Liavek 6

by Will Shetterly

  Behind Her, a single brief chime. Foral Yatt's buckle dropped unceremoniously to the rush matting. Upon an impulse, She allowed Her eyes to open, their gaze drifting across the chamber, drinking in the moment in all its infinitesimal detail. On the other side of the room, the copper ball rested upon the tabletop where Foral Yatt had placed it. It was like the freshly gouged eye of a brazen speaking-head, such as certain personages in Wizard's Row were reputed to possess.

  It stared back at Rawra Chin, glittering suggestively, and all that came to pass behind the pale yellow door was reflected impartially, in perfect miniature, upon the convex surface of that lifeless and unblinking orb.

  Later, lying flat upon Her stomach with their mingled sweat drying in the hollow of Her back, Rawra Chin allowed Her awareness to float tethered upon the margins of wakefulness while Foral Yatt squatted naked by the fire, adding fresh coals to sustain a fading redness that had burned low during the preceding hour. The air was heavy with the intoxicating bouquet of semen, and each of Her muscles slumped in blissful exhaustion.

  Still, something nagged at Her, even in the sublime depths of her sated torpor. There was yet something unresolved between the two of them, no matter how eloquent their lovemaking may have seemed. It was barely a real thing at all, more a disquieting absence than an intrusive presence, and She might have ignored it. This, however, proved more than She could bear. It was a cavity within Her that must be filled before She could be complete. Though reluctant to send ripples through the calm afterglow of their congress, eventually She found Her voice.

  "Do you still love me?" This was followed, after a hesitant beat, by, "Despite what I did to you?"

  She turned Her head so that the right side of Her face rested against the interwoven rushes. He crouched before the fire with his back toward Her as he carefully arranged cold black nuggets atop the bright embers. His skin glistened, a yellow smear of watercolor highlight running down the side toward the fire. She followed the line of his vertebrae with Her eyes to the plumbline-straight crease that bisected the hard buttocks, adoring him. He did not turn to Her as he replied.

  "Is there a lizard asleep within the ball?"

  Taking another piece of coal in a hand already blackened by dust, Foral Yatt placed a capstone atop the dark pyramid in the scaled-down hell of the fireplace. Nothing more was said behind the pale yellow door that night.

  •

  Upon the following morning, Rawra Chin visited Som-Som and took tea with her, as if the five-year hiatus in their ritual had never existed. She recounted a string of anecdotes from Her career, then paused to sip Her infusion while Som-Som informed Her that her mother had once closed a door, and that it had once been dark, and that once she had been unable to stop coughing. Rawra Chin's smooth reentry into the bizarre rhythms of their conversation did much to eradicate any distance between the two that might have flourished in their half decade of separation. Even so, it was not until the interlude approached its conclusion that the performer felt comfortable enough to broach the subject of Her resumed relationship with Foral Yatt.

  "I won't be staying here forever, of course. In another month or so I must begin to consider my next role, and it would be impossible to do that here. But this time, when I leave, I believe I shall take him with me. I'm rich enough to keep him until he finds work of his own, and it seems ridiculous that someone with his talent should be wasting it upon…"

  Her hands performed a curious movement that was part theatrical gesture and part genuine involuntary revulsion. It was as if they were retching with violent spasms that shuddered out from the slender throat of the wrist and on toward Her fingertips, where ten mirrors shivered in the cold morning sunlight.

  "…upon ugly, sick old women like that terrible Donna Blerot! He deserves so much better. I could look after him, I could find work for him, and then perhaps neither of us would need to come back to this place ever again, not even just to look at it. Don't you think that would be a good idea?"

  Som-Som sipped her floral infusion through the corner of her mouth and said nothing.

  "I think we can do it. I think that we can love each other and be together without anything going wrong between us. It was only my ambition that pushed us apart before, and I've fulfilled that now. Things can be just as they were, only somewhere else, in a better place than this."

  Rawra Chin looked thoughtful, sucking the dazzling tip of Her right index finger so that it made a small and liquid popping sound when she pulled it from between Her lips. She did this twice. Behind Her, birds wheeled above the diverse skyline of Liavek. When She spoke again, Her voice had assumed a puzzled tone.

