And so it came to pass that the beast went the ball.
They stood just inside the gate of 4 Kühler Brunnen. They made a fine pair, plumed and bejewelled, masked and covered, loose and sensuous silks flashing provocatively beneath their cloaks.
‘Will it be like the story you read me, the one you liked so much? With the clock and the coloured rooms, the one that gave me nightmules?’ he asked.
‘Nightmares,’ she corrected. ‘Yes, but not so solemn. It will be much ruder. Everybody is drunk and behaves badly.’
‘How badly?’ he asked, apprehensively.
‘Behind a mask you can be anybody, do anything. No one is found guilty, no one is innocent; there are more children sired during these three days than the rest of the year. And no one looks too closely for family resemblance, nine months later, when the babes are born.’
‘And nobody is ever unmasked?’
‘Never!’ she said, with more certitude than she felt. It was true that one felt a certain freedom under the protection of disguise, and she had committed petty crimes and minor malices before under the mask. But she had never possessed the nerve to engage in open debauchery. Until now.
They peeped through the gap and plucked at the springboard of their nerves, readying to be jettisoned into the whirling throng of dreams that bustled and shoved in the streets outside. The noise was colossal. Hurdy-gurdies and pipers roamed the streets, confusing the vast steam organ that played from the heart of the market square. There were fireworks and pistol shots, trumpets and singing, screaming and laughter.
Suddenly, the gate was open and they were gone. Mutter locked it hard behind them and spat on to the wet cobblestones.
* * *
My gentle years are over. A long-forgotten hunger has been rekindled by my unexpected adventure, and I feel its energy course hungrily through my body. The murderer across the water has awoken a coiled reaction – I can taste his blood, even at this distance. Why anyone would find cause to shoot at me remains a mystery. My dealings with other humans are decades past, and all before that is erased. Only my wife keeps the memories in her flesh and moisture, both of which live in my bow. We will find the assassin and dig the answers out of him; my foes in this unfamiliar and treacherous world will not remain hidden.
I will rest, and make an evening camp. In the coming morning, I will make new arrows, and use them to sign my passage and sweep all enemies aside. The man in the water will be in no hurry to meet me again, and the next time he does, the first shot will be mine.
* * *
The cleric knew he would not be alone. He slowly prepared himself behind the kitchen lean-to, at the back of the inn, deep in the animal shadow of its primitive architecture. He moved his large hands around his cane, and adjusted his hat and the side panels of his green-glass spectacles.
Walking around to the entrance, he stiffly made his way to the bar, seemingly without registering the other occupants and their irritation at his presence. He hissed the name of a drink in a foreign accent, displacing himself even further from the company’s sympathy. His back was insultingly square against the faces of the seated clientele; his eyes could not be seen, but they picked every detail out of the mirror. All movement
was measured and assessed in its cracked, murky glass.
The twins exchanged a twisted look and approached him, breaking a shaft of light at the back of the room as they sauntered towards him, grinning. He stood three heads taller than they, implacable and deadly calm. The twin with the earring was rehearsing a suitably caustic and insulting address, when the cleric’s left hand crawled around from the side of his body to the small of his black back and stopped suddenly, one outstretched finger pointing menacingly towards them, statue-like in accusation. The pair froze, confused by this unpredictable and peculiar gesture. The other twin started to laugh on the strange side of his previous grin. His brother’s mouth was a wobbling slit of anger.
‘Who you pointing at, you stick-legged cunt?’ he said as he approached the hand. ‘We’ll cut your lungs out, yoooo!’
The rest of the wide body slowly turned to confront him, and he swallowed his voice in a gulp. Both hands were now pointing, a digit at each twin, the cane balanced across the stranger’s wrists like a conjuror’s wand. The face above the hands was long, broad, white and totally unnatural, a stretched, boiled egg, with tiny eyes and a flattened, broken nose. It looked unfinished and malleable, as if its shortsighted sculptor had retired midway through its creation. The twins had met and murdered all manner of men and women, but they had never come across an apparition like this before, never stood in the presence of indomitable wrongness.
