Corambis

  “Don’t look at me,” said Mrs. Pallister. “He hasn’t said a syllable on the subject.”

  “Oh, I didn’t learn about him from Kay,” said Murtagh. “Penny! That’s it. Anselm Penny. That’s a good thought, Mr. Harrowgate. I’ll send a message to my agent in Barthas Cross. Vanessa, there’s no point in taking any more of these gentlemen’s valuable time.”

  “Oh, you’re very welcome,” Felix said, and there was a fucking weird note in his voice. Mrs. Pallister didn’t seem to notice, and Murtagh just gave him this look that I couldn’t make any kind of sense out of, and him and Mrs. Pallister took themselves out.

  “What the fuck was that?” I said.

  “What was what?” said Felix, but his color was high.

  “You gonna tell me what your thing is with the Duke of Murtagh?”

  “No,” Felix said, and grinned at me. “I have to have some secrets from you, darling.”

  “Drink your tea,” I said, because it was no use talking to him when he was in that mood. And I hoped Mr. Brightmore was okay.

  Felix

  Mildmay came to my office with me, to sit in the corner and work on d’Islay while I did work of my own in the shape of frantically cramming Grevillian thaumatology so as to be able to keep ahead of my students. Hutch and Ashmead had lent me their personal collections, and I was passionately grateful.

  Two hours later, I shoved violently away from my desk and stalked out into the hallway. I wanted someone real to argue with, instead of these dry smug paragraphs, so certain of their truths they were blind to their own fallacies. And I was not going to argue with Mildmay, who followed me patiently.

  Hutch wasn’t in his office—he was probably off with the Automaton, as he had been most of his waking hours—and I was standing, debating whether I really wanted to pick a fight with John Ashmead, when I realized someone had beaten me to it.

  I followed the sound of raised voices and found Ashmead glaring from behind his desk at a blue-veiled intended, like a deerhound brought to bay by a stag.

  I wanted an argument, and Ashmead looked like he needed some support. “Virtuer?” I said. “Is everything all right?”

  They both turned. The intended was, by Corambin standards, skinny and dark, with a wide, thin-lipped mouth and bulgy, glaring eyes. He looked like a dried-out toad who knew all one’s darkest secrets and condemned them.

  “Mr. Harrowgate,” Ashmead said with audible relief. “This is Intended Marcham, from Our Lady of Marigolds in Howrack. He has a . . .” He wrestled for a moment with a polite phrasing. “A most remarkable story.”

  “Is not a story,” the intended said; his voice was peculiarly strident, even when not raised. “Is truth, and something must be done.”

  “And what did you have in mind?” I said.

  The disapproving eyes raked me from head to toe. “You are the foreign magician all the papers blather about.”

  “Yes, I suppose I must be.”

  “And that’s your shadow,” he said, with a jerk of his chin at Mildmay.

  “My brother,” I said, less pleasantly.

  “Are Mulkist?”

  The question was deliberately offensive, and perversely, I felt better. “No, if you’re looking for a Mulkist, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”

  In the moment in which Intended Marcham was bereft of words, Ashmead opened his pocket watch, displayed only slightly exaggerated surprise, and said, “I’m sorry, I really have to run. Felix, if you would . . . ?” and had dodged past Intended Marcham, me, and Mildmay out the door.

  Intended Marcham glared at me balefully; I smiled back. “Intended? I would be glad to hear your concerns.”

  “Have not come all this way to be mocked by heathen foreigners,” he grated. “I expect no better from annemer, but I thought magicians would have the motherwit to listen.”

  “Are you an aethereal?” I said, puzzled.

  This look was withering. “I am a magician, bound-by-obedience in the service of the Lady. So don’t think you can condescend to me.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, trying to conceal my shudder. I might have orchestrated my own binding, as Mildmay had said, but it was a punishment I deserved, not this deliberate, unnecessary sacrifice. And I remembered the anchorite of Our Lady of Fogs. “Really, you might as well tell me. Since I’m a heathen foreigner, I’m actually more likely to believe you than my Grevillian colleagues.”

