Astrance

Water gurgled in the bilges and Phlebitis, doomed sailor, turned his lip up in a faint snarl.  The bilges stank, of dead, fishy things and things that had managed to rot in salt.  The smell was unpleasant, sour in an odd way that he couldn't put his finger on, and probably the third worst thing he'd ever smelled.
The second worst thing he'd ever smelled was boiled frog, and his ship had hauled a cargo of frogs across the Winter Ocean for over six years, boiling the wretched things once they were out of sight of land.  He'd thought that he'd never get the smell of boiled frog out of the wood of the ship, nor that he'd ever forget it.  His nightmares tended to start with the pervasive, vile-green miasma of a freshly boiled frog and usually ended with him waking up in time to vomit over the side of the bed.  His cabin-boy now refused to sleep in his cabin and slept the with the others sailors in a cabin at the other end of the ship instead.
The worst thing he'd ever smelled was Astrance, a spice grown in the tiered gardens of Neuschatsel, that was dried for shipping.  The smell started with the deep, rich tones of fresh fertiliser and went into incontinent dog territory after a second or two, then settled into the higher notes of a three-day old chicken carcass rotting in the sun.  It made vomiting seem pleasant because the acrid notes of bile counteracted the smell quite well, but as the crew had rapidly discovered, there's only so many times you can throw up if you want to have a usable throat.  They were now settling mostly for handkerchiefs dipped in dilute ammonia solution, but Phlebitis found it easier to come down to the bilges three times a day and breathe deeply.
He loathed Astrance more than he loathed boiled frogs, and he'd thought he'd already plumbed the depths of hate that a soul could sink to.
Astrance carried a significant premium with it because there were so few crews willing to transport it, and sea-transport was the only real way to get it anywhere because land-transport could be abandoned by its drivers when they decided that the smell was too much.  Here at sea the choice was between the smell and suicide, and Phlebitis thought that his crew had finally weeded out all those who preferred death.  The price he was being paid to haul it would be trebled when he landed and handed it off to the factors, but the sea-route seemed infinitely long and infinitely miserable.  The only consolation he had was that if the smell permeated his clothes like the boiled frog had it stood a good chance of finally repelling advances from Madame Sosotris when he next visited the Unreal City.
Astrance was mixed, in small quantities by highly trained chefs, with a herb called Fengill that was grown in low, marshy swamplands by the Maigre river.  Done correctly the smell of the spice was modulated into something earthy but wholesome, and the poisons in the Fengill, which could pole-axe an ox in under thirty seconds, were attentuated into something with a tingle and a hint of forbidden sensation.  The whole thing was said to be highly addictive, though possibly lethal if the eater were to get overenthusiastic with the portions, and drove the high prices that those who produced and carried Astrance could demand.
Phlebitis had no desire to try the food, just in case he could still smell the vile odour of the spice just by looking at the food.
Footsteps splashed behind him, and he turned.  The cabin-boy, his face reddened by ammonia burns, looked at him with milky, cataractal eyes.
"Boat ho!" he said, coughing.  His spit was milky too, and bubbled in the bilges, no doubt another side effect of the ammonia.
"What?" said Phlebitis, not believing the cabin boy for a second.  "We're in open water, boy.  There's no boats out here.  Is it a ship?"
"Boat ho!" said the cabin boy.  A thin line of spittle ran out of the corner of his mouth.
"Right," said Phlebitis.  "A boat.  Ho.  Ho-ho-ho."
"And a bottle up your bum!" said the cabin boy, completing the traditional shanty.  Phlebitis rolled his eyes, and headed up to the deck.

*

To his astonishment there was indeed a small rowing boat trying to pull alongside his ship.  The wind was full in his sails and he thought they were probably making forty knots, so that the rowing boat was staying in sight at all struck him as impressive.  He gave the order to spill some of the wind from the sails and slow the ship down, and they let the row-boat catch up to them.  The man sitting in the stern had a face that looked to have been beaten down to a pulp and then resculpted by a golem-maker, and the... thing... rowing had eight arms each more muscular than either of Phlebitis's legs.  It stayed in the boat, slumped over the oars as though tied to them and the man in the stern stood up and waved for a ladder.
A rope ladder was cast over the side of the ship, and the man came up.  He stood on deck, took a deep breath, and promptly ran down the ladder again.
"Hear ye, hear ye!" he yelled from the relative safety of the row-boat.  "Hear now that the trade in Astrance is forbidden on the Angled Isles and the shores of Mostlybony on pain of being buried in the damn stuff.  And don't try telling me you've not got any, that stench is almost strong enough to kill."
Phlebitis leaned over the side of the boat and looked down.  "What do you mean, trade is illegal?" he said.  "Are you saying that possession of Astrance is now illegal in the Angled Isles?"
"Nope, you can own as much as you like," said the man in the boat, sitting down now.  "But you can't buy or sell it.  Or give it away for that matter.  Foul stuff."
"Then what do traders do with it?" asked Phlebitis, trying to stay calm.  "Dump it overboard?"
"No, that's illegal too!" said the man.  "At least in the coastal waters of Mostlybony and the Angled Isles."
Phlebitis swore colourfully, managing three and a half-minutes before he needed to draw breath.  The man in the boat nodded, impressed, and then the thing at the oars sat up and started rowing again.
"Forty-five seconds," said Phlebitis to the crew.  "Then run us over him and cut that damn boat in half.  Making bloody Astrance illegal while we're still carrying the stuff!"

Trader with the broken-hearted

Phlebitis, lost and lonely sailor, spat overboard and cursed until he started repeating himself.  The sailors, his crew, sidled as way as fast as they could without attracting his attention and busied themselves with any job they could find.  Where possible they skittered up into the rigging, moving like the strange, bloated insects of the Jade coast as they caught ropes and hauled themselves into a mariner’s maze.  Those unlucky enough to have to remain on the open deck studiously swabbed it, their own feet, and anything that looked as though it might polish up with a few years’ effort.  When Phlebitis was done cursing he looked around him, his bad mood worsening as he realised that there was no-one to justifiably shout at.  He stamped off to his cabin, kicking three buckets of scummy seawater over as he did so, noting from the corner of his eye that the mistreated sailors rushed to the side to hoist more water with an unhealthy enthusiasm.

His cabin smelled of seaweed and boiled frogs, the legacy of too long plying his trade on the Northern Sea.  His desk was as he left it, covered with charts and maps, and the dividers were still standing where he’d plunged them, rageful and shaking, into the wooden planking that the desk was made from.  The wood hadn’t split, he noticed, and he supposed he ought to be grateful for that.  He ignored the desk for now, and opened a tiny wooden cabinet bolted to the wall of the cabinet at head height, a little way away from his bunk.  Inside was a bottle of rum, the good stuff, not the stuff in casks that the cook mixed with burned sugar and served of an evening, carefully supported in a wooden half-column to make sure that it could spill or shatter during bad weather.  He released the catch on the half-column and swung it open to free the bottle, noticing with little worsening of his mood that the level was below a quarter now.  He splashed two fingers’ worth into a dirty glass and sipped it.

The rum slipped down, smooth and sweet, high notes like the comforting arms of a familiar whore in the Unreal City.  Less seasoned drinkers would have coughed and spluttered, the back of their throats burning, but Phlebitis had been drinking for as long as he’d been sailing and had drunk much worse than this.

He put the bottle back and then hunched over the desk, staring at the map.  The hold was full of Sandibrack spices for trading with the Khanate of Rosia, which had all been fine until this morning when he’d idly cross-checked his map with an older one bought from an antiquarian in the Unreal City and discovered that the Khanate of Rosia was also known, in some circles, as the lands of the Broken-hearted.  Staring at the map didn’t change anything though: the Khanate was still in the same location on the coast, and he was less than half a day from it, and he still had a hold full of spices to sell.  Spices that though more fragrant than boiled frogs were still cheap on any of his usual trade routes.

