The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

  With an uncanny series of movements, the dummy seemed to reassemble itself, took on human posture and lurched into motion; reacting to the push Mikolas had given it, it slashed him across the back, then aimed a second slash at his neck, which Mikolas, in turning, just managed to parry. Beheim seized the opportunity to thrust his sword into Mikolas’s side just below the ribs; he ripped the blade sideways as Mikolas howled and twisted, dropping his saber. An instant later the dummy pierced him through the belly, thus effectively skewering him from two directions. Mikolas swayed, his eyes rolled back, he vomited blood. Then both the dummy and Beheim yanked their weapons free, and he collapsed onto the floor, blood diapering his trousers and soaking his red shirt. Beheim started toward Alexandra, who was sitting up, holding a hand to her temple. The dummy came after him, its saber at the ready and wires singing in their tracks, its clever feet clacking on the boards.

  He had assumed that the dummy would only react to an attack, but now, having offered no attack, staring at that oddly inimical wooden head, at the scarred body with its faded valentine heart, he knew that he had been wrong, that some undreamed-of scientific miracle had invested it with deadly independence. The dummy struck at him, its weirdly articulated joints lending a mantislike stiffness to its movements, but moving far more rapidly than any crawling thing, the persistent click and clatter of its limbs adding a sinister value to its violent intent. It was all Beheim could do to fend off its attack, let alone mount one of his own, and as he was driven across the room he thought that the best he could hope for was that once he had been severely wounded, whatever regulation governed the dummy would be satisfied and it would desist. The dummy’s saber notched his shoulder. Sliced his chest. In desperation, he ducked under the swung blade and grappled with the thing, his face pressed against the cool, smooth oval of its head; but it began to shiver and shake, to jerk uncontrollably, and he was thrown to the floor. He rolled away from a downstroke, came to his feet, and sprinted toward the pole at the center of the room, hoping to reach the buttons and switch the dummy off; but it made an unearthly, ungainly leap, going unbelievably high, that carried it across the room in time to block his path. It turned to him, its limbs coordinating in a horrid mechanical rhythm that caused him to picture a crab stalking along the sea bottom toward some helpless pulpy victim.

  As it confronted him, its head tipped to the side as if in perplexed study, saber pointing toward his chest, the grain of the pale brown wood seemed to contrive an eerie, eyeless face. He could have sworn he sensed a faint radiation like the presence of personality from the thing, and he had the feeling it was assessing him in some way, matching his skills with an array of tactical possibilities. “I yield,” he said, hoping against all rationality that it would hear him. He glanced over at Mikolas. Still down. Alexandra had not moved. “Stop,” he said to the dummy, wondering if it might not respond to a simple command, a magic word.

  The dummy took a step forward, holding its saber in an unusual high guard up by its cheek, blade pointing to the ceiling. It stood still a moment, then initiated a whirling attack, wielding the saber in great circles, at times aiming slashes at Beheim while its back was turned, moving at incredible speed. Beheim dove to the floor, tried to cut the wires attached to its legs, but could not penetrate its defense. He regained his feet and backed away, unable to do other than protect himself. He was tiring badly. Each parried blow sent a shock into his elbows. The sword grew heavy, the grip slick with sweat. He closed with the dummy a second time and wrenched at its head, its arms, hoping to tear them off, but was thrown off again before he could do any real damage.

  And then, without warning, it went limp, hanging from its wires as impotent as a marionette, head down, sword trailing on the floor. Beheim, who had been in the process of scrambling to his feet, sagged back. He saw Alexandra standing by the pole, bashing at the control buttons with a mace. The children were still sitting in listless poses beneath the window, their blond hair glowing in a spill of wintry light so clearly defined it might have been a tilted column of crystal; their eyes were like smudges in their white faces. Mikolas was crawling feebly in the direction of the door, leaving a smeared track of blood as he went. After a bit he stopped crawling and sat there, his legs tucked beneath him, holding his wounded stomach. With a mighty effort, Beheim got to his knees. Once he had managed to catch his breath, he stood, walked over, and kicked Mikolas in the chest, laying him out flat. Mikolas gasped and closed his eyes. When he opened them, Beheim stabbed him in the throat, turning the blade to widen the wound, and then in the groin. He felt tremendous joy well up inside him. Blood filmed over Mikolas’s lips. He tried to speak, but the wound in his throat prevented it; he stared at Beheim with black intensity, and Beheim looked quickly away.

