Logorrhea

by John Klima

  II

  The Material

  SHE HAD BROUGHT him to the depth of the city’s oldest quarter, where artists of every skill, she told him, were licensed to work unhindered by landlord or—save in the gravest cases—the law. This ancient sanctuary was created by time-honoured tradition and the granting of certain guarantees by the clerics whose great university had once been the centre of the settlement. These guarantees had been strengthened during the reign of the great King Alo’ofd, an accomplished player of the nine-stringed murmerlan, who loved all the arts and struggled with a desire to throw off the burdens of his office and become a musician. King Alo’ofd’s decrees had been law for the past millennium and his successors had never dared challenge them.

  “Thus, this quarter harbours not only artists of great talent,” she told him, “but many who have only the minimum of talent. Enough to allow them to live according to our ancient freedoms. Sadly, sir, there is as much forgery practised here, of every kind, as there is originality.”

  “Yours is not the only such quarter.” He spoke absently, his eyes inspecting the colourful paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts displayed on every side. They were of varied quality, but only a few showed genuine inspiration and beauty. Yet the accomplishment was generally higher than Elric had usually observed in the Young Kingdoms. “Even in Melniboné we had these districts. Two of my cousins, for instance, were calligraphers. Another composed for the flute.”

  “I have heard of Melnibonéan arts,” she said. “But we are too distant from your island home to have seen many examples. There are stories, of course.” She smiled. “Some of them are decidedly sinister….”

  “Oh, they are doubtless true. We had no trouble if audiences, for instance, died for an artist’s work. Many great composers would experiment, for instance, with the human voice.” His eyes again clouded, remembering not a crime but his lost passion.

  It seemed she misinterpreted him. “I feel for you, sir. I am not one of those who celebrated the fall of the Dreaming City.”

  “You could not know its influence, so far away,” he murmured, picking up a remarkable little pot and studying its design. “But those who were our neighbours were glad to see us humiliated. I do not blame them. Our time was over.” His expression was again one of cultivated insouciance. She turned her own gaze towards a house which leaned like an amiable drunkard on the buttressed walls of two neighbours, giving the impression that if it fell, then all would fall together. The house was of wood and sandy brick, of many floors, each at an angle to the rest, covered by a waved roof.

  “This is the residence,” she told him, “where my forefathers and myself have lived and worked. It is the House of the Th’ee and I am Rai-u Th’ee, last of my line. It is my ambition to leave a single great work of art behind, carved in a material which has been in our possession for centuries, yet until now always considered too valuable to use. It is a rare material, at least to us, and possessed of a number of qualities, some of which our ancestors only hinted at.”

  “My curiosity grows,” said Elric, though now he found himself wishing that he had accepted her offer and brought his sword. “What is this material?”

  “It is a kind of ivory,” she said, leading him into the ram-shackle house which, for all its age and decrepitude, had clearly once been rich. Even the wall hangings, now in rags, revealed traces of their former quality. There were paintings from floor to ceiling which, Elric knew, would have commanded magnificent prices at any market. The furniture was carved by genuine artists and showed the passing of a hundred fashions, from the plain, somewhat austere style of the city’s secular period, to the ornate enrichments of her pagan age. Some were inset with jewels, as were the many mirrors, framed with exquisite and elaborate ornament. Elric was surprised, given what she had told him of the quarter, that the House of Th’ee had never been robbed.

  Apparently reading his thoughts, she said, “This place has been afforded certain protections down the years.” She led him into a tall studio, lit by a single, unpapered window through which a great deal of light entered, illuminating the scrolls and boxed books lining the walls. Crowded on tables and shelves stood sculptures in every conceivable material. They were in bone and granite and hardwood and limestone. They were in clay and bronze, in iron and sea green basalt. Bright, glinting whites, deep, swirling blacks. Colours of every possible shade from darkest blue to the lightest pinks and yellows. There was gold, silver, and delicate porphyry. There were heads and torsos and reclining figures, beasts of every kind, some believed extinct. There were representations of the Lords and Ladies of Chaos and of Law, every supernatural aristocrat who had ever ruled in heaven, hell, or limbo. Elementals. Animal-bodied men, birds in flight, leaping deer, men and women at rest, historical subjects, group subjects, and half-finished subjects which hinted at something still to be discovered in the stone. They were the work of genius, decided the albino, and his respect for this bold woman grew.

