The Ruined City (52 page)

Aureste tossed in his sleep, frowned and grumbled. The Fume slid through his parted lips and into his mouth. Insinuating tendrils of itself into his nostrils, it plunged to the depths of his lungs, thence finding its way into his blood.

It was done. Events would now proceed to their beautifully inevitable conclusion. Vinz allowed his connection with the Source to lapse, lest the surge of arcane activity in their very midst lure his colleagues from slumber. Spent, he lay down again, and drew the blanket up to his chin, but did not allow himself to sleep, did not so much as shut his eyes. Soon Aureste Belandor would wake, and Vinz very much wanted to see what would happen then.

He wanted to see it all.

The Magnifico Aureste dreamed. In his dream, he walked a dark and gloomy wood, a place of loss and loneliness. At first he walked alone, wrapped in despondent reflection. But soon others came to him, surrounded and pressed in close upon him. They were pale and translucent of face and form, and they moved with impossible lightness, as if their feet did not touch the ground. He understood that they were not alive, but did not know whether they were real or imaginary, whether he was awake or asleep.

Then he perceived that the faces were known to him. They came out of the past, both distant and more recent, and they did not come in friendship.

There before him rose his trusting cousin, the Magnifico Onarto Belandor, who had offered him hospitality and protection during the wars. Onarto, whom he had betrayed, ruined, and ultimately murdered. Onarto, whose fortune and title he had usurped.

And there beside Magnifico Onarto glimmered a woman, her face streaked with luminous tears. He knew those tears, he had seen them flowing endlessly from the eyes of his wife, the Lady Zavilla. She had been vastly wealthy and quite comely—it was from her mother that Jianna had inherited the exquisite alabaster complexion—but for all of that, a pitiful creature, weak and clinging. Within weeks of their wedding, he had come to despise her tears, her groveling pleas for affection, her whining reproaches. He had not troubled to disguise his contempt, and she had waxed melancholy and languid, then died in the aftermath of childbirth. Many women died in childbirth. But perhaps if she had been stronger, happier, allowed a modicum of hope—?

And there was Onarto’s younger son Trecchio Belandor, his throat agleam with ghostly gore, shed at Aureste’s command.

And there was an inhuman form among them—a Sishmindri. He recognized Zirriz, formerly of his own household. He remembered the ache in his arm from the violent exertion of the whipping. He remembered the smell of Zirriz’s blood.

And then there was the stout albeit transparent form of the Magnificiari Flune Brulustro, whose false accusation and arrest he had personally engineered. He had witnessed Brulustro’s execution.

And there was the old moneybags, Stizi Oni, strangled in his bed. If only old Oni had been more reasonable, if only he had died of natural causes as a person of his age ought, it would not have been necessary to arrange his removal.

And there were others, so many others. In some cases he had lost the names, but the faces were unforgettable.

A tide of grief and guilt overwhelmed him. Its intensity was extraordinary, and even in his dream he wondered at it. Occasionally, throughout the course of a long and interesting career, the pangs of conscience had troubled him, and he had learned long ago how to distance such qualms, how to neutralize and reject them. He was, in fact, an expert at such mental maneuvering. But never before had he suffered such an assault. He could not contain, evade, or stand against it.

Desperate in his dream, he snatched the dagger from his belt and thrust at the shape of Onarto Belandor. The blade passed through nothingness, and Onarto smiled upon him, but not in malice or triumph. It was the simple, kindly, trusting smile of old, and the sight of it shattered Aureste’s defenses. Despair crushed him, pressing the tears from his eyes in streams. He was, he realized, a piece of vile human pollution, unfit to live.

The world would be a better place without him.

It would
. He did not know where the voice came from, whether it spoke inside his mind or came from the outside. He did not know whose voice it was, his own or someone else’s.

You are a criminal, a murderer, a traitor to your country, loathed and detested by all decent folk. Your very name is synonymous with villainy. You have brought shame upon a proud House, never before stained with infamy. Perhaps your daughter once loved you, but only because she did not know you for what you are. In any case, she is gone, dead or worse, because you failed to guard and protect her
.

The tears were burning him, inside and out. The voice tolled like a passing bell—sometimes speaking in his own resonant tones, sometimes with the fluting notes of a woman, sometimes as an echoing chorus.

The phantoms crowded in around him, too numerous to count, but all of them his victims, all of them tallying the sum of his crimes.

You bring naught but suffering and ugliness to the world
.

You are hated by all, and such is your just desert
.

You hate yourself, and that is as it should be
.

The world is a better place without you
.

“Enough!”
The cry wrung from his own lips woke the Magnifico Aureste. He gazed around him at a scene well illumined by moonlight. He walked a dark and gloomy wood, a place of loss and loneliness. He was barefoot and uncloaked. Evidently he had risen in his sleep and wandered from the camp. In his right hand he grasped his dagger. He was drenched in sweat, dizzy, and afire with fever. An iron band of the imagination seemed to clamp his temples. And the despair—the gigantic, killing despair of his dream—that was with him yet, deeper and darker than ever, permeating every fiber.

The ghosts were likewise with him yet. He gasped, and passed his free hand across his eyes. He was awake, or so he believed. But those floating phantasms were all about him—Onarto, Zavilla, Moneybags Oni, and all the others, all of them with their wounds and their knowing eyes that he remembered too well. And the fever blazed in his head, while the voices spoke on and on, and the guilt devoured his heart, and the dagger in his fist ached to drink his blood.

One stroke to atone and escape. One stroke, so easy and so right.

But there before him was another figure, one among many, but somehow different, less ethereal of substance, not unfamiliar, and watching with a look of simple pleasure. He knew them all, and this new one was no exception. Confusion clouded his thoughts and his eyes, and it took him a moment to recognize Vinz Corvestri, who—although wronged by the Magnifico Aureste—owned no proper place among the ghosts. But perhaps he did. Perhaps he had quietly died during the night, and now legitimately claimed membership in this company.

He had drawn very near, this happy Corvestri-figure. He
was watching avidly, and he was speaking, his tones somehow unlike those of the other ghosts.

“Do it. Do it. It is the only way.”

Something within Aureste’s burning brain rose in rage and revolt. Some confused recognition of trickery and treachery exploded, its force driving his dagger through flesh and vitals.

The mad moonlit world reeled. Gasping, Aureste dropped to his knees, and the dagger fell from his hand. For a time he knew nothing, understood nothing. Then, swift as a fleeing nightmare, the delirium abated. His surroundings had resumed their normal aspect. The conifers rose stately and somber; a night bird hooted nearby. The ghosts were gone, or perhaps they had never been there at all. Surely they could not have been real.

But one remained, its solid reality unquestionable. Eyes sightlessly staring and chest soaked with blood, Vinz Corvestri lay dead on the ground before him.

B
Y
P
AULA
B
RANDON

The Traitor’s Daughter

The Ruined City

The Wanderers