Inversions

21. THE DOCTOR

I do not believe the Doctor thought there was anything amiss. I know I did not suspect anything. The gaan Kuduhn seemed to have disappeared as quickly as he had arrived, taking ship for far Chuenruel the day after we’d met him, which left the Doctor a little sad. There had, when I thought about it later, been hints that the palace was preparing for a large contingent of new guests — a degree more activity in certain corridors than one might have expected, doors being used that were not normally open, rooms being aired — but none of it was particularly obvious, and the web of rumour that connected all the servants, assistants, apprentices and pages had not yet woken up to what was going on.

It was the second day of the second moon. My mistress was visiting the old Untouchable Quarter, where once the lowest classes, foreigners, bondagers and quarantiners were forced to dwell. It was still a far from salubrious area, but no longer walled and patrolled. It was there that the Master Chemicalist and Metaliciser (or so he styled himself) Chelgre had his workshop.

The Doctor had risen very late that morning and seemed much the worse for wear for about a bell or so. She sighed heavily and frequently, she said little to me but rather muttered to herself, she appeared a trifle unsteady on her feet and her face was pale. However, she shook off the effects of her hangover with astonishing rapidity, and while she remained subdued for the rest of the morning and the afternoon, she seemed otherwise back to normal after her late breakfast, just before we set off for the Untouchable Quarter.

Of what had been said the night before, not a further word was spoken. I think both of us were a little embarrassed at what we had admitted and implied to each other, and so achieved an unspoken but fully mutual agreement to keep our own counsel on the subject.

Master Chelgre was his usual strange and singular self. He was of course well known around the Court, both for his wild-haired and ragged appearance and his abilities with cannons and their dark powder. I need say no more for the purposes of this report. Besides, the Doctor and Chelgre talked of nothing that I could understand.

We returned by the fifth bell of the afternoon, on foot but escorted by a couple of barrow boys pushing a small cart loaded with straw-wrapped clays containing yet more chemicals and ingredients for what I was starting to suspect would be a long season of experiments and potions.

At the time, I recall feeling mildly resentful of this, for I did not doubt that I would be heavily involved in whatever the Doctor had in mind, and that my efforts would be in addition to those domestic tasks she had come to rely on me performing as a matter of course. To me, I strongly suspected, would fall most of the weighing and measuring and grinding and combining and diluting and washing and scouring and polishing and so on which this new batch of observations would require. There would be proportionately less time for me to spend with my fellows, playing cards and flirting with the kitchen girls, and, without being shy about it, that sort of thing had become relatively important to me in the past year.

Even so, I suppose, it could be said that in some cellar of my soul I was secretly pleased to be so relied upon by the Doctor and was looking forward to being crucially involved with her efforts. These would, after all, mean us being together, working as a team, working as equals, closeted in her study and workshop, passing many happily intense evenings and nights together, striving for a shared goal. Could I not hope that a greater regard might blossom in such intimate circumstances, now that she knew it was in my thoughts? The Doctor had been decisively rejected by the one she loved, or at least the one she believed she loved, while the manner in which she had declined the connotation of my interest in her seemed to me to be more to do with modesty than hostility or even indifference.

Yet I did feel a degree of petulance towards the ingredients being wheeled up the street in front of us that evening. How I regretted that feeling, so soon afterwards. How unsure that future I had envisaged for myself and her really was.

A warm wind seemed to blow us up the Market Square towards the Blister Gate, where long shadows advanced to meet us. We entered the palace. The Doctor paid the barrow boys off and a handful of servants were summoned to help me carry the clays, crates and boxes up to our apartments. I laboured under a rotund clay I knew was full of acid, chafing at the thought of having to share the same cramped set of rooms with it and its fellows. The Doctor was talking about having a workbench-level hearth and chimney constructed to allow the noxious fumes to escape better, but I suspected that even so the next few moons would see me with running eyes and an aching nose, not to mention hands pimpled with tiny burns and clothes perforated with pin-head holes.

