These were not real philosophers, thought Anton. They did not seek to uncover the truth beneath appearances. They were pragmatists—petty men concerned with the day-to-day running of the House. But Lefebvre had already indicated to him that he was not solely here for a discussion. He was here for work. “What I seek by such experiences is not escape from the world, but an even greater experience of it. I seek new and ever more intense cognizance of things.”
“And what pleasures do you seek tonight?” The young man smiled lasciviously.
“Why, whatever pleasures offer themselves.” Anton turned his hands up, smiling.
Lefebvre spoke slowly, fixing Villiers with his eyes. “And what do you think, Villiers, of the rumours that there are Technis agents in our midst?”
Villiers looked at Lefebvre and his face twitched. “They are...surely rumours.” Silence now hung like a mist in the room and Villiers looked from Officiate to Officiate for affirmation. When none was forthcoming he glanced at Lefebvre. “Surely you don’t think...”
Lefebvre nodded to Anton and then at Villiers who, seeing the gesture, blurted out, “No!”
In a blur, Anton had somersaulted onto the floor in front of Villiers. His hands emerged from beneath his coat clutching stilettos. In an instant he stood up, just as Villiers himself did. For a moment Anton and the Officiate stood eye to eye before Anton plunged his knives beneath the man’s ribs. Villiers’ eyes bulged and he grabbed Anton’s forearms and held them tight as his face contorted. His body shuddered and he dropped to his knees. Anton watched as the man’s eyelids fluttered and his eyes slowly became flat surfaces without depth. When he was gone, Anton laid him gently face forward on the floor.
The still smirking young Officiate looked from Anton to Lefebvre. “As Villiers himself said, what a wonderful collection of entertainment you have provided tonight, Director.”
Anton was relieved when he left the smoking room. It had been an unwelcome distraction; he had other business to pursue. He entered the ballroom. Leaning against the wall with her bird-like husband was Madame Demoul. She smiled at him and looked at her feet.
Anton turned away and saw her: he wove between the dancers until he came close to the childlike woman. One of her friends looked quickly at him and back to her friend. Without acknowledging the other ladies, he stepped forward and asked, “Would the lady like to dance?”
A slight surprised smile appeared on her face. Without waiting for a reply, Anton took her hand and led her towards the dancing.
“Might I ask your name?” she said.
“I think it should remain a mystery, don’t you?” The band began a piece comprised of plucked violins, violas and cellos that rose and fell in a soft staccato march. Anton and the woman carved out little paths for themselves, joining up, moving in formation with the others, and rejoining. Each time they came together Anton broke into his half-smile.
“Stop it,” she said.
“Why, whatever can you mean?” he said.
“I’ll have you know I’m happily married.”
“Then you’re perfect,” he said.
“You rascal.”
“And to whom are you so very happily married?”
“Why, to the Director himself,” she said.
Anton smiled, though he felt the fear rushing through his body: waves that started in his chest and coursed down his legs and arms. He breathed steadily to calm himself. “Perhaps we should go somewhere where we can...talk now.”
Her eyes were wide and sparkling, and she looked at him as if mesmerised.
“Now.” Anton spoke calmly and assertively, brooking no opposition.
She walked slowly from the room, nodding to guests as they greeted her. Anton followed her to the wide passageway that led back to the entrance hall. His heart beat rapidly, as if it were a ferret rushing around in its cage. She opened a servants’ door, camouflaged by the wall’s decorations, passed through it and closed it behind her. Anton leaned against the wall and looked back at the ball. A couple passed by, smiling politely at him, and entered the ballroom. As long as Lefebvre or one of his loyal officiates did not spy him, things would be fine.
Turning quickly, he slipped through the servants’ door.
In a narrow corridor, she stood, her eyes still alive with excitement. She spoke softly, “I know who you are. I have heard stories about you.”
