The dream of Quyani

 It was Madame Sosotris’s tarot deck, I’m sure of it.  I stole it, on commission, from the old witch while she was out drinking in some surely insalubrious pub in the streets of the Camden Throne.  It was a surprisingly easy job: you’d think the best Seer in the city would have more protection on her rooms but the door barely had a lock worth talking about and the cards were in a chest with a lock — but the key had been left in the lock!  One turn, one click, and there were the cards.

They were a tatty bunch, I was surprised by that too.  I expected slivers of ivory painted by some ancient Chinese sage, or elaborately ornate pieces of canvas; maybe even thin slips of balsa wood engraved by one of the ten Dead Engravers that the priest in Ormswood Church likes to talk about.  Instead I got a bunch of tattered bits of card that you wouldn’t make a cereal box out of.  They were painted, I’ll give you that, but some of the pictures on there looked like they’d been crayoned on first and then prettied up a bit.  Probably to justify having to pay for a reading from them.

I did look around, in case these were a trap and the real cards were somewhere else, but there wasn’t all that much in the room.  Old furniture, antimacassars, a box of tissues that looked like she was expecting an elephant with sinus trouble.  Of course, her everpresent cold is something they all talk about, but that box seemed unnecessary nonetheless.  There was a book on a table by the door but it was just a guest-book; you signed your name in it when you came, and by the looks of things you wrote the time you left in it too.  I’ve seen them before in businesses, especially those new warehouses down by the dock where the security is tighter than a gnat’s arse, but… but shouldn’t the greatest Seer in the city be able to see when her client’s leaving?  Like, literally, with her eyes?

My contact, a ratty little man who goes by the name of Corners and who squeaks like a rat when you grab him by the throat and hoist him off the ground so that his shiny-booted feet dangle five centimetres above the floor, confirmed the cards to me when I called him on the phone and then hung on me.  I called him back and made my point, a little forcibly, perhaps, that I needed to know where to deliver the merchandise.

“Back of the Bunch of Grapes,” he said, as predictable as ever.  “Tomorrow morning, just before ten.”

I’m not much for hanging on to the merchandise for long, but overnight didn’t seem like a big problem.  It wasn’t like I’d signed my name in the guest-book or left fingerprints where they could be found, so I sauntered home, dropped the cards on my night-stand, and was going to make myself a nice hot chocolate when I yawned loud and long enough to crack my jaw and tiredness hit me like a chair crashing down on a man’s head in a bar fight.  I looked at the bed and it looked comfortable so I figured I’d just lie down for a minute.  As soon as I lay down I felt heavy and warm and I just pulled the comforter up to my neck and my eyes closed and I was gone.

It was the cards.  I’m sure they made me tired, somehow, and then plunged me into that dream.  Because the next moment I was standing next to my bed, wearing absolutely nothing, and picking up the cards and turning the top one over.  And there’s no way in the whole of the Unreal City that I’d go messing with tarot cards stolen from Sosotris.

The card showed a doorway when I looked at it, so I put it back on the top of the deck, face-down, and turned to leave my room.  The doorway out looked like the one on the card, but when I picked the card up again it had changed and now was the Fool, starting out on his journey across the Major Arcana.  He looked familiar but then I realised he was naked too and put the card back down.  I don’t remember leaving the room, but I must have gone through the doorway somehow.

I found myself stood, dressed in grey pants and a blue shirt, on a smooth, black stone path that lead alongside a quarry.  The moon was in the sky, hanging pretty central over the quarry, and there were a couple of small, cigar-shaped clouds scudding away from it in both directions.  The path glinted and tried to reflect the moon but it was as though the light kept trying to avoid it, so there seemed to be moving patches of shadow all along it.  That didn’t bother me much so I set off towards the quarry, wondering what was being dug up there.

