Anura and Madame Laudine left with many promises that we would soon meet again, and I, of course, remained where I was, staring through borrowed eyes at a dawn-smudged sky. My vow, so long dormant, was now in a state of such excitement that the leaden weight of your limbs oppressed me. I wanted to haul you upright and send your purloined flesh dashing straight into the Thames. It took an hour of frustrated twitching—for that was all I could manage—before I calmed enough to realize that I must be methodical, not impulsive.
I must study my new abilities, practice them and expand them where I could. Rather than exhausting myself with unobtainable desires—to run again, to jump, to embrace!—I must teach myself to desire what I could have. I could blink and move your fingers, that was established. Shifting small parts, lifting slight burdens: there was enough of me inside you to accomplish that much. But however hard I tried I could not raise your torso and make you sit up, nor heave one of your legs into the air. Even your right hand would only float up an inch or so above the ground before its mass overwhelmed me.
A ghost must learn to make do, that’s all.
Of course, it was only an offshoot of me that was busy with these exercises. The lion’s share of myself remained in Nautilus, screaming monotonously over Gus’s head. All of me, though, was equally awake, kicking and flaring with eagerness to work Gus’s undoing. I watched with great interest as Gus rose and burrowed in his heaps of musty clothes for something halfway presentable. I observed for the first time that his room was very much larger than it had been, the sort of airy space allotted to Nautilus’s affluent citizens, though still dirty and dismally furnished. As he slipped through his wall and into the street, I loomed with a vulture’s appetite.
When we arrived at the Nimble Fire, Asterion cocked his unwieldy head and gazed at me for longer than I liked. Firelight stroked along his curved horns as if whetting them to a cutting edge.
“Catherine’s picking up steam again. Did something happen to work her up like that?”
His tone sagged with suspicion and his bovine lips rippled. Even after my long span of inattention, I guessed at once what was troubling him.
“Nothing out of the usual,” Gus snipped back, and I thought he truly hadn’t noticed any change in me. He had aged to a very satisfying degree, I thought, inspecting his creases and jowls. He looked to be nearing fifty. “Catherine has her little moods.”
“Not in a long time, she hasn’t. She’s been tediously calm. This is the sort of activity I’d expect if, oh, you’d paid a visit to someone she particularly dislikes. Maybe performed some unpleasant operation on her.” He paused, sullen. “You know she hasn’t been the same since the last time you took her to Sky. I’d have thought that you’d know better than to risk it again!”
The story of Flynn’s disintegration had spread widely, it seemed, reaching both Anura and Asterion. But whatever quarrels had erupted over Gus sneaking behind Asterion’s back—maneuvers which had deprived the minotaur of a great wealth of talens—the pair had evidently reconciled. Barely.
(Meanwhile in London you were waking. You rolled into a ball and clutched your head. I found that with attention I could register the pain drumming in your temples, and I learned as well that your conscious will was enough to override my small ability to command your body. I would have to wait, then, until you were asleep. Now, after years of practice, I can also take advantage of moments when your mind is wandering. I can pick up your right hand where you’ve dropped it like a soiled tissue on a tabletop, as I am doing at this very moment. I can use that hand to write while you daydream, quite unaware of my presence. I can even tamper with your vision when you look down at the page, blur the letters, trip your focus, and send you reeling. Not yet, my vile one, I croon unheard beneath the churn of your thoughts. You will read when I permit it.)
“I haven’t taken Catherine to Sky!” Gus exclaimed. He seemed easily irritated by the subject, as if it came up too often for his taste. “I told you, I can’t guess the nature of his designs on her. But I know I don’t like them.”
“And if you did like them—if you thought of bargaining for an umbrastring of your own—you might recall who your real friends are, Gus. The ones who’ve looked out for you, who’ve kept your secrets close for so long! I like my friends to trust me, and I expect to be able to trust them. But sometimes someone disappoints me, and it’s always such a blow.”
Oh, of course. Their touching reconciliation was the sort greased by blackmail. Asterion knew quite enough to have Gus permanently exiled to the unworld, where he would age and die in the time-honored tradition of mortal men. But I could take no pleasure in the realization. If Asterion exposed Gus for paying a bribe, then with the same breath he would condemn Anura for taking it.
I could not allow that to happen.
