The New Weird (32 page)

"Very much. I've always liked predators better than prey."

"Is that a fact? Again,
de gustibus..."
Gwynn blew a smoke ring, which the wind ruined in an instant, while Siegfried continued vivaciously.

"All you swordslingers and knife-fighters and all ― you've got the power of life and death. That's a pretty fascinating power. I guess I'd like to be able to put holes through people, too, sometimes. I've always admired you folks."

"Well, thank you, that's very nice. But tell me, do you take the orthodox view that we're enactors of divine justice ― instruments of a moral universe?"

There was a change in the man's voice, an undercurrent appearing which Siegfried heard but could not precisely name, so that he hesitated again, crossing out what he had started to write. He said, "I'm not really sure."

Gwynn crushed his cigarette out and stood up. He looked around the base of the stone, where a few gentians and wild white poppies were growing. He broke off the head of a poppy and carefully tucked it into his buttonhole. He gave Siegfried a foxy look.

"Choose a number between one and five."

"A number?" Siegfried was nonplussed. The man hardly seemed the type to play parlour games. He shrugged. "All right. Four. But I don't ― "

Gwynn drew one of his twin revolvers. He emptied two rounds out of the chamber, leaving four in. After appearing to give it a moment's second thought, he removed a third and a fourth round. He spun the chamber and snapped it shut.

"Stand over there," he said, pointing the muzzle of the gun at the open ground past the thornbush.

Siegfried swallowed hard. Was this some kind of ceremony, an initiation ritual ― a test of his courage and trust? Perhaps he had to survive this in order to be admitted to certain secrets. He had heard of such things happening.

Gwynn aimed the gun to point at Siegfried's face. "Move," he said.

Siegfried's heart vibrated as if someone had struck a gong inside his chest. Slowly, he put the notebook away in his pocket. There was nowhere he could run to, except over the cliff. He had no doubt that Gwynn's other gun was fully loaded. He had no idea of what else to do, so he got up from the stone, shakily, and stood a little behind the bush.

The gun muzzle waved. "Further back."

Siegfried walked haltingly backwards toward the cliff. He felt sick and weak-gutted, and wished he'd relieved himself back at the cafe, which now seemed to belong to another world.

"Further. Further. Stop!"

Siegfried couldn't see the end of the ground, but he knew it must be close behind him.
Have I been a fool?
he wondered. Gwynn was taking aim. The gunman's hair lifted suddenly in the wind, floating up to form a black halo radiating around his starkly moonlit face.

The shot was very loud.

Blood and matter erupted from the back of Siegfried's head, and his body fell backward into the empty sky.

Gwynn stalked to the verge of the cliff and looked down. He caught a vertiginous glimpse of the dead kid, a barely visible speck that soon diminished out of sight. He reloaded his gun and holstered it with a philosophical shrug.

Gwynn did not hold the orthodox view of his profession. For a moment he allowed himself to imagine that he had been an instrument of humour, sans the appellation of divinity. He mused, not for the first time, that if the putative divine claimed all territories of sense and significance for itself, it fell to comedy, with its bifurcations, reversals and annulments of sense, to destroy that claim. The existence of the comic viewpoint, even if it was only an interpretation placed upon the tragedy of a world where death was king of kings, might prove the absence of an absolute divine authority.

Mona did not die, and seemed embarrassed. She started taking her medicines again, claiming publicly to have grown bored with Death as a lover, but admitting privately to Vali that she felt a fresh enthusiasm for life.

"What made you change your mind?" Vali asked one morning. The slow pale arrows of the sun were passing through a vase of glass flowers on the windowsill, throwing faint coloured shadows onto their bed.

Equally colourful was the latest issue of
Hearts and Blades,
through which Vali was idly flicking. It featured the first installment of a serial in which Mona journeyed to the underworld to find a friend who was trapped there. The blurb for the next episode promised that "classic character" Vali Jardine would return. It was funny, Vali thought, to know that although one day you would die, your small-press avatars, your dolls and knick-knacks, would live on. You who had ceased to breathe and were extinguished would go on existing strangely, inflated by the sentience of readers and collectors, who would re-imagine you, re-create you, perhaps with less class and cleverness and fewer of your original qualities than you might have hoped for, but still, perhaps, with more energy, delight and imagination than you, when you lived, had put into the making of yourself.