I think I walked for an hour, but it felt like ten minutes and nothing around me seemed to change until I got there.  Then I gazed down onto Quyani, the City in the Pit, because that was what lay at the bottom of the quarry.  The steep black walls became sheer as they descended and the colour changed to a purplish red like new bruising.  The tops of the spires and minarets of the city caught the moonlight and shone like tiny torches except where the dragonflies clung and shivered their wings in the light.  They cast odd, mind-chilling shadows on the streets and raised walkways below, where people walked seeming unconcerned that such vast monsters were sitting above them.  Now and then a dragonfly would launch itself into the air and even from my high vantage point I could see that each must be eight metres long at least.  They would circle Quyani exactly once and then settle again on a new spire or minaret.  And after a moment another would launch, complete a circuit, and descend.  This was known, I suddenly understood, as the dance of the shadows.

“There is a prophecy,” said a voice, and there was a man stood next to me.  He was dressed ordinarily and had a hand on the neck of a donkey.  There were items in the panniers that the donkey wore and I thought that perhaps he was a merchant.  “They say that a man will walk into Quyani uninvited and tear a hole in the Veil.  Then the dragonflies will return from when they came, the dance will end and the City in the Pit will drown in lava.”

“That sounds bleak,” I said, squinting at him.  He reminded me of Corners and my hands were itching to make him squeak.

“Will you enter Quyani?” he said, and he looked me, meeting my gaze.  It wasn’t Corners, I saw that then, but if you told me they had the same mother I might have believed you.  “Will you see if you are the prophesied one?”

“Another day, mate,” I said as easily as I could manage, but the words were hard and harsh in my mouth and it felt like I was spitting them out.

“Then perhaps you should not be here,” he said, and he raised a hand.  I started to answer him — what bloody right did he have to tell me where I should or should not be? — but the ground heaved beneath my feet and I stumbled.  When I looked up again I was on the floor next to my bed.

I bloody was as well.  I’ve never fallen out of bed, not even when I’ve been drunk enough to have to hang on to the floor because the room’s spinning so violently, so I’ve no idea how I got there, but on the floor, butt-naked, I was.

I put the cards in the bread-bin, had a couple of bottles of chilled lager, and went to bed a bit later.  With a chair underneath the door handle, just in case.

Lilies from the dead land

“Tell me about Paysmort,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  He had lead them to the end of the colonnade and then produced a small brass key from a pocket of his waistcoat and opened a barred door in the wall.  Phlebitis peered unenthusiastically inside where it was gloomy and smelled damp.

“No,” he said.

“But you brought it up yourself,” said the doctor.  Seeing that Phlebitis was not about to lead the way, he took it himself.  “Close the gate behind you, it will lock itself.  You wouldn’t have brought it up if you didn’t want to talk about it, you know.”

“Amateur psychology,” said Phlebitis.  The gate clanged at it closed, and he followed Dr. Rosendieb round a corner.  The corridor, hewn seemingly out of rock, got narrower, the ceiling lowered, but a row of white electric lights set in rubber, waterproof housings now illuminated it.  Rosendieb was walking briskly along it, just a little faster than Phlebitis might have expected, and he had to speed up a little to catch up.

“Professional, actually,” said Rosendieb.  “It is my job, after all.”

“Hah!  Yes, I suppose it is, though it still feels like an amateurish attempt.  I brought Paysmort up, Doctor, because their scent gets onto anything inorganic and lingers.  Anything you take from my cargo as payment will carry some of that scent with it for a couple of days at least, and so you’d ask about it anyway.  I’m telling you up front that you won’t get any answers, or any lilies.  They’re as bad as the boiled frogs.”

“I suppose you don’t want to talk about the boiled frogs either?”

“I’ll talk about them as much as you like, I think you don’t want to listen.”

Doctor Rosendieb laughed, a short bark that echoed slightly in the corridor.  “I listen to anything if the price is right,” he said.  “But you said I could have anything from your cargo, and your memories are cargo that all men carry through their lives.”

“I also said that you couldn’t have any of the lilies from the dead land,” said Phlebitis.  “And memories are certainly lilies from a dead land.”

The corridor turned a corner and ended abruptly at another metal gate.  Rosendieb produced another key, that might have been the first again, and paused before he unlocked it.  “How did you discover Paysmort?” he asked.  “There have been plenty of rumours over the years about it, but they’ve all been just that: rumours.  I’ve interviewed your first mate at length, and he says that you just came back to the ship one day with a new map and co-ordinates and that you sailed there with the aid of it.  Where did that map come from?”

