I must have slept, for I woke from a nightmare in pitch-blackness, with the stars above me like cold eyes. The Virtu still shattering in my head, I realized that I could hear myself screaming.
Malkar's paw caught me across the face with bone-rattling force. "Quit that noise!"
I had nothing left but obedience to Malkar; I did as he said. He kicked me and then, satisfied, went back to the other side of the fire. I sobbed, half strangling myself in my efforts not to make a sound, and eventually fell back asleep because I was too exhausted even for grief.
My dreams were chaotic and confused, full of fire and stone.
Shannon weeps in endless silence, and the Virtu shatters like a child's toy. Malkar chains me in his
stone pentagram. Keeper smiles at me, fingering the haft of his whip, and I take off my shirt
obediently. Robert's poisonous malice drips from his smile, and Stephen looks at me and looks
away.
Malkar shook me awake at dawn. He was himself; I did not look at his shadow.
He tied my hands to the saddle again before we started; I wondered if he was afraid that I would bolt or that I would faint.
Last night it had all been darkness and dizziness. This morning, I recognized that we were in the
Grasslands, in the vast, empty land that neither the Protectorate of Marathat nor the Empire of Kekropia valued enough to start a war over. We were, of course, heading toward the Bastion, where Malkar would doubtless be greeted as a hero and I as his catamite.
As his catamite. For a second, I couldn't breathe.
I could feel the damage done to my mind as vividly as I saw the wreckage of the Virtu every time I closed my eyes. I could not touch my power, sundered from it by a chasm of pain as dark as the Sim. My last possible weapon against Malkar was gone; now that I was desperate enough, mad enough, to turn my magic against him, I could not. He had taken it away from me, as he had taken everything else.
Mildmay
Mrs. Pickering pounded on the door.
I came bolt awake, out of a dream—something about the Boneprince, and Rindleshin, I don't know—and shoved my fingers through my hair on the way to the door. More for me than her.
I was expecting a fight—about the rent, about Scabious, about Kethe knows what—but when I opened the door, her face said otherwise.
"What?" I said.
"I've been hearing things all morning. Something happened up there. Something bad. You know anything?"
In the Lower City, "up there" means the Mirador. People don't like to say the name. It's bad luck.
"Not me," I said. But bad news from the Mirador is bad news for everybody, one way or another. "I can go ask around."
"That's good of you, Gilroi." She stood there a second, like she was going to say something else, and then went away.
I dragged my boots on and went out.
I knew where I was going. I mean, if you're just out to shoot the shit, that's one thing, and I could have gone a septad different places for that. But that would only get me the same rumors Mrs. Pickering had been hearing. For real information, you have to go deeper.
I spent a lot of time in the Arcane. The tunnels run under most of the Lower City—except in Simside and Queensdock, where the ground's only barely fit to build on—all the way out to Carnelian Gate on the east. About two blocks south of the Road of Ivory, to the west of the Lower City, somebody bricked 'em off. Perfectly straight line, perfectly regular brick-work, all the way from Ivory Gate to the Plaza del'Archimago. There's spells there, too, or so the hocuses say, and if anybody's ever been crazy enough to try and see what the mason and the hocus were hiding—well, they ain't come back to brag about it, that's for sure.
Can't get to the Arcane from Simside. Can't get to the Arcane from Queensdock. Breadoven don't have a way into the Arcane, neither, but I don't know why. Other'n that, you got your pick. The big, official entrance is in Scaffelgreen, with the fancy carving over the doors that says CATACOMBES DES ARCANES. That's where the tours go in, but what they don't tell you on the tours is that what you see ain't even the
beginning
of what's down there. They take your half-gorgon and show you the Executioners' Ossuary and the buried church of St. Flossian and probably a couple miles of crypts, but that ain't the Arcane. That entrance ain't much good for nobody but the flats.
There's three entrances in Midwinter that I know about—probably more—but two of them are hard to get at. One's under the altar in the church of St. Griphene, and the other's in the root cellar of a house on Excalibur Street, and the family that lives there now don't know about it. I went in through the trapdoor in the basement of the Hornet and Spindle and started for Havelock, where the lady I wanted to talk to ran her business.
