Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  There were no department stores such as she was used to along the traffic-thronged thoroughfare of Bertram Street back at home in Carden. Merchants conducted their business over long counters opening directly from their ground-floor workshops onto the street, so that in the case of dressmakers, she could watch the seamstresses at work and marvel at the rich profusion of colourful fabrics which were stacked everywhere in rolls and bolts.

  Trying a dress on was in itself an exciting novelty, conducted in a small room off one side of the workshop. The concept would have been scandalous in Oraille, where one took one’s purchase home, tried it on in respectable privacy, and if it proved unsatisfactory had the proprietors send a boy around to collect it. She couldn’t deny a certain exhibitionistic thrill at undressing in a strange room, which was enhanced by the cut of the garments themselves. They were looser and freer in this much warmer climate, low in the neckline where Oraillean dresses were high, fastened with laces and ribbons instead of clasps and buttons. She let herself be guided entirely by Meria as to taste, and settled on a moderately conservative gown of a material called seasilk which shone like opals and flowed along what curves she had before descending to a short train. It felt wonderfully like she was wearing a waterfall. More than happy with the result, she returned to the apartments which Cheyne had arranged and thanked her for a lovely day.

  ‘Oh no, my lady,’ Meria objected. She had steadfastly refused to use Berylin’s first name all day; it was unthinkable, she’d said. ‘Why, we haven’t even begun to think about your hair!’

  5

  As it turned out, the banquet was every bit as lavish and exotic as anything her imagination could have furnished, and she felt that she acquitted herself rather well – that was, up until the end.

  There were dozens of dishes, mostly different permutations of fish and fruit, all of which she was able to heap praise upon quite honestly – even the ones which she found too spicy for her southern palate (what was it about hot countries that they felt the need to make their food hotter still?) but which Harcourt said he preferred. She’d dragged him along in his best savant’s robes as much for moral support as to satisfy the expectations of her hosts, and it was hard to say which had alarmed him more: the enforced bonhomie or the prospect of being her ‘plus one’. Fortunately, the other guests took his awkwardness for gravitas and nodded respectfully at his every utterance. There were sincere and fulsome speeches praising the long friendship between their two nations, et cetera, and she was able to reply courteously enough to avoid provoking an actual war, so that was good. It was only when conversation began to relax between neighbours, after the third dessert and before the first of the liqueurs, that she ran into trouble be being asked to hold forth on a subject which, ironically enough, she was most qualified to speak: the nature of subornation. Her interlocutor was the Dravanese First Minister – a large man called Lidan, who in his prime would have been athletic but now simply sprawled. He was also extraordinarily hairy, with black wiry curls of it peeping at cuff and collar as if he were losing his stuffing. At first, he had directed his questions at Harcourt.

  ‘I am curious, sir,’ he boomed, ‘as to the Oraillean understanding of the phenomenon of Visitation – what you would call subornation.’

  In reply, Harcourt had simply tilted his glass at Berylin and said ‘My apologies, sir, but Officer Hooper is your expert there.’

  ‘Really?’ Lidan turned to her in great surprise. ‘I had no idea that the women of your nation were so learned.’

  ‘More than learned,’ she responded. ‘Don’t tell him this, but I actually outrank him.’ She’d been aiming for a tone of conspiratorial levity, and sure enough Lidan laughed, but something about the indulgent sound of it annoyed her. When he answered ‘A fair jest from a fair lady, to be sure,’ she understood why: he’d not been laughing at her but at the idea that she could be Harcourt’s superior – or, presumably, any man’s.

  ‘What fascinates me the most about it,’ she continued, as if he hadn’t said anything, ‘is the wide variety of terms used to describe the same thing: subornation, geopossession, haunting. Take visitation, now. Not a word that’s heard very often these days. I would never have pegged the First Minister of so large and flourishing a nation for a mystic.’

  ‘You find it hard to believe that a man of God can also be an effective administrator of worldly affairs?’

  ‘No more so than that a woman can be an effective investigator of otherworldly ones,’ she countered.

  He acknowledged the point well scored. ‘Or indeed a debater. My apologies if I have caused offence. If I spoke out of turn, it was simply from surprise, for in Drava a beautiful woman will have armies of men falling over themselves to provide for her, while a clever woman will have them working under her – it is not common in my experience to meet a woman who is both.’

  She accepted with a gracious nod and a small smile.

  ‘But there,’ he continued. ‘An interesting word of your own. “Investigator”. Such a cold, procedural term for dealing with something so esoteric.’

  She laughed. ‘Well, I must congratulate you on having found possibly the best understatement I’ve ever heard to describe it. You are correct, though – it is procedural. A hundred years ago, my job would have been done by a priest with bell, book and candle rather than electrostatic technology, probably killing as many innocents as he saved. Did you know that they used to burn entire villages to eradicate cases of what the Hegemonic Church called “demonic infestation”? Is that what you mean by “esoteric”, perhaps?’ This was possibly a little harsh, but at least it wiped the condescending smile from his face. He seemed to look at her properly for the first time.

