Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  I followed Julian’s guidance off the train and out of the station, and followed still, obedient as any dog, across the campus of the Institution, through the strong heat of sunshine and the rising and ebbing babble of young men arguing, and up more steps and into the Mammothium.

  Julian was greeted cheerfully by a baritone who said, “Thrale said I should lift the wards on Henry for you, right?”

  “If it’s not a bother,” Julian said, shy again.

  “Not a bit,” said the baritone. “I wanted to tinker with them anyway. Something Mr. Harrowgate said in lecture made me think I could do a better job with them.”

  “Mr. Harrowgate?” said I.

  “Dean Ashmead hired him to teach,” said the baritone. “About how magic works in Mélusine. It’s very interesting, and I think there are some applications—”

  Had heard someone thump up the stairs outside; now the door opened, and Julian said, “Thrale!”

  “Hello, Carey,” said a voice I remembered from Our Lady of Mirrors a week and a half ago. “And this must be Kay Brightmore.”

  I disliked the way he said it. “And you are Cyriack Thrale. Have heard much about you.”

  “I was just going to take the wards down,” said the baritone. “Unless you want to do it?”

  “Yes, I’ll take care of it, thanks, Clayforth,” said Thrale. “You must be busy.”

  “Oh, a trifle,” said Clayforth. “Just let me know when you’re ready to put them back up. I’ve got some ideas.”

  “All right.” A confused noise of footsteps—one set going away to the left, and another circling clockwise in a fashion which told me this room was very large, but otherwise made no sense.

  Then Thrale said, “There. The wards are down, so you can do whatever it is you wanted, Carey.” And I still disliked his tone.

  But Julian said, “Come on, Kay,” and led me forward, within the ring of the circle the footsteps—Thrale’s footsteps—had paced out. He put my hand on something and said, “This is Henry-the-Mammoth.”

  It was slick and grainy and hard; I found I could barely close my hand around its circumference. I followed the length of it down as it curved extravagantly and tapered into a point that was blunt but no bigger around than my little finger.

  “That’s the tusk,” said Julian.

  I reversed direction and followed the sweep of the tusk back up and up, and up, until finally, well above my head, I found the spread of the skull.

  “A monster in truth,” I said. I worked my way slowly from what I could reach of the skull, around and down to the shoulder. Followed the massive bones of the leg down to a foot with four strangely delicate toes. Then retraced the leg to find the ribs like the slats of a garden fence.

  Thrale broke away from a quiet-voiced conversation with Julian to say, “Some of those we actually had to make—carved them down from whale ribs.”

  I had begun this mostly to please Julian—and because it was of a certainty more interesting than pacing the nursery floor. But now I found I did wish to know, to be able to imagine this beast in its entirety. I went back carefully to its skull. “Julian?”

  “Yes, Kay?”

  “How much more of its skull is there above my hand?”

  “At least two feet,” said Julian

  Not like the skull of a pig, then. “Has it a neck more like a horse or a cow?”

  “Much more like a cow.”

  “Thank you.”

  I felt the width of its skull, found its jaw behind and beneath the rack of its tusks. The jaw seemed almost ridiculously small, but with those monstrous tusks—I put my hands out, feeling one tusk to each side of me, here as much around as young trees—perhaps this creature had had no need for impressive teeth.

  Julian said, “Kay, if you’d like, Cyriack has offered to show us his bog people.”

  “His what?”

  Another of Julian’s explanations more notable for its excitement than its cogency: dead people brought out of peat bogs. “And you study them?” I said. “Why not just give them decent burial?”

  Thrale and Julian both tried to answer me at once.

  I turned around—still between the mammoth’s tusks so that I did not need to fear becoming disoriented—and said, “Let us go examine your dead people then.” Was still better than pacing the nursery of Carey House.

