Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  “Corambins are an ingenious people.” I wasn’t sure what “ingenious” meant, but Felix didn’t sound like he thought it was a good thing. I was trying to decide if it was worth maybe getting my head bitten off to ask, and I guess he knew that look on my face because he said, “It means they’re clever. Good at inventing things.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said, because I could see where they were.

  “For example,” Felix went on like I hadn’t said nothing, “it never occurred to us that the binding-by-forms could be anything but permanent, but the Corambins can undo it in the twinkling of an eye.”

  He was being a prick on purpose—I knew that look on his face. “Okay, I got it,” I said.

  “Good. I’d hate to have your education interrupted just because Kay’s off meeting his future in-laws.”

  Well, that was just nasty. “You trying to pick a fight because of something I’ve done, or is it just because you ain’t sleeping good?”

  “Aren’t sleeping well. And I’m not trying to pick a fight.”

  I laughed at him. “The fuck you aren’t.”

  “I’m just explaining a definition. With illustrative examples.”

  “In case I’m too stupid to get it the first time, yeah, I know.” And I wasn’t asking him what illustrative meant, not if he begged me.

  “Past experience has shown . . .” He trailed off meaningfully, and you know, it can’t be good to start off first thing in the morning wanting to punch somebody in the nose.

  “Yeah, well, past experience also shows you’re a fucking prick when you want to be. Guess I should be glad they took the binding-by-forms off after all.”

  “And why is that?” His horrible purring Strych-voice, and I decided all at once to quit dancing around the fucking thing.

  “You know, you sound like Strych when you do that, and I wish you’d cut it the fuck out.”

  It worked. He went white and said furiously, “No wonder you’re glad to be rid of the obligation d’âme. I’m surprised you stay around at all. Or have you changed your mind about that, too?”

  “I said I wasn’t going, and I ain’t.”

  “Am not.”

  “I’m saying, you get this tone in your voice when you’re playing with somebody, and you sound exactly like Brinvillier Strych or Malkar Gennadion or whatever the fuck you want to call him today. Which I get enough of in my dreams already, and don’t fucking need from you.”

  “Then what do you need from me?” he said, with a horrible smile, his voice rising. “Food? Lodging? Spending money?”

  I looked at him for a long moment before I could say levelly, “I don’t need nothing from you, and you might be smart to remember it.” And then I left, before one or the other of us came up with something even worse.

  I was four blocks away before I could think again, and then I stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and tried to figure out whether to laugh or scream.

  Powers and blessed fucking saints, he’d done it to me again. I could say I didn’t want to fight with him—fuck, I could say I wasn’t going to fight with him—until I was purple and blue in the face, and it didn’t make a scrap of difference. He could get me going every fucking time.

  “Fuck me sideways ’til I cry,” I said, and startled a man passing so bad he almost fell off the sidewalk.

  Watch your mouth, Milly-Fox.

  I shifted my grip on Jashuki and tried to figure out a plan.

  Well, the first thing was, don’t go running back, either to slug Felix or to apologize for wanting to slug him. Let him go work that nasty temper out on his students. They didn’t deserve it, but neither did I, and they didn’t have to live with him.

  Right at the moment, that felt like their good luck.

  Second thing was, don’t go running off and do something stupid like, say, proving to Felix just how much money I could pull down in a day if I wanted to. I’d been looking, because it never hurts to have, you know, options, and I knew where to find a game if I wanted to.

  Which I didn’t. I wanted to be done playing cards for money. Never fucking mind what Felix thought and how purely satisfying it would be to make his eyes bug out.

  I sat down on a bench—that’s one thing I’ll say for Esmer, they put benches everywhere. I sat down and thought about my breathing for a while, until I was sure I wasn’t going to go do something stupid. And then I sat there and tried to figure out what I was going to do instead.

  And, okay, I’d got myself calmed down, but Felix’s crack about my education was still eating at me. Like I needed Mr. Brightmore around to read a book or something. And that reminded me of Miss Leverick and her Society for the Advancement of Something-or-Other, and I remembered that when we’d finally gotten off the train in Lily-of-Mar Station, she’d given me her card instead of Felix, along of having figured out that Felix would just give her one of his five-alarm smiles and then lose the card.

