CHAPTER 60
‘Idiota!’ Leto slapped the guard with his glove and walked back over the bridge in a black mood. He’d been rather looking forward to putting Geta on the rack.
‘Cadet Fifty-Eight!’
Leto pulled up short. ‘Who said that?’
‘Up here, General!’
On either side of the barbican’s archway were gibbets. The gibbet on the left was older, and the wicker had worn away, leaving a rusted outer frame and a tattered skeleton; the prisoner had outlasted his prison, but freedom no longer interested him. The gibbet on the right was still functional, and the prisoner within likewise, although the unnatural tilt of his shoulders revealed he had been treated to the attentions of the strappado, and what was left of his strength had been broken on the wheel. Leto scowled – he disapproved of prisoners keeping their tongues. ‘How do you know my number?’
‘I gave it to you.’
‘Grand Selector Flaccus? Well, I never. You’ve moved up in the world.’
‘And you, General! Congratulations on your promotion.’
‘How did you end up there?’ Leto said politely, but without much interest.
‘Your talented friend saw to that – but I’ll be out soon. There’s some justice in this world. Sixty is languishing in a dungeon now, if Corvis hasn’t had him killed.’
‘Ah. No, sorry. He’s First Apprentice again.’
‘Oh …’
‘Well, I must be going. So nice to see you again.’
‘Tarry a while and I’ll tell you what really happened to Agrippina. I don’t suppose Sixty ever told you the truth.’
Leto looked puzzled. ‘I expect he killed her. You really thought I’d give a damn? Dear me. No wonder you stayed a selector all your life.’
Geta raced through the Wastes and did not look back. He’d always boasted that he knew when to leave the table. The one stop he’d made before leaving was the treasury, making full use of his authority to take what he wanted without explanations – another gamble, but necessary. Whatever city he stopped in couldn’t be an ally of Concord’s and he’d need to make friends quickly. He should perhaps have squirrelled away a cache outside the capital, but he did not regret it: a true gambler never hedges. To win Fortune’s favour one must be faithful – but because of his fidelity he was destitute, with only as much gold as two horses could carry and a question: Where to?
There was nothing in the north but legions loyal to Spinther, so south then.
Geta didn’t begrudge the First Apprentice’s success – he only wished he had seen it coming. The boy had played a bad hand brilliantly. He and Spinther had obviously prearranged the assassination campaign to discredit Corvis with the Collegio; they’d decapitated Norcino’s mob, and, since Spinther had been dissimulating all along, the army was his too, and Concord was his again. He deserved it. Geta’s motley militia was the last loose end, and he expected they’d all be dead before nightfall. Shame really: nice lads. Obviously the First Apprentice had expected their leader to nobly stand by them, hence the appeal to Geta’s patriotism. That had been his one miscalculation.
The gruesome spectacle of ex-Consul Corvis’ public flaying was a timely lesson that served to forestall any more Collegio conspiracies and cool Norcino’s followers. Geta’s bravos, abandoned by their champion and offered the choice of joining Corvis or reinstatement in the army, all chose reinstatement. Though Old Town was not yet fully pacified, the First Apprentice promptly returned to the isolation of the Drawing Hall. Throughout Corvis’ power grab, Torbidda had been directing Leto’s movements, while the rest of his brain chipped away at the other conundrum. It was challenging, but no more than the simultaneous chess games they used to play in the Guild Halls. Corvis was dealt with, but Torbidda’s confidence that the other problem’s solution would dawn on him, given time, had not been borne out.
He needed to return to first principles.
For the first few revolutions, prisoners in the beast were fed a recycled mush, the origin of which was best not speculated upon. The beast was like a mine-shaft, and the fuel it mined was agony, so prisoners must be capable of producing it for as long as possible. Once cells reached a certain depth, feeding stopped; Torbidda had seen the relevant formula in Bernoulli’s notebook. It was bad luck if all the upper-row cells were full; a lower cell whose occupant had died prematurely would have to be found.
For the last week, along with food, Torbidda had been punctiliously administering the excruciating blue light, until the preacher was ready to talk. ‘Whatever you are, you’re no mendicant. Who is your master?’
Words spilled from his drooling maw. ‘The king of the world. Ages ago my brothers and I conquered the Worm, that we might serve Him for ever.’
‘Who are you?’
‘… Melcior? Or was it Balthazar? I’ve forgotten.’
Torbidda reached for the lever. ‘Don’t lie. No one forgets his name.’
‘Was that not the method by which you won the red?’
‘That’s different.’
