The Virtu (50 page)

“Yeah, well, he told
me
you weren’t kind to your friends,” Mildmay said to me. Peripherally, I noticed Gideon’s eyebrows drawing down into a scowl as he read; I said to Mildmay, “And what did he mean by that?”

“I think he was warning me you were gonna treat me like shit.” Something that wasn’t laughter flickered and was gone from his eyes. “Didn’t tell him I knew that already.”

“Thank you,” I said, midway between irony and sincerity.

:Thaddeus has always been a proponent of telling one things ‘for one’s own good,’: Gideon said, and added something vicious in Kekropian, of which I recognized just enough words to realize that Gideon’s gift for invective would turn a sailor’s hair white.

“Is it true?”

:Of course it’s true. Thaddeus is a self-righteous idiot with a great gift for willful blindness, but he would never demean himself by lying.:

And I would have been convinced by his acerbic, contemptuous tone, except that his hands were restless among his pages of notes, and he looked at my face without meeting my eyes.

“Gideon,” I said, “nothing you’ve done can be any worse than the things I’ve done, and you already know about those.” Some of them, anyway.

:But he is wrong,: Gideon said defiantly. :I am not a spy for the Bastion.:

“I know that, idiot,” I said, and when he met my eyes, I smiled at him. He blushed and looked down, but some of the cold misery had lifted from his face.

I was not sure what association of ideas prompted me to look at Mild-may then; he was watching us. There was nothing showing on his face, and I realized suddenly, by the contrast, how much I had learned to read from Mildmay’s face, how much, comparatively, he had started to let me see.

And it took only a moment’s thought to understand why he might have retreated behind his stone mask now. “Thaddeus alleges that Gideon is a spy and a cultist.”

“You mean what the Aiaians said was true?” Mildmay said, with something that might almost be alarm, and looked at Gideon.

Gideon flushed bright red and nodded.

“What kind of cult?” Mildmay said. “I mean, can you talk about it at all?”

“You seem worried about something,” I said, and he looked even more embarrassed.

But he said doggedly, “You ain’t an Obscurantist, are you?”

:Obscurantist?: Gideon asked me.

“A follower of the God of the Obscured Sun,” I said, “whose cult has been extinct in Mélusine for centuries.”

Mildmay gave the equivalent in Kekropian, haltingly and with terrible pronunciation. And Gideon’s eyes went wide.

:No,: he said, :although I know the god of whom you speak. My goddess is the White-Eyed Lady, goddess of the dead, the lost, the trapped.:

I realized, after a long moment, that I had both hands pressed flat against the tabletop with enough pressure that my fingernails were turning white.

“Felix?” Mildmay said, and he sounded frightened.

I turned my head stiffly to look at him. His green eyes were watching my face intently, and there was none of the hardness I was used to seeing in them. He was frightened, but I realized vertiginously that he was frightened
for me
. No one had been frightened for me since Joline; nobody had cared so much that they…

My memory lit for a moment, like a flash of lightning against a brooding summer midnight, a hundred jumbled images of Mildmay watching me with that same mixture of fear and love in his face. And then the darkness closed in again; the past was gone, and the present must be dealt with.

I licked my lips and croaked, “Gideon worships the White-Eyed Lady-The goddess of Nera, and of the labyrinth in Klepsydra.”

“Oh,” Mildmay said. Then, very quietly, “Fuck.”

I had to keep moving, keep responding, keep from breaking down in panic. I asked Gideon, “What does the worship of the White-Eyed Lady entail, exactly?”

:In principle or in practice? I’m not about to murder you both in your beds, if that’s what you’re worried about.:

“No, I… I didn’t think… I was just…” I was babbling. I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes, took a deep breath, looked at Gideon, and said in a falsely steady voice, “We have had dealings with the White-Eyed Lady. And they have not been pleasant.”

:Dealings?: Gideon’s eyebrows rose dramatically. .-Considering that her worship has been all but extinct for the past several hundred years, I am curious to know what sort of ‘dealings’ you might have had.:

“When we were in Klepsydra, we—”

“Hang on,” Mildmay said, and both Gideon and I jumped. “You asked a question, and I want it answered.”

“Gideon says he won’t murder us in our beds,” I said.

“I’m sure he won’t. But that ain’t what you asked.” After a moment, he added, “I ain’t keen on him murdering nobody else, neither.”

:I don’t want to murder anyone!: Gideon protested.

I relayed, and Mildmay shrugged, looking not entirely convinced. “Then how d’you go about worshipping a goddess of death?”

:It has become a very private religion,: Gideon said after a moment, hesitantly, .-although it seems always to have been a mystery cult. The dangers are such—especially in the Bastion—that her devotees almost never meet. We never see each other’s faces, and if we ever guess another’s identity, we do our best to forget it.:

I repeated what he had said for Mildmay, then asked, “Then why meet at all? Why practice such a dangerous faith?”

Gideon and Mildmay gave me equally impatient looks. Gideon said, :Because we must. Because that is what faith is.:

“But surely you can believe in her without worshipping her? Forgive me, but she does not seem like a goddess worthy of worship.”

