Nights of Villjamur - Mark Charan Newton [131]
“Why would a cultist care about that?” he sneered.
She made full eye contact. “Because he was in love with me.”
“Ah, yes,” Tryst said. “He paid for your body, and you called it love—is that right?”
“It wasn’t like that at all. He only paid me the first time …”
“I’m sure it wasn’t really the first,” he said, hoping his sarcasm would provoke her.
“Why are you being like this to me? I’ve done nothing to hurt you.”
“True,” he said, and slowly untied her. “Now, let’s have a little tour of your gallery, shall we?”
She explained it all, each painting, from conception to creation.
Behind the ones that Tryst saw first lay even greater horrors, and he would never forget them. What he had at first found disgusting he later deemed cruel, since her creations did genuinely appear to be alive, but not in any way he was familiar with. For an hour he was shown the intricacies of her paintings, the body shapes that appeared to step out of them. Most of her creations were now set free, somewhere across the Archipelago, on journeys of their own. One image intrigued him particularly: a clay sculpture of a reclining dog. It moved its head around when she neared it, as if it fed off her presence. The creature was totally black, except for eyes possessing a fragile emotion. How could anything so unreal have a life? It broke all known laws, all religious teachings, every philosophy he’d known.
“I’ve one more question,” Tryst said, as the clock tower rang out the thirteen chimes of midnight. “Why do you make these things?”
She turned to a lantern resting on a chest of drawers, stared at it as if it was a beacon of hope. “I think, deep down, it’s because I can. You don’t know how rewarding it feels to have your creations come to life. No one does, so I can’t begin to explain. That way your art takes on a life of its own. I remember when I was much younger, people criticizing my paintings for being lifeless. Now I can make anything come out of these canvases, and they behave according to my wishes—even if they die shortly after. And I do it because … well, because I’m lonely. This is a big city, but I feel like a stranger in it. My family died years ago. I’ve spent all my life here, so where else would I go? There’s nothing for me in one of the far-off villages of some backwater island, and I wouldn’t fancy my chances out there in the Freeze anyway. No, I’m trapped here, a permanent stranger. Perhaps it makes my job easier. When men have finished with me, they go back home to their wives, their families, and I know they wouldn’t want me to walk up to them in the street and say hello. So every time I make love to a stranger, it makes me a little more distant, a little more solitary. A little more scarred.”
Tryst brushed her sadness to one side. “It’s possible, then, for you to create a living creature simply to murder someone?”
She was silent for some time before answering, frozen in posture, so he could not tell what she was thinking. “Yes, of course. And I suppose you’d want to know why I did it.”
Tryst waited for her to go on.
She continued, “Ghuda talked a lot over the pillow. It’s like a confessional, and you’d be surprised to know just how many secrets are whispered to a woman like me. He may have been a little drunk, of course, but he started ranting about the refugees, and how they should be eliminated, that they disturbed the central plans of the Council. He claimed they were parasitic scum who deserved to die before they could leach the Treasury dry. So much disease among them, too, threatened the survival of the city, so he and Councilor Boll were working on certain plans to bring about their removal, and there were others involved, too. It wasn’t difficult to work out what he meant and I couldn’t let him continue, Tryst. I just couldn’t let them destroy the lives of so many.”
Tryst was concerned that she might know Urtica’s secrets, of his own involvement in them. “There were other ways to act, you know. You should have informed the Inquisition.”
“You think I’m stupid? You think you lot would have