The Golden (23 page)

“I must
see the Patriarch!” he said, turning to the woman, trying to
inject mastery into his voice, but hearing a quaver in it. “I
must see him at once!”

She remained
imperturbable. “He hears you now, Michel. You have only to let
your wishes be known.”

“Where is
he?” Beheim spun about, searching for a sign of an unseen
eavesdropper. “I must see him!”

“Michel!”
The woman’s peremptory tone shocked him into stillness. “
He
sees
you. That is the important thing. Now say what you have to say, and
he will answer you.”

Recognizing that
he could not succeed in imposing his will, Beheim summoned a degree
of calm and began to tell of what had transpired, of his plan and all
he hoped to achieve, directing his words toward the woman. She kept
her eyes on him, yet there was no force to her stare as there had
been previously. It was as if some essential part of her machinery
had been switched off. Except for the rise and fall of her chest, she
stood motionless, her white gown glowing in the half-light.

When he had
finished, she maintained her silence for a time; finally, with no
more animation than she had displayed while listening, she said, “We
were of course aware that Felipe and Dolores had passed into Mystery.
But we did not know the agency of their fate.” A pause. “They
were much loved.”

This last bore a
hint of accusation, and Beheim was quick to offer a defense. “I
had no choice. I was obeying the Patriarch’s charge.”

“Perhaps.
Though it seems to us you may have been overzealous in your
obedience. Be that as it may, once this matter is behind us, the
Valeas will seek to square accounts with the Agenors. I trust you
will not lose sight of that.”

Beheim caught
movement out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned, he saw
only the statue of the enthroned man. Ice seemed to melt along his
spine. Had not those taloned hands shifted ever so slightly along the
arms of the throne? He was certain they had. And those pale slivers
showing beneath the heavy lids, were they imperfections in the stone
or the whites of two globed eyes? This statue, he thought, might very
well be the Patriarch. If so, it was terrible to contemplate the
extent of his deformities, his state of near petrifaction; the price
for millennia of life was high, indeed. He gazed at those hooded
eyes, trying to connect with the great cold mind, still vital in its
prison of stony flesh, and said, “I cannot proceed without your
assistance, lord. Were I to spread the rumor that an important clue
in the murder of the Golden lies outside the castle, it would surely
be seen as a potential trap by the murderer. If, however, you were to
let slip the news, it would not be doubted. Further I require a
number of servants to help me dig the pits before daybreak. It is
essential that we begin at once. By my reckoning we have but six
hours of the night remaining, and it will take some time to organize
things.”

Again the woman
let a few moments pass before speaking. “What you have asked is
now being done.”

Beheim had
detected no movement on the part of the enthroned man, and he
wondered if mental signals could be passing between him and the
woman.

“You
understand that this must be done with subtlety,” Beheim said.
“The spreading of the rumor, I mean. And you must not inform
anyone before daybreak. Tell them that I am planning to inspect the
body of the old woman shortly after dusk, and that I wish no one else
to touch the body until I have had a chance to look at it myself.
Some tale may be needed to explain the absence of Felipe and Dolores.
I will leave that for you to determine.”

“Everything
will be done as you require,” the woman said. Another lengthy
pause. “However, here is a condition that attaches to my
assistance. My agent must accompany you. Do you have with you a
supply of the undiluted drug?”

“I do.”

“Enough
for two?”

“More than
enough.”

She held out a
hand and, reluctantly, he passed over one of his three flasks. “I
will send her to you after daybreak.”

“A sip
should provide sufficient protection for the day,” Beheim said.
“Another thing, lord. Two of my servants are waiting outside
your chambers.”

“Yes,”
said the woman. “We know. One is sorely in need of judgment.”
She tipped her head, as if trying to see him in a better light.
“Shall we judge her for you?”

The prospect of
unburdening himself of his responsibilities was appealing, but he
resisted temptation. “No, my lord. But I beg you to watch over
them while I am gone.”

She inclined her
head. “It will be done.”

“I am
curious about something, my lord,” Beheim said. “I have
been told that all this, the investigation, the murder, is part of a
game, that games are the order of the day, and that I am only an
unimportant player. That much I can accept. But I find it difficult
to be so ignorant of the goal of the game. The stakes.”

