Margo’s eyes were wide with shock, and a bit glazed, as she stood in Anura’s office. One of the promised witnesses was human in appearance, a dour and bulky woman with stiff curls and brilliant azure eyes. The other, though, was a sort of spiral of purple flame that could form hands to sign paperwork, or a mouth to offer comments.
With so many entities present, Anura studiously ignored me.
Gus levitated a teacup, and everyone pretended, loudly, that Margo had done it—except for Margo herself, who gawked in silence at her new compatriots and especially at me. Of course the witnesses would take their cut later, but for now they performed with creditable enthusiasm and signed the papers just as if they were convinced that Margo was a witch indeed. The woman, Carmen, used ordinary ink to inscribe her name, while the flame singed his into the paper with a suitably fiery script.
And with that, Margo was certified as a sorceress of the lowest level, her expected production half a talen per unworld day. It was enough to secure her citizenship and the meanest accommodations, no more than the equivalent of a hovel. She was rated so low, I gathered, because that was all Anura would risk, but also because Gus would henceforth be liable for the taxes on Margo’s supposed magic as well as his own. If there was a shortfall and the amount of magic seeping to power the city did not meet expectations, someone might come looking for the source of that discrepancy. No one present could afford to attract that sort of attention.
I had my own reasons for bitterness at the conclusion of this business. Now that Margo lived in Nautilus, what would tempt Gus to spend his days in the unworld? What inducement would he have to expose himself to aging and eventual death? I would have ground my teeth at finding my desires thwarted once again, if only I had been capable of closing my mouth.
And though I understood her likely reasons, it crushed me to be in the same room with Anura and not receive the slightest glance from her. What if she regretted her kindness to a wretched ghoul like me? I shrieked and flapped with utter disregard for dignity, trying to draw her eyes. I failed. I had no way to weep, but my insubstantial form felt like boiling tears.
Then Gus hurried Margo from the office. She kept her hands over her ears as much as she could; only since arriving in Nautilus had she gained the ability to see me and been treated to the sonic bludgeoning of my scream. If she had understood before that Gus must have murdered me, such a dramatic confirmation no doubt disagreed with her. Well, she would get used to it. Now that she was trapped in Nautilus and utterly dependent on her nephew, she would have no other choice.
We had not gone far before Margo stopped and wobbled. Her breathing was labored. Wisps of hair clung to her perspiring brows.
“Of course,” Gus mused, “you’ll have to take extreme care never to walk through walls where anyone can see you, or they’ll know at once you aren’t generating magic. Make sure you always pass beneath the lintels; I’m sure even you can learn how to pay the tolls. I’ll have to arrange an allowance for you, enough to cover such basic necessities.”
I understood at once that her allowance would be paltry in the extreme, but Margo didn’t seem to be listening. She looked puzzled.
“The pain, Angus,” she said, once she’d caught enough breath. “I thought the pain would be gone. I thought I would be well again.”
“Oh,” Gus said. His mouth worked through various figures of impatience and surprise. “No, not without further intervention. But you won’t age anymore, and your illness won’t progress beyond what it is at this moment. You can live with no end in sight—perhaps it’s not true immortality, but we can last as long as the city itself! There are sorcerers here who are rumored to have lived for millennia.”
Here Gus seemed to notice that Margo’s gaze was still wandering, and his lips pinched. What he wanted, of course, was a show of gratitude. He wanted Margo’s joyous amazement at the eternity before her. But her weary and baffled expression made it clear that she was feeling nothing of the kind.
“Further intervention?” Margo asked hopefully. This vague woman was nothing like the brisk and acerbic Margo I was used to. How much of the change was simple shock, I wondered, and how much a more permanent diminishment brought on by her long illness? “So it can be done? The pain, Angus.”
Gus, I could tell, hardly knew what to make of Margo’s unexpected response to the dawning of her new existence, glorious as it all seemed to him.
“Of course it can,” he said after a pause. “It isn’t at all my specialty, I’m afraid. But for a fee, nearly anything can be accomplished.”
There was a sullen note to his voice, and I knew he was already resenting all the unforeseen expenses attendant on bringing Margo here. He had probably thought that the thousand talens he had paid to Anura would be the last of his obligations. Now he was chagrined to find the case very much otherwise.
I looked from one of them to the other, Gus bristling with restless energy and Margo slumped and wasted, and wondered how long she had before he tired of paying to alleviate her suffering. He had no doubt thought to procure a helpmeet, and not a burden, by importing his old aunt.
Magic was money in Nautilus. And just as at home, money was everything.
Gus escorted Margo to her new dwelling, but he was withdrawn and silent, Margo weak and wistful. As soon as they reached her tiny, tent-shaped room, Margo collapsed on her pallet and slept, and Gus sat cross-legged on the floor and brooded until he dropped into fitful sleep as well.