“Land ahoy!” came the cry from outside, and Phlebitis slammed his glass down on the desk next to the dividers, unable to believe that they were already in sight of the cursed place.  Leaving the drink behind, he hurried outside to make the lookout’s life a misery.

His telescope confirmed what the lookout had called though, the first misty humps of land were just visible on the horizon, and the sky was clear and lucid as a waking dream.  There was no chance that the lookout was mistaken.

“Rowers!” came the call next, and Phlebitis had to adjust the telescope to focus on the boats.  They were longboats, a long way out from sure but being handled well through the only-slightly choppy waters.

“They’re mad, Cap’n,” said the sailor nearest him, barely peering up from what he was doing, his eyes checking Phlebitis’s face for anger.  There was plenty there.

“Not mad,” he said.  “Broken-hearted.  They’ve nothing left to live for, so they feel that they’ve nothing left to lose.  They’ll try and pirate us just for sake of bringing interest into their miserable little lives.”

“That can’t be right,” said the sailor shaking his head.  Little flecks of black spit flew from his lips; the juice from chewing tobacco.

“Clean that up,” said Phlebitis savagely, appreciating the vent for his anger, even though it was tiny.  “And first mate!  Get some more sail up.  We’re going to want all the speed we can get.”

“What are you going to do, Cap’n?”  The sailor was polishing hard, but seemingly uncowed by Phlebitis’s words.

“Cut their boats up with them still in them,” said Phlebitis.  There was a collective murmur around the ship as the crew disapproved.  “Don’t give me that.  There’s fighting fair and then there’s being a bloody idiot, and there’s seven boats out there with a bunch of moony dimwits in that think that giving their life for a… a cause is the noble and wonderful thing to do.  We’re taking out as many as we can without a fight, and then you can slaughter the rest.”  There was a slight lightening of the mood at the suggestion of slaughter, but the first mate still demurred.  Phlebitis snatched a mop from a nearby sailor and swung it at his head.

“Get the sail up!  I want to hear the crunch of those boats before I see people climbing up the sides.  If your all so bloody humanitarian all of a sudden then we’ll go back and pick everyone up, and you can cut their wretched throats on the deck.  Which you’ll then all clean again!”

As the crew hurried to carry out his orders at last Phlebitis returned to his cabin, remembering his drink.  He had an idea that whoever the Khan of Rosia was he must be as fed up with his miserable subjects as everyone else, and there was a chance that being able to announce that he’d reduced their number on the way in might just get him a better trading position.  As the ship bore down on the nearest longboat, and the screams of the broken-hearted lifted in unison, he allowed himself a grim smile and sipped his rum.

The Hyacinth girl

Phlebitis shivered even though he was stood in sunlight.  The skies had been clear for nearly two weeks now, and the wind had barely raised itself from its bed.  His ship sat in the harbour, effectively becalmed and he had wondered now for three days if he shouldn’t break out the oars and give the crew some exercise.  Even if it turned out that there was no wind on the open sea, by the time they were there the crew would have no choice but to either keep rowing until they found wind, or at the very least row back to the harbour.  If it were just a little cooler here he’d probably stay until the wind picked up again, but the heat was making him fretful, and the crew were having nightmares.  He couldn’t blame them, over the last six months they’d seen plenty of things to give people nightmares; he rather thought that a day’s rowing would probably tire them out to the point where they slept without dreams.  They might be grateful to him for that.

His thoughts turned for a moment to the great moths that the Eidolon of the Marches kept for the purpose of eating the dreams of its subjects, and he shivered again despite the heat.  Even if he were to capture one, he doubted that anyone would tolerate having it locked up on the ship for any time at all.  Some things were just evil in and of themselves.

There was a splash somewhere starboard of him and he pulled himself from his reverie and went to see who was swimming.  The harbour was normally far too busy and dangerous for that kind of activity, but with everyone becalmed several of the crews had taken to playing in the water.  As he strolled along the deck, he heard a cry go up from some of the men, and quickened his pace.

There in the water, being watched and laughed at, was a young girl with her arms full of flowers.  She was kicking her legs to stay afloat, and even managing a small amount of movement towards the dock wall, but she was refusing to let any of her flowers be tugged away by the chill green water.  Phlebitis sighed.

“Who pushed her in?” he asked.  “And who’s got the book on how long it’ll take her to drown?”  Scattered laughter among the men, but curiously no volunteers.  He hardened his expression.  “I’m thinking maybe we should row out to find the wind,” he said.  “If I don’t get an answer, I’ll be picking me some pacemakers for the rowing.”

“She’s not from our ship, Captain,” said someone in the crowd.  “No-one pushed her that we saw.”

Phlebitis frowned.  There were no other ships near enough for her to have jumped from one of them and reached where she was without being a strong swimmer, and with her arms full of flowers she wasn’t even a weak swimmer.  She was just a slow drowner.

“Lower a boat and bring her up,” he said.  “I want to know who she is.”

“Women are unlu–“ started the voice from the crowd, and Phlebitis pointed like a Titan exiling an impudent child.  “You, Jack,” he said.  “You’re leading the boat-crew.  Pick two others, and if that boat isn’t in the water in two minutes, you will be.”  He knew all the stories about women being unlucky on board a ship, but in his experience women were unlucky full stop.  Madame Sosotris came treacherously to mind, attempting to flirt with him despite being old enough to be his grandmother.  “Ninety seconds,” he said, feeling a touch cruel.

The boat rappelled down in short order, and he watched with slight satisfaction as they rowed out to the girl and then struggled to bring her aboard.  She refused to let go of even a single one of her flowers, and eventually they resorted to dragging her in by her heels and her head, though she squealed and writhed like a sea-snake when they did.  When they reached the ship, she remained in the boat while it was raised, and only when it was back on deck did she step demurely out and look around her.  The crew retreated a little, still superstitious, and Phlebitis stepped forward.

“Who are you, and what were you doing in the water?”

“I was swimming ashore,” she said, sounding defiant.  “Until you interfered.”

“Who are you?”

He got no answer, just a fiery stare.

“Fine,” he said.  “I’ll call you the Hyacinth girl since those are hyacinths.  How did you get into the water?”

“I stepped,” she said.  “I wasn’t supposed to end up in the water though.”

“Did you somehow miss the ship?” asked Phlebitis, and the crew laughed approvingly.  “It’s not that big, as they go.”

She flushed at being mocked, but thrust her elfin, pointy chin out.  “I was pushed off course,” she said.  “I normally arrive where I intend.”

“And you were intending to arrive on my ship?”

“Oh yes.  Madame Sosotris was most insistent that I come and visit you.”

Phlebitis’s heart sank.

There has been a problem

“You’ve seen Belladonna?”  Dr. Rosendieb leaned forward in his chair, steepling his hands in front of his lips.  His eyes were wide and he looked slightly maddened.  “Our Lady of…?”

“Seen her, spoken to her, and regretted it every time,” said Phlebitis.  “She’s marginally better company than Madame Sosotris, but most of the time you wouldn’t be able to tell.”

“But Belladonna isn’t real,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  “All of the best authors – Crackell, Swithburn, Malakine – agree on this.  She’s not real, she’s an archetype.  There’s an element of the sea god in her, a shadow of Poseidon on her soul maybe, but she’s just a figment of the imagination of sailors starved or dehydrated at sea.  A salt-dream, if you will.”

Phlebitis crossed his legs, resting one ankle on the other knee.  It wasn’t a comfortable position, but no position in this plastic chair bolted to the floor was comfortable.  He looked Dr. Rosendieb in the eye, wishing that the man would blink occasionally, and then wondering where his first mate was.  The Doctor had ordered him brought here twenty minutes ago.

