The Virtu (3 page)

I spent the next two days in the library, trying to bury that terrible flash of desire.

I had desired him in Kekropia, I remembered; I had been mad then and surely could be forgiven. But this…

He is your brother, I said to myself, and even in my own mind, the voice sounded pleading rather than stern. He was my brother, and I knew I should not desire him. But knowing that changed nothing.

And in fleeing from my own monstrosity, I achieved nothing more than confronting myself with another monster I did not want to face: the
De Doctrina Labyrinthorum
of Ephreal Sand.

I had never read Sand’s
Doctrine of Labyrinths;
I would not have said I’d even heard of it. But when I had come across it in the Gardens’ library, it had been familiar in a nagging, terrible, senseless way. Every effort I made to prove to myself that it was coincidence merely reinforced the knowledge that it was not. It was not quite déjà vu; it was too diffuse, too persistent. I had tried to avoid it, much as I had tried to avoid Mildmay, distracting myself with the search through the Gardens’ resources for possible ways to mend the Virtu, to reweave the torn and tangled magic of the Mirador. But Sand’s book fretted at me like a headache, so that I hated reading it and yet could not leave it alone.

De Doctrina Labyrinthorum
seemed at first a simple catalogue of labyrinths in the Empire, and for a time I had lost sight of my dread in wonder at how many there were—or, at least, how many Ephreal Sand claimed to have found. Until I remembered something else.

He had gone mad.

There was a voice in my ear, a Kekropian-accented tenor with a precise cadence that was achingly familiar:
He began to draw mazes that could not be solved. At first his apprentices thought it was but a new phase of their master’s research, some new theoretical bauble. But days became weeks became months, and still Ephreal Sand did nothing but draw these snarls and tangles, and when they asked him why, he would merely point at the maze he was drawing, as if it contained within itself the only possible or necessary answer
.

I shook my head, and the voice was gone. It was not a voice I knew—it was not Thaddeus de Lalage or any of the other Kekropian wizards who lived and worked in the Mirador—and yet it was
familiar
. I could hear the way the aspirants eroded away from “th” and “ph”—the way “Ephreal” was almost but not quite “Epreal”—as clearly as if the man who had spoken those words were standing next to me now in the library’s dimness.

Reflexively, I reached for a pocket watch I no longer owned. And stopped, sitting with my hand halfway in my trouser pocket, for a moment unable to breathe. That pain, that sharp, shocking, mortal pain, mocked all my efforts to make of my past a mere nightmare, dismissible, forgettable, all my efforts to pretend it didn’t matter.

So
do
something, I said to myself, exasperated. Ask the questions you know how to ask while you still have the opportunity to ask them. I pushed away from the table and went to find the historian who could tell me about the lost city of Nera, the city I knew more about than I should. I had seen it mentioned in the
De Doctrina Labyrinthorum
, and had had a sudden terrible knowledge of Nera’s fall, knowledge I could not explain.

Themistokles was a Celebrant Terrestrial, an archivist. His specialty was the Empire of Kekropia and its history as a territory of Troia. Nephelian Celebrants, I had learned, were as likely to be scholars as healers, and many were both. Theirs was the only magic-practicing covenant that prized the past as more than merely the source of tradition and precedent; wizards of a scholarly bent gravitated to the Nephelians, and although the focus of their research remained healing, the scope of their studies had gradually broadened, until there were now a number of archivists, like Themistokles, whose specialties had only the most tenuous connection with their ostensible purpose. No one seemed to mind; I understood that the Gardens’ relationship with the university in Haigisikhora was remarkably cordial.

I found Themistokles in his office, a dusty, closet-sized room with parchments and codices overflowing from the shelves, stacked on the desk and the windowsill and the floor, so that only Themistokles himself could move safely through the labyrinth.

And then I wished I hadn’t thought that.

“Felix!” Themistokles said, taking off his spectacles and waving them at me in a hospitable fashion. “Come in, have a seat! What can I do for you?”

Since there was nowhere in Themistokles’ office to sit, I stayed where I was, leaning against the doorframe.

“I need to ask you about Nera,” I said.

