"Would you believe moral support?"
"No."
"Pity, since it would even be true, more or less. I'm outnumbered, to put it bluntly, and that can be bad news with Cabalines. They tend to think in packs."
"And what good are me and Bernard gonna be if they get ugly?"
"No, no, you've missed the point. You're there to
keep
them from getting ugly."
"I don't get it."
"Don't worry. Just believe me when I say that the possibilities for unpleasantness will become drastically reduced if there are a few annemer in the room."
"Okay. You're the boss."
"How right you are. Shall we?"
"Sure," I said and followed him out of his and Bernard's room and down the stairs and out, to where Bernard had decided to skip the whole argument and just hire a mule.
"Bernard," Mavortian said, like he was going to go on and have the argument anyway, and I just couldn't put up with it no more.
"It's a mule," I said. "What's the big deal?"
"Bernard knows how I feel about this sort of thing," he said, and he was glaring at Bernard like he was making notes for the dissection later.
"What sort of thing? Not having blisters on your hands the size of St. Millefleur? Being on time in front of
them other hocuses? What?"
Now he'd turned the glare on me. "Look," I said, "you want to pretend you ain't a crip, it's fine with me. But I don't get it."
"Ah, the refreshing directness of street filth," Mavortian said, as nastily as he could. "Fine. I'll ride the damn mule."
Bernard didn't say nothing while he was getting Mavortian settled on the mule, but he did give me kind of a wink where Mavortian couldn't see, and I followed them and the mule through Hermione mostly thinking how weird it was that me and Bernard had ended up on the same side of anything.
This tower that everybody was so excited over wasn't much to look at. The guys from the Mirador were already there, standing around the door and looking like a funeral. Felix and Mr. Thraxios were standing a little apart from everybody else, and the other Kekropian looked like he was trying to put a hex on both of them. Lord Shannon Teverius looked like a fairy-tale prince who'd got himself in the wrong story. I wondered if they'd brought him for the same reason Mavortian had insisted on bringing Bernard and me. Lady Victoria was arguing with one of the other lady hocuses, and the rest of them looked like they were waiting for the sanger-man. And from the way they looked at Mavortian when he got down off the mule, they thought he was it.
Powers and saints, I thought, today's just going to go on getting better and better, ain't it?
And that's when the little squad of soldiers came out from behind the tower.
I realized in time they were heading for Lord Shannon, not for me, and I didn't bolt. Maybe Felix hadn't betrayed me after all. I looked at him, and he was staring at Mavortian, and I thought maybe I was okay. But you'll understand that I was hanging back a little.
I was specially not-happy when the hocuses decided that the guards should stay down here, outside, and Mavortian wouldn't let me stay, too. But he only knew half of why the Mirador made me twitchy, and the half he knew wasn't the
really
bad half. And all my instincts were against picking a fight in front of people who weren't friends and couldn't be trusted. So I followed the hocuses into the tower.
It was spooky. Not spooky like the Boneprince, not exactly, but I got some of the same feel. And there was no dust and no cobwebs, and even with the broken window, there weren't no birds' nests or nothing. And it didn't smell like an old building. That hit me about halfway up the stairs, and I almost did turn around and bail, even if it meant I had to sit and dice With the Protectorate Guard the rest of the day. 'Cause, see, I'd spent a lot of time in old buildings, and I knew how they smelled. Dust and water, and air that ain't nobody been breathing for a septad or six. And this tower didn't smell like that at all. It didn't smell like anything. When I came up into the room at the top of the stairs, I caught like a hint of something sweet, but it was gone before I was even sure it was really there.
The hocuses went over to the broken window, dragging Felix with them, although he was looking really white around the eyes, like
he
was wanting to bail in the worst possible way. Me and Bernard stayed right by the stairs, and Lord Shannon sort of wandered off, so he wasn't getting in his sister's way, but he wasn't hanging out with us street filth either.
"So," Bernard said, "are you enjoying the shit out of this or what?"
"Oh yeah."
