And I cannot see him.
I wonder if I will be able to see him when he has finished with the woman. I wonder if he will look like Malkar. I don't even realize I have moved until I am out in the corridor. Keeper said I mustn't leave the room, but I can't go back in there. I can't. Nothing Keeper can do to me can be worse than what's happening in there, on that bed I could not sleep on.
But Keeper will be furious. I remember what he did to Fenella when she disobeyed him. I remember how Joline and I held each other afterward, crying, both of us shaking as if we were fevered. I am shaking now.
I can't go back into that room; Keeper will punish me if I stay out here. I can't face the ghost; I can't face Keeper. I wish that I could simply disappear, vanish from this blood-soaked stage like the Necromancer in a pantomime.
And then I realize that I can. There is no one here to stop me or to bear tales. It is dark out; Keeper will not come looking for me in the dark. I have never been that important to him. I can find the Sunling from my dreams, and he will help me.
My shivering lessens. I proceed cautiously down the stairs. The desk clerk is deep in conversation with a young man with the head of a cat, and does not notice me when I leave.
I know where I want to go. I start walking.
Mildmay
There wasn't nobody in Hithe could play Long Tiffany to keep up with me, although a couple of the local goons fancied themselves pretty hot shit. I was careful not to win every game, on account of not wanting somebody laying for me and Felix on the way out of town tomorrow, but I won enough to give us some breathing space the next few days.
Nobody at the table was hard-core enough to want to make a night of it. So round about the septad-night, me and my winnings went upstairs.
Our door was open.
Felix wasn't there.
It felt like somebody'd hollowed me out and replaced all my insides with ice water. It was a minute before I could even start to make sense of what I was seeing.
The bed was all rumpled, but there weren't no signs of a brawl or nothing like that. Felix's shoes and socks were on the floor beside the bed, but that didn't mean nothing. He could keep himself decent, but when he was down the well, little things like shoes and combing his hair didn't happen without I took a hand. And if somebody'd grabbed Felix, they would've found out he was a Cabaline by now, and I would've heard about it. Boy would I ever.
So it looked like Felix probably left on his own two feet and without nobody else to put the idea in his head. Kethe. What the fuck had gotten into him?
But as soon as I asked, I knew the answer, because there was only about one thing in Felix's head these days, and if he'd lit out on his own it was an absolute sure thing that he was heading east.
I said some things, between my teeth and lavish on the details, while I got together Felix's socks, shoes, and coat—which he'd
also
bailed without—and bundled them up, tying the whole thing together with his shoelaces. Then I dropped the bundle out the window. It would get dirty, but that was better than having the desk clerk wondering why I was taking my clothes out for a walk. I would've gone out the same way myself, except that there was no way in Hell I was going to get Felix up that wall, and if I was going to be seen coming in, I'd better be seen leaving.
I figured I'd better lay some groundwork, in case I was bringing Felix back in a state, so I told the desk clerk I was going to go get my brother before he decided to make a night of it, and since that didn't faze him, I figured Felix must have snuck out somehow without him noticing. I went out, circled the building and got my bundle, then went back to the street and headed east. I didn't know how much of a head start he might have but I was betting it wouldn't do him much good regardless.
Hithe had rolled itself up for the night, and I was glad of it. Fewer people out, fewer people to see Felix and wonder what the fuck was wrong with him. He'd been wearing his gloves when I left, and I hadn't seen them anywhere in the room. I was praying that meant he still had them on.
Shouldn't've left him, Milly-Fox. And I knew I shouldn't've, but I still didn't see what else I could've done. I sure as fuck couldn't take him with me. Cardplayers are about the most superstitious guys out there, and they wouldn't have to know he was a hocus or that he was nuts to think I was trying to hex them by bringing him along. One look at his spooky skew eyes and they wouldn't touch any deck of cards I'd had my hands on. And me sitting up there in the room with him wouldn't do nothing for nobody, including the hotel manager.
