Liavek 6 Page 4

  Foral Yatt stood transfixed at the center of the huge black disc, still with one flawless arm raised, clutching its cold green fistful of oblivion. He stared blankly at the archway as if expecting Her to reappear and tell him it was all some ill-considered hoax. From beyond the encircling walls there came the jingle of reins followed by a slow clattering and the creaking of wood and leather as the carriage moved away down the winding streets of the City of Luck. After a pause during which it seemed that he would never move again, the actor slowly and falteringly lowered his arm.

  Three floors above him, realizing the abandoned lover wouldn't kill himself, one of the denizens of the House Without Clocks pursed her shiny black lips discontentedly and made a clucking sound before retiring to her quarters. Hearing the sound, Foral Yatt tilted back his gray-stubbled skull and stared up at the watchers in surprise, as if previously unaware of their scrutiny. His eyes were full of miserable incomprehension, and it was a relief to Som-Som when he lowered them to the black tiles at his feet before walking slowly across the courtyard toward the pale yellow door, the glass skull now quite forgotten in his hand.

  Scarcely a handful of months elapsed before news began to work its way back to the House Without Clocks of Rawra Chin's dizzying success. It seemed that Her elusive charisma was able to captivate audiences as easily as it had once enthralled Her individual customers. Her performance as the tragic and infertile Queen Gorda in Mossoc's The Crib was already the talk of Liavek's intelligentsia, and rumor had it that a special performance for His Scarlet Eminence was being considered.

  Such talk was generally kept from the inconsolable Foral Yatt, but within the year Rawra Chin's fame had spread to the point where the embittered young actor was as aware of it as anyone. He seemed to take the news of Her stellar ascent with less resentment than might have been anticipated, once the initial despair of separation had lifted from him. Indeed, save for a coldness that would creep into his eyes at the mention of Her name, Foral Yatt made much of his indifference to his former lover's fortunes. He never spoke of Her, and those less insightful than Som-Som might have supposed that he had forgotten Her altogether.

  Now, five years later, She had returned.

  In the courtyard beneath Som-Som's balcony, Rawra Chin turned to face the pale yellow door, a resigned slump in Her shoulders. She lifted one hand to knock, and there was a sudden dazzling scintillation that seemed to play about Her fingers. It took Som-Som a moment to realize that the young man had chips of some reflective substance pasted to Her nails. The afternoon was hushed, as if holding its breath while it listened, and the sound of Rawra Chin's white knuckles upon the pale yellow wood was disproportionately loud.

  Seated high above on her balcony, Som-Som found that she wanted desperately to call out, to warn Rawra Chin that it was a mistake to return to this place, that She should leave immediately. Silence, massive and absolute, surrounded her and would not permit her to make the smallest sound. She was embedded in silence, a tiny bubble of consciousness within an infinity of solid rock, mute and gray and endless. She struggled against it, willing her tongue to shape the vital words of warning, knowing as she did so that it was hopeless.

  Below, someone unlocked the pale yellow door from inside and it creaked once, musically, as it opened. It was too late.

  Som-Som's balcony was situated upon the third floor, the adjacent living area being one of four contained behind the violet door at the extreme left of the House Without Clocks' concave front. Thus, as she sat upon her balcony and gazed down at Rawra Chin she could not see who had opened the door. She supposed that it was Foral Yatt.

  There was a surprisingly low exchange of words, following which the crimson-wrapped figure of the celebrated performer stepped inside the house and beyond Som-Som's vision. The pale yellow door closed with a sound like something sucking its teeth.

  After that, there was only silence. Som-Som remained seated upon her balcony staring down at the pale yellow door with mute anguish in her one visible eye while the sky gradually darkened behind her. Finally, when the moment of her urgent need for a voice was long past, she spoke.

  "I ran as fast as I could, but when I reached my mother's house the bird was already dead."

