Beautiful Blood

12

Until his meeting with Breque, Rosacher’s days had been relatively undemanding. He would spend a few hours handling logistical issues at the House and, once he was assured that things were running smoothly, he would pass the remainder of his time in reflection upon his newfound faith, an imperfect thing that he examined in various lights, trying alternately to shore it up and pick it apart. On occasion he was summoned back to the House to deal with some crisis, but these instances grew more infrequent as the men and women he had trained to be his aides grew more competent. Following the meeting, however, he was forced to spend hours each day in the treatment room, located beneath the amphitheater, there pretending to work some magic with the blood to make it suitable for human consumption. Since no one was permitted to oversee this process, he initially whiled away the hours by daydreaming and playing mental games; but he wearied of these pastimes and took to writing down his thoughts. Sitting in a wooden chair beside a ceramic-lined tub of Griaule’s blood (which, against logic, gave no sign of congealing), staring at the black cryptograms that materialized upon its golden surface, then faded and vanished, it was hardly surprising that his thoughts were of Griaule—insights into the dragon’s intent, meditations on man’s place in relation to Griaule and other like topics. Soon he began to organize these thoughts into essay form and, after several months of pruning and polishing, he read one of the essays, an examination of Griaule’s influence upon the history of Teocinte entitled “On Our Dragon Nature,” delivering it by means of a speaking tube that carried his raspy whisper throughout the amphitheater. The reaction was overwhelming, outstripping his expectations—the gift shop was besieged with requests for printed copies of the essay and also with inquiries as to when the next “sermon” would be read. It seemed that a tremendous audience had been waiting for just such a preachment to give shape and substance to their inarticulate feelings, and so Rosacher was encouraged to construct a second essay. As he searched about for an appropriate topic, he cast his mind back to the beginning of his involvement with the dragon, to his study of the blood and the peculiar lapses in time (as if, he imagined, he had been skipped across the river of time like a flat stone across an actual river) that had marked the dragon’s efforts to thwart that study. Viewed in retrospect, it was an unwieldy tactic. It would have been much easier for the dragon to arrange his death—he’d had ample weapons at his disposal. Yet instead of letting flakes or enemies or some other element of the natural world do his bidding, Griaule had imperiled Rosacher time and again only to save him for some mysterious purpose, perhaps the very purpose he was now serving, the deification of the dragon. It was as if through his interaction with humanity, Griaule had adopted a human means of problem-solving, a haphazard empiricism, trying this ploy, discarding another, rummaging through innumerable potentials until he had winnowed them down to a single promising thread, one that embodied an immortal perspective on mortal circumstance…and thus was Rosacher led to write the essay entitled, “Is The God I Worship The God I Cause To Be?”, which elicited a more enthusiastic response than had his first attempt at theological discourse.

While visiting with Meric Cattanay on his tower one sunny, blustery afternoon, he brought up the subject, asking the artist if he had ever thought much about it. Cattanay was belted into a sturdy chair atop the platform, dabbing paints onto blank pages in a sketchpad, mixing colors together and adding linseed oil, then gauging the effect. He had aged markedly during the previous decade—his hair had gone from mostly gray to mostly white, the lines on his face had deepened into seams and his movements were stiff and halting, so much so that whenever the tower creaked in the wind, Rosacher would imagine the creaking issued from Cattanay’s joints. He required assistance in order to ascend and descend from the tower—thus the chair. “I used to think a great deal about things of that sort,” he said, wiping off a brush with a rag. “I never got anywhere with it. Too busy, I guess. And now I don’t have the time. If the mural’s going to be finished before I die, I’d better work swiftly.”

“You’re being overly dramatic,” said Rosacher. “You’ve long years ahead of you.”