“Nera?” he said, putting his spectacles back on to frown at me. There was ink staining his fingers and a long smudge of it down one cheekbone. “Good gracious, what about it?”

“Well,” I said, and bit back the insane impulse to say,
I’ve been having visions in the library
. “Just… it was destroyed, wasn’t it? By Troians?”

“Oh, yes. Back in the ascendancy of the House Atreis.”

“Why?”

“Why?” he echoed, baffled.

“Why was it destroyed? What did they do?”

“They worshipped abominations,” Themistokles said, as if surprised I had to ask.

“Did they
practice
abominations?” I said, too sharply.

He blinked at me, taken aback and a little hurt. “Felix, this is ancient history!”

Not for me
, I nearly said. “What sort of abominations? Did it involve… mazes?”

Themistokles gave me a narrow, searching look. Absentminded he might be, and very little interested in anything outside his research, but he was not obtuse, and I had been too distressed (I realized belatedly) to be subtle.

After an agonizing moment, he decided he would not ask. “The state religion of Lucrèce,” he said, “included a number of strange and unsavory deities. I shan’t detail them all, if you’re interested in mazes… ?” He trailed off, eyebrows raised.

“Yes.”

“Then you want to know about their death goddess.”

“Do I? Grand.”

Themistokles leaned back, his expression becoming abstracted and distant. “She was called the White-Eyed Lady. She has no name—or, rather, her name died with her last worshipper. It was anathema to write it down, or to speak it to anyone who was not an initiate in her mysteries.”

“It was a mystery cult?”

“Yes. Does it matter?”

“No,” I said, remembering the stories of the Obscurantists I had heard as a child. “Please go on.”

“She was worshipped in labyrinths. Or
with
labyrinths. The texts are unclear. There’s a hymn—unless it’s an apotropaic prayer—that begins, ‘She is the center of every maze.’ Since she is death and despair and mikkary, I for one don’t find it a comforting thought.”

“Wait. What did you say? Death, despair, and what?”

“Mikkary.”

“What’s that?”

“A Midlander word, I think. The etymology is singularly obscure. It means… well, it means a number of things.”

“It sounds like a Marathine word: ‘misery.’ ” I gave the Kekropian. “Is that close?”

Themistokles grimaced. “Well, yes and no. It’ll do for a start, but mikkary is more than that. There isn’t a word in Troian for it. But it means something like insanity and something like ecstasy—in the theological sense, not as in the throes of delight—and something like terror. And the texts we have always describe it in conjunction with buildings, especially but not exclusively their goddess’s labyrinths.”

“It sounds lovely,” I said and couldn’t quite repress a shiver.

“It was her miasma, her perfume if you will. She was a goddess of fear and pain. Her rites were performed in darkness. Her followers drank the blood of their own children.”

This goddess was sounding more and more like the God of the Obscured Sun. “And the Troians eradicated her worship?”

“Three thousand years ago, give or take.”

“Do you know, was there anything special about the labyrinth in Nera?”

He frowned thoughtfully. “Well, Nera was the Lucrètian capital, so I imagine the labyrinth of Nera would have been notably opulent. But I’ve never heard anything about it particularly. Why?”

“Just something I came across in the archives. I’m working my way through your Midlander books, you know. I found de Kalends’s treatise on linguistic borrowings quite fascinating.”

“Oh, yes,” Themistokles said, his vague eyes lighting. Here, as in the Mirador, it was not difficult to decoy academic wizards onto their specialties; I escaped a half hour later without having to answer any more questions about my interest in Nera’s labyrinth.

Felix showed up in the evening and dragged me to the Gardens’ refectory for dinner. I wanted not to like it—and it sure did piss me off the way everybody stared, like I had three heads and a couple extra arms or something. But there was a stupid little kid inside me, and that stupid little kid was so fucking happy to be getting attention from Felix that I couldn’t hate eating dinner with him the way I thought I should. It was purely embarrassing. About the only good thing I could see in it was I didn’t have to talk to Felix about it.

Mostly, I didn’t have to talk at all with Felix. Mostly, Felix was happy as a drunk saint doing all the talking himself, and powers and saints, the way he talked I could listen for hours and not get bored. He talked about everything—the plants in the gardens, the books he was reading, gossip about the celebrants. I could just sit and listen and not have to try and be smart and not have to worry about how I sounded or nothing. And that was good.

