The Dragon Griaule

One

How The Father of Stones came into the possession of the gemcutter William Lemos continues to be a subject for debate among the citizens of Port Chantay. That Lemos purchased the stone from the importer Henry Sichi is not in question, nor is it in doubt that Sichi had traded several bolts of raw silk for the stone to a tailor in Teocinte, and although the tailor has not admitted it, witnesses have clearly established that he took the stone by force from his niece, who had seen it glinting amid a clump of ferns growing beneath the lip of the dragon Griaule. But how the stone came to be in that spot at that exact moment, therein lies the cause of the debate. Some hold that the stone is a natural artifact of Griaule, a slow production of his flesh, perhaps a kind of tumor, and that it served to embody his wishes, to move Lemos – who lived beyond the natural range of his domination – to do the dragon’s bidding in the affair of the priest Mardo Zemaille and the Temple of the Dragon. Others will say that, yes, Griaule is indeed a marvel, a creature the size of a mountain, immobilized millennia before in a magical duel, who controls the population of the Carbonales Valley through the subtle exercise of his will and is capable of manipulating the most delicate and discreet of effects, the most complex of events; but to think that his tumors or kidney stones have the aspect of fabulous gems . . . well, that is stretching things a bit. Lemos, they claim, is merely attempting to use the fact of Griaule’s mastery to justify his crime, and doubtless The Father of Stones is a relic of the dragon’s hoard, probably dropped beneath the lip by one of the pitiful half-wits who inhabit his innards. Of course that’s how it got there, their opponents will say; do you believe Griaule incapable of such a simple machination as that of directing one of his minions to leave a stone in a certain place at a certain time? And as for the origin of the stone, here we have a vast, mysterious, and nearly immortal intelligence, one whose body supports forests and villages and parasites large enough to destroy a city – given all that, is the possibility that he might have fabricated The Father of Stones in some dark tuck of his interior really so far removed?

These arguments aside, the facts are as follows. One misty night in February some years ago, a young boy burst into the headquarters of the constabulary in Port Chantay, bursting with the news that Mardo Zemaille, the priest of the Temple of the Dragon, had been murdered, and that his assassin, William Lemos, was awaiting the pleasure of the constabulary at the temple gates. When the constables arrived at the temple, which was located a few hundred yards from the landward end of Ayler Point, they found Lemos, a pale sandy-haired man of forty-three with a pleasant yet unremarkable face and gray eyes and a distracted professorial air, pacing back and forth in front of the temple; after placing him in restraints, the constables proceeded onto the grounds, which were uncharacteristically deserted. In a corner building of the compound they discovered Zemaille lying crumpled beside an altar of black marble, his skull fractured, the fatal blow having been struck with a fist-sized gem of an inferior milky water, one side left rough, affording an excellent grip for someone wishing to hurl it, and the other side cut into a pattern of sharply edged facets. They also discovered Mirielle, Lemos’ daughter, stretched naked on the altar, drugged into a state of torpor. Port Chantay, while a fairly large city, was not so large that the constabulary had been unaware of the conflict between Lemos and Zemaille. Lemos’ wife Patricia, drowned in the waters off Ayler Point three years before (she had, it was rumored, been visiting her lover, a wealthy gentleman with a home at the seaward end of the point), had willed her portion of the gem-cutting business to Mirielle, and Mirielle, who had been deeply involved with the dragon cult and with Zemaille himself, had donated the half-share to the temple. Zemaille was accustomed to using rare gems in certain of his rituals, and he soon began to drain the resources of the shop; the imminent failure of the gemcutter’s business, along with his daughter’s rejection, her wantonness and sluttish obeisance to the priest, had driven him to the depths of despair and thence, it seemed, to murder. And so, with a confession in hand, one backed by clear motive and a wealth of physical evidence, the constables felt confident that justice would be swift and sure. But they had not reckoned on the nature of Lemos’ defense. Nor, it appeared from his initial reaction, had Lemos’ attorney, Adam Korrogly.

‘You must be mad,’ he told Lemos after the gemcutter had related his version of the events. ‘Or else you’re damned clever.’

‘It’s the truth,’ Lemos said glumly. He was slumped in a chair in a windowless interrogation room lit by a glass bowl depended from the ceiling that held clumps of luminous moss; he gazed at his hands, which were spread upon a wooden table, as if unable to accept that they had betrayed him.

Korrogly, a tall, thin, intense man with receding black hair and features that looked to have been whittled into sharpness out of smooth white wood, walked to the door and, facing it, said, ‘I see where you’re trying to lead me.’

‘I’m not trying to lead you anywhere,’ Lemos said. ‘I don’t care what you think, it’s the truth.’

‘You should care very much what I think,’ said Korrogly, turning to him. ‘In the first place, I don’t have to accept your case; in the second, my performance will be greatly abetted if I believe you.’

Lemos lifted his head and engaged Korrogly’s eyes with a look of such abject hopelessness that for an instant the attorney imagined it had struck him with a physical force. ‘Proceed as you will,’ Lemos said. ‘The quality of your performance matters little to me.’

Korrogly walked to the table and leaned forward, resting his hands so that the splayed tips of his fingers were nearly touching Lemos’ fingers. Lemos did not move his hands away, did not appear to notice the closeness of Korrogly’s hands, and this indicated that he was truly overborne by all that had happened, and not putting on an act. Either that, Korrogly thought, or the man’s got the nervous system of a snail.

‘You’re asking me to attempt a defense that’s never been used before,’ he said. ‘Now that I think of it, I’m amazed no one’s ever tried it. Griaule’s influence – over the Carbonales Valley, anyway – is not in doubt. But to claim you were enacting his will, that some essence embodied in the gem inspired you to serve as his agent, to use that as a defense in a criminal case . . . I don’t know.’

Lemos appeared not to have heard: after a moment he said, ‘Mirielle . . . is she all right?’

Irritated, Korrogly said, ‘Yes, yes, she’s fine. Were you listening to what I just said?’

Lemos stared at him uncomprehendingly.

‘Your story,’ Korrogly said, ‘appears to demand a defense that has never been used. Never. Do you know what will attend that?’

‘No,’ said Lemos, and lowered his eyes.

‘Judges are not delighted by the prospect of setting precedent, and whoever presides over your trial is going to be particularly loath to establish this sort of precedent. Because if it is established, God knows how many villains will seek to use it to avoid punishment.’

Lemos was silent for a few seconds and then said, ‘I don’t understand. What do you wish me to say?’

Studying his face, Korrogly had a feeling of uneasiness: Lemos’ despair seemed too uniform, too all-encompassing. He had acted for a number of clients who had been in the grip of terrible despair, but even the most despondent of these had on occasion suddenly realized their plight and exhibited fright or desperation or some variant emotion. He had the idea that Lemos was an intelligent man, one capable of such a subtle deceit as this might be.

‘It’s not necessary that you say anything,’ he told Lemos. ‘I simply want you to understand the course you’ve set me. If I were to plead for mercy from the court, ask them to recognize the passions involved, to take into account the unscrupulous nature of the deceased, I’m confident that your sentence would be light. Zemaille was not well loved, and there are many who consider what you’ve done an act of conscience.’

‘Not I,’ said Lemos in such an agonized tone that Korrogly was persuaded for the moment to complete belief.

‘However,’ he went on, ‘should I pursue the defense that your story suggests, you may wind up facing a much harsher sentence, perhaps even the ultimate. That you choose to defend in this manner might imply to the judge that the crime was premeditated. Thus he would allow no mediating circumstance in his instructions to the jury. He would dismiss all possibility of it being a crime of passion.’

Lemos gave a dispirited laugh.

‘That amuses you?’ Korrogly asked.

‘I find it simplistic that passion and premeditation are deemed to be mutually exclusive.’

Korrogly moved away from the table, folded his arms, and regarded the luminous globe overhead. ‘Of course that’s not always the case. Not all crimes of passion are considered acts of the moment. There is leeway left for obsession, for irresistible compulsion. But what I’m telling you is that the judge in his desire to avoid setting precedent might block these avenues of mercy in his instructions to the jury.’

Once again Lemos appeared to have slipped into a reverie.

‘Have you decided?’ Korrogly insisted. ‘I can’t decide for you, I can only recommend.’

‘You seem to be recommending that I lie,’ said Lemos.

‘How do you arrive at that?’

‘You tell me the truth is a risk, that the secure course is best.’

‘I’m merely counseling you as to the potential pitfalls.’

‘There’s a fine line, is there not, between recommendation and counsel?’

‘Between guilt and innocence also,’ said Korrogly, thinking he might get a rise out of Lemos with this; but the gemcutter only stared at the table, brushed back his sandy forelock from his eyes.

‘Very well.’ Korrogly picked up his case from the floor. ‘I’ll assume you want me to go forward with the case as you’ve presented it.’

‘Mirielle,’ said Lemos. ‘Will you ask her to come and visit me?’

‘I will.’

‘Today . . . will you ask her today?’

‘I plan to see her this afternoon, and I’ll ask her. But according to the constables, she may not respond favorably to anything I ask on your behalf. She is apparently quite bereft.’

Lemos muttered something, and when Korrogly asked him to repeat it, he said, ‘Nothing.’

‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’

Lemos shook his head.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ said Korrogly; he started to tell Lemos to be of good cheer, but partly in recognition of the profundity of Lemos’ despair, partly due to his continuing sense of uneasiness, he thought better of it.

The gemcutter’s shop was in the Almintra quarter of Port Chantay, a section of the city bordering the ocean, touched yet not overwhelmed by decay and poverty. Dozens of shops were situated on the bottom floors of old peeling frame houses with witchy-looking peaked roofs and gables, and between them, Korrogly could see the houses of the wealthy ranging Ayler Point: airy mansions with wide verandahs and gilt roofs nestled among stands of thistle palms. The sea beyond the point was a smooth jade-colored expanse broken by creamy surf, seeming to carry out the theme of elegance stated by the mansions; on the other hand, the breakers that heaped foam upon the beaches of the Almintra quarter were fouled with seaweed and driftwood and offal. It must, he thought, be dismaying to the residents of the quarter, which not so long ago had been considered exclusive, to have this view of success and beauty, and then to turn back to their own lives and watch the rats scurrying in piles of vegetable litter, the ghost crabs scuttling in the sandy streets, the beggars, the increasing dilapidation of their homes. He wondered if this could have played a part in the murder; he could discern no opportunity for profit in the crime, but there was so much still hidden, and he did not want to blind himself to the existence of such a motive. He did not believe Lemos, yet he could not fully discredit the gemcutter’s story. That was the story’s virtue: its elusiveness, the way it played upon the superstitious nature of the citizenry, how it employed the vast subtlety of Griaule to spread confusion through the mind of whomever sought to judge it. The jury was going to have one hell of a time. And, he thought, so was he. He could not deny the challenge presented him; a case of this sort came along but rarely, and its materials, so aptly suited to the game of the law, to the lawyerly sleights-of-hand that had turned the law into a game, afforded him the opportunity of making a quick reputation. His inability to discredit Lemos’ story might be a product of his hope that the gemcutter was telling the truth, that precedent was indeed involved, for he was beginning to realize that he needed something spectacular, something unique and unsettling, to reawaken his old hopes and enthusiasms, to restore his sense of self-worth. For the nine years since his graduation from law school, he had devoted himself to his practice, achieving a small success, all that could be expected of someone who was the son of poor farmers; he had watched less skilled lawyers achieve greater success, and he had come to understand what he should have understood from the beginning: that the Law was subordinate to the unwritten laws of social status and blood relation. He was at the age of thirty-three an idealist whose ideals were foundering, yet whose fascination with the game remained undimmed, and this had left him open to a dangerous cynicism – dangerous in that it had produced in him a volatile mixture of old virtues and new half-understood compulsions. Lately the bubblings up of that mixture had tended to make him erratic, prone to wild swings of mood and sudden abandonments of hope and principle. He was, he thought, in much the same condition as the Almintra quarter: a working class neighborhood funded by solid values that had once looked forward to an upwardly mobile future, but that now aspired to be a slum.

The gemcutter’s apartment was on the second floor of one of the frame houses, located directly above his shop, and it was there that Korrogly interviewed the daughter, Mirielle. She was a slim young woman in her early twenties with long black hair and hazel eyes and a heart-shaped face whose prettiness had been hardened by the stamp of dissipation; she wore a black dress with a lace collar, but her pose was hardly in keeping with the demureness of her garment or with her apparent grief. Her cheeks were puffy from weeping, her eyes reddened, and yet she lay asprawl on a sofa, smoking a crooked green cigar, her legs propped on the back and the arm, affording Korrogly a glimpse of the shadowy division between her thighs: it appeared that grief had offered her the chance to experience a new form of dissolution, and she had seized upon it wholeheartedly.

We’re proud of our little treasure, are we not, he thought, we like to give it lots of ventilation.

But Mirielle Lemos, for all her dissipation, was an extremely attractive woman, and despite his sarcasm, Korrogly – a lonely man – felt drawn to her.

The air in the apartment was thick with stale cooking odors, and the living room was a typical bachelor’s disarray of soiled dishes and tumbled piles of clothing and scattered books, all strewn across furniture that had seen better days: the sprung sofa, a couple of easy chairs shiny with dirt and grease, a thread-bare brown carpet with a faded blue pattern, a small scarred table that bore several framed sketches, one depicting a woman who greatly resembled Mirielle and was holding a baby in her arms – thin winter sunlight cast a glaze of reflection over the glass, imbuing the sketch with a mystical vagueness. On the wall were several paintings, and the largest of these was a representation of Griaule half-buried beneath centuries of grass and trees, only a portion of a wing and his entire massive head, as high as a hill itself, left visible; this painting, Korrogly noticed, was signed W. Lemos. He pushed aside some dirty clothing and perched on the edge of an easy chair facing Mirielle.

‘So you’re my father’s lawyer,’ she said after exhaling a stream of gray smoke. ‘You don’t look competent.’

‘Be assured that I am,’ said Korrogly, who had been prepared for her hostility. ‘If you were hoping for some white-haired old man with ink on his fingers and crumpled legal notes peeping from his waistcoat pockets, I’m . . .’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I was hoping for someone exactly like you. Somebody with a minimum of experience and skill.’

‘I take it, then, that you’re anticipating a hard judgment for your father. That you’re embittered by his act.’

‘Embittered?’ She laughed. ‘I despised him before he killed Mardo. Now I hate him.’

‘And yet he saved your life.’

‘Is that what he told you?’ Another laugh. ‘That’s scarcely the case.’

‘You were drugged,’ he said. ‘Lying naked on an altar. A knife was found on Zemaille’s body.’

‘I’ve spent other nights lying on that altar in exactly the same state,’ she said, ‘and never once have I experienced other than pleasure.’ Her sultry, smirking tone made clear the nature of that pleasure. ‘As for the knife, Mardo always went armed. He was in constant danger from fools like my father.’

‘What do you remember of the murder?’

‘I remember hearing my father’s voice. I thought I was dreaming. Then I heard a crack, a splintering sound. I looked up and saw Mardo fall with blood all over his face.’ She tensed, looked up to the ceiling, apparently made uncomfortable by the memory; but then, as though also inflamed by it, she ran a hand along her belly and thigh. Korrogly averted his eyes, feeling an accumulation of heat in his own belly.

‘Your father claims there were nine witnesses, nine hooded figures, all of whom fled the chamber. None of them have come forward. Do you know why this might be?’

‘Why should they come forward? To experience more persecution from people who have no idea of what Mardo was attempting?’

“And what was that?”

She exhaled another stream of smoke and said nothing.

‘You’ll be asked this question in court.’

‘I will not betray our secrets,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what happens to me.’

‘Neither does your father . . . or so he says. He’s very depressed, and he wants to see you.’

She made a noise of contempt. ‘I’ll see him on the gallows.’

‘You know,’ Korrogly said, ‘despite what your father has done, he really does believe he was acting to save you.’

‘You don’t know what he believes,’ she said, sitting up, fixing him with a dead stare, her voice full of venom. ‘You don’t understand him at all. He pretends to be a humble craftsman, an artisan, a good honest soul. But in his heart he considers himself a superior being. Life, he used to say, had thrown obstacle after obstacle into his path, keeping him from achieving his proper station. He feels he’s been penalized with bad luck for his intelligence. He’s a schemer, a plotter. And his bad luck stems from the fact that he’s not so intelligent as he thinks. He bungles everything.’

The first part of what she had said was in such accord with Korrogly’s impression of Lemos that he was taken aback; hearing his feelings issue from Mirielle’s mouth acted both to reinforce his impression and – because she was so obviously her father’s antagonist – to invalidate it.

‘That may be,’ he said, covering his confusion by shuffling through papers, ‘but I doubt it.’

‘Oh, you’ll find out,’ she said. ‘If there’s one thing you’ll end up knowing about my father, it’s his capacity for deceit.’ She settled back on the sofa, her skirt riding up onto her thigh. ‘He’s been wanting to kill Mardo ever since I got involved with him.’ A smile hitched up the corners of her mouth. ‘He was jealous.’

‘Jealous?’ said Korrogly.

‘Yes . . . as a lover is jealous. He delights in touching me.’

Korrogly did not reject the notion of incestuous desire out of hand, but after going through the mental file he had begun on Lemos, he refused to believe Mirielle’s accusation; she had been so committed to Zemaille and his way of life that he could not, he realized, believe anything she told him. She was ruined, abandoned to the point of dissolution; the stink pervading the apartment, he thought, was scarcely distinguishable from the reek of her own spoilage.

‘Why do you despise your father?’ he asked.

‘His pomposity,’ she said, ‘and his stodginess. His stale conception of what happiness should be, his inability to embrace life, his dull presence, his . . .’

