"Where is Pharaohlight?"
"It is a district of Mélusine, the… the city of the Mirador."
He seems incredulous or angry or both. "Mélusine? How did you come to be in
Mélusine
?"
"I… I was born there."
"But you are Troian!" And he demands like a whip crack: "Who were your parents? What were their houses?"
"My mother's name was Methony. That's all I know."
I flinch a little, expecting to have made him angrier, but he seems thunderstruck.
"Methony?"
"She was called Methony Feucoronne," I offer. "She died when I was eleven."
The yellow-eyed man is framing another question, but mention of the fire has brought it upon me, crackling and roaring in its greed. The Omphalos goes up like paper, and I lose the yellow-eyed man in the strangling smoke. I run through the burning gardens, blind and suffocating, until I wake up crying.
"You okay?" says a voice.
For a moment, I don't know where I am or who is with me, but the voice continues, "That sounded like one fuck of a bad dream," and I realize it is my brother Mildmay.
"The Fire," I say, although I know there was more to the dream than that: something about the gardens and the yellow-eyed man. He told me his name was Diokletian, but everything else slips away like water.
"Yeah," says Mildmay. "That'll do it." He isn't shocked or alarmed or pitying, and I wonder for a moment before I fall asleep again what
his
dreams are like. I wonder if they are worse than mine.
Chapter 10
Mildmay
There ain't much to be said about walking across Kekropia aside from the boredom of it. We stayed in seedy little hotels, and I played cards with guys who shouldn't've been let out alone, and saw more buffalo up close than I'd ever felt the need for. And then there was me not sleeping and Felix being crazy and us both always being afraid—me that the Bastion was going to find us, him… I didn't know
what
had his tail in a knot. Oh, he was frightened to death of me when he was down the well, which was mostly, but that wasn't all of it. Sometimes, out in the middle of nowhere between one ugly little town and the next, I'd realize he wasn't behind me and turn around, and there he'd be, sunk down in the middle of the road and rocking back and forth in this way that completely spooked me out. And I'd have to go back and drag him to his feet and yell at him to start walking again, and all the time he'd be kind of huddled away from me like he thought I was the Tallowman or something. That starts getting on your nerves something fierce about the third time it happens.
And when he was topside—which was less than I would've liked—he pretended like that other stuff never happened at all. He was older than me and a hocus and educated and he talked flash, and he made like that was all there was to it, and it was him doing me the favor, being out here in the middle of absolutely fucking
nothing
, with the sky like some kind of monster, just waiting 'til you weren't watching to lean down and swallow you whole.
So we walked—hitched rides when we could—and the Empire crawled away underneath us like a turtle in no particular hurry. The worst was the two or three days where we could see this ugly blot on the horizon to the north, like a thundercloud that'd left the party to go sulk. Felix said it had to be the Bastion.
He was topside most of the time for that couple of days, although he was acting even crazier than normal, muttering under his breath and watching the Bastion sidelong, like he thought it might move if he didn't keep an eye on it. I had a nightmare the second night about that happening, that we looked at the horizon and the blot was gone, and then we looked back at the road and it was right in front of us and the gate was opening like a hungry mouth to suck us in. There was a lot of running after that, and every time we thought we were safe, we'd turn around and there it'd be, waiting for us. I was about as much use as wet paper the next day, but we did finally begin to get ahead of it, and then to leave it behind, and I ain't never been so glad to see the back of anything in my life.
After that, there weren't no more landmarks, and we just headed east as best we could. I had my map and the road and the sun to keep us from getting lost, and I guess we did okay, although I got to say, of the two, I'd rather be dipped in barbecue sauce and thrown to the gators than walk across the Grasslands again. People looked at our red hair like they thought it was catching, and I caught five different chambermaids making hex signs where they thought I wouldn't see. If I'd been on my own, I would've asked what they meant by it, but with Felix to look after, I didn't want to risk pissing anybody off. I mean, I can take care of myself, but he was about as helpless as a newborn kitten, and some of them hotelkeepers I thought would've been glad to drown him like one.
