Eyes of night,
Dreams aflight,
Darkling gaze,
Travel the ways…
The words rang in Vredech’s head like a knell and, with a cry, he jerked away from the fearful image in the mirror. His mind clamouring for escape, he pressed his fingers hard into his closed eyelids. You’re still half-asleep, he thought frantically. You’ve just woken up. It’s only the lamplight. It’s…
He gave up. There was no alternative but to look again to see if that first glance had shown him the truth.
His hands were shaking as he forced himself to take hold of the mirror. At first he could not focus, bringing on a spasm of earnest blinking until eventually his vision cleared. Standing where he was however, his eyes were heavily shaded. Hands still unsteady, he moved the mirror and twisted himself around until the faint lamplight was shining on his face. Almost childishly, he pulled a long face, widening his eyes manically in unconscious imitation of the dream figure who had just so violently ejected him into wakefulness.
For a terrifying instant he thought he was staring again into the black orbs that the mirror had shown him before. But as he blinked again, the image was gone. His own face, twisted awry, gaped wildly out at him, but his eyes were quite normal. Relief swept over him.
‘Of course. Of course,’ he whispered as, composing his features, he slowly returned the mirror to the mantel shelf. ‘What else did you expect, foolish man?’ He moved back to his chair, massaging his brow with his fingertips and repeatedly muttering, ‘Foolish man.’ He turned up the solitary lamp and then lit another. The light blossomed to fill the room, and though some of the shadows deepened at its touch, the room became more its familiar self again.
Night eyes, night eyes. He shivered at the memory of the words. So many images, he thought. So that was a dream, was it? It needed little imagination to see why people would sometimes come to him for advice after such an experience. It had been so vivid; at once real and unreal. Easy to doubt one’s sanity in that strange place – wherever it was.
It must have been as his father had once suggested – perhaps in reality he dreamed regularly but normally did not remember. Now, for some reason he had. That was not an idea he should have any difficulty in accepting, surely? And, despite widows’ tales to the contrary, he knew that dreams came only from within. What he had seen, heard, felt, could only have been of his own making, no matter how strange.
‘Night eyes can’t dream.’ The words came to deny this conclusion. He remembered the Whistler’s voice, dismissive, scornful almost, that such an obvious thing should have to be mentioned. But apart from the strange reference to his eyes, the idea that he could not dream had been his own for as long as he could remember.
Then he suddenly recalled the sight of his fellow Chapter Brothers as they had struggled up the mountain through the darkness in search of Cassraw. At one point the light had been so strange that they, too, had had eyes whose sockets seemed to be full of night. The memory relaxed him. So that was where that idea had come from.
As for why he should choose to create strange figures and dialogue just to torment himself, that puzzle must be left for some other time. The fear for his sanity was almost gone now, driven into nothingness by the solidity of the ordinary world that had once more closed about him.
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Slowly his breathing grew quieter, his heart began to beat more steadily, and his hands stopped trembling. His thoughts returned gradually to the problems that he had been considering when he first sat down, although he felt oddly reluctant to move away from the vivid intensity he had just left.
Still, he could ponder his new experience any time. At the moment he had more important considerations to deal with than his first dream – his first remembered dream, he corrected himself. He dropped his hands on to his knees noisily and sat up straight, signalling to himself that he must now move on. Tonight was to be a vigil still. He had to find a solution to his unsettled disposition of late, and sleeping – dreaming – the night away was hardly likely to help.
Yet something had changed. He was different. As in the shadow-strewn landscape he had just left, his perspectives had changed, though he could not have said in what manner. Perhaps the thoughts and ideas that had come to him in the dream had been his father’s, ‘little swine lurking about below the surface, getting ready to ambush you’. Perhaps the whole thing had been some kind of catharsis – a purging, a purification. Certainly it had taxed him in ways he had never known before. The place, if ‘place’ was the correct word, though eerie and disturbing, had seemed as real as this room. And the strange figure of the Whistler with his haunting tune – from what depths had he arisen to test Vredech with taunts about his very existence? ‘I made you,’ he had said. ‘I made you.’ And he had trapped him twice, first with the verse, and then with his name. That had been truly disturbing. What self-flagellation did he represent?
As for that verse – that damned silly verse! That was not remotely familiar, yet Vredech knew it now as though he had known it all his life, and it kept running through his mind, demanding attention. Why should he find it so alarming – no – why did he find it downright frightening? He mouthed it silently to himself, searching for signs within it that might help him to track down its source. But there was nothing there, and it still held a terror of some kind which was not to be found in the simple words. Furthermore, he noted, it brought back to him the intense reality of his dream-world. For a heart-stopping moment he thought the firm contours of his room were fading again.