‘All that sounds quite adolescent,’ he said. ‘Like the reaction of a stubborn child who’s been denied her favorite treat.’

She shrugged. ‘Perhaps. He rejected my suitors, he prevented me from becoming an actress . . . and I could have been a good one. Everybody said so. But how I am, how I was, doesn’t have any bearing on the truth of what I’ve said. And it’s not relevant to what my father did.’

‘Relevant . . . possibly not. But it speaks to the fact that you’re not in the least interested in helping him.’

‘I’ve made no secret of that.’

‘No, you haven’t. But the history of your emotions will be helpful in pointing up that you’re a vindictive bitch and that your idea of the truth is whatever will hurt your father. It has no relation to what really happened.’

He had been trying to make her angry, wanting to get an idea of her boiling point, knowledge that would come in handy during the trial; but her smile only broadened, she crossed her legs and traced a florid shape in the air with the tip of her cigar. She was very cool, he thought, very cool. But in court that would work against her; it would cast Lemos in a more benign light, show him to be the patient, caring parent in contrast to her vengeful ingrate. Of course that would be more significant to a defense based on compulsion, on wrong-headed passion; but Korrogly believed he could color his actual defense with this other and so win the jury’s sympathy.

‘Well,’ he said, coming to his feet. ‘I may have some more questions later, but I don’t see any use in continuing this now.’

‘You think you’ve got me, don’t you?’

‘Got you? I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You think you’ve got me figured out.’

‘As a matter of fact, I do.’

‘And how you would portray me in court?’

‘I’m sure you must have an idea.’

‘Oh, but I’d like to hear it.’

‘All right. If necessary I’ll paint a picture of a spoiled, indulgent creature who has no real feelings for anyone. Even her grief for her lover seems to be no more than a kind of adornment, an accessory to be worn with a black dress. And in her degeneracy, a condition prompted by drugs and the black arts, by the depraved rituals of the dragon cult, the only emotions she is capable of mustering are those she thinks will serve her ends. Greed, perhaps. And vengefulness.’

She let out a lazy chuckle.

‘That strikes you as inaccurate?’

‘Not at all, lawyer. What amuses me is that knowing this, you think you can use it to your advantage.’ She turned on her side, supporting her head with one hand, her skirt twisting beneath her, exposing even more pale firm flesh. ‘I’ll look forward to our next meeting. Perhaps by then your understanding of the situation will have grown more complex, and you’ll have more . . . more interesting questions to ask.’

‘May I ask one further question now?’

‘Yes, of course.’ She rolled onto her back, cutting her eyes toward him.

‘This display of yours, the dress up to your waist and all that, is it intended to arouse me?’

She nodded. ‘Mmm-hmm. Is it working?’

‘Why?’ he said. ‘What possible benefit do you think that’ll gain you? Do you think I’ll defend your father with less enthusiasm?’

‘I don’t know . . . will you?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Then it’ll be for nothing,’ she said. ‘But that’s all right, too.’

He couldn’t tear his eyes away from her legs.

‘Really, it’s all right,’ she said. ‘I need a lover now. And I like you. You’re funny, but I like you anyway.’

He stared at her, his anger alternating with desire. Knowing that he could have her alarmed him. He could go to her now, this moment, and it would affect nothing, it would have no resonance with the trial, it would merely be an indulgence. Yet he understood that it was this increasing openness to indulgence that signaled his impending moral shipwreck. To reject her would not be an act of prudishness, but one of salvation.

‘It’ll be good with us,’ she said. ‘I have a feeling for these things.’

His eye followed the line of her thigh to the white seashell curve of her hip; her fingers were long, slender, and he imagined how they might touch him.

‘I have to be going,’ he said.

‘Yes, I think you’d better.’ Her voice was charged with gleeful spite. ‘That was a near thing, wasn’t it? You might have actually enjoyed yourself.’

Two

During the next week Korrogly interviewed many witnessess, among them Henry Sichi, who reported that when Lemos purchased the gemstone, he had been so entranced by it, so absorbed, that Sichi had found it necessary to give him a nudge in order to alert him sufficiently to complete the deal. He spoke to various members of Lemos’ guild, all of whom were willing to testify to the mildness and honesty of his character; they described him as a man obsessed with his work, obsessed to the point of absentmindness, drawing a vastly different picture of the man than had Mirielle. Korrogly had known quite a few men who had presented an exemplary public face and a wholly contradictory one in private; yet there was no doubt that the guildsmen’s testimony would outweigh Mirielle’s . . . in fact, whatever Mirielle said in evidence would, no matter how hostile, benefit Lemos’ case because of its vile context. He sought out experts on Griaule’s history and talked to people who’d had personal experience of Griaule’s influence. The only witness whose testimony ran contrary to the defense was that of an old man, a drunkard who was in the habit of sleeping it off in the dunes south of Ayler Point and on several occasions had seen Lemos hurling stones at a sign post, hurling them over and over again as if practicing for the fatal toss; the old man’s alcoholism would diminish the impact of the testimony, but it was nevertheless of consequence.

When Korrogly related it to Lemos, the gemcutter said, ‘I often walk out past the point of an afternoon, and sometimes I throw stones to relax. It was my only talent as a child, and I suppose I seek refuge in it when the world becomes too much to bear.’

Like every other bit of evidence, this too, Korrogly saw, was open to interpretation; it was conceivable, for instance, that Griaule’s choice of Lemos as an agent had been in part made because of this aptitude for throwing stones, that he had been moved by the dragon to practice in preparation for the violent act. He looked across the table at his client. Jail, it appeared, was turning Lemos gray. His skin, the tenor of his emotions, everything about him was going gray, and Korrogly felt infected by that grayness, felt that the gray was the color of the case, of all its indistinct structures and indefinite truths, and that it was spreading through him and wearing him away. He asked again if he could do anything for Lemos, and again Lemos’ answer was that he wished to see Mirielle.

On a Sunday in late March, Korrogly interviewed an elderly and wealthy woman who had until shortly before the murder been an active member of the Temple of the Dragon. The woman was known only as Kirin, and her past was a shadow; she seemed not to have existed prior to her emergence within the strictures of the temple, and since leaving it, she had lived a secretive life, known to the public only through the letters that she occasionally wrote to the newspaper attacking the cult. He was met at the door by a thick-waisted drab, apparently the woman’s servant, who led him in a room that seemed to have been less decorated than to have sprung from a green and leafy enchantment. It was roofed by a faceted skylight, divided by carved wooden screens, all twined with vines and epiphytes; plants of every variety choked the avenues among the screens, their foliage so luxuriant that sprays of leaves hid the pots in which they were rooted. The sun illuminated a profusion of greens – pale pomona, nile, emerald, viridian, and chartreuse; intricate shadows dappled the hardwood floors. The fronds of sword ferns twitched in the breeze like the feelers of enormous insects.

After wandering through this jungly environment for nearly half an hour, growing more and more impatient, Korrogly was hailed by a fluting female voice, which asked him to call out so that she might find him among the leaves. Moments later, a tall white-haired woman in a floor-length gown of gray watered silk came up beside him; her face was the color of old ivory, deeply wrinkled and stamped with what struck Korrogly as a stern and suspicious character, and her hands moved ceaselessly, plucking at the nearby leaves as if they were the telling beads of some meditative religion. Despite her age, she radiated energy, and Korrogly thought that if he were to close his eyes, he would have the impression that he was in the presence of a vital young woman. She directed him to a bench in a corner of the room and sat next to him, gazing out into the lushness of her sanctum, continuing to pluck and pick at stem and leaf.

‘I distrust lawyers, Mister Korrogly,’ she said. ‘You should know that from the outset.

‘So do I, Ma’am,’ he said, hoping to elicit a laugh, some softening of her attitude, but she only pursed her lips.

‘Had you represented any other client, I would not have agreed to see you. But the man who has rid the world of Mardo Zemaille deserves any help I can give . . . though I’m not at all certain how I can help.’

‘I was hoping you might provide me with some background on Zemaille, particularly as regards his relationship with Mirielle Lemos.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That.’

‘Mirielle herself has not been forthcoming, and the other members of the cult have gone to ground.’

‘They’re afraid.’

‘Of what?’

She gave an amused hiss. ‘Of everything, Mister Korrogly. Mardo has addicted them to fear. And of course now that he’s gone, now that he’s abandoned them to the fear he instilled in them, they’ve fled. The temple will never thrive again.’ She tore a strip of green off a frond. ‘That was Mardo’s one truth, that in the proper environment, fear can be a form of sustenance. It’s a truth that underlies many religions. Mirielle understands it as well.’

‘Tell me about her.’

The old woman fingered a spray of bamboo leaves. ‘She’s not a bad girl . . . or at least she didn’t used to be. It was Mardo who corrupted her. He corrupted everyone, he broke them and then poured his black juice into their cracks. When I first met her, that was five years ago, I took her for a typical convert. She was an agitated, moody girl when she came to the temple. All dance and no standstill, as the saying goes. I assumed Mardo would have her – he had all the pretty ones and that then he would let her fall from grace, become an ordinary devotee. But I underestimated Mirielle. She had something, some quality, that fascinated Mardo. I originally thought that he might have met his match sexually, for I knew from some of the other members that she was’ – she seemed to be searching for the right word – ‘rapacious. And perhaps that did have something to do with it. But of greater relevance, I believe, was that she was driven in much the same way as he. And thus she is equally untrustworthy.’

‘How do you mean “driven”?’

The old woman looked down at the floor. ‘It’s difficult to explain Mardo to anyone who never knew him, and it’s entirely unnecessary to explain him to anyone who did. When you examine what he said closely, it was all doctrinal persiflage, mumbo jumbo, a welter of half-baked ideas stirred together with high-flown empty language. But despite that, you always had the idea that he knew something, or that he was onto something, some course that would carry him to great achievement. I’m not speaking of charisma . . . not that Mardo was short in that department. What I’m trying to get to is something more substantial. There was about him an air that he was being moved by forces within him that not even he fully comprehended.’

‘And you’re saying Mirielle had this air as well.’

‘Yes, yes, she was driven by something. Again, I don’t know if she understood its nature. But she was driven much like Mardo. He recognized this in her, and that’s why he trusted her so.’

‘And yet it appears that he was going to kill her.’

She sighed. ‘The reason I left the temple . . . no, let me tell you first the reasons I joined it. I fancied myself a seeker, but even at the height of my self-deception, I realized that I was merely bored. Bored and old . . . too old to find better entertainment. The temple was for me a violent dark romance whose characters were constantly changing, and I was completely taken with it. And there was always the sense that Griaule was near. That chill scaly presence . . . that awful cold power.’ She gave a dramatic shudder. ‘At any rate, two years ago I began to have a sense that things were getting serious, that the great work Mardo had talked of for so long was finally getting under way. It frightened me. And being frightened awakened me to the deceits and evils of the temple.’

‘Do you know what it was . . . the great work?’

She hesitated. ‘No.’

He studied her, thinking that she was holding back something. ‘I have no one else to turn to in this,’ he said. ‘The cult members have gone to ground.’

‘They may have gone to ground, but some of them are watching even now. If I revealed secrets, they would kill me.’

‘I could subpoena you.’

‘You could,’ she said, ‘but I would say no more than I have. And there is also the fact that I would not make a very reliable witness. The prosecutor would ask questions about my past, and those I would not answer.’

‘I assume the great work had something to do with Griaule.’

She shrugged. ‘Everything did.’

‘Can’t you even give me a clue? Something?’

‘I’ll tell you this much. You have to understand the nature of the cult. They did not so much worship Griaule as they elevated their fear of him to the status of worship. Mardo saw himself in a peculiar relationship to Griaule; he felt he was the spiritual descendant of that first wizard who long ago did battle with the dragon . . . a sort of ritual adversary, both celebrant and enemy. That kind of duality appealed to Mardo; he considered it the height of subtlety.’

Korrogly continued to press her, but she would say no more and finally he gave it up. ‘Did Mirielle know about the work?’

‘I doubt it. Mardo’s trust of her extended to the material world, but this was something else, something magical. Something serious. And that troubled me. I didn’t want things to be serious, I began to be afraid. People vanished, conversations became whispered, the darkness inside the temple seemed to be spreading everywhere. Finally I couldn’t bear it. I started to notice things. Perhaps I’d always noticed them, but had preferred not to see them. At any rate, I realized then how dangerous a thing had been my boredom, how low I had let it drag me. I understood that for all his drive and intensity, Mardo Zemaille was an evil man . . . evil in the blackest of definitions. He sought to master wizardly arts that have died away for lack of adherents corrupt enough to dig in the nightsoil where the roots of such power are buried.’

‘What things did you notice?’

‘Rituals of torture . . . sacrifices.’

‘Human sacrifice?’

‘Perhaps . . . I can’t be sure. But I believe at the least that Mardo was capable of it.’

‘Then you think that he was going to sacrifice Mirielle.’

‘It’s hard to credit. He doted on her. But, yes, it’s possible that he would feel he had to sacrifice the thing he most cared about in order to complete the great work. She may not have known it, but I think he may have had that in mind.’

Korrogly watched leaf shadows trembling on the sunlit floor; he felt tired, out of his element. What, he thought, am I doing here, talking to an old lady about evil, trying to prove that a dragon has committed murder, what am I doing?

‘You mentioned trust between the two of them.’

‘Yes, Mardo made it plain to everyone that in the event anything happened to him, she was to lead the temple. There was something . . .’

‘What?’ Korrogly asked.

‘I was going to say I always suspected that there was a secret history between them, and that was another reason for Mardo’s trust. It was something I felt was true . . . but it was only a feeling. Nothing admissible, nothing you could use. Anyway, I suppose he drew up documents that would grant her some kind of legal succession. He was a stickler for that sort of detail.’ She tilted her head to the side as if trying to make out some indefinite quality in his face. ‘You look surprised. I’ve never known a lawyer whose expressions were so readable.’

Failure, he thought, even my face is failing me now.

‘I had no idea the bond between them had been ratified in any way,’ he said.

‘Perhaps it hasn’t. I can’t be sure. But if I’m correct and it has, you’ll have no end of trouble unearthing the documents. Mardo would have never gone to a lawyer. If they exist they’re probably hidden in the temple somewhere.’

‘I see.’

‘What are you thinking?’

He made a noise of baffled amusement. ‘I thought this would be such a simple case, but everywhere I turn I come upon some new complexity.’

‘It is a simple case,’ she said, her wrinkled face tightening with a grim expression. ‘Take my word, no matter how villainous a creature you believe William Lemos to be, his act has made him an innocent.’

One night shortly before the opening of the trial, Korrogly visited the constabulary headquarters to have another look at the murder weapon – The Father of Stones, as Lemos had named it. Standing alone by a table in the evidence room, looking down at the stone, which rested at the center of a nest of tissue paper within a tin box, he was as confounded by it as he had been by every other element of the case. At one moment it seemed to enclose profane fractions of encysted light, its surface clouded and occult, a milky bulge with the reek of a thousand-year-old egg trapped inside; the next, it would appear lovely, subtle, embodying the delicate essence of some numinous philosophy. And at its heart was a dark flaw that resembled a man with upflung arms. Like Griaule himself, it was a thing of infinite shadings, of a thousand possible interpretations, and Korrogly could easily believe that its point of origin was a cavity in the dragon’s body. He was, however, still unable to believe Lemos’ story; it, too, was flawed, and this flaw would be enough to lead the gemcutter to the gallows. There was just no good reason, at least none he, Korrogly, could discern, why Griaule would have wanted Lemos to kill Zemaille. Not even Lemos could come up with a good reason; he simply continued to insist that it was so, and mere insistence would not save him. Yet it was that same flaw, the lack of patness to the story, that kept forcing Korrogly to relent in his judgment, to be tempted to belief. What a case, he thought; when he was back in law school he’d dreamt of having a case like this, and now he had it, and all it was doing was making him weary, making him wonder if he had wasted his life, if every question, even the most fundamental, was as elusive as this one, and he just hadn’t noticed before.

He picked up The Father of Stones and juggled it; it was unusually heavy. Like dragon scale, like ancient thought.

Damn, he thought, damn this whole business, I should give it up and start a religion, there must be sufficient fools out there for some of them to consider me wise and wonderful.

‘Thinking about murdering someone?’ said a dry voice behind him. ‘Your client, perhaps?’

It was the prosecutor, Ian Mervale, a reedy, aristocratic-looking man in a stylishly cut black suit; his dark hair, combed back from a noble forehead, was salted with gray, and the vagueness of his eyes, which were watery blue, set in sleepy folds, belied a quick and aggressive mentality.

‘I’m more likely to go after you,’ said Korrogly wryly.

‘Me?’ Mervale affected shocked dismay. ‘I’m by far the least of your worries. If not your client, I’d consider an attack upon our venerable Judge Wymer. It appears he’s not at all sympathetic to your defense tactics.’

‘I can’t blame him for that,’ Korrogly muttered.

Mervale studied him a moment, then shook his head and chuckled. ‘It’s always the same every time I run up against you. I know you’re being honest, you’re not trying to underplay your hand; but even though I know it, as soon as the trial begins I become positively convinced that you’re being duplicitous, that you’ve got some devastating trick up your sleeve.’

‘You don’t trust yourself,’ Korrogly said. ‘How can you trust anyone else?’

‘I suppose you’re right. My greatest strength is my greatest weakness.’ He started to turn toward the door, hesitated and then said, ‘Care for a drink?’ Korrogly juggled The Father of Stones one last time; it seemed to have grown heavier yet. ‘I suppose a drink might help,’ he said.