Cattanay dunked the brush into a jar of cleansing solution. “I wish I could believe you, but I listen to what my body tells me…and it’s telling me I don’t have much longer. Both my parents were dead by their early sixties. Unlike yours, I’d wager. The years have been extremely kind to you.” He selected a finer brush. “When I used to wonder about Griaule, whether he was a god, all that, I concluded that of course he was. What else could he be? He’s the most godlike being I’ve ever run across and if there’s a consensus about the question, which there seems to be, who am I to argue? I’m a simple craftsman and not a deep thinker—I’ll leave that to you and Breque.”

“You must have gone round and round about Griaule,” said Rosacher. “I mean, you didn’t just make a snap decision.”

“I gave it due consideration.” Cattanay dipped the brush in indigo, daubed it onto the page, and mumbled something that Rosacher didn’t catch. “The truth is,” he went on, “once I stopped thinking about Griaule as a metaphysical problem, I became more content. I realized that a lot of what had been bothering me…you know, woman troubles, logistical matters, and so forth. I had complicated them by paying so much attention to Griaule. It was more satisfying to focus on questions I had the ability to answer. For instance.” He showed Rosacher the page on which he’d been painting—a splotch of gold partly limned in indigo. “I’ve been debating whether or not to edge the lower right quadrant of the mural with indigo. It wouldn’t serve as a border. It wouldn’t be this neat. Just a ragged evolution of the paint from gold to indigo in this one area. What do you think?”

Rosacher studied the page. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t. To make a judgment, you’d need to have some expertise, you’d need to understand how the color would work on the scales. You’d have to learn about varnishes. I’ve been using beeswax to fix the colors, but I’ve been considering a more conventional finish on the indigo.” He chuckled. “You’re not qualified to make that sort of decision. And none of us are qualified to assess Griaule’s mystical potential. Let it go. Concentrate on the things you’re expert in. You’ll be much happier.”

“I’ve become expert on how to handle whores.” Rosacher said glumly. “And drugs. I know how to create a demand for drugs.”

“You’re a businessman,” said Cattanay. “And a scientist. Perhaps you should focus on science for a while. Stop worrying about Griaule.”

Rosacher suppressed a laugh. “I’m afraid that science is entwined with metaphysics in this case.”

The old man’s white hair lashed about in the wind and he groped for his beret, lying on the platform beside the chair. Rosacher handed it to him.

“When you go down,” Cattanay said. “And I’m not trying to run you off. But when you do go, you may see a redheaded boy standing by the tower. Ask him to bring up a blanket, won’t you?” He turned to a fresh page in his sketchbook and looked toward the lowering sun, halfway obscured by Griaule’s majestic head. “Astonishing…to be sitting here. I hoped I might open my own gallery, sell a few of my paintings. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that I’d be fortunate enough to have witnessed all that I have. You ever think you’d see anything like him?”

“Yes, I did,” said Rosacher. “But I thought it would be different.”

+

Though much of what Cattanay said rang true, Rosacher failed to follow his advice. Encouraged by the reception given his essays, he embarked upon the creation of one a week (a task that entailed his working many late nights), and read it aloud to those assembled in the amphitheater each Friday evening prior to the weekend bacchanal. The most pronounced effect of these essays was not, as might be surmised, upon the audience, but was their effect upon Rosacher himself. Before taking up the pen, he had reached the conclusion that the dragon exerted a powerful influence on human affairs, but his belief was based upon a preponderance of evidence, rarely rising to the level of faith, and he was constantly assailed by doubt; but with every word written and spoken, his belief in Griaule’s divinity was strengthened and transformed into a devout reverence, until he became as zealous in his affirmation of the dragon’s divine potency as he had once been in his determination to paint Griaule as an exemplar of the mundane, somewhat larger than most, yet ordinary nonetheless.

