Deumon

Simon shrugged.  He didn’t play Psychic Go, although Lissajous had tried to teach him a couple of times, and didn’t really believe that his friend could see any way into the future at all.  The future was determined by our actions, in his view, and trying to predict it was pointless, because then knowledge of it would cause you to change what you did, and so change the future that you’d just seen.  It would be like trying to swim in jelly: it didn’t look that hard, but it was nearly impossible when you tried, and what you left behind didn’t look much like jelly any more.

“Where next then?” he asked.  Lissajous looked around fruitlessly for the waiter.  “The next temple’s over in Nelson Street,” he said.  “Supposedly somewhere near the foot of the monument.”

“Nelson’s monument?”  Simon looked interested.  “Nelson was a hero of the Blue Brigade, you know?”

“No.”  Lissajous looked around for the waiter again, seemingly uninterested.

“And the Blue Brigade is often referenced in Deumon’s art,” said Simon.  He watched his friend as he forked up some crisp green beans from the salad and chewed them.  For a few moments he was still more interested in where his drink was, and then his head snapped back round and his eyes met Simon’s.

“So you think this might be an actual Temple?  Deumon would have put something there because of the Blue Brigade connection?”

“Possibly,” said Simon.  “Probably,” he corrected himself.  “The two you found already, I did a little bit of research on.  They’ve both got Blue Brigade connections, and one of them has a direct connection to Nelson himself as well.”

“Is that weird?”

“Not really.  Nelson was a hero, there were a lot of people wanted to ride his coat-tails and get rich off his fame.  Think how many pubs there are called the Nelson’s Head, or Nelson’s Arms.”

“Or Nelson’s Butt,” said Lissajous with a smile.  “But I already checked that one.  The only art there’s in the public toilets, and while it’s very fitting, it’s not Deumon.”

“They hang art in the toilets?”

“Yeah, ladies and gents.  The gents looks better looked after if you ask me.”

“You went in the ladies?”  Simon started laughing.  Lissajous looked a little uncomfortable, but then the waiter reappeared with their drinks.  He waited for the waiter to leave again before swallowing a mouthful of tea and glaring at Simon.

“It was quiet and no-one saw me slipping in.”

“What’s it like in the ladies then?”

“A bit weird,” said Lissajous.  “All cubicles and mirrors and sinks and not much else.  It’s like a cloakroom or something.  And the art of course, on the walls.  Bit battered, smears of stuff on it that I didn’t want to touch.  Not Deumon though.”

“Right, well, that’s the important thing.  You think we might have to check the pubs as well?”

“Can’t hurt,” said Lissajous.  “But let’s do the Temples first, there’s fewer of them.  And it’s easier to get round them, especially in this heat.”

“No-one watching,” said Simon.  Lissajous nodded in agreement.  “While the pubs are busy.”

“You coming to this one?” asked Lissajous.  Simon smiled.  “Sure, the temple should be cool inside, and I’ve had enough busking this heat.  I’ll go back out again this evening when the commute home starts.  Let’s go and see if Deumon left us anything at this new place.  What’s it called?”

“Our Lady of Fatigue,” said Lissajous.  “Apparently that’s Saint Matifa, but – what?”  He stared at Simon who was looking excited.

“Fatigue?” he said looking and sounding like he wanted to say eight hundred other things instead.  Lissajous nodded.  “That’s perfect!  Deumon suffered from chronic fatigue for eight years; that’s what’s called the Period of Lassitude.  He did all these really simple, lazy pictures then that when you start to look at them reveal all levels of detail.  They’re really clever, but he supposedly only did them because he was too tired to do any of the other stuff!”

“Sounding better all the time,” said Lissajous.  “You going to finish that salad then?”

Simon shook his head and passed the fork over, picking up his beer instead to drink that.

Lissajous

An oppressive heat filled the streets.  The skies were open and blue and had been for weeks, not even a fluffy white cloud had sailed across to cast a soupçon of shade in all that time.  The sun blazed, spending its fury on the towers and streets of Tal Malloran, and the populace of the city sweltered.  The streets were largely empty; here and there a white-shrouded figure hurried along, performing an errand that couldn’t wait any longer, but no one left their houses voluntarily until the sun went down and the heat bled back out of the city and into the star-pricked night sky.

Office workers travelled in early before the sun had really got into its blowtorch act, and left late in the evening, often sitting out in street cafés and bars to wait until the heat had fallen to where public transport was tolerable.  The demand for air conditioning was high, and in the towers of the Electricity Plant the workers there sweated even though it was cool, trying to maintain power across a network that now had a permanent daytime peak that lasted for hours longer than they’d planned for initially.  The Electrician General, a corpulent man with a ruddy complexion and hands burned black from electrical discharges, had deployed installation crews across the roofs of the city, fitting solar panels everywhere there was a space and feeding the power back into the electrical grid.  The cost was high, but while the heatwave persisted the air-conditioning price was returning the money almost as fast as he spent it.

In Restator Square a huge stone fountain sprayed water eighteen feet into the air and the cafés and restaurants around the edges all had ancient shade trees outside under which they set out their chairs and tables.  The only direct sunlight fell on the fountain water, where it was said to purify it, and on a few of the paving stones around it.  The square, despite the heat, was a relatively cool and delightful place to spend time, and it was full of tourists and locals who didn’t have jobs to go to.  Chatter echoed around mingling with the splash of water and the occasional sussuration of an errant breeze in the leaves of one or other of the trees.  At the Café Rougepeau white aproned waiters moved near-silently around, delivering dishes of delicate, chilled sandwiches, bowls of sorbet, or glasses of iced tea and cellared beers.  At a table outside, near the trunk of a tree so old that it had probably seen Restator Square grow up around it, sat a pale young man by himself.  A guitar-shaped leather case was on the chair to his left, and a soft cap was on the table next to a half-eaten salad.  He held a fork in his left hand, which was poised half-way to his mouth with a tomato quarter speared on it, and he appeared to be thinking.

Something shuffled in the branches of the tree above, and he seemed to wake up.  The fork continued its path to his mouth, and he ate the tomato, enjoyed its tart sweetness.  Then, with a crash and a small shower of leaves, someone fell into the seat opposite him.

“Lissa,” he said, looking at the newcomer.  He was also a young man, a little thinner than the diner, a little shorter, with dark hair and dark eyes.  In his hand – the diner noticed the painfully thin wrists – he held a leather wallet, and around that wrist, small but still loose, was the gem-studded copper bracelet that marked out a Psychic Go player.  “Where’ve you come from this time?”

Lissajous opened the wallet and inspected the money in there.  Eventually he took out a note and waved at the shadow-hugging waiters.  “Eskdrill Street,” he said.  “There’s a temple there.  Iced Tea please.”  This last was addressed to the waiter, who then turned to look at the original diner.  He shrugged, and tapped his glass of beer.  “Another,” he said.

“It’s not a Temple, though,” continued Lissajous.  “I was inside, and although there’s some neat artwork at the back, behind the altar and in the vestry, there’s nothing by Deumon.”

“Did they know you were inside?”

“Simon!”  Lissajous looked mildly offended.  “Of course they didn’t, you know I’m better than that.”

“Yeah, I know.  But what’s going to happen if you do get caught?  They’ve got the temple-hounds after all.”

“I can outrun a dog,” said Lissajous confidently.  “Well, I can definitely get up high before it catches me, and then I can outrun it, easy.  But it’s not going to happen, I know.”  He tapped the bracelet on his wrist.