Angrily he dashed the impression aside. No doubt at some time in the next few days he would recall the verse as having been learned at school, or from his mother or grandmother, and all would then be clear to him. If he kept on worrying at it, he was merely postponing that revelation.
He went to the window and opened the shutters. It was dark out, and all he could see at first was the reflection of himself silhouetted against the lighted room. He looked at it pensively for a moment and then, bringing his face close to the glass, he peered through it at the dimly-lit streets of the town. Rain on the window blurred such street lamps as were lit. As he gently closed the shutters again, he made a decision. Picking up his cloak, he walked quietly out of the room.
The shadows wavered slightly as he left, leaving the door open. Then, moments later, they flickered and danced a little more urgently as cold air from the street wafted into the house and sought out the lamps. They became still again as the sound of the Meeting House door closing faded into the silence.
That night there was a murder in Troidmallos. A peculiarly nasty one.
Skynner was bleary-eyed and irritable when he arrived at the scene and nothing happened there to improve his demeanour. Murder was not a common crime in the town but he had had the misfortune to encounter a few in his time as a Keeper. Ironically, for all the horror associated with such a crime, the cause and the culprit usually took little finding. First he would question the spouse and any other ‘loved ones’, then the immediate relatives, followed by close friends, and perhaps business partners and the like. Very quickly from that would emerge a picture that would almost inevitably direct him towards his goal -usually some pathetic, inadequate individual with precious little control over his own destiny, and, by the time of his discovery, often utterly destroyed by the forces that had led him or her to such violence.
Sometimes a murder would ensue from youthful brawling, and these, too, were usually easy to solve. Occasionally there would be an abrupt and vicious end to a dispute, or a realignment of authority within the criminal elements that Troidmallos shared in common with every other community in Gyronlandt. In such cases, Skynner would investigate with sufficient diligence to satisfy his professional conscience but would meticulously avoid any excess of zeal. Generally he viewed them with a pragmatic air as, ‘One less for me to worry about. Pity more of them don’t do it. Save us all a lot of problems.’ It was a commonly held view.
As a rule, however, he took little relish in bringing murderers to justice, as such affairs were invariably hallmarked by a squalid pettiness that left him feeling soiled.
As he followed Albor, the duty Keeper who had discovered the body, into a narrow alleyway between two warehouses, his mood was therefore mixed. His expectations of a rapid conclusion were quite high, but already he could feel the taint of what the next few days would bring as he saw himself once again having to wade through the dismal lives of the victim and who knew how many other wretched creatures. He set the prospect aside. It was unavoidable so there was no point in suffering it twice. Now he must steel himself for whatever grim spectacle lay in wait for him, knowing that he would have to bear it with seeming indifference as befitted an experienced Serjeant Keeper. Albor’s unusual reluctance to go into details however, unsettled him a little.
Halfway along the alley they reached a small circle of rain-soaked Keepers, all with their night lanterns turned high as if some form of extra protection were needed to keep the night at bay. The circle parted silently as he arrived and, maintaining the silence, he and Albor stepped through the gap. Quickly he noted the faces of his men. Except for Albor they were all fairly junior. One was obviously distressed, and a couple were grinning uneasily, while the rest were trying unsuccessfully to keep their faces unreadable. Curious, nervous, and ashamed of both, Skynner thought. Another problem for him. But he could not prevent his own lip from curling back as he crushed down the remains of his own reluctance to do what he had to do next. Crouching down, he turned back the sheet that someone had placed over the body. Albor brought a lamp close to the upturned face. The fine rain danced silver and black through its light. Skynner’s brow wrinkled unhappily as he found himself looking into the fear-filled eyes of a young man. For the first time, though for no reason that he could have explained, his routine expectations of a rapid solution to this affair started to falter.
‘Anyone know him?’ he asked without turning round, at the same time throwing back the sheet entirely. There was an intake of breath behind him as the lamplight exposed a lacerated throat and a tunic covered with a random pattern of gore-stained slashes.
‘If anyone’s going to be sick, get down the alley now, and then get back here at the double. You’re Keepers and you’re on duty,’ Skynner growled unsympathetically as he turned round and glared at his men. No one moved, though all faces were now drawn and tense. ‘Does anyone know him?’ he repeated angrily. ‘I don’t want to spend all night out here getting soaked while you lot gather your wits.’