"Yeah. Me too."
Lord Shannon gave us this look like he'd found a dead rat under his bed, and moved farther away.
Me and Bernard were both looking around like we expected something to jump out at us, even though I ain't never been in a room with less hiding places. But it felt like a trap. I kept thinking about them doors we'd passed on the way up and how we didn't know what was behind them, and any monster or anything with the sense to just lay low had us caught like rats, since the only other way out from here was straight down to the paving stones. I mean, I knew that wasn't the kind of monster we were dealing with, but it was how the room
felt
, like we'd just walked into a trap like a bunch of trusting sheep.
The hocuses were arguing now—and I wished I'd thought to make book with Bernard on how long
that
would take—and Lord Shannon was still sort of exploring, looking at the walls and the holes in the roof. He went across to examine this big red circle in the middle of the floor. He crouched down and touched it, straightened up again looking at his fingers-there wasn't no red on them, I could see that from where I was—and started to step into the circle.
"Shannon, don't!"
I know everybody in the room didn't really stop breathing at once, but that was what it felt like. Felix was absolutely as white as chalk, and I didn't know how good an actor you'd have to be to fake that note of panic, but I didn't think he was that good. I couldn't see the look Lord Shannon was giving him, but I guess he didn't think Felix was acting either, 'cause after a moment he nodded and stepped back.
He was real stiff about it, like it pissed him off to be doing anything Felix said. I remembered all at once, out of nowhere, that they'd been lovers before the Virtu got broken. Looked like that was over and then some.
"The longer we argue," Mavortian said loudly, over one of the hocuses whose name I didn't know, "the more pointless our presence here becomes. Let us perform the spell and argue about the theory later."
"Hear, hear," said one of the lady hocuses, the sensible-looking one, like you could have a conversation with her—if you were crazy enough to be talking to a hocus in the first place.
"I agree," said Lady Victoria. "Bickering is futile. Come."
The hocuses moved over to the red circle. Felix came across the room to stand by me and Bernard, though I didn't think it was because he wanted our company. He looked scared and kind of sick.
"You okay?" I said.
"Fine," he said, but not like he meant it. I was starting to think it would be a good idea for somebody to pin him down and find out what it was he really meant when he said "fine," but this wasn't the time for it, and I wasn't sure I was the right person anyway. I was still wondering how I felt about having a brother who was a hocus and crazy with it and maybe not a very nice guy besides.
The hocuses made a circle around the red circle—and I noticed they were all being real careful not to step inside it—and then they started chanting in this language I didn't know and didn't want to. It sounded like the same shit Vey Coruscant had been rattling off in the Boneprince, and that wasn't making me feel no better about the whole thing.
They went on for a while—I don't know how long exactly, but it felt like forever—and just when I had decided nothing was going to happen, something did. It wasn't nothing big, but I realized that the smell I'd noticed when we came in was getting stronger and ranker. I could see in between two of the hocuses that there was something clouding up in the circle, like somebody'd breathed on a windowpane. It wasn't an actual shape or nothing, but it was there, and it was watching. I knew that feeling from the Boneprince. The thing in the circle, the fantôme, was watching and hating, and I could feel it looking for an opening, like a guy in a knife fight waiting for the other guy to let his guard down.
Me and Bernard and Felix and Lord Shannon were all clumped by the stairs now, and the hocuses were chanting louder. I hoped whatever it was they were doing was working, because if that thing got free, I didn't think there was anything short of flying that could get us down the stairs fast enough to get away from it.
Then, over the hocuses' chanting, Mavortian shouted something, five words like the hammer of doom. The thing in the circle seemed to pull in on itself. The hocuses kept chanting, and Mavortian shouted his words again. I could feel the fantôme screaming in the bones of my skull. Mavortian shouted a third time, my ears popped, and the fantôme was gone.
It really was. You could tell by the way the room felt. It was just a room again. I could feel the breeze from the broken window.
