through all the lies one told oneself in every passing instant, every eternal moment.
He saw now that there was no beginning to anything, and no end, either. Moments fell forward in seamless progression and then fell behind in gathering haze. Colours washed away the moment the observing eyes lost appreciation; or they grew stark and hard when the senselessness of things struck home. He saw now, at the ends of his scraped and stung arms, one hand that etched out creation, and the other that erased it: and by these twin measures he existed, and his entire purpose in living was to insist that he was here, and that this was now, and once those hands fell still, eternally still, all that he proclaimed of himself would vanish.
In his irretrievable absence, they could walk the halls between his paintings; they could walk as things of flesh and heat, blood and bone, thought and unthought, while to either side ran windows on to flattened worlds and reduced lives that were in total all Kadaspala had ever achieved, and with sharpened nail they could poke through those false worlds, and behind them find naught but mortar and stone.
I have always been a liar. I cannot help what I am — and that is the first lie, the one I uttered to myself long ago. Others accepted it, by virtue of my talent, and in accepting it, they let me live the lie. Sweet of them, and such a relief — that I fooled them — and if my contempt now dogs their shadows, wherever I walk in their wake, well, it is no surprise.
Give me the lie and I will take it.
And then give it back to you. In vibrant otherworldly colours — that godly language uttered by ungodly tongues — and yearn for the adoration in your eyes. It’s what I feed on, after all. Give me what I need, to keep the lies alive. To keep me alive.
He kept his honest thoughts to himself, for himself. He risked nothing that way, because if artists were liars first and foremost, in close second were they cowards.
One day he would paint beauty. He would capture its essence, and once it was captured, at the pinnacle of his talent, he could lie back, close his eyes, and drift into death. He would be done, and done with the world. It would have nothing left to give him.
But for now, he would paint in blood.
The trail opened ahead, in tangled scrub and severed stumps, and beyond that was the raised river road.
I leave the wild behind me, with all its perils of raw truth and senseless death. I step into civilization, its shaped stones and lifeless wood, its sun-baked clay and its crowded streets filled with furtive moments we boldly name people. If he had a free hand, his fingers would awaken to paint the scene, in all its desultory glory, and so make things anew, in all the old ways.
If the colours are gods, then another god waits in the death of all colour; in black lines and swaths of drowned light. My hand and my eye are creators of entire worlds, creators of new gods. Behold, artist as creator and world upon world to unfurl, inscribe, delineate, destroy.
He clambered slowly up on to the road, wincing, and swung left — south — and set off.
To a wedding, where beauty was offered up to the sole promise of being sullied, made mundane by mundane necessities and the drudgery of day upon day, night upon night, the host of insipid demands that pulled flesh down, dulled the eyes, made puffy and irresolute the regard — no, he would never paint beauty. It was already too late.
But the scene haunted his mind. The flower petals upon the path, tears of colour already wilting and trodden upon, the bright eyes of the two now bound as one and the lascivious envy of the onlookers. Enesdia’s was a transient beauty, its perfect day almost done, almost in the past. Handfuls of crushed petals thrown into the river, riding the currents down and away. Tree branches hanging low over the water as if weighted with sorrow. The colours watery and muted, as if seen through cold tears. A sky empty of life. The Wedding of Andarist and Enesdia.
If he could — if he dared — he would steal her away. Lock her in a tower like some mad lover in a wretched poem fraught with twisted notions of possession. His hands alone knew the truth of her, and brother or not he would show her every one of those truths, in pleasures she had never imagined — oh, he knew the crimes of such thoughts, but thoughts lived well in realms of the forbidden — he’d seen as much in the eyes of every victim he painted. He could play out his defiance of taboos here in his mind, as he walked this road, and imagine the brush of his fingers as they painted skin and flesh, as they painted gasp and ecstasy, lurid convulsion and spent sigh. Before his talent everything would surrender. Everything.
There had been riders on the road. He saw scores of hoof prints in the dust and dirt, leading in both directions. But the air felt dead, empty, drained of urgency. Here and there, in faint streaks beneath the signs of riders, he saw the tracks of a carriage.
He was indeed behind the procession then, but despite all the traffic suggested by the hoofprints, Kadaspala walked alone and no one else was in sight.
The Wedding of Andarist and Enesdia. Painted with rage. The Wedding of Andarist and Enesdia. Erased by fury. He had the power of both, here in his hands. Such thoughts lived well in this forbidden realm.
Behold, artist as god.
Bruised and scraped and stung, he limped down the road beneath his burden of paints and brushes.
The smell of smoke rode the wind, the smell of dying colours.
Once the Houseblades were out of sight, Narad nudged his mount into a fast trot. Sweat trickled down beneath his shirt, but he felt chilled. He had seen the suspicion in that woman’s hard eyes. Corporal Bursa had sent him on to the road, while the troop travelled along a parallel track in the forest. They needed to know how many were ahead, and Narad now had good news for them. A full dozen Houseblades and an officer were riding back to Enes House.
His nerves were ruined. This wasn’t what he wanted. He had heard that other companies were on the move, and even now death was being delivered across Kurald Galain. This had gone beyond the Deniers, the wretched poor in their foul huts. Things were spiralling out of control. Urusander’s Legion had saved the realm. They were heroes. But they had been treated badly; they had grievances.
He thought about Haral, that old Legion veteran. He thought about the emptiness in that bastard’s eyes when he was breaking Narad’s face — and the others watching, like that ogre, Gripp, as if fists were proper arguments, as if brutality belonged in the company of men and women, and children. That nobleborn brat, with Gripp on his shoulder like a sour crow — who said that that boy was better than anyone else? What made him worth more than Narad, or any of those dead Deniers?
The world was full of lies. And people keep telling us we need them, all in the name of peace. But the peace we got was poison. It’s all kept in place to feed the few — the ones in charge, the ones getting rich off our backs, our sweat. And they sell us the virtue of obeying, and keeping our heads down, and not taking what we want — what they got and we don’t got. They say they worked for it but they didn’t. We did, even when we did nothing — by staying in the shadows, in the alleys, in small filthy rooms, by shovelling the shit they dump on us when they walk past noses in the air.
None of it’s right. So maybe things do have to go down. Maybe it all needs tearing apart, every one of those lies. And maybe brutality is what’ll make us all equal.
Still, he dreamed of killing Haral. And Gripp and that boy.
Every face is ugly. Even the perfect ones.
Horses behind him. He twisted round to see that woman and four others. Coming for him. Terror spasmed in Narad’s chest, throbbed into the cracked bones of his skull like fists punching from the inside out. He drove his heels into his mount’s flanks and leaned forward in the saddle as the beast surged forward, knowing that he was now riding for his life.
She’s another Haral. Abyss spare me — I saw it in her. I saw in her what he had. Those eyes. I can’t take any more beatings. I can’t.
He felt his bowels loosening, and each jolt in the saddle warmed his crotch.
None of this was fair. He was just trying to get by, to get through. Instead, he felt as if he were sliding down, and down, and no matter how he grasped or dug in his nails, he kept sliding. The scene before him was jarred and rocked with every clash of hoofs on the old cobbles. As if the world were breaking apart.
But his horse was fresher. He was outdistancing his pursuers — he could hear it. Once he was out of sight again he would cut into the forest, plunge into it and take any trail he found. He would lose them in the wild. He
