She choked on her rabid words, and stopped. I could not help feeling some compassion, so I said, “And a few minutes later, you had even more reason for hating me.”
She nodded wretchedly, and swallowed, and got her voice working again. “I was returning to your chambers when they flew all apart, before my eyes, with that terrible noise and flame and smoke. Biliktu died then—and so did I, in everything but body. She had long been my sister, my twin, and we had long loved each other. I might have felt wrath enough if I had lost only my twin sister. But it was
you
who made us more than sisters. You made us
lovers.
And then you destroyed my loved one.
You!”
That last word burst out in a spray of spittle. I prudently said nothing, and again it took her a moment before she could go on.
“I would happily have killed you then. But too many things were happening, too many people about. And then you went suddenly away. I was left alone. I was as alone as a person can be. The only one I loved in the world was dead, and everyone else thought I was, too. I had no employment to occupy me, no one to answer to, no place I was expected to be. I felt quite thoroughly dead, myself. I still do.”
She fell morosely silent again, so I prodded. “But the Arab found employment for you.”
“He knew I had not been in the room with Biliktu. He was the only one who knew. No one else suspected my existence. He told me he might have use for such an invisible woman, but for a long time he did not. He paid me wages, and I lived alone in a room down in the city, and I sat and looked at the walls of it.” She sighed deeply. “How long has it been?”
“Long,” I said sympathetically. “It has been a long time.”
“Then one day he sent for me. He said you were on your way back, and we must prepare a suitable surprise with which to welcome you home. He wrote out two papers, and had me heavily veil myself—even more of an invisible woman—and I delivered them. One I gave to your slave to give to you. If you have seen it, you know it was not signed. The other paper he did sign, but not with his own yin, and that one I delivered some while later to the Captain of the Palace Guard. It was an order to arrest the woman Mar-Janah and take her to the Fondler.”
“Amoredèi!” I exclaimed in horror. “But … but … the guardsmen do not arrest and the Fondler does not punish just on someone’s whim! What was Mar-Janah charged with? What did the paper say? And how did the vile Wali sign it, if not with his own name?”
While Buyantu had been telling of occurrences, her voice had had some spirit in it, if only the spirit of a venomous snake taking satisfaction in malevolent accomplishment. But when I began demanding details, the spirit went out of her, and her voice got leaden and lifeless.
She said, “When the Khan is away from the court, the Minister Achmad is Vice-Regent. He has access to all the yins of office. I suppose he can use whichever he pleases, and sign it to any paper. He used the yin of the Armorer of the Palace Guard, who was the Lady Chao Ku-an, who was the former owner of the slave Mar-Janah. The order charged that the slave was a runaway, passing as a freewoman of property. The guardsmen would not question the written word of their own Armorer, and the Fondler questions nobody but his victims.”
I was still sputtering in appalled bewilderment. “But … but … even the Lady Chao—she is no paragon of virtue, but even she would refute an untrue charge illicitly made in her name.”
Buyantu said dully, “The Lady Chao died very shortly thereafter.”
“Oh. Yes. I had forgotten.”
“She probably never knew of the misuse of her official yin. In any case, she did not halt the proceedings, and now she never will.”
“No. How very convenient for the Arab. Tell me, Buyantu. Did he ever confide to you why he was taking so much trouble, and involving so many people—or eliminating them—on my account?”
“He said only ‘Hell is what hurts worst,’ if that means anything to you. It does not to me. He said it again this evening, when he sent me again to follow you up here and whisper that threat once more.”
I said between my teeth, “I think it is time I spread some of that Hell around.” Then a chilling realization struck me, and I exclaimed, “Time! How much time? Buyantu—quick, tell me—what punishment would the Fondler inflict for Mar-Janah’s alleged crime?”
She said, with indifference, “A slave posing as a free subject? I do not really know, but—”
“If it is not too severe, we still have hope,” I breathed.
“—but the Minister Achmad said that such a crime is tantamount to treason against the state.”
“Oh, dear God!” I groaned. “The penalty for treason is the Death of a Thousand! How—how long ago was Mar-Janah taken?”
“Let me think,” she said languidly. “It was after your slave had gone to catch up to you and give you the unsigned message. So it has been … about two months … two and a half … .”
“Sixty days … seventy-five …” I tried to calculate, though my mind was in a ferment. “The Fondler once said he could stretch out that punishment, when he had the leisure and was in the mood, to near a hundred days. And a beautiful woman in his clutches ought to put him in a most leisurely mood. There might yet be time. I must run!”
“Wait!” said Buyantu, seizing my sleeve. Again there came a trace of life into her voice, though not very fittingly, for what she said was, “Do not go until you have slain me.”
“I will not slay you, Buyantu.”
“You must! I have been dead all this long time. Now kill me, so I can lie down at last.”
“I will not.”
“You would not be punished for it, since you could justify it. But you will not even be charged—for you are slaying an invisible woman, nonexistent, already attested dead. Come! You must feel the same rage that I felt when you slew my love. I have been long working to your hurt, and now I have helped to send your lady friend to the Fondler. You have every reason to slay me.”
“I have more reason to let you live—and atone. You will be my proof of Achmad’s involvement in these filthy doings. There is no time now to explain. I must run. But I need you, Buyantu. Will you just stay here until I return? I will be as quick as I can.”
She said wearily, “If I cannot lie in my grave, what matter where I am?”
“Only wait for me. Try to believe that you owe me that much. Will you?”
She sighed and sank down, her back bowed against the inner curve of the Moon Gate. “What matter? I will wait.”
