News reached Rosacher from Teocinte. Makdessi’s campaign against Mospiel had been successful, though Makdessi himself had not survived, and the rule of the prelates was no more. Many of them had been hanged in the square facing the palace. On hearing this, Rosacher thought of Arthur and how he would have loved to preside over the festivities. As for Teocinte’s economy, Carlos’ prediction did not pan out. The infusion of Mospiel’s wealth into Teocinte’s coffers staved off financial collapse and might have stabilized the economy, but Breque’s continued expenditures kept the nation in a state of perpetual crisis, never able to catch up on their debts. Rosacher reacted to these reports with diminishing interest and it was not until eight years had passed, when the news that Griaule had wakened from his millennia-long slumbers and destroyed most of the city before giving up the ghost, thereby ending the production of mab…not until this came to his attention was he moved to visit the country he had once called home.
The establishment of a ferry between Temalagua and Port Chantay had cut the duration of the trip in half and, availing himself of this improvement in transportation, Rosacher arrived in Teocinte less than two weeks after the dragon’s death. What he saw appalled him. The House of Griaule and, indeed, all of Morningshade, had been obliterated, either crushed beneath the dragon’s body, which lay athwart the ruined city, or burnt to cinders by the fire he had vomited in his final assault on the world of men. Fire had destroyed the bulk of the city beyond Morningshade—the buildings atop Haver’s Roost had survived, though not unscathed. The rear of the cathedral, now utilized as an orphanage, had been left in ruins and the government buildings had sustained minor damage. A vast tent city had sprung up among the charred ruins and there lived a population composed of survivors and émigrés, the latter mainly people who had come to scavenge the treasure hoard of Griaule’s corpse. Cutthroats and pistoleros and scoundrels of every stamp ruled the place and you took your life in your hands by walking through its crooked byways. At every hour of the day and night, gunshots could be heard, bespeaking the minor wars fought between the embattled remnants of Teocinte’s army, who strove to protect the rights of those who had made pre-mortem arrangements regarding the ownership of Griaule’s scales, bones, organs, and so forth, and those who sought to possess these things extra-legally. Thousands of people swarmed over the carcass, hacking and slicing and prying. They had laid bare one of the dragon’s ribs, the curve of bloodstained bone arching above the host of two-legged flies that milled beneath like the rib of an enormous unfinished ark, and gunfire also issued from dark crimson recesses of the body. Winches had been maneuvered into place and were engaged in removing the teeth and fangs. Men in butcher’s aprons carted away huge slabs of meat. So many people were engaged in picking over the corpse, sawing at bones and scales, sampling fluids, even preying on the dragon’s parasites, the gigantic worms that infested the dragon’s bowels, Rosacher entertained the notion that he was observing the annihilation of a normal-sized lizard by a Lilliputian race of hominids who performed the functions of ants and beetles, and dwelled in a settlement of dirty gray canvas that hid the bulk of their repulsive habits from view. It was both an epic and dismaying sight, one that called to mind the majesty of nature and at the same time posed an inescapable comment on the vile nature of mankind. Rosacher was grateful that Griaule’s flesh seemed to be rotting at a rate commensurate with the pace of his metabolic processes when alive—there was as yet only a hint of the stench that would saturate the atmosphere before too long.
On the morning following his arrival, Rosacher visited Breque in his home, a white-washed colonial-style mansion with a red tile roof, surrounded by palms and enclosed within high stone walls patrolled by armed guards. Due to its location behind Haver’s Roost, the house and grounds had been shielded from destruction and appeared to exist in a tranquil country at a significant remove from the land on the dragon’s side of the hill. A servant led Rosacher up a curving stair and along a corridor with mahogany panels carved into scenes of Teocinte’s recent history—the fall of Mospiel, Breque’s signature triumph, predominating—and at last into a gloomy, spacious bedroom where he found Breque’s family gathered about a bed the size of a banquet table, canopied in green satin, where lay an unrecognizable shrunken personage whom he identified by process of deduction as Breque. A pale dust-hung shaft of light penetrated from a curtained window, painting a thin stripe up the center of the bed, and medicinal smells, particularly that of camphor, hung in the air. Word of the councilman’s illness had been conveyed to Rosacher, but he had not expected this: Wisps of white hair floated above Breque’s mottled scalp; his face was caved-in, blotched with liver spots, and his bony hands twitched atop the bedclothes like some kind of sea life that had been exposed by low tide and was being killed by the sun. Upon Breque’s instruction, his wife, once a beauty, now reduced to a dry stick of a woman, ushered their two grown sons from the room and in a whispery voice Breque summoned Rosacher to come near. The reek of camphor was stronger close to the bed. Two dark, massive wardrobes hulked along the walls, looking in the shadows like silent, cowled witnesses.
“You haven’t changed a bit, my friend.” Breque’s voice was stronger, as if enlivened by Rosacher’s propinquity; but he drew a deep breath between sentences. “I marvel at your good health.”
“I didn’t realize you were so ill,” said Rosacher.
“All life is an illness, whether of the flesh or of the spirit. I’ve grown accustomed to such frailties. This…” Breque’s right hand made a palsied movement, a mere echo of what would have been a sweeping gesture in his prime. “Death is simply a shabby theatricality at life’s end, one to which we all have been given tickets…with the possible exception of you.”
It had been Rosacher’s intention to seek redress for Breque’s betrayal, but seeing him so debilitated, his resolve was blunted. “Oh, I’m not the man I was,” he said. “I may not look my age, but I feel every year, believe me.”