‘Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m being so open,’ Lemos said. ‘It’s really no mystery. You’re a dogged man, Mister Korrogly. I have a lot of respect for you. Once you got the scent, and I’ve been aware that you’ve had the scent for some time, I knew you’d keep at it until you learned all there was to learn. I knew we’d play this scene sooner or later. I could have had you killed, but as I’ve said, I’m grateful to you, and I prefer to let you live. It’s unlikely you can harm me in any event. But you can consider this a warning. I’m watching you. If you ever get it in mind to try and harm me, it’ll be one of your last thoughts. And if you should doubt that, then I want you to think back to what you’ve heard today, to realize what I’m capable of, what I was able to do when I had no power, and to imagine what I might do now that I am powerful. Do you understand?’
Korrogly said, ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well.’ Lemos disengaged from Mirielle, who tottered back to her lounge. ‘Then there’s nothing else to do except to bid you good day. Perhaps you’ll visit us again. For dinner, perhaps. Of course you’re always welcome to visit Mirielle. She does like you, she really does, and I’ve learned not to be jealous. I would hate to deny her whatever joy she might find with you. I’m afraid the things I’ve asked her to do have damaged her, and maybe you can help her overcome all that.’ He put his hand on Korrogly’s back and began steering him through the house and toward the front door. ‘Pleasure’s a rare commodity. I don’t begrudge any man his share. That’s something that being wealthy has given me to understand about life. Yet another reason to be grateful to you. So’ – he opened the front door – ‘when I say to you that what’s mine is yours, I mean it in the most profound and intimate sense. Do take advantage of our hospitality. Anytime.’
And with that, he waved and shut the door, leaving Korrogly blinking in the bright sunlight, feeling as if he had been marooned on a stone island in an uncharted sea.
Toward twilight, after walking and thinking for the remainder of the afternoon, Korrogly ended up in Henry Sichi’s museum, standing in front of the glass case in which The Father of Stones was displayed. Lemos had been right – there was nothing he could do to achieve justice, and he would have to accept the fact that he had been used by someone who if anything was more monstrous than Griaule. His best course, he decided, would be to leave Port Chantay and to leave soon, for while Lemos might have meant all he had said, he might well change his mind and begin to consider Korrogly a threat. But the danger he was in, that was not the thing that rankled him; he was still enough of a moral soul – a fool, Lemos would say – to want a judgment upon Lemos, and that there would be none left him full of gloom and self-destructive impulse, regarding the shattered fragments of his wished-for orderly universe.
He gazed down at The Father of Stones. It sat winking in its nest of blue velvet, a clouded lump of mystery giving back prismatic refractions of the light, the peculiar man-shaped darkness at its heart appearing to shift and writhe as if it truly were the soul of an imprisoned wizard. Korrogly focused on that darkness, and suddenly it was all around him, like a little pocket of night into which he had fallen, and he was looking at a man lying on the ground, an old, old man with sunken cheeks and a hooked nose and dressed in wizard’s robes, with black eyes threaded by veins of blue-green fire. The vision lasted only a few seconds, but before it faded, he became aware of the propinquity of that same cold, powerful mind that he had sensed back in the temple, and when he found himself once again standing in front of the glass case, looking down at The Father of Stones, he felt not afraid, not shocked, but delighted. It had been Griaule after all, he realized; the vision could mean only that Zemaille had been a serious threat, one that Griaule had been forced to eliminate. And he, Korrogly, had actually seen the moribund wizard that night in the temple; it had been no hallucination. The dragon had even then been trying to illuminate him. He laughed and slapped his thigh. Oh, Lemos had worked his plan, but as the ex-member of the cult had said, it had still been Griaule’s idea, he had inspired Lemos to act . . . and he had done it through the agency of this shard of milky stone.
