The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

  As he stood there, shivering in the crepuscular light and moist air, growing more and more uneasy, Beheim realized that the chamber could not be considered ordinary even in relation to the extraordinary potentials of Castle Banat. The place was Mystery itself. He could feel it. It was part of death, part of the infinite country whose only border was the act of dying, and like all Mysteries, it was a realm where one could lose oneself utterly, where the concept of life after death was transformed from a philosophical concept into a bleak physicality, a region whose unfathomable logics could in an instant fold up a tuck of black essence into the shape of a monster, a dream, an endless array of dread events and objects. He felt now the same dissolute gravities as he had when he passed through judgment, the same enfeebling despair and loss of orientation, as if he were falling and falling, hoping for a fire to catch in his blood that would lend him the strength to swim against the currents of death and strive toward one of the faint lights that picked out the distance. Somehow the Patriarch had succeeded in wedding the continuums of life and death, and here he dwelled in both, at home in fire and in ice, fullness and nothingness, steeping himself in these pure contraries, hardening over the long centuries into a god.

  More frightened than he could remember, Beheim backed away from the edge of the pier, eyes fixed on the mass of seething bodies; but then he spotted something on a pier almost directly opposite, perhaps a hundred feet away, that gave him pause: a blazing figure, a man made all of white fire, so sharply defined against the blue-dark backdrop, it appeared inset into the air. Though it possessed human form, it was featureless, its effect rather like, he was later to think, a wizard’s mark stamped at the bottom of a mystic scroll. After a few beats the figure lifted its arm and pointed toward a ragged opening resembling a cave mouth some forty feet above and to its left. Beheim had the idea it was pointing out a path to the Patriarch, commanding him to take it. But the thought of stepping down among those half-alive things mindlessly churning their way to nowhere…He could not bear it. He continued backing toward the door, but as he spun about, preparing to run, he found himself face-to-face with another blazing white figure. (Or was it the same? When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw no sign of the original.) It stood an arm’s length away, blocking his exit. Though the face was without feature, as he stared into that white oval, into such a fiery absolute of whiteness it seemed to flow with dazzling hints of every color, he had a sense of insane intellect, a soul in furious disarray. One touch of that glowing hand, he thought, and blistering energy would spread through his flesh, magicking him into a raving, featureless thing, a soul imprisoned within an armor of fire, demented by pain, capable only of this sentinel obedience.

  Beheim’s first thought was that the figure had once been a man like himself, one who had displeased the Patriarch and been punished in this fashion; but then he was seized by the knowledge that this was not someone like himself, but was by some uncanny process the image or reality of his future, the infernal thing he would become if now he tried to flee. He could not tell whether this impression was purely premonitory or if it had been planted in his mind by the Patriarch…though he suspected this latter to be the case. Yet whatever the character of the premonition, he did not question its truth. Hesitantly he moved toward the lip of the pier and was relieved to find that the bodies below had cleared a pathway for him, forming a long, curving avenue that stretched across the chamber floor; however, this turn of events only marginally diminished his fear, and it was with unsteady legs and a growing sense of hopelessness that he scrambled down a crumbling slope to the floor and set out for the cave mouth to which the fiery figure had pointed.

  He tried to avoid looking at the bodies, heaped slightly more than head high on either side, as he negotiated the crossing; but now and then something would attract his attention, a throaty noise, a susurrus of breath, a despondent sigh, and he would glance in reflex toward the sound and encounter a staring eye, a slack mouth, a tangle of bluish-white limbs, a pallid scalp from which sprouted scant dark hairs, a pair of emaciated buttocks, all in a tumbled, haphazard arrangement such as might have been conceived by a lunatic artist. He did not permit his eye to linger, but even a glance was sufficient to inform him that despite their horrid state of repair, these pathetic creatures still possessed minds and wills. There was pleading in their tortured faces. Pleading, and what Beheim interpreted as fearful recognition. Their flesh was wasted, desiccated, imbuing their features with an androgynous aspect; yet here and there were visible withered genitals and flaccid female breasts. Overall, they seemed to emit a thin radiation of emotion; he could almost hear it, less a keening than a whine, an expression redolent not—as he might have thought—of agony and loss, but of milder emotions, petulance and frustration, as if they were not truly unhappy with their lot, merely dissatisfied.

  After walking among them for half a minute or thereabouts, Beheim became somewhat accustomed to the surroundings. Though daunting, the chamber embodied a sufficiently grand conception so as to mute its more horrific qualities. If, he thought, one managed to quell one’s initial revulsion and view it as a continuation of the castle’s bizarre decor, it was possible to gain a perspective, to see it as otherworldly, even oddly sublime. But on rounding a curve, coming in sight of the opening he was to enter, Beheim’s hard-won perspective went glimmering. Dozens of the creatures had piled themselves high in order to create a crude stairway that he would have to ascend in order to reach his objective. He made to turn back, unwilling to be so intimate with them, but discovered that the avenue had closed behind him, dammed up by a wall of distended bellies and grubby elbows and horny shins. There was nothing for it but to press ahead.

