Prosper's Demon Read online

In and out of each other’s heads, like neighbors in a small, friendly village, which is exactly what we aren’t. Or, to put it another way, it doesn’t do to get too familiar.

  But it didn’t take me long to figure out what He—

  Excuse me, I have a lot of trouble with pronouns. The proper singular form for one of Them is, of course, It. We neither know nor care whether They are divided into genders as we are, nor, as far as I can tell, do They. But rules were made to be broken, at least as far as I’m concerned, and this one particular, unique, individual specimen was definitely, in my mind, a He. I don’t know why; I suspect it has more to do with me than—well, Him. For some reason I need Him to be male in order to deal with Him. That’s one of the many dangers I was warned about. Precisely because everybody sees Them differently, the risk is always of creating Them in your own image.

  So, indulge me: Him. It didn’t take me long to figure out what He was up to, or why He’d gone to all the trouble of attacking me. All I needed, therefore, was a copy of the Court Circular and a fast horse.

  * * *

  I told you that you wouldn’t like me.

  I understand. It shows proper feeling. If you said to me: There’s this man who is so callous and brutal that he doesn’t give a damn about his fellow human beings, wouldn’t shed a tear over the death of an innocent; would you care to meet this person, shake hands with him, maybe invite him into your home and have dinner with him? You’re kidding, right.

  That hypothetical piece of shit is, of course, me. All my life—

  * * *

  Many of the great civilized nations have a foundation myth in which their national hero was abandoned on a hillside at birth and brought up by wolves, or bears or hyenas or whatever your local gregarious predator happens to be. To all intents and purposes I was brought up by Them. What the hell do you expect?

  I feel guilty because I don’t feel guilty. Sure, I could defend myself, if I wanted to. I could describe to you what it’s like having one of Them inside your head. It hurts, like nothing else, all the time. It makes you do things, the sort of things you’ll never forgive yourself for, even though you know it’s not you doing them. You’d kill yourself to be rid of the pain and the shame and the dread of what you’re going to do next, only It won’t let you. It’s torture and rape and all the worst things that can possibly happen, and it’s not just suffering it but doing it to others, friends, lovers, children. It lays eggs of sheer horror deep inside you, and you can feel them hatching, growing, their burgeoning new life trapping your nerves against the bone.

  I can tell you about that, and case histories of lives ruined, and lives saved when I intervene. But I’m not going to defend myself. I’m too far down the road for that. The victims aren’t what motivates me, not anymore. Or not the only thing.

  All I can do, am prepared to do, is ask you to consider two things: my motives and the effect of my actions. The effect of my actions is to save my brothers and sisters from the worst possible thing that can happen to anyone, and only I, and a handful of others like me, can do this. My motivations are my own business, my privilege and my intolerable burden.

  * * *

  The wedding of Grand Duke Sigiswald of Essen to the Princess Hildigunn, daughter of the Elector Frohvat of Risenem, was rather a low-key affair. There were ten thousand guests at the wedding breakfast, and all the fountains in Essen ran with sweet white wine, but that was about it. No triumphal procession, gladiatorial displays, mock sea battles, or mass sacrifice of prisoners of war on the Temple steps; no nationwide amnesty or emancipation of slaves; and only a modest donative, five gold kreutzer a man, to the soldiers in the army. Times, whispered the underlying message, are hard, money is tight, and your Duke and his lovely bride are setting an example.

  The message was received loud and clear and went down well with the taxpayers, so that was all right. But the Princess insisted on one small indulgence. Unless she could be accompanied into the wilderness (her words, not mine) by her faithful tutor and confidant, Prosper of Schanz, she wasn’t going, and her father and six years of eggshell-brittle diplomacy could go to hell.