  He regarded me narrowly, but in the end, his need for someone to listen won out over his enmity for me. I discovered, as I listened, that I knew much of the story already: the engine beneath Summerdown and Gerrard Hume’s folly; the stoppages on the Barthas Cross line, which Hutch bemoaned almost daily; the pestilence among the sheep which Mildmay had read about in the newspaper. But Intended Marcham was much more specific. “Not all sheep,” he said. “Not all sheep in Murrey, nor even all sheep belonging to men of Howrack. No. It is the sheep who are grazed on Summerdown that die.”

  “And what is it you think is happening?”

  “Thought at first was a curse,” he said. “But I think now is worse than that. Is the engine. It seeks to finish that which Prince Gerrard began and failed in, by drawing vi—‘aether,’ they call it here—from the sources it can reach.”

  “The trains,” I said, understanding. “The sheep.”

  “Yes. And now the suicides have begun.” He glared at me, daring me to say I didn’t see the connection. But I did.

  “Sacrifices,” I said, my body becoming cold with the truth. “Kay said the engine is at the heart of a labyrinth, and we have just quite recently discovered—”

  “The bog body,” Mildmay said, and I knew from the horror in his voice that he understood as well. “You mean all them people died on purpose?”

  I knew what he meant, although he’d said it badly. “It’s a sacrifice machine,” I said, as certain of that truth as if I’d designed the damned thing myself. “Which means, if Kay has gone to Summerdown . . .” I couldn’t finish that sentence; one look at Mildmay told me I didn’t need to.

  “Intended Marcham,” I said, giving him the best smile I could muster, “do you happen to have Ottersham handy? And I’m going to have to cancel class. There’s a magician-practitioner in Barthas Cross I believe I need to talk to.”

  Mildmay

  We could’ve gone straight from the Institution to the train station, but it seemed like a dumb idea when we could also take half an hour to go home and pack a bag. And while we were doing that—well, while I was doing that and Felix was pacing around muttering to himself—Corbie knocked on the door.

  “Felix? You canceled class? Are you all right?”

  “A bit of a crisis,” said Felix and gave her this smile that looked perfectly natural, but I knew he had it judged like a barrow wife and a pound of peaches.

  “Can I help?” Corbie said, fast as winking.

  It was kind of funny watching Felix fall over that—he almost did fall over his own feet.

  “C’mon,” Corbie said. “You know you can trust me. And if it really is a crisis, you may need someone to do magic.”

  Felix was frowning, and he opened his mouth. Then he shut it again hard, and after a second, Corbie watching him the whole way, he said, like he hated saying it, “You may be right. We’re leaving for Barthas Cross on the fourteen-twenty-five train from Lily-of-Mar. Can you make it?”

  “You betcha, guv,” Corbie said and disappeared from the doorway so fast you would’ve thought she’d fallen down a hole.

  Felix paced around some more and I finished packing. Then I said, “You really think you might need a hocus?”

  “Unfortunately,” Felix said, “I really do.”

  Part Four

  Chapter 15

  Felix

  Anselm Penny, the wizard in Barthas Cross, was a magician-practitioner second grade. He was in his forties, his hair mostly gray, his face lined and pinched and chronically unhappy. I was a little appalled that this had been the best Prin
ce Gerrard Hume had been able to do.

  He was first surprised to find another wizard on his doorstep, then alarmed—alarmed enough that he would have slammed the door in my face except that somehow Mildmay, who had been leaning on his cane beside me looking utterly harmless, stopped the door (with his foot? his cane? I couldn’t tell) and then simply kept going. I remembered him saying once that he didn’t want to be somebody’s hired muscle; apparently that hadn’t been idle speculation on his part.

  Anselm Penny looked like he was about to cry.

  “You might as well let me in, Mr. Penny,” I said. “It’ll be much easier than getting him out.”

  There was really nothing else he could do.

  Even when we were seated in his office, though, he remained profoundly unwilling to talk about the engine. But he must finally have realized that we weren’t leaving until he did, because he burst out with “I told him not to do it! And I don’t know what more I could have done.”

  “Him?” I said.