“She’s not a dream of any kind,” he said.  “She’s not exactly real, I’ll give you that.  She manifests herself through other people, but you have no doubt when you’re in her presence.  She’s unmistakeable.  And anyway, you’re here asking me about Paysmort which most people think is a fiction, listening to me tell you about the Unreal City which parents tell their children to scare them before bedtime, and you’re complaining that Belladonna isn’t real?”

Dr. Rosendieb lowered his hands and had the grace to look a little discomforted.  His eyes stopped bulging so much, and he blinked much to Phlebitis’s relief.  Then he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, taking several seconds over it.  When he opened them and saw Phlebitis watching him, he shrugged.

“They felt gritty,” he said.  “Dry, somehow.  Yes, ok, I get that you’re telling me ten fantastic things before breakfast, but there are other sources that corroborate the Unreal City, the Lilies from the Dead Land and other things you’ve said.  Everyone says that Belladonna isn’t real.”

“Except the man who’s actually been to all those places,” said Phlebitis.  “That should count for something.”

“Maybe….”  It was clear that Dr. Rosendieb wasn’t about to give in easily.

“Where’s my first mate?”  Phlebitis decided that he’d waited long enough.  “I’ve told you quite a lot now, and I was promised the return of my first mate.”

“I don’t know.”  Dr. Rosendieb pushed a button on an intercom on his desk, a squat little box that could be locked inside the desk when he was interviewing dangerous patients.  The box squawked, and he spoke briefly to someone called Matthieu.  The box squawked in response, but Phlebitis couldn’t make out enough of the words to understand what was being said.  He avoided looking around the room, which seemed intended to make any madman’s condition worse, and to make any sane person think that they were actually mad.

“There seems to be a problem,” said Rosendieb, turning the intercom off.  “Would you like to come with me?”

“No,” said Phlebitis, “but I’d like staying here by myself less.  Where are we going?”

“To see your first mate,” said Rosendieb.  “It seems that he’s refusing to leave his room.”

The corridors of the Tiergarten were empty.  They were tiled with clean white tiles, and the walls were painted a bilious shade of green that was somehow both monotonous and calming.  After his initial repulsion for a corridor and a half Phlebitis found himself quite pleased to each new uniform corridor, and found himself getting annoyed when a door appeared in the middle of a wall, disrupting the clear, blank expanse of wall.  When they actually stopped in front of a door he felt irrationally angry for several seconds, and then he realised that Rosendieb was watching him.

“What is that?” he said, gesturing with both hands, trying to indicate everything that they’d just walked through.

“Institutional psychology,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  “It’s a subtle neurological effect that tries to get the patient to co-operate in their captivity.  If it’s bothering you, put your fingers in your ears.  There’s a very high-pitched tone transmitted through all of the corridors that increases suggestibility in listeners.  You get it at a lot of rallies, too.

Your first mate is in here.  Matthieu thinks that he might be better suited to staying here.”

Dr. Rosendieb unlocked a small viewing panel in the door, which hinged downwards.  Phlebitis stepped forwards and looked into a small cell with a jungle mural painted on all the walls that he could see.  The bed was a flat slab of metal attached by one long side to the wall.  There was a pillow and a blanket, and under the bed was a clay pot that he suspected was a chamber pot.  A pair of shoes had been stuffed under the pillow.  The room appeared empty.

Phlebitis stepped back and gestured to the viewport.  “I don’t see anyone in there,” he said.

“What?”  Dr. Rosendieb looked confused, and peered in.  “I’m sure he is AAARGGH!” he said, his words suddenly transforming into a scream.  He staggered back from the door, white-faced and one hand patting his chest.  Phlebitis saw a pair of wild eyes staring out of the hatch and then they moved backwards to reveal more of a face.  He waved once, and mimed putting his fingers in his ears.

“Are you alright, Doctor?” he asked.  Dr. Rosendieb shook his head first, then bent over slightly, putting his hands on his knees, and sucked in a huge breath.  As it came out again, he managed,

“Just.  That was a bit of a shock.”

“Yes,” agreed Phlebitis.  “Can I have my first mate back now?”

“He won’t… he won’t leave the cell,” said Rosendieb.

“Cell?”  Phlebitis’s voice was perfectly innocent, but conveyed an impression of cold, unbending steel beneath his words.

“Room,” said the doctor.  “Of course I meant room.  Look, he won’t come out.”

“May I try?”

Dr. Rosendieb handed over a bunch of keys, one key singled out, wordlessly, and Phlebitis opened the door.  His first mate, utterly naked, walked out with his fingers in his ears, and waggled his eyebrows at Phlebitis.

“I’m sure we’re free to leave, aren’t we, doctor?” said Phlebitis.

“Goddammit,” was all Rosendieb managed to spit out before they were out of earshot.

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.

Tiergarten

The colonnade was a long covered walkway supported by wooden pillars that had been carved with grinning, leering, demonic faces.  Many were poking their tongues out and were pop-eyed.  Teeth sprouted from parts of faces that should only have grown hair, eyes were extruded from ears on stalks, and bones were twisted and deformed as though the heads had been through strange and unusual pressures.  Some of the tongues were long, unnaturally so, and one or two stretched from one pillar to the next, forming slender railings that, if you looked closely, were textured as though covered in hair.

“They’re carved from life, you know,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  He gestured casually with one black-gloved hand at the pillars.  “Each face was the face of a real person in the Tiergarten in the late seventeen hundreds.”

“Tiergarten?  Zoo?” asked Phlebitis, staring at his feet.  The pillars made him feel queasy, almost sea-sick if it weren’t for the fact that he hadn’t felt sea-sick since he was fourteen, even when Poseidon was angry and the sea was throwing his ship around like a dog worrying a chew-toy.  He was trying hard not to look too closely at them, partly because he thought he might recognise some of them.

“Hah!”  The doctor’s laugh was short and sharp, almost humourless but redeemed at the end by the hint of dryness.  “Hah, yes, I suppose.  It was a name that would be considered unpolitisch these days I suppose.  That’s politically incorrect in the delightful euphemism of English, of course.”

“Really?  I thought that was a type of trumpet.”

“You’re thinking of the euphonium, of course,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  “I played it as a child in a marching band.  It was, despite the name, not a particularly pleasant instrument, too heavy for my little arms.  I much preferred the shawm.”

“That sounds lovely,” said Phlebitis, aware that the doctor had stopped walking and hoping that if he continued the doctor would resume suit.  Instead, Dr. Rosendieb caught his elbow and gestured at the pillars.

“The Tiergarten then was the name given to the Asylum,” he said.  “The inmates were… demented I suppose, although it is arguable that they resulted in that state because they were interned in the Tiergarten rather than being put there because they were already in that state.  There have been a small number of high-profile cases in the papers of late, which you must have seen.  Various records have been uncovered that suggest that certain high-ranking families were disposing of unwanted family members there.”

“Well,” said Phlebtits looking with distaste at a pillar.  “You can see how some of them might not have been the relative you wanted to introduce to people.”

“This one,” said Dr. Rosendieb, laying his hand on the forehead of a cephalitic-looking young man with a twisted jaw and flattened nose, “ended up looking like this only after five years in the Tiergarten.  When he was committed there he was sufficiently handsome that fights would start in bars because of other men’s wives looking at him for too long.

“I see,” said Phlebitis.  He shivered somewhat theatrically.  “It’s a little cool under here, doctor.”

“Of course, of course!  Let us continue, at the end there is sunlight.  It is a lovely day.  But tell me, my dear chap, what brings you here?  Why are you interested in the Tiergarten?  It was closed down over eighty years ago.”

“I think my first mate might be in there,” said Phlebitis, his eyes firmly fixed on the ground again.  “And I’d quite like him back.”