  Climbing that stair, clutching at crooked knees and cleft buttocks for handholds, stepping on foreheads and breasts and backs, encountering thready pulses and hearing shocked exclamations as he put his weight on stomach or chest, clinging to a pair of shoulders and leaning so near to the face of a staring, gawking woman that her graveyard breath warmed his cheek, feeling the bodies striving not to give way beneath him—not even crawling through the sewer pipe after Vlad had been as oppressive an experience—and by the time Beheim reached the top and went stumbling forward into the opening, into the tunnel beyond, he felt so soiled and defeated he was ready to take his place among these damned and nearly empty vessels, and go slithering with them this way and that, creating roads and dead ends for new recruits. He rested against the wall, gathering himself. Blue light struck inward from farther along the tunnel, glinting on the rock faces, signaling the presence of another chamber. He supposed it would be no less horrid than the first.

  With a weary step, he headed off along the tunnel, stopping once to consider his options, deciding that he had none, then going on again. A short walk brought him, as expected, to the top of a broad marble stair that led down into a second chamber, equally vast, but much longer than it was high, shaped roughly like an egg laid on its side, its pale gray floor smooth yet slightly undulant, like well-worn limestone—it made him think of a great natural cavern, an underground vista such as might be described in the work of a baroque fantasist. Here, too, there was sourceless blue light; here, too, the walls were ornamented with disturbing bas-reliefs and the chamber floor was occupied by hundreds of human figures, but these were not crawling, they were standing and walking about and even dancing. Bathed in that sickly radiance, dressed in elegant rags, the remnants of ball gowns and evening clothes, their movements graceful albeit somewhat stiff, pale couples circled to the inaudible rhythms of a sedate waltz—one inaudible at least to Beheim’s ear—avoiding the numerous small black pools, round as periods, that dotted the expanse, passing in and out of the shadow of colossal statues, warriors, beasts, and so forth, nine or ten of them, that sprouted up at irregular intervals like chess pieces in an endgame. It was a gathering similar to that held in the banquet hall on the evening of the murder, except here there was no music, no laughter, no conversation, only a thick silence that
seemed to be welling from the blue shadows at the opposite end of the chamber.

  Despite the morbid eccentricity of the scene, this chamber struck him as being more hospitable than the first; but whatever complacency that idea had bred was dashed when he noticed a woman ascending the stair toward him. She was, he saw as she drew near, quite beautiful, though her pallor and rigidity of expression—typical, he had heard, of the most venerable members of the Family—did nothing to enhance this impression. Her black hair was fashioned into a heavy braid that hung down over her shoulder; the smooth curves of her belly and breasts showed through rents in her gown of white brocade, and her features were strong, almost too strong to be in harmony with the delicate bone structure that supported them. It was a Mediterranean face, with large dark eyes and high cheekbones and full lips, its olive tone gone waxy, yet overall managing to retain a sensual appeal; in fact, the longer he looked at her, the more her deathly coloring and lack of expression came to seem positive facets of her beauty, perverse accents that bespoke a haunting sexuality. Though enormous potentials for violence and vindictiveness were implicit in who she was, he could not help marveling at her and feeling a need to be close to her, to gain through an intimate association some portion of her knowledge and power. How long, he wondered, had she lived? A thousand years and more, he’d wager. She might have trod the Byzantine world, the Roman, walked with Darius and Caesar. She might be Helen, Magdalene, Cleopatra, a Cretan sorceress. Compared with her, compared with the force of the cold fire that flowed from her, numbing his fear and rendering him increasingly vulnerable to her charms, all the women of the Family he had known, even Alexandra, were children of their sex.

  She opened her mouth, then closed it and sighed, as if speech were difficult for her. When at last she did speak, her voice was frail, rusty, some of the words incorporating pauses between syllables, hinging them with hoarse breaths. “You are most welcome, Michel,” she said, offering him her left hand, which was adorned with a moonstone set in a wide silver band. “Come, let me introduce you to your elder cousins.”

  Her grip was deceptively gentle. She could, he knew, wrench off his arm and sling him halfway across the chamber with only a minimal effort; yet as she led him down the stairs and out onto the floor among the gliding dancers, he did not focus on the dire possibilities attendant on her touch, but on the frisson of arousal he experienced whenever her hip brushed against him; the sensational perfume of her blood; the rippling of milky flesh across the tops of her breasts caused by the shock of her footfalls; the charge of light in her eyes that flashed each time she glanced at him, like silver fish surfacing briefly in black ponds, barely a glint, yet too brilliant to be mere reflection; the bemused half smile that came to her lips when she caught him staring; the entire subtlety of her presence, a potent emanation in which he thought he could detect the essences of ancient magics and forlorn histories, desolate kingdoms, burning cities. He was so enthralled by her, he scarcely registered the introductions she made. The men’s arrogant, dismissive nods, the hot eyes of the women trying to pin down some fluttering corner of his soul, the illustrious names of the branches they represented, Vandelore, Moritella, Agenor, Pescalco, de Czege, LeMiron, Sepulveda—these were irrelevancies. It was her name he wished to know, her gestures and looks he yearned to interpret. And not until a waltzing couple passed too close, jostling him, did the spell she had cast lift and permit him to remember why he had come. Nor was it until that precise instant that he fully apprehended where he stood, feeling with redoubled intensity an awareness of Mystery, the disorientation and flagging spirits that derived from a propinquity with the country of death, which lay everywhere, attached to the skin of life like a dark subdermal layer and, in places such as this, showed in patches through the flimsy cover of the living world.

