Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  Corbie brought lunch again, and while we ate, she told me how she had practiced the night before by lighting and extinguishing the candles in her room after every client. I suspected it had improved her business as well, for even telling me about it put life in her face and made her long nose and dark eyes lovely rather than merely interesting.

  She was eager to know what I would teach her today. I called witchlight, and her eyes went wide. She was facing the window, and I saw for the first time that her eyes weren’t brown as I had thought but a fantastically deep blue, so deep it was actually more accurate to call it violet. “I can’t do that,” she said.

  “Of course you can. It’s no harder than lighting a candle.”

  “But it’s real magic.”

  “I thought that’s what I was teaching you,” I said.

  She went red and said half-angrily, “Don’t tease me, Felix, all right?”

  “My dear Corbie, I assure you—” I cut myself off, realizing that to her that would sound like I was teasing her. “Look. I promise I’m not teasing you. But why would you think I was?”

  She got up and stalked over to the window, more to avoid having to meet my eyes, I thought, than because she was truly angry. “I know what I am. I’m a jezebel, not a magician. I figure maybe I can learn enough to get a third-grade practitioner’s license, and then, you know, when I’m too old for the fish, I’ll have something to fall back on. But I’m not expecting anything more.”

  I blurted, “Why in the world not?” and startled her into turning to face me.

  “What?”

  “Corbie, you’re . . . How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three,” she said, her chin going up so defiantly I knew it was a lie. I gave her my most severely skeptical look and waited. She folded fairly quickly: “Oh, all right. Seventeen.”

  “Better,” I said. “Some wizards don’t come into their powers at all until they’re eighteen or nineteen, you know, and although I don’t know the Corambin system, I can’t imagine you’re starting ruinously late; you’ve certainly got enough power to do whatever you want. And you know I was a prostitute. So why would you think you can’t . . . ?”

  She muttered something at the floor, for a moment uncannily like Mildmay.

  “What?”

  “I said, you don’t sound like it. Even being foreign and all.”

  “I was taught not to,” I said. “I’m sure you could learn likewise.” She gave me a look that went beyond skepticism and into outright disbelief. “No, really. It’s a matter of learning how to hear yourself more than anything else.”

  “Could you teach me that?”

  “Um,” I said. Malkar’s pedagogical methods had not been ones that I would want to use. And the learning process had been very slow, although possibly Corbie would not be as stupid a student as I had been. “Let me think about that. Right now, let’s just work on witchlights.”

  For all her protests, Corbie listened avidly, and she mastered the trick of witchlights far more quickly than she’d learned to extinguish a candle the day before. The rest of the afternoon was easy, for the color visualization exercises were simple but time-consuming—and more important than they seemed. By the time she left, Corbie had lost the hangdog expression that said she thought she wasn’t good enough to learn “real magic,” and I was profoundly glad to see it go.

  In my dream, I am walking down the hallway in the Mirador that leads from the Hall of the Chimeras to the Lesser Coricopat, a hallway I know as well as I know my own hands. Except, in my dream, the hallway is longer, darker, as if someone has come and taken away half the candles, and I am nervous, walking fast.

  There is someone walking ahead of me, a man with long red hair, dressed in black. I think that I know him—certainly, his gait is familiar, that easy, powerful stride like a panther’s. But he will not look back, even though I know that he knows I am behind him, and I cannot think of his name. I know—the way one does know things in dreams—that if I can just see his face, I will remember his name, and I lengthen my stride to catch up.

  For some reason it disturbs me that I have to work so hard to catch him; I am nearly trotting by the time I come abreast of him. He turns to look at me, his eyes green and cold, and I do know him—he is Mildmay, my brother—but there is no scar on his face.

  Mildmay, I say, and then falter to a stop. I can’t mention the scar and say instead, feebly, You . . . you aren’t limping.

  The look in his eyes is hard impatience, like flint and iron, and he says, Of course not, you stupid fuck. Except that he doesn’t sound right, not like himself, his consonants as clear and hard as his ice-green eyes. I’m dead, ain’t I?

  I flailed out of bed in a tangle of blankets, my breath coming in hard sobs, and lurched, half-crawling, across the room. For a moment I thought my dream had been a true one; Mildmay’s face was waxen and the quilt was not moving with his breath, but then I was near enough to hear the rasp of air in his lungs. I touched his face, my fingers shying away from his scar, remembering despite myself how he had looked in my dream, how different he had seemed without that harsh livid line. His skin was still fever-hot. I found the pulse in his neck; it was labored but still strong.

  It had not been a true dream, then. Not yet.

  I barely waited for dawn before I was down at the front desk, begging Mrs. Lettice for the name of a doctor.

  “You can’t afford a pledged practitioner,” she said, not as a question.

  I couldn’t afford a piece of horehound, but I didn’t say that. Mrs. Lettice consulted a small black notebook, giving me a thoughtful look, and said, “I’ll send Joanna for Practitioner Druce.”

  Practitioner Druce turned out to be a woman, middle-aged and fierce. She examined Mildmay thoroughly; asked a cogent series of questions, some of which I could not answer due to Mildmay’s habit of never talking about himself and especially not to complain; then brought chalk and a straightedge out of her bag and began marking symbols on the floor.