“No, you are quite mistaken,” said Dr. Rosendieb, his voice now quieter and more discreet.  “The Tiergarten was closed down and the patients remanded into other, better care.  Your first mate cannot be in there.  Perhaps you misunderstood the name of hospita–“

“The Tiergarten,” said Phlebitis.  “There has been no misunderstanding, just as it was not chance that caused me to seek you out, Doctor.  I had a little help, of course, but not too much.  Not so much that I couldn’t find you, I was warned about that too.”

Doctor Rosendieb stopped again and Phlebitis, cursing to himself, also stopped and looked back at him, trying to ignore the faces on the pillars.  He was sure he could hear insane laughter in the background.

“What are you talking about?”  The doctor’s words could have meant that he thought Phlebitis was gibbering, but his tone made it clear what he meant.

“Madame Sosotris sends her regards,” said Phlebitis.  “She still has her cold.”

“That woman always has a cold,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  “I suspect she has the archetype of colds and were we ever to cure her of it then no-one would ever get a cold again.”

“You should try,” said Phlebitis.

“Hah!  Is she still chasing every man she sees, though?”

Phlebitis nodded and shuddered at the same time.

“I may wait a little longer,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  “I see then, the clairvoyant has told you where the boundaries are then.  Did she also tell you that no-one leaves the Tiergarten until they die?  Hmm?”

“What she said was that you didn’t let any of them leave before they die,” said Phlebitis slowly.  He realised with horrible slowness that the pillar the doctor was standing closest to contained a carving of his first mate’s face second from the ground.

“That woman is too accurate for her own good,” said Dr. Rosendieb, a moue of distaste crossing his face.  “What are you looking at?”

“The face of the man I’ve come to buy from you,” said Phlebitis.  He pointed.

“Buy?”

Phlebitis nodded.

“That’s the first time anyone’s offered,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  “Perhaps I should listen to you.”

“Yes,” said Phlebitis.  “That would be advantageous to us both I hope.  Allow me to tell you what I will not sell you from my cargo first though.  You may have none of the lilacs from the dead land.”

“Lilacs from Paysmort?”  Dr. Rosendieb staggered, even though he’d been standing still a moment earlier.  “You found lilacs from Paysmort?”

“I found Paysmort,” said Phlebitis.  “And I’d really like to forget it now.”

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.

Withered stumps of time

Phlebitis, doomed sailor, sat in the waiting room and felt impatient.  Somewhere beyond the reception desk, through at least three doors and down corridors that were carpeted in beige and painted in blue and left the traveller with the feeling that they were the only thing left on earth, was Justice Aburton.  Who was keeping him waiting, in the appropriately named room, for reasons that Phlebitis suspected were entirely selfish.

On the wall, a clock made of toast ticked quietly, measuring out the seconds, minutes and hours with three hands, each looking as though it were ashamed of its companions and was reluctant to spend time in their company.  The hands tried to stay maximally separated, meaning that the clock currently claimed that the time was 30 seconds past ten past two, and had been just five minutes earlier twenty-five seconds past five past nine.  Phlebitis could understand the use of toast as the outer body of the clock as it was disposable, replaceable, and edible if the mood took you.  He spent months at a time on board his ship, hauling boiled frogs, or willow-drug statues, or little jade figurines that were probably cursed, and appreciated things that had a use but could also be eaten when the only alternative was boiled frog or the cabin boy.

The receptionist lifted her head from the magazine she was reading and smiled vacantly at Phlebitis.  Her pupils were dilated, and the whites of her eyes were mostly yellow.

“He will see you now,” she said, her voice dreamy and quiet.  “He says he will apologise for keeping you waiting if you can only show him how late he is.”  Phlebitis snorted at that; Justice Aburton was famous for making seemingly penitent offers if the injured party could only do three impossible things before breakfast.

“The usual way?” he asked, gesturing towards the door behind reception.

“Yes,” replied the receptionist, her focus sliding back towards her magazine.  “Please don’t kick the echidna on your way.”

I don’t even know what one of thsoe is, thought Phlebitis, but he nodded and smiled, and made his way to the door.

Beyond was the beige, earth-like carpet of the corridors, and the walls and ceiling were painted sky-blue, and Phlebitis remembered walking on a honey-coloured beach one morning just after sunrise, wondering how he was going to escape from the wretched desert island.  He shivered; he’d learned a lot about what he was capable of in those three weeks.

The corridors seemed to run on interminably, and there too few doors into rooms for the length of the corridors.  For them to be sensibly sized the rooms that were there would have to be the size of football pitches at least.  He walked down them, knowing the route by heart and turning at all the right places without having to count doors or paces, arriving at the door with the little brass nameplate on it: Justice Aburton.  He knocked.

“Come in,” came a heavy-sounding, tired voice.  “Come in, come in.  I haven’t got all day to wait while you figure out a door-handle.  Ah Phlebitis,” as Phlebitis opened the door, “come in.  I’ve been told I should be expecting you.”

“I made an appointment, yes,” said Phlebitis, closing the door behind him.  “I wasn’t expecting you to honour it though.”

“You killed two of my insurance inspectors last time you were here.”

“I left the Unreal City without anyone telling me that you had men hidden in my frog-boiling barrels.”

Neither man sounded angry, they were just stating facts.  For a moment there was silence between them, and then the Justice, a brown-haired man with a face as wrinkled as an old potato (and with little green patches), tapped a finger on some documents on his desk.

“It says here,” he said, tapping again for emphasis, “that you wish to leave harbour with some withered stumps of time.”

“I am trading in clocks and watches this time round,” said Phlebitis.  “The frog-farmers have finally developed astronomy and want access to timepieces to improve their harvest.”

“Of frogs?”

“So they tell me.”  Phlebitis had his own doubts that frogs and watches worked well together, but he couldn’t see how a clock would build a weapon, so he wasn’t worried about this new trade demand.

“It seems unlikely,” muttered the Justice.  He turned pages of a document, the papers held together by a clip in the corner, while Phlebitis looked at the three frames hanging on the wall behind him.  Two contained certificates, of Law and Philosophy, and the third contained a picture of a young man, who might just have been the Justice, proudly holding up a fish as long as his body.  Phlebitis, who knew how heavy fish were, thought the picture had been faked.

“But you have withered stumps of time,” said the Justice, pointing at a page.  Phlebitis leaned in a little to see it and realised that it was a copy of his manifest.  He read the line that the Justice was stabbing a finger at, and frowned.

“Those are integral sticks,” he said.  “I got them from Madame Genevieve, who’s government-sponsored and possibly has links to the City Directors–“  Justice Aburton glared at him so hard when he said that that he had to stop and swallow before continuing, ”– and she said nothing about there being export problems.”

“The integral sticks form a clock of sort,” said the Justice.  “There aren’t normally issues with them, but you’re taking them to a new destination, and we don’t really know what they want them for.”

“You just said yourself that clocks aren’t an issue going to frog-farmers!”  Phlebitis felt like he was being jerked around like a marionette by some petty mandarin.

“Most clocks don’t contain reservoirs of time!”

Justice Aburton was white faced save for two burning red spots in his cheeks, and he was half out of his seat, leaning forward on his knuckles on his desk.  His breath was short, panting.

“What?” Phlebitis felt a sudden chill run down his spine, and he struggled not to shiver.

“They are withered stumps of time,” said the Justice.  “As they grow they contain time within their cells, and then when they sporulate they die.  Their time is released into their spores, which grow rapidly into young plants, getting past the most dangerous part of their lives in the blink of an eye as far as the rest of the world is concerned.  But if the plants don’t sporulate for some reason, possibly because humans have intervened and prevented it, the time is never released and is held still in the dead and withered stumps when the plant dies from other means.  You can then crush the plant to release that time into one burst.”

“That sounds dangerous,” said Phlebitis.  “To everyone.”

