Remarkably, the sight of the picture calmed him more than anything else he had done. As he stared into the painted eyes he became convinced that if this really was the face of the fiend which haunted him, then the ghost had certainly not risen of its own volition, but had been torn from its rest by the foulest necromancy.
But that, he thought, can hardly be possible. A necromancer must hate his victim more than he loves his own life, for he who injures others with the aid of daemons or vile spells must also injure himself. No one could hate me thus, for in all that I have done I have only been the humble instrument of the law.
Having reached this conclusion, he began to think as a judge again, and as a man of reason, with his thoughts quite unclouded by wrath and barely upset by tremors of fear. And then, quite suddenly, he saw all that had happened in a different light, and guessed at last who the Phantom must be.
He looked up then, and saw that the Phantom was with him, standing at the foot of the bed, just as he had on the previous night. Those shadowed eyes were watching him through the holes of his mask.
M. Voltigeur raised the pistol, and pointed it carefully at the mask.
“My hand is steady tonight, lean Malchance,” he said. “I promise that I will not miss again.”
Jean Malchance reached up without delay to remove the mask from his face, as though he had become tired of the masquerade in any case. He looked at his friend with eyes as hard as flints, and replied: “You cannot kill me, monsieur. I have already seen to that.”
M. Voltigeur licked his lips, and stared into the naked face of the man who was most definitely not his friend, but must have been his enemy for longer than he cared to think.
“I believe that you have,” he whispered. “Or that you think so. But whatever wicked spell you have used, or whatever daemon it may be to whom you have sold yourself, you cannot be entirely sure. Dark magic is ever treacherous, and is said to be very likely to misfire, destroying its user instead of his victim.”
“The same is said of pistols,” the other retorted, calmly.
“But pistols do not care what they may destroy,” said M. Voltigeur. “I have always believed that even the instruments of the foulest magic must hesitate to harm the good. And whatever hatred you nurse against me, you must allow that I have ever been a good and honest man, always as fair as I knew how to be.”
“I believe that you underestimate the power of dark magic,” said Malchance, “and I know full well that you overestimate your worth as a man. Fair as you knew how to be you always were, but your failing always lay in what you knew how to be.”
M. Voltigeur’s finger tightened a little on the trigger of his weapon, but he did not press it yet. He was not so very frightened, now that he knew what it was that he had to face.
“I thought you were my friend, Jean,” he said, piteously. “Why were you not my friend, when I was always friend to you?”
“You hold the answer in your hand,” replied Malchance. “I could have forgiven you the rest. I could have forgiven you for winning every other contest in which we took part as boys or men. I could have forgiven you for becoming a magistrate while I remained a clerk. I could even have forgiven you for becoming famous for those cunning sentences you passed, though fully three in four were ideas which I put into your head. I am the man who fits punishments to crimes, Monsieur, and I am doing now what I have always done.”
M. Voltigeur looked at the portrait which he held in his hand.
“I remember that you liked her,” he said, quietly.
“Liked her!” said Malchance, stifling a cry of pain and showing for the first time that ire which he must have kept hidden for many long years. “I loved her with all my heart, and she loved me. But she could see that there was a magistrate in you and a clerk in me, just as she could see that there was gold in your family coffers and only silver in mine. She loved me, but she would not marry for love. She would rather have a man without a heart, whose fine clothes and full pockets made up for the emptiness that was inside him. If you had loved her as I loved her, I would have understood, and forgiven, but I could not forgive you what you are, and what you made of her.”
“But men and women should not many for love!” said the great judge, with the air of one stating the obvious. “It is our reason which sets us above the beasts, and we must live by that reason and not by silly passion. It is passion which drives men to use dark magic, and to sell their souls, thus to hurt themselves more horribly than any penalty of the law ever could.”
“I have not used much magic,” Malchance told him. “Far less than you think, I do believe. I had only to use a petty spell which would blind you to my actions unless I desired that you should see them. I was beside you while you packed your chests, and removed whatever I wished before you closed them and before Odo put his seals upon them. I slept within your door, not without, and could do what I wished, unnoticed, even while you kept your vigil. It was from within that I opened the door—and thus broke the magic seal—on each of the two occasions. I admit, though, that my arms were at full stretch the night I had to break the weakened chest as well, having earlier strewn its pilfered contents about the floor.”
“But you are only a clerk,” said M. Voltigeur, “and as a clerk you surely have no skill in magic at all!”
“I can read,” replied Malchance, “and that rare talent, which made me your servant because I could do it better than you, allowed me to search in forbidden books for that which men of my station are not supposed to have. You do not know what I can do, monsieur. You do not know me at all, for I am merely an appearance to you, about which you cannot truly care—just as she was.”
M. Voltigeur looked again at the portrait.
“Why did you steal her gifts to my children?” he asked.
“Because they should have been gifts to my children. It should have been my children that she bore, and not yours. You have no right to these things I have taken—you have no right to your own family, though I know you would not care if they were taken away, and so I have not sought to hurt them. I loved her. All her love-tokens are rightly mine, and all the things which she loved.”