  But I’d kept it, along with Robin Clayforth’s card—which Felix still hadn’t noticed I’d lifted off him—in the little purse I kept money in for fathom tickets and buying flowers from street vendors and shit like that. So I fished it out. Society for the Advancement of Universal Education, 117 Smiling Angel Street, Tamsen Dominion, Esmer.

  I’d expected not to recognize the street name, and I didn’t. I was learning Esmer as fast as I could, but there was a fuck of a lot of it. More than Mélusine, maybe. But I didn’t recognize the dominion, either, and I thought I’d been doing pretty well with those.

  Well, at least I knew where to find a map.

  I hauled myself up. It was easier than it had been for a while, but I figured I was pretty much stuck with Jashuki for the rest of my life. The goons in Gilgamesh had seen to that, which might’ve made them happy if they’d known. My feeling was, I deserved it for being stupid enough to get within spitting distance of Kolkhis, no matter what I thought was at stake, and maybe in the future I could do like Rinaldo had said and remember I was lame.

  It was a nice day to be out, sunny and with a breeze. Chillier than it would be at home, but not bad. I paid attention on my way to the fathom station, along of not having been paying none at all on my way to that bench, reading the signs and making mental notes. And if I couldn’t quite shut up the part of me pricing everything for a fence—well, old habits die extremely fucking hard.

  I planted myself in front of the map in St. Ingry Station and went looking for Tamsen Dominion, figuring it couldn’t be near either the Institution or Carey House or I’d know it already.

  The dominion names were written bigger than everything else, so they were easy to spot. It only took me a minute to find Tamsen, up north of Nath, a couple dominions out from the center of town. A considerable hike, but not as bad as it could’ve been. I looked for fathom stations next and got lucky, because there on the south end of Tamsen was Smiling Angel Station.

  It was midmorning, and Felix wouldn’t go and teach for another three or four hours. I gave the girl a penny and headed down to find a northbound train.

  Tamsen was as bourgeois as Breadoven. Everything clean and respectable and flower boxes everywhere, even by the doors of the fathom station, and it turned out the Society for the Advancement of Universal Education was right across the street. Nice big sign over the door, black letters on white and easy to read.

  And of course staring it in the face like that, I got cold feet and had to go walk up and down Smiling Angel Street until I’d got over wanting to bail. I found the smiling angel, too, standing right in the middle of the intersection with its hands spread, twice life-size—assuming an angel’s the same size as a man—and smiling like it was trying to tell the whole world not to be assholes.

  Turned out, at the other end of the block there was a real school: Tamsen Dominion Practicum School, the windows open on account of it being a nice day and a bunch of kids around their second septad all learning arithmetic from a stern-faced lady in a green dress. I thought about what I’d been learning when I was their ag
e, and turned around to head back for the fathom station and home.

  You ain’t fooling nobody, Milly-Fox, and all the book learning in the world ain’t gonna change what you are.

  But I stopped by them stupid flower boxes. Felix would know what the flowers were. I didn’t. I knew what I was, and what I’d been—what I’d done—but I also remembered Mehitabel telling me that we don’t have to stay where the past puts us, even if we can’t get rid of it. And me telling Felix the same exact fucking thing.

  Yeah, I knew what I’d been. But I had to believe I could be more than that if I tried. I turned around and walked across the street to the Society for the Advancement of Universal Education. Opened the door and went in before I had a chance to talk myself out of it.

  It was nice inside. I mean, not fancy or nothing, but all the stuff that could be polished was shining, and there wasn’t a speck of dirt anywhere, and the gal behind the desk had a beautiful smile.

  “May I help you, sir?” she said, and she even sounded like she meant it.

  And of course I’d been working so hard on getting myself through the door, I hadn’t stopped to think about what I was going to do once I got there.

  “I, um. Is Miss Leverick around?”

