Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  “Yes,” said Tinder. “His Grace wishes you to be particularly thorough.”

  “Yes, I can see why.”

  There were thick fingers on my face, trying to tilt my head to one side. I knocked the hand away and said, “Never mind His Grace’s wishes. Mine are that you either treat me as a man or you leave.” And if much of the sharpness in my voice was camouflaged fear, no one needed to know that save I.

  “Mr. Brightmore,” Tinder began, but the practitioner barked out a startled laugh and said, “No, I deserved that. I beg pardon, m’lord.”

  “Am no lord,” I said. “Just—am no performing dog either.”

  “Or a medical specimen. I have all the worst habits of my breed. Let’s start again. My name is Richard Almond. I’m a physician-practitioner second grade.”

  “Kay Brightmore,” I said, even though he knew that already.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Brightmore,” said Practitioner Almond. “Now, if you would allow me to examine your eyes.”

  I submitted to his examination. Midway through, Murtagh came in and unlocked the collar. I hissed as it came away from my skin, and Almond said, “I think we could do with some hot water here, Your Grace.”

  “Tinder,” said Murtagh, “see to it, would you?”

  “Is very bad?” I asked.

  “You’ll want to avoid open-collared shirts for a while,” said Almond. “But I’ll give you some salve that will reduce the scarring.”

  “Glimmering is a thrusting fool,” Murtagh said.

  “He has made no very good impression on Bernatha,” Almond said mildly, “although the House of Mercy is glad of his cows.”

  “Are you a pledge, Practitioner?”

  “I am, although I spend very little time there. I find the House of Mercy rather stifling.”

  “Insular, you might say,” Murtagh murmured, and got another barking laugh out of Almond.

  “Yes, you might. I say nothing against my colleagues and fellow pledges, but I was very grateful when I could afford to open a practice on the Crait. And here’s your man back with the water. That was quick.”

  “The Althammara has unusually excellent water systems,” said Murtagh. “It’s one of the reasons I prefer to stay here.”

  “I’ll remember that. Now, Mr. Brightmore, if you’d remove your shirt.”

  Much, much later, Practitioner Almond was done with me, and I was able to get into bed and lie back among the clean sheets. Murtagh sent Tinder to get me something to eat, and Almond said, “You’re in surprisingly good health, all things considered. You need rest and food and a less exciting life, and I think you’ll quickly come to feel yourself again.”

  “And the other?” I said, and cursed myself for the cowardly circumvention of the words: mine eyes, my blindness.

  Almond sighed. “I am sorry, although I think you already know the answer. Your eyes don’t respond to light. Now, if it were a blockage in the flow of aether, as I admit I thought it might be, that would be one thing, but it isn’t. The aether is moving freely both in your head and between your head and your heart. I’m afraid the problem is simply that—if you’ll forgive the metaphor—your eyes are burnt out. There’s nothing there for the aether to kindle.”

  “Thank you,” I said. As he had surmised, I had expected nothing different. Was Murtagh who asked, “Is there any hope?”

  “It seems unlikely,” said Almond. “I’m sorry.”

  “Is hardly your fault,” said I. “You do but tell the truth.”

  “Sometimes,” said Practitioner Almond, “that is the cruelest thing you can do.”

  Felix

  It was Corbie at the door. I had been in that trance—or dreaming—or in some strange state in-between—for nearly twelve hours. I begged her to wait and staggered to the lavatory on feet first numb and then agonized. When I came back, she was sitting on the bed beside Mildmay, looking worried. “Your brother’s really sick.”

  “I know,” I said. Mildmay did not stir; if he’d woken while I’d been dreamwalking, it clearly hadn’t been for long. I hoped he hadn’t; I hated the thought of him trying to call for me and getting no response. “Did you bring that banshee?”

  She handed it over and stayed with Mildmay while I went downstairs to present it to Mrs. Lettice, who looked a great deal happier on the instant. She balanced the banshee against our bill thus far, and we came out in the black and even slightly ahead. “That’ll see you through to Domenica,” she said. Four days. It wouldn’t be enough, but I thanked her and went back up to the room.

