Inversions (16 page)

DeWar looked at the doors with a pained expression, as a small boy with no coin might look at a sweet shop counter. ‘I really do think I ought to be with you during these briefings, sir.’

‘Now, DeWar,’ UrLeyn said, taking hold of his elbow. ‘I shall be safe with my military men, and there will be a double guard on the doors here.’

‘Sir, leaders who have been assassinated have usually believed that they were safe until the instant before it happened.’

‘DeWar,’ UrLeyn said kindly. ‘I can trust all these men with my life. I have known almost all of them for most of it. Certainly I have known most of them for longer than I have known you. I can trust them.’

‘But, sir’

‘And you make some of them uncomfortable, DeWar,’ UrLeyn said, with a hint of impatience. ‘They think a bodyguard should not be so opinionated as you have been. And your mere presence suffices to unsettle some of them. They think there’s an extra shadow in the room.’

‘I shall dress in motley, put on the uniform of a fool’

‘You will not,’ UrLeyn told him, and put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. ‘I order you to amuse yourself as you see fit for the next two bells and then return here and resume your duties after my generals have told me how many more towns we’ve taken since yesterday.’ He clapped DeWar’s shoulder. ‘Now be gone. And if I’m not here when you come back I shall have returned to the harem for another bout with your opponent.’ He grinned at the other man and squeezed his arm. ‘All this talk of war and victorious battles seems to put a young man’s blood in my cock!’

He left DeWar standing there, staring at the tiled floor of the corridor while the doors opened and closed on the sound of talking men. The two palace guards joined their comrades on either side of the doors.

DeWar’s jaw worked as though he was chewing on something, then he spun and walked quickly away.

The plasterer had almost finished the remedial work on the Painted Chamber. A final layer was drying and he was kneeling on his white-spotted sheet surveying his tools and buckets and trying to remember the correct order to put them away. This was a job normally done by his apprentice, but he had had to do it himself on this job because it was all so secret.

The chamber’s door was unlocked and the black-clad figure of DeWar, the Protector’s bodyguard, walked in. The plasterer felt a chill go through him when he saw the look on the tall man’s dark face. Providence, they didn’t intend to kill him now he’d done his job, did they? He’d known it was secret what he had plastered up was a hidden alcove for someone to spy on people, that was obvious but could it be so secret they’d kill him afterwards to stop him from talking? He’d done jobs in the palace before. He was honest and he kept his mouth shut. They knew that. They knew him. One of the palace guards was his brother. He could be trusted. He wouldn’t tell anyone about this. He’d swear to that on his children’s lives. They couldn’t kill him. Could they?

He shrank back as DeWar approached. The bodyguard’s sword wagged from side to side in its black scabbard while the long dagger at his other hip bounced in its own dark sheath. The plasterer looked into the other man’s face and saw only a blank, cold expression that was more terrifying than a look of pitiless fury or an assassin’s lying smile. He tried to find his voice, but could not. He felt his bowels start to loosen.

DeWar hardly seemed to see him. He glanced down at him, then at the new plaster partition still drying between the other painted panels, like a blood-drained lifeless face between living ones, then he walked past, to the small dais. The plasterer, his mouth dry, swivelled round where he knelt to watch. The bodyguard clutched one arm of the small throne on the dais, then he went and stood before a panel on the far side of the room which showed a scene set within a harem, full of stylised images of languidly buxom ladies in revealing dresses all lounging around, playing games and sipping from tiny glasses.

The black figure stood there for a moment. When he spoke, the plasterer jumped.

‘Is the panel finished?’ he asked. His voice was loud and hollow-sounding in the bare room.

The plasterer swallowed, coughed dryly and eventually was able to croak, ‘Ye-ye-yes, yes, sir. Ready for the p-painter by tomorrow.’

Still facing the painting of the harem, still with hollow-sounding voice, the bodyguard said, ‘Good.’ Then without warning, and with no back-swing, just a single startlingly sudden thrust, he rammed his right fist straight through the panel he was standing in front of.

On the other side of the chamber, the plasterer yelped.

DeWar stood there a moment longer, half his lower arm protruding from the harem painting. A few painted plaster pieces fell dryly to the floor as he slowly withdrew his arm again.

The plasterer trembled. He wanted to get up and run but he felt glued to the spot. He wanted to raise his arms to defend himself but they seemed pinned to his sides.

DeWar stood, looking down at his right forearm, slowly brushing the white plaster dust off the black material. Then he spun on his heel and walked quickly to the door, where he paused and looked back with a face that seemed now to have taken on an expression of inconsolable torment. He glanced at the panel he had just punctured. ‘You may find another panel which needs repair. It must have been broken earlier, must it not?’

