Leviathan Sleeps: Part III
CHAPTER SEVEN: QUANDERS
It was dark when I left the room to discuss further payment with the inn's proprietor. Fatigued, Indrastea had remained abed for most of the day. We concluded our business quickly, settling on a moderate rate in exchange for a promise of three days' payment. I sat down at a chair in the common room and ordered a glass of wine from a doe-eyed serving girl. While I was waiting, the giant I had seen before came to sit beside me. He was perhaps the tallest man I had ever seen, closer to eight feet than to seven and with that warping of the features and limbs that occurs when too much height stresses the skeleton. His face was long and solemn, twisted slightly to the left. He wore clothes of a good cut and his black hair was shorn close to his scalp.
“Good evening,” I said as he settled into his seat. It creaked beneath his great weight.
“And to you, sur,” he said, meeting my eyes. His own were a startling shade of green, so pale as to be almost yellow. His mouth worked before he spoke. “I have discerned that you are, and correct me, sur, if I am taken now by faulty reasoning, a man intending to travel.”
“I am,” I said, because I could see no point in dissembling my purpose.
The giant nodded gravely. “Then, my friend,” he said, “I have a proposition to make. My name is Ilan Quanders and I find myself, at this juncture, a traveling physician. My assistant has been absent for some few days now, doubtless engaged in whoring or dead in an culvert somewhere, and I am in the market to contract another.” The giant leaned forward and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Particularly one with the medical expertise of a trained Confessor.”
The girl brought my drink and set it down. I thanked her, my eyes still on the giant. “What wages do you offer?” I asked, sipping the bitter drink. Raised in the temple, I had a theoretical understanding of money and its transferal between parties. Quanders might have taken me for a fool then and there, for I would have agreed to anything short of slavery to escape from Monta and the shadow of the temple. Thankfully, he was an honest man in his own strange way.
“Fifty shekels a month,” he said. “Ten extra if you can be ready to leave tomorrow.”
I put down my glass. “I have a...woman with me. Her health is poor.”
Quanders blew out a breath, squinting at me through his round spectacles. At length, he leaned back in his chair and, frowning, said: “She can ride in my carriage, if it is amenable to her.” He made no mention of his services as a physician, and I did not press him.
“She'll ride,” I said.
“Good,” said Quanders. He held out a hand and I took it, avoiding the urge to stare at the gross proportions of his digits or the prominence of his wandering blue veins. Our bargain sealed, the giant rose with obvious difficulty from his seat and placed a shekel on the table by my drink. “I will expect you at breakfast, master...?”
“Abendrad,” I said.
Quanders departed, speaking briefly with the innkeeper before climbing the stairs to his room. I observed the obvious pain with which he moved. His joints must have been under tremendous strain.
I finished my wine and returned to mine and Indrastea's room. The bed was empty, the rumpled sheets strewn across the floor. Indrastea knelt naked before the washbasin, blood dripping from her parted lips. Even as I closed the door she was seized by a violent coughing fit and sprayed bloody sputum over the porcelain. I went to her side and set a finger to her wrist. Her pulse fluttered beneath my touch. She glanced at me, eyes wide and frightened. Her breath came raggedly.
“What's wrong?” I asked.
Indrastea shook her head and then vomited, slumping against the basin. Her whole body twitched, muscles spasming beneath her voluptuous flesh. I put an arm around her shoulders and drew her up. She gasped for breath as spittle ran down her chin. “Sick,” she said. “I just need to rest, darling. That's all.” She turned, her neck jerking through the motion with unpleasant delays, as though she were some clockwork toy. Her lips, red and full and warm, found mine. The taste of bile flooded my mouth, but I did not push her away as she mashed her heavy breasts against my chest and slid her arms around my neck. There was a desperation to her ardor, a maladroit girlishness to her movements that I had never noticed before. I pushed her thighs apart as she undid my trousers.
I slid into her, erect and flushed with desire. She sank back onto the ground beneath me, resting on her elbows. Her chin was smeared with blood. I braced myself over her, hands on the rough planks. “Will I hurt you?”
She leaned up to kiss me, bloodying my mouth. “No,” she said.
In the morning we rose together just before dawn. Indrastea was sluggish and weak. I helped her to wash the blood from her skin and hair before she dressed herself. I packed our meager belongings in a burlap sack. We went down to breakfast in the common room where Quanders sat at his own table, attended by the innkeeper and his daughter. The giant, accompanied by a second man of tall stature and pompous aspect, was engaged in eating a roast ham, honeyed flatbread, thick yogurt and a ripe golden melon split into crescents. It was a feast fit for six men, and yet already he had devoured half of what had been placed before him. Quanders looked up at our descent from the stair and, mouth full, gestured with a lit cigar to a pair of empty seats. We joined him, Indrastea still pale and unsteady on her feet.
“Good morning, master Abendrad,” said the giant, stubbing out his cigar in a half-eaten dish of mussels. He ignored Indrastea entirely. “Meet my associate, Doctor Anarian.”
The doctor stood, removing his hat, and, rounding the table, proffered his hand. I shook it. He was a large man, though he appeared almost short beside Quanders. “Good morning, sur,” he said. “A pleasure.” He pulled out a seat for Indrastea, bowing over her hand as she took it, and then returned to his own chair where a simple repast of tea and dry bread waited untouched. I was reminded forcibly by his scowl of Master Halmure, though Doctor Anarian was bulky and austere where Master Halmure had been sour and thin. I wondered if he had survived the massacre at the temple, if he had lived while Master Gallian had died. The unfairness of it galled me.
“Doctor Anarian is a chemist by trade,” said Quanders, sawing at a breast of quail. His knife and fork looked like toys in his massive, blue-veined hands. “He serves as my apothecary.”
Indrastea looked up, meeting Anarian's pale eyes. “My father was a chemist,” she said.
“Fascinating,” said Anarian before turning back to me. “I trust you understand the fundamentals of the Accepted Sciences, master Abendrad?”
“Don't insult our guest, Doctor,” said Quanders. “Master Abendrad is fully qualified.”
Doctor Anarian looked at Quanders with such venom that I thought, for a moment, he might launch himself across the table and stab the doctor with his fork. Instead, though, he set to tearing his loaf of baked bread apart. His hands were slim and feminine, at odds with his broad shoulders and thick neck. I wondered what had made him hate Quanders with so much passion.
“I've had my megatheres curried, fed and hitched,” said Quanders as he dabbed at his lips with a napkin, quite oblivious to Doctor Anarian's displeasure. “We can depart once you've eaten.” His gaze flicked to Indrastea, who was toying disinterestedly with the plate of chilled fruit that had been set down before her. Even pale and drawn, she was beautiful. “Master Abendrad has informed me of your delicate health, madame,” the giant said. “You will, of course, ride in my coach.”
“You are too kind, Doctor,” said Indrastea quietly. “Thank you.”
The rest of our meal passed pleasantly enough, though I was in a poor humor for the knowledge that Doctor Anarian would be traveling with us. Afterward we went out from the inn and around to where Quanders' coach and baggage cart were waiting by the street corner. A pair of huge, stinking megatheres were harnessed to the cart and in a foul temper for it. I helped Indrastea into Quanders' enormous coach, which was richly gilded and drawn by six fine black horses of impressive pedigree. She was soaked in sweat and nearly limp. Her fingers slid reluctantly from mine as she took her seat, limp hair falling across her flushed cheek. I stepped down from the coach's running board.
A crabbed, red-faced coachman sat up on the box with his legs crossed and a cigar clamped firmly between his yellow teeth. I, Quanders explained, was to drive the cart. I protested that I had no notion how to direct megatheres, in harness or out, but he assured me that they were completely docile and very tractable. Even so, I climbed onto the driver's seat warily and kept well away from the great sloths in the traces. Quanders and Doctor Anarian climbed into their carriage and their driver cracked the reins, setting the horses to a walk. I gathered my own reins, gave them a tentative snap and breathed a sigh of relief when the megatheres lumbered into motion in the carriage's wake.
It was a warm morning, and soon my shirt was stuck to my shoulders with sweat. I sat on the creaking cart box, trying not to betray my nervousness by glancing down every alleyway we passed. We passed in procession down the narrow streets of the Sambul, past sour merchants hawking their wares as naked beggars prostrated themselves in the gutter and prostitutes blinked sleepily behind the gauzy veils of their pleasure kiosks. The backs of the megatheres moved rhythmically before me like twin mountain ranges of hair and muscle. The laden cart creaked onward at a snail's pace toward the distant shadow of the city wall. I wondered what Quanders and Anarian were discussing in the darkness of their carriage, and whether or not Indrastea was frightened of them. Lialisk, I was sure, had been a much more fearsome lover than Anarian could hope to be, and I thought that Quanders' deformity would keep him from forcing himself on her.
The megatheres seemed content to follow the carriage of their own accord. I straightened up in the box, letting the reins lie slack in my hands as we joined the thronging traffic bound for the gates. The crowds seemed nervous. Their eyes, like mine, strayed often to the temple where it loomed on its sinister hill. One of that structure's great towers had collapsed in upon itself. Smoke still smeared the air above its sprawl. There was, aside from the marring of the temple itself, no sign of the interus of the hermiods; if indeed they had ridden to earth on the flames that had crashed down from the sky.
It was a tense and dogged crowd. Peddlers with their tin and iron goods on their backs and their mules laden with millet and bolts of cloth, dour herdsmen returning from the bazaar to tend their flocks in the hill country, families of colonists traveling by wagon down the Benaz and lesser Feudales in their gilt-trimmed coaches pulled by teams of gelded oryx. As we processed toward the gates, caught up in the human river of the Monta's traffic, I began to doze. Perhaps it was the plodding rhythm of the megatheres, the rise and fall of their broad backs, or else the oppressive heat. Whatever the reason, my attention drifted. I saw the human river in a dreamy light through the lids of my half-closed eyes. A surging channel of sapience and flesh moved around me, their bodies webbed and veined with light.