  “Yes.” Again she anticipated a question, speaking with firm pride. “They are all mine. I love to work. Many of these are taken from life.”

  He thought it impolitic to ask which.

  “But you will note,” she added, “that I have never had the pleasure of sculpting the head of a Melnibonéan. This could be my only opportunity.”

  “Ah,” he began regretfully, but with great grace she silenced him, drawing him to a table on which sat a tall, shrouded object. She took away the cloth. “This is the material we have owned down the generations but for which we had never yet found an appropriate subject.”

  He recognised the material. He reached to run his hand over its warm smoothness. He had seen more than one of these in the old caves of the Ph’oorn, to whom his folk were related. He had seen them in living creatures who even now slept in Melniboné, wearied by their work of destruction, their old master made an exile, with no one to care for them save a few mad old men who knew how to do nothing else.

  “Yes,” she whispered, “it is what you know it is. It cost my forefathers a great fortune for, as you can imagine, your folk were not readily forthcoming with such things. It was smuggled from Melniboné and traded through many nations before it reached us, some two and a half centuries ago.”

  Elric found himself almost singing to the thing as he caressed it. He felt a mixture of nostalgia and deep sadness.

  “It is dragon ivory, of course.” Her hand joined his on the hard, brilliant surface of the great curved tusk. Few Ph’oorn had owned such fangs. Only the greatest of the patriarchs, legendary creatures of astonishing ferocity and wisdom, who had come from their old world to this, following their kin, the humanlike folk of Melniboné. The Ph’oorn, too, had not been native to this world, but had fled another. They, too, had always been alien and cruel, impossibly beautiful, impossibly strange. Elric felt kinship even now for this piece of bone. It was perhaps all that remained of the first generation to settle on this plane.

  “It is a holy thing.” His voice was growing cold again. Inexplicable pain forced him to withdraw from her. “It is my own kin. Blood for blood, the Ph’oorn and the folk of Melniboné are one. It was our power. It was our strength. It was our continuity. This is ancestral bone. Stolen bone. It would be sacrilege…”

  “No, Prince Elric, in my hands it would be a unification. A resolution. A completion. You know why I have brought you here.”

  “Yes.” His hand fell to his side. He swayed, as if faint. He felt a need for the herbs he carried with him. “But it is still sacrilege.”

  “Not if I am the one to give it life.” Her veil was drawn back now and he saw how impossibly young she was, what beauty she had: a beauty mirrored in all the things she had carved and moulded. Her desire was, he was sure, an honest one. Two very different emotions warred within him. Part of him felt she was right, that she could unite the two kinsfolk in a single image and bring honour to all his ancestors, a kind of resolution to their mutual history. Part of him feared what she might create. In hon
ouring his past, would she be destroying the future? Then some fundamental part of him made him gather himself up and turn to her. She gasped at what she saw burning in those terrible, ruby eyes.

  “Life?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A new life honouring the old. Will you sit for me?” She, too, was caught up in his mood, for she, too, was endangering everything she valued, possibly her own soul, to make what might be her very last great work. “Will you allow me to create your memorial? Will you help me redeem that destruction whose burden is so heavy upon you? A symbol for everything that was Melniboné?”

  He let go of his caution but felt no responsive glee. The fire dulled in his eyes. His mask returned. “I will need you to help me brew certain herbs, madam. They will sustain me while I sit for you.”

  Her step was light as she led him into a room where she had lit a stove and on which water already boiled, but his own face still resembled the stone of her carvings. His gaze was turned inward; his eyes alternately flared and faded like a dying candle. His chest moved with deep, almost dying breaths as he gave himself up to her art.

