CANDLELIGHT had revealed the face of Reiner.
He had survived the river. He was alive.
Having been dragged, about midday, into the Chamber of Revelation, Vilmos stood on legs that did not belong to him, made of strong stone like the supports of the Flavel Bridge. Planted in life’s rushing black water, they never shook.
Vilmos’s upper body too seemed to have its own physical if quiescent strength. He stood straight, his head held up, his arms and hands motionless at his sides. It was not either that he had been frozen and was too cold to move. It was that his body itself had decided it would not want to.
There was feeling in every limb, and in his torso and head, but though striped by severe flagellation and bruised by blows, pain was not all-consuming. He had no headache, had not had it, he thought, for more than twenty days – which was unusual. Awareness only was paramount. His mind worked intelligently and quickly.
Sometimes he did turn his head a little, for his head permitted him to do this. His eyes allowed him to move them freely. He had noted, his heart-beat was uncongested if rather slow, his breathing regular and deep.
Thus, seeing Reiner who might have been dead, slipping here and there through the crowd of men in the Chamber, Vilmos knew at once that Reiner had simply swum to shore.
Such an idea amused Vilmos. He felt for Reiner unfettered contempt. To survive now seemed, in some innate, inchoate sense, more slavish and conventionally drab than to have given in and drowned.
The import of the revelation did not strike Vilmos for a while, during which he continued to peruse the robed gathering of the Order of the Indian Mystery, as he stood upright in the centre of the room within a great new circle representing the Wheel. It had been made about him, its execution beginning in the late afternoon and proceeding through several hours. Those who had seen to this task had frequently grown exhausted. Some swooned and had to be replaced. Vilmos on his stony supportive limbs, his spine a reliable column, remained tall among them, watching the ones to the front and a little to either side, listening to those who worked behind him, since his head did not intend to let him to look over his shoulders, just as all the rest of him did not countenance the act of his fully turning round.
They had drawn the Wheel on the floor with the spilled blood of creatures brought in cages, from salt and liquefied silver, from ordure, which had been dried to powder and did not stink, or not greatly, and from the contents of vessels of milk. This last, according to what was said, was of three types. Firstly that of a virgin cow inspired to produce it by giving her a calf to foster, secondly of a whore who was feeding, or had been, her own baby, thirdly of a pure mother whose spouse belonged to the Order. There were other things also; chips of bone and splinters of wood, which Vilmos assumed had been hacked from reliquaries. Dusts ground from precious stones had been added in miserly quantities. But too there were other commodities. Some – many – Vilmos did not recognise. His mouth, tongue and throat did not wish to be used, and so he could not inquire.
The Master oversaw the entire labour. He chid the artisans, once or twice struck them with his staff. Those that fainted he chose to inspect. In some he found virtue. Others not. One he spat on, saying the fool smelled of drink and had perhaps upset the ritual. But in the end it seemed not; the old man was satisfied.
He had rarely glanced at Vilmos. He must know how Vilmos was, and that he had been primed to his present condition and use.
Vilmos did not even feel any anger at the Master, let alone entertain thoughts of revenge. Revenge, of course, could not enter into the equation. When all this was – done, Vilmos would be no more. As some other foreign poet had once described it, Vilmos was to be their torch, and like a torch they would not light him for himself. He would kindle and burn up, and reaching the sixth stage, the point of dark blue fire, his purpose for them would be accomplished, and his own life snuffed out.
Yes, for all these lumbering and inadequate imbeciles, for these talentless lesser things, he was to attain and instantly freely render up the power of utter dominion over the inner and outer spheres: Mastery of Self, Mastery of All.
This it seemed the Devil granted to the Order, having become sick of the idiocy of mankind. For Satan loved God. He longed hopelessly only to be forgiven and raised.
And Vilmos felt neither fear nor struggle in him. He did not care anymore what became of him.
Like Satan, Vilmos was sick of the world and all its works. And if God did not want him, neither did Vilmos want any part of God.
And then. He beheld Reiner.
And a little while after, perhaps two or three minutes after, Vilmos saw what this meant. And also he saw that none but he had seen it – either Reiner, or what his presence suggested. The rest of them, the rabble in the Chamber, the educated and wise, virtuous acolytes chosen of the Master, the cripple-hearted Master himself – none of them saw or knew.
The very fitness of Vilmos, and his use to them, was predicated upon his having killed men and women to the number of thirteen. For this reason had they not brought him here another man to slaughter, while the girl they brought for his carnal release they swiftly removed after congress, in case he might offer her also death – and so increase the number of the slain.
But Vilmos, since Reiner lived, had formerly killed in total only eleven, and now, with his single murder here, only twelve.
After all, something salient in the rite was out of alignment, a broken bone sticking from the skin of the spell.