Ink by Hal Duncan

Author:Hal Duncan [Duncan, Hal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780345487339
Google: 3-AtwBp6XVUC
Amazon: 0345487338
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2014-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

THE HARLEQUIN's DANCE

She drags the angel into town behind her, him staggering to match her stride. She's still not sure of why she let him live; she can't believe it's Jack, no matter what he says, no matter how his eyes glint with the blue of open skies, electric sparks, but still… there was this moment when she felt her fingers at his throat, her claws piercing his skin, and some tiny scrap of her humanity kicked in and held her back. Even with the bitmites hissing in her head, and the pack behind her howling for his blood, she'd felt some little piece of sense in her saying, no, don't do it, this was never what you wanted. Not revenge. It can't just be about revenge. The world, the Hinter, the whole Vellum, can't just be about revenge.

So she drags the angel through the town he rules, this little Haven out in the Hinter where he's set himself up as fucking king, Basileus. She drags him through the market, toppling stalls and barrows as she passes them, and brings him to his knees up within the portico of his own fucking palace, this once-grand angel of fire, stripped of his armor, stripped to the waist… and stripped of his graving. The hatch-work of scars on his chest is so much like the birthmark graved on her lost son.

But where Jack inherited that strange riven graving from the bitmites and from herself, from the confusion written on her own right arm, this unkin's graving is an artifice. His graying hair, the beard on his face—it's the work of a warrior trying to rewrite his own fate, she thinks, trying to not die gloriously in battle, to exchange a destiny of war for one of will. A small-town king. A reasonable man, he'd say. But in the desperate order he's imposed over his own wild nature she can still read what he was, once, in the world before the Evenfall.

“The fates we make are sad,” says Phree, “but what had he to do with my mistake?”

She speaks the line like she already knows the answer. Everything and nothing. A serving maid starts to sob. The consul grips her arm, looks nervously at Joey's scowl. You made your bed, now lie in it, I can just about hear him muttering.

“He was like you,” says Don, “refusing to respect the Harlequin, to join his dance. He's ruined all of us together now, this house itself, you, me, and him.”

The audience stand round the walls like statues, eyes fixed on the grim sight of the body of the Duke. It's almost gone now, dissolved into the swirling mess of bitmites rising from the floor, filling the room; there's something even more unsettling in the absence of it, though, the fact that all there is now is the head in Phreedom's hand. Strange how we talk about decapitation as losing your head, when it's as much a head losing its body, becoming heartless, gutless, spineless… dead.

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