SquidgeWorld Archive

He actually remembered very little about his first time - it had been a blur of screaming lights, screaming voices with dirty Norman accents, and the suffocating stench of earthen walls and decaying concoctions that had taken the alchemist decades to assemble. Add to that the three or four years it had taken the alchemist to actually convince him, and the mixture did not bear thinking about.

Well, fortunately he *had* been dead when the stir-crazy Norman had dunked him into it. And probably just as crazy as the Norman himself when he emerged, his coughing and spluttering only marginally worse than the alchemist's infernal accent.

He had seen to it that the man received a generous stipend from the Order (as it was then known, and he himself a mere Brother Knight shrouded in shadows), and staff to help ensure the serviceability - and reasonable freshness - of the pit at all times.

At least, if all else failed, he could now simply outlive the Father Commanders.

***

The second time had almost been a vanity. Let the saying be true that all duels are built on vanity - this one certainly was.

It had been hard enough finding a young fop tactless enough to accept the challenge from a greying man with a limp that was fast becoming a problem because it set him apart, attracting unwanted attention to a man who had been virtually the same age since he had acquired that limp when a falling siege engine had shattered his hip some forty years ago.

Constantinople. The spring in his step as he strode along the porphyry-encrusted corridors of the palace, a mere soldier of fortune judging from his ragged attire and unrefined nicked blade. He had left the high-profile work to others, ones who would ultimately be expendable to the pages of history they would doubtless go down in. He had learnt generations ago that staining your hands with the blood of strangers made you the Murderer of Someone, and therefore regrettably memorable. He had not marred his century-old sword with as much as a drop of Imperial blood, not even when the Empress had stood there glaring at him, hidebound in gold and jewels and panels of fabric harder than wood and heavier than iron. His blade had sliced clean through her façade and left her naked and affronted beyond belief, able to run should she wish to.

Like a true gentleman, he had turned his back and left.

There had been nothing of the gentleman in the loud-mouthed, beak-nosed young Florentine fop, and in all honesty he would have enjoyed taking him down a notch, had he not come here with the express purpose of dying. The boy, scheming to a fault and desperately in need of a military or at least manly reputation, had left little to chance; the sniper with the crossbow had been almost insultingly obviously placed.

Lorenzo the Doctor's son, he had mused idly as his seconds dragged him to the cart that would take him to Nola and the pit that would remake his war-worn body, leaving a thick trail of near-black blood on the grass. I will have to keep an eye on him.

***

It had been that much easier without the limp, simply returning to a life of recruiting, refining, researching and redirecting, relocating every now and then to keep suspicion to a minimum, and effortlessly absorbing whatever name the locals were willing to give him.

He had gone for centuries with just one name, often eschewing the need for a family name by simply appearing and accepting whatever description the locals were willing to apply to him. He had been Legrand, Lange, al-Akbar any number of times, had been whatever version of John or Thomas or even his birth name, Henri, had seemed most likely to them. He had learnt it the hard way that acquiring a distinguishable name had become a hazard after the invention of the printing press; a hazard that was anything but incalculable given the increased power and influence of the League, but nevertheless an unnecessary one. He could hardly justify using the resources of the Shadows to obliterate mentions of his name from chronicles and draft lists, from pamphlets and private letters when there was more pressing business to attend to. He would not go as far as claiming that it had nearly cost them that war, but it had been an unnecessary encumbrance to find some unsuspecting soul to saddle with the name he had made for himself, and send him home to Sweden to get married and leave his name in the church registries, doubtless found 'much changed' after nearly three decades of war, Ã...ke Hendriksson the Swedish captain, son of an imaginary Hendrik who was little more than a vanity on his part.

As was the name that the poor boy went down in the history books under - Achatius Tott, a fancy with its grim overtones of blood-brown agate and death to the miserable German peasants whose inhumane existences were being wiped out by a thirty-year fire that had been so well-engineered he had allowed himself the vanity of taking a named part in it.

The exhilaration of throwing his name away in battle, taking as many of the deluded souls with him as possible, had almost been worth the agony of dying, strapped to the horse of a faithful musket-wielding Shadow, painting the stallion's grey flank deep red with the blood streaming from where the arquebuse shot had ripped his thigh wide open. The Pit had been established in a ravaged church in Merseburg, barely fifteen miles away, barely a shadow of the flourishing town it had been mere months ago.

It would be remade, in time, purer and better. Just as he would be.

***

The little painter had done his job exceedingly well, had not even needed the slightest bit of pressure or guidance. He had found that in circumstances like these, simply planting an idea in a man's head and letting it germinate and grow was by far enough to wreak havoc.

Jacques Louis David - that had been the little painter's name, doubtless intent on becoming a great painter of the First French Republic, a commemorator of the fallen hero of the new age in pomp and circumstance and grand gestures that had somehow managed to crawl out from under the wreckage of Rome and haunt the wreckage of Paris. Jacques, Louis, Jean, Paul, David, Marat - he allowed himself a little smile at the observation that he had probably borne all these names individually at one point in his unnervingly long life. A few of them taken together had actually managed to create an agitator's personality that would have been a credit to the Shadows, had he ever as much as heard of them.

