The Duke In His Castle (8 page)

And then, with a soundless cry of parted lips, he scatters it over the complete skeleton. The dust, in a cloud of fire-sparks, takes on slow motion. Billowing in the way of swirling snow, it floats gently down to settle over the bones.

Everything wavers then, and in a ghostly blur an image of a body begins to appear about the skeleton, then solidify. Rossian outstretches his fingers, stroking the outlines of the translucent flesh in an echo of sexual ecstasy, though his face as always shows no emotion; ecstasy is expressed through motion and touch.

A sudden squall of mist-laden wind; he pulls water out of the air, draws it in, and the mists coalesce and come to him. All around, the rock walls are stripped of their water slickness as he absorbs it, takes it into himself and directs it to the forming flesh. Flesh is water. . . .

Suddenly he is feeling dry, desiccated. . . . Around him the funnel of cold night wind is a parched breath of winter desert.

As the waters are absorbed, energy continues to flow from an arcane fountainhead contained in him. Janerizel can likely perceive with her own ethereal sense the tiny living cells forming out of the energy and the moisture drawn from the night air, beginning to multiply with unnatural speed. The matter, layers upon layers of gradual thickening, becomes solid completely, no longer semi-transparent, no longer showing through itself, through vaporous gossamer, the cloth surface of the table.

The body, complete at last, is female. It is however still pulsing with material instability, hairless, not quite alive and more akin to wax. She is beautifully unreal, this woman. And the Duchess of White watches her emergence from out of nothing with an intense facial expression that can be understood as an incomprehensible mixture of affection, jealousy and some deeper emotions which are coming to the surface after being repressed for quite some time.

She appears to be jealous of this empty thing possessing the touch of his hands. . . . For, his elegant fingers are still moving against the now-resilient flesh, with every stoke bringing more natural color to the skin, delicious peach, a coral glow suddenly rising on the marble lips, and the scalp pierced by the light down of beginning hair. It is embryonic at first, yet quickly matures into a real deep auburn mane; it erupts like a forest, in waves, coming down her pale neck, bursting elsewhere on her body, eyelashes, skin-covering down. . . .

Or maybe the Duchess is jealous instead of his hands possessing the joy of this wondrous thing they are sculpting, and she craves to reach out and know the resiliency of the female for herself, know the smooth surface and the potential warmth underneath.

No matter; the woman lies unbreathing. Her lovely small breasts do not rise and fall under the expansion and contraction of the diaphragm; there is no air escaping her nostrils. And there is no pulse in her throat, no beating in her chest. A wax doll indeed.

He exclaims in frustration and stands back, his touch leaving the mannequin body. “I cannot!” he cries. “There’s a certain level that I can’t seem to reach—and thus she’s not complete.”

“You must,” says Izelle; somehow she is imploring with her gaze. “For it is the same level you must attain in order to understand the force that binds you here in the castle. It’s quite likely that long ago, the Just King only meant for each of us to know our own secret. This might be absurd, but I believe that all the secret powers of the Dukes are fundamentally the same. And they resonate on a single sorcerous level. It’s the exact intensity and sphere of it, on which depends our freedom.”

“Look at her,” Rossian says meanwhile, the attention of his eyes never leaving the body before him. “She lies incomplete, yet—yet I can almost perceive what I seek, what I’m missing. So infinitely close to my understanding, yet a hair-breadth away.”

Suddenly he turns to Janerizel. “Lady,” he says, looking at her. “As you see, I’ve done this. I’ve conquered and indeed utilized my primeval distaste. Verily, I’ve converted death—or rather, the
nonbeing
—through my aversion, into its opposite,
existence
. Yet why can’t I do more? I thought my knowledge of the arts was advanced indeed. Her body is almost alive, but not completely so. It exists, yes, but it does not
live
.”

The state of being in existence, and life
, he thinks in tumult,
are so close . . . so close. And yet they stand in two different spheres.

It is odd what Izelle must feel then, seeing the expression of his eyes accompanying the words, for it is
trusting
and innocent, washed clean of sarcasm and replete with longing, the search for that which he cannot attain. He has been transfigured by his arcane act of making, made receptive, sensitive. And he is asking her, honestly asking without arrogance.

“I am not sure . . .” she says quietly, set back by this novelty, even though she knows and is sure. “There are the greater details that must be dispatched, specific things. For example, start her heart beating, the organs functioning. You were so particular to the tiny particles of being, the dust of life that comprises the cells of our flesh, that you never concerned yourself with the
movement
, the living general kinesis of her.”

“Yes!” he exclaims. “What an imbecile, to overlook! Thank you for reminding me. Movement, yes! It’s inherent in the living mechanism. I see you’re aware of profound levels in your craft, yet—how do you know this? Unless—”

Izelle shrugs. “No, it’s not quite what you infer. My secret is closely related to yours. Unfortunately it is not identical.”

But again he is no longer listening, having approached his creation, and his hands begin their phosphorescent life-giving movement.

A shudder, light and half-real, moves through the form of the woman. The drum of life, the heart, is the epicenter of that shudder; suddenly, it happens. The drum starts its pounding automation. . . .

Blood rushes. Blood is blue and crimson and anemic-pale and dark with the riches of surrounding night, for it has been coalesced from the waters present in the night air; it is chilled by the cold and warmed by the passion of the one who sets it into pumping motion—and it is all one thing. Blood is moving, and thus, it is alive. The subterranean streams of it begin their sluggish activity in the veins and arteries, and continue to the tiniest passages of capillaries.

Her cheeks—the cheeks of the female creature—attain true subdermal coloration as a result. It’s not merely the presence of blood under the skin, but of a moving,
seething
stream.

