The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

  For a few seconds her words were reduced by the fierceness of her emotions to a fuming sputter more like animal speech. She drew a breath, her shoulders hunching, back bowing. For an instant Beheim had the idea that she was expanding, growing, becoming a giantess. He examined Dolores’s anger in the context of Alexandra’s characterization of their relationship. It was not out of the question that she had been telling the truth. If Dolores had seduced her against her will, it might have been because she had been obsessed with Alexandra to begin with—and this would explain Dolores’s description of her as an innocent. He wanted to believe this, he wanted to believe in everything that happened between them. But he did not think he could sustain belief against his growing suspicion that she had sent him to Felipe’s apartment for reasons other than she had revealed.

  “I have lived for nearly three centuries,” Dolores said huskily, giving the impression that she was holding back a shout. “I have loved five thousand men, five thousand women. I have seen Siberia burning and I have walked in the hidden cities of the Khan. And now, to be cowed by a pitiful thing like you.” She let out a labored sigh. “Three centuries. Perhaps it is enough.”

  She glanced up at him.

  “Don’t do this,” he cautioned, guessing her intent. Giselle whispered, “Michel!” and tightened her grip on his arm.

  Lady Dolores gave a distressed laugh, one that seemed reflective, a self-commentary.

  “Turn your eyes away from me,” Beheim told her.

  “My eyes?” she said. “Is it only my eyes you fear? Not my hands, or my hair? Not these?” She cupped her breasts as if assessing their weights, her thumbs making idle circles about the chocolate-colored nipples. She gave another distraught laugh, and her voice acquired a burred, urgent tonality. “Oh, cousin, cousin, I am made of fearful stuff! My heart is poison, my mind is fire and a rhyme. My flesh is death itself. Beetles lay pearly eggs in the crannies of my brain. There is no more fearful thing than I, no more desperate and conscienceless an enemy. Do you believe I lack the courage or the will to drag you down to hell on fire in my arms? If so, you are wrong, mortally wrong, for I fear death only as I might fear to satisfy a lover of whom I’ve dreamed a thousand nights. He is with me always, and I have always yearned for him. He is endlessly alluring, endlessly patient. Those who do not know him, they fear him. But not I. Though he is Mystery itself, he is no mystery to me, no undiscovered country. I have traveled each night along his stygian rivers, along the moon-colored roads that lead forth from the desert of the skull. I have run with the beast whose beauty is the sun that creates the beautiful shadows of our lives. I have taken his demons in my mouth and drunk the juice of their decaying fecundity. The homunculi who burrow in his night soil have crawled inside me. I have given myself to the parasites that feed on the residues of his terrible dreams.” She gazed with daft intensity at the black opening that Felipe had conjured, as if newly aware of it. “Death. Say it, cousin. Say it and listen how it vibrates in the air! The word has a windy, solemn sound, does it not? Like the expiration of a great passion, or the first breath of a storm.”

  She buried her face in her hands as if overborne by her lust for death. But then, moving more quickly than Beheim had thought possible, catching him unawares, she reached up and seized his wrist, immobilizing the arm that bore the torch. With her free hand, she knocked Giselle aside and, rising to her feet, flung Beheim against the door. The torch dropped to the stones, scattering sparks, and rolled away behind her.

  “Yet if needs be,” she said gleefully, “I am willing to endure life a while longer.” She secured her hold on his jacket, lifting him so that his feet dangled. “Long enough, at any rate, to oversee your final passage.” She called out over her shoulder. “Felipe! I am free!”

  Beheim butted her in the face, and she staggered backward, losing her grip on him. Blood spurted from her nose, filming thick as gravy over her lips and chin. Her tongue flicked out. She lapped at the bright flow from her nostrils and smiled.

  Felipe began to hurl himself against the study door; the wood bowed outward with each impact.