“It is,” said the Justice.  “So I must abjure you from taking them as cargo.”

“Yes, of course,” said Phlebitis, suddenly placid and eager to help.  Although the Justice eyed him a little suspiciously, they finished the documentation in just fifteen minutes, and then Phlebitis was free to leave again.  He walked back through the corridors deep in thought, wondering how he could hide the fact that he’d already shipped four cargoes of the withered stumps of time to the frog-farmers.

Playing with a full deck

"Crabbe made them for me."  Madame Sostris sniffed to punctuate her sentence as she shuffled the cards.  They were a new deck; for the first time in a long time it looked like she might actually have a full deck in her hands.  Phlebitis, doomed sailor, tried to look interested.
"Crabbe?" he said, his tone weary and defeated.  Madame Sosotris appeared not to notice.
"He walks the banks of the river," she said.  "You've probably seen him, what with you being a sailor and all."
Phlebitis was indeed a sailor, and made his money by taking cargoes across the Sea of Demons.  One way with frogs that his crew boiled on the voyage, because the people they got the frogs from considered them sacred and would be angry if they knew what was done with the frogs, and the other way with fragile jade statuettes that possibly had curses attached to them.  The curses seemed to stay attached to whoever owned the statuette though, so apart from the odd pang of conscience, Phlebitis managed not to think about it.  Trying to take his ship up a river would be foolhardy.
"Yes," he said.  "Probably.  Does he fall in much?  Perhaps I've even rescued him?"
"I doubt it," said Madame Sosotris.  "His wife did though."
Phlebitis paused and thought about this for a few seconds before replying.  It was clear that this was a deliberate conversational gambit to keep him talking, because he knew that Madame Sostris had an unrequited crush on him, but he was also intrigued as to how she could think this was relevant.  Eventually curiosity won over caution.  "I hope she could swim," he said, going for a fairly neutral comment that didn't commit him to being interested in what she was saying.  Her hands shuffled the cards constantly.
"Yes, but she was run over by a Stinking Barge.  She went under the water and never came back up to the surface."
The Stinking Barges were the city's rubbish-collectors.  They were huge long boats that transported rubbish and sewage downstream to avoid polluting the water that the city depended on for its life.  A few miles outside the city were mountains of ordure and filth that sent out a stench that could make a man want to cut his own nose off his face.  At night, in hot weather, the gases they gave off burned with a pale, shaky blue light that the locals suspected of attracting demons from the sea, and in particularly hot summers they sometimes exploded.  At the base of these mountains men worked, their faces wrapped in cloths soaked in lye, shovelling the filth away into the river, polluting and poisoning the downstream water for thirty miles.  Phlebitis refused to hire men who'd worked on the Stinking Barges because they couldn't get the smell of the refuse off their skin.  He also refused to hire anyone who'd ever been a cultist, anyone who appeared to know what a City Throne was and people who wouldn't drink rum on religious grounds.  So far his crew had been loyal and stable, and he put this competely down to his hiring policies.
"That's sad," he said.  In his experience bodies always came back up unless they were eaten or weighted down first, and his money was on pockets full of rocks.
"Now he collects flotsam from the river," said Madame Sosotris, her hands almost hypnotic.  She was skilled at shuffling the cards, and though few of her clients realised it could prestidigitate any card in the deck to the top almost imperceptibly.  "He hopes to find her in the straw and frayed rope, that her bones might be waiting at the bottom in the mud for the right moment to return to him."
"What's he going to do with the bones when he finds them?"  Phlebitis had a sudden, nightmarish vision of the poor man wiring the bones together and keeping his skeletal wife in his home, presumably a two-room hovel.  Would her keep on display to visitors or in his bed?  Phlebitis shook his head to chase the image away.
"I've never asked," said Madame Sosotris.  "He made this deck of cards though, from things that the river gave up to him.  They're as close to the soul of the city as anything I've ever owned."  She coughed.  "Would you care to cut?"  She held the cards out, and Phlebitis scrutinised them, trying to see if they were bone.  They appeared to be paper, so he reached a hand out and picked a number of cards from the top.
Madame Sosotris bade him lay his cards down, to one side, and turned the top card of the rest of the deck over.
"The strangled Kitten," she said.  "Inverted."  Sure enough, a bedraggled, green-looking kitten took up most of the card, but in the background there was an arm and leg just visible, that might have been human.  The kitten's tongue was hanging out, and its eyes were greyed and hazed.  "Things that people throw away are important to you, and you collect them."
"I'm not sure–" began Phlebitis, but Madame Sosotris glared at him and tapped the card.
"In the background," she said, her finger tapping insistently, "you can see the arm and leg of Belladonna, Our Lady of the Rocks."
Phlebitis fell silent.  His future seemed entwined with Belladonna, who- or what-ever she might be.  He nodded at Madame Sostotris.
"Carry on then," he said.  "Tell me what the mad bitch wants from me now."

Dental Palmistry

Phlebitis paused at Madame Sosotris's door and re-read the sign on it.  At first glance he'd thought it said Oriental Palmistry but now that he was closer he could see that it in fact read Dental Palmistry.  He hesitated, his calloused fist a couple of centimetres from the door's surface, wondering what it could mean.  Indecision wracked him for several seconds; his visits to Madame Sosotris were not made for pleasure but out of painful necessity and the opportunity to not visit was tempting.
The door opened just as he was deciding that madness was as good a reason as any to not knock and not find out his future from her.  A small woman who barely came up to Phlebitis's waist walked into him and said, "Ow."
Phlebitis lowered his fist, seeing Madame Sosotris emerging from the gloom inside her house.  Her eyes seemed dilated and unfocused, and there was a trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth.
"I said, 'Ow'," said the small woman, looking up at Phlebitis.  He pulled his gaze from the slightly vampiric-appearing Madame Sosotris and looked down.
"Watch where you're going," he said.  "If you were a sailor you'd be over the side in no time, making friends with the sharks."
"Are you saying I'm clumsy?"  The small woman squeaked when she was excited or angry.
"No, I'm saying that the other guys would think it funny to trip you over and watch you fall over the side.  Don't worry.  You look like you'd float for quite a while."
There was a noise like a boiling kettle whistling, which Phlebitis slowly realised was the small woman.  She was so angry that her face had turned a deep purple and she was standing on the very tips of her toes.
"Are you going to move?" he said.  "Only I'm here to visit Madame Sosotris and you're rather in the way.  You seem to be blocking the entire doorway."
The small woman was actually vibrating with anger now and was having trouble staying on her toes as she did so.  Seeing an opportunity, Phlebitis stepped to the side and tugged gently on her shoulder as he did so.  A spasm of panic passed over her face as she lost her balance completely, her hands reflexively pushing forwards to break her fall and pushing her center of gravity further out of alignment, speeding her fall.  Phlebitis stepped over her and pushed the door shut behind him.
"I'b god a midderable code," said Madame Sosotris.
"You always do when I visit," said Phlebitis.  "It's almost like it's been written about somewhere and we just have to play our parts out over and over again."
Madame Sosotris gave him a penetrating look and produced a lace handkerchief from one of her sleeves.  As she lead the way into her drawing room, where she performed séances, table-turnings, read cards and ate dinner, she blew her nose.  It was a long, drawn-out, mournful honking process, at the end of which she dropped the sodden handkerchief into a bucket
"What's dental Palmistry then?" asked Phlebitis sitting down in the high-backed chair that didn't wobble.  Madame Sosotris glared at him but sat on the other one without saying anything.  She rocked slightly as she tried to make it balance.
"A mistake by the sign-writer," said Madame Sosotris.  Phlebitis could see that her eyes were red as though she'd been crying, and her wrinkles seemed to get deeper and dirtier everytime he came.  "Although, a couple of nights ago I did get a visit from a man who had mouths in his palms.  His future was very hard to read, but eventually I figured out that he'd misunderstood the sign and was hoping for Palmal Dentistry."
"Is there such a thing?"
"Ye–e–es," said Madame Sosotris trying not to look at the builder's wrap of hammers and chisels on the sideboard.  "How have you been though?  Surely another eight months alone at sea must give a man certain... urges?"  She winked.
Phlebitis tried to ignore his stomach doing somersaults and forced a smile.  "I'm not alone," he said.  "I'll just have the usual please.  The future for the next six months in strange images and dire pronouncements.
Madame Sosotris sighed softly, suspecting that Phlebitis was somehow mocking her, and leaned back in her chair.  For many clients she would draw out cards or a crystal ball and use them to distract the customer while she engaged the trance, but she'd been trying and failing to seduce Phlebitis for years now.  He could see it all done the real way, warts and everything.  Her eyes rolled up back in her head, revealing jaundiced whites, and her fingers tensed until her hands looked like claws.
"I see a marriage," she said, and Phlebitis snorted.
"You tried this two times ago," he said.  "You do not see me marrying you, you just wish you could."
"No," said Madame Sosotris, her voice now oddly thick.  "I see you marrying a shape, an intelligence that is not moulded by earth into a human form.  The ceremony is under a moon, and there are people and ... and un-people watching.  There are boiled frogs for the wedding feast.  There are... wait, the image is changing.  There is a chair, a golden chair with eyes in the back.  They are watching you, they are looking for you.  Then they cannot find you and the chair warps and twists.  It is angry.  There are more chairs, and they gather around a table to discuss you."
She sat forward, her wispy grey hair spilling over her eyes and gasped for breath.
"Great," said Phlebitis standing up.  "Married to something not human and it looks like one of the wedding gifts is going to be a carnivorous dining suite.  You've outdone yourself this time, Madame."
His money tinkled on the table.  "I should have asked for the Dental Palmistry," he said.  "That might have made more sense."
As the door closed behind him Madame Sosotris finally got air back into her tired, ancient lungs, and called out.  But Phlebitis was already gone.

