Nights of Villjamur lotrs-1

by Mark Charan Newton

  She seemed to like that. 'Of course. Besides, because I spend a lot of time alone, I could do with the company. In my time, I've listened to a lot of men talk – and let me tell you, men do talk, if only to the right woman. You know my profession, so I get to peek into a lot of lives, see a lot of destruction – the amount of hidden secrets and lies that keep a partnership intact…' She looked intently at a small metal clock and picked it up. 'And, besides, I'm just making my living doing something I enjoy. If they didn't come to me for their kicks, they'd only go elsewhere. I'm not the problem – just a symptom.'

  'No one suggested you were a problem,' Jeryd observed bashfully.

  She put the clock down, tucked a loose strand of red hair behind her ear. 'Anyway, what I'm saying is I know quite a bit about relationships.' She laughed to herself, some hidden irony perhaps. 'Yet I myself have never held one together. But, I'd like to think I could help you. And your partner obviously had good tastes.' She gazed at Jeryd intensely.

  He looked away awkwardly.

  'Relax, investigator,' she said, laughing. 'I meant she liked quality antiques.'

  'I know that,' Jeryd said, defensively.

  'You shouldn't take things so seriously. You're so full of melancholy. I think you work too hard. What would you do if you didn't work?'

  Jeryd frowned. 'I'm not sure really.'

  'It's scary for some people to think what they'd do if they didn't have to work constantly. I think that's why many do work so much: because they're frightened of stopping.'

  'What's all this got to do with helping me get Marysa back?'

  'Because you've probably put your work ahead of her most of the time when she needed care and attention. You didn't listen to her enough. You didn't make her feel special. You therefore never earned the right to be loved. I dare say you worked so hard because you didn't feel comfortable loving her.'

  'Compliments corner, this,' Jeryd muttered dryly.

  'It's a reality check,' she said. 'I can tell by your face that I've hit a nerve.'

  'Maybe you have. Look, I'm meeting her tonight. What could I do to… seduce her?'

  She proceeded to give him some advice at length.

  It was as if the secrets of womankind were being revealed to him.

  He even had to make notes.

  'So,' he said, after being numbed into silence by her advice, 'what should I get Marysa as a present?'

  'A good-quality antique, one that could also be thought of as a relic. It'll arouse her curiosity, will mystify her, play on her mind. You must be on her mind always.'

  'Of course.' Jeryd folded his arms, leaned back, playing it cool. Yes, he could appear confident, he could persuade Marysa to come back to him. This seducing business was clearly a breeze. 'You're pretty clued-up on all this stuff.'

  'I know.' She seemed satisfied with the compliment.

  Turning to what he was genuinely more confident about, Jeryd risked another attempt to dig for information, now that she was more at ease with him. 'So how did you really get to know Delamonde Ghuda?'

  'You don't ever ease up on the work front, do you?' she said.

  'My lunch hour is over, I fear.'

  'I met him in a tavern, Rumex. That's all. He's just one more handsome man I went to bed with. A man I wanted to sleep with out of choice. Not a crime, is it?'

  It should be, he thought, but then he didn't really understand his personal feelings in this. As a rumel who was out of touch with the way the modern world worked, he often understood himself even less than he did others.

  *

  Dusk, and standing outside of the Bistro Juula. Jeryd stared up at the pterodette that had narrowly missed excreting on him. The little reptile flew up to perch on the roof, looking down at him.

  'Not on these robes, you won't, my friend,' Jeryd said confidently, empowered by the advice of another woman.

  Antique present tucked under his arm, carefully wrapped. He wore fine silk robes, in black, over a white silk undershirt with matching handkerchief. The outfit had cost him nearly a Jamun. He had shaved with an expensive blade earlier on, too. Consequently the breeze felt chillingly fresh against his smooth cheek, despite his thick rumel skin. He had even – though he would never admit this to anyone else serving in the Inquisition – scented his white hair with fragrant oils.

  I may stink like a tart's dressing table, but every little helps.

  He tried to remember everything Tuya had told him. He had reread his notes a dozen times, and it put him in mind of those Inquisition entrance exams, back in his youth.

  Jeryd cast an eye at the nearby clock tower. She was bound to keep him waiting – she always did. He felt nervous, as if this was their first date. The sky was darkening fast, the tall buildings becoming even blacker against it. Birds and pterodettes arced hypnotically above the countless spires. Lanterns were being lit along the street, their coloured glow catching the limestone. Sandalwood incense wafted from one of the taverns further upwind. Maybe he was going soft, but he thought the scene rather romantic.

  There she was, Marysa, walking slowly along the path to meet him, hips swinging slightly as she came up the hill, and his heart was beginning to race. She caught his eye as she came closer, then looked at the ground. For a moment neither of them said anything. Her elegant, black robe was slightly darker than her skin, with a coloured scarf wrapped around her neck. Her white hair was tied up with something that sparkled, no doubt some current fashion he wasn't aware of, and the coloured make-up around her eyes opened up her face in new ways. Her tail swayed back and forth sinuously.

  'Hello,' Jeryd gulped. 'You look incredible.'

  'Thank you,' she said. 'And I like your new robe.'