“That’s enough. I’ve kept my side of the bargain all this time. Surely you can keep yours, when you do so well by it.”
Asterion’s hand was already in his pocket, drawing out his specialized heartstring. Its hateful rain-colored prongs glistened, the very color of hunger. In the long span of my oblivion I had felt the pain of it, of course, but distantly. It needled, gnawed, subtracted from me, but its torment seemed to hang across a far-off horizon, like lightning seared at the edge of a dream. Now I must pay the price of my heightened attentiveness and feel my suffering close-up, as it were.
But no sooner did I pity myself for what was about to ensue, than I thought of the girls who had paid a higher price yet.
Asterion seemed in no hurry to pierce me with his toy, though. He let it dangle by its thread and watched the light play inside the prongs. I had never known him to care for such ephemeral beauties before: those prongs caught the light in moon-colored filaments, half-dissolved as if in puddles.
“How goes your beamer?” the minotaur asked at last, his gaze still sullenly averted. “As sturdy as the rest?”
Gus at once was placated, as so many men are when invited to take their hobbyhorse for a gallop. “The latest Angus? It’s been in the field for nearly eleven months already, with no signs of degradation I’ve noticed. It should easily last the full year. That said, though, I consider this one much too lethargic when it comes to claiming its girl. She doesn’t seem to love him, I admit, but only the kiss can put that to the test! I haven’t invested so much in the Anguses only for them to turn qualmish on me!”
Qualmish, really? That was a possible development that interested me, but Asterion’s concerns lay elsewhere.
“Independence of mind is always troublesome,” the minotaur observed with a dismissive flick of his hand. “But their sheer durability! As far as I can ascertain, no one but you has ever made an embodied beamer that was good for more than a month or two at the outside. Their flesh starts to fray in the most unseemly manner—holes in the cheeks, tendons trailing. So what is it about your Anguses, Gus?”
Asterion’s glance slid up at a sly angle that told me, as plainly as any confession, that someone was paying him to secure this information. Trade secrets are as valuable to sorcerers as they are to earthly artisans.
“Something to do with the way I rendered down the original,” Gus replied absently. A very large snail had brought glasses and a decanter on its golden flat-topped shell and he was preoccupied. The original. So that was how he referred to Christopher Flynn, pulverized to his very cells in the storm of my being. However thoroughly I’d taught myself to despise Flynn, still I would not have denied him his name. “I really don’t know. But it seems the materials acquired a certain valence by passing through Catherine as they did, and they’ve kept a residual charge ever since. It was a lucky accident, honestly.”
He drank, and Asterion’s globular eyes again rolled in my direction. Sky wasn’t the only sorcerer in Nautilus who would like to make use of me, that was clear.
(You were afoot in the London streets, buying coffee and buns from a cart and then slumping on a stone by the river. Was Gus right in thinking that a creature like you could arrive at actual scruples? You certainly seemed very sullen. It occurred to me that my vantage relative to you was quite different from what I was used to with Gus: I was over his head, but I was inside yours! What liberties would our enforced proximity allow? And with that I began to listen for your thoughts. They sounded very faintly, like footsteps treading through a distant room. But the more I listened, the more I caught their vibrations.)
“How wonderful! I see how mistaken I was to oppose your ideas at the time.” How quickly the old cow swerved from reproach to flattery! Consistency exceeded his reach as an actor. “Why haven’t you tried letting one run on until it falls apart, just to see how far it can go?”
“No reason for it. If an Angus can’t inspire devotion in a year, I have to assume it’s defective. I’m better off recalling it and trying again.” Gus knocked back the rest of his lilac liqueur and reached for the decanter. The snail made a sort of mooing sound.
“But how can we measure the true scope of your achievement unless you put it to the test?”
If Asterion meant to sell my unwilling services, it would of course be helpful to have a precise valuation of the goods. But Gus seemed deaf to the minotaur’s subtext, which to me was louder than drums.
“That doesn’t matter. What I’ve done already is a tremendous advance in the art, and that’s enough for me. And a year is a generous lifespan, considering how little I demand of my Anguses. Fulfill their purpose, or don’t, it’s time for them to surrender the stuff they’re made of. It should be more than enough time for their chosen girls to fall madly in love with them, if only they have the decency to do so! A chance to repair the past … And then I’m nearly out of patience with my current Angus as it is.” He grimaced. “The girl sat on his lap three nights back. And he still withheld the strike!”
