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“No, that’s Aldebaran. I dressed him like that, in skirts and flounces, for the first several years to hide him from his father, in case he came looking. Until he was seven. He turned willful then, nasty creature, and wouldn’t wear his proper clothes. I had to give in, he walked out in the street buck naked. But I didn’t give in easy. Three days he went bare before the priest came and said this could not be.”
“How did Aldebaran come to have an ofrworld education?”
She ignored the question. “I wanted a daughter, of course. Girls are so much more tractable. A girl would not have run off to find her father, the way he did.” Abruptly she commanded, “Put your hand under my bed. Pull out what you find there.”
He reached into the vaginal shadows under the bedskirts, drew out a shallow trunk carved with half-human figures. Mother Gregorian rolled over, grunting with effort, to look. “Under that green silk — there ought to be a brown package. Yes. That. Unwrap it.”
It was alarmingly easy to obey this monster, she was so sure of her commands. He held a battered notebook in his hand, a faded scrawl of sigils ru
“That belonged to Aldebaran. He lost it just before he ran away.” Her smile hinted at stories untold. “Take it with you, perhaps it’ll tell you something.” She closed her eyes, let her face relax into a flaccid mask of pain. She was panting now, steadily as a dog in summer, but quieter.
“You’ve been very helpful,” the bureaucrat said cautiously. He could sense the old woman about to name a price for information given.
“He thought he was so clever. He thought that if he went far away enough, he could escape me. He thought he could escape me!” Her eyes flickered open, glittered venomously. “When you find him, give him a message for me. Tell him that no matter how far you go, in miles or learning or time, you ca
He could think of nothing to say. So instead, he bowed politely and turned to leave.
“Oh, and you needn’t bother about the broken saucer. We have more, and it was an incomplete set anyway.”
He smiled. “That’s a good trick. How did you know that?”
She reached a hand up in the air, a gesture that managed to be both languid and laborious, like a drowning woman reaching for the water’s surface, and tripped a switch beam. The lights went out, and the room was plunged in darkness, save for a snowflake of light on the ceiling. It was a rosette of small circles, like a festival cookie. He looked down, and there was a smaller rosette on the floor, and brighter.
Her voice came out of the darkness, gloating. “The hot-air register. When it’s open, I can hear every word in the room below. I heard the saucer crack, and Esme scuttling out into the pantry and back.” She laughed at him. “Too straightforward for you, eh? You offworlders think yourselves so sophisticated. Something as simple as our ventilation system is beyond you.”
In the room below, he met a dignified-looking man with a dark mustache, holding a glass of the daughters’ thin beer. His hair was slicked down, Piedmont style. “You must be the appraiser,” the bureaucrat said.
They shook hands. “Yes, I come here every few weeks, to draw up another schedule of prices. A year ago, these pieces were worth a fortune; now, shipping costs have gone up and they’re not so valuable. Most will have to be left behind.” The appraiser held up a battered sheaf of papers and sighed piously. “These are the figures, anyone can check them. There’s no profit in it for me. The only reason I agree to come back so often is that there are so many beautiful things here, it would be a pity if they were lost to the tides.”
Linogre and Ambrym stood nearby, and Esme out of sight. Yet he could feel her watchful from some dim recess, all tiny black beadglass eyes and quivering whiskers.
“Esme,” Linogre said. “Please show mother’s visitor to the door. We must see to her wardrobe.”
The elder two sisters swept away in the wake of the appraiser. As soon as they were gone, Esme emerged from shadow. The bureaucrat glanced up at the air register and impulsively took her hand. He felt the sudden, urgent need to get her out of this poisonous atmosphere. To save something from disaster. “Listen to me: Your mother has told me she’s cut you out of her will,” he said. “She’s not willing you a thing. Leave this house tonight, child. Right now. I’ll help carry your things. There’s nothing here for you.”
The girl’s dusty-glass eyes took on a dull sheen of malice. “I want to see her die!” she spat. “She can keep her money, I just want to see her dead and never coming back!”
It was night when he left the house, but Caliban was high in the sky and full, Ariel low but gibbous and bright, so the river road was well-lit, and the trees had ghostly pairs of shadows arcing away from each other. The tree stars had come down from their high perches and, faintly luminous, were rooting for mites in the humus. The walk was peaceful, and the bureaucrat used it to sort out his impressions. It seemed to him that the house he’d just left was frozen in time. When the tides come, everything will change. Only some have rendered themselves beyond change, and caught by the sun, will be revealed as lifeless stone.
It wouldn’t hurt to find out who the magician’s father was. Even given that he’d doubtless broken tariff when he brought his money planetside, he must’ve been a rich and quite likely influential man. He thought again of the three sisters, unaged and unsexed by greed and inertia.
I could almost like Gregorian, he said to himself, just for escaping that woman.
At last he asked his briefcase, “Well — what is it?”
“Judging by the sketches and diagrams scattered within, it’s a magical diary — the account book an aspiring sorcerer maintains to keep track of his spiritual progress. It’s written in a floating cypher, using obsolete alchemical symbols, the sort of thing an extremely bright adolescent might invent.”
“Decode it, then.1’
“Very well.” The briefcase thought for a moment, and then said, “The first entry begins: I killed a dog today.”
4. Sibyls in Stone
The famous witch Madame Campaspe, who claimed she had transcended humanity and thus had no need to die and who always carried with her a tame water rat, was nowhere to be found. Some said she had retired to the Piedmont, where she owned a walled estate in the Iron Lake district under an assumed name, others that she had been drowned by a horrified lover, that her clothes had been discovered by the river and taken to the local church to be burned. Nobody expected her back.
Hammers sang. Workmen were tearing walls from houses and stringing waxflowers over the streets of Rose Hall. The little river community was half-dismantled, the houses at its core reduced to roofs and floors so that they might serve as dance pavilions. They looked like so many skeletons, flanked by sad piles of rubble.
The bureaucrat and Chu stood before what was once Madame Campaspe’s house. The high roof, ironically like a squared-off version of a witch’s peaked cap, and the corner posts were all that remained intact. The interior had been filled with scrap lumber and other inflammables. “What a mess,” the bureaucrat said disgustedly of the heaped and broken wardrobes and divans, stained blankets, clotted masses of paper, and filthy brown rugs, the flotsam and jetsam of a hastily abandoned life. A broken-backed stuffed angel shark leered from the bottom. The house reeked of white kerosene.
“It’ll make a nice bonfire, anyway,” Chu said. She stepped back as a canvas-gloved woman threw in more planks. “Hey — lady! Yeah, you. You from around here?”
The woman brushed back her short black hair with her wrist, not bothering to doff her work glove. “I was born here.” Her eyes were green, cool, skeptical. “What do you want to know?”