The blood from the wound seeps into the jelly and the fish circling around Gato are suddenly wild. They fly at him and rip joyously into all parts of his body, tearing off the hunks of flesh and gulping them down. Gato, behung with fish, staggers about the statue. The courtiers jump from their chairs and cry out in horror, unable to tear their eyes away from the head whose mouth is screaming with pain, from the body covered with great, terrible clusters of fish, from the pall of blood spreading throughout the statue. Perhaps Prince Gato would have survived had he turned and tried to fight his way out of the statue. But his mind is focused on the gemstone still more keenly than the physical pain. On the final stretch of the journey towards the longed-for gemstone — which consists of the swollen waves of the sea and the body of the squid — the statue is taller than Gato. Gato takes a deep breath before plunging into the jelly with his eyes open. He catches sight of the gemstone, glinting as a ray of sun pierces the jelly. Gato struggles towards the flash of red in the green gloom, his body a flame of pain.
Now the sharp teeth rip into Gato’s cheeks and neck; he is overwhelmed by the need to cry out, and the jelly gets into his mouth. He begins to choke. He has to jump up in order to catch his breath. The courtiers see his head break the surface — a bloody head with fish hanging in bunches from its cheeks — before it sinks back into the jelly. Not even Uddo can keep herself from exclaiming in horror. Only Hios remains silent and motionless. The glinting gemstone is now close enough for Gato to close his hand over it — a hand which has been gnawed down to the bone. He then forces his way through the squid. Between the last of the waves and the shore, the surface of the sea brings the statue to its lowest point. The courtiers look on as this is breached by the body covered with blood and behung with fish — with red and black bunches of death. The prince takes in breath and staggers a few steps more; then he loses consciousness and pitches back onto the jelly table with its jelly food, deep into the statue, which closes over him. In the courtyard a silence settles; nothing is heard but the distant calls of birds flying high above the palace. In silence the king, the queen, Hios, and the courtiers watch the shadow of the prince’s body in the jelly, how it is enveloped in a great cluster of black, how it continues to make slight movements (whether these are the final motions of departing life or are effected by the furious tugging of the fish, is unclear). After a while the great bunch of fish dissolves. On the bottom of the translucent jelly there lies a white skeleton with a red gemstone sparkling in its hand.
The performance is at an end. Wordlessly the spectators get to their feet; again the scraping of chairs across granite begins. The king and Uddo are well satisfied. But they are bothered by Hios’s detachment — after all, the performance was staged largely to punish her for betraying the family. Taal and Uddo wished to see her weep and wail. But by the time Hios rises from her chair, hatred of her parents has burned into her brain; henceforth the spectre of revenge will live on the ashes of her reason and sensibility. In the days that follow Hios continues to behave calmly. But everyone begins to fear her.
Putsch
Months later the news reaches Taal that Hios has become the lover of the commander of the palace’s praetorian guard. Taal flies into a rage and determines to question Hios at luncheon that day, but when he does Hios does nothing to refute the allegations. While her father rants and rages, she sits there calmly eating a peach. Suddenly Taal falls silent, begins to wheeze, and falls face-first into the crockery. Hios continues to bite into her peach, watching her bewildered mother flap around Taal. When no further sound comes from Taal, Hios throws the peach stone into her bowl and leaves for her room. Once it becomes clear to Uddo there is nothing more she can do for Taal, she runs through the long corridors in pursuit of her daughter. But at the door to her daughter’s chamber her way is blocked by two praetorians. She screams at them that she is the queen, but the guards hold their silence and do not move. She runs to her own chamber to find there six more guards going carefully through her things. Nor do they respond to her threats, and when they leave they take with them all the apparatus of her evil kitchen — all the flasks and jars of poisons, potions and drugs, all the instruments of her prowess as a chemist, which she would sit over for hour upon hour and compose for as though they were the most sophisticated musical instruments, concertos filled with pathos or dreams, nocturnes and preludes of evildoing. It seems that the putsch is proceeding along carefully prepared lines. As the praetorian guard takes the palace, others of its units occupy the Academy; but this is nothing more than a futile gesture of perfectionism on the part of the putschists, a small, unasked-for present to Hios from the praetorians, or perhaps a settling of old accounts. (There has always been a certain tension between the guard and the Academy, the two real centres of power on Devel.) Owing to the gradual disappearance over the past twenty years of centres of resistance to the government, the Academy has become somnolent; it has ceased to be a feared nest of the dark sciences and forces to such a degree that occasionally it returns to the innocent researches of old.
Surprisingly the command of the army puts up as little resistance as the weakened Academy. Years ago Taal promoted the palace guard to the position of most powerful force in the state, and this resulted in the de facto subjugation of the army. The guard does not have a hierarchy; it has the character of a strong but elastic web woven from dark bonds, impure dreams and complicity in old crimes. The guard has no code nor central idea, nor any specific purpose in the running of the state. The motto on its coat of arms is composed of incomprehensible, magic words for which everyone has his own interpretation. The guard is the ideal means of disseminating and enforcing decisions that should be spoken of only in whispers and ambiguous terms, decisions that grow from dark roots and grope about for means of implementation, even for guiding aims. The guard does not act by the passing down of clear commands through a hierarchy, but in such a way that its instructions — or rather the dark movements of its consciousness and emotions, spoken in low voices behind locked doors, in high galleries or the alleys of parks, in which tone of voice and accent play important roles — enter immediately the filiform web from which the body of the guard is woven; once these instructions are in circulation, the imagination of the great body sets to work on developing the dark themes within them, while simultaneously — as if in a single movement — turning them into action. This was the chemistry by which Taal exercised power; it was in many ways similar to his wife’s more intimate compositions, whose lifeblood was poison.
Only subsequently, once everything is in motion, are a design and a plan fashioned, and these are really little more than hallucinations. These visions, of which the guard takes so little notice, set the army in motion. The army itself has no sensory organs by which to perceive the tangle of forces, desires and chaos that glimmer behind these phantom constructions; the commanders of the army do not realize that orders are born out of whispers, twitches and dreams, that indeed they never move very far away from them. So the putsch under the leadership of Hios and the commander of the praetorians is not so very different from the way things have been for many years up to this point. Even while the coup is in progress, a sense of normality sets in, stirring in the army command a sense that law and order are at work. After all, Hios is the daughter of the late king, and it has always been so that the commander of the guard mediates between the palace and the army. Hence the army — whose intervention Uddo is relying on — does nothing. The system of power established by Taal is turned against Uddo, and the queen discovers that she is powerless to resist it.