"Who are Troians?"
"Troians are the people who once ruled half this continent."
"Oh."
We had reached the path leading to the Linlowing Bridge; Gideon dropped back to walk beside me.
"They are tall, red-haired, pale-skinned. They have yellow eyes." Like one of mine, the good one. "Oh," I said again.
"The Empire still trades with them, but, as I said, I thought they never went inland. There are still, er, folk-beliefs."
"Rather," I said. I could imagine what kind of folk-beliefs he was talking about. Keeper always said my hair was unlucky, and beat me for it Lorenzo scoffed at superstition; he saw my hair as a draw and he made it be one. But the men who chose me were the men who wanted the illusion of danger in their cheap transactions with a cheap teenage whore. Malkar too, had traded on my hair with his story about Caloxan nobility, although apparently that was as much a lie as everything else.
Gideon broke in urgently on my thoughts: "When was this bridge built? Do you know?"
"No."
The Linlowing River was a tributary of the Sim; as it flowed through Hermione it was wider than the Sim, but slower. The Linlowing Bridge stood on five pairs of pylons; each pylon was carved in the shape of a man kneeling in the river, so that the bridge appeared to be supported on their shoulders. They stared out with blank, solemn faces, softened by time and water and wind, five looking east and five looking west. Gideon was entranced.
"It looks like Cymellunar work." As we reached the first pair of kneeling men, he leaned out over the parapet in a way that made me nervous. "Which would mean it's ruinously old. Do you know anything about it at all?"
"No."
"There will be someone to ask," he said cheerfully and, much to my relief, straightened up. Then he frowned at me. "You've gone white as a sheet. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
He looked at the statue's head, then back at me. "Heights?"
"No. Really, I'm fine." I started walking, because it wasn't the height that frightened me, it was the water underneath. Obligingly, he followed me; even more obligingly, he didn't press for an answer.
Hermione no longer extended to the south bank of the Linlowing, if ever it had. The great bridge served primarily as an awe-inspiring entrance to the town for traders from the south, and as the town's connection to the farmlands that supported it. The only land south of the Linlowing that belonged to the city was the expanse of the Municipal Gardens. They were vast, rigidly landscaped and bleak with winter. The entrance price was two centimes; Gideon paid, and we went through the gate. Gideon struck up a conversation about the Linlowing Bridge with the gatekeeper, who must have been both lonely and bored at this time of year, and because no one forbade me, I wandered away along the carefully tended path.
Everything was laid out in a strict geometry, exactingly and mercilessly pruned. The fountains were all dry and silent, prisoners of winter. I walked through a topiary—where the woven, leafless shapes made my eyes hurt—climbed a narrow staircase and found myself in a gazebo, looking north at Hermione proper. Clearly the gardens' designers had intended this as a splendid vista, evoking civic pride in the garden-strolling burghers. I remembered standing on the Crown of Nails, looking out across Mélusine, and to me Hermione seemed petty and dull.
But from here, I could see the wizard's tower. It looked as I knew it did, short, squat, the windows boarded up, and empty patches in its red-tile roof. The tower in my dreams was the creation of my madness, the black looming shape of my fear—nothing to do with the real world. "You are mad, Felix Harrowgate," I said to myself and turned to go. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the black shadow of the tower stretching across the river, reaching for me. I spun back, and there were no shadows at all. It was almost noon, and in any event, a three-story tower two blocks in from the Linlowing's northern bank could not cast a shadow that could reach me here. I knew that. But now I was afraid to take my eyes off the tower. And the longer I looked at it, the more it seemed to me that the real tower
was
the one in my dreams, that this dilapidated structure was only a façade. And if that was true, then the rest of my dream was true, and there was something in that tower, something terrible. I had to make Thaddeus believe me; I knew that, and at the same time, I knew he never would.
"Felix?" Gideon's voice, and I almost broke my neck getting down the stairs again. Whether I could make anyone believe me or not, I knew I could never be convincing with the tower where I could see it. And only then, back down on the path and trotting toward Gideon, did I think to wonder if maybe Gideon would believe me.
