CHAPTER 5
There’s going to be a flower crash!
Manserphine knew this as she floated before her alter ego in the bubble space of her vision. The mermaid of these lucid dreams was silent today, but all around her floated a framework of purest white, phosphorescent in the blue tinted water like the remains of a ghostly diatom. Manserphine understood through the intuitive logic of her visions that this structure represented the potential for good. She floated up to the mermaid and tried to speak, but her lips were numb and her tongue seemed glued to the roof of her mouth, so she was forced to collect information by gesture and through flashes of insight.
From the mouth of the mermaid a bouquet emerged, its flowers every colour of the rainbow, plus black and white, and an eighth, almost luminous colour that she knew must represent ultra-violet. These flowers expanded into lines and spots of colour, then somehow dissolved into the fluid around Manserphine, like ink into sand. With them went the white structure. Manserphine felt loneliness, and regret for the passing of colour and good. She understood that there really was going to be a flower crash: the flowers represented the networks, and hence goodness.
All around her the leached colour coalesced like oil into small globes that seemed to beseech her. They wanted to be saved, or so it seemed to her. She was beset by thousands of tiny pleas, the innocent wishes of children, and it was all she could do to stop herself reaching out and gathering them to her breast, where she knew they would be safe. She sensed that she was somehow important to Zaïdmouth. Then foresight took her. With the mermaid watching she looked up into sun soaked heights, took a deep breath, and rose, to emerge like a geyser and explode into pigmented rain, which fertilised all about, turning grey ground into stained grass.
There’s going to be a flower crash!
Manserphine returned to the reality of her room. The choking scents of honeysuckle and lemon filled the air, and she began coughing. Hundreds of insects filled the room, whirring around her head, smacking into her, their saw-tooth buzzing filling her sensorium. She was frightened. They crawled up her legs. They struggled in her hair. Panicking, she ran to the window and opened it, whereupon the insects threw themselves as one into the air and sped south over the roof of the inn. Manserphine was left gasping on the floor, her nose streaming and her eyes itching, the memories of the vision fresh in her mind, symbolising all the knowledge she had acquired.
She was exhausted. The power of the vision had drained her. She flopped onto her bed, too tired to dress, and lay slowly freezing as the winter air outside sank into the room. Her bare skin first goosebumped then turned pale. After some time the sense that she was trapped in a paralysed body overcame her, and she forced her icy limbs into motion, closing the window then pulling on her gown. Unsteadily she walked downstairs, to sit before the fire.
Vishilkaïr entered the common room. “Hello. You look ill.”
“I’m just cold.”
He walked over and put a hand on her arm. “You’re frozen. Honestly, you have Kirifaïfra to look after you and you still manage to hurt yourself.”
“Stop fussing.”
Vishilkaïr ignored her. “I must make you a hot toddy. Let me see… plenty of nutmeg, plenty of stingwort, and a touch of the firewater.” He took a glass, a bottle, and poured a three-finger tot. “Add some whiskey… there we are. Drink that.”
Manserphine gratefully took a sip of the liquor. She walked to the bay window and looked out. In the distance lay the sea, grey and blue, criss-crossed with streaks of morning light. Tears formed in her eyes as she watched its rippling motion. She sobbed, and the tears ran down her cheeks, until she was weeping from the longing in her heart. She wanted to skip across dunes of sand, walk along the shore into an evening sun, through the night, then return to greet the morning sun, barefoot, with the breeze in her hair. She wanted to find strangely coiled shells, pieces of rounded wood, odd stones and lumps of metal. She wanted to pick up a lump of amber and reflect on the insect inside.
Kirifaïfra’s strong arms turned her, and she buried her head in the pinny he wore. Her tears soaked his undershirt.
“What is it?” he murmured.
“I want to go there.”
“Where?”
She looked up at him. Vishilkaïr stood at his side, concern in his face. “To ocean," she said. “I’m in the wrong place. I should be by the sea. I should have gone down to the Shrine of the Sea when I was a girl.”