  •

  Since the closing of the yellow door, no word had been spoken in the rooms that lay immediately behind it. Foral Yatt sat in a hard wooden chair beside the open fire, amber light flickering across one side of his lean face. Rawra Chin stood by the window, Her vivid crimson darkening to a dull, scablike burgundy against the failing light outside. Uncertain of how best to gauge the distance that had arisen between them, She watched the play of firelight upon the velvet of his shaven skull until the absence of conversation was more than She could endure.

  "I brought you a gift."

  Foral Yatt slowly turned his head toward Her, away from the fire, so that the shadow slid across his face, and his expression was no longer visible. Rawra Chin immersed one chalk-white hand in the black fur of the bag She carried, from whence it emerged holding a small copper ball between the mirror-tipped fingers. She held it out to him and, after a moment, he took it.

  "What is it?"

  She had forgotten how captivating his voice was, dry and deep and hungry, quite unlike Her own. Calm and evenly modulated, there remained a sense of something watchful and carnivorous lurking just beyond it, pacing quietly behind the accents and inflections. Rawra Chin licked Her lips.

  "It's a toy … a toy of the intellect. I'm told that it's very relaxing. Many of the busiest merchants that I know find that it calms them immeasurably after the bustle of commerce."

  Foral Yatt turned the smooth copper sphere between his fingers so that it gleamed red in the glow of the fire.

  "What's special about it?"

  Rawra Chin took a step away from the window, Her first tentative movement toward him since entering the House, and then paused. She let Her black fur bag drop with a soft thud, like the corpse of an enormous spider, onto the empty seat of the room's other chair. A certain establishing of territory accompanied the gesture, and Rawra Chin hoped She had not overstepped in Her eagerness. Foral Yatt's face was still in shadow, but he did not seem to react adversely to the wedge-end represented by the bag upon the chair, now less like a dead spider than a sleeping cat dozing before the hearth. Encouraged by this lack of obvious rebuke, Rawra Chin smiled, albeit nervously, as She replied to him.

  "There might be a lizard asleep inside the ball, or there might not. That's the puzzle."

  His silence seemed to invite elaboration.

  "The story goes that there exists a lizard capable of hibernating for years or even centuries without food or air or moisture, slowing its vital processes so that a dozen winters might pass between each beat of its heart. I am told that it is a very small creature, no bigger than the top joint of my thumb when it is curled up.

  "The people who make these ornaments allegedly place one of the sleeping reptiles inside each ball before sealing it. If you look closely, you can see that there's a seam around the middle."

  Foral Yatt declined to do so, remaining seated, his back toward the fire, holding the ball in his right hand and turning it so that molten highlights rolled across its surface. Though an impenetrable shadow still concealed his expression, Rawra Chin sensed that the quality of his silence had changed. She felt whatever slight advantage She had gained begin to slip away. Why wouldn't he speak? Unable to keep the edge of unease from Her voice, She resumed Her monologue.

  "You can't open it, and, and you have to think about whether there really is a lizard inside it or not. It's to do with how we perceive the world around us, and when you think about it you start to see that it doesn't matter if there's a lizard inside there or not, and then you can think about what's real and what isn't real, and…"

  Her voice trailed off, as if suddenly aware of its own incoherence.

  "…and it's said to be very relaxing," She concluded lamely, after a flat, dismal pause.

&n
bsp; "Why did you come back?"

  "I don't know."

  "You don't know."

  It was as if Her words had hit a mirror, rebounding back at Her full of new meanings and implications, warped out of true by some fluke of the glass. Rawra Chin's fragile composure began to crumble before that flat, disinterested voice.

  "I … I don't mean that I don't know. I just mean…"

  She looked down at Her pale, well-kept hands to find that She was wringing them together. They looked like crabs mating after having been kept in the dark for too long.

  "I mean that there was no real reason for me to come back here. My work, my career, it's all perfect. I have a lot of money. I have friends. I've just completed my role as Bromar's eldest daughter in The Lucksmith and everybody will talk about me for months. For a while, I do not have to work. I can do whatever I want.

  "I didn't have to come back here."