  “Prince Gerrard.” There was no real fight in Anselm Penny; I suspected there never had been. “I told him I couldn’t be sure what the engine would do once it was started. I told him it was unlikely to be what his childhood stories led him to believe. But I didn’t know it would do that!”

  “Mr. Penny, I’m not trying to lay blame,” I said, as patiently as I could. “I just want to know about the engine. How did you figure out how to start it?”

  Penny looked suddenly hopeful. “If I give you my notes, will you go away?”

  “Your notes?” I said, feeling more hopeful myself.

  “I may not be an adept,” he said, voice sharp with what was clearly a decades-old resentment, “but that doesn’t mean I’m incompetent. Will my notes satisfy you, Mr. Harrowgate? I assure you, I wrote everything down.”

  “That sounds ideal.” There was no reason to pretend I was enjoying Penny’s company any more than he was pretending to enjoy mine. He turned immediately to the bookcase behind him and pulled down a fat quire bound in blue buckram. He all but threw it at me. I opened it—a neat, slanted hand, far more legible than I had expected and feared: AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE OF THE CYMELLUNAR ENGINE SAID TO RESIDE UNDER SUMMERDOWN, UNDERTAKEN By ANSELM PENNY, MAGICIAN-PRACTITIONER OF BARTHAS CROSS, AT THE BEHEST OF PRINCE GERRARD HUME OF CALOXA.

  “If things had turned out differently,” said Penny, still resentful, “I could have published.”

  “Indeed,” I said, because I could not think of a better response. “I’ll return this to you when my own inquiries are complete.”

  “See that you do,” Penny said and moved pointedly toward the door.

  We returned to our hotel room—Corbie, whom I’d sent out to ask at other hotels about Kay, had not yet returned—and I sprawled across the bed with Penny’s notes. Penny in the notes was much better company than Penny in person: competent as he had said, meticulous, unexpectedly thorough. He had drawn the engine from several different angles, taken every measurement he could think of, copied down the symbols engraved on its various parts. He had written out Prince Gerrard’s stories about the engine; he had also written what the Intended of Howrack had told him, with notes on the etymology of verlain and how many generations back the natives of Howrack had been telling their own stories, which were very different from Prince Gerrard’s. He’d made detailed bibliographic notes on every book he’d consulted, and equally detailed notes on the three enginists he’d pestered (my word, not his) to get a better grasp on the mechanics involved. Not that it had done him—or Gerrard Hume—any good, but I couldn’t find it in myself to blame him for having failed to imagine the thing’s true purpose.

  “I don’t think I like the ancient Corambins,” I said to Mildmay, who was sitting by the window darning one of my socks.

  “Um,” he said. “Do you think they were really from Cymellune like everyone says?”

  “Oh dear. You never ask the easy questions, do you?”

  “Sorry. Never mind.”

  “No, it wasn’t a complaint! Just a warning that I don’t have a satisfactory answer.”

  “Oh. Well, okay then.” And he gave me a stone-faced look that I knew to accept as a smile. “What do you think?”

  I sighed and stretched the cramped muscles in my upper back. “It’s obvious that Corambis had contact somehow with Cymellune, and I suppose Agramant the Navigator is as good a candidate as any, since they certainly didn’t go overland. But I don’t think the Corambins are the lost heirs of Cymellune, either.”

  “I didn’t mean like that.”

  “What did you mean?”

  He concentrated on his darning for a moment, then said, “Well, you been talking about how the ancient Corambins were sacrificing people and stuff, and I was just wondering if that’s what they did in Cymellune, too.”

  “Ow,” I said and sat up straight. “That’s a very good question. I hadn’t thought to turn it around like that.”

  He gave me a shy flicker of a glance.

  “I’m perfectly serious,” I said. “We know there were labyrinths in Cymellune—there was one made of mirrors that Ephreal Sand talks about.”

  “And the one in Nera. Or was that a different empire or something?”