Rosacher’s investigation into Ludie’s death proved fruitless. Her will, as he had presumed, was a sham, and either the killer had covered his tracks too well or else the accident had been no more than an accident; but he was confident that Breque knew of his agreement to hand over the business to the Church and that he was attempting to turn him against Mospiel in hopes that he would abrogate the agreement. Each week brought a fresh complaint from Breque’s office—the prelates wanted a larger percentage of the foreign markets or demanded a tightening of quality control or else were creating a fuss about some trivial issue that they claimed ran contrary to their doctrine. Rosacher advised Breque to appease them by offering a crumb of what they asked for, and Breque did as advised; yet he kept up his saber-rattling and made bellicose gestures against adjoining countries, massing troops along their borders and holding training exercises. Rosacher felt that something would have to be done to muzzle Breque’s ambitions, but he decided to bide his time. Though the relationship was sorely taxed on occasion, Breque had proved himself a dependable and trustworthy partner, one to whom Rosacher owed much of his success. Not the least of this debt related to Amelita Sobral, one of the operatives that Rosacher had borrowed from Breque in order to investigate Ludie’s death. She was a slender, black-haired woman with a milky complexion and features of an unearthly delicacy (enormous dark eyes, tiny chin, high cheekbones, a face that might have been the work of a master carver with a bent for the exotic) that lent her a deceptively frail, fey manner, like a fairy tale maiden in constant need of rescue, though this was far from the case, and a manner so grave, it challenged Rosacher to extract a smile from her. He assumed that she and her male counterpart would inform Breque about his activities, and his deeper motive in requesting them was to control the stream of information between his office and Breque’s by feeding them material and having his own agents report on what the operatives had communicated to Breque. In particular he wished to learn by this experiment whether Breque would react to false information about the murder investigation and thus prove himself complicit in Ludie’s death.

Amelita and Rosacher became lovers shortly after she entered his employ. He had thought this would happen, and that it would be entirely cynical on her part, but he allowed the relationship to prosper because it suited his strategy and further because he was smitten with her. Yet he noticed over the months that the information she passed on to Breque excluded details designed to inflame the councilman and eventually became an uninformative digest of what Rosacher permitted her to see. One drizzly morning almost two years after he had requested her services, she came to him out on the ledge, where he had gone to write and to draw inspiration from the shifting pastorale visible from Griaule’s side. She wore the khaki trousers of a Hangtown woman and a blouse of black broadcloth, a garment that signaled self-abnegation among her people, puritanical cultists who dwelled along the banks of the Putomaya in the jungly lowlands of the country. Sitting with her knees drawn up beneath her chin, she confessed her betrayal, telling him that she had reported to Breque on Rosacher’s activities—as her feelings for Rosacher grew, however, she had come to censor her reports, omitting whatever she considered to be crucial, but she could no longer maintain even this level of subterfuge. He was unable to rid himself of suspicion and, though moved by her apparent sincerity, with a fraction of his mind he reserved judgment, knowing her to be an accomplished deceiver—he thought the confession might be a ploy designed to engage his trust. He drew her into an embrace and, his face buried in her hair, said that he loved her, words he fervently believed as he spoke them, but that seemed devalued once he released her.

“I should never have accepted the assignment,” she said in a small voice. “My instincts told me to avoid you at all costs.”

“Then we would have never met,” Rosacher said. “Would you have preferred that?”

“It might have been for the best.”

“We can move past this,” he said.

“I’m not so sure.”

“Well, I am!”

“I have higher standards for my behavior than do you…or so it would seem.”

He tried to read her face, but it remained impassive. “What would you have me do?” he asked. “Devise some punishment? You were following orders and deserve none. Forgive you? I forgive you. That should go without saying.”

She gave him a penetrating look, then hung her head, picking at a fray on her trouser cuff. At last she said, “You’re taking this rather well…and I find it odd that you don’t seem at all surprised by my duplicity.”

“Did you expect me to put on a show for you? Wail and tear my hair? I’m not a fool. I knew from the outset that you might be carrying tales about me back to Breque.”

“I see. You were being duplicitous as well.”

“Naturally I protected myself. I don’t know whether I would call that duplicity. If I had mentioned my suspicions concerning you, it would have ended our relationship. I wasn’t prepared for it to end.”

