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At the moment he was rubbing his chin and sounding thoughtful. "Who am I and where
am I from, you ask? Well, I'm from Kinshasha and Broome. I'm from Port Moresby and
Vanuatu. I'm from New Caledonia and New Delhi, from Dushanbe and Kuang-chou, from
Kiev and Cairo." Unexpectedly, an extraordinary sadness filled his face.
"I'm from all of those places and from none of them. Most especially, I'm from Tananarive.
Yes, Tananarive. I'm from there because that's where she was from. I have to be from
there. Don't you see?"
Extraordinary, Prentice mused. In seconds Old Cone had gone from being alternately
crazy and intimidating to a wretched shell of a human being. Pity welled up in him. A
glance showed that his companions were similarly affected.
Lejardin asked the question as gently as she was able. "Who was'she'?"
"She was Melanie, Melanie she was," he whispered. Framed by that thick, unkempt beard
and yellowed teeth, his smile was a wondrous thing to behold. It was as if the sun had
burst through a permanent cover of black clouds hard on the heels of forty days and forty
nights of pure misery.
"Melanie, my Melanie, was from Tananarive. She was the color of fine cafe au lait, and as
sweet. Hair black as onyx wire, eyes of eveningtide. Tall, too. Tall as you." His eyes flicked
past Cedric Carnavon. "But she didn't look down on me." For just an instant his voice
deepened and darkened. "No one looked down on me.
"She was kindness personified, and thoughtful, and understanding of others. She had the
face of an angel and the body of a succubus. She was so naturally kind and sweet she could
stand even me, unlike all who had preceded her. So many others. For the first time in my
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life someone liked me for myself, for who and not what I was. I had never thought to see
that moment, to experience that feeling. So alien was it to me I didn't even recognize it at
first. When I did, I experienced what I can only call nothing less than a personal epiphany.
"I would have accepted that feeling from a broken, leprous beggar. Instead it flowed like a
river of honey from someone as desirable as her, from Melanie. There was no pretense in
her, no desire as in other truly beautiful women to hang a brace of scalps from her belt or
to carve notches in a gun. No mental black book in which to record conquests.
"She just. . ." he hesitated "she just. . . liked me. You have to understand that I was not
liked, no. Admired, yes. Looked up to, in certain circles. There were even those who
worshiped me. But liked?" He shook his woolly head. "No one liked me. I didn't let on, of
course, that I knew they didn't like me. I had evolved means for dealing efficiently with
fawning sycophants before I was twenty.
"That was not my Melanie. She liked me, for me. And I liked her. But I was still so very full
of myself in those days. Not surprising when you consider how I was treated. They didn't
put me on a pedestal, you see. They put me on a pedestal on a pedestal. I could do no
wrong. No matter where I was sent or what I did, it always seemed to be the right thing.
"Because I was good at what I did, and didn't have the sense not to be proud of it. I
wouldn't say that I enjoyed my work, but someone had to do it, and I was better at it than
anyone else. None of which mattered to Melanie. Nothing troubled her. She still liked me.
Enough to see through what I had to do."
"What happened?" Lejardin inquired gently. The sounds of Xican revelry, the swelling
night chorus of the forest, all seemed to fade around them.
"I made a mistake," he told them quietly. "That's what happens when you're full of
yourself. Against my better judgment, just that one time, I took her with me on an
assignment. I was so loathe to be away from her, you see, even for a moment, much less
weeks. Also, I wanted her to see how I worked and what I did. And she did.
"Even then, even after that," he continued earnestly, "she still liked me. It had been my
one lingering fear that when she discovered who I was and what I did, it would change the
way she saw me. With that concern banished, I was so grateful and pleased that I actually
relaxed. Relaxing with her had become my greatest joy in life.
"Those I had dealt with had been broken. That was my job, you see. But they were not
dead, their organization not entirely eradicated. They saw that I was relaxed, and so they
rose up in one final defiant gesture and struck at me. Blindly and thoughtlessly, as is the
nature of such people. Knowing they couldn't do anything to me, not because I was
immortal or invulnerable but simply because I was damned hard to kill, they struck at the
one thing in the world that meant anything to me." He had to pause long there, to deal
with the remembrance.
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"They killed her," he said finally, his voice utterly devoid of emotion. "They killed my
Melanie and left her as twisted and broken as a grahpius can break a vine-climbing
mou'son. Melanie was only human. She didn't have a second, defensive shape to fall back
on, like a Xican. It didn't matter to them. They didn't even have anything against her. All
that mattered to them was that she mattered to me.
"They all died eventually, of course. I saw to that, even though my mandate didn't extend
that far once my assignment had been completed. Those who knew me knew better than to
try to stop me.
"I sought each of them out, one by one. Two I came across in Milan, having lunch at an
outdoor cafe. I was so careful that none of the other diners saw them die. Another I
tracked to Rangoon. He'd become a monk and shaved his head, adopting the ways of the
Buddha. As he folded his hands before me, I strangled him with his saffron robe. Another
led me into the taiga, far to the northwest of Novosibirsk. He was mining for diamonds,
hopeful of replenishing the small fortune he'd spent avoiding me. I watched while he froze
to death.
"There were others. It may seem like a lot to some, but they were few to me. When I had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]