:You do not understand,: Gideon said resignedly, as if he had expected no better. I felt myself redden.

He took a deep breath, although he did not need it for speech, and said, :When I was fifteen, I wanted to die.:

I repeated his explanation as he gave it, feeling strangely, relievedly transparent, as if it were Mildmay that Gideon spoke to. Mildmay understood him, I thought, in a way I never would.

:I had been tithed to the Bastion two years before as an oblate, but my powers had come upon me very rapidly—too rapidly, and I was made a lieutenant when I was barely fourteen. I was thrust among the Eusebian officers before I had a chance to understand what they were.:

“What were they?” Mildmay asked, his voice unexpectedly gentle.

:You do not trust wizards,: Gideon said, and Mildmay nodded. :The Eusebians of that generation are the reason I do not blame you. I think—I pray—that things are better now.:

And yet he had fled, I thought, but J did not say it.

:The details do not matter, and I do not wish to burden you with them. Suffice it to say, I was desperately unhappy, and the only thing that held me back from suicide was fear of what would be done to me if someone guessed my intention before I could carry it through, or if I botched it.

:Now, the White-Eyed Lady is the goddess of suicides. She takes them as her lovers, uses them, betrays them. It is their nature as much as hers that makes it so. In the days when she had a proper priesthood—or so the initiates of her mysteries tell each other—one of her priests’ duties was to mediate between the goddess and those who wished to come to her intemperately. It is said there was once a ritual, so that suicides could make of their deaths a proper gift, could find the peace the Lady promised. But that, like so much else, has been lost. Now we have only her mystery, and the ritual of initiation that imitates death. In truth, I think that is why the Bastion turns a blind eye to her worship: for so many of us, that sham death is enough.:

“Like the valve on a steam boiler,” Mildmay said. “You let a little out, and the whole thing don’t blow up in your face.”

:Rather, yes.: Gideon smiled, a sudden dazzling sweetness. :Although your simile is theologically appalling, I find it personally quite apt.:

Mildmay looked down at his hands—flustered, as he always was by praise. Gideon continued, :Again, the details do not matter. I was initiated into the White-Eyed Lady’s mysteries, and I did not die. My death is hers, when she chooses to take it.:

Finished, he folded his hands and sat—waiting, I supposed, to discover whether we would reject or accept what he had said.

After a moment, Mildmay said, clearly struggling with it, “So you
ain’t
—I mean, it ain’t about helping other people meet her, whether they want to or not?”

:She is not the God of the Obscured Sun,: Gideon said. We must both have looked dubious, perhaps a little frightened still, for he said, .-The God of the Obscured Sun is the god of necromancers. The White-Eyed Lady is the goddess of the dead and dying.:

“I don’t think I entirely understand the difference,” I said.

Gideon frowned, his hands moving in a frustrated gesture, as if the words he wanted hovered just out of his reach. .-The White-Eyed Lady takes the dead into her domain. She neither wishes nor allows their return to this world. Ghosts are those who have lost their way to her—or have been dragged back by the followers of the Obscured Sun, who is both her rival and her ever-rejected suitor.:

I saw Mildmay’s flinch as I repeated Gideon’s words. “What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. It just… Nothing.”

“That was
not
nothing.”

“Just something you said once.”

“When?”

He mumbled down at his hands, but I caught the word
Nera
clearly enough.

So did Gideon. :Yes. You mentioned a labyrinth beneath Klepsydra, where I did not know any labyrinth existed, and also the city of Nera, which so far as I know has been lost for a thousand years.:

“Oh. Um, yes. There is a labyrinth beneath Klepsydra, which seems to have been sacred to the White-Eyed Lady, and Nera… well, I was not myself at the time.”

We both looked at Mildmay, who said, “You want
me
to… Powers.” But when he had collected himself, he told the story well, vividly, and if he was more honest than I would have liked about the spectacle I had made of myself, I supposed it was no more than I deserved for making him tell the story in the first place.

I had the sense, as I had had when he told me about Nera in the Gardens, that there was something he was leaving out, something he did not want to say, but I had no idea of what it might be until Gideon asked, and I relayed, “Do you think the maze worked?”

“Dunno. I can’t see ghosts.” But his eyes cut away from mine.

“So you’re saying you think it was just my hallucination?”

“Not what I said.”

“Do you
believe
in ghosts?”

“Well, yeah,” he said, as if the answer were so obvious no one should need to ask.

I looked at him, waited until he reluctantly met my eyes. “What aren’t you telling me?”

His face colored, and he muttered, “Don’t want to upset you.”

I wondered if he meant he didn’t want to distress me or he didn’t want to make me angry. “Just tell me,” I said, and tried not to sound impatient. “It could be important.”

“Important for
what?‘”

“For the problem of the Mirador’s dead.” Gideon gave me a sharp, skeptical look, but did not interrupt me. “There are parallels between the two situations that could be useful. So out with it. What happened when we made the maze?”