The large public salon at the Nimble Fire jostled with an uncanny crowd; never had I seen so many Nautilusers packed together, fins slapping into elbows and horns clicking against skinless skulls. Gus reeled back, nonplussed, for in his self-absorption it had not occurred to him that everyone would naturally wish to gather and gossip after the city’s recent convulsion. There was such an agitation of raised voices in that room, all winging and echoic against the vaulting walls, that my scream drew less attention than ordinarily. Hardly anyone bothered to look, though a lady with cobalt skin and pulsating blue butterfly wings in lieu of hair favored me with a sidelong glance and sly smile.
Gus mastered his discomfiture and began shouldering through the assembly in search of Asterion. A score at least of languages shivered and clattered through a thousand voices, the name Mariam flecked across all of them. I heard enough to gather that she was the sorceress responsible for the liquefaction of the buildings all around us, and that the change announced her new regime. A milky, bluish miasma blurred the air, and there was the distinct singed-violet smell of taxes being paid.
Given my elevated vantage, I caught sight of Asterion long before Gus did. The minotaur stood in a knot of chattering grotesques directly before the fire itself, so that its light played across his horns. We never sat near the fireplace—Gus preferred to be at a slight remove from his fellow citizens while he was engaged in the unsavory business of draining my mental energies. So it was the first time I noticed something peculiar in the motion of that firelight, though it was hard to say in what its peculiarity lay. It was fluid and dancing as firelight ought to be, so why did its gestures convey a sense too purposeful for mere inanimate combustion?
A familiar ragged shape tugged at the edge of my vision, and I looked in time to see Old Darius shuffling away from the fire, his legs stirring the mist. I knew the wretch lived in Nautilus, knew indeed that he could no longer afford to leave it. His age was now so advanced that even brief visits to the unworld amounted to dabbling in death, and any day he spent under the warm sun might well be his last. But I had not actually seen him since my own demise.
Had Darius been talking to Asterion, then? I had not known they were acquainted.
And then I caught sight—or rather sound—of another group. My interest in Darius’s doings evaporated on the instant.
The crowd was such that it overwhelmed the intimate clusters of chairs and sofas that dotted the cavernous space, and nearly everyone was obliged to stand, compressed and overheated, in the magical fug. Those rare spots where citizens had managed to gain seats appeared as depressions in the field of heads. The haze settled opportunistically in such hollows, so that the crowd appeared dotted with milky pools. Oh, these sorcerers were leaky vessels, always seeping their trace magics—as I apparently did, as well. With so many of them crammed together the oozing atmosphere reached a choking density.
There was just such a foggy pool some dozen yards ahead and to the left, a large one indicating a collection of perhaps eight or nine chairs and their occupants drawn close together. I could only dimly discern fragments of the figures sitting there: a curve of head, a spread of black hair that fanned as if caught in ocean currents. And the one who interested me sat too low to be visible at all—but oh, even a hint of her voice seemed to catch my heart in a net and haul it straight to her. If I had had a heart, that is.
Anura was here! I could not distinguish her words above the din, but I thought I could identify the rolling cadences of poetry.
And now my lack of autonomy became irksome indeed—for Gus had at last spied Asterion’s horns bucking with his unctuous laughter. Gus began insinuating his narrow person in Asterion’s direction, while I strained to pull him in another. It was useless. To put it bluntly, I lacked mass, and my flailing motions could get no purchase on the air.
My writhing drew other eyes to us, however. A rose-feathered serpent reared up to taste me with a tongue cloud-blue and as dainty as a winding breeze. From Anura’s group I saw someone stand to get a better look at me; it was a lady with a head of sculpted water where slim pearly fishes looped in hypnotic patterns, as if she had embodied her thoughts in their scaly forms.
Gus by now had dragged me far enough from Anura that I could no longer catch the faintest hum of her voice. But the knowledge that my friend was close at hand gnawed at me until I hardly cared for my impending torment. I learned in those moments that loneliness and longing have a power much fiercer than fear’s. My feelings ran so wild that I was forced to wonder at their nature. If this was friendship, it was friendship more passionate, more rocked by longing, than any I had known in life.
We were nearing the fire; the fireplace itself was formed in the likeness of a cave, its many overlapping domes toothed with stalactites. I saw that there were flames draped on either side of the firebox like curtains drawn apart at the theater, and that small human-like figures shaped from flame were performing some drama in a fiery, doll-sized drawing room that perched upon the coals. The miniature actors had no voices beyond the spit and crackle of the wood, and I looked on them with fascination. Were they like me, beings with minds of their own but with speech reduced to noises shapeless and uncontrolled?
Now, of course, I know better. The Nimble Fire draws its imagery from the mind of someone near it. Like a dream, it reveals suppressed fancies, memories, subtexts; they say you can fall into the flames and find your own forgotten secrets there. They say you can pass through the fire, and return to yourself with new illumination.
Before I could examine those blazing figures any further, Asterion barged in front of the firebox and blocked my view, avidly clapping his arm around Gus’s shoulder.