Mona stretched her back and legs, luxuriating in the feeling of the mild sun and the linen sheets on her skin. Her malady was slowly but steadily going into remission. Her adventure in illness had been worth it, almost, for the pleasures of convalescence that were now hers ― those delicate, slightly abject pleasures of the reawakened senses. Milky tea and chicken soup, innocent aromas of bread and soap, the daily sounds of the street below fed like streams into the river of the sensual enjoyment she took in her recovery.

She hesitated over an answer. In fact, her recollection was hazy. She rather thought she had looked out into the night beyond the end of the Teleute Shelf and had feared it. Had refused its call ― had failed it, refusing in the end to go the final dance with the milkthistle ghost whose queer, scornful lullabies had burned her on the mouth in the cradle and made her a poet. And then, too, there was that kid, dying as if the hour had wanted a life and had taken the first one offered.

"I always was stubborn. I never took the right path."

"Gwynn said you were a runner."

Mona snorted. She smoothed the bedspread over her legs. "I don't know. Fashions change. I suppose I lost my nerve. Then again, sometimes the witless leaf keeps drifting, until it sees love coming to pick it up."

Vali smiled, entirely unfooled, and rang for their boy to bring breakfast.

On a clear day early in winter the two women took a picnic lunch to the necropolis. They sat inside the shrine of St. Anna Vermicula. Mona had been taking her various physicks like a model patient. She was less pale, and had begun training with her sword again.

"I'm feeling much better," she declared, chewing delicately on a sandwich. "Wanting to die was some strange summer madness that lingered on out of season, I think."

"Perhaps it was," Vali agreed vaguely.

She could not recapture the sense of timelessness she had felt here a month ago. The world was marching on. Coming out to the necropolis they had gone past numerous building sites. Tall brick apartment blocks were going up along the canal. Chic new bars attracted the in-crowd on Arcade Bridge.

Both women were in furs. Already there was a bite to the winter chill.

Although snow rarely fell on Sheol, Vali felt this year might prove an exception.

Munching on a biscuit, she watched the tiny figures of a tour group standing near the edge, peering down at the desert. Closer, in the middle of the no man's land, a group of children were playing "Masked Avengers." Their high voices carried on the wind:

The men in the masks,

The ladies in the masks,

See how they kill, see how they kill—

Six-shooters and switchblades,

Swords, daggers and poison,

We all fall down,

We all fall down.

At Reparata

EVERYONE REMEMBERS WHERE THEY WERE when they first heard that Queen Josette had died. I was standing in twilight on that cliff known as the Cold Shoulder, fly-fishing for bats. Beneath me, the lights of the palace shone with a soft glow that dissolved decrepitude into beauty, and a breeze was blowing in from the south, carrying with it the remnants of a storm at sea. I had just caught a glimpse of a star, streaking down behind the distant mountains, when there was a tug at my line followed hard by a cry that came, like the shout of the earth, up from the palace. I heard it first in my chest. Words would have failed to convince me of the fact, but that desperate scream told me plainly she was dead.

Josette had been an orphan left at the palace gates by a troupe ofwan-dering actors. She arrived at a point in her life between childhood and maturity, wondrously lithe and athletic with green eyes and her dark hair cut like a boy's. I suspect she had been abandoned in hopes that her beauty and intelligence might work to make her a better life than one found on the road. This was back in the days when Ingess had just begun to build his new court from society's castaways. Upon seeing her, he pronounced she was to be the Lady of the Mirrors, but we all knew that she would someday lose the title to that of Queen. The drama that brought her to this stately affair was ever the court's favorite spectacle and topic of conversation.

Her hair grew long and entangled us all in her charm and innocence. Ingess married her on a cool day in late summer five years after her arrival, and the Overseer of Situations released a thousand butterflies upon the signal of their kiss. We all loved her as a daughter, and the younger ones among us as a mother. She never put on airs or forced the power of her elevated position, understanding better than anyone the equanimity that was the soul of the Palace Reparata. Her kindness was the perfect match for Ingess's comic generosity.