  The smell was strong and sour, though not the smell of decay. Thrale could, at least, describe things clearly, and although he was surprised when I was willing to touch his dead warlock, he did not object. I could have spoken of wading in blood at Angersburn, of the charnel house beneath Summerdown, of the night I spent sleeping on my dead beloved’s bier, but I held my tongue. Would be mere unkindness, and surely the world had enough of that already.

  My fingers encountered hair first, and I was startled into speech: “Nalattris.”

  “What?” said Thrale.

  “Is an old Usaran custom,” said I, feeling the tight twisted knots, each secured by its own weight and tension. “When a person is thronged with evils, and particularly when they are sapping his mind—driving him mad, we would say”—although was a poor translation—“the athen, the holy man, draws the evils and binds them, each in a knot of hair. And then the knots are cut off, as close to the scalp as possible and without undoing them.”

  “But no one cut off these knots,” Julian said.

  “Perhaps,” said I, “an he was a madman, he escaped his caretakers and drowned in the bog before that part of the ceremony could be performed.”

  “No,” said Thrale, although he did not sound so superior as he might have. “I hadn’t told you yet about the sticks.”

  “The sticks?”

  “To hold him down. His death wasn’t an accident.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Must be a most ghastly way to die.”

  “I should think so,” said Thrale.

  “Much Usaran magic is built on notions of sacrifice,” said I. “The people who pinned this man in a bog to drown, who were they?”

  “He died two thousand years ago,” said Thrale. “Before the voyage of Agramant the Navigator.”

  “So is Vedaran,” said I. As the Usara were the mountain people, so the Vedara had been the plains people—before the travelers from Cymellune came and slew them to build cities on their land. Were no Vedara left now, and had not been for a thousand indictions or more. “Is likely—or at least plausible—that their magic worked the same way.”

  “So perhaps it was a sacrifice instead of an execution,” Thrale said thoughtfully. “That’s very interesting, Mr. Brightmore, thank you.”

  And Julian said, as I had been waiting for him to say almost since we set out from Carey House, “We’d better get home, Kay.”

  An there was a difference between the word “home” and the word “prison,” I was beginning to forget what it was.

  Chapter 12

  Felix

  Virtuer Hutchence leaned in at my office door late Martedy afternoon. “What is it, Hutch?” I said without looking up. Beckett had not made good on his threat, as I had been fairly sure he wouldn’t—a gamble, but not a risky one—and my relationships with my colleagues were becoming more comfortable. Virtuer Hutchence continued unfailingly friendly and cheerful, and I actually quite liked him. But given the slightest encouragement, he’d grow roots in my office and talk until I wanted to strangle him.

  “Got permission from Giffen,” he said. “We’re going to go out Venerdy and bring the Automaton of Corybant in.”

  “Bring it in?” I said, looking up involuntarily. “Like what, some kind of trophy?”

  “To study,” said Hutch.

  “Are you quite sure that’s a good idea?” I said. “It’s not as if any of you has been able to come up with an explanation for how it works or why it started running again.”

  “Well, that’s why we have to study it,” he said patiently. “And, no, there’s no danger. We’re going to put it in the Nullity.”

  He’d mentio
ned the Experimental Nullity before—I’d gathered that it was his pet project—but always at times when I was trying to escape his conversation. “What, exactly, is the Nullity?” I said.

  Hutch beamed at me—I wasn’t quite sure whether it was simply because I’d asked a leading question or whether he knew he’d finally trapped me. “It’s a space in which magic doesn’t work.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A nullity,” he said. “A dead space. No magic. So we’ll stick the Automaton in there, and there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “And it’s permanent?” I said.

  “Until we take it out again. If we do.”

  “But how in the world do you set something like that up? And how do you keep it going?”

  He raised a bushy eyebrow. “Do you really want to know?”

  “In this instance, yes, I do.”

  “It has to do with engines,” he warned me.

  “So I won’t understand it when you explain it. Damn.”

  “I don’t despair of someday teaching you the principles involved,” Hutch said. “But at the moment, no. It was my virtuer project, and I sometimes think they passed me just because none of them wanted to admit they didn’t understand. But it does work. I promise. And anyway, I just wanted to ask if you wanted to come along.”