I saw the face of the man I had interrogated in the oubliette beneath the temple. I saw his throat work as he babbled helplessly in his alien language, spilling secrets.
The gates of the city rose up from the dust and sweat of the crowds. I sat up on the wagon seat, blinking sweat from my eyes. Quanders' carriage had drawn to a halt at the back of a long queue waiting to pass beneath the arch and into the wilderness. The guards looked over travelers' papers with bored diffidence, smoking as they leafed through sheaves of promissory notes and official documents. I pulled up the hood of my cloak and took firm hold of the reins. The sloths stirred in their traces, irritated at the delay in their exercise. The sun blazed. I began, in a heat-induced stupor of paranoia, to fear discovery. I had determined to leave the temple, and Masters Gallian and Rochelle had conspired to see that I effected my departure, but what had Halmure thought at my disappearance? Or Drasten, for that matter? Even at such an early hour they might have dispatched their men to detain me. Foremost in my fears, looming over even Halmure's vicious temper, was Lialisk. I had not forgotten his lifeless eyes or the queer way in which he had treated me as a boy.
I had not forgotten the window in his tower.
The roar of a sudden wind banished my reflections and drew my gaze skyward. A hermiod, almost identical to my attacker in Lialisk's tower, stood balanced atop one of the bartizans that flanked the gate. Some few others stared up at him in silence. Gradually, the crowds fell deathly quiet as more eyes found their handsome, alien surveyor. He leaned back against the sun-heated stone of the bartizan roof, arms folded over his sculpted chest. His vivid yellow eyes looked down upon us, slitted and lazy as a sated cat's. He said nothing. I stared at him. My hands shook. He wanted me. I was sure of it. For a wild instant I considered turning the Psychologos against it.
The hermiod vanished with a crack like thunder, speeding back towards the temple. I nearly pissed myself with fear.
We went up to the gates. Doctor Anarian emerged from the carriage to present papers to the guardsmen, who nodded and dismissed us to the road at once. The doctor returned to the coach, which presently lurched into motion with myself following at a small distance. The bent-backed old driver seated atop Quanders' coach offered no conversation, and I would not have been fit for it if he had. I was caught between relief and awe at my first look at the countryside beyond the walls of filthy Monta. For some miles the earth was barren and hilly, its only landmark the reddish bulwark of the walls themselves. Only when the city had begun to fade did the forest begin to make itself apparent. Gnarled trees rose up from the earth in stands and copses. Leaves fluttered in the air, falling. Other travelers made the going slow, and several times I was obliged to snap the reins against the backs of my charges to prevent them grazing at the roadside.
That night a storm savaged the forest. I sat with Indrastea under the wagon, our sleeping mat raised up from the sodden ground by wooden blocks. Water coursed under us. The megatheres, hobbled under the sheltering branches of a nearby oak, roared at the thunder as it crashed. Screaming winds unlimbed the forest's trees while lightning scrawled archaic letters in the bruised intaglio of the sky. Indrastea's breath was shallow, her skin chill and clammy. I held her close and thought I saw, as I slipped away into dreams, the misshapen outline of Quanders standing atop the carriage, his back to us and his face to the mad roil of the storm.
In the morning Indrastea seemed recovered and joined Quanders and the doctor in the carriage after a hurried breakfast of salt cod and biscuit. The storm had left the roads muddy and unreliable. We met no other travelers and halted at first sunset, leaving the road and rolling into a just-visible gap in the thick boscage of the forest verge. The limbs of the trees wove together above us. Pale light was filtered green in the still, clean air. I heard the trickle of running water as the coachman scrambled down from his box and lit a cigar. I, stiff-necked and sweaty, stood and abandoned the cart with stiff deliberation, my muscles painfully sore. The megatheres were content to hunker down and crop the thick, dark foliage of the forest floor. I left them and went to the coach. Quanders stepped out. He was in shirtsleeves, his fine clothes soaked through with sweat. The buckle of his belt was undone, and when he had seen me and caught my eye he did it up with special deliberation. I stood, conscious of the weight of the katar hidden in the sleeve of my shirt. Quanders pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his crooked nose. “She's still alive,” he said, “but only just. I'm afraid the granpadre's medicaments, while imaginative, are not of lengthy duration.”
Doctor Anarian emerged from the darkness of the coach's interior. In his arms he carried Indrastea. She was naked, her thighs bloodied and bruised. Her head lolled against his chest, dark hair limp with sweat. Her eyes were glazed. Anarian looked at me, his eyes empty.
“Why?” I asked them. I thought my chest would burst with hate. The halves of my mind flared with brilliant loathing.
The driver sat down with his back against a tree and began to whittle.
“Have you visited the track?” asked Quanders, scratching at his chin with a tapered finger. “The best races have only two contestants. The field is of no consequence, the other beasts irrelevant. Only two matter. Two horses burst from the gates. The rest are light and dust. Imagine the thunder of their hooves, the foam that will streak their flanks in a moment's time.”
I lunged at the giant, drawing my katar with lightning speed. His misshapen hand caught me across the face. I staggered back, spitting blood. I saw in double-vision Anarian dump Indrastea to the ground without ceremony. He ignored her, his hateful eyes boring into me. I turned back to Quanders, warier now. He looked mad with his sunken eyes, his sweaty black hair and twisted face. His white teeth, gritted, gleamed.
“They crash toward the mark, neck and neck as they heave and struggle in pursuit of their destiny. Their bodies break. It is the spirit that motivates them onward. They gain nothing by the superseding of that scratch in the hard-packed sand. They want not victory but the nectar that comes with it, that flows from the godhead, the Demiurge itself and into all who delude themselves with the trappings of power and prestige.”
I lunged at him again and he sidestepped with a quickness unnatural for a man of his freakish size. His lips parted in a mad grin. “Both horses brim with that selfsame urge, that same unending drive. And yet one falters and must cede to the other. But what worth is an inch, an instant, against the power of the labyrinth mind?” The giant was crying now, his face nearly black with fury. He seized me by the arms as I attacked him again, and in spite of my struggles he lifted me easily from my feet and held me close against him. His lips touched my ear. “I will taste of all that you delight in,” he said. “My death comes on swift wings in the twisting of my bones. Before I see it, I will know that you comprehend the fullness of your folly.” And with that he flung me to the ground and strode back to his coach. I struggled to my feet, fighting the pain of what I believe to be a broken rib, and threw myself at the giant one final and moronic time. He turned en pointe and caught my skull in one great hand. I drove my katar into his arm, but he did not flinch. His mad eyes raged at mine.
“Overindulgence is a sin,” said Doctor Anarian. He stood with one foot on the running board of the coach and the other on the springy moss of the forest floor, disinterested and bored-looking. “Leave him to die. The Demiurge will judge him better.”
Quanders' fingers tightened on my skull. I felt bones shift and grind, compressing the powers of my mind even as I sought to summon them. The giant's eyes bulged in their shadowed sockets, and then he drove his knee into my stomach and threw me down again. I lay, curled up and gasping for air, in his shadow. He stood there for a time before joining Anarian in the coach. The driver lashed the sloths' bits to the coach's axle and then climbed to his box and whipped the doctor's team into procession. They rattled from that clearing, the black carriage like a clumsy statue lurching over every root and stone. I stood, blood drooling down my chin, and limped to Indrastea. She looked up at me with love, her own mouth bloodied and fouled. I knelt down and pulled her into my arms, breathing in the fading smell of her, remembering the silken smoothness of her skin even as I felt it. The fullness of her body, the smell of her breasts and the warmth in the hollow of her neck. Her fingers left little smears of blood on my cheek. “Near the water,” she said.
She died. I buried her in the soft, dark earth and fell asleep in the shade of a tree by a creek.
I had imagined her as some diaphanous thing, half real or less. A phantasm, ghostly and ephemeral. I see now how laughable my boyish fantasies were, how fettered she was by the elaborate prison Lialisk had woven her in the stuff of her own heavy flesh. I see now that she was never his concubine. She had been too frail.
A statue in his gallery.
CHAPTER EIGHT: ATHRAGAR
I woke to the gross rumble of the Crocuta at its feast. Stirred from an exhausted sleep, I saw it tearing Indrastea's flesh from her bones. Blood and some milky fluid were spattered across the clearing and even on my own clothes, which I regarded in stupefied horror. The Crocuta itself paid me no heed but only continued to gorge itself. Bones snapped like kindling in its sharkish jaws. “Sweet, sweet, darling daughter,” it said to itself in the voice of Hastuk the baker as it swallowed my lover, twisting its head to tear gristle and fat from her corpse. “I saw you once as you walked in the garden and drew a picture which I loved and hated until I ate myself. Now we are together as you eat of your flesh. We are together in this warm and wretched garden.”
The Crocuta's voice dissolved into a wretched sob. It wailed as it ate. “No!” it cried, raking the turned earth with its claws to expose the rest of Indrastea. “Abendrad will kill you! Please, I belong to the granpadre. Please. He'll be so furious.
“Please, no.”
By stealth I slipped around the trunk of the tree under which I had slept and crept away through the thick undergrowth, quiet in spite of my injuries and weariness. There was a dull core of disbelief throbbing beneath my perception of the Crocuta's gluttonous repast. I had seen my lover die only hours ago. I had seen my master torn apart before my eyes, had been betrayed by men who defied comprehension with their weird cruelty. Quanders' ranting still echoed in my ears as I crept through the foliage. And the Crocuta feasted, sobbing to itself in Indrastea's voice. “Don't go,” it whimpered. “Please, please, please.”
