The visitor’s name was Rawra Chin, and she was a man.

  During the years of her service within that drifting environment, her perceptions of the world limited by her condition and by the virtual confinement that was its effective result, Som-Som had nonetheless contrived to reach a plateau of understanding, an internal vantage point overlooking the vast sphere of human activity from which the Broken Mask had excluded her. This perspective afforded her certain insights that were at once acute and peculiar.

  She understood, for example, that quite apart from being a limitless ocean of fortune, the world was also a churning maelstrom of sex. Establishments such as the House Without Clocks were islands within that current, where people were washed ashore by the tides of need and loneliness. Some would remain there forever, lodged upon the high-tide line. Most would be sucked away when the ebb of the waters came. Of these fragments reclaimed by the ocean, few would ever again reach land, and if they did, it would not be in those latitudes.

  Rawra Chin, it seemed, was an exception.

  Som-Som remembered her as a wide-boned and awkward boy of fourteen whose employment at the House Without Clocks had commenced when Som-Som was already in the fifth year of her service. Despite the flatness and breadth of her face and the clumsiness of her deportment, Rawra Chin had even then possessed some rare and indefinable essence of personality, animating the uneasy frame of the adolescent boy and lending her a beauty that was disturbing in its effect.

  Mistress Ouish, long skilled in detecting that pearl of the remarkable that is concealed within the oyster of the ordinary, had noticed Rawra Chin’s distinct yet elusive charm when she decided to employ the youth. So, too, did the clientele of the House Without Clocks, with numerous merchants, fishermen and soldiers proclaiming her their especial favourite, asking after her whenever they should chance to visit that establishment.

  The common bond shared by all those who admired this charisma within Rawra Chin was that none of them could precisely identify it. It remained a mystery, concealed somewhere within the oddly disparate components of her broad and starkly decorated face, hovering at some imaginary point of focus between her hasty pencil-line of a mouth and her widely spaced eyes, overwhelmingly tangible, eternally ungraspable.

  Som-Som, one of two people within the House who had come to know Rawra Chin closely, had always been inclined to the belief that her charms originated in the emotional depths of the nervous and hesitant lad herself, rather than in some fluke of physique or physiognomy.

  There was a restless melancholy that seemed to inform everything from the youth’s stance to the way she brushed her hair, so long and soft, so golden it was almost white. There was also the occasional icicle glitter of fear in those eyes, which had too great a distance between them for prettiness but just enough for beauty. These disparate threads of personality were woven into a design that gave the overwhelming impression of vulnerability. As to the precise nature of that vulnerability, Som-Som had no more idea than the most brief and casual of Rawra’s adoring customers.

  Often, she had come to sit and drink tea with Som-Som upon her balcony to pass the time between engagements, a diversion popular with many of the inhabitants of the House Without Clocks. Due to the singularity of Som-Som’s impairment, they could reveal their longings or resentments without fear. Rawra Chin would visit her during the long, dull mornings, seeming to delight in the thin floral infusions and the opportunity for one-sided conversation.

  It seemed to Som-Som that she had contributed little to these often intimate discussions, having no confidences that she was able to share. Since the side of her brain that governed speech had known nothing but darkness and silence for several years, the best that it could offer conversationally was a string of inappropriate and disconnected fragments, half-remembered impressions and anecdotes relating to the world that Som-Som had known before the Silencing.

  Confusing matters further, Som-Som’s verbal half could not hear and was forced to make interjections without knowing whether the other person had finished speaking. Thus, while Rawra Chin would be engaged in a vivid description of what she hoped to do once her employment at the House Without Clocks was ended, Som-Som would startle her by saying, ‘I remember that my mother was an unlikeable woman who rushed everywhere to get her life over with the sooner,’ or something equally obscure, followed by a long silence during which she would stare politely at Rawra Chin and sip her floral infusion through the left corner of her mouth.

  Though at first disoriented by these random pronunciations, Rawra Chin grew accustomed to them, waiting until Som-Som had finished her non sequitur before resuming. The continuing presence of these bizarre ejaculations did not seem to lessen Rawra Chin’s enjoyment of their conversational interludes. Som-Som supposed that her real contribution to these talks had been her simple presence.

  Her function was that of a receptacle for the aspirations and anxieties of others, but this never became oppressive. She enjoyed the exclusiveness of these glimpses into the way that ordinary life was conducted. The fact that people would relate to her things that went unvoiced even to their lovers gave Som-Som a perspective upon human nature more true and comprehensive than that enjoyed by many sages and philosophers.

  This gave her a measure of personal power, and she took pride in her ability to unravel the many and varied personas that presented themselves to her, laying bare the essential characteristics that were concealed beneath their façades of affectation and self-deception. Rawra Chin had been Som-Som’s only failure. Like everyone else, she had been unable to give a name to that rare and precious element upon which the bewilderingly attractive adolescent had founded her identity.