The Blind Lady, a pub in Chancrey’s Lane, was as usual crowded with law clerks and young solicitors, whose body heat fogged the mirrors on the walls, whose errant darts lodged in white plaster or blackened beam, and whose uproarious babble made quiet conversation impossible. Korrogly and Mervale worked their way through the press, holding their glasses high to avoid spillage, and at last found an unoccupied table at the rear of the pub. As they seated themselves, a group of clerks standing nearby began to sing a bawdy song. Mervale winced, then lifted his glass in a toast to Korrogly.

The singers moved off toward the front of the pub; Mervale leaned back, regarding Korrogly with fond condescension, an attitude more of social habit than one relating to their adversary positions. Mervale was the son of a moneyed shipbuilder, and there was always an edge of class struggle to their conversations, an edge they blunted by pretending to have a fund of mutual respect.

‘So what do you think?’ Mervale asked. ‘Is Lemos lying . . . demented? What?’

‘Demented, no. Lying . . .’ Korrogly sipped his rum. ‘Every time I think I have the answer to that, I see another side to things. I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess at this stage. What do you think?’

‘Of course he’s lying! The man had every motive in the world to kill Zemaille. His daughter, his business. My God! He could have done nothing else but kill him. But I have to admit his story’s ingenious. Brilliant.’

‘Is it? I might have gotten him off with a couple of years if he’d pled some version of diminished capacity.’

‘Yes, but that’s what makes it so brilliant, the fact that everyone knows that’s so. They’ll say to themselves, God, the man must be innocent or else he wouldn’t stick to such a far-fetched tale.’

‘I’d hardly call it far-fetched.’

‘Oh, very well! Let’s call it inspired then, shall we?’

Growing annoyed, Korrogly thought, you pompous piece of shit, I’m going to beat you this time.

He smiled. ‘As you wish.’

‘Ah,’ said Mervale, ‘I sense that a trial lawyer has suddenly taken possession of your body.’

Korrogly drank. ‘I’m not in the mood tonight, Mervale. What are you after that you think I’m willing to give away?’

Displeasure registered on Mervale’s face.

‘What’s wrong?’ Korrogly asked. ‘Am I spoiling your fun?’

‘I don’t know what’s got into you,’ said Mervale. ‘Maybe you’ve been working too hard.’

‘These little ritual fishing expeditions are beginning to bore me, that’s all. They always come to the same thing. Nothing. They’re just your way of reminding me of my station. You drag me in here and butter me up with the old school smile and talk about parties to which I haven’t been invited. I expect you believe this gives you a psychological advantage, but I think the false sense of superiority it lends you actually weakens your delivery. And you need all the strength you can muster. You’re simply not that proficient a prosecutor.’

Mervale got stiffly to his feet, cast a scornful look down at Korrogly. ‘You’re a joke, you know that?’ he said. ‘A tiresome drudge without a life, with only the law for a bed partner.’ He tossed some coins onto the table. ‘Buy yourself a couple of drinks. Perhaps drunk you’ll be able to entertain yourself.’

Korrogly watched him move through the crowd, accepting the good wishes of the law clerks who closed around him. Now why, he thought, why did I bother doing that?

He waited until Mervale was out of sight before leaving, and then, instead of going directly home, he walked west along Biscaya Boulevard, heading nowhere in particular, moving aimlessly through the accumulating mist, his thoughts in a despondent muddle; the dank salt air seemed redolent of his own heaviness, of the damp dark moil inside his head. Only peripherally did he notice that he had entered the Almintra quarter, and it was not until he found himself standing in front of the gemcutter’s shop that he suspected he had tried to hide from himself the fact that he had intended to come this way. Or perhaps, he thought, I was moved to come here by some vast and ineluctable agency whose essence spoke to me from The Father of Stones. Though that thought had been formed in derision, it caused the hairs on the back of his neck to prickle, and he wondered, what if Lemos’ story is true, could I also be vulnerable to Griaule’s directives? The silence of the dead street unnerved him; the peaks of the rooftops looked like black simple mountains rising from plateaus of mist, and the few streetlamps left unbroken shone through the haze like evil phosphorescent flowers, and the shop windows were obsidian, reflective, hiding their secrets. It was still fairly early, but all the good artisans and shopkeepers were abed . . . all except the occupant of the apartment above Lemos’ shop. Her light still burned. He gazed up at it, thinking now that Mervale’s insulting and accurate depiction of his life might have motivated him to visit Mirielle, thereby to disprove it. He decided to leave, to return home, but remained standing in front of the shop, held in place, it seemed, by the glow of the lamp and the sodden crush of the surf from the darkness beyond. A dog began to bark nearby; from somewhere farther away came the call of voices singing, violins and horns, a melancholy tune that he felt was sounding the configuration of his own loneliness.

This is folly, he said to himself, she’ll probably kick you down the stairs, she was only playing with you the last time, and why the hell would you want it anyway . . . just to be away from your thoughts for awhile, no matter how temporary the cure?

That’s right, that’s exactly right.

‘Hell!’ he said to the dark, to the whole unlistening world. ‘Hell, why not?’

The woman who opened the door, though physically the same woman who had sprawled brazenly on the sofa during their first meeting, was in all other ways quite different. Distracted; twitchy; pale to the point of seeming bloodless, her black hair loose and in disarray; clad in a white robe of some heavy coarse cloth. The dissolute hardness had emptied from her face, and she seemed to have thrown off a handful of years, to be a troubled young girl. She stared for a second as if failing to recognize him and then said, ‘Oh . . . you.’

He was about to apologize for having come so late, to beat a retreat, put off by her manner; but before he could frame the words, she stepped back from the door and invited him in.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said, following him into the living room, which had undergone a cleaning. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep.’

She dropped onto the sofa, fumbled about on the end table, picked up a cigar, then set it down; she looked up at him expectantly.

‘Well, have a seat.’

He did as instructed, taking his perch again on the easy chair. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions.’

‘Questions . . . you want . . . oh, all right. Questions.’ She gave a fey laugh and picked nervously at the fringe on the arm of the sofa. ‘Ask away.’

‘I’ve heard,’ he said, ‘that Mardo had in mind for you to take over the leadership of the temple in case of his death. Is that correct?’

She nodded, kept nodding, too forcefully for mere affirmation, as if trying to clear some painful entanglement from her head.

‘Yes, indeed,’ she said. ‘That’s what he had in mind.’

‘Were there papers drawn up to this effect?’

‘No . . . yes, maybe . . . I don’t know. He talked about doing it, but I never saw them.’ She rocked back and forth on the edge of the sofa, her hands plucking at ridges of its old embroidered pattern. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘Why . . . why doesn’t it matter?’

‘There is no temple.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There is no temple! Simple as that. No more adherents, no more ceremonies. Just empty buildings.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘But . . .’

She jumped to her feet, paced toward the back of the room; then she spun about to face him, brushing hair back from her cheek. ‘I don’t want to talk about it! I don’t want to talk at all . . . not about . . . not about anything important.’ She put a hand to her brow as if testing for a fever. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘My life’s a shambles, my lover’s dead, and my father goes on trial for his murder tomorrow morning. Everything’s fine.’

‘I don’t know why your father’s plight should disturb you. I thought you hated him.’

‘He’s still my father. I have feelings that hate won’t dissolve. Reflex feelings, you understand. But they have their pull.’ She came back to the sofa and sat down; once again she began picking at the embroidered pattern. ‘Look, I can’t help you. I don’t know anything that can help you with the trial. Not a thing. If I did I think I’d tell you . . . that’s how I feel now, anyway. But there’s nothing, nothing at all.’

He sensed that the crack in her callous veneer ran deeper than she cared to admit, and, too, he thought that her anxiety might be due to the fact that she did know something helpful and was holding it back; but he decided not to push the matter.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘What would you like to talk about?’

She glanced around the room, as if searching for something that would support a conversation.

He noticed that her eye lingered on the framed sketch of the woman and baby. ‘Is that your mother?’ he asked, pointing to it.

That appeared to unsettle her. ‘Yes,’ she murmured, looking quickly away from the sketch.

‘She’s very much like you. Her name was Patricia, wasn’t it?’

Mirielle nodded.

‘It’s a terrible thing,’ he said, ‘for a woman so lovely to be taken before her time. How did she drown?’

‘Don’t you know how to talk without interrogating people?’ she asked angrily.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, wondering at the vehemence of her reaction. ‘I just . . .’

‘My mother’s dead,’ she said. ‘Let that be enough for you.’

‘I was only making conversation. You choose the subject, all right?’

‘All right,’ she said after a moment. ‘Let’s talk about you.’

‘There’s not much to tell.’

‘There never is with people, but that’s all right. I won’t be bored, I promise.’

He began, reluctantly at first, to talk about his life, his childhood, the tiny farm in the hills above the city, with its banana grove, its corral and three cows – Rose, Alvina, and Esmeralda – and as he spoke, that old innocent life seemed to be resurrected, to be breathing just beyond the apartment walls. He told her how he used to sit on a hilltop and look down at the city and dream of owning one of the fine houses.

‘And now you do,’ she said.

‘No, I don’t. There’s a law against it. The fine houses belong to those with status, with history on their side. There are laws against people like me, laws that keep us in our place.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I know that.’

He told her about his first interest in the law, how it had seemed in its logical construction and order to be a lever with which one could move any obstruction, but how he had discovered that there were so many levers and obstructions, when you moved one, another would drop down to crush you, and the trick was to keep in constant motion, to be moving things constantly and dancing out of the way.

‘Did you always want to be a lawyer?’

He laughed. ‘No, my first ambition was to be the man who slew the dragon Griaule, to claim the reward offered in Teocinte, to buy my mother silver bowls and my father a new guitar.’

Her expression, happy a moment before, had gone slack and distraught; he asked if she was all right.

‘Don’t even say his name,’ she said. ‘You don’t know, you don’t know . . .’

‘What don’t I know?’

‘Griaule . . . God! I used to feel him in the temple. Perhaps you think that’s just my imagination, but I swear it’s true. We all concentrated on him, we sang to him, we believed in him, we conjured him in our thoughts, and soon we could feel him. Cold and vast. Inhuman. This great scaly chill that owned a world.’

Korrogly was struck by the similarity of phrasing with which the old woman Kirin and now Mirielle had referred to their apprehension of Griaule, and thought to make mention of it, but Mirielle continued speaking, and he let the matter drop.

‘I can still feel his touch in my mind. Heavy and steeped in blackness. Each one of his thoughts a century in forming, a tonnage of hatred, of sheer enmity. He’d brush against me, and I’d be cold for hours. That’s why . . .’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ She was trembling violently, hugging herself.

He crossed to the sofa, sat beside her, and, after hesitating for a few seconds, draped an arm about her shoulder. Her hair had the smell of fresh oranges. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘I can feel him still, I’ll always feel him.’ She glanced up at Korrogly and then blurted out, ‘Come to bed with me. I know you don’t like me, but it’s warmth I want, not affection. Please, I won’t . . .’

‘I do like you,’ he said.

‘No, you can’t, you . . . no.’

‘I do,’ he said, believing it as he spoke. ‘Tonight I like you, tonight you’re someone it’s possible to care about.’

‘You don’t understand, you can’t see how he’s changed me.’

‘Griaule, you mean?’

‘Please,’ she said, her arms going around his waist. ‘No more questions . . . not now. Please, just keep me warm.’

Three

As Korrogly began his opening statement, half his mind was back in the gemcutter’s apartment with Mirielle, still embraced by her white arms, nourished by the rosy points of her breasts and her long supple legs, finding that beneath her veneer of depravity there existed a woman of virtue and sweetness, replaying in memory the joys of mastery and submission. None of this posed a distraction, but acted rather to inspire him, to urge him on to a more impassioned appeal than that he had originally contrived. Strolling alongside the jury box, stuffed with twelve pasty-faced models of good citizenship culled from an assortment of less worthy souls, he felt like a sea captain striding the deck of his ship, and the courtroom, it struck him, was essentially a cross between church and vessel, the ship of state sailing toward the coast of justice, with white walls for sails and boxy divisions of black wood holding a cargo of witnesses and jurors and the curious, and lording over all, the judge’s bench, an immense teak block carved into the semblance of dragon scales, where sat the oracular figurehead of this magical ship: the Honorable Ernest Wymer, white-haired and florid, an alcoholic old beast with a cruel mouth and tufted brows and a shiny red beak, hunched in the folds of his black-winged gown, ready to pounce upon any lawyerly mouse that should happen to stray into his field of vision. Korrogly was not afraid of Wymer; he, not the judge, was in command this day. He knew the jury’s mind, knew that they wanted to believe Griaule was the guilty party, that this suited the mystical yearning of their hearts, and with all his wiles, he set about consolidating that yearning into intent. There was urgency in his voice, yet it was neither too strident nor too subdued, perfect, a blend of power and fluency; he felt that this harmony of intent and skill stemmed from his night with Mirielle. He was not in love with her, or perhaps he was . . . but love was not the salient matter. What most inspired him was to have found something unspoiled in her, in himself, and whether that was love or merely a place left untouched by the world, it was sufficient to renew his old enthusiasms.

‘We are all aware,’ he said toward the conclusion of his statement, ‘that Griaule’s power exists. The question remains, is he capable of reaching out from the Carbonales to touch us here in Port Chantay. That is a question we should not need ask. Look there.’ He pointed to the judge’s bench and its carved scales. ‘And there.’ He pointed to crude representations of the dragon carved twining the lintel posts at the back of the hall. ‘His image is everywhere in Port Chantay, and this is emblematic of his propinquity, of the tendrils of his will that have infiltrated our lives. Perhaps he cannot move us with the facility that he does those who dwell in Teocinte, but we are not so far beyond the range of his thoughts that he does not know us. He knows us well. He sees us, he holds us in his mind, and if he requires something of us, do you really believe he is incapable of affecting our lives in a more pronounced fashion? Griaule is, if anything, capable. He is an immortal, unfathomable creature who is as pervasive in our lives as the idea of God. And as with God, we do not have the wisdom to establish the limits of his capacities.’ Korrogly paused, letting his gaze fall on each of their rapt faces in turn, seeing therein a measure of anxiety, understanding how to play upon it; the slants of winter sunlight made them all look wan and sickly, like terminal patients hopeful of a cure. ‘Griaule is here, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. He is watching this proceeding. Perhaps he is even involved in it. Search inside yourselves. Can you feel secure that his eye is not upon you? And this’ – he picked up The Father of Stones from the prosecution table – ‘can you be sure that this is not his eye? The prosecution will tell you that it is only a stone, but I tell you that it is much more.’ He held it up to their faces as he passed along the jury box and was pleased to see them shrink from it. ‘This is Griaule’s instrument, the embodiment of his will, the vehicle by which his will has been effected here in Port Chantay, miles and miles beyond the range of his usual sphere of influence. If you doubt this, if you doubt that he could have formed it and injected it with the complex values of his wish and need, then I urge you to touch it. It brims with his cold vigor. And just as you now perceive it, so it is perceiving you.’

The prosecution’s case was elementary. A constable testified to the authenticity of Lemos’ confession; several witnesses were called to testify to the fact that they had seen him working at cutting The Father of Stones; the old drunkard related his story of Lemos throwing stones on the beach; others claimed to have seen him breaking into the temple. Korrogly limited his cross-examination to establishing the point that none of the witnesses had known the gemcutter’s mind. No more was needed. The defense would rise or fall on its own merits.

Late in the day, Mirielle was called to the stand. Her testimony, while not as embittered as Korrogly had assumed it would be, was nonetheless of great benefit to Lemos; it was obvious that she was of two minds about her father, that she despised him, and that this attitude warred with the guilt that arose from testifying against him – that she should be in the least guilty implied that Lemos must have been a good parent, that her spite was doubtless a product of Zemaille’s corrupting influence. It was also evident that she was not being entirely forthcoming. She denied knowledge of Zemaille’s great work, and there was – Korrogly was certain – something else that she was keeping from the light. In his cross-examination he touched upon it, establishing the area of vagueness, one having to do with her reasons for entering the temple.

‘I’m not quite clear on this,’ he said to her. ‘Surely you didn’t enter into such a dark society on a whim?’

‘It was years ago,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it was a whim, perhaps I simply wanted to escape my father.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘your father, who simply wanted to spare you the violent excesses of the temple. Truly, that was overly severe of him.’

Mervale leaped to his feet. ‘If the defense wishes to frame his lectoral remarks in a question, I suggest he do it.’

‘I agree,’ said Judge Wymer, with a cautionary nod to Korrogly.

‘Your pardon.’ Korrogly inclined his head in a respectful bow. ‘The temple,’ he went on musingly, ‘what attracted you to it? Was it Zemaille?’

‘I don’t know . . . yes, I think so.’

‘A physical attraction?’

‘It was more complex than that.’

‘How so?’

Her face worked, she worried her lower lip. ‘I don’t know how to answer that.’

‘Why not? It’s a simple question.’

‘Nothing is simple!’ she said, her voice growing shrill. ‘You couldn’t possibly understand!’

Korrogly wondered if she might be restraining herself from speaking of her father’s alleged abuse – he was not afraid of the topic, yet he did not want to break her down into tears and that seemed a likelihood. He would not have minded rage; but he did not wish to make her in any way an object of sympathy. He could, he knew, always recall her.

Questioning her, even though her adversary, he felt that a strange connection had been forged between them, as if they were partners in a plot, and it was difficult to maintain a professional distance; she looked beautiful in her lacy black dress, and standing beside the witness box, inhaling her scent of heat and oranges, he began to believe that his feelings for her did run deep, that something powerful had been dredged up from beneath the years of disappointment and failure.