And after a while—I don't know quite how long, seeing as how I lost track of the date somewhere between one armpit of a town and the next—we got far enough east that all the signs started being in Kekropian instead of just the ones the Empire put up, and people quit looking at us quite so much like we were a pair of three-headed dogs with each head uglier than the last—at least in the big towns. Instead, they started expecting that we would understand Kekropian a whole lot better than we did. Kethe, that was nasty, trying to explain in a language you don't got a good grip on that you
don't
got a good grip on it, to somebody who obviously don't believe you and ain't going to believe you even if you go on explaining 'til the end of the world. But I figured that was a sign Felix could take off those fucking gloves, and I reminded myself to be grateful for small favors.
And, Kethe, I'll remember to my dying day the first time I saw a redhead that wasn't me and wasn't Felix and wasn't Madame Scott with her henna. It was a gal maybe an indiction or two younger than me, with long curly red hair like Felix's—except for Felix's hair looking like a briar bush that day, I mean—and big yellow eyes, as yellow as a cat's. She was pretty, I guess, if you got a taste for spooky eyes. Dunno what she was doing out there—little town called Ekube, without much to recommend it beyond a local beer that was the most amazing stuff I'd ever had in my life—and since she disappeared about as soon as she laid eyes on us, I ain't ever going to know. But I got a better idea after that of what my mother must've looked like.
So we kept going east and my Kekropian got better in a hurry and I learned two variants of Long Tiffany I'd never seen before. Me and Felix worked out this half-assed sort of system, so if something in our room freaked him out, he'd have a place to go that was safe and where he knew I wouldn't be mad at him. It was a hard game to run, even aside from him being crazy, because we had to find a new place almost every day, and it had to be somewhere he'd remember in a panic and somewhere that people wouldn't come along and start wondering what the fuck he was up to. Mostly we ended up agreeing on the roof, and then I spent the whole damn evening praying to Kethe and St. Eliot against fire. It wasn't good enough, and I knew it, but it was all I could do. I couldn't stay with him, I couldn't take him with me, and I sure as fuck couldn't ask no Kekropian chambermaid to babysit.
And mostly it worked out, although I didn't deserve it to. There were three or four times I came back and he wasn't in our room, but he was always on the roof like he was supposed to be, even if it did take me an hour to talk him down—and there was that one time we both spent the whole night up there.
But that was okay, and I was dealing with the cardsharping pretty good, even if I did hate it so much I dreamed about it when I wasn't dreaming about Cerberus Cresset, when I was sleeping at all, which wasn't much, although that piece of glass was still holding off the cramps, and things weren't great, but they were going more or less okay, and I felt like maybe I had things sort of under control.
And then we came to the crossroads.
Now, the first problem was that crossroads not being on my map. I'd been wondering kind of on and off for days whether I should buy a second map, seeing as how we'd come so far east, and then telling myself that I'd better not waste the money. So I stood and cussed myself out a bit, and then I got over that and moved on to the next problem, which was that the signpost wasn't there. Oh, I could see where it
had
been, no problem, but somebody must've decided they didn't like it where it was and not yet figured out where they'd like it better because it just purely was not there.
My guess, of course, was that we just wanted to keep following the road east, but there had been some bad moments the past couple decads that had taught me you didn't assume that kind of thing about roads in Kekropia. So I was still standing there, wondering what to do, when the third problem showed up.
And that was a bunch of Imperial dragoons.
Kethe was still looking out for me a little. The land had been getting hillier, and I was glad of it, because, powers and saints, I was sick to death of nothing but flat—but you could still see people on horseback coming a long way off, so there was plenty of time for me to grab Felix and hustle him off the road. I'd been listening to all the gossip I came in earshot of, and my Kekropian had got good enough that I knew these dragoons were probably headed south to try and keep the peace in a place called Lunness Point, where the people were habitually kind of rowdy.