Rain plip-plopped on the scales, dripping from the edge of the wing, and an assortment of trivial creatures were poking their heads, feelers and other protuberances up between Griaule’s scales. Amelita absorbed what he had said and then made a slight gesture with her head that might have been a nod signaling acceptance.

“I have one question regarding Breque,” he said. “Did you ever withhold information from me that would have implicated him in Ludie’s murder?”

“I found nothing to implicate him,” she said. “That scarcely constitutes proof of innocence, but if he was involved, he left no trace.”

Rosacher could not hide his disappointment and she put a hand on his arm, saying, “I’ll keep trying to find a connection, if you wish.”

“No, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Keep turning in your reports to Breque.”

A bewildered expression crossed her face. “You want me to continue deceiving him?”

“Your deceit protects us. If you were to go to Breque and tell him you could no longer work for him, he would simply replace you with someone whom I might not be able to detect.”

Seeing that she was displeased, he said, “You became entangled in this web when you embarked upon a course of deception. It’s going to take some time for you to free yourself.”

“And so, in order to ‘free myself,’ I must cease being Breque’s creature and become yours? Or have I always been your creature? You knew I was a spy from the outset, didn’t you? You used me!”

“What would you have done in my place? Breque put me in the position of having to defend myself. I blame him, not you.”

A squabbling arose from the nests hanging beneath the edge of the wing, and one of them, large and mud-colored, its bottom shaped roughly like a four-pointed star, swayed back and forth. A spasm of frustration struck through Rosacher and he aimed a punch at the scale whereon he sat, but pulled it before impact, recalling the damage done his hand by similar punches thrown in the past.

“Damn it!” he said. “You’re the most contrary human being I’ve ever come across!”

For all her reaction, he might have spoken under his breath. She stared into the middle distance, giving no sign of noticing the flight of swifts that swooped low across the dragon’s back, passing with a rush of wings a few feet away. Rosacher waited to see how long it would take her to speak, but lost count of the seconds. Three minutes or thereabouts, he reckoned.

“So if we are to continue,” she said, “whatever house we build will rest upon a foundation of lies.”

“That’s all you take from this conversation? That dire prognosis.”

She remained silent and turned her head to the side, away from him, as if something to the south had caught her attention.

“Well,” he said curtly. “At least we have a foundation.”

+

For the life of him, Rosacher could not fathom why he loved Amelita. In truth, he was unsure that what he felt was love, but he was most certainly obsessed with her. Thanks to mab, every woman was beautiful, but Amelita’s beauty, in his view, was supernal. Each line and curve of her had a sculptural velocity, a flow that led the eye from one place to the next, and whenever she moved it seemed to Rosacher that he had witnessed something wholly of nature, like the movement of wheat in the wind. She was a vigorous and attentive lover, and on those rare occasions when the clouds lifted and her mood brightened, she became vivacious and clever, given to quick-witted repartee; but she was depressed the majority of the time and often he would find her weeping for no reason she could articulate. There was, he thought, a great blank space in his relationship with her, a crucial vacancy that prevented them from perfecting their union. He surmised that the moral and physical rectitude of her childhood was to blame, but since she would speak of it only in the vaguest of generalities, he was unable to connect cause to effect in any practical way and thus incapable of concocting a remedy. As a result, his scrutiny of her grew more focused, more obsessive.