  Foral Yatt remained silent, the firelight behind his shaven head edging his skull with a trim of blurred phosphorescence as it shone through the stubble. The copper ball turned between his fingers, a miniature planet rolling from day into night.

  "It's just that … this place, this house, it has something. There's something inside this house, and it's something true. It isn't a good thing. It's just a true thing, and I don't know what the name of it is, and I don't even like it, but I know that it's true and I know that it's here and I felt, I don't know, I felt that I had to come back and look at it. It's like…"

  Rawra Chin's hands seemed to pluck and squeeze the air before Her, as if the words She required were concealed beneath its skin, and that by probing She could guess at their shape. Separated now, the blanched crustacean lovers lay upon their backs, feebly waving their legs as they expired upon some unseen shoreline.

  "It's like an accident I saw … a farmer, crushed beneath his cart. He was alive, but his ribs were broken and sticking through his side. I didn't know what they were at first, because it was all such a mess. There were a lot of people gathered 'round, but nobody could move the cart without hurting him even more than he was hurt already.

  "It was summer, and there were a lot of flies. I remember him screaming and shouting for somebody to beat the flies away, and an old woman went out and did that for him, but until then nobody had moved, not until he screamed at them. It was horrible. I walked by as fast as I could because he was suffering and there was nothing anybody could do, except for the old woman who was beating the flies away with her apron.

  "But I went back.

  "I stopped just a little way down the road, and I went back. I couldn't help it. It was just that it was so real and so painful, that man, lying there under that terrible weight and screaming for his wife, his children, it was so real that it just cut through everything else in the world, all the things that my luck and my money have built up around me, and I knew that it meant something, and I went back there and I watched him drown on his own blood while the old woman told him not to worry, that his wife and children would be there soon.

  "And that's why I came back to the House Without Clocks."

  There was a long hyphen of silence. A copper world rotated between the fingers of a faceless and unanswering god.

  "And I still love you."

  Someone rapped twice upon the pale yellow door.

  For a moment there was no movement within the room save for the illusion of motion engendered by the firelight. Then Foral Yatt rose from the hard wooden chair, still with the fire at his back and his face in eclipse. Crossing the room, ducking beneath the blackened beams that supported the low ceiling, he passed close enough for Her to raise Her hand and brush his arm, so that it would be thought an accident of passing. But She didn't.

  Foral Yatt opened the door.

  The figure on the other side of the threshold was perhaps forty years of age, a large and strong-boned woman with raw cheeks who wore a single garment like a tent of smoky gray fur. It covered the top of her head with a hole cut away to reveal the face, and then its striking, minimal lines dropped away to the floor. There was no opening in the fur through which she might extend her hands, which suggested to Rawra Chin that the woman must have servants to do everything for her, the feeding to her of meals not excluded. Even in the world that Rawra Chin had known over the previous five years, such arrogantly flaunted wealth was impressive.

  As the inopportune visitor tilted back her head to speak, the flickering yellow light caught her face, and Rawra Chin noticed that the woman had an umber blemish, unpleasantly furry-looking, that almost entirely covered her left cheek. The woman had obviously attempted to conceal it beneath a thick coat of white powder with little success. The discoloration remained visible through the makeup as if it were a paper-thin flatfish that swam through her subcutaneous tissue, its dark shape discernible just below the clouded surface of her face.

  When she spoke, her voice was distressingly loud, her tone strident and somehow abusive.

  "Foral Yatt. Dear Foral Yatt, how long? How long has it been since I saw you last?"

  Foral Yatt's reply was professionally polite, coolly inoffensive, and yet delivered at such volume that Rawra Chin winced involuntarily, even though She stood several paces behind him. It came to Her suddenly that the fur-draped woman must suffer from some defect of hearing.

  "It has been two days since you were here, Donna Blerot. I have missed you."