The plasterer nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. Yes, oh yes, of course, sir. Oh yes, very very definitely. I noticed it myself earlier, sir. I’ll attend to it immediately, sir.’

The bodyguard looked at him for a moment. ‘Good. The guard will let you out.’

Then he was gone, and the door closed and was locked.

The Guard Commander of Yvenir palace held a scented kerchief to his nose. Before him was a stone slab fitted with iron manacles, leg-irons and hide straps. None of these was required to restrain the current occupant of the slab, for spread upon it lay the limp body of the King’s chief torturer, Nolieti, naked save for a small cloth draped over his genitals. Beside Guard Commander Polchiek stood Ralinge, chief torturer to Duke Quettil, and a young, grey-faced and sweating scribe sent by Guard Commander Adlain, who had taken personal command of the hunting party seeking the apprentice Unoure. These three were faced on the other side of the slab by Doctor Vosill, her assistant (that is, myself) and Doctor Skelim, personal physician to Duke Quettil.

The questioning chamber underneath the palace of Yvenir was relatively small and low-ceilinged. It smelled of a variety of unpleasant things, including Nolieti himself. It was not that the body had started to decay the murder had happened only a couple of hours ago but from the dirt and grime visible on the otherwise pale skin of the dead chief torturer it was obvious that he had not been the most personally hygienic of men. Guard Commander Polchiek watched a flea crawl out from beneath the cloth over the man’s groin and start to travel up the slack curve of his stomach.

‘Look,’ Doctor Skelim said, pointing at the tiny black shape moving over the mottled grey skin of the corpse. ‘Somebody’s leaving the sinking ship.’

‘Looking for warmth,’ Doctor Vosill said, reaching quickly out to the insect. It disappeared an instant before her hand got there, jumping away. Polchiek looked amused, and I too wondered at the Doctor’s naïveté. What was that proverb about there being only so many ways to catch a flea? But then the Doctor’s fingers snapped closed in mid air, she inspected what she had there, nipped their tips more tightly together and then brushed the remains off on her hip. She looked up at Polchiek, whose face wore a surprised expression. ‘It might have jumped on one of us,’ she said.

A light-well above the slab had been opened for what was to judge from the amount of dust and debris that rained down upon the unfortunate scribe sent to do the opening by Doctor Vosill the first time in a long time. A brace of floor-standing candelabra added their own light to the gruesome scene.

‘May we proceed?’ the Guard Commander of Yvenir asked in a rumbling voice. Polchiek was a big, tall man with a single great scar from grey hair line to chin. A fall while hunting the previous year had left him with a knee that could not bend. It was for this reason that Adlain and not he was in charge of the search for Unoure. ‘I have never enjoyed attending any sort of event down here.’

‘I don’t imagine the subjects of those events did either,’ Doctor Vosill observed.

‘Nor did they deserve to,’ Doctor Skelim said, one of his small hands playing nervously with his collar ruff as his gaze flicked round the barrel-vaulted walls and ceiling. ‘It is a cramped, oppressive sort of place, isn’t it?’ He glanced at the Guard Commander.

Polchiek nodded. ‘Nolieti used to complain that there was barely room to swing a whip,’ he said. The grey-faced scribe began to make notes in a small slate-book. The fine point of the chalk made a scratching, squeaking noise on the stone.

Skelim snorted. ‘Well, he will swing no more of those. Is there any word on Unoure, Guard Commander??

‘We know which way he went,’ Polchiek said. ‘The hunting party should pick him up before dark.’

‘Do you think he will be in one piece?’ asked Doctor Vosill.

‘Adlain is not unused to hunting in these woods, and my hounds are well trained. The youth may suffer a bite or two, but he’ll be alive when he is delivered to Master Ralinge here,’ Polchiek said, glancing at the wide little barrel of a man standing at his side and staring with a sort of greedy fascination at the wound that had gone most of the way towards separating Nolieti’s head from his shoulders. Ralinge looked slowly up at Polchiek when he heard his name mentioned, and smiled, showing a full set of teeth which he was proud to have removed from his victims and which he had used to replace his own diseased items. Polchiek made a rumbling, disapproving noise.

‘Yes. Well, Unoure’s fate is what concerns me here, gentlemen,’ Doctor Vosill said.

‘Really, madam?’ Polchiek said, keeping his kerchief at his mouth and nose. ‘What concern of yours is his fate?’ He turned to Ralinge. ‘I believe his destiny now lies in the hands of those of us on this side of the table, Doctor. Or does the lad have a medical condition that may rob us of the chance to question him on the matter?’

‘Unoure is unlikely to have been the murderer,’ the Doctor said.

