Maldor (_puzzled and wistful, speaks softly to the Poisoner_)
A secretion from the intestines of the cane-rat found in the Hwang-Ho river, sprinkled with the pollen of jasmine-flowers, produces a most wonderful poison, O Master. When dropped into the eyes of a virgin, this poison will cause her face to contract in a twitching crescendo.
The eyes of a virgin are too blank for a poisoner’s relish.
Maldor (_speaks with eager, hopeful emphasis_)
The virgin, O Master, provides only the unimportant tinge to the process. The relish lies in the pompous complexity of the poison.
From the irridescent dimples of the Medusae fish I have extracted a saffron liquid, O master, which mixed with the larvae of dragon-flies, completes a most satisfactory poison. Administered in microscopic doses, it creates ribbons of flame in the blood and its enchanting victim expires, glowing with strange, phosphorescent colors.
What strange delicacy makes you almost brutal tonight, O Master?
Wearisome poisons. A droll flutter ... and then always that dainty monotony--death.
But surely our work still holds you, O Master. You have not become reconciled to the empty ferocity of death!
Ah, Maldor, our poisons lend their little flourishes merely to life. I would like to poison death.
But master, those cringing writhings, those indelicate squirmings and jocund acrobatics which our most fastidious poisons produce--what more tender satisfaction!
They are but interludes leaving me languidly envious of death, my master.
You have no master! Your last poison of moth-blood produced an effect so exquisitely monstrous that even death was appalled. Ah, the bones of an old woman, dissolving within her, left her body, a loose grimace.
Some new and lethal poem has sighed itself into your heart.
There are no poisons remaining. We have signalled death with many diverting gestures. We have fitted too many clownish shrouds.
You are wistfully nervous. Some dream has burned your heart to an ashen bag.
I will tell you, Maldor, what I have done.
Surely, you have found no last contortion for life.
Beware, master, beauty is life’s revenge upon death.
You know very little. Beauty is the devourer of death.
A drop taken into the blood, no more. The skin becomes a milk-tinted pond in which wine-ghosts timidly bathe. The eyes, like purple breasted birds, beat against the day. The mouth blooms into splendours. Ah, Maldor, the drop releases beauty from her thousand prisons. The victim stands washed in a flood of light before which imagination dies.