Not long after this conversation, they moved into an apartment atop the House of Griaule, one that until then had been reserved for visiting dignitaries, and there they lived for the next three years. The opulence of the place cheered Amelita. She would wander through the rooms, trailing her hand across the backs of gilt chairs and sofas upholstered with cloth that presented a dragon motif; she would sit and study the ornately worked tops of teak tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl by the light of brass lamps mounted on the walls, and gaze intently at the icy, delicate chandelier in the living room, as if she saw in its prismatic depths a kind of resolution. Rosacher could not be certain that these luxurious appointments actually increased her happiness, but they did appear to lift her out of herself, to satisfy some vital need, for her tears no longer flowed so easily and she developed an interest in the fauna that occupied Griaule—indeed, she began to go for day-long walks about the dragon, sketching the creatures that she spotted (marvelously complicated sketches that displayed a heretofore unexploited talent for art), and collecting them in a folio, along with her written observations. Her favorite room in the apartment was their bedchamber. It was dominated by a richly carved ebony four-poster mounted on a dais, with a painted canopy (more dragons) and peach-colored satin sheets; but the main attraction for Amelita was the carpet, an intricate weave of reds, purples, gray and white imported from Isfahan. The design was partitioned into two large hemispheres like, she said, an ancient map of an imaginary world, and once she had formulated this connection, she broke off her nature walks and would lie in bed all day sketching the fantastic creature with which her mind populated that world. Rosacher did not think this inactivity was good for her health, either mental or physical, and urged her to start walking again; but she would not budge and told him she found this type of art more creative and inspiring, and assured him that she was content. Before too long, however, her bouts of weeping grew more frequent and prolonged, and her moods darkened to the point that he feared she might take her own life. Her face began to betray signs of aging—faint crowsfeet, a worry line on the bridge of the nose—whereas his face, the undamaged portion of it, betrayed none, and he was led to consider the possibility that this discrepancy might be a factor in her despair.

One day while he sat beside a twenty-gallon tub of golden blood in the treatment room, entranced by its shifting patterns, it occurred to him that the reason for his lack of aging might be the massive injection of the dragon’s blood given him by the late Arthur Honeyman. And if such were the case, if a huge dose of the blood ameliorated the signs of aging and, perhaps, increased one’s longevity. If the effect were not peculiar to him, he could give a similar dose to Amelita and, once she became aware of its effect, that might have the secondary effect of enlivening her. None of this struck him with the force of a revelation—they were idle thoughts, merely—but he kept returning to them, re-examining them, and they acquired a revelatory power. Here was the answer to a question he had asked himself for decades: why had Griaule sought to distract him from his work? If he had arrived at this conclusion early on (it seemed impossible now that he had not) and, whether correct or incorrect, that conclusion had become known, there would have been a run on the blood by those desiring a longer prime of life. Despite his vast bulk, Griaule would have been drained, his veins and arteries emptied. Did the fact that the dragon had ceased distracting him from these ideas portend that he was prepared to die, or did he now trust in Rosacher’s devotion and so had offered up the remedy of his blood as a blessing to reward him for his faith? A myriad doctrinal questions attendant on that initial question arose, all of them casting doubt on his basic assumption, but in his eagerness to find a cure for his relationship with Amelita and to bring her the gift of an extended youth, he brushed them aside. That night, as she lay on their bed, naked beneath the peach-colored sheets, he sat next to her and spoke about his experience with the blood and explained what he intended to do, showing her a full syringe. She took the syringe from him and peered at the fluid—in the unsteady lantern light, the dark characters of the blood surfaced and faded with the elusiveness of eels, staying only long enough to give an impression of sinuous vigor before slipping away into their golden medium.

“Is this something you want?” she asked. “Am I not sufficiently beautiful?”

He had expected this kind of joyless reaction and advised her that the blood would not enhance her looks, merely maintain them longer than was usual.

“But is this what you want?”

“I thought it would please you,” he said. “Doesn’t every women wish to prolong her beauty?”

“I’ve always been beautiful,” she said. “I think it would be interesting to grow old and wrinkled.”

Impatient with her, he tried to take back the syringe; but she resisted him playfully and tucked the syringe beneath a pillow.

“Prove you love me,” she said. “And I’ll give it back.”

“After all these years,” he said, “I shouldn’t have to prove anything.”

“‘All these years?’” Her playful mien evaporated. “Has it been such a chore? Putting up with me?”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

She looked at him soberly. “You amaze me, Richard. You continually amaze me.”

