The Raven stuck his head into Bender’s field of vision and caw, caw, cawed like his namesake. The action sent Bender into a hysterical spasm of fear. The Raven dealt him a cracking blow across the face.
Bender slumped back down into the coffin. His eyelids fluttered; the smell of urine came from the coffin.Lake couldn’t tear his gaze away. This was Voss Bender, savior and destroyer of careers, politicians, theaters. Voss Bender, who had been dead for two days.
“Why? Why have you done this to him?”Lake said, though he had not meant to speak.
The Stork sneered, said, “He did it to himself. He brought everything on himself.”
“He’s no good,” the Raven said.
“He is,” the Owl added, “the very epitome of Evil.”
Voss Bender moved a little. The eyes under the imperious gray eyebrows opened wide. Bender wasn’t deaf or stupid — Lakehad never thought him stupid — and the man followed their conversation with an intense if weary interest. Those eyes demanded thatLake save him.Lake looked away.
“The Raven here will give you his knife,” the Owl said, “but do not think that just because you have a weapon you can escape.” As if to prove this, the Owl produced a gun, one of those sleek, dangerous-looking models newly invented by the Kalif’s scientists.
The Raven held out his knife.
Senses stretched and redefined,Lake glanced at Voss Bender, then at the knife. A thin line of light played over the metal and the grainy whorls of the hilt. He could read the words etched into the blade, the name of the knife’s maker: Hoegbotton & Sons. That the knife should have a history, a pedigree, that he should know more about the knife than about the three men struck him as absurd, as horrible. As he stared at the blade, at the words engraved there, the full, terrible weight of the deed struck him. To take a life. To snuff out a life, and with it a vast network of love and admiration. To create a hole in the world. It was no small thing to take a life, no small thing at all. He saw his father smiling at him, palms opened up to reveal the shiny, sleek bodies of dead insects.
“For God’s sake, don’t make me kill him!”
The burst of laughter from the Owl, the Raven, the Stork, surprised him so much that he laughed with them. He shook with laughter, his jaw, his shoulders, relaxed in anticipation of the revelation that it was all a joke… before he understood that their laughter was throaty, fey, cruel. Slowly, his laughter turned to sobs.
The Raven’s hilarity subsided before that of the Owl and the Stork. He said toLake, “He is already dead. The whole city knows he’s dead. You cannot kill someone who is already dead.”
Voss Bender began to moan, and redoubled his efforts to break free of his bonds. The three men ignored him.
“I won’t do it. I won’t do it.” His words sounded weak, susceptible to influence. He knew that faced with his own extinction he would do anything to stay alive, even if it meant corrupting, perverting, destroying, everything that made himMartinLake. And yet his father’s face still hovered in his head, and with that image everything his father had ever said about the sanctity of life.
The Owl said, with remorseless precision, “Then we will flay your face until it is only strips of flesh hanging from your head. We will lop off your fingers, your toes, as if they were carrots for the pot. You, sir, will become a bloody red riddle for some dog to solve in an alley somewhere. And Bender will still be dead.”
Lakestared at the Owl and the Owl stared back, the owl mask betraying not a hint of weakness.
The eyes were cold wrinkled stones, implacable and ancient.
When the Raven offeredLake the knife, he took it. the lacquered wooden hilt had a satisfying weight to it, a smoothness that spoke of practiced ease in the arts of killing.
“A swift stroke across the throat and it will be done,” the Raven said, while the Stork took a white length of cloth and tucked it over Bender’s body, leaving exposed only his head and neck. How many times had he drawn his brush across a painted throat, the model before him fatally disinterested? He wished he had not taken so many anatomy classes. He found himself counting and naming the muscles in Bender’s neck, cataloging arteries and veins, bones and tendons.
The Raven and the Stork withdrew to beyond the coffin. The divide between them andLake was enormous, the knife cold and heavy in his hand.Lake could see that tiny flakes of rust had infected the center of each engraved letter of Hoegbotton & Sons.
He looked down at Voss Bender. Bender’s eyes bulged, bloodshot, watery. The man pleaded with Lake through his gag, wordsLake could only half understand. “Don’t… Don’t… what have I…
Help… ” Lake admired Bender’s strength and yet, as he stood over his intended victim,Lake found he enjoyed the power he wielded over the composer. To have such control. This was the man he had only the other day been cursing, the man who had so changed the city that his death had polarized it, splintered it.
Voss Bender began to thrash about and, as if the movement had bro ken a spell,Lake ’s sense of triumph turned to disgust, buttressed by nausea. He let out a broken little laugh.
“I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”
Lake tried to drop the knife, but the Raven’s hand covered his and, turning into a fist, forced his own hand into a fist that guided the knife down into the coffin, makingLake stoop as it turned toward Bender’s throat. The Stork held Bender’s head straight, caressing the doomed man’s temples with an odd gentleness. The Owl stood aloof, watching as an owl will the passion play beneath its perch.Lake grunted, struggling against the Raven’s inexorable downward pressure. Just when it seemed he must succumb, he went limp. The knife descended at a hopeless angle, aided by Bender’s mighty flinch. The blade did only half the job — laying open a flap of skin to the left of the jugular. Blood welled up truculently.
As if the stroke had been a signal, the Raven and the Stork stood back, breathing heavily. Bender made a choking gurgle; he sounded as if he might suffocate in his own blood.
Lakerocked back and forth on his knees.
The Owl said to his companions, “You lost your heads. Do you want his blood on our hands?”
Lakestared at the knife and at Voss Bender’s incompetently cut throat, and back at the knife.
Blood had obscured all but the “Hoeg” in “Hoegbotton.” Blood had speckled his left hand. It looked nothing like paint: it was too bright. It itched where it had begun to dry.
He closed his eyes and felt the walls of the study rush away from him until he stood at the edge of an infinite darkness. From a great distance, the Owl said, “He will die now. But slowly. Very slowly.
Weaker and weaker until, having suffered considerable pain, he will succumb some hours or days hence.
And we will not lift a feather or finger to help him. We will just watch. Your choice remains the same — finish him and live; don’t and die with him. It is a mercy killing now.”
Lakelooked up at the Owl. “Why me?”
“How do you know you are the first? How do you know you were chosen?”
“That is your answer?”
“That is the only answer I shall ever give you.”
“What could he have done to you for you to be so merciless?”
The Owl looked to the Raven, the Raven to the Stork, and in the sud den quaver, the slight shiver, that passed between them,Lake thought he knew the answer. He had seen the same look pass between artists in the cafes alongAlbumuth Boulevard as they verbally dissected some new young genius.
Lakelaughed bitterly. “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you? You’re envi ous and you want his power, but most of all, you fear him. You’re too afraid to kill him yourself.”