The Piccadilly Throne

Bright lights cascaded around him and he instinctively put his hands over his head. Like silent fireworks, they exploded around him, each new burst of colour stabbing into his eyes like icicles. His head ached, his eyes hurt, and even thinking seemed painful now as though the synaptic pathways had been damaged and ruptured. He let loose a low moan, a primal connection to the pain he was feeling, and felt the ground meet his knees. Then he let himself fall over and put his hands up, trying pathetically to push the colours away.

*
A few feet away a tourist turned around, his camera held up obscuring his face. He saw the young man on the ground, writhing slowly, possibly having a seizure, and reached up to adjust the focus on his lens. The camera pointed at the young man like some strange mechanical proboscis and the tourist's finger began to depress the shutter release.

*
Something woke in the back of the young man's head. Another colour exploded, a shower of tiny green stars tasting of mint, but this time he didn't flinch.
Who are you? asked a voice, and he replied with his name, Nicholas. For a long moment he was surprised that he could remember it.
Why did you come here? asked the voice. Nicholas – Nick, he thought – paused, but the voice rifled through his mind and memories, sorting out relevant images and discarding ones it didn't like. For a moment there was a blur and a smeared sensation of pain, as though all his nerves were jangling in competition, then an image of his sister wearing her graduation gown. The focus on the image changed and he became aware of the background, of the caryatid columns behind her that had somehow all turned to face her and watch. Then the image dissolved in a blaze of static which in turn was replaced with an image of his father's funeral. A coffin was lowered into the grave and handfuls of mud were cast on top. But now he saw clearly; there were no mourner's near the grave, no-one throwing the mud save the earth itself. More images followed, all seemingly of one thing but always the background details resolved into something else, something bigger and potentially more interesting.
Finally the images ceased and his mind felt as though it had been raked through; his scalp blazed with criss-crossing lines of pain.
Thrones are not inherited, said the voice which was starting to sound disturbingly like his own. There was a hint of a tremble in it that hadn't been there at the start, something that reminded him of his own constant struggle to overcome his stutter.
Thrones are earned, said the voice. And you want the Piccadilly throne?
He tried to nod, but couldn't feel enough of his body to know if he succeeded. The voice seemed to understand anyway though.
So what did you bring to substantiate your claim? asked the voice, and again there was a sensation of violation, of things in his head being broken apart without his permission, and then there, front and centre of his mind was all that he'd brought with him.
The vial containing the blood of Anteros.

*
The shutter release depressed and the tourist took a picture of the young man, millions of photo-sensitive cells recording the instant of ascension.

*
Nick felt the vial shatter even though it was safely wrapped in cotton wool in a sturdy cardboard box. The voice tried to recoil, but as it had taken on his aspect, so now it was trapped inside his head. The colours around him exploded again and again, harder and brighter than before but to no avail; now they were contained within him, made part of him, gave strength to him.
He sat up, hearing the roar of traffic and feeling it, viscerally, through his skin. The buildings around him felt like part of him; he was sure that if he made the choice he could lift an arm vaster than any of his own limbs and shake the streets and buildings with his power. He had, without a doubt, claimed the Piccadilly Throne as his own.

*
The tourist turned away, the camera vanishing from his face and into a bag, the act of theft concealed from the only person it could matter to. And though Nick looked around him and saw the tourist, though there was a momentary flicker of recognition, it passed and the tourist faded away into the crowd with his prize.

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
Phlebitis stands before the London Bridge.
So many travel its ancient stones,
Their feet wearing paths to the City's many thrones,
And yet none of those who pass him by
Acknowledge him, and he needs not ask why
For all carry a stone chained 'round their neck
That describes the day they died.

Saint Mary Woolnoth still keeps the hours,
Her dead chimes ringing as mechanical and soulless
As all the folk that cross the bridge,
Save one.
Phlebitis, though he fears he may be undone
Has braved the fog and the treacherous way,
And now stands upon the London Bridge,
Amidst a crowd of the curious dead.

And there he spies one who once he knew,
An erstwhile member of his ship's poor crew.
"Haregebo!" he spits,
The very name a curse upon his lips.
A grey-skinned head must slow arise,
An unearthly light glowing in its eyes,
And Phlebitis, uncaring, continues on,
Upbraiding a man whose spirit's long gone.

"Haregebo, you rogue, you lying wretch!
Stand you alone amongst the men you were sent to fetch?
These corpses here were planted by you,
In the garden where things never grew.
The frost came and raked across the soil,
Wolves howled at the door,
And Famine stalked my porch for weeks.
You are as unfaithful a servant as I have ever had,
And to see you here dead; well I am glad."
But what Phlebitis cannot bring himself to say,
Is that even in death
A familiar face makes easier the way.

And so to the City, the Unreal City,
Phlebitis returns with heavy heart and leaden steps.
The City Directors still sit in state,
The City Directors still lie in wait,
And the Phoenician Sailor who can't know his fate,
Stands at last at the southern gate.

