Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  “Miss Leverick?” I said, although I could barely get enough breath to form the words.

  Her invective broke off abruptly, and she raised her head. Nothing ever looked quite normal by witchlight, but I did not think that entirely accounted for the sallow cast of her complexion.

  “Are you all right?” I said and winced. The question got more inane every time it fell out of my mouth.

  Her mouth compressed into a straight line. “I seem,” she said thinly, “to have broken my wrist.”

  Half an hour later, matters were not quite so dire. The lights were back on. Polite crimson and gold gentlemen had come around with complimentary cups of tea, and a practitioner had been found—a shabby, worn-out-looking woman traveling third class—to splint Miss Leverick’s wrist and encourage her vi. Remarkably, Miss Leverick was the worst of the casualties, along with a scullery maid in the galley who had been scalded. “Not too badly,” the practitioner said reassuringly. “The girl must have reflexes like a cat.”

  The crimson and gold gentlemen also provided explanations: the train had stopped because of a fallen tree across the tracks. “It may be some time before we can drag it clear,” they said apologetically, from which Miss Leverick and I deduced that by “tree” they meant “behemoth.”

  “Shouldn’t we help?” Mildmay said.

  “By ‘we,’ of course, you mean me,” I said. “You couldn’t help lift a tea-cup at the moment.” Since he was holding his cup in both hands, he was hard-pressed to argue with me.

  “I’d help,” Corbie said, but then looked worried. “But I don’t know what I could do.”

  Miss Leverick said, “If they need help from the passengers, they’ll ask. But the engine-practitioner can probably handle it.”

  “Engine-practitioner?” I asked.

  “Every train has two enginists,” Miss Leverick said, “the men who actually drive the train. One is annemer. He deals with the throttle and the brake and watches the track for exactly such things as monumental tree trunks. The other is a magician-practitioner who watches over the magic which mediates between the steam boiler and the gears of the train. And, of course, they’ve found that having a magician along comes in handy more often than you’d think.”

  “We’re like a pocketknife that way,” I murmured. Happily, Miss Bridger had at that same moment asked Miss Leverick how long she thought the delay might last, and Mildmay was the only one who heard me. He snorted and bumped my shoulder with his.

  “I don’t know,” Miss Leverick said wearily.

  “What if we’re stuck here all night?” Corbie asked, even more worriedly.

  I said, “I observe that there are people strolling beside the train. Miss Bridger, Miss Corbie, why don’t we walk down and examine the situation for ourselves?”

  “That’s an excellent idea, Mr. Harrowgate,” Miss Leverick said gratefully. “Go on, Olive. You can report back.”

  Miss Bridger acquiesced, frowning. Corbie bounced to her feet. I said to Mildmay, “No, don’t even think about getting up. I can take a walk without your supervision.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, raising his hands in mock surrender. Just as we were leaving the compartment, he added, eyes gleaming wickedly, “Don’t get eaten by bears.”

  Kay

  In my dreams, I was still sighted; I dreamed of fighting: blood and the screams of horses and the terrible moans of dying men. And then I dreamed of the Usaran woman who had come to my tent in the middle of the night and offered herself to me if I would release her brother, who was a prince, a cephar as the Usara styled such things. In the dream I saw her clearly, although in truth the dark-lantern had shadowed as much as it had illuminated: wide hips, heavy breasts, everything in shades of copper and gold. She pushed her breasts up with her hands, showing me the dark discs of her nipples. She was beautiful, and it cost me nothing to deny her.

  In reality, I had told her to put her dress on and go, and she had put her dress on and attacked me with the knife she had concealed in its folds. That night had ended with the cephar keening over his sister’s body and me getting seventeen stitches in my right arm. She had almost been fast enough.

  But in the dream, she merely turned away for a moment, pushing her fingers through her long, dark hair as she arched her back, and when she turned again to face me, she was Gerrard, smiling at me as I’d seen him a thousand times, but naked and aroused.

