I did not tell him that Malkar had once used a spell to make me deaf, dumb and blind for over an hour because I had refused to answer one of his questions, what would be the point? I'm sure Sherbourne remembers it word for word.
Thaddeus and Vida glanced at each other, a conversational glance, the look that lovers who are also friends can share. I turned away, memories of Shannon digging into me like shards of glass. And Gideon said, "Felix?"
I looked at him. He had put his pen down. He said, in his perfect, though heavily accented, Marathine, "I fancy a walk. Would you care to come? I have a pair of slippers you can borrow."
I felt my face redden. But I wanted very badly to get away from Thaddeus and Vida and the things they thought they knew about me, and he was offering me an excuse. So I said, "Thank you," more or less to the floor, and Gideon went and fetched me a pair of scuffed carpet slippers.
"Have fun," Thaddeus said, very dryly, as we left, and I caught Gideon in a grimace of exasperation.
We walked in silence for a while. Gideon was a stranger to the Mirador, and I knew I should be exerting myself to identify landmarks and important rooms, to share the odd bits of history that I could remember. But my throat felt like it was full of ashes, and my eyes were burning, and it was all I could do to keep from the even greater rudeness of forcing Gideon to pretend not to notice that I was crying.
We came to an intersection, where a hallway hung with enameled scales, like the sides of a sea serpent or a dragon, met the Wooden Hallway, and Gideon said, "Where do you like to go?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"You are an inhabitant of the Mirador. Which parts of it do you
like
?"
"Oh," I said. "The battlements."
"Then let us go there."
"All right." I hadn't gone up to the battlements since I had been returned to the Mirador.
There were staircases to the battlements scattered throughout the fabric of the Mirador, though most of them were in the Vielle Roche, leading to the Crown of Nails, the highest ring of merlons. We climbed up, around and around in a dizzying corkscrew, until we came out the narrow door at the top into a night cold and clear. I only then remembered that it was Petrop and should have been raining, looked at the stars sailing serene and distant above my head, and for the first time since the beginning of
The Singer's
Tragedy
, felt my heart unclench just slightly.
Gideon said, "I have never been much of an astronomer. Where is the Minotaur?"
"There." I pointed. "That red star is Oculus, and see? There's his horns, and his shoulders."
"And his feet. Thank you." I could just make out Gideon's profile, he too, gazed up at the stars.
After a while, he laughed. "Consider the stars. Among them are no passions, no wars. They know neither love nor hatred. Did man but emulate the stars, would not his soul become clear and radiant, as they are? But man's spirit draws him like a moth to the ephemera of this world, and in their heat he is consumed entire."
"Is that a quotation from something?"
"The
Inquiries into the World's Heart
of Nahum Westerley. An atheist philosopher from Lunness Point."
"Oh. Do you read much philosophy?"
"I read everything," he said, perhaps a shade ruefully. "Since I have come here, I feel like I am drowning in a wealth of books. But the
Inquiries into the World's Heart
is an old friend. I had to leave my copy in the Bastion, where it has doubtless been burned, but I am told there are shops here—in the 'Cheaps' if I understood correctly—where I can buy another."
"You can buy almost anything in the Cheaps. You must have left the Bastion in a dreadful hurry."
"Oh yes. One doesn't sit on a decision like that. Secrets in the Bastion do not stay so for long."
"Why did you leave?"
"Because I had to."
It was gently delivered, but a rebuff nonetheless. I wanted to ask him why he and Thaddeus hated each other and why—that being so—he had not yet left Thaddeus's suite, but I did not have the courage, and he would not have answered me anyway.
I said, "I don't know much about philosophy. My education was almost entirely… pragmatic."
"It is either a consolation or the heaviest possible curse. I have never been able to decide which."
We watched the stars in silence for a few minutes longer before Gideon remarked that it was cold, and we went back in.
All night long, I dreamed that Malkar was searching for me, and all night long, I hid from him.
Mildmay
Mr. von Heber was dealing out his cards again.