The close of Mirielle’s testimony was also the close of the prosecution’s case, and Judge Wymer called for a recess until the morning. Lemos, as he had throughout the proceeding, sat without displaying any emotion – a gray statement of despair – and nothing Korrogly could say had a cheering effect upon him. He had been given a haircut in jail, his sandy forelock trimmed away, his ears left totally exposed, and this, along with his loss of weight and increased pallor, made him look as if he had been the victim of a prolonged and dehumanizing abuse.

‘It’s going well,’ Korrogly told him as they sat at the defense table afterward. ‘Before today I wasn’t sure how the jury would react to our tactics, I was concerned that we didn’t have sufficient detail. But now I don’t know if we’ll need it. They want to believe you.’

Lemos grunted, traced an imperfection in the wood of the table with his forefinger.

‘Still, it would help a great deal if we could present a reason that would explain why Griaule wanted Zemaille dead,’ Korrogly went on.

‘Mirielle,’ Lemos said, ‘she didn’t seem to be as distant from me today as before. I wonder, could you ask her again to visit me?’

Korrogly felt a rippling of guilt. ‘Yes, I’ll ask her tonight.’

‘Tonight?’ Lemos looked askance at him.

‘Yes,’ said Korrogly, hurrying to cover the slip, ‘I’ll make a special trip to see her. I want you to see her, I’m in favor of anything that’ll wake you up. You’re on trial for your life, man!’

‘I know that.’

‘You don’t much act like you do. I’ll ask Mirielle to see you, but my advice is to forget about her for the time being, concentrate on the trial. Once you’re free, then you can repair the relationship.’

Lemos blinked, gazed out the window at the reddening western sky. ‘All right,’ he said listlessly.

Frustrated, Korrogly began packing up his papers.

‘I know,’ Lemos said.

‘What?’ Korrogly asked, preoccupied.

‘I know about you and Mirielle. I’ve always been able to tell who she was bedding. She looks at them differently.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! I . . .’

‘I know!’ said Lemos, suddenly energized, turning a bright stare on him. ‘I’m not a fool!’

Korrogly, taken aback, began to wonder if Mirielle’s veiled accusations of parental lust might have had substance. ‘Even if I were . . .’

‘I don’t want you to see her like that!’ Lemos gripped the edge of the table. ‘I want you to stop!’

‘We’ll talk more after you’ve calmed down.’

‘I won’t have it! Ever since she’s been old enough, men like you have taken advantage of her. This time . . .’

Korrogly slammed his case shut. ‘Now listen to me! Do you want to die? Because if you do, alienating your lawyer’s a fine first step. I promise you, if you don’t stop this right now, I’ll start treating your case with the same lack of concern you’ve shown toward it. You don’t seem to care very much about living . . . or maybe that’s just an act. If it is an act, I caution you to be temperate with me.’

Lemos sank back into his chair, looking defeated, and Korrogly felt he had at last penetrated the man’s mask. The gemcutter did care about his fate; his pose of unconcern was a fake, his entire story a lie. Which made Korrogly an accomplice. He could back out of the case, he thought, claiming to have stumbled upon new information; but given Judge Wymer’s hostility toward the defense, it might be that charges would be brought against him in any event. And he could not be sure of the matter; there was nothing sure in this case. He had become so confused by the conflicting flows of evidence that he was unable to trust his own judgments. Lemos’ perverse desire for his daughter – if that, too, was not a fraud – might have enlivened him sufficiently to react to his peril.

After the guard had led Lemos back to his cell, Korrogly walked slowly through the twilight across town toward the Almintra quarter, ignoring the bustle of the evening traffic; his mind was in a turmoil, the greater part of his agitation caused not by the snarls of the case, but by the fact that he had threatened to turn against a client. It was the final tattering of his ideals, the ultimate violation of his contract with the law. How could he have done it, he thought. Was it Mirielle, her influence? No, he could not blame her – blame attached only to himself. The sole course open to him was to defend the gemcutter from this point forward to the best of his abilities, his guilt or innocence notwithstanding. And he would have to break it off with Mirielle; he could not in good faith continue to upset Lemos. It had been a long time since he had felt so at ease with a woman. But he would do it nevertheless, he told himself; he would not allow this case to become a drain down which the last of his conscience flowed.

When he reached the gemcutter’s apartment, however, his resolve went glimmering. Mirielle was even more ardent than she had been the previous night; it was not until much later that Korrogly thought of Lemos again, and then it was only in passing, produced by a flicker of remorse. Mirielle was lying on her side, one leg flung across his hip, still joined to him; her breasts were small and white, glowing in the misted light from the streetlamps with the milky purity of The Father of Stones; beneath the skin, faint blue veins forked upward to vanish in the hollow of her throat. He traced their path with his tongue, making her breath come fast; he cupped her buttocks with his hands, holding her against him while his hips moved with sinuous insistence. Her nails pricked his back, the rhythm of her own movements quickened, and then she let out the last best part of her feeling in a hoarse cry.

‘God!’ she said. ‘God, you feel so good!’ And without thinking of what he was saying, he told her that he loved her.

A shadow seemed to cross her face. ‘Don’t say that.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Just don’t say it.’

‘I’m afraid it’s true,’ he said. ‘I don’t have much choice.’

‘You don’t know me, you don’t know the things I’ve done.’

‘With Zemaille?’

‘I had sex with other people, with whomever Mardo wanted me to. I did things . . .’ She closed her eyes. ‘It wasn’t so much what I did, it’s that I stood by while Mardo . . .’ She broke off, buried her face in the join of his neck and shoulder. ‘God, I don’t want to tell you any of this.’

‘It doesn’t matter, anyway.’

‘It does,’ she said. ‘You can’t go through what I have and come out a whole person. You may think you love me, but . . .’

‘How do you feel about me?’

‘Don’t expect me to say I love you.’

‘I’m not expecting anything more than the truth.’

‘Oh!’ She laughed. ‘Is that all? If I knew the truth, things would be much easier.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘Look.’ She took his face in both hands. ‘Don’t make me say anything. It’s good between us, it helps. Sometimes I want to say things to you, but I’m not ready. I hope I will be someday, but if you force me to say anything now . . . I’m perverse that way. I’ll just try to deny it to myself. That’s what I’ve been taught to do with things that make me happy.’

‘That says enough.’

‘Does it? I hope so.’

He kissed her mouth, touched her breasts, feeling the nipples stiffen between his spread fingers.

‘There’s something I’d like you to do for me, though. I want you to visit your father.’

She turned away from him. ‘I can’t.’

‘Because he . . . he abused you?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think there’s some evidence you were abused by him.’

‘Abused,’ she said, enunciating the word precisely as if judging its flavor; then, after a moment, she added, ‘I can’t talk about it, I’ve never been able to talk about it. I just can’t bring myself to . . . to say what happened.’

‘Well?’ he said. ‘Will you see him?’

‘It wouldn’t do any good, it wouldn’t make him any happier. And that’s what you’re after, isn’t it.’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘A visit would just upset him, believe me.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to,’ he said. ‘I can’t force you. I just wish I could get him more involved.’

‘You still think he’s innocent, don’t you?’

‘I’m not sure . . . perhaps. I don’t think you’re sure, either.’

She looked as if she were going to respond, but her mouth thinned and she remained silent for a long moment. Finally she said, ‘I’m sure.’

He started to say something, and she put a finger to his lips.

‘Don’t talk about it anymore, please.’

He lay on his back, watching frail shadows of the mist coiling across the white ceiling, thinking about Lemos; he could accept nothing, believe nothing. That the gemcutter had molested his daughter seemed both apparent and unlikely, as was the case with his guilt and innocence. He did not doubt that Mirielle believed her father had abused her; but while he loved her, he was not assured of her stability, and thus her beliefs were in question. And in question also were her motives in being with him. He found it difficult to accept that she was anything but sincere in her responses; her reluctance to voice a commitment seemed clear evidence of the inner turmoil he was causing her. Still, he could not wholly reject the notion that she was using him . . . though for what reason he had no idea. He was walking across quicksand, in shadows, with inarticulate voices calling to him from every direction.

‘You’re worrying about something,’ she said. ‘Don’t . . . it’ll be all right.’

‘Between us?’

‘Is that what you’re worrying about?’

‘Among other things.’

‘I can’t promise you that you’ll like what will happen,’ she said. ‘But I will try with you.’

He started to ask her why she was going to try, what she had found that would make her want something with him; but he reminded himself of her caution against pushing her.

‘You’re still worrying,’ she said.

‘I can’t stop.’

‘Yes, you can.’ Her hand slid down across his chest, his belly, kindling a slow warmth. ‘That much I can promise.’

Against Korrogly’s objections, the case for the prosecution was reopened the following morning and Mirielle recalled to the stand. Mervale offered into evidence a sheaf of legal documents, which proved to have been signed by Mardo Zemaille and witnessed by Mirielle, and constituted a last will and testament, deeding the temple and its grounds to Mirielle on the event of the priest’s death. Mervale had unearthed the papers from the city archives and produced ample evidence to substantiate that the signatures were authentic and that the papers were legal.

‘How much would you say the properties mentioned in the will are worth?’ Mervale asked Mirielle, who was wearing a high-collared dress of blue velvet.

‘I have no idea.’

‘Would it be inaccurate to say that they’re worth quite a large sum of money? A sizeable fortune?’

‘The witness has already answered the question,’ said Korrogly.

‘Indeed she has,’ said Judge Wymer, with a stern look at Mervale, who shrugged, stepped to the prosecution table, and offered into evidence the tax assessor’s report on the properties.

‘Did your father know of this will?’ Mervale asked after the exhibits had been marked.

Mirielle murmured, ‘Yes.’

Korrogly glanced at Lemos, who appeared not to be listening.

‘And how did he come to know about them?’

‘I told him.’

‘On what occasion?’

‘He came to the temple.’ She drew in breath sharply, let it out slowly, as if ordering herself. ‘He wanted me to leave the cult, he said that once Mardo tired of me he would drop me and then the family would be without a penny. The shop would be gone . . . everything.’ She drew in another breath. ‘He made me angry. I told him about the will, I said that Mardo had taken care of me far better than he had. And he said that he’d have me declared incompetent. He said he’d get a lawyer and take everything Mardo left me.’

‘Do you know if he ever did see a lawyer?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘And was that lawyer’s name Artis Colari?’

‘Yes.’

Mervale picked up more papers from his table. ‘Mister Colari is currently trying another case and cannot attend this proceeding. However, I have here a deposition wherein he states that he was approached by the defendant two weeks before the murder with the intent of having his daughter declared mentally incompetent for reasons of instability caused by her abuse of drugs.’ He smiled at Korrogly. ‘Your witness.’

Korrogly requested a consultation with his client, and once they were sequestered he asked Lemos, ‘Did you know about the will?’

A nod. ‘But that wasn’t why I went to see Colari. I didn’t care about the money, I didn’t want anything that Zemaille had touched. I was afraid for Mirielle. I wanted her out of that place, and I thought the only way I could manage that was to have her declared incompetent.’

The uncharacteristic passion with which he had spoken startled Korrogly: it was the first sign of vitality that Lemos had displayed since his arrest.

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘I didn’t think of it.’

‘It seems an odd thing to have forgotten.’

‘It wasn’t so much that I forgot . . . Look.’ Lemos sat up straight, absentmindedly putting his hand to his brow. ‘I realize I’ve given you a hard time, but I . . . it’s been . . . I can’t explain what it’s been like for me. I didn’t think you believed my story. I’m still not sure you do. And that’s just added to the despair I’ve been feeling. I’m sorry, I know I should have been more cooperative.’

Despite his prison haircut and coverall, his unhealthy complexion, Lemos seemed the picture of eager contrition, boyish in his renewed vigor, and Korrogly did not know whether to be pleased or disgusted. Incredible, he thought, more than incredible, the man was impossible to believe, except that somehow his very implausibility seemed believable. As for Mirielle, how could she have hidden this from him? What did that signal as to their relationship? Was her hatred for her father such a powerful taint that it could abrogate all other rules? Had he misjudged her in every way?

‘It doesn’t look good, does it?’ Lemos said.

Korrogly resisted the temptation to laugh. ‘We still have our witnesses, and I’m not going to let Mirielle’s testimony go unchallenged.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Try to overcome the effects of your despondency,’ said Korrogly. ‘Come on.’

Once back in the courtroom, Korrogly took a turn around the witness box, studying Mirielle, who appeared nervous, picking at the seams of her dress, and at last he said, ‘Why do you hate your father?’

She looked surprised.

‘It’s not a difficult question,’ Korrogly said. ‘It’s obvious to everyone here that you want him found guilty.’

‘Objection!’ Mervale shrilled.

Judge Wymer said, ‘Limit yourself to proper questions, Mister Korrogly.’

Korrogly nodded. ‘Why do you hate your father?’

‘Because . . .’ Mirielle stared at him, pleading with her eyes. ‘Because . . .’

‘Is it because you consider him a restrictive parent?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because he tried to separate you and your lover?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because you feel he is contemptible in the stodginess and staleness of his life?’

‘Yes.’

‘And can we assume you have other reasons yet for hating him?’

‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘Yes! What are you doing?’

‘I’m establishing that you hate your father, Miss Lemos. That you hate him with sufficient passion to attempt to turn this trial into a melodrama so as to guarantee his conviction. That you’ve hidden evidence from the court so that it could be produced at a particularly theatrical moment. Perhaps you’ve had help in this from the theatrical Mister Mervale . . .’

‘Objection!’

‘Mister Korrogly!’ said Judge Wymer.

‘. . . but whatever the case, you most certainly have been duplicitous in your testimony . . .’

‘Mister Korrogly!’

‘Duplicitous in your intent, in your every action before this court!’

‘Mister Korrogly! If you don’t stop this immediately . . .’

‘I apologize, Your Honor.’

‘You’re on thin ice, Mister Korrogly. I won’t permit another such outburst.’

‘I can assure you, Your Honor, it won’t happen again.’ He walked over to the jury box, leaned against it, hoping to ally himself thereby with the jurors, to make it seem that he was asking their questions. ‘Miss Lemos, you knew of the will prior to this morning . . . correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you make mention of it to the prosecutor?’

‘Yes.’

‘When did you mention it to him?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

‘Why not before? Surely you must have recognized its importance.’

‘I . . . it slipped my mind, I guess.’

‘It slipped your mind,’ said Korrogly, injecting heavy sarcasm into his tone. ‘You guess.’ He turned to the jury, shook his head ruefully. ‘Is there anything else you have forgotten to mention?’

‘Objection!’

‘Overruled. The witness will answer.’

‘I . . . no.’

‘I hope not for your sake,’ Korrogly said. ‘Did your father ever tell you that the reason he wanted to declare you incompetent was to remove you from the temple, to prevent you from being destroyed by Zemaille?’

‘Oh, he said that, but . . .’

‘Just answer the question Yes or No.’

‘Yes.’

‘This will,’ said Korrogly, ‘you knew its contents . . . I mean you were versed in its contents, you knew its exact particulars.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Now the conversation during which you told your father about the will, it was, I take it, rather heated, was it not?’

‘Yes.’

‘And so in the midst of a heated conversation, a violent argument, if you will, you had the presence of mind to inform your father of the contents of a most complicated document. I assume you filled him in on every detail.’

‘Well, no, not everything.’

‘Oh!’ Korrogly arched an eyebrow. ‘What exactly did you tell him?’

‘I . . . I can’t recall. Not exactly.’

‘Now let me get this straight, Miss Lemos. You remember telling him about the will, but you can’t recall if you informed him of its contents. It is possible then that you merely blurted out something to the effect that Mardo had seen to your future?

‘No, I . . .’

‘Or did you say . . .’

‘He knew what it meant!’ she shouted, standing up in the box. ‘He knew!’ She stared with fierce loathing at Lemos. ‘He killed him for the money! But he’ll never . . .’

‘Sit down, Miss Lemos!’ said Judge Wymer. ‘Now!’ Once she had obeyed, he warned her in no uncertain terms to restrain her behavior.

‘So,’ Korrogly went on, ‘in the midst of an argument you blurted out some incoherent . . .’

‘Objection!’

‘Sustained.’

‘You blurted out something, you can’t recall exactly what, about the will. Is that a fair statement?’

‘You’re twisting my words!’

‘On the contrary, Miss Lemos, I’m simply repeating what you’ve said. It appears that the only persons who were absolutely clear as to the contents of the will were you and Mardo Zemaille.’

‘No, that’s . . .’

‘That wasn’t a question, Miss Lemos. Merely the preamble to one. Since you are likely to benefit greatly from your father’s conviction, since that will in effect prevented him from initiating a competency hearing, doesn’t that color your testimony the color of greed?’

‘I never wanted anything except Mardo.’

‘I believe everyone within earshot will second your characterization of Mardo Zemaille as a thing.’

‘No need to object, Mister Mervale,’ said Judge Wymer; then, to Korrogly: ‘I’ve given you a great deal of leeway. That leeway is now at end. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes, Your Honor.’ Korrogly crossed to the defense table, picked up some of his notes, and leafing through them, walked to the witness box and stood facing Mirielle; her face was tight with anger. ‘Did you believe in Mardo Zemaille, Miss Lemos?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I mean did you believe in what he said, in his public statements, in his theological doctrines? In his work?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was his work? His great work?’

‘I don’t know . . . nobody except Mardo knew.’

‘Yet you believed in it?’

‘I believed that Mardo was inspired.’

‘Inspired . . . I see. Then you accepted his precepts as being the code by which you lived.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it would be illuminating to examine some of those precepts, might it not?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, I think it would.’ Korrogly turned a page. ‘Ah, here we are.’ He read from his notes. ‘“Do what thou wilt, that is all the law.” Did you believe that?’

‘I . . . yes, I did.’

