Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  “They’re not shy about their capital, are they?” I said.

  “Where’s the pass?” Mildmay said.

  I searched and pointed to it. “Here.” ST. ULO’S PASS, in red, with a badger, presumably part of St. Ulo’s iconography, running toward the bottom edge of the map.

  “And we’re . . . ?”

  “Here.”

  He leaned over to take a closer look. “Shit. D’you suppose the scale’s any good?”

  After a moment, I saw what he meant. Whereas the distance from St. Ulo’s Pass to Bernatha was barely the length of my thumb, the distance from Bernatha to Esmer was nearly the length of my forearm. “No wonder they invented trains,” I said.

  “Yeah, and looks like we don’t have much choice about using ’em. Least, I’m assuming that thing like an ink blot ain’t good news.”

  “The Forest of Nauleverer,” I said. “I’m inclined to agree with you. I suppose, it being a guidebook and all, we should see what Mr. Lilion has to say on the subject.” The book was arranged thoughtfully by places of interest, and it was somehow not surprising to find that Nauleverer Forest was one of them.

  Lilion wrote disapprovingly, and I read aloud: “Though there be many foolish and superstitious whisperings about the Forest, in Wildar and surrounding communities, yet it is true that the water there is of the clearest, the air the freshest, and the meat the most succulent and healthful of anywhere in the Convocate.”

  “I don’t like the sound of them superstitious whisperings,” Mildmay said.

  “No,” I agreed. “And—oh dear. It was by decree of the Convocation of the Sixth of the Ninety-second that the forest was made a Convocate Preserve, forbidden to any community of more than fifty souls. Further, the construction of roads was most strictly prohibited. Although, that stricture has been once contravened, when the representatives of the Corambin Railway Company persuaded the Convocation of the Fifth of the One Hundred Forty-second to permit them to run the railway from Skimfair to Follenfant, and this in despite of the many persons who spoke against it.”

  “Train or nothing,” Mildmay said.

  “It looks that way. And really, just because we don’t like the idea doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.”

  “Yeah,” Mildmay said and sighed, sagging back against his pillows.

  “There was once,” I continued reading—because a distraction was better than continuing an inevitably fruitless not-quite-argument—“a great city in the heart of Nauleverer, called Corybant, the city of the first Corambin kings. It was lost before the Fiftieth, and fearful tales are still told of the doom that came to Corybant and of its shape. Of the laborers to whom I have spoken of the construction of the railroad through the forest, not one saw any signs of a city, although they told me many other tales unfit for the ears of gentle persons. Such was the magnitude of the destruction of Corybant—or, if you prefer, the magnitude of the imaginations of the country people.”

  “ ‘Unfit for the ears of gentle persons.’ Those sound like fun,” Mildmay said; his voice was failing, this burst of strength almost spent.

  “Yes. Pity he doesn’t record any of them.” I gave in to an impulse—affection, desire, I didn’t even know—and brushed a stray strand of hair off Mildmay’s forehead.

  He gave me a slightly dubious look, but seemed to decide the gesture was not meant patronizingly, and closed his eyes. “What’s he say about Bernatha?”

  The book fell open readily to the section on Bernatha, as if its previous owner had consulted it frequently. Opposite the beginning of the text (The city of Bernatha, unique in its situation and customs, was founded by . . . ) was another map, displaying the islands of Bernatha: the House of Honesty to the north, the House of Mercy to the south, the causeway to St. Melior drawn with neat dotted lines, and on the Crait itself, the five houses of Prudence, Patience, Charity, Chastity, and Loyalty—roughly circular, not entirely contiguous with each other—and in the center, the top of the massive hill that was the Crait, a building, towers and flags lovingly drawn, labeled CLOCK PALACE OF THE SEVEN HOUSES.

  “They have something called a Clock Palace,” I said.

  “What d’you suppose that is?”

