Around him the house followed its appointed routine. He could hear people passing and repassing, his guard shuffling and sighing beyond the door to the antechamber, snatches of music from somewhere in the garden, and he smelled a strong aroma of wheaten gruel. Turning his head with difficulty, he saw that while he slept someone had been admitted with food for him. A bowl of now cold soup and a plate of melon slices smothered in honey sat on his bedside table. Beside the fruit lay a paring knife, winking in the sunlight angling from the clerestory windows high in the walls.
Hori stared at it stupidly. The events of the night reeled slowly through his mind in an aura of dream-like unreality, yet he knew they had occurred. Father rejected everything I tried to show him, he thought weakly. Sheritra stands loyally by my side but she refuses to consider the truth.. She is too besotted with Harmin to allow the possibility that he is … that Tbubui is … What is left to do? No spell will save me and we cannot find the doll. I think Sheritra is right. It is in the house on the east bank. If I could only go there. The paring knife lay innocently, its tip buried in oozing honey, its blade shimmering.
While contemplating it Hori fell into another doze, not knowing if his eyes had closed on not, for he woke still gazing at the innocent little fruit knife. The pain had intensified, like a feral animal gnawing and worrying at his vitals, yet no one had come. There is no one to tend me, he thought with a gush of self-pity. No servant to bathe and soothe me, no physician to administer the blessed herbs of oblivion. I have been deliberately forgotten.
Tears of weakness and loneliness ran down his face, and for a while he succumbed to them, drawing his knees up to his chin while that cursed beast chewed delightedly at his vitals and pawed at his brain. But then he struggled up and reached for the flask of poppy he himself had dropped to the table before plummeting like a stone down the well of forgetting. He shook it before taking a mouthful. There was not much left. Curiously, he felt a little stronger and more clear-headed, a sign that sent a stab of panic through him. His father was a physician, and he knew that often a terminally ill patient would exhibit a burst of well-being, lucidity and energy just before the end, like the flaring of a candle about to gutter into nothingness. I must make use of this, he thought. It will not last long.
His agony had receded to a dull ache and his eyes returned to the small, clean knife waiting beside the melon. The house on the east bank, he thought lazily. I refuse to die without a fight. How many guards stand at my door? Surely no more than one at a time. I am dying, remember? And that one will not be alert, thinking that he watches over a very sick man. Hori’s hand reached out and closed over the hilt of the knife. Tonight, he told himself. He fell asleep again, still clutching it.
He woke, and it was dark. Some noiseless, faceless servant had set a night lamp on his table but had not bothered to remove the tray from the morning. If I were Father, Hori thought with hysterical humour, I would reprimand that person. His fingers had frozen around the hilt of the knife, which had become entangled in the sheets. He extricated it, flexed his hand and examined himself. He felt better. He knew very well that it was the calm before the final, incendiary storm, but put that thought away.
With infinite care he sat up, felt for the floor with his feet and cautiously stood. The room whirled and then steadied. He realized that he was naked, but the filthy kilt the guards must have stripped from him lay in a heap on a chair. Slowly, still bent double against the pain that lay in wait for him if he straightened, he tottered to it and wrapped it on. No sound came to him from the passage beyond the door. He crept across the room, the knife held loosely on his palm, and put his ear to the warm cedar wood. He could hear his guard shuffle, but little more. Slowly he inched the door open.
The man was standing to his right, leaning with a negligent boredom against the wall, most of him in deep shadow. The nearest torch burned some way along the passage. Hori took a deep breath. He knew what a frighteningly small amount of his strength was left. If he missed the first time he would not get a second chance. Easing himself beyond the door he tightened his grip on the knife, then, lurching forward and sideways, he grasped the guard’s arm and drove the blade up under the man’s chin and into his throat. The soldier coughed once, grabbed at his chest, then slid to the floor. His eyes were wide and shocked under the intermittent flare of the torch’s flame. Hori did not have the strength to drag the body inside the room but it did not matter. Within a very few minutes he would have left the house. The amount of energy needed to kill the guard who lay, still bleeding, at his feet, had been enormous. He put out a hand to the wall to steady himself while the deserted passage revolved slowly around him. Renewed pain seemed to bulge in his abdomen and send jolts of fire down his legs. Struggling to breathe more evenly he bent, set his foot on the soldier’s shoulder and wrenched out the paring knife, wiping it as best as he could on the man’s kilt. Then he set off towards the garden.