Inversions (35 page)

The chain-fire disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived, and the wind fell back to the strong and steady force it had been before. By and by, all but those on watch returned to their cabins. One of the other passengers remarked they had not been able to wake the Doctor to come to see the display in the first place, though nobody thought much of this the Doctor had been invited to dine with the vessel’s captain that evening, but had sent a note declining the invitation, citing an indisposition due to special circumstances.

By the next morning it was realised she was gone. Her door was locked from the inside and had to be forced. The scuttles were screwed open for ventilation, but were too small for her to have squeezed through. Apparently all her belongings, or at any rate the great majority of them, were still there in the cabin. They were packed up and were supposed to be sent on to Drezen, but unsurprisingly they disappeared during the passage.

Gaan Kuduhn, hearing all this, like I, nearly a year later, became fixed upon letting her family know what had happened to her and what good she had done in Haspidus, but for all his enquiries on the island of Napthilia and in the city of Pressel, including some which he made himself on a visit there, and despite the numerous occasions when he seemed on the very brink of discovering her nearest ones, he was always frustrated, and never did find anybody who had actually met or known the woman we knew as Doctor Vosill. Still, I think that was one of the few things that irked him on his death bed, and there was, in balance, an extraordinarily influential and productive life to look back on.

The old Guard Commander Adlain suffered badly towards the end of his allotment of seasons. I think what consumed him was something like the growing disease that had taken the slaver Tunch, all those years earlier.

I was able to alleviate the pain but in the end it became too much for him. My old master told me, he swore truly, that indeed, as I had always suspected, he had been the officer who had rescued me from the wreck of my home and the dead arms of my parents in the smoking ruins of the city of Derla, but that he had taken me to the orphanage in a fit of guilt, for it had been he who had killed my mother and father and burned their house. Now, he said, from the clawing depths of his agony, I would want to kill him.

I chose not to believe him, but I did what I could to hasten his end, which came, peacefully, less than a bell later. His mind must have been going, of course, for if I had believed for a moment what he had told me, I think I would have been tempted to have left him to suffer.

Also before he died Adlain begged me, knowing he was on his death bed, to tell him what had really happened in the torture chamber that evening. He tried to joke that if Quience had not turned the questioning chamber into a wine cellar shortly after the Doctor left us, he might have been tempted to have me interrogated there, just to discover the truth. I think he was joking. It saddened me to have to tell him that I had already, in my reports to him, told him everything that had occurred to the limit of my recollection and descriptive ability.

I have no idea whether he believed me or not.

And so I am old now, and will lie on my own death bed before a few more years are out. The Kingdom is at peace, we prosper, and there is even what the Doctor would, I think, have called Progress. To me fell the immense privilege of being the first Principal of the Medical University of Haspide. I also shouldered the happy duty of being the third President of the Royal College of Physicians, and later served as a city counsellor, when I was in charge of the committee overseeing the construction of the King’s Charitable Hospital and the Infirmary For The Freed. I am proud that one of such lowly birth was able to serve his King and his people in so many different ways during a time of such improvement.

There are still wars, naturally, though not recently in the vicinity of Haspidus. Even yet the three so-called Empires dispute, though with little result save to leave the rest of the world free from Imperial tyranny and so able to thrive in its own various ways. Our navy seems to fight sea battles every now and again, but as they are usually far away and we are as a rule victorious it is as if they do not really count as warfare. Going further back, the barons of Ladenscion had to be taught that who helps them resist one ruler might take it ill when they attempt to forgo all rule. There was civil war in Tassasen, of course, following the death of the Regicide UrLeyn, and King YetAmidous proved a poor leader, though young King Lattens (well, he is not so young any more, I admit, but he still seems young to me) made good most of the ill, and rules well, if quietly, to this day. I am told he is something of a scholar, which is no bad thing in a king, providing it is not taken to excess.

But that was a long time ago. All of this was.

The tale of the concubine Perrund, which forms the counterpoint to my own, and which I have included here with almost no amendment save where her taste foundered occasionally on the skerries of overly ornate prose, I searched out myself, after reading a version in the form of a play which I discovered in another bibliophile’s library here in Haspide.

I chose to end her tale where I did because it is after that point that the two versions diverge most violently. The first version I read, in the guise of a drama in three acts, had the bodyguard DeWar running the lady through with his sword to revenge his dead master and then returning to his home in the Half-Hidden Kingdoms, where he was revealed in his true identity as a prince who had been spurned by his father due to an unfortunate but honourable misunderstanding. A death-bed reconciliation, decorated with pretty speeches, was effected with the expiring King and DeWar reigned well thereafter. I admit I find this the more morally satisfying ending.

The version which purported to be by the lady’s own hand and which she claimed she only committed to paper to counter the sensationalised untruths of the dramatic edition could hardly have been more different. In it, the bodyguard whose trust she had just violated and whose master she had most cruelly done to death, took her by the hand (from which she had barely finished washing their master’s blood) and led her out o£ the harem. They told those waiting nervously outside that UrLeyn was well, but sleeping deeply, at last, as though he already knew the cause of the boy’s illness had been discovered.

DeWar said he would take the concubine Perrund to Guard Commander ZeSpiole’s offices to confront the nurse who had accused her. Falsely, he suspected. DeWar apologised to chief eunuch Stike and handed him back his keys. He told some of the assembled guards to remain where they were and the rest to go back to their normal posts and tasks. He led the lady Perrund away, politely but firmly.

They were seen leaving the palace by the groom who supplied them with mounts, and observed leaving the city by a variety of honest citizens.

It was about the time they were galloping through the city’s northern gate that Stike tried to open the doors into the small court, on the top-most level of the harem.

The key would not fit properly into the lock, in which something appeared to be lodged.

The doors were broken down. The foreign body which had been inserted into the lock after the doors had been secured proved to be a piece of marble in the shape of a little finger, broken from one of the maidens in the fountain in the centre of the raised pool in the little court.

UrLeyn’s body was discovered in the bedroom off the court. His blood saturated the sheets. His body was quite cold.

DeWar and Perrund were never caught. They made their way after unrecounted adventures to Mottelocci, in the Half-Hidden Kingdoms, where DeWar, surprisingly, was not known at all, but which he knew a great deal about, and where he rapidly established a good name for himself.

The two became merchants, and later founded a bank. Perrund wrote the account from which I have taken half my story. They married, and their sons and allegedly their daughters too continue to this day to run a trading enterprise that supposedly rivals that of our own Mifeli clan. The company’s symbol, reportedly, is a simple torus, a ring, such as might be cut from one end of a hollow pipe. (This symbol is one half of what I suspect is not the only set of correspondences within and between these two tales, but considering the implications of these far too bamboozling for this old head to encompass I have left it to the reader to discover their own points of similarity, draw their own conclusions and blaze their own trails of speculation.)

At any rate, DeWar and Perrund, we are told, both died in the mountains, in an avalanche in a mountain pass, five years ago. The snow and ice of the unforgiving peaks is their only tomb, but as they died after what appears to have been a long and happy life together, I beg to repeat that I prefer the former version of their fates, even if it is not supported by any facts whatsoever.

And now I think my divided tale is finished. I am sure there is much I have not said, much that could justifiably have been added had we had I only known a little extra, discovered a trifle more, but, as I have indicated above, sometimes (indeed probably always) one simply has to make do with what there is.

My wife is due to return soon from the market. (Yes, I married, and I love her now as I always have, for her own sake, not for that of my lost love, even if as I will admit she does look just a little like the good Doctor.) She took two of our grandchildren with her to look for presents, and they will expect me to play with them when they come back. I do little real work now I am so old, but still there is a life to be lived.