‘Hmmm. And this, did you believe this? “If blood is needed for the great work, blood will be provided.”’

‘I don’t . . . I never knew what he meant by that.’

‘Really? But you accepted it, did you not, as part of his inspired doctrine?’

‘I suppose.’

‘And this? “No crime, no sin, no breach of the rules of what is considered ordinary human conduct, shall be considered such so long as it serves the great work.”’

She nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘And I assume that included under the label of sin would be the sin of lying?’

Her stare was hard and bright.

‘Do you understand the question?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well?’

‘Yes, I suppose. But . . .’

‘And included under the label of crime would be the crime of perjury?’

‘Yes, but I no longer hold to those beliefs.’

‘Don’t you? You’ve been heard recently to characterize Mardo Zemaille as a paragon.’

Her mouth thinned. ‘Things have changed.’

Korrogly knew he was invading dangerous territory, that she might make specific reference to the changes he had brought to her life; but he thought he could make his point and clear out before damage was done.

‘I submit that things have not changed, Miss Lemos. I submit that the great work, whatever its nature, will go on under your aegis. I submit that all the miscreant rules attaching to that work still hold, and that you would tell any lie, commit any . . .’

‘You bastard!’ she cried. ‘I’ll . . .’

The courtroom was filled with babble, Mervale was objecting, Wymer pounding his gavel.

‘And commit any crime,’ Korrogly went on, ‘in order to assure its continuance. I submit that the great work is your sole concern, and the truth is the farthest thing from your mind.’

‘You can’t do this!’ she shrilled. ‘You can’t come to my . . .’

Judge Wymer’s bellow drowned her out.

‘No further questions,’ said Korrogly, watching with mixed emotions as the bailiffs led her, still shouting, from the courtroom.

Shortly after beginning the examination of the first witness for the defense, the historian and biologist Catherine Ocoi, a striking blond woman in her late thirties, Korrogly was summoned to the bench for a whispered conversation with Judge Wymer. The judge leaned over the bench, pointing at the various displays that Catherine had brought with her, indicating with particular emphasis the huge painting of the mountainous dragon set beside the defense table.

‘I warned you not to turn this into a circus,’ he said.

‘I scarcely think that displaying Griaule’s image . . .’

‘Your opening statement was a masterpiece of intimidation,’ said Wymer. ‘I didn’t censure you for it, but from now on I will not allow you to intimidate the jury. I want that painting removed.’

Korrogly started to object, but then saw virtue in having it done; that it was deemed important enough to be removed only gave added weight to his thesis.

‘As you wish,’ he said.

‘Be careful, Mister Korrogly,’ Wymer said. ‘Be very careful.’

As the painting was carried out, the jury’s eyes followed it, and once the painting was out of sight, they expressed a visible degree of relief. That relief, Korrogly thought, might be more valuable than the oppressive presence of the painting; he would be able to play them, to remind them of Griaule, to let them swing between relief and anxiety, and so exercise all the more control.

He led Catherine Ocoi through her testimony, the story of how she had been manipulated by Griaule to live inside the dragon for ten years, the sole purpose being for her to oversee a single event of Griaule’s internal economy; then he let her testify as to the marvels to be found within the dragon, the drugs she had distilled from his various secretions, the strange and in some instances miraculous parasites and plants that flourished there. She had no knowledge of The Father of Stones, but the wonders to which she was able to testify left little doubt in the jury’s mind that the stone could have been produced by Griaule. Her exhibits – every one of them taken from the interior of the dragon – included a glass case filled with spiders in whose webs could be seen all manner of fantastic imagery; cuttings of a most unusual plant that was capable of creating replicas of the animals who fell asleep in its coils; and most pertinently, nodes of an amber material, very like a mineral form, which she claimed was produced by the petrification of Griaule’s stomach acid.

‘I have no doubt,’ she said, ‘that Griaule could have produced this.’ She held up The Father of Stones. ‘And touching it now, I know it is of Griaule. I had ten years to become intimately familiar with the feeling that attaches to his every element, and this stone is his.’

There was little Mervale could do to weaken her testimony: Catherine Ocoi’s reputation was above reproach, her story and discoveries celebrated throughout the region. However, with the witnesses that followed, philosophers and priests, all of whom presented opinions concerning on Griaule’s capacity for manipulation, Mervale was not so gentle; he railed and ranted, accusing the witnesses of wild speculation and Korrogly of debasing the legal process.

‘This does seem to be degenerating into something of a metaphysical debate,’ said Wymer after calling the attorneys for consultation at the bench.

‘Metaphysical?’ said Korrogly. ‘Perhaps, but no more so than the debate that underlies any fundamental point of law. Our laws are founded upon a moral code which comes down to us through the tenets of religious faith. Is that not metaphysics? Metaphysics are rendered into law based upon a consensus moral view, the view nourished by religion and commonly held in our society as to what is right and appropriate as regards the limitations that should be placed upon men in their behavior. What I’m establishing first and foremost is that there is a consensus regarding the fact of Griaule’s influence. I could go out into the street and not find a single person who doesn’t believe to some degree or another in Griaule. That kind of unanimity can’t even be found as relates to a belief in God.’

‘This is ridiculous!’ said Mervale.

‘Secondly,’ Korrogly continued, ‘I’m establishing through expert testimony the consensus regarding the extent of Griaule’s influence, the range and limitations of his will. This is simple foundation. Essential to any decision regarding the validity not only of my client’s claim to innocence, but also to the validity of the precedent. If you disallow it, you disallow the plea. And since you have already allowed the plea, you’ll have to allow foundation to support it.’

Wymer appeared to be absorbing all this; he glanced inquiringly at Mervale, who sighed.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’m willing in the interests of brevity to stipulate that Griaule’s influence exists, that it is . . .’

‘I’m afraid the interests of brevity are not altogether congruent with those of my client,’ said Korrogly. ‘In order for precedent to be established, I wish to lay a proper foundation. I intend to make the jury aware of the history of Griaule and his various acts of influence. I think it’s absolutely essential they have a complete understanding of his subtlety in order to arrive at an equitable judgment.’

Wymer heaved a sigh. ‘Mister Mervale?’

Mervale’s mouth opened and closed; then he threw up his hands and stalked back to the prosecution table.

‘Carry on, Mister Korrogly,’ said Wymer. ‘But let’s try to keep the floorshow to a minimum, shall we? I doubt that anything you produce here is going to outweigh the evidence of the will, and there’s no point in wasting time.’

It came to be late in the day, but Korrogly did not ask for a recess; he wanted Lemos to tell his story, to give the jury a night to let it sink in, before exposing him to cross-examination. He conducted Lemos through some background testimony, allowing him to get a feel for the witness stand and the jury and then asked him to tell in his own words what had happened after he had bought The Father of Stones from Henry Sichi.

Lemos wet his lips, gazed down at the rail of the witness box, sighed, and then, meeting the jury’s eyes as he had been coached, said, ‘I remember I was in a great hurry to get home with the stone. I didn’t know why at the time, I just knew I wanted to examine it more closely. When I reached the shop, I went to my workbench and sat with it awhile. The part you see now was gripped by what appeared to be claws of corroded-looking orange material, whose color came away on my fingers; it was flaky, soft, rather like old wood or some other organic matter. As for the stone itself, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it. Its clouded surface seemed so lovely, so mysterious. I became certain that an even greater beauty was trapped within it, beauty I knew I could unlock. Usually I will not cut a stone until I have lived with it for weeks, sometimes months. But I was in a kind of trance, invested with a strange confidence that I knew this stone, that I had known it always, that its internal structures were as familiar as the patterns of my thoughts. I cleaned off the orange material, then clamped the stone in a vise, put on my goggles and began to cut it.

‘With each blow of my chisel, light seemed to fracture within the stone, to spray forth in beams that penetrated my eyes, and these beams acted to strike sprays of images from my brain, as if it too were a gemstone in process of being cut. The first image was of Griaule, not as he is now, but vital, spitting fire toward a tiny man in a wizard’s robes, a lean, swarthy man with a blade of a nose. There followed another image that depicted both dragon and man immobilized as a result of that battle. Then other images came, too rapidly for me to catalogue. My mind was alive with light, and the ringing in my ears was the music of light, and I knew with every fiber of my being that I was cutting one of the great gems. I would call it The Father of Stones, I thought, because it would be the archetype of mineral beauty. But when at last I set down my chisel and considered what I’d done, I was more than a little disappointed. The stone was flashy, full of glint and sparkle, but had no depth and subtlety of color. Indeed, it appeared to have a hollow center. Except for its weight, it might have been an intricate piece of blown glass.

‘I was distressed that I’d wasted money on the thing. I couldn’t imagine what I’d been thinking – I should have realized it was worthless, I told myself. The shop was already in danger of going under, and I’d had no business in making the purchase under any circumstance. Finally I decided to present the stone to Zemaille. He’d been harrassing me to come up with something unusual for one of his rituals, and perhaps, I thought, he would allow the superficial brilliance of the stone to blind him to its worthlessness. And I also hoped I might get the chance to see Mirielle. I wrapped the stone in a velvet cloth and hurried toward the temple, but when I reached it I found the gates locked. I knocked again and again, but no one responded. I’ve never considered myself an intemperate man; however, being locked out after having walked all that way, it seemed a terrible affront. I paced up and down in front of the gates, stopping now and again to shout, my anger building into a towering frustration. Finally, unable to contain my rage, I set about climbing the temple walls, using the creepers that grew upon them for handholds. I pushed my way through the garden – if such noxious growths as flourish there can be called such – becoming even more angry, and when I heard chanting coming from a building that stood at a corner of the compound, I rushed toward it, so angry now that I intended to fling the stone at Zemaille’s feet, to cast a scornful look at Mirielle, and then storm out, leaving them to their perversions. But once inside the building, my anger was muted by the barbarity of the scene that met my eyes. The chamber into which I’d entered was pentagonal in shape, enclosed by screens of carved ebony. The floor was carpeted in black moss and declined into a pit where lay an altar of black stone worked with representations of Griaule. It was flanked by torches held in wrought-iron stands of grotesque design. Zemaille, robed in black and silver, was standing beside the altar – a swarthy hook-nosed man with his arms lifted in supplication, chanting in company with nine hooded figures who were ranged about the altar. Moments later, a door at the rear of the chamber opened, and Mirielle was led forth, naked except for a necklace of polished dragon scale. She was in an obvious state of intoxication, her head lolling, her eyes showing as crescents of white.

‘I was so appalled at seeing my daughter in this pitiful condition that I was stunned, unable to act. It was as if the sight had ratified all the hopelessness of my life, and I think for awhile I believed that this was proper, that I deserved such a fate. I watched as Mirielle was stretched out on the altar, her head tossing about, incapable – it appeared – of knowing what was happening to her. The chanting grew louder, and Zemaille, lifting his arms higher, cried, “Father! Soon you will be free!” Then he lapsed into a tongue with which I was unfamiliar.

‘It was at this point that I sensed Griaule’s presence. There was no great physical symptom or striking effect . . . except perhaps an intensification of the distance I felt from what I was seeing. I was absolutely unemotional, and that seems to me most peculiar, because I have never been unemotional where Mirielle is concerned. But I was nonetheless certain of his presence, and as I stood there overlooking the altar, I knew exactly what was going on and why it had to be stopped. This knowledge was nothing so simple as an awareness of my daughter’s peril, it was the knowledge of something old and violent and mystic. I can still feel the shape it made in my brain, though the particulars have fled me.

‘I stepped forward and called to Zemaille. He turned his head. It was strange . . . never before had he displayed any reaction to me other than disdain, but there was tremendous fear in his face then, as if he knew that Griaule and not me was his adversary. I swear before God it was not in my mind to kill him before that moment, but as I moved toward him I knew not only that I must kill him, but that I must act that very second. I’d forgotten the stone in my hand, but then, without thinking, without even making a conscious decision to act, I hurled it at him. It was an uncanny throw. I could not have been less than fifty feet away, and the stone struck with a terrible crack dead center of his forehead. He dropped without a cry.’

Lemos lowered his head for a second, his grip tightening on the rail of the witness box. ‘I had expected that the nine gathered around the altar would attack me, but instead they ran out into the night. Perhaps they, too, sensed Griaule’s hand in all this. I was horrified by what I’d done. As I’ve stated, the knowledge of what was intended by the act had fled, had flown from my brain, evaporated like a mist. I knew only that I had killed a man . . . a despicable man, but a man nonetheless. I went over to Zemaille, hoping that he might still be alive. The Father of Stones was lying beside him. Something about it had changed, I realized, and on picking it up I saw that the center was no longer hollow. At the heart of the stone was the flaw that you can see there now, a flaw in the shape of a man with uplifted arms.’ He leaned back and sighed. ‘The rest you know.’

Mervale’s cross-examination was thorough, incisive, yet if it had not been for the will, Korrogly thought after the day’s proceedings had been concluded, he would have had an excellent chance to win an acquittal; the weight of the material evidence would not have impressed the jury any more than his witnesses and Lemos’ account. But as things stood, the fact that Lemos could not put forward any reason why Griaule had wanted Zemaille dead, that seemed to Korrogly to tip the balance in favor of the prosecution. He stayed late at the courthouse, running over the details of the case in his mind, and finally, just after eleven o’clock, more frustrated than he had yet been, he packed up his papers and set out for the Almintra quarter, hoping that he could mend his fences with Mirielle; perhaps he could convince her of his good intentions, help her to understand that his responsibilities had demanded he treat her roughly.

By the time he reached the quarter, the streets were deserted and mist had sealed in the dilapidated houses from the beach, from the sky and the rest of the world, turning the streetlamps into fuzzy white blooms; the surf sounded sluggish, like slaps being delivered by an enormous hand, and the dampness of the air caused Korrogly to turn up his collar and hurry along, his footsteps scraping on the drifted sand. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in a shop window, a pale anxious man, clasping his coat shut with one hand, his brow furrowed, rushing through a glossy black medium . . . the medium of Griaule, he imagined it, the medium of guilt and innocence, of every human question. He walked faster, wanting to subsume his doubts in Mirielle’s warmth. Up ahead, he made out an indistinct figure standing wreathed in mist. Just standing, but there was something ominous about its stillness. Idiot, he said to himself, and kept going. But as the figure grew more solid, his nervousness increased; it was wearing a cloak or a robe of some kind. He peered through the mist. A hooded robe. He stopped by an alley mouth, remembering Lemos’ story and the nine hooded witnesses. Once again he told himself that he was being foolish, but he was unable to shake the feeling that the figure – no more than forty or fifty feet away – was waiting for him. He held his briefcase to his chest, took a few tentative steps forward. The figure remained motionless.

There was no point, Korrogly thought, in taking chances. He backed toward the alley mouth, keeping his eyes on the figure, then bolted down the alley; he stopped at the end of it, on the margin of the beach, and, hidden behind a pile of rotted boards, gazed back toward the street. A moment later, the figure appeared at the alley mouth and began walking down it.

Icy cold flowed down Korrogly’s spine, his testicles shriveled, his legs felt trembly and weak. Clutching his case, he ran through the darkness, slipping in the soft sand, stumbling, nearly falling across an overturned dory. He could see nothing, he might have been sprinting in the glossy darkness he had glimpsed within the shop window. Things came blooming suddenly out of the mist, visible in the faint glow from the windows of the houses – dead fish bones, a bucket, driftwood – and the erratic rhythm of the surf had the glutinous sound of huge laboring lungs.

He ran for several minutes, stopping for fractions of seconds to cast about for sign of pursuit, spinning about, jumping at every noise, peering into the misted blackness; at last he ran straight into what felt like a sticky thick spiderweb and fell tangled in its mesh. Panicked, he let out a strangled cry, tearing at the mesh, and it was only after he had freed himself that he discovered the web had been a fishing net hung on a wooden rack to dry. He began running again, making for the street, visible as a spectral white glow between houses. When he reached it, he found that he was less than a block from the gemcutter’s shop. He sprinted toward it, fetching up against the door, gasping, bracing against it with one hand, catching his breath. Then a terrible shock, and pain lanced through his hand, drawing forth a scream; he saw to his horror that it had been pierced by a long-bladed dagger, whose handle – entwined with the image of a coiled dragon – was still quivering. Blood trickled from the wound, flowing down his wrist and forearm. Making little shrieks, he managed to pull the blade free; the accompanying surge of pain almost caused him to lose consciousness, but he managed to keep his feet, staring at the neat incision in his palm, at the blood welling forth. Then he glanced wildly along the misted street – there was no one in sight. He pounded on the door with his good hand and called to Mirielle. No answer. He pounded again, kept it up. What could be taking her so long? At last steps sounded on the stairs, and Mirielle called, ‘Who is it? Who’s there?’

‘It’s me,’ he said, staring at his hand; the sight of the blood made him nauseated and dizzy. The wound throbbed, and he squeezed his wrist, trying to stifle the pain.

‘Go away!’

‘Help me!’ he said. ‘Please, help me!’

The door swung inward.

He turned to Mirielle, suddenly weak and fading, holding up the injured hand as if it were something she could explain to him. Her face was a mask of shock; her lips were moving, but he could hear no sound. Then, without knowing how he had gotten there, he was lying on the sand, looking at her foot. He had never seen a foot from that particular angle, and he gazed at it from the perspective of a dazed aesthetic. Then the foot was replaced by a bare knee. Milky white. The same clouded color as that of The Father of Stones. Against that white backdrop he seemed to see the various witnesses, the evidence, all the confounding materials of the case, arrayed before him like the scenes that reportedly came to the eyes of a dying man, as if it were the case and not the details of his own life that were of most significance to him. Just as he passed out he believed that he was about to understand something important.