I have these dreams sometimes where I'm on a job for Keeper, and I'm supposed to have a map and I don't, and I'm supposed to have learned the night patrol's timing and I haven't, and I'm supposed to meet somebody so they'll let me in and I'm late. And I can't remember what it is exactly Keeper wants, and everybody I ask says something different. The kind of dream where you wake up and lay there for a quarter hour before you can believe none of it was real and you ain't going to be stuck in that particular circle of Hell for the rest of your life. Traveling with Felix was turning out to be just like that, only it wasn't a dream.
I headed east pretty steady, casting out north and south every so often because I knew his sense of direction was no good even when he was topside, and I was betting he'd get himself lost pretty quick. It occurred to me after a while that it'd be funny if he'd not even got going the right way to start with, so I was looking for him east and he was going west. Fucking hilarious, Milly-Fox.
But before I really got into the second-guessing—and there ain't no way to fuck yourself up faster—I heard somebody fall over something up ahead of me. I gave myself good odds it was Felix and waited 'til he came to the next streetlamp to be sure.
It was him, all bones and red hair. I covered the ground between us faster than I'd ever covered a comparable stretch in my life, swung him around by his shoulder, and slammed him up against the wall.
"What the fuck are you doing?" I said, just barely remembering not to shout, and it was only when I saw how wide his eyes were and felt how bad he was shaking that I realized how pissed off I was and how scared, and how stupidly fucking glad I was to see that he was okay—still in one piece, I mean, because otherwise he was looking fairly well fucked over.
"Felix?"
And he said in this tiny, tiny whisper, "Please don't hurt me."
Kethe. I can't even describe what that felt like. I mean, if I could've crawled into a hole and had somebody wall me up like an anchorite right then and there, I would've done it. Not even paused for breath. But there wasn't no hole handy, and I don't suppose it would've helped Felix any if there had been.
He was still shaking, and he was about to start crying—I could see it coming, and it wasn't nothing I wanted to deal with out there in the middle of Hithe. And I was feeling like a total asshole anyway.
I eased up my grip on him—didn't let go because it seemed like when he was down the well he could only hear me when I was touching him—and said, "I'm not gonna hurt you. Promise. But what are you doing?"
He shook his head in a way I'd learned to know and hate. It didn't mean he didn't want to answer—that was how Mavortian always took it, him and his endless questions about fucking Beaumont Livy, and, powers, but it pissed him off. It just meant Felix couldn't get to the answer, like the words weren't there for the thing he needed to say.
"Were you going east? To this garden you're after?"
He nodded, and I thought he was grateful.
"Do you know it's the middle of the night?"
I hadn't meant that to come out quite as snarky as the look on his face said it did. But he nodded again and swallowed hard.
"Good. You're doing good." And I felt like even more of an asshole, seeing how much he lit up just 'cause I said something nice to him. "But what set you off?"
He swallowed again, and I could see how hard he was working to keep his shit at least sort of together. And he managed to get out, "In the room."
"In the room? What?"
But he couldn't say it. He was too scared. I knew some of that was me, but I thought some of it wasn't. Something had happened.
"Did somebody hurt you?" I said, so fast and hard that I wound him up all over again.
"Hey, it's okay," I said, and he gulped and rubbed at his eyes. "I ain't mad at you, I promise. But if somebody hurt you, I'm gonna do macramé with his finger bones. Is that what happened? Did somebody hurt you?"
He shook his head, and I racked my brain for another idea. "Did somebody come in the room at all? Say something to you?"
He shook his head to each question, and his spooky eyes were all wide and staring at me like he was scared to death of me and trusted me completely all at the same time. Kind of like how I felt about Keeper as a kid.
I tried again. "Did you see something?" And this time he nodded.
Kethe, I thought. Fucking marvelous. I didn't really want to be out here all night playing Guess-how-many-bats-in-Felix's-belltower. I said, "Can you tell me what you saw?"
I felt the breath he took through my hold on his shoulders. And his face set into no expression at all, and he said, "A ghost."
"Sacred
fuck
. What was it doing?"
