Mélusine (7 page)

What has Malkar done to me?

Panic closing my throat, I struggled, wedging my power into the places where Malkar's compulsion was weakest. As he'd said, he was in a hurry, and it showed in his casting. And no compulsion could ever hold for long against a determined wizard. When he turned to me and said, "Lie down," I was able to keep standing, although the effort had me panting, almost choking for breath around his gag.

"Lie
down
!" He knocked me sprawling, facedown in the pentagram. I rolled back to my feet and lurched away from him. I had one thing I could try on the door, if I could just reach it.

"You little bitch!" One paw caught my shoulder, spinning me around; the other knocked my head against the wall, but the only star I saw was the one in the floor. He knotted his hand in my hair and dragged me to the pentagram, dragged me down to the floor. He leaned his knee between my shoulder blades and forced first one arm and then the other out straight, to where he could snap his shackles closed around my wrists. I could feel the pull against my joints—even worse when he had done the same to my ankles-—and since I was one of the tallest men in the Mirador, that meant both that Malkar had designed these shackles expressly for me and that he had meant them to be uncomfortable. The latter was no surprise; the former…

"Now," he said, a growl in my ear that made my skin crawl, "be still!"

As if I had a choice.

He began his ritual standing over me. The spell he was casting seemed to be a bastard compilation of Cabaline ideas and blood-magic and even some things from the Bastion. But he had taught me, and I probably understood the way his mind worked better than anyone else in the world. I was able, not to follow what he was doing, exactly, but to get the gist of it, as if I were listening to a play in a foreign language, a language with which I was familiar, but not fluent. Long before Malkar touched me, I had gone cold with horror down to the marrow of my bones.

To be a wizard of the Mirador implied a certain understanding of how magic worked and how it was to be used, different from the understandings of the Eusebians in the Bastion or the other schools of magic that flourished in Norvena Magna and Ervenzia and faraway Corambis. Cabaline magic worked with the material world, channeling power through material objects, such as the rings that every Cabaline wizard wore, or the Virtu itself. And, of course, Cabaline dogma said that the worst possible thing a wizard could do was to touch a person with their magic in any way. Even benevolent magics such as healing were anathema to the Mirador, and old Iosephinus Pompey had only taught me how to ward dreams after making me swear a variety of bloodcurdling oaths that I would not betray the source of my knowledge to any other wizard.

What Malkar was doing—and I wanted to shriek and giggle and weep, all at once—was creating a spell that would allow him to use me in the same way that Cabaline wizards used their rings. It was a brilliantly evil parody of Cabaline magic; even if I'd had all my wits about me, even if I hadn't still been mind-numbed by phoenix, I didn't think I would even have been able to find a place to start a counterspell. No wonder, though, that he'd gagged me; no wonder that he'd chained me flat to the floor. I could work magic I without either voice or motion, but it was always harder—and he'd known I wouldn't be able to do it tonight. I had no doubt he'd been watching the level of wine in the decanter with great and expert interest.

I tried to breathe through my fear, through the gag. It wasn't as if this would be the first time Malkar had used my body sexually as part of a spell-casting, just as it wasn't the first time he'd laid compulsions on me. And I knew how to cope with violent intercourse. I'd even been good at it, once upon a time. Some of the tarquins who came to the Shining Tiger had asked for me particularly. Relax, I said to myself. You can't fight him, so don't try.

Malkar pulled back. There was a moment of stillness, in which I could not hear him, could not feel him, could not see him. Then he entered me, brutally, throwing my weight forward against the shackles.

He lunged again, and I felt him working his spell, using his penetration of my body to penetrate my mind, using the material to work upon the spiritual. And with his presence came understanding of what he was going to do. I screamed against the gag, screamed my throat raw. Screamed uselessly and far, far too late. I'd thought I'd understood the rules of the game we were playing, Malkar and I, a particularly vicious and twisted version of cat and mouse, the same game we'd been playing since I was fourteen and his eye lit on me amid all the shabby gaudery of the Shining Tiger's parlor. But Malkar had changed the game, changed the stakes, changed the rules, and how stupid I had been to think I understood him, to think I knew what I was letting myself in for. I'd known he would hurt me, and I'd known it would be bad. That playlet the night before had only been Practice; I'd known that as soon as he let me go. But I had thought that the catastrophe would be mine alone—and, after all, no more than I deserved, I had been wrong, so terribly wrong that the knowledge of my stupidity and blindness was like a separate pain all to itself.

I felt him in my mind, even more vividly than I felt him in my body, a hurtful, hateful, rending presence, like the color of blood, like the taste of iron, like the scent of burning, destroying everything in his path until he reached the core of my power and seized it.

There were no words for the agony that stabbed through me, from head to heart to hands, enveloping my entire body in the molten blackness of cramp and spasm. No words. No strength. Nothing.

I can't breathe; I can't see; my heart is beating itself to death against the sides of an iron box.

And then Malkar's hand comes down, just at the base of my neck; I feel the pull, as he siphons power through me, just as I was accustomed to siphon power through my rings. And my body responds to this new guidance, this new understanding of what it is supposed to do with its magic. I can breathe again; I can see. I can see blood on my left wrist.

"Now," says Malkar, his voice rough with triumph, with the power he holds. And he begins to use our magic, to wield it like a sledgehammer against the one thing in the Mirador that should be proof against him.

For a moment, I am not in his workroom. I am in the Hall of the Chimeras. It is dark, all the candles snuffed. The Virtu stands by itself, alone on the granite plinth at the east end of the hall, its serene radiance bathing the air around it. I have never seen the Virtu in the dark before, have never seen it this beautiful.