“Is this your price?”  Phlebitis shivered as the tunnel was much cooler than the sunshine outside had been and it was starting to affect him.  “Knowledge of how I found out where Paysmort is?  Because it will not include the location of Paysmort or how to get there.”

Rosendieb slipped the key into the lock.  It turned with a brittle click.  “Yes,” he said.  “In my office, tell me, and we will call that payment.”

*

Rosendieb’s office had four walls that were divided each into four sections from floor to ceiling, and each section was painted with a semi-human monster.  Having heard the doctor’s description of the colonnade Phlebitis shuddered, aware that these too were probably painted from life and were how the poor unfortunates in the Tiergarten had ended their lives.  In the exact centre of the office was a steel desk with three drawers, deep enough for the doctor to lay out five tablet computers on and wide enough for him to lie down on comfortably.  There was a single chair on each side, made of a sturdy metal frame and bolted to the floor.  Phlebitis noted, with little surprise, that there were anchor points for chains or manacles on the floor on his side of the desk.

“There are anchor points on my side too,” said Rosendieb sitting down and looking uncomfortable.  “And the table is actually welded to a metal slab buried in the floor, and when patients are in here there’s nothing out on the desk.  But you’re here to tell me about how you found the map.”

“I’m here to rescue my first mate.”

“Of course, of course.  Let me have him brought here while you tell your story.”

“Have you heard of the Unreal City?” asked Phlebitis after the doctor had tapped some instructions in to one of the tablet computers.  Dr. Rosendieb lifted his head and looked at Phlebitis, his expression unreadable.  He nodded.

“Oh good.  Then this is a story of the Unreal City and a City Director,” said Phlebitis.  “And how I came to liberate a map and be told how to read it.”

“The Unreal City actually exists then?  I thought it was… well, a fugue state, a dream-world.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” sighed Phlebitis.

A heap of broken images

Phlebitis sat on an uncomfortable wicker chair.  There was supposed to be a blanket; green and white striped, thick and woollen; draped over the chair, and he supposed that would make it easier to sit on, but his blanket appeared to have been taken by the matron sat behind him.  He had turned, intending to ask her for the return of the blanket, but seeing her in profile he had recognised immediately that she was an avatar of Belladonna, Our Lady of the Rocks, and had turned back around again.  He had no wish to attract her attention.  He now planned to take the blanket from the chair to the left of him, which was ostensibly occupied by a young boy who kept standing up and running off to play with other small children behind the score board.  The boy’s parent, a woman with a lined face and scabs all over her hands, looked exhausted and was clearly about to fall asleep, and Phlebitis was waiting for it to happen.

In the near distance there was a thwock of leather striking ash and a low cheer raised from the front row of seats.  The elderly men gathered there were, to Pheblitis’s uncertain knowledge, either retired cricketers who were watching the game with a professional interest, or City Directors who were busy being seen at a City event and ensuring the safety of their Thrones.  He was aware that many of them had been to visit Madame Sosotris recently, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to talk to her yet.  Her constant attempts at flirting, which were growing ever more unsubtle, were disturbing and mildly unpleasant.  He had half a plan there too, to try and foist her on some other member of his crew, but none of them had yet done anything bad enough to warrant it.  The young boy’s mother’s head drooped, and her eyes finally closed.

“Six!” shouted an elderly gentleman in the front row, and Phlebitis’s arm snaked out and tugged the blanket over to his own chair.  The front row mostly stood up, applauding with trembling, age-spotted hands, blocking the view of the cricket game for the rest of the audience unless they too stood.  One or two men at the back did, but the remainder stayed seated, some not even aware of what had happened.  Phlebitis stood as well, suddenly realising that this was a perfect excuse, and when they all sat again he rearranged the blanket on his chair as though it had always been there, but badly laid out.

