Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  “Certainly,” I said, then hedged: “I don’t promise I can answer.”

  She waved that away with her free hand. “You’re a magician, right?”

  “I, um.”

  “No, I mean, you are. I know.”

  “You recognized the tattoos,” I said with a sigh.

  “Well, yeah, but that ain’t—I mean, that wasn’t what—I mean—oh fuck it.” She stopped, gripping my arm so that I was turned to face her. She looked up and down the street swiftly, but it was perfectly deserted. “Like this,” she said, tilting her head to lock gazes with me, and as I watched, something shuttered behind her eyes came open.

  She was a wizard.

  She pulled away from me almost immediately, breaking eye contact as if it were a dead stick, and her wizardry vanished again completely. She might have been annemer. “I’m trusting you here,” she said, and there was a wobble in her voice. “And may the Lady protect me, because I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do or not, but I just don’t know what else to do. I don’t know where else to—”

  “Corbie,” I said. I saw her swallow hard. “What is it exactly you’re trusting me with? It’s not illegal to be a wizard in Corambis, or I would have been arrested days ago. And you’re not—that is, I didn’t think the Grevillians prosecuted heretics.”

  “Heretics?” She sounded like she’d never heard the word before.

  “Never mind. What is it you’re frightened of?”

  “You ain’t a warlock, are you?” she said, and then buried her face in her hands. By the street lamps, I could see her ears turning red. “Cry your mercy. Strewth, what a question to ask somebody.”

  She was mortified; I was bewildered. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what a warlock is.”

  That got her head up; she was all but gaping at me, her eyes round as saucers. “There aren’t warlocks where you come from?”

  “Not by that name. Look, do we have to talk about this in the street?” I realized as the words left my mouth that I could have been more tactful about it. “What I mean is, come up to my room and tell me about warlocks. And you haven’t asked your question, you know.”

  “What?”

  “You said you wanted to ask me something.”

  “Right. Yeah, I do. Your room?” Her look was openly dubious.

  “I told you, I don’t do women. Besides, my brother has very high moral standards. He’d never let me rape you.”

  That made her laugh. “All right then. We’re almost there anyway.”

  Another block and a half brought us to the Fiddler’s Fox, where Corbie stopped and tugged on my arm. “We don’t have to go in together. Just tell me which room.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “If you don’t want to be seen with a jezebel.”

  “My dear child, I don’t care what the desk clerk thinks of me.”

  She grinned. “Just checking. Some fish get themselves all bent out of shape.” We went up the stairs together.

  Mildmay was awake when we reached the room, and inclined to regard Corbie with suspicion. I couldn’t tell if it was the fever making him more than usually unfriendly or some ramification of his habitual turtle-like reaction to the advent of any young woman. I refused to believe there were any actual grounds for concern. If Corbie had wanted to do me harm, she’d already had all the chances she needed.

  Corbie herself was only slightly taken aback by Mildmay’s hostile, glowering silence. Looking at him, I thought he was too obviously ill to need apologizing for. His color was bad again, and his breathing was audible across the room where Corbie and I, lacking chairs, sat on the cot Mrs. Lettice had had her man-of-all-work assemble for me.

  I had to prompt her to get her started: “All right. Warlocks.”

  Her explanation was extremely difficult to follow, for what she could tell me was based entirely on what her grandmother had told her, and over the course of Corbie’s tangled narrative, I came to have grave doubts as to that lady’s sanity, redoubtable though she clearly had been.

  Corbie’s “gran” had been a wizard, too, and had received what little training she’d had in the days before the Corambin thaumaturgical reforms. The wizards then had been warlocks, and it had been Corbie’s gran’s abiding fear that one of them, having survived in hiding for thirty years, would come and enslave her. “It’s what warlocks do,” Corbie said earnestly, a much younger girl showing through her adult hardness. “It’s why you gotta hide. Gran taught me how. She said the Corambins couldn’t’ve found all of them, and they were probably training more.”