  “Everything all right?” said Corbie.

  “Idyllic,” I said. “You’ve bought yourself four days’ room and board worth of lessons. And we’d better start with you telling me what you know.”

  What Corbie knew was painfully little. She had her grandmother’s trick for hiding from other wizards, and then she had a hodgepodge of half-understood precepts, some from her grandmother, some from stories about wizards, some from what she’d heard by eavesdropping on magician-practitioners, a few even from her clients. She’d learned how to light a candle from watching the way her magician clients did it. I was surprised to find that she could read—she’d gone to something called a dominioner school until she was eight—but she’d had no further schooling, and certainly not in magic. “Gran said it wasn’t right for girls,” she told me, and I said tartly, “Well, ‘Gran’ was wrong.”

  But that was hardly a matter for a few days. She needed the most basic, brute rudiments of practical magic: essentially, how not to hurt herself or anyone else. That first day, we didn’t do much more than get rid of everything she’d learned wrong. She had some very strange ideas about what magic was, as for example that salt water would extinguish it. She told me solemnly that “everyone knew” it took a week for a magician who’d fallen out of a gondol to get his magic back. Half of Corbie’s knowledge of magic was nonsense like that, and I had a frightening suspicion that the only thing that had kept her alive this long was the fear her grandmother had drummed into her. She’d been too busy hiding to experiment. I was grateful on one level, for she could indeed very easily have killed herself, but on another, I was furious and afraid that her grandmother’s fear might prove to have crippled her.

  That, too, was not a matter for a few lessons.

  She had to leave at sundown for her night’s work; I spent a tiring evening first charming Mrs. Lettice into sending a girl up with some broth and then bullying Mildmay into waking up enough to eat it and then to use the chamber pot. His eyes were dull and glassy, his face slack around the twisting of the scar. As best I could tell, he had no idea who I was. He coughed up several vile wads of mucus, and I hoped that was a promising sign. I had never studied medicine; Malkar had had less than no interest, and the Mirador called it heresy. Hindsight was flawless and did me no good.

  I was exhausted by the time I’d got Mildmay settled and at least marginally comfortable again. I crawled into the cot and fell asleep almost before I managed to extinguish the candle. I dreamed all night of fire, sometimes among the buildings of the Lower City, sometimes among the tall trees of the forests of Arvelle; in the flames I saw the faces of the dead: my mother, Joline, Sherbourne, Mavortian, Gideon. And others, children whom Keeper had drowned, children whose names I didn’t even remember. Wizards who had died in one of Malkar’s attacks. Wizards who, from the testimony of Simon Barrister, we knew had died in the Bastion. The dead of Nera. The dead of the Mirador. I fled from the fire, but again and again I found myself in a dead end, up against a brick wall or a jumble of rocks. And when I turned, there would be a woman standing in front of me, her burning hair lifting from her burning forehead, her eyes like a visitation of the desolation of Hell, her child burning in her arms.

  Revenge, she said, and held the child out to me.

  I cannot, I said, and twisted past her to flee again.

  I was more tired when I woke up than I had been when I went to sleep. But at least this morning, I had time for a
bath.

  I might be wretchedly homesick, but I did appreciate the Corambins’ mechanical bent as they had applied it to plumbing. Hot water could be produced merely by turning a tap, and I was determined to find someone who could explain to me how, but in the meantime, I luxuriated in it. Hot water was not a substitute for sleep, but it was better than nothing, and I met Corbie that afternoon with a doggedly clear head. She’d brought lunch: a kind of stuffed bread which she told me proudly was a Bernathan specialty. I was to the point of appreciating any food I didn’t have to pay for, but I didn’t say so.

  That day, we started with the one thing Corbie did know: how to light a candle. The first thing I taught her was how to extinguish a candle once she’d lit it. It was counterintuitive, but once she understood the relationship between the two actions, the lighting and the extinguishing, we could work on calling witchlight, which was both useful in a practical sense and an exercise on which a great deal of more advanced work was based. Extinguishing the candle took most of the afternoon. It didn’t make sense, Corbie complained, and I finally said, “Yes, that’s true, but it isn’t useful. If you expect the world to be logical . . . well, you’re going to have a very unhappy life, for one thing.”

