The Architecture of Desire Read online

  "What goes on inside that room is pure, if you like, but it has very little to do with our decisions outside it. Being born and dying are the givens. They’re what happens, that’s all. "

  Now she smiled.

  "I would be a liar now if I pretended that I cared for Desire Guillaime any more than you do. I have my guilt. Killing you—that would just be rank hypocrisy."

  The man brushed snow from his white-dirty sleeves as one might flick away thread or ash.

  "You don’t know that you could kill me. I would gamble, myself. You see, I have no regrets."

  She broke cover, loping towards the shelter of the pier. No shouts. His footsteps and breathing sounded at her back. She picked her way cautiously up the icy river steps and into the cover of a dockside wall, among timbered houses.

  Here voices sounded from behind closed doors, the noise of song, drinking, eating; pigs in their pens grunting for scarce scraps, and the tarred bodies of malefactors hung in chains chanting their confessions. Four or five alleys led away into Northbankside’s stews. And Casaubon and Jared and the baby where?

  She turned her head.

  "Not I—"

  Only an empty river bank: Pollexfen Calmady gone.

  The thirty-year-old woman scratched at her aching, full breasts, irritated by the dried blood. She stared into empty air.

  Downriver.

  Into a hazed white void, edged with the city. Frozen water. Whitehall’s distant spires. The ragged scaffolding of the eye of the sun. And, furthest, the forest of bare masts at the docks, pointing towards the sea.

  The open sea.

  The last of the afternoon sun cut a bright line across chimney-stacks and snow-covered roofs. She shrugged her cloak off and reversed it to its proper side, drew her blade to carry loosely in her left hand, and walked at random into the frozen alleyways. Her steps, slow at first, quickened. Before she had gone a hundred yards she began to sing under her breath.

  About the author

  MARY GENTLE lives in Hertfordshire, England. She is the author of such highly acclaimed works as Rats and Gargoyles, A Hawk in Silver, Golden Witchbreed, and Ancient Light.