Except that I am Athenais Karthagonensis: lover, mother, alchemist and forger, and this is my place. This is my Chamber, my lie. It belongs to me by right and making, it was born in my mind – and you, whoever you are, will mind your manners in my presence or I shall scribe you a new arsehole.
The hive rises, roars away and settles on the leaves. Air returns, shockingly cold. I can still hear, at the edge of perception, the whisper of chitin.
I breathe out. In. Out. In. Each exhalation feels unwise, as if I may wish I had kept the air a little longer in my chest. I’m fine. I’m fine. I have touched a spirit and seen it off, or ducked beneath its arms.
*
‘Julius Marcus Cassius,’ I murmur, because I don’t really need to shout any more, ‘I will have your full attention while we conduct this interview.’
Father Fishy does not nod, because he is profoundly sensible of my novacula and its position directly against the lid of his left eye. The pressure I am exerting is not great, but I’m very annoyed and there is a firmness in my posture which he reads – correctly – as contraindicating any casual motion on his part. Nonetheless he wishes me to know that I have his attention – indeed that no one has ever had more of it in a more focused fashion.
I was dragged from my bed last night and cast into this mess. I stood under the cold, glittering eyes of the goddess, and confronted not just the corpse but all of it, and was entirely grown up and controlled about finding my own face on the east wall of a room fabricated to my own mendacious design and purporting to be an ancient treasure of magic, presently containing a dead princeling in five easily portable sections. I sat on my horror, on the echoing and nauseating sense the Chamber evoked in me that I had somehow betrayed my son by not being there for his death, and my sense that he betrayed me in the same way. I was equal to all that, and I think we can agree that it was a masterwork of self-discipline and calm.
But there is only so far a woman can go before she becomes irritable in the conduct of these affairs, and I find that the limit of my tolerance for conspiratorial pissing about is reached in the moment when I am forced, by the presence of some bad suffocating spirit, to stake claim with my name and soul to a priceless relic and false miracle either sanctified by the holy murder of its most recent owner or thus defiled into a charnel house which among other things may be the earthly dwelling of that same evil angel that did him in. That sort of thing, as it transpires – because who knows that about themselves until the moment of testing? – gets right up my nose.
I came out here and said so. I was direct.
I think the good flamen had still entertained until then the fond delusion that he was in charge of his own fate, despite the death of a young darling of the empire who was in some manner under his care. So when I came out of the channel under the egg and he tried to instruct me in his High Church voice, I hooked one finger into his mouth and dragged him bodily against me by the cheek, which is exquisitely painful, and then I pinned him against the Chamber with my blade. Not actually pinned. He was not pierced. Pinked, maybe.
Strange thought: I once seduced Augustine this way, pressed him to the wall of a wayside pub and ravished him. He was abandoned and gasping and so grateful to be excused the stern duty of self-control. Afterwards he dropped his head on to my shoulder and whispered that he loved me. I think it was the only time I ever saw him truly unwound. Later he would not talk about it, and after that he was careful to be dominant with me, though he repeated his declaration of love many times, and meant it, I think.
Well, no danger of my ravishing Father Fishy, and it’s not the moment for a vengeful killing, either: if he was a little more savvy he’d know he’s in no danger right now. He’s not that savvy, though, so I growl into his face, and he flinches when I swear, because in his mind scholarly middle-aged women don’t.
‘Tell me what the hell is going on!’
‘I have!’
‘Do you take me for a fool? Where did you get this … thing? Who made it for you? And why?’
He’s baffled, truly confused. ‘It’s the Chamber of Isis! It was given to Queen Tarset in the days before Christ!’
‘I know the story, I’m a bloody alchemist!’ I clench my fists against my legs and count my breaths. I nearly said ‘I wrote it!’ That wouldn’t go down well. They’d either take me for a madwoman or believe me, and it’s hard to say which of those would be worse. ‘And being a bloody alchemist, I also know a few things about anatomy, and one of them, if I can let you in on a little trade secret of the mystical community – which is shared only by every butcher, fishmonger, soldier and surgeon in the empire and beyond, so it’s seriously arcane, Julius Marcus, and you better not tell anyone about it – is that people don’t spontaneously split into five parts when they die! So let me ask you again: what is going on? Or shall I drag you in there by yourself and leave you over night?’
And there, at last, is something he is afraid of, even more than he fears this spitting hellcat in front of him.
‘Scipio,’ Father Fishy says uncertainly, ‘said he was being hunted by a jinn.’
*
In my mind, I am banging my forehead slowly against the great, cool beams of the high table at the university. If I do this a couple more times, I will wake up in my bed, and this whole pile of shit will prove to be a dream. Or perhaps I will wake with Augustine’s flank alongside, or with Adeodatus two years old and banging a wooden spoon on a pot lid to attract my attention. Certainly I will wake in my own bed, with nothing more dramatic to do today than buy fresh sage from the market and bottle some surgical alcohol.
Or I’m here, and Scipio was being hunted by a jinn.
