The Virtu

The Virtu Read Free Page B

Book: The Virtu Read Free
Author: Sarah Monette
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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

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