That night I could tell he was on edge about something. It didn’t show exactly, but he was talking just a little too fast and gesturing with his hands a little too much. And his spooky mismatched eyes were too bright.

But he let me eat in peace—aside from talking my ear off, I mean—and it wasn’t until I was done and he was sitting there with his brandy that he said, “Do you know anything about Nera?”

“Nera? You mean the place where…” And then my mind caught up with my mouth.

“Where what?” Felix said after a moment.

“I dunno,” I said. “I mean, you’re the one knew what it was.”

“Knew what
what
was?”

“Don’t you remember?” He didn’t really flinch, but his face tightened up for a second, and I said, “Oh shit you
don’t
remember.”

“Don’t be absurd,” he said, which ain’t even remotely the same thing as,
Yes, I do, and I can prove it
.

“You wouldn’t be asking if you did.”

There was a minute there when he thought he was just going to bull through on brass alone, but then he sighed and said, “All right. I
don’t
remember. I remember almost nothing from the entire time I was… was not myself.”

“So you don’t remember what happened in Hermione or with Mavortian or Gideon or anything?”

“Gideon?” His eyes went sharp suddenly. “That’s a Kekropian name.”

“Um, yeah. He’s a Kekropian. Little guy, looks sort of like a choirboy, sort of like a clerk. Really smart. A hocus.”

“Ah,” he said. “I think I do remember Gideon. Slightly.”

It occurred to me to be damn fucking glad that he’d remembered me at all. “I’m sorry.” Kethe, Milly-Fox, do you think you could say anything
stupider
!

He waved it off. “Tell me about Nera.”

So I told him. I told him about the crossroads and the dragoons and him hearing crying people and how we’d walked for two days. I left out the part about me getting locked in a farmhouse cellar, because it didn’t seem like it mattered. But I told him about the valley and how he’d told me it was the ruins of a city called Nera and how the people that had died there wanted a maze so they could get shut of the world and rest. And about us taking the maze, and how it had seemed like all them ghosts had used it the way they wanted.

By that time he was white as a sheet, and I could see his jaw muscles all tensed up, so I left out the part about how I’d had to beat him up to keep him from following the ghosts through the maze. I didn’t feel like that would help the situation none, and Kethe it wasn’t nothing I wanted to talk about anyway.

“So we made a maze,” he said finally.

“Yeah.”

“So the ghosts could reach Hell?”

“I guess.” It hadn’t been that long ago, but, well, he’d been crazy and I hadn’t been crippled and there was a whole ocean we’d crossed between here and there. So it took me a moment to remember what he’d said. “You said their goddess liked mazes or something.”

“Oh,” he said, and if he’d been anybody else, it would have been a swearword.

“What?”

“Nothing. Something I read today. It doesn’t matter.”

“And that’s why you look like you been served up a dish of eyeballs?”

He actually laughed a little. “Thank you for
that
vivid piece of imagery. I can’t explain it. I don’t know what’s going on. But that book I’ve been reading… ?”

He raised his eyebrows at me, like he thought I should remember this book of his
and
know why it mattered.

“Yeah?”

Like a quarter sigh, just enough to let me know he’d expected better. “
De Doctrina Labyrinthorum. Of the Doctrine of Labyrinths.”

“Oh. That.” And now I remembered him talking about it, because I hadn’t known what a labyrinth was. A maze. Like the curtain-mazes. Like that maze we’d made in Nera. Oh fuck.

“It mentions Nera,” he said.

Well, I mean, what the fuck do you say to that? I couldn’t think of nothing, so I just sat there, staring at him like a half-wit dog—which I was compared to him, no question, but it still ain’t no nice feeling. And after a bit, he kind of shook himself and said, “Would you… I was wondering if… ?”

“What?”

“Would you do something for me?”

I probably looked even stupider then, because I couldn’t fucking believe my ears. I pulled myself together and said, “Um, sure. What?”

He was frowning now, just a little, and staring off into space. “Do you… I remember, I think. I remember that you are good with maps.”

“I guess. Why?”