He grabbed her by the arms and thrust her against the wall. Surprised by the action, she stood like a frightened animal, breathing heavily. He leaned in so that his lips brushed her hair and his breath hovered against her skin.
She took his hand and led him to a rickety flight of stairs and up to the second floor of the mansion. They passed along a long corridor to the great doors at its end. “What’s in here?”
“His study,” she said and leaned in to whisper in his ear. “I’m not allowed in.”
Anton hesitated, then opened the door.
“No,” she said.
But Anton led her inside and lifted her onto the great desk that dominated the room. He brushed aside the Director’s papers and the quills. “What have you done to me?” Anton said playfully. He kissed her and felt the softness of her lips. He kissed her on her cheek and along her neck and shoulder, her ringlets brushing against his face. He ran his lips along the top of her breasts, bared by the décolleté neckline. He hitched her dress up, and ran his finger up her white stockinged legs. She threw her head back and closed her eyes.
He pulled a glinting stiletto from the sheath hidden around his waist. She drew a sudden intake of breath.
He pressed a finger to her lips to silence her and cut though the front of her undergarments with the blade, without taking his eyes from hers. Her mouth opened slightly, revealing her delightfully crooked white teeth.
A moment later, he was inside her and she wrapped her arms around him tightly, as if she might lose him. “My philosopher,” she said. “My assassin.”
All the while, he looked over her shoulder at the Director’s papers, strewn across the dark wood.
When it was done, he said, “Perhaps you should leave alone and I should follow you down.” He waited in the study for five minutes and then breezed out confidently.
Later in the night, as the guests were leaving, he leaned up against the wall next to her.
“You look familiar,” she said.
Anton drew an excited breath. He felt himself to be dancing on some invisible precipice that might crumble beneath his feet at any moment. “Near the Southern Gate lies Hotel du Cirque. It is not far from here. It has the most charming atmosphere. Perhaps you would like me to show it to you.”
“I’m free in two days time,” she said.
“Until then, Eliana.”
“How is it that you know my name?”
Anton half-smiled and blew air at her cheek. “Until then.”
His mind still alight with traces of excitement and risk, Anton walked from the mansion and onto the street. As he passed the wall, as if to reaffirm his daring, and to feel the exhilaration of earlier in the night, he purposely walked close to the Toxicodendron Didion. A vine whipped out and wrapped around his wrist, pulling him towards the rest of the heaving plant. He pulled a stiletto, cut the vine and stepped back. His wrist was already inflamed and itchy. He looked back at the vine, thinking how easy it would be to become trapped.
At first Anton sought only the immediate pleasures of the body. Over time, as they met weekly in the room on the top floor of the Hotel Du Cirque, Anton discovered that beneath Eliana’s childish air were hidden depths. Often she would ask him to explain some finer point of gratificationist philosophy, and her questions were unusually probing. She could grasp the philosophy’s consequences quickly, and constantly surprised him with her acumen. “So in the pursuit of immediate gratification, you’re prepared to risk long-term distress,” she said.
“Tomorrow we may be dead, and then what was the deferral of our desires for?” he said.
“But, per
haps we might also need to consider the terrible possibility that we may live another fifty years,” she said.
“Another fifty years of this!” He pulled her close so he could feel her breasts against him. She laughed.
One week, Lefebvre headed on business to the great monolithic city Varenis. Anton and Eliana arranged to meet for the afternoon. Anton was looking forward to a languorous lovemaking session, where the long hours would stretch like eternity itself. He imagined Eliana’s head thrown back, her mouth opening and closing in some counterpoint to the rest of her body. As he thought of it, his heart leaped.
It was with some surprise that, when he arrived at the hotel, he found a carriage was waiting at the front.
“Get in,” whispered Eliana.
Uncertain, Anton stepped up into the carriage and it took off, rattling along the cobblestones. Eliana leaned back on the seat opposite him and smiled knowingly.