He sought to make a joke of her comment. “That’s been my aim.”

“Well, you’ve succeeded. You’re a brothel keeper, a drug dealer, and you’re ruthless in your business practices. You’ve had people murdered. Yet you think of yourself as a good man. Most people are no different. We all engage in that sort of deceit, but we’re not as skilled at it as you. Your sins are so great, yet you hide the fact from yourself so thoroughly! It’s truly remarkable.”

Her words sliced into him and he said, “Damn it, ’lita! Must our pleasure always be held hostage to your morbid outlook on life.”

He made another try for the syringe and she pushed him away, this time with considerable force.

“You’re not a good man,” she said. “You don’t love me…except in the way most people love, and that isn’t really love, but a form of self-aggrandisement. I wish I had your talent for hiding from myself, for ignoring the realities—then I could love you the way you pretend to love me.”

“Then why are you with me? The money…is that it? The power. Do you find it exhilarating?”

“What I find exhilarating is that you’re so adept at deluding yourself, sometimes I’m able to believe the fairy tales you tell yourself.”

He wanted to reject her argument, her characterization of his feelings, but knew that to do so would only anger her further. Even if he submitted to her logic, she would be likely to mine a cause for disagreement from whatever he said.

She pulled back the sheet to expose a creamy thigh and pointed to it with the syringe. “This is where you would inject me?”

“Yes,” he said, encouraged—he thought she was relenting, deciding to relent, to allow them to go forward. “I’ll do it in the big muscle. It’ll sting, and there’ll be a sensation of cold, but that doesn’t last.”

“Apart from you,” she said, “has anyone else been injected with so much of the blood?”

“No, but I’ve adjusted the dose to compensate for your lighter weight. It should be perfectly safe.”

As he said those words, he realized how irresponsible it was not to do some further testing, and he reached again for the syringe; but she blocked him with her knee and jammed the needle home, thumbing down the plunger.

“Let’s see,” she said, and appeared on the verge of saying more, but the blood overpowered her and all that emerged from her throat was the shadow of a sound, the faintest of gasps.

He had thought she would react as had he and that as she recovered she would grow fuddled and amorous; instead she sat up in bed, more alert than he had seen her in months and, dismissing his expressions of concern with a blithe gesture, she strolled about the room, inspecting gilt picture frames, touching the surface of a mirror as though to validate that it was her reflection she saw, caressing the sublime curves of a divan that had been owned by a Byzantine prince, and eventually coming to stand at the center of the carpet, directly between the two hemispheres, posed with her head turned to the side, her high, small breasts and full hips lacquered with gleams, her left hand touching her left shoulder, strangely demure despite her nudity. Whether due to a physical transformation caused by the blood or a perceptual distortion on Rosacher’s part, her body appeared enveloped in a white radiance, and this aura, this glow, spread from her feet across the complex patterns of her imaginary world, a puddle of light making it look as if the bloom of her beauty was the production of a luminous essence that had been imprisoned until now within the threads of the carpet.

Rosacher waited for her to speak, scarcely breathing, half-convinced that when she gave tongue to her thoughts, it would be oracular in nature…but rather than speaking she sprang for the door, grabbed up a gray cloak from a chair and enfolded herself in it, and fled the apartment. Stunned, caught off guard, he hesitated before chasing after her and she disappeared down the stairs—he did not catch sight of her again until twenty-five minutes later when, after searching through the House, questioning the passers-by he encountered in the corridors, he reached the front entrance where she was pointed out to him by a group of young men loitering on the steps. Visible in the strong moonlight, she had ascended to a platform atop the scaffolding braced against Griaule’s side—it still bore tatters of black bunting from Meric Cattanay’s funeral six weeks earlier—and was scrambling toward the joint of the dragon’s shoulder, using vines to haul herself upward, moving with such agility and grace that he was hard put to believe this was the same woman who had been more-or-less bedridden for months. Ignoring the young men’s catcalls, he ran to the base of the scaffolding and clambered up it, but realized that he could not match her pace and slowed his ascent, using a measure of caution in securing his footing. By the time he had climbed to the platform, she had disappeared into the thickets atop Griaule’s back, yet he kept going, fueled by a sense of desperation, plowing through brush and tangles of vines. As he skirted the limits of Hangtown, the lights of Martita’s fractioned by leaves and branches, he wondered what she could have in mind. Was she driven by delirium? She hadn’t seemed delirious, but rather focused and serene…but she may have gone mad after fleeing their bedchamber. And what was that glow emanating from her body? She hadn’t looked to be glowing any longer, so perhaps it had been a flaw in his vision, some mental defect brought on by stress. Be that as it may, her reaction to the blood had been completely different from his, that much was certain, and he feared for her.