With a voice like a paper cut, the cleric hissed, ‘Divided one, you have died!’ He drew the blade slowly from the cane with great deliberation, in the manner of a salesman handling a stock of priceless antiquities. As he brought it to a stop at eye-level, the room was reflected in its polished shine. Words, engraved along its length, shimmered in the light for all to see.
It was impossible to tell the span of time which had passed since the cleric’s utterance: it might have been a fraction of a second, or a full day. The ear-ringed twin jolted from his torpor, assessed the distance
of the blade, and pulled a curved dagger from his coat. His trajectory was certain to maim the stranger before he could turn his blade into a defensive or aggressive posture, and he charged, eyes locked on one of the blade’s shining words: ‘TRUTH’. With all his strength, he lunged onto the blade which clicked out of the wooden cane’s other end and twitched up, across his rushing throat.
The mortally wounded twin dropped his knife, grabbing at his own neck in a hopeless attempt to strangle the flow. His brother rushed to his side, one hand on his pistol, the other hopelessly attending to the ravaged wound, not knowing whether to fight or save his twin. The debate was settled for him by the lightning point of the written sword, which pierced his eye and was pushed to the back of his brain – he caught flashes of text as the words raced past the confusion of his other oculus.
As children, both twins had received some formal education. In their early years, they had been taught the elemental principles of grammar by a country curate. Later, they attended two years at a nearby seminary, where their reading and writing skills were greatly enhanced. They had not come from the gutter, like most of their kind, but from a respected family of seed merchants; the little town where they were born had been mildly affluent. But, at the tender age of twelve, they had turned from the upstanding paths of scholar and cloth and wilfully run onto the twisted, bitter road that brought them to this place, where they now danced in their own blood.
The stranger brought his face close to the shuffling man and hissed, ‘The scripture of the blade says, THE WAY!’ – he thrust the blade in further, so that the words were deep inside – ‘THE TRUTH!’ – the point grated and stopped against the bone of the skull – ‘AND THE LIFE!’ With this, he brought his other hand down, pushing steel through bone, skewering the blade’s length through the bobbing head. He twisted the blade, the words vanishing with a crunching sliver, and then pulled it clear of the wobbling rag doll in one swift, smooth stroke. Caught in a moment of rubber balance, his victim briefly looked like a child’s toy
or a dancing monkey. Still holding the dying man, the cleric cleaned the blasphemous blade on the lapel of his victim’s twitching coat, before letting him drop to the steaming floor.
The dog, inert up to that point, twitched an eye open at the sound. But it had all happened so smoothly, with such minimal movement, that there was almost nothing to be seen and, observing nothing of consequence, he stretched comfortably, lay his head back on the stony floor, and returned to his dreams.
Each action had been focused, precise and confident. It had been an execution in every meaning of the word, and the power of its malice was pristine in its inexorable certitude. There had been an air of delight about the act.
The perpetrator turned to the innkeeper, who had remained motionless throughout, and placed two heavy coins and a flat, wooden sheath on the bar. He opened the sheath and displayed a tablet of hard wood, covered in gold writing, a wax seal at its base and an insignia on the seal. The innkeeper’s gaze was fixed on the coins.
‘The money is for you to clean this away. Do you know what this is?’ The fat man nodded and avoided looking at the stranger’s face.
‘I am Sidrus, and I have jurisdiction in this sector.’ He opened his hand to reveal the same wax insignia, tattooed onto the palm of his hand. ‘How long were these two waiting here?’ he demanded.
‘Eleven or twelve days now,’ said the innkeeper, cautiously picking up the coins, and holding their weight in his closed paw. ‘Them and the other one together, the black one.’
‘And where is he?’
‘I don’t know, been gone two days now.’
The cleric knew he was telling the truth; he had been watching the inn, only entering after the other man had left. ‘Have any others passed this way in recent weeks?’ he asked.
‘Just drifters and strangers, moving on.’
The man dressed as a cleric suspected that there would be many more hunters seeking their prey, more assassins trying to kill the man with the bow, before he got close to the Vorrh. He did not know how many he would have to dispatch to protect the Bowman and allow him to make the impossible journey through the forest to the other side, where he would be waiting for him. He could not enter it at all, and had circumnavigated its perimeter to reach him. It had taken him two months to arrive in this shithole.
