“Get into
the study!” Beheim locked his fingers in the Lady Dolores’s
hair, twisted her head so that she faced Felipe, displaying for him
the full extent of her fear. “Do what I tell you! At once!”
Felipe continued
his retreat. “Do you know what awaits you now, you simple
bastard? You—”
“I’ll
give you another second or two before I burn her,” Beheim told
him. “After that you’ll have all the time in the world to
threaten me.”
Felipe stepped
back into the study. “The light of Hell,” he said again,
just before Giselle closed the study door after him and shot the
bolt. “Make sure you tell Agenor that. Use those exact words.
Not even in the light of Hell will he find respite.”
Lady Dolores had
fallen to her knees; her head was lowered, her face hidden by a
tangle of black hair. Her pendulous breasts hung free of the robe,
which had bellied open, and her fingers clawed obsessively at the
floor. Beheim delighted on seeing her in this submissive posture.
“Why did
you do it?” he asked her.
She started to
lift her head, but he warned her not to look at him, to keep her eyes
fixed on the floor. Then he repeated his question. When she replied
that she did not understand, he asked why she and Felipe had killed
the Golden.
“I’ve
killed no one,” she said, and then, with fresh malice in her
voice, she added, “At least, not recently.”
“So it was
Felipe.”
“No, he
was with me here.” She gave her hair a toss. “You’re
an idiot to think we’re involved. What could we possibly hope
to gain?”
Giving the weird
black maw at the center of the room a wide berth, Giselle came up
beside Beheim and took his arm.
“Perhaps
gain had nothing to do with it,” he said.
Lady Dolores
kept silent, and he made menacing play with the torch.
“Damn
you!” She stared up at him like a madwoman through the disarray
of her hair, the whiteness of her drawn face seeming an element of
her ferocity, as shocking as ice on the spine. She lowered her head
again. “You have no idea of how you’re being used.”
“And how
is that?”
“I can
only guess,” she said. “But the Golden . . .
don’t you see? She was of no consequence. None whatsoever. Who
would be foolish enough to risk such an act for a taste of her blood?
The murder must have been a means to an end, not an end in itself.”
“I don’t
see how that eliminates you from suspicion.”
“Think,
damn it! What was the next step following the murder? Who made the
next move?”
“If you
know, tell me.”
“Agenor,
you imbecile!”
“I don’t
understand.”
“He had
you appointed to head the investigation, didn’t he? Do you
actually believe that this was due to your investigative prowess? Are
you that much of a fool? Agenor is using you to implement one of his
schemes.”
Beheim mulled
over the implications of what she had said. “I’m at a
loss to understand how this exonerates you.”
“Who is
Agenor’s current adversary?” Lady Dolores tapped her
breast. “I am! He has taken this opportunity to aim you at me.
And at my lover.”
Beheim saw that
there might be some validity to this accusation, but he said, “My
lady, if I were to disregard evidence on the grounds that every one
of my suspects had enemies who seek to harm them, then I would have
no suspects at all. I’m afraid your attempt to undermine my
confidence in Lord Agenor is as fundamentally unsound and simplistic
as is the stratagem that you have accused him of using.”
“You are a
great fool,” she said. “I wonder if even Agenor knows how
great.”
He decided to
try another tack. “When I mentioned that the Lady Alexandra had
provided me with information implicating Felipe, you put on a fine
show of outrage. But given your relationship with her, I doubt it
came as surprise. What did you have in mind by trying to influence me
in this direction? Don’t you realize that I understand how she
has succeeded in turning my investigation to her purposes? Perhaps to
your purposes as well. It seems reasonable to me that this scheme to
implicate Felipe might have been hatched by the both of you.”
Was that a noise
of amusement that escaped Lady Dolores’s lips? He could not be
sure, not having seen her face when she uttered it. But the words
that followed were scarcely the product of an amused sensibility, and
he was unable to determine whether or not she was acting.
“I will
not hear it!” she said, an eager muscle working in her jaw. “I
will hear no more of your poison against Alexandra! She is an
innocent in this. Speak one more lie concerning her . . .”