“Surely not.”
Manserphine entertained a thought. “I will go. Now.” She struggled to be free of Kirifaïfra, but he would not let her go. “I must go.”
“You’ve not mentioned all this before,” Kirifaïfra said sternly. “Why should you suddenly want to go down there? Aequalaïs isn’t safe.”
“Don’t be so suspicious. You’ve only heard silly rumours. They are noble and strong and their speech flows like the tide.”
Kirifaïfra tutted. “That’s just an old story you’ve picked up off the networks.”
True. Manserphine could feel the longing ebb, but she struggled once more. “Let me go.”
Kirifaïfra hesitated, then freed her. Manserphine straightened her dress. “Another whiskey,” she said to Vishilkaïr.
It was over. The echo of her surf yearning remained in her mind, but her emotions were quiet, like a deep well at night. She dried her face. This had happened before. After intense visions she would be desperate to see and hear the sea, to smell salty air and wonder at the perfectly flat horizon.
She sighed.
Her drink arrived. “I’m free of it,” she muttered. “Bring me a menu, I’m starving.”
Later that afternoon Pollonzyn arrived at the Determinate Inn asking after Manserphine. The pair sat on the bay window seat, Pollonzyn with ale, Manserphine with a seaweed vodka.
Pollonzyn said, “Cirishnyan has knowledged me regarding a favour we require from you.”
“Flowered up.”
“There was a theft from our floral home bed, a few hours after flower- open. A whole calyxful of abstract petals were stolen from our memories. Cirishnyan suspects the crones. Given that suspicion, she wondered if you could investigate.”
“Scented. Shall we walk after this watering?”
They drank up, then departed for Novais. At the Shrine of Flower Sculpture, Manserphine was shown into a chamber to the rear, where she found irregular beds full of winter flowering blooms, their inner screens twinkling in the soft light of a dozen wall tulips. The chamber was empty except for Cirishnyan, who sat alone, a mournful expression on her face.
Manserphine approached. “Good pollen to you,” she greeted the cleric.
“There has been a terrible theft,” Cirishnyan replied in a doleful voice.
Manserphine sat at the nearest flowers and examined their screens. These being winter blooms, the screens were granular, as if she was looking through frosted glass, and the data windows below were somewhat difficult to follow. From an inner pocket she withdrew her insect pen, a device made to mimic the pollen gathering attributes of a species of insect, which allowed for network manipulation without the presence of actual insects. Like most pens, the end was shaped as a generic bee, which lacked the precision of a pen made to mimic a particular insect but which made for ease of use amongst more than one species of flower.
“What exactly was removed?” she asked.
“Abstract petals. They all related to gardening with softpetal.”
“What fragrance of gardening?”
Cirishnyan sighed. “Large scale—fortresses, walls, all unusual petals, nothing subtle.”
Manserphine pulled the nearest screen towards her, holding it so that it was a foot from her face. She touched the bee end of her pen onto the black stamens, until, after a few experiments, she had the sense of how the data windows moved with the movement of her pen. The flowing intuition of one familiar with flower technology then came upon her. She followed the abstract trail of the raiders until she had dumped all the data into a memory root. She frowned. So far she had not needed to use any knowledge of her own Shrine; anyone here at the Shrine of Flower Sculpture could have done this. By now she would have expected to have noticed a clue, some hint of her fellow clerics.
“I’ve sent the data to a root," she told Cirishnyan. “Let’s see what fragrance it is.”
They watched data flow across the nine inch screen of a giant snow- magnolia, orange and yellow against a frosty green background, but Manserphine was again struck by the quality of the trail. Clerics of Our Sister Crone used carefully tested methods that manifested a certain depth, frequently following the pattern of the act of arousal as enjoyed by some incarnations Our Sister Crone; preparation of the goal, expansion, then a series of data-catches from all across the relevant network, ending in a series of four or five sudden transactions. Nothing like this was evident. Nor did it follow the pattern of numerous shallow events, which characterised the work of clerics from the Shrine of Flower Sculpture.