  I tried to protest, looked around frantically for something to offer him: a cloak, a blanket, anything to cover that rampant nakedness. And when he spoke, it was that Usaran woman’s words, though his own voice: “Do I not please you, Cougar-cephar?”

  I realized that I was naked, too, and that he would see the truth in my body’s response. Was no sin to have a taste for the violet-boys; sin was a matter of the spirit, not the body. Was sinful to deny the body’s truth. Was sinful to make a mockery of the sacred love between men and women by confusing the body’s needs with the spirit’s, and I feared Gerrard would see that sin writ large upon my face.

  He stepped forward.

  I stepped back.

  And the world crashed around me; I woke falling, woke blind, woke cramped on the floor of a train compartment with someone’s elbow thumping painfully against my head.

  “Ouch,” said Murtagh.

  “What happens?” I said and winced at the plaintiveness of the question.

  “I’m not sure,” said Murtagh. “The train has stopped and the lights have gone out. And I’m afraid I’ve fallen on top of you.”

  “That part I had observed, thank you.”

  “Well, it’s the best I can do at the moment.” He picked himself up, regaining his seat, and I began cautiously to follow suit, knowing it was possible I had injured myself and did not yet feel it. Gerrard had been particularly fond of the story of the Usaran ambush which I fought my way out of, then looked down and said to my sergeant-at-arms, Is a bloody arrow through my leg. When did that happen? I still had no memory of being shot, although I remembered with great distinctness having the barbed head pushed the rest of the way through my leg so that it could be drawn out.

  “Wyatt!” called Murtagh.

  “Yes, Your Grace?” Wyatt called back from the other end of the carriage.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, Your Grace. Shaken but unharmed. As is Tinder.”

  “Good, good. Would you go see if you can find out what’s going on?”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  I managed to get back into my seat; as far as I could tell, I was uninjured.

  “As if Nauleverer weren’t bad enough,” said Murtagh.

  “Is that where we are?”

  “Oh, of course it is. This sort of thing could hardly happen anywhere else.”

  “Your Grace has no fondness for the forest?”

  “No, My Grace does not. I hate it, to be perfectly frank, and if I’d been part of the Convocation of the One Hundred Forty-second, I would have stonewalled the railways until we all died of old age. What’s that word your friend Intended Marcham used?”

  “Verlain,” said I.

  “Verlain, yes. That’s how I feel about Nauleverer. We shouldn’t be here.”

  Was not as if, at that moment, we had anything in the way of a choice. After some time, Wyatt returned and said, “There’s a tree down across the line, Your Grace. It’s enormous. The enginists aren’t quite sure how to move it. But the porters are setting the train to rights, and they’re going to bring tea to everyone.”

  “Because nothing is more suitable in a crisis,” Murtagh said, but he was gracious to the deeply apologetic porter, and I at least was grateful for the tea.

  Murtagh was, for once, more restless than I, and after we’d drunk our tea he said abruptly, “I want to go look at this monstrous tree. Do you want to come? After all, a promenade in Nauleverer is not something one gets the chance at every day.”

  “True,” said I. “Yes, I would like to come.”

  I had learned, p
erforce, to trust Murtagh. He helped me down from the carriage, and I took his arm as if I’d been doing so all my life. The air smelled damp, of trees and rocks, of water and rot; there was only the very slightest of breezes, which after the relentless wind of Bernatha was almost a relief. I smelled the engine, too, as we neared the head of the train: hot metal and soot and a sharp crackling smell that I supposed might be the magic that made it run.

  I walked in the direction Murtagh led me, and after a while, he said, “May all the angels preserve us. ‘Enormous’ does not begin to describe this tree. Lying on its side, it’s nearly taller than the engine.”

  “How will they move it?” I asked.

  “I imagine that’s going to be the job of the engine-practitioner, poor man. If I were him, I’d put in for—shit!”