  III

  The Sitting

  HOW MANY HOURS did he sit, still and silent in the chair? At one point she remarked on the fact that he scarcely moved. He said that he had developed the habit over several hundred years, and when she voiced surprise, permitted himself a smile. “You have not heard of Melniboné’s dream couches? They are doubtless destroyed with the rest. It is how we learn so much when young. The couches let us dream for a year, even centuries, while the time passing for those awake was but minutes. I appear to you as a relatively young man, lady. But actually I have lived for centuries. It took me that time to pursue my dream quests, which in turn taught me my craft and prepared me for…” And then he stopped speaking, his pale lids falling over his troubled, unlikely eyes.

  She drew breath, as if to ask a further question, then thought better of it. She brewed him cup after cup of invigorating herbs and continued to work, her delicate chisels fashioning an extraordinary likeness. She had genius in her hands. Every line of the albino’s head was rapidly reproduced. And Elric, almost dreaming again, stared into the middle distance. His thoughts were far away and in the past, where he had left the corpse of his beloved Cymoril to burn on the pyre he had made of his own ancient home, the great and beautiful Imrryr, the Dreaming City, the dreamer’s city. Many had considered Imrryr indestructible, had believed it to be more conjuring than reality, created by the Melnibonéan sorcerer kings into a delicate reality, whose towers, so tall they disappeared amongst clouds, were actually the result of supernatural will rather than the creation of architects and masons.

  Yet Elric had proven such theories false when Melniboné burned. Now all knew him for a traitor and none trusted him, even those whose ambition he had served. They said he was twice a traitor, once to his own folk, second to those he had led on the raid which had razed Imrryr and upon whom he had turned. But in his own mind he was thrice a traitor, for he had slain his beloved Cymoril, beautiful sister of cousin Yyrkoon, who had tricked Elric into killing her with that terrible black blade whose energy both sustained and drained him.

  It was for Cymoril, more than Imrryr, that Elric mourned. But he showed none of this to the world and never spoke of it. Only in his dreams, those terrible, troubled dreams, did he see her again, which is why he almost always slept alone and presented a carefully cultivated air of insouciance to the world at large.

  Had he agreed to the sculptress’s request because she reminded him of his cousin?

  Hour upon tireless hour she worked with her exquisitely made instruments until at last she had finished. She sighed and it seemed her breath was a gentle witch-wind, filling the head with vitality. She turned the sculpture for his inspection.

  It was as if he stared into a mirror. For a moment he thought he saw movement in the bust, as if his own essence had been absorbed by it. Save for the blank eyes, the carving might have been himself. Even the hair had been carved to add to the portrait’s lifelike qualities.

  She looked to him for his approval and received the faintest of smiles. “You have made the likeness of a monster,” he murmured. “I congratulate you. Now history will know the face of the man they call Elric Kinslayer.”

  “Ah,” she said, “you curse yourself too much, my lord. Do you look into the face of one who bears a guilt-weighted conscience?”

  And of course, he did. She had captured exactly that quality of melancholy and self-hatred behind the mask of insouciance which characterized the albino in repose.

  “Whoever looks on this will not say you were careless of your crimes.” Her voice was so soft it was almost a whisper now.

  At this he rose suddenly, putting down his cup. “I need no sentimental forgiveness,” he said coldly. “There is no forgiveness, no understanding, of that crime. History will be right to curse me for a coward, a traitor, a killer of women and of his own blood. You have done well, madam, to brew me those herbs, for I now feel strong enough to put all this and your city behind me!”

  She watched him leave, walking a little unsteadily like a man carrying a heavy burden, through the busy night, back to the inn where he had left his sword and armour. She knew that by morning he would be gone, riding out of Séred-Öma, never to return. Her hands caressed the likeness she had made, the blind, staring eyes, the mouth which was set in a grimace of self-mocking carelessness.

  And she knew he would always wonder, even as he put a thousand leagues between them, if he had not left at least a little of his yearning, desperate soul behind him.

