by David Edison
She turned up the wick on the lanterns, and continued, “You are a guest here at La Jocondette, and though my patrons overpraise me with an honorific I no longer merit, it would give me great pleasure to hear you address me by the name given to me at birth by my father, and that is Thea. I am Thea Philopater, and you are CooperOmphale, whether you know it or not.”
“Hello.” His voice was thick with sleep and hoarse from the shouting— the shouting that he remembered with a rush of adrenaline.
He sat up too quickly. “We were attacked—”
“—So I understand. A useless act of violence, in my sight, but such are the means of men in any world. You are safe here, Cooper. Know that.”
“Safe!” He barked a laugh. “I hear unspoken fears and the Dying roam the streets like lunatics. You violently kidnapped me and attacked my friends. What’s safe?”
“How like Asher you sound, child of Rome.” She fluffed his pillow and he lay his head back down. “Has he affected you so profoundly, or is it merely that common contrivance of man in the face of the overwhelming: feigned bravado?”
“I’m not brave or feigning—just overwhelmed. About ten times over. How do you know Asher?” From her considerable décolletage, an answer sprang to mind.
The Lady closed her eyes. “I cannot imagine how you could fail to be overwhelmed, under the circumstances. Do you still pray? Have you prayed today, CooperOmphale?”
“Excuse me?”
She opened her eyes, and they were iron. “Has a single day on the other side of life shattered your faith, or do you yet venerate whatever gods our people worship in the centuries since my feet last touched Earthen sands?”
“Earthen sands?” Cooper asked, but as he said the words he realized that he already knew.
“You and I walked the same world, darling boy.” She raised his chin with a finger so that their eyes met. “It has been many years since I ruled there, but I have read some few of the scrolls they scribed about my first life, and seen the play-acts. I am not so luminous as that purple-eyed angel, but surely you know me?”
Cooper heard more than a little vanity in her tone. Purple-eyed angel? Queen? If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought he was still dreaming. Either this woman was batshit barmy or she was . . . the realization crystalized. He was suddenly giddy with the idea. This was possible only here, so how could he be wrong to doubt it? Could the City Unspoken be a blessing in disguise? Possibilities bloomed.
Again, she seemed to follow his thoughts. “I found your Shakespeare on my doorstep one day. A great one for whores, the shaker of spears. I teased him until he promised to write me over—he never stopped writing, you know. I don’t believe he could stop if he wanted to. I am told he wrote me into plays at least twice more; he swore to me that he had not met another model for his historical roles, and I enjoyed the opportunity to thoroughly educate him on my nature and bearing. His subsequent efforts will have captured me more cunningly, I am confident.”
“That’s unbelievable.” Except that it wasn’t, not anymore. What would be?
“Believe it, little brother. Our people rise and conquer all across the worlds, you know. There is no truer cradle than Gaia, for our sands bear the sweetest fruit.”
Cooper realized then that as a former Earthling, no amount of time or distance would diminish the sense of kinship she felt toward him. Would that fraternity extend to other planetary graduates? Had he joined a club so improbable in its exclusivity? This woman and he knew each other in a way so permanent it shocked him. She was famous, the original celebrity, born and died two thousand years before him, yet as far as the Lady was concerned, they were countrymen or closer; she called him brother. Never minding that she was, he suspected, the last queen of Pharaonic Egypt and he merely an overeducated, bull- shouldered American with an unhelpful attitude and zero survival skills.
She leaned closer, and the scents of flowers and poison grew stronger. “But you have not answered my question, though perhaps I press it upon you too soon: how fares your faith, child of Rome?” Her fingers stroked a rhythm on the tender side of his forearm.
Cooper shook his head and raised himself to a sitting position, ignoring his nakedness and the scrapes that pained him. He wanted to say this right. “I don’t think the people here are that different from those back home: I’m sure the need for something . . . larger . . . is universal. I just can’t imagine—given the scale of the worlds and the lives we live, apparently—what kind of god could be big enough to encompass these worlds? What’s a Christ compared to that?” He gestured at the window, where twin cerulean suns had peeked above the horizon, limning the skyline in an underwater glow.
