Take No Prisoners (17 page)

All the Best Curses Last for a Lifetime

As expected, Almatria, King of Sanjran, sent his daughter Cimara to me for a certificate of her virginity preparatory to her betrothal to Prince Genon, eldest son of Xilon, King of Debreia, whom if all be well she shall wed within the year. She arrived this morning – a pretty little thing, deliciously flat-chested and squint-eyed, all ringlets and blushes and ribbons tied in unexpected places – so I debauched her for much of the day, then gave her her certificate as well as the obligatory nuptial present for the happy couple. Decided against the incurable clap, as being passé, and the demon-seed, as merely tiresome; settled for cold feet at bedtime for both the newlyweds – in perpetuity, naturally: all the best curses last for a lifetime. I'd allow a few years at most before Sanjran and Debreia are at war.

After she'd gone I ate, drank, wenched and ordered a couple of flayings for the morrow. And so to bed ...

And that's precisely where I'm going to go now, scribe, so pack up your quills and your scrolls and be gone from my sight. I've had enough of everything for the day, but most especially talking to you, my faithful amanuensis. Tomorrow ... tomorrow I may at last fulfil the promise I've made you on so many other nights like this, and start to relate the story of my life. But for now ...

For now, leave me alone with my bottles and my thoughts, and pray on my behalf to the nonexistent god or goddess of your choosing that I'm not troubled by dreams tonight.

~

He goes, surrounded by a swarm of musty smells – hot sealing-wax and powdered ink-block, stale parchment newly brought from a dusty cellar – and the heavy door closes behind him, bellying the drapes around the walls. I watch the blank door as his footsteps rattle away down the corridor. Only after he's exchanged a brief word with the guard posted unnecessarily at the top of the stairs do I begin to relax, puffing out a long gust of air and brushing the front of my lavish tunic as if I hadn't already removed supper's crusts a hundred times before.

It's late, and the night is empty except for a thousand stars and a scimitar moon as I lean against the windowsill, breathing the cold, rank-smelling air. I wish I felt tireder. Once upon a very long time ago I might have found my mind exhausted at the end of a day like today – except, of course, that all those eons ago I wouldn't have
had
a day like today.

And no scribe at the end of it to jot down my musings, with his crablike hand curled around his quill and his face all wrinkled with concentration and the tip of his tongue poking between his lips, and his reluctance to look up and gaze upon my face. In those days my thoughts weren't of much interest to anyone except myself – and even then, to be honest, still not much. It was only later, after things had changed, that people and all the other mortal beings of The World's Dross began to expect me to keep a diary of my doings, so that after my death a stuffy scholar can piece together the story of my life – changing it, in that very act, into something new, something that will be as much his as mine.

"After my death"?

I should be so lucky.

~

This is the time of day that I like the best: the early part of the night. The castle is quieting, the last pots have been jangled in the kitchens and emptied in the latrines, and the horses in their stables are silent except for occasional snickered equine confidences. Most of the guards are in their beds, their armor just a heap of empty metal shapes on the floor, so I won't have to listen to their mindless clanking until the morning. Sometimes there's a scream from the dungeons, but I try to discourage that sort of thing after dark. In an hour or so the vampire bats and the owls will be out and the dragon will be a-roar, warning off trespassers and benighted travelers, and the thunder-and-lightning spell will give its diurnal chuggety-chug as it gears itself up in readiness to split, if required, the ebon into a billion humming fragments; I hope in the nameless name of the Darkness that it won't be needed tonight. I wish, as I wish every time that I'm allowed to be on my own, that I could dispense with these appurtenances of evil and power but ... well, they're expected of me. They come with the job.