We achieved the Doctor’s apartments just as Xamis was setting. The casks, clays and so on were distributed about the rooms, the servants were thanked and given a few coins, and the Doctor and I lit the lamps and set to unpacking all the inedible and poisonous provisions we had purchased from Master Chelgre.

A knock came at the door just after seventh bell. I answered it to find a servant I did not recognise. He was taller and a little older than me.

“Oelph?” he said, grinning. “Here. A note from the GC.” He shoved a sealed piece of paper addressed to Doctor Vosill into my hand.

“The who?” I asked, but he had already turned and was sauntering off down the corridor. I shrugged.

The Doctor read the note. “I am to attend the Guard Commander and Duke Ormin in the Suitor’s Wing,” she said, sighing and pushing her fingers through her hair. She looked round the half-unpacked cases. “Would you mind doing the rest of this, Oelph?”

“Of course not, mistress.”

“I think it’s obvious where everything goes. Like with like. If there is anything unfamiliar, just leave it on the floor. I’ll try not to be too long.”

“Very well, mistress.”

The Doctor buttoned her shirt up to the neck, sniffed at one of her armpits (just the sort of thing she did which I found unladylike and even distressing, but which I look back on now with an ache of longing), then shrugged, threw on a short jacket, and made for the door. She opened it, then came back, looked round the mess of straw, box-planks, twine and sacking that lay strewn across the floor, picked up her old dagger which she had been using to cut (or rather saw) the twine around the boxes and crates, and went off, whistling. The door closed.

I do not know what made me look at the note which had summoned her. She had left it lying on top of an opened crate, and as I pulled the straw out of another box nearby, the fold of creamy paper kept attracting my eye. Eventually, after a glance at the door, I lifted the note and sat down to read it. It said little more than what the Doctor had told me. I read it again.

Providence Guard the King, indeed. I looked at the last word for a few moments. The name at the end of the note was Adlain, but it did not look like his writing, which I knew. Of course the note had probably been dictated, or composed and written by Epline, Adlain’s page, on his master’s instructions. But I thought I knew his writing, too, and this was not it. I cannot claim that I thought any further or at any greater depth.

I could claim a host of reasons for what I did next, but the truth is that I do not know, unless instinct itself can be cited. Even to call it instinct may be to dignify the urge. At the time it felt more like a whim, or even a sort of trivial duty. I cannot even claim that I felt fearful, or had a premonition. I simply did it.

I had been prepared to follow the Doctor from the start of my mission. I had expected to be told to shadow her one day, to follow her into the city on one of the occasions she did not take me along with her, yet never had my Master requested such a thing. I had assumed that he retained other people, more experienced and adept at such behaviour, and less likely to be recognisable to the Doctor, for such work. So, in putting out the lamps, locking the door behind me and following her, I was in a sense doing something I had long thought I would one day find myself doing. I left the note lying where I had picked it up.

The palace seemed quiet. I supposed most people were preparing for dinner. I ascended to the roof-floor. The servants who had their rooms up here would all be busy just now, and probably nobody would see me as I flitted by. Also, this way to the old Suitor’s Wing was shorter. For somebody who was not thinking about what he was doing, I was thinking remarkably clearly.

I descended to the dark confines of the Little Court by the servants’ stairs and skirted the corner of the old North Wing (now in the southern part of the palace) by the light of Foy, Iparine and Jairly. Lamps burned in the distant windows of the main part of the palace, pointing my way for a few steps before the light was eclipsed by the shuttered façade of the old North Wing. Like the Suitor’s Wing, this would not normally be used at this time of year unless there was a great state occasion. The Suitor’s Wing looked shuttered and dark, too, save for one sliver of light showing at the edge of the main doorway. I kept to the two-thirds darkness at the foot of the old North Wing’s wall as I approached, and felt exposed beneath the single intrusive eye of Jairly.

With the King in residence, there were supposed to be regular guard patrols, even here where there would not normally be anybody. I had seen no hint of any guards so far, and had no idea how often they made their rounds, or indeed if they really did bother with this part of the palace, but even knowing that men of the palace guard might appear made me more nervous than I felt I really ought to be. What had I to hide? Was I not a good and faithful servant, and devoted to the King? Yet, here I was, quite consciously skulking.