With her passing, His Royal, as he had insisted on being called, came apart like light in a prism. I sat four nights in succession with him in the gardens, smoking my pipe and listening to him weep into sunrise. The quantity of tears drained him of his good looks and left him a haggard wreck, like some old crone, albeit with shining, blonde hair.

"See here, Ingess," I told him but could go no further, the logic of his grief too persuasive.

He'd wave his hand at me and turn his face away.

And so the world he had managed to create with his pirate ancestor's gold, his kingdom, suddenly lost its meaning. Before Josette had succumbed to the poison of a spider bite, Reparata was a place where a wandering beggar might be taken in at any time and made a Court Accountant or Thursday's High Astronomer. Every member of the palace had a title bestowed upon them by His Royal. There was no want at Reparata, and this made it an oasis amidst the sea of disappointment and cruelty that we, each in his or her own way, had found the world to be.

Never before had a royal retinue been comprised of so many lowly worms. The Countess Frouch had been a prostitute known as Yams in the nearby seaside town of Gile. His Royal welcomed her warmly, without judgment, as he did Tendon Durst, a round, bespectacled lunatic who believed beyond a doubt that he was joined at a shared eye with a phantom twin. In a single day's errant wandering, Durst had set out as a confirmed madman and ended the evening at the palace with a room of his own and a title of Philosopher General. We had never before seen someone speak simultaneously from both sides of the mouth, but that night he walked in his sleep and told us twice at once that he would never leave Reparata. We all shared his sentiment.

Even Ringlat the highwayman, hiding from the law, performed his role of Bishop to the Crown righteously. Our lives were transformed by a position in society and whatever bizarre duties His Royal might dream up at his first encounter with us, standing before him at the palace gates, begging for a heel of bread or the eyes from that morning's marsupial dish. Times were bad everywhere, but Ingess was so wealthy, and Reparata was so far removed from the rest of the world, no one who wandered there and had the courage to ask for something was sent away. We lived long bright days as in a book and then, with a fit of narcolepsy, the reader closed his eyes and fell asleep.

If we ever had intentions of fleecing His Royal, the time of his mourning was the perfect opportunity. Instead, we went about our jobs and titles with even greater dedication, taking turns keeping an eye on our melancholic leader. My full title was High and Mighty of Next Week. Ingess, beneath his eccentric sense of humor, must have known that it was the only position vague enough to tame my impulses. On my own, I, who had never done an honest day's work in my life, created and performed a series of ritual tasks that gave definition to my importance at court. Gathering bats in order to exterminate the garden's mosquitos was only one of them. Another was dusting the items in the palace attic.

On Mondays I would usually spend the mornings making proclamations, and on the Monday following the death of Josette, I proclaimed that we should seek some medical help for His Royal. He had begun to see his young wife's spirit floating everywhere and was trying to do himself in with strong drink, insomnia, and grief.

"I see her next to the Fountain of the Dolphins as we speak, Flam," he said to me one night in the gardens.

I looked over at the fountain and saw nothing, but, still, the frantic aspect of his gaze sent a shiver through me.

It turned out to be the first proclamation of mine that was ever acted upon. I got high and mighty on the subject and didn't wait until the following week. Carrier pigeons were sent out to all the surrounding kingdoms inquiring if there was anyone who could cure the melancholy of loss. A small fortune in gold was offered as the reward. I changed my own title to Conscience of the King and set about to do all in my power to cure Ingess, if not for his own good, then for the good of the state.

While we waited for a reply, His Royal raved and stared, only stopping occasionally to caress the empty air. His mourning reached such a state of hysteria that it made me wonder if it was natural. I had the Regal Ascendiary, Chin Mokes, a five-time convicted forger, take over the task of signing the royal notes of purchase in order to keep the palace running smoothly. A plan was hatched in which one of the women, well-powdered and bewigged, would dress up like Josette and, standing in the shadows of the gardens, tell Ingess to stop grieving. After the Countess Frouch laughed at us in that tone that could wither a forest, though, we saw the emptiness of our scheme.