  ‘What I mean, my lady,’ he answered carefully, ‘is that the phenomenon of subornation, as you choose to call it, is an ineffable mystery of God’s universe, which – though we may deplore the injury done to innocent lives – no amount of steam-power or lightning guns will ever truly penetrate.’

  ‘I have no desire to penetrate anything, my Lord Lidan. I am not a savant or a theologian. My job is simply to make bad things go away.’

  To her immense surprise, Harcourt interjected: ‘The procedure, steam-power and lightning guns with which she does so are the fruits of our nation’s Great Mechanisation, which has been achieved, in part, by casting aside the medieval superstitions of our forebears.’ She winced.

  ‘Then I come back to my original question,’ replied the First Minister. ‘If these subornations are not demons, then what are they? Please, you would flatter a superstitious medieval man with the benefits of your great mechanised wisdom.’

  She caught the dangerous undertone in his voice and tried unsuccessfully to warn Harcourt, who ploughed in, oblivious.

  ‘Are you familiar with the psychodynamic theories of Professor Falaise?’

  ‘A little, in passing.’

  ‘He was a psyrgeon at the end of the last century, working to help victims of subornation recover from the trauma of their experiences – you must understand that the therapeutic methods of the time were extremely barbaric. Patients were subjected to forcible restraint, had holes drilled in their heads and even parts of their brains cut out – all sorts of horrible things. Anything the patients said about their experiences was discounted as nothing more than insane babbling – the nightmare reactions to an unspeakable horror – but Falaise was the first to take the obvious step of entering an active subornation zone to see how much of their testimony could be verified. When one reads his early case notes, one cannot escape the impression of reading the diary of an explorer discovering an entirely new continent – and in many cases this was literally the case. The dangers which Officer Hooper and other members of the DCS face – with all of their equipment and support – he walked into willingly, armed with little more than a notebook and a stopwatch.’

  ‘You sound like you admire him a great deal.’
<
br />   ‘I do. His bravery and tenacity in the face of received scientific wisdom telling him that he was wrong. Because it was all true – every word of the patients’ accounts. The nightmares and dreamscapes which they described were not trauma-induced distortions but accurate recollections of events in which they had been forced to participate. Somehow, by a mechanism we still don’t understand, certain people’s dreams impose themselves on areas of waking reality in such a way as to incorporate the people and places within those areas into the dream’s narrative – effectively suborning them for its purposes, hence the term.

  ‘Falaise identified a range of typical narrative building blocks that he called tesserae – which combine, recombine and mutate to give the dream narrative its often chaotic structure – and the actants, who are the character functions that the victims are suborned into performing. He developed the protean vector scale to measure the speed and extent to which these dream features change. Also, every dream has a phantasm who is responsible for the conditions within the subornation, though there are conflicting theories as to whether or not they have conscious control over what happens.’

  ‘What do you think, Miss Hooper?’ asked Lidan

  ‘When you are caught up in the shifts of a subornation it is impossible to tell whether any given figure is the author of the Event or a suborned victim,’ she explained. ‘In my experience the phantasm is almost never aware that he or she is dreaming at all. In many cases it is actually as much a victim of its own nightmare as the people caught up in it.’ Clear in her memory was an image of the man with worms being ground into his skull. Angels in my brain! They’re putting angels in my brain! She shuddered and gulped more wine.

  ‘I note that you refer exclusively to nightmares and fear, and the trauma of being overtaken by another person’s dream,’ he observed. ‘But there must be more positive dreams, must there not? Dreams in which miracles occur? In which we may fly or see our departed loved ones or converse with angels?’

  ‘They are dreams, to be sure, but daydreams – nothing more. They are nothing like the awfulness which grins and dances behind our eyelids while we sleep.’

  ‘That is very poetic, if somewhat grim, for someone who claims to be a mere functionary. I do not think that you are as coldly materialistic as you would like to appear.’

  ‘Thank you for the compliment – I think. Hegemonic Church doctrine would once have had us believe that they are visitations from the powers of heaven and hell and pinned the blame for them on the sinfulness – or otherwise – of those who were afflicted. There is an emerging Rationalist school of thought at home which contends that they come from human dreamers in an entirely separate world existing alongside our own called the Realt. Savant Harcourt holds to this view, don’t you?’

  Harcourt blushed, as if having had some secret vice exposed. ‘It explains much of the observed phenomena which cannot be accounted for by orthodox...’

  She waved his sputtering away, though not unkindly. ‘But to my mind that’s just as mystical and unnecessary an explanation. I’m sorry, my lord, I have seen too much real pain and injury inflicted on too many real people to be under any illusions as to the nature of subornation; what you hear as poetry is nothing more than simple outrage. I loathe and despise the authors of these Events for the way they arbitrarily impose themselves on people’s lives and the things they force them to do – wherever they’re from. It is a violation, my lord, as plain and brutal as that, and I cannot abide it. I will not abide it.’ She drained the remains of her wine and put the glass down a little too heavily. The air seemed very thick and warm around her.

  The First Minister topped up her glass again. ‘You are convinced, then, that such subornations are entirely injurious. Nothing more.’

  ‘I have yet to see evidence to the contrary, my lord.’