Its beady eyes scanned the forest. I stepped behind a tree of sufficient girth to conceal my presence and, overtaken by fear, pressed myself against it. My own breath seemed thunderous in my ears. I knew I would be found, that soon the Crocuta's muzzle would appear beside me and its lips would part, and Indrastea's voice would speak. And then I would die. With iron certainty, I knew this. But hours passed, and it did not appear. I heard its heavy tread and the gnashing of its teeth, but it did not speak again and slowly, despite my terror, exhaustion sapped my strength. I sagged against the rough bark of the tree. Sunlight filtered down through the canopy.
“If you're going to run,” said the Crocuta, “do it now.” Its voice, Indrastea's voice, was close at hand. Soft and loving. I felt its breath on my neck. “Please.”
I ran. Branches caught at my clothes. I splashed across a shallow creek and skinned my hands climbing its stony bank. There was no looking back. The suns danced wildly overhead as I tore through the thinning woods, not daring to stop even as dark spots burst before my eyes and my lungs heaved like bellows. Clothes sopping wet I thrashed my way through the underbrush, flailing with my katar at low-hanging vines and branches. The forest was miasmic, a close-clutching world of hands and moss-draped arms. It oppressed my soul, peeled back the skin-like layers of civilization's conceits and left me gasping and wild-eyed beneath the pitiless sun. I walked when I could no longer run, stumbling blindly down game trails and through thorn bushes that tore my skin and clothes. My thoughts were slurred and indistinct, my reason utterly stripped from me. Coveys of quail and archeopteryx burst from the brush at my unsubtle approach, startled skyward. One a stag bounded across my path, its flanks glistening with sweat, its dark liquid eyes wide with terror. I lurched onward, blowing spit with every step, too frightened of what might have chased the beast to linger overlong.
The suns wheeled overhead as I went onward. Sol sank out of sight, followed by dying Erebus. Sweaty and bloodied, I crawled to the crest of a bald hill and there fell against a stump, lightning-struck and withered. With trembling fingers I removed my boots, wincing as blisters tore and began to ooze. My feet, used to the paved streets of Monta, throbbed. I forced myself to massage them, although the pain was severe. Better pain now than agony in the morning. When I had recovered some measure of breath, I stood up and, against my every inclination, hobbled like an invalid to the stream that flowed past the hill where, sinking down on the mossy bank, I dangled my feet. The cold water soothed my inflamed skin. Minnows flitted around my ankles, nibbling with small mouths at my body. I wondered what I was in their world.
So exhausted was I by my flight from the Crocuta and the shock of Quanders' depredations that I nearly missed hearing the rumble and creak of wagon wheels on the nearby game trail. I withdrew with some reluctance from the stream and crept through the underbrush to a place where, shielded from sight by the stand of stunted sumac, I could watch the road in safety. A pair of colossal brontotherii lumbered into view no more than a minute after I had settled into place, towing behind them the largest wagon that I had ever seen. Indeed, it produced such a din as it rattled along the track, snapping branches and thumping over roots, that I wondered it had not been set upon by predators-for it stank like a slaughterhouse. A bull mammoth, freshly butchered and covered all over with blocks of sweating, bloodstained ice occupied the cart's entire bed while above it on a narrow bench sat perched an old man. He was as outsize as his cargo, a big-gutted, broad-shouldered man with a thick white beard and a hooked nose shaded by the brim of his wide straw hat. His eyes, points of glittering black, watched the road with unbroken concentration. In his weathered hands he held the reins of the two brontotherii and, on occasion, he would snap the broad leather straps across their humped backs. The brutes lowed in irritation, muscles rippling as they dragged the cart along its too-narrow track.
I had no desire to seek succor from such an unprepossessing source, but my bloodied feet would carry me no further and it seemed likely that the Crocuta might come upon me as I slept. I had no desire to wake to the sour wash of its breath, or to the saw-sharp rasp of its teeth closing on my stomach. I stood and limped out of the sumac. The driver saw me almost at once and, without speaking, drew his team to a halt. The beasts grunted, shouldering one another as they bent to graze on the sides of the track. The old man removed his hat and ran a hand over his bald pate. “You're a ways from the compass of the Arch-Emperor's eye, traveler,” he said.
“My name is Abendrad,” I said. “I traveled with a caravan of merchants from the city of Monta. We were waylaid, several of our number slain by highwaymen. I escaped and fled, seeking asylum and safe passage to any place where rule of law holds weight.”
“I'm bound north for Lienn,” said the old man as he replaced his hat. “Climb up, and do not mind the smell. My client deserved his death.”
There was a ladder on the cart's blood-gummed side. I dragged myself up its rungs to sit, my nostrils full of the stench of the butchered mammoth, on the bench beside the old man. Turning to sit, I caught a glimpse of the mammoth's regal skull. Yellowed tusks, cracked with age, jutted from beneath a trunk scarred and burned. One dark eye stared up at me, rotten and sinking. The old man gripped my hand in his callused paw and shook it. “I am Komarck,” he said as he sat back and gathered up the reins. A crack of leather against hide and the wagon lurched into ponderous motion. “I've known the perils of the road and wilderness before.” A fly settled on the brim of his hat, rubbing its forelegs together like a fiddler.
I leaned against the bench's back, letting my head loll bonelessly over it. Heat soaked my body, plunging bone-deep into me. Bruised, worn down and brutalized I could hardly summon the vigor to converse with Komarck at all as he muttered under his breath, more to the brontotherii than to me. Indeed, I soon lost consciousness to the rattle and thump of the cart in motion.
Asleep, I dreamed of the mammoth.
With brazen call, in rav'nous glory
The Mammoth King ascends his throne
Wielding now, his triumph gory,
Bloody tusks that scrape across unpolished bone
Crowned beneath the blooded sky
Draped in strands of cloying tar
Mercy, please, the people cry
Ruled over now by Athragar.
Anger. Manlight. The crash of tusks and the stabbing pain of manteeth, fire-dazzling, in my hide. Not anger. Fury. Raw wrath. Other bulls in my fold, savaging the cows that were mine to rule and break and brutalize. I trampled them beneath my feet, rent their soft bodies with my tusks, caught them up in my trunk and wrung the blood from their skin. Manchildren. Rage. Manlight on all sides, closing in and then, from above, the greatest light of all broke through the clouds and I panic. Anger is there, and it rules still, but now sharp fear tinges the scent of the world. Bodies- NO, MINE -crash through trees and into water. Manteeth come pursuing, biting flesh, burning hair.
Anger. Such impossible anger. In my youth I rampaged down the veins of mancaves, breaking and killing so that the anger might pour out of me and burn the whole world. I crashed through the bones of the before-livers, trumpeting my anger to the vault of the sky. I trampled my firstborn son on a cliff overlooking my domain, for only I am real. All else is dust and blood, held between two-
GET OUT, MANLING
-hemispheres of burning light.
I am Athragar, the Mammoth King.
CHAPTER NINE: WANDERER
I awoke in a frozen alleyway beneath a starry sky. My mouth tasted of blood. I rolled over, cold and stiff, and spat reddish phlegm onto the cobblestones. My arms were stiff, my back twisted and aching, but the blisters on my feet had healed. I stood, wiping my hands on the front of a plain black robe. Where were the clothes I'd bought in Monta? I could not find my katar. I slumped against the sheer concrete wall of one of the alley's framing structures, mammoth-thoughts still roaring in my mind between the halved-sun poles of consciousness and madness. A cart. I had climbed up onto a cart, driven by Komarck the Hunter.
I ran from the alley and burst into an abandoned square, snow-dusted and serene. Kiosks and carts lay forsaken, weathered by who knew how many winters. The temple of St. Anthony loomed over me, high on its austere hill behind its encircling walls. Snow fell from a leaden sky. Opposite me, sitting on the room of a silent fountain, was Quanders. He had grown old. His left shoulder rose higher than his right. His face was distorted and lined with age, his hair grown long and turned white as snow. The clothes he wore were threadbare and ill-fitting. I knew that it had been his face I had seen while drowning in the koi pond, trapped by Master Rochelle's foot, but where once I had felt awed and overmastered by his aspect I now knew him for the pathetic creature that he was. He looked at me with cloudy eyes and his misshapen hands formed palsied, liver-spotted fists. He stood, taller even than he had been. He leaned heavily on a cane, his right leg strangely twisted. “Abendrad,” he said bitterly, tears streaming down his pitted cheeks. “I've waited long enough.”
I reached out to him with the Psychologos. The halves of my mind bathed him in actinic light, plunged him down into the depths I had felt in the mind of the unfortunate man in the temple oubliette. I was those depths, drowned and mad. He shied away, crying out in his pathetic old man's voice.
I was myself, drowning in a foot of brackish water. I was the anguished laboring of my own starved lungs, the rush of water down my throat. Blackness. I awoke in two beds. Master Rochelle sat beside one, Master Gallian by the other. One of me began to scream.
Two horses burst from the gates.
The priests threw me out from the temple. I wandered the streets of Monta, begging as the seasons passed and my body grew tall and twisted as a root. I killed for money. Sometimes, skulking in dark alleyways, I saw myself walking at the illusion Gallian's side and my heart contorted with hate.
They crash toward the mark, neck and neck as they heave and struggle.
I meet the doctor, Anarian, in a brothel in the Sambul. He tells me things, a white blur of meaning and suggestion clouding over his words in my memory. A plot. A design. Greater than ever either of me knew. I meet myself years later in the common room of a worthless inn, flea-bitten and ramshackle. A day passes and I kneel inside a sweat-stinking carriage, raping the empty shell of a woman I desired beyond all else. Slap of flesh against flesh. Screams muffled by my twisted hands. Vengeance forestalled by the doctor's harsh command.
What worth is an inch, an instant?
