“What are they?” said Hutch.
“Rubies,” I said. “The rubies from the rings that were worn by my master Malkar Gennadion. And they . . .” There was no word for this, not in Ynge, not in all the Mirador’s treatises about architectural thaumaturgy, certainly not in Grevillian thinking. “They’re haunted.”
“Haunted,” said Hutch.
“Not literally,” I said. “But the magic that was done with them has left a . . . call it a residue. Or a curse, if you like.”
Hutch looked as if he would like nothing less.
“Poison?” I said. “Can you believe that something can be thaumaturgically poisonous?”
“I . . . I’m not sure,” he said, and I saw his gaze slide to the Automaton. He felt some of its noirance, then, even though he didn’t know what it was. “But I believe that you are serious about what you’re trying to tell me. And, yes, you may put the rubies here.”
“But—”
“We have documentation,” Hutch said patiently. “Even if I’m not here when this nullity is closed—if this nullity is closed—it will be in the documentation that these rubies are to be put in another nullity, or kept separate from the Automaton, or whatever instructions you want to leave. And they’ll be followed. I know you don’t think much of our imaginations,” and he smiled crookedly, “but I promise you, Corambins are very good at following instructions. And maybe by then, you will have figured out a better answer.”
I poured the rubies back into their bag. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.” He moved one lantern out of a niche in the wall. “Put them here.” And when I hesitated, he said, “Felix. Whatever magic they have, poison or curse or whatever it is, I swear to you, it is completely inert down here. It’s like . . . like trying to kindle a fire underwater. You can’t.”
“All right,” I said. “All right.” And I put the bag in the niche.
Conclusion
Mildmay
This is the best story I know about hocuses, and it’s true.
Late in the summer, me and Felix went out to Grimglass. Instead of the train we took a boat called a paddle-steamer, and I got to say, the Lilibet Sawyer is the neatest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. It was slower than the train, but we weren’t in no hurry.
We’d finally finished with d’Islay, and although I thought he was a fuckhead about a lot of things, I agreed with what he was really trying to say down at the bottom of it, that bravery wasn’t about killing people or dying for a great cause or whatever it is the stories make it out to be. D’Islay said it was two things. One was doing what you knew was right, and the second was figuring out what “right” meant. Most of his book was about that, actually, about how you judged what was right and wrong and about facing yourself down when you’d done something that you’d thought was right but now you were kind of thinking was wrong. Or, Felix said, how you dealt with yourself when you’d done something you knew was wrong and whether you could ever honestly do something right after that. And I knew he was thinking about Isaac Garamond, but also about what he’d done to me. And I couldn’t lift that off him, but I did finally tell him about Bartimus Cawley and the fuckload of wrong stuff I’d done in my life.
“How did you figure it out?” he said. We were standing at the rail of the Lilibet Sawyer, watching the long, slow Corambin countryside go by. It was kind of like Kekropia to look at, but greener. “How did you figure out it was wrong?”
“I dunno. How’d you figure out that what Malkar taught you was wrong?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t think I ever really did figure it out until he broke me in half and abandoned the pieces. I know I’m still a terrible person, but I’m better than I used to be.”
“You ain’t that bad,” I said.
He gave me a sidelong look that called me a liar clear as daylight. Then he shrugged and looked back at the shore, where there was a herd of something-or-other watching the boat go by. “At least now I care that it’s wrong. For a long time, I didn’t.”
“I did some awful things,” I said. “I mean, really awful. Worse’n what you done.”
“I think we should avoid turning that into a competition,” he said, real dry.
“Yeah, well. But what I mean is, I figured out finally that it was something wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said, sharp like I’d insulted him.
“The fuck there ain’t,” I said. “I mean, I don’t do it no more, but that ain’t because I can’t.”
“You would have killed the virtuers for hurting me,” he said. He was looking down at the Crawcour now, brown and fast and nothing like the Sim.
“Yeah,” I said. “I would’ve. And I wouldn’t’ve been sorry. I mean, I know it’s wrong, killing people, and I ain’t gonna do it, but that’s because I worked it out. I ain’t proud of what I was, but I ain’t . . .”
“You don’t feel guilty?” he said.
“Not the way I do about Ginevra.”
“Ah,” he said, and we watched the river for a while longer before he said, “But you don’t want to be that anymore.”
“No,” I said. “I really don’t.”
“Good enough to get by on,” he said, and grinned at me sidelong.
So we’d finished d’Islay, and Felix hadn’t even really asked if I wanted to start another one. Now we were reading a book Miss Leverick had given me along with a letter to the President of the Society chapter in Whallan. This was a book about Corambin religion, and we were going kind of carefully, along of not being quite sure what we might run into. And Felix was reading three different books on Mulkist magic that Corbie’d dug out of the University library for him.
“You think she’s gonna be okay?” I asked him on a different day. We were in a hillier part of Corambis now.
“I had very long discussions with both her and Hutch,” Felix said. “I think Hutch wants her to succeed almost as badly as she does.”
I remembered Virtuer Hutchence sitting on the Circle’s table and grinning at me. “He said something—I think maybe they gave him a hard time about becoming a virtuer. So maybe he understands.”
“Yes,” Felix said. “I think he does. And anyway, you heard her. She doesn’t want to live at Grimglass.”
“Not even for you,” I said and bumped him real soft.
He gave me a look. “I thought she’d be more upset at your leaving.”
“Me?”
His eyebrows went up. “You mean you weren’t sleeping with her?”
Which was what I got for needling him. “Once or twice,” I said. “But it was just for fun. And, you know, I think she was only fucking me because she couldn’t fuck you.”
He went bright red, and I figured I won that round.
And I went and hung out with the enginists some, and they explained how the Lilibet Sawyer worked, and Felix flirted with the ship’s captain, whose eyes had just about fallen out of his head when we came on board. And we stayed up too late at night, reading and talking with Felix’s little green witchlights everywhere around the bed.
And when the countryside leveled out again, I saw something standing up like a spike on the horizon. “Look,” I said to Felix and pointed. “You think that’s Grimglass?”
He squinted, and if he couldn’t make it out, he wasn’t going to admit it. “Well, really, what else could it be?”
“D’you think it’s gonna work out?” I said. “I mean, do you think you’re gonna be happy?”
“I hope,” he said, giving me a stern look, “that we will be happy. But I don’t know. All we can do is try.” And then he smiled at me, the real smile, the rarest one, and said, “But I’m glad we’re trying together.”
And all I could say back was “Yeah. Me, too.”
Acknowledgments
The writer of a four-book series inevitably accumulates more debts than she can count, but I want to say thank you especially to Jim Frenkel, who gave me some of the most valuabl
e advice I’ve ever received, and to Jack Byrne, Anne Sowards, Judy York, Judith Lagerman, and everyone else involved in the arduous process of turning my airy nothing into an actual series of actual, and beautiful, books. Thank you all very much.
Thanks are also due to Allen Monette and Sarah Wishnevsky for bearing with me, and bearing me up, through some very ugly months of angst and fraughtness. And special shiny thanks to my friend Tisha Turk, who let me invade her house for a three-week DIY writer’s retreat, without which this series might never have been finished at all.
And I couldn’t have done it without Earl the Writing Frog.
Ace Books by Sarah Monette
MÉLUSINE
THE VIRTU
THE MIRADOR
CORAMBIS
Corambis Page 56