Free The Golden by Lucius Shepard Page B

us is
that we are stronger, and our cruelties are but vivid exaggerations
of their cruelties. Even the worst of us has his rival in evil among
humankind. So”—she clasped her hands, held them to her
breast—“when you ask me about Kostolec, I am forced to
say, we do what we must to live. What he did may seem evil or a
waste, however you wish to characterize it. But he is old, of another
generation. He has forgotten what once he was, and he lives only
partially in the world that you and I inhabit.” She made a
plaintive noise. “That’s all I know to say. That’s . . .”
She shook her head ruefully. “That’s all.”
    He had expected
to argue with her, to attempt some proof, but her answer was so
succinct and clear, so poignant in its honesty, so free of the
bombast with which most of his questions had been greeted, that he
was utterly persuaded by it and could think of nothing to say. What
she had said roused a feeling of sadness in him, and he tended to
equate truth and sadness. Like most good Frenchmen, he thought, he
did not believe in happiness, or rather he believed that nothing
happy could be truly profound.
    “What’s
that? I wonder,” she said, pointing toward the hole in the
wall, at the black, swiftly moving thing that appeared now and again
on the marble plain.
    “I’ve
no idea.”
    “I want to
see.”
    She hopped down
from the block of marble and set out around the lake toward the hole
in the wall. Reluctantly he followed. He had, he realized, been
hoping to kiss her, and now that eventuality seemed remote.
    The machinery
that lay without the cavern was functionless, loose gears and
frameworks, cogs and rods, much of it tumbled about like the
discarded toys of a gigantic child, but some pieces were joined by
bolts with heads the size of serving platters, thus creating simple
mechanical sculptures. Overhead, an immense, slanted mirror reflected
silvery light downward from some invisible source. Like moonlight,
Beheim thought, and he wondered if there might not be a system of
mirrors channeling moonlight down from the battlements of the castle.
Beyond the machinery, the plain of white marble sloped up for several
hundred feet toward a wall pierced by a dozen arched doorways, and
clattering across it, lowering its head and charging at some
imaginary playmate, then cantering off, stopping to stare at
Alexandra and Beheim as they approached, was a black stallion. A
two-year-old, perhaps. Fully mature, but still coltish in its
behavior.
    “It’s
beautiful!” Alexandra said as the stallion trotted away,
rolling its eyes at them. Its skin looked oiled. Gleams outlined the
play of its muscles. It was perfect in its energy and sexual power, a
living engine of blood and satiny skin and bone. At a distance,
standing stock-still with the slope behind it, it might have been an
emblem stamped into the white marble.
    “What
could it be doing here?” Alexandra asked.
    Beheim said,
“Maybe it’s not really a horse.”
    “What else
could it be?”
    “Old
Kostolec, perhaps. Or an enemy on whom he’s cast a spell. In
this place, it might be anything.”
    But the horse
was exactly what it appeared to be, for—like a true horse—it
refused to allow them to come close and touch it, sensing their
strangeness, displaying extreme fear each time they tried, whinnying
and moving farther away. Beheim considered the possibility that it
might be, as had been the death of the young man at Kostolec’s
hands, a kind of lesson, set here to remind them of their unnatural
life, of their predator’s natures, and so ruin any illusion of
normalcy they might wish to inhabit. That, at least, seemed the
measure of its effect on Alexandra. She grew morose, silent, and when
Beheim tried to kiss her, when he put his hands on her waist and
fitted his mouth to hers, she responded to him for a split second,
but then slipped from his grasp and told him that she was no longer
sure of what she wanted.
    Chapter
Eight
    O ther rooms of