeus hated the Bastion, hated it with a raw, pure fury that itself bordered on madness. One reason the Curia had sent him to Aurelias was to get him away from the Bastion, in the hopes that time might erode the sharp edges of that passion. I wondered if it had.
"The other person in your suite," I said. "Who… ?"
"Oh," said Thaddeus. "Gideon."
"Gideon?"
"Gideon Thraxios. I knew him in the Bastion."
"Another defector?"
"Yes. He won't bother you."
I wanted to say that wasn't what worried me, but my head hurt, and the colors spiking around Thaddeus told me that this was not a subject he wanted to discuss. Unless and until the Curia decided to revoke their interdict, I was dependent on Thaddeus's goodwill; I knew that at this stage in the proceedings it would take no more than a word from him to send me back to St. Crellifer's, or back to the crushing darkness in the Verpine.
"You know what Robert said when Giancarlo asked him why he hadn't noticed Malkar's compulsion?" Thaddeus said, breaking in on the downward, anxious spiral of my thoughts. That must have been what Thaddeus and Giancarlo had been talking about after the meeting was officially dismissed, while Stephen was forbidding me to see Shannon again,
at least until this matter is satisfactorily cleared up.
"When did Giancarlo ask him?" Vida said.
"This morning, after he'd seen it for himself. And Robert said he thought it was the interdict."
Vida said, "Surely even
Robert
isn't that stupid!"
"Maybe," said Thaddeus, "maybe not. But nobody's going to be able to prove it."
"And Robert weasels free again," I said dully.
"Felix?" said Vida. "Are you all right?"
"I'm just very tired." I didn't want to talk about the headache or the colors surrounding them both, or the way that Vida, walking on my right, was a blur to begin with, and then kept dissolving into shadows. I was not cured, I realized; I was coherent now, but not necessarily sane.
The stranger, Gideon Thraxios, was sitting by the fireplace in Thaddeus's main room, curled up in one of the big chairs like a cat and reading a treatise on water magic from Imar Eiren. He stood up when we came in; either his manners were naturally very good or Thaddeus made him nervous. Or I did.
Now that he wasn't just a green shape in a cloud of fog, he proved to be a man of medium height, slenderly built, with the bronze tone to his skin that indicated he came from the eastern end of the Kekropian Empire. His hair was dark and curly, escaping from his queue in wild tendrils; his eyes were dark and startlingly intelligent, shining like beacons out of an otherwise undistinguished, snub-nosed face. He was older than I, but I wasn't sure by how much.
The colors between him and Thaddeus were a brooding brownish red shot through with lightning-white, belying the seeming friendliness of the way Thaddeus told Gideon about the Curia meeting and introduced him to me. Reintroduced, I corrected myself, but Gideon and I shook hands anyway. I decided his manners were just naturally good.
I could feel the conversation moving, like a boat tugged by a strong Current, toward the subject of Malkar and my madness—things I did not want to talk about any more today. The knock at the door was a reprieve, and I welcomed it.
The crimp in Thaddeus's eyebrows suggested he was not so pleased, but he opened the door.
"My lord?" he said. "What—"
"Felix? I'm sorry, Lord Thaddeus, but I must—"
"Shannon?" A moment's ice-locked paralysis, and then I was at the doorway with no memory of the intervening yards of carpet, and his arms were around me. "
Shannon
!"