  Like Mélusine’s fear of Obscurantists, I thought. And although Corbie’s tale wasn’t what one might call thaumatologically informative, I knew of other cases of wizards enslaving wizards. That wasn’t what the Eusebians called it, of course—just as I was sure the warlocks Corbie was frightened of had had some elegant term—but that was what it amounted to. And it was what Malkar had done to me—though I was sure he, at least, would have been happy to call it slavery.

  “Well, I’m not a warlock,” I said. “Now, what is this question you’re so anxious to ask me?”

  “Oh. I, um . . .” She was going red again.

  “Spit it out, Corbie,” I said, and she did, a rush of syllables which it took me a moment to separate into sense: I was wondering if you’d teach me.

  “Me?” I said. “That is, there must be wizards in Bernatha you know are Grevillian.”

  “I can’t afford the apprentice fees,” Corbie said, embarrassed but dogged. “I been saving and saving, but I just can’t ever get there.”

  “So you want me to teach you for free.”

  She winced. “Not like—I’ll give your banshee back. I ain’t spent it, and it’s gotta be worth a lesson or two anyway. See, with the Grevillians, they got a system. You pay the ’prenticeship or you go to their school up in Esmer. But if you don’t got the money . . .” She shrugged comprehensively. “I figured you wouldn’t be Grevillian, so you wouldn’t mind that part, but then I didn’t know you weren’t . . . I mean, I’m sure you wouldn’t, but I didn’t—”

  “Shut up, Corbie,” I said, and smiled at her to show I didn’t mean it unkindly.

  And then Mildmay said, “Just like at home.”

  I startled—I hadn’t thought he was listening—and said, “What do you mean?”

  “Like them kids you were teaching,” he said, his voice slow and slurred and drawling; he sounded half-asleep. “Don’t got the money, don’t nobody give you the time of day.”

  He was right. And even at that, those children—“children” I called them, though most of them were Mildmay’s age or older—had been better off than Corbie, or any of the Corbies trapped in the Lower City. No prostitute was going to be admitted to the Mirador. Unless, as I had, they lied, and lied convincingly. At home, Corbie would have had no option except to learn from a heretic and spend the rest of her life waiting for the witchfinders. Here, she didn’t even seem to have that much.

  Mildmay said something else.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You like teaching,” he said.

  That was true and, I thought, was Mildmay’s way of giving me his blessing. I looked at Corbie—hopeful, scared, embarrassed, stubborn. “Bring the banshee tomorrow afternoon,” I said, and when her jaw dropped, I deliberately misread her surprise. “Well, we can’t start now.”

  Corbie came back to herself with a bump. “Oh, lumme, the time.” She bounced to her feet, said, “I will come tomorrow. Um. Half-past thirteen, probably.” She was halfway out the door when she remembered to say thank you. And then she was gone, her heels clattering down the stairs.

  “What have I let myself in for?” I said, getting up.

  “Good for you,” Mildmay said. “Keep you out of trouble.”

  “Oh thank you.”

  He raised his eyebrows at me. “You wanna tell me you came back after dark with a hooker because you didn’t get in trouble?” He coughed, a slow, thick, ugly sound
.

  “You have such a suspicious mind. Let me tell you about the part of my day that didn’t involve this hypothetical trouble I may or may not have gotten into.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Rather,” I said and told him about, first of all, the Clock of Eclipses, and secondly, the Margrave of Rothmarlin. He listened the way he always listened, his attention deep as a well, and when I’d finished, he said, “Y’know, in Aiaia, when we were rescuing Gideon and them, we had to get Bernard out of the stocks. That was ugly. Least the sanguette’s quick.” After a moment, he added, “Don’t like menageries, either. All that staring.”

  “I admit to some fellow feeling. I was . . . after the Virtu was broken, Stephen . . . that is to say, it’s a long-standing custom . . .”

  “Felix,” Mildmay said.

  I twitched.

  “I know that. I was there.”

  “You what?” My voice skied and cracked.

  He met my eyes. “They brought you up the Road of Chalcedony on a rope. People threw rocks. That’s where you got that scar over your eyebrow, ain’t it?”