The woman said
nothing.

“The
matter of our common argument,” said Beheim. “The
question as to whether or not the Family should go into the
East . . . is this, perhaps, one of the things at
stake? The resolution of that argument?”

“Perhaps,”
said the woman.

Frustrated,
Beheim said, “By ‘perhaps,’ do you mean it is one
of many things at risk, or is it that—”

“The
answer to all your questions is ‘perhaps,’ ”
the woman said. “Each moment brings a new answer, yet as far
you are concerned, they are all ‘perhaps,’ for you do not
have the discretion necessary to perceive the nuances of the
questions.”

Beheim started
to speak, but she waved him to silence.

“This
matter of a possible migration,” she went on, “it is of
some small interest to us. And that being so, it is to an extent
involved in all of our deliberations and our actions. But only to an
extent. Should disaster come upon us, some here”—she
indicated the onlookers, the dancing couples—“have other
means of escape at their disposal apart from fleeing to the ends of
the earth. Others have no wish to escape. Others yet no longer have
any real understanding of the concept of escape. So you see, while it
is a question that concerns the majority of our cousins, here, among
this most illustrious minority, it merits spotty consideration at
best.”

“But
surely you have at heart the welfare of all the Family, not just that
of its most powerful members?”

“If you
could see what is in my heart,” the woman said, “your
eyes would go dark with that vision. If you could perceive but one
hundredth of the logics that assail me at every second, your brain
would burst. Play your part. Learn from the playing of it. That is
all you can do. At any rate, you will eventually draw your own
conclusions, no matter what I tell you.”

Beheim was
disappointed. To have endured so much, to have passed through that
harrowing antechamber and to have received such a flimsy answer, to
have discovered that the Patriarch had been reduced to statuary, to a
grotesque garden ornament capable of communicating only by means of a
proxy, it was worse than disappointing. He had expected a more
dynamic presence, someone whose power and clarity would act as a
solvent upon his doubts and crystallize his wisdom.

The woman let
out an amused hiss. Her smile widened until the tips of her fangs
were exposed, lending a newly sinister aspect to her beauty. Some of
the couples had stopped their dancing and were regarding Beheim with
what seemed sly anticipation.

“You wish
to confront the Patriarch?” the woman asked in a dry voice.
“Truly you do have courage.”

Beheim glanced
in confusion at the statue of the enthroned man, with his corroded
blue skin and dour mouth and slitted eyes. “I thought this
was—”

“Perhaps
someday. For now he waits his time.” She moved close to Beheim,
took his left hand. “Come with me, Michel. If it’s the
Patriarch you wish to see, I will take you to him.”

She drew him to
the extreme edge of one of the black pools, and on glancing down,
seeing lights drifting beneath the surface, fans of pallid radiance
like a fading aurora borealis, he shrieked and threw himself
backward, realizing that this pool, and likely all the rest, were not
incidences of underground water but portals into the pure medium of
Mystery, into the country of death. The woman held him fast,
squeezing his hand with such force, he thought the bones would
shatter. She turned a shriveling stare upon him, and he soon found
himself absorbed by the shifts of color within the irises, the minute
contractions and expansions of the pupils. His fear dwindled to a
flickering anxiety. When she told him to step forward, he felt a
twinge of alarm, nothing more, and did as she instructed.

Breaking the
surface of the pool was like breaking through the crust atop a churn
of thickening butter. The crust slid greasily between Beheim’s
legs, up his chest, across his face, like a blind thing groping at
him, trying to acquaint itself with his shape. Then he and the woman
were plunging down into a chill nothingness, a void populated by
clusters of starry lights, scattered here and there like the flowers
on a black bush. The presence of the lights wounded him; they seemed
unattainably distant and bright and hopeful, antidotes to the
fathomless darkness in which he was foundering. The cold was so
intense, he could not feel the woman’s hand, and he was
startled to find that she had maintained her grip. She floated
half-facing him, the classic lines of her face warped by a demonic
smile, her skirt pushed back between her legs by their momentum, the
stiff fabric molding to her belly and thighs; her hair lifted from
her shoulders, merging with the blackness. She looked so fierce, so
full of heat and viciousness, he expected her to burst into flames.
He managed a quick glance behind him. There a solitary blue light
winked and glittered—the pool, its surface seen from beneath.
He made out the black walls of death curving on all sides away from
this particular light, as if it were the neck of a bottle into which
he had been dropped; but in every other direction he saw a
perspectiveless depth, and when he glanced back again, he discovered
that the blue light had shrunk and now occupied a position on the rim
of a cluster of lights, and he could no longer detect any sign of
enclosure.