The hesitation persisted.
‘Well, look at him, for pity’s sake!’ he shouted as he stood up. ‘He won’t bite you, poor sod. WhereasI will.’
This was sufficient to galvanize his men.
It appeared that no one knew the victim.
‘Marvellous,’ he muttered caustically, looking round at the warehouse walls bounding the alley. Glistening darkly with rainwater, they stretched up into the night beyond the bobbing lantern-light, like sinister observers. Neither witnesses nor inhabitants would be found around here. ‘Well, he might have died here, but he certainly doesn’t live here, that’s for sure,’ he announced. ‘We’ll have to wait for someone to come looking for him. Failing that, I suppose we’ll have to get his picture posted up.’ He shook his head and swore softly to himself, then he began going through the man’s pockets. ‘Empty,’ he said, his voice a little surprised. ‘Look around. See if there’s a pack or a bag lying about somewhere.’
There was a brief flurry of activity in the alley, but nothing was found.
‘Robbery,’ Skynner concluded, though he was frowning. Street robbers usually worked in groups of three or more and used intimidation, or at worst clubs rather than knives, precisely to avoid risking killing people and thereby bringing the Keepers relentlessly down on them. Perhaps something had gone wrong here. The lad had argued, resisted. Someone had panicked or…
Or what?
He looked at the gashed throat and the mass of wounds in the young man’s chest, then dropped the sheet back over him with an extravagant gesture to disguise his response to the thoughts that were beginning to come to him. This killing had not been the result of an accident during a scuffle. It had been frenzied – and that betokened a jealous lover, a betrayed husband. Yet all the man’s possessions had apparently been taken away.
A savage, unrestrained killingand robbery. It didn’t make sense. Or rather, it made a kind of sense that he did not really want to think about. And something else was troubling him, too, though he could not bring it into focus.
He looked at Albor and grimaced, keeping his face away from the others. ‘Get a cart and take him to the buriers. I’ll need to have a good look at him in daylight, see what’s really been done to him. Leave a couple of men here to stop people walking through until we’ve given the place a proper search in the morning.’ He turned to the others. ‘The rest of you get back on duty. There’s nothing else to be done here tonight.’
He stood silent and thoughtful as his instructions were implemented. Albor remained by him, standing close and confidential, instinctively demonstrating his superiority to the more junior Keepers now milling about the alley.
‘You think we’ll find anything?’ he asked as the group dwindled to the two who had been posted on guard.
Skynner eased him out of earshot of the two men. ‘I hope to Ishryth we do,’ he said. ‘But I doubt it.’
Albor raised an eyebrow, detecting the unusual note in his superior’s voice. Skynner answered the unspoken question. ‘It’s got all the earmarks of a lover’s tiff.’ Albor allowed himself a slight knowing smile at this heavy professional irony as Skynner continued. ‘But wives and sweethearts don’t normally rob their heart’s desire after they’ve killed him, do they?’ The slight smile became a slight nod. ‘So…’ He seemed reluctant to spell out his conclusion and his voice dropped even though he could not be overheard by the two junior Keepers. ‘So it might be a random killing. We might have a lunatic on our hands… someone who kills people for no reason, except some weird desire of their own.’
Albor remained silent. Skynner’s simple statement made as powerful an impression on him as any amount of ranting and shouting, and though he had no experience of such a killing, he was experienced enough to see the implications. If it had happened once, then…
And neither laws nor Keepers could protect anyone from a murderer who would strike thus.
He shivered slightly. He did not want to think about it. Indeed, he found it almost impossible even to imagine such a thing, notwithstanding, or perhaps because of, the presence of a mutilated corpse.
‘I’ve heard about things like that, but a long time ago,’ he said reassuringly. ‘I’ll grant this is a bad one, but you’re probably worrying unnecessarily. There’ll be a jealous lover somewhere, I’ll wager.’
Skynner did not reply. His conviction was growing, and the thing that had been silently nagging at him came into focus. ‘Itis a lunatic,’ he said eventually. ‘You saw the man’s eyes. That wasn’t someone fighting to keep his money, or trying to beat off a jealous lover. He was looking at something truly frightful.’
‘He was being stabbed,’ Albor remarked, in an attempt to move away from this conclusion. ‘He’s hardly likely to have been smiling, is he?’