  She was a wizard. A magician to Corambins. A heretic back home.

  I wavered for a moment between three different kinds of hysterics, and then said, quite reasonably, “Will you explain the theory of what you’re doing?”

  She gave me a slow, sidelong look. She knew I was a wizard—of course she knew I was a wizard. I realized she suspected me of mocking her, and said more hastily than tactfully, “It’s heresy at . . . in Mélusine. So I don’t know how it works.” And then I held my breath, waiting for her response. If she took offense at being called a heretic, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to persuade her to stay. I didn’t need anyone to tell me my charm was at low ebb.

  But after a moment, her face relaxed into the first real smile she’d shown. “I wondered why you were calling on me, when I’m only a magician-practitioner second grade and you’re . . .” She waved a hand. “You’ve never studied healing at all?”

  “No. Is a magician-practitioner different from a physician-practitioner?”

  “Many physician-practitioners are annemer. Many magician-practitioners aren’t physicians. I happen to be both. Third grade and second grade.”

  “But not pledged,” I said cautiously.

  “The House of Mercy and I do not see eye to eye on certain matters,” she said, and that was all the answer she was going to give. “As to what I’m doing . . .” Her explanation was lucid and straightforward but more mechanical than theoretical. She knew what she was doing and on a very elementary level, the level of cause and effect, why she was doing it, but not any more than that. I reminded myself that she was here to treat Mildmay, not to satisfy my curiosity, and contented myself with listening and watching and extrapolating privately where I could. I understood why the Coeurterre found the magicians of Corambis so congenial: Practitioner Druce talked a great deal about balance and flow, although the flow she meant was not of magic, but of something else.

  She called it vi and said it was stagnating in Mildmay’s lungs.

  “But what
is it?”

  She shrugged and leaned across Mildmay to chalk a series of symbols on the wall. “It’s what magic works on. You can’t mend bones with magic, but you can use vi to encourage the bone to mend. Or here, with your brother, I can’t magically expel the congestion from his lungs or the invaders from his blood, but—”

  “Wait, invaders? What invaders?”

  She seemed more amused by my alarm than anything else. “The invaders that are making him sick. The invaders that his body is trying to burn out with this fever.”

  My mouth was probably hanging open in an unbecoming fashion, I realized. “I don’t—but how can he have invaders in his blood?”

  She straightened, dusted the chalk off her hands. “Mr. Harrowgate, have you ever used a minusculium?”

  “A what?”

  “A magnifying glass?”

  “Well, yes, of course.”

  “A minusculium—think of it as an incredibly powerful magnifying glass. If I had one here, I could take a drop of your brother’s blood and show you what I mean.”

  “He has . . . creatures in his blood? Like parasites?”

  “No, no. Like machines. Tiny machines that tell his body to do the wrong things.”

  The idea was more than a little abhorrent. “But how did they get into his blood in the first place?”

  “If I could tell you that,” said Practitioner Druce, “I could blackball the House of Mercy instead of the other way ’round.”

  Corbie arrived as Practitioner Druce was leaving; she barely waited for the door to close before she hissed at me, “That’s Priscilla Druce.”

  “She didn’t tell me her given name,” I said. “If that’s what it is, I see why.”

  “But—” She broke off and said, “Mildmay must be really bad, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said and felt myself sag into the truth. “Practitioner Druce was kind enough to allow me to go into debt to her—a practice which I suspect is why Mrs. Lettice recommended her in the first place.”

  “Oh probably,” Corbie said. “It’s all right, though. She won’t break your shins. But she’ll have you up in the House of Honesty if you don’t pay her back quick enough.”

  “I know,” I said. “She warned me. And so I . . .” The words knotted and stuck in my throat.

  Corbie looked up at me worriedly. “Felix?”

  “Corbie, you said . . .” I couldn’t get it out that way, either. Corbie was looking even more worried.

  “You said you’d be my patron,” I ground out finally.

  “Oh,” said Corbie, her eyes going wide. “Well, yeah, I will, but are you sure? I mean, you seemed like you meant it when you said you weren’t going to do that no more, and I know I shouldn’t’ve pushed at it, but I just—”

  “Corbie,” I said tiredly, “please shut up.”

  We kept working that afternoon on color visualizations, and if I was distracted, Corbie was tactful enough not to mention it. Practitioner Druce had said the best thing now for Mildmay was sleep, and had reassured me that he could be left for a few hours. So I felt guilt, but no particular concern at going out into the cold evening air with Corbie.

  “I guess,” Corbie said, “now I got to ask how much you know.”

  “I lost my virginity when I was eleven,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact despite the fact that this was history I never talked about. “At auction, actually. I spent the next three years in a brothel that specialized in the tarquin trade.”

  “Tarquin?”

  “Oh, damn it all, of course you don’t use the same words. People who, um, enjoy other people’s pain.”

  “Flame,” Corbie said; she was now looking at me very dubiously. “You were one of those?”

  “No, I was a martyr,” I said, omitting my personal preferences from the conversation entirely. “The . . . the other side.”

  “Shadow.”