  “What?” I said frantically; he had gone tense as wire beneath my hand, and I had never heard him use an obscenity before.

  “Nothing,” said Murtagh.

  “You cannot actually expect me to believe that.”

  “I, ah . . . I just saw someone I wasn’t expecting to see.”

  “From your reaction, I would guess it was Clara Hume.”

  He laughed, but it was shaky and not terribly convincing. “No, nothing like that. It’s . . . it’s no one you know.”

  “Murtagh, you sound like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “It’s not that bad,” he said, and he did sound a little better. “It was just the surprise. And I was afraid he’d see me, but I don’t think he has.”

  “You could just tell me,” I said, and he twitched and went tense again. “Or not.”

  “It’s not you. It’s . . . I don’t want Isobel to know.”

  “Don’t want Isobel to know,” I repeated slowly, only half-convinced I’d heard him correctly.

  “Ah, damnation, I’m just digging myself in deeper every time I open my mouth. Kay. As a friend, will you forget I said anything?”

  It took me a moment to find any reply at all. “Are we friends? Truly?”

  “I had hoped we were,” said Murtagh, and I was still caught between deriding his unexpected naïveté and asking him why in the world he would seek my friendship when the noise came.

  It was like no noise I had ever heard in my life, and I could not, either then or later, find words that would describe it fully. It sounded something like a train engine, something like a rockslide, and something like a vast and vastly rusty hinge. I could not tell how far away it was, nor in what direction.

  And then Murtagh was dragging me in the direction from which we’d come, his grip like iron and his voice muttering a hoarse prayer. The noise came again; I could tell that it was much closer, and now, underlying it, I could hear a ticking sound, like the cursed ticking of the Clock of Eclipses.

  “Blessed Lady, be kind to us in this the hour of our extremity,” Murtagh muttered, and I recognized the Caddovian version of the Canticle of Desperation.

  “Murtagh,” I said, desperate in my turn, “for the love of the Lady and the saints and the angels, what is it?”

  “I think,” said Murtagh, in a thin and horrifically steady voice, “that it’s the Automaton of Corybant.”

  And a voice cried, “GET DOWN!”

  Murtagh and I dropped like stones. I felt something pass over us, sharp and hot and indescribable, and then hands were dragging me again—away from the shriek of metal and fury, and I cooperated as best I could—and someone was saying, a light, breathless voice, strangely familiar although I could not think why, “That may distract it, but I doubt it will do more. How do I kill it?”

  “I don’t know.” A woman’s voice.

  “Not helpful, Corbie. Anyone? It’s your monster. How does it die?”

  “There aren’t stories about that,” said another man’s voice, lower-class Corambin by the accent.

  “That’s just stupid,” said the breathless voice, with a wealth of feeling. “Well, what about your train here? If it went mad, how would you kill it?”

  The lower-class voice must belong to one of the enginists, the practitioner from the way he said promptly, “Burn out the thaumaturgic converter. But I don’t know if that thing—”

  “I’ve got to try something,” said the breathless voice. The woman made an odd protesting squeak.

  There was a noise like the end of the world, howling and banging and a rising steam-whistle shriek, and a terrible stench of burning metal, and then nothing. Even the ticking had stopped.

  The breathless voice said, thoughtfully, “I think I burned out more than the converter.”

  Mildmay

  What I wanted to say to Felix was more along the lines of Don’t go off and leave me here with this nice lady whose wrist I just broke, but that was gonna fly like a stonemason’s kite, so I didn’t. And I could even get behind the idea of giving Miss Leverick a break from Miss Bridger—and giving Corbie something else to think about, which the saints know she needed. I just didn’t want to be the one left behind.

  But I wasn’t feeling up for taking a walk, and I couldn’t pretend I was. I sat and looked out at the little blotches of light from the windows. After a minute I saw Felix and Corbie and Miss Bridger go past. Corbie looked up and saw me and nudged Felix, who waved at me. I waved back.