I make everyone wait while I refresh my memory, but to be honest it all comes back so fast and so completely that I barely need to. Years gone now, and so many things I’d choose to remember. I have the shape of them, the gap they have left in me, but I cannot recapture what they were. The sound of my son’s voice, the feeling in my heart when Augustine first kissed me. The warmth of my father’s smile. Instead of any of them, I have this. This farrago of lies.
Lord, but I was fanciful. I think, honestly, that part of the reason they believed the Scroll was real was that it was so shamelessly bad. No respectable forger would ever string words together in such a self-important slurry. Forgery is a quiet discipline that doesn’t put itself forward – indeed, it wants very much to fade into the scenery. This idiot, this supposed scribe I contrived as my narrator, was afflicted with no such sense of limitation. The prose is purple, adolescent, puffed up, and filled with mystical ellipsis. In other words – though I didn’t realise it at the time, I was just drunk with Hortensus’ pawprint on my tit – it is perfectly authentic for a young man trusted with what he saw as a great task of record-keeping. Or, let us be fair, a young woman also, for portentousness is beyond gender and I never did specify which our young chronicler might be; they all just assumed, as men do.
So let’s call her Camilla – in defiance of logic, since the one thing we really know she wasn’t is Roman – and let’s go over it again. Chapter three, which is the bit about spirits and Titans.
Into that place there came also the jennaye, the good and generous gods, and they are called marids that came out of the ocean and iphrids that are of the fire, and for each element and place there is a jinn, and for each tone and texture and flavour of the earth also, and for the lands and kingdoms and beasts and forests, but they are not of many races but only of one, that is the race of jennaye. They are also called the Hidden, because their footfall is the breath of the spider and though they are giants yet they walk unseen, and they are all about you. And they also came to the Chamber and sought its blessing, for to the jennaye the Alkahest is as sunlight to a flower or water in the desert, and yet also it is their death should they resist it. And these were their names and aspects, that one who drinks the Alkahest shall know and shall speak, and by them be obeyed:
The lawgiver came, that is called Firespine for
the wings of flame upon his back by which he passes into every holt and redoubt, even into the palaces of kings and the vaults of merchants, and he is an inquisitor and made of justice all along his arms.
There also was the mother of owls and rivers, whose name is lost, and all the wells were made clean and sweet and all the books of the place fruited and in the fruit was knowledge;
And there also was that one of them that is named Agoraeus, who walks upon precious stones, and in his train was a great dragon of the ocean and the people were filled with fear, but Agoraeus spoke and it was calmed;
And so too came Ogioslitus, and the eyes of the world were made full of light, and birds sang and the wind was glad;
And also his sister, that cannot be denied: she also came, and her hounds beside her that do not relent;
The whole of the jennaye were there like soldiers upon the marching field, in their raiment and arms, and they swore they would defend the Chamber. Even Gnomon of the Thousand Eyes was there, that cannot be contained, and these were the judges of mankind. Even crabwise Gnomon, that is the thumb, that the others of the jennaye do not trust: even Gnomon so swore, and that was all, and laughing Gnomon was wise and spoke not the name of Firespine. And these others also were there, of the numberless order of jennaye—
She did go on, that Camilla in my head: a long poetic litany, and if you took note of the colophon at the top it was a rebus puzzle, and if you solved the rebus – which you were all but told right out was what you were supposed to do because the title of the bloody document was ‘Seek and ye shall find’, but to my knowledge no one to this day ever has – it yielded a cryptographic key, and if you applied that key properly to the list, well, it spelled out the mighty arcane secret that Lucius Hortensus of Carthage has a penis shaped like a ram’s horn and warts upon his tongue. I have no idea if that is true. I never saw either of them, I just took offence, and my creativity rather ran away with me.
But here, now, I must ask whether it truly did, or whether I was remembering as I catalogued those jennaye some endless harvest song of my youth, or whether, worse yet, some spirit of mischief jogged my arm and made me write real spells and honest truths of the firmament concealed in my outrageous lies, and now that some fool has put it all together in one place, has made an actual Chamber like the one I described, everything in the Scroll is to some extent the truth.
So now I wonder: what is it that my message truly says? My encrypted secret? If I unravel the list, will I find some quite other communication waiting for me? Dear Athenais, thank you for the loan of your soul. I have returned it in good order, perhaps slightly foxed. Did I play my divine inspiration? Or did such inspiration play me?
*
The big legionary – I feel now that he was less an abductor, more a conductor with extreme prejudice – brings me water, fresh and cold. My throat is a little raw from the shouting.
‘Thank you, Optio.’ A guess at his rank.
‘Tesserarius,’ he corrects me.
And I’d thought his responsibilities a little light already. It’s unlike the legions to underuse intelligence. ‘Bit old, aren’t you?’
‘My third time round. Evidently, I have a bad attitude.’
‘Your name?’
‘Gnaeus.’
‘Well, Tesserarius Gnaeus, it may or may not have escaped your notice that I also have a bad attitude.’
That makes him smile. It’s a little bit heartstopping, that smile, at least to a woman who looks for something more than a pretty stomach on some shepherd in a field. It’s a smile that knows things.
Down, girl. It’s really not the time.