What, then? “I think I shall play this data as a series of sounds,” Manserphine said.
Cirishnyan hissed her displeasure. “That is leaf knowledge!”
“Scentless,” Manserphine replied, shaking her head. “They garden with sound to the exclusion of almost everything else. We garden enjoying all our senses, as was meant to be.”
Cirishnyan remained unhappy, but she let Manserphine continue. Eventually Manserphine had a recording that approximated speech. She played it. Familiar… she played it once more.
“I have it!” she cried.
“What?”
“By converting the fragrance of the abstract petal theft into a kind of speech I’ve interpreted the thoughts behind it. I hear who the thieves are.”
“Who?” demanded Cirishnyan and Pollonzyn together.
“Clerics from the Shrine of the Sea.”
They gasped.
“There is no doubt. I recognise the heaving, ebb-and-flow fragrance of this data.”
Cirishnyan sighed, then cursed in some secret flower-tongue, and while Manserphine did not understand it she recognised the anger on the cleric’s face.
“This is an unfortunate reservation,” Cirishnyan told Manserphine. “I had wished that your intimate understanding of the crone meadow would aid us here, but if we are pestered by the saltysands we have no chance of discovering what gardening they have.”
Manserphine considered this. “Perhaps, or perhaps not.” In silence she considered what had happened to her during recent weeks. She felt as if the direction of her life had shifted slowly toward the south. It was as if her inner face regarded the sea. She did not know why this should be, but she knew it to be true. One option stood out. A visit to Aequalaïs.
“Scentless!” cried a shocked Cirishnyan when Manserphine voiced her thoughts.
“It is not so perilous,” Manserphine insisted. “The sand meadow itself is little known, that is all. It is saltysands home bed that offers peril.”
“I cannot sanction such a visit.”
Manserphine shrugged. “I am not grafted to you. I am Interpreter at crone meadow. If I want to visit, then I shall.”
“But why can you not explore their meadow from our bed here?”
“Of all the meadows, the sandy one is the most isolated. I can only explore fully from the inside, so gardening from here would gather me little. Their flower networks comprise a shoreline ecology.”
“But I shall feel guilty,” said Cirishnyan.
“You need not. I agreed to garden for you, remember. The deed did not involve force.”
Cirishnyan nodded. “Then I shall aid you. Should you go.”
“I think I shall go.”
“I shall request Dustspirit for aid.”
Manserphine thought back to her encounter with the spirit in the motes. “Scentless. I fear Dustspirit. That is, I fear her fragrance.”
Cirishnyan frowned and seemed close to an outburst. Pollonzyn moved to steady her, but Cirishnyan waved her away, saying, “I need no trellis! Manserphine, you must understand that Dustspirit is a purity of good colour. Fearing her is insulting her.”
Manserphine looked away. The tension eased as silent seconds passed.
At length Cirishnyan said, “There is one other petal of aid I can offer. A gynoid.”
Manserphine nodded, eager to please the scowling cleric. “Scented. A strong gynoid, full of pollen.”
“Flowered up. Knowledge me via Pollonzyn tomorrow regarding when you depart.”
Manserphine departed the Shrine and returned to Veneris. Early evening enshadowed Zaïdmouth, and from low clouds snow fell, a light scattering that froze to the hard earth but melted on her face. As she walked, she wondered if she was doing the right thing. Yes, of course: it was the right option and it was the right time. Her banishment allowed her a certain freedom, which she must exploit. If the networks she wanted to explore were in Aequalaïs then there she must go, and if her own life was somehow linked to that urb, then all the more reason.
After a tot of whiskey with Vishilkaïr she retired to bed. A few minutes later there came a loud crash from the adjacent corridor. Nobody stirred downstairs. Wondering if at last there was another guest, Manserphine walked along her corridor to its end, where she looked right and left. She was surprised to see Kirifaïfra walking away towards his door, naked, water running down his back and legs, steaming slightly in the cold air. She stared. His physique was as striking as his face, marred only by a scar traced down his back like a yard of string. She caught her breath in case he heard her. Guilty at this voyeurism, yet unable to resist, she watched him pause at his door, push it open with his toe, then stroll in.
