Yet despite the arcade’s size, it lacked spaciousness. The Aegis’s obsessively self-enclosed nature pervaded it, making it almost claustrophobic.
Rachad’s eyes rested on a huge statue that commanded the near end of the arcade. It was of a figure in a flowing robe, tall but with broad shoulders. The hair was cropped short and hung in a fringe over a bulging brow.
The face was extraordinary. It bore a pained, sneering, almost insane look—a look of ultimate rejection. The eyes stared straight ahead, as if fixed on something incomprehensible and horrifying.
This, Rachad thought, must be the Duke of Koss.
Suivres halted. Someone else had entered the arcade and was walking unhurriedly toward them. It was a man dressed in a loose, flowing purple robe, a man who might have been the model of the statue, except that he was slimmer and somewhat younger in appearance. The statue, Rachad realized, was of the old duke. This was the present master of the Aegis, the son and successor.
The resemblance between the two was striking, and yet markedly different. The second duke appeared austere rather than brutal, distracted rather than insane, an aesthete rather than a man of power. His eyes seemed permanently glazed, except when they focused, for long disturbing moments, on some object—as they did on Rachad, making him feel naked and transparent.
Hastily Rachad copied Suivres’s low bow. “Your Grace,” Suivres said humbly, “may I present Rachad Caban, an artifex, owner of the fragment we seek.”
“If all is as it seems, you have indeed done well, Suivres,” the duke murmured, his faint voice sounding to Rachad like the distant piping of the wind. “I shall reward you.”
“To serve Your Grace is reward enough!” Suivres replied ardently. It was evident that the duke inspired enormous respect in those around him, so much so that as he drew closer, with effete movements and giving off a waft of pungent scent, Rachad found himself trembling.
“Give His Grace the tome!” Suivres hissed out of the side of his mouth. With a start Rachad handed over the lead-bound book, noting as he did so that though barely above forty years of age if his appearance was any judge, the duke’s swept-back hair was streaked with gray.
Gracefully accommodating himself to its weight and bulk, the duke opened the volume and for a minute or two seemed deep in thought, his face bent to the beautifully colored pages. Eventually he nodded slowly, and again looked directly at Rachad.
“It has an authentic air. Have you studied the Asch Mezareph?”
“Er… I’ve examined it,” Rachad replied hesitantly.
“You seem very young to have had any extensive alchemical experience…” the duke observed pensively. “What operations have you performed?”
Rachad felt obliged to evade the question. “I owe everything to my master and mentor,” he said. “He sent me in search of the knowledge we lack, entrusting the book to me for the purpose.”
The duke pondered this. “Well, we shall find much to discuss in this text, you and I, not to speak of Master Amschel. Come, let me conduct you through my realm.”
Due to some acoustic effect the flute music faded as they approached the steps at the end of the arcade. The duke turned at the head of the stairs, smiling faintly at Rachad. Then he descended the steps, becoming shadowy in the thickening mist.
A tinkling sound reached Rachad’s ears as he encountered the first coils of the sparkling smoke. Stepping down the staircase was like floating through a cloud. The tones, initially random and inchoate, increased in volume and texture, coalescing as he moved into a collage of shifting, novel melodies of incredible complexity and color.
The duke’s voice drifted to him. “Does the melody mist please you? The smoke is composed of crystal particles, each emitting a tiny tone. In addition the crystals have a vibrational empathy with one another; they respond to each other, creating elaborate webs of sound that movement translates into times and harmonies. No composer could equal the inventiveness of the mist… music, I find, is a unique adjunct to the stirrings of the soul… My Aegis is everywhere pervaded by music… One could become lost in music…”
The murmuring voice went on, droning against the ever-meshing, ever-separating and commingling maze of melody, which was beginning to lull Rachad into a state of helpless fascination, especially as the melodies were so alien to his ear. But then they reached the bottom of the steps and, a little farther on, emerged into clearer air.
The duke stopped and stared straight ahead, his face slack, his eyes vacant. Then he turned and looked blankly at Rachad.
“Eh? What? Oh yes, it’s you again.”
They strolled across a mosaic floor strewn with what looked like rose petals. The music had faded to a tinkle, like the sound of a running stream in the background.
“You have seen the statue of my father,” the duke said. “He was a much maligned man. They called him a criminal, a traitor, a thief… whereas he was merely a philosopher, whose disgust with life led him to construct his own artificial life. In those days many famous philosophers and artists were invited into the Aegis… they settled here, and have brought up a generation who have known only the Aegis…”
“But do outside affairs never interest you, Your Grace?” Rachad asked.
“Never. The outside world does not exist, as far as I am concerned. Here we have created our own cosmos…” The duke made a wry mouth. “Would that I could seal off the Aegis from the rest of space and time altogether, to live self-existent, and alone… Amschel has spoken of the possibility, once the Great Work is completed.”
“But you depend on the outside for some things, surely? What about food?”
“The Aegis needs no supplies, either of food or of fuel. We grow food in our own culture gardens. And as for light—” He directed Rachad’s attention to the lamps that illuminated the concourse through which they were passing, milky hemispheres set in the ceiling and giving forth a clear white glow.
“The bowls are filled with a luminous substance which retains its glow for five years,” the duke told him. “It can then be revived by means of an alchemical process.”
“Extraordinary!” Rachad said. “I’ve never heard of that before!” For some reason it impressed him even more than the melody mist. Yet still he felt compelled to press the point of the duke’s isolation. “But tell me honestly, Your Grace—could you really stay aloof if Maralia were faced with a Kerek invasion?”
“Kerek? Kerek? I’ve heard that word somewhere…”
“An alien race who are making war on mankind!” Rachad supplied, amazed to see the unconcern on the duke’s face. “A race who may well end up enslaving the whole of humanity!”
“Enslave? Not I, not I… This invasion you speak of will wash over the Aegis but never break it… Never will man or alien dictate to me…”
They walked on, deeper and deeper into the Aegis. And as its atmosphere engulfed him, Rachad found himself less and less able to speak of outside events…
In fifty years the Aegis had become an inward-looking world of stunning artistic perfection. It was an art gallery, a museum, a sybarite’s palace, all rolled into one.
In his short tour Rachad saw only a fraction of the vast and mysterious building. But it was enough to give him the flavor of the duke’s aesthetic experiments—for he soon realized that though many men of genius had been at work here, they were all influenced by the peculiar private tastes the duke had inherited from his father. Everywhere there was quiet music, sometimes from the drifting melody mist, sometimes from indefinable distant sources, much of it strange and jarring to the ear—developed, Rachad imagined, from the odd dissonances and mindtwisting themes, lacking key or regular rhythm, that the melody mist generated. And often there were eerie cries, bellows, prolonged and unintelligible monologues, and frighteningly strange singing—though whether all of this emanated from madmen or from some form of drama that was being performed, Rachad did not inquire.