For a few
seconds her words were reduced by the fierceness of her emotions to a
fuming sputter more like animal speech. She drew a breath, her
shoulders hunching, back bowing. For an instant Beheim had the idea
that she was expanding, growing, becoming a giantess. He examined
Dolores’s anger in the context of Alexandra’s
characterization of their relationship. It was not out of the
question that she had been telling the truth. If Dolores had seduced
her against her will, it might have been because she had been
obsessed with Alexandra to begin with—and this would explain
Dolores’s description of her as an innocent. He wanted to
believe this, he wanted to believe in everything that happened
between them. But he did not think he could sustain belief against
his growing suspicion that she had sent him to Felipe’s
apartment for reasons other than she had revealed.
“I have
lived for nearly three centuries,” Dolores said huskily, giving
the impression that she was holding back a shout. “I have loved
five thousand men, five thousand women. I have seen Siberia burning
and I have walked in the hidden cities of the Khan. And now, to be
cowed by a pitiful thing like you.” She let out a labored sigh.
“Three centuries. Perhaps it is enough.”
She glanced up
at him.
“Don’t
do this,” he cautioned, guessing her intent. Giselle whispered,
“Michel!” and tightened her grip on his arm.
Lady Dolores
gave a distressed laugh, one that seemed reflective, a
self-commentary.
“Turn your
eyes away from me,” Beheim told her.
“My eyes?”
she said. “Is it only my eyes you fear? Not my hands, or my
hair? Not these?” She cupped her breasts as if assessing their
weights, her thumbs making idle circles about the chocolate-colored
nipples. She gave another distraught laugh, and her voice acquired a
burred, urgent tonality. “Oh, cousin, cousin, I am made of
fearful stuff! My heart is poison, my mind is fire and a rhyme. My
flesh is death itself. Beetles lay pearly eggs in the crannies of my
brain. There is no more fearful thing than I, no more desperate and
conscienceless an enemy. Do you believe I lack the courage or the
will to drag you down to Hell on fire in my arms? If so, you are
wrong, mortally wrong, for I fear death only as I might fear to
satisfy a lover of whom I’ve dreamed a thousand nights. He is
with me always, and I have always yearned for him. He is endlessly
alluring, endlessly patient. Those who do not know him, they fear
him. But not I. Though he is Mystery itself, he is no mystery to me,
no undiscovered country. I have traveled each night along his stygian
rivers, along the moon-colored roads that lead forth from the desert
of the skull. I have run with the beast whose beauty is the sun that
creates the beautiful shadows of our lives. I have taken his demons
in my mouth and drunk the juice of their decaying fecundity. The
homunculi who burrow in his night soil have crawled inside me. I have
given myself to the parasites that feed on the residues of his
terrible dreams.” She gazed with daft intensity at the black
opening that Felipe had conjured, as if newly aware of it. “Death.
Say it, cousin. Say it and listen how it vibrates in the air! The
word has a windy, solemn sound, does it not? Like the expiration of a
great passion, or the first breath of a storm.”
She buried her
face in her hands as if overborne by her lust for death. But then,
moving more quickly than Beheim had thought possible, catching him
unawares, she reached up and seized his wrist, immobilizing the arm
that bore the torch. With her free hand, she knocked Giselle aside,
and rising to her feet, flung Beheim against the door. The torch
dropped to the stones, scattering sparks, and rolled away behind her.
“Yet if
needs be,” she said gleefully, “I am willing to endure
life a while longer.” She secured her hold on his jacket,
lifting him so that his feet dangled. “Long enough, at any
rate, to oversee your final passage.” She called out over her
shoulder. “Felipe! I am free!”
Beheim butted
her in the face, and she staggered backward, losing her grip on him.
Blood spurted from her nose, filming thick as gravy over her lips and
chin. Her tongue flicked out. She lapped at the bright flow from her
nostrils and smiled.
Felipe began to
hurl himself against the study door; the wood bowed outward with the
each impact.
Then Lady
Dolores shrieked. She looked in horror at the smoke that had begun to
billow up about her, for in recoiling from Beheim’s blow, she
had stepped close enough to the fallen torch that a spark had caught
on the train of her robe. Now the silky fabric was alive with flame.
