Chapter Thirteen A Spy in the House of God #2
Outside they could hear raised voices arguing, explaining, demanding.
Any moment now someone in authority would come in.
A thought occurred to Karpelin, and he sank to his knees and raised his hands together in an attitude of prayer, just in time; because there were other faces now in the doorway, and uniformed bodies, and weapons.
They might have been police, but they looked more like soldiers. Karpelin could see the shoulder-flash of the Office of Right Duty, which was similar to that of the old and much-feared Consistorial Court of Discipline.
The first of the men looked around, noticed Karpelin, but then was shoved aside by another, who was pointing at the trembling daemon under the table.
“There it is! Look!”
It, again. Four or five men, rifles raised, advanced towards the table, spreading out to cover a wider angle. Their daemons, dog-formed themselves, were clearly unhappy about the matter. Two of them tried to hang back, unsuccessfully.
“Hey!” called one of the men. “Come out here!”
The daemon tried to force her head down even further.
Another man in a sergeant’s uniform made his way towards Karpelin, casting glances back at the table all the time.
“Sir,” he said. “Sir. Got to leave the building, please.”
Karpelin opened his eyes and looked up at him, but kept his hands clasped.
“I’m telling you to leave,” the sergeant said more harshly.
“Yes, all right,” said Karpelin. “I understand. But don’t hurt her, will you? She’s just terrified.”
“No one’s going to get hurt. But you’ve got to leave. Come on, hurry up.”
Karpelin stood up carefully, and edged his way to the end of the row of chairs.
Then something frightened Brande’s daemon.
She howled and leapt up, and raced out of the shelter of the communion table, and one of the soldiers was so startled that he fired his rifle, missing the daemon but smashing a window.
The daemon was in a passion of fear and misery; she ran with all her force directly into the far wall, as if she thought it was made of paper, and fell back, with the bones of her face smashed and splintered, but still alive.
Now pain was added to the terror; the poor creature must have been nearly mad, thought Karpelin, and his own daemon was sobbing pitifully; and in came two more men in different uniforms, carrying a long pole with a noose of wire rope at the end.
By now the sergeant had given up on Karpelin, and was more interested in the process of capturing the daemon. Karpelin could hardly bear to watch, but thought someone ought to witness what was happening, so forced himself to stay, holding his own little daemon in both hands close to his breast.
The dead man’s daemon was struggling fiercely, but without any sense of where she was or what was happening to her.
Her claws kept slipping on the stone floor, and when the men tried to get the wire noose around her neck she screamed and howled and sobbed exactly like a—like a human being, Karpelin thought, but then she was human, of course she was human, and her man was lying dead, and she couldn’t die, and Karpelin’s own daemon was pleading with him, begging him to do anything to help, anything at all.
But they had her in the grip of the noose, and there were four of them, big heavy men, dragging her towards the door.
It was impossible for her. The doorway was crowded with people shoving and peering and staring wide-eyed, exactly as Karpelin imagined the spectators at a public execution would behave.
The soldiers were wielding batons, striking left and right to clear the way to the door for the men hauling the stricken daemon as she struggled and choked in the noose, and then they were outside and every brutal human face went with them, leaving Karpelin and his own little daemon to collapse onto the nearest chair and sob with helpless grief.
—
They brought the news to Marcel Delamare as he enjoyed a glass of wine with some important guests in the garden of La Maison Juste.
“Stay here, Matthieu,” he murmured to his private secretary. “I must see to this.”
Rumors were already flying through the city like sparks from a careless bonfire, ready to ignite any tinder they touched.
The grim and lurid personality of Gottfried Brande and the bizarre circumstances of his death combined to produce a sensation that was more than the Magisterium could silence.
When Delamare arrived at the headquarters of the Office of Right Duty five minutes after the news reached him, he found a small crowd already jostling outside the main entrance.
“Monsieur le Président!” he heard someone call, and recognized the voice of Théophile Engelmann, a journalist who specialized in religious affairs. An instant calculation unreeled in his mind: to talk to him—better or worse?
He stopped and nodded gravely. “Good afternoon, Théophile,” he said. “A troubling business.”
“Did you know what Gottfried Brande was going to say in his lecture, Monsieur Delamare?”
“No. We are not in the business of censorship. Good heavens! Professor Brande was of course at perfect liberty to say whatever he wished, and we would have listened with profound attention to the words of such a distinguished scholar.”
“And his daemon—”
“You’ll forgive me, Théophile, but in the present circumstances I can’t say anything until I’ve examined the case myself.”
Other voices: “Are you going to have it killed?” “Are you going to put her down?” “Is it dead or alive?”
Voices were coming at him from every part of the crowd, which was already growing.
Delamare held up a hand, shook his head, smiled sorrowfully, and allowed his escort to clear a path through the doorway and into the building.
His owl daemon raised her wings and flapped them once or twice in a rare display of annoyance.
“Well?” Delamare snapped at the officer in charge.
“This way, Monsieur le—”
“Still alive?”
“Yes, but in great distress. She can’t—”
“There is no doubt that Brande is dead?”
“None whatsoever, monsieur. An apoplexy killed him at once.”
“And the daemon is injured? Who caused that?”
“My understanding is that she ran so hard into a wall that she caused it herself. Possibly trying to—”
“Take me to her at once.”
Delamare followed the officer down the stairs and into a room designed for the interrogation of prisoners. A table and two chairs were bolted to the tiled floor; there were no windows, just a glaring strip light overhead.
And the daemon, than whom, or than which, Delamare had never seen any creature more pitiful. He had noticed the “it” from the voices outside, and recognized the effect it had.
He sat on one of the chairs and watched as the creature tried to hide in a corner, under the table, in another corner, forcing her agonized face against the wall, uttering all the time a choked and stuttering wail.