The nymphs have departed

The wind was cold but silent, tugging at Phlebitis's sleeves and the tails of his untucked shirt. It seemed to find all the gaps between his clothes, sliding icy fingers down his back and along the underside of his arms until goosebumps rose. He shivered, wishing that he'd not left his coat behind in the city. Even so, he thought, it was a small price to pay to have managed to leave unseen, undiscovered by the strange coterie of men who called themselves the City Directors. The wind tugged a little harder at his shirt and he tucked it in again, knowing that it would pull free when he started walking once more.
He stood on a gravelled path just inside a wood or forest; he'd not been able to see clearly from the path behind just how large the expanse of trees was. The leaves all around him were the colours of autumn and here and there were small drifts against the tree trunks; red and gold turning to a dead and dessicated brown. He'd been hoping that the trees would shield him somewhat from the wind, but it was contriving to blow past them and tickle him still.
He'd stopped because he'd found a small sign, a wooden rectangle neatly nailed to a tree. Carven into it, with something hot that had charred and blackened the wood, were the words "The nymphs have departed." As he looked at, reading and re-reading the words, he felt a sense of hopelessness settle on him like fog falling from the sky and hiding the road ahead. The last time he'd felt like this had been as he'd left Madame Sosotris with a future that he'd paid for and couldn't understand. Slowly, he was learning what it was that she'd told him only in the most oblique terms. And the nymphs, he knew, were somehow associated with Belladonna, our Lady of the Rocks.
Sighing in concert with the wind he started forward again, following the path with weary footsteps. He'd spent seven days in the city, only intending to be there a couple of hours but unable to find his way out. Streets that seemed straight turned subtly, winding back on themselves and leaving him where he'd started, confused and dizzy; while streets that clearly went nowhere somehow stretched out and branched when he walked along them, offering new places to be lost in and dark rooming houses where saturnine landladies tapped fat fingers against shiny timepieces with a look of menace in their eyes. At certain junctions he smelled the unforgettable stench of boiled frog, and at certain others there was a faint haze in the air that tingled against his skin. And then, finally, he'd come to a square where the City Directors sat together at a trestle table in the open air. A white tablecloth failed to cover the whole table, and set upon it were seven crystal glasses filled to a quivering brim with red wine. As he watched, lurking in a shadow in a doorway, they'd lifted their glasses and stood, chiming them together with a cheer and a toast to the end of summer.
He'd fled then, and been running ever since. A young boy with no teeth had taken pity on him and shown him a street that only appeared when you walked through a gate into a garden that then didn't exist. Looking at the urchin, seeing the desperation in his eyes, Phlebitis had slipped the coat from his back, checking the pockets first and taking the last of the jade statuettes from them, and given it to the lad. There was a flicker of gratitude and a shadow of shame on his face when he accepted. Phlebitis had barely taken another ten steps before the lad reappeared and handed him a verdigrised copped coin, worthless everywhere except inside the city. Only then did the streets straighten out and behave themselves, and as Phlebitis reached the southern gate at last he heard rumours from the travelling-folk that the City Directors were hunting for a sailor.
The wind, still silent, rose as he walked forward, listening always for the sound of water and a path back to the sea. It pulled his shirt loose, then blustered it around, lifting it up and trying to tear it from his skinny torso. Leaves rustled an angry sussuration, finally pulling free from the trees and swirling about him in an autumn blizzard. As he struggled onward, pushing against the wind into the leaf-storm, all he could think was how it seemed as though the air were bleeding.

Madame Sosotris

Madame Sosotris, famous clairvoyante, still had her bad cold. Phlebitis looked in dismay at her rheumy eyes, so watery he wondered if she sometimes thought she'd drowned, and shuddered to hear her ferocious sniff.
Every bloody time, he thought morosely. It doesn't matter what time of year I come, or how hot or cold it is, but that bloody woman always has that bloody cold. Does she keep it as some kind of bizarre pet? She looked up then, and he forced a smile onto his face.
"Madame Sosotris," he said almost pleasantly, "It is always a delight to see you again."
"I have a premonition coming on!" she said sharply, one wrinkled hand moving across her plucked-and-pencilled eyebrows. "You are going to ask me about... the future!"
"Does anyone ever ask you about anything else?"
"No," she said, dropping her hand and looking a little sad. "And it would be nice, if even only for once, someone asked me how I was, or if I'd been keeping well since the last time I saw them."
Phlebitis nodded. "I know what you mean," he said. "The crew on my ship all jump to carry out my orders quickly enough, but none of them ever asks me if they're doing it right, or if I'd like it done differently, or even how I'm feeling for that matter. Sometimes you wonder why you're doing it all."
"People can be so self-centred," said Madame Sosotris. "I don't know how you cope." She arranged her necklaces, many strands of gold, silver, electrum and uranium, across her wattled neck, and adjusted the neckline of her age-discoloured linen shirt, and then looked up again.
"Are you still here?" she said.
"Madame Sosotris," said Phlebitis, feeling in his pocket for the leather purse he'd put there before leaving his ship. "I have come to purchase your services."
"Ah well--"
"Your clairvoyant services," said Phlebitis quickly, stressing the second word. He shuddered again at the look of real disappointment on her face, and tried to push the images that it raised far from his mind.
"You'd better sit down then," she said, ungraciously. "And put that purse where I can see it."
She pulled a torn deck of cards from a pocket of her sea-green skirt and gestured casually to a stool on one side of a small circular table. A lace cloth, its pattern enhanced by moths, draped casually over the table, and she whisked it aside and threw it to the floor. Underneath the wood was polished with age and warped with neglect, and she sat on the other side of it in a high-backed chair with carven arms and legs that would have been impressive in another place. Phlebitis sat, noticing that the deck was barely half the size it had been the last time he'd been here, and waited.
She held the cards out to him, and he shuffled them, cutting them three times always with his left hand and handed them back to her, whereupon she dropped them on the floor, spilling tattered painted pasteboard everywhere.
"Butterfingers!" she swore, sweeping them together as best she could with a calloused bare foot. Phlebitis crouched down and gathered them up, handing them back to her in a higgledy-piggledy pile.
"Right," she said, turning the first one over. "This is the signifier, this is your card." The card she laid on the table, as close to the centre as the twisted wood would allow, was the Boiled Frog. It was a vivid green, its eyes closed and an oddly blissful smile on its all-too-human face, sitting in what appeared to be a copper boiling pan.
"The Boiled Frog," she said. "Sitting replete in a vat of briny water. I am sure that this will have some signficance to you."
Phlebitis ground his teeth and merely nodded.
"Your second card is... Belladonna, our Lady of the Rocks," she said, laying down half a card, torn lengthways so that only half of a woman's face and body remained. Phlebitis stared at it as Madame Sosotris laid it crosswise on the Boiled Frog, unable to grasp why its presence terrified him so much.
When he finally made himself look away from the cards, he found that Madame Sosotris was industriously sorting through the remaining deck of cards.
"I cannot find the Hanged Man," she said. "He was in here this morning, I know it. I had a man in who wanted to know his future, and bugger me backwards with a broomstick if all the cards I could pull weren't the Hanged Man."
Behind her, shadows formed and writhed, and a pair of yellow eyes observed her actions. They met Phlebitis's briefly and conveyed a warning of silence, and he knew without being told that somehow Madame Sosotris was cheating, and that there were forces afoot that disapproved.
"Oh well," she said flipping over another card. "Your third card ought to be the Hanged Man, because if there's anyone I'd like to see hanged it's you, but instead you're getting... oh." The card on the table was the Jade eyeball, depicted as having fallen from the head of a tentacled idol of a god. "I've not seen that one before," said Madame Sosotris. "Oh well, fear death and slaughter. That's always good advice."
Phlebitis pushed the purse across the table and Madame Sosotris made it disappear far more dextrously than she'd handled the cards, and he stood and left, forgetting to thank her for her time. As he walked away, unseen behind him and her, the shadows thickened and the yellow eyes blinked.