I would have to cross another courtyard in the light of the three moons if I were to use the main entrance of the Suitor’s Wing, but even without thinking about it I knew I did not want to use that front entrance. Then I found what I recalled ought to be here — a way which led beneath the North Wing to a smaller galleried courtyard within. There were gates at the far end, just visible in the gloom of the tunnel, but they were open. The narrow courtyard was silent and ghostly. The painted gallery posts looked like stiff white sentries watching me. I took the small tunnel on the far side of the court, also gated but not locked, and one left turn later found myself at the rear of the Suitor’s Wing, in the shadow of all three moons, with the building’s wooden-shuttered facade tall and blank and dark above me.

I stood there, wondering how I was going to get in, then walked along until I found a doorway. The door would be locked, I thought, but then when I tried it, it was not. Now why should that be? I pulled the slab of wood slowly to me, expecting it to creak, but it did not.

The darkness inside was complete. The door closed behind me with a soft thud. I had to feel my way along the corridor inside, one hand on the wall to my right, my other hand out in front of my face. These would be the servants’ quarters. The floor under my feet was naked stone. I passed several doors. They were all locked, save for one which gave access to a large, empty cupboard with a faint acrid, acidic smell which made me suspect it had once contained soap. I banged my hand on one of its shelves and almost swore out loud.

Back in the corridor again, I came to a wooden stairway. I crept upwards and came to a door. From the bottom of the door there was the very faintest suggestion of light, hinted at only when I did not look directly at it. I twisted the handle carefully and pulled the door towards me, for less than a hand’s width.

Down a broad, carpeted corridor lined with paintings I could see that the source of the light was a room at the far end, near the main doorway. I heard a cry and what might have been the sound of a scuffle, and then another cry. Footsteps sounded in the distance, and the light in the doorway changed an instant before a figure appeared there. It was a man. That was about all I could ever be sure of. The fellow came running down the corridor, straight towards me.

It took me a moment to realise that he might actually be heading for the door I was hiding behind. In that time he covered about half the length of the corridor. There was something wild and desperate about him that put a terror into me.

I turned and jumped down the dark stairs, landing heavily and hurting my left ankle. I stumbled towards where I thought the unlocked cupboard door ought to be. My hands flailed around the wall for a moment until I found the door, then I pulled it open and threw myself inside just as a bang and a thin wash of light announced that the man had thrown open the door at the top of the stairs. Heavy footsteps clattered down.

I leant back against the shelves. I put my hand out towards the swinging shadow of the cupboard door to pull it back, but it was out of my reach. The man must have run into it, for there was a loud bang and a yelp of pain and anger. The cupboard door slammed shut and I was left in darkness. Another, heavier door slammed somewhere outside and a key rattled in a lock.

I pushed the cupboard door open. A small amount of light was still falling down the stairway. I heard some noise from the top of the stairs but it sounded distant. It might have been a door closing. I went back to the top of the steps and looked out through the half-open door. Down the broad corridor, the light changed again in the doorway near the main entrance at the far end. I got ready to run again, but nobody appeared. Instead there was a stifled cry. A woman’s cry. A terrible fear shook me then, and I started to walk down the corridor.

I had gone perhaps five or six steps when the main doors at the far end of the hall were thrown open and a troop of guards rushed in, swords drawn. Two of them stopped and looked at me, while the rest made straight for the door where the light was coming from.

“You! Here!” one of the guards shouted, pointing his sword at me.

Shouts, and a woman’s frightened voice, came from the lit room. I walked on trembling legs down the hall towards the guards. I was grabbed by the collar and forced into the room, where the Doctor was being held by two tall guardsmen, her arms pinned, forced back against a wall. She was shouting at the men.

