Read Online The Golden by Lucius Shepard - Free Book Online Page B

passage of a light in motion. Beheim felt a shiver in
his flesh, as if some just-less-than-physical thing had passed
through him. And with that the gleam faded and everything was as
before, except that Kostolec was gone and in his stead were only a
few dust motes eddying slowly in the orange glow of the lantern,
glittering like the ghosts of nebulae and stars.
    Chapter
Seven
    A s they proceeded along the corridor that led away from the
Patriarch’s library, Beheim began to consider Alexandra in a
new light. It did not seem reasonable that she would stand ready to
defend him against someone of Kostolec’s power simply to
achieve a political goal, and yet it appeared that she had. He
recalled her moment of confusion after their embrace. Was it
possible, he asked himself, that she had developed some infant
attraction for him? He did not think this likely, but neither would
he have thought it likely that his attraction for her would have
grown as particularized and consuming as it had. He found himself
watching her on the sly, noticing her ways. Her habit of gnawing on
the edge of the nail of a forefinger when she was perplexed. How
shadows appeared to shift about in her green eyes whenever she grew
discontent. Her walk, so careful, almost somnambulistic in its
cautious energy, contained to the point of repression, except when
she became excited, and then she would twist to look at him while she
walked, put half-skips into her stride and go bouncing along like a
gawky schoolgirl. The solemnity she displayed when listening to him,
head down, eyes lidded, all her features in repose, like a nun at
prayer. She laughed easily, but when she did, it was if she were not
laughing with her whole being, as if the place inside her where vivid
responses were manufactured remained blank and gray and dull, and
this gave her an eerily inconsistent vitality, like someone under a
spell. He wondered how he could ever have thought her extreme height
grotesque, for now her body struck him as elegantly slim, exquisitely
formed, a miracle of aesthetic proportion, and when he pictured them
together, it was not, as previously, in some weird Gordian
entanglement, but joined in a sleek and perfectly coordinated union.
To entertain such thoughts was ridiculous, he told himself; they were
accomplices in some as yet undetermined political action, nothing
more. Yet he could not keep from entertaining them, nor could he keep
from interpreting her sidelong glances as being other than the
articles of a freshly waked affection. He believed that she was
affording him glimpses of her true self, now and then dropping the
glibly aggressive style that she had affected when she came to his
apartments, and letting him see the personality behind the façade,
one capable of anger and joy, petulance and sadness, all the usual
components, yet tempered by an underlying seriousness and charged by
a kind of ardent composure. He still suspected her, he still doubted
the character of her intentions; but he felt that he was not entirely
deluded in thinking that she had changed toward him, that whatever
she had wanted from him in the beginning, she wanted more now.
    They turned into
a side corridor, long and lantern-lit, roofed with whitewashed
stones, broken by arches that led off into tunnels, open spaces,
other corridors, and at a moment when they caught one another
staring, Alexandra looked quickly away and asked what he was
thinking.
    “Not an
easy question to answer,” Beheim said.
    “I
disagree,” she said. “It’s the easiest of all
questions to answer, unless one has something to hide.”
    “I don’t
wish to appear foolish,” he said, after walking a few paces in
silence.
    “I believe
we have come far enough along this path to be gentle in our
judgments.”
    “Very
well, then. I was thinking about you.”
    They were just
passing a lantern mounted in a niche, and her shadow, which had been
trailing behind her on the floor, suddenly leaped up onto the wall
and