He checked the ledge beneath the wing and called out to the shadows deeper in. Nothing, no response. He proceeded farther along the dragon’s spine. If she were headed for the plain below, he might never find her. He shouted her name and listened to the winded silence that came back to him. The brush grew thicker and his step faltered when he moved past the point where the spine began to slope downward. Only the boldest of scalehunters ventured beyond this area—he remembered old Jarvis telling him that something big lived in the thickets above the haunch, some kind of animal, possibly a bear, that could tear you apart—remains of its victims had been found and there had been a handful of sightings, albeit fleeting and unreliable ones. Of course that had been years before and it might be that the animal had gone elsewhere or had died, but Rosacher had learned it was unwise to disregard such warnings, because more often than not the consequences of flouting them proved severe. The moon, silvery and almost full, was at its zenith and in its light he could make out palm crowns on the plain below, but not their trunks. A thin mist veiled the brilliance of the stars. Insects chirred and a nightjar cried. Rosacher felt as alone and frightened as he had on that long-ago night when he had drawn blood from Griaule’s tongue, yet he pressed forward into the thickets, made wary by every rustle, every shadowy twitch and tremble of leaf or twig.

Another quarter of an hour brought him to what was essentially a bald patch on the dragon’s back, an oval area some fifty or sixty feet across, and perhaps much larger than that (he couldn’t judge how far it stretched down the slope of Griaule’s side), scantily covered in dirt and weeds, but free of brush. He stepped out onto it and understood the reason for the lack of vegetation. Some idiot had cleared it away—within the past year, he guessed—and attempted to pry loose the enormous scales, shattering them into dozens of pieces that shifted under his weight. The danger associated with trespassing in places like this was that Griaule might mistake you for a scalehunter come to violate his body, and though Rosacher believed the dragon capable of distinguishing among humans and had evidence aplenty that Griaule recognized him for who he was, that belief was nothing he cared to rely on in this situation. Best, he decided, to go to Martita’s, have a glass of ale and think things over. Perhaps he could prevail upon the scalehunters there to assist him in the search. And then he spied Amelita. She stood facing away from him, her figure obscured by the gray cloak, so low on the dragon’s side, some twenty yards distant, that if she took another step or two forward, she would be unable to keep her footing.

“’lita!” he shouted.

