The Damnation Game (24 page)

Breer stood in the doorway. He’d only been in this room once before, and he had a niggling fear of it. It was too plain. The European had asked Breer to nail boards across the window: this he had done. Now, by the light of a single wick, burning in a dish of oil on the floor, the room looked bleak and gray; everything in it seemed insubstantial, even the European. He sat in the dark wood chair that was the only furnishing-and looked at Breer with eyes so glazed he could have been blind.

“I didn’t call you up here,” Mamoulian said.

“I wanted … to talk to you.”

“Close the door, then.”

Though this was against his better judgment, Breer obeyed. The lock clicked at his back; the room was now centered on that single flame and the fitful luminosity it offered. Sluggishly Breer looked around the room for someplace to sit, or at least lean. But there was no comfort here: its austerity would have shamed an ascetic. Just a few blankets on the bare boards in the corner, where the great man slept; some books stacked against the wall; a pack of cards; a jug of water and a cup; little else. The walls, except for the rosary that hung from a hook, were naked.

“What do you want, Anthony?”

All Breer could think was: I hate this room.

“Say what you have to say.”

“I want to go …”

“Go?”

“Away. The flies bother me. There are so many flies.”

“No more than there are in any other May. It is perhaps a little warmer than usual. All the signs are that the summer will be blistering.”

The thought of heat and light made Breer sick. And that was another thing: the way his belly revolted if he put food into it. The European had promised him a new world—health, wealth and happiness—but he was suffering the torments of the damned. It was a cheat: all a cheat.

“Why didn’t you let me die?” he said, without thinking what he was saying.

“I need you.”

“But I feel ill.”

“The work will soon be over.”

Breer looked straight at Mamoulian, something he very rarely mustered the courage to do. But desperation was a rod at his back.

“You mean finding Toy?” he said. “We won’t find him. It’s impossible.”

“Oh, but we will, Anthony. That I insist upon.”

Breer sighed. “I wish I was dead,” he said.

“Don’t say that. You’ve got all the freedom you want, haven’t you? You feel no guilt now, do you?”

“No…”

“Most people would happily suffer your minor discomforts to be guiltless, Anthony: to commit their heart’s desire to flesh and never be called to regret it. Rest today. Tomorrow we’re going to be busy, you and I.”

“Why?”

“We’re going to visit Mr. Whitehead.”

Mamoulian had told him about Whitehead and the house and the dogs. The damage they’d done to the European was conspicuous. Though his torn hand had healed quickly, the tissue damage was irreparable. A finger and a half missing, ugly scars raking palm and face, a thumb that would no longer move properly: his facility with the cards was permanently spoiled. It was a long and sorry tale he’d told Breer the day he’d returned, bloodied, from his encounter with the dogs. A history of promises broken and trust despised; of atrocities committed against friendship. The European had wept freely in the telling of it, and Breer had glimpsed the profundity of pain in him. They were both despised men, conspired against and spat upon. Remembering the European’s confessional, the sense of injustice Breer had felt at the time was reawoken. And here was he, who owed the European so much—his life, his sanity—planning to turn his back on his Savior. The Razor-Eater felt ashamed.

“Please,” he said, eager to make amends for his petty complaints, “let me go and kill this man for you.”

“No, Anthony.”

“I can,” Breer insisted. “I’m not afraid of dogs. I feel no pain; not now, not since you came back. I can kill him in his bed.”

“I’m sure you could. And I will certainly need you, to keep the dogs off me.”

“I’ll tear them apart.”

Mamoulian looked deeply pleased.

“You do that, Anthony. I loathe the species. Always have. You deal with them while I have words with Joseph.”

“Why bother with him? He’s so old.”

“So am I,” Mamoulian replied. “Older than I look, believe me. But a bargain is a bargain.”

“It’s difficult,” said Breer, his eyes wet with phlegmy tears.

“What is?”

“Being the Last.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Needing to do everything properly; so that the tribe’s remembered …” Breer’s voice broke. All the glories he’d missed, not being born into a Great Age. What must that dream time have been like, when the Razor-Eaters and the Europeans, and all the other tribes, held the world in their hands? There would never come such an Age again; Mamoulian had said so.

“You won’t be forgotten,” the European promised.

“I think I will.”