She returned to bed, where she tried to settle. The incident played on her mind. Kirifaïfra’s natural ease intrigued her, and she wondered why neither Vishilkaïr nor Omdaton had come to investigate.
~
Next day Pollonzyn arrived to consider the details of the expedition, but through overhearing their conversation Vishilkaïr came to know what they were planning. He tried to dissuade Manserphine, but she was resolute.
“It is my task,” she insisted. “Let me do what I must do.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Have you been there? No. Listen to fewer scare stories and pay more attention to the facts.”
“Well, I won’t let you go alone,” he declared. “Kirifaïfra will go with you.”
“I wasn’t going alone,” Manserphine replied, annoyed at his presumption. “I am going with the gynoid.”
“Aitlantazyn,” supplied Pollonzyn.
“So there.” Though, thinking about it, a trio including Kirifaïfra would be better. “I’ll consider your offer,” she told Vishilkaïr. “You haven’t even asked him yet.”
“Oh, he’ll go.”
Manserphine frowned, rattled by this certainty. Recently she had been thinking far too much about Kirifaïfra. “You will have to free him from work tomorrow.”
“As you wish.”
So it was settled. Next morning dawned clear and icy, and as the sun rose out of sea mist Aitlantazyn presented herself at the inn door. She was tall and bulky, but carried herself with the grace of a gymnast. A scimitar and a club hung at her belt. The pigment in her plastic skin had coalesced in the cold, making her look like the victim of dermatitis. Her huge eyes were orange with glittering golden sparks. She spoke Veneris dialect, beginning with, “Good morning, Interpreter.”
“Manserphine,” came the automatic correction.
“Are we ready to go?” Aitlantazyn asked.
Manserphine glanced inside the inn. “I think Kirifaïfra is still winding his pigtail. Vain man.”
“A man is coming with us?”
“Do you object?”
“I am yours to command. But it is unusual.”
Manserphine uttered a single humourless laugh. “He and his uncle are both unusual men. Quiet, now, here he comes.”
Kirifaïfra was dressed in a woollen greatcoat, black knee boots and a red scarf that he coiled around his neck. On his broad back hung a rucksack. He grinned.
“I’ll take that as the signal to move off,” Manserphine said.
For some time they did not speak, as they trod the streets of the urb trying to avoid flowers deactivated by frost that flopped from the central aisle to outer paths. The extreme narrowness of the streets made walking difficult. Overhanging buildings reduced light to gleams and beams. But once they were away from Veneris they struck a path that led west around the autohives, and Kirifaïfra began to chat about the weather, the likelihood of snow, and the possible date for spring and the reactivation of the flower networks. He estimated that day as a month ahead. Manserphine thought six weeks.
After an hour they saw the Water Meadows ahead, snail-infested flats stretching as far as the eye could see. Beyond, just out of sight, lay Aequalaïs.
“Here we come to our first decision,” Manserphine said. “Do we go across or under?”
“Let us check the nearest tunnel,” Aitlantazyn suggested. “I can see the dark hemisphere of an entrance not a quarter of a mile away.”
This they did. A foul breeze rose up from the entrance, but still Aitlantazyn led them down the crumbling stone steps to the tunnel mouth, gesturing with her free hand for them to stay back. She took a torch from her pocket and spoke to it, whereupon it produced a cone of light. The tunnel looked clear, though a few inches of water sloshed inside it, and algae of all species hung in strings from the walls and roof. Aitlantazyn gestured them on, shining the torch on anything ahead that might offer danger.
The tunnel was long. After fifteen minutes they still could not see the end, and Manserphine began to feel uncomfortable, but then she saw a light ahead, and she splashed past Aitlantazyn. The gynoid stopped her, grabbing her shoulder with a single, immense hand. “Not yet,” she whispered. She walked on ahead and when certain it was clear waved them on. They ascended the steps and looked out over Aequalaïs.
