The Virtu (24 page)

There’s two kinds of mazes. There’s one where you want to find your way from one door to another—that’s the way the curtain-mazes at the Trials are. But there’s the other kind, where the maze has a heart, and getting out the other side—or out back the way you came, if that’s the kind of maze it is—won’t do you a centime’s worth of good if you ain’t got to the heart first. I was betting this maze was that kind.

I was also trying real hard not to think about the maze me and Felix had made in Nera for the dead people. ‘Cause, I mean, I ain’t all that bright, but I could do the math. And dead people had talked to him there, the same way Ginevra had talked to me.

Don’t
think
about it, I told myself, but it was like telling myself not to blink. Because hearing her had woken up all these things I’d thought I’d been done with, and if it hadn’t been for Felix and Miss Parr, I suppose I would’ve sat there in that ugly little room ‘til I died. And I figured that was what Felix meant by mikkary, but that didn’t make it no easier to deal with.

It was a pretty nasty maze, even without the voices, twisting around like a poisoned snake, and with dead ends that you didn’t find out were dead ends until five rooms later when there was a wall in the way of where you needed to go. I had to backtrack a couple times, and the second time, when we got back to where I’d gone wrong, I said, “Gotta rest,” and sat down only just slow enough that it wasn’t a fall. Felix and Miss Parr sat down, too, so I guessed I wasn’t the only one needing a break.

We were quiet for a while, but the silence was spooking Felix—and I got to admit, it was pretty bad sitting there and trying not to listen for Ginevra or Zephyr or any of the other dead people whose voices I’d recognize. So I didn’t want to talk to him, but I was almost glad when he said, “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“This.” He waved an arm at the darkness around us. “You could find your way back to the stairs from here, couldn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Dunno.”

“Somehow I knew you were going to say that. But, were you trained to do it?”

“Nope. Just can.” Miss Parr didn’t say nothing, but she was watching us with her big round dark eyes, and I wished Felix hadn’t used that word, “trained.” Because I didn’t want that teacher-lady knowing all about my past, and “trained” was more than halfway to being a clue if she knew anything about Mélusine. Which since she spoke Marathine, she probably did. So I said, before Felix could ask more questions, “How long we been down here?”

His hand started for his pocket, then stopped. “I don’t have a watch.”

“I do,” Miss Parr said. She pulled a chain out of the neckline of her dress, giving me a flash of Ginevra I really didn’t need just then. The chain had a watch strung on it, about the size and shape of a hazelnut. Valuable trinket for a lady in her line of work, and I wondered if Mehitabel Parr might have stuff in her past she didn’t want to talk about either.

“About three and a half hours,” she said.

“And how long before the Gauthys panic, do you suppose?” Felix asked.

Miss Parr tucked her watch back into her dress and said, “They have great faith in you, Ker Harrowgate.”

“Thank you,” Felix said, with some sting in it, “but that isn’t exactly what I meant.”

“I don’t believe you need to worry about any of them following us down here, if that’s your concern. And Ker Gauthy will be even more resistant now to the idea of notifying anyone in a position of authority.”

“Because of the unexpected contents of the cellar, so to speak?”

“Precisely. He will worry—and with some justification—that this will lead the Imperial Assessors to wonder what else the house might be concealing.”

“A devoted father.”

“That’s why he and Keria Gauthy agreed to consult
you
.”

“Marvelous,” Felix said and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “I suppose we’d best not die down here, then.”

I said, “Yeah, let’s not,” and got up. It wasn’t fun, but I could do it, and that was enough to get by on. “Y’all ready?”

“There’s no reason to stay in this room when the next one will be just the same,” Felix said. He and Miss Parr stood up, and I ducked through the opening I should have taken in the first place.

We were getting closer. I could feel it, although I couldn’t explain that any more than I could explain how I knew where I was. It was like a dance—not that I could dance no more, and there’s another thing to add to the fucking list—where when you know the steps, you don’t have to think about them. You just feel where your feet need to go. That’s what it was like.

I knew better than to let it rush me, though. I mean, I couldn’t have moved faster if I’d wanted to, but this would be a stupid time to get sloppy. Cause the maze didn’t want us in its heart. I know it sounds crazy, but I could feel that, too.