The European stood up. He seemed bigger than Breer remembered him; and darker.

“Have a little faith, Anthony. There is so much to look forward to.”

Breer felt a touch at the back of his neck. It seemed a moth had alighted there and was stroking his nape with its furred antennae. His head had begun to buzz, as though the flies that beset him had laid eggs in his ears, and they were suddenly hatching. He shook his head to try to dislocate the sensation.

“It’s all right,” he heard the European say through the whirring of their wings. “Be calm.”

“I don’t feel well,” Breer protested meekly, hoping his weakness would make Mamoulian merciful. The room was fragmenting around him, the walls separating from the floor and ceiling, the six sides of this gray box coming apart at the seams and letting all kinds of nothingness in. Everything had disappeared into a fog: furniture, blankets, even Mamoulian.

“There’s so much to look forward to,” he heard the European repeat, or was it an echo, coming back to him from some far-off cliff face? Breer was terrified. Though he could no longer even see his outstretched arm, he knew that this place went on forever and he was lost in it. The tears came thicker. His nose ran, his guts knotted.

Just as he thought he must scream or lose his mind, the European appeared out of the nothingness in front of him, and by the lightning flash of his eclipsed consciousness Breer saw the man transformed. Here was the source of all flies, all blistering summers and killing winters, all loss, all fear, floating before him more naked than any man had right to be, naked to the point of not-being. Now he spread his good hand toward Breer. In it were bone dice, carved with faces Breer almost recognized, and the Last European was crouching, and was tossing the dice, faces and all, into the void, while somewhere close by a thing with fire for a head wept and wept until it seemed they would all drown in tears.

Chapter 35

W
hitehead took the vodka glass, and the bottle, and went down to the sauna. It had become a favorite retreat of his during the weeks of Crisis. Now, though the danger was far from over, he had lost focus on the state of the Empire. Large sectors of the corporation’s European and Far Eastern operations had already been sold off to cut their losses; receivers had been called in to a couple of smaller firms; there were mass redundancies planned for some of the chemical plants in Germany and Scandinavia: last-ditch attempts to stave off closure or sale. Joe had other problems on his mind, however. Empires could be regained, life and sanity could not. He’d sent the financiers away, and the government think-tank men: sent them back to their banks and their report-lined offices in Whitehall. There was nothing they could tell him that he wanted to hear. No graphs, no computer displays, no predictions interested him. In the five weeks since the beginning of the Crisis he remembered with interest only one conversation: the debate he’d had with Strauss.

He liked Strauss. More to the point, he trusted Strauss, and that was a commodity rarer than uranium in the bazaar Joe bartered in. Toy’s instinct about Strauss had been correct; Bill had been a man with a nose for integrity in others. Sometimes, particularly when the vodka filled him with sentiment and remorse, he missed Toy badly. But he was damned if he’d mourn: that had never been his style, and he wasn’t about to start now. He poured himself another glass of vodka and raised it.

“To the Fall,” he said, and drank.

He’d worked up a good head of steam in the white-tiled room, and sitting on the bench in the half-light, blotched and florid, he felt like some fleshy plant. He enjoyed the sensation of sweat in the folds of his belly, at his armpits and groin; simple physical stimuli that distracted him from bad thoughts.

Maybe the European wouldn’t come after all, he thought. Pray God.

Somewhere in the benighted house a door opened and closed, but the drink and the steam made him feel quite aloof from events elsewhere. The sauna was another planet; his, and his alone. He put the drained glass down on the tiles and closed his eyes, hoping to drowse.

B
reer went to the gate. There was a hum of electricity off it, and the sour smell of power in the air.

“You’re strong,” the European said. “You told me so. Open the gate.”

Breer put his hand on the wire. The boasts were true: he felt only the slightest tremor. There was just a cooking smell and the sound of his teeth chattering as he started to tear the gate apart. He was stronger than he’d imagined. There was no fear in him, and its absence made him Herculean. Now the dogs had started to bark along the fence, but he just thought: let them come. He wasn’t going to die. Perhaps he would
never
die.

Laughing like a loon, he ripped the gate open; the hum stopped as the circuit was broken. The air was tinged with blue smoke.

“That’s good,” said the European.