Chapter
Eighteen

I
n the beginning he had little sense of the speed at which they were
falling, because he did not struggle as he had on his day of
judgment, content to plummet feetfirst, becoming if not totally
relaxed, then accepting of the situation. Why, he reasoned, should he
struggle? He was doing the Patriarch’s bidding. No harm would
come to him. But when he noticed the woman’s hair flowing
straight back behind her and recognized that their speed had
increased markedly, then reason fled. He thought he felt the
blackness seeping into him, insinuating itself into the corners of
his eyes, his pores, flushing out what was left of his soul. Filling
his brain with zeros, choking his heart, icing his bones. He pried at
the woman’s fingers; he tried to rip away the blackness, to
swim back the way he had come, but able only to use one hand, he made
no headway, and all his flailing succeeded in achieving was to send
them spinning out of control. Light pinwheeled in his blurred vision;
the breath was sucked from his chest. It took every ounce of his
strength and determination to right them. The woman offered no
assistance whatsoever. Nothing, it appeared, could disturb the
pathological rectitude of her smile.

“Damn
you!” he said, surprised that he was able to hear even his own
voice in all that whirling emptiness. “Let me go!” He
tried unsuccessfully to pull free. Her smile broadened, and she shook
her head mockingly, as if he were a child from whom she was
withholding a treat.

He drew back his
hand and, marshaling all his strength, slapped her face. Her head did
not move an inch; she might have been made of stone. He hooked his
fingers, clawed at her eyes, but she knocked his hand aside, numbing
his wrist with the blow. He wanted to plead with her, to beg, but his
pride would not allow it.

The current
drawing them into the void was stronger than any he had heretofore
experienced. Even had he had both hands free, he doubted he would
have been able to make much progress against it. And there might, he
decided, be no need to do so, for the current—gaining speed
with every passing second—appeared to be bearing them toward
the distant lights, toward salvation, not away from them as had been
the case during his judgment. Perhaps, he told himself, his thoughts
once again tinged with panic, with a touch of hysterical glee,
perhaps the Patriarch was not at home, off doing errands or some
such, and a swift-moving current was performing butler service,
whisking whoever stopped in for a visit back to their point of origin
or else to some other safe harbor. Yet as they approached the nearest
light, a yellow pinprick that had swelled into a radiant golden sun,
he realized that its center, into which he might have wished to
steer, preferring whatever place it opened onto to this endless fall,
was blocked by something. A woman, he saw on drawing closer. Sinewy;
olive-skinned. With apple breasts and muscular legs and a frightful
gash in her throat that must have nearly decapitated her. Dried blood
stained her breasts and belly, matted her secret hair. She hovered in
the midst of the golden fire, immense, a giantess; but Beheim knew
her size was only apparent, a product of the visual distortions that
afflicted all who passed through Mystery, and when he drew closer
yet, he would find the light diminished and the woman shrunk to
normal proportions. Initially he had assumed her to be an Imago, a
scarecrow left by the Patriarch to warn off the uninvited, but as
they flashed toward her she reached out her arms as if in welcome.
His heart stuttered on seeing her more clearly. Red teeth filed to
points, pupils cored with fire. Her fingernails were ebony-colored,
long and curved and sharp. He tried to alter their course, to lunge
aside, but the current proved irresistible and he was borne into the
golden halation, then to within inches of the woman’s grasping
fingers. So close he could see the streaks of gray rot surfaced from
beneath her skin, the collapsed humors of her eyes, and he thought he
saw something else, something moving sluggishly in the blackness of
her mouth, an insect god perhaps, secure behind the scarlet
portcullis of her teeth. Then, as she slashed at him with those
razoring fingernails, the current spun him off to safety. From behind
him there came a shrill cry of disappointment.