“My dear Gus Farrow! How long it’s been since you favored us with your company! Too long, my friend, far too long, if I may venture an opinion.” Then his voice sharpened, greed peering out through the veiling cheer. “How go the beamers?”
Gus glanced around uncomfortably. Asterion stood in a knot of creatures who no doubt had all been human once, though most of them had now departed from their original forms in one way or another. Gus was accustomed to meeting Asterion—and to ransacking me—without the pressure of so many quizzical eyes upon us. Several turned their stares on me with unabashed hunger.
“Ten talens a day?” asked a man whose only concession to the local fashions was skin as red as poppies. “Her?”
“Twelve at her best,” Asterion bragged. “And as Nemo can tell you, that makes her a rare bird; none of the ghosts in his collection can top seven! She looks to be in an especially generous mood today. See how she flashes? Twinkle, twinkle, eh? That’s what I like to see, our Catherine in a positive state.”
There were ghosts kept in a collection, like seashells or taxidermy? The idea shocked me. And how could any ghost be parted from the one they haunted?
“Twelve, though! Catherine here proves it’s possible. Do you suppose it’s too late for me to acquire a pretty little ghost of my own, then?” the scarlet man inquired. “What a return on a few minutes’ strangling!”
Gus drew himself up as far as his spindly frame would allow and jutted his lips. “Sir. An ordinary, an indifferent murder would never produce the same result! Catherine and I were bound in life, as if a single spirit twined through us both. And the proof is that neither her stubbornness nor her death was enough to sever our—our entanglement. If she contributes so much to my undertakings, it is because she understands that she is, ineluctably, my own. She was and is a part of me. But a girl murdered for nothing but coarse profit—such a one would most certainly not—that is, if she haunted you at all! She—”
Gus was sputtering in his offense. The company burst out chuckling and Gus reared, nearly as red-faced as his interlocutor.
“There, Gus,” the minotaur said, and slapped his back. I pitched dizzily with the blow. “Mr. Manley is only joking. No one questions that you and your Catherine have a singular relationship. I’m sure she’s blinking like that in her sweet anxiety to assist you in any way she can.” The mocking note was blatant, but before Gus could react Asterion forged on. “But you haven’t answered my question: how goes your work with the beamers? Mr. Manley and these others are interested in your proposed innovations. I’ve told them that your work is truly on the forefront of the art.”
Gus was only slightly mollified by this flattery. “It’s progressing very well, thank you. I had meant to discuss it with you. I have all sorts of ideas for improvements, though I dread to think of what they might cost—but perhaps another time—”
“Asterion tells us you studied with Old Darius,” another man put in. He was entirely human-looking, dressed in elegant dove gray with a face ageless and illegible. A scrim of silver hair showed beneath his hat. In any world he would have been known at once to be rich, and cold, and dangerous. “So it’s surprising that you’ve developed such a different specialty. Weren’t you trained to work with fire?”
“Predominantly, yes,” Gus conceded, and I could tell that for all his annoyance the interest of such an obviously important man beguiled him. “Darius taught me trickery with fire and smoke, as well as weather magic. Illusion work and the like. But none of that is particularly useful to me at the moment, so I’ve been obliged to teach myself afresh.”
It would be mistaken to suggest that, in life, I had been excluded from circles like this one, where men of wealth and power bandied their common preconceptions from mouth to mouth and termed it debate. It was rather that such circles were so remote from my experience as to be irrelevant, and it would not have occurred to me that I was excluded any more than the sparrows were. Nonetheless I could recognize the roles of the various players by subtleties of tension and tenor, by the cant of shoulders and the eagerness of laughter. I knew that Asterion was a vulgar climber and upstart, barely tolerated; that Gus was a curiosity whom Asterion was retailing to secure his entrance here; that Mr. Manley was a hanger-on and the gray man, Nemo, was the real power among them.
Collecting ghosts was surely an expensive hobby.
“Teach yourself, you say? There are rumors that you forged a projection with functioning cognition after a mere handful of attempts. Do you mean to say you did that with no instruction but your own?”
How quickly the word had spread! I glanced around at the field of chattering heads, wondering how many of them had already learned of the tragically alert beamer child lately deposited in Margo’s care. How many knew that that child had been created with power largely siphoned from myself. I realized at once that some sort of magical eavesdropping was likely involved, but Gus seemed too oblivious to draw the clear inference.
Instead he puffed a little and was about to join in the acclamation of his own talents when we were interrupted. My first confused impression was that a very large and lumpy hat was levitating on our periphery. Then it appeared that the hat was afloat on a column of wavering distortion. Had I not been screaming, I might have laughed.
For it was Anura perched atop the head of her watery friend, the lady whose brows contained the intricate loopings of pearly fishes. Anura’s small blue hands clutched the transparent forehead tightly and her back feet sometimes paddled for purchase, to absurd effect. But there was nothing comical in her expression. Her scarlet eyes rolled atop her head and caught Gus in a gaze of grim ferocity while her watery companion—dressed in a fluid, silver-blue fall of metallic silk, with bare pellucid arms that put me in mind of mountain rills—slipped into our circle with such confident grace that it nearly concealed her aggression. The gentlemen, if I may so term them, had little choice but to part and admit the exquisite lady along with her warty, seething bonnet.
