The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [402]
Again and again he did all in his power to locate the suffering creature, for Flay had begun to realize that it was nearing the end of its strength. It was not so much terror that he now felt as a blind pity. A pity that drew him to the place night after night. It was as though he had this nameless tragedy upon his conscience; as though his being there to listen to the weakening voice, was in some way helpful. He knew that this was not so, but he could not keep away.
The night came when for all his listening there was no sound, and from that time onwards the silence remained unbroken.
He knew that in some way the end had come to some demented thing. What it was that had laughed with that double note, that had cried out and answered itself with the same flat and terrible voice, he never knew. He never knew that he was the last to hear the voices of their ladyships Cora and Clarice, nor that he had been within a few feet of those apartments into which they had once been lured. He never knew that behind the locked doors of this place of incarceration the Twins had languished, their brains losing what grip they had, their madness mounting, until, when their provisions began to fail them, and Steerpike no longer came, they knew that death was on his way.
When weakness overpowered them they lay down side by side and staring at the ceiling, they died at the same moment, on the other side of the wall.
FORTY-SIX
While Flay, in his wilderness of hollow halls, was brooding upon the shock he had sustained, and fretting at its insoluble nature, Steerpike, now up and about once more, was losing no time in establishing his position as Master of Ritual. He was under no illusions as to what the reaction of the castle would be, when it became borne in upon them that he was performing no stop-gap office. To neither be old, nor to be the son of Barquentine, nor one of the accepted school of hierophants, nor indeed to have any claim upon the title, save that of being the only disciple of the drowned cripple’s, and of having the brains to perform the onerous office, was an anything but encouraging inception.
Nor was he, physically, any longer personable. His hunched shoulders, his pallor, his dark-red eyes had never encouraged intimacy even supposing he had ever courted it. But now, how much the more so was he likely to be shunned, even in a society that laid no claim to beauty.
The burns upon his face and neck and hands were there to stay. Only the worms could put an end to them. The effect of the face was of something skewbald; the taut crimson tissue, forming fiery patterns against the wax-like pallor of his skin. His hands were blood-red and silky; their creases and wrinkles like those on the hand of a monkey.
And yet he knew, that although he created a natural revulsion among those about him, the reason for his disfigurement stood in his favour. It was he who had (as far as the castle knew) risked his life to save the hereditary Master. It was he who had suffered delirium and excruciating pain because he had had the courage to try and wrest from death’s grip a keystone of the Gormenghast tradition. How, in that case, could his diabolical appearance be held against him?
And what is more he knew, however prejudiced his opponents might be, that in the end they had no option but to accept him, in spite of his burns, his background, and the unproven rumours which he knew were in constant circulation – to accept him, for the simple reason that there was no one else with the necessary knowledge at his fingertips. Barquentine had divulged his secrets to no one else. The very tomes of cross-reference would have been beyond the powers of even the most intelligent of men to comprehend, unless, as a preliminary, he were schooled to the symbols involved. The principle upon which the arrangement