Loneliness. The creeping ruin of my body as bones twist and organs falter. I am alone.
I opened my eyes, letting the fearsome light of consciousness, of Reas, fade back into the animal darkness of thought. Quanders was gone, his walking stick lying abandoned on the paving stones of the square. And yet he was not gone, for he now looked out from within me. I knew his bitterness, his anger and his hatred as I had known the mammoth's, and the misery of the alien prisoner beneath the temple oubliette. I stared at the place where he had stood, feeling the harsh heat of him, of my other self, in my breast. Anger overcame me. I tore my hair, clawed at my own skin and writhed like a serpent in moult. I had murdered Indrastea. I had dumped her to the ground like so much meat. And I had not. I tore my cheeks, nails gouging deep furrows in my flesh, and then I collapsed to my knees and vomited until my stomach held nothing but sour water and acid.
It took some time for me to collect myself. I stood, unsteady on feet no longer twisted and deformed, and looked down on my cane with pity and loathing both. My hands I could not refrain from feeling, from rubbing together as though to assure myself repeatedly of their function and wholeness. No swollen joints. No ligaments age-stiffened and unmoving. I brushed snow from the front of my robes and looked up at the shadowed bulk of St. Anthony's. Around me, Monta echoed to the sound of its own emptiness. A door swung in the chill wind, banging against its stone lintel again and again. The snow fell now in thick, wet flakes. It had begun to drift against storefronts and in alleys as I had met myself. I set my shoulders and set off toward the temple, head bent against the gathering storm. The trek up the hillside path and into the graveyard was long and laborious. I was ready, though, for the Crocuta when it came padding toward me through the snow. Its narrow eyes found mine as I froze in place. It paced between gravestones, sleek and fearful with its razor teeth bared in a madman's grin.
“Aben. Dear boy. Come in out of the cold. There are sweetbuns by the fire.”
I said nothing. It circled me, huge and hoary and awful, silent as death and drooling long ropes of yellow spittle. Its voice changed, abandoning the gruff accent of Hastuk the baker for a younger man's bright tenor. Eschegg. “Come on, Aben. You don't want to stay in this temple forever, do you? I'm going to make my name and take back my father's land. I should have been the heir. Didn't we always say so, when we were boys?”
Barlans. “We're all waiting, Aben. It's not so bad in here. No Halmure. No lessons.”
Trebatius. “Just let it go, boy.”
The creature hissed, gnashing its teeth. I watched it, unfeeling and cold. It clawed the ground and, snarling, charged. We went down in a tangled, tumbling heap of fur and black cloth. Snow flew around us as the Crocuta's heavy jaws snapped at my shoulders and throat. Its teeth sank deep into my collar, cracking bone. Blood soaked my robes. “I love you,” it said in Indrastea's soft, warm voice. “I love you, darling.” Her fingers touched my throat. “Lie with me.”
The disjointed hemispheres of my mind blazed back to life. I caught the Crocuta between them, caught my friends, my lover, the fragments of their minds preserved in that awful creature. Meat, not light, played cradle to their gnawed and blinded psyches. I took them from it, wrenched from that grasping unperson its greed-hoarded treasures, its baubles and jewels. I took them into me, the walls of my mind thinning until nothing was unabsorbed, until I was and always had been Barlans' ironic grin, his desperate struggle for the cleverness that seemed to come to him so readily; I was Eschegg's veneer of arrogance scraped thinly over doubt, Trebatius's coarse laugh and the cook's absent-minded affection for the acolytes. I had always been Indrastea's round, full thighs just as I had been the boy fumbling between them. I loved myself, mind traveling at speed down the corridors of her mind, and, loving, knew the rotten thing like flowers spoiling in the humid heat that she had never told me. Revelation scorched the sky and boiled the clouds. Light poured from my mouth. The Crocuta slumped over onto its side, whining in pain as steam rose from its blasted flank. I stood, clutching at my mauled shoulder, and looked down at it as the incandescence of my mind faded away to shadows, bearing with it voices soft and strident. “I love you,” wheezed the beast. “I love you. I love you.”
I left it to die in the falling snow, and carried the newness of my self to old familiar places.
The temple courtyard was cold and empty, the bailey of the north tower deserted. No guards walked the walls. No acolytes scrubbed the floors of the bathing house. The light that spilled through the skylight in the sepulcher was washed-out and drab. The oda was broken, its glass walls spidered with mad traceries of cracks. The five high seats of the temple's masters stood empty. I walked the temple's silent halls, accompanied only by the forlorn whistling of the wind. The cyclopean corridors and tombs of the great edifice had been my boyhood haunts, the loveless dormitories my only cradle. I thought I saw, for a fleeting instant, my memory coupling with Indrastea in a corner, buttocks clenching with each boyish thrust. My face was wrong, though, and soon the memory faded. I lingered in the kitchens, rested my hand on the cracked and frigid stove where once Hastuk and his cooks had worked. Master Rochelle's study, the room in which he had died, was dark, Master Gallian's utterly bare.
In the orchard, bare-treed and grim, I found a boy's skeleton lying weather-worn in the dried basin of the koi pond.
Only in Halmure's grim, unwelcoming quarters was there any sign that, once, men and boys I had known had called the temple home. A daguerreotype, ragged and unframed, lay alone atop the old man's desk. I crossed the room and looked down at it. It was myself, not yet seven and grinning widely as I hunted for insects in the cracks between the courtyard's heavy flagstones. I gripped it in bloodless fingers, looking down with distaste at the old man's hateful memory. Of all the fantasies I had entertained as a boy, I had never imagined for an instant that Halmure had fathered me. I dropped the daguerreotype to the floor and left. There was, I knew, only one place I might find answers to the questions that had dogged my mind, conscious and unconscious, since the earliest days of my childhood.
Master Gallian was waiting for me in the ascender, which one we had ridden together to see the granpadre. He looked much as he had, tall and lean in his plain black robe and kilt. Older, lined and worn, but much the same with his aureole of blue-white light, his skin thatched with subtle lines of illumination. Had he ever been real? I stood on the threshold of the iron cart, one hand on the grille that served as its door. “Master Gallian,” I said.
He opened his arms. “Abendrad.”
We embraced. His smell, the musty stone-and-leather smell of the temple, was a comfort. His thin arms were still strong. We stood together for a time, and then my teacher stepped back, his hands still on my shoulders. “Let me look at you,” he said, his expression one of mingled pride and sadness.
“You died,” I said.
“Only here.” He pulled the ascender's lever and the grille slid shut. The cart rose smoothly upward along its tracks, engine wheezing. Bars of light and shadow slid over us as we passed in rapid succession a hundred empty rooms and chambers, deserted halls thick with dust, iron-grey light spilling over unpolished floors. Master Gallian kept his wrinkled hand on the lever. His throat worked as he swallowed. “There was so much I wished to tell you.”
The ascender slowed and ground to a gradual halt. The heavy steel doors to the granpadre's apartments slid apart and we stepped out into the long, antiseptic corridor where Master Gallian had died, torn apart by the wounded hermiod as I escaped with Indrastea. Blood still smeared the wall, thick and black. We passed down the hall where dust-filmed eyes opened to watch us pass, and through an open airlock into a chamber I did not recognize. It was a yawning space, high-vaulted and lit by the light of an unfamiliar yellow sun that streamed through windows nine times a man's height. High golden seats formed a crescent facing the doorway in which Master Gallian and I stood. The granpadre sat in one, icy-eyed and silent. In another sat Master Drasten, and beside him ancient Master Rochelle. Halmure was nowhere to be seen.
On the floor before the granpadre's throne sat a coffin, glass-fronted and ornate, its brass bars wound with golden wire, its sides etched with images erotic, neural and monstrous. Masked necrohols stood over it, swords bared. I feared to draw too close, lest its occupant upset what little sanity was left to me. It was a deep thing. A well of self and soul. Instead I stayed where I was, facing the architects of my youth across a gulf of time and marble, my mind coursing with accreted thought. At last, Lialisk stood. His dark eyes, set in the square confines of that unremarkable face, bored into mine. “You may depart, Gallian,” he said.
I turned to my master. His lips moved, beginning the impression of a smile, and then he was gone, his space occupied by a shaft of sunlight in which dust danced lazily toward oblivion. I fought down the urge to weep. He had never truly been at all. The granpadre cleared his throat and I returned my gaze to his. “No span of time can claim you,” he said. “No arrow can still the beating of your breast, and no mind can stand between the halves of yours. With this world, warm in the bosom of a truer one, as the reservoir of your power, you will be forever tombed in chthonic glory, a leviathan breaching reality's skin. You will return with us through the channels of the sun, and you will be more than Man. The plagues that afflict truth will be undone.”
I stood there, poised on the threshold between corridor and cathedral, black robes caught at by the rumor of some ethereal wind, or else by sluggish tides. It seemed an ocean of lies crashed and roared about me, its waves ship-breaking and increate. Unwilling, my feet bore me to the coffin where, looking down, I beheld, as I had known I would, my own self dressed for burial in flowing robes of black. I put a hand on the glass front of the coffin. The breath of my other self had fogged it. “Will it hurt?” I asked.
“Life is pain,” said Lialisk.
I nodded.
I know now that I will have no deathbed, that as I was born, fatherless and unloved, I shall live to see the last gasped breaths of stars different from those I knew in my fast-fading boyhood. How many years have passed between strokes of pens while I slumbered, unknowing, too distant from time to feel its rushing passage? The reasons for which I was made have long since passed from my mind. I accomplished all that was wished of me, and more. I know I have awoken to ink cracked and dried by the passage of decades. I know that the servants in this house differ from day to day, though I have not the heart to learn their names. If life is pain, then death is forgetting.