Doctor Skelim made a derisory snorting noise. Polchiek looked up at the ceiling, which for him was not far away. Ralinge did not take his gaze off the wound.

‘Really, Doctor?’ Polchiek said, sounding bored. ‘And what brings you to that strange conclusion?’

‘The man is dead,’ Skelim said angrily, waving one thin hand at the corpse. ‘Murdered in his own chamber. His assistant was seen running into the woods while the body was still oozing blood. His master used to beat him, and worse. Everybody knows that. Only a woman would not see the obvious in this.’

‘Oh, let the good lady doctor have her say,’ Polchiek said. ‘I for one am already quite fascinated.’

‘Doctor, indeed,’ muttered Skelim, looking away to one side.

The Doctor ignored her colleague and bent over to grip the ragged flaps of skin that had been Nolieti’s neck. I found myself swallowing hard. ‘The wound was caused by a serrated instrument, probably a large knife,’ she said.

‘Astonishing,’ Skelim said sarcastically.

‘There was a single cut, from left to right,’ the Doctor said, teasing apart the flaps of skin near the corpse’s left ear. I confess that her assistant was feeling a little queasy at this juncture, though like the torturer Ralinge I could not tear my gaze from the wound. ‘It severed all the major blood vessels, the larynx’

‘The what?’ Skelim said.

‘The larynx,’ the Doctor said patiently, pointing to the roughly slashed pipe inside Nolieti’s neck. ‘The upper part of the wind-pipe.’

‘We call it the upper part of the wind-pipe here,’ Doctor Skelim told her with a sneer. ‘We have no need for foreign words. Quacks and the like tend to use them when they’re trying to impress people with their spurious wisdom.’

‘But if we look deeper,’ the Doctor said, levering the corpse’s head right back and lifting its shoulders partly off the surface of the slab. ‘Oelph. Would you put that block underneath the shoulders here?’

I picked a piece of wood shaped like a miniature executioner’s block up off the floor and stuck it under the dead man’s shoulders. I was feeling sick. ‘Hold his hair, would you, Oelph?’ the Doctor said, forcing Nolietis head back still further. There was a glutinous sucking noise as the wound opened further. I took hold of Nolieti’s sparse brown hair and looked away as I pulled on it.

‘Looking deeper,’ the Doctor repeated, seemingly quite unaffected as she bent close over the tangle of multicoloured tissues and tubes that had been Nolieti’s throat, ‘we can see that the murder weapon cut so deep it nicked the victim’s upper spinal column, here, at the third cervical vertebra.’

Doctor Skelim snorted derisively again, but from the corner of my eye I saw him leaning closer to the opened wound. A sudden retching sound came from the far side of the table as Guard Commander Adlain’s scribe turned quickly away and doubled over by a drain, his slate-book clattering to the ground. I felt my own bile rising and tried to swallow it back.

‘Here. Do you see? Lodged in the cartilage of the voice box. A splinter of the vertebra, deposited there as the weapon was withdrawn.’

‘Very interesting, I’m sure,’ Polchiek said. ‘What is your point?’

‘The direction of the cut would indicate the murderer was right-handed. Almost certainly the right hand was used, in any event. The depth and penetration points to a person of considerable strength, and incidentally reinforces the likelihood that the murderer was using his favoured hand, for people are rarely able to apply so much power so accurately and so certainly with their non-favoured hand. Also the angle of the cut the way the wound slopes upward relative to the victim’s throat implies that the murderer was a good head or so taller than the victim.’

‘Oh, Providence!’ Doctor Skelim said loudly. ‘Why not rip out his innards and read them like the priests of old to find the murderer’s name? I guarantee they will say “Unoure” in any event, or whatever his name is.’

Doctor Vosill turned to Skelim. ‘Don’t you see? Unoure is shorter than Nolieti, and left-handed. I imagine he is of average strength, perhaps a little more, but he does not have the look of a particularly powerful man.’

‘Perhaps he was in a rage,’ Polchiek suggested. ‘People can gather an inhuman strength in certain circumstances. I have heard they do so particularly in a place like this.’

‘And Nolieti might have been kneeling down at the time,’ Doctor Skelim pointed out.

‘Or Unoure was standing on a stool,’ Ralinge said in a voice that was surprisingly soft and sibilant. He smiled.

The Doctor glanced towards a nearby wall. ‘Nolieti was standing at that workbench when he was attacked from behind. Arterial blood sprayed the ceiling and venous blood fell directly on the bench itself. He was not kneeling.’

The scribe completed his retching, picked up his fallen slatebook and stood again, returning to his place by the table with an apologetic look at Polchiek, who ignored him.

‘Mistress?’ I ventured.

‘Yes, Oelph?’