Asterion made sympathetic noises.
(In fact you were brooding on this precise event: the girl’s soft weight on your knees, and how a cold dread wholly inexplicable to you had opposed her alluring warmth. Why didn’t I kiss her? you thought. Why?
It was not scruple that troubled you, I discerned; you were ignorant both of your true nature and of what your kiss would do. It was fear. But you did not know what it was that quickened your heart.)
“If I remember correctly, it was you who told me that the Anguses must have freedom of thought to inspire love in their targets. A mere puppet would never beguile her, isn’t that right?” Gus continued, a querulous note in his voice. “Well, it hasn’t worked yet. All it’s done is to make the dratted things unreliable.”
How old he seemed, how bitter, a scarecrow stuffed with whining and recrimination!
“Oh, come, it’s not as bad as all that! How many have you sent out now?”
“The present one is the twelfth.”
“And how many of them have bestowed your kiss for you?”
“Eight.” Gus peered up beneath a furrowed brow.
“That sounds like an excellent return on your investment, then. Surely you couldn’t have expected that they would all succeed?”
“But that isn’t the point! I have no wish to kill these young women, Asterion. How could I?” Asterion’s flaccid mouth pursed skeptically. “The point is to find the one I won’t have to kill. The one who earns her salvation with her love, and thereby redeems Catherine as well! Find her, heal Catherine’s fault, and I’ll never make a beamer again.”
Asterion reclined in his chair with his arms propped wide and welcoming along its crescent back. He seemed to be ardently embracing nothingness, which of course was all he cherished. He put on a show of careful consideration.
“You might try a change of window dressing, then.”
Gus twitched in his brocade chair. His fingers drummed. “Window dressing?”
How disingenuous, this question, for Gus must have known what the minotaur meant. Even the early Anguses were taller and broader-shouldered than my erstwhile friend, and their faces might have been termed a charitable interpretation of Gus’s at nineteen. But in those days they were still recognizably Gus-like, sharp-featured with his prickling blond hair and pale green eyes.
“The crucial thing is that the essence of each Angus is identical to yours. Isn’t that right? It might just be that these Catherine substitutes would prefer darker hair, or a—ladies are weak-minded creatures—a less challenging manner?”
Gus hunched his shoulders irritably. “If they can’t love me as I am, I don’t see how they can be worthy.”
Asterion threw up his hands. “Oh, they can! They will! Only soften their approach. If I may allow myself a metaphor: if a Catherine finds the path too thorny, she won’t come close enough to see the light in the windows.”
“But a girl with so little fortitude is hardly a Catherine at all! She was determined, unflinching. No one ever truly understood me except—”
And here Gus broke off, his head bowed as if he walked through driving rain. For of course my true understanding of him had in no way compelled my love. Asterion took advantage of Gus’s lowered gaze and smirked.
“Never mind,” Gus said, rearing upright again. “It’s a ridiculous idea, but then you didn’t know her, not as she was when she lived. You can’t be expected to understand.”
“Oh, then I’m ridiculous once again! One gets used to it in time.” How false, how venomous, was Asterion’s merry tone! “Well, then. Shall we drain her?”
They did, of course, and crowed together at the results, their bickering forgotten. Apparently my production had been slightly depressed for quite some time, down to seven or eight talens a day. But now it showed signs of full recovery.
(And you? All at once you jolted out of your languor and pointed like a hunting dog. You were up on your feet, running through the crowded streets while a dirty mist scrolled through your hair. She’s there, she’s there, Viola’s there, your thoughts pattered with the senseless persistence of a dog’s claws ticking on parquet. Her, her, her. This time I won’t, I’ll be sure to, no more hesitation! This time! I could sense her, too, this girl who was supposedly a variation on my theme rather than, as I here propose, a free and complete individual with no reference to me whatsoever. The air drew taut and your breath became a shallow panting.
What could I do? It fell to me to discover something, some way to stop you. But I did not know how. Given time to prepare, perhaps I could send a letter warning her. But that would require an address, as well as hours I did not have.