I went down the hill in long bounds, asking myself whether I ought first accost the instigating Achmad or the perpetrating Fondler. Better hasten first to the Fondler, and hope I could stay his hand. But would he still be working at this late hour? As I scurried through the subterranean tunnels toward his cavern chambers, I groped in my purse and tried to count my money by feel. Most of it was paper, but there were some coins of good gold. The Fondler might be wearying of his enjoyment by now, and be cheaply bribable. As it turned out, he was still at his labors, and was surprisingly amenable to my appeal—but not from either boredom or avarice.
I had to do a lot of shouting and pounding of my fist on a table and shaking of it at the austere and aloof chief of the chambers clerks, but he finally unbent and went to interrupt his master at his work. The Fondler came mincing out through the iron-studded door, fastidiously wiping his hands on a silk cloth. Restraining my impulse to throttle him then and there, I upended my purse on the table between us, and poured out all its contents, and said breathlessly, “Master Ping, you hold a Subject woman named Mar-Janah. I have this moment learned that she was unjustly condemned to you. Does she still live? Can I request a temporary cessation of due process?”
His eyes glittered as he studied me. “I have a warrant for her execution,” he said. “Do you bring a revoking warrant?”
“No, but I will get one.”
“Ah. When you do, then … .”
“I ask only that the proceedings be suspended until I can do so. That is—if the woman still lives. Does she?”
“Of course she lives,” he said haughtily. “I am not a butcher.” He even laughed and shook his head, as if I had foolishly disparaged his professional skill.
“Then do me the honor, Master Ping, of accepting this token of my appreciation.” I indicated the litter of money on the table. “Will that requite your kindness?”
He only grunted a noncommittal “Humpf,” but began swiftly picking out the gold coins from the pile, without seeming to look at what he was doing. For the first time, I noticed that his fingers had nails incredibly long and curved, like talons.
I said anxiously, “I understand that the woman was sentenced to the Death of a Thousand.”
Contemptuously disregarding the paper money, he scooped the coins into his belt purse, and said, “No.”
“No?” I echoed, hopefully.
“The warrant specified the Death Beyond a Thousand.”
I was briefly stunned, and then afraid to ask for elucidation. I said, “Well, can that be suspended for a time? Until I can fetch a revocation order from the Khakhan?”
“It can,” he said, rather too readily. “If you are certain that that is what you want. Mind you, Lord Marco—that is your name? I thought I remembered you. I am honest in my transactions, Lord Marco. I do not sell goods sight unseen. You had best come and take a look at what you are buying. I will refund your—token of appreciation—if you ask it.”
He turned and tripped across the chamber to the iron-studded door, and held it open for me, and I followed him into the inner chamber, and—dear God—I wish I had not.
However, in my desperate urgency to rescue Mar-Janah, I had neglected to bear in mind certain things. She, simply in being a beautiful female Subject, would have inspired the Fondler to inflict his most infernal tortures, and to drag them out as cruelly long as possible. But more than that. The warrant would have told him that Mar-Janah was the spouse of one Ali Babar, and it would have been an easy matter for Master Ping to discover that Ali was the onetime slave who had visited these very chambers, to the Fondler’s extreme disgust. (He had said in revulsion,
“Who … is … this?”)
And Ping would have remembered that that slave was my slave, and that I had been an even more obnoxious visitor. (I had, not knowing that he understood Farsi, called him “this simpering enjoyer of other people’s torments.”) So he would have had every excuse for exerting himself to the utmost in his attentions to the condemned Subject, who was wife to the lowly slave of Marco Polo, who had once so brashly insulted him. And now he had the very same Marco Polo before him, abjectly suppliant and pleading and cringing. The Fondler was not just willing, but fiendishly eager and proud, to show me the handiwork he had wrought—and to let me realize that it had resulted, in no small part, from my own foolhardy impertinence.
In the stone-walled, torch-lighted, blood-warmed, gore-spattered, nauseously reeking inner chamber, Master Ping and I stood side by side and looked at the room’s central object, red and shiny and dripping and ever so slightly steaming. Or rather, I looked at it, and he looked sideways at me, gloating and waiting for my comment. I said nothing for a while. I could not have done, for I was repeatedly swallowing, determined not to let him hear me retch or see me vomit. So, probably to goad me, he began pedantically to explain the scene before us:
“You realize, I trust, that the Fondling has been going on for some time now. Observe the basket, and in it the comparatively few papers still unpicked from it and unfolded. Only those eighty-seven papers are left, because I had this day got to the nine hundred and thirteenth of them. You may believe it or not, but just that single paper has occupied my entire afternoon, and kept me working this late into the evening. That was because, when I unfolded it, it was the third directive to the Subject’s ‘red jewel,’ which was somewhat hard to find in all that mess down there between the thigh stumps, and which of course had already received attention twice before. So it required all my skill and concentration to—”
I was able finally to interrupt him. I said harshly, “You told me this was Mar-Janah, and she was still living. This thing is not she, and it cannot conceivably be alive.”
“Yes, it is, and yes, it is. Furthermore, she is capable of
staying
alive, too, with proper treatment and care—if anyone were unkind enough to want her to. Step closer, Lord Marco, and see for yourself.”
I did. It was alive and it was Mar-Janah. At the top end of it, where must have been the head, there hung down, from what must have been the scalp, a single matted lock of hair not yet torn out by the roots, and it was long—a woman’s hair—and it was still discernibly ruddy-black in color, and curly—Mar-Janah’s hair. Also the thing made a noise. It could not have seen me, but it might dimly have heard my voice, through the remaining aperture where an ear had been, and perhaps even recognized my voice. The noise it made was only a faint bubbling blubber of sound, but it seemed feebly to say, “Marco?”
In a controlled and level voice—I would not have believed that I could manage that—I remarked to the Fondler, almost conversationally:
“Master Ping, you once described to me, in loving detail, the Death of a Thousand, which is what this seems to me to be. But you called this one by another name. What is the difference?”