  "Of course, he has changed. I suppose we've both changed. He's very quiet now, and very … very commanding. Yes, that's it exactly. Very commanding. It's wonderful, I'm not complaining at all. After all, those are his chambers and he's being kind enough to let me stay there for the next couple of months so that I don't need to keep up my rooms at the lodging house. I don't mind doing whatever he wants. I think, you know, I think it's good for me in a way, good for how I am as a person. Since my career broke out of the egg, nobody had told me what to do. I think that's spoiled me. It doesn't feel right, somehow. Not when people just defer to me all the time. I think I need someone to—"

  "A sticky head looked out from between the cow's legs, and I screamed."

  Som-Som's interjection was so startling that even Rawra Chin, accustomed to such utterances, was momentarily unnerved. Blinking, She waited to see if the half-masked woman intended to make any further comment before continuing.

  ''I'm having my clothes sent over from the lodging house. I have so many beautiful things it hardly seems fair. Foral Yatt says that he will store my wardrobe, but he does not want me to wear the more exotic creations while I am with him. He prefers plainer things."

  Rawra Chin glanced down at the clothing She was dressed in. She wore a simple blouse of gray cotton and a skirt of similar material. Her white-gold hair swung about Her narrow shoulders and sparked life from the dusk-colored fabric with its contrast. It lay against Her blouse like wan torchlight reflected on wet, gray cobbles. Evidently satisfied with the novel restraint and subtlety of her costume, She raised Her lashes and smiled across the tea bowls at Som-Som.

  "But enough of my affairs and vanities. Which side of luck have you yourself walked these five years gone?"

  The divided face stared back at Her with its one live eye. No one spoke. Over the City of Luck, great scavenger birds dipped and shrieked, so that it sounded as if babies had been torn up from the earth and dragged wailing into the oppressive dome of the sky.

  •

  On the fifth day after Her arrival, Rawra Chin appeared upon Som-Som's balcony wearing breeches of leather with a stout length of rope looped about the waist as a belt. She did not refer to this reversal of Her sartorial tendencies, but after that Som-Som never again saw Her in a skirt and supposed that this was due to Foral Yatt's austere influence. The performer seemed also to forgo the application of face paint and the wearing of all jewelry save for a simple band of unadorned iron, which She wore upon the smallest finger of Her left hand. The ten slivers of mirror were long since vanished.

  Two weeks after Her return, Foral Yatt persuaded Rawra Chin to shave off Her hair.

  Sitting with Som-Som the following morning, She would break off from Her trail of conversation every few seconds and run one incredulous palm back from Her temple and across the stubble. Her talk had a forced gaiety, and there was something nervous and darting within Her eyes. Som-Som realized with some surprise that Rawra Chin no longer seemed attractive. It was as if Her charisma had leaked out of Her, or been sheared away as ruthlessly as the spun sunlight of Her hair.

  "I think, I think I look better like this, don't you?"

  Som-Som said nothing.

  "I mean to say that it, well, it makes such a change. And I think it will do my hair a service, after it grows back. The colorings I use had made it so brittle, a new head
of hair will be such a relief. And of course, Foral Yatt likes it this way."

  The casual delivery of this last phrase was belied by an evasive glance and an air of restless self-consciousness.

  "I mean, I understand how it must look, how it must look to people who don't know him, but…"

  One hand rasped lightly across Her skull in a single, backward motion.

  "…but the way that I dress is important to him, the way I look, it's so important to him, the way that I look when we make love."

  Som-Som cleared her throat and told the performer the name of the street where she had lived before the night when her mother had led her out by the hand, through the noise and toward the Silence. Rawra Chin continued Her monologue without acknowledging the interjection, Her eyes hollow and sleepless with their gaze still fixed on the grubby tiles.

  "He's changed, you see. He wants different things now. And, and I don't mind. I love him. I don't mind what he wants me to do. I even like it, sometimes I like it for myself and not just for him. But the fact, the fact that I like it, that's something that frightens me. Not frightens me, really, but it's as if everything is changing and moving under my feet, and as if I'm changing too, and I feel as if I should be frightened, but I'm not. It's so easy, just slipping into it. It's so easy just to let it happen, and I don't mind. I love him and I don't mind."