  “Well, let’s see.” Mr. Lilion obligingly printed the names of objects of particular interest in capital letters, so his remarks on the Clock Palace were easy to find. I read aloud, “THE CLOCK PALACE OF THE SEVEN HOUSES is the seat of government in Bernatha, having been chosen as neutral ground after the Schismatic Massacres of the Seventh of the Seventy-seventh. The structure itself, however, is much older than that, although it cannot be dated with any certainty, due to the catastrophic loss of the Civil Records Hall in the Honesty Fire of the Fifth of the One Hundred Twelfth. The Bernathans themselves believe that the Clock Palace was built by their founder, Agravain the Lesser, and furthermore that it was in order to build the Clock of Eclipses that Agravain came to the Crait, the founding of the greatest city in the southern half of the Convocate being merely a happy consequence.”

  “The Clock of Eclipses?” Mildmay said. “That ain’t no nice thing to name a clock.”

  In the Lower City, eclipses were the worst of ill omens, being as they were the special providence of the God of the Obscured Sun. “It probably doesn’t mean the same thing here as it does at . . .” I trailed off as my eye was caught by something farther down the page. “Oh dear.”

  “What?”

  “The Clock of Eclipses has been defunct for nearly two hundred indictions. After it tolled the solar eclipse of the Third of the One Hundred Seventeenth—an eclipse during which it is said that all the windows of the Clock Palace were obscured by blood, the blood having no known or determinable source—it fell silent. People of Bernatha still speak of ‘counting the clock’ instead of the common idiom, ‘counting sheep,’ in reference to the fact that the Clock of Eclipses could be heard throughout the Crait, and—it is said—on still days could be heard on the northern and southern islands as well.”

  “It is one of them clocks,” Mildmay said, almost accusingly.

  “A Titan Clock,” I said, scanning the rest of the entry. “It certainly sounds like one. Lilion says the Clock Palace is open to the public. If that’s still true, I suppose I could—” I broke off so sharply I almost bit my tongue.

  “What?”

  “No, never mind. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “You should go.”

  “Mildmay! I can’t leave you when you’re—”

  “Look,” he said, and stopped, breathing carefully to avoid another coughing fit. “There ain’t nothing you can do for me, ’cept sit here and watch. And don’t take this the wrong way or nothing, but I’d really rather you didn’t.”

  I looked at him suspiciously, but he held firm. “I ain’t gonna do nothing but lie here. I swear by all the saints and powers. And, you know, even if I could get up, I don’t fucking want to.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  “Yeah. When you get back, you can tell me about it. Go on.”

  Insofar as I could tell, he meant it, and it would be more unkind—more unforgivable in his view—to assume he was lying than it would be to take him at his word. And it was what I wanted to do.

  I thought he was asleep before I closed the door behind me, Lilion’s Guidebook in hand.

  The city of Bernatha, winding serpentinely up and around the Crait, was built predominantly of a pale grayish-brown stone. It was curiously difficult to decide how tall the buildings were, as they were built into and against the slope in such a way that they could be five or six storeys tall without ever getting more than two or three storeys off the ground. In some places, I was not even sure where I ought to judge that one building ended and the next began. The façades were very plain; I supposed between the wind and the sea, decorations wouldn’t last long. There were street lamps at close and regular intervals, and I remembered what the gondolman had said about fog.

  The people were mostly of the Corambin type, althoug
h there was another type, taller, with pale curly hair like Gartrett Corbie’s, and there were others still, even shorter and stockier than the Corambin norm, dark-haired and pale-skinned. Everyone, men and women alike, dressed in dark, plain clothes, severely tailored. I found the effect depressing. There were a few people dressed in brighter colors, almost all of them of the taller, curly-haired type, and I noticed that they stuck together, speaking to each other in a language I didn’t recognize.

  I took careful notice of my path, for while finding the Clock Palace might be a simple matter of persevering uphill, finding my way back, by the selfsame token, could be a rather difficult job. I was heartened by the discovery that Bernatha, unlike many parts of Mélusine, put signs at intersections. The Fiddler’s Fox was on Cattamery Road, and I thought I could remember that, even if my sense of direction deserted me as it almost inevitably would.