“He was a kinder man than I expected. We who proclaim ourselves the children of gods are rarely so gentle.” Thea laughed, and Cooper realized that he felt a hint of fear from her, a constant undercurrent running just beneath her surface. He didn’t have to be a student of history to know she held plots within plots. “Or maybe you’d expect him to be the paragon of compassion—I confess I haven’t paid much attention to those who followed in my footsteps. Was he the forgiving one? I, too, was an avatar of god on Earth. I was the sun himself, Cooper, and as for me and Yeshua of Canaan, my end was no nobler than his.”
She slipped an arm from her dress and lifted one weighty breast out of its confines. Puncture wounds were tattooed across her flesh, not one pair but many, as if she had fed her chest with poison until it was ready to burst. “My children died. What use had I for milk?” She shrugged herself back into her clothes. “I gave myself to the serpents instead, and now I express milk of another kind.”
A thought occurred to Cooper. “Shouldn’t you have left those scars behind when you died? Or are they new?”
She flashed another smile—one that dazzled. Cooper wondered if she ever faltered. The woman who made a triumph of suicide. “Finally asking the smart questions, my innocent soul! You may yet survive the trials to come. Yes, that is what ought to have happened. It did happen. And happened, and happened, across a dozen-dozen spheres. My journey has not been as dignified as you might think, Cooper. I spent many lives in a haze of self-destruction, drunk on loss, and I found serpents rarer than the viper whose kiss I once thought so final.
“I have become something somewhat more than woman, thanks to those many-fevered kisses, and something less. I cannot die, or Die, and I cannot leave this place. I poisoned myself too deeply, and now I am bound to this body as thoroughly as the rest of the whores in this city.”
Cooper couldn’t imagine this woman, whose identity he had begun to accept—as a whore. Or was it that he could not imagine her as anything else? Two faces on the coin, or one? The submerged fear that veiled the Lady fluttered as if in a breeze.
“There are many diversions on the streets of the City Unspoken.” She turned the subject away from True Death. Cooper thought that if he reached out with his mind, he could hear their fear. A sea of it, and it would drown him. “You know the card game they play on the streets, which cannot be won?”
“Three Whores? Yes, Asher warned me away from it.”
She nodded. “Then you know the three flavors of courtesans who populate the bordellos of the City Unspoken?”
Cooper frowned, shaking his head. “There are three kinds of whores? I didn’t know that. I know about the bloodsluts, I mean, the life-whores, or whatever we’re calling the ones who die for a living. I saw one in the Guiselaine. I . . . heard her fear, I guess. The scratching whispers in my head. She was half-mad from it . . . poor thing . . .”
“Yes. Thing is closer to the mark.” Cleopatra’s voice was bitter. “The life- whores are people who have become little more than chattel. Here at La Jocondette, my sisters and brothers and I are something less inhuman, but no less trapped.”
“If you’re not a life-whore, then what do you . . . do?” He found no way to lessen the awkwardness of the question.
“If you will permit me, Cooper, I will show you the talents my sisters and I possess
. The people of this city come to us for emotional rather than physical release, although that may become part of the work. But my ilk do more than talk, you understand? The poison in our veins provides our patrons with a seer’s insight, unveils visions and unlocks forbidden knowledge. Our succor is not the enchantment of the flesh, but the fulfillment of fate. I will awaken your secret self and hold up a mirror to your lidless eye.”
“Okay.” Cooper did not hesitate. “I mean yes, yes please. Show me my fate—if you can do it, I will dare it.” Since it was worth kidnapping me, he thought but did not add.
The Lady opened her arms and whispered something sibilant to the corners of the room before redrawing the curtains against the cobalt morning. “Once this city gleamed, although you may not believe it; I have seen it myself, in the memory of a very, very old client. He still mourns, I think. Long after the city fell into mortal hands, and thence into dust and disuse, my sisters and their peers retained the glamour of the previous ages—there were whole epochs when we plied our trade and the word ‘whore’ was all but unknown. This was before my time, of course, but La Jocondette still shined spotless white when I arrived in the city. My talents brought me here and as the years wore on I became its mistress.”
