The Shadow of the Torturer

22. DORCAS

I had first heard of the flower, I had imagined averns would be grown on benches, in rows like those in the conservatory of the Citadel. Later, when Agia had told me more about the Botanic Gardens, I conceived of a place like the necropolis where I had frolicked as a boy, with trees and crumbling tombs, and walkways paved with bones.

The reality was very different—a dark lake in an infinite fen. Our feet sank in sedge, and a cold wind whistled past with nothing, as it seemed, to stop it before it reached the sea. Rushes grew beside the track on which we walked, and once or twice a water bird passed overhead, black against a misted sky. I had been telling Agia about Thecla. Now she touched my arm. “You can see them from here, though we’ll have to go half around the lake to pluck one. Look where I’m pointing… that smudge of white.”

“They don’t look dangerous from here.”

“They’ve done for a great many people, I can assure you. Some of them are interred in this garden, I imagine.”

So there were graves after all. I asked where the mausoleums stood.

“There aren’t any. No coffins either, or mortuary urns, or any of that clutter.

Look at the water slopping at your boots.”

I did. It was as brown as tea.

“It has the property of preserving corpses. The bodies are weighed by forcing lead shot down their throats, then sunk here with their positions mapped so they can be fished up again later if anyone wants to look at them.” I would readily have sworn that there was no one within a league of where we stood. Or at least (if the segments of the glass building really confined the spaces they enclosed as they were supposed to do) within the borders of the Garden of Endless Sleep. But Agia had no sooner said what she did than the head and shoulders of an old man appeared over the top of some reeds a dozen paces off. “ ‘Tis not true,” he called. “I know they say so, but ‘tisn’t right.” Agia, who had allowed the torn bodice of her gown to hang as it would, quickly drew it up again. “I didn’t know I was talking to anyone but my escort here.” The old man ignored the rebuke. No doubt his thoughts were already too involved with the remark he had overheard for him to pay much heed. “I’ve the figure here—would you like to see it? You, young sieur—you’ve an education, anyone can tell that. Will you look?” He appeared to be carrying a staff. I watched its head rise and fall several times before I understood that he was poling toward us.

“More trouble,” Agia said. “We’d better go.”

I asked if it might not be possible for the old man to ferry us across the lake, thus saving us the long walk around.

He shook his head. “Too heavy for my little boat. There’s but room for Cas and me here. You great folk would capsize us.”

The prow came into sight, and I saw that what he said was true: the skiff was so small it seemed almost too much to ask of it that it keep the old man himself afloat, though he was bowed and shrunken by age (he appeared older even than Master Palaemon) until he could hardly have weighed more than a boy of ten. There was no one in it with him.

“Your pardon, sieur,” he said. “But I can’t come no nearer. Wet she may be, but she gets too dry for me, or you couldn’t walk upon it. Can you step here by the edge so’s I can show you my figure?”

I was curious to see what it was he wanted of us, so I did as he asked, Agia following me reluctantly.

“Here now.” Reaching into his tunic he pulled out a small scroll. “Here is the position. Have a look, young sieur.”

The scroll was headed with some name and a long description of where this person had lived, whose wife she was, and what her husband had done for a living; all of which I only pretended to glance at, I am afraid. Below the description were a crude map and two numbers.

“Now you see, sieur, it ought to be easy enough. First number there, that’s paces over from the Fulstrum. Second number’s paces up. Now would you believe that for all these years I’ve been trying to find her, and never found her yet?” Looking at Agia, he drew himself up until he stood almost normally.

“I’d believe it,” Agia said. “And if it will satisfy you, I’m sorry to hear it.

But it has nothing to do with us.”

She turned to go, but the old man thrust out his pole to prevent my following her. “Don’t you heed what they say. They put them where the figure shows, but they don’t stay there. Some has been see’d in the river, even.” He looked vaguely toward the horizon. “Out there.”

I told him I doubted that was possible.

“All the water here, where’d you think it come from? There’s a conduit underground that brings it, and if it didn’t this whole place’d dry out. When they get to moving about, what’s to prevent one from swimming through? What’s to prevent twenty? Can’t be any current to speak of. You and her—you come to get a avern, did you? You know why they planted ‘em here to begin with?” I shook my head.

“For the manatees. They’re in the river, and used to swim in through the conduit. It scared the kin to see their faces bobbing in the lake, so Father Inire had the gardeners plant the averns. I was here and saw it. Just a little man he is, with a wry neck and bow legs. If a manatee comes now, those flowers kill it in the night. One morning I come looking for Cas like I always do unless I’ve something else I have to take care of, and there was two curators on the shore with a harpoon. Dead manatee in the lake, they said. I went out with my hook and got it, and it wasn’t no manatee, but a man. He’d spit up his lead, or they hadn’t put enough in. Looked as good as you or her, and better than me.”

“Had he been dead long?”