Covering the shallow slope down to the sea Manserphine saw scores of buildings, all glassy and bright and perfectly cuboid, reflecting the rays of the sun so that it was like confronting a garden of mirrors. The broad streets between these tower blocks ran with water. All were devoid of people. They saw nothing of flowers, just verges of green dotted with white salt marks. Above them, gulls flew, keening as they wheeled about, while at their feet, in innumerable brackish pools, they saw crayfish, aluminium crabs, and the shifting rainbows of anemone tentacles.
“Who lives here?” Kirifaïfra whispered into her ear.
“Strictly speaking nobody lives here permanently. Most of the people are based in the Shrine of the Sea, which is huge.” She pointed east. “It must be over there, behind the dunes. But there are roving bands of people who dwell in these buildings, living off the sea. If you look on the horizon you can see some of their fishing smacks.”
“What do you know of these people?”
“Not much. They are as isolated as the Sea-Clerics. Although there are tales of attacks, they will leave us alone as long as we don’t threaten them. Their lives are too precarious to consider aggression. No, it is the Shrine of the Sea that we must be careful of.”
“Then we will be. What do we do now?”
Manserphine considered. “Let’s walk towards the sea. We are looking for winter flowering blooms—I want to sift a few networks. Eventually I’d like to access the Shrine networks, but we’ll have to locate the right species first.”
They began walking down the nearest street, ice edged though damp in its centre. Manserphine found herself jumping as reflections appeared in glass panels to their sides. In these mirrors they looked very small; dwarfed by their environment. They came across a few small flowers, but these were data collectors and had no screens. Plants here were prickly, pale, often succulent or cactus-like, but their leaves and buds glowed under the touch of Manserphine’s hand. It was something she had never seen before, and it moved her, as if they were affirming a connection.
Soon she was looking down upon the beach itself, russet in morning light, with the sea rippling in a wriggling line. She looked to her left and saw a golden spire. “There it is!”
Carefully, they moved towards it, until the whole Shrine was visible. Inside a salt-encrusted wall encompassing an area of six acres stood the Shrine of the Sea, a series of golden onions massing up to one vast central dome, from which the spire emerged. It shone. Windows and external doors showed up as dark dots. Behind the Shrine they saw the ends of jetties, and boats moored in an artificial harbour. Manserphine, who had only seen the place in pictures, was impressed by its grandeur. She looked down at the wall. There stood the single entrance, the black gate that was Iron Maw.
“Look to your left,” Kirifaïfra said. “I see white and yellow flowers.”
They crawled down a sandy hillock to the strip of foliage Kirifaïfra had seen. Flickering lights inside the giant mimulus blooms seemed to greet them, and again Manserphine received the impression, as if from the echo of a vision, that they were aware of her, responding to her presence.
She thrust the thought aside. Time to explore. The miniature screens inside the newly opened flowers were insensitive to her insect pen, so she was forced to resort to the old standby of anther tickling. At times like this the network ecology could really annoy. Eventually, she had windows up that allowed her to view the types of information used and acquired by the less important sections of the Shrine. She noticed that the Shrine had been using great quantities of softpetal, but she did not have enough privileges to find out what they wanted it for. Sculpting of some description? She wondered where they found the stuff, and where the effluent went that followed its use.
“This is going to be difficult,” she said. “To find out important things I would have to get inside the Shrine. The flower networks around here are just too strange, not to mention quiet because it is winter.”
“Perhaps we could return in the summer,” Kirifaïfra suggested.
Manserphine sighed. She did not regret coming, in fact she felt a connection with this urb and its lonely Shrine, a connection growing stronger with the passing weeks; there was an as yet undiscovered ocean within her. But there were too many obstacles here, and she was an outsider.
But when five minutes later she noticed a sub-set of information refering to dresses, she learned a singular fact. The idea to create the softpetal impregnated dress had not originated in the Shrine of Flower Sculpture, rather it had been devised by Sea-Clerics and then shunted in disguise to Cirishnyan’s data beds. Yet another connection…
“Hola!”