  “Come along?”

  “On Venerdy. We’ve worked it all out with the Company—we catch the catmint train out, get there about ten, and then we have a good four or five hours to have lunch and look around and get the Automaton ready for the train from Wildar. They’ve even agreed to hitch a special car on the end to pack the Automaton into. We’ll be back by half past twenty-one at the latest.” He cocked his head at me. “Bunch of students going, and me and Bullinger, plus a group from the University. It’d be a good chance for you to meet people more informally. And your brother could come, if he wanted.”

  Part of me, remembering the screams of the dead of Corybant, thought this was a terrible idea. But my curiosity thought otherwise. “I’d love to come,” I said. “And I’m sure Mildmay would love to, as well. And maybe Corbie?”

  “That’s fine,” Hutch said cheerfully, heading out my door with a wave. “The more the merrier.”

  Hutch, at least, saw nothing wrong with my championing of Corbie; he had been an ally in the long and acrimonious discussion I had had first with Virtuer Ashmead and then with the Dean of the Women’s College, a fish-faced adept named Hastings. Aside from a number of questions I was going to ask at a more advantageous moment about women students and how many of them—if any—persevered past practitioner and why it was, when some of the most powerful and intelligent wizards in Mélusine were women, that there were no female virtuers in the Institution at all, the upshot was that they would not accept Corbie as a regular student at the Institution. If she wanted official sanction, it was the Women’s College or nothing. But they couldn’t prevent me from teaching her, or—said Virtuer Ashmead privately—any other virtuer who felt inspired to follow my example; thus I taught her, and Hutch, and a quiet virtuer named Stone, and she assured me she was happy when I asked. When I told her about the expedition to retrieve the Automaton, her eyes lit up like stars.

  I’d make a wizard of her yet.

  Kay

  Attending church that Domenica had been so sore a penance as to make Glimmering’s heart glad, for Vanessa Pallister had been attached to my arm like a leech. Both before and after—and even during—the service, my ears were full of Vanessa’s voice, simpering at new acquaintances, gushing at women she had known before her marriage, whispering to Isobel for information about who various persons in the benches around us were. When the intended approached me after the service, the first I knew of it was Vanessa, gushing again, saying how wonderful it was to have an intended who gave proper sermons instead of just telling children’s stories. I was astonished that she had noticed.

  Intended Godolphin said, “Thank you,” uncomfortably, and then, “I just wanted to find out if Mr. Brightmore—”

  “My intended,” Vanessa said, so archly that I was hard-pressed not to grimace or even gag outright.

  Intended Godolphin said, “Er. Yes. Um. I’m sure he’s in very good hands then.” And then either he fled—and I could not fault him if he did—or he was pushed aside by four ghastly, squawking, squealing, gushing women who had apparently been Vanessa’s bosom-bows at Miss Flowerdew’s.

  I was at least spared the ignominy of asking what Miss Flowerdew’s was. Serena had dreamed of attending it. Was a Corambin institution, a “finishing school,” designed to make girls into gentlewomen. My mother, in one of her rare moments of maternal interest, had told Serena that the things she needed to learn weren’t things any school could teach her, and based on the evidence of Vanessa and her friends, my mother had been right.

  That afternoon was so ghastly that I found absolute consolation in the silence of the nursery, which in turn had made me fearful that I was becoming in truth an invalid. Thus when Julian came up on Mercoledy and said there was an expedition to retrieve the Automaton of Corybant on Venerdy and Professor Dombey said there was no reason I couldn’t come if I had a mind to, I could, in my gratitude and relief, have fallen on his bosom and wept, though I did not.

  Rose early on Venerdy. Washed and dressed and breakfasted, and Murtagh had provided his carriage, so that Julian and I traveled to Lily-of-Mar Station in some comfort, rather than in the noise and stench of the fathom. The professors and magicians had hired a private waiting room. Julian found me a chair and said, apologetically, “Kay, I have to go find Professor Dombey, but I think you’ll be more comfortable if you wait here, because I don’t see him, and—”

  “Oh,” said a light, breathless voice. “Good morning, Mr. Brightmore.”