Breer tried to drop the section of wire he was holding, but some of it had welded itself into his palm. He had to tear it out with his other hand. He looked down incredulously at his seared flesh. It was blackened, and smelled appetizing. Soon, surely, it must begin to hurt a little. No man—not even a man like him, guiltless and sublimely strong—could receive a wound like this and not suffer. But there was no sensation.

Suddenly—out of the dark—a dog.

Mamoulian backed off, fear convulsing him, but Breer was its intended victim. A few paces from its target the dog leaped, and its bulk struck Breer center chest. The impact toppled him over onto his back, and the dog was swiftly on top of him, jaws snapping at his throat. Breer was armed with a long-bladed kitchen knife, but he seemed uninterested in the weapon, though it was within easy reach. His fat face broke into a laugh as the dog scrabbled to get access to the man’s neck. Breer simply took hold of the dog’s lower jaw. The animal snapped down, clamping Breer’s hand in its mouth. Almost immediately it realized its error. Breer reached around the back of the dog’s head with his free hand, grabbed a fistful of fur and muscle, and jerked neck and head in opposite directions. There was a grinding sound. The dog roared in its throat, still unwilling to let go of its executioner’s hand, even as blood sprang from between its clenched teeth. Breer gave the dog another lethal wrench. Its eyes showed white and its limbs stiffened. It slumped down onto Breer’s chest, dead.

Other dogs barked in the distance, responding to the death-yelp they’d heard. The European looked nervously to right and left along the fence.

“Get up! Quickly!”

Breer loosed his hand from the dog’s maw and shrugged the corpse off. He was still laughing.

“Easy,” he said.

“There’s more.”

“Take me to them.”

“Maybe too many for you to take on all at once.”

“Was this the one?” Breer asked, kicking the dead dog over so that the European could see it better.

“The one?”

“That took off your fingers?”

“I don’t know,” the European replied, avoiding Breer’s blood- spattered face as it grinned at him, eyes sparkling like an adolescent’s in love.

“The kennels?” he suggested. “Finish them off there.”

“Why not?”

The European led off from the fence in the direction of the kennels. Thanks to Carys, the layout of the Sanctuary was as familiar to him as the palm of his own hand. Breer kept pace with him, stinking of blood already, a spring in his heavy step. He had seldom felt so alive.

Life was so good, wasn’t it? So
very
good.

T
he dogs barked.

In her room Carys pulled the pillow over her head to shut out the din. Tomorrow she’d pluck up her courage and tell Lillian that she resented being kept awake half the night by hysterical hounds. If she was ever going to be healthy she’d have to start learning the rhythms of a normal life. That meant going about her business while the sun shone, and sleeping at night.

As she turned over to find a portion of the bed that was still cool an image flashed into her head. It was gone again before she could entirely grasp it but she caught enough to wake her with a start. She saw a man—faceless, but familiar—crossing a tract of grass. At his heels, a tide of filth. It crept close behind him, in blind adoration, its waves sibilant as snakes. She didn’t have time to see what the waves contained, and perhaps that was a good thing.

She turned over a third time, and ordered herself to forget these nonsenses.

Curiously, the dogs had stopped barking.

A
nd what, after all, was the worst he could do, what was the very worst? Whitehead had tried on this particular question so often it felt like a familiar coat. The possible physical torments were endless, of course. Sometimes, in the clammy hug of a three-A.M. sweat, he would deem himself worthy of them all—if a man could die a dozen, two dozen times—because the crimes of power he had committed were not easily paid for. The things, oh, Jesus in Heaven, the things he had done.

But then, damn it, who would not have crimes to confess, when the time came? Who would not have acted out of greed, and envy; or grappled for station, and having gained it, been absolute in authority rather than relinquish it? He couldn’t be held responsible for everything the corporation had done. If, once in a decade, a medical preparation that deformed fetuses had slipped onto the market, was he to blame because there’d been profit made? That kind of moral accounting was for the writers of revenge fiction: it didn’t belong in the real world, where most crimes went punished only with wealth and influence; where the worm seldom turned, and when it did was immediately crushed; where the best a man could hope was that having risen to his ambition’s height by wit, stealth or violence there was some smidgen of pleasure in the view. That was the real world, and the European was as familiar with its ironies as he was. Hadn’t Mamoulian shown him so much of it himself? How, in all conscience, could the European turn around and punish his student for learning his lessons too well?