  A wave of hotness washed over Rawra Chin, cooling almost instantly to a leaden ingot in Her stomach. Foral Yatt had a customer, and She must leave him to his labors. Her disappointment was so big She could not admit that it was Hers. She resolved to leave immediately, hoping to keep it one step behind Her until She could reach Her own rooms in a lodging house on the far side of the City of Luck. Once She was safely behind closed doors She would let it have its way with Her, and then there would be tears. She was reaching for Her bag, sleeping there in its chair, when Foral Yatt spoke again.

  "However, it is not convenient that I should see you tonight. A member of my family has come to visit"—here he gestured vaguely over his shoulder toward the stunned Rawra Chin—"and I regret that you and I must let our yearnings simmer untended for one more day. Please be patient, Donna Blerot. When finally we meet together, you know that our union will be the sweeter for this postponement."

  Donna Blerot turned her head and gazed past Foral Yatt at the slim, crimson-swathed figure that stood in the f1amelit room, almost like a flame Herself within the gaudy wrappings. The dame's eyes were frozen and merciless, boring into Rawra Chin for long instants before she turned them once more toward Foral Yatt, her expression softening.

  "This is too bad, Foral Yatt. Simply too bad. But I shall forgive you. How could I ever do otherwise?"

  She smiled, her teeth yellow and her lips too wide.

  "Until tomorrow, then?"

  "Until tomorrow, dearest Donna Blerot."

  The woman turned from the door and Rawra Chin heard the slow, derisive clapping of her wooden sandals as she walked back across the black courtyard. Foral Yatt closed the door, sliding the bolt across. The sound of the bolt's passage, metal against metal, was electrifying in its implications, and Rawra Chin shuddered in resonance. The actor turned away from the closed portal and stared at Her, his face brazen in the fire glow.

  His face seemed less chiseled and gaunt than She had remembered it. His eyes, conversely, were so riveting and intense that She knew Her recollection had not done them justice. Across a chamber so filled with swaying clots of darkness that it seemed like a ballroom for shadows, the two young men stared at each other. Neither spoke.

  He walked toward Her, pausing only to set the small copper globe upon the polished white wood of his tabletop before continuing. His pace was so deliberate that Rawra Chin felt sure he must be aware of the tension that this deliciously prolonged approach kindled within Her. Unable to meet his gaze, She lowered Her lashes so that the quivering light of the room became streaks of incoherent brilliance. Her breathing
grew shallow, and She trembled.

  The warm, dry smell of his skin enveloped Her. She knew that he was standing just before Her, no more than a forearm's length away. Then he touched Her face. The shock of physical contact almost caused Her to jerk Her head back, but She controlled the impulse. Her heart rang like an anvil as his fingernail traced the line of Her jaw.

  The ingenious arrangement of bandages that was Rawra Chin's costume had a single fastening, concealed behind a triangular black gem in a filigree surround that that She wore upon the right side of Her throat. The pin pricked Her neck as Foral Yatt withdrew it from the blood-red windings, but even this seemed almost unbearably pleasant to Her in that aching, oversensitized state. She lifted Her gaze and his eyes swallowed Her whole. With his hands moving in languid, confident circles, he began to unwind the long band of brightly dyed gauze, starting from Her head and spiraling downward.

  Free of the confining wrap, Her thick hair tumbled down upon Her white shoulders. She gasped and shook Her head from side to side, but it was not an indication of denial. A wave of thrilling coolness crept down Her body as progressively more of Her skin was exposed to the drafts of the room. It moved across Her belly and down to the angular and jutting hips, over the shaven pudenda and past the jumping, half-erect penis. It continued down Her thighs and on toward the rush carpeting, where the unraveled wrappings gathered in a widening red puddle about Her feet, as if Her naked flesh bled from a dozen imperceptible wounds.

  He nodded his head to Her once, still without a sound, and She knelt upon the floor at his feet, Her knees pressed against the tangle of fallen bandages so that they would leave a faint lattice of impressions upon Her skin. Closing Her eyes, She allowed Her head to sink forward until it came to rest against the seat of the chair in which She had placed Her bag an eternity before. Its luscious dark fur and the hard wood were equally cool against Her burning cheek.