Kadaspala wiped the last stubborn pigment stains from his hands using a cloth soaked in spirits, his eyes watering as the fumes reached his face. He’d sent the servant from his room. The idea of needing someone to help him dress for a meal was absurd. The secret of a great portrait was to meet the subject eye to eye, as equals, whether that subject was a commander of armies, or a shepherd boy who’d give up his own life to defend a flock of ahmryd. He despised the notion of betters. Station and wealth were flimsy props thrown up in front of people as flawed and as mortal as anyone else, and if it was their need to strut and prance behind them, it was proof of internal weakness and nothing else, and what could be more pathetic than that?
He would never have servants. He wanted no artificial prop to deference. Every life was a gift — he needed only look into the eyes opposite him, at any time on any given day, to know this. It did not matter to whom those eyes belonged. He would see true, and then make that truth plain to see for everyone else. His was a hand that would never lie.
The day’s sitting had been… adequate. The mood that took Kadaspala when rendering a portrait was a foul one, and he knew it. But most of his impatience was with himself. Each and every day was too short, the light too whimsical, his vision too sharp not to see the failings in his work — and no amount of praise from onlookers could change any of that. Hunn Raal had no doubt thought his comment soothing, even complimentary, but it had taken all of Kadaspala’s will to keep him from stabbing the smirking soldier in the eye with his brush. The passion that stole his mind when composing was a dark, frightening thing. Murderous and vile. Such depths had once frightened him, but now he simply lived with them, like an unpleasant scar marring his face, or pockmarks on his cheeks from some past illness.
Yet it was the breadth of the contradiction that most disturbed him: that on the one hand he could adhere to the belief that every life was of equal value, a value that was immense, while at the same time despising everyone he knew.
Almost everyone. There were precious exceptions.
The reminder made him pause, vision blurring slightly. It did not take much, he knew. A flash of memory, a sudden rush of anticipation for when he would see her again. There was nothing untoward in his love for Enesdia, his sister. He was an artist, after all, who knew the truth of beauty, and she was his definition of that virtue, from the core of her gentle soul to the smooth perfection of her form.
He dreamed of painting her. It was an abiding dream, an obsessive dream, yet he had never done so and never would. No matter how consuming his effort, no matter how vast his talent, he knew he would fail to capture her, because what he saw wasn’t necessarily there to be seen — though he could not be sure of that, as it was not something he discussed with anyone.
This battered old warrior, Urusander, offered him an appropriately stark contrast. Men like him were easy to paint. They might well have depths, but those depths were all of one colour, one tone. They were devoid of mystery, and this was what made them such powerful leaders. There was something frightening in that unrelieved monochrome, and yet it seemed to reassure others, as if it were a source of strength.
Some people suited their transformations, into paint on board, as dyed plaster on walls, or in the unrelieved purity of marble. They existed as both surface and opaque solidity, and it was this quality that Kadaspala found so cruel and monstrous, for it spoke of the will of the world. He knew he played his role. He gave the substance to their assertion of power.
Portraits were the weapons of tradition, and tradition was the invisible army laying siege to the present. And what was at stake? What victory did it seek? To make the future no different from the past. With every stroke of his brush, Kadaspala opened a wound, against all who would challenge the way things were. He fought that bitter knowledge, perversely setting his talents to the battlements as if he would refuse his own advance.
He wished he were less aware; he wished that his own talent could somehow blind him to its insipid appropriation. But this was not to be.
Thoughts churning, as they always did following a sitting, he dressed with haphazard indifference and made his way out, down to dine with the Lord of the House. Would it be this night, then, that Urusander or Hunn Raal finally broached the possibility of painting young Osserc? Kadaspala hoped not. He hoped that moment would never come.
Finish the portrait of the father, and then flee this place. Return home, to see her again.
He dreaded these formal suppers. They were filled with banal reminiscences of battle, mostly from Hunn Raal, warring with Urusander’s daily discoveries when delving into the arcane idiocy of the Forulkan. With Osserc’s head turning as if on a spike. There was nothing in the Lord’s son that he wanted to paint, no depths to seek out. Behind Osserc’s eyes there was bedrock, disfigured by Hunn Raal’s incessant chipping away. The boy was destined for obscurity, unless he could be prised away from his father and his so-called friend. As it stood, the combination of Urusander’s raising high unassailable walls around his son, and Hunn Raal’s ceaseless undermining of those foundations, left Osserc in genuine danger. Should something lead to a collapse of his world he might well be utterly crushed. In the meantime the sheer oppression was visibly suffocating the young man.
No matter. None of this was Kadaspala’s problem. He had plenty of his own to worry about. Mother Dark’s power grows, and with that power, she is stealing the light. From the world. What future has an artist, when all is in darkness?
Mulling on these bleak thoughts, he strode into the dining room. And then paused. The chairs where he had expected to see Hunn Raal and Osserc seated were both vacant. Lord Urusander sat alone at his place at the table’s head, and for once the surface before him was uncluttered — not a single fired-clay cylinder or unfurled scroll of notations weighted down at the corners and awaiting his studious perusal.
Urusander was leaning back, in one hand a goblet, cradled at his waist. His faded blue eyes were fixed on the artist with an acuity that was unprecedented in his recollection. ‘Good Kadaspala Enes, please sit. No, here, upon my right. It seems that this evening it shall be you and me.’
‘I see, my lord.’ He made his way over. The moment he arrived and seated himself, a servant appeared with a goblet to match the Lord’s. Taking it, he looked down. Blackvine, the rarest and most expensive wine in the realm.
‘I was looking upon your day’s work,’ Urusander continued.
‘Indeed, Lord?’
Urusander’s eyes flickered slightly, the only detail to signal his mood, and that signal was obscure. ‘You are not curious as to my opinion?’
‘No.’
The Lord sipped, and it could have been stale water that passed his lips for all the change in his expression. ‘One may presume, I hope, that the notion of an audience is relevant to you.’
‘Relevant, Lord? Oh, it’s relevant… to an extent. But if you imagine that I yearn for a heavenly chorus of opinion, then you must think me naive. If I were to require such reward as if it were the blood of life, why, I would starve. As would virtually every other artist in Kurald Galain.’
‘So opinions are without value?’
‘I value only those that please me, Lord.’
‘Then would you deny the potential worth of constructive criticism?’
‘That depends,’ Kadaspala replied, still to taste the wine.
‘Upon what?’ Urusander asked, as servants appeared once more, this time with the first course. Plates whispered down, the air was stirred by bodies in motion behind and around the two men, and the candles on the table flickered and dipped this way and that.
‘How fare your studies, Lord?’
‘You evade my question?’
‘I choose my own path to answering it.’
Neither anger nor patronizing amusement touched Urusander’s worn face. ‘Very well. The issue I am struggling with is one of moral stance. Written law is in itself pure, at least in so far as language can make it. Ambiguity emerges only in its practical application upon society, and at this point hypocrisy seems to be the inevitable consequence. The law bends to those in power, like a willow or perhaps a cultured rosebush, or even a fruit-bearing tree trained against a wall. Where it grows depends upon the whims of those in power, and before too long, why, the law becomes a twisted thing indeed.’