Chapter 17: Of Masks and Mendacities
I had stumbled into a vibrant castle as a shadow of the world’s callousness.
I had ascended gilded towers and secured a high seat of delusion, and having learned from the best, mastered deception as my common tongue.
I wore masks belonging to none truly, but some god of greater consequence whom exists purely through the guises shared and stolen by all, and found their inner stitchings most comfortable on faces conscious of their potential for treachery.
I had found companionship in a man bred to be the symbol of my abhorrence.
In killing him, I’d constructed a staircase of bones, to usurp a throne and crown of bitter morrow, symbols visible to none besides their creator. In that same stroke, I’d fallen from all heights previously ascended, landing with little but memories of a past meant to satiate a lifetime, yet finding myself feeling hollow.
In the right moments, we are fortunate if we manage to feel nothing, if only to avoid a darker despair.
The self-perpetuated obligation of patrolling graveyards of past regrets and recollections is a burden that men have sought to forget for centuries, through every conceivable medium of addictions—some honorable, others less. The artist drowns himself in his work, the drunk in his drink, the devout in their prayer, but one way or another, the only differentiation is whether we face or run from ourselves.
But you don’t care for all that, do you?
You’re here to see how a dead man speaks. Curious, isn’t it, that you’ve been listening to one’s thoughts this entire time?
Sarkana’s mouth hung agape with the last of her incantations deafened by the throbbing in my body, a heartbeat’s pulse magnified to fleshy quakes.
“I thought you might never see,” she breathed through a wearied and relieved sigh, before slumping over slightly from the exertion of her casting. “You haven’t the faintest idea how I worried, how I feared you might despise me. I can hardly believe that you … that you,” she shook her head, a tear of joy about to fall from her eye. “But it’s finally over, now.”
“Yes, I understand,” I repeated, shaking. The walls of the room dismantled, crumbs of stone falling like flakes of dust, crashing against the floor with what was left of my mental stability. “I understand, I do. Truly.”
“Yes?” she echoed with a soft confusion.
“I understand you.”
When I got to my feet, it felt as if every fiber of my body had been satiated, strengthened, bolstered. But now, molten waves of revelation and animosity were beating against it. In the last glimpse I’d seen of myself from the mirror, I’d watched the pallor of my skin slowly fade to healthier hues. A corpse temporarily taking on the appearance of a living body.
My corpse. A mask of the living, and only that.
But not a moment could be afforded to process that. “I understand that you led me here under illusions of heroism. That you showered me with pleasant falsities, day by day, threading my trust through your needle, all so you could suture me with it.”
“No Casimir, nothing false. I lied only because—”
“There! That’s all I needed to hear,” I growled and closed the distance between us.
“You’re confused, exhausted. Your body is still learning—”
“Oh, I am anything but exhausted. I might be dead, but I’m more myself than I’ve ever felt since the first time I stepped foot on this damned cemetery you call a home. You played on my weakness until I was little more than a puppet beneath your fingers. Another body amongst your collection, a disgusting, revolting, pitiless representation of your obsession with death because you cannot bring yourself to reconcile a life amongst the living.”
Her whispers drowned under my shouts. “Please don’t. Please don’t say such things.” Every word spat was another dagger, her excited expression shrinking to pain. “I only—”
“You were alone. You had nobody. So you created someone who would be damned to you, to your life of feeding from the deceased, forever. Is that it? Is that why?!” I screamed.
“No, no, no. Nothing like that.” She stumbled herself into a corner, with my teeth closing the finger’s width between hers.
“You killed me, not so that I might live, but so that you could. You can’t bear the thought that the world finds you repulsive. You found the first person who had any scrap of empathy for you so you thought you’d keep them chained to you for eternity.”
“I thought you would—”
“What? ‘Enjoy’ it? Is that what you were going to say? As if this is a gift?!” I laughed. I laughed and I gripped her shoulders until my knuckles paled. “Just which delusion finally pushed you to do it? Or had you been planning this all along? Whether I died at the crossroads or at your doorstep, it hardly mattered. My life was an inconvenience to you, just another—look at me!— just another process in your ploy.”
My venom came stuttering, as I was surprised to find hateful tears spilling down my cheeks, not just for her betrayal, but for my stupidity. “And I … I let Fahim’s last words go wasted. Because he was right, that’s what I hate most about all this. That he got to die so you could carve my skin to ribbons. You were never to be trusted. You took something that can’t be fixed; you took my mortality. And that’s what you don’t understand, Sarkana. Death isn’t a disservice, an end for us all to ignore. It’s a part of living. Life is only beautiful because it ends, and somehow, we have to find a way to make our own eternity out of nothing. Don’t think just because you meddle with death that you don’t fear it. You’re too much a coward to face the notion that you fear death a great deal more than most. Why else would you hide away for a lifetime, never to live, never to love, if only to know protection from the one thing that should have pushed you to love and live in the first place?”