And I would’ve thought it was just me getting spooked out, except Miss Parr said, “God, it’s like
breathing
mikkary.”

“It is an old place,” Felix said, sounding like he was half-asleep. “Like the lowest levels of the Mirador, it has been long undisturbed, long abandoned, left to wait and brood and darken.”

I nearly brained myself on the top edge of the hole I was crawling through. Because I remembered plain as day him chewing me out for telling Florian Gauthy about Mélusine, and here he was, telling a teacher-lady—who was
way
more likely than Florian to recognize what he was talking about—that he’d been in the Mirador. I stopped and waited, and when Felix ducked through, I said, “Felix? You okay?”

“Of course,” he said, and he had the brass to sound surprised. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Did you mean to say that?”

“Say what?”

“You know. About the—” Miss Parr came through the hole, and I cut my eyes sideways at her as meaningfully as I could.

“Oh, that,” Felix said. “Mehitabel already knows.”

“Knows what?” Miss Parr said.

“That I’m a Cabaline,” Felix said, cheerful as a gambler raking in the pot, like it was no big deal and never had been.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.” I turned and crawled through the next hole. I didn’t let my face twist until I was sure neither him nor Miss Parr could see it.

What did you expect, Milly-Fox? I said to myself. She’s smart enough he can trust her with a secret, even if you ain’t. He told you how it was going to be—ain’t his fault if you’re too fucking dumb to learn.

I kept moving, because it was either that or try and look Felix in the face, and I kept myself as tight focused as I could on the maze and the holes and the stones. It beat the fuck out of thinking. Behind me, Felix and Miss Parr were talking about something, but I didn’t care and I wasn’t listening.

And then all at once I wasn’t listening for real. “Shut up,” I said, and it was probably some kind of miracle, but they did, and I heard the thing I’d thought I’d heard, a voice calling in Kekropian.

“Hello? Is someone there? Really there?”

And that wasn’t no ghost voice. That was Florian Gauthy, sounding scared and miserable as a half-drowned cat.

I shouted back, “Florian! It’s me! Mildmay! Are you okay?”

There was this sort of breathless little pause, and then Florian shouted, sounding way more like himself, “Mildmay? Where are you? What are you doing down here?”

Trust a bourgeois kid to go straight for the stuff that don’t matter. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m not hurt. I’m just…” And then, a lot quieter, “Lost.”

“
Stay put
!” I shouted. “We’ll find you.”

“All right,” Florian called back, although he didn’t sound too sure about it.

But it didn’t take long—he was only a few rooms farther in, sitting in the corner of the first room we’d come to that didn’t look exactly like all the others.

It was more than twice the size, for one thing, and the floor was paved in squares of some stone that didn’t look like the rest of the maze at all. It was black, and shiny where Florian had scuffed away the dust. And not a nice kind of shiny, neither.

Florian came bolting to his feet as I dragged myself into the room, and the next thing I knew he had his arms wrapped around me and his face buried in my shoulder, and he was gulping for breath like somebody who’d just run a septad-minute mile.

“Hey, steady on,” I said, about as useful as ballet shoes to a duck. “It’s okay.” I hugged him back, because he needed it.

Then Felix said, “Gracious,” and Florian jumped back and made a big business out of straightening his coat. But Felix wasn’t paying no mind to him, or me. He was standing just inside the room, staring up at the ceiling like a farmboy seeing Ver-Istenna’s dome for the first time and all his little chrysanthemums gone up there like hot-air balloons, too.

Miss Parr had just finished getting herself through the hole. Her and me and Florian looked up, and then for a while there were four farmboy impressions in that one room.

I don’t know how to describe that ceiling or what looking at it was like. It was like I was falling down—I mean, up, only it felt like down, into this sort of pit, only worse than the pit I’d almost fallen into on the stairs, because it wasn’t just a pit, it was a maze, and if I thought the maze we were in was bad… well, all I know is I would’ve gone stark raving batfuck nuts before I’d‘ve found my way out of the maze carved on that ceiling.