They all span around. From the dune behind them came five women. Aitlantazyn had been looking down at the Shrine; now she turned around and flourished her scimitar.
“Hola, zeema ssoo!”
Manserphine pulled Aitlantazyn’s arm down. The women were dressed in sumptuous black cloaks and they wore silver circlets on their brows. These were cleric guards from the Shrine.
“Tell them we’ll go away,” Kirifaïfra urged.
Manserphine cleared her throat. “I’m not sure I can. I don’t speak their private tongue, only the dialect. This lot have probably never seen anybody from another urb.”
“Kanka graya! Ye, te, zeema ssoo!”
Manserphine shrugged, then held her hands out, palms up, and said, “We come, we stay, we smell the tang, we go.”
The five women approached, frowning at one another and talking in their rhyming tongue. One knelt to speak into a flower, which she then turned to face them, as if transmitting an image. Manserphine did not like this at all.
In a leaden voice she said, “If we are taken inside the Shrine it is not inconceivable that we’ll never leave.” She hesitated. “It happened to my great-grandmother. So my mother told me.”
“Never mind that,” Kirifaïfra said, “how do we get away?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shall I make a move?” Aitlantazyn asked.
“No. Stay still. Don’t threaten them.”
Manserphine began signing that they were from the north and wanted to return home. The leader of the group, who had spoken to the flower, nodded and smiled at her, a disconcerting action that made her falter.
“Look!” Kirifaïfra said, pointing to the Shrine.
From Iron Maw a single woman had emerged, and now she was running towards them. As she closed Manserphine saw that she was a tall woman whose tails of beaded hair swung around her head like angry serpents. She wore a rich blue cloak and under that a flowing, full-length dress like Manserphine’s; also a silver circlet upon her brow. She wore sandals, allowing a view of ten toes, six of which boasted a ring. A fierce woman, yet beautiful.
Manserphine recognised her. “This is Fnfayrq, the Shoreline Cleric.”
“The who?”
“This is the public face of the Shrine. She’s supposed to take her place in the Outer Garden every spring, but she never does. There are only two Sea-Clerics above her in the hierarchy.”
“Is this the end of us, then?” asked Kirifaïfra.
“I don’t know. But at least I can talk to her.”
Fnfayrq closed, then stood a few yards away. She stared at Manserphine, shock plain in her face. “You, here, so sea soon, when all is dark in the mind?”
Manserphine was confused by Fnfayrq’s anger at their presence. It was as if they had dared to cross a line drawn in the sand. She replied, “We came to breathe, we live, we draw together, shore-sounds fading quietly to silence.” Manserphine hoped that telling the Sea-Cleric of their intention to leave Aequalaïs was not too forward.
Fnfayrq replied, “But you, lover, you dive into us, you pour yourself into our minds, so sea soon?”
Fnfayrq objected to her presence. Manserphine frowned. Why should her appearance cause Fnfayrq so much anguish? She began, “Truthfully, lover, all is waves—”
Contemptuously Fnfayrq gestured for silence. Her blue eyes, now clouded, held nothing but savage anger. From the pocket of her cloak she pulled a bracelet, a coiled cylinder of dark silver set with amber, which she unwound, grunting with the effort. She walked up to Manserphine and looked into her eyes. Anger. And fear. Manserphine understood now that the Sea- Cleric was terrified by her appearance here. The anger was a cover for something deeper.
Fnfayrq grabbed Manserphine’s hand and the bracelet coiled itself three times around her wrist, making her skin crawl at the slithering sensation. Its weight made her flex her arm muscles to compensate. She stared at it.
Fnfayrq told her it would ensure she never returned to the dunes. And she could never pull it off. Manserphine just stared.
Fnfayrq pointed north and spoke to the five guards. “Im ssaa, gu, tu!”