  From the dilated pupil of the courtyard, someone called Rawra Chin's name. Som-Som turned her gaze to the flagstones below, puzzling for a moment over the stranger that stood there before she was able to reconcile the familiar face with the unplaceable gait and manner, finally resolving these disparate impressions into Foral Yatt.

  Rawra Chin had spoken the truth. Foral Yatt had changed.

  Standing beneath them, looking up with one hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun, the bar of shadow cast across his features did not conceal the change that had come over them. The actor seemed less lean. Som-Som supposed that this was in part due to Rawra Chin's wealth supplementing his income and his diet.

  His clothing, too, was noticeably different from the somber and functional raiment that he had appeared to favor. Foral Yatt wore a long tunic, its blue so deep and vibrant that it bordered upon iridescence. A wide orange sash was wound twice about his waist, and the billowing pants that he wore beneath were orange also, a fragile, mottled orange almost white in places. His feet were naked and exquisite, much smaller than Som-Som would have expected them to be. Something glittered, a sparkling fog about the toes.

  "Rawra Chin? Our meal is almost prepared."

  His voice had altered, too: lighter, a patina of melody imposed upon its assured tones. And there was something else, something which above all was responsible for the striking change in his aspect, something so obvious that it eluded her completely.

  Rawra Chin murmured an apology as She made ready to leave, not bothering to tie up any loose ends remaining from Her conversation with Som-Som. As was Her custom, She reached out and squeezed Som-Som's wrist to let the half of her brain that was cut off from sight or sound know that her visitor was leaving. In response, the half-masked woman lifted her gaze until it met Rawra Chin's. When she spoke, her voice was filled with a sadness that seemed to have no bearing upon the content of her speech.

  "I do not think that the food was so good, back then."

  Rawra Chin's lips twitched once, a helpless little facial shrug, and then She turned and ran down the narrow wooden stairs that led to the courtyard below, where Foral Yatt awaited Her.

  She joined him there and they exchanged a snatch of dialogue that was too low for Som-Som to hear before making their way toward the pale yellow door. Som-Som craned her neck to watch them go. Just before they passed from her sight, she identified the single glaring quirk that had so transformed the young actor.

  Running along his brow in an uneven snow-line, curling around the topmost rim of his ears, Foral Yatt's hair was starting to grow out.

  •

  On the fifteenth night after Her arrival at the House Without Clocks, something occurred behind the pale yellow door that gave Rawra Chin Her first glimpse into the darkness that had been waiting for Her for five long years. She went indoors to share Her evening repast with Foral Yatt just as the sun was butchering the western horizon, and before morning She had seen the abyss. She was not to comprehend the immensity of the hungry void beneath Her for some three days further, but that first shattering look was the beginning. It was as if She dropped a pebble into the chasm that awaited Her and listened for the splash. When three days later the splash had still not come, She knew that the blackness was bottomless, and that there was no hope.

  On the earlier evening, however, when She walked through the pale yellow door with the sunset at Her back and the rich aroma of the pot-boil hanging before Her, this shadow was yet to fall. It seemed to Her that all her anxieties were containable.

  They ate their meal quickly, the two of them facing each other across the blanched wood of the table, and then Rawra Chin cleared away what debris there was while Foral Yatt retired to his bedchamber to prepare for the business of the evening ahead. Rawra Chin, scraping an obstinate scab of dried legume from the lip of his bowl, wondered idly what She would find to amuse Herself tonight during the hours when Her presence behind the pale yellow door was not required. On previous nights She had walked down to the harbor. Watching the moon's reflection in the iron-green water, She had tried to wring some cooling trickle of romance from Her situation.

  With an abbreviated cry of pain and surprise She looked down to discover that She had split Her nail upon the nub of dried and hardened food. Her nails were a ruin, She thought, all of them bitten and uneven, many of them split or with raw pink about the quick. She wondered how long it would take for them to regain their former elegance, and as She did so She ran Her other hand back over Her razed scalp without being aware of the gesture.