I'd got used to watching him do it while I was sick, same way I got used to listening to him and Bernard fight. At first, I'd thought he was playing solitaire, like I did when I didn't have nothing better to do with my hands, but when I got so as I could sit up and see the cards, they weren't ordinary playing cards, and the layout he used was really weird.
So after a while—long enough that I figured if he was a blood-witch or a friend of Vey Coruscant's, I'd already know and most likely be dead—I asked him.
He was sitting at the table, like he'd been when I met him, and the sunlight showed up the lines on his face and the gray starting in his hair. I was guessing he was in his seventh septad, but that was only a guess. He said, "I suppose you would call it fortune-telling."
"Okay. For real fortune-telling or to gull the flats?"
"What?"
"Is it for real?"
"Yes, of course," he said, like I shouldn't've had to ask, and that was all the conversation I could handle right then, and I went back to sleep.
But I'd had plenty of chances to watch him since then. His deck of cards was old, old enough that most of them were missing their corners, and some were creased down the middle, and there was one looked like a dog'd been chewing on it. They were about the right size for playing cards, and I recognized the suits—grails, swords, staves, pentacles—but then there were the other cards, the ones with pictures on them, and there was the fucked-up spiral he laid them out in, and there was the way he'd sit and mutter at them for upwards of an hour with his silver watch fob that didn't have no watch gripped in one hand. He seriously spooked me out sometimes.
I would've liked to ask Bernard about it, but there was no point. He'd get too big a kick out of not telling me. So I just watched, and I wondered what Mr. von Heber's cards said about me that made him so sure he had to have me around. Whatever it was, it was the closest thing I'd had to a future since 11 Messidor, and I was even kind of getting to the point that I was glad of it.
He said now, sweeping the cards together, "I've done fortune-telling for money in other cities, but Bernard thinks it would be a bad idea in Mélusine right now."
"Bernard's right," I said.
"Would I get arrested?"
"Dunno. You might."
"That makes things rather unpleasant. You see, that's half our income gone."
"Oh. And I been a drain, ain't I?"
"I don't begrudge it, but it does mean that we don't have the money to hire you."
"That's okay. I mean, I owe you. You got stuff you want done, I'll do it."
"Well," he said, "that's the trouble. I don't."
"You want me to stay, but you got nothing for me to do."
"I will! I just don't yet."
"Then why don't you come find me when you need me?"
"It's not that easy. We don't know this city well, and I may need you… without much warning."
He hadn't acted like he was looking for a mollytoy, but it'd been worrying me some, and now was worrying me more. I said, "If'n you're thinking of making a pass, spare your breath. I ain't a whore."
I think it took him a minute to understand me. I saw when he got it, though. His face flushed brick-red, and he said, "Nothing of the sort, I assure you."
"Then what d'you
want
?" In some ways, me and Bernard were an awful lot alike, and it was driving me nuts just as much as him that Mr. von Heber wouldn't say what it was he wanted me to do.
"I don't know yet."
"Why the fuck not? You said you do fortune-telling."
"No form of divination provides precise instructions. I can't read the future in my cards the way I can read about history in a book."
"Why not?" I realized as I said it how it sounded and went on in a hurry, "I mean, I believe you and everything, I just…"
"Want to know," he said. He was giving me a weird look. Then he shook his head like a man trying to get rid of a fly, and said, "Well, there's reason you shouldn't be told. Sit down."
I'd been standing near the door, half-thinking about walking out and not coming back. The only thing stopping me was I knew I didn't have nowhere better to go. So I went over to the table and sat down.
He'd been shuffling his cards while he talked to me—it was a habit he had like some people crack their knuckles, and he had a flashy box shuffle to go with it—and now he swept his hand across the table and let the cards spread themselves out in a fan, facedown.
"Nice trick," I said, and he grinned.
"Don't pretend you couldn't do it."
"Still a nice trick."
"Oh, I'm good at card tricks," he said, kind of gloomy, like he wished he wasn't. "But here. These are the Sibylline." He swept his hand back the other way, and now the fan of cards was faceup.
