He looked down at the body. Until that second he had given little idea to the Golden’s misfortune, identifying with the case as a break of honor and custom; however, now he reviewed her excellence, her elegance, and thought about what she had made of all the energy encompassing her and what kind of lady she had been. Had she known the points of interest of the custom? Had she been ravenous for everlasting status? So close. Just about a sovereign and undying. His psyche went to Giselle, similarly delightful and educated by similar objectives. He thought of her as a youth in Quercy, her refined schooling, her introduction in Paris. None of that might have arranged her for the existence she currently drove. How she should shudder to live among these dandified, morose masters and women, these blasting looked at executioners with their blood loaded with dreams and abnormal climates, and contemplations like dark spidery stars withering in their cerebrums. How profoundly her dread should stream! Dread that in a moment could be changed into affection, similar to an underground waterway blasting out into the light of day. He thought of her as possible destiny. Either dead by his hand or unfading. How might he respond to that first and most likely outcome? He would be forlorn, most likely. Upset. He would sob. However, he realized he would discover a method of setting her demise in context, yet in addition to celebrating in it, and that nauseated him—this capacity to legitimize each frightfulness for the sake of dim arcana and spiritualist interests. Agenor was correct: the Family should change… and not just because it would be the insightful thing, the protected and even-minded thing. What’s more, if by cutting the killer down, he, Beheim, could be a specialist of that change, that would go far toward affecting recovery for how he had dealt with Giselle. He moved away from the body, watching out over the rugged slopes, yet he held a picture of the Golden’s spread appendages and pawed hands, a featureless picture looking like a brilliant root that appeared to get comfortable his psyche and dissolve like margarine into the dull matter of his mind, mixing him with new purpose. Insoluble however the issue showed up, he was resolved to uncover the liable party. This was all things considered, just a homicide, regardless of how strange its culprit. In Paris, he had addressed violations of viciousness that had at first offered even less any desire for arrangement. Brimming with resolve, he moved in the direction of the turret entryway, however as he moved once again into the dimness of the palace, his certainty was dispersed by the silly dread that behind him the silver and the appropriate moon had melted away, and hanging in its place, similar to malignant growth in the sky, was a swollen, deformed circle of wiped out yellow, an insignia of insanity and unholy fever, of another fire in the blood, of secrets and fear yet unseen, whose fear specifics he was unable to surmise.
The inside plan of Castle Banat had been devised not with viable contemplations of stronghold or residence as a top priority, yet as indicated by a progression of particular building dreams made by an Italian craftsman who had been one of the Patriarch’s sweethearts exactly 600 years prior, and its crazy tremendousness mirrored the degree and intricacy of the difficult that defied Beheim. Immense chambers as extensive as whole palaces themselves were spread over by spans—some of them drawbridges—that prompted doorless dividers; hundred-foot-wide flights of stairs finished in midair, and some chambers opened onto inlets in whose cloudy profundities more abnormal structures yet could be seen. Windowed towers grew from the most unforeseen places and rose toward faint vaulted rooftops, and to a great extent were gigantic wheels, for example, those used to raise and lower a portcullis, just most of these had no reason at all. Anytime one could admire see—in the light of the created iron lamps that hung all over—apparently boundless viewpoints of curves and flights of stairs, with thick circles of chain hanging down like plants, and pulleys and ropes with no obvious capacity, and elevated stone yards decorated with fairies in bas help and unshaven countenances with extraordinary iron rings depending from their mouths.