Four

Because of his injury, Korrogly was granted a day off from the trial, and since the following two days would be given over to a religious festival, he had nearly seventy-two hours in which to come up with some tactic or evidence that would save Lemos’ life. He was not sure how to proceed, nor was he sure that he wanted to proceed. He had not been the only victim of the previous night; Kirin, the old woman he had interviewed prior to the trial, was missing, and a bloody dagger identical to the one that had pierced his hand had been found on her stoop. Apparently the members of the cult were seeking to assure Lemos’ conviction by silencing everyone who could possibly help him.

He spent the first day going over his notes and was distressed to see how many avenues of investigation he had neglected; he had been so caught up with Mirielle, with all the complexities of the case, complexities that had led nowhere, he had failed to do much of what he normally would consider basic pretrial work. For example, apart from digging up character witnesses, he had done nothing by way of researching Lemos’ background; he should, he realized, have checked into the gemcutter’s marriage, the drowning of his wife, Mirielle’s childhood, her friends . . . there were so many routine things that he should have done and had not, he could spend most of the next two days in merely listing them. He had intended to interview Kirin a second time, certain that the old woman had known more than she was saying; but his infatuation with Mirielle had caused him to forget that intent, and now the old woman was gone, her secrets with her.

After a day, a night and another day, he realized that he did not have sufficient time left to carry out further investigations, that he had been derelict in his duty to the court and to Lemos, and that – barring a miracle – his client was doomed. Oh, he could file an appeal. Then there would be time to investigate everything. But with precedent having been denied by a respected judge, he would have to present overwhelming proof of innocence in order to win an appeal, and given the nature of the case, such proof would likely not be forthcoming. Realizing this, he closed his notebooks, pushed aside his papers and sat brooding, gazing out the window of his study at Ayler Point and the twilit ocean. If he were to lean forward and crane his neck, he would be able to see the black pagoda roofs of the dragon cult standing up among palms and sea grape on the beach a few hundred yards beyond the point; but he had no desire to do so, to do anything that would remind him further of his failure. Lemos might well be guilty of the crime, but the fact remained that he had deserved a better defense than Korrogly had provided; even if he was a villain, he was not a great villain, certainly not as great a one as Mardo Zemaille had been.

It was a relatively clear night that fell over Port Chantay; the mists typical of the season failed to materialize, stars flickered between the pale masses of cloud that drove across the winded sky, and the lights of the houses picked out the toiling darkness along Ayler Point. White combers piled in toward the beach; then, as the tide receded, they were swept sideways to break on the end of the point. Korrogly watched them, feeling there was something instructive in the process, that he was learning something by watching; but if a lesson were being taught, he did not recognize it. He began to grow restless, and he thought with frustration and longing of Mirielle. At length he decided to go to The Blind Lady and have a drink . . . or maybe several drinks; but before he could set out for the tavern there came a knock at his door and a woman’s voice called to him. Thinking it was Mirielle, he hurried to the door and flung it open; but the woman who faced him was much older than the gemcutter’s daughter, her head cowled in a dark shawl, the lumpiness of her body evident beneath a loose jacket and skirt. He backed away a step, reminded by her shawl of the cowled figure who had attacked him.

‘I’ve something for you,’ the woman said in a voice with a thick northern accent; she held out an envelope. ‘From Kirin.’

He recognized her then for Kirin’s servant, the drab who had admitted him to the old woman’s house some weeks before. Heavy-breasted and thick-waisted, with features so stuporous that they looked masklike.

She pushed the envelope at him. ‘Kirin said I was to give this to you if anything happened to her.’

Korrogly opened the envelope; inside were two ornate keys and an unsigned note.

Mr Korrogly,

If you are reading this, you will know that I am dead. Perhaps you will not know by whose hand, though if you don’t, then you’re not the astute individual I reckon you to be.

The keys open the outer gate of the temple and the door to Mardo’s private apartment in the main building. If you wish to learn the nature of the great work, go with Janice to the temple as soon as you have received this. She will be helpful to you. You dare not wait longer, for it’s possible that others will know what I know. Do not involve the police; there are cult members among them. The cult has become afraid of the temple, afraid of what has happened there, and most of them have no wish to come near the place. However, the fanatics will be anxious to protect Mardo’s secrets.

Once in Mardo’s apartment, if you search carefully, I know you will find what you need to save your client.

Be thorough, but be swift.

Korrogly folded the note and looked at Janice, who, in turn, regarded him with bovine stolidity; he could not for the life of him think how she would be helpful.

‘Do you have a weapon?’ she asked.

Ruefully, he showed her his bandaged hand.

‘When we reach the temple,’ she said, ‘I’ll take the lead. But keep close behind me.’

He was about to ask how this would be an advantage, when she pulled a long knife from her jacket; the sight of it made him reconsider his options. This might be a trick, a trap set by the members of the cult.

‘Why are you helping me?’ he asked.

She looked perplexed. ‘Kirin asked it of me.’

‘You’d put yourself in danger simply because she asked?’

She continued staring at him for a long moment; at last she said, ‘I’ve no love for dragons.’ She tugged at her blouse, pulling the hem up from the waistband of her skirt, then turned away from him, exposing her naked back; the smooth pale skin below her shoulderblades had been branded by an iron in the shape of a coiled dragon; the flesh surrounding it was puckered and discolored.

‘Zemaille did this to you?’ asked Korrogly.

‘And more.’

Korrogly remained unconvinced; the more fanatical of the cult members might have adopted such mutilations as a fashion.

‘Are you coming?’ Janice asked, and when he hesitated, she said, ‘You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?’

‘I’m wary of you,’ he said.

‘I don’t care if you come or not, but make up your mind quickly. If we are to go the temple, we need to make use of the cover of darkness.’

She glanced about the room, then crossed to a table on which stood a decanter of brandy and glasses. She poured a glass and handed it to him.

‘Courage,’ she said.

Shamed by this, he drank the brandy down; he poured a second and sipped it, considering the situation. He questioned Janice concerning her mistress, and though her answers were circumspect, he derived from them the sense of an old brave woman who had done her best to thwart the evil ambitions of Zemaille. That, too, shamed him. What kind of lawyer was he, he thought, to refuse to risk himself for his client? Perhaps it was the effects of the brandy, perhaps a product of the self-loathing he felt concerning his failure to provide Lemos with an adequate defense, but for whatever reason he soon began to feel brave and resolute, to perceive that unless he did his utmost now in Lemos’ defense, he would never be able to practice his profession again.

‘All right,’ he said finally, taking his cloak from its peg. ‘I’m ready.’

He had expected Janice to be pleased, to approve of his decision, but she only grunted and said, ‘Let’s just hope you haven’t waited too long.’

The road that led to the temple was paved with enormous slabs of gray stone and continued along the coast for several miles, then turned inland toward the Carbonares Valley, where Griaule held sway; it was said that the location had been chosen because it stood in the dragon’s imaginary line of sight, so that his eye would be always fixed upon the cult. At the spot where the road passed the temple it widened considerably as if its builders had wanted to offer travelers the option of giving the place a wide berth. That option now greatly appealed to Korrogly. Standing before the gate, looking at the immense brass lock in the shape of a dragon, at the high black walls twined with vines that bore orchidaceous blooms the color of raw beef, the pagoda roofs that loomed like strange terraced mountains, he was inclined to discard any pretense he had of being a moral man and a committed officer of the court, and to hurry back to the security of his apartment. Not even the clarity of the night could diminish the temple’s forbidding aspect, and each concatenation of the surf, driven in onto the shore by a blustery wind, made him jump. If he had been alone, he would have had no compunction about fleeing. Only Janice’s dull regard, in which he saw a reflection of Lemos’ despondent stare, kept him there; he felt outfaced by her, and though he told himself that her courage was born of ignorance and thus not courage at all, he was unable to persuade himself that this was relevant to his own lack of fortitude.

With an unsteady hand, he unlocked the gate; it swung inward with surprising ease, as if either the place or its controlling agency were eager to receive him. Following Janice, who went with her knife at the ready, he moved along a path winding among shrubs hung with overripe berries and low spreading trees with blackish green leaves; the foliage was so dense that he was unable to see anything of the buildings other than the rooftops. The wind did not penetrate there, and the stillness was such that every rustle he made in brushing against the bushes seemed inordinately loud; he fancied he could hear his heartbeat. Moonlight lacquered the leaves and applied lattices of shadow to the flagstones. He felt he was choking, moving deeper into an inimical hothouse atmosphere that clotted his lungs; he realized this was merely a symptom of fear, but knowing that did nothing to alleviate the symptom. He fastened his eyes on Janice’s broad back and tried to clear his mind; but as they drew near the building where Zemaille’s apartment was situated, he had the notion that someone was watching . . . not just an ordinary someone. Someone cold, vast, and powerful. He recalled how Kirin and Mirielle had described their apprehension of Griaule, and the thought that the dragon’s eye might be turned his way panicked him. His fists clenched, his jaw tightened, he had difficulty in swallowing. The shadows appeared to be acquiring volume and substance, and he imagined that terrible creatures were materializing within their black demarcations, preparing to leap out and tear at him.

Once inside the door, which opened onto a corridor lit by eerie mosiac patterns of bioluminescent moss, like veins of a radiant blue-green mineral wending through the teakwood walls, his fear increased. He was certain now that he could feel Griaule; with every step his impression of the dragon grew more discrete. There was an aura of timelessness, or rather that time itself was not so large and elemental as the dragon, that it was something on which Griaule had gained a perspective, something he could control. And the walls, the veins of moss . . . he had the sense that those patterns reflected the patterns of the dragon’s thoughts. It was, he thought, as if he were inside Griaule, passing along some internal channel, and thinking this, he realized that it might be true, that the building, its function aligned with Griaule for so long, might well have become attuned with the dragon, might have in effect become the analogue of his body, subject to his full control. That idea produced in him an intense claustrophobia, and he had to bite back a cry. This was ridiculous, he told himself, absolutely ridiculous, he was letting his imagination run away with him. And yet he could not escape the feeling of enclosure, of being trapped beneath tons of cold flesh and bones the size of ships’ keels.

When at last Janice pointed out the door to Zemaille’s apartment, it was with tremendous relief that Korrogly inserted the key, eager to be out of the corridor, hoping that the apartment would provide a less oppressive environment; but although well-lit by globes of moss, the room that greeted his eye added more fuel to the fires of his imagination. Beyond an alcove was a bedchamber of a most grotesque design, the walls covered in a rich paper of crimson with a magenta stripe, and coiling around the entire room was a relief depicting a tail and a swollen reptile body, all worked in brass, every scale cunningly wrought, resolving into a huge dragon’s head with an open fanged mouth that protruded some nine feet out from the far wall, wherein lay a bed like a plush red tongue. The eyes of the dragon were lidded, with opalescent crescents showing beneath, and its claws extended from the foot of the bed; above the head, suspended from the ceiling, was a section of polished scale some four feet wide and five feet long, angled slightly downward so that whoever entered would see – as Korrogly did now – their dark reflection. He stood frozen, his eyes darting between the scale and the dragon, certain that through some mystic apparatus he was being perceived by Griaule, and he might have stood there for a good long time if Janice had not said, ‘Hurry! This is no place to linger!’

There was little furniture in the room – a bureau, a small chest, two chairs. Korrogly made a hasty search of the chest and bureau, finding only robes and linens. Then he turned to Janice and said, ‘What am I looking for?’

‘Papers, I think,’ she said. ‘Kirin told me once that Mardo kept records. But I’m not sure.’

Korrogly began feeling along the walls, searching for a hidden panel, while Janice stood watch at the door. Where, he thought, where would Zemaille have hidden his valuables? Then it struck him. Where else? He stared at the bed within the dragon’s mouth. The idea that Mirielle had once slept there repelled him, and he was no less repelled by the prospect of exploring the dark recess behind the bed; but it appeared he had no choice. He knelt on the bed, his trouserleg catching on one of the fangs, stalling his heart for an instant, and then he crawled back into the darkness, tossing aside pillows. The recess extended for about six feet and was walled with a smooth material that felt like stone; he ran his hands along it, hunting for a crack, a bulge, some sign of concealment. At last his fingers encountered a slight depression . . . no, five depressions, each about the size of his fingertips. He pressed against them, but achieved nothing; he tapped on the stone and it resounded hollowly.

‘Have you found it?’ Janice called.

‘There’s something here, but I can’t get it open.’

In a moment she came crawling up beside him, bringing with her a faint sweetish smell that seemed familiar. He showed her the depressions, and she began to push at them.

‘Maybe it’s a sequence,’ he said. ‘Maybe you have to push them one at a time in some order.’

‘I felt something,’ she said. ‘A tremor. Here . . . put your weight against the wall.’

He set his shoulder to the wall, heaved and felt the stone shift; the next second the stone gave way and he went sprawling forward. Terrified, he pushed up into a sitting position and found himself in a small round chamber whose pale walls, veined like marble, gave off a ruddy glow. At the rear of the chamber was a lacquered black box. He started to reach for it, but as he picked it up the veins in the stone began to writhe and to thicken, melting up from the surface of the chamber, becoming adders with puffy sacs beneath their throats, and behind the wall, as if trapped in a reddish gel, there appeared the image of Mardo Zemaille, a dark hook-nosed man robed in black and silver, his hands arranged into tortuous mudras from which spat infant lightnings.

Korrogly screamed and pounded on the wall; he looked behind him and saw that the serpents were twining around one another, some beginning to slither toward him. Zemaille was intoning words in some guttural tongue, staring with demonic intent, and the detonations of light emerging from the fingertips were forming into balls of pale fire that spat and crackled and arrowed away in all directions. Korrogly pried at the wall, his breath coming in shrieks, expecting the adders to strike at any second, to be scorched by the balls of fire. A searing pain in his ankle, and he saw that one of the adders had sunk its fangs deep. His screams grew frantic, he lashed out his foot, shaking the adder loose, but another struck at his calf, and another. The pain was almost unendurable. He could feel the venom coursing through his veins like black ice. Half-a-dozen of the serpents were clinging to his legs, and his blood was flowing in rivulets from the wounds. He began to shiver, his right leg spasmed in a convulsion. His heart was huge, swelling larger yet, bloating with poison; it felt like a fist clenched about a thorn inside his chest. One of the fireballs struck his arm and clung there, eating into his arm, charring cloth and flesh. Zemaille’s voice echoed, the voice of doom, as meaningless and potent as the voice of a gong. Then the wall swung outward, and he scrambled from the chamber, falling, coming to his knees, making a clumsy dive toward the bed, only to be caught up by Janice.

‘Easy,’ she said. ‘Easy, it’s only one of Mardo’s illusions.’

‘Illusion?’ Korrogly, his heart racing, turned back to the chamber; it was empty of all but the ruddy light. The pain, he realized, had receded. There were no wounds, no blood.

Janice picked up the box from where he had let it fall, held it to her ear and shook it. ‘Sounds like something solid. Not papers. Maybe this isn’t it.’

‘There’s nothing else there,’ said Korrogly, snatching the box from her, desperate to be away from there. ‘Come on!’

He crawled to the edge of the bed, started for the door, then glanced back to see if Janice was following. She was swinging her legs off the side of the bed, and he was about to tell her to hurry when movement above the bed drew his eye. In the polished scale that overhung the bed he saw his own reflection . . . that and more. Deeper within the scale another figure was materializing, that of a man lying on his back, wearing the robes of a wizard. At first Korrogly thought it must be Zemaille, for the man was very like him: hook-nosed and swarthy. But then he realized that the figure was shrunken and old, incredibly old, and the eyes, half-lidded, showed no sign of white or iris or pupil, but were black and wound through by thready structures of blue-green fire. The image faded after a second, but was so striking in aspect that Korrogly continued staring at the scale, feeling that more might be forthcoming, that it had been part of a sending. Janice pulled at him, making him aware once again of their danger, and together they went sprinting along the corridor toward the door.

The wind had grown stronger, the tops of the bushes were seething and the boughs of the trees lifting as if in sluggish acclaim. After the silence within the building, the roil of wind and surf was an assault, disorienting Korrogly, and he let Janice, who seemed untroubled by all that happened, lead him toward the gate. They had gone halfway through the toiling thickets, when she came to a sudden stop and stood with her head tilted to the side.

‘Someone’s coming,’ she said.

‘I don’t hear anything,’ he said. But she hauled at him, dragging him back the way they had come, and he trusted in her direction.

‘There’s a rear gate,’ she said. ‘It opens out onto the bluff. If we get separated, go west along the beach and hide in the dunes.’

Korrogly hustled after her, clutching the lacquered box to his chest, glancing back once to try and make out their pursuers; he could have sworn he saw dark hooded figures as he went around a bend. It took them less than a minute to reach the gate, another few seconds for Janice to unlatch it, and then they were slogging through the soft sand atop the bluff, heading away from Ayler Point; the moonstruck waves below were flowing sideways, obeying the drag of the outgoing tide. Korrogly was relieved to have left the temple behind, and he was more confused than afraid; he thought that Janice might have been mistaken about hearing someone, that he had not really seen the hooded figures. He ran easily, feeling amazingly sound. It was as if something about the temple had occluded his faculties, diminished his strength. He soon began to outpace Janice, and when he slowed to let her catch up, she gestured for him to keep going; her face was drawn tight with fear, and seeing this, he redoubled his efforts. Just as he came to the slope that led down from the bluff onto the beach, a path of white sand winding through tall grasses, he heard an agonized cry behind him, and turning, he had a glimpse of Janice, her shawl blown by the wind into a pennant, her dark hair loose, teetering on the edge of the bluff, clutching at her breast, at the handle of a dagger that sprouted bloody between her hands. Her eyes rolled up, she toppled over the edge and was gone.