As Fnfayrq turned and walked away Manserphine felt her mind change. The guards seemed like giants, oppressing her. She felt sick at having to stand on this ground. When the guards began to make north she followed, Kirifaïfra and Aitlantazyn behind her, expressions of confusion on their faces.
Because she knew she was leaving Aequalaïs the pain in her mind was less than it might otherwise have been, for she saw the place now as a dead land of metal and mirror, fit for nobody. Tears of joy ran from her eyes when she saw a tunnel entrance, and she ran toward it, while the five guards pointed and sniggered to themselves. They stood still.
But this was not quite the end. To her right she saw figures crawling along the streets. The guards turned to see where she was looking, and their smirking faces changed to faces of shock. The newcomers were mermaids, five of them, a merman bringing up the rear, each raising an arm to plead with Manserphine while pulling themselves along with the other. Their expressions mingled joy and fear. All were naked, but their skins and scales were coated with a thick film, colours swirling like oil on water. Manserphine stared at them, reminded at once of the mermaid of her visions. Suddenly frightened, she ran.
With Aitlantazyn and Kirifaïfra already at the tunnel, all that remained was the final walk. The moment they were out she felt better. The dark cloud of suspicion that had settled upon her lifted, and she became her old self. But the memory of the place was bad, like a nightmare, and the mermaids, who before had seemed pathetic in their attempts to reach her, now seemed like venomous fish.
An hour later they sat exhausted in the common room of the Determinate Inn. Manserphine flung her coat to the floor and wrung out the sopping edges of her dress, which had dragged through mud and water, kicking off her boots then tying up her dress to warm her bare legs at the fire. Kirifaïfra drank mead from a tankard, eyeing his uncle. Aitlantazyn sat silent.
“How did it go?” Vishilkaïr asked.
Manserphine held up her right arm. “I seem to have acquired a python.”
Vishilkaïr came over to examine it. “This is unusual, very old… where did it come from?”
“Sea-Clerics.”
“This is ancient technology,” Vishilkaïr opined. “Not from the Shrine of Root Sculpture.”
Manserphine agreed. That Shrine, the satellite of Our Sister Crone, was the main source of technology not sourced in Zaïdmouth’s flowers, but all its works had a distinctive radical character. “This is something other,” she said, “very heavy, and it’s affecting my mind.”
“Hmmm. Affecting your mind, you say?”
“Anti-Aequalaïs.”
“I see.”
Vishilkaïr glanced at Kirifaïfra, prompting Manserphine to remark, “You two obviously know something. What is it?”
“I think I could have this removed. But you would have to be brave.”
“I can take a bit of pain.”
“I was thinking more of terror. Weren’t you, Kirifaïfra?”
“If you say so, unc.”
Vishilkaïr frowned. “He knows what I mean,” he said.
Manserphine slapped him on the shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“This is the sort of thing that certain Bands unearth from…”
Manserphine interrupted, “The Cemetery? So this is the secret you two have been hiding. You scoundrels. You work for a Cemetery Band.”
“Now don’t get the wrong idea,” Vishilkaïr said. “I can categorically state that neither of us is in a Cemetery Band.”
“Well?” Manserphine insisted.
Vishilkaïr dipped and bobbed his head, as if searching for the right phrases. “We have certain contacts,” he said. “When you’re a man it is unavoidable, unless you become the drone of some guardian, or beholden to the Green Man. We have simply exploited our position, that is all.”
Manserphine half believed them. “So how do you intend getting this thing off my arm?”
“Have you tried pulling it off?”
“Fnfayrq said I could never pull it off.” She tested this. Pain shot through her arm. “Ooh. She was right.”
“As I thought. We will need to raise a Cemetery, er… assistant.”
Manserphine could see that this was a path she ought not to be going down. Unfortunately there was no choice. “Don’t tell me any more,” she said, sourly. “All right, I’ll do it, but I reserve the right to drop out the moment I’m in danger.”
Vishilkaïr shrugged. “That essentially is what we will be doing.”
Kirifaïfra looked at his uncle, then said, “Is this wise?”
