I laughed at them all and was feigning to toss the head to them when someone plucked at my ankle. It was Eusebia, and I knew before her first word that she was under that compulsion to speak I had often observed among the clients in our tower. Her eyes were sparkling with excitement, and her face was twisted by her attempt to get my attention, so that she looked simultaneously older and younger than she had appeared before. I could not make out what she was shouting and bent to listen.
“Innocent! She was innocent!”
This was no time to explain that I had not been Morwenna’s judge. I only nodded.
“She took Stachys — from me! Now she’s dead. Do you understand? She was innocent after all, but I am so glad!”
I nodded again and made another circuit of the scaffold, holding up the head.
“I killed her!” Eusebia screamed. “Not you — !”
I called down to her: “If you like!”
“Innocent! I knew her — so careful. She would have kept something back — poison for herself! She would have died before you got her.”
Hethor grasped her arm and pointed to me. “My master! Mine! My own!”
“So it was somebody else. Or sickness after all—”
I shouted: “To the Demiurge alone belongs all justice!” The crowd was still noisy, though it had quieted a trifle by this time.
“But she stole my Stachys, and now she’s gone.” Louder than ever: “Oh, wonderful! She’s gone!” With that, Eusebia plunged her face into the bouquet as though to fill her lungs to bursting with the roses’ cloying perfume. I dropped Morwenna’s head into the basket that awaited it and wiped my sword blade with the piece of scarlet flannel Jonas handed me. When I noticed Eusebia again she was lifeless, sprawled among a circle of onlookers. At the time I thought little of it, only supposing that her heart had failed in her excess of joy. Later that afternoon the alcalde had her bouquet examined by an apothecary, who found among the petals a strong but subtle poison he could not identify. Morwenna must, I suppose, have had it in her hand when she mounted the steps, and must have cast it into the blossoms when I led her around the scaffold after the branding.
Allow me to pause here and speak to you as one mind to another, though we are separated, perhaps, by the abyss of eons. Though what I have already written — from the locked gate to the fair at Saltus — embraces most of my adult life, and what remains to be recorded concerns a few months only, I feel I am less than half concluded with my narrative. In order that it shall not fill a library as great as old Ultan’s, I will (I tell you now plainly) pass over many things. I have recounted the execution of Agia’s twin brother Agilus because of its importance to my story, and that of Morwenna because of the unusual circumstances surrounding it. I will not recount others unless they hold some special interest. If you delight in another’s pain and death, you will gain little satisfaction from me. Let it be sufficient to say that I performed the prescribed operations on the cattle thief, which terminated in his execution; in the future, when I describe my travels, you are to understand that I practiced the mystery of our guild where it was profitable to do so, though I do not mention the specific occasions.
Chapter 5
THE BOURNE
That evening, Jonas and I dined alone in our room. It is a very pleasant thing, I found, to be popular with the mob and known to everyone; but it is tiring too, and after a time one grows weary of answering the same simpleminded questions again and again, and of politely refusing invitations to drink.
There had been a slight disagreement with the alcalde concerning the compensation I was to receive for my work, my understanding having been that in addition to the quarter-payment made when I was engaged, I would receive full payment for each client upon death, while the alcalde had intended, so he said, that full payment should be made only after all three were attended to. I would never have agreed to that, and liked it less than ever in the light of the green man’s warning (which out of loyalty to Vodalus I had kept to myself). But after I had threatened not to appear on the following afternoon I was paid, and everything peaceably resolved.
Now Jonas and I were settled over a smoking platter and a bottle of wine, the door was shut and bolted, and the innkeeper had been instructed to deny that I was in his establishment. I would have been completely at ease if the wine in my cup had not recalled to me so vividly the much better wine Jonas had discovered in our ewer the night before, after I had examined the Claw in secret.
Jonas, observing me, I think, as I stared at the pale red fluid, poured a cup of his own and said, “You must remember that you are not responsible for the sentences. If you had not come here, they would have been punished eventually anyway, and probably would have suffered worse in less skilled hands.”
I asked him what he thought he was talking about.
“I can see it troubles you… what happened today.”
“I thought it went well,” I said.
“You know what the octopus remarked when he got out of the mermaid’s kelp bed: ‘I’m not impugning your skill — quite the opposite. But you look as if you could use a little cheering up.’ ”
“We’re always a little despondent afterward. That’s what Master Palaemon always said, and I’ve found it true in my own case. He called it a purely mechanical psychological function, and at the time that seemed to me an oxymoron, but now I’m not sure he wasn’t right. Could you see what happened, or did they keep you too busy?”
“I was standing on the steps behind you most of the time.”
“You had a good view then, so you must have seen how it was — everything proceeded smoothly after we decided not to wait for the chair. I exercised my skills to applause, and I was the focus of admiration. There’s a feeling of lassitude afterward. Master Palaemon used to talk of crowd melancholy and court melancholy, and said that some of us have both, some have neither, and some have one but not the other. Well, I have crowd melancholy; I don’t suppose I’ll ever have the chance, in Thrax, of discovering whether I also have court melancholy or not.”
“And what is that?” Jonas was looking down into his wine cup.
“A torturer, let’s say a master at the Citadel, is occasionally brought into contact with exultants of the highest degree. Suppose there’s some exceedingly sensitive prisoner who’s thought to possess important information. An official of lofty standing is likely to be delegated to attend such a prisoner’s examination. Very often he will have had little experience with the more delicate operations, so he will ask the master questions and perhaps confide in him certain fears he has concerning the subject’s temperament or health. A torturer under those circumstances feels himself to be at the center of things—”
“Then feels let down when it’s over with. Yes, I suppose I can see that.”
“Have you ever seen one of these affairs when it was badly botched?”
“No. Aren’t you going to eat any of this meat?”
“Neither have I, but I’ve heard about them, and that’s why I was tense. Times when the client has broken away and fled into the crowd. Times when several strokes were needed to part the neck. Times when a torturer lost all confidence and was unable to proceed. When I vaulted onto that scaffold, I had no way of knowing that none of those things was going to happen to me. If they had, I might have been finished for life.”
“’Still, it’s a terrible way to earn a living.’ That’s what the thorn-bush said to the shrike, you know.”
“I really don’t—” I broke off because I had seen something move on the farther side of the room. At first I thought it was a rat, and I have a pronounced dislike of them; I have seen too many clients bitten in the oubliette under our tower.