I glance back at Fishy. ‘Scipio was in the Chamber.’
‘Yes.’
‘And so were you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you kill him?’
The priest utters a bark of disbelief. ‘How? I, do that? How?’
Well, no. I don’t really see Julius Marcus as the quinsecting type – he’s more of a strangler, with that narrow frame. Father Marcus would steal up behind you, cord in hand, and put his knee to your spine, and with those long arms he could do you fast enough. But what has been done to Cornelius Severus Scipio is not that sort of assassination. Look at the corpse: you’d need an axe, or a saw, or, well: in honesty I have no idea what could achieve cuts like that. Great shears, such as tailors use, and arms like a Gothic axeman. The force required alone … Let us assume that Scipio stood still and naked for his execution, that he cooperated in this strange design, not because that is likely but because the more he resisted the more impossible this becomes. The tesserarius, now, and two of his mates, with the right tools and an unconscious subject – well. That would make the business only somewhat impossible, until you start to ask where all the blood went, or how no one heard the screaming.
‘Describe it, please, Father.’
‘We were talking. He must reassure himself from time to time that it was real, and yet he did not like to be within. I think he found it uncomfortable.’
‘But you did not?’
‘I felt observed.’
Yes. To stand in the Chamber – whatever it is – is to stand at the mouth of a cave, and the bear within peers out.
Marcus is still talking. ‘But I believe that God sees us all, from crown to toe, at all times and in all places. I am forever observed. I am made of water, and any impurity is visible as it floats in me. And then, too, I spend my life around images of the divine, and I find they have this effect. I am familiar with the sensation of being measured.’
‘And found wanting?’
‘Inevitably. But this was different: as if the wheel of the world grated against its axle. I thought for a moment that I could not see him, as if I had blinked. Then Scipio made a noise. A dog noise, Learnèd, not a man’s noise at all – not even on the battlefield.’ An absent recollection, this, but the tesserarius looks at him sharply. Marcus as a soldier, before the cloth? How very unlikely. ‘I turned and he fell. I want to say I felt a breath on my face, but I think that is my mind adding ornament. The room was still. There was no warning, no sense of the passage of an object. No other person.’
‘His clothes,’ Gnaeus prods.
‘What about them?’
‘Where were they?’
‘He was wearing them, of course.’
Quite. So either Marcus lies, or the world is broken, or someone possesses a mind beyond devious that can produce this impossible result. Or all of these may be true, or none.
‘Tesserarius Gnaeus.’
‘Learnèd?’
‘How long from the last moment you saw Scipio alive to your first sight of the corpse?’
‘Quarter of an hour, perhaps two minutes longer.’
So here, if we are to persist in regarding Marcus straightforwardly as a suspect, we must imagine him, alone and weaponless, somehow subduing the young soldier without a fight, then stripping him and murdering him, cutting the corpse in segments with his bare hands and yet getting no blood on his skin or clothes, nor on the floor of the Chamber, and then likewise with remarkable skill redressing him, all within the briefest time and all in silence. Suppose the victim dead at the start, the task is no less impossible. If they were all in it together, perhaps – but for that they must all be consummate actors, as well as murderers – and why bother to bring me in at all? Am I so disposable, so unthreatening? Hardly. They’d do better with one of the drunkards for that, or the bought-and-paid-for liars of the alchemical trade. They’re not difficult to come by.
Marcus cannot have done this. And yet his proximity is so suggestive, so important. Without his presence in the room, this might be done, or be made to appear to be done, by trickery. It would be a mad thing, to work so hard to create this bizarre appearance – but all roads here lead to madness. I must accept the slayer is mad, or the world. Where nothing makes sense, one must put sense aside and acknowledge only what is possible.
Marcus is a man, not a perfect observer. His perc
eption is malleable, by tricks and misdirection. Perhaps I need to talk to a market conjuror, or a fraudster.
Or: ‘Did Scipio have close kin? A brother, who might be mistaken for him?’ The corpse might have been pre-prepared, the man abducted. Or the man Marcus went into the Chamber with could have been the double. Theoretically. I do not believe it, but I would very much like to.
Gnaeus meets my eyes: you’re not serious?
I wave my hands to ward off his scepticism. ‘All right, I grant you, a twin is asking too much. A chance encounter, then, a man in the street who for no obvious reason simply resembled him?’
Those same steady brown eyes. I’m reaching. He knows I am. I am baffled, and so is he, and so are we all.
Baffled. The murder is impossible because of that quinsection. If Scipio were simply knifed, that would be another thing. Marcus would be in chains – rightly or wrongly – and that would be that.
What function does it serve to cut a man in five pieces? It is superfluous, for a man, except in one way. There is one possible answer that might let us remain in the ordinary world of human wickedness.
What function does it serve to cut a man in five pieces? None. Save that it is the difference between banality and bewilderment. One blow kills. Four make a miracle. With Scipio thus in five pieces, most people would not look for an ordinary slayer. The Eastern Empire these days is a credulous place. It doesn’t take much to get people shouting ‘sorcery’ – and if you wanted to hide an ordinary sort of murder, you could do worse than blame a ghost.