  He hadn't heard it for so long, that soothing voice. 'Oh, this is for you,' he forced himself to say, handing over the present. 'Just a little something you might be interested in.' He tried not to contain his eagerness as he urged, 'Go on, open it.'

  She unwrapped it quietly, and her face lit up. The gift was small, possibly some ancient navigational device, only a hand-span wide, with an intricate mechanism.

  'An antique,' she said in awe. 'Looks almost like a relic.'

  Jeryd stood back, arms folded, feeling pleased with himself. 'Should keep you busy for a few days trying to work out what it is.'

  'It's really wonderful.' She kissed him on the cheek, a gesture that could have meant anything, so he tried not to interpret it with wishful thinking.

  'Now, shall we?' Jeryd indicated the nearby bistro.

  *

  After a deep initial awkwardness, the night went better than he could have imagined. He actually listened to her for the first time in years. Her main focus these days turned out to be ancient architectures – particularly newly discovered remains of the Azimuth Empire, undergoing restoration work here and there. She told him at length of the ancient Azimuth civilization: the great causeways now strewn under a hillside, the skeletal palaces submerged under marshes. Whilst she had been consorting with the archaeologists, bones of ancient creatures had been found, great mastodon ribcages unearthed near the coast, mammoth quidlo squids, human remains several armspans in length, even unknown beasts with three skulls. She gradually painted for Jeryd a vivid history of the Boreal Archipelago. Why had he never found her so fascinating before?

  Gestures came and went, light touches to the wrist, a smile after meaningful words, catching each other's eyes through the flame of the candle, every nuance so much more powerful, so much more lingering than before, as if the very fact of being apart had made them realize just how much they filled a gap in each other's life.

  Inevitably they got round to the breakdown of their marriage, whereupon Jeryd confessed to being a poor husband. She then gave him a list of demands, should they give it another go.

  They were not unreasonable, he admitted, all to do with time, attention, details. Even he could manage that. He stopped short of pleading with her, was merely happy to be with her once again. And she responded posit
ively to that, he hoped.

  *

  Later that evening, he walked her home to her temporary residence – a room on Gata du Seggr, the other side of the Gata Sentimental, where you found a lot of old soldiers living in retirement. She whispered to him that it would not be right to spend the night together, so at the door he merely pressed his lips to her hand, then turned away into the darkness.

  *

  On his way home he couldn't help but notice that he was being followed by someone with heavy footsteps, but there was no incident. Once inside the door, seeing with clarity how much of a mess his house was, Jeryd decided to have a quick tidy up. Afterwards he sat naked on his bed by the burning wood stove, with his head in his hands, his tail motionless, his expensive new robe folded neatly on a chair in the corner. There was an ache in his chest as he reviewed the evening in his mind. Things seemed to have gone well, but he didn't want to get his hopes up. Becoming over-optimistic could lead to very worst kind of disappointment.

  It was interesting how Tuya had changed the way he looked at his marriage, at his entire life. She had been amazingly succinct in pointing out his errors, had been the only one ever to locate a direct channel to the things that were essential in his world. Without Marysa there would still be so much… emptiness. Emptiness which he had previously tried to fill with so much work, in some vague attempt to avoid thinking about how bad things had become.

  He reclined back on the bed, began to drift off to sleep.

  *

  He was woken by footsteps, heels clipping the cobbles beneath his window. His heart missed a beat as the front door opened, then closed. He twisted round in his bed, rubbed his eyes, peering at the clock. He realized he had been asleep for only half a bell. Footsteps up the stairs, footsteps to his bedroom door. With one eye he watched it open, pretending he was still asleep.

  A figure approached his bed, paused.

  'Some inquisitor you are,' Marysa chuckled. 'What if I was a thief?'

  Everything I have is yours anyway, he wanted to say, but didn't. She kicked off her shoes, slid her dress down, eased herself onto the bed. They kissed, and he was gentle with her, and as they made love she would bite his chest gently, and arc her back like a bow.

  Tonight, and for as long as I'm alive, he promised himself, it will be all about her.

  *

  Outside Jeryd's house, Aide Tryst was leaning against the wall watching the glint of the moon on the slick cobbles. He had sifted through the backstreets to get here, mannered and methodical in his stealth, sliding by the tenebrous traffic of Villjamur, past all the hustlers and the slick magic and weird hybrid beasts that filled the hour with a night-noir exoticness.

  And now Marysa's gentle groans came down to him occasionally above the noise of the breeze.

  In his hand he held up the heart of a pig. Blood dripped along his arm under his sleeve as he silently incanted an Ovinists' mantra, the words forming in a hushed murmur on his lips.

  I curse that man, he thought. Because he won't promote me to the position I deserve, yet instead of solving Brother Ghuda's death he's wasting his time with that wife of his.

  Yet all the time he pretends to be my friend.

  In his semi-trance, Tryst's thoughts drifted, took control of things again. How had he got to be here, outside this house, in the middle of the night, so full of rage and jealousy?