‘Might I let go his hair now?’

‘Yes, of course, Oelph. I beg your pardon.’

‘What does it matter exactly how Unoure did it?’ Doctor Skelim said. ‘He must have been here when it happened. He ran away after it had happened. Of course he did it.’ Doctor Skelim looked disgustedly at Doctor Vosill.

‘The doors to the chamber were neither locked nor guarded,’ the Doctor pointed out. ‘Unoure may have been on any sort of errand and come back to find his master killed. As for’

Doctor Skelim shook his head and held up one hand towards the Doctor. ‘These womanly fancies and this unhealthy attraction to mutilation may represent a form of sickness in the mind on your part, madam, but they have little to do with the business of apprehending the culprit and getting the truth out of him.’

‘The doctor is right,’ Polchiek told the Doctor. ‘It is clear that you know your way around a corpse, madam, but you must accept that I know mine around an act of villainy. Running is invariably a sign of guilt, I have found.’

‘Unoure may simply have been frightened,’ the Doctor said. ‘He did not appear to be possessed of a great amount of wit. He may simply have panicked, not thinking that running away was the most suspicious thing he could have done.’

‘Well, we shall shortly apprehend him,’ Polchiek said with an air of finality. ‘And Ralinge here will find out the truth.’

When the Doctor spoke it was with a degree of venom I think all of us found surprising. ‘Will he, indeed,’ she said.

Ralinge smiled broadly at the Doctor. Polchiek’s scarred face took on a look of some grimness. ‘Yes, madam, he will,’ he told her. He flapped one hand at the corpse still lying between us. ‘This has all been most diverting, I’m sure, but on the next occasion you wish to impress some of your betters with your macabre knowledge of human anatomy I would ask you not to include those of us with better things to do, and certainly not me. Good day.’

Polchiek turned and left, ducking under the doorway and acknowledging the salute of a guard. The scribe who had been sick looked up hesitantly from his incomplete notes and appeared uncertain what to do next.

‘I agree,’ Doctor Skelim said with a note of relish in his voice as he brought his small face up towards the Doctor’s. ‘You might have bewitched our good King for now, madam, but you do not deceive me. If you have any regard for your own safety, you will request leave to depart from us as quickly as possible and return to whatever decadent regime raised you. Good day.’

The grey-faced scribe hesitated again, watching the Doctor’s impassive face as Skelim swept smartly out of the chamber, head held high. Then the scribe muttered something to the still smiling Ralinge, closed his slatebook with a snap and followed the small doctor.

‘They don’t like you,’ Duke Quettil’s chief torturer said to the Doctor. His smile broadened still further. ‘I like you.’

The Doctor looked across the slab at him for a few moments, then held up her hands and said, ‘Oelph. A wet towel, if you please.’

I ran and fetched a pitcher of water from a bench, picked a towel from the Doctor’s bag and soaked it, then watched her as she washed her hands, not taking her gaze off the small, round man across the slab from her. I handed her a dry towel. She dried her hands.

Ralinge kept on smiling. ‘You might think you hate what I am, lady doctor,’ he said softly. His voice sounded distorted by his grisly collection of teeth. ‘But I know how to give pleasure as well as pain.’

The Doctor handed me the towel and said, ‘Let us go, Oelph.’ She nodded at Ralinge and then we walked towards the door.

‘And pain can be pleasure, too,’ Ralinge called after us. I felt my scalp crawl and the urge to be sick returned. The Doctor did not react at all.

‘It’s just a cold, sir.’

‘Ha. Just a cold. I’ve known people die from colds.’

‘Indeed, sir, but you should not. How is your ankle today? Let’s take a look at it, shall we?’

‘I believe it is getting better. Will you change the dressing?’

‘Of course. Oelph, would you . . . ?’

I took the dressing and a few instruments from the Doctor’s bag and arranged them on a cloth on the King’s huge bed. We were in the King’s private chamber, the day after Nolieti’s murder.

The King’s apartments at Yvenir are arranged within a splendid domed cupola set high at the rear of the palace, upon what is the roof to the main part of the great building. The gold-leaf-covered dome is set back from the terraced edge of the roof and separated from it by a small formal garden. As the roof level is just above the height of the tallest trees on the ridge behind, marking the summit of the hills on this side of the valley, the view from the northfacing windows which bring light into the most spacious and airy apartments is of nothing but sky beyond the clipped geometrical perfections of the gardens and the white tusk balustrade at their edge. This lends the apartments a strange, enchanted air of detachment from the real world. I dare say the clear mountain air contributes to this effect of isolated purity, but there is something most especially about that lack of sight of the mundane disorder of the landscape of men which gives the place its singular spirit.