"How does it feel?" the Autarch asked, straining to catch the merest murmur of a reply. "The pain's passed, hasn't it? Didn't I say it would?"
The man's eyes flickered open, and he licked his lips. They made something very close to a smile.
"You feel a kind of union with Abelove, am I right? It's worked its way into every little part. Please speak, or I'll take it from you. You'll bleed from every hole it's made, but that pain won't be anything beside the loss you'll feel."
"Don't..." the man said. "Then talk to me," the Autarch replied, all reason. "Do you know how difficult it is to find a leech like this? They're almost extinct. But I gave this one to you, didn't I? And all I'm asking is that you tell me how it feels."
"It feels... good."
"Is that Abelove talking, or you?"
"We're the same," came the reply.
"Like sex, is it?"
"No."
"Like love, then?"
"No. Like I'm unborn again."
"In the womb?"
"In the womb.""Oh, God, how I envy you. I don't have that memory. I never floated in a mother."
The Autarch rose from his chair, his hand covering his mouth. It was always like this when the dregs of kreauchee moved in his veins. He became unbearably tender at such times, moved to expressions of grief and rage at the obscurest cue.
"To be joined with another soul," he said, "indivisibly. Consumed and made whole in the same moment. What a precious joy."
He turned back to his prisoner, whose eyes were closing again. The Autarch didn't notice.
"It's times like this," he said, "I wish I were a poet. I wish I had the words to express my yearning. I think that if I knew that one day—I don't care how many years from now, centuries even, I don't care—if I knew that one day I was going to be united, indivisibly, with another soul, I could begin to be a good man."
He sat down again beside the captive, whose eyes were completely closed.
"But it won't happen," he said, tears beginning to come. "We're too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are in case we're nothing, and holding on so tight we lose everything else." Agitation was shaking the tears out of his eyes now. "Are you listening to me?" he said.
He shook the man, whose mouth fell open, a trickle of saliva dribbling from one corner.
''Listen!" he raged. "I'm giving you my pain here!"
Receiving no response, he stood up and struck his captive across the face so hard the man toppled over, the chair to which he was bound falling with him. The creature clamped to his chest convulsed in sympathy with its host.
"I didn't bring you here to sleep!" the Autarch said. "I want you to share your pain with me."
He put his hands on the leech and began to tear it from the man's chest. The creature's panic flooded its host, and instantly the man began to writhe, the cords drawing blood as he fought to keep the leech from being stolen. Less than an hour before, when Abelove had been brought out of the shadows and displayed to the prisoner, he'd begged to be spared its touch. Now, finding his tongue again, he pleaded twice as hard not to be separated from it, his pleas swooping into screams when the parasite's filaments, barbed so as to prevent their removal, were wrenched from the organs they'd pierced. As soon as they broke surface they began to flail wildly, seeking to return to their host or find a new one. But the Autarch was unmoved by the panic of either lover and divided them like death itself, pitching Abelove across the chamber and taking the man's face in fingers sticky with his infatuate's blood.
"Now," he said. "How does it feel?"
"Give it back... please .,. give it back."
"Is this like being born?" the Autarch said.
"Whatever you say! Yes! Yes! Just give it back!"
The Autarch left the man's side and crossed the chamber to the spot where he'd made the summoning. He picked his way through the spirals of human gut he'd arranged on the floor as bait and snatched up the knife still lying in the blood beside the blindfolded head, returning at no more than an amble to where the victim was lying. There he cut the prisoner's bonds and stood back to watch the rest of the show. Though he was grievously wounded, his punctured lungs barely able to draw breath, the man fixed his eyes on the object of his desire and began to crawl towards it. Ashen, the Autarch let him crawl, knowing as he went that the distance was too great, and the scene must end in tragedy.
The lover had advanced no more than a couple of yards when there was a rapping on the door.
"Go away!" the Autarch said, but the rapping came again, this time accompanied by Rosengarten's voice.
"Quaisoir's gone, sir," he said.
The Autarch watched the crawling man's despair and despaired himself. Despite all his indulgences, the woman had deserted him for the Man of Sorrows.
"Come in!" he called.
Rosengarten entered and made his report. Seidux was dead, stabbed and thrown from a window. Quaisoir's quarters were empty, her servant vanished, her dressing room overturned. A search for her abductors was already under way.
"Abductors?" the Autarch said. "No, Rosengarten. There are no abductors. She's gone of her own accord."
Not once as he spoke did he take his eyes off the lover, who had covered a third of the distance between his chair and his darling but was weakening fast.
"It's over," the Autarch said. "She's gone to find her Redeemer, the poor bitch."
"Then shouldn't I dispatch troops to find her?" Rosengarten said. "The city's dangerous."
"So's she when she wants to be. The women in the Bastion taught her some unholy stuff."
"I hope that cesspit's been burned to the ground," Rosengarten said, with a rare passion.
"I doubt it is," the Autarch replied. "They've got ways of protecting themselves."
"Not from me, they haven't," Rosengarten boasted.
"Yes, even from you," the Autarch told him. "Even from me. The power of women can't be scoured away, however hard we try. The Unbeheld attempted it, but he didn't succeed. There's always some corner—"
"Just say the word," the commander broke in, "and I'll go down there now. Hang the bitches in the streets."
"No, you don't understand," the Autarch said, his voice almost monotonous, but all the more sorrowful for that. "The corner isn't out there, it's in here." He pointed to his skull. "It's in our minds. Their mysteries obsess us, even though we put them out of sight. Even me. God knows, I should be free of it. I wasn't cast out like the rest of you were. How can I yearn for something I never had? But I do." He sighed. "Oh, I do."
He looked around at Rosengarten, whose expression was uncomprehending.
"Look at him." The Autarch glanced back at the captive as he spoke. "He's got seconds left to live. But the leech gave him a taste and he wants it back again."
"A taste of what?"
"Of the womb, Rosengarten. He said it was like being in the womb. We're all cast out. Whatever we build, wherever we hide, we're cast out."
As he spoke the prisoner gave a last exhausted moan and lay still. The Autarch watched the body awhile, the only sound in the vastness of the chamber the weakening motions of the leech on the cold floor.
"Lock the doors and seal them up," the Autarch said, turning to leave without looking back at Rosengarten. "I'm going to the Pivot Tower."
"Yes, sir."
"Come and find me when it's light. These nights, they're too long. Too long. I wonder, sometimes..."
But what he wondered had gone from his head before it could reach his lips, and when he left the lovers' tomb it was in silence.