“Oh Jean,” said the magistrate, with a sigh, “you are a great fool. I was your friend, and you should have been mine. Instead you are a famous robber and a faithless betrayer. How will I find a punishment to fit such crimes?”
“We are not here to pass judgment on me,” said Malchance. “I have been occupied in passing sentence on you. In the eyes of the people of Yremy you, not I, are the famous robber. My denunciation has carried to every covert and corner of the town, and because it came from your trusted friend it is believed! And in the morning, valuables stolen from many houses will be discovered in those chests beneath your bed, to add the final proof. Your confession, dictated to me in your final hour of life, and signed by your own hand, will also be offered in evidence—I have it in my pocket now, with your name already forged. Your loyal footman who admitted me tonight fully believes the story which I told him, that I was bitterly sorry about our quarrel, and came to make amends.
“When I swear that you died by your own hand, and that I was just too late to prevent it, I will shed such tears that no one would doubt me for a moment. Every detail is now in place.”
“Not quite,” said M. Voltigeur. “I have not died by my own hand, and have no intention of obliging you in such a matter. In fact, I rather think that I might shoot you dead instead.”
“Alas,” said Jean Malchance, “I think that you are wrong, and can only hope that you will not be too disappointed.”
“I must stand by my belief,” said the magistrate, “that your evil magic will not work on a virtuous man, and that whatever daemon has given you your skill will come for your soul, not for mine.”
And so saying, he fired his weapon, determined this time that the smoke and the recoil would not affect his aim.
The powder in the pan sizzled madly for a moment, and then the pistol blew up in his hand
.
The force of the explosion sent fragments of twisted metal into his eyes. One tiny sliver penetrated to a deeper level, and killed him on the instant.
Jean Malchance had thrown up his arms to shield himself from the explosion, but he quickly lowered them again.
Poor man! he thought. You were ever a poorer judge than you thought. It does not need magic to block up the barrel of such a stupid weapon as that, and only the pettiest of spells to accomplish it unobserved. If I have damned myself for such a little thing, so be it, but I do not think I have.
The coachman arrived then, followed by the footman and the valet, and all the other servants who had kept such fruitless watch.
“Alas,” said Jean Malchance, “the poor man was so deluded and deranged that he thought his phantom had come back to haunt him again. But see! It is only a portrait of his dear late wife.”
So saying, he picked up the little picture—bloodstained now—which had fallen on the floor, and when the servants had looked at it, he put it in his own pocket, and took it away with him.
Malchance was quite correct in his estimation that the people of Yremy would believe what he told them, and he had more than enough apparent proofs to convince them. He pretended to be so stricken by grief that he never served again as a clerk to the court of Yremy, but retired to live in solitude, alone with his memories and his secrets.
M. Voltigeur, who was famous while he lived as the great judge, became more famous still after his death, albeit briefly, as the Phantom who had haunted himself. It was said of him by many that he had devised the most fiendish of all his punishments for himself.
Whether Jean Malchance was damned for those petty magics which he had used to secure, as he saw it, a penalty uniquely fitted to his enemy’s trespasses, no one knows. All that is certain is that he died but a few years after, and that just before he died he made a full confession of the whole affair—not to any eager priest of Verena or Morr, but to a wandering story-teller like myself, whom he first forced to swear that the tale should never be told within the walls of Yremy.
The inevitable result of that injunction, of course, was that everyone within those walls had heard the whole of it within a fortnight—and the lowest of the low were for once united with the highest of the high in thinking it the finest tale to which their humble town had ever given birth.
THE OTHER
by Nicola Griffiths
The city of Middenheim reared up on its fist of rock, blocking the glitter of weak autumn sunlight and throwing a shadow across the line moving patiently up the slope of the viaduct towards the east gate. The air creaked with harness; iron-rimmed wheels rang softly against stone. Stefan stood up in his stirrups to get a better look at the jam of carts and foot travellers.
“It’s more than two weeks yet until Carnival.” He pulled at his reins in irritation; the horse snorted and curvetted.
“Stefan,” his father said mildly.
Stefan relaxed his grip a little, patted the horse on the neck. Herr Doktor Hochen nodded approval. Stefan’s attention wandered.
He stared down at the back of a craftsman’s neck. It was creased with dirt; the rough leather jerkin had rubbed a sore into the skin. It ought to be cleaned with good lye soap before it festered.
He imagined the edges of the sore swelling, glistening red and tight as the poisons accumulated; he could almost taste the thick sweet smell of decay.
His horse danced, sending a stone skittering. Stefan swallowed bile.
“It’s going to take longer crawling up this viaduct than to ride from Hunxe.” He tried not to think of the man’s neck, festering, swelling. “We should have ridden on last night and not bothered staying at the inn.”
“The gates would have been closed at that hour.”
“They would have recognized you.”