  * * *

  C•A•M•B•I•S•T

  cam·bist 'kam-bist

  noun

  1: a dealer in bills of exchange

  2: an expert in foreign exchange

  3: a manual giving the moneys, weights, and measures of different countries, with their equivalents

  * * *

  The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics

  DANIEL ABRAHAM

  FOR AS MANY YEARS as anyone in the city could remember, Olaf Neddelsohn had been the cambist of the Magdalen Gate postal authority. Every morning, he could be seen making the trek from his rooms in the boardinghouse on State Street, down past the street vendors with their apples and cheese and into the bowels of the underground railway, only to emerge at the station across the wide boulevard from Magdalen Gate. Some mornings he would pause at the tobacconist’s or the newsstand before entering the hallowed hall of the postal authority, but seven o’clock found him without fail at the ticker tape checking for the most recent exchange rates. At half past, he was invariably updating the slate board with a bit of chalk. And with the last chime of eight o’clock, he would nod his respect to his small portrait of His Majesty, King Walther IV, pull open the shutters, and greet whichever traveler had need of him.

  From that moment until the lunch hour and again from one o’clock until six, Olaf lived and breathed the exchange of foreign currencies. Under his practiced hands, dollars became pounds sterling; rubles became marks; pesos, kroner; yen, francs. Whatever exotic combination was called for, Olaf arranged with a smile, a kind word, and a question about the countries which minted the currencies he passed under the barred window. Over years, he had built nations in his mind; continents. Every country that existed, he could name, along with its particular flavor of money, its great sights and monuments, its national cuisine.

  At the deep brass call of the closing gong, he pulled the shutters closed again. From six until seven o’clock, he reconciled the books, filled out his reports, wiped his slate board clean with a wet rag, made certain he had chalk for the next day, paid his respects to the portrait of the king, and then went back to his boarding room. Some nights he made beans on the hotplate in his room. Others, he would join the other boarders for Mrs. Wells’s somewhat dubious roasts. Afterward, he would take a short constitutional walk, read to himself from the men’s adventure books that were his great vice, and
put out the light. On Saturdays, he would visit the zoo or the fourth-rate gentleman’s club that he could afford. On Sundays, he attended church.

  He had a reputation as a man of few needs, tepid passions, and great kindness. The romantic fire that the exotic coins and bills awakened in him was something he would have been hard pressed to share, even had he anyone with whom to share it.

  Which is to say there could not be a man in the whole of the city less like Lord Iron.

  Born Edmund Scarasso, Lord Iron had taken his father’s title and lands and ridden them first to war, then to power, and finally to a notorious fame. His family estate outside the city was reputed to rival the king’s, but Lord Iron spent little time there. He had a house in the city with two hundred rooms arranged around a central courtyard garden in which trees bore fruits unfamiliar to the city and flowers bloomed with exotic and troubling scents. His servants were numberless as ants; his personal fortune greater than some smaller nations’. And never, it was said, had such wealth, power, and influence been squandered on such a debased soul.

  No night passed without some new tale of Lord Iron. Ten thousand larks had been killed, their tongues harvested, and their bodies thrown aside in order that Lord Iron might have a novel hors d’oeuvre. Lord Biethan had been forced to repay his family’s debt by sending his three daughters to perform as Lord Iron’s creatures for a week; they had returned to their father with disturbing, languorous smiles and a rosewood cask filled with silver as “recompense for his Lordship’s overuse.” A fruit seller had the bad fortune not to recognize Lord Iron one dim, fog-bound morning, and a flippant comment earned him a whipping that left him near dead.

  There was no way for anyone besides Lord Iron himself to know which of the thousand stories and accusations that accreted around him were true. There was no doubt that Lord Iron was never seen wearing anything but the richest of velvets and silk. He was habitually in the company of beautiful women of negotiable virtue. He smoked the finest tobacco and other, more exotic weeds. Violence and sensuality and excess were the tissue of which his life was made. If his wealth and web of blackmail and extortion had not protected him, he would no doubt have been invited to the gallows dance years before. If he had been a hero in the war, so much the worse.