Back in the house in Primrose Hill, Godolphin sat up through the night and listened to the news bulletins reporting the tragedy. The number of dead rose every hour; two more victims had already perished in the hospital. Theories were being advanced everywhere as to the cause of the fire; pundits used the event to comment on the lax safety standards applied to sites where itinerants camped and demanded a full Parliamentary inquiry to prevent a repeat of such a conflagration.
The reports appalled him. Though he’d given Dowd leash enough to dispatch the mystif—and who knew what hidden agenda lay there?—the creature had abused the freedom he’d been granted. There would have to be punishment meted out for such abuse, though Godolphin was in no mood to plot that now. He’d bide his time, choose his moment. It would come. Meanwhile, Dowd’s violence seemed to him further evidence of a disturbing pattern. Things he’d thought immutable were changing. Power was slipping from the possession of those who’d traditionally held it into the hands of underlings—fixers, familiars, and functionaries—who were ill equipped to use it. Tonight’s disaster was symptomatic of that. But the disease had barely begun to take hold. Once it spread through the Dominions there’d be no stopping it. There had already been uprisings in Vanaeph and L’Himby, there were mutterings of rebellion in Yzordderrex; now there was to be a purge here in the Fifth Dominion, organized by the Tabula Rasa, a perfect background to Dowd’s vendetta and its bloody consequences. Everywhere, signs of disintegration.
Paradoxically the most chilling of those signs was superficially an image of reconstruction: that of Dowd re-creating his face so that if he was seen by any member of the Society he’d not be recognized. It was a process he’d undertaken with each generation, but this was the first time any Godolphin had witnessed said process. Now Oscar thought back on it, he suspected Dowd had deliberately displayed his transformative powers, as further evidence of his newfound authority. It had worked. Seeing the face he’d grown so used to soften and shift at the will of its possessor was one of the most distressing spectacles Oscar had set eyes upon. The face Dowd had finally fixed was sans mustache and eyebrows, the head sleeker than his other, and younger: the face that of an ideal National Socialist. Dowd must also have caught that echo, because he later bleached his hair and bought several new suits, all apricot but of a much severer cut than those he’d worn in his earlier incarnation. He sensed the instabilities ahead as well as Oscar; he felt the rot in the body politic and was readying himself for a New Austerity.
And what more perfect tool than fire, the book burner’s joy, the soul cleanser’s bliss? Oscar shuddered to contemplate the pleasure Dowd had taken from his night’s work, callously murdering innocent human families in pursuit of the mystif. He would return to the house, no doubt, with tears on his face and say he regretted the hurt he’d done to the children. But it would be a performance, a sham. There was no true capacity for grief or regret in the creature, and Oscar knew it. Dowd was deceit incarnate, and from now on Oscar knew he had to be on his guard. The comfortable years were over, Hereafter he would sleep with his bedroom door locked.