Beautiful Blood

The sudden effort appeared to have sapped Breque’s energies—his chest heaved, his breath wheezed, his eyes fixed on a spot in the satin canopy, and yet his grip on Rosacher’s wrist grew no weaker. At length he turned his head, locking stares with Rosacher and, his voice straining with intensity, said, “We were great men!”

Rosacher did not know how he should respond, for Breque’s words seemed at once a proclamation and a seeking of validation.

“You will deny it, I realize,” Breque went on. “But we were great men. You more so than I. I attempted great things and failed, but you achieved them.”

“What did I achieve?” Rosacher asked. “Wealth? Many men achieve wealth and few of them are great.”

“You killed Griaule! And in this, I was your accomplice. Together we destroyed a monster like none other the world has known.”

“Cattanay killed the dragon.”

“Cattanay was merely an instrument. It was your genius that enabled him, and it was mine to support you, to allow you to function. Yet I will be remembered only for my folly, and you may not be remembered at all. But we were…” His lips trembled. “We were…great men!”

His grip relaxed and then he let go of Rosacher’s wrist.

“You won’t accept what I’ve told you,” said Breque in a faltering voice. “I know this. You’ve had to maintain a distance from people, an inhuman distance, in order to complete your work. The sole personal desire you have satisfied is your desire to be unhappy. The one woman you loved was one with a bleaker outlook on life than you. But hearing this from me may stop you from making too harsh a self-judgment. That is my hope for you.”

Rosacher could not help being moved by these sentiments. His eyes watered and he wanted to offer a similar consolation to Breque, but he could not shape the words; they soured in his mouth and dissolved before he could speak them. The single comfort he could offer was to continue to sit with Breque, and this he did until the councilman asked for his family. Once they had entered the bedroom, Rosacher shut the door and sat down on a bench in the corridor to await the inevitable. His mind traveled back to the day he met Breque, waiting on a bench outside the council chamber, and he wondered briefly at this apparent circularity. He studied the carved mahogany panel across from him, warships approaching a coastal city, and realized that it was not a representation of the past, but depicted a future that would never occur—it had been commissioned in advance of Breque’s planned invasion of Temalagua. The recognition increased his sadness and he thought of Breque’s final message to him, not debating its truth or its purpose, but categorizing it, cataloguing it under the kindness of monsters, the charitable impulses of fiends, men responsible for thousands of deaths who at the end sought to bestow their blessing on the world.

He had been sitting in the corridor for fifteen or twenty minutes when he felt a wave ripple through his body and experienced a powerful shudder as of some vital passage. He went quietly to the bedroom door and cracked it, thinking that what he had felt was Breque’s soul taking flight; but Breque’s eldest son was bent over the councilman, his ear close to Breque’s mouth, and it was clear that he was whispering some instruction or wish. Rosacher shut the door and sat back down. He could still feel the aftershocks of that passage, faint tremors that came to him as might the inaudible reverberations of a gong, and he imagined that these heralded the passage of a soul of much greater profundity than Breque’s, and that some crucial cut, some last insult to the flesh, had loosed the dragon’s soul from his decaying body, freed him to fly out from his prison, casting a final shadow over the city upon which he had waited so long to avenge himself…or else it was a misperceived symptom of Rosacher’s own decay, a minor unsteadiness of the heart, a palpitation. From behind the bedroom door there arose a muted wail. Rosacher stood and adjusted the hang of his jacket. He was confident that he would make the right noises, say the right things, for though he found people unfathomable on an emotional level, in a formal situation he could always be counted upon to display appropriate behavior.

Epilogue