  It occurred to me that the surest sign of how ill Mildmay was, was his failure to remind me not to get lost.

  But, as I had anticipated, the Clock Palace was impossible to miss. Built of the same grayish-brown stone as the rest of the city, it wrapped itself over and around the apex of the Crait. Its towers, unlike those of the Mirador, were identical both in height and in architecture and were placed with neat mathematical precision at the five corners of the outer wall. I found the main entrance by dint of walking around the palace wall until I came to it. Here at last was the sort of decoration I was used to: the doors, standing open, were bronze, engraved with the sun in eclipse on the left and the moon in eclipse on the right, with elaborate designs circling and spiraling over the remaining space. It was lovely, and the craftsmanship superb, but there was nevertheless a shiver of superstition down my spine.

  Since there was nothing to prevent me, and no reason not to, I entered the Clock Palace; I found myself presented with a sign. One arrow, pointing to the left, read “THE CLOCK OF ECLIPSES—WORKS.” The other arrow, pointing to the right, was “THE HALL OF THE SEVEN VIRTUES.” I consulted Lilion, who informed me that the Hall of the Seven Virtues was the largest single room in all of Bernatha and that its floor was the living granite of the Crait itself. He also had several lavish paragraphs about the frescoes and painted ceilings, mentioning artists and architects whose names, naturally, meant nothing to me.

  I turned left. Two straight hallways and a short spiral stair brought me to a room labeled “THE CLOCK OF ECLIPSES.” There was a young man in brown livery whose duty was clearly to guard the clock, and a pair of elderly ladies pestering him with questions he equally clearly had no idea how to answer. After the first few seconds, I didn’t even hear them.

  It was, unmistakably, a Titan Clock. I had never seen one before, for Nemesis had been destroyed hundreds of years ago, and while Juggernaut was still operational, and I had heard it, my one entry into the Bastion had not been a suitable opportunity for scholarly inquiries. But I had read about Titan Clocks—Ynge even mentioned them as an example of noirant patterning—and studied the precise and elegant diagrams of Diadumenian Butler, who, if the stories were true, had been one of Nemesis’s first victims. I knew what I was looking at.

  An enormous iron rod rose in the center of the room, vanishing through holes cut in floor and ceiling. When the clock had been operational, the rod had rotated, for I could see the knobbed arms at varying heights and, in the mass of surrounding machinery, the hinged gold squares those knobs were meant to strike. Beyond that, I had no hope of puzzling out how the clock had once worked, what the tiny bone cogs had had to do with the great silver chains that, like the rod, ran from floor to ceiling, nor what the iron hooks jutting from the walls of the room had been meant to hold.

  I could, however, feel the noirance like a layer of dust over everything in the room. Deeper in the clock’s works, where there were no visitors, it would be mikkary wound around the springs and pulleys, trailing like ribbons of darkness from the toothed wheels. I both wanted and did not want to touch the nearest protruding spike, and it was a good thing the guard was there, for otherwise I might not have been able to stop myself.

  The elderly ladies had stopped pelting him with questions about the clock and had moved on to another topic. My attention was caught by a name I remembered from the political discussions in the Five Dancing Frogs: Rothmarlin.

  “He didn’t look nearly so dreadful in person,” one woman said.

  “Ah,” said the guard, trying to look wise. “He’s a broken man, that’s what I hear.”

  “I don’t care what he’s done,” the other woman said. “It’s not right, putting a man on display like some sort of beast. I shouldn’t’ve gone with you.”

  “It’s his penance,” the guard said.

  “That’s not penance, sitting there freezing in the hall. Which of the virtues can it possibly teach?”

  “Patience,” the guard suggested, so pointedly that I had to swallow a laugh.

  “And you do penance for sins,” the other woman said earnestly. “You can’t deny his sins, Meriel.”