The little painter had done his job exceedingly well, had laid the dead man out in the Panthéon draped in nothing but a sheet, his bathtub and his writing implements arrayed around him - behold, what a man. The painting had done an even better job in doing away with Marat's imperfections - the haranguing voice, the misanthropic demeanour and the skin ailment that had left him a mass of scabs and sores under that sheet that mercifully exposed little more than a face relaxed in death, and a well-placed stab wound. The glorification had already set in.

Of course, the girl had failed to make good on her promise and sacrifice herself before she could get arrested - nevertheless, she had managed to feign insanity well enough to be spared the worst of the questioning before the guillotine separated her pretty head from her shoulders. Charlotte, that had been her name, Citizen Charlotte Corday. Like him, she had thrown away any number of names in her life, and she had needed little persuasion to purchase a knife and go down in history as the one who assassinated the mastermind of the Godless revolution.

He had almost been moved to offer her a last night of pleasure, seeing as she was doubtless abhorrent at the thought of as much as touching her anti-Royalist fiancé, but had kept in the background, satisfied with the ardour that chit of a girl brought to a task fit for a man of his own size and cunning.

And the little painter had done a beautiful job of leaving her out of the picture too - a picture that hung in the National Convent, larger than life, inscribed with the painter's dedication (and thereby with several names that he had once borne, he thought with inappropriate amusement), an icon of a man who had had to die nobly in order to immortalise his words.

*Society must rid itself of its rotten limbs. Five or six hundred severed heads would ensure happiness and freedom where a false humanity would cost the lives of thousands*. So he had written, so he was quoted, read aloud by those who could, and could lay hands on a torn copy of *The People's Friend*, maybe a week old, maybe a month, who could tell with the new Revolutionary calendar. Who needed to tell, when there was a purge going on, a rabid rage of gunfire and barricade fire and rivers of rotten royal blood dripping from the guillotines onto the pages of the newspapers? Who needed to tell whose names they reported as executed when there was freedom to celebrate with every corrupt official and degenerate nobleman decapitated? Who needed to tell whose blood those pages were stained with when they got picked up for the twentieth time and read aloud by the muckrakers and down-and-out abbés celebrating a freedom that scoured the city, baptising the young Republic in blood and wine and the dizzy draught of a new beginning?

It had been his blood, though that mattered only marginally - and a marginal it had become, spattered in the margins of *The People's Friend* as the last of the marauding Royalist soldiery had crushed his hands in the printing presses before being wiped out by Robespierre's righteously enraged populace.

***

He had not thought to return to that particular theatre for a few decades, but circumstances had dictated otherwise; and for all that he barely remembered France as his home all those centuries ago, he found he had developed a certain fondness for it, with all its verve and stubbornness, its penchant for the absolute and its bloodstained anthems.

It had taken several ordinary lifetimes to restore a semblance of order to what Marat had unleashed; lifetimes unbroken by violent deaths for a change. Was it old age, finally setting in after more than six centuries, instilling in him the wish to withdraw deeper behind the scenes, leave the overripe apples of Europe to their own devices and set out for pastures new? Somehow, he had doubted that.

More than anything, it had been the advent of photography.

Where before, it had taken little more than five years and fifty miles to reinvent himself as the man who was permanently in his middle age and merely uncommonly tall and quiet, where no description of the man Lorenzo de' Medici had killed in a duel would have been accurate enough to make anybody suspect that he was in fact the same person as Henri Legrand next door, or Master Jacopo, or even General Achatius Tott, this little wildfire invention of M. Daguerre's had made life just that little bit more complicated.

Fortunately, for every M. Daguerre, there is a Signor Marconi born into this world, and the desert of Arabia or the mountains of Bhutan proved perfect locations for long-wave radio transmitters and certain camera-shy Shadows. Ironically, it had been there, in his oasis camp in the Dasht-i-Lut, that he had acquired the first name to stick with him for more than one human lifetime. Desert-tribe folklore had styled the organization's encrypted radio antenna the 'Demon's Head', and somehow the name had stuck.

It had suited him well, all but unpronounceable to the uninitiated, the victims, targets, and hangers-on as the organisation's focus moved steadily westward, following the rotten core of civilisation. Telegraphs had replaced radio, computers had replaced telegraphs, and still there was work to be done. There was always work to be done, keeping up with the follies of mankind, keeping the fragile balance between progress and decay, keeping the beauty that was man from disfiguring himself by allowing the rot to spread.

That had always been the reason to come back, every single time he had fought his way out of the still-stinking murk of the Pits. The beauty that was man. Very few men had that beauty in them still.

One man in particular would merit salvaging from the cultural wreckage that was Gotham City, to be remade, refined, resurrected into something sublimely beautiful, and something that would be his in spirit as well as in flesh.

Failing once had never stopped him in the long centuries on earth. Willing his racing heart to calm, the man reluctantly known as Ra's al Ghul closed his eyes and allowed the wildly plummeting train to burn the final full stop into this particular page of his life.

There would be another. He would come back, and come back to this very place.

He had work to do.