  No, it wasn’t like that at all. Prosper was sixty if he was a day, and it took four strong men to prize him out of his chair and load him onto a specially reinforced chaise every time Her Highness felt like a spot of intellectual conversation. His salary at the time was sixty thousand kreutzer a year, and he insisted on a 50 percent raise to compensate him for leaving Risenem and going to live among the woad-painted savages (he’d said something similar when the Elector headhunted him from Falhoel), so he was rather more than a trivial whim. Ninety thousand would pay the Sixth Legion for a month, or fit out twelve warships. You’d have to have a heart of stone, though, if you didn’t reckon Prosper of Schanz to be a bargain at three times the price. The finest painter and sculptor of his age, even though he very rarely finished anything; the most learned scholar, though everything he’d ever published fit neatly into one small, handy pocket edition; the most exquisite and refined musician; the most outstanding natural philosopher and engineer. By all accounts, Hildigunn had a tin ear, didn’t like any painting that wasn’t blue, and had to sign her name through a stencil, but she knew a class act when she saw one, and always had to have the best. So Prosper came to Essen, with all his books, machines, tin boxes full to bursting with notebooks and diaries, mechanical and philosophical paraphernalia, clogging up the mountain roads for a week. They say he spent his first month in residence watching a sheep’s head decaying on a mounting block in the stable yard. He wanted to see for himself exactly how the process of deliquescence and entropy worked, in real time, second by second. So he had a comfortable chair brought down from the royal apartments on the sixth floor, and a footstool, a handy writing table, and a good supply of nice things to drink and snack on, and sat there, night and day (with a brazier to keep him warm and a huge silk umbrella to keep him dry), just watching. Whether the result was any special insight into the natures of change and mortality, I couldn’t say, but you have to admit, the man’s a class act, by any standards.

  When the news broke that Sigiswald and Hildigunn had fulfilled their royal function and a tiny Elector was on the way, Prosper declared that this would be the ideal opportunity for him to put into practice a project that had been growing like a stalactite in the back of his godlike mind for absolutely ages: nothing less than the handcrafting of the ultimate superior human being—an enterprise, he modestly said, worthy of himself, at last. Since he was the greatest living authority on obstetric medicine, Prosper announced that he would deliver the child himself. As soon as it was born, he would personally supervise every aspect of its upbringing, nurture, and education. He would mold the child in his own image, teach it everything he knew, with a view to giving the world its first true top-notch very-best-quality philosopher-king, who would in turn solve every problem, make the world into an earthly paradise, and serve as a fitting monument to the greatest man who ever lived.

  Now, conceding that Prosper was at least 40 percent full of the stuff that makes roses grow, that still left quite a lot of sheer unparalleled genius. The royal parents, no doubt reflecting on their own childhoods and education and figuring that anything had to be better than that, announced that they were delighted to give the great man carte blanche.

  They nailed up a new copy of the Court Circular on the front door of the Temple in Jasca on the first day of the month. The lead story was Hildigunn’s due date. It gave me precisely six days to cover the two hundred miles of rutted roads and broken-down bridges to Essen, a miracle that I somehow managed to accomplish.

  * * *

  I was in a foul mood when I reached the palace gate. I bounced up to the sentry and told him I needed to see the duty officer. He looked at me, weighing my derelict boots against the priest’s gown, and decided I was too difficult for him. That got me inside the lodge, where I hung around for most of the morning until the duty officer was available. Being an officer, he could rea
d, so I showed him my certificate. It worried him. It’s supposed to.

  “How can I help you, Father?” he said.

  “I need to see the palace chaplain,” I told him. “Now.”

  I could see the poor man’s brain grinding to a halt, as though I’d stuck an iron bar through the spokes. The chaplain, needless to say, wasn’t part of his chain of command and he had no idea how to get in touch with him. Lucky for him, he had me to do his thinking for him. “You’ll need to get a pass from the Prefect,” I told him, “to take me inside so I can explain to the deputy chamberlain why I need to see the chaplain. He’ll take it from there.”