“Yes,” Cooper mouthed, barely speaking. “I see that.”
The whore who had been queen leaned over him, the redolence she wore like a shroud enveloping and intoxicating him, and all was liquid eyes and trails of hair like the lightless depths of the great celestial river, drowning and nourishing him until the corbeled ceiling opened and swallowed Cooper into vision beyond sight.
“What about the third kind of whore?” Cooper asked the beluga whale with orange fire for eyes. They treaded water beneath the surface of a sea of silk cloth, aquamarine banners and ribbons flowing past his body, curling about his limbs, and eddying off into the depths.
“He makes you feel. He feels for you.” The beluga’s cloud-gray skin shimmered in the aquatic light and the hand bones hidden by evolution within its flippers glowed white-hot, visible through the skin. They began expanding, fingers curling in gloves of fin- flesh.
“Oh,” he said, as a school of wooden geese darted overhead. “What are you thinking, Cooper?”
He held out his hand, palm forward, and splayed his fingers. They matched the bones of the whale, which had stopped glowing along their length and now only sparkled at the joints, like a constellation. When Cooper answered, he spoke from a subsystem of himself that had perfect recall and zero irony:
“I am thinking that Gould’s Belt is not part of the natural spiral structure of the Milky Way. It spans three thousand light years and sits at a twenty-degree angle to the galactic plane. Yet it surrounds us with a ring of bright stars, and without them we would not have Orion, Scorpius, the Southern Cross, Perseus, Canis Major, Vela, or Centaurus. What astrological sign would I be if Gould’s dark matter had not impacted my galaxy? Would my story be different?”
The beluga nodded, taking notes on a pad of legal paper. “I see. And how does this make you feel?”
“I feel that these plastic stars are in my way.” Cooper brushed a mobile of toy stars away from his face as they drifted past. “And also that the gray jackass feels responsible for the dying of Death. Why would he feel that way? What has he done to close the Last Gate? It makes him so afraid, he doesn’t know himself anymore.”
“Please, go on.”
“He’s in love with her. And she loves him back, so strong, but she hates herself for it. I don’t think they will be together, even though she would give him the one thing he wants more than anything.”
“And what do you think Asher desires most?”
“A child.” Cooper raised an eyebrow at the inquisitive cetacean. His replies were reflexes. “Wait, no: a second child. Aren’t you supposed to be the one doling out the answers?”
The beluga—who he somehow knew was part Lady, part Cooper, and part something else entirely—laughed bubbles and brushed dark hair from her face. “I am just the swimmer, little brother. You are the sea.”
“That explains it, then, why I am so cold and dark and empty.”
“Is that how the sea makes you feel?” She pushed wire spectacles onto her nose with a dainty flipper. “Even though it drinks warmth and light from the sun and houses teeming billions?”
“The sky is empty and dark and cold, but it houses billions too—and teems with suns besides.” He paused. The sea was emptying, silk streamers rippling off into the distance, where they vanished. “Where is all the woven water going?”
The beluga pointed to the center of his forehead with a fin. “Back where it came from. Have you ever touched a star, I wonder, and found its furnace cold? I think we are almost out of it, Cooper. How do you feel?”
“Sleepy.” He opened his eyes and saw the Lady of La Jocondette above him, cradling him in her ample lap. Her storm of scents was withdrawing from him like a tentacled thing; it had reached inside him and cracked him open. Cooper felt like a crab sucked empty of its meat. “You did quite well, child of Rome.” The Lady smoothed his face with her fingers. “I would almost suspect you of being familiar with the narcotic haze.”
“Well, there was college.”
She shook her head. “I would advise against hiding behind your humor when unnecessary, or your intellect. I believe you have two new friends who suffer from one or the other such tendencies, yes? Do not mimic their flaws. It will only make your lives harder.”
Cooper let out a sigh that seemed to go on forever, until his lungs were flattened pancakes. “I suppose that’s good advice. Don’t be smart or funny, and don’t play Three Whores. And whatever you do, try not to fucking die. But if you do die, it’s okay, because nobody can Die, which makes the most perfect sense ever. Yep, I’ve heard some good advice today.” The Lady swept her hand toward the windows, where watery light struggled through the curtains. “Today has become tomorrow.” Cooper rubbed his face with his hands, but the Lady pulled them away and leveled an earnest look.