  On the other hand, Som-Som had been able to construct a relatively complete picture of Rawra Chin’s aversions and ambitions, however superficial these appeared without an understanding of her more fundamental motivations.

  Som-Som knew, for example, that Rawra Chin did not intend to make a lifetime’s vocation of prostitution. While she had heard similar avowals from most of the occupants of the House Without Clocks, Som-Som sensed a determination in Rawra Chin that was iron-hard, setting her appraisal of the future apart from the rather sad and much-thumbed fantasies of her fellows.

  Rawra Chin often assured Som-Som that she would one day be a great performer travelling the globe, transporting her art to the masses by way of a celebrated company of dramaticians such as the Torn-Stocking Troupe, or Dimuk Paparian’s Mnemonic Players. The less aesthetically demanding acts of pantomime that she was called upon to perform each day behind the pale yellow door of the House Without Clocks were merely a clumsy rehearsal for the innumerable thespian triumphs waiting somewhere in her future.

  The pale yellow door gave access to that part of the house that was given over to romantic pursuits of a more theatrical nature, its four floors each housing a single specialist in the erotic arts, linked by a polished wooden staircase that zigzagged up outside the house from courtyard level towards the grey slate incline of the roof.

  In the topmost chamber lived Mopetel, the corpse-mime. Beneath her lived Loba Pak, whose flesh had an unusual consistency that enabled her to adjust her features into the semblance of almost any woman between the ages of fourteen and seventy. Rawra Chin lived on the second floor, acting out mundane and unimaginative roles for her eager male clientele, but compensating for this with her charisma. On the first floor, immediately beyond the pale yellow door, there lived a brilliant and savagely passionate male actor named Foral Yatt, whose talent had been subverted into a plaything by the many female customers who enjoyed his company. It was with Foral Yatt that Rawra Chin had become amorously entangled.

  Foral Yatt was the subject of a great number of those balcony conversations, conducted through the motionless fog of warm vapour that hung above their tea bowls. While Rawra Chin spoke animatedly, Som-Som would sit and listen, breaking her silence intermittently to remark that she remembered the colour of a quilt her grandmother had made for her when she was an infant, or that a brother whose name she could no longer call to mind had once knocked over the pot-boil and badly scalded his legs.

  The heart of Rawra Chin’s anguish concerning Foral Yatt seemed to lie in her knowledge that if she were to achieve her ambition, she must leave the intense and darkly attractive young actor while she progressed to greater things. She confessed to Som-Som that though in private she and Foral Yatt would make their plans as if they would quit the House Without Clocks together, pursuing parallel careers in the outside world, Rawra Chin knew that this was a fiction.

  Despite the fact that Foral Yatt’s raw talent dwarfed her own to insignificance, he possessed neither the indefinable appeal of Rawra Chin nor the remorseless drive that would propel him through the pale yellow door and into the pitch and swell of that better life that lay beyond. Adding masochistically to her anguish, the wide-faced boy also felt troubled by the fact that she was using her nearness to Foral Yatt to study the finer points of his superior craft, storing each nuance of characterisation, each breathtakingly understated gesture, until that point in her career-to-come when she might use them. Having purged herself for the moment of her moral burden, Rawra Chin would sit and stare miserably at Som-Som, waiting for some acknowledgement of her dilemma. Long moments would pass, measured in whatever units were appropriate within the House Without Clocks, until finally Som-Som would smile and say, ‘It was raining on the afternoon that I almost choked on a pebble,’ or ‘Her name was either Mur or Mar, and I think that she was my sister,’ after which Rawra Chin would finish her tea and leave, feeling obscurely contented.

  Despite her tormented writhings, Rawra Chin had eventually summoned sufficient strength of character – or sufficient callousness – to inform Foral Yatt that she would be leaving him, as she had been offered a place in a small but critically acclaimed touring company by a customer who happened to be the merchant without whose continuing financial support the company could not survive.

  Som-Som could still remember the ugly playlet that the two estranged lovers had performed in the courtyard of the House on the morning that Rawra Chin was to leave. The players paced across the flat black stage – seemingly oblivious to the audience above that watched with boredom or amusement from their balconies – as their angry accusals and sullen denials rang from the curving courtyard walls.

  Foral Yatt pathetically followed Rawra Chin around the courtyard, almost staggering beneath the weight of the dreadful, unexpected betrayal. He was a tall, lean man with beautiful arms, his dark and deep-set eyes brimming with tears as he trailed behind Rawra Chin, an unwanted satellite still trapped within her orbit by the irresistible gravity of her mystique. The fact that he kept his skull shaven to a close stubble to facilitate the numerous changes of wig required by his customers only added to his air of desolation.

  Rawra Chin remained a measured number of paces in front of him, occasionally directing some pained but dignified comment over her shoulder while he ranted, incoherent with hurt, raging and confused. Som-Som suspected that she was in some oblique way enjoying this abuse from her former lover, that she accepted his tirade as an inverted tribute to her mesmeric influence over him.