  Joy unbounded for the duty officer, who whisked me up seven flights of winding narrow stone stairs to the Prefecture, where I spent far too long hanging about while my pass was written up. Then a sad-looking clerk led me down the stairs I’d just come up and up an even longer staircase to the chamberlain’s office, where I showed my certificate to somebody’s poor relation’s younger son, who went white as a sheet and told me to follow him. Nine flights of winding narrow stone stairs up to the Chaplaincy, where the junior deputy chaplain asked me what I wanted.

  “I want to see the chaplain.”

  “That’s not possible right now.”

  “Yes,” I told him. “Actually, it is.”

  So we went to see the chaplain, who scowled at my certificate as if it were a turd floating in his soup, and shut the door so nobody could hear us. “What?” he said.

  “I need to see the Duchess,” I told him.

  “Nobody sees the Duchess.”

  Bless him, he was having a bad day, I could tell. He had twelve large-scale services to plan out, for at least three of which there was no clearly established precedent, which meant he was going to have to wing it, liturgically speaking, and hope nobody present would be sufficiently erudite to find him out. On top of that, me: a fully authorized representative of a branch of the Ministry that is always bad news at any time; at a time like this—

  I’d have liked to help him out, but I couldn’t afford to indulge myself. I sat there and stared at him, a bit like the Sun, which you’re not supposed to look directly at.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Three guesses.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” he said. “Are you trying to tell me that a member of the royal household is—?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But that’s absurd,” he said. “It’s impossible to predict when and where—”

  “No,” I told him, “it isn’t.”

  People really don’t like looking at me if they can possibly avoid it. There’s something about me that makes me objectionable to have in their field of vision. The company I keep, presumably.

  “I can’t just admit you to the royal birth chamber,” he said. “Not without very good reason and documentary evidence to corroborate—”

  He tailed off. I was the worst thing that had ever happened to him in his entire life, and he’d done nothing whatever to deserve me. “All right,” he said, “if you insist. But I’ll be making a written memorandum that I’m doing this under protest.”

  Which was probably the most aggressive thing he’d ever said, and he watched it bounce off me like gravel off a breastplate. “When you’re quite ready,” I said.

  “Follow me.”

  * * *

  How far back can you remember? When you were a toddler? Before you could walk? Before you could speak, just possibly? I can trump that. I can remember before I was born. Being unborn, and not alone.

  It was in there with me, you see; the first one I ever met. They’re not stupid. They know where They’re safe. If They can get inside a child before it’s born, They know They’ve got security of tenure for at least ten years, maybe as many as twelve, because of the unspeakable level of collateral damage that would be involved in digging Them out. Works both ways, mind; leaving an infant hurts Them just as much as it hurts the host, so if They choose to enter an unborn child, They’re stuck there until the child matures, and the pickings are slim. It’s boring, living in something so small and crude and stupid, so They take that option only when They’re hurt and need somewhere to hole up and recover, or when They’ve had a really rough ride at the hands of me and my lot. In my case, It had just been evicted, with rather more force than absolutely necessary, from Its previous home. It was smashed up and raw, a real mess, and It had just enough strength to crawl inside my mother before It passed out and collapsed; and then It encountered me.

  I remember It very clearly. It was a voice I could understand, outside me but very close. Let me in, It said. Please, It said.

  I can remember what it was like, thinking without words, knowing nothing—nothing at all. But It wanted to come inside me, and I didn’t want It to. I pushed It away. It tried to push back, but It couldn’t. Go away, I told It.

  Oh, for crying out loud, It said. You’re one of them.

  I didn’t understand, of course, but I didn’t like it, not one little bit. I pushed It away. I could feel myself hurting It. It was the first thing I ever came across that was weaker than me, that I could prevail over, that I could hurt. It wasn’t bothering me anymore, but I could bother It, if I wanted to. I wanted to. Good game. I pushed harder.

  Stop that, It said. You’re hurting me.

  Go away, I told It, but I didn’t mean it. I wanted It to stay and be played with. Rough games, the sort small children enjoy.