  Then Lady Dolores shrieked. She looked in horror at the smoke that had begun to billow up about her, for in recoiling from Beheim’s blow, she had stepped close enough to the fallen torch that a spark had caught on the train of her robe. Now the silky fabric was alive with flame. She let out a howl of agony and rage and threw herself at him, but he ducked away. He caught Giselle by the arm, and veering to the right of Felipe’s magical void, which still held its form in the center of the room, he dragged her back from the alcove and the burning woman who tottered after them, screaming, arms outstretched, rapidly becoming a gigantic torch that brightened the air till it seemed like day. The study door splintered and cracked. Lady Dolores’s skin blistered and grew dark, her screams shredded into a raw grating noise barely audible above the snapping of the fire that was consuming her. The crisping mask of her face was horrid to see, and Beheim now felt nothing of vengeance, no hint of triumph. She made a rush at them, shedding gouts of flame, but when they eluded her, she changed direction and, taking a wobbly step to her left, poising for a fraction of a second as if to orient herself, thus leaving no doubt in Beheim’s mind that this was a conscious act, she toppled into the black maw hovering in midair just as Felipe burst through the door in a shower of splinters, an explosion of snapped boards, looking—with his bared fangs and reddened eyes—like the emblem of nightmare. Aghast at the sight of Dolores, he caught her wrist, and as she fell she in turn—perhaps thinking he was Beheim, or perhaps in mere reflex—clasped him in an embrace. For a moment they teetered on the brink of a mortal balance, half in, half out of that chill black emptiness; the flames crawled up Felipe’s arm, licking at his face. Then Beheim, recognizing that he could not chance their survival, ran forward and shoved them in.

  Their disappearance into the void created a harrowing stillness. It seemed impossible that so much vitality could have been snuffed out so quickly, and Beheim experienced a central uneasiness at the suddenness and finality of the deaths…if death it was. Perhaps Lady Dolores had believed that the blackness would muffle the flames. But it did not. Even after she and Felipe had receded to a great distance, Beheim could see them burning: a tiny reddish star in the midst of pale, swarming lights. The silence in the room made a kind of prison for him, turning his thoughts inward and forcing him to contemplate his ineptitude, his naïveté.

  How easily he had let her distract him!

  He was assaulted by the prospect of immortality lost. They would kill him for this crime, they would force him to undergo an Illumination. Lashed to the turret stones, he would bake and blister in the rays of dawn, the sun would boil away his spirit, send it fuming ahead into the future, and as he died he would howl out what he had seen, praying that his vision would be of sufficient worth to the Family that the Patriarch would signal a servant to make play with a wooden stake and end his agony. He recalled hearing how Giuseppe Cinzal’s Illumination had lasted for hours, how his visions of the future had been of such clarity and import that the Patriarch had been loath to cut short the process. Cinzal, it was said, had turned into a thing of sticks and carbon, still spitting up roses of blood and clairvoyant fragments of the truth in a voice like ashes.

  What was the sun that it could distill such mystical diamonds from the heat and pressure of a death?

  And what was the soul that it could fly so far afield, that it could pass forward into time and still maintain a connection with the flesh?

  Beheim stood bewildered, trying to make sense of everything that had happened, to fit together the pieces of the event and make it display some evidence of hope; but the only evidence available was that of his folly. And of Alexandra’s betrayal. Oh, she had used him right enough. And in doing so she had brought him to the end of his days. The strange doorway through which Lady Dolores and Felipe had fallen appeared now to be a black mirror reflecting his future.

  Panic crackled in his brain. Fear
was thin, yellow, sour in his throat.

  Chapter EIGHT

  Giselle urged him toward the door, tugging at his arm, too stunned, apparently, to speak. Though unmanned by fear, Beheim was still able to feel pity for her. She must know there could be no escape, not with these deaths upon their hands. Yet he could not bear to abolish whatever hope remained to her, and since flight seemed preferable to waiting, he acted out the gesture of survival, and they went down from the drawbridge, down through the precipitous maze of arches and stairways, down and down into the bottom places of the castle, passing along byways so deep and obscure that whenever he chanced to look up, the great hanging lanterns overhead appeared as faint stars burning in a murky heaven. At any second he expected to hear shouts behind them, but no pursuit came. Was it possible the crime had gone undetected? He could think of no other explanation. Yet even so, sooner or later Felipe and Dolores would be discovered missing, and Alexandra would implicate him. She could not have presumed that he would kill the lovers, but he was certain now that she had been trying to discredit him or Agenor in some way; she would likely have a net poised to drop upon him. And yet she had led him in a profitable direction, for the suggestion of complicity between Agenor and Felipe was intriguing, though how it might relate to the murder of the Golden was still unclear.