I finally had to look away, and found myself looking straight at Felix. “Somehow ‘vertigo’ doesn’t seem quite strong enough,” he said.

“Um,” I said, ‘cause I wasn’t quite sure what ’vertigo‘ was.

Miss Parr said, “It must have taken
years
.”

“Oh, at least,” Felix said, and his lights came dropping back down. “Let us, I pray you, speak of something else. Florian!”

Florian kind of jumped, and jerked his head around to look at Felix in-stead of the ceiling, and said, “Yes, Ker Harrowgate?”

“We were under the impression that you had come down here with Ker-Tantony. Is that correct?”

It was hard to tell with only the witchlights, but I thought Florian’s face went red. “Yes, sir.”

“Then where is he?”

“Didn’t he send you after me?”

Florian and Felix stared at each other like a pair of frogs. It was Miss Parr who said, “We haven’t seen Ker Tantony. Was he down here with you?”

“Yes, but he went, and he had the map, and—”

“Wait,” Felix said, holding up his hands. His rings caught the witch-light in a way I got to say I didn’t care for. “Let’s start at the beginning. When did you and Ker Tantony start making these expeditions?”

“About a year ago. After Kechever went off to school. I told him about the hollow stone and how Kechever had always said it had to be a secret door, and he found out how it worked. It only took him a week.”

“Mildmay found it in under ten minutes,” Felix said.

“I knew it was there,” I said in a hurry. “That makes a difference.”

Florian was staring at me with his mouth hanging open. Then he shook his head and went on. “Anyway, he got it open and he said it was a tremendously important find and I mustn’t tell anyone until we knew just what it was. And he said we’d have to take it very slow and careful.”

“Thank God he had that much sense,” Miss Parr said, not quite under her breath, and made Florian jump again.

“He knew just what to do,” he said. “He had a lantern and he drew a map and… and
everything
!”

“Yes, quite,” Felix said. “But what happened this time?”

“Ker Tantony said we were getting close to the center. He’d thought we were getting close even before Father took me to Troia, but he promised he wouldn’t come down here without me. He said he couldn’t manage on his own.”

“True,” Miss Parr said, but this time Florian ignored her.

“We’ve been coming down here almost every night since I got back, and last night Ker Tantony said that we
had
to be almost there. Here, I mean.”

“So this is the center of the labyrinth?” Felix said.

“Yes.”

“Then why isn’t Ker Tantony here?”

“He’s after the heart,” I said, and they all three of them looked at me like I was a carny freak with two heads.

“
What
did you say?” Felix said.

I could feel my face turning red as a brick. “Center ain’t the heart.”

Florian and Miss Parr just looked confused, but Felix was giving me the hairy eyeball with mustard. “How do you know that?” he said, like it was some kind of secret only he was supposed to know.

“Trials teachings. Didn’t you ever go?”

“
Trials
teachings?” he said, and I might have been talking about the cities on the moon for all the good it was doing him. “No. Never mind. Later.” He turned back to Florian. “So this is the center of the labyrinth and Ker Tantony wasn’t satisfied.”

“Yes,” Florian said, “although he didn’t tell me why. He told me to stay here so we could be sure we didn’t get lost, and then he took the map and the lantern and went. And he hasn’t come back. But he said to stay here, and anyway I don’t think I could find my way out without the map and… are Mother and Father very angry?”

“They’re very worried,” Miss Parr said.

Felix said, like a terrier after a rat, “Which door did he take?”

“That one,” Florian said and pointed at the hole to the left of the one we’d come in by.

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No.”

“How long has it been?”

“I don’t know. A while. The candle’s almost burnt out.”

“Blow it out,” I said. “We got lights.”

“Yes, Mildmay,” Florian said, and did.

Felix gave that left-hand hole a thoughtful look. “I find myself remarkably unenthused at the prospect of going after Ker Tantony.”

“We can’t just leave him down here!” Florian and Miss Parr said, on top of one another. It made a weird, ugly sort of echo, and we all froze right where we were until it had died away.

Then Felix said—and I give him credit for managing to sound almost normal—“I wasn’t suggesting we abandon him. I was merely remarking that I do not feel sanguine about what we may discover.” He looked at me.