  “Miss . . . ?”

  “Leverick,” I said, as slow and clear as I could, and her smile came back.

  “Yes, of course. Just a minute—and may I tell her who’s asking for her?”

  “Mildmay Foxe,” I said and hoped her not asking me to repeat it was because she’d got it, and not just because she didn’t want to be bothered.

  On the other hand, it wasn’t like I was hard to describe.

  There were chairs, so I sat on one. It was most of a septad-minute before the gal came back, but when she did, she gave me another beautiful smile and said, “Frances says you should come up to her office. Up the stairs, second door on the left. It’s open.” Then she went back to whatever she’d been doing, and I went out the door and up the stairs and found Miss Leverick’s office. Seemed like you weren’t nobody in Esmer if you didn’t have an office.

  Miss Leverick’s office wasn’t as clean and shiny as the rest of the place. There were stacks of paper everywhere, plus a half-finished quilt in a lap-frame draped over the extra chair and a skinny brown cat with blue eyes looking at me like I was everything wrong with the world and then some. Didn’t budge off the windowsill though.

  Miss Leverick looked up from her papers and smiled like she was glad to see me. We shook hands, and she told me to dump the quilt on the floor, although I was more careful with it than that, and when I was sat down, I said, “I never seen a cat with blue eyes before,” along of really not wanting to get into me and what I thought I was doing here yet.

  “She’s Ygressine,” Miss Leverick said. “They’re the most fantastic mousers. There was quite the little dustup a few indictions ago, when the newspapers discovered that all the navy’s cats are Ygressine instead of honest, hardworking Corambin tabbies. Sailors apparently believe that blue eyes are good luck.”

  “She’s a long way from the sea.”

  “Many of our students are retired sailors. A Ygressine cat was probably the inevitable solution to our mouse problem. And we’ve all become very fond of Edmund. She’s much friendlier than most of the Corambin cats I’ve met.” She reached back to pet the cat. The cat, obviously knowing a good thing when it saw one, stood up, stretched, and kind of flowed over Miss Leverick’s shoulder and down into her lap, where it curled itself up again and, as far as I could tell, went straight to sleep.

  “Edmund? You did say ‘she,’ right?”

  “She’s named for her ship. The Edmund Libby?”

  She said it like she expected me to recognize the name, and I shook my head.

  “There are ballads about the wreck of the Edmund Libby now. It wrecked—oh, it must be a full wheel ago—on Old Sadie’s Teeth. The worst storm on record, and in the morning, when the rescue boats could finally put out from Grimglass, there were only three survivors. Two men and the cat.”

  “This cat?”

  “This cat. And now her children are populating Esmer. We have a waiting list for her kittens. She’s quite famous.”

  Well, me and Felix had survived the Morskaiakrov going down, and I felt all kinds of respect for the cat.

  “But you can’t have come to talk about either cats or famous shipwrecks,” said Miss Leverick. “Or is this just a social visit?”

  Powers. “I, um. Well, you said y’all taught classes, and I was just wondering about them.”

  Oh very eloquent, Milly-Fox. I knew I was blushing, but Miss Leverick just said, “Did you have any particular class in mind?”

  “I don’t even know. What all do you teach?”

  “Let’s start from the beginning, then,” she said and reached—careful not to disturb the cat—for the top of a stack of paper that turned out to be little booklets. She handed one to me. “These are the classes we’re offering next month. I can tell you, of course, about the classes for Illa and Pella, but we haven’t gotten those printed up yet.”

  “Sure,” I said, kind of on reflex, and looked at the booklet to keep from saying something really dumb.

  Me not knowing nothing about it, that booklet looked pretty good. They had a bunch of different classes. Arithmetic like the kids were learning down the street, grammar and composition and I knew Felix would be after me to take that one. A class on Corambin poetry. A class on Corambin history. And a class on something I had to say to myself twice before I was sure I was reading it right.

  “Labyrinths?”

  “Oh dear,” said Miss Leverick, looking embarrassed. “Mrs. Weatherby has a bit of a hobbyhorse on the subject, and since she and her husband are among our principal donors . . .”