There was another thwock and the cricket ball flew off again and then, perhaps a second later, there was a soft thunk.  A gasp of horror arose from the front row and Phlebitis looked up in curiosity.  The cricket ball appeared to have struck a dead tree, which was awkwardly located at the corner of the in-field.  Its trunk was broad but hollow, and though several handfuls of branches still arose from it, then were blunted and stunted and no leaves or other greenery grew on them.

“The dead tree gives no shade,” muttered a man in the front row, and the rest of the row tried very hard to appear not to have heard him.  There was a garbled cry from the pitch, and the umpire, an obese, sweating man dressed in flannel whites and looking very miserable, raised a finger on each hand, giving both batsmen out.  Their heads sank and they slunk from the pitch, but the opposing team made no sound; raised no cheer, offered no mockery.  It was, Phlebitis thought, as though what had happened was too dreadful to be just the fault of the batters.  Though all they’d done was strike a dead tree, so he couldn’t really see what the problem could be.  He shifted in his seat, which was much more comfortable with the blanket on it, and slouched back a little.   The matron behind leaned forward, and whispered in his ear, “The dead tree offers no shade.”

An electric current seemed to run through his body, and his left leg twitched, a little spasm that made him kick the ground.

“I heard the man at the front, thank-you,” said Phlebitis in a low voice, hoping that this would bring the conversation to a close.

“Not well enough,” said the Matron.  “It hides a heap of broken images.  I would expect you to want to confirm that.”

He turned his head now, about to complain to her that she couldn’t just tell him what to do, but she had sat back again, and was now gazing at the game looking exactly like Belladonna once more.

*

The game ended with one side winning by several runs and wickets and Phlebitis wasn’t honestly sure which side had won, or if either side even cared.  The backslapping and camaraderie didn’t fit with his ideal for the sport, and they seemed to be walking off the pavilion both together and with the audience.  The most elderly gentlemen were supported and assisted by the others, while the rest of the audience wiped away crumbs from the cucumber sandwiches and pretended that they’d wanted to take small children with them to the match.  The young boy’s mother was still asleep on her chair, and her son was now patting her knee, trying to wake her.  Phlebitis sighed softly, stood up, and threw his blanket over the boy in a quick movement.  The heavy fabric bore him to the ground and muffled his cry of surprise so that no-one turned their heads or noticed what was happening.  The he gave the mother a gentle push, tipping her far enough forward that she slowly toppled off her chair and onto the ground, and set off at a quick jog onto the cricket pitch, towards the in-field.  Her cry of surprise as she woke on the hard ground distracted the milling crowd that had been watching the game but wasn’t going to the pavilion, and then the discovery that her child was under the blanket had them hunting about for any further misfortunes that may have befallen, and no-one noticed Phlebitis reach the dead tree and hoist himself up amongst the dead branches.  He only had to climb about ten feet to get high enough up to see down in the hollow trunk of the tree itself and see that it was partly filled with water.  As he looked at the water though he felt an invisible pair of hands pass across his eyes, and the world seemed somehow brighter, more sharply defined at the edges, and the water in the tree trunk became a pile of broken images.

He saw a woman dressed in white standing on the beach, crying.  A man crawled ashore from the water, the waves struggling to pull him back, but he clawed his way beyond them and lay there, gasping for breath.  The crying woman couldn’t see him, and she turned away, heading off the beach to a narrow, sandy track.  Clouds overhead merged together and became a lighthouse; a beam of intense light shot out from it.  Following it along, it illuminated a wicker chair on the edge of a cricket pitch, and Belladonna turned to look at him, her eyes aflame.  He shuddered, and a man on horseback rode past, wearing a leather jacket with metal studs all down the arms and a skull with flaming eye-sockets on the back.  The horse’s hooves boomed as it cantered and the beach suddenly returned, with waves taller than a man crashing on the shore and throwing white spume high into the air.  A boat tossed on the waves, some distance out, and Phlebitis could smell the unforgettable aroma of boiling frogs.  The boat seemed to come in closer to shore and then the waves calmed and he saw that the name of the boat was the Odysseus.

Phlebitis sighed and let himself slide down the branches and fall from the tree.  The grass below the tree was soft, but the tree roots that snaked through it were hard and ligneous.  It seemed somehow fitting.