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.