I have lived too long, kept company only by the minds within my own. I do not often hear their voices anymore.
It was dark when I left the room to discuss further payment with the inn's proprietor. Fatigued, Indrastea had remained abed for most of the day. We concluded our business quickly, settling on a moderate rate in exchange for a promise of three days' payment. I sat down at a chair in the common room and ordered a glass of wine from a doe-eyed serving girl. While I was waiting, the giant I had seen before came to sit beside me. He was perhaps the tallest man I had ever seen, closer to eight feet than to seven and with that warping of the features and limbs that occurs when too much height stresses the skeleton. His face was long and solemn, twisted slightly to the left. He wore clothes of a good cut and his black hair was shorn close to his scalp.
“Good evening,” I said as he settled into his seat. It creaked beneath his great weight.
“And to you, sur,” he said, meeting my eyes. His own were a startling shade of green, so pale as to be almost yellow. His mouth worked before he spoke. “I have discerned that you are, and correct me, sur, if I am taken now by faulty reasoning, a man intending to travel.”
“I am,” I said, because I could see no point in dissembling my purpose.
The giant nodded gravely. “Then, my friend,” he said, “I have a proposition to make. My name is Ilan Quanders and I find myself, at this juncture, a traveling physician. My assistant has been absent for some few days now, doubtless engaged in whoring or dead in an culvert somewhere, and I am in the market to contract another.” The giant leaned forward and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Particularly one with the medical expertise of a trained Confessor.”
The girl brought my drink and set it down. I thanked her, my eyes still on the giant. “What wages do you offer?” I asked, sipping the bitter drink. Raised in the temple, I had a theoretical understanding of money and its transferal between parties. Quanders might have taken me for a fool then and there, for I would have agreed to anything short of slavery to escape from Monta and the shadow of the temple. Thankfully, he was an honest man in his own strange way.
“Fifty shekels a month,” he said. “Ten extra if you can be ready to leave tomorrow.”
I put down my glass. “I have a...woman with me. Her health is poor.”
Quanders blew out a breath, squinting at me through his round spectacles. At length, he leaned back in his chair and, frowning, said: “She can ride in my carriage, if it is amenable to her.” He made no mention of his services as a physician, and I did not press him.
“She'll ride,” I said.
“Good,” said Quanders. He held out a hand and I took it, avoiding the urge to stare at the gross proportions of his digits or the prominence of his wandering blue veins. Our bargain sealed, the giant rose with obvious difficulty from his seat and placed a shekel on the table by my drink. “I will expect you at breakfast, master...?”
“Abendrad,” I said.
Quanders departed, speaking briefly with the innkeeper before climbing the stairs to his room. I observed the obvious pain with which he moved. His joints must have been under tremendous strain.
I finished my wine and returned to mine and Indrastea's room. The bed was empty, the rumpled sheets strewn across the floor. Indrastea knelt naked before the washbasin, blood dripping from her parted lips. Even as I closed the door she was seized by a violent coughing fit and sprayed bloody sputum over the porcelain. I went to her side and set a finger to her wrist. Her pulse fluttered beneath my touch. She glanced at me, eyes wide and frightened. Her breath came raggedly.
“What's wrong?” I asked.
Indrastea shook her head and then vomited, slumping against the basin. Her whole body twitched, muscles spasming beneath her voluptuous flesh. I put an arm around her shoulders and drew her up. She gasped for breath as spittle ran down her chin. “Sick,” she said. “I just need to rest, darling. That's all.” She turned, her neck jerking through the motion with unpleasant delays, as though she were some clockwork toy. Her lips, red and full and warm, found mine. The taste of bile flooded my mouth, but I did not push her away as she mashed her heavy breasts against my chest and slid her arms around my neck. There was a desperation to her ardor, a maladroit girlishness to her movements that I had never noticed before. I pushed her thighs apart as she undid my trousers.
I slid into her, erect and flushed with desire. She sank back onto the ground beneath me, resting on her elbows. Her chin was smeared with blood. I braced myself over her, hands on the rough planks. “Will I hurt you?”
She leaned up to kiss me, bloodying my mouth. “No,” she said.
In the morning we rose together just before dawn. Indrastea was sluggish and weak. I helped her to wash the blood from her skin and hair before she dressed herself. I packed our meager belongings in a burlap sack. We went down to breakfast in the common room where Quanders sat at his own table, attended by the innkeeper and his daughter. The giant, accompanied by a second man of tall stature and pompous aspect, was engaged in eating a roast ham, honeyed flatbread, thick yogurt and a ripe golden melon split into crescents. It was a feast fit for six men, and yet already he had devoured half of what had been placed before him. Quanders looked up at our descent from the stair and, mouth full, gestured with a lit cigar to a pair of empty seats. We joined him, Indrastea still pale and unsteady on her feet.
“Good morning, master Abendrad,” said the giant, stubbing out his cigar in a half-eaten dish of mussels. He ignored Indrastea entirely. “Meet my associate, Doctor Anarian.”
The doctor stood, removing his hat, and, rounding the table, proffered his hand. I shook it. He was a large man, though he appeared almost short beside Quanders. “Good morning, sur,” he said. “A pleasure.” He pulled out a seat for Indrastea, bowing over her hand as she took it, and then returned to his own chair where a simple repast of tea and dry bread waited untouched. I was reminded forcibly by his scowl of Master Halmure, though Doctor Anarian was bulky and austere where Master Halmure had been sour and thin. I wondered if he had survived the massacre at the temple, if he had lived while Master Gallian had died. The unfairness of it galled me.
“Doctor Anarian is a chemist by trade,” said Quanders, sawing at a breast of quail. His knife and fork looked like toys in his massive, blue-veined hands. “He serves as my apothecary.”
Indrastea looked up, meeting Anarian's pale eyes. “My father was a chemist,” she said.
“Fascinating,” said Anarian before turning back to me. “I trust you understand the fundamentals of the Accepted Sciences, master Abendrad?”
“Don't insult our guest, Doctor,” said Quanders. “Master Abendrad is fully qualified.”
Doctor Anarian looked at Quanders with such venom that I thought, for a moment, he might launch himself across the table and stab the doctor with his fork. Instead, though, he set to tearing his loaf of baked bread apart. His hands were slim and feminine, at odds with his broad shoulders and thick neck. I wondered what had made him hate Quanders with so much passion.
“I've had my megatheres curried, fed and hitched,” said Quanders as he dabbed at his lips with a napkin, quite oblivious to Doctor Anarian's displeasure. “We can depart once you've eaten.” His gaze flicked to Indrastea, who was toying disinterestedly with the plate of chilled fruit that had been set down before her. Even pale and drawn, she was beautiful. “Master Abendrad has informed me of your delicate health, madame,” the giant said. “You will, of course, ride in my coach.”
“You are too kind, Doctor,” said Indrastea quietly. “Thank you.”
The rest of our meal passed pleasantly enough, though I was in a poor humor for the knowledge that Doctor Anarian would be traveling with us. Afterward we went out from the inn and around to where Quanders' coach and baggage cart were waiting by the street corner. A pair of huge, stinking megatheres were harnessed to the cart and in a foul temper for it. I helped Indrastea into Quanders' enormous coach, which was richly gilded and drawn by six fine black horses of impressive pedigree. She was soaked in sweat and nearly limp. Her fingers slid reluctantly from mine as she took her seat, limp hair falling across her flushed cheek. I stepped down from the coach's running board.
A crabbed, red-faced coachman sat up on the box with his legs crossed and a cigar clamped firmly between his yellow teeth. I, Quanders explained, was to drive the cart. I protested that I had no notion how to direct megatheres, in harness or out, but he assured me that they were completely docile and very tractable. Even so, I climbed onto the driver's seat warily and kept well away from the great sloths in the traces. Quanders and Doctor Anarian climbed into their carriage and their driver cracked the reins, setting the horses to a walk. I gathered my own reins, gave them a tentative snap and breathed a sigh of relief when the megatheres lumbered into motion in the carriage's wake.
It was a warm morning, and soon my shirt was stuck to my shoulders with sweat. I sat on the creaking cart box, trying not to betray my nervousness by glancing down every alleyway we passed. We passed in procession down the narrow streets of the Sambul, past sour merchants hawking their wares as naked beggars prostrated themselves in the gutter and prostitutes blinked sleepily behind the gauzy veils of their pleasure kiosks. The backs of the megatheres moved rhythmically before me like twin mountain ranges of hair and muscle. The laden cart creaked onward at a snail's pace toward the distant shadow of the city wall. I wondered what Quanders and Anarian were discussing in the darkness of their carriage, and whether or not Indrastea was frightened of them. Lialisk, I was sure, had been a much more fearsome lover than Anarian could hope to be, and I thought that Quanders' deformity would keep him from forcing himself on her.
The megatheres seemed content to follow the carriage of their own accord. I straightened up in the box, letting the reins lie slack in my hands as we joined the thronging traffic bound for the gates. The crowds seemed nervous. Their eyes, like mine, strayed often to the temple where it loomed on its sinister hill. One of that structure's great towers had collapsed in upon itself. Smoke still smeared the air above its sprawl. There was, aside from the marring of the temple itself, no sign of the interus of the hermiods; if indeed they had ridden to earth on the flames that had crashed down from the sky.
It was a tense and dogged crowd. Peddlers with their tin and iron goods on their backs and their mules laden with millet and bolts of cloth, dour herdsmen returning from the bazaar to tend their flocks in the hill country, families of colonists traveling by wagon down the Benaz and lesser Feudales in their gilt-trimmed coaches pulled by teams of gelded oryx. As we processed toward the gates, caught up in the human river of the Monta's traffic, I began to doze. Perhaps it was the plodding rhythm of the megatheres, the rise and fall of their broad backs, or else the oppressive heat. Whatever the reason, my attention drifted. I saw the human river in a dreamy light through the lids of my half-closed eyes. A surging channel of sapience and flesh moved around me, their bodies webbed and veined with light.