Her lungs quiver once, initially. Then, in a sharp intake they fill with air for the first time, billow, unfurl like sails, supported by the pressure of the diaphragm, while the body on the table convulses and falls back. Rossian’s fingertips linger over her lips and nostrils to feel that air escaping and once more drawn in by the whirlpool of turbulence inside.

“She . . . lives?” whispers Izelle.

Rossian is silent, watching the body.

“My Lord? She—”

“
No
.” His voice is harsh. “No, she does not! Her body lives. Not
she
. Where is
she
?”

Where, where, where, where. . . .

“Only you would know the answer.”

Agonized, he begins to pace, his face now twitching with frustrated emotion. Nerves pull at his eyelids, a vein throbs in his forehead, echoes in his throat.

It is unbearable.

“What?!” he cries. “What is the missing element?”

Izelle averts her eyes. “I think I begin to understand,” she says quietly.

“
What
? Understand what, damn you?” Like a madman he turns on her.

But unperturbed, she continues in the same tone, staring off into the darkness of the night about them. “It’s the
responsibility.
Yes, I remember now. When I was also faced with that—final moment, the
decision
, I too, balked unconsciously at the sudden realization of the magnitude of it all, the responsibility for another being. I knew then that I had the terrible ultimate control over the
act
of my power and the repercussions that would follow.”

He watches her with agonized eyes.

“My Lord, can you at this moment imagine, understand what this all means? What it means for that body over there, that
thing
, to suddenly become a living self-aware being? Can you conceive of this Nairis—whoever she once was—getting up, smiling at you, and walking away of her own free will? For, somewhere in the ethereal sphere, her captive will cleaves to yours even now, and you must be the one to break with it in order to set her free. Can your pride and will endure such a parting?”

The Duke looks on, his eyes glittering with moisture in the candlelight. And
something
happens to him then, something in the intimate night. But it is not what she thinks.

It is his perception of her, the Duchess of White. All her former insignificance is suddenly effaced, transformed into forbidding will. He
sees
her then, sees
that
in her eyes, which he had only glimpsed briefly when holding her wrist-to-wrist, hearing the clockwork of her heartbeat and the impossibly dark gaping maw in her skull that terrified him. He knows what it is that makes her far more powerful than him with all his arcane learning and intensity, all his pent-up desire for freedom and his suppressed life force.

This doll with a rosebud mouth has attained the knowledge of her full power, while he has not.

She is potential force, curbed violent energy. She is an abyss of spheres, a universe without end. For, she knows how to pull from it, from the fabric of it all. . . .

And he does not.

. . . Not yet.

And yet—yes. It’s the will and the responsibility, he knows and realizes he’s known always.

And thus Duke Rossian approaches the corpse and for the last time forces his fear and awe of the death before him to lie in the open, in the forefront of his mind in a thin oil-slick coating of vulnerability. And for the first time, he allows himself to touch that fear—not a deep-set beast within him, but a shimmering illusion, a parasitic flimsy membrane. Fear reveals itself; it is a bubble to be popped. And then there’s nothing on the other side, nothing but his self. He allows the
wanting
and the urge to take over, and he reaches for the responsibility.

He feels a rift.

He is cracked and patched together.

Responsibility flies to him like a falcon, his falcon, trained to return. Responsibility is merely the undeniability of certain things, the acceptance of reality for itself and not himself.

And in a pale smoky film,
something
comes away from his mind. His consciousness is now a sphere of new, strangely sharp
clarity
, as though a bubble of self has expanded to twice its size. The walls of his castle spin around him, rushing upwards, as he experiences vertigo and a grounding in the present moment—sharp awareness of the night’s cold, the slight movement of air upon the numb skin of his face; gold flickering of two candles; the fuzzy microscopic chamois cloth surface; her body; body lying nude and perfect with the pump of lungs; two moths flying over the flames; overhead, sky, sky, sky. . . .

In his fixed grandeur of clarity, Rossian suddenly knows the exact meaning and result of any and all of his possible actions for that moment and all others to come—terrible, sharp, clean, perfect. And knowing, he realizes certain absolute inevitabilities and consequences. There are necessities of things arising as a result of other things. It is frightening, the unfurling of a new mindset.

Izelle never sees his eyes in that moment, is never later to be sure what it is that happens, but the candlelight knows.

It touches the gaunt man’s face, caresses it once and flees, as he, inhuman, turns away while appearing to glance into the night.

The Duke stands before the wax-like body. There is absolute determination in his fluid movement, and this time he is sure.

His hands flare with light and he runs them down the living-dead flesh. Izelle can surely feel it, the fierce light, and her own hair stands on end all over her body, in sympathetic resonance and something
else
.

It is like a string being tuned. Power comes to a snap all around and resettles into a new harmonic key. The walls of the castle sing. The meta-sound surrounds Izelle, perfect as the pitch within her own self. And then there is a
rush
of something.

The woman lying on the table shudders, full-body, and opens her eyes. In the dim candlelight they are colorless spots of shadow, the irises only slightly paler than the dilated pupils.

Rossian, the light of his hands extinguished, shudders also, his vigor spent. He lurches forward powerfully against the table, across the body of her who is now truly
present
among them.

Everything afterwards is anticlimactic. Izelle gives a small scream, then quickly stifles it. She comes forward to help him, and now it seems she is unable to hold her tongue. The jester is allowed to surface; it is the mad aspect of herself. “Come, my Duke, it cannot be so bad now, that you faint away. You’ve brought her to life, yet you would as soon kill her again by the weight of your body falling on her delicate newborn frame.”

Yet the nature of her touch to help him up belies the flippant words. Her small thin hand rests upon his arm with the faintest pressure of contact through velvet sleeve, as though she fears to hurt him. He has become a delicate bubble that can be broken with the point of a hair.