  And it figured that Miss Leverick wasn’t just going to sit there and let me ignore her. She said, “This is a most unfortunate introduction to railway travel, Mr. Foxe. I assure you, I’ve never broken a limb before.”

  There was nothing for it. “Sorry ’bout that,” I said. “You probably caught my stick just wrong.” And I showed her Jashuki’s knobby head.

  “Even if I did, it’s hardly your fault,” she said, and she sounded pretty cheerful about it, for a lady with a broken wrist. “That’s an interesting cane. Is it Mélusinien?”

  “Nah. It comes from the islands.”

  “Islands?”

  Fuck me sideways, Felix, did you have to go and leave me to give the geography lesson? “South. The Imari.”

  “Could you draw a map?” She was frowning, but she looked interested, and I figured she was probably after anything that could keep her mind off her wrist.

  I thought about it. “Well, I s’pose. I mean, so long as you ain’t gonna try and navigate by it or nothing.”

  She smiled and said, “To pass the time, Mr. Foxe,” and I figured I was right about what she wanted.

  She had a little notebook, kind of like the ones Felix used back home, and a pen, so I turned to a blank page and drew a square up at the top of the page. “That’s Mélusine.”

  “All right.”

  I drew another square further down the page. “And you go south and get to St. Millefleur. You go further south and you get to where Cymellune used to be.”

  “Used to be?”

  “Yeah, it, um—”

  “Corambis is said, in its earliest histories, to have been settled by those fleeing the foretold destruction of Cymellune. So it was actually destroyed?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said.

  “How?”

  I looked out the window, but there was no sign of Felix. Fuck. “It got swallowed up by the sea.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite follow.”

  “It sank,” I said, and dealt with the s as best I could.

  “It sank? Like a boat sinks?”

  “Dunno. Felix might could tell you.”

  She didn’t take the bait. “The city fell into the ocean, then?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, spacing the words out careful. “I just know it ain’t there now. So here.” I drew a sort of spiral. “That’s where it was. And here’s the way the coast runs now.” Which, okay, I was mostly making up, but I’d seen some maps that showed that part of Tibernia, so I didn’t feel too awful about it.

  “All right,” she said, and thank you, Kethe, she was going to let it go.

  “So then you go south some more, if you got a boat to go south in, and you get to the Imari.” And I had no fucking idea
what the Imari looked like, so I drew some circles and told her the names I knew: “Imar Eolyth, Imar Elchevar, Imar Esthivel. There’s others, but I don’t know ’em. But that’s where Jashuki comes from.”

  “Jashuki?”

  “The, um. The koh, Rinaldo said it was.”

  “The what?”

  “The, well, this guy,” I said, tapping his friendly, ugly head. “He’s a kind of guardian or something. The friend who gave the stick to me said he was a friendship spirit.”

  “How lovely,” said Miss Leverick, and she actually sounded like she meant it. And then she looked up at me. “You must have left a great many friends behind when you came to Corambis.”

  “Um.” Fewer than you’d think is what I almost said, but I bit my tongue. I settled for “I wasn’t gonna let Felix go wandering off by himself.”

  She smiled. “Is he so feckless?”

  I wasn’t quite sure what “feckless” meant, but I didn’t want to say so. “No common sense,” seemed a safe enough answer.

  “He’s lucky to have you then,” she said, and that was when there was this great big burst of green light from somewhere around the front end of the train.

  Powers and saints, I nearly fell off the bench again. Miss Leverick twisted around. “What was that?”

  “Felix,” I said, because it was, and I didn’t even know if it was the binding-by-forms saying so or just too much fucking experience.

  I was trying to get up and Miss Leverick was saying, “Mr. Foxe, I really don’t think you ought to,” when there was another big fucking burst of green light and this noise like somebody caught a thunderstorm in a soup tureen and the train jerked once, just hard enough to knock me back down on my ass.