“Of course. We must help our guest. What happened to your gallantry?”
“It’s been scared right out of me.”
“When will you go?” Manserphine asked.
“We? You must come too.”
Disappointment made her frown, then sag back into her seat. “I didn’t realise that. I can’t go to the Cemetery. You see, I have this premonition that if I ever enter it alive, I will die.”
“Premonition?” Kirifaïfra asked, sitting at her side.
“Of my own demise,” she told him. “I know it sounds odd, but I could never challenge my own vision.”
“Vision,” he murmured, deep in thought.
“Premonition,” Manserphine insisted, hoping she had not given anything away. “Anyhow, the plan is off.”
“Not off,” Vishilkaïr said, “just more difficult. There is a way. You need not enter the Cemetery. I know a ruined tower from which you could watch.”
“Well…”
“It will be safe. Come along, no time like the present.”
Bustled back into her coat and boots, a reluctant Manserphine, the two men at her side, departed the inn. They walked up the main street of Veneris into the hilly northern district, passing through markets that choked the narrow thoroughfare, fending off hawkers, merchants and demagogues. After fifteen minutes they passed the Shrine of Root Sculpture, an oval dome to their left, while at their right hand lay the scented paradise of the Venereal Garden, with its centrepiece, the Pagoda Azure, just visible behind evening mist.
At the Cemetery, Vishilkaïr pointed out the ruined tower, a mound of stone surrounded by lumps of ivy-covered masonry. “Sit up there and observe,” he said. “Come to the Cemetery wall when I call, but don’t enter.”
Ensconced on a stone, Manserphine watched. She could see ragged men in the Cemetery and more walking in and out of the Woods, which lay just a stone’s throw away. She watched the two men vault the wall and approach a green cloaked figure, that she knew must be a cleric of the Shrine of the Delightful Erection. After a few minutes talking the three knelt upon the ground and began to beat it with their bare hands, in a rhythm that Manserphine could just make out over the sound of soughing trees. She knew what they were doing. Old songs kept alive by the clerics of the Shrine of the Delightful Erection, and learned by many children in the play-yard, were supposed to bring Cemetery beasts up from the earth, where, depending on the potency of the song, they would make a bargain of lesser or greater power. Manserphine herself knew many of these songs.
Intrigued, and not a little appalled, she watched. After just a minute of beating, the earth rose a few yards away from them, as if a mole was about to emerge, but then a gleaming snout appeared and after that a six-foot beast like a fat, segmented worm with fiery eyes and a lipped mouth. Vishilkaïr waved her down while Kirifaïfra talked to the beast.
Apprehension made her stomach knot. Never having considered the male culture of this region she had not realised the element of truth in the old stories. Her eyes had been opened. At the Cemetery wall she waited while the men coaxed the metallic beast away from its hole. Manserphine could hardly look. It wriggled and flopped. Vishilkaïr ran up to her and grabbed her hand, so to display the bracelet.
“No!” she screamed, trying to pull away.
“It’s all right,” he insisted. “Be brave.”
The beast was at the wall. It raised itself and, opening a toothed mouth, eyed her wrist.
Manserphine screamed louder and in panic tried to pull away from Vishilkaïr, but his grip on her arm was too strong. The beast closed, placed its mouth around her wrist, and—
Manserphine felt herself lose control. She tried to tear herself away from Vishilkaïr.
“There,” he called out.
She looked. The remains of the bracelet disappeared into the beast’s mouth as if it had sucked in a worm. It crunched, and blue fluid dribbled from its mouth. It turned, then buried itself into the ground.
“Success,” Vishilkaïr said. “Now we can return to the inn and enjoy a good hot meal.”
They walked away in silence. Manserphine glanced back, to see three men at the wall, who looked at her and Kirifaïfra with malice in their eyes.
Later on, wondering about the details of the bargain, she noticed that Kirifaïfra’s prized insect-wire, with which he made his pigtail, had gone, leaving a few long strands free to whip about in the breeze.