At last Gus roused himself and left Margo still sleeping. He had the bare consideration to leave an opening in her wall so that she would not be obliged to stay confined, and to hire a firefly to lead her to us when she woke—though I wondered if Margo would know what to make of an insect stubbornly blinking at her. And with that we turned and walked out into the snow.
Yes, snow. For all that there was no sky in the customary sense, but only a hazy dome. For all that there were no clouds unless willfully conjured.
The most uncongenial aspect of the climate here lies in how it falls sway to the whims of the powerful. Those with sufficient magic to waste can bring on bitter cold, or they can make the very winds rustle with iridescent plumage, or trace veins of colored water in intricate trellises through all the air so that no one can walk without drenching themselves—at least, not without expending their own magic to avoid it. The rich create these displays to remind everyone that they can afford such extravagance, and to make certain no one forgets where the true power lies. During periods when the greatest sorcerers of Nautilus vie with one another in petty ostentation, one can hardly go out for all the moons rolling through the streets or birdlike creatures slashing past with feathers of cutting ice.
On this occasion, then, someone had seen fit to create a blizzard as their particular performance. The snowflakes were blazing blue, like an indigo bunting’s feathers in the brightest sun; they were periwinkle and violet, the colors of twilight and pining. Gus cringed, annoyed, for he was not dressed for the sudden cold, then set his shoulders and stomped off through the giddy whirl. Of course he was too parsimonious to spend any magic on personal warmth. Many others would be too poor, and they would have to bear their discomfort as best they could.
The imposed misery, too, was part of the point. In any world, the powerful are much the same in their idle cruelties. Magic only enabled the worst in them, as it had with Gus.
“Bother the old bastard,” Gus snapped. “Why can’t he leave me alone?”
The flakes were several times larger than the natural variety, and as they spun across my eyes I noticed that each bore a miniature portrait at its center: faces both human and fantastic danced across my vision, and I guessed at once that these were images of Nautilus’s own citizens delicately crystallized. Some faces smiled, others contorted in the agonies of the damned, yet others showed a weary indifference. Presumably it amused him to portray his enemies suffering, his friends in bliss. Was this another game, then, to set the city’s inhabitants scrambling, searching for their own portraits, so that they could discover whether or not they were in favor? I glimpsed a frozen Asterion looking smug and secretive, and an Anura who seemed rather pained. At first I had no luck in locating Gus’s image, curious though I was to see what expression would be painted on his features. Darius had kept his distance since Gus had arrived in Nautilus, and I’d guessed their relations must have cooled.
Gus trudged on and the snow blew through the streets with ever-increasing density, battering him back. But not a single flake could be seen to alight on the ground. The only accumulation was in the air itself. The atmosphere acquired an intimidating thickness, became a blue and glittering wall that perpetually wove and unraveled itself with the dip and dive of flakes. Ghost though I was and beyond corporeal harm, still I shrank into myself. The snow spun a fearful spell, a stunning glimmer, so that I could only stare until my every thought went spindling from my mind and entered into the air’s bright warp and weft.
Gus grunted, though, and shouldered through it. Even here in Nautilus he proved oddly resistant to wonder. If the sun is never bright enough for your taste, then can enchantment ever be adequately magical?
“Is this sort of decoration all he can think of to do?” Gus complained, glancing at me over his shoulder. “Is it all anyone here can do? All this power, and yet—the uses of it seem so empty at times, so vain and stupid. I can’t imagine why I ever looked up to him.”
Did he realize that the emptiness and vanity he complained of were his own?
We had nearly reached Gus’s own room when I caught sight of a portrait I had not expected. It was myself, only rather idealized; if I had been modestly handsome in life, the Catherine on the snowflake blazed with strength and beauty. More than that, she sat enthroned; wearing a gown of stars, a diadem on her head. I could think only that Darius was taunting me with this contrast to my actual condition, or possibly he was parodying Gus’s old fantasies. The Catherine-flake danced with seeming purpose straight into Gus’s view, and he recoiled.
And with that, the show came to its finale. All around us the luminous blue flakes caught fire. The air rippled in sheets of blinding gold. It swarmed with unbearable heat. Anyone who had rushed to put on a coat or summon magical warmth would be forced to throw off that protection just as quickly.
But not for long. Gus had no sooner flung his hands before his face than the flames expired and white ash twinkled down, brushing everything with soft pallor.
Gus’s childish fancies regarding Darius had come nearer to the truth than I ever could have guessed, you see. In Nautilus, he was a notable power. And though he’d mocked me for fearing him, it seemed evident that inspiring fear wherever he could was one of his principal pleasures.
I, on the contrary, rather regret the horror I strike into all hearts. It seems indelicate, and then it has the unfortunate effect of putting people on their guard. Even Gus, so long habituated to my presence, is warier than I would like.
If I could, I would assure Gus I gave up any idea of taking action ages ago. That I am so numbed by my own demise that I feel nothing at all as one promising girl after another joins me in death, and adds her cold limbs to his insatiable accounting.
That I never dream of vengeance.
Tell me, is that not a true depiction of my character?