The sentence was evil; the way he pronounced it was villainous. He engorged the words, wrapped his mouth around them as if they were candy or dope, as if they gave him some deep and obscene satisfaction. I sprang at him, driven by multiple motives: in panic there is an exultant need for physicality; in desperation there is always the question what have I got to lose; and in extremis, death loves company. The least I could do was rip off an ear or tear out an eye before I died, before he took Val from me forever. I’d be damned if I’d go to dust unpartnered.

Blind rage was not fuel enough. I never reached him, although he was only a few feet away. Qazwini and his apes closed in, gang-tackling. I went down with the butt of a rifle hard against the side of my head. The torchlight wavered, dimmed, and went out altogether.

FORTY
CONSPIRACY

I get through the days on a kind of muscular memory, eating little, writing less, assailed by wild, careening thoughts. In the night they continue to sweep over me like a stormy sea and I sink into a spiral of frightful confusion. I dream dreams of terror, mostly about an eagle, both wings broken, crying in a cage. I’m obsessed by mountain climbing.

The nightmares return, although I try to fight them off at their source by refusing to sleep. I trudge in the dark, feeling my way as the blind do, with fingers for eyes, and by memory and the peculiar aura that emanates from solid objects otherwise undetected by the senses.

Some days pass swiftly. For hours on end I totter on the verge of coma, totally inattentive to the passage of time. Or I waver between resignation to the inevitable and the soothing conviction that this couldn’t possibly be happening to me. Somehow, just before the end, the cavalry will swoop down with flashing sabers of deliverance, and I’ll ride off into the sunset with Val. I can see her smiling face wavering before me. Slowly the face ages, slackens, and solidifies. A small dark man with phosphorescent eyeballs stands over me like a shade, like some Gothic rendition of Death. In a hand he carries not a scythe but a rat-skin sac in the shape of a bota. Expressionlessly he stares at me.

“I have brought you goat’s milk,” he says. “It will help your diarrhea.”

I mumble my appreciation.

“Perhaps you don’t remember me. I am Zun Alawi. Zun the Sculptor. Advisor to the late sheik.”

How could I forget him? The blind gnome who had ravished Val with his thick, inquisitive hands. “I’ve admired your statues in the square,” I tell him.

He nods slowly. The skin of his face is like the bark of a tree.