Duke Ormin lay motionless on his back on the floor, in a huge pool of dark blood. His throat had been cut. A thin, flattened metal shaft protruded from above his heart. The flat metal shaft was the handle of a thin knife made all of metal. I recognised it. It was one of the Doctor’s scalpels.

I think I lost the power of speech for a while. I lost the power of hearing too, I believe. The Doctor was still shouting at the men. Then she saw me and shouted at me, but I could not make out what it was she was shouting. I would have fallen to the floor had I not been supported by the scruff of the neck by the two guards holding me. One of the guardsmen knelt by the body on the floor. He had to kneel at the head of the Duke to avoid the still spreading pool of darkness on the wooden floor. He opened one of Duke Ormin’s eyes.

A piece of my brain still functioning told me that if he was checking for signs of life this was a foolish thing to do, given the amount of blood that had flowed over the floor, and the quite stationary shaft of the scalpel protruding from the Duke’s chest.

The guardsman said something. I have a feeling it was “Dead” or something similar, but I cannot recall.

Then there were more guards in the room, until it became quite crowded and I could not see the Doctor.

We were taken away. I did not hear things properly again, or find my own voice until we arrived at our destination, back at the main palace, in the torture chamber, where Duke Quettil’s chief questioner, Master Ralinge, was waiting for us.

Master, I knew then that you must forsake me. Perhaps I was not supposed to be forsaken, according to the original plan, for that note, purportedly from you, did use the word “privately” which implied that the Doctor was to go alone, and not take me along with her, so I could believe that I had been supposed to remain innocent of whatever the Doctor was accused of. But I had followed her, and I had not thought to tell anybody else of my fears.

I also had not thought to stand my ground when the man who must have been the real murderer of Duke Ormin came thundering down the hall towards me. No, instead I had taken flight, jumping down the stairs and hiding in a cupboard. Even when the fellow had banged into the cupboard door, I had stayed back against the shelves of the cupboard, hoping he would not look inside and discover me. So I was complicit with my own downfall, I realised, as I was brought struggling into the chamber where last the Doctor and I had been that night when we had been summoned by Master Nolieti.

The Doctor, for those moments, was magnificent.

She walked erect, her back straight, her head raised. I had to be dragged, because my legs had entirely stopped working. I think, for myself, that had I had the wit I would have shouted and screamed and struggled, but I was too stunned. There was a look on the Doctor’s proud face of resignation and defeat, but not of panic or fear. I was not so deceived as to imagine for a moment that I appeared to be anything other than the way I felt, which was shaking and quivering with abject terror, my limbs reduced to jelly.

Do I shame myself to say that I had soiled my breeches? I think I do not. Master Ralinge was an acknowledged virtuoso of pain.

The torture chamber.

It seemed very well lit, I thought. The walls were studded with torches and candles. Master Ralinge must prefer being able to see what he was doing. Nolieti had favoured a darker and more menacing atmosphere.

I was already preparing myself to denounce the Doctor and all her works. I looked at the rack, the cage, the bath, the brazier, the bed, the pokers and pincers and all the rest of the equipment, and my love, my devotion, my honour itself turned to water and drained out through my heels. Whatever it was required of me to say, I would say, to save myself.

The Doctor was doomed, of that I was certain. Nothing I could do or say would save her. Her actions had been arranged to fit this accusation. The suspicious note, the odd locale, the route left open for the real murderer, the timely appearance of the guard, so mob-handed, even the fact that Master Ralinge looked so bright-eyed and happy to see us and had arranged and lit all his candles and stoked his brazier… all spoke of arrangement, of collusion. The Doctor had been forced to this by people capable of wielding great power, and therefore there was absolutely nothing I could possibly do that would save her from her fate or in any way mitigate her punishment.

Those of you who read this and think, Well, I would have done whatever I could to have reduced her torment, I beg you think again, for you have not been marched into a torture chamber to see the instruments there waiting for you. When you see those, you think only of a way to stop them being used against you.

