Free The Secret Book of Paradys by Tanith Lee Page B

the salon, I heard him give a contemptuous little wordless sound, like a note or a chord of music, low down in the register.
    Don’t play, answer me
, he had said that before to me, on Sacrifice Hill. He would know that I remembered him. But then, on that former occasion, when I would have held out the ring, he turned and was gone to his hunting. All this had had to come between. Besides, then, he had only been a demon.
    Satanus est
.
    I walked away into the city, and found a notary. By his reluctant candlelight I set my affairs in as much order as I could, and allocated such possessions as might be of any worth. I had never thought I should do such a thing, or that there would be any margin to do it. For I would be assassinated on the street, or perish in some stupor. Nor was there left me a Philippe, unreliable, impassioned, to take the residue of my writing to the printers, if he ever would have taken it. Would it concern me, in hell or in the grave, to recollect my unpublished works? Who would remember me in a year or two? But in two centuries, who would remember anyone, and in a hundred hundred years, all the paper would have transposed to paste, and dust. All the words, all the concertos, all the shrieking and the shouts, lost in the void of life. Oh, let it go.
    The business with the gunsmith did not take long. The barber’s took longer.
    It did occur to me that perhaps I might also seek a priest, and make to him my confession. But in the end, I had visualised it so thoroughly I seemed to have done it. And I did not want to go over all my sins again. Instead, I composed an ambiguous letter to Russe. I did not call on him. I wanted no one with me when I died but Death himself. He should surely be sufficient.
    Having paid my landlady, and told her only that I was going away, I went to bed.
    At first I woke several times, choking and panic-stricken. Then I slept deeply. I knew I would wake at the four o’clock bell, and so I did, with a mild surge, as if cast up by a wave upon a beach.
    Because I was to die in public, last night my vanity had determined it had better be as beautifully as possible. And so, last night, the barber’s shop, withits hirable bath, and then my hair washed and curled and freshly laved in “Martian” henna. From the launderers’ came the shirt with all its ruffles starched, the linen and muslin immaculate (Philippe’s coat), and so on. Even to the boots my vanity went, and had them polished up again with a rubric molasses to bring out their red.
    I had put on the ring. He would have to take it from my hand himself.
    The gunsmith’s man had been told he must make his own way over to the duelling place, with the case of pistols. But he knew where to go. As Scarabin had said, it was the preferred venue for those who wished to kill each other. The Senate winked at such illegal fights. Who could say what went on, at sunrise, in the thick woods below the planet-searching dome of the Observatory, which saw only space and stars?
    The sky looked nowhere near light when I went down the stairs and out into the City. All Paradys seemed to lie dumbfounded under a high black lid. Not a window awake. The street lamps glimmered, drunk to their dregs; many were out. There was a tingle of frost on the air.
    Two or three times I paused to drink from a small brandy-flask, a worthless metal thing from which, for a while once, I had never been parted. I was glad of it now. All natural feeling was gone, yet the world seemed far too real, and so insistent. It rubbed its bony sides against me. To die had no glamour left, because the practicalities of its arrangement had revolted me. Yet I wanted it more than ever, with a kind of hunger, and a desperate dread of its complications.
    It appeared to me I wandered more than walked, but I had left plenty of time to get there. I even went along a little way by the river, but no slender ominous boat came drifting from the mist.
    Then, as I began to climb up into that