"Thaddeus would flay me if I lost you," he said. "Let's go look at the hedge maze."
"Do you like mazes?" I said, more or less at random. I was wondering how I could tell him about my dreams without sounding like… well, like a madman.
Gideon started talking about the theory and practice of mazes—mazes made of hedges, mazes made of stones, mazes inlaid in the floors of temples in the Myrian Mountains, a maze made of mirrors that was said to have stood in Cymellune before it sank. He mentioned the string mazes of the wizards of Lunness Point and the dance-made mazes of the far north. He told me about the
De Doctrina Labyrinthorum
written by Ephreal Sand, who had gone mad and spent his last years drawing insoluble mazes, first with pen and paper, then with a stick in the dirt, then with his finger in the dust, and finally in his own blood on the walls and floors and windows.
At that point, Gideon broke off abruptly and said, "I beg your pardon."
"Why?"
"I have a tendency—I've been told about it before, I assure you—to well, to go on rather about things that interest me. I must be boring you to tears."
"I'm not bored," I said, because I wasn't.
"Then you are unique." His momentary smile lit up his face like a flash of sunlight through clouds. "But I really have done about three people's share of the talking, and I ought to let you get a word in edgewise."
"There's the maze," I said.
"Oh good. The gatekeeper's description has not led me to hope for great things, but perhaps I shall be pleasantly surprised."
The hedges of the maze were only about shoulder high on Gideon, which was some comfort. At least we could not become permanently lost. "That tower marks the center," Gideon said. I followed the direction of his pointing finger rather wildly, but the wizard's tower was not lying in wait for me. The center of the maze had a square wooden openwork tower, with a roofed platform at the top. "If we climb up there, we'll be able to see our way back."
We started into the maze. Gideon led me confidently, muttering things under his breath about various books he'd read, and within ten minutes we had come to the wooden tower.
"As I expected," he said. "Shall we climb up?"
"All right," I said.
Five short flights of stairs brought us to the platform. Gideon leaned on the railing, looking out. "It's a nice maze," he said, "but child-simple."
I leaned beside him, looking at the neat square symmetry of the lines of the hedge. And I said, before I was fully sure I was going to, "Do you believe in dreams?"
"How do you mean?" he said, tilting his head to look at me.
"Do you think they can… that they can tell the truth?"
After a meditative silence, Gideon said, "As I recall, the Mirador teaches that they cannot."
"Yes. I mean, no. I…" I trailed off in confusion.
Gideon said mildly, "I've never liked Cabaline dogma."
"But you… that is…"
"Yes, I hate the Bastion, but that's more personal than doctrinal. I
admire
the Cabal quite dreadfully, mind you, but I think they were, in some ways, misguided. It is foolish to say, simply because one does not wish to have any truck with necromancers, that the magic that makes necromancy possible is evil."
"But dreams don't—"
"Have anything to do with necromancy? You say so only because you have not been properly taught. What do
you
believe about dreams?"
"I don't know. I know my dreams are strange. They always have been. There was an old man—he's dead now, so I guess it can't hurt to tell you about him. He taught me how to control my dreams a little, to keep the nightmares away, and I didn't think about them much for a long time. But they've gotten worse, since… since the Curia put me under interdict. More… more true, somehow."
"Well, with your magic out of the way," Gideon said, but he wasn't talking to me, not really; the look in his eyes was one I'd come to recognize, that distant but not at all dreamy expression that meant he was on the track of an errant splinter of thaumaturgical theory.
"But I thought you said my dreams were like necromancy."
"Good gracious, no. I said they were related to necromancy, and so they are. True dreams of the sort you're talking about exist in the same world of the spirit as ghosts and revenants—and the forces of divination, for that matter. But dreaming isn't magic, although for some people it can come close."
"You mean like what Malkar did?"
