Ellesbrith of Quyani

 The old house was lit by candles: tall, yellow columns of dragonfly-wax harvested from the roofs of the city and moulded into shape by the ciresters.  The narrow hallway that Ramayon walked down after locking the door behind him held two, both floor-standing and as tall as mid-chest on him.  Each wick was finger-thick and burned white with a faintly lavender edge.  Shadows wavered on the walls in front of him as he moved and his eyes tracked them alertly.  The house was safe, he was sure of that, but in Quyani you lived longest by not taking chances.  There was a smell too, something papery and dry; the ciresters said it came from the wax and Ramayon, who would never dare to climb the roofs and harvest wax, chose to believe them.  The smell wasn’t unpleasant, but after a short while it was like being in a musty, unaired library and he then felt an urge to escape to fresh air.

At the end of the hallway was another door.  It had no lock and pushed outwards easily when he laid a hand on it.  He walked through, letting the door swing shut by itself, and now he was a in an antechamber of sorts.  There were doors in each of the other three walls, and in the centre of the room was a flight of wooden stairs leading downwards.  The staircase was surrounded by wooden bannisters except where the top stair made contact with the floor and, unsurprisingly, the stairs themselves vanished into darkness.  Between the doors were frescos in what looked like an untutored hand; colour was applied boldly but seemingly without much thought, and the lines of the people and animals depicted were bold but crude.  Ramayon paused for a moment, looking at the frescos.  They were mostly hunting scenes and were supposedly older than the house, painted onto the walls of caves before Quyani had been quarried around them.  Personally he thought that some of the people who lived here and never left had drawn them when they were bored and had made the story up to justify them.

The door to his left opened and a woman stepped out.  She was slightly shorter than him, wearing a blue shirt and grey trousers and had auburn hair tied back from her face in a pony-tail.  She hesitated for a moment, then recognised him.

“Ramayon,” she said.  She didn’t sound precisely hostile, but he knew she didn’t like him and, though the ballots were secret, he suspected that she had voted against his joining their society.  “Have you been lurking here long?”

“I just arrived,” he said.  “Do people often lurk in here, then?”

She pursed her lips for a moment, disliking that he’d picked up on her choice of verb.  “A slip of the tongue,” she said, waving one hand dismissively.  “Some people have been known to study the paintings.  I would… I would not have thought you were one of them.”

Ramayon decided to ignore the implied slight.  “I am sure they have amazing qualities,” he said, walking towards the door she was standing in front of.  “But I was asked to come here by Ellesbrith and you know as well as I that she does not like to be kept waiting.”

“She is impatient already,” said the woman.  She stepped aside. “I would recommend being apologetic.”

“We are not the same, though,” murmured Ramayon as he passed through the doorway.

This room had been hewn out of the rock itself; the floor, the walls and the ceiling were all pale-grey stone.  The floor had veins of colour, mostly brown and red, running through it while the walls were more uniform.  The ceiling was hard to judge as stalactites descended from it in several places and the rest was so rough that it might have been entirely natural.  In the centre of the room was a helix of metal that spiralled upwards and eventually made contact with a stalactite.  There was a cold draught coming from somewhere up near the ceiling and Ramayon shivered.

Ellesbrith was standing by the helix doing something to it with a rubber-handled tool that seemed to consist of eight prongs connected together at a central point.  As he approached she looked over her shoulder at him.

“I said midnight,” she said sharply.  Her voice echoed around the cavern, which was a better descriptor than room in Ramayon’s opinion.  “Are you deaf, stupid, or inconvenienced?”

“I am late,” said Ramayon, who knew that Ellesbrith hated anything she could describe as an excuse.  “I passed Natalie on my way in.”

He waited.  Ellesbrith tapped the helix and seemed very interested in the noises that her tool made.  After thirty seconds or so she looked over her shoulder again and she looked less annoyed.

“Natalie overran her time,” she said.  “Not that that’s any of your concern, and since you couldn’t have known she would you couldn’t have allowed for that in your arrival.”

“True,” said Ramayon. “But the circumstances are that I am only late in absolute terms; relatively speaking I am exactly when you needed me.”

“One day,” said Ellesbrith, “one day you won’t have a smart answer.  Then what will you do?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when it needs burning,” said Ramayon.  Ellesbirth snorted, but it might have been laughter.

“Fine,” she said.  “Be like that.  Now come and look at this.  If I’m not mistaken, the dance of shadows is getting longer, and I think we’re in danger of seeing a prophecy fulfilled.”

Ramayon of Quyani

 The dance of shadows caused patches of glittering, milky white light to skim across the streets and houses.  Here and there a window was illuminated and a chiaroscuro of furniture appeared momentarily; there and here some poor soul would be transfixed by the light for a second, held immobile as it streamed in through their eyes and paralysed their minds.  Then the light moved on, the rooms changed and the victims were freed.

Ramayon stood in the deeper shadows and watched the dance.  High above the city, where the tallest minarets and cubical towers reached, huge dragonflies roosted.  When they launched themselves into the air, conducting a brief circuit of the city before alighting again on a high perch, their wings caught the moonlight, transformed it somehow, and cast it across the city like a strange net.  Those who dwelled their learned, eventually, how to read the patterns of light and dark, the shadows of the dance, and when to walk the streets to avoid them.  Those who visited, and they were few in number, were the ones caught and the ones sometimes afflicted.

A bell tolled somewhere off to his left.  There were churches in Quyani as well as mosques and synagogues and temples; a panoply of religion was available to anyone who wished to worship.  Many of them were near-empty now; the worshippers who came had no leaders, no spiritual guides, to assist them in their quest for metaphysical enlightenment.  Some were entirely empty, stripped of their furnishings as whatever god had held sway there faded away and their protection rotted like old wood battered by storms.  He shifted slightly, feeling chilled though the air was balmy still, and checked the time.  It was a little shy of midnight, and he decided that that was good enough for his purposes.

He moved through the streets with the ease of a native, walking along the shaded roads, passing through alleys where the houses leaned inwards and prevented the dance from penetrating and occasionally taking shortcuts through old buildings hewn from the stone floor of the quarry where no-one dared dwell.  There were silences in there that couldn’t be broken by speech or footfall; there were scratches on the floor not made by tools; there were strange drawings on the walls that hurt the eyes of observers if they spent too long there.  They were left alone, but some used them as byways, as passages to other places, and they risked themselves with every traversal.

Ramayon emerged near a butcher’s shop, closed up this late in the evening, his breath slightly laboured and his pulse slightly quickened but still himself and still in Quyani.  The building next to the butcher’s had a door a head shorter than himself and windows set with stained glass but it was narrow and mean and squeezed tightly by its neighbours.  He tapped on the door; no need for coded knocks and barely remembered passphrases: no-one would come to a house this old without knowing what they were coming for.  There was a creaking, perhaps of floorboards within affected by a change of weight, and a click that might have been the turning of a key, and then silence.

Ramayon turned the doorhandle and pushed and the door swung open into darkness.  Behind him, where the street opened out onto the Plaza dell’amici, the dance crescendoed and light from several different dragonflies lit it as brightly and as coldly as an icy dawn over a snowfield.  He glanced back at it, checking his watch again.  Five minutes after midnight — a positive omen.  Then he stepped inside into the darkness and locked the door behind him.

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.