Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (31 page)

“Stay with us. Let us love you,” they whispered, and they reached out with sharp talons and teeth.

“I do not believe your love will prove to be good for me,” said the Duke. One of the women, fair of hair, with eyes of a peculiar translucent blue, reminded him of someone long forgotten, of a lover who had passed out of his life a long time before. He found her name in his mind, and would have called it aloud, to see if she turned, to see if she knew him, but the battle-steed lashed out with sharp claws, and the pale blue eyes were closed forever.

The battle-steed moved fast, like a panther, and each of the guardians fell to the ground, and writhed and was still.

The Duke stood before the Queen’s palace. He slipped from his battle-steed to the fresh earth.

“Here, I go on alone,” he said. “Wait, and one day I shall return.”

“I do not believe you will ever return,” said the battle-steed. “I shall wait until time itself is done, if need be. But still, I fear for you.”

The Duke touched his lips to the black steel of the steed’s head, and bade it farewell. He walked on to rescue the Queen. He remembered a monster who had ruled worlds and who would never die, and he smiled, because he was no longer that man. For the first time since his first youth he had something to lose, and the discovery of that
made him young again. His heart began to pound in his chest as he walked through the empty palace, and he laughed out loud.

She was waiting for him, in the place where flowers die. She was everything he had imagined that she would be. Her skirt was simple and white, her cheekbones were high and very dark, her hair was long and the infinitely dark color of a crow’s wing.

“I am here to rescue you,” he told her.

“You are here to rescue yourself,” she corrected him. Her voice was almost a whisper, like the breeze that shook the dead blossoms.

He bowed his head, although she was as tall as he was.

“Three questions,” she whispered. “Answer them correctly, and all you desire shall be yours. Fail, and your head will rest forever on a golden dish.” Her skin was the brown of the dead rose petals. Her eyes were the dark gold of amber.

“Ask your three questions,” he said, with a confidence he did not feel.

The Queen reached out a finger and she ran the tip of it gently along his cheek. The Duke could not remember the last time that anybody had touched him without his permission.

“What is bigger than the universe?” she asked.

“Underspace and Undertime,” said the Duke. “For they both include the universe, and also all that is not the universe. But I suspect you seek a more poetic, less accurate answer. The mind, then, for it can hold a universe, but also imagine things that have never been, and are not.”

The Queen said nothing.

“Is that right? Is that wrong?” asked the Duke. He wished, momentarily, for the snakelike whisper of his master advisor, unloading, through its neural plug, the accumulated wisdom of his advisors over the years, or even the chitter of his information beetle.

“The second question,” said the Queen. “What is greater than a King?”

“Obviously, a Duke,” said the Duke. “For all Kings, Popes, Chancellors, Empresses and such serve at and only at my will. But again, I suspect that you are looking for an answer that is less accurate and more imaginative. The mind, again, is greater than a King. Or a Duke. Because, although I am the inferior of nobody, there are those who could imagine a world in which there is something superior to me, and something else again superior to that, and so on. No! Wait! I have the answer. It is from the Great Tree:
Kether,
the Crown, the concept of monarchy, is greater than any King.”

The Queen looked at the Duke with amber eyes, and she said, “The final question for you. What can you never take back?”

“My word,” said the Duke. “Although, now I come to think of it, once I give my word, sometimes circumstances change and sometimes the worlds themselves change in unfortunate or unexpected ways. From time to time, if it comes to that, my word needs to be modified in accordance with realities. I would say Death, but, truly, if I find myself in need of someone I have previously disposed of, I simply have them reincorporated . . .”

The Queen looked impatient.

“A kiss,” said the Duke.

She nodded.

“There is hope for you,” said the Queen. “You believe you are my only hope, but, truthfully, I am yours. Your answers were all quite wrong. But the last was not as wrong as the rest of them.”

The Duke contemplated losing his head to this woman, and found the prospect less disturbing than he would have expected.

A wind blew through the garden of dead flowers, and the Duke was put in mind of perfumed ghosts.

“Would you like to know the answer?” she asked.

“Answers,” he said. “Surely.”

“Only one answer, and it is this: the heart,” said the Queen. “The heart
is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity. The heart is greater than a King, because a heart can know a King for what he is, and still love him. And once you give your heart, you cannot take it back.”

“I
said
a kiss,” said the Duke.

“It was not as wrong as the other answers,” she told him. The wind gusted higher and wilder and for a heartbeat the air was filled with dead petals. Then the wind was gone as suddenly as it appeared, and the broken petals fell to the floor.

“So. I have failed, in the first task you set me. Yet I do not believe my head would look good upon a golden dish,” said the Duke. “Or upon any kind of a dish. Give me a task, then, a quest, something I can achieve to show that I am worthy. Let me rescue you from this place.”

“I am never the one who needs rescuing,” said the Queen. “Your advisors and scarabs and programs are done with you. They sent you here, as they sent those who came before you, long ago, because it is better for you to vanish of your own volition, than for them to kill you in your sleep. And less dangerous.” She took his hand in hers. “Come,” she said. They walked away from the garden of dead flowers, past the fountains of light, spraying their lights into the void, and into the citadel of song, where perfect voices waited at each turn, sighing and chanting and humming and echoing, although nobody was there to sing.