Skynner gave a slight nod but his demeanour did not change. ‘We’ve got an ordinary person doing some ordinary thing here, suddenly faced with an unprovoked, unexpected and unstoppable attack. Suddenly faced with his worst nightmare. It’s all in his eyes.’ He started walking slowly towards the mouth of the alley, motioning Albor to follow him.
There was such certainty in his voice that Albor did not even consider debating the point. Besides, the man’s eyes had given him the creeps.
‘If you’re right, what can we do then?’ he asked.
‘Personal awareness and luck,’ Skynner said flatly.
Albor looked at him quizzically.
‘That’s what my old Serjeant told me when I was a pup,’ Skynner expanded. ‘Personal awareness and luck. Said he’d realized that the last time this kind of thing happened here.’
Albor was openly surprised. ‘I’ve never heard of any… lunatic… murderer actually in Troidmallos,’ he said.
Despite the rain, his interrupted sleep, and his dark thoughts, Skynner felt his spirits lift a little at the memory. The two men emerged into the street where their horses were tethered.
‘Nor will you,’ Skynner said, mounting. ‘It was all discreetly forgotten in the end.’ Albor leaned forward a little, detecting the change in tone. He did not have to prompt Skynner into continuing. There was nothing quite like Keepers’ gossip. ‘Ten people this fellow killed,’ Skynner went on, holding his hands out in demonstration. ‘Ten. Smashed their heads in.’ One hand folded into a fist and struck the palm of the other. ‘One every two weeks or so. ‘Course, there were no Sheets in those days, just the daily postings, but apparently there were crowds around the posting points, and the whole town was in a state verging on panic. Heinders were yelling at the Chief to “do something”, the Chief was yelling at the High Captains, High Captains yelling at Captains and so on, right down the line. One of the Witness Party Heinders even tried to get an emergency law passed to forbid people from carrying cudgels.’
Albor’s mouth dropped open. ‘You’re not serious,’ he said with amused incredulity.
‘Oh yes,’ Skynner confirmed. ‘Just like it is today, there’s no end to the ridiculous things that a Heinder will suggest rather than admit he can’t do anything.’
‘I presume nothing came of it?’
‘With most of the Heinders around him armed to the teeth, some of them even hiring private guards, and ordinary folks organizing armed patrols? It certainly didn’t.’ He paused. ‘Awareness and luck,’ he said softly to himself. His mood darkened as he realized he was describing what might come to pass again if he was right. ‘It was a bad time by all accounts, Albor. Difficult to imagine. The whole town full of frightened people. One person holding tens of thousands in sway.’
But Albor was not interested in social subtleties. ‘What happened in the end?’ he asked.
Skynner pursed his lips appreciatively. ‘Some woman got him – a little old lady. Strange really, he’d always attacked men before. But who knows what these people think? Anyway, according to my old Serjeant, this old dear was walking home past Haven Park when a man appeared in front of her shouting something wild and waving an iron bar at her. At this, she’s supposed to have folded her arms across her bag and said something like, “Stand aside, young man, I wish to pass,” even as he was walking towards her!’
Albor was enthralled, and Skynner was beginning to enjoy himself. ‘But as the man’s arm goes up to add number eleven to his list, out of the old lady’s bag comes her best carving knife.’ Skynner thrust his hand forward in imitation. His horse lifted its head and shook it. ‘Not a flicker of a pause. Up under the ribcage, into the heart, end of murderer. Thus let it be.’ He chuckled loudly. ‘It seems that the old lady was once a butcher’s wife.’ His chuckle became a full-bellied laugh.
Albor was suspicious. ‘You’re making it up,’ he risked. ‘I’ve never heard of any of that.’
Skynner shook his head. ‘No, it’s true to the best of my knowledge. There were other officers who remembered it. It was a tale they came out with almost every time there was a murder. The reason it’s not commonplace is that the murderer was the son of one of the wealthy merchants – a big supporter of the Castellan Party – you know the kind of thing. And, as I said, there were no Sheets in those days. The daily postings simply announced that an unknown man had been killed while resisting arrest and the whole business quietly faded away.’
The two men shared a brief spell of professional good fellowship in the glow of this tale as they rode quietly along, but the bloodstained body under the sheet soon returned to dispel it. Skynner began making plans for the immediate future. He would catch as much sleep as he could salvage from the rest of tonight, then tomorrow he would inform his Captain and set about the happy business of examining the body. He puffed out his cheeks in rueful anticipation. At least he could leave the Sheeters to the Captain. On the whole he’d rather deal with a dead body than the likes of Privv and his ilk. Somehow it felt more wholesome.