  I’m stuck, It said, I can’t get out. Stop pushing.

  Memories are tricky; there’s what you remember, and what you think you remember, the editions and redactions of memory, the corrections and amendations and blundered readings and the whole apparatus criticus of the conscious mind trying to make bread out of soup. The way I remember it, I bashed Its head against something until It screamed, then I tried strangling It, then I broke Its arms and legs, and then I bashed It some more. All impossible, I now realize, since They don’t have arms, legs, heads, so whatever I did to It could only have been equivalents. But whatever I did, I hurt It, and it was fun.

  I have no way of knowing, of course, how long we were cooped up in there together. My best guess, based on what my mother told me (about recurring nightmares she’d had, that sort of thing), is something between three and four months; but, what the hell, time is subjective, especially between us and Them. We were in there together for a long time, and then I was born and It was able to crawl out and escape, at desperate cost to Itself, but better than staying in there with me. By all accounts, I was a fairly ordinary baby after that, though inclined to be willful.

  * * *

  So, we went to see the Duchess. But we couldn’t; not even the chaplain. Master Prosper was in there, they told us, with the royal midwife, two nurses, and Master Prosper’s authorized biographer (he had two of them working twelve-hour shifts), and nobody could go in until it was all over, not even the Duke. Especially the Duke. I showed them my certificate. They went all thoughtful—it’s a really good certificate—but apparently the penalty for disobeying Master Prosper’s slightest whim was death by garrotting, so clearly nothing could be done.

  They parked the chaplain and me in a small anteroom, empty except for one straight-backed ivory chair. I sat in it.

  “Can you really predict what—?”

  I nodded. “In this instance, yes.”

  “But I thought—”

  I turned and looked at him, my full professional look. Someone once explained to me why it’s so terrifying. He told me: just for a moment, you get the impression that you can see some of the things those eyes have seen, like a sort of trick mirror. I hope he was exaggerating.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “That’s all right.” He’d made me feel guilty. “In this instance, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Would you care to—?”

  I shrugged. “Why the hell not?” I said. And I told him; about waking up next to the dead girl. He went a funny sort of gray color. “It made you do that?”


  “While I was asleep,” I said. “I know it was Him.”

  “How can you—?”

  “Not the first time,” I said. “Not by a long chalk. And the last time this one did something like that—no, I tell a lie, time before that—I was out of action for months, dodging the dead girl’s family and the law and all that sort of thing. During which time He was free to get up to all sorts of mischief without having to look over His shoulder every five minutes in case I was sneaking up on Him. So I thought: If I were Him, what would I be up to, that would justify pulling a prank like that? Bearing in mind what I’m going to do to him when I do catch up with him. Which won’t be pretty, believe me.” I smiled. I don’t think it was a happy smile. “And then I glanced through the Court Circular, and the question kind of answered itself.”

  Years ago, I came across a man lying in the road. He’d been run over by one of those gigantic carts they use for shipping oak trees down from the forest to the shipyards, and his back was broken. He was still alive but completely paralyzed, and he had much the same look on his face as my unfortunate friend the chaplain had after I’d explained the position to him. “You think—?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think, because I think like He does.”

  “Dear God.”

  I grinned. “Oh, we’re quite alike in many ways,” I said. “In fact, there’s only two differences between us that really matter. One, I’m stronger than He is. Much, much stronger.”

  For some reason, this didn’t seem to set the chaplain’s mind at rest. Rather the reverse.

  “The other,” I went on, “is that one day I’ll die, but not Him. They can’t die. He can hurt—trust me, I know, He can suffer more pain than you could possibly imagine—but He can’t die. It’s a sort of equilibrium,” I explained. “Two very different things but nonetheless equivalent.”

  I’d lost him; not that it signified. “But if you’re right,” he said, “if that thing has got inside—”

  Through the closed door we heard that unmistakable sound, a newborn baby’s first scream. The chaplain shuddered as though he’d just been stabbed, by his mother.