Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (88 page)

And yet Fulke did try to run, of course he did, because it was predicted that he would; and he had barely made the turn towards the door before his shoulder was seized and held. He struggled to pull free, but Blaise's arm that gripped him might as well have been cast of iron or carved from rock. This again was as it had been foretold; as if strengthened tenfold by that certainty, those fingers were as impassive to Fulke's struggles as Blaise's face was to his words.

'Blaise, man, you were my man before ever you belonged to that - that creature, remember the oaths you swore to me, to the God
...'

By all appearances, Blaise had entirely forgotten them. But Blaise, Fulke could hold the others' eyes only for a moment, or for a series of moments, glances snatched against desire when their gaze was drawn against their will, when Fulke did scream and scream again to them and to his absent men and to his God who was not worshipped here. Through all of that, it was still the King who held their attention, because his flesh was disintegrating as they watched.

It was a slow process, or it seemed slow compared to all the deaths and the fires and the brutalities they had witnessed in Surayon, where injustice came at the speed of a blow, the leap of a flame; and yet it was too fast by years, by generations. Mortal bodies were not made to lose coherence suddenly or from within, except in the patient darkness of a crypt. What they watched here was like all the little secret changes happening between eyeblinks, the hand of time scrabbling in a frenzy. The King did not rot so much as crumble, like a corpse that had desiccated in the Sands and turned to sand itself, falling into dust as it lost any memory of itself.

It began in the eyes, where he had kept the only visible sign of his power or his strangeness, a glitter in the darkness, a hint of lights far off and busy. Now they shone and dazzled, and not only within the confines of his gaze; they shone through his skin, they danced in the spaces where his bones ought to be.

Light and shadow: it seemed that his flesh was shaped over something quite other than a skeleton.
I do not serve
he had said, and why should he, when his own body told the whole story of the God that Fulke would have him worship, when he was himself both battleground and battle?

The King had lost his bones to lights; he lost his skin, his flesh to dust. It fell away in trickles and runs, forgetful of its former shape. It seemed golden in the lamplight, and shimmered as it was swept up by the currents of light as they swirled and spun. There was no skull where his face was lost, only the patterns that dust could make in a silent, vicious wind that wo
und around itself, tightl
y and more tightly so. It ripped the Kings simple garment into shreds and tatters as the fabric fell in upon
itself and was snared in the ru
shing of that wind; it showed its own weave only in the way it drew the dust like a line, like a thread bound round and round a spinning bobbin.

It might have been Elisande who knew first what it was, if she'd been alert to an early hint; it was Julianne's father who named it.

'Djinni,' he said, which was obvious to all of them by then, except perhaps to Fulke.

It gave him no response, beyond its rising like a pillar before them. It stretched itself until it had achieved almost the height and slender grace of the pillars round about, though it still hung poised above the old chest the King had sat on and it did not try to reach into the darkness of the dome.

'Djinni Khaldor,' the Shadow said. If he were Shadow still, if he had a King to serve and chose to serve him. He named the djinni as though he recognised it; the girls recognised the name, of course, and Elisande grunted,
of course,
as though she too should have known the immediate differences between this djinni and her own, or any. 'I think you lied to me, djinni. You said "It has always been me", and that is not true. The King was once
the Duc de Charelles, and the Duc
was once a young man whom I knew. I will swear that he was a man of normal flesh, whatever they say of him in the wider world; and he was still so, I think, still a man until he came to be King and closed himself into this place.'

The djinni said nothing. The man who had been Shadow while the King still had a shadow to cast took a slow, angry breath and faced his betrayal squarely; said, 'I have done you service enough in the last forty years that I think you owe me some questions answered.'

'You think I lie to you, and yet you will stand and demand answers. Your thinking is as loose as your under
standing; you should grip more ti
ghdy.
I
think that you have asked me questions enough for one man
’
s lifetime, and that in only half a life.'

‘I
did not know then that you were a djinni.'

'You always knew that I was a djinni. What you did not know is that I was also the King. But ask your questions; I have said already that I will answer them. Only the answers may be dangerous to you, because knowledge is always chancy. I will not claim a price, except from Fulke who is paying it already.'

No one there said
let Fulke go,
or even thought it; at least one was guiltily delighted to see him held by a djinni's servant, claimed by the djinni itself.

Coren - who thought he would answer after this to no tide other than his name - said, 'Where is the King my master?'

‘I
am the King your master.'

'Where is the man who was Due de Charelles be
fore he was King of Outremer?' ‘I
do not know.'

'It's lying,' Elisande said fiercely. 'Of course it knows, they always know. But Esren lied to me too, and they weren't supposed to do that. I thought the djinn were honest,' suddenly accusing, facing the creature where it rose, where it hovered, where it spun.

‘I
know you did. Why did you?'

Another day she might not have answered, she might have been wise or cunning. But another day she would not have been here in the dim light and the heavy air, watching the way it leaned against the stillness, feeling the way it leaned against the truth.

'Because I have always been told so, because it seemed to be true, because it seemed right that something made of spirit could not lie.' Men walked on the edge of darkness always, groping for a path; their only light fell behind them to show where they had been, and they called it memory or history. Or God, Julianne said; lies, said Elisande. The djinn moved in a mist, perhaps, but they stood in a pool of light that fell all ways around them. It would be unfair, it would be wrong to see so much more and not describe it truly.