"And they tell you the future."
"Yes and no." He folded his hands on the table behind the fan of cards. "They show me the patterns the future is likely to take. They are symbols, not facts. For instance, turning up the Death card—" He edged it out of the fan with one finger, a card painted black with Cade-Cholera's sigil picked out in gold. "The Death card literally means death, but in a reading it may mean stagnation or destruction or the necessity of speaking to a dead person. You see?"
"Sort of," I said. "I mean, I guess so."
"They show the pattern of the future, not the events. And therefore, they show me that you are important to my plans, but they do not show me how."
"They do? How do you find me in them cards?"
"when we arrived in Mélusine, I did readings searching for the patterns that I could trace to reach my goal. And this card"—he slid it out of the ten to lie next to Cade-Cholera's card—"kept showing up. Over and over."
It was one of the picture cards, showing a youngish guy surrounded by swords, all pointing in at him.
"The Knight of Swords," Mr. von Heber said. "He kept showing up, and in ways that indicated he was a person and not one of the more symbolic meanings. So I did a calling, using that card, and you walked through my door. I did clarifications every way I could think of while you were sick, and they all agreed: you were the Knight of Swords, and my plans depended on you." He smiled at me, but it wasn't no nice smile. "You tell me why."
"Fuck. I don't know. But… I mean, can't your cards make mistakes"?
"No," he said, so flatly that I jumped. He gave me maybe a quarter smile's worth of apology. "I can make mistakes in reading them, although that doesn't happen very often anymore, but I assure you, this is not a mistake."
"Kethe," I said and rubbed at the back of my neck. "That ain't a nice feeling."
"No, I suppose it isn't."
"It don't bother you?"
He shrugged a little, swept up the cards, and started shuffling them again. "It's my magic," he said. "I trust it."
I don't trust magic. But I didn't say it. I sat and watched him lay out his cards. He didn't talk to me while he did it, but I saw them two cards over and over again, until Bernard came back and Mr. von Heber put the cards away: Death and the Knight of Swords.
Felix
The yellow-eyed man stands in Thaddeus's sitting room, at the edge of the candlelight.
"Hello, Felix. Do you still need my help?"
"Yes. But I thought you couldn't reach me here in the Mirador."
"I found a way around that," he says carelessly. "Will you trust me."
"Yes," I say, because I have no choice, because I know I am still mad. "What will you do?"
He starts toward me, where I am standing in the doorway of the room I sleep in, moving out of the light entirely. "You must trust me," he says "and let me do what I need to. Do you understand?"
"Yes," I say, noting uncertainly that he seems to be larger than he was when I dreamed about him before. And I remember him saying that he could do nothing with the Mirador, although now it seems to have become no more than a trivial problem.
"Give me your hands," he says.
I extend my hands and realize, just as it becomes too late to evade his grasp, that he is wearing Malkar's gold and ruby rings. I try to jerk away, but he is fast, as Malkar is fast, and he traps my fingers. "Come now, my dearest," Malkar's voice says out of the darkness, mocking and brutal, "don't you trust me?"
I make a convulsive effort to pull free of him, to get out of this dream, to break the spell Malkar has already ensnared me in. From what little I know of it—most of that learned from Malkar himself—oneiromancy, even more so than ordinary magic, is predicated on symbolism, and Malkar has centered his symbolic working on our hands: my tattooed hands, symbols of the Mirador as much as of my own sundered magic; his heavy, clever hands, with their rings glowing like blood and fire. His grip hurts me, and I cannot break free.
Hopelessly, I ask, "What are you going to do?"
"I'm so glad you asked, darling." I feel him in my mind, oily and monstrous and laughing. "You see, I assured the General that, using you as a conduit, I could destroy the Mirador. I do not think he has entirely believed me, and it has been very frustrating these past few months, not being able to find you. Where have you
been?"
"St. Crellifer's," I say in a gasp of pain, as he wrenches my hands over so that the tattooed eyes on my palms stare blindly upward.