“No way of telling, for the water here pickles them. You’ll hear it said it turns their skin to leather, and so it does. But don’t think of the sole of your boot when you hear it. More like a woman’s glove.” Agia was far ahead of us, and I began to walk after her. The old man followed us, poling his skiff parallel to the floating path of sedge. “I told them I’d had better luck in one day for them than I’ve had in forty years for myself. Here’s what I use.” He held up an iron grapple on a length of rope. “Not that I haven’t caught aplenty, all kinds. But not Cas. I started where the figure showed, year after she died. She wasn’t there, so I kept working my way out. After five years of that I was a ways far away—that’s what I thought then—from what it said. I got to be afraid she might be there after all, so I begun over. First where it said, then working out. Ten years of that. I got to be afraid again, so what I do now is start in the morning where it says, and make my first cast there. After that I go to where I stopped the last time, and circle out some more. She’s not where it says—I know that, I know everyone that’s there now, and some of them I’ve pulled up a hundred times. But she’s wandering, and I keep thinking maybe she’ll come home.”

“She was your wife?”

The old man nodded, and to my surprise said nothing.

“Why do you want to recover her body?”

Still he said nothing. His pole made no sound as it slipped in and out of the water; the skiff left only the faintest of wakes behind it, tiny ripples that lapped the side of the sedge track like the tongues of kittens. “Are you sure you would know her, after so long a time, if you found her?”

“Yes… yes.” He nodded, slowly at first, then vigorously. “You’re thinking I may have hooked her already. Drug her up, looked her in the face, and throwed her back in. Ain’t you? It ain’t possible. Not know Cas? You wondered why I want her back. One reason is the memory I have of her—the one that’s strongest—is of this brown water closing over her face. Her eyes shut. Do you know about that?”

“I’m not certain I know what you mean.”

“They’ve a cement they put on the lids. It’s supposed to hold them down forever, but when the water hit them, they opened. Explain that. It’s what I remember, what comes into my mind when I try to sleep. This brown water rolling over her face, and her eyes opening blue through the brown. I have to go to sleep five, six times every night, what with the waking up. Before I lie down here myself I’d like to have another picture there—her face coming back up, even if it’s only on the end of my hook. You follow what I say?” I thought of Thecla and the trickle of blood from beneath the door of her cell, and I nodded.

“Then there’s the other thing. Cas and I, we had a little shop. Cloisonne-work, mostly. Her father and brother had the trade of making it, and they set us up on Signal Street, just past the middle, next to the auction house. The building’s still there, though nobody lives in it. I’d go over to the inlaws and carry the boxes home on my back, and pull them open, and put the pieces on our shelves. Cas priced ‘em, sold, and kept everything so clean! You know how long we did that? Run our little place?”

I shook my head.

“Four years, less a month and a week. Then she died. Cas died. It wasn’t long before it was all gone, but it was the biggest part of my life. I’ve got a place to sleep in a loft now. A man I knew years before, though that was years after Cas was gone, he lets me sleep there. There isn’t a piece of cloisonne in it, or a garment, or so much as a nail from the old shop. I tried to keep a locket and Cas’s combs, but everything’s gone. Tell me this, now. How am I to know it wasn’t no dream?”

It seemed to me that the old man might be spell-caught, as the people in the house of yellow wood had been; so I said, “I have no way of knowing. Perhaps, as you say, it was a dream. I think you torment yourself too much.” His mood changed in an instant, as I have seen the moods of young children do, and he laughed. “It’s easy to see, sieur, that despite the outfit under that mantle, you’re no torturer. I do truly wish I could ferry you and your doxie. Since I can’t, there’s a fellow farther along that has a bigger boat. He comes here pretty often, and he talks to me sometimes like you did. Tell him I hope he’ll take you across.

I thanked him and hurried after Agia, who by this time was a great distance ahead. She was limping, and I recalled how far she had walked today after wrenching her leg. As I was about to overtake her and give her my arm, I made one of those missteps that seem disastrous and enormously humiliating at the time, though one laughs at them afterward; and in so doing I set in motion one of the strangest incidents of my admittedly strange career. I began to run, and in running came too near the inner side of a curve in the track. At one moment I was bounding along on the springy sedge—at the next I was floundering in icy brown water, much impeded by my mantle. For the space of a breath I knew again the terror of drowning; then I righted myself and got my face above water. The habits developed on all those summer swims in Gyoll reasserted themselves: I blew the water from my nose and mouth, took a deep breath, and pushed my sopping hood back from my face. I was no sooner calm than I realized that I had dropped Terminus Est, and at that moment losing that blade seemed more terrible than the chance of death. I dove, not even troubling to kick off my boots, forcing my way through an umber fluid that was not water purely, but water laced and thickened with the fibrous stems of the reeds. These stems, though they multiplied the threat of drowning many times, saved Terminus Est for me—she would surely have outraced me to the bottom and buried herself in the mud there despite the meager air retained in her sheath, if her fall had not been obstructed. As it was, eight or ten cubits beneath the surface one frantically groping hand encountered the blessed, familiar shape of her onyx grip.

At the same instant, my other hand touched an object of a completely different kind. It was another human hand, and its grasp (for it had seized my own the moment I touched it) coincided so perfectly with the recovery of Terminus Est that it seemed the hand’s owner was returning my property to me, like the tall mistress of the Pelerines. I felt a surge of lunatic gratitude, then fear returned tenfold: the hand was pulling my own, drawing me down.