  He was tempted to convict her of betrayal, but there was as yet too little real evidence to draw a final conclusion. He needed time to let the mud settle from the waters and the hard facts sift down. Yes, that was exactly what he needed. Time, and an implausible amount of luck.

  After more than two hours of running, ducking into shadows, they reached a yawning tunnel above whose entrance was inscribed an intricate graffiti of nymphs being raped by satyrs, flung onto their hands and knees, and mounted from behind, their mouths twisted, hands outflung, as if somewhere in the darkness beyond lay salvation. Beheim, overborne by a weariness less physical than spiritual, shared their longing for surcease. Beneath the drawing were scrawled lewd comments in German and French and Hungarian, many of which contained words unfamiliar to him. He had the irrational urge to let this be his final place, to stand there and translate each and every phrase, deducing nouns from verbs and vice versa, and composing of them an obscene ode, an epitaph charged with moral sickness.

  There was a thick silence, the damp smell of sunless waters and rotting stone. He could see scarcely a dozen feet ahead, but straining his ears, he made out the beating of hearts nearby: two mortals in hiding some fifteen or twenty yards away. Males, he decided, judging by their odor. Either servants, advance elements of a pursuing force, or—and this he thought more probable—refugees who had once served the Family and had abandoned their hopes of life immortal. The notion that he had become like them, a cowering outcast, sparked feelings of shame and outrage, and glancing at Giselle, who hovered patiently beside him, vulnerable looking with her hair come all unpinned, he experienced a flash of resentment. How could he have let himself be swayed by such a creature? If he had not fled, he might have been able to convince the Patriarch that he was the victim of deception; he should have stayed and demanded a confrontation with Alexandra.

  And with Roland Agenor.

  Especially with Agenor.

  That old villain’s touch was everywhere in the scheme of his undoing. Oh, he was likely innocent. Innocent of murder, at any rate. But Lady Dolores had made a telling point: Agenor might well be using him to turn the Golden’s death to his advantage. What Beheim had taken for paternal solicitude and noble motive might have merely been the formal dress of a cunning stratagem, and he damned himself for not having recognized that altruism such as Agenor pretended to espouse was a virtue alien to the Family, that few favors done were not freighted with duplicity, no kindness untainted by greed or some other form of perversity. Agenor’s pose of an ancient grown to ruddy wisdom through centuries of academic solitude doubtless masked appetites as feral and conscienceless as those of the de Czeges.

  Agenor and Alexandra, Alexandra and Agenor.

  Did that axis hinge upon some crucial fact, something that might bear upon the investigation?

  Impossible to say.

  He had lost everything and learned nothing.

  Beheim’s despair planed away into anger, and his anger grew so profound, so liberating, he began to feel that he was soaring high above the bleak plain of his thought, no longer grounded in the rational concerns that had provoked it. And in that furious flight, distanced from all gentler considerations, it seemed that he had at last completed the arc of his being, embraced the lineaments of an inky, sharp-winged soul, and inhabited it fully. He thought he sensed a thousand vital potentials that a moment before he might have found loathsome, yet now appeared intriguing and inviting, promising new styles of dominance, fresh angles from which to approach the problem of forever. It was exhilarating, this knowledge. Intoxicating. His heart pumped with the robust rhythm of one just fed, and in his mind’s eye—or perhaps it was no inner vision, but a product of the walls of the moment breaking down and permitting him a view of some netherworld through a ragged breach in the stones of Castle Banat—he saw vague figures gathering round him: slim, darkly clad men and women with pale skin and lustrous eyes. They drifted toward him with the processional slowness of creatures in a dream, wreathed in streamers of mist. Frightened, he sought to will them away, and when they did not disperse, he grew even more afraid; but then he realized that these were the hosts of the Agenor branch, both the living and the dead assembled in a place of witness, there yet not there, an immaterial splinter of each drawn to attend the ceremony of this, his enlightenment. He seemed to hear their names in his blood, a hushed droning like the shadow of a song, music that filled and enriched him like darkness thickening in a crypt; he could feel the specific force of their presences, a thicket of energies as intricate as fern shadow; and from all this, steeped in those spiritual pressures, he derived a fresh appreciation of his history.