I could not burst out in cries of childish delight, could not crow and embrace my amphibious friend. I was used to the agony of inexpressible rage. Here I discovered that speechless adoration is a far worse affliction, swelling within me like an ache I had no hope of relieving. How could I tell her what her presence meant to me? Everything about her that had once appeared homely or ridiculous took on a new aspect: the beauty of love incarnate.
The company gathered around Asterion ruffled with polite aversion; Nemo lifted his hat and Mr. Manley bowed his crimson head like a wilting rose.
Gus raised his eyes and studied the ceiling.
“Madame Laudine,” Mr. Manley greeted the watery lady, and I thought that he was unduly flustered. “And, ah—I don’t believe I’ve been introduced to—your friend?”
Madame Laudine gave a gracious dip of her own head that set Anura scrabbling for balance.
“Mr. Manley, Nemo, gentlemen. How pleasant to meet you on this historic occasion! I’m sure you are all as overjoyed as we are at Mariam’s ascendancy.” Her voice had a calculated insincerity that gave away nothing of her true feelings. The circle offered murmurs of equally insincere agreement. “As for my friend, surely she needs no introduction, Mr. Manley? This is the great Anura! Of course all of you are acquainted with the work of our foremost poet?”
Madame Laudine was plainly exaggerating for some reason that was not yet clear to me. Nonetheless I was pleased and quite irrationally proud to learn that Anura’s work had received some measure of recognition.
“I must confess—that is, my business allows me little leisure for such—”
Madame Laudine’s watery lips tweaked in a sly smile that told me she had gained her object, though I did not yet understand what she was after.
“Oh, no? We must remedy your deprivation, then! As it so happens, Anura has composed some verses in honor of Mariam’s new reign. Darling Anura, could I perhaps prevail on you to recite your latest for these gentlemen?”
Gus by now was thoroughly purple in the face, though he kept his expression locked in a sort of strained abstraction that fooled no one.
Asterion’s horns bucked. “Ladies, we are regrettably preoccupied at the moment. I’m afraid—”
“Oh, but one can always find time for true beauty, Asterion!” Madame Laudine gave a warbling laugh, and I knew at once that, alone with Anura, she laughed in a very different key. Insolence knocked inside her coquetry like a clapper in a bell. “Business means nothing unless it allows for the elevation of the spirit. Dearest Anura, it seems these gentlemen’s need of your art is acute.”
Anura hadn’t yet spoken, but now she bulged upward and resettled herself and her scarlet eyes—at long last!—rotated to meet mine. I suppose anyone else might have mistaken her look for the usual crude inquisitiveness, but oh, I saw something in it grave, and tender, and faithful. She had come to me, and she cared. My endless flashing fired with a new brilliance, as if I could make it spell her name.
“Sorcerers as well as ordinary mortals may live their whole lives immured in loneliness. But poetry is the power that speaks through the walls.” Anura’s voice had a low rumble like scattering pebbles, and I felt sure the loneliness she meant was mine.
“Tell us, then,” Asterion said with ill grace. “Since nothing else will satisfy you.”
Madame Laudine smiled as if he had expressed the warmest enthusiasm. Nemo’s head tipped back so that his gaze slanted across his cheekbones, and I guessed that, like me, he wondered at the point of their game. Gus stamped in place as if he had half a mind to storm off, but he was too uncertain to follow through. It was apparent that, in his arrogance, he thought the whole performance was meant for his exclusive benefit.
It was not. Anura began.
“Where is the wine that ever forged its glass?
None ever, oh, none ever,
For garnet contradiction holds it fast.
The cup is but a spill belied,
And wine englassed is flow denied.
“Where is the glass that ever made man fall?
None ever, oh, none ever,
For trampled grape, disordered dream, and all,
Drain down his throat like whispered lies,
The glass left empty as his eyes.
“Where is the poison that was in the wine?
Forever, oh, forever
It claims his veins to be its vine,
Its fruit cold stones, its scent stopped breath,
For wine’s true form wreathes through his death.”
Anura ceased speaking. There followed a long silence, for it was a very uncomfortable poem, and a puzzling one. Gus twitched. Then Asterion forced a laugh, loud and dismissive, as if he could frighten away Anura’s words if he only barked at them loudly enough.
“But what in the name of all impossibilities has that to do with Mariam?”
It had been evident to me as soon as Madame Laudine broached the subject that there had not been nearly enough time for Anura to write a commemorative poem. Now from the general fidgeting of the company I gathered that this complication had dawned on them as well. Anura’s mouth broadened even further if such a thing were possible; it was hard to say if it was a grimace or a smile.
“The significance of a poem is not always immediately apparent.” She was gazing at me as she spoke. “In time its bearing on the present moment will become quite clear.”