It's a bloody stupid place to build a castle, one would have thought, here beneath the looming slopes of Starveling-stage. Castles – especially castles for things like me – should be stark against the skyline, their grim, angular walls bleakly staring across all of the surrounding countryside, both a statement of unconquerable might and a reminder of the power of their lord's rule ... not to mention a defence against any who should ignore those unsubtle hints. But the builders of this castle –
my
castle, Starveling itself – must have been ignorant of the symbolism of tyranny, for they constructed its walls of white marble, and set the edifice in the middle of what, although now just a weed-strangled wreckage, was then a thriving city. When I realized their error, some time after I took up residence, I had my minions stain the walls dark with filth and blood, but I never got round to moving the castle as a whole to the top of Starveling-stage, which is surely where it belongs. Maybe one day ...

No. The Dross is accustomed to Starveling being where it is. So, more importantly, am I.

But from Starveling-stage's high plateau the views would be so breathtakingly good ...

~

A guard enters. His face looks white and nervous.

"Is there anything else that the Master requires before ... ?" he begins, his voice the thinnest twig on the branch as the mounting breeze warns of tempest.

"
NO
!" I bellow. The tapestries beat against the walls with the force of my shout. "I have told you all to leave me alone for the night!" The guard's face eases: by giving vent to my wrath I have fulfilled his expectations, reassuring him. But I give him more: "Do I have to cast you blockheads to the tormentors before you learn to heed my commands?"

The pretty pallor comes back to his cheeks. He salutes me with a limp hand and is gone.

I grin, though there's hot moisture pooling at the sides of my mouth. The threat was empty, as fundamentally he knew. If my power were less absolute I would not be at liberty to exercise it so sparingly as I do. Power brings with it the freedom to advise and cajole.

~

Solitude. Oh, yes.

Sometimes I wonder if it's perhaps, everything considered, all actually worth it for these precious times of solitude. Loneliness I'm inured to; solitude is my luxury.

I breathe a shroud of curling whiteness and put the first of the night's heady-smelling bottles to my lips.

It's funny how one's mind forgets some of the major details of the past and yet can conjure up the apparent trivia with such vividness, producing mental scenes so rich in every detail that it seems you're no longer just remembering them, you're
reliving
them. Perhaps there is some use in my having a scribe, after all: I could call for him now and order him to search all through the scribblings of his predecessor until he could calculate precisely which year it was, counting back from the present, that saw the change in me. But I'll leave him to his slumbers or his doxies or, if my suspicions are correct, his catamites. I don't want anyone with me now.

Besides, if my memory serves me right, the first thing I did after his predecessor died was to burn all that he'd written. It was as if I were casting off the burden of my past. Just for a moment, I felt like a new-born child all over again – which was a curious sensation for me to feel, come to think of it, because of course I'd never been a new-born child in the first place.

I wonder what it's
like
– being born. Perhaps I'll ask the inkfingers about it in the morning. The trouble is, him and the rest of them'll likely all be too tongue-tied with their terror to be able to give me a straight answer, for fear of incurring my wrath. The rack or the white heat of the tongs would make 'em describe it for me, of course, but I'd never know for certain if it was the truth they'd told or just some wild imagination babbled out to try to make the pain stop.

Stupid creatures, mortals. What makes them think that pain ever stops?

~

I can remember who brought me into being. He was a man who had been blinded at the behest of the cruel woman he loved – blinded already to her cruelty by his love for her, of course, but now she'd had her soldiers seize him and burn his eyes away. He was thrown naked out of this very castle, and sent to walk The World with nothing for his companion save his despondency and his sightlessness. He never spoke to me about what it was like, those first few weeks, begging people he could no longer
see
for rags with which to cover himself and food to put in his belly; but from the way his hands used to shake whenever he was not-talking about it I can guess it was misery. Must have been. And yet I can't, to be honest, feel any true pain on his behalf, because if it hadn't been for that distress then he might never, from the pits of his isolation, have created
me
.

I was closer to him than any human being had ever been – closer, indeed, than any human being could ever be to another. I was dearer to him than a lover, or even a child. Lovers often say that they are of one soul, but in our case it was actually true: we
were
of one soul. His soul. There was enough inside him of whatever fabric it is that souls are made of to fill not just himself but also my own clumsy, unspirited husk. He had conjured the conception of me from his own dreamings and the matter of me from the earth and the air around him, from the waters of rivers and the fire of sunsets, but a soul for me was not something that could be magicked into existence: he had to tap off some of his own soulstuff and pour it into me.