  He broke free of the woman and gazed wildly about. They had come more than halfway across the chamber and were standing about thirty feet from one of the statues: a monolithic iron-colored rock thrusting up from the pale stone of the floor, atop which was perched a massive throne of some pitted blue mineral, and seated thereon, a sculpted male figure with coarse, brooding features and taloned hands and dark corroded skin almost the same color as the throne, making it seem either that he was sinking into it or emerging from it. Several of the black pools ringed the base of the monolith, and four couples were negotiating a path among them, dipping and swaying, their heads tilted at gay angles; the only sound was the sibilant scrape of their dancing pumps on the stone. As he gazed out into the chamber at the statues, immense court pieces, their pawns whirling over the undulant gray floor, Beheim felt diminutive and lost, entirely out of his element.

  “I must see the Patriarch!” he said, turning to the woman, trying to inject mastery into his voice, but hearing a quaver in it. “I must see him at once!”

  She remained imperturbable. “He hears you now, Michel. You have only to let your wishes be known.”

  “Where is he?” Beheim spun about, searching for a sign of an unseen eavesdropper. “I must see him!”

  “Michel!” The woman’s peremptory tone shocked him into stillness. “He sees you. That is the important thing. Now say what you have to say, and he will answer you.”

  Recognizing that he could not succeed in imposing his will, Beheim summoned a degree of calm and began to tell of what had transpired, of his plan and all he hoped to achieve, directing his words toward the woman. She kept her eyes on him, yet there was no force to her stare as there had been previously. It was as if some essential part of her machinery had been switched off. Except for the rise and fall of her chest, she stood motionless, her white gown glowing in the half-light.

  When he had finished, she maintained her silence for a time; finally, with no more animation than she had displayed while listening, she said, “We were of course aware that Felipe and Dolores had passed into Mystery. But we did not know the agency of their fate.” A pause. “They were much loved.”

  This last bore a hint of accusation, and Beheim was quick to offer a defense. “I had no choice. I was obeying the Patriarch’s charge.”

  “Perhaps. Though it seems to us you may have been overzealous in your obedience. Be that as it may, once this matter is behind us, the Valeas will seek to square accounts with the Agenors. I trust you will not lose sight of that.”

  Beheim caught movement out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned, he saw only the statue of the enthroned man. Ice seemed to melt along his spine. Had not those taloned hands shifted ever so slightly along the arms of the throne? He was certain they had. And those pale slivers showing beneath the heavy lids, were they imperfections in the stone or the whites of two globed eyes? This statue, he thought, might very well be the Patriarch. If so, it was terrible to contemplate the extent of his deformities, his state of near petrifaction; the price for millennia of life was high, indeed. He gazed at those hooded eyes, trying to connect with the great cold mind, still vital in its prison of stony flesh, and said, “I cannot proceed without your assistance, lord. Were I to spread the rumor that an important clue in the murder of the Golden lies outside the castle, it would surely be seen as a potential trap by the murderer. If, however, you were to let slip the news, it would not be doubted. Further I require a number of servants to help me dig the pits before daybreak. It is essential that we begin at once. By my reckoning we have but six hours of the night remaining, and it will take some time to organize things.”

  Again the woman let a few moments pass before speaking. “What you have asked is now being done.”

  Beheim had detected no movement on the part of the enthroned man, and he wondered if mental signals could be passing between him and the woman.

  “You understand that this must be done with subtlety,” Beheim said. “The spreading of the rumor, I mean. And you must not inform anyone before daybreak. Tell them that I am planning to inspect the body of the old woman shortly after dusk, and that I wish no one else to touch the body until I have had a chanc
e to look at it myself. Some tale may be needed to explain the absence of Felipe and Dolores. I will leave that for you to determine.”

  “Everything will be done as you require,” the woman said. Another lengthy pause. “However, here is a condition that attaches to my assistance. My agent must accompany you. Do you have with you a supply of the undiluted drug?”

  “I do.”

  “Enough for two?”

  “More than enough.”

  She held out a hand and, reluctantly, he passed over one of his three flasks. “I will send her to you after daybreak.”

  “A sip should provide sufficient protection for the day,” Beheim said. “Another thing, lord. Two of my servants are waiting outside your chambers.”