The Doctor was taken, without a struggle, to a floor sink, where she was forced to kneel while her hair was cut off and her head shaved. That seemed to upset her, for she started to shout and scream. Master Ralinge did the cutting and shaving himself, in a loving, careful way. He bunched in his fist, brought to his nose and slowly sniffed each bundle of hair he removed from the Doctor’s head. I meanwhile was strapped upright to an iron frame.

I cannot recall what the Doctor screamed or what Master Ralinge said. I know they exchanged words, that is all. The master torturer’s motley collection of mismatched teeth gleamed in the candle light.

Ralinge ran his hand over the Doctor’s head, and at one place, over her left ear, his hands stopped and he looked more closely, muttering in his soft voice something which I could not make out, then he ordered her stripped and placed on an iron bed by the brazier. As the Doctor was manhandled by the two guards who had brought her to this awful place, the torturer slowly undid and pulled off his thick leather apron, and then began to unbutton his trousers in a deliberate, reverential manner. He watched the two guards — four eventually, for the Doctor put up a remarkably powerful fight — as they stripped my mistress naked.

And so I saw what I had always hoped to see, and was able to view what I had envisaged during many hundreds of shameful soporific imaginings.

The Doctor, nude.

And it meant nothing. She was struggling, pulling and heaving and trying to punch and kick and bite, her skin mottled with exertion, her face hot with tears and reddened with fear and fury. This was no soft dream of lust. Here was no emollient vision of loveliness. Here was a woman about to be violated in the most base and disgusting ways possible, and then tortured, and then, eventually, killed. She knew this as well as I, and as well as Ralinge and his pair of assistants did, and as well as the guards who attended us.

What was my most fervent hope at that point?

It was that they did not know of my devotion to her. If they thought me indifferent, I might only hear her screams. If they thought for a moment, for the merest heart-beat, that I loved her, then the very rules of their profession would require that my eyelids be cut out and I would be forced to watch her every torment.

Her clothes were thrown away, landing in a heap in one corner by a bench. Something clinked. Master Ralinge looked at the Doctor as she was secured, quite naked, to the iron bed frame. He. looked down at his manhood, stroking it, then he dismissed the guards. They looked both disappointed and relieved. One of Ralinge’s assistants locked the chamber door behind them. There was upon Ralinge’s face a bright and shining, almost luminescent smile as he moved towards her.

The Doctor’s dark clothes settled where they had fallen.

My eyes filled with tears, thinking of how she had thought to check her progress as she had left her apartments, being so careful as to go back and pick up that stupid, blunt and useless dagger that she carried with her whenever she remembered. What good could that do her now?

Master Ralinge said the first words that I could recall in detail since the Doctor had read out the note in her apartments, half a bell — and an entire age — earlier.

“First things first, madam,” he said. He climbed up on to the bed the Doctor had been strapped to, his swollen manhood held poised within one fist.

The Doctor looked into his eyes quite calmly. She made a clicking noise with her mouth and her face took on a look of disappointment. “Ah,” she said, matter-of-factly. “So you are serious.” And she smiled. Smiled!

Then she said something that sounded like an instruction in a language I did not know. It was not the language she had used with the gaan Kuduhn, a day earlier. It was a different kind of language. A language from somewhere, I thought, even as I heard it and closed my eyes — for I could not bear to see what was going to happen next — beyond even far Drezen. A language from nowhere.

And, well, what happened next?

How many times I have tried to explain it, how many times I have attempted to make sense of it. Not so much for others, but for myself.

My eyes — as I hope will seem understandable given the feelings I lave attempted to imply through this journal — were closed at the time. I simply did not see what happened during the next few heart-beats.

I heard a whirring noise. A noise like a waterfall, a noise like a sudden wind, like an arrow as it passes nearby one’s ear. Then a long gasp which I realised later must in reality have been two gasps, but in any case a long exhalation of sound, and then a thud, a punch-like concussion of what, in retrospect, was air and flesh and bone and… what? More bone? Metal? Wood?

Metal, I think.

Who knows?

I felt a strange, dizzying sensation. I may have been senseless, for a while. I do not know.

When I woke, if I woke, it was to something that was impossible.