I saw the face of the man I had interrogated in the oubliette beneath the temple. I saw his throat work as he babbled helplessly in his alien language, spilling secrets.
The gates of the city rose up from the dust and sweat of the crowds. I sat up on the wagon seat, blinking sweat from my eyes. Quanders' carriage had drawn to a halt at the back of a long queue waiting to pass beneath the arch and into the wilderness. The guards looked over travelers' papers with bored diffidence, smoking as they leafed through sheaves of promissory notes and official documents. I pulled up the hood of my cloak and took firm hold of the reins. The sloths stirred in their traces, irritated at the delay in their exercise. The sun blazed. I began, in a heat-induced stupor of paranoia, to fear discovery. I had determined to leave the temple, and Masters Gallian and Rochelle had conspired to see that I effected my departure, but what had Halmure thought at my disappearance? Or Drasten, for that matter? Even at such an early hour they might have dispatched their men to detain me. Foremost in my fears, looming over even Halmure's vicious temper, was Lialisk. I had not forgotten his lifeless eyes or the queer way in which he had treated me as a boy.
I had not forgotten the window in his tower.
The roar of a sudden wind banished my reflections and drew my gaze skyward. A hermiod, almost identical to my attacker in Lialisk's tower, stood balanced atop one of the bartizans that flanked the gate. Some few others stared up at him in silence. Gradually, the crowds fell deathly quiet as more eyes found their handsome, alien surveyor. He leaned back against the sun-heated stone of the bartizan roof, arms folded over his sculpted chest. His vivid yellow eyes looked down upon us, slitted and lazy as a sated cat's. He said nothing. I stared at him. My hands shook. He wanted me. I was sure of it. For a wild instant I considered turning the Psychologos against it.
The hermiod vanished with a crack like thunder, speeding back towards the temple. I nearly pissed myself with fear.
We went up to the gates. Doctor Anarian emerged from the carriage to present papers to the guardsmen, who nodded and dismissed us to the road at once. The doctor returned to the coach, which presently lurched into motion with myself following at a small distance. The bent-backed old driver seated atop Quanders' coach offered no conversation, and I would not have been fit for it if he had. I was caught between relief and awe at my first look at the countryside beyond the walls of filthy Monta. For some miles the earth was barren and hilly, its only landmark the reddish bulwark of the walls themselves. Only when the city had begun to fade did the forest begin to make itself apparent. Gnarled trees rose up from the earth in stands and copses. Leaves fluttered in the air, falling. Other travelers made the going slow, and several times I was obliged to snap the reins against the backs of my charges to prevent them grazing at the roadside.
That night a storm savaged the forest. I sat with Indrastea under the wagon, our sleeping mat raised up from the sodden ground by wooden blocks. Water coursed under us. The megatheres, hobbled under the sheltering branches of a nearby oak, roared at the thunder as it crashed. Screaming winds unlimbed the forest's trees while lightning scrawled archaic letters in the bruised intaglio of the sky. Indrastea's breath was shallow, her skin chill and clammy. I held her close and thought I saw, as I slipped away into dreams, the misshapen outline of Quanders standing atop the carriage, his back to us and his face to the mad roil of the storm.
In the morning Indrastea seemed recovered and joined Quanders and the doctor in the carriage after a hurried breakfast of salt cod and biscuit. The storm had left the roads muddy and unreliable. We met no other travelers and halted at first sunset, leaving the road and rolling into a just-visible gap in the thick boscage of the forest verge. The limbs of the trees wove together above us. Pale light was filtered green in the still, clean air. I heard the trickle of running water as the coachman scrambled down from his box and lit a cigar. I, stiff-necked and sweaty, stood and abandoned the cart with stiff deliberation, my muscles painfully sore. The megatheres were content to hunker down and crop the thick, dark foliage of the forest floor. I left them and went to the coach. Quanders stepped out. He was in shirtsleeves, his fine clothes soaked through with sweat. The buckle of his belt was undone, and when he had seen me and caught my eye he did it up with special deliberation. I stood, conscious of the weight of the katar hidden in the sleeve of my shirt. Quanders pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his crooked nose. “She's still alive,” he said, “but only just. I'm afraid the granpadre's medicaments, while imaginative, are not of lengthy duration.”
Doctor Anarian emerged from the darkness of the coach's interior. In his arms he carried Indrastea. She was naked, her thighs bloodied and bruised. Her head lolled against his chest, dark hair limp with sweat. Her eyes were glazed. Anarian looked at me, his eyes empty.
“Why?” I asked them. I thought my chest would burst with hate. The halves of my mind flared with brilliant loathing.
The driver sat down with his back against a tree and began to whittle.
“Have you visited the track?” asked Quanders, scratching at his chin with a tapered finger. “The best races have only two contestants. The field is of no consequence, the other beasts irrelevant. Only two matter. Two horses burst from the gates. The rest are light and dust. Imagine the thunder of their hooves, the foam that will streak their flanks in a moment's time.”
I lunged at the giant, drawing my katar with lightning speed. His misshapen hand caught me across the face. I staggered back, spitting blood. I saw in double-vision Anarian dump Indrastea to the ground without ceremony. He ignored her, his hateful eyes boring into me. I turned back to Quanders, warier now. He looked mad with his sunken eyes, his sweaty black hair and twisted face. His white teeth, gritted, gleamed.
“They crash toward the mark, neck and neck as they heave and struggle in pursuit of their destiny. Their bodies break. It is the spirit that motivates them onward. They gain nothing by the superseding of that scratch in the hard-packed sand. They want not victory but the nectar that comes with it, that flows from the godhead, the Demiurge itself and into all who delude themselves with the trappings of power and prestige.”
I lunged at him again and he sidestepped with a quickness unnatural for a man of his freakish size. His lips parted in a mad grin. “Both horses brim with that selfsame urge, that same unending drive. And yet one falters and must cede to the other. But what worth is an inch, an instant, against the power of the labyrinth mind?” The giant was crying now, his face nearly black with fury. He seized me by the arms as I attacked him again, and in spite of my struggles he lifted me easily from my feet and held me close against him. His lips touched my ear. “I will taste of all that you delight in,” he said. “My death comes on swift wings in the twisting of my bones. Before I see it, I will know that you comprehend the fullness of your folly.” And with that he flung me to the ground and strode back to his coach. I struggled to my feet, fighting the pain of what I believe to be a broken rib, and threw myself at the giant one final and moronic time. He turned en pointe and caught my skull in one great hand. I drove my katar into his arm, but he did not flinch. His mad eyes raged at mine.
“Overindulgence is a sin,” said Doctor Anarian. He stood with one foot on the running board of the coach and the other on the springy moss of the forest floor, disinterested and bored-looking. “Leave him to die. The Demiurge will judge him better.”
Quanders' fingers tightened on my skull. I felt bones shift and grind, compressing the powers of my mind even as I sought to summon them. The giant's eyes bulged in their shadowed sockets, and then he drove his knee into my stomach and threw me down again. I lay, curled up and gasping for air, in his shadow. He stood there for a time before joining Anarian in the coach. The driver lashed the sloths' bits to the coach's axle and then climbed to his box and whipped the doctor's team into procession. They rattled from that clearing, the black carriage like a clumsy statue lurching over every root and stone. I stood, blood drooling down my chin, and limped to Indrastea. She looked up at me with love, her own mouth bloodied and fouled. I knelt down and pulled her into my arms, breathing in the fading smell of her, remembering the silken smoothness of her skin even as I felt it. The fullness of her body, the smell of her breasts and the warmth in the hollow of her neck. Her fingers left little smears of blood on my cheek. “Near the water,” she said.
She died. I buried her in the soft, dark earth and fell asleep in the shade of a tree by a creek.
I had imagined her as some diaphanous thing, half real or less. A phantasm, ghostly and ephemeral. I see now how laughable my boyish fantasies were, how fettered she was by the elaborate prison Lialisk had woven her in the stuff of her own heavy flesh. I see now that she was never his concubine. She had been too frail.
A statue in his gallery.
CHAPTER EIGHT: ATHRAGAR
I woke to the gross rumble of the Crocuta at its feast. Stirred from an exhausted sleep, I saw it tearing Indrastea's flesh from her bones. Blood and some milky fluid were spattered across the clearing and even on my own clothes, which I regarded in stupefied horror. The Crocuta itself paid me no heed but only continued to gorge itself. Bones snapped like kindling in its sharkish jaws. “Sweet, sweet, darling daughter,” it said to itself in the voice of Hastuk the baker as it swallowed my lover, twisting its head to tear gristle and fat from her corpse. “I saw you once as you walked in the garden and drew a picture which I loved and hated until I ate myself. Now we are together as you eat of your flesh. We are together in this warm and wretched garden.”
The Crocuta's voice dissolved into a wretched sob. It wailed as it ate. “No!” it cried, raking the turned earth with its claws to expose the rest of Indrastea. “Abendrad will kill you! Please, I belong to the granpadre. Please. He'll be so furious.
“Please, no.”
By stealth I slipped around the trunk of the tree under which I had slept and crept away through the thick undergrowth, quiet in spite of my injuries and weariness. There was a dull core of disbelief throbbing beneath my perception of the Crocuta's gluttonous repast. I had seen my lover die only hours ago. I had seen my master torn apart before my eyes, had been betrayed by men who defied comprehension with their weird cruelty. Quanders' ranting still echoed in my ears as I crept through the foliage. And the Crocuta feasted, sobbing to itself in Indrastea's voice. “Don't go,” it whimpered. “Please, please, please.”