  “Um. The relationship between Lucrèce and Cymellune is not, to my knowledge, perfectly understood, although no doubt there’s some aged scholar in the Library of Arx who’s figured the whole thing out. But let’s say you’re more right than wrong. Certainly, I don’t think we can ignore the possibility that labyrinths and death being connected in Lucrèce—and in Klepsydra, don’t forget, which is much later—and labyrinths and death being connected here . . . where was I?”

  “Possibility of something.”

  “Right. Thank you. We can’t ignore the possibility that labyrinths and death were connected in Cymellune.”

  “Fuck,” he said. “We know they were connected.”

  “We do?”

  “Heth-Eskaladen. You made me explain it all to you, so don’t go telling me you forgot.”

  “The Trials,” I said. I almost had forgotten, but he was right. All of Mélusine’s theology was Cymellunar in origin—a fact which made the Corambins’ goddess even more of an oddity.

  “You have to walk the maze to get to Hell,” Mildmay said solemnly. “And that don’t seem so far off from dragging someone through the maze to send ’em to Hell. It’s sort of what the ghosts in Nera wanted, ain’t it?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “A sacrifice,” he said, taking care over his consonants.

  It took three slow, dull beats of my heart before I comprehended his meaning, and then I ended up with my knuckles pressed against my mouth as if to hold in a scream. Finally, shakily, I said, “Couldn’t you have kept that charming notion to yourself?”

  “Sorry,” he said with a one-shouldered shrug.

  “It does make sense, though,” I said, so that he wouldn’t think I meant for him to stop telling me what he thought. “A sacrifice, a labyrinth, a goddess of death. Their goddess here doesn’t seem to be the White-Eyed Lady, but I’m a little reluctant to go prying around in their beliefs to find out.”

  “Well, the White-Eyed Lady ain’t always the same, right? I mean, the White-Eyed Lady in Klepsydra—she wasn’t the same White-Eyed Lady that Gideon followed.”

  “It’s a good point. But, also, I am beginning to wonder whether modern Corambin beliefs have any great similarity to ancient Corambin beliefs.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “I haven’t seen any significance to labyrinths for modern Corambins. The people we’ve met.”

  “Only Miss Leverick’s crazy friend,” he said, and I heard the grin in his voice.

  I threw a pillow at him, which he caught without either looking up or dropping his needle. He threw it back, but softly enough that I could catch it.

  “So what d’you think happened?” he said. “They just got tired of it?”

  “I don’t know. But I wonder.??
?

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I wonder about the Automaton of Corybant. No one now could build a machine like that, although they’re clearly working their way back to it. And I wonder about the lack of records. I wonder how much was lost on purpose.”

  “Huh.” He thought about that for a few moments while he finished his darn and turned the sock back right side out. Then he said, “Hey, Felix, what is the Doctrine of Labyrinths?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s that book of yours, and the guy went crazy writing it, right? But what is it? I mean, is it just that the mazes drove him nuts, or is there something there?”

  “Oh. I see what you mean. Well, given that Ephreal Sand was in fact mad—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got that part.”

  “His theory—his postulated doctrine of labyrinths was that labyrinths act to collect and intensify what he calls manar, which is roughly analogous to what Corambin wizards call aether.”

  “Anna-what?”

  “Analogous. Similar. Can be used as an analogy for. You know what an analogy is.”

  I knew he did, and he nodded. “Zephyr taught me that. Okay. So he calls it manar and the people here call it aether, and it’s really what? Magic?”

  “Um. Sort of. But it’s also what mikkary is formed out of.”

  “Oh. That. Okay. I get it. So Sand wants to collect magic the same way the ancient Corambin people were collecting badness, right?”

  I opened my mouth to say no, but then realized he was exactly correct. Both Sand (in theory) and the ancient Corambins (in practice) had used labyrinths as—I looked wildly at Mildmay’s needle and thread—as a spindle. Or, more properly, the labyrinth was the spinning wheel, the person who walked the labyrinth the spindle. Exactly like that poor dead girl in the Mammothium. So the manar, the aether, was drawn into the heart of the labyrinth . . .

  “Hold on a moment,” I said, diving for Penny’s notes. The aether was drawn into the heart and there given to the engine via the sacrifice of seven men. But what did it do with its power then?