“Leave me,” Delamare said to the attendant.
“But she might—”
“She can do nothing. Leave, now.”
“I’ll be just outside, Monsieur le Président.”
He closed the door carefully as he left.
“Can you understand me?” Delamare asked, speaking very clearly.
No response except a constant quiet note of anguish. Delamare’s own daemon spread her owl wings and glided from his shoulder to the table, to peer down at the demented being and her poor shattered face.
Delamare tried in German: “Do you know where you are?”
No response.
“My name is Marcel Delamare. You are in the care of the Magisterium, in Geneva. Do you know what happened to your person, to Gottfried Brande?”
She uttered a groan that was half a growl. She recognized his name, then. Delamare went on: “We can try to heal your injuries. We can certainly make you more comfortable. Can you speak at all? Can you utter words in any language?”
The daemon forced a sound out of her throat, and Delamare’s owl daemon said something in response.
“Persian, I think,” she said to Delamare. And then to the daemon she uttered a phrase in that language, which Delamare recognized as a greeting.
The daemon did nothing but put a paw over her face, and flinch from the pain, and then take it off. Her eyes were tightly closed. A long soft moan, hardly audible, was the only sound she made.
Delamare tried again in German.
“I think you must have spoken with Professor Brande in this language, but if you would rather speak in a different language and can tell us which, we can arrange for an interpreter. Meanwhile, is there anything we can provide for your comfort? Would you like some water? Would you like a rug?”
No response. Apart from the constant quiet moan of pain and misery, she might have been asleep, or dead, he thought—but no, not dead. She would have vanished. Was she perhaps not a daemon at all?
“Don’t,” said his daemon.
“Don’t what?”
“You were going to touch her.”
“Simply to see whether—”
“Don’t do it. She would die at once.”
“Die of what?”
“Of shame.”
“That would settle the question.”
“But dishonorably. She’s certainly a daemon. Don’t touch her.”
Delamare sat back to watch the stricken creature. She seemed like someone at the very limits of exhaustion and agony, who knows she is alone, and no one will ever help.
“But not his daemon,” Delamare said suddenly.
“Ah!” said the owl daemon. “Then…whose?”
He sat forward and said in German, “Gottfried Brande was not your person, was he?”
The daemon curled her spine and tried to put both front feet over her face, but had to stop, because it clearly hurt so much.
“Tell me. How did you come to pose as his daemon? Why did he pretend you were?”
Delamare regretted, now, that he hadn’t attended Brande’s lecture, spoken to him beforehand, watched how he was with the daemon.
She made no attempt to respond, but tears were spilling from her eyes.
He said, “I think you understand me. You are alone now, and in great pain. I have offered to try to relieve it. We have experts here in the treatment of ailing daemons. There are medications, there are practitioners of the talking cure, there is even surgery. No daemon need suffer a moment longer than necessary.”
The tears were pooling on the floor beside the daemon’s broken face. Delamare was convinced now that she understood him.
“If there is anything you’d like to say, perhaps about your original person, perhaps about your homeland—”
The daemon raised her head and murmured, “Nichts.”
And then she vanished, as if she’d been made of smoke. All that remained was the pool of tears.
“What did she say? What was that last word?”
“Nothing. She had nothing to say and she said it.”
Delamare sat back in his chair. “So much for that,” he said. “Well, we shall learn from it. You think it was Persian, whatever it was she said?”
“The last word was German, but yes, the rest was Persian, I think.”
Delamare stood up and opened the door. “She died,” he told the attendant.
He set off along the corridor, and after a moment his daemon glided to his shoulder. Delamare gave orders as he left the building, summoning various officials and aides to a meeting at La Maison Juste, to begin immediately. A golden idea was already forming in his mind.
Leenart Karpelin to Oakley Street:
The sensation caused by the death of Gottfried Brande shows no sign of fading.
The official narrative says that Brande was struck down by an apoplexy, the shock of which caused his daemon to tear herself away from him, mad with fear.
She was given refuge in La Maison Juste while doctors attended to Brande, but despite the best medical care he and the daemon died within the hour, simultaneously.
The text of his lecture has been carefully preserved by the Magisterium, and they are said to be considering the possibility of publishing it in his memory.
The daemon business remains a mystery. Everyone who saw the event knows that Brande died at once; no one believes that his daemon was in any sense “normal.” Stories of her behavior after his death spread and multiply.
Some say she still haunts the Chapel of the Sacred Presence.
A service of exorcism has been requested by a delegation of the faithful.
A small observation. Marcel Delamare, whose style and bearing are proverbially immaculate, is becoming careless with his dress. A small stain on his lapel, which I noticed yesterday, is still there today, and his fingernails were dirty. I mention this purely because it is so unusual.
—
“Publishing it? Really?”
“Oh, not as it is, of course not. But I can see several advantages in a rewritten version, echoing and even anticipating various views of our own.”
Delamare and his daemon were in his private rooms at La Maison Juste, examining the text of the notes Brande had with him when he died. His hotel room had been searched, and other pages of manuscript found in his luggage lay on the desk in front of the President.
“When have we got time to do that?” said his owl daemon.
“A young scholar—Maximov, say…”
“I don’t trust him.”
“Someone else, then. A postdoctoral student would jump at the chance.”
“Same objection applies. Marcel, the only mind that could possibly put this confused and contradictory rant in order is yours. But why would you take time out of—”
“Because there are insights here that are quite new. What he says about language…”
“Steal them, then. Simply take them. Then burn the papers.”
“He was going in our direction, that’s the point.”
“Put it all in the safe. Lock it away and come back to it when the girl is dealt with.”
Delamare leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the desk. “Yes,” he said. “This evening the girl will arrive in Baku, and then that will soon be over.”