  As he reflected, memories came back to him, the ones of his youth, back when the summers seemed endless. The cottage just south of the city where his parents lived. His father, that colossal bearded man, a priest of Bohr, and an alcoholic, who abused both Tryst and his mother. His mother herself, small and fragile and beautiful, so undeserving of the hell his father brought home with him. Tryst loved her, wanted to protect her with every instinct of his being.

  But to his father she meant nothing, because Bohr had become everything, a god Tryst could never see, and perhaps that was the reason why Tryst had become an Ovinist.

  Because he excelled at his lessons, it was his mother who fought for him to stay at school as long as possible, even as his father's drinking habits and bouts of violence worsened. She invested in him a sense of motivation, of freedom to get on in life, not to be held back by conditions. Perhaps some of her own fears laced her words. When she died of some mysterious illness, it destroyed his optimism. Strangely, it broke his father too, and Tryst didn't expect that. So now that it turned out Tryst couldn't expect any more promotions in the Inquisition, he thought back to those days constantly, relived those moments of helplessness again and again.

  His mother had told him he was so clever he could achieve anything, and now Jeryd was stopping Tryst from achieving.

  Tryst slid an ornamental dagger from his sleeve. He cut a slice of the pig's heart, then took a bite to show his devotion to his new god – the one that had helped process his bad memories.

  But he still could not do much about the problem of Jeryd.

  Seething, he walked home, contemplating ways to hurt the investigator.

  FIFTEEN

  Verain pulled up the hood of her fuligin cape to escape the cold wind that channelled through the passageways of Villjamur as if it was chasing her, haunting her like a relentless ghost.

  As she continued on her way, old men leered at her from hidden doorways, called out to her with degrading suggestions. Some were so drunk they were falling against the walls, yet even then they were requesting sexual favours. She had half a mind to use a relic to castrate them – at least that ought to cut short their fantasies. She merely flashed a short sword by their faces as she passed, but their voices continued to pursue her long after she had gone. Otherwise there were only the cats infesting the alleyways, but she actually appreciated their company.

  She felt so isolated now. She was going to betray her lover.

  For that's how Dartun would see it, there was no hiding from the truth. He would scarcely care if she left him for another man. He scarcely ever had sex with her, certainly never bought her gifts. It wasn't as though she wanted much, just some vague show of affection – was that too much to ask? But that wasn't the reason she was about to betray him.

  Over the past year, she had seen him become obsessed with his projects, even down to little things that kept him from interacting with others for days. Somehow he had retreated into his mind, and was becoming totally self-obsessed with his plans to step across the threshold of the world. He was going to tamper with the very nature of reality by opening a gate to another realm and stepping through it.

  Dartun frightened her with his ambitions.

  These were things that ought not to be decided by one man alone. Others should be warned, and if she – his lover – suspected it was immoral to proceed in such a way, then she should at least find a way of opening it to debate, shouldn't she? It was after all a decision that could affect her home.

  She passionately loved Villjamur, with its antiquated buildings that leaned on each other through neglect and decay. Amid architecture that often contrasted violently in places, centuries of history was jammed in together, tens of thousands of diverse inhabitants criss-crossed in a mosaic that made up the daily life of the city. Without a family to now call her own, the city represented that familiar link to her childhood, her anchor, something she could always turn to in comfort. No one in her order liked her due to her proximity to Dartun. All she had in her life was the city. She would often walk across the bridges alone, looking down at the hundreds of citizens surging past, lost in their own thoughts. Nothing should be allowed to threaten their world. Orphaned at a young age, she had been passed between people she did not know, never feeling settled, never appreciating the love or guidance of a mother or father, or those gestures that defined who you were. Villjamur alone gave her context. It was while growing up on the streets of the city that she became involved with the cultists. It was in Villjamur that she learned about right and wrong. The place had taught her who people really were, no matter what strata of life they inhabi
ted. And Villjamur had taught her that most fundamental truth – that most people were the same, because of experiencing similar sufferings, pains and pleasures of existence. In the end they were all of them equal.

  She asked Dartun what if something came through the doors that he would open into new worlds? And he had told her, quite simply, that if something escaped into this world, if something contaminated the islands and then Villjamur, so be it. His life and the importance of furthering knowledge were more important.

  So torn between her lover and her city, she had chosen Villjamur. That was not because she loved him less, but because she had to weigh up the happiness of more than one person. Here, she told herself, was a whole city to potentially protect.

  Verain's destination was a featureless stone building, located somewhere off the usual avenues. She knocked on the door and a hatch slid open. To the questioning face behind it, she displayed her cultist medallion. She hoped that the mathematical equal symbol would be enough to declare the importance of the matter.

  'What?' the face asked.

  'I need to see Papus, Gydja of the Order of the Dawnir. It's urgent.'

  'Wait there a moment.'

  Minutes later the door opened, and three cloaked and hooded figures stepped out into the darkness of the street. 'We'll need to search you before you can enter,' one of them explained.

  Verain nodded, handing over her blade. Three pairs of arms worked her over, prodding at her in vaguely abusive ways, but, eventually, when they were satisfied she carried no relics, she was led inside. She was made to sit on a simple stool in a bare, wood-panelled room, the only light coming through the open door from a lantern hanging on the wall. Since there was no fire, she watched her clouded breath catch this dim light.