  “I’m not trying to. I’m saying the Hall of the Seven Virtues isn’t the place for it.”

  “What better place could there be?”

  “An abbey,” Meriel snapped. “A hermitage. Our Lady of Fogs, for that matter. Let him do penance as an anchorite. It’d be more seemly than this . . .” She broke off, waving a hand inexpressively.

  The guard saw his chance and said, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I think this gentleman—”

  But I was not in the mood to rescue him, and if he couldn’t answer their questions, he certainly couldn’t answer mine. “I was just leaving,” I said and suited the action to the word.

  I retraced my steps back to the foyer and its sign, and there I stopped, stuck fast between my curiosity and what little sense of compassion I could be said to possess. For surely it was, as Meriel said, cruel to gawk at a man like a carnival beast. On the other hand . . .

  I sighed and gave in to my curiosity, taking the right-hand corridor.

  There was another young man in brown livery at the door to the Hall of the Seven Virtues. He gave me a highly dubious look, but I must have seemed harmless even if patently foreign, for he nodded me in.

  The Hall of the Seven Virtues was nothing compared to the Hall of the Chimeras, into which it would have fit five times over. But for this city, with its steep, cramped architecture, it was very impressive. One side was a series of arched windows looking out west over the sea; opposite were the allegorical frescoes Lilion had spoken of so highly. They were rather stiff and spikily angular, quite unlike, for example, the sign of the Fiddler’s Fox, which I had noticed for its elegantly stylized curving lines, at once sly and inviting. The frescoes’ colors, though, were rich, deeply saturated, and vibrant, as if in reaction to the monochrome of the city’s exterior and her citizens’ clothes. The ceiling—I tipped my head back for a quick inspection—was likewise beautifully colored, though I found the subject matter unfortunate.

  But perhaps that was due merely to the proximity of the black-draped bier like a blot of ink. The body on the bier, surely the Prince Gerrard of whom Sholto Ketteller had spoken so passionately, looked like wax, its features sunken and ghastly, but the man crouched before it looked almost worse.

  He was wearing only a sort of nightshirt—that and chains. His manacled feet were bare, and I could see the raw welts on both wrists and ankles. There was a collar around his neck, and it was that which was fastened by a length of chain to the bier. The guards, two strapping young men, were so clearly unnecessary as to seem almost ludicrous. They gave me a look, dismissed me as their colleague at the door had, and returned to a low-voiced but quite intense conversation the subject of which I did not attempt to discern.

  The prisoner did not raise his head at my approach. His tawny skin had gray undertones; his face was stubbled; his hair was lank and becoming matted. Since the guards weren’t watching, I knelt down and whispered, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  That brought
his head up with a startled jerk. He was square-jawed, snub-nosed, not at all handsome and even less so with lines of fatigue and strain bracketing his generous mouth and deepening the crow’s-feet around his eyes. They were odd eyes, pale amber striated with gray, and I realized after a frozen moment that they were sightless.

  No one had mentioned that Rothmarlin was blind.

  “Is Glimmering reduced to petty tricks now?” he said.

  “Tricks?” I said. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t even know who Glimmering is. I’m a foreigner.”

  He frowned as he listened to me. “An you are a foreigner, why would you want to help me?”

  “Common decency?” I suggested. He lowered his head, making an awkward, clanking gesture, as if to push my words away. And I supposed it even worked; it attracted the attention of the guards.

  I straightened as they approached; I didn’t hurry, which seemed to discomfit them. And then I smiled and said, “I wonder if either of you could tell me the way to the nearest bookstore?”

  The two strapping young men had been surprisingly helpful; I had ended up with directions to three different bookstores and a quite enlightening difference of opinion as to which of the three was the best. In return, I had had to allow myself to be escorted out into the cobbled plaza—broad for Bernatha—fronting the Clock Palace, so that they could point me in the right direction, but that was better than being arrested and I hoped had distracted them sufficiently that their prisoner would not get in trouble.