Despite an almost overwhelming urge to ask her about their destination, Anton sat back in his own seat and looked through the window at Caeli-Amur. At first he thought they were headed to the massive Arena that sat at the base of the southern headland. But they passed it by, and it was empty on this afternoon. Instead they climbed the headland and passed through the southern gate of Caeli-Amur towards the water-parks and gardens that lay to the south. Though officially under the province of House Arbor, they were considered a neutral zone, where any of the House’s officiates could promenade in safety. Anton had never visited them. He was strictly a citizen of the city. Like many philosopher-assassins, he had grown up among his caste. His father had died when Anton was young and he had spent much of his childhood strapped to his mother’s back, his eyes calmly taking in events as she continued to fight in the internecine wars between the Houses. Murder, intrigue, theory—Anton was born into them.
When they arrived at the gardens, they passed through a great cast-iron gate imprinted with images of the goddess Pandae, crying alone in her boat on a great flat ocean. The carriage continued along the path, speckled sunlight falling between the trees. Colours leaped out at Anton: purples and yellows and oranges of flowers, the deep green of the grass, the sparkling blue of the canals that criss-crossed the gardens. Statues of gods and heroes stood sternly on little hillocks, or in semi-hidden arbours.
“Is it true that the statues in the gardens move around at night, that the gardens are filled with spirits?” Anton asked.
“Stay with me and you’ll survive,” teased Eliana.
Eventually they crossed a long bridge that led to an island in the middle of the lake. Among a copse of trees a great blanket was laid down, and on it were spread fruits and dried meats, cake-breads and flagons of liqueurs.
They stepped from the carriage, which then rattled away, leaving them alone with the feast.
“Who are you?” said Anton, half-joking, half in wonderment.
Eliana sat delicately on the blanket and her face became serious. “Who am I?” She seemed troubled by the question. “My father is a fisherman. My mother sells the fish at the markets, fixes the nets. It’s a poor life, but an honest one. One day, I was helping my mother at the market stall, and the Director came out of the Opera building. He walked over and spoke to me briefly. He invited me to one of his balls. My parents were so proud when the Director proposed to me. I knew I didn’t love him, but the look in their eyes! There were tears in them, and the Director even came to talk to my father about it. ‘As an equal,’ my father said. ‘He spoke to me as if we were equals.’ He was so pleased. It was such an opportunity—I couldn’t let them down. So that’s it: I’m just some poor girl the Director discovered down near the docks.”
“You’re not just that.”
After they had eaten, they sat looking out over the lake to the rest of the garden. Beneath the water moved fish and eels.
“Close your eyes, I have something for you,” said Eliana.
Anton smiled and closed his eyes. He felt her hand on his, pulling his fingers apart, and something small and heavy dropped into it.
He opened his eyes and there lay a heavy flat-topped silver ring with intricate carvings on it. He peered at it more closely. The carvings were of a labyrinth, small and delicate.
Eliana held her hand out. “I have one also, though I’ll keep mine hidden. Life is a maze, isn’t it? These are to symbolise that we have found our way to...something.”
Anton took Eliana’s hand in his, cupping the two rings in the space between their palms. He looked over the lake again. He felt a warmth in his body that he’d never experienced before, flowing from his heart outwards. He wondered at it, and searched for the words to describe it. It was an entirely new form of pleasure. One he hadn’t before experienced. Contentment—that’s what it was—a kind of wholeness, a feeling that everything was in its right place.
After a moment, he turned rapidly and pushed Eliana onto her back. As he fell upon her she laughed. “My dress!”
After that day, something changed between them. Each time they met at the Hotel, their lovemaking seemed more passionate, more intimate. Anton attended to Eliana’s every nuance: her tiny exhalations of breath, the way she turned slightly onto one side of her body, then onto the other, the rapid fluttering of her eye-lids, and then, finally, her half-muffled cry of his name. Through all this he held back, denying himself the momentary pleasures, until finally he seemed to reach a kind of transcendent bliss where he lost sense of his very body, and sense of hers, and somehow they left the material plane intertwined, surrounded by nothing but white light. When they finished, Anton, who considered himself a master of the amorous arts, lay speechless and breathless.