Beyond the citadel was only mist.

“There,” she told him. “We have reached the end of everything, where nothing exists but what we create, by act of will or by desperation. Here in this place I can speak freely. It is only us, now.” She looked into his eyes. “You do not have to die. You can stay with me. You will be happy to have finally found happiness, a heart, and the value of existence. And I will love you.”

The Duke looked at her with a flash of puzzled anger. “I asked to care. I asked for something to care about. I asked for a heart.”

“And they have given you all you asked for. But you cannot be their monarch and have those things. So you cannot return.”

“I . . . I asked them to make this happen,” said the Duke. He no longer looked angry. The mists at the edge of that place were pale, and they hurt the Duke’s eyes when he stared at them too deeply or too long.

The ground began to shake, as if beneath the footsteps of a giant.

“Is anything true here?” asked the Duke. “Is anything permanent?”

“Everything is true,” said the Queen. “The giant comes. And it will kill you, unless you defeat it.”

“How many times have you been through this?” asked the Duke. “How many heads have wound up on golden dishes?”

“Nobody’s head has ever wound up on a golden platter,” she said. “I am not programmed to kill them. They battle for me and they win me and they stay with me, until they close their eyes for the last time. They are content to stay, or I make them content. But you . . . you need your discontent, don’t you?”

He hesitated. Then he nodded.

She put her arms around him and kissed him, slowly and gently. The kiss, once given, could not be taken back.

“So now, I will fight the giant and save you?”

“It is what happens.”

He looked at her. He looked down at himself, at his engraved armor, at his weapons. “I am no coward. I have never walked away from a fight. I cannot return, but I will not be content to stay here with you. So I will wait here, and I will let the giant kill me.”

She looked alarmed. “Stay with me. Stay.”

The Duke looked behind him, into the blank whiteness. “What lies out there?” he asked. “What is beyond the mist?”

“You would run?” she asked. “You would leave me?”

“I will walk,” he said. “And I will not walk away. But I will walk towards. I wanted a heart. What is on the other side of that mist?”

She shook her head. “Beyond the mist is
Malkuth:
the Kingdom. But it does not exist unless you make it so. It becomes as you create it. If you dare to walk into the mist, then you will build a world or you will cease to exist entirely. And you can do this thing. I do not know what will happen, except for this: if you walk away from me you can never return.”

He heard a pounding still, but was no longer certain that it was the feet of a giant. It felt more like the beat, beat, beat of his own heart.

He turned towards the mist, before he could change his mind, and he walked into the nothingness, cold and clammy against his skin. With each step he felt himself becoming less. His neural plugs died, and gave him no new information, until even his name and his status were lost to him.

He was not certain if he was seeking a place or making one. But he remembered dark skin and her amber eyes. He remembered the stars—there would be stars where he was going, he decided. There must be stars.

He pressed on. He suspected he had once been wearing armor, but he felt the damp mist on his face, and on his neck, and he shivered in his thin coat against the cold night air.

He stumbled, his foot glancing against the curb.

Then he pulled himself upright, and peered at the blurred streetlights through the fog. A car drove close—too close—and vanished past him, the red rear lights staining the mist crimson.

My old manor,
he thought, fondly, and that was followed by a moment of pure puzzlement, at the idea of Beckenham as his old anything. He’d only just moved there. It was somewhere to use as a base. Somewhere to escape from. Surely, that was the point?

But the idea, of a man running away (a lord or a duke, perhaps, he thought, and liked the way it felt in his head), hovered and hung in his mind, like the beginning of a song.

“I’d rather write a something song than rule the world,” he said aloud, tasting the words in his mouth. He rested his guitar case against a wall, put his hand in the pocket of his duffel coat, found a pencil stub and a shilling notebook, and wrote them down. He’d find a good two-syllable word for the
something
soon enough, he hoped.

Then he pushed his way into the pub. The warm, beery atmosphere embraced him as he walked inside. The low fuss and grumble of pub conversation. Somebody called his name, and he waved a pale hand at them, pointed to his wristwatch and then to the stairs. Cigarette smoke gave the air a faint blue sheen. He coughed, once, deep in his chest, and craved a cigarette of his own.

Up the stairs with the threadbare red carpeting, holding his guitar case like a weapon, whatever had been in his mind before he turned the corner into the High Street evaporating with each step. He paused in the dark corridor before opening the door to the pub’s upstairs room. From the buzz of small talk and the clink of glasses, he knew there were already a handful of people waiting and working. Someone was tuning a guitar.

Monster?
thought the young man.
That’s got two syllables
.

He turned the word around in his mind several times before he decided that he could find something better, something bigger, something more fitting for the world he intended to conquer, and, with only a momentary regret, he let it go forever, and walked inside.

M
Y DARLING
,

Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me, placed coins in the palm of my hand). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.

I write this in English, your language, a language I also speak. My English is good. I was some years ago in England and in Scotland. I spent a whole summer standing in Covent Garden, except for the month of Edinburgh Festival, when I am in Edinburgh. People who put money in my box in Edinburgh included Mr. Kevin Spacey the actor, and Mr. Jerry Springer the American television star, who was in Edinburgh for an opera about his life.

I have put off writing this for so long, although I have wanted to,
although I have composed it many times in my head. Shall I write about you? About me?