  Foral Yatt called to Her from the bedchamber and She went to see what he wanted, wiping Her hands upon the coarse gray fabric of Her shirt as She trudged across the rush matting.

  Stepping through the door of the chamber, She was puzzled to discover that Foral Yatt had retired to bed, rather than preparing for the evening's duties. He lay upon the rough cotton of the sheets with his eyes half-closed and his hands resting limp upon the patches of dyed sackcloth that formed the counterpane.

  "I cannot work this evening. I am ill."

  Rawra Chin's brow knotted into a frown. He did not look discomforted, nor was his voice unsteady or less masterful, and yet he said that he was sick. It was as if he meant Her to understand that this was a lie but to respond as if it were irrefutable truth.

  Searching within Herself She discovered, with only the briefest pang of surprise or disappointment, that She did not mind. She accommodated the fiction, because that was the easiest thing to do.

  "But what of Mistress Ouish? There have been other nights lately when you have not worked. A room not in use is a drain on her resources. Others have been dismissed for as much."

  Mistress Ouish, though now blind and close to death, was still the dominating presence at the House Without Clocks. Even Rawra Chin, who had not been employed at that establishment for five years, regarded the old woman with alloyed respect and fear. From his blatantly spurious sickbed, Foral Yatt spoke again.

  "You are right. If no work is done here tonight, it will be the worse for me."

  He raised his lowered lids and stared directly into Rawra Chin's eyes. He smiled, knowing that to smile altered nothing between them. The masquerade was accepted by mutual consent. His voice dry and measured, he continued.

  "That is why you must do my work for me."

  It was as if there were some sudden dysfunction within Rawra Chin's mind that rendered Her unable to glean any sense from Foral Yatt's words. "That," "must," "do," "work"—all of these sounded alien, so that She was almost convinced that the actor had coined them upon the spot. She ran the sentence through Her head again and again.
"That is why you must do my work for me." "That is why you must do my work for me." What did it mean?

  And then, recovering from the shock of the utterance, She knew.

  She shook Her head and in Her horror still had room to be surprised by the absence of soft hair swinging against Her neck. Barely audibly, She said "No," but it didn't mean "I will not." It meant "Please don't."

  But he did.

  •

  Donna Blerot took Her hand (His hand?) and pulled it up beneath the fur tent so that it came to rest upon the dampness between the disfigured woman's thick legs. Beneath her single outer garment the dame was naked, flesh damp and solid like dough.

  Later, burying Herself in the woman's body as Donna Blerot sprawled back across the table, gasping noiselessly like a fish upon a slab, Rawra Chin looked down at her and saw the abyss. The bell of gray fur had ridden up to reveal the body beneath, so that it now covered Donna Blerot's face, birthmark and all. For a lurching instant the woman looked like a drowned thing washed up on the coastline of the Sea of Luck, a sheet already covering the puffy, fish-eaten face.

  Fighting nausea, Rawra Chin shifted Her glance so that it came to rest upon Her own body, luminous with sweat, plunging mechanically forward, jerking back, thrusting and withdrawing like a gauntlet-manikin worked by the hand of another. She regarded the jutting hardness that grew from Her own loins and wondered how it was that She could be doing this thing. She felt no desire, no lust for the deaf woman and her bucking, heaving desperation. She felt nothing but shame and horror. How could Her body sustain such ardor in the face of that abomination?

  Later still, Donna Blerot kissed Rawra Chin and left, closing the pale yellow door behind her. The performer sat naked in one of the wooden chairs, elbows resting upon the tabletop before Her, face concealed behind Her hands as if behind the slammed doors of a church. The memory of the matron's kiss was still thick about Her lips. It had seemed as if a fat and bitter mollusk were attempting to crawl into Her mouth, leaving its glistening saliva trail across Her chin. This imagery slithered out of Her mind and down Her throat, from whence it dropped into Her stomach. There was a faint, warning spasm, and Rawra Chin tortured Herself with an image of their hastily devoured meal from earlier that evening. The gelatinous, half-melted skirt of fat trailing from the gray-pink fingers of meat…