And there, I watched her shatter. If ever I held doubts for words’ potential to afflict irreparable wounds, all of it was dispelled there. Despite her joy at seeing the success of me—the culmination of her experiments—my words had rent deeper than her obsession, deeper than her fears, to do precisely what any blade would do. It spilled them out for both of us to see.
After the last word had been drawn, I felt her blood in the silence, palpable as the frost in the air. I almost regretted some of it. It wasn’t her her life practices I abhorred, it was that she made me a victim of them.
“I …” I began a quiet apology, but fell silent instead.
She sank to the floor between whimpers and stifled sobs.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I’m not a monster. You aren’t either. We aren’t. I only wanted to make you beautiful. I didn’t … I didn’t …” She was cracking at my feet, the years of solitude being cast in white, blinding scrutiny. “It is a gift. I promise you,” she whispered. “Please understand. I see you. Why can’t you see me? Why are you doing this to me?”
I smeared a hand across the markings carved into my chest, before spreading the chilled blood across her cheek. My palm found a grip on her jaw, and I pushed her into my chest, uncertain if I wanted to embrace or suffocate her. I resisted the urge to apologize, then stifled the instinct to hurt her. She deserved one of those things, but of which, I couldn’t be certain, and from me specifically, it was impossible to decide.
And didn’t I deserve precisely what she did to me? Wasn’t this fortune’s retribution for all the time’s I’d abused her?
“What does this mean, what you’ve turned me into …” I continued. “Will I even need to breathe?”
“Yes, as you always have.”
“Must I rest?”
“If you desire it.”
“Only if I desire?”
“Mostly.”
“Should I eat?”
“Rarely, if ever.”
“Then how should I … ‘eat’?”
“You won’t. You’ll take what nobody else uses. The dead. You’ll use what’s left.”
I saw Fahim's face frozen and bloodied in the road. A tear slid down and salted my tongue. “And how long do I have to live, now?”
“As long as you can … eat.” She continued to repress her sobs, the staccato convulsions of her chest and body like a confused heartbeat in my arms. I pitied her. I hated her. I wanted her to die. I needed her to live, to show me how to survive.
How would Zakora find this music? I wondered. If bloodshed and fighting was the epitome of humanity’s carnal heart, didn’t this make me the art and not the artist, to be swept into a maelstrom of devastation, to be one of Sarkana’s victims? I regarded her face. There was no triumph on her snot and tear-covered expression. I struggled to understand who was the victor and who was the fallen.
“How am I supposed to live, now, like this?”
“You were perfect for it, Casimir. You still are. That is why I chose you,” she wept as she squeezed herself further into the corner. “I thought you were the only one who might appreciate it, someone who could make the gods envious. I thought you would be grateful.”
I never wanted to make gods envious. I wanted to disappoint them with how little I groveled at the feet of their imposed tragedies. Yet here I was at one of them. No hat, no laughter, no smiles. But I couldn’t see myself as a victim, not after all I’d done. How could I? “There is another … lingering question. Why the false affection? The long nights together? If you had planned this all along, why not kill me the first moment you saw me?”
“It was not false. I had …” She shook her head. “Go. I can see I overestimated your intelligence. I cannot undo any of this, but if you are so eager to have your mortality back, wander off, die somewhere. Go on then. You are not beyond death, even now. If that’s how far you must go to be rid of me, I won’t stop you. I’ll even pretend like I never cared, either.”
“You’re pitying yourself now? You made drawing parchment of my body and you are the one weeping? You owe me this,” I seethed.
“Leave.”
“You do. I didn’t pass into the realm of the dead just to keel over now. I had no intention of dying when I was alive and I have no intention now.”
Somehow, she found it in herself to meet my eyes, her rims wet and scarlet as she must’ve found a indecipherable gaze of choked affection and malice staring back from mine. “You’re right.” She nodded and cleaned her face. I buttoned up my tunic, wincing as the wounds caught on loose threads of wool.
“No lies. No half-truths.”
“Not anymore,” she replied and got to her feet, leading me through one of the doors. “I’ll show you more. I’ll show you whatever you wish. What you think can’t change anything, now.”
And that was more terrifying than anything else, that I was no longer an observer of her craft, but a piece of it. I might’ve imagined myself years later, neglecting these memories at the bottom of a glass in a tavern or in the sheets of a bed before greeting the morning light.
