The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [474]
The spreading roofs themselves furnished him with seven secret strongholds. The attics and the three dry floors below provided for at least four as safe, in their varying ways, as his garret above the kitchen. And now that the flood had stayed at the same level for three days, a few feet above the majority of the landings of the ninth floor, it had become possible for him to prepare in advance a number of aqueous asylums.
But how much simpler and safer it would be for him were he able to reconnoitre the high canals in such a craft as he now saw below him.
No. He could not afford to send the rough stone hurtling down. There was more than a chance of his failure to slay. The acute temptation to crush at a single blow that life out of the heir to Gormenghast – and leave nothing more than brick and stone behind – the intoxicating temptation to take the risk and to do this, was hard to resist.
But before all else came his own survival, and if by so much as an iota he deviated in any way from what he considered to be his final advantage then the end would surely come if not now, then very soon. For he knew he was walking on a razor’s edge. He gloried in it. He had slid into the skin of a solitary Satan as though he had never enjoyed the flourish of language, the delights of civil power. It was war, now. Naked and bloody. The simplicity of the situation appealed to him. The world closed in upon him, its weapons drawn, eager for his death. And it was for him to outwit the world. It was the simplest and most fundamental of all games.
But his face was not the face of a thing at play. Or even of the Steerpike of a few years back – at play; or even of sin at play, for something new had happened to it. The terrible pattern that made of it a map, the white of the sea, the red, the continents and spattered islands, was hardly noticeable now. For it was the eyes that drew away the attention from all else.
For all the characteristic cunning and agility of his brain, he was no longer living in the same world that he lived in before he murdered Flay. Something had altered. It was his mind. His brain was the same but his mind was different. He was no longer a criminal because he chose to be. He had no longer the choice. He lived now among the abstractions. His brain dealt with where he would hide and what he would do if certain contingencies arose, but his mind floated above all this in a red ether. And the reflection of his mind burned through his eyes, filling the pupils with a grizzly bloodlight.
As he stared down like a bird of prey from its window’d crag, his brain saw, far below him a canoe. It saw Titus standing on the stone balcony. It saw him turn and after a moment’s hesitation enter the rotting halls and disappear from view.
But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man’s-land, over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood’s red bugles. To be alone and evil! To be a god at bay. What was more absolute.
Three minutes had passed since the Earl had disappeared into the maw of the building below him. Steerpike had given him time to move well into the fastness before he took action. There had been the chance of the sudden reappearance of the youth, for the lower halls were dark and sinister. But he had not reappeared, and the time was now ripe for Steerpike to make his leap. The descent was of a sickening duration. The blood hammered in the murderer’s head. His stomach turned over and for a while he lost consciousness. When his reflection, flying upwards from the depths to meet him was shattered at the surface, and as the spume of water rose like a fountain, Steerpike’s body, far below the surface, continued its descent until, at last, as his feet touched lightly upon the submerged head of a weather-cock, he began to rise again to the surface.
The disturbed water had become quite smooth again.
Dazed with the effort of the long fall, sick with swallowed water and with painful lungs, yet it was only a moment or two before