  “You can’t tell her no.” I got that part. “But what does she have to say about ’em? Labyrinths, I mean.”

  “Ah,” said Miss Leverick, looking even more embarrassed. “There are labyrinths all over Corambis, you see, and nobody knows what they’re for. And Mrs. Weatherby’s theory is—oh dear. Mrs. Weatherby believes that the labyrinths, all of them, were placed at sites of particular spiritual importance by King Edward, the last king of Corambis who could claim direct descent from Agramant the Navigator, and that he knew where to put them because, the people of those days being so much purer and holier than we are, he was in direct communication with at least one and possibly several angels.”

  “Okay,” I said after a moment. “So when you say she has a hobbyhorse, what you mean is she’s batfuck crazy?”

  Miss Leverick absolutely cracked up. The cat opened her eyes and gave me a disgusted look, then jumped off Miss Leverick’s lap and stalked out the door. That just made Miss Leverick laugh harder, but finally she took a deep breath and got herself settled again. She said, “Really, Mrs. Weatherby’s class is very popular. She teaches them about the importance of the labyrinth in Cymellunar culture, and the names of all the Cymellunid kings of Corambis, and they take day trips on Domenicas with picnic lunches and such like.”

  “To look at labyrinths?” Because, why would you want to?

  “There are several near enough to Esmer for train excursions. And we convinced the Company to offer a special fare.”

  “Huh,” I said, although I could sort of see the part where getting out of the city for a day might be worth having to listen to a crazy lady yap about labyrinths. “So what was the importance of the labyrinth in Cymellunar culture?”

  Which I know Miss Leverick only understood because it was her words. “Well, there are several conflicting theories—”

  “Figures. But what does Mrs. Weatherby think?”

  “Purification. Something about clarifying and channeling one’s vi, I think, but honestly I try not to listen to her.” She stopped and sort of squinted at me. “You weren’t thinking about attending her class, were you?”

  “Powers, no,” I said. “Just curious.”

  “Good. Because
I couldn’t in all honesty recommend it.” But she looked like she wasn’t entirely satisfied. “Are there labyrinths in Mélusine?”

  “Um. Well, there’s curtain-mazes at the Trials, but—”

  “The Trials?”

  “Of Heth-Eskaladen. He’s the god of . . .” She was eyeing me like she was a hungry dog and I was a side of beef. “What?” I said, although I didn’t think I was going to like it.

  “A class about Mélusine would be very popular.”

  “Not with me teaching it, it wouldn’t,” I said. “And Felix is pretty busy.”

  “It’s only one night a week. And I admit our honorarium isn’t much, but it’s something.”

  “Felix has a job.”

  “And you?” She added quickly, “Many of our students are from the working classes, and I think they would appreciate having a teacher who was more like them than we well-to-do, well-meaning ladies.”

  “Powers and saints, lady, I ain’t no teacher.” I waved a hand at my face, at my ugly fucking scar. “Nobody’s gonna pay to come and listen to me when they can’t understand half the fucking things I say.”

  “But how long ago were you injured?” she said. “The physicians of Bernatha can do truly astonishing things—”

  “Too fucking long.” I shoved myself to my feet. “I been taking up too much of your time anyway. Thanks for the booklet.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, standing up. “I’m sorry I upset you—it wasn’t my intent. But do think about it. I don’t think it would be nearly as bad as you believe.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  But I was thinking about it all right, thinking about it all the way back to Ingry Dominion. I was thinking about it so hard I went out and did the thing I’d gone over to Smiling Angel Street just exactly so I wouldn’t do it. Went out and found the game in the cellar of the Blooming Turtle where I’d been real careful about not looking for it for a decad and a half.

  Felix

  Corbie appeared in my office with a wad of scribbled-on papers and some unkind things to say about the University librarians. But then, rather than launching into a report on what she had—or hadn’t—found, she fidgeted around my office and finally burst out with “Do you think it’s wrong for women to be magicians?”