  “Mr. Harrowgate?” I said.

  Julian made a slight squeaking noise. Mr. Harrowgate said without any trace of discomfort, “Good morning. I’m Felix Harrowgate, and this is my brother, Mildmay Foxe. You must be a friend of Mr. Brightmore’s.”

  “Julian Carey,” Julian said. “Kay’s my uncle. Sort of. I’m a student of Professor Dombey’s.”

  “Of course,” said Mr. Harrowgate. “Virtuer Hutchence wants me to find your professor, although I told him it was useless since I’ve never met the man in my life. Perhaps you could point him out to me?”

  “Well, I don’t see him,” said Julian. “I was just going to go look, but I don’t like to leave Kay alone.”

  “Am fine,” I started, but Mr. Harrowgate said, “Then we’ll leave Mildmay with him. Sit, Mildmay.”

  His brother’s voice, much deeper and slower and slurring, growled something I couldn’t make out.

  “No, but sometimes I wish I could muzzle you like one,” said Mr. Harrowgate. “Just sit and keep Mr. Brightmore company and Mr. Carey and I will be back as soon as we can.”

  I felt a body drop into the seat next to mine. After a long and very uncomfortable pause, I said, “Good morning.”

  He answered, and I felt at least cautiously certain that what he said was “Good morning.”

  He shifted and something tapped against my leg. I startled, and he said, “Sorry,” followed by a sentence I could not follow at all.

  “I cry your mercy,” I said. “What did you say?”

  He repeated himself, even more slowly, and this time I understood: “Almost dropped my stick.”

  “A walking stick?”

  “Bad leg,” he said. Our chairs were close enough together that I felt his shrug.

  “I’m sorry I have such a difficult time understanding you,” said I. “Your accent is—”

  I startled at his laugh. “Ain’t that. C’mere.”

  He took my hand—his was callused and surprisingly long-fingered—and said, “This is why.” He guided my hand to his face.

  At first I didn’t understand what I was feeling, and then I found his nose, his chin—shockingly smooth for the grown man his deep voice indicated he was—his mou
th, and then something wrong, a raised, knotted line that twisted his upper lip and ran from mouth to temple and on into long, coarse hair.

  “A scar,” I said stupidly and felt him nod. “But how did it—no, that’s no business of mine. I cry your mercy.” I put my hand back in my lap; touching his face seemed like an unwarranted intrusion, especially as we were surrounded by scholars and magicians, any of whom might be watching.

  “Knife fight,” he said, and now I could not only hear but also imagine the effort he was expending to make his words clear. “Long time ago.”

  “A knife fight? A battle, you mean?”

  “No. You can get Felix to tell you.”

  “I know it’s difficult for you, but . . . surely my comprehension will improve with practice.”

  I felt him twitch a little beside me, and he said, “You sure?”

  “Unless you have something better to do,” I said politely, and that made him laugh again.

  “Okay then,” he said, and began to talk.

  Mildmay

  So I told Kay Brightmore the whole stupid story. And he listened, and asked me to repeat myself, and asked me for more information, and it was kind of like the bit in the pantomimes where Jean-the-Wizard makes the statue of King Ming’s dead daughter come to life. I mean, nothing could help about his eyes, which were even spookier than Felix’s, but his face kind of warmed up around them, and he went from hunched in on himself, to leaning forward and, you know, really interested. And he was right. Practice did help. By the time I’d finished explaining to him about kept-thieves, he was only having to ask me to repeat myself on the really hard words, or the words he didn’t know. We had a fuck of a time over “Scaffelgreen,” and then of course he wanted to know about the public scaffolds and the sanguette and the ketches, and we were doing really well with each other when Felix came back with the kid in tow and said, “The enginists won’t hold the train any longer, so we’d better go.”