“Perhaps. But the Watch might be a little overzealous about its duties at this time of year.”
Stefan looked at the sunlight gleaming on his father’s soft-tanned boots and brown riding velvets, and wondered why a physician important enough to be summoned all the way to Grubentreich to minister to the son of Grand Duke Leopold would not be prepared to force the Watch to recognize him. Whatever the hour.
Privately, he suspected that it was because his father was getting too old to sit on his horse comfortably for any length of time.
“Perhaps we should have taken a coach from the inn at Hunxe.”
His father’s shoulders hunched in anger but he spoke quietly, without looking up from his reins.
“You might be eighteen, Stefan, and old enough to have applied for your own physician’s licence, but it seems you do not yet have sufficient manners to mind me to grant it.”
Stefan knew an apology would only make things worse. As it was, his father would probably delay the licence for a week or so. He stayed quiet and concentrated on trying to ignore the ache of two days’ riding.
Ahead, the faint background noise grew louder. Stefan thought he could hear shouting.
“Sounds as though there’s a fight in front.” He stood up in his stirrups but could not see what was happening.
The shouting got louder; a ripple of movement spread outward, reaching them in the form of a rustling of clothes as people shifted from foot to foot. Several scrambled up onto their carts to get a better look.
“Hoy!” Stefan called. “Can you see what’s happening?”
“Someone’s had his wagon turned right over on its side.”
“Ask him if anyone’s been hurt,” his father said. “Can’t tell,” the man shouted, “but the Watch are coming out.” He paused. “They’re coming this way. Tell them we’re physicians.”
Under the direction of two members of the Watch, the wagon had already been hauled upright by unwilling bystanders. A guardswoman led them through the crowd.
The air was sharp with the reek of wine which still poured from the shattered barrel. A man wearing the coarse clothes and leather gauntlets of a waggoner lay on his back in shadow. A woman knelt at his side, gently probing his shoulder.
Herr Hochen handed his bag to Stefan and looked around. He walked over to a flat-bedded cart.
“Lift him up here,” he said to the guardswoman.
The woman kneeling at the man’s side stood up, shadow line slicing across her body diagonally from collarbone to hip. One knee of her pale green trousers was stained with wine, like a bruise. A cotton scarf, the same colour as the wine stain, was tied around her upper left arm. She was wearing a light cloak against the autumn chill but it was slung back over her shoulders, out of the way, and pinned with a wooden brooch. She was young, seventeen perhaps, but fatigue or something else made her seem older. Her hair, light brown and just long enough to be tied back, was dull with travel dust.
“He should not be moved until his leg is splinted,” she said.
“I need to get a good look at him, my dear.”
“His shoulder may be broken too.”
“He’ll be taken good care of, don’t worry. Are you his daughter?”
“No.”
“I see.” He turned to the guardswoman. “Lift him up please.”
Stefan turned away from the injured man’s pain as two guardsmen heaved him onto the cart. The woman stooped to pick up a leather satchel which she slung over her back. Stefan recognized it as the kind of thing travelling musicians carried and wondered how she knew about splinting bones. She saw Stefan watching her. He blushed, but walked over.
“You don’t agree with my father’s methods?”
“No.”
“Don’t you know who my father is?”
“No.”
“Herr Doktor Franz Hochen.”
“So now I know his name, as well as the fact that he doesn’t know his job.”
“He’s the most well-respected physician in Middenheim. In fact, my father is the representative of the Guild of Physicians and advises the Emperor on health, education and welfare.”
“Then if he
is not ignorant, he has caused that waggoner suffering wilfully.”
“That man was poor, you could tell by looking at him. If we treated him here, we’d get no fee. So that cart will take him to the Temple of Shallya where the initiates take charity cases. Later, if it turns out he has got funds, then my father would be pleased to treat him. As it is, my father is probably paying for the use of that cart out of his own pocket. He’s too generous.”
“I see.”
It was the exact tone his father had used earlier.
“We could prosecute you for practising healing without a licence,” he said.
“You wouldn’t.” It was a statement. “Who authorizes these licences?”
“My father. He makes recommendations to the elector from the applications received by the guild. Why? Do you want to apply?”
She studied him a moment.
“Perhaps.”
And then she turned and forced her way into the crowd.
Stefan was left staring at the people she had pushed past. He felt foolish. He did not even know her name.
The night was mild and damp. Stefan walked along the Garten Weg slowly, enjoying the smell of grass and wet leaves. He stopped and listened to the unusual quiet. When he set up his practice, he would buy a house somewhere in clean, orderly Nortgarten, overlooking Morrspark where it was always peaceful.
He smiled. Today, his father had handed him a parchment stamped in blue and fastened with the electors seal; he could set up his practice whenever he liked. He walked north and then east along Ostgarten, leaving the quiet behind.
Burgen Bahn heaved with people. It was nearly midnight but with only a week to Carnival, hawkers and pleasure-seekers lit lamps against the dark and did business while they could.
The Laughter of Dark Gods Page 8