  These decaying villains with ruptured chests and stitched-shut eyes; these manly young beasts with their elegant manners and glinting teeth; these women with fanged smiles whose combination of beauty and unhealthy vigor was a lash to the senses—they all shared, he realized, much more than the specific strain of a blood infection, for that infection was the crucible from which a great harmony was being forged. As they crowded close, closer, their features growing increasingly distinct, he identified several of his acquaintances among them: Danielle Hinault, her chestnut hair piled high; Monroe Seaforth, the American financier; Claude St. Cyrille, Paul Widowes, and Andrew McKechnie, three men—like him—relatively new to the Family. And there was old Agenor himself. His shock of hair, like a white flame, struck Beheim—contrary to his previous assessment of his mentor’s character—as reflecting a whiteness of spirit. Not an actual virtue. Virtue was too limiting a term. It was more a purity of intent, an absolute clarity of purpose that Agenor had transmitted to each of them, a signifying quality that would attach to all their deeds. The treasure of his blood, their chemical birthright. Beheim began to know himself as a figure in a centuries-long tradition, its heir and—more pertinently—its implement, his essential purpose being to assist in the completion of a scheme whose ultimate goal was clear not even to Agenor, but was an imprint of the blood, a cellular labyrinth whose ornate patterns they were fore-ordained to duplicate with their schemes and violent actions. He could almost envision its eventual result, and he could almost make out those of the branch—some yet unborn, others living yet unjudged—who would one day fashion its final structures. Perhaps, he thought, he would be among them, for the grand design was nearing completion. That much was apparent, a wisdom of his blood. And it was, he understood, his blood that was truly wise, not his mind or his soul. Just as that red juice was moved along the passages of his veins by the beating of a heart, so he himself was moved along the passages of the design by the workings of some mystic engine, its true nature obscured by time and the exigencies of mutant biology. Yet he co
uld hear it churning in the song of his blood (oh, the Lady Dolores had been right about that; it was a song he had not heard till now, and now that he had heard it, he knew it plainly for what it was). And he imagined he could see the embodiment of the melody shining like a beacon in the black sky of his solitude, a simple device such as a cross or an ankh, yet emblematic of a deeper passion and a more fundamental truth.

  As if their function had been merely to shepherd him toward this peak of understanding, the shades of the Agenor branch began to recede, undulating like the shadows of flames; their droning song rose like a steamy perfume, imposing upon him an awareness of great destiny and enormous truth and infinite belonging. He felt drugged and delirious. It was as if after having been lost for years in an enchanted wood, he had suddenly grown to the stature of a giant and was now capable of overlooking the treetops and orienting himself amid the Family’s arcane metaphysical geography. He had the urge to shout, to roar his exultation; but a sense of calm potency washed over him, an emotion that had the richness of a cathedral silence. All of this might be, he thought, merely another dark symptom, an acceleration of the fever that possessed the Family, and thus might signal a slackening of good judgment rather than an evolution of awareness. Yet though he feared this to be the case, he could not reject the feeling, for it recast his confidence, allowing him to disregard the hopelessness of the situation and to concentrate upon what he might achieve.

  Giselle made a frail noise, but Beheim was too involved with his own purposes to pay her heed. He stepped forward into the tunnel, imagining the shadows fitting about him like a cape, and held out his arms to the darkness beyond. The hearts of the two men in hiding beat faster. To see one of their former masters so close at hand must, Beheim thought, have returned to them all the fearful allure of their former service.