Her name's Elvire. She's the madam of the Goosegirl's Palace. Her and her girls cater to the hocuses and flashies along with the thieves and pushers, so the Palace is about as much about gossip as it is about fucking. Elvire'd passed her Great Septad, but she hid it with corsets and rice powder and this enormous black wig like her own private cathedral. She talked flash—rumor said she'd been Lord Gareth's mistress for an indiction or three. Her information was always good, and worth its weight in gold.
The Palace is way, way under the Butchers' Guild. I never went there without wondering how many butchers knew that. The guy at the door today was Philippe Wall-Eye—so as not to get him confused with Philippe le Coupé, the eunuch who ran the Palace's bar. Philippe Wall-Eye knew me, and he let me past without any fuss. Me and Elvire had done deals before, and I'd played fair by her.
She had two offices. I found her in the one that wasn't meant to impress the clients. She looked up when I knocked and gave me a smile. Elvire had been a madam for three septads and a whore for at least two before that—her smile didn't mean nothing about how she felt.
"Hey, Elvire," I said. "What's going on?"
"You mean Upstairs." The Arcane don't like the word "Mirador" neither.
"Yeah."
"Sit down."
My stomach muscles clenched up, 'cause she hadn't said that like it was just to be sociable. I sat.
Elvire took a deep breath and came out with it. "The Virtu was broken last night."
"
What
?" I was glad I was sitting down, 'cause that was a nasty kick in the teeth, no two ways about it.
The Virtu of the Mirador was created by the Cabal back in 16.5.1. It was a big blue globe, as tall as a man. They kept it in the Hall of the Chimeras, smack in the middle of the Mirador, and what it was supposed to do depended on who you asked. The Mirador talked a lot of mystic bullshit about purity and strength—the name "Virtu" was some kind of cleverdick Marathine-Midlander pun. The hocuses in the Lower City talked about focusing and matrices, and made even less sense than the official line. All I knew for sure was that all the hocuses in the Mirador swore oaths on the Virtu every single day, and that was what kept the Mirador from tearing itself apart. No matter how you felt about the hocuses sitting on top of the city like a pack of vultures, you didn't want the Virtu broken.
Elvire just sat there and let me grapple with it, and finally I said, "I thought… I mean, that's impossible, right?"
She spread her hands in a sort of helpless I-only-know-what-I'm-told way. "Well, they seem to know who did it, and if
that's
true, then I believe it. Do you know about Felix Harrowgate?"
"Elvire, you know me. I stay
away
from hocuses."
"He's Caloxan," she said, like it should mean something to me.
"He's what?"
"From Caloxa. Blessed saints, don't you ever look at a map? North. Past the Perblanches."
"So?"
"They had a
king
."
"Oh boy."
"Yes. Exactly. And when their king was deposed, Lord Felix's mother took her child and ran south. I've heard that she was related to him."
"To the king?"
"Yes. In any event, she got as far as Arabel and was taken in by a wealthy landowner. She died, the landowner raised Lord Felix, and when he had two septads and three, he came to the Mirador."
"And he's related to a king."
"A dead king."
"Fuck."
"And he's very powerful. My clients are scared witless of him." She paused, gave me this look from under her eyelashes. "Nobody can find him this morning."
"Fuck."
"Lord Stephen left at dawn, riding east. That's all I know."
"We're all fucked sideways, ain't we?" East toward the Empire. East toward the Bastion. East was a bad direction. "Thanks, Elvire."
I did a little fishing for other things—you got to keep your ear to the ground in my line of work—but the news from the Mirador was really all there was, and I was out of Elvire's office before long. Philippe Wall-Eye said he had a hot tip for the dog races next Deuxième, but I told him to give it to somebody who cared.
I made Mrs. Pickering one popular lady that morning. Seemed like half Midwinter was jammed into her kitchen, wondering what that hocus had been thinking of and what they'd do with him when they caught him. I sat in my front room and stared out the window, imagining the news traveling through the Lower City like a fire.