  I felt naked—worse than naked. Exposed. “You . . . you saw me?”

  “Not up close,” he said, as if that made it better. My face was burning; my hands were clammy. I wanted to run, but there was nowhere I could go. I paced the width of the room, but it didn’t help.

  “Felix.” Mildmay pushed himself into a sitting position. “Calm down, would you? This ain’t . . .” He coughed, painfully and long. I sat down next to him on the bed, feeling suddenly, deeply exhausted.

  “That was before,” Mildmay said finally. “It don’t matter. It’s never mattered.”

  I understood what he was saying, but I couldn’t believe him. “I didn’t know,” I said, although it was a stupid thing to say.

  “Hey,” he said, and he touched my forearm very lightly. “I know you didn’t deserve it.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed that, either. I pressed thumb and forefinger against the corners of my eyes, against a ridiculous, burning prickle of tears. “You need to rest.”

  “Ain’t got much choice,” he said wryly. “But, look—you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.” I raised my head to meet a severely skeptical look. “Really. You’re right. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I meant it don’t matter to me. Not that it don’t matter. But it don’t change—it can’t change because it didn’t—oh fuck it.” He lay down again, and I could see he was struggling for breath.

  “No, I understand,” I said. “Truly. I shouldn’t have—”

  “I shouldn’t’ve laid it on you like that,” he said and coughed again.

  “It’s all right. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Can’t help worrying,” he said, but he was already fading. I touched his hair gently, and that seemed to reassure him, for I felt the last tension leave him and he was asleep.

  Corbie’s banshee would keep a roof over our heads for another week, but rest was the only medicine we could afford. I hoped wretchedly that it would be enough.

  I realized that night, pacing the width of the room while Mildmay slept, that I was actually afraid to sleep, afraid of finding myself in St. Crellifer’s or in the Bastion or in the Caloxan woods watching a cabin burn. It was an insupportable state of affairs. I had to regain control of my dreams, and the oneiromantic symbolism told me as plainly as it could that the only way to do that was to purge my construct-Mélusine of the briars that had invaded and blocked it from the Khloïdanikos.

  And to do that—I was reminded incongruously of the children’s story-game that ended “the stick hit the pan and the pig jumped out the window”—I had to find out what had happened to the Khloïdanikos and find out if, as I both feared and suspected, Malkar’s rubies were the cause.

  Which meant I had to find a way to reach the Khloïdanikos without the use of my construct. In theory, that should have been only marginally more difficult than reaching it through the construct. I was sure a properly trained oneiromancer would have managed it easily.

  Of course, a properly trained oneiromancer wouldn’t have dug himself into this hole in the first place.

  I decided against lying down; I was tired enough I didn’t trust myself not to fall asleep. I sat on the floor and composed myself into a trance. The reflexive urge to call up my construct was strong, but I maintained my discipline and instead went back to the first exercise Iosephinus Pompey had taught me. I visualized a golden egg.

  The egg was principally a calming technique, Iosephinus had told me, but calm was all to the good here—if asked, I would have admitted freely I was not at my most serene. I meditated on the egg. When eventually I felt steady and if not calm, then at least calmer, I allowed the egg to hatch.

  Iosephinus had taught me there were three animals that could hatch from the golden egg: a lion, a mercy-snake, and a hawk. Each of them had a particular meaning, not unlike a Sibylline trump. I’d always gotten the snake, which had made Iosephinus rather melancholy, and that was what I expected this time, although I was hoping, exactly as I always had, for the lion. But what emerged was a sphinx.

  I knew a great deal about sphinxes, in several different traditions. The scholars of Cymellune, long lost beneath the sea, had taught that sphinxes were hermaphrodites, that every sphinx was both mother and father to its offspring, that they spent their lives seeking new riddles and that the only way to kill a sphinx was to propound a riddle it could not solve. It would starve to death trying to reason out the answer.

