“I would enter the Exiguous Hagioscopic Chamber,” I announced to the scholiast. I gazed up at it fearlessly.
The ocular sensors extruded. Squinting, I could see the array of lenses inside the metal nipples circle and reverse as they sought to focus upon me, the pinpoint of light that revealed the periscopic aperture within the mechanism. The phallic tongue unfolded, flecking the air with metallic dust.
“The chamber has been engaged for private excruciations, ” the hollow voice intoned.
“I am an expected guest of the Curator Roland Nopcsa and Whitlock High Brazil.” I glanced at Anku. The scholiast’s sensors shifted to regard him. The voices inside the chamber grew louder, as though arguing, then silent. “This animal is a gift for Roland Nopcsa.”
Loud whirring from the scholiast. The cool air pouring from the air vents made me shiver, so I moved from the wall. The sensors followed me.
“Whitlock High Brazil and Roland Nopcsa have requested no assistance for the evening’s excruciations. The chamber may not be engaged.”
“I do not wish to engage the chamber!” I said. “I bring a gift for Roland Nop—”
“The chamber may not be engaged.”
“But this—”
The scholiast’s jeweled navel suddenly dilated. I shut up and backed across the hall and to one side, kicking at Anku to alert him. From the scholiast shot a needle that sprayed the air with a fine mist. Anku whined. I covered my mouth with my sleeve to avoid breathing the sedative essence.
The needle retracted. The painted breasts swiveled. The phallus furled back into the cold steel mouth. Before the sensors could focus upon me again I slammed against the door. It swung inward as easily as the postern to my room at the House Miramar. I felt Anku’s soft fur against my legs as he slipped beside me and the door shut behind us.
8. The traces of the existence of a body
“MAGDALENE,” SOMEONE WHISPERED. THE sound was magnified in the bell of a vast chamber that seemed to encompass all of High Brazil. I stood surrounded by shafts of violently tinted light: orange, violet, turquoise, burgundy columns rising to explode against a ceiling of brilliant stained glass. The far end of the chamber appeared to open above the Great Hall, where masquers reeled and shouted in eerie silence, heedless of us watching from the seraglio above. I gathered that this chamber was located directly behind the wall of prismatic glass that overlooked the east end of the Great Hall. I shut my eyes to blot out the sense of vertiginous space in a room that I knew could not possibly be this huge. When I looked up again it was into the face of Roland Nopcsa regarding me with muzzy brown eyes.
“Raphael?” he said thickly. “‘Sat you?” He pawed at the air. I stepped backward, lost my balance, and fell onto a pallet heaped with satin coverlets and the remnants of a feathered costume.
“Raphael!” exclaimed the voice I’d first heard upon entering. “Magdalene save me, I’m glad you’re here! He’s a madman.” From the tangle of bolsters and sheets a figure half-rose to greet me. Slender, with skin so translucent it shimmered with the pulse of blood in his veins, blue-green and violet. The marks of bruising kisses lingered upon his shoulders and throat.
“Oh, Whitlock!” Ignoring Roland, I crawled to where, Whitlock hugged a pillow to his frail chest. “What happened to you?”
He dropped the pillow and wrapped his arms around me, cool and insubstantial as a wraith’s. He blinked often as he spoke, those weak lovely eyes always seeming to focus on someone else, slightly to my left.
“He’s shattered my poor splendid wings,” he said, laughing. Dabs of silver arched across each cheekbone where bijoux tears had been artfully wrung. I kissed him, recalling our pairing at Winterlong: my auburn locks braided with his shining hair. He looked no less lovely now for his bruises and disarray, only achingly fragile.
“S’ dog?” rumbled Roland, staggering as he waved his arms toward Anku. “S’ dog, Whitlock.”
Anku had trotted to the far end of the chamber where the floor seemed to open onto the Great Hall below. Glitter and dying moths beat the air relentlessly, always just inches out of reach of the jackal’s quicksilver jaws. The figure of Anku himself blurred as he leaped close to the edge of the room, then grew sharper and clearer as he fell back to the floor.
“Obfuscating oriels,” Whitlock explained. “I hate them, they give me vertigo. But he likes to think that all of them ”—he indicated the silent crowd beneath us—“are watching.”
“Raphael,” Roland repeated. He plopped onto a pile of cushions, splaying one heavy thigh across a crimson comforter. “How’d you get in?”
“Oh, I sent for him, Roland,” said Whitlock, kicking a pillow so that it sailed and landed with a thump against Roland’s leg. “We make such a striking couple. I finally had to dose his wine,” he added aside to me. Ruby flashed to ivory as he rolled his eyes. “I never had your constitution, Raphael. Curators exhaust me. What’s it like living with them?”
“Awful,” I said. “I’ve left.”
“Good for you.” He smiled and kissed my cheek. Dear Whitlock! “You know, Lemuel paired me with Aspasia Persia for The Glorious—she’s lovely, reminded me of Ketura from your House, that red hair and those legs!—and I kept thinking of last Winterlong when …”
He chattered on, while beside him I sat nearly stupefied with—
What?
Relief? Indecision? Fear?
All of these; and a twisted desire for Roland, who now stood staring down at the masque. His hands rested against some invisible barrier at the room’s edge, and he mumbled to himself while Anku lay watchfully a few feet away. And I felt desire for the sweet and faithless Whitlock beside me, giggling as he recounted his own exploits at recent castigations, punctuating each anecdote with quick childish kisses and toying with the cosmetic cylinders and ribbons and gleaming candicaine straws strewn on the floor about him.
“… and, Raphael, tonight Iontha High Brazil said she heard congreves launched across the river, and Gamaliel and Swan Illyria saw lazars gathering near the Tiger!” He paused, and plucked a cherry from a silver serving platter.
“Lazars,” I repeated. I took a deep breath. “I saw lazars—”
“You, cousin!”
“Yes—by the Tiger.” I continued to stare at Roland. I wondered whether he was too drunk to identify me later if I simply left now; or if I should confront him with my dismissal.
“But you were alone! How did you escape?” Whitlock grabbed my hand.
“Oh—” I stammered, quickly but gently moving my hand from his grasp. When I glanced down I saw the sagittal gleaming very faintly. I slipped that hand into the folds of my tunic, with the other pointed toward the far end of the room where Anku lay. “The jackal—”
“But lazars—!”
I turned and laid a finger to his lips.
“Whitlock,” I said. “When did Roland first engage you?”
“Nopcsa? Months and months ago. Right after you went to the Museum.” He gazed up at me, cabochon eyes glinting with surprise. Then he clapped both hands to his small mouth and glanced from myself to Roland and back again.
“Raphael! I’m so sorry—I had no idea—you didn’t know!” There was the faintest note of glee in his apology.
“No, I did not, ” I said. Suddenly all of my anger and hurt and spite flooded me again. I glared at my former Patron, naked save for a loose undershift of white cambric now stained with wine, peering at Whitlock and myself. “I am not accustomed to such treatment.”
“Ah, Raphael.” A twinge of malice quivered in Whitlock’s smile. He tipped his head toward Roland, then reached for an atomizing tube. There was a soft hiss staining the air with sandalwood. “You are too proud, you know … All of us are accustomed to ‘such treatment’—only Raphael Miramar ever thought he was above it. To dare live among the Curators! Didn’t you know he would hate you for it?”