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“Yes, I remember that style,” the bureaucrat said. “Expensive, as I recall.”
Orphelin shrugged. “It was his popularity that most offended me. I was a material phenomenologist. So while Gregorian could freely discuss what he was learning, my education was very strictly controlled, and I wasn’t allowed to take any of it out of class. What status I had in student circles came from my having studied under a pharmacie
The bureaucrat hesitated. “Once. . . I was young.”
“Then I don’t have to tell you that it’s a rigged game. Anyone foolish enough to play by the rules is going to lose. I had mastered the standard means of cheating — tapping in extra data sources, relaying your opponent’s signal through a millisecond-delay circuit, all the usual — and enjoyed a local reputation as a mind warrior. But Gregorian beat me three times ru
“You met his father? What was he like?”
“I have no idea. It was edited out before we left the halls. His father was somebody important who couldn’t afford to be co
“A year later I returned home to the Tidewater with Gregorian beside me. We shared a room at my parents’ hotel as if we were close friends. By then, antipathy had blossomed into hatred. We’d agreed to have a wizard’s duel — three questions each, wi
“The night we went in search of the maddrake root was wet and starless. We dug by the paupers’ boneyard, where we would not be disturbed. Gregorian straightened first, hands all mud. I have it, he said. He snapped the root in two and held it to my nose. Maddrake has a distinctive odor. It was only after I had swallowed my half that — that smile of his! — it occurred to me that he might have rubbed his hands with maddrake sap and offered instead the halfaman root, which is a close cousin but can be counteracted with a simple antidote. Too late. I had to trust him. We waited until the trees burned green to their cores and the wind spoke. Let us begin, I said.
“Gregorian leaped up and walked through the bones with his arms out, making the skeletons rattle. They were not well maintained, of course. The paint was faded, and half the bones had fallen to the ground so that we trod them underfoot. The death-forces flowed up from them and crawled under my skin, and that made me bold. I felt strong with death. Turn and face me, I commanded. Or are you afraid?
“He turned, and to my horror I saw that he had taken on the aspect of Crow. His head was huge and black: black beak, black feathers, bright obsidian eyes. There was that little bristle of hairlike feathers at the base of the beak, the narrow nostril slits halfway to its point. I had never seen a spirit invoked before. That’s one question, he said in Crow’s harsh voice. No, I am not.
“I assumed this was all illusion, an effect of the maddrake. Angrily I strode forward and seized his arms. The little deaths flowed into him and fought beneath his skin, so that his muscles writhed and spasmed. I squeezed. I was strong then, you must know. My grip should have choked off the blood and left his arms paralyzed. The death-forces should have killed him. But he shook my hands away effortlessly, and laughed.
“You ca
“How did you know I was seeing Crow? I asked. Feeling that horror that comes on realizing that one is completely out of his depth.
“That’s two questions. Crow stropped his beak against a nearby skull, setting the whole skeleton aswing. I know all about you. I have an informant who tells me everything. The Black Beast.
“Who is the Black Beast? I cried.
“That’s three questions. Crow poked his beak into a skull socket, teased out some small sweetmeat. I have answered two of them, and now it is my turn. First tell me: What does it mean when I say Miranda is black?
“I was angry at how he’d tricked the questions from me, but the duel’s purpose is to test will against will; it had been fairly done. An inch down, I said, all the world-globe is an egg of blackness. Starlight does not touch it; only Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban contend for influence. Mystery is that close. This was all catechism, you see, baby stuff, and so I regained much of my confidence. As beneath the skull the brain is black. The magician understands this and contends for influence.
“Crow ruffled his feathers, then parted his beak as he threw back some dark gristly bit. That black tongue! What are the black constellations?
“They are the shapes formed by the starless spaces between the bright constellations. The uninitiated ca
“Crow poked about among the teeth with the tip of his beak. I’d offer you a maggot, he said, but there are barely enough here for me. One last question. Who is the Black Beast?
“What do you mean? I said angrily. I asked you that same question, and you wouldn’t answer me. I don’t believe in your Black Beast at all.
“Crow threw his head back then and screamed in triumph. Those beady little eyes were dark novae of malice. He spread out thumb and forefinger and said, you are that long erect. Your mistress was once involved in the Committee for the Liberation of Information, and only her mother’s money hushed up the scandal. You suspect she is unfaithful to you because she says nothing of your own infidelities. You wet the bed long into your adolescence — you wound up apprenticed to your pharmacie
“And he walked away. I shouted after him that our duel was not over, that there had been no clear wi
Dr. Orphelin sighed. “Gregorian disappeared from my life. Perhaps he transferred to another extension. But I could not get his question out of my mind. Who was the Black Beast? What false friend had told Gregorian my secrets? One morning I woke to find a drawing of a crow in flight tacked up on the wall. I awoke my mistress, pointed to it. What is that? I demanded.
“A picture of a bird, she said.
“What does it mean?
“It’s just a picture, she said. You never objected to it before. She put a hand on my arm. I knocked it away. It wasn’t there yesterday. I said. She was baffled and began to cry. Are you the Black Beast? I asked her. Are you?
“I could not read that sleek face of hers. That complex and all but noseless plane whose geometries I would trace by the hour with finger, tongue, and eye, now seemed a mask to me. What could lie behind it? I set her various traps. I asked her sudden questions. I accused her of impossibilities.
“She left me.
“But the Black Beast did not. I was expelled from Laputa for dueling. I came home to find a stuffed crow on the center of the di