Chase the Morning

I was spellbound; I couldn’t protest, I didn’t want to. Through my hands, through my commanding mind the world’s commerce poured like a shining river, to be diverted this way and that, settling its gold-dust sediments wheresoever I chose. But still something didn’t quite belong there, some factor that kept bobbing up in the torrents of my mind and wouldn’t sink …

The others!’ I choked. ‘Okay, I’m here! What d’you need them for, now? Clare – you don’t have any use for her any more! Let her go! Let them all go!’

I don’t know what reaction I expected. Anything, perhaps, except the ghastly flicker of fury that crossed the sallow face, clear as lightning in a sulphurous sky. The nostrils pinched tight, the dark eyes narrowed to slits, the livid lips crumpled; blood rose beneath the high cheekbones, then drained as swiftly from the papery skin. It fell inward as if sucked, flat against the bone, leathery and wrinkled; the teeth bared in a horrible grin, the muscles shrank, the tendons stood out like rope. Only the eyes remained full beneath their parchment lids, but their lustre dulled like drying ink.

Sweep a torch around a dry crypt or catacomb and a face like that might leap out at you; or as I’d done, in one of those Neapolitan mausoleums with glass-panelled coffins, I’d seen hands, too, with nails that had gone on growing, yellowed and ridged and curling; and though his never touched me, I felt the bite of them as my face was slapped sharply, from side to side. Still fuming, he bowed again, very stiffly.

‘Desolated as I am to contradict the señor, not for anything in the world would I have these your friends miss the occasion! Indeed, their absence would severely hinder the whole proceedings!’

Stryge let out a horrible sneering caw of laughter, and his breath rolled over me like sewer gas. ‘Call yourself one who binds Immortals, do you? And you can’t even spell this empty thing’s mind off his friends! You – bah! I’ve met the like of you before – spiders in your ceiling! What man dares hold Their kind in thrall?’

Don Pedro bowed deeply once again, and when he rose the face was clear and composed as before. ‘I defer to a colleague of rare distinction; a pity he must share the fate of his inferiors. True, no man could humble Them so. But I have long since ceased to be only a man.’

Stryge gargled and spat. ‘That error’s common enough – the cure swift and final! What are you but a petty Caligula who’s learned a bit of hedge-wizardry? Enjoy your delusions while you may, man; they only mock you, biding Their time to strip them from you! Yes, and all else besides!’

‘Caligula?’ The dark man seemed amused. ‘Hardly; for he was but a mortal who dreamed himself a god. Whereas I –’ He looked at me again. ‘At first, I assure you, I had no such thoughts. I sought only to enhance an existence grown burdensome, to find … satisfactions beyond the conventional.’ He chuckled slightly, as a man might at some naïve childhood memory. ‘With the wealth my creatures made me I bought ever more, and devised me ingenious amusements. Some I sent to deaths swift and painful. Others I spared to tread a narrow line, loosening little by little their holds on life, watching them cling all the faster to the dwindling, deluding shreds left them. From that death in life I gave them, fast or slow, I learned to draw new life to refresh me, and that was much; yet even that paled. For once I held the race of slaves in the palm of my hand, once I as both master and bocor could lash not only their cringing bodies but their thoughts, their dreams, their hearts – then the strength I could draw from their torments grew thin. Even then I had come to depend on it, to sustain my very being. Even then blood was the wine I drank, anguish the air I breathed. I must needs cast around for some new source. But as yet I lacked the courage and the vision to seek the Absolute. So, limited as I still was, I turned – as a man must, must he not? – to my own people.’