"No!" Gideon said, vehemently enough to make me flinch. "What Malkar did is something completely different. It's called a sending, and it is one of the nastiest pieces of magic the Bastion has failed to outlaw. Sendings use
other
people's dreams, not the caster's own. But that's not what you're talking about, if I'm understanding you correctly."
"I don't think I've ever used anyone else's dreams."
"You'd know if you had.
Do
you dream about the future?"
"Iosephinus—that was the old man's name, the one who helped me. Iosephinus Pompey—he said I could, but it was better not to. He said it never helped. I just… I dream about real things. I think."
"What do you mean?"
It was the opening I had been both hoping for and dreading, "The tower," I said, all in a rush. "There's something awful in the tower and tried to tell Thaddeus, but he won't listen. Gideon, can you talk to him?" I saw the refusal before Gideon said anything; the colors around him darkened and furled like wings.
"Felix, I'm sorry. I can't. He won't listen
to
me, and—I know it's hard to believe, but truly—I would only make things worse."
"It's all right. I didn't mean…"
"No, I am sorry. But it probably isn't as bad as you think. I don't know very much about the history of this wizard's tower, but probably you're just feeling… echoes of the past."
"It's there. It's there now. It's watching us."
"Are you sure," Gideon said very gently, "that it isn't just a nightmare?"
Yes, I thought. "No," I said aloud. "Maybe you're right."
An uncomfortable pause, and he said, "We'd better be getting back."
"Yes," I said hopelessly and followed him back through the maze.
The others didn't return to the Chimera Among the Roses until nearly sundown, and they were tremendously pleased with themselves. They had extracted the keys from the Mayor, and a promise that repairs to the tower would be undertaken as soon as the wizards told him what they needed. was almost sorry for the Mayor of Hermione.
But the longer I sat and listened to the wizards making plans, the worse the feeling got, the residue of my dreams, the knowledge that the thing in the tower was hungry and waiting and powerful. And finally, although I knew it would do no good, although Thaddeus had already laughed at me, I said, "Thaddeus, can I talk to you?" I knew no one else would listen to me; the other wizards all avoided me as if I were a leper—except for Vicky, whose mind was as inflexible as an iron rod—and Shannon was still looking through me as if I were not there. The guard lieutenant was faith fully following Shannon's lead, and the guards were all copying their lieutenant. If Gideon would not help me, there was only Thaddeus left.
His eyebrows went up, a slow, deliberate display of incredulity, a pause long enough to attract the others' attention and make them aware of the burdens he labored under. Then he said, "Very well. I assume you mean privately?"
I nodded, embarrassment choking me, and followed him up to the bedroom we shared with Gideon. It was already going wrong; the situation was already twisting out of true. But the only way out was to go forward.
"Well?"
"The tower," I said. "Thaddeus, there's something there. I can feel it, and it's dangerous. You have to—"
"Oh, for the love of God.
This
again? Felix, it's a building. It's been deserted for two centuries. There's nothing there but pigeons and spiders and rats."
"Can't you feel it at all?" I said, although I knew it was the wrong thing even as I said it. Thaddeus was only a middling-powerful wizard, and it had always been a sore point with him.
"No," he said, and I saw red sparking around him. "Because there's nothing there. Look. I'll prove it to you. We'll go there tomorrow, you and I. Lady Victoria wants someone to have a look at the roof, and you can see that there's nothing there but cobwebs. All right?"
"Yes."
"And don't flinch like that!"
"Yes, Thaddeus," I said, but he was already halfway back down the stairs.
I followed him as far as the doorway, where I heard him say, "Felix thinks there's a bogeyman in the tower," and I turned and fled back up to he bedroom. No one would come to look for me; no one cared. I shut my eyes, so that I could pretend I wasn't crying, and eventually I fell asleep.
The thing in the tower watched me all night long.
Thaddeus was in a dangerously good mood in the morning, the sort that was bright and sparkling because it was made of shards of glass. I said nothing, even when he made all the guards laugh by saying we were off to hunt my nightmares. He could still change his mind if I gave him a reason.