Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

Driven from haunt to haunt, from hiding place to hiding place by the rising water, his operations conditioned always by the necessity of his being within striking range of the stores and larders, it had in the narrowing zone of manoeuvre become imperative for him to be able to travel with equal speed and silence over both land and water. For days he had starved when the mobile kitchens were so positioned in a curve of the spacious west wing that it was impossible for him, guarded as they were, to plunder.

But they had moved, since then, at least three times, and now, with the possibility of the rain having stopped for good, it was his savage hope that they had found a fixity in that high sub-attic room above which in a barricaded and all but lightless loft he had established his headquarters. In the ceiling of this murky refuge a trap door opened upon a sloping roof of slates, where swathes of creeper bandaged it from sight. But it was the hatch in the floor below him which, when lifted with a tender and secret care more usually associated with the handling of sucklings, that gave him access to the most pressing of his needs: for below him lay the stores. In the small hours, when it became necessary he would lower himself inch by noiseless inch on a long rope. The sack he brought down with him he would fill with the least perishable provisions. A dozen or more of the staff would be asleep on the floor, but the sentries were naturally posted on the outer side of the three doors and were no bother to him.

But this was not his only hide-out. He knew that sooner or later the floods would fall. The kitchens would again become nomadic. It was impossible to tell in which direction the life of the castle would sway as on its slowly downward journey it trod upon the wet heels of the subsiding water.

The spreading roofs themselves furnished him with seven secret strongholds. The attics and the three dry floors below provided for at least four as safe, in their varying ways, as his garret above the kitchen. And now that the flood had stayed at the same level for three days, a few feet above the majority of the landings of the ninth floor, it had become possible for him to prepare in advance a number of aqueous asylums.

But how much simpler and safer it would be for him were he able to reconnoitre the high canals in such a craft as he now saw below him.

No. He could not afford to send the rough stone hurtling down. There was more than a chance of his failure to slay. The acute temptation to crush at a single blow that life out of the heir to Gormenghast - and leave nothing more than brick and stone behind - the intoxicating temptation to take the risk and to do this, was hard to resist.

But before all else came his own survival, and if by so much as an iota he deviated in any way from what he considered to be his final advantage then the end would surely come if not now, then very soon. For he knew he was walking on a razor's edge. He gloried in it. He had slid into the skin of a solitary Satan as though he had never enjoyed the flourish of language, the delights of civil power. It was war, now. Naked and bloody. The simplicity of the situation appealed to him. The world closed in upon him, its weapons drawn, eager for his death. And it was for him to outwit the world. It was the simplest and most fundamental of all games.

But his face was not the face of a thing at play. Or even of the Steerpike of a few years back - at play; or even of sin at play, for something new had happened to it. The terrible pattern that made of it a map, the white of the sea, the red, the continents and spattered islands, was hardly noticeable now. For it was the eyes that drew away the attention from all else.

For all the characteristic cunning and agility of his brain, he was no longer living in the same world that he lived in before he murdered Flay. Something had altered. It was his mind. His brain was the same but his mind was different. He was no longer a criminal because he chose to be. He had no longer the choice. He lived now among the abstractions. His brain dealt with where he would hide and what he would do if certain contingencies arose, but his mind floated above all this in a red ether. And the reflection of his mind burned through his eyes, filling the pupils with a grizzly bloodlight.

As he stared down like a bird of prey from its window'd crag, his brain saw, far below him a canoe. It saw Titus standing on the stone balcony. It saw him turn and after a moment's hesitation enter the rotting halls and disappear from view.

But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man's-land, over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood's red bugles. To be alone and evil! To be a god at bay. What was more absolute.

Three minutes had passed since the Earl had disappeared into the maw of the building below him. Steerpike had given him time to move well into the fastness before he took action. There had been the chance of the sudden reappearance of the youth, for the lower halls were dark and sinister. But he had not reappeared, and the time was now ripe for Steerpike to make his leap. The descent was of a sickening duration. The blood hammered in the murderer's head. His stomach turned over and for a while he lost consciousness. When his reflection, flying upwards from the depths to meet him was shattered at the surface, and as the spume of water rose like a fountain, Steerpike's body, far below the surface, continued its descent until, at last, as his feet touched lightly upon the submerged head of a weather-cock, he began to rise again to the surface.

The disturbed water had become quite smooth again.

Dazed with the effort of the long fall, sick with swallowed water and with painful lungs, yet it was only a moment or two before he had struck out for the stone stairway.

When he reached it and climbed the few steps to where the canoe lay quietly upon her side, he wasted not a moment in setting her upon the water. Boarding her nimbly he grasped the paddle that lay within and with the first half-dozen strokes was speeding beneath the ivy-covered walls towards one of the few windows which coincided with the water level.

It was of course necessary for Steerpike to make immediately for cover. The great bay ahead was a death trap, where, were a fish to raise its head above the surface it would be seen at once!

At any moment the young Earl might return. It was for him to skid unseen through the first of the flood windows leaving no trace. As Steerpike sped rapidly over the water he had, as far as possible kept his head turned back over his shoulders for the possible reappearance of the earl. Were he to be seen it would be necessary for him to make his way at once to one of his hiding places. There would be no possibility of his being overtaken, but to be sighted would, for many reasons, be unfortunate. He had no wish for the castle to know he could travel by water - nor that he roamed so far afield as to these frowning headlands; the sentries might well be reinforced, the vigilance sharpened.

So far he had been fortunate. He had survived his fall. His enemy had been out of earshot when he had splashed into the water; he had sighted a window through which he would pass with ease and behind the dark jaw of which he could remain until darkness descended.

For a few minutes at a time, as he slipped along the base of the dark walls he was forced to turn his head, to correct the course of the canoe, but for the most part his eyes were fixed upon the empty balcony to which at any moment his enemy might return.

It was when he had but three or four lengths of his canoe to go, before he turned her into the castle that, concentrating upon a faultless entry, he was unable to see that Titus had stepped out upon the open balcony.