The Mermaid

"Phlebby!"
"Don't call me that."
"Phlebby, look what we caught in the net!"
Phlebitis looked over. His first and second mates, Christian and Haregebo, were sorting through the fishing net on the deck. Seaweed and clumps of sea-slime were scattered here and there, and Phlebitis allowed himself a small, tight smile knowing that neither man had realised that their next job was now going to be cleaning the deck down. A couple of silver fish wriggled, gasping their last in the bright, clean suffocating air. One was as long as his forearm, though he had no idea what species it was. A little further away were a handful of mackerel that he did recognise. The thought of kippers made him instantly hungry, and he wondered how hard it would be to smoke the fish at sea.
Then Haregebo shouted and jumped back, his foot landing on a patch of sea-slime and skidding out from underneath him, landing him heavily on his bum.
"Deck-cleaning," said Phlebitis instantly. "Clear those nets away, get the fish down to the cook, and get scrubbing. I want you to eat your dinner off this deck."
"But Boss!" Christian was pointing at something still caught in the net. "You have to see this."
Phlebitis sighed and locked the wheel in place, automatically glancing to the sky to check that no clouds were about to materialise overhead and ruin his day. He walked over to Christian and punched him hard on the shoulder.
"You call me Captain," he said. "Not Boss, and especially not Phlebby." He punched Christian in the same place again, slightly harder this time and was gratified to see a wince of pain. "Now, what's the fuss about that you're not doing as you're told?"
He looked down. Not so much wriggling as curling and uncurling slowly, still caught in the net, was something about as long as his arm. It had the tail and lower-half of a fish, shiny, iridescent scales that shimmered in the sunlight and looked somehow muscular and powerful. The upper-half though was almost human. The scales gave way to skin, fish turned into defined abdominal muscles and a thin, almost concave chest. The head was that of a screaming, red-faced baby, with straggly black wisps of hair clinging here and there. Clutched in one reddening and blistering fist was a short spear tipped with coral.
The thing opened its eyes and saw them, and its whole body seemed to contract. For a moment it was there, and then there was a beautiful woman, long blonde hair cascading down her shoulders and over her chest to protect her modesty. With a toss of her head and a twinkle in her eye she indicated that she wanted to go back into the sea. A breath of fresh salt air seemed alluring, and Christian moaned, reaching towards her, his eyes glazed over.
Phlebitis punched him again, and waved a hand in the mermaid's face, breaking the illusion and revealing the half-fish, half-fetus thing slowly dying on the deck of the ship.
"Boil it up with the frogs," he said. "And get this damn deck cleaned up!"

Reconsider Phlebitis

The statue of the long-dead king had three legs. Phlebitis looked at it and counted again, but it definitely had three legs. It towered above him, easily four times his height and carved, it seemed, from a single block of stone. Stone like no other stone he'd seen down here in these gloomy caves. On its head was a crown with jagged points, it wore a carven robe that drew back at the waist; there was a real leather belt wrapped around it there holding nothing up. And there were three legs. Still having trouble convincing himself of what he was seeing, Phlebitis climbed up on to the statue's dais and touched each leg in turn, checking that he wasn't getting confused with a stone scabbard, or that part of the statue had broken off leaving just a spare leg behind.
But no. This ancient king had had three legs, and had commanded enough respect from his craftsmen at least that they'd created this statue of him to celebrate the fact.
Phlebitis sighed and sat down on the dais, wedging the pitch-soaked torch into a convenient gap between two of the statue's three legs. It guttered briefly and then recovered, its smoky yellow flame making shadows dance and jump all around. It stank of pitch as well, but Phlebitis preferred this to the smell of boiled frogs he'd had to breathe during the sea-voyage.
The map was in his pocket -- the treasure map was in his pocket -- so he took it out again and smoothed it out. He'd found the cave system, found the waterfall in the first cave that was actually a true cataract and had nearly drowned him. He'd made it past that to the beach of golden sand that had turned out to be quicksand and had nearly drowned him again. Then there was the limestone cavern with the pools of milky water that he'd carefully avoided in case they tried to drown him too. Now, here, in this vast cavern with the three-legged king of some ancient people there was supposed to be treasure. And apart from the statue he'd found nothing. Not even an IOU.
Something sproinged above him and he got hurried to his feet, worrying that the statue was somehow going to spray water at him and attempt to drown him. Whoever had lived on this island had, in his opinion, had an unhealthy obsession with water. He looked at the statue, and saw that the cloak had somehow popped out slightly above the waist. Touching it he found that the stone was warm and deduced that the heat from the torch must have been the key to opening it. His heart now feeling as though it was in his mouth, he braced his feet, stretched up and gripped the cloak, and pulled.
The cloak moved only a few centimetres outwards but there was a loud grating sound, a gust of air like something very large had moved like a piston, and the ground in front of the dais sank gracefully into the ground. Water gurgled and hissed and bubbled over the descending land creating a large lake. Phlebitis's mouth turned up at the corners in a wry grin; exactly where everyone but the statue-molester would have been standing on a proper expedition was now a steep-sided lake of water that smelled rather putrid. These damn people were still trying to drown intruders.
There was a clunk and then a whooshing sound and another gust of air but in the other direction. In a spray of water that nearly extinguished his torch, a small island, barely big enough for a man to stand on, rose out of the lake. On it, though it was hard to tell in the gloom and with a sputtering torch, was a wooden crate of some kind.
The treasure.
Phlebitis looked at the lake and sighed, certain that the only way to get to the crate was to swim, and equally certain that there would be something living in the lake that would attempt to grab him and drown him.

Consider Phlebitis

Boiled frogs. More bloody boiled frogs.
Phlebitis hated boiled frogs more than he hated his name, and more than he hated the mother who had given him his name. Yet the boiled frogs were considered a delicacy in the Meliphasic isles and they traveled well, so every summer Phlebitis spent four months sailing back and forth across the stretch of water that was called the Meliphasic Sea on one side and Big-Wet-Salty on the other. He had to boil the frogs himself, en route, because the frog farmers believed that their frogs were sacred. He'd tried asking them to boil the frogs and they'd almost refused to trade with him any more. He'd not wanted to risk boiling the frogs on the beach in front of them after that.
So, he constructed large iron barrels that were raised slightly off the deck and the frogs were put into spring water in the barrels so that the frog farmers were happy they were being cared for and respected. If they'd got their language far enough to describe love they'd probably have insisted that Phlebitis love the frogs too. Once they'd set off, Phlebitis would clip his nose shut and light the fires beneath the barrels, and the frogs would boil from noon until sunset.
The Meliphasts would trade trinkets for the boiled frogs; trinkets that they either carved from local jade or amber, or sculpted from a kind of white rock they made beneath the banks of willow trees. The amber and jade fetched prices that would astonish (and enrage) the Meliphasts, especially considering they got barely a bucket of boiled frogs for each little objet d'art, but the sculpted white rock was in even higher demand. It dissolved easily in water and could be administered to cure fevers, mental weakness and a host of other things besides. And of course, the Meliphasts considered the white rock sacred, so they wouldn't increase production of it, explain how they produced it, or sell it in anything other than elaborate carvings that took months to create.
"Can't you carve me little discs, perhaps with a symbol engraved in it?" Phlebitis had asked. "The letter E, for example?"
The Meliphasts were slightly less angry than the frog farmers had been but Phlebitis had still twisted both his ankles trying to get away from them and back to the relative safety of his ship.
And so, he had a sea-voyage back to sensible, enlightened lands where he was trying to keep precious white-rock statues from dissolving in the wet atmosphere, waves and rain so that his profits didn't run into the sea and cure headaches in all the fish.
For now though, he was on his way to the Meliphasic isles and the stench of boiled frogs seemed to both pre- and suc-ceed his ship so that he was forever moving in a miasma of amphibian stink. The cook, a short ugly man whose mother had apparently called him Adonis in a show of irony so large that the Gods were still discussing who had priority for striking her down, had just told Phlebitis that they were out of meat, unless he counted the boiled frogs. Phlebitis, his head in his hands, had sent him to do just that while he tried to find out if they'd ever stocked a net or fishing lines on the boat. It was, he felt, an omen, a sign that this voyage was not going to be one of the wildly successful ones like the one where a giant squid had attacked them just hours out of harbour, and they'd pretty much just dragged it ashore losing only four men and a mast in the process.
Boiled frogs. He hated boiled frogs.