  Lidan considered this for some time. ‘I wonder,’ he said eventually, ‘if you would be interested in seeing how a small nation such as Drava cares for the victims of its own, ah, violations.’

  ‘Please,’ she shook her head. ‘You are very polite, but I am sure that the last thing your people want is an arrogant Southerner like myself poking around, trying to hide her condescension at your supposedly primitive psyrgical methods.’

  ‘Oh, I think you’ll find that we are not so thin-skinned as that, Miss Hooper.’

  She blinked, taken aback, and kicked herself for allowing the wine to dull her wits. How had she managed to offend him? ‘I’m sorry, my lord, I didn’t mean…’

  ‘Yes you did,’ he interrupted, though not ungently. ‘To expect otherwise would be unreasonable – and undesirable. Careful politeness may suit us diplomats, but for those like you, who are trying to shed light into the dark corners of the human soul, it is worse than useless. Were you not so forthright, you might not be so able. Jowett’s recommendation was well made.’

  ‘You are too generous.’

  He laughed. ‘Oh don’t spoil it now, I was just beginning to like you!’

  ‘Very well then.’ She straightened up and fixed him with her most arch look. ‘I would be delighted to accept your kind invitation, First Minister. I am indeed extremely curious to see how the rest of the world copes with the curse of subornation – and rest assured, I shall be as patronising and supercilious as everybody expects. I wouldn’t want to disappoint my most gracious hosts, after all.’

  ‘Excellent!’ He beamed, and she caught a tantalising glimpse of the handsome man he must have been in his youth. ‘There is a sanatorium in the mountains a day’s ride from here; the Hospice of Bles Gabril. I shall have Cheyne arrange transport and send for you tomorrow morning, if that is convenient.’

  ‘That will be perfect. It will take my crew more than a few days to supply for our journey to the Flats, and I shall leave Savant Harcourt here to liaise with your people regarding the necessary technical details.’

  Talk turned to other, more frivolous matters, and at the evening’s end, they bowed and parted amicably, but as she and Harcourt returned to the Spinner along the lantern-lit boulevards of Bles Marique, he said ‘So what exactly happened between you and the First Minister? Did we just make an ally or an enemy?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she replied. ‘He’s offered to show us how the Dravanese deal with subornation.’

  ‘Then I’d say take Runce with you and pack for trouble.’

  ‘But subtly.’

  ‘Subtle trouble?’ He tugged at his formal collar uncomfortably. ‘Politicians,’ he muttered. ‘Give me mind-eating demons any time.’

  Chapter 15

  The Miracle of Bles Gabril

  1

  Berylin, Runce, Matalo Cheyne, and a small retinue of liveried servants set out on horseback from Bles Marique at dawn the next day. Runce had packed his pv-satchel and the fully-charged tez gun carefully out of sight.

  The sun lifted veils of early morning river mist over the city’s rooftops in gauzy plumes which quickly burned away, and choruses of crickets shrilled in the dry grass on either side of the main road which followed the broad sweep of the Barra River, out through patchworked fields, vineyards, olive groves, and up towards the island’s mountainous interior. As the day grew, so did the temperature, and Berylin soon began to wish that she’d dressed in the loose silks that Dravanese women favoured, rather than the heavy cotton of her customary travelling clothes. Yellow dust from the sun-baked road hung in a perpetual haze about them. Buster trotted happily alongside, tongue lolling, delighted to be able to exercise his legs on solid ground for a change.

  They passed through many riverside towns bustling with farmers, fisherfolk, and the crews of huge log rafts being poled downstream to feed Bles Marique’s insatiable demand for ship timber. Similarly to its warlike rival Elbaite, the island of Drava was large enough to boast a variety of natural resources such that she could be self-sufficient if necessary. Fishing villages along the coast,
and small market towns in the agricultural hinterland behind them, fed mining and logging towns higher up. The Barra’s tributary streams – some of which were large enough to be rivers in their own right – were crossed by stone bridges with high, vaulting arches, and at one of these they left the Barra to follow a stream which soon led them up and out of the cultivated river valley, foaming as it tumbled out of the forested uplands. The trees were strange to Berylin. They had coarse, dagger-like leaves and a peculiarly pungent smell, and their bark hung in tattered strips from the trunks as if even they found the heat intolerable. She guessed they were eucalyptus, though had never seen one in real life before. Buster bounded to and fro, gleefully stuffing his nose full of as many new and exotic odours as he could.

  For a road which seemed to be heading away from civilisation, it was in better kept condition than the main river-road which they had just left. Not paved, but oiled and hard-packed earth with few ruts or potholes, clear drainage channels on either side and steeply-roofed shelters every mile or so, beneath which she saw travellers resting from the heat. Though there were fewer carts and goods wagons, this road was no less busy; there seemed to be just as many travellers on foot, and all heading in the same direction as Berylin’s party. Most were sick, injured, or crippled in some fashion – some so badly that they had to be carried by their companions or else drag themselves as best they could through the dust. Though she was more used to the sights of pain and suffering than most, she nevertheless found the spectacle disquieting and voiced her concern to Cheyne.