He thrusts, and I am in the Hall of the Chimeras again. The Virtu, which no one guards because it needs no guarding, seems to dim for a moment, then responds in a pulse of brilliant viridian. I flinch back, but Malkar's weight shoves me forward. I can feel the Virtu's surface beneath my palms, smooth and astonishingly cold. I see Malkar's attack, like a wave of blackness, traveling from my palms inward toward the globe's puissant tourmaline heart.

I am bathed in the pain of cobalt as the Virtu responds, and fall back into the workroom, where Malkar is snarling curses, even as his power is building, building in him, in me, in the hollow vastness where my magic once was.

He thrusts; the blackness roars down into the Virtu, deeper, stronger. The Virtu's answering flash lights the entire Hall of the Chimeras, but is a pale dream of blue. It is weakening. Malkar thrusts again, harder. And again and again, using the rhythm of his attacks on my body to augment the power of his attacks on the Virtu, as the Virtu's responses weaken, as blood begins to drip from my wrists and ankles. I am crushed between them, asphyxiated; I wonder if I will break before the Virtu does.

And then I am in the Hall of the Chimeras, staring into the heart of the Virtu, and I see the crack, hairline thin, deep within the stone. And through me, Malkar sees it, too. He drives our power down through the stone, hitting the crack again and again. I see the crack widen, see other cracks begin to radiate out. I feel Malkar gather himself.

He climaxes in a terrible explosion of power, a massive surge that roars along the path of the ritual, hurling itself into those cracks, combusting itself in the heart of the Virtu's blue-green purity as Malkar's orgasm combusts itself in my mind and body.

The Virtu shatters like glass.

Malkar collapses on top of me, and I am so deafened by the sound of the Virtu's shards smashing against the plinth, against Lord Michael's Chair, against the dais, against the mosaic chimeras, that I only gradually realize he is speaking.

"Wonderful," he murmurs in my ear, as if he were truly my lover, while he works out the knot of his gag. My hair is caught in the knot; I feel the pull, but as if from miles away. "Magnificent. You have met my expectations, my dearest, and I will take you with me." He removes the gag. I draw a deep, shuddering breath that comes out in painful sobs. He makes no threats this time; I am beyond being able to make enough noise to bother or imperil him, and he knows it.

He lifts himself off me, kneeling over me while he opens the shackles that bind me to the floor. I cannot move, even to flinch from his touch. The light in my rings is gone; there is nothing in my head where my magic was, nothing except hurt. I shut my eyes. Tears run down my cheekbone, down my nose.

I feel Malkar get to his feet. The only thing he can do to me now, the only thing that could hurt me more, is kill me, and I hope he will. I lie and wait. At some point I realize my eyes are open, staring at my dead rings.

Malkar returns. "Come on, Felix, get up. We don't have time for this nonsense."

"Just kill me," I say, half into the floor, and shut my eyes again. I don't recognize my own voice, that harsh, hoarse croak with the Lower City vowels.

That is a lie. Malkar loves breaking promises. Then the sense of what he said hits me, and my eyes open again. "General Mercator?"

"Well, of course, darling. You didn't imagine I was going to stay here did you?" But teasing me is no lasting pleasure this evening. His voice changes. "Now, get up, slut, and if you love your tongue,
mind it.
I don't want you talking like a cheap whore."

I remember the lengths he went to, in order to teach me to talk like the Marathine nobility. He does not intend to kill me, and my fear of him wraps back around me like a coat made of chains and shards of glass.

"Ye… yes, Malkar," I say, jerking my vowels under control. I manage to roll over, manage to sit up, although my head is spinning. I look at Malkar, purely from reflex, and do not scream only because I am too frightened. The thing standing there, wearing Malkar's clothes, is vast, the color of the Sim, the terrible black river of Mélusine. It has the broad, cruel head of a bull-baiting dog; its eyes are red, glowing like cinders, and the drool hanging from its jaws is flecked with blood.

"Better," it says in Malkar's voice. "Clean yourself up and get those clothes on.
Hurry
, curse you."

Numbly, my hands shaking, I do as it tells me. I have plenty of experience in dealing with the aftereffects of what Malkar has done to my body, know all too well how to ensure that there will be no bloodstains on my clothes. Once I am dressed, the dog comes back and bandages my wrists. It has Malkar's hands, Malkar's rings. The air around it shivers with red and copper.

It ties back my hair, although I know that nothing now can hide the fact that I am mad. "Come along," it says.

"Wh… where are we going?"

"I told you. The Bastion. Now, come on, Felix, or I'll leave you for Stephen."

I do not want to be left for Stephen.

Felix

I had a moment of clarity, a moment when the world snapped into place like a dislocated joint back into its socket. We were in the yard of a livery stable, not far off the Plaza del'Archimago. Malkar was bargaining with a lanky, squinting individual. And he was Malkar again, not a dog-headed monster. The lanky man with the squint was suddenly free of the wash of purple that had half obscured him from me. I could hear them arguing, and their voices were voices, and their words made sense.

I thought, Malkar has driven me mad. And the thought was a comfort, because it meant the dog-headed monster was not real, that the colors I had seen around the guards at the Harriers' Gate, the colors around the ostler, were not real, either. It was only madness, not that I had fallen into Hell.

Then I thought, And what, pray tell, is the difference?

Looking at the ground, I saw that Malkar's shadow had a dog's head.

I ride behind the dog out of the city, the city of shadows, the city of burning, the city of ghosts. When the gatemouth has shrunk behind us, the dog stops and comes back and ties my hands to the saddle. Then we ride again. I don't know how long we ride. Everything hurts, and the city is screaming behind me.

We stop. The dog drags me off the horse. There is a fire. Later, the dog makes me eat; everything tastes like soot. I am afraid the dog will make me do other things, but it leaves me alone. I am so grateful I start crying, and it snarls at me to keep still.