Pentimento, Nick Kyme [each kindness read aloud TXT] 📗

Stumbling through side streets, it wasn’t long before a part of the mob found her. Mabeth thought perhaps they were bullet-makers, though their grubby overalls would suit many menial professions.

‘Please,’ she said, shivering like prey in a hunter’s sights, ‘I have nothing of value.’

The look on the men’s faces suggested otherwise, and she had to stifle an involuntary yelp as she started to back away from her aggressors.

She had fine clothes, at least to the likes of them. Jewellery. Ostensible wealth. A noblewoman, abroad on unquiet streets and unprotected. Mabeth pulled the collar of her robes tighter. An alleyway she hadn’t noticed before suddenly presented itself and she took it, bolting like a startled gyrinx. She dumped the canvases, to hells with the consequences. The merchants could burn like their fucking warehouse for all she cared. Behind her, she heard the grunting of pursuit and the tread of heavy, dirty boots.

Oh shit, oh shit…

They were closing, driven by something animalistic.

No, no, no…

And then nothing.

After a few hundred yards, Mabeth slowed and then stopped. The faint aroma of lavender pricked her nostrils and she whirled around in a panic, half expecting to see him. But the narrow byway she found herself in was empty, although rude tenements crowded on either side. Turning, she realised no one was chasing her either. The entire street was silent, as if shrinking back into itself and holding its breath.

Not questioning her good fortune, but trembling at so close a call, Mabeth found Auric House again.

She staggered inside, her breathing ragged, and began to shake. Trauma settled in now the adrenaline had bled away. A drink would ease the nerves. Maybe a bottle. Or two.

The absinthe veritably gulped into the glass, the edge chinking as it met the lip of the bottle. Mabeth drained it, poured another and drained that too. Slowly calming down, she took the bottle and the glass and went to find a place to slump.

As she passed the open archway of the studio, the bottle and the glass slipped from her fingers and smashed against the floor.

On the lectern were the three canvases. And as the paint began to fragment, flaking away like dead skin, Mabeth found she was drawn to them. To it.

A single vista, doggedly revealed for her to see.

Without knowing why, she took up her scalpel and began to scrape away the upper layer. And with every stroke, she uncovered greater and greater horrors. A scene of beauty and torture, of unparalleled human suffering so vivid she could almost hear their screaming. Tears streamed down Mabeth’s face but she couldn’t stop. It had her now. Perhaps it had taken her long ago, that first night. Perhaps it was inevitable.

The painting, the true image, was a conduit. Hakasto had always taught her that art is a voyeur upon the soul, its flaws and virtues laid bare upon canvas. Something from the realm of the soul had found its way through. The lavender man stood proudly amongst his depravity, his paradise, immortalised in oil paint. The artist, whoever it was, had captured his essence perfectly. And in a moment of stasis, caught between action and inaction, Mabeth wondered how much of it was actually paint.

A gentle touch nudged her hand back to the task and she shuddered, the scent of lavender stronger now and warm breath upon her neck.

I am here, the killer said without speaking, as I promised I would be.

She had done this. Her pride, her obsession… her excesses. It had brought her to his attention.

‘Please…’ she tried to whisper, but a soft susurration stayed any further objection.

Shh…

Outside her hab, the city had begun to eat itself. The rioting was everywhere, rising like a black tide to wash away anything good, anything pure. The structures would not hold. She bit her lip, using the pain to try to drown it out.

The cloying scent of his perfume made her gag, but she dared not stop. She felt the heat of his skin near her own, both a furnace and a glacier. Mabeth scraped away the above to reveal the below, knowing that as she did so, his foothold in the real would solidify.

A dead sky presented itself, blood red and terrible. A great wall thronged with desperate fighting in the distance. Gods and monsters vying for the fate of mankind…

The thoughts came unbidden, the memories and realisations not her own.

Terra… a voice in her head told her.

She knew it then, the vista revealed upon the canvas. An ancient war, the oldest of wars. The Great Heresy.

The Long War, the voice supplied, and could not hide its bitterness.

The last piece fell away, a nondescript corner but its style at odds with the rest, as if painted by a different hand. Two robed figures…

Mabeth released a gasp, for it was her. A perfect portrait. She had a red blade in her hand and before her on the ground was the second figure. Older, dying, a feeble hand pressed to the wound in his chest as blood poured from his mouth.

Mabeth was transfixed, the bare truth of her crime rendered as clearly as a pict, an impossible image as damning as any confession.

His perfumed breath broke her dark remembrance.

Perfection always comes at a price.

The hand upon her neck was firm but not painful. Not yet. It turned her head and she took in her abode. The indulgence, the trappings of wealth, desire and obsession.

Tell me, what did your master call it… that which is hidden beneath?

‘Pentimento…’ said Mabeth, almost beyond the ability for rational thought. ‘It means redemption,’ she added, a needless translation, her gaze now fixed upon the image of her murdering Hakasto. So she could be preeminent; so she could be perfect.

‘A lie to hide another lie,’ the killer answered, his organic voice as old as millennia.

Mabeth would find no redemption here, she realised, as the blades and the hooks bit into her flesh, and as she screamed they started to pull.

‘But there will always be