It had happened so suddenly that Korrogly stopped running, scarcely able to believe what he had seen, but after a split-second, hearing a shout above the wind, he set out in a mad dash along the path. Three-quarters of the way down, he lost his footing and went tumbling head over heels the rest of the way. At the bottom of the slope, he groped for the box, found it, and bright with fear, made for the dunes which rose pale as salt above the narrow strip of mucky sand. By the time he had reached the top of the dunes, he was nearly out of breath, and he stood gasping, looking out over a rumpled moonlit terrain of grasses and hillocks, the folds between them holding bays of shadow. He set out running again, stumbling, dropping to his knees in a depression, tripping over exposed roots, and finally, his stamina exhausted, he dove into a cleft beneath a little rise and covered himself as best he could with sand and loose grass.

For awhile he heard nothing except the wind and the muffled crunch of the surf. Clouds began to pass across the moon, their edges catching silver fire, and he stared at them, praying that they would close and draw a curtain of darkness across the land. After about ten minutes he heard a shout, and it was followed a moment later by another shout. He could not make out any words, but the outcries had, he thought, the quality of angry desperation. He tucked his head down and made promises to God, swearing to uphold every sacred tenet, to do good works, if only he would be permitted to survive the night.

At long last the shouts ceased, but Korrogly remained where he was, afraid even to lift his head. He gazed at the clouds; the wind had lessened, and they were coasting past the moon like huge ragged blue galleons, like continents, like anything he wanted to make of their indefinite shapes. A dragon, for instance. An immense cloudy bulk with a vicious head and one globed, glaring silver eye, coiled throughout the heavens, the edges of its scales glinting like stars on its blue-dark hide, spying him out, watching over him, or else merely watching him, merely keeping track of its frightened pawn. He watched it take wing and fly in soaring arcs, diving and looping, making a pattern that drew him in, that trapped him like a devil within a pentagram and, eventually, hypnotized him into a dream-ridden sleep.

Dawn came gray and drizzly, with clouds that resembled heaps of dirty soap suds massing on the horizon. Korrogly’s head ached as if he had been drinking all night; he was sore, filthy . . . even his eyes felt soiled. He peered about and saw only the hillocks, the flattened grasses, the heaving slate-colored ocean, gulls scything down the sky and keening. He rested his head against the sand, gathering himself for the walk back to town, and then remembered the box. It was unlocked. Zemaille, he supposed, had thought that his illusion would dissuade any intruders. He opened it cautiously on the chance that there were more tricks inside. It contained a leather-bound diary. He leafed through the pages, stopping occasionally to read a section; after going over a third of it, he knew that he could win an acquittal, yet he felt no triumph, no satisfaction, nothing. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he still was not sure that he believed in Lemos. Perhaps it was because he knew he should have unearthed the motive sooner; Kirin had given him a clue to it, one he had neglected in his confusion. Perhaps the deaths of Kirin and Janice were muting his reaction. Perhaps . . . he laughed, a sour little noise that the wind blew away. There was no use in trying to understand anything now. He needed a bath, a sleep, food. Then maybe things would make sense. But he doubted it.

Five

The following morning, against Mervale’s objection, Korrogly recalled Mirielle to the stand. She had on a brown dress with a modest neckline – a schoolteacher’s dress – and her hair was done up primly like that of a young spinster. She had, it appeared, passed beyond mourning, and he wondered why she had not worn black; it might signal, he thought, some indecision on her part, some change of heart as related to her father. But whether or not that was so was unimportant. Looking at her, he had no emotional reaction; she seemed familiar yet distant, like someone he had known briefly years before. He knew that he could break down that distance and dredge up his feelings for her, but he was not moved to do so, for while he knew they were still strong, he was not sure whether they would manifest as love or hate. She had used him, had confused him with her sexuality, had undermined his concentration, and nearly succeeded in killing her father, who was very likely innocent. She had told him that she could have been a good actress, and she had been unsurpassable in her counterfeit of love, so perfect in the role that he believed she had won a piece of his heart for all time. But she was a perjurer and probably worse, and he was duty-bound to make her true colors known to the court, no matter what the cost.

‘Good morning, Miss Lemos,’ he said.

She gave him a quizzical look and returned the greeting.

‘Did you sleep well last night?’ he asked.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Mervale. ‘Is the counsel for the defense next going to inquire about the lady’s breakfast, or perhaps her dreams?’

Judge Wymer stared glumly at Korrogly.

‘I was simply trying to make the witness feel comfortable,’ Korrogly said. ‘I’m concerned for her welfare. She’s had a terrible weight on her conscience.’

‘Mister Korrogly,’ said the judge in tone of warning.

Korrogly waved his hand as if both to accede to the caution and dismiss its importance. He rested both hands on the witness box, leaning toward Mirielle, and said, ‘What is the great work?’

‘The witness has already answered that question,’ said Mervale, and at the same time, Mirielle said, ‘I don’t know what more I can tell you, I . . .’

‘The truth would be refreshing,’ said Korrogly. ‘You see, I know for a fact you haven’t been candid with this court.’

‘If the counselor has facts to present,’ said Mervale, ‘I suggest that he present them and stop badgering the witness.’

‘I will,’ said Korrogly, addressing the bench. ‘In due course. But it’s important to my presentation that I show exactly to what extent and to what end the facts have been covered up.’

Wymer heaved a forlorn sigh. ‘Proceed.’

‘I ask you again,’ said Korrogly to Mirielle, ‘what is the great work? And I warn you, be truthful, for you will not escape prosecution for any lie you may tell from this point on.’

Doubt surfaced in Mirielle’s face, but she only said, ‘I’ve told you all I know.’

Korrogly took a turn around the witness box and stopped facing the jury. ‘What was the purpose of the ceremony in progress on the night that Zemaille was killed?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was it part of the great work?’

‘No . . . I mean I don’t think so.’

‘For someone who was Zemaille’s intimate you appear to know very little about him.’

‘Mardo was a secretive man.’

‘Was he, now? Did he ever discuss his parents with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So he was not secretive concerning his origins?’

‘No.’

‘Did he ever discuss his grandparents?’

‘I’m not sure. I believe he may have mentioned them once or twice.’

‘Other relatives . . . did he ever discuss them?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Did he ever make mention of a remote ancestor, a man who – like himself – was involved in the occult?’

Her face tightened. ‘No.’

‘You seem quite certain of that, yet a moment ago you claimed that you couldn’t recall if he had ever talked about other relatives.’

‘I would have remembered something like that.’

‘Indeed, I believe you would.’ Korrogly crossed to the defense table. ‘Does the name Archiochus strike a chord in your memory?’

Mirielle sat motionless, her eyes widened slightly.

‘Should I repeat the question?’

‘No, I heard it . . . I was trying to think.’

‘And have you finished thinking?’

‘Yes, I’ve heard the name.’

‘And who might this Archiochus be?’

‘A wizard, I believe.’

‘A wizard of some accomplishment, was he not? One who lived some time ago . . . thousands of years?’

‘I think so.’ Mirielle seemed to be mulling something over. ‘Yes, I remember now. Mardo considered him his spiritual father. He wasn’t an actual relation . . . at least I don’t think he was.’

‘And that is the extent of your knowledge concerning him?’

‘It’s all I can remember.’

‘Odd,’ said Korrogly, toying with the lid of his briefcase. ‘Let’s return to the ceremony on the night Zemaille was killed. Did this have anything to do with Archiochus?’

‘It may have.’

‘But you’re not sure?’

‘No.’

‘Your father has testified that Zemaille cried out to his father at one point, saying, “Soon you will be free!” Might he not have been referring at that moment to his spiritual father?’

‘Yes.’ Mirielle sat up straight, adopting an earnest expression as if she wanted to be helpful. ‘Now that you mention it, it’s possible he was trying to contact Archiochus. Mardo believed in the spirit world. He would often hold seances.’

‘Then you’re suggesting that the ceremony in question was something on the order of a seance?’

‘It could have been.’

‘To contact the soul of Archiochus?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Are you certain, Miss Lemos, that you know nothing more about this Archiochus? For instance, did he have anything to do with Griaule?’

‘I . . . maybe.’

‘Maybe,’ said Korrogly bemusedly. ‘Maybe. I believe he had quite a bit to do with Griaule. As a matter of fact, was it not the wizard Archiochus, the man with whom Zemaille felt a spiritual – if not an actual – kinship, who thousands of years ago did battle with the dragon Griaule?’

Babble erupted from the onlookers, and Wymer gaveled them to silence.

Korrogly said to Mirielle, ‘Well?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I believe it was he. I’d forgotten.’

‘Of course,’ said Korrogly. ‘Your flawed memory again.’ He engaged the jury’s eyes and smiled. ‘According to legend, just as Griaule lies dormant, so that same fate struck the wizard who stilled him . . . have you ever heard that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Had Mardo?’

‘I believe so.’

‘So then Mardo believed that this powerful wizard was yet alive? Moribund, but alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s talk about the work for a moment. Not the great work, just the ordinary run-of-the-mill work. Is it true that you took part in sexual rituals with Zemaille in that same room where he died?’

The vein in her temple pulsed.

‘Yes.’

‘And these rituals involved intercourse with Zemaille?’

‘Yes!’

‘And others?’

Mervale stood at the prosecution table. ‘Your Honor, I see no point in this line.’

‘Nor do I,’ said Wymer.

‘But there is a point,’ said Korrogly, ‘one I will shortly make plain.’

‘Very well,’ said Wymer impatiently. ‘But be succinct. The witness will answer.’

‘What was the question?’ Mirielle asked.

‘Did you participate in sex with others aside from Zemaille for ritual purposes?’ said Korrogly.

‘Yes.’

‘Why? What use did this wantonness serve?’

‘Objection.’

‘I’ll rephrase.’ Korrogly leaned against the defense table. ‘Did sex have a specific function in these rituals?’

‘I suppose . . . yes.’

‘And what was it?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Korrogly opened his briefcase, using the lid to hide the diary inside it from Mirielle’s eyes; he opened the little book. ‘Was it to prepare the flesh?’

Mirielle stiffened.

‘Shall I repeat the question?’

‘No, I . . .’

‘What does that mean, Miss Lemos . . . “to prepare the flesh”?’

She shook her head. ‘Mardo knew . . . I was never clear on it.’

‘Did you practice any sort of birth control prior to these rituals? Did you for instance drink some infusion of roots and herbs, or in other way attempt to prevent yourself from becoming pregnant?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yet on the night Zemaille died, you used no birth control.’

Mirielle came to her feet. ‘How do you . . .’ She bit her lip and sat back down.

‘I believe that night was considered by Zemaille to be the anniversary of the battle between Griaule and Archiochus, was it not?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I will introduce evidence,’ said Korrogly addressing the bench, ‘to show that this was indeed Zemaille’s opinion.’ He turned again to Mirielle. ‘Was it your intent on that night to become pregnant?’

She sat mute.

‘Answer the question, Miss Lemos,’ said Judge Wymer.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘Why of all the nights did you hope to become pregnant on that one? Was it because you were hoping for a specific sort of child?’

She stared hatefully at him.

Korrogly let the lid of the briefcase fall, let her see the diary. ‘The name of the child whom you were to bear, was it to be Archiochus?’

Her jaw dropped, her eyes were fixed on the leather book.

‘Was it not Zemaille’s intent, the long focus of his great work, to achieve by some foul magic the liberation and repair of Archiochus’ soul? And for that purpose did he not need flesh that was so soiled and degraded, it would offer a natural habitat for the black mind of that evil and moribund man? Your soiled flesh, Miss Lemos. Was it not your function to provide the vile womb that would allow the soul of this loathsome wizard to be reborn in innocent flesh? And would he not, once he had come to manhood and regained his full powers, with Zemaille’s aid, seek once again to destroy the dragon Griaule?’

Instead of answering, Mirielle let out a scream of such pure agony and despair that the courtroom was thrown into a stunned silence. She lowered her head, resting it on the rail of the witness box; at last she sat up straight, her face transformed into a mask of hatred.

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes! And if hadn’t been for him’ – she flung out a hand, pointing to Lemos – ‘we would have killed the damned lizard! You would have thanked us . . . all of you! You would have praised Mardo as a liberator! You would have built statues, memorials. You . . .’

Judge Wymer cautioned her to silence, but she continued to rant; every muscle in her face was leaping, her eyes were distended, her hands gripping the rail.

‘Mardo!’ she cried, turning her face to the ceiling as if seeing through it into the kingdom of the dead. ‘Mardo, hear me!’

At length, unable to silence her, Wymer had her taken in restraints to an interrogation room, returned Lemos to his cell, and ordered a recess. After the courtroom had been cleared, Korrogly sat at the defense table, fingering the diary, staring gloomily into the middle distance; his thoughts seemed to arc out and upward like flares, bright for a moment, but then falling into darkness.

‘Well,’ said Mervale, coming to sit on the edge of the table, ‘I suppose I should offer my congratulations.’

‘It’s not over yet.’

‘Oh, yes it is! They’ll never convict now, and you know it.’

Korrogly nodded.

‘You don’t seem very happy about it.’

‘I’m just tired.’

‘It’ll sink in soon,’ Mervale said. ‘This is a tremendous victory for you. You’ve made your fortune.’

‘Hmm.’

Mervale got to his feet and extended a hand. ‘No hard feelings,’ he said. ‘I realize you were overwrought the other night. I’m willing to let bygones be bygones if you are.’

Korrogly took his hand and was surprised to see actual respect in Mervale’s face – his surprise stemmed from the fact that he felt no respect for himself; he could not stop thinking of Mirielle, wanting her, even though he realized that everything between them had been a sham. And, too, he was dissatisfied. The case struck him as a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces fit neatly together, but whose picture made no sense.

‘Want a drink?’ Mervale asked.

‘No,’ said Korrogly.

‘Come on, man. Maybe there was some truth in what you said the other night, but I’m won over. You won’t find me patronizing you anymore. Let me buy you a drink.’

‘No,’ said Korrogly; then he looked up at Mervale with a grin. ‘You can buy me several.’

Six

Korrogly’s dissatisfaction did not wane with time; he remained uncertain of Lemos’ innocence, and everything that happened as a result of the gemcutter’s acquittal caused his dissatisfaction to grow more extreme.

Mirielle was declared incompetent, and the temple and its grounds were ceded to Lemos, who promptly sold them for an enormous sum; the buildings were razed and a hotel was planned for the site. Lemos also sold The Father of Stones at a large profit back to Henry Sichi, for it was now considered a relic of Griaule and thus of inestimable worth, and Sichi wanted it for an exhibit in the museum he had built to house such items. Lemos had invested the majority of his new wealth in indigo mills and silver mines, and had purchased a mansion out on Ayler Point; there, with the court’s permission, he and a staff of nurses took charge of nursing Mirielle back to health. They were rarely seen in public, but word had it that she was doing splendidly, and that father and daughter had reconciled.

Whenever he had a spare hour, his practice having grown large and profitable following the trial, Korrogly would use the time to do the pretrial work that he neglected and continued to investigate all the circumstances surrounding Zemaille’s death. In this he made no headway until almost a year and a half later, when he interviewed an ex-member of the dragon cult on the beach below the bluff where the temple had once stood. The man, a slight balding fellow whose innocuous appearance belied his dissolute past, was nervous, and Korrogly had been forced to pay him well in order to elicit his candor. He was of little help for the most part, and it was only toward the end of the interview that he provided information that substantiated Korrogly’s doubts.

‘We all thought it strange that Mirielle took up with Mardo,’ he said, ‘considering what happened to her mother.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Korrogly asked.

‘Her mother,’ said the man. ‘Patricia. She came to the temple one night, the night she died as a matter of fact.’

‘What?’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘No, I’ve heard nothing about it.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose it’s public knowledge. She only came the once, and that same night she drowned.’

‘What happened?’

‘Who can say? Word was that Mardo had her into his bed. Probably drugged her. Maybe she fought him. Mardo wouldn’t have liked that.’

‘Are you saying he killed her?’

‘Somebody did.’

‘Why didn’t any of you come forward with this?’

‘We were afraid.’

‘Of what?’

‘Griaule.’

‘That’s ludicrous.’

‘Is it, now? You’re the man who got Lemos off, you must understand what Griaule’s capable of.’

‘But what you’re saying, it throws a different light on things. Perhaps Lemos and Mirielle plotted this whole affair to get revenge, perhaps . . .’

‘Even if they did,’ said the man, ‘it was still Griaule’s idea.’

Following this interview, Korrogly checked the tides on the night of Patricia Lemos’ death and discovered that they had been sweeping out from the temple bluff toward Ayler Point, that had her body entered the water in the early morning, she might well – as had been the case – have washed ashore on Ayler Point. That, however, was the extent of his enlightenment. Despite exploring every avenue, he could come up with no evidence to implicate Lemos or his daughter in a plot against Zemaille. The matter continued to prey on him, to cause him bad dreams and sleepless nights; having been used, he had an overwhelming compulsion to understand the nature of that usage, to put into perspective all that happened, so that he could know the character of his fate. He did not know whether he wanted more to believe that he had been manipulated by Griaule or by Lemos and his daughter. Some nights he thought he would prefer to cling to the notion of free will, to think that he had been the victim of human wiles, not those of some creature as inexplicable as God; other nights he hoped that he had won the case fairly and freed an innocent man. The only thing he was certain of was that he wanted clarity.