The cloak flapped about her, appearing to register a stronger force of wind than the one blowing across the dragon’s back. An updraft, he thought. He shouted again and she turned toward him. At that distance he could not distinguish her features, but her skin had acquired the mousey coloration of the cloak. Tentatively, realizing something was wrong, he walked forward a half-dozen paces, paused, and then went a few paces more. Not only had her complexion gone gray, but a myriad fine lines now webbed her skin, as if she had grown ancient as she fled from him—yet on second glance she did not seem to have aged, but rather that her youthful image had been partitioned into irregular segments like those of a jigsaw puzzle. He spoke her name again, less a shout than a plaintive inquiry. The wind blew more fiercely about her—at least her hair (also gray) billowed and the cloak flapped with increased fury—but Rosacher felt no like increase where he stood and heard no keening or any other windy noise. Cold gripped the nape of his neck, as if it had been seized by a dead hand. He backed away, his heel catching on a loosened fragment, and he pitched onto his side, his temple smacking down hard. He must have blacked out, for when his eyes blinked open he discovered her standing over him. He thought initially that her facial muscles were in spasm, but her expression was neither agonized nor contorted—it was her customary stoic expression, reflecting no particular mood or attitude. And then he realized it wasn’t her muscles that were moving—it was the skin, and not just that of her face. Every square inch of skin was rippling the way bacon ripples in a frying pan. Each tiny segment of skin as defined by the cracks pulsed to a separate rhythm, as if they were blistering, about to release a vile fluid. A dribble of sound leaked from him, a whimper born of fear, fear for himself, for her, revulsion. He crawled away, trying to regain his feet…but fell again. Her lips parted, her eyelids drooped and she lifted an arm, a gesture that an opera singer might make in straining for a high note, and something fluttered up light as ash from the back of her hand, something winged—it fluttered in the air above her. Further gray scraps disengaged from her and joined it, accumulating into a cluster, then a cloud that bobbled and danced overhead. Each time a scrap lifted from her body, it left behind a patch of glistening flesh that rapidly darkened and began to pulse. She was dissolving, disintegrating…the process quickened, quickened again, and after two or three minutes more she became unrecognizable, diminished to a stump, a gray stalagmite from which winged things no larger than a flake emerged and arose, forming a whirling mass that encircled Rosacher, penning him in. Possessed by dread, he knew that once she had completely dissolved, these remnants would descend, fasten onto his face and kill him with their stings. But in the end only one of the creatures touched him. It hovered in front of his face for an instant and, his mind bright with terror, he had the impression that its wings were not attached to an insect body, but to a slender white female figure, perfect in every detail, a replica in miniature of his former lover—it brushed against his cheek, imparting a chill sensation, and flew up to merge with the fluttering gray cloud, which then passed toward the south, vanishing behind the bulge of Griaule’s spine.

For several minutes thereafter, Rosacher continued lying where he had fallen. The chill spread across his cheek, yet did not disturb him—on the contrary, the coolness was soothing, as though a salve had been applied. The bizarre manner of Amelita’s death, if death it had been, if she were not reincarnate as a cluster of flakes, left him in an uncertain mood, overcome by sorrow, but also wondering if this might not have been the best possible outcome for her—she had always been unhappy—and not merely unhappy, despondent, despairing—except for moments here and there, and though he ached for her, he experienced an undercurrent of relief that she had been released from whatever pain had been gnawing at her for all her days—but this did not alleviate his own pain. He wept while walking back to Martita’s and had to pause outside the door in order to compose himself. Once inside, seated at a table in the rear, he hated the dim, wavering lantern light, the smell of stale beer, the lively talk and laughter around him, all the dull brown normalcy of the place. He hung his head and tried to calm himself, but his thoughts flurried and he kept picturing Amelita as her living layers peeled away, her mouth open and eyes lidded, an expression that reminded him of how she had looked when they made love—yet it lacked vitality and was absent the sounds of passion, the gasps, the musical sighs, and thus seemed a mockery.

Martita dropped onto the bench opposite, bubbly as ever, and asked what brought him to her door—it had been months since he visited. “You’ll be wanting a mug of the brown, I suppose,” she said, and before he could answer, she put a hand to her mouth. “God! What happened to your face?”

“My face?” he said. “What’s wrong with it? Am I bleeding?”

She told him to wait, ran to the bar and brought back a small mirror that she kept beneath the counter. “You won’t believe this unless you see for yourself,” she said, holding it out to him.

In its clouded surface he saw his old face, his face as it had been before Ludie and Honeyman betrayed him, unmarked by any scarring, marred only by the lines of middle age. And he understood…or perhaps he didn’t understand, perhaps he only hoped he understood why the sting of that tiny creature pared from her life had felt so soothing. Moved by that flawed comprehension, then, he once again began to weep.