  “Enough!” said Alexandra. “There’s no purpose to this, not unless you intend to kill him.”

  “Now, there’s an idea!”

  “No.” She closed her long fingers about his wrist; for an instant there seemed to be a flurry of lights and darks in her eyes. “This has not helped to ease matters between the Valeas and the de Czeges. I don’t want it to go any further.”

  “As you wish, then,” he said. “But I refuse to have him hounding me during the remainder of the investigation. Give me the mace.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Break his legs. That should take two or three days to heal.”

  Mikolas rolled away, trying to reach his sword. Beheim hauled him back by his belt and held him while he thrashed and fumed; a pinkish liquid bubbled from his throat—the wound was healing quickly.

  “What of his brother?” Alexandra asked. “And what of the rest of the de Czeges? Their legs will be whole.”

  “One of them, at least, will no longer pose a threat.” Beheim stretched out a hand to her. “Give it to me.”

  “I don’t trust you,” she said after a pause. “I’ll do it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! Go and see to the children.”

  “What’s the use of that? If we take them away from him, they’ll only return. You know that.”

  He continued holding out his hand, and with obvious reluctance, she passed him the mace and walked off toward the window where the children were sitting.

  “You know,” Beheim said to Mikolas without looking him in the eyes, “I understand you. I used to arrest men like you. Sometimes I had to kill them. I understand you very well.”

  He tapped the mace lightly against Mikolas’s knee, watched the leg stiffen in anticipation. Then he raised the mace high and brought it down on the kneecap with all his strength, shattering bone, smashing the fabric of the trousers down into a mire of blood and cartilage. A high-pitched whining escaped from Mikolas’s lips, and he lost consciousness. Beheim crushed the other kneecap with a second blow and sat patiently, waiting for him to wake up. Alexandra, he saw, was kneeling beside the children, ministering in some way to one of them. Finally Mikolas stirred. His eyes fluttered open. Focused on Beheim.

  “Now I’m going to tell you a story,” said Beheim, pushing Mikolas’s face to the side with the ball of the mace so that he was unable to use the power of his eyes. “Not so long ago in Paris there was a maniac who had killed four women with his hands. He was, as a matter of fact, a man very much like you. A physical marvel, possessed of inhuman strength. We could see that from the brutal things he’d done to the bodies. He sent us messages, laughing at us, challenging us to find him. He boasted that he would kill anyone who dared come near him. He wrote poems about our stupidity and mailed them to the newspapers. Eventually we discovered who he was, but since he lived on the streets, in the sewers, any dark place that he could dominate with his strength, it was no easy task to bring him to ground. At long last, however, we managed to trap him in Montparnasse one night, and we chased him up onto the rooftops.”

  Alexandra came up beside him and started to speak, but he held up a hand, urging her to silence. “Just give me a moment,” he said. “I’m almost finishe
d here.”

  Mikolas tried to turn his head, to look at Alexandra, but Beheim gave him another firm push with the ball of the mace.

  “The houses in that particular section of Montparnasse are set very close together,” he went on. “Many of the streets no more than alleys, the alleys barely wide enough to permit a grown man passage. The rooftops are like a country all their own, a terrain of odd peaks and gables and steep slopes, all tiled and slick underfoot even in dry weather. A dangerous place to hunt so formidable a man as our maniac. We knew he could not escape us. We had cordoned off an area of several blocks. Sooner or later we were bound to catch him, either on the streets or on the rooftops. But we had two concerns. First, we did not want to take many casualties. If we flooded the rooftops with men, the maniac would almost certainly be able to kill several of them. Perhaps more. He would leap upon them from some dark cranny and rip them apart or throw them off the roof. We would have to be very cautious. Yet at the same time speed was of the essence, for we believed that if we did not catch him soon, he would succeed in breaking into one of the apartments and wreak havoc upon those dwelling there. Naturally we were attempting to evacuate the buildings, but at that time of night it was a slow and laborious process. The chances of our completing it before the maniac decided to effect entry were negligible, indeed.