‘Is it? Perhaps it is. I get so confused.’ He crept closer to the door. ‘Go easy on me, child. You’re still so young. You don’t know about the years. There’s no end to them! They bury you unless you keep moving. After the Bethlehem … incident, my brothers and I did what we always did and parted ways to wander the world’s dark paths, listening to rumour, watching the stars, following the winds where they led us, to the courts of strange kings, majestic huts built on jungle canopies, caves fretted with rubies and blue ice, hide-skin tents that rumble over the steppes like ships, and always we asked the same questions: is the new Emmanuel born? Are you the new Herod? It was an endless search, but I took comfort that I was not the only one searching. Back in Babylon, we three had not your wonderful lenses, so we learned to walk amongst the Stars in our minds. It proved a useful skill in the wandering times. No matter which of the world’s deserts we were lost in, my brothers and I could confer.’
‘These are a madman’s fantasies,’ said Torbidda.
‘They may be, for surely I am mad, the years have seen to that.’ The blind man’s face trembled with painful grief remembered. ‘Then, a few hundred years ago, I lost contact. In my dreams I no longer heard their whispers; I could not sense their passing in the world. They were gone! I pondered to myself: was the work done, the war won? Had the Old One surrendered, finally resigned his claim on this world? If so, the Magi were no longer needed. My brothers had perhaps heard the good news sooner than I and taken their sweet reward.’
‘What’s that?’
‘… sleep …’ He savoured the word as if describing the sum of the world’s treasure. ‘I took me to a desert I knew well and found there an old pillar, strong and tall, and all that stood of a temple of a god whose name I have forgotten. My plan was to let the sun and wind and rain consume me together – each had as good a claim on my bones. I sat there for – oh, a century at least, getting thinner, retreating from the world. Whenever a stranger happened by, once a decade or so, I’d ask, more out of habit than curiosity, to what king was he subject? Finally there came a day when a man – he was an engineer like you, child – told me a thing I had never heard in all my wanderings: he said he had no king!’
The blind man shook his head with dissatisfaction. ‘I insisted that all men have a king, but he insisted that he was subject to Reason alone. So I pried a little, asking who taught him this novel dogma. With a reverent manner he spoke of an artful man of war who’d enslaved the Water even as Solomon enslaved the Wind.’
Torbidda looked down at the dark pool at the bottom of the pit, felt the hunger biding there. ‘Bernoulli.’
Inside the cell, the blind man leapt with such excitement that he nearly tipped over his slop bucket. ‘I knew! Herod was amongst us once more, and where Herod is, near about is Emmanuel. O, I was frantic! I’d weathered millennia, but now time was short. I searched between the stars for my brothers, in deep time; I sailed on the burning winds between suns until at last I saw a pair of shifting shadows on the bloody skin of a dying star: two wrestlers. I raced to intervene – O, but the vacuum is vast. When I reached the star, the hurly-burly was done and only a smouldering husk was left of what had been my youngest brother.’
For a time Fra Norcino said nothing, just sat humming and cooing to himself.
Torbidda leaned in to examine the shivering sobbing wreck.
‘My elder brother has fallen into apostasy,’ Norcino confessed quietly. ‘He is Magi no more.’ Suddenly he reached out, and Torbidda flinched instinctively, but he was too slow. Norcino pulled him to the bars, babbling in his ear, ‘You are the last Apprentice as I am the last Magi! When I returned to my body, my skin was raw and blistered and a buzzard was feeding on my eyes. I did not blame the creature; all things need sustenance. I sucked it dry and threw myself from the pillar, and after my bones healed, I limped towards Etruria. On the way, I fell in with some pilgrims—’
‘Yes, I remember,’ Torbidda said, struggling to free himself.
‘—but when I came to Concord and learned that Girolamo Bernoulli was long dead, I feared that I was too late. I launched my spirit once more into the stars, to search out my King. I did not look long. It’s close, Torbidda, closer than ever before. The Darkness waits behind the rising sun to swallow the world at last. It told me to tarry in the desert until the temple burned; it told me the vessel would soon be ready. Then you found me.’
‘I told you before, I’m no lamb.’ Torbidda’s hand blindly searched for the switch.
The blind man’s breath was the rabid panting of a predator about to pounce. ‘Seek your heart: you know you have a great destiny, if only you will stop running from it. Torbidda, you were born to slay God’s son!’
Torbidda’s fingers found the switch and the cell was flooded with crackling blue light. The current passed to his body from Norcino’s and when his grip fell away, they collapsed as one on either side of the bars: prisoner and jailer; courtier and king.