Finally, having no other course of action open, he went to the source, to Lemos’ mansion on Ayler Point, and asked to see the gemcutter. A maid advised him that the master was not in, but that if he would wait, she would find out if the mistress was at home. After a brief absence she returned and ushered him onto a sunny verandah that overlooked the sea and provided a breathtaking view of the Almintra quarter. The strong sunlight applied a crust of diamantine glitter to the surface of the water, spreading it wider whenever the wind riffled the tops of the wavelets, and the gabled houses on the shore looked charming, quaint, their squalor hidden by distance. Mirielle, clad in a beige silk robe, was reclining on a lounge; on a small table close to her hand lay a long pipe and a number of dark pellets that Korrogly suspected to be opium. There was a clouded look to her eyes, and though she was still lovely, the marks of dissipation had eroded the fine edge of her good looks; a black curl was plastered to her sweaty cheek, and there was an unhealthy shine to her skin.

‘It’s wonderful to see you,’ she said lazily, indicating that he should take a chair beside her.

‘Is it?’ he said, feeling the rise of old longings, old bitternesses. God, he thought, I still love her, despite everything; she could commit any excess, any vileness, and I would love her.

‘Of course.’ She let out a fey laugh. ‘I doubt you’ll believe me, but I was quite fond of you.’

‘Fond!’ He made the word into an epithet.

‘I told you I couldn’t love you.’

‘You told me you’d try.’

She shrugged; her hand twitched toward the pipe. ‘Things didn’t work out.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ He gestured at the luxurious surround. ‘Things have worked out quite well for you.’

‘And for you,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard you’ve become a great success. All the ladies want you for their . . .’ A giggle. ‘Their solicitor.’

A large wave broke on the shore beneath the verandah, spreading a lace of foam halfway up the beach; the sound appeared to make Mirielle sleepy; her lids fluttered down, and she gave a long sigh that caused her robe to slip partway off one pale, poppling breast.

‘I tried to be honest with you,’ she said. ‘And I was. As honest as I knew how to be.’

‘Then why didn’t you tell me about your mother and Zemaille?’

Her eyes blinked open. ‘What?’

‘You heard me.’ She sat up, pulling her robe closed, and regarded him with a mixture of confusion and displeasure.

‘Why have you come here?’

‘For answers. I need answers.’

‘Answers!’ She laughed again. ‘You’re more a fool than I thought.’

Stung by that, he said, ‘Maybe I’m a fool, but I’m no whore.’

‘A lawyer who thinks he’s not a whore! Will wonders never cease!’

‘Tell me,’ he demanded. ‘Nothing can happen to you now, your father can’t be tried again. It was you, wasn’t it? This was all a scheme, a plot to kill Zemaille and avenge your mother. I don’t know how you pulled it off, but . . .’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Mirielle,’ he said. ‘I need to know. I won’t hurt you, I promise. I could never hurt you. It almost killed me to have to do what I did to you in court.’

She met his eyes for a long moment. ‘It was easy,’ she said at last. ‘You were easy. That’s why we picked you . . . because you were so lonely, so naive. We just kept you spinning. With love, with fear, with misdirection. And finally with drugs. Before I – or rather Janice – took you to the temple, I slipped a drug into your drink. It made you highly suggestible.’

‘That’s what made me hallucinate?’

She looked perplexed.

‘The hidey hole behind the bed. The snakes, the . . .’

‘No, that was Mardo’s illusion. It was real enough. The drug only made you believe what I wanted you to – that we were in danger, being pursued. All that.’

‘What about the scale?’

‘The scale?’

‘Yes, the image of the dead wizard in the scale above Zemaille’s bed. Archiochus, I guess it was.’

Her brow wrinkled. ‘You were so frightened, you must have been seeing things.’

She got to her feet, swayed, righted herself by catching hold of the verandah railing. He thought he saw a softening in her face, the trace of a longing equal to his own, and he also thought he saw her madness, her instability. She would have had to be insane to do what she had, to be in love and not in love at the same time, to inhabit those roles fully, to lie and deceive with such compulsive thoroughness.

‘If we’d presented our evidence in a straightforward way,’ she said, ‘Daddy still might have been convicted. We needed to orchestrate the trial, to manipulate the jury. So we chose you to be the conductor. And you were wonderful! You believed everything we handed you.’ She turned, let her robe drop to expose her perfect back and said in a northern accent, ‘I’ve no great love for dragons.’

It was Janice’s voice.

He gazed at her, uncomprehending. ‘But she fell,’ he said. ‘I saw it.’

‘A net,’ she said. ‘Rigged just below the bluff.’ This she said in a fluting voice, the voice of the old woman, Kirin.

‘My God!’ he said.

‘A little make-up can do miracles,’ she said. ‘And I’ve always been good at doing voices. We planned for years and years.’

‘I still don’t understand. There were so many variables. How could you control them all? The nine witnesses, for example. How could you know they would run?’

She gave him a pitying look.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right. There were no witnesses, were there?’

‘Only Mardo and I. And of course Daddy didn’t throw the stone. We couldn’t take a chance on him missing. We overpowered Mardo, and then he smashed in his skull with it. Then I took drugs to make it look as if I’d been laid out on the altar. The cult had already disbanded, you see. They were all afraid of the great work. It was already in process of breaking up when I joined. That was the heart of the plan. Isolating Mardo. I spent hours encouraging him in the great work; I knew the others would abandon him if they thought he actually might complete it. They were more afraid of Griaule than of him.’

‘Then that part of it was the truth?’

She nodded. ‘Mardo was obsessed with killing Griaule. He was mad!’

‘What about the knife, the hooded figure?’

She bowed. ‘I didn’t intend to injure your hand, merely to frighten you. I was so worried because I’d hurt you. I had to run around to the rear of the shop and climb the back stairs in order to make you think I’d been in the apartment, and I almost decided to forget about the plan, just to run to you and take care of you. I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry! God!’

‘You haven’t got anything to complain about! Your life’s better than it’s ever been. And like you said, Mardo’s death was no great loss to anyone. He was evil.’

‘I don’t even know what that word means anymore.’

Looking back, he could see now the clues he should have seen long before, the similarities in nervous gesture between her and Kirin, her overwrought reaction when he had tried to talk about her mother, all the little inconsistencies, the too-pat connections. What an idiot he had been!

‘Poor Adam.’ She walked over to him, stroked his hair. ‘You expect the world to be so simple, and it is . . . just not in the way you want it to be.’

Her smell of heated oranges aroused him, and he pulled her onto his lap, both angry and lustful. With half his mind he tried to reject her, because to want her would ratify all the duplicity in which he had played a part and further weaken his fraying moral fiber; but the stronger half needed her, and he kissed her mouth, tasting the smoky sweetness of the opium. His lips moved along the curve of her neck to the slopes of her breasts. She responded sluggishly at first, then with abandon, whispering, ‘I’ve missed you so much, I love you, I really do,’ and it seemed she was as she once had been, open and giving and soft. It startled him to see this, to realize that the vulnerability underlying her dissipation was no act, for he had come to doubt everything about her. He kissed her mouth again, and he might have taken her then and there, but a man’s voice interrupted them, saying, ‘I wish you’d be more discreet, darling.’

Korrogly jumped up, dumping Mirielle onto the floor.

Lemos was standing in the doorway, a smile touching the corners of his lips. He looked prosperous, content, a far cry from the gray failure whom Korrogly had defended. His clothes were expensive, rings adorned his hands, and there was about him such an air of health and well-being, it seemed an obscenity, like the ruddy complexion of a sated vampire. Mirielle scrambled up and went to him; he draped an arm about her shoulders.

‘I’m surprised to find you here, Mister Korrogly,’ said Lemos. ‘But I don’t suppose I should be. My daughter is alluring, is she not?’

‘I told him, Daddy,’ Mirielle said in a sugary, babyish voice. ‘About Mardo.’

‘Did you now?’

To his horror, Korrogly saw that Lemos was fondling his daughter’s breast beneath the beige silk; she arched her back to meet the pressure of his hand, but he thought he detected tension in her expression.

Lemos, apparently registering Korrogly’s revulsion, said, ‘But you didn’t tell him everything, did you?’

‘Not about Mama. He thinks . . .’

‘I can imagine what he thinks.’

Lemos’ smile was unwavering, but behind it, in those gray eyes, was something cold and implacable that made Korrogly afraid.

‘You look disturbed,’ Lemos said. ‘Surely a man of your experience can imagine how love might spring up between a man and his daughter. It’s frowned upon, true. But society’s condemnation of such a relationship need not diminish it. In our case, it only made us desperate.’

The final pieces were beginning to fall into place for Korrogly. ‘It wasn’t Zemaille who killed your wife, was it?’

Lemos smiled.

‘It was you . . . you killed her!’

‘You’d play hell proving it. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re right. Let’s say that in order to . . . to enjoy one another fully, Mirielle and I needed privacy, something that Patricia prevented us from having. What better villain to use as our foil than Mardo Zemaille? The temple was at that time always open to the curious. It would have been easy for someone, someone like myself, to convince Patricia that it might be fun to pay the place a visit one night.’

‘You killed her . . . and you were going to blame it on Zemaille?’

‘Her death was ruled an accident,’ Lemos said with a shrug. ‘So there was no need to blame anyone.’

‘And then you saw your opportunity with Zemaille.’

‘Mardo was a weak man with power. Such men are easy to maneuver. It took some time, but the result was inevitable.’

Lemos’ hand slid lower to caress Mirielle’s belly. Despite her acquiesence, Korrogly sensed that she was less lover than slave, that her enjoyment was due to coercion, to confusion; a slack, sick look had come to her face, one that had not been evident when he had been touching her.

‘I don’t believe I’ve ever properly expressed my gratitude to you,’ Lemos continued. ‘Without you, I might still be back in Almintra. I’m forever in your debt.’

Korrogly just stared at them, uncertain of what to do.

‘Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m being so open,’ Lemos said. ‘It’s really no mystery. You’re a dogged man, Mister Korrogly. I have a lot of respect for you. Once you got the scent, and I’ve been aware that you’ve had the scent for some time, I knew you’d keep at it until you learned all there was to learn. I knew we’d play this scene sooner or later. I could have had you killed, but as I’ve said, I’m grateful to you, and I prefer to let you live. It’s unlikely you can harm me in any event. But you can consider this a warning. I’m watching you. If you ever get it in mind to try and harm me, it’ll be one of your last thoughts. And if you should doubt that, then I want you to think back to what you’ve heard today, to realize what I’m capable of, what I was able to do when I had no power, and to imagine what I might do now that I am powerful. Do you understand?’

Korrogly said, ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Well.’ Lemos disengaged from Mirielle, who tottered back to her lounge. ‘Then there’s nothing else to do except to bid you good day. Perhaps you’ll visit us again. For dinner, perhaps. Of course you’re always welcome to visit Mirielle. She does like you, she really does, and I’ve learned not to be jealous. I would hate to deny her whatever joy she might find with you. I’m afraid the things I’ve asked her to do have damaged her, and maybe you can help her overcome all that.’ He put his hand on Korrogly’s back and began steering him through the house and toward the front door. ‘Pleasure’s a rare commodity. I don’t begrudge any man his share. That’s something that being wealthy has given me to understand about life. Yet another reason to be grateful to you. So’ – he opened the front door – ‘when I say to you that what’s mine is yours, I mean it in the most profound and intimate sense. Do take advantage of our hospitality. Anytime.’

And with that, he waved and shut the door, leaving Korrogly blinking in the bright sunlight, feeling as if he had been marooned on a stone island in an uncharted sea.

Toward twilight, after walking and thinking for the remainder of the afternoon, Korrogly ended up in Henry Sichi’s museum, standing in front of the glass case in which The Father of Stones was displayed. Lemos had been right – there was nothing he could do to achieve justice, and he would have to accept the fact that he had been used by someone who if anything was more monstrous than Griaule. His best course, he decided, would be to leave Port Chantay and to leave soon, for while Lemos might have meant all he had said, he might well change his mind and begin to consider Korrogly a threat. But the danger he was in, that was not the thing that rankled him; he was still enough of a moral soul – a fool, Lemos would say – to want a judgment upon Lemos, and that there would be none left him full of gloom and self-destructive impulse, regarding the shattered fragments of his wished-for orderly universe.

He gazed down at The Father of Stones. It sat winking in its nest of blue velvet, a clouded lump of mystery giving back prismatic refractions of the light, the peculiar man-shaped darkness at its heart appearing to shift and writhe as if it truly were the soul of an imprisoned wizard. Korrogly focused on that darkness, and suddenly it was all around him, like a little pocket of night into which he had fallen, and he was looking at a man lying on the ground, an old, old man with sunken cheeks and a hooked nose and dressed in wizard’s robes, with black eyes threaded by veins of blue-green fire. The vision lasted only a few seconds, but before it faded, he became aware of the propinquity of that same cold, powerful mind that he had sensed back in the temple, and when he found himself once again standing in front of the glass case, looking down at The Father of Stones, he felt not afraid, not shocked, but delighted. It had been Griaule after all, he realized; the vision could mean only that Zemaille had been a serious threat, one that Griaule had been forced to eliminate. And he, Korrogly, had actually seen the moribund wizard that night in the temple; it had been no hallucination. The dragon had even then been trying to illuminate him. He laughed and slapped his thigh. Oh, Lemos had worked his plan, but as the ex-member of the cult had said, it had still been Griaule’s idea, he had inspired Lemos to act . . . and he had done it through the agency of this shard of milky stone.

Korrogly’s delight stemmed not from his realization that in a way Lemos had been innocent – innocence was not a word he could apply to the gemcutter – but from a new comprehension of the intricate subtlety with which Griaule had acted; it spoke to him, it commanded him, it instructed him in a kind of law that he had neglected throughout his entire life. The law of self-determination. It was the only kind, he saw, that could produce justice. If he wanted justice, he would have to effect it, not the system, not the courts, and that was something he was well-equipped to do. He was amazed that he had not come to this conclusion before, but then he supposed that until this moment he had been too confused, too involved with the complexities of the case, to think of taking direct action. And perhaps he had not been ready to act, perhaps his motivation had been insufficient.

Well, he was motivated now.

Mirielle.

It might be that she was unsalvageable, that she had gone too far into perversity ever to emerge from it; but for a moment in his arms she had again been the woman he had loved. It had not been fraudulent. The least he could do was to deliver her from the man who had dominated her and seduced her into iniquity. That he would be also serving justice only made the act sweeter.

He strolled out of the museum and stood on the steps gazing over the shadowed lavender water toward Ayler Point. He knew exactly how he would proceed. Lemos himself had given him the key to successful action in his words concerning Zemaille.

‘Mardo was a weak man with power,’ he had said. ‘Such men are easy to maneuver.’

And of course Lemos was no different.

He was rife with weakness. His investments, Mirielle, his crimes, his false sense of control. That last, that was his greatest weakness. He was enamored of his own power, he believed his judgments to be infallible and he would never believe that Korrogly could be other than as he perceived him; he would think that the lawyer would either do nothing or seek redress through the courts; he would not suspect that Korrogly might move against him in the way that he had moved against Zemaille. Zemaille had probably thought the same of him.

Korrogly smiled, understanding how marvelously complex was this chain of consecutive illuminations, of one man after another being induced to take decisive action. He stepped briskly down the steps and out onto Biscaya Boulevard, heading for The Blind Lady and a glass of beer, for a bout of peaceful contemplation, of deciding his future and Lemos’ fate. By the time he had walked a block he had already come up with the beginnings of a plan.

But then he was brought up short by a disturbing thought.

What if he was obeying Griaule’s will in all this, what if The Father of Stones had had an effect upon him? What if instead of taking his destiny in hand, he was merely obeying Griaule’s wishes, serving as an element in some dire scheme? What if he was by dismissing ordinary means and moral tactics taking a chance on becoming a monster like Lemos, one who would in the end be cut down by yet another of Griaule’s pawns? There was no way of telling. His sudden determination to act might be laid to a long inner process of deliberation, it might be the result of years of failed idealism; the resolution of the Lemos case could have been the weight that caused the final caving-in of his unsound moral structure.

He stood for a long moment considering these things, knowing that he might never come to the end of considering them, but searching for some rationalization that would allow him to put aside such concerns, to cease his analysis and questioning of events, and he found that this had become for him a matter of choice; it was as if the decision to act had freed him from an old snare, from the hampering spell of his ideals, and introduced him into a new and – though less moral – much more effective magic. What did he care who was in control, who was pulling the strings? Sooner or later a man had to stop thinking and start being, to leave off fretting over the vicissitudes and intricacies of life, and begin to live. There was no certainty, no secure path, no absolutely moral one. You did the best you could for yourself and those you cared about, and hoped that this would be a sufficiently broad spectrum of concern to keep your soul in healthy condition. If not . . . well, there was no use in fretting over the prospect. Why trouble yourself with guilt in a world in which everyone was guilty?

He set off walking again, walking with a firm step and a smile for everyone who passed him by, bowing politely to an old woman sweeping off her stoop, stopping once to pat a young boy on the head, all the while giving thought to his campaign against Lemos, picturing the gemcutter in various states of ruinous defeat, imagining Mirielle in his arms, letting his mind roam freely through the realms of possibility, posing himself in judge’s robes, dispensing the dispassionate rule of the law, fair yet inflexible, full of imponderable wisdoms, and he saw himself as well on the sunny verandah of a mansion on Ayler Point, on a white yacht, in a glittering ballroom, in every manner of luxurious environment, with loyal friends and beautiful lovers and enemies whose secrets he had mastered. Life, which for so long had seemed distant, a treasure beyond his grasp, now seemed to embrace him, to close around him and make him dizzy with its rich scents and sights. What did it matter, he said to himself, who ran the world, it tasted no less sweet, it gave no less pleasure. He laughed out loud, he winked at a pretty girl, he plotted violence and duplicity, all things that brought him joy.

One way or another, the dragon was loose in Port Chantay.