Eliana said, “How is it that you hold on for so long?”
He smiled and said, “It’s an unusually cold winter this year, don’t you think?”
He expected one of her usual loving barbs: “You’re such a rascal” or “You’re cruel.” He liked the way she would play with him in that happy way, following the words with a light-hearted laugh.
Instead, Eliana started to cry.
He knew he should leave her there, as he had done many times to others, but the sight of her tears running down her cherubic cheeks, the way she brushed her hand across her small upturned nose, kept him pinned on the bed as if under some great weight. And now, as she said nothing and looked away, as if defeated, Anton felt something shift inside him—a tiny little pain that cut him somewhere deep.
“He’s going to find out,” she said.
“No, he won’t. He spends all his time in his office—you’ve said so yourself.”
“He’ll kill you. You know that. Or worse.”
“Neither of us is going to die. I’ve always been lucky. Things work out for me.”
“It will have to end, won’t it? We can’t go on together, you and me.”
To his own surprise, Anton found himself saying, “Perhaps we should run away. It’s not as if anyone would miss us.”
She looked at him with those ice-blue eyes that had first attracted him. Her face lost its sadness and was now amazed: her bloodshot eyes wide, her cheeks glistening after the tears. “He’ll hunt you down.”
“He’ll take another wife and he’ll find another philosopher-assassin.”
She threw herself onto him and pinned him on the bed. “You’re teasing me, you rascal.”
He looked up at those eyes, his own alight with mischief. “Eliana, would I do such a thing?”
“I...I...” She was flustered and her face reddened. She turned her head from side to side and he understood her, and the words she could not say.
Something shifted inside him again, and in that moment Anton was convinced that there would be nothing more natural or romantic than to run away with her to Varenis, or perhaps south to a little fishing village where they could finally live in peace away from the internecine struggles of the Houses.
“Just say the words,” she whispered to him, closing her eyes as if she were praying. “I can’t bear this lif
e any longer.”
“Bring your things next week and we’ll run away. We’ll go south to a fishing village.”
Later, as he slipped out of the rear door of Hotel du Cirque into the dark alleyway, he felt confused. He had been wrong to give in to the romance of the moment. No fishing village could ever hold him, just as he could never limit himself to one woman—he was not a gratificationist for nothing. Now he would have to break it off with her and he hoped that Eliana wouldn’t burn her bridges with Lefebvre as she left him. That would be disaster. Their affair would be unveiled and all would come apart.
Wrapped up in these thoughts, he was only vaguely aware of a figure standing at the other end of the alley. He cut through the winding cobblestoned ways towards the white cliffs, and back towards his apartment. A few minutes later he stopped. He kicked himself. This affair was ruining his instincts. There had been something suspicious about the figure, and he had simply passed by. Something about its presence disturbed him, like a dream half-remembered in the morning, shadowy and unreal.
To avoid thinking about Eliana, Anton gorged on Lika-flowers, so the days became instants of kaleidoscopic beauty where he found himself in the endless now, each moment perfect and whole. The world seemed filled with luminous truth and incandescent beauty. When these effects lifted, he snorted uderri-powder and rampaged through the nights fighting and drinking, waking in the morning bloodied and bruised, his memories of the night before mostly gone, his head pounding, yet his disposition happy enough.
The day before he was to meet Eliana, Anton stopped at the La Tazia café, drank two shots of black coffee and ate spiced fruit for breakfast.
Pehzi, the wizened old café owner, passed Anton a message from his former lover, Madame Demoul. Anton tore it up without reading it and left it on the table in front of him. Shortly afterwards a slight and effeminate message-boy entered the café and passed Anton a second letter, this one from Director Lefebvre. He was to come to the House Arbor Palace.
The Library of Forgotten Books Page 7