But that had faded, I suppose you could say, with my life.
At our entrance in another chamber of her catacombs, more torches spluttered to life, illuminating a room lined with bookshelves, parchment, countless quills and inkwells, half a dozen desks, and on their surfaces, jagged stones the color of a deepened twilight sky. Amongst them were contraptions whose purposes could not be deciphered by look alone.
We continued through another door, another blaze of light, and into a hall of corpses affixed to stone beds behind panes of glass, the grey tongue of the stretching walkway hypnotic with its exceeding number of silent inhabitants.
“When I first saw you, I saw somebody who looked into death’s eyes and wondered what more was there. You seemed to have a grip on yourself, like you could laugh at anything. Only fools think that death is the final mystery. And,” she added with spite, “only fools do not fear it. Even if there is so, so much more beyond it,” she said as some tears still squeezed from her eyes, tears that I liked to think had been waiting for decades. “But you were more timid than I thought, when we first met. After the killing at the crossroads and your reactions to my practices,” she paused and shook her head sadly, “I thought I had made a mistake in choosing you.”
“So you never did save me, did you? My plan had been sound all along. The water would never have crushed my body.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “That was my first lie, the first of three.”
We walked through another door, this time in the left face of a wall, where we turned into a chamber that was filled with dozens of forest critters, many of them not wholly themselves. Their petrified, shriveled bodies beneath the curved glass of various-sized display cases, all showcased Sarkana’s talent of stitching limb from limb, eye to eye; their mismatching parts the only similarity between them all.
“Must you force me to goad you on?”
“This is not easy for me, Casimir.”
"Good. It shouldn’t be.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Then go on.”
“The day you lost your eye, I thought better on that favor you promised me. I thought, perhaps, you would not be so agreeable with what it would ask of you.”
“You mean to say that this is not the favor?” I boiled again. “What more could you expect?”
“No, it is only one part of it,” she replied, ignoring the rest.
She pushed on another door, into a room similar to the last, only this one’s subjects were not animals. They were humans. Their incongruous limbs as telling as a doll after it’s been sutured beyond recognition of its original state. We paced around them, each of us choosing opposite sides to observe, before we both lingered back to the center of the room, and ceased moving.
“But then you had a willingness to take Fahim’s eye despite the ramifications, something that confused as much as excited me. You were grateful. I hoped, then, that you might still accept the task. I imagined that you would feel obliged, perhaps even enthusiastic.”
I paused, only because her subtle manipulation and analysis rang all too familiar to the processes in my own mind. “And if I didn’t?” I asked.
“Precisely.”
“Precisely?”
She held another pause, evidently pained by my slow grasp. “After our first meeting, I truly hoped we would be companions. I did. Your life was never an inconvenience to me, even if there was a time when all I saw you as was a means to an end. After everything, I had hoped our time together would not come to this.”
“Come to what, mutilation?”
“No,” she scoffed, “your alteration was never meant to be avoided. I had hoped you would be willing to help me, of your own accord.”
“Well,” I laughed, “there is little chance of that.”
“Yet here you are. You should know by now that I am not one to play with chances.”
“I don’t think you understand. Why would I help you now? Why should I?”
“No, Casimir. It’s you who’s misunderstood.”
“How?”
“I’m afraid you’re caught. ‘Should’ is the only reason you need.”
I laughed. “After all this, you still boil down to petty threats? You’ll kill me, so to speak?”
“No. I don’t have to, because I know you’d never let yourself die.”
The pieces fell. Past frustration and hatred, I had said all I needed to, and what remained was a stale, unendurable silence.
“Tell me, are you familiar with the Mancer’s Stone?”
“All too well.”
“I am sorry to admit—truly sorry—now that things have settled the way they have, but I have no means by which to replenish your life other than the slate. Of course, I am under no delusion that you wish to stay with me any longer, or that you even wish for me to remain in your life as soon as you can survive on your own.”
I could see it in the flickers of her eyes, how she had imagined the splitting or conjoining of our paths. In one instance, I awoke in wonder to find myself changed, and in the other, so horrified that I attempted to kill her, only to be caged by her ultimatum. How terribly surprising it must have been, I realized, for her to find me in a confused and softened state somewhere between, where what affection there was between us was forced to be tortured in excruciating lengths, rather than severed or swelled by one fatal realization. “Survive on my own?”
“At this moment, I have no device capable of transcribing energy from one vessel to yours. There must always be a median, but the only thing capable of that is the weight of a small castle, and is permanently affixed to this home. I need something of a stronger material if I am to craft something more … lightweight.