Well, we won't take their road, I said to myself. And then Felix got up from behind the bushes I'd picked as a hiding place and started walking away as cool as you please.
I stared after him for a second, just absolutely unable to believe my eyes. And then I said to myself, Here's number four, and threw myself after him.
I didn't catch him at once, not because I couldn't've, but because if we were going to have a fight, I wanted it to be where we wouldn't have an audience. So we were out of sight of the crossroads, Felix heading southeast like he knew right where he was going, when I finally came up even with him and said, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"I hear them," he said, like it was an answer.
"What? Hear
who
?"
"The crying people," he said in the same half-witted way he said,
I dreamed it
, that made me want to shake him 'til he rattled.
And what really pissed me off—aside from being lost and having them dragoons breathing down my neck, I mean—was that the past two or three days Felix hadn't hardly been acting nuts at all. And he'd seemed pretty solid with it, not like the days when I could see in his eyes how he was balanced on the edge of the well with nothing but sheer cussedness holding him up. This time he'd really seemed sort of okay, and I guess I'd relaxed a little, and that's the best way to be sure something bites you on the ass.
What I wanted to do was club him over the head and drag him back to the road. But, the way my luck was running, that'd mean walking right back into those damn dragoons. And I didn't think I was going to have any better luck getting Felix to let go of this new idea than I'd had with the old one. I thought of him setting off on his own in the middle of the night to look for these "crying people" and felt cold all over.
I couldn't talk sense to him when he was like this, and that left me with two choices. Either I made him do what I wanted or I did what
he
wanted.
"Fuck me for a half-wit dog," I said between my teeth and followed Felix.
I trailed along after Felix all fucking afternoon. We hit this kind of goat track after a while—and if you ask how I know it was goats, it was because they was standing around laughing at us the whole way. So we followed that—or, Felix followed the path, and I followed Felix—and after a while it turned into an actual road, although not flash enough for paving stones, and I saw the occasional barn or farmhouse away off on in the distance. And it still seemed like Felix knew where he was going.
Finally, when it started getting dark, I caught up with him and said, "Felix?"
He turned to look at me, and that was a good sign. After a second, he even said, "Yes?"
"It's getting late," I said. "You figured out where we're going yet?"
He pointed. All I saw was yet more damn grass.
"How far?"
He gave me this look like my eyes'd rolled back in my head and I'd started speaking in tongues.
"Are we close? Or do we got to hike two more days?"
I guess it came out nastier than I meant, because he turned red and didn't answer me. And I was pretty close to the point where I didn't care if I sounded nasty or not.
"Are we close? Yes or no?"
There was a pause that told me the answer even before he shook his head. We weren't close.
I took a deep breath, counted a septad, then counted another because the first one didn't take. Then I said, "Okay. We'd better find somewhere to sleep, and we got to do something about food."
"Oh," he said, so quiet I couldn't even hear him.
"I know. You hadn't thought of that."
If he'd been all the way topside, I would've got torn into strips for mouthing off like that. But he could feel the cold crazy water around his feet—I could see it in the way his eyes were—and he didn't say nothing.
It was starting to scare me a little, how easy I could read his face and what he did and didn't say. That ain't the same as being able to handle him, and I wasn't even pretending I had any kind of a grip on what he might do when he was topside, but I was getting to where I knew his madness like it was an old friend. And if the water and the rope and the narrow stone sides of the well was just my own way of thinking about it, I didn't think he'd've disagreed with me if I'd been fool enough to mention it, which I wasn't. I knew how deep water gave him the creeping, crawling, screaming horrors, even if I didn't have the least idea why and wasn't going to ask.
I looked around and tried to think. I knew we didn't want to go waltzing up to a farmhouse, because even if they didn't think we were necromancers or ghouls or whatever the fuck it was the people in the Grasslands thought we were, we were still pretty damn suspicious-looking strangers, and what was I going to say when they asked me where we were headed? So that wasn't no bright idea.