And then, on the bank, Viola came into view. I knew her by the faltering of your steps, as if her profile excised a matching silhouette from your chest. She was very dark-skinned, her cheekbones cradling bluish highlights under wire-rimmed spectacles, with curly hair pulled back under her hat. Standing at an easel, her hand steady and confident. A few more steps, and I saw through your eyes that she was sketching in oils: an elegant study of the clouds overhead. She was absorbed in capturing exactly their subtle tints of gray, puce, dun, with a bludgeoned lilac like a row of bruises angling to one side. Why had she been chosen as my surrogate? A refusal to accept the world’s terms, Gus had said, a certain brisk clarity. No doubt those qualities were in evidence, but they did not bridge our fundamental difference.
She did not look up at your footsteps, did not seem to hear them. Instead she leaned close to her canvas, feathering a tiny touch of rose madder into slate gray.
I tried to catch your ankle from within, to trip you up and give her time to flee.
I failed. You pounced on her like a large and slobbering dog on its mistress, jarring the brush so that all her sensitive work was ruined by a dark pink streak.)
Gus by this time had regained his room, or rather rooms, for I saw that he now had a separate domed alcove for his bed. He commanded a towering mirror in the air and stared at me with such a furious air of accusation that I feared he might have learned somehow of my meeting with Anura and Madame Laudine.
“Is that it, Catherine?” Gus demanded at last. “Could you possibly be so shallow, so empty-hearted, that you turned against me over details of appearance? Were you seeking a different manner, when I was always a perfect gentleman to you as well as a most loyal friend?”
I never turned against him, at least not while I lived. Rather, I had turned away, and that was not at all the same thing. But my scream was not up to the task of disputing prepositions.
“What will it be, then?” Gus sneered. “Go on, tell me your preferences! You know I desire nothing more than to satisfy your every dainty whim. Soon enough it will be time to make a new Angus. It would be my pleasure to design him according to your specifications! Well?”
I wondered, as I so often had, exactly what he expected me to say. Surely he knew that murdering someone doesn’t tend to enhance their conversation?
“I cannot for one moment credit that Thomas Skelley was a choice. He was nothing but a ploy, a means for you to evade your one great duty of loving me.” Gus stamped to emphasize these words and smeared his tears with a dirty sleeve. “So what would you like? A dark and brooding poet? Could your tastes really be as vapid as that? Or possibly a starry-eyed mooncalf, all angelic curls and saccharine phrases? In what guise must I appear, before you see your way to loving me at last?” He was howling outright now, thoroughly discomposed, a trail of snot glistening on one cheek. “Tell me!”
(But even if I could have spoken, my interest was elsewhere. You were grappling with Viola, her wrists tight in your grip. It was early morning and people strolled nearby, but no one moved to help the ebony-skinned painter against her fair assailant. One man actually laughed. You used your greater weight to drive her back against a tree—her build was delicate, your strength, I perceived, magically augmented—and shoved your mouth against hers. And oh, I could feel, I could watch, but I could not prevent—)
Far away in Nautilus, Gus felt the power drain out of him and staggered against a wall.
“This one acquitted itself better than I expected, anyway,” Gus muttered. “But his Catherine still didn’t care for him! How many of you have to die before you’ll give up your obstinacy? What will it take? Catherine, these are your daughters! Why won’t you reason with them?”
(Viola’s back was sliding down the tree’s trunk. She looked dazed. Her madder-tipped brush was still in her hand as you stood over her, panting. You called her name once or twice, in a failing and cursory way. You merely performed your concern, for by then you knew that you had killed her. Her hand dropped and the brush stroked a rose smear across a root. Then you turned on your heels and ran.
Viola Wright. I did not even know her, nor her me. What can I say as her memorial?
Only that she was in no way a substitute for me, whatever Gus pretended. She was not my daughter, not in any sense of those words, though I would have been honored to consider her my friend. She was certainly not a Catherine, as Gus and Asterion were pleased to call her, but only and absolutely herself. What reference could she have to me, a stranger? Even if she had somehow imagined herself in love with Gus’s creature, that love, too, would have been all hers, as remote from me and my heart as Cassiopeia; nor can I lay the slightest claim to her dying hatred of him. I have only my own, and the burden of my weary and singular self.
I cannot carry the brave, lost self that was Viola Wright’s; she could not carry mine.
Do you understand me, Angus? Viola Wright was not me, any more than young Geneva is. You murdered her for nothing.)
Gus curled up, sobbing, as bloated with self-pity as a tick is with blood.