Chapter 90

Now he is Edmund Lambert again, a boy on the road holding hands between the General and the Prince. He knows they are there but makes no attempt to look at them; understands that he is too small to see their faces, and keeps his eyes fixed on the light in the distance as they escort him past the lines of the impaled.

But the boy’s steps are their steps. Giant steps. And before the boy can wonder at it he has reached the temple doors at Kutha.

The Prince and the General leave him. The boy feels their hands slip away.

Now he is alone. Now there is only his mother, standing with her arms outstretched high above him at the top of the stairs—a silhouette in the temple doorway with the light of a billion stars behind her.

“Be a good boy and carry that rope for me,” she says.

“It’s not my fault,” the boy replies. “I only did what they told me.”

“C’est mieux d’oublier,” another voice echoes from somewhere, and his mother beckons him, disappearing slowly into the light.

Now the boy is climbing the stairs—black stairs, like rows of forgotten pictures in a yearbook—when all at once, it seems, he is standing in the doorway.

But the boy hesitates, unsure if he should enter. He hears the other voice again—a man’s voice that reminds him of his own—but cannot make out what it’s saying. Two words, only two words—but the voice is behind him now, far away in the void at the bottom of the stairs.

It doesn’t matter, the boy thinks.

And then he steps forward into an attic full of stars.