The Virtu Read Free

been killed.”
    Another half shrug, an impatient jerk of one shoulder, as if he were throwing off an intrusive hand. “No big loss.”
    “No big
loss
? Are you out of your
mind
?” They were all staring at me, and I realized that my calm, level voice had become a shriek. I turned on the pallid young man, made a conscious effort to modulate my voice, and said, “What did you think you were doing?”
    His golden eyes were dreamy with fever and drugs, lambent in his white face. He was consumptive, and that explained a great deal. He said, “I didn’t hurt him. I would never have hurt him. I just had to…”
    “Thamuris,” Xanthippe said gently.
    He turned to her, wide-eyed, pleading, “Xanthippe, it was perfectly safe. I swear it.”
    “You’ll forgive me,” I said, “if I am skeptical.”
    Xanthippe shot me a
not now
look and sat down next to Thamuris on the bed. “I know you would never do anything intentionally to hurt anyone,” she said, taking his hands and making him look at her, “but you don’t have the strength you used to. If something had gone wrong, you couldn’t have controlled it.”
    “But I
had
to,” he said, and I saw his dream-hazed eyes fill with tears. “Xanthippe, I
had
to.”
    She sighed, touched his cheek, and said, “Khrysogonos, Oribasios, Hesione, would you see that Thamuris gets safely to bed?”
    Acolytes and Celebrant Terrestrial, they helped Thamuris to his feet and half led, half carried him out of the room, leaving Xanthippe and me staring at each other and Mildmay slumped grayly in his chair, staring at nothing.
    I pushed my hair off my face. “Xanthippe, what just happened here?”
    She sighed, rubbing restlessly at the ache of arthritis in her hands. “Thamuris is dying.”
    “Yes, I recognize consumption when I see it. That isn’t an explanation.”
    She looked past me at Mildmay. “What did he tell you?”
    He didn’t move, but he seemed to sink even lower into the chair. “He asked me not to tell anyone. He said it wouldn’t be hard. I was gonna be two things for him. Anchor and… and some word I didn’t know.”
    “Querent?” Xanthippe said in a tone indicating she knew the answer and didn’t want to hear it.
    “Yeah. That was it. And he was going to tell the future.”
    “That’s it?”
    “Um. Yeah.”
    Xanthippe said some things under her breath that I politely pretended not to hear.
    “He didn’t hurt me,” Mildmay said, and there was perhaps a hint of anxiety in his voice. “I’m really okay.”
    “Then what happened to your hands?” I said.
    “I bruise easy,” he said. He met my eyes as he said it and made no effort to hide the rising bruises on his wrists. I wasn’t going to be able to stampede him into giving anything away.
    Xanthippe said in a slow, measured voice, “The fact that you are neither dead nor insane is a miracle. Thamuris should
never
have performed a pythian casting with an annemer.”
    “Didn’t look like nobody else was helping him,” Mildmay said, with the first spark of real feeling I’d heard since I came into the room.
    “Not helping him kill himself? No. No, we aren’t.”
    Mildmay’s flinch was all in his eyes. He said nothing.
    “I’m sorry,” Xanthippe said. “That was unkind. You had no way of knowing that the celebrants of Hakko sent Thamuris here precisely to keep him from doing what he has done.” Her mouth compressed, bitter, angry, helpless. “What they themselves trained him to do. In Euryganeic thinking, it is what he was
created
to do.”
    Mildmay muttered something.
    “What?” I said.
    “Junkie,” Mildmay said in Marathine.
    “I’m not sure the analogy of addiction is going to be a very popular one here,” I said, also in Marathine.
    “It’s what it was like. Or maybe that was just the laudanum.” He sank back down into himself and shut his eyes.
    Xanthippe was waiting politely, her eyebrows raised. “So what was this evening’s demonstration about?” I said to her.
    “I