  “A compelling problem, don’t you agree? Seemingly one without a happy solution.” Beheim nudged Mikolas with the mace. “I wonder how you would have solved it. You would have burned the whole damned area down, I’d imagine. You see, men like you are not accustomed to operating under constraints. They believe that such constraints are enfeebling, that men like me who suffer them are witlings, easy prey. But they’re wrong to believe that. Those constraints breed a certain type of canny strength that is often the downfall of men like you, men who put their faith in willfulness and brute force.”

  He noticed Alexandra staring at him and, annoyed, said, “What is it? Where are the children?”

  “Both the boys are dead,” she said tonelessly. “The girl…perhaps she will live. I’ve sent her on an errand. She’ll be in good hands.”

  He glanced at the two blond, still forms seated beneath the window. Their deaths seemed almost irrelevant to the loathing he felt for Mikolas, to add no more than a thin wash of color to his emotions, and he thought now that this was because he had long since given up on them. And yet knowing that they were dead changed him in one way, making him less interested in confiding in Mikolas, more eager to get on with things.

  “I’m not going to tell you the rest of my story,” he said to Mikolas. “Though perhaps I should tell you how it ended. We did not lose a single man, and ten minutes after I went alone onto the rooftops, the maniac took his own life.” He bent close to Mikolas, keeping his head still with the mace. “I’m not afraid of you,” he whispered. “I want you to come after me. That is, if you’re man enough. If you think you can face me without running to your brother for assistance. I’m sure you’ll be tempted to turn what is essentially a personal matter into a feud with the Agenors, but consider what that says about the caliber of your manhood. Frankly I don’t think it’s in you to engage in a conflict that you’re not absolutely certain of winning. You’re a coward, a bully. And not such a formidable bully at that. You couldn’t kill me here, on your own ground, and anywhere else it’s going to be easy for me. I’ll be waiting.”

  He pushed himself up to his feet and sent the mace skittering across the floor into a far corner, and with Alexandra in tow, he left Mikolas to his hatred and his pain.

  As they walked along a corridor that led away from the gray room, Alexandra kept looking expectantly at him, and finally she said, “Aren’t you going to tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “What happened on the rooftops of Montparnasse. With you and the maniac. I’m curious how you managed it.”

  In one of the rooms nearby a clock was tolling midnight; from the distance came terrified shouts, wild laughter, then a tinny clangor, and the convergence of these sounds, their hollow resonance and dark specificity, reawakened Beheim to the alien immensity of his environment. Alexandra’s face, despite its loveliness, its openness, struck him as being a devious contrivance, as threatening and perplexing as the blank wooden face of the fencing dummy. Secrets flashed and darted in the shifting currents of her green irises. Give nothing away, he thought. Show the world a face empty of everything except that which they want to believe of you. He felt suddenly, disastrously weary, exhausted by the poisons of fatigue and adrenaline. He wanted to rest, to stop his thoughts from spinning in their unstable orbits.

  “No,” he told her. “Not for now, anyway.”

  Chapter SIX

  Several levels beneath the room where they had fought with Mikolas, they found a large unoccupied chamber with whitewashed walls and plaster angels that flowed from the molding in the corners of the ceiling, their grave, contemplative faces seeming to guarantee the sanctity of the space they overlooked; it was furnished with two overstuffed chairs, a chest of drawers, and the wreck of an ebony bed, one of its legs broken, its tented canopy half-collapsed, that was big enough and sufficiently morbid in design—the frieze on the headboard depicted a crowd of tormented faces—to serve as a funeral barge. Two lanterns hung from the ceiling; when lit, they burned with a pale constant flame. They wedged the chest of drawers beneath the bed, succeeding thereby in placing the mattress on a more or less even keel, and once this was done, Beheim stripped off his bloody shirt, stretched out, and closed his eyes. Alexandra, however, went pacing about the room, and after five minutes or so had passed and she continued to pace, Beheim propped himself up on an elbow and asked what was troubling her.