'Who was it told you?'

'My father,' and she said it firmly, determinedly, almost proudly.

'And who told him and his father, who was it told the world?'

That one she had to pause, to glance at her grandfather where he stood mute and impassioned, to think about; in the end there was only one answer possible. 'The djinn,' she said, chagrined for her entire race, for their innocence and gullibility.

'The djinn indeed. Myself, indeed, I said it. Long ago now; and often since, when men gave me the opportunity'

'What, and were you lying all the time?'

'Perhaps I was,' it said, as though that were something it too had to think about.

'Why, though? Why would you do that, great one, do you like to laugh at us little people as you lie?'

'I have laughed at humans, in my time. But perhaps I did it for some other reason; perhaps everything that I have ever done was done to bring us here, to this place and this conversation.'

She would have asked
why?
again, but Coren broke in to lead the djinn back to what it had said before, what Elisande had challenged.

'And are you telling the truth now, then? I will risk that, and ask again. Do you truly not know where the King my friend is to be found?'

'Truly, I do not. I have watched many a human die, and I still do not know where their spirits go when it happens.'

'Is he dead? Since when?'

'Since he died.'

'How long since?'

Almost forty years.'

'Did you kill him?'

'Not by my touch. I came to him, and he died; that was understood. I had foreseen it. So perhaps had he.'

Perhaps so; how could they tell, if the djinn could lie?

'What have you done with his body?'

For answer, it drifted a little away, to the further side of the rug-strewn dais. Briefly their eyes followed it, as though it were going to show them; then Elisande made a noise in her throat - contempt or self-contempt, even she was uncertain - and ran forward, jumped up, pulled open the lid of the old chest.

It would have been easily big enough to hold the new-slain body of a man, and a bigger man than the King had ever been. In fact what lay in there, half-curled like a child, was something smaller than Elisande herself, the figure of a wizened thing. She stooped and lifted it out into the light before either of the older men could reach her.

'It's not
...'

She genuinely thought it was not a man at all, as she lifted it. Too light, too dry, too browned and tough ever to have been human: at first she thought it was another lie, a tease, a dead man sculpted, made, a mockery. Her own rather had put a poppet in a cell, and made it human-seeming; that had moved, at least, which this did not.

When she saw the skull s shape beneath the leather skin, when she saw how the thin black lips were drawn back from real teeth, she still did not think it was human, or the King. A giant monkey, dried and salted? It was still too small, too twisted surely to be a man
...

But there was white hair clinging to the scalp of it, and no fur else. And the skull had a human shape, like no monkey that she had ever seen or heard about; and yes, it was a man, of course it was, deny it as she liked she could not change it.

Instead she knelt and laid him on the carpets; looked up at her grandfather, at the father of her friend, and said, 'Is this him?'

'Oh, yes,' the Princip said, 'it isn't lying now.'

'It might be, about how he died
...'

'No.' Julianne had seen a man touched by the djinni, she knew what kind of death that was; and there was no visible mark on this body, only the terrible absence of its owner. Terrible and long-term: very soon after he closed the gates of the Dir'al Shahan. Outremer had been ruled by a djinni for a generation. And the djinn were supposed not to meddle in the affairs of men — but then the djinn were supposed not to He, not to be able to, and that had proved to be as false as any lie else.

Even so, it had been the experience of men for hundreds of years, that the djinn were not concerned with what they did or how they lived in the world. The first sign otherwise that she could think of was her own first meeting with a djinni, with this djinni. She gazed at it where it roiled in the dust of its own deception, and asked the first question of her own. 'Why are you so different? You're not like Esren, even, let alone like the djinn in the histories I've read, or the stories Jemel tells. What makes you play these games?'
Why kill a king, and spend
forty
years in imitation of him?

'I am
...
incomplete,' it said, with just the faintest hesitation before the word; she reminded herself again that it was a liar and an actor, supremely skilled at both. It likely had no feeling and no doubt, only intentions; she would not be swayed.

'In what way, incomplete?'

'I have given myself away,' it said. 'Small pieces of myself, to strengthen these my servants in their tasks,' and its servants were still going about their tasks in the shadows of the great chamber, no whit disturbed. Marron might have done that too, she thought, with his red eyes and his unnatural powers, with the Daughter slowly sealing him off from the world; she was ahead of the djinni already when it said, 'And rather more of me, of my substance went long ago. It is almost its own creature now, though not a djinni, far from that. There are those of my kind who will say that I am no longer truly of the djinn; its absence diminishes me, so that I can do these things and find some amusement in them.'

And now, at last, 'Why would you want to?' from Elisande, where she knelt still above the body of the King. 'You must have known that this would happen, that you would be — reduced,' in what was almost cruel imitation, except that she could see no way to be truly cruel to something that had no true humanity, only a decaying of its proper self.

'It was necessary. The 'ifrit meant to take this world from us.'

'I thought this world was ours.'

'Lisan. We are the djinn. Do your pastures belong to the cattle, does the soil belong to the worm? You may do as you will, but we are still the djinn. The 'ifrit, though - the 'ifrit wanted this world for themselves, and they thought they could take it. We are stronger, but they are many, they thought we would not fight them. Why should we risk death, for this crude clay?'

'They thought you would not fight them,' the Princip repeated. 'They were right, weren't they?'