Its beady eyes scanned the forest. I stepped behind a tree of sufficient girth to conceal my presence and, overtaken by fear, pressed myself against it. My own breath seemed thunderous in my ears. I knew I would be found, that soon the Crocuta's muzzle would appear beside me and its lips would part, and Indrastea's voice would speak. And then I would die. With iron certainty, I knew this. But hours passed, and it did not appear. I heard its heavy tread and the gnashing of its teeth, but it did not speak again and slowly, despite my terror, exhaustion sapped my strength. I sagged against the rough bark of the tree. Sunlight filtered down through the canopy.
“If you're going to run,” said the Crocuta, “do it now.” Its voice, Indrastea's voice, was close at hand. Soft and loving. I felt its breath on my neck. “Please.”
I ran. Branches caught at my clothes. I splashed across a shallow creek and skinned my hands climbing its stony bank. There was no looking back. The suns danced wildly overhead as I tore through the thinning woods, not daring to stop even as dark spots burst before my eyes and my lungs heaved like bellows. Clothes sopping wet I thrashed my way through the underbrush, flailing with my katar at low-hanging vines and branches. The forest was miasmic, a close-clutching world of hands and moss-draped arms. It oppressed my soul, peeled back the skin-like layers of civilization's conceits and left me gasping and wild-eyed beneath the pitiless sun. I walked when I could no longer run, stumbling blindly down game trails and through thorn bushes that tore my skin and clothes. My thoughts were slurred and indistinct, my reason utterly stripped from me. Coveys of quail and archeopteryx burst from the brush at my unsubtle approach, startled skyward. One a stag bounded across my path, its flanks glistening with sweat, its dark liquid eyes wide with terror. I lurched onward, blowing spit with every step, too frightened of what might have chased the beast to linger overlong.
The suns wheeled overhead as I went onward. Sol sank out of sight, followed by dying Erebus. Sweaty and bloodied, I crawled to the crest of a bald hill and there fell against a stump, lightning-struck and withered. With trembling fingers I removed my boots, wincing as blisters tore and began to ooze. My feet, used to the paved streets of Monta, throbbed. I forced myself to massage them, although the pain was severe. Better pain now than agony in the morning. When I had recovered some measure of breath, I stood up and, against my every inclination, hobbled like an invalid to the stream that flowed past the hill where, sinking down on the mossy bank, I dangled my feet. The cold water soothed my inflamed skin. Minnows flitted around my ankles, nibbling with small mouths at my body. I wondered what I was in their world.
So exhausted was I by my flight from the Crocuta and the shock of Quanders' depredations that I nearly missed hearing the rumble and creak of wagon wheels on the nearby game trail. I withdrew with some reluctance from the stream and crept through the underbrush to a place where, shielded from sight by the stand of stunted sumac, I could watch the road in safety. A pair of colossal brontotherii lumbered into view no more than a minute after I had settled into place, towing behind them the largest wagon that I had ever seen. Indeed, it produced such a din as it rattled along the track, snapping branches and thumping over roots, that I wondered it had not been set upon by predators-for it stank like a slaughterhouse. A bull mammoth, freshly butchered and covered all over with blocks of sweating, bloodstained ice occupied the cart's entire bed while above it on a narrow bench sat perched an old man. He was as outsize as his cargo, a big-gutted, broad-shouldered man with a thick white beard and a hooked nose shaded by the brim of his wide straw hat. His eyes, points of glittering black, watched the road with unbroken concentration. In his weathered hands he held the reins of the two brontotherii and, on occasion, he would snap the broad leather straps across their humped backs. The brutes lowed in irritation, muscles rippling as they dragged the cart along its too-narrow track.
I had no desire to seek succor from such an unprepossessing source, but my bloodied feet would carry me no further and it seemed likely that the Crocuta might come upon me as I slept. I had no desire to wake to the sour wash of its breath, or to the saw-sharp rasp of its teeth closing on my stomach. I stood and limped out of the sumac. The driver saw me almost at once and, without speaking, drew his team to a halt. The beasts grunted, shouldering one another as they bent to graze on the sides of the track. The old man removed his hat and ran a hand over his bald pate. “You're a ways from the compass of the Arch-Emperor's eye, traveler,” he said.
“My name is Abendrad,” I said. “I traveled with a caravan of merchants from the city of Monta. We were waylaid, several of our number slain by highwaymen. I escaped and fled, seeking asylum and safe passage to any place where rule of law holds weight.”
“I'm bound north for Lienn,” said the old man as he replaced his hat. “Climb up, and do not mind the smell. My client deserved his death.”
There was a ladder on the cart's blood-gummed side. I dragged myself up its rungs to sit, my nostrils full of the stench of the butchered mammoth, on the bench beside the old man. Turning to sit, I caught a glimpse of the mammoth's regal skull. Yellowed tusks, cracked with age, jutted from beneath a trunk scarred and burned. One dark eye stared up at me, rotten and sinking. The old man gripped my hand in his callused paw and shook it. “I am Komarck,” he said as he sat back and gathered up the reins. A crack of leather against hide and the wagon lurched into ponderous motion. “I've known the perils of the road and wilderness before.” A fly settled on the brim of his hat, rubbing its forelegs together like a fiddler.
I leaned against the bench's back, letting my head loll bonelessly over it. Heat soaked my body, plunging bone-deep into me. Bruised, worn down and brutalized I could hardly summon the vigor to converse with Komarck at all as he muttered under his breath, more to the brontotherii than to me. Indeed, I soon lost consciousness to the rattle and thump of the cart in motion.
Asleep, I dreamed of the mammoth.
With brazen call, in rav'nous glory
The Mammoth King ascends his throne
Wielding now, his triumph gory,
Bloody tusks that scrape across unpolished bone
Crowned beneath the blooded sky
Draped in strands of cloying tar
Mercy, please, the people cry
Ruled over now by Athragar.
Anger. Manlight. The crash of tusks and the stabbing pain of manteeth, fire-dazzling, in my hide. Not anger. Fury. Raw wrath. Other bulls in my fold, savaging the cows that were mine to rule and break and brutalize. I trampled them beneath my feet, rent their soft bodies with my tusks, caught them up in my trunk and wrung the blood from their skin. Manchildren. Rage. Manlight on all sides, closing in and then, from above, the greatest light of all broke through the clouds and I panic. Anger is there, and it rules still, but now sharp fear tinges the scent of the world. Bodies- NO, MINE -crash through trees and into water. Manteeth come pursuing, biting flesh, burning hair.
Anger. Such impossible anger. In my youth I rampaged down the veins of mancaves, breaking and killing so that the anger might pour out of me and burn the whole world. I crashed through the bones of the before-livers, trumpeting my anger to the vault of the sky. I trampled my firstborn son on a cliff overlooking my domain, for only I am real. All else is dust and blood, held between two-
GET OUT, MANLING
-hemispheres of burning light.
I am Athragar, the Mammoth King.
CHAPTER NINE: WANDERER
I awoke in a frozen alleyway beneath a starry sky. My mouth tasted of blood. I rolled over, cold and stiff, and spat reddish phlegm onto the cobblestones. My arms were stiff, my back twisted and aching, but the blisters on my feet had healed. I stood, wiping my hands on the front of a plain black robe. Where were the clothes I'd bought in Monta? I could not find my katar. I slumped against the sheer concrete wall of one of the alley's framing structures, mammoth-thoughts still roaring in my mind between the halved-sun poles of consciousness and madness. A cart. I had climbed up onto a cart, driven by Komarck the Hunter.
I ran from the alley and burst into an abandoned square, snow-dusted and serene. Kiosks and carts lay forsaken, weathered by who knew how many winters. The temple of St. Anthony loomed over me, high on its austere hill behind its encircling walls. Snow fell from a leaden sky. Opposite me, sitting on the room of a silent fountain, was Quanders. He had grown old. His left shoulder rose higher than his right. His face was distorted and lined with age, his hair grown long and turned white as snow. The clothes he wore were threadbare and ill-fitting. I knew that it had been his face I had seen while drowning in the koi pond, trapped by Master Rochelle's foot, but where once I had felt awed and overmastered by his aspect I now knew him for the pathetic creature that he was. He looked at me with cloudy eyes and his misshapen hands formed palsied, liver-spotted fists. He stood, taller even than he had been. He leaned heavily on a cane, his right leg strangely twisted. “Abendrad,” he said bitterly, tears streaming down his pitted cheeks. “I've waited long enough.”
I reached out to him with the Psychologos. The halves of my mind bathed him in actinic light, plunged him down into the depths I had felt in the mind of the unfortunate man in the temple oubliette. I was those depths, drowned and mad. He shied away, crying out in his pathetic old man's voice.
I was myself, drowning in a foot of brackish water. I was the anguished laboring of my own starved lungs, the rush of water down my throat. Blackness. I awoke in two beds. Master Rochelle sat beside one, Master Gallian by the other. One of me began to scream.
Two horses burst from the gates.
The priests threw me out from the temple. I wandered the streets of Monta, begging as the seasons passed and my body grew tall and twisted as a root. I killed for money. Sometimes, skulking in dark alleyways, I saw myself walking at the illusion Gallian's side and my heart contorted with hate.
They crash toward the mark, neck and neck as they heave and struggle.
I meet the doctor, Anarian, in a brothel in the Sambul. He tells me things, a white blur of meaning and suggestion clouding over his words in my memory. A plot. A design. Greater than ever either of me knew. I meet myself years later in the common room of a worthless inn, flea-bitten and ramshackle. A day passes and I kneel inside a sweat-stinking carriage, raping the empty shell of a woman I desired beyond all else. Slap of flesh against flesh. Screams muffled by my twisted hands. Vengeance forestalled by the doctor's harsh command.
What worth is an inch, an instant?