  She stared at me for a moment, almost outraged, and then laughed. “And if that ain’t the truest thing anybody ever said, I don’t know what is. All right. It don’t make sense. What does it do instead?”

  Which was an unexpected way of looking at it, and was the first sign in Corbie I’d seen of the bone-deep inquisitiveness that, far more than power, was the hallmark of the great wizards. Her life had probably taught her to hide that, too.

  “You’re trying to think of it as the same action as snuffing the candle,” I said, “and that’s logical, because you figured out how to light it by imagining the same action as striking a lucifer and holding it to the wick. But magic doesn’t work like material action. I mean, I suppose you could snuff a candle with magic, but you’ll give yourself a tremendous headache. Instead, what you’re trying to do is to reverse the action of lighting it, to put the flame back in the lucifer.”

  “But you can’t,” Corbie said.

  “With a real lucifer, no. But this isn’t a real lucifer. You put the flame in the wick, Corbie. Now take it out.”

  She frowned at me, and then her eyes widened. She turned her head to look at the candle, and after a moment, the flame snapped out of existence. Corbie looked back at me, grinning like an urchin.

  “Good job,” I said, grinning back at her. “You practice that tonight, and tomorrow I’ll show you what to do with it.”

  “Yessir,” she said.

  But she hesitated at the door. “Mr. Harrowgate?”

  “Felix,” I corrected her.

  “Felix. You said you didn’t do women. Did you mean just jezebels or are you a bluet?”

  “A bluet?”

  “A violet-boy. You know, a man who f—sleeps with other men.”

  “Ah. Yes. The word we use at home is ‘molly.’ ”

  “And are you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Well, I just . . .” She fidgeted with a stray strand of pale hair. “If you were, which I ain’t saying you are because I don’t know, and if you were interested . . . I mean, I know you don’t got a lot of money, and with your brother being so sick and all, so if you wanted, I could tell you . . . not that you need me to or anything, I just thought that—”

  “Corbie, are you offering to pimp for me?”

  She went brick-red. “It’s just, you’d do better with a pledged patron. If you were going to, which I know you said you weren’t, but if you were, I wanted you to know—”

  “Corbie,” I said, and smiled at her. “Shut up and go to work.”

  She left in a flurry of skirts and a rattle of heels, and I sat in the darkness of that very small room and tried to pretend I wasn’t tempted.

  That night, as I realized instantly I should have been expecting, Diokletian came dreamwalking to find me. It was actually something of a relief—which said far more about my state of mind than I wanted to contemplate, but at least I didn’t have to worry about fires or labyrinths. Diokletian’s disapproval seemed a small price to pay.

  I wished—I had always wished—that my relationship with Diokletian were not so fraught with ugliness. But he had chosen certain roles for me at the outset, and they were not roles I was willing to play. I was not willing to be a perfect copy of my mother; I was not willing to be a dutiful son (on the off chance that he was in fact my father); I was not willing to be his damaged protégé. And he had no willingness to deal with me as I was. He found me threatening, outraging, disappointing. I had to be grateful to him, for without his intervention, I would still be helplessly insane, but I could not like him.

  He entered into a dream of an argument with Shannon. There had been dozens of those arguments, stupid, stupidly vicious things that had gone on for days. In the dream, we were arguing over what to do with Mildmay. Shannon said, Drown him like a kitten and have done with it, and was infuriated by my objections.

  Don’t be silly, Felix. It’s not like you can keep him.

  In the dream, I knew that if I drowned Mildmay, he would turn into Keeper, and I was still trying to explain this to Shannon when I became aware of Diokletian.

  I shoved Shannon into a convenient wardrobe and said to Diokletian, What do you want?

  Thamuris said he thought you visited him.

  I did.

  So what do you want? You must want something.

  I told Thamuris. I made a mistake, and I want to correct it.

  Do you really think it’s that easy?

  No, of course not, I said, irritated. But I have to try.

  Then why haven’t you?