The bodies of the twins had stopped twitching. Stepping clear of the lake of their blood, he picked up the wooden tablet he had displayed and made for the door. A dim, gawping youth stood in his way by mistake, frozen to the spot as the incident replayed through his slow brain.
‘Kippa! Kippa, get out of the way!’ barked the innkeeper.
The cleric stopped moving and brought his sheathed cane into view. He knew there was no danger from this faint one, but he had no intention of showing mercy as the other drinkers watched; even the dog had awakened to the danger and watched him with bared teeth from beneath the table.
Kippa was still rendered immobile, unable to take his eyes away from the approaching demon. The blade made a great, circular arc, an elaborate matador flourish that had none of the surgical precision of its previous use. On its upward swing, it cut between the youth’s legs, severing his budding manhood and sending him, toppling and screeching, out of the deliberate path of the living, grinning nightmare called Sidrus.
* * *
It crawled across the floor on all fours, its long, white proboscis sniffing, whiskers quivering as it nodded from side to side. Its rangy, pale legs seemed to both tiptoe and slide on the polished wooden floor. The top part of its body was clothed in a green, silken skin, which caught
the garish light from the blazing flambeaux on the balcony outside the windows. The lower half of its body was naked, its huge, swollen phallus swaying like an independent entity as the creature approached its next engagement. The last bed was in great disarray, the covers pulled messily around the softly snoring body of its spent occupant. The room was full of whispers and laughter; small, animal noises of hunger and fulfilment rippled the landscape of opulence. Sighs gilded the tangled scent of incense, musk and intoxication.
It reached the next bed and slid its gloved hands beneath the sheet. They were instantly gripped by the smooth, trembling grasp of the woman who waited there. She pulled the beast inside and drew the covers over them both. Her form was older, large and voluptuous, and she too had a distorted face, in the shape of an owl, black feathers accentuating the ivory wideness of her eyes. He slipped a catch on his beak and pulled it backwards, leaving the lower half of his face exposed, so that his mouth was visible and active in their lovemaking. Pulling him close, she kissed him passionately. He jumped back, startled, almost falling from the bed. Neither Luluwa nor Ghertrude had ever done such a thing; it had never been explained to him, and Ghertrude had always looked away when they mated.
The stranger drew him closer still. ‘Don’t be shy,’ she said.
He let her suck his mouth again, and it was sweet and arousing. He kissed back, and his manhood surpassed previous dimensions and expectations.
Even in the over-populated room of revellers, the sounds of the owl and her new companion arose above all others. Their bedding thrashed wildly, and something else wallowed out from their conjunctures; other couples and trios found their attention hooked and pulled across the pulsing darkness, away from their own compacted intimacies, peering towards an unnameable eminence that was outside and beyond their own little shudders and sighs.
It was almost dawn when he crept from her bed to search the rooms for his black velvet cloak.
When the owl awoke, she began to cry. She pulled her mask away and started to shout. She stumbled to the window, her hands on her face, and began to scream.
The owl was called Cyrena Lohr. She was thirty-three years old, and had been blind since birth. In the early light of post-carnival, with anxious friends and strangers standing by her side, she shivered, naked and overpowered at the window, watching the brilliant sunrise, yellow and crisp on her first visual day.
How had he done this? Who was this miracle worker who had entered her bed and given her sight? She had to find him. The moment she could be sure she was not dreaming, she would find him and thank him on her knees.
The remaining revellers in her mansion were dressing quickly. One brought a dressing gown and wrapped Cyrena in its warm folds, while attempting to steer the emotional woman away from the window and back to the bed. But she would not be moved, so they brought her a high-backed armchair and seated her safely within it. Most of the crowd that had occupied her many rooms had disappeared; the combination of unmasking and being a witness was too much for their frail identities to bear, and they had fled as the whisper slithered through the house. Miracles are never comfortable; for the hungover, the debauched and the anonymous, they are intolerable.