  In the Deep Lands west of Vusantine, sphinxes appeared in the vast and complicated allegorical paintings beloved of the citizens of Elzibat and Shalfer. There, they represented secrets and were always portrayed with a key under one paw. They were also always female; the stories said they caught travelers to mate with, and that the only way to escape a sphinx was to force, cajole, or trick her into telling her secret.

  The atheist philosophers of Lunness Point said that sphinxes symbolized the relentless thirst for knowledge. In alchemical writings, the sphinx was glass, the daughter of sand. The mystics of the Iulevin Circle had believed the sphinx was the guardian of the Seventh Unknowable Truth.

  It occurred to me to wish that I were not quite so well read.

  The sphinx stretched, its wings spreading wide, and yawned, showing me teeth that definitely didn’t belong in a human mouth. It padded forward on its great silent lion’s paws, its wings, dusty rose and gold, folded neatly along its back. Its eyes were silver, luminous as the moon, and fixed on me; I saw the pupils dilate and braced for the pounce, although there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do against those paws or those teeth.

  And then it sat back on its haunches, affording me an excellent view of both its breasts—small but distinctly feminine—and its penis and testicles, licked its lips with a long, narrow, pink tongue, and said, “Tell me your secret.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You must have one,” said the sphinx. “Tell me your secret, and I’ll give you my key.”

  “Your key?”

  “Really, darling, you’re awfully thick.” It lifted its chin; I saw that it wore a collar, and hanging from the collar was a key, carved out of a yellowish-white material.

  “Horn?” I said.

  “Oh bravo!” said the sphinx, as scathing as any courtier.

  “But the briars,” I said, and hated my own stupid, bleating voice as I said it.

  “I can’t help you with the briars. All I have is this key. Besides, what makes you so sure this key unlocks Horn Gate? . . . Oh, don’t gape like a fish. It’s very unbecoming. Tell me your secret.”

  “But I don’t have any,” I said, at which the sphinx laughed so hard it ended up lying down.

  “What a ridiculous lie,” it said at last, almost fondly. “You have so many secrets, it’s a wonder you haven’t stifled. So cough it up, there’s a good boy.”

  “But—”

  “It’s poisoning you. You
need to say it.”

  And somehow when I opened my mouth, the words fell out like stones: “I did it on purpose.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t lose the Khloïdanikos. I threw it away. To . . . to get rid of Malkar once and for all.”

  “And?”

  “It didn’t work.”

  The click was sharply audible; the collar fell away from the sphinx’s neck, landing tidily between its paws.

  “That was your secret,” the sphinx said. “And that is your key.” It stood up, stretched its spine luxuriously, its wings spreading and beating. Powerful muscles bunched and it sprang upward, flinging itself into flight.

  Alone again, I bent and picked up the key. It was unexpectedly, unnaturally hot, almost burning my fingers. And I had not the faintest idea what to do with it.

  The egg had led me to the sphinx; the sphinx had led me to the key. The sphinx had implied—although certainly not stated outright—that the key was not to Horn Gate, but if that was the case, what did it unlock?

  I looked around and my heart sank. Stone and creeping darkness and there was the rising stench of the Sim. Mélusine. “I don’t want to be here,” I said under my breath.

  “Where wanting to be?” said a voice out of the darkness. I yelped and startled backwards, but came up hard against a wall.

  The darkness blinked great pale eyes somewhere about the level of my knees. I realized I was standing at the edge of a body of water—I had no way of judging its size—and my interlocutor was actually in the water, leaning its elbows on the bank.

  “Wh-who are you?” I said, managing at the last possible moment to edit what into who.

  “Calling me the Kalliphorne,” it said. “And you, dreamswimming, smelling of . . . smelling of . . .” It hauled itself farther out of the water, sniffing at me in a way that would have been amusing if my head had not suddenly been full of stories I’d heard and only half believed. “The foxlike one!” it said triumphantly, then pushed itself backwards, angling, I realized, to get a look at my face. “You not being him,” it said after a very long pause; it sounded, not disappointed, but highly suspicious. “Smelling magic.”