The face was untouched but for one detail – one of the eyes had been cut out.
‘Throne…’ uttered Mabeth, and swiftly covered her mouth. She smelled Levio as he sidled up next to her, the reek of sweat and cheap tabac pervasive. ‘I understand why you didn’t want to describe it over fonogram,’ she said, recovering.
‘An aquila,’ he replied, gesturing to the victim’s altered form, ‘even I can discern that much. Who the hells does that?’
‘I don’t know, a religious fanatic? Aren’t you supposed to work that out?’
Levio rubbed his balding scalp. The man looked paler and older since last night. ‘I have no frame of reference for this.’
‘It would take strength…’ ventured Mabeth, ‘and precision.’
‘Still think it’s art?’
‘I think the killer does.’
Levio lit up a smoke. ‘Paradise.’
Mabeth turned on him. ‘What did you just say?’
From Levio’s expression, she must have looked fearsome. He held up his hands. ‘That’s what the witness said.’
‘What bloody witness?’ She was livid, practically shaking. The smile, the sickly scent of lavender…
‘Easy,’ said Levio. ‘Calm down.’
Mabeth stared, heart pounding. She felt feverish. A cold sweat clung to her body like a rotten bandage.
‘Are you all right?’
She snapped back, hard as a spring. The fever ebbed. ‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘I just… I didn’t know there had been a witness.’
‘Why does it matter?’
‘Someone is killing people seemingly at random and turning them into grotesque anatomical works of art,’ Mabeth replied, still a little shaky. ‘I am both professionally intrigued and personally appalled. Of course it matters. Who’s the witness?’
‘An old curate. The church is mostly in a state of disrepair. He was effectively the caretaker until it could be restored. Though not much chance of that, given the state of things. He’s back at the precinct house with the interrogators, who are trying to find out what he knows.’
‘He didn’t tell them?’
‘Beyond saying “para–” that word, he hasn’t said much of anything. Whatever he saw, he didn’t like it. And it definitely wasn’t him who did it, before you ask.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’
‘Yeah, yeah, strength and precision and all that. Fancy yourself a peacekeeper, eh, artisan?’
Mabeth didn’t answer. She’d had enough of Levio. She gathered her tools and began. The sooner she got started, the sooner she could leave.
The return to Auric House was conducted in silence. The rioting and unrest in the city had forced her to take a more circuitous route via maglev, and by the time she reached her studio again night had drawn in. It seemed perpetual now, and the memory of the ‘flayed angel’, as she had come to regard it, lingered like the aroma of decay. And no matter how hard she tried to mentally excoriate, it would not go away.
A long pulse shower when she was safely back in her domicile did little but leave her itchy and hot. She dressed in a gown, a glass of absinthe to soothe her fractious nerves. Every mirror shawled by a blanket. On the journey back she had assiduously avoided looking into any reflective surfaces, glass or otherwise, a silver snuff box held to her nose to keep any undesirable odours at bay. No visitations from the lavender man came to her.
‘Am I losing my mind…?’ she murmured.
Gethik, lurking in his alcove, offered no comment.
‘Definitely losing it, if I’m trying to make conversation with a servitor.’
Perhaps she should call Yrenna for a rendezvous, but she didn’t want to go out into the city at night, not with the curfew and the violence, and her domicile was in a parlous state so she couldn’t invite her over. Empty bottles everywhere, the reek of kalma on her rugs and drapes.
She settled for another absinthe instead, before slumping onto a pile of cushions to regard the three paintings sitting on her lectern. Subject matter in kind, but different artists, she reflected.
The work remained, a refuge and a spiritual tonic.
Mabeth sighed. It’s not like I can sleep anyway.
Putting her glass down, Mabeth took up her tools. It was late and the work painstaking but she threw herself into it, as if each small act of restoration cleansed a part of her soul. The images in her mind lessened in intensity, the imagined scent of lavender faded. Saints were brought to life on canvas. And it felt good. She made swift progress, an obsessive compulsive urge to be rid of the taint of remembering driving her.
Then she saw something unexpected.
She had begun to strip back the layers of ink and pigment, intending to rebuild them from the base up where the image was particularly degraded, when she noticed part of a second image, incongruent with the first, revealed beneath. A magnifying lens from her iris attachment brought it into sharper focus. She couldn’t tell what it was exactly, but was certain it was not a part of the religious scene. A layer beneath a layer.
Hakasto had called it ‘pentimento’, when one image is subtly altered or a previous one painted over entirely. Though there was too little of the hidden image to discern much of anything about its subject, the rationale for hiding it was intriguing.
‘Curious…’ Mabeth muttered, and tried to reveal more. She reasoned she could repair the upper image later, but this one beneath, this secret, beguiled her. Her fingers ached, and while a heavy dose of stimms kept her going until the deep night hours, the scalpel eventually slipped her grasp and she fell into an exhausted sleep.
Mabeth woke to a feeling of disquiet, and the vague memory of a troubling dream that try as she might to grasp, dissipated like smoke. Sensations remained, of pain and pleasure, the instinct of peeling back the layers of her skin to reveal the dark places within. She shivered, despite the warmth of the morning and the blanket she had wrapped around herself.
Through the half-light streaming through the drapes, she saw the paintings and felt a moment of profound arrhythmia. More of the secondary