Loneliness. The creeping ruin of my body as bones twist and organs falter. I am alone.
I opened my eyes, letting the fearsome light of consciousness, of Reas, fade back into the animal darkness of thought. Quanders was gone, his walking stick lying abandoned on the paving stones of the square. And yet he was not gone, for he now looked out from within me. I knew his bitterness, his anger and his hatred as I had known the mammoth's, and the misery of the alien prisoner beneath the temple oubliette. I stared at the place where he had stood, feeling the harsh heat of him, of my other self, in my breast. Anger overcame me. I tore my hair, clawed at my own skin and writhed like a serpent in moult. I had murdered Indrastea. I had dumped her to the ground like so much meat. And I had not. I tore my cheeks, nails gouging deep furrows in my flesh, and then I collapsed to my knees and vomited until my stomach held nothing but sour water and acid.
It took some time for me to collect myself. I stood, unsteady on feet no longer twisted and deformed, and looked down on my cane with pity and loathing both. My hands I could not refrain from feeling, from rubbing together as though to assure myself repeatedly of their function and wholeness. No swollen joints. No ligaments age-stiffened and unmoving. I brushed snow from the front of my robes and looked up at the shadowed bulk of St. Anthony's. Around me, Monta echoed to the sound of its own emptiness. A door swung in the chill wind, banging against its stone lintel again and again. The snow fell now in thick, wet flakes. It had begun to drift against storefronts and in alleys as I had met myself. I set my shoulders and set off toward the temple, head bent against the gathering storm. The trek up the hillside path and into the graveyard was long and laborious. I was ready, though, for the Crocuta when it came padding toward me through the snow. Its narrow eyes found mine as I froze in place. It paced between gravestones, sleek and fearful with its razor teeth bared in a madman's grin.
“Aben. Dear boy. Come in out of the cold. There are sweetbuns by the fire.”
I said nothing. It circled me, huge and hoary and awful, silent as death and drooling long ropes of yellow spittle. Its voice changed, abandoning the gruff accent of Hastuk the baker for a younger man's bright tenor. Eschegg. “Come on, Aben. You don't want to stay in this temple forever, do you? I'm going to make my name and take back my father's land. I should have been the heir. Didn't we always say so, when we were boys?”
Barlans. “We're all waiting, Aben. It's not so bad in here. No Halmure. No lessons.”
Trebatius. “Just let it go, boy.”
The creature hissed, gnashing its teeth. I watched it, unfeeling and cold. It clawed the ground and, snarling, charged. We went down in a tangled, tumbling heap of fur and black cloth. Snow flew around us as the Crocuta's heavy jaws snapped at my shoulders and throat. Its teeth sank deep into my collar, cracking bone. Blood soaked my robes. “I love you,” it said in Indrastea's soft, warm voice. “I love you, darling.” Her fingers touched my throat. “Lie with me.”
The disjointed hemispheres of my mind blazed back to life. I caught the Crocuta between them, caught my friends, my lover, the fragments of their minds preserved in that awful creature. Meat, not light, played cradle to their gnawed and blinded psyches. I took them from it, wrenched from that grasping unperson its greed-hoarded treasures, its baubles and jewels. I took them into me, the walls of my mind thinning until nothing was unabsorbed, until I was and always had been Barlans' ironic grin, his desperate struggle for the cleverness that seemed to come to him so readily; I was Eschegg's veneer of arrogance scraped thinly over doubt, Trebatius's coarse laugh and the cook's absent-minded affection for the acolytes. I had always been Indrastea's round, full thighs just as I had been the boy fumbling between them. I loved myself, mind traveling at speed down the corridors of her mind, and, loving, knew the rotten thing like flowers spoiling in the humid heat that she had never told me. Revelation scorched the sky and boiled the clouds. Light poured from my mouth. The Crocuta slumped over onto its side, whining in pain as steam rose from its blasted flank. I stood, clutching at my mauled shoulder, and looked down at it as the incandescence of my mind faded away to shadows, bearing with it voices soft and strident. “I love you,” wheezed the beast. “I love you. I love you.”
I left it to die in the falling snow, and carried the newness of my self to old familiar places.
The temple courtyard was cold and empty, the bailey of the north tower deserted. No guards walked the walls. No acolytes scrubbed the floors of the bathing house. The light that spilled through the skylight in the sepulcher was washed-out and drab. The oda was broken, its glass walls spidered with mad traceries of cracks. The five high seats of the temple's masters stood empty. I walked the temple's silent halls, accompanied only by the forlorn whistling of the wind. The cyclopean corridors and tombs of the great edifice had been my boyhood haunts, the loveless dormitories my only cradle. I thought I saw, for a fleeting instant, my memory coupling with Indrastea in a corner, buttocks clenching with each boyish thrust. My face was wrong, though, and soon the memory faded. I lingered in the kitchens, rested my hand on the cracked and frigid stove where once Hastuk and his cooks had worked. Master Rochelle's study, the room in which he had died, was dark, Master Gallian's utterly bare.
In the orchard, bare-treed and grim, I found a boy's skeleton lying weather-worn in the dried basin of the koi pond.
Only in Halmure's grim, unwelcoming quarters was there any sign that, once, men and boys I had known had called the temple home. A daguerreotype, ragged and unframed, lay alone atop the old man's desk. I crossed the room and looked down at it. It was myself, not yet seven and grinning widely as I hunted for insects in the cracks between the courtyard's heavy flagstones. I gripped it in bloodless fingers, looking down with distaste at the old man's hateful memory. Of all the fantasies I had entertained as a boy, I had never imagined for an instant that Halmure had fathered me. I dropped the daguerreotype to the floor and left. There was, I knew, only one place I might find answers to the questions that had dogged my mind, conscious and unconscious, since the earliest days of my childhood.
Master Gallian was waiting for me in the ascender, which one we had ridden together to see the granpadre. He looked much as he had, tall and lean in his plain black robe and kilt. Older, lined and worn, but much the same with his aureole of blue-white light, his skin thatched with subtle lines of illumination. Had he ever been real? I stood on the threshold of the iron cart, one hand on the grille that served as its door. “Master Gallian,” I said.
He opened his arms. “Abendrad.”
We embraced. His smell, the musty stone-and-leather smell of the temple, was a comfort. His thin arms were still strong. We stood together for a time, and then my teacher stepped back, his hands still on my shoulders. “Let me look at you,” he said, his expression one of mingled pride and sadness.
“You died,” I said.
“Only here.” He pulled the ascender's lever and the grille slid shut. The cart rose smoothly upward along its tracks, engine wheezing. Bars of light and shadow slid over us as we passed in rapid succession a hundred empty rooms and chambers, deserted halls thick with dust, iron-grey light spilling over unpolished floors. Master Gallian kept his wrinkled hand on the lever. His throat worked as he swallowed. “There was so much I wished to tell you.”
The ascender slowed and ground to a gradual halt. The heavy steel doors to the granpadre's apartments slid apart and we stepped out into the long, antiseptic corridor where Master Gallian had died, torn apart by the wounded hermiod as I escaped with Indrastea. Blood still smeared the wall, thick and black. We passed down the hall where dust-filmed eyes opened to watch us pass, and through an open airlock into a chamber I did not recognize. It was a yawning space, high-vaulted and lit by the light of an unfamiliar yellow sun that streamed through windows nine times a man's height. High golden seats formed a crescent facing the doorway in which Master Gallian and I stood. The granpadre sat in one, icy-eyed and silent. In another sat Master Drasten, and beside him ancient Master Rochelle. Halmure was nowhere to be seen.
On the floor before the granpadre's throne sat a coffin, glass-fronted and ornate, its brass bars wound with golden wire, its sides etched with images erotic, neural and monstrous. Masked necrohols stood over it, swords bared. I feared to draw too close, lest its occupant upset what little sanity was left to me. It was a deep thing. A well of self and soul. Instead I stayed where I was, facing the architects of my youth across a gulf of time and marble, my mind coursing with accreted thought. At last, Lialisk stood. His dark eyes, set in the square confines of that unremarkable face, bored into mine. “You may depart, Gallian,” he said.
I turned to my master. His lips moved, beginning the impression of a smile, and then he was gone, his space occupied by a shaft of sunlight in which dust danced lazily toward oblivion. I fought down the urge to weep. He had never truly been at all. The granpadre cleared his throat and I returned my gaze to his. “No span of time can claim you,” he said. “No arrow can still the beating of your breast, and no mind can stand between the halves of yours. With this world, warm in the bosom of a truer one, as the reservoir of your power, you will be forever tombed in chthonic glory, a leviathan breaching reality's skin. You will return with us through the channels of the sun, and you will be more than Man. The plagues that afflict truth will be undone.”
I stood there, poised on the threshold between corridor and cathedral, black robes caught at by the rumor of some ethereal wind, or else by sluggish tides. It seemed an ocean of lies crashed and roared about me, its waves ship-breaking and increate. Unwilling, my feet bore me to the coffin where, looking down, I beheld, as I had known I would, my own self dressed for burial in flowing robes of black. I put a hand on the glass front of the coffin. The breath of my other self had fogged it. “Will it hurt?” I asked.
“Life is pain,” said Lialisk.
I nodded.
I know now that I will have no deathbed, that as I was born, fatherless and unloved, I shall live to see the last gasped breaths of stars different from those I knew in my fast-fading boyhood. How many years have passed between strokes of pens while I slumbered, unknowing, too distant from time to feel its rushing passage? The reasons for which I was made have long since passed from my mind. I accomplished all that was wished of me, and more. I know I have awoken to ink cracked and dried by the passage of decades. I know that the servants in this house differ from day to day, though I have not the heart to learn their names. If life is pain, then death is forgetting.
I have lived too long, kept company only by the minds within my own. I do not often hear their voices anymore.