She let out a howl of agony and rage and threw herself at him, but he
ducked away. He caught Giselle by the arm, and veering to the right
of the magical void, which still held its form in the center of the
room, he dragged her back from the alcove and the burning woman who
tottered after them, screaming, arms outstretched, rapidly becoming a
gigantic torch that brightened the air till it seemed like day. The
study door splintered and cracked. Lady Dolores’s skin
blistered and grew dark, her screams shredded into a raw grating
noise barely audible above the snapping of the fire that was
consuming her. The crisping mask of her face was horrid to see, and
Beheim now felt nothing of vengeance, no hint of triumph. She made a
rush at them, shedding gouts of flame, but when they eluded her, she
changed direction and, taking a wobbly step to her left, poising for
a fraction of a second as if to orient herself, thus leaving no doubt
in Beheim’s mind that this was a conscious act, she toppled
into the black maw hovering in midair just as Felipe burst through
the door in a shower of splinters, an explosion of snapped boards,
looking—with his bared fangs and reddened eyes—like the
emblem of nightmare. Aghast at the sight of Dolores, he caught her
wrist, and as she fell, she in turn—perhaps thinking he was
Beheim, or perhaps in mere reflex—clasped him in an embrace.
For a moment they teetered on the brink of a mortal balance, half in,
half out of that chill black emptiness; the flames crawled up
Felipe’s arm, licking at his face. Then Beheim, recognizing
that he could not chance their survival, ran forward and shoved them
in.
Their
disappearance into the void created a harrowing stillness. It seemed
impossible that so much vitality could have been snuffed out so
quickly, and Beheim experienced a central uneasiness at the
suddenness and finality of the deaths . . . if death
it was. Perhaps Lady Dolores had believed that the blackness would
muffle the flames. But it did not. Even after she and Felipe had
receded to a great distance, Beheim could see them burning: a tiny
reddish star in the midst of pale, swarming lights. The silence in
the room made a kind of prison for him, turning his thoughts inward
and forcing him to contemplate his ineptitude, his naïveté.
How easily he
had let her distract him!
He was assaulted
by the prospect of immortality lost. They would kill him for this
crime, they would force him to undergo an Illumination. Lashed to the
turret stones, he would bake and blister in the rays of dawn, the sun
would boil away his spirit, send it fuming ahead into the future, and
as he died he would howl out what he had seen, praying that his
vision would be of sufficient worth to the Family that the Patriarch
would signal a servant to make play with a wooden stake and end his
agony. He recalled hearing how Giuseppe Cinzal’s Illumination
had lasted for hours, how his visions of the future had been of such
clarity and import that the Patriarch had been loath to cut short the
process. Cinzal, it was said, had turned into a thing of sticks and
carbon, still spitting up roses of blood and clairvoyant fragments of
the truth in a voice like ashes.
What was the sun
that it could distill such mystical diamonds from the heat and
pressure of a death?
And what was the
soul that it could fly so far afield, that it could pass forward into
time and still maintain a connection with the flesh?
Beheim stood
bewildered, trying to make sense of everything that had happened, to
fit together the pieces of the event and make it display some
evidence of hope; but the only evidence available was that of his
folly. And of Alexandra’s betrayal. Oh, she had used him right
enough. And in doing so she had brought him to the end of his days.
The strange doorway through which Lady Dolores and Felipe had fallen
appeared now to be a black mirror reflecting his future.
Panic crackled
in his brain. Fear was thin, yellow, sour in his throat.
Chapter
Thirteen
G
iselle urged him toward the door, tugging at his arm, too stunned,
apparently, to speak. Though unmanned by fear, Beheim was still able
to feel pity for her. She must know there could be no escape, not
with these deaths upon their hands. Yet he could not bear to abolish
whatever hope remained to her, and since flight seemed preferable to
waiting, he acted out the gesture of survival, and they went down
from the drawbridge, down through the precipitous maze of arches and
stairways, down and down into the bottom places of the castle,
passing along byways so deep and obscure that whenever he chanced to
look up, the great hanging lanterns overhead appeared as faint stars
burning in a murky heaven. At any second he expected to hear shouts
behind them, but no pursuit came. Was it possible the crime had gone
undetected? He could think of no other explanation. Yet even so,
sooner or later Felipe and Dolores would be discovered missing, and
Alexandra would implicate him. She could not have presumed that he
would kill the lovers, but he was certain now that she had been
trying to discredit him or Agenor in some way; she would likely have
a net poised to drop upon him. And yet she had led him in a
profitable direction, for the suggestion of complicity between Agenor
and Felipe was intriguing, though how it might relate to the murder
of the Golden was still unclear.