I glanced at the others. Lord Shannon was already heading for Lady Victoria. Bernard was staring at Mavortian, looking grumpy like always. Felix's face had gone all stiff, like there was something he was trying real hard to keep from showing on it.
One of the hocuses said, "Is it gone?"
"Yes," said Mr. Thraxios. "We should do something about this circle, but the fantôme is gone."
"I know a number of good ritual cleansings," said the plump lady hocus. "What do you think will be most effective?"
They were just getting into it when I heard the door open at the bottom of the stairs. Me and Bernard looked at each other and moved away from the stairs. Felix came with us, but he still had that funny look on his face, and I didn't feel like it was a good time to try talking to him.
There was more than one person coming up the stairs—three or four from the sound of it, but the echoes were weird. I wondered if I should say anything, but whoever it was had got past all them guards with no fuss so probably wasn't a big threat—or was the sort of thing a warning wouldn't help with. And the hocuses were arguing so that I figured they wouldn't pay me no mind anyways.
Out of the blue, Felix said to the hocuses, "Don't use garlic. It'll only make your eyes water."
Everybody got real quiet for a second, all of us staring at him, and the people on the stairs rounded the last turn and came up into the room.
And that's when every bone in my body started trying to twist into a different shape, and my blood started burning, and my brain tried to crawl out my eyes and ears and nose. It was purely on instinct that I got past the guy standing at the head of the stairs and a personal miracle that I didn't fall down the entire staircase from top to bottom. But I knew what was happening, and I wasn't going to die with all them hocuses watching.
Felix
"Who was that?" said Stephen Teverius.
A moment's frozen silence. Vicky said, "Stephen?"
"Yes, yes, of course it's me. I need to talk to you. And what are you doing up here anyway?"
"Powers," said Vicky. "Stephen, it's… it's delightful to see you, but what…"
"Don't blither, Vicky," Stephen said, crossing the room. "I have news, and we need to make decisions that can't wait, so…"
I lost the rest of it in the realization of what I'd just witnessed. The thorns around Mildmay lashing into life, the lurching, clumsy way he'd started down the steps—it made no sense, but I knew what I'd seen.
Gideon was standing by the window, watching the other wizards, the expression in his eyes thoughtful but otherwise unreadable. I was amazed, peripherally, that I could see him so clearly, since Stephen was shrouded with the mantle of the bear, and I saw other, stranger things out of the corners of my eyes. But Gideon was clear to me, and I was as grateful as I was surprised.
I went up to him. "Gideon?"
"Felix," he said, politely but without warmth.
"I don't want… it's not about me. Do you think you can tell the Fres-sandran wizard—"
"Von Heber."
"Von Heber. Do you think you can tell him he should go and find Mildmay right now?"
Gideon's eyebrows went up. "Why?"
"Because… because I think he's in trouble. And I don't think the others should know. Please?"
He gave me a narrow, green look.
"It may be extremely urgent," I said. "Gideon,
please
."
"All right," he said. I watched as he went over to the Fressandran wizard, touched his sleeve, said something in his ear. They had a quick, almost silent exchange, and then Gideon came back to me, the Fressandran limping behind him.
"Messire von Heber would appreciate it if you would explain what's going on," Gideon said.
"I can't," I said. "But… but Mildmay may be dying."
"Of
what
?" said the Fressandran.
"A curse.
The
curse. The Mirador's curse. But I don't know. I don't know how—"
"No
wonder
he said he wouldn't go anywhere near the Mirador. Are you sure?"
"No. Not really. But I think—"
"No, you're right. Find him first, work out the details later. Messire Thraxios, do you think you can spin a story…"
"To cover our hasty departure?" Gideon thought a moment. "Yes. We're going to consult about cleansing spells. I don't think they'll ask why Felix is tagging along."
Resentment flared and died at the contempt in the verb. I deserved nothing better. Gideon went and
caught Chloë Wicker, who was the best of his limited range of options. Von Heber crossed to the stairs, where his blond hireling was waiting, arms folded and eyebrows up. I followed him.