  The dream had been shifting around us as we talked, and we were now in the Omphalos. Not the Omphalos of the Khloïdanikos, but the Omphalos as it appeared in the waking world of the Gardens of Nephele: dank, dark, and claustrophobic. I walked out immediately onto the portico, and Diokletian followed me. Yes, well, there’s a hitch.

  What hitch? he said, frowning out over the distinctly Mélusinien cemetery with which my mind had replaced the Gardens.

  I can’t get to the Khloïdanikos, I said. The briars have blocked my way in.

  Have they? he said; he sounded almost pleased. You refused my help once.

  And I’m not asking for it now, I snapped.

  Aren’t you? He raised his eyebrows in a supercilious manner I found intensely irritating. You have a better plan?

  Which of course I didn’t. I’ll think of something, I said, but the defensiveness in my voice was clearly audible.

  How like your mother. Determined to cut off your nose to spite your face.

  Don’t flatter yourself, darling, I said. It’s just that I don’t trust you, that’s all.

  At least I had the satisfaction of making him mad. He lost his air of detached superiority in an instant and said, He’s dying, you know.

  I beg your pardon?

  Thamuris. Is dying.

  People with consumption usually do.

  The Khloïdanikos was helping.

  Yes, he told me.

  It isn’t anymore. Because of what you did. And Thamuris is deteriorating more and more rapidly.

  I could have pretended I was surprised, but it wasn’t worth it. If you’re saying this situation needs to be resolved quickly, you’re still not telling me anything I didn’t already know.

  So you admit you need my help.

  No, I said, and as I said it, I understood what my dreamwalking had been trying to tell me. I need Thamuris’s help.

  In the morning, Mildmay was no better, and I tried rather desperately not to think about what that might mean, keeping myself busy instead with the Standard and the old newspapers Mrs. Lettice had given me. I thought she felt it was her duty to help me educate myself about Bernatha.

  And the newspapers were telling me a tremendous amount, even if M
rs. Lettice wouldn’t have liked some of the conclusions I drew. I learned that Bernatha had escaped the Insurgence largely unscathed, though somewhat inconvenienced, due to the ineffable wisdom of the Seven Houses in choosing to side with Corambis rather than with the Caloxans who were the city’s neighbors (much hyperbolous blather here about the superiority of a “free city” to a “margravate city”). I learned that the Duke of Glimmering was an ornament to society whose charm and elegance would be sorely missed when he returned to Esmer. I learned that the men who had defended the railroad line against “the misguided and the savage” were glad to be back with their families. I learned that the Bernatha city council argued over the budget much the same way the Cabinet and Curia did at home.

  Not home, I reminded myself. I had lost the right to call the Mirador home, and I would do better to stop thinking of Mélusine as home, too. It wasn’t as if I was ever going to be allowed to go back.

  A bleak thought, and one I tried not to dwell on.

  I noted the air of self-congratulation with which the newspapers reported the profits of aiding the Corambin army; the obsessive lavishness of the discussions of the Houses’ annual budgets; the advertisements that framed each page, selling everything from ladies’ hand soap to the services of a physician-practitioner third grade who specialized—reading between the lines—in abortions. And then there were the advertisements for livestock and used gondols and tin guttering, which took up pages all by themselves. This was a society in which everything was for sale.

  There was a very long essay about relations with Ygres, the country across the sea to the west. Corambis was at war with part of Ygres, and Bernatha deplored it. Bernatha was maintaining trade with the rest of Ygres and was trying to claim neutrality in Corambis’s war. “We are only honest merchants!” seemed to be the refrain, and I could not help wondering what the Caloxans made of that.

  The discussions of the Insurgence made it very clear that Bernatha did not consider itself Caloxan and probably never had. Bernatha had supported Corambis from the first, meaning that even if the Caloxan forces could have controlled the railways, which apparently they had never entirely managed, they still couldn’t have blocked Corambin movement, for Bernatha’s was the only decent harbor on the Caloxan coast. There was no Caloxan navy. Why, I wondered, had Gerrard Hume thought he could fight this war at all? But with that question, the Bernathan newspapers could not help me.