The Doctor stood over me, clad in her long white shirt. She was bald, of course, having been shaved. She looked utterly different. Alien.

She was undoing my bonds.

Her expression seemed cool and assured. Her face and scalp were freckled with red.

There was red on the ceiling above the iron bed where she had been secured. More blood was scattered almost everywhere I looked, some of it still dripping from the nearby bench. I looked at the floor. Master Ralinge lay there. Or most of him did. His body, up to his lower neck, lay on the stones, still twitching. Where the rest was… well, there were quite sufficient pieces of red, pink and grey distributed around the chamber for one to re-create something like what must have happened to his upper neck and head.

Simply, it was as though a bomb had exploded inside it. I could see half a dozen teeth of various sizes and colours scattered about the floor, like shrapnel.

Ralinge’s assistants lay nearby in a single great spreading pool of blood, their heads almost severed from their bodies. Only a strip of skin still connected the head of one to his shoulders. His face was turned towards me and his eyes were still open.

I swear, they blinked, once. Then they slowly closed.

The Doctor released me.

Something moved at the hem of her loose shirt. Then the movement stopped.

She looked so steady and so certain. And yet she looked so dead, so utterly overpowered. She turned her head to one side and said something in a tone I swear to this day was resigned and defeated, even bitter. Something buzzed through the air.

“We must imprison ourselves to save ourselves, Oelph,” she told me. She put her hand on my mouth. “If that is possible.”

Warm and dry and strong.

We were in a cell. A cell set within the walls of the torture chamber and separated from it by a grid of iron bars. Why she put us in here, I had no idea. The Doctor had dressed herself. I had hurriedly undressed while she looked away, cleaned myself as best I could, then dressed again. Meanwhile she had gathered up the long red hair Ralinge had shaved from her head. She looked at it regretfully as she stepped over the master torturer’s body, then threw the gleaming red bundles on to the brazier, where they crackled and spat and smoked and flamed and gave off a sickening smell.

She had quietly unlocked the door of the chamber itself, before putting us both in this small cell, locking the door from outside and throwing the keys on to the nearest bench. Then she had sat calmly down on the dirty straw floor and put her arms round her knees and stared blankly out at the carnage in the chamber outside.

I squatted down beside her, my knee close to where her old dagger protruded from the top of her boot. The air smelled of shit and burned hair and something sharp that I decided must be blood. I felt sick for a little while. I tried to concentrate on something trivial, and was inordinately grateful to find something. The Doctor’s old battered dagger had lost the last of its little white beads round the top rim of its pommel, under the smoky stone. It looked neater, more symmetrical now, I thought. I took a deep breath through my mouth, to escape the smells of the torture chamber, then cleared my throat. “What… what happened, mistress?” I asked.

“You must report what you feel you have to, Oelph.” Her voice sounded tired and hollow. “I shall say that the three of them fell out over me, and killed each other. But it doesn’t really matter.” She looked at me. Her eyes seemed to drill into me. I had to look away. “What did you see, Oelph?” she asked.

“My eyes were closed, mistress. Truly. I heard… a few noises. Wind. A buzz. A thud. I think I was out of my senses for a short while.”

She nodded, and smiled thinly. “Well, that’s handy.”

“Should we not have attempted to run away, mistress?”

“I don’t think we’d get very far, Oelph,” she said. “There is another way, but we must be patient. The matter is in hand.”

“If you say so, mistress,” I said. Suddenly my eyes filled with tears. The Doctor turned to me and smiled. She looked very strange and child-like with no hair. She put her arm out and hugged me to her. I rested my head on her shoulder. She rested her head on mine, and rocked me to and fro, like a mother with her child.

We were still like that when the chamber door burst open and the guards rushed in. They stopped and stared at the three bodies lying on the floor, then hurried on towards us. I shrank back, convinced that our torment would shortly be resumed. The guards looked relieved to see us, which I found surprising. One sergeant picked up the keys from the bench where the Doctor had thrown them and released us and told us that we were needed at once, for the King was dying.