  “Shadow,” I echoed, thinking it was uncomfortably appropriate. “So, really, there’s very little I don’t know about what men will pay to do to other men.” My effort at a smile failed abysmally.

  “Well,” Corbie said, a little skittish around the eyes, but standing her ground, “you don’t need to worry about that, because flames and shadows is the Black and White’s business, and nobody who ain’t pledged has a piece of it. And what we’re banking on is your tattoos.”

  “My tattoos?”

  “My friend Georgina reads all those Mélusine novels, and she tells me the plots on slow nights. And I know just how big they are. Everybody knows about the magicians with the tattoos, and even people who don’t have a thing about the books will think that’s worth paying for.”

  “Oh,” I said weakly. She had it planned out, probably had from the moment she’d recognized me for what I was.

  “Hold that thought,” said Corbie. “I’ll be right back.”

  I stayed where I was, despite an increasing urge to run, as she ducked into a storefront. An apothecary shop, it looked like, and I wondered what she needed so suddenly.

  She came back and said, “Here.”

  I held my hand out reflexively, and she gave me a small glass bottle filled with pale pink pills. “You should take one now.”

  “What are they?”

  “Hecate,” Corbie said, as if it should have been self-evident.

  “That didn’t help.”

  “They make it so you can’t hex anybody.”

  “Hex anybody?” I said incredulously.

  “Not that you would. But. Well. People are a little twitchy about magicians. Like my gran.”

  Twitchy like her gran, I realized she meant. “Because I might be a warlock,” I said.

  “Yeah, exactly,” said Corbie. “And, I mean, they were worst for other magicians, but they did pretty nasty things to annemer, too.”

  I thought of Porphyria Levant and the tale of her revenge on Creon Malvinius. “I understand. What exactly does hecate do?”

  “It makes it so you can’t do magic. It don’t last long—you’ll be back to normal by tomorrow morning.”

  “And you know this from personal experience?”

  “You mean, have I taken it?”

  “In a nutshell.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Well, no. Seeing as how you’re the first person I’ve ever told I could do magic. But lots of magicians use it.”

  “Why?” I could think of few things I wanted less than to take a drug that would make me annemer, even temporarily.

  “Well, people used to take it all the time so the warlocks wouldn’t get’em. Nowadays, magicians mostly take it when they’re running for office or petitioning a House. You know, before the vote so there’s no funny business. It really is safe.”

  “Depending on your definition,” I muttered, but I didn’t need Corbie to tell me I didn’t have a choice. I shook one of the pale pink pills out and dry-swallowed it, then stoppered the bottle firmly and put it in one of my inside pockets.

  “It’ll take about half an hour to work,” Corbie said. “C’mon.”

  Corbie did have a plan, and she explained bits of it to me as we walked.

  Prostitution in Bernatha was in some ways very similar to prostitution in Mélusine and in some ways radically different. For one thing, it wasn’t merely legal—or mostly ignored, which was a better description of the situation at home—it was a flourishing and vital part of the Bernathan economy. All brothels had to be pledged to the House of Chastity; individual prostitutes might be pledged to Chastity, as Corbie was, or they might be unpledged. You could not—Corbie said and seemed shocked that I had to ask—be a prostitute pledged to a different House, although you might work in, or even for, one of the other six.

  As an unpledged prostitute, I couldn’t work in a pledged brothel, and therefore not in a brothel at all. There were what Corbie called blacklight brothels, but she said the House of Chastity always caught them, and when it did, it blackballed the clients as well as the prostitutes. “Not worth it,” she said emphatically.
/>   So I had to work the streets, which I’d done for Keeper but never since, “except it’s better,” said Corbie, “if you can work out a deal with a bar.”

  “Can I?” I said curiously.

  She looked up at me and then grinned. “Yeah, you can.”

  The bar was called Crysolomon’s, and the bartender was a close friend of Corbie’s—close enough, from the way he greeted her, that if he wasn’t one of her clients, he wanted to be. The look he gave me was not entirely friendly, but Corbie whispered something in his ear out of which I only caught the word “violet,” and he relaxed considerably, enough to say, “Any friend of Corbie’s is welcome here.”

  Corbie established me at a table in the back, said, “Fish will find you, so don’t go trolling,” and “don’t take less’n five hermits,” and left. The rest of it was up to me.

  Her bartender brought me a drink—“on the house,” he said when I looked alarmed. “If Corbie’s right, you’re going to be bringing in some custom.”

  Fish will find you, Corbie’d said; I decided not to think about it any further and took a swallow of sweet white wine. I was starting to feel the hecate. The absence of my magic didn’t hurt, but I felt a little light-headed, a little dulled, as if I couldn’t see or hear properly. And at the same time I felt raw and naked and utterly helpless. It was not a nice sensation.

  The first fish found me three-quarters of an hour later, and it was like I’d never left the Shining Tiger. I knew how to do this; there was even a feeling it took me some time to identify as relief. For the first time in twenty years, I wasn’t lying.

  Crysolomon’s had a back room—a storeroom reeking of beer and rats, but the door locked and that was good enough. By the time Corbie came back for me, I had made fifteen hermits and been bought enough drinks to put a buffalo under the table.