He didn't say nothing for a moment. "You believe me?"
" 'Course. You saw that thing in Hermione, didn't you? And I been in the Boneprince. I know about ghosts."
He stared at me. I remembered Mavortian saying as how the Mirador didn't believe in ghosts—which, I mean, how fucking dumb do you have to be? "You can tell me," I said. "It's okay."
"It was a woman. She was being… raped. But the… I couldn't…
he
wasn't visible."
I couldn't say nothing for a moment, and then I said, "Kethe. No wonder you bailed. But you could've come and found me."
He looked down, and I felt his shoulders tense. "You said not to leave the room."
There wasn't no way to answer that, and I didn't try. I said, "Can you come back, do you think?"
"Will you be there?"
"Yeah. I ain't going nowhere."
"You won't get mad if I…"
"I won't get mad. Promise."
"All right," he said and gave me this shaky smile that just about ripped my heart into little shreds. He was trying so damn hard, and the only guy he had looking out for him was me. That was fucked up and wrong and stupid.
"Here," I said and picked up my bundle from where I'd dropped it. "I brought your shoes."
"Oh," he said, and I knew he hadn't noticed he wasn't wearing them.
"C'mon, sit down and put 'em on. We need to get back."
I undid my bundle, and put his shoelaces back in while he put on his socks and coat. He put on his shoes one by one as I handed them to him, and then we walked back to the hotel together, not talking, and went up to bed. Felix kind of hesitated before he lay down, but when I asked him if he was still seeing the ghost, he shook his head.
Felix
I try to run from the yellow-eyed man in my dreams. I remember that he is Malkar. But I can't get away from him. I could never run fast enough to escape Malkar, could never be strong enough to defeat him. When I cannot run anymore, I stop and wait for Malkar to catch me and hurt me and use me as a weapon against everything I love.
The yellow-eyed man stands facing me, and says, "Why do you run from me? I thought you understood that I mean you no harm."
I stare at him. "Who are you? Are you…" But I cannot say Malkar's name.
"I told you. I am Diokletian of the House Aiantis, Celebrant Terrestrial of the Nephelian Covenant."
His words mean nothing to me, and I cannot remember being told his identity before. But I do remember that, if he is not Malkar, he belongs to the gardens, and surely that means I can trust him.
"Why are you so frightened? Has someone hurt you?"
I nod, remembering Malkar, remembering Keeper. "I'm trying to come to you, but it's hard."
"I will do anything I can to help you, although there is little enough one can do in dreams."
"Thank you," I say, but there is nothing I can imagine that he can do.
The dream is shifting around us, although I do not know if it is my doing or his. We are standing now on a tiled floor beneath the tremendous vault of a dome. As color washes in, I realize that this must be his dream, for I have never seen this place before. The dome becomes bluer and bluer until it is the dazzling cerulean of the summer sky. The tiles are yellow and white and blue; the columns are white marble. Between them, I can see the breathing emerald lushness of the gardens in all directions.
"I thought you would like this," the yellow-eyed man says, and I think he is laughing a little, not unkindly, at my awe. "This is the Omphalos, the center of the Gardens."
"It is beautiful."
"Do you find it calming? Many people do."
"Yes. Yes, it is restful." I can feel my mind, like a cramped muscle, relaxing out of its tight, painful knot.
"Then could I ask you some questions?"
I look at him but see nothing of Malkar in his face, only anxiety and curiosity. "All right," I say. "I will try to answer."
"If you have the answer within you, the dream will find it. That is why I am asking now instead of waiting until you have reached this place in the waking world. Now. You said your name is Felix?"
"Yes. Felix Harrowgate."
"And you are a wizard of the Mirador?"
"Yes."
"How did you come there?"
"Malkar brought me."
"Malkar?"
"My master."
I am afraid he will ask questions about Malkar, but he is on the track of something else. "Where did you come from?"
Arabel, I almost say, but the dream demands the truth of the spirit, not of the letter. And I know where I come from; I have always known, although I have tried not to. "Pharaohlight."