And you know fear would be traveling right along with it.
Felix
They caught us a little after midday, as Malkar must have known they would. He made no attempt to outrun them, instead stopping at the top of a rise, dismounting, making me dismount, too. We stood and watched the riders approach.
Stephen led them—although sometimes when I looked at him, he had a bear's head—and I saw faces
that I knew among the riders: Luke and Esmond and Vida looking as if she had been carved out of stone. Stephen was black and lurid scarlet with fury; I was frightened to look at him.
"My lord," said the dog, with a slight nod.
"Lord Malkar," said the bear. "I expect you know why I have come."
"I do, and I am prepared to offer you a bargain."
"A
bargain
!" Red and yellow incredulity washed across the whole company.
The dog nodded again, its jaws parting in a slavering grin. "Felix for my freedom."
I thought I was going to faint, with the shock and panic and horror slamming through my skull. I knew Malkar did not keep his promises, but this I had not expected. The only thing at this point that seemed worse than staying with Malkar was being given to Stephen. Malkar's cruelty was at least a known quantity, and I had the protection of being useful. Or, rather, I had thought I did. Never trust Malkar. Never, never, never.
"You want the man who broke the Virtu," Malkar said. "You must know—Victoria surely has told you—that it was not I. I do not have the power."
Stephen nodded grudgingly, but his eyes were suspicious. I wanted to scream at him, tell him not to listen—
never
listen to Malkar—but I could not speak. I knew all that would come out were the whining howls of a coyote.
"Felix is the only wizard in the Mirador with the power to break the Virtu," Malkar said, so reasonably, so truthfully. "I will give him to you; in return, you will let me go on my way."
"You are going to the Bastion."
"Yes. I had been going there anyway. Felix begged me to take him with me. I do not know why. I refused. But after he broke the Virtu, I… reconsidered."
Those sparks of blackness in the raging red corona around Stephen told me that Shannon had admitted our fight, confessed to the bruise. And Stephen had loathed me for years. He would believe any evil of me, and gladly.
"I could take both of you," the bear growled. "You are as much a traitor as he."
"Please, Lord Stephen, be reasonable. I am not a Cabaline. I have not sworn your ridiculous panoply of oaths. I am not even a citizen of Marathat. If I wish to visit the Empire, it is no one's business but my own. And I do not care to have my business interfered with. Take Felix, who is too far gone on phoenix to cause you any trouble, and let us part without further… unpleasantness."
I could see that Stephen believed him about the phoenix, just as he seemed to believe that I would have broken the Virtu in consequence of a nasty piece of gossip and a lovers' quarrel. He sat and thought. I could see, too, that his fury was almost too great for him to think at all; it washed off him in great scarlet waves, splashing the riders and lapping against my feet.
I wanted to move back, but Malkar's grip on my arm was too strong.
"Malkar, please," I said, "please don't—"
"Hush, Felix," the dog said. "Lord Stephen is thinking."
The mockery in Malkar's voice acted on Stephen like spurs. "Very well," he said. "Give me Felix, and you can go. But do not think this is the end of it."
"Not at all," Malkar said. "Thank you, my lord." He turned and caught me in a kiss that probably looked passionate, but was nothing more than a brutal, numbing intrusion, a blind for the compulsion he cast, winding me about in a shroud of briars, ensnaring me and silencing me, so that I could tell no one the truth, tell no one what he had done and how.
He murmured, just loud enough for the riders to hear, "Good-bye, my darling," and pushed me suddenly toward Stephen. I stumbled halfway down the hill and dropped to my knees, drowning in a pool of bloody hate. Malkar had already swung onto his horse and spurred it away, over the top of the rise, the second horse running after.
The bear dismounted, his movements deliberate with fury as he waded through the bloody surge of his own hatred, and grabbed me by my coat lapels, hauling me to my feet.
"Do you know what you've done?" he said, his voice low, his eyes red and black and horrible. "Do you even care? The Curia managed to contain the damage, which I'm sure disappoints you, but
every single
spell
has been weakened. Victoria says they may begin to unravel at any moment."