careless child.
Ben averted his gaze, and then, wrenchingly, forced himself to look again. More details were visible. Embedded in a horribly webbed and wrinkled central concavity were two nasal openings, higher than the nostrils would once have been. Below, he made out a mouth that was little more than a gash, a wound within a wound.
"Oh, dear God." Ben slowly breathed the words.
"You are surprised?" Chardin said, the words scarcely appearing to come from his wound-like mouth. It was if he were a ventriloquist's dummy, one designed by a deranged sadist. A cough-laugh. "The reports of my death were quite accurate, all except for the assertion of death itself. "Burned beyond recognition' yes, indeed I was. I should have perished in the blaze. Often I wish that I had. My survival was a freak accident. An enormity. The worst fate a human being can have."
"They tried to kill you," Anna whispered. "And they failed."
"Oh no. I think that in most respects they quite succeeded," Chardin said, and winced: a twitch of dark red muscle around one of his eyeballs. It was apparent that the simple act of talking was painful to him. He was enunciating with exaggerated precision, but the damage meant that certain consonants remained blurry. "A close confidant of mine had suspicions that they might try to eliminate me. Talk had already begun about dispatching the angeli re belli He came by my country estate too late. There were ashes, and blackened timber, and charred ruins everywhere. And my body, what was left of it, was as black as any of it. He thought he could detect a pulse, my friend did. He brought me to a tiny provincial hospital, thirty kilometers away, told them a tale about an overturned kerosene lamp, gave them a false name. He was canny. He understood that if my enemies knew I had survived, they would try again. Months passed in that tiny clinic. I had burns over ninety-five percent of my body. I was not expected to live." He spoke haltingly but hypnotically: a tale never before spoken. And then he sat down in a tall-backed wooden chair, seemingly depleted.
"But you survived," Ben said.
"I did not have the strength to force myself to stop breathing," Chardin said. He paused again, the memory of pain imposing further pain. "They wanted to move me to a metropolitan hospital, but of course I would not permit it. I was beyond help anyway. Can you imagine what it is like when consciousness itself is nothing other than the consciousness of pain?"
"And yet you survived," Ben repeated.
"The agony was beyond anything our species was meant to endure. Wound dressings were an ordeal beyond imagining. The stench of necrotic flesh was overpowering even to me, and more than one orderly would routinely vomit upon entering my room. Then, after the granulation tissue formed, a new horror was in store for me-contracture. The scars would shrink and the agony would be rekindled all over again. Even today, the pain I live with every moment of every day is of a degree I never experienced in the whole of my preceding life. When I had a life. You cannot look at me, can you? No one can. But then I cannot look at myself, either."
Anna spoke, clearly knowing that human contact had to be reestablished. "The strength you must have had-it's extraordinary. No medical textbook could ever account for it. The instinct for survival. You emerged from that blaze. You were saved. Something inside you fought for life. It had to be for a reason!"
Chardin spoke quietly. "A poet was once asked, If his house were on fire, what would he save? And he said, I would save the fire. Without fire, nothing is possible." " His laughter was a low, disconcerting rumble. "Fire is after all what made civilization possible: but it can equally be an instrument of barbarity."
Anna returned the shotgun to Chardin after removing a last shell from the chamber. "We need your help," she said urgently.
"Do I look like I am in a position to help anyone, I who cannot help myself?"
"If you want to call your enemies to account, we may be your best bet," Ben said somberly.
"There is no revenge for something like this. I did not survive by drinking the gall of rage." He withdrew a small plastic atomizer from the folds of his robes, and directed a spray of moisture toward his eyes.
"For years, you were at the helm of a