Balzac's War: A Tale of Veniss Underground Read Free

more numerous than Balzac’s fingers. A pool of green and purple liquid had congealed near the mouth. The dog’s eyes, staring blankly into the far wall of the amphitheater, shared the purple tint of the tongue, although they were partially hidden by loose flaps of skin; these same flaps camouflaged a bulbous knot of tissue, twice as large as a clenched fist, which jutted from the forehead. The beast could not have died more than an hour previous and yet it had an unnatural, almost mechanical, stiffness. The curled, taut quality of the limbs made him wonder how it could have walked or run. He had a sudden, chilling image of the creature dragging itself across the desert floor. The thought of the creature crippled disturbed him more than the thought of it whole.
    Jamie knelt beside the forepaws. She took one paw in her hands.
    “It’s raw.”
    Five pads formed the underside of the paw. The pads had been worn to redness and the sides of the paw were as smooth as wind-washed stone.
    “This beast traveled a long way just to die here. I wonder where it came from – another city or maybe even from beyond the desert. How could anything with such thick fur come from the desert?”
    “It looks dangerous to me.”
    “It’s dead, Balzac.”
    “Even so.”
    Balzac’s gaze traveled the length of the creature and beyond until, lightheaded with dread, he realized the beast’s destination: the hole. The hole that must spiral down into level beneath level, threading its way through catacombs without number, musty and old, where lived the creatures from nightmare.
    “Jamie. Jamie, we should go. We should find Jeffer.”
    “Too late now. He’ll find us.” She did not bother to look up, but held the paw gently in her hand. “Such a distance to travel.”
    The sun beat down, hot and withering. It stung Balzac’s eyes and brought beads of sweat dripping onto the bridge of his nose. But, despite the sun, the creature had no smell, no stench of decay. This creature had padded across the desert, the mountains, perhaps, and seen things Balzac could only imagine, and it had had the singleness of purpose to head for the darkest hole it could find when its legs had begun to give out . . . and it had no smell.
    He wanted to run, to finally leave Jamie behind if she insisted on being so foolish. But, foolish or not, she was right: it was too late, for at that moment Jeffer appeared above them, staring down from the lip of the amphitheater.
    II
    “It seems to him there are a thousand bars,
    and behind the bars, no world.”
    —Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Panther”
    Ten years after the amphitheater, on the forty-eighth night of the war for Balthakazar, Jeffer saw Jamie for the last time and his mind wobbled strangely. He stood on the third-story balcony of the crumbling, baroque building he had chosen as a resting place for his men, but seeing her he was suddenly adrift, the stone beneath his feet shockingly porous, apt to fall apart and spill him onto the street below. Seeing her, he could not help but curl inward, downward, into a spiral of memories, surfacing only much later to the implications of her existence below him. Almost in self-defense, his thoughts circled back to the one ritual that had proven impervious to change: When he slept in those years before and after the amphitheater, he would dream of the oasis lakes reflecting the stars. In his dreams, the lakes transformed themselves to light-choking, frictionless surfaces, as motionless as, as smooth as, lacquered black obsidian, the stars that fell upon the lakes screaming down like shards of broken, blue-tinted glass. Other times, the lakes became the land and the surrounding desert metamorphosed into thick, churning oceans through which swam fish flipped inside out so that their organs slithered and jiggled beside them.
    Once, he had found Balzac at the oasis lakes, alone, his bony, frail body naked from a midnight swim, skin flushed blue with cold. Balzac’s smile of