  “I’m not troubled,” she said. “Just a little nervous. I’m always a little nervous.”

  “Are you worried that the de Czeges will come after us tonight?”

  “No.” She leaned against the wall, hands behind her back. “They’ll brood and plot and attempt to devise some ingenious trap, but in the end, if they do anything, which is not a certainty, they’ll lose their tempers and charge. That’s their way. They’re incapable of subtle maneuvers.”

  “Which makes them excellent suspects.”

  “In the matter of the Golden?” She shook her head. “I don’t believe it. Not that they wouldn’t be capable of the violence. But this particular murder doesn’t seem the sort of outrage they would commit. It would take some planning at least. And as I said, they tend to act on the spur of the moment.”

  Beheim examined the sheet beneath him; it bore a delicate raised pattern, white on white, of thorns and roses.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I’m not making any progress like this. I’m going to do as you suggested. The bottle cap is the one consequential piece of evidence I have. You were right. I really don’t have a choice.”

  “I thought you’d see that.” Her voice was subdued.

  “Will you go with me to Felipe’s apartments?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t risk it. If Felipe caught me there, if he discovered I was plotting against him, it would ruin everything. You’ll need someone to keep watch, though. Your servant, Giselle. Take her.”

  Here we are, he thought, here’s the part you have to shine a light on. Here’s the fundamental discourse upon which all your decisions regarding her must be based. “What exactly would it ruin?” he asked.

  A petulant expression came fleetingly to her face. “Everything I want.”

  “Power.”

  A hesitation. “Yes, power.”

  “But there’s more.”

  She nodded.

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “It’s nothing important. Just some things I want.”

  “How do you know you’ll get them? Are you certain I’ll find evidence implicating Felipe?”

  “How could I be certain?” Anger made her voice shrill, stiffened her shoulders as she paced across the room
and stood by the opposite wall. With her back to the whitewashed surface, the red tints in her hair and the blue of her silk nightdress and the vivid coloration of her eyes were all enhanced; it looked as if she were a goddess emerging from a dimension of whiteness, from a featureless white sky.

  “You’re only hoping that Felipe’s involved, then?” Beheim said.

  Another nod.

  Beheim sat up straight, his back against the frieze of faces. “These things that you want, could one of them be the Lady Dolores?”

  Hectic spots of red burned in her cheeks. “No!”

  “It’s said the two of you have become close.”

  “Close!” She spat out a laugh. “That’s hardly the term I’d choose.”

  “Which term would you choose?”

  Her flushed cheeks reddened further, and he thought she was going to shout at him; but she said nothing.

  “My questions seem to be upsetting you.”

  “It upsets me that you’re treating me like a suspect.”

  “How else should I treat you? You won’t volunteer anything.”

  She appeared to be giving this question more attention than she had the others. After a considerable pause she crossed to the bed, sat on the edge, and trailed her fingers across the sheet.

  “Felipe asked me to help him find out what Dolores wanted from him,” she said. “He was suspicious of her. He had been ever since they became lovers.”

  “Why would he ask for your help? You two have been quits for some time, haven’t you?”

  She shook back a curl from her cheek and gazed up to one of the plaster angels, as if receiving instruction. Beheim’s eyes went to her graceful neck, the blue vein that figured it, barely visible beneath the white skin, vanishing in the hollow of her throat.

  “I don’t know if I could ever explain how it is between the two of us,” she said. “There’ve been times aplenty when he’s used me badly, times when I have used him. It’s always a struggle with me and Felipe. Always. He’s a cruel, perverted bastard. I would not grieve to see him undergo an Illumination, yet at times I feel something akin to love for him. There is something that binds us. Something of the blood, I imagine. Whatever we feel toward one another, it’s strong.”