“There is another side to the coin of advice you’ve been paid—it has been said that a visitor to the City Unspoken may call upon the aid of three whores to guide him. Once for blood, once for wisdom, and once for love.”
Cooper blushed but felt a crabby awkwardness—was he developing an allergy to unsolicited counsel, or just sick of all the sex-worker jargon? “Asher warned me that there was no way to win that game. I think I’m beginning to understand what he meant.”
The dead queen laughed, and her throat matched the bells that rang in the city outside her bordello palace. “Asher told you that? He’s lying, of course. Any game can be won. Remember that”—she touched her chest— “when you are stripped of the choice of whether or not to play, my strapping boy.”
“I can avoid a hard hustle, Lady. I’m a New Yorker.”
“All the pride of a Roman! Three whores, I think, will help you. I have been one of them.”
Cooper paused, weighing his increasing resistance to anything tangential to bullshit against his need to absorb all the useful knowledge he could. “What else did you see inside me?”
“Every soul shines with its own brilliance, and yours is a blossom, unique. You have a strong affinity toward the call shamanic, yes? You will feel it one day, if you have not already been drawn to it. To the omphalos, yes? It means the navel, the axis mundi, the worlds-pillar. The center of the world, where all truths and lies converge. You will take its name for your own, CooperOmphale, and become something of an axis yourself. But listen to me well: this is less a position of power than it is a moment of leverage. And you have some of the seer’s sight, if you’d learn to use it—we have already spoken of your propensity for hearing the frightened thoughts of others. This is the beginning of the path of the shaman.”
She let out a slow breath, and pressed her knuckles against his cheek. “But I do not see in your possibilities the greatness to merit the attention of any of the true penates, the elder ones who
call themselves the First People. Nor do I see a great worker of the art whose awakening ripped him whole from his physical reality and sent him hurtling down, down, down to me.”
Cooper resisted the urge to hang his head. “In other words, I’m still a useless mystery. An erratum.”
The Lady shook her head and pierced him with an intense look. Again, he felt her fear, distant and undefined, but which lessened whenever she spoke, “I do not understand why the gray one and the faerie noblewoman care so strongly about resolving your mystery—there are far stranger things in the worlds than one lost man. Your ash-skinned friend is one of those things, as am I. But I’d sooner tear out my eyes than betray his trust, and you yourself have earned my deepest respect and admiration, Cooper. Your answers may not be easily uncovered, but you are far from useless.”
“I am?” He didn’t feel it.
“You have retained your self-possession in the face of a reality that has crushed lesser minds. So few experience the truth of the worlds entire during the course of a single day! There is waking to new life, yes, and this is always a shock—but you are a white-hot smelting thrust into the coldest water without cracking.”
She brought him a plate from a credenza by the wall, all curves and curls and coils of venomous sight. “This resilience is perhaps the only quality I see in you that might qualify for greatness. Let us appreciate that irony for a moment, before your monochrome savior storms my keep and rescues you from the torments of luxury. Pastry?”
Asher dripped down the sentinel wall and swung onto the branches of a papery sycamore, flipping head over heels before grabbing a lower branch and pushing himself off, swinging his feet in a backward arc, and hooking his knees around on a still-lower branch. He hung there for a moment, upside down, and scanned the grounds of La Jocondette through inverted eyes to see if he’d been detected or triggered any sort of alarm, then unlocked his knees from the bough and allowed himself to drop headfirst to the manicured lawn before bracing his impact with an arrowstraight handstand. As he spun forward into a machine-perfect landing, Asher wondered if anyone could acquire dexterity like his if they had lived as long—and as dangerously—as he had, or if acrobatics were simply another of his natural gifts. He couldn’t remember ever feeling clumsy, but who could say what details of his long-distant childhood had been eroded? The worlds themselves had changed. His family, his people. Chara, for instance, wherever she was. Would he even recognize her as the sister who once chased him through Anvit’s Glade? She would surely not recognize the gray- skinned beggar he had become.