“Previously,” she continued after bending close to one of her cadavers, “I could never dream of reducing something so intricate as the slate’s glyphs into a smaller device, until, well, until I did.”
“The Mancer’s Stone.”
She nodded. “There are perhaps other materials like it, but their existence or location isn’t certain, and if they are, they’ll be worth no small fortune. The Mancer’s Stone, however, is no gamble, and it’s been in hiding long enough for its protectors to grow careless. Retrieve it for me, and I’ll make you a fork only you can eat from. Until then … ” she flicked her head back towards the winding hallways, “I’m afraid you are rather dependent on me.”
“You are horrifically crafty, Sarkana,” I relented. “There’s no doubt in my mind that you are not ‘afraid’ of my dependency anymore than you were afraid to drive your knives into my chest.”
But even when she grinned, I could tell she was not convinced of her own heartlessness. There was a telling twitch that made me wonder how she’d managed to do any of this at all. “ ‘Horrifically crafty.’ I could only expect my favorite compliment to come from you. You understand why I did what I did, don’t you? Why I had to?”
Fahim was right. Many people see life as a monotonous cycle of disappointments, habits, failures, with only a few rare moments of achievement and true bliss to brighten that bleary fog. Try as we might to make peace with it, there is nothing more intoxicating than seizing that bliss through our own indulgences, our own happiness and thrill, even if that means, sometimes, that it is found at the disadvantage of another. Perhaps, for some, that only makes it better. I recollected the burst of emotions as I killed the guards in Foxfeather Castle, the thugs in the alleyway. Although I had not waited decades, nor had any prediction of such invigorating rushes of blood, I had tasted what she had: an unparalleled gratification in one’s own peculiar and taboo choice of expression.
“Yes. I do. This time, I mean it.” I was only disheartened to find myself on the wrong end of it. I switched the lens covering my left eye, and found myself being clung to by the stretching arms of the deceased, every one of them recoiling from Sarkana as if she was a torch and they were wary moths, all too conscious of being cast into oblivion by her touch.
“This was your second lie,” I observed aloud. “Their spirits aren’t freed once they die. You’ve kept them here, to drain them.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “And my third.”
“Your third lie?”
“I told you that I was no murderer.”
“Did you really think I believed you?”
“Would it have made a difference if you had?”
“No.”
She stared at me through the flowing ether of a dispersing phantom.
“But you’re still hiding something.”
“Do you think someone like me is ever in lack of skeletons for her closet?”
“Fahim wasn’t just an infant somewhere in your distant memory. You knew him very well. He was one of your pupils, wasn’t he?”
“Impressive deduction,” she said. “He was no brilliant child, but he had his father’s propensities for study.”
“And his father, well, he had been your colleague for many, many years, not just for a handful. He had more than enough time to realize the danger behind your studies. In all likelihood, it must have been difficult for him to have you exiled from the Academy.”
“Aha,” Sarkana hummed sadly. “So my stories are not as cryptic as I thought.”
“And yet you told them to me.”
“Lies are not so satisfying once they become the truth.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighty-seven or eighty-eight. I’m beginning to lose count,” she said with the carelessness of an adolescent.
I swallowed my nausea. “One final question. If you had the power to transfer life into your own body using the slate, why put me through this? Why kill me?”
“Do you know how many lives it takes to reverse one year of aging? Too many,” she answered before I could guess. “As I said before, it’s a matter of ice into water, that’s all. Souls resist living vessels, irritatingly enough. But a body only mimicking the mechanisms of one, well, that’s quite a different matter.”
“Mimicking?”
“Your body’s a clock, now. A more efficient skeleton of all the functions it used to perform. Those souls, think of them as the key to winding your spring.”
I leaned closer to one of the coffin-shaped panes of glass. Inside, I recognized the silversmith’s apprentice who had gone missing just a few days before William’s birthday. He was the apprentice to the man who’d crafted my feather ring. One of his eyes, incidentally, seemed to have been replaced.
The boy’s spirit sloughed out from his skin, met my gaze briefly, then went to roam the catacombs.
“It’s strange. I feel … only slightly different than before,” I admitted.
“The years will tell the difference. But even I can’t answer how or when, or to what extent.”
“And yet I am dead. You’ve killed me.”
“Most would say so. But killing only begins with the body; it ends with the soul. You are far from dead. Trust me.”
“And yet, I’m not truly living, am I?”
Sarkana shrugged. “You never struck me as the type to have these kind of questions answered for you.”
“No, I suppose I’m not.”
“Then tell me, what’s changed?”