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Belacqua had many times almost asked his raven-headed friend how he felt about their one great case. Tomek never mentioned it. Occasionally, in their rounds, they would catch a glimpse of Savonarola, naked and shunned, drifting miserably among the crowds. Once, Belacqua himself had nearly run right into the woman called Awo, who stared at him as though she could punch through his delicate skull with her gaze. He hadn’t been able to bear that; he’d run. Run, from a local, a dead woman with nothing but her rags. And yet it had happened.
So time, in its shapeless, corpulent, implacable way, bore on in Nowhere. And only when he was alone did it trouble Belacqua how much they never understood about the incident, the monstrous hole at the bottom of the case file through which everything sensible tumbled out. Into this hole, he began to drop the words of his novel, one by one, painstakingly, the only story he knew, a story without an end. Which, he supposed, was to be expected, considering the author.
When it came time to open the bottle of white wine, the policemen found the cork encased in awfully thick black wax, too thick for fingernails and too awkward for beaks.
“Nothing to it,” Corporal Tomek laughed, and drew a small pair of scissors out of the inner pocket of his coat. He worked the little blades deftly round the mouth and wiggled them up underneath till the cake of wax fell away.
They were a perfectly ordinary pair of scissors. A little tarnished and stained, but utterly usual and serviceable, like Tomek himself. Detective Inspector Belacqua had no reason to notice them in the least. And yet, he did. He could not stop noticing them. Small enough for delicate work. For carving. Was that tarnish, that black smear along the shears?
Belacqua cleared his throat. “Has it ever woken you nights, Tomek, that we never discovered how the old man did it?”
“Did what, sir?”
“Killed a dead woman. There had to be a method—that’s the whole thing, you know, means, motive, and opportunity—that’s the entire thing of it. And the means just…got away from us, didn’t it?”
“I suppose it did. But I wouldn’t worry. It’s never happened again. It’s not like we had an epidemic on our hands, Belacqua. And if we had, well, you know. No one harmed but the dead. The chief would have sorted it out, I’m sure.” Tomek poured the wine and handed a glass across the desk. Belacqua just looked at it.
“I just want to know, that’s all. Haven’t you ever wanted to know anything so badly it ate you away until there was nothing left of you but the not knowing?”
The raven grimaced. “Just drink your wine, Detective Inspector.”
Belacqua did not blink. He thought he ought to feel something in the pit of his stomach, but all he felt was the not knowing, the canker of it, working its way through him like rot.
“How did you meet her?” Detective Inspector Belacqua whispered.
Tomek put down the glasses, very carefully, as though, in his hands, they might break.
Thirteenth Terrace: The Lustful
Pietta bludgeons the wall over and over, jamming her scissors into the wine-dark stone. Chips and chunks fly away as she gouges the skin of the city. The thudding and scraping of her blows fill the endless halls of Taedium.
They care about very little, Pietta knows. But they will care about this. Vandalizing Nowhere brings them running, so she is not surprised when a man with the head of a raven steps through her door and snatches the scissors from her hands with a strength that would snap all the bones of her wrist, if the bones of her wrist could still break.
“That’s enough, miss,” Sergeant Tomek says crisply, professionally. Their faces are close as kissing. Raven and girl; pale, bloodless lips and a mouth like black shears.
“It’s not fair,” Pietta snarls at him. “All I ever did wrong was be sad.”
Outside, the man on the mountain eats his smoke. Tomek is on top of her by the time he begins to move his arms in straight, strident lines, and she does not see.
P-I-E-T-T-A?
Fourteenth Terrace: The Contemptuous
“We all have our ways of coping with it,” Tomek said, running his finger around the lip of his glass.
“With what?” Belacqua scowled.
“Eternity,” answered the raven slowly. “You
have your novel—oh, for God’s sake, we all know. I have my research. It’s wrong, you know, everything, all of this. At least they lived, fucked something up well and good enough to end up here. We’re here…for what? Why? To punish what sin? The only difference between them and us is we wear better clothes. I can’t bear it any more than they can. And it’s worse, it’s worse for us, Belacqua. We’ve just enough spark in us to draw up a rough sketch of feeling, just a basic set, nothing too detailed: duty, loyalty, a smear of free will, a little want, a little envy, just enough to know somebody else got to see what a summer looks like, but not enough for the cosmos to even look at us, for one second, as anything but lock and keys. And it never ends for us. Don’t you see? They all have the hope of progress, of the climb. This is it, just this, nothing else, forever. I was so bored, Belacqua.”
Tomek began to pace, tugging at his feathers, half-preening, half-tearing.
“And so I began to think. Just for the last couple of thousand years. I began to plan a way to murder a person. It’s a big enough problem to take up centuries. Could it even be done? They can’t, certainly. One punches the other in the nose and it’s like punching ice cream. Nothing. Not even a mark. But I am a strigil. There is no record of what I can do because no one has ever cared enough to find out. Do your job, little birdie, get back to us at the end of everything for your performance review. What would happen if a strigil sinned? Would there be consequences? And if I could do it, if, ontologically speaking, it would be allowed to occur, how? These are worthy questions! The first experiment was obvious. I broke a man’s neck in Oboedientia Sector. For a minute, I thought I’d gotten it right on my first go. But no, he just sort of shivered and put his head right and went on his way. It seemed the rules held for me as well as him. After that I kept it all in my head. The project. I thought it out while the Renaissance idiots poured in, while I walked my beat, while I watched you fumble with a sad little dime store potboiler in the corner like one of the chronic masturbators down in Desidia. Nothing physical would do it. I should have realized that—we do not move in the realm of the physical. I had to act upon the nature of a soul, to alter it so that it could not remain whole. And it would work—Belacqua, this is the important thing! It would work because of that smear of free will, that tiny table scrap of self a strigil owns. I have to be able to act freely, or else I could not arrest or judge or mete out punishment. You have to be allowed to plunk away at your silly stories, because not even the font of all can build a being of judgment without building a being of perversity.”
Tomek put his hands on the window sill and let the wind off the mud plain buffet his face.
“When I met Pietta I knew she would let me do anything to her. She was in despair. They all are, for awhile, but hers was frozen and depthless, a continuation of who she had always been, just spooling on into the black forever. And she was right. It’s not fair. It’s all grotesque. That little spit of living and all this ocean of penance. She wanted it, Belacqua. She did.”