I was too stupid to be grateful.

In fact, in those days I was too stupid for anything much. It's easy enough to talk in the abstract of feeding off someone else's spirit – a gift gladly given, but a one-way flow of psychic nutrient however you choose to look at it. It's quite another business actually to live that way. Had it been possible for him to give me all the soulstuff I required in a single great dollop, and there an end to it, I might have found my own, independent wits far earlier. As it was, he was the primary and I the satellite, with the center of rotation being inside him. There was a constant flux of soulstuff through me, none of it ever seeming to stay still long enough for it to congeal in place and become
me
, my exclusive property.

Because of my soullessness, my master declined to give me a name – and, indeed, I had no name for myself. Some of the children we met called me "Piggy" because of my appearance; I answered to their calls of "Piggy" but I didn't regard it as a name – merely as a descriptive tag, hung from me by string. I was just ... my master's beast.

I saw things in a haze, events rushing by outside me, rarely seeming to impinge upon me directly. I hadn't then learned the knack of ordering my perceptions to make events occur in a steady and logical progression: I hadn't discovered how to impose the arrow of time upon my experiences. Past, present and future were all interchangeable for me; I had no fixed present, no sensation of "now." It is an ignorance that I might often wish I still possessed.

I can remember some things from that period, however, although whether any of them hold or held any significance is something that I guess at rather than judge. Somewhen and somewhere I met the cruel golden woman who had blinded my master, and she tormented me, too – perhaps torture and slaughter were all that she ever did – so that pain filled my universe without beginning and without end. She had her minions nail me to a board and mutilate me until my body was so damaged that my master was forced to withdraw his soulstuff from it. Later – it must have been later – I was in my body again, knowing my identity only because of that fact, and I discovered that he had taken those mutilations, and all the agonies that came with them, to himself, rendering me whole once more.

I loved him sacred sevenfold for that act of love.

And then there was the time of his going. All of this was very muddled in my potpourri mind, you understand; but I can recall as my first moment of proper mental clarity the instant that the golden woman plunged a dagger into his throat, wounding him mortally. She left him for dead, but he wasn't yet quite dead. Enough of his soulstuff remained attached to his fleshly self for him to direct its departure. We were in the corridor of a lushly furnished hotel. (Don't ask me where the hotel – or even the
idea
of a hotel – came from. It was all
wrong
, except that it was only afterwards I realized this. At the time, as awareness seeped into me in perfect synchrony with the seepage of life out of the gash in my master's throat, the hotel was just another part of the jumble of my existence.)

He put part of his soulstuff into a flawed gem, a stone gewgaw, and the rest of it he donated in perpetuity to myself. Maybe I've got that the wrong way round – maybe I was the principal recipient of his essence, and the jewel merely took the overflow (because I was of course a much smaller receptacle for soulstuff than my master) – but I think it likely that what he gave me were the leftovers from the stuff he imparted to the gem. Certainly, as his eyes glazed, I got the impression that – however great the love he had for me, his solitary true companion – the stone was more important than I was. In my more cynical, self-hating moments – and there are a lot of those – I think that maybe he gave me only enough soulstuff to ensure the survival of the gem. Through bubbles of blood he told me where to take it, and I did so; only then did I start grieving for him.

The World was falling apart around then. Even as I left the emptied body of my master, lying sprawled and gruesome on the garishly carpeted corridor floor, even as I felt my own, independent consciousness settling into position, so that events around me were becoming ordered into a rationalized progression – even then I could see that this dissolution was happening. Great swathes of the past were fading away like ancient ink, and being written over in a fine strong hand, so that no trace of them remained. Wherever I looked, the artifacts of humankind were fragile and cloud-edged, their permanence eroded: their existence had become strictly provisional, so that at any moment a whim of the departing World might not only render them as if they had never been, but make that in fact the case. The only rule was constant change; the only thing of permanence was transitoriness.