  Eventually, when desperation had driven Foral Yatt beyond all considerations of dignity, he threatened to kill himself. Pulling something from the small pouch that he wore at his belt, the distraught young actor held it aloft so that it glittered in the morning sunlight.

  It was a miniature human skull, fashioned from green glass and holding no more than a mouthful of the clear, liquorice-scented liquid that it had been designed to contain. No more than a mouthful was required. These suicidal trinkets could be purchased quite openly, and it was impossible to determine how many of Liavek’s more pessimistically inclined citizens carried one of the death’s-heads in anticipation of that day when life was no longer endurable.

  His voice ragged with emotion, Foral Yatt swore that he would not be deserted in so casual a manner. He promised to end his life if Rawra Chin did not pick up her baggage and carry it back through the pale yellow door to their chambers. They stared at each other, and Som-Som had thought that she perceived a flicker of uncertainty dance across the widely spaced eyes of Rawra Chin as they moved from Foral Yatt’s face to the skull-shaped bottle in his hand. The instant seemed to inflate into a massive balloon of silence, punctured by the sudden rattle of hooves and wheels from beyond the courtyard’s arched entrance, signalling the arrival of the carriage that was to take Rawra Chin to join her theatre troupe. She darted one last glance at Foral Yatt and then, picking up her baggage, turned and walked out through the archway.

  Foral Yatt stood transfixed at the centre of the huge black disc, still with one flawless arm raised, clutching its cold green fistful of oblivion. He stared blankly at the archway as if expecting her to reappear and tell him it was all some ill-considered hoax. From beyond the encircling walls there came the jingle of reins, followed by a slow clattering and the creaking of wood and leather as the carriage moved away down the winding streets of the City of Luck. After a pause, during which it seemed that he would never move again, the actor slowly and falteringly lowered his arm.

  Three floors above him, realising the abandoned lover wouldn’t kill himself, one of the denizens of the House Without Clocks pursed her shiny black lips discontentedly and made a clucking sound before retiring to her quarters. Hearing the sound, Foral Yatt tilted back his grey-stubbled skull and stared up at the watchers in surprise, as if previously unaware of their scrutiny. His eyes were full of miserable incomprehension, and it was a relief to Som-Som when he lowered them to the black tiles at his feet before walking slowly across the courtyard towards the pale yellow door, the glass skull now quite forgotten in his hand.

  Scarcely a handful of months elapsed before news began to work its way back to the House Without Clocks of Rawra Chin’s dizzying success. It seemed that her elusive charisma was able to captivate audiences as easily as it had once enthralled her individual customers. Her performance as the tragic and infertile Queen Gorda in Mossoc’s The Crib was already the talk of Liavek’s intelligentsia, and rumor had it that a special performance for His Scarlet Eminence was being considered.

  Such talk was generally kept from the inconsolable Foral Yatt, but within the year Rawra Chin’s fame had spread to the point where the embittered young actor was as aware of it as anyone. He seemed to take the news of her stellar ascent with less resentment than might have been anticipated, once the initial despair of separation had lifted from him. Indeed, save for a coldness that would creep into his eyes at the mention of her name, Foral Yatt made much of his indifference to his former lover’s fortunes. He never spoke of her, and those less insightful than Som-Som might have supposed that he had forgotten her altogether.

  Now, five years later, she had returned.

  In the courtyard beneath Som-Som’s balcony, Rawra Chin turned to face the pale yellow door, a resigned slump in her shoulders. She lifted one hand to knock, and there was a sudden dazzling scintillation that seemed to play about her fingers. It took Som-Som a moment to realise that Rawra Chin had chips of some reflective substance pasted to her nails. The afternoon was hushed, as if holding its breath while it listened, and the sound of Rawra Chin’s white knuckles upon the pale yellow wood was disproportionately loud.

  Seated high above on her balcony, Som-Som found that she wanted desperately to call out, to warn Rawra Chin that it was a mistake to return to this place, that she should leave immediately. Silence, massive and absolute, surrounded her and would not permit her to make the smallest sound. She was embedded in silence, a tiny bubble of consciousness within an infinity of solid rock, mute and grey and endless. She struggled against it, willing her tongue to shape the vital words of warning, knowing as she did so that it was hopeless.

  Below, someone unlocked the pale yellow door from inside and it creaked once, musically, as it opened. It was too late.

  Som-Som’s balcony was situated upon the third floor, the adjacent living area being one of four contained behind the violet door at the extreme left of the House Without Clocks’ concave front. Thus, as she sat upon her balcony and gazed down at Rawra Chin, she could not see who had opened the door. She supposed that it was Foral Yatt.

  There was a surprisingly subdued exchange of words, following which the crimson-wrapped figure of the celebrated performer stepped inside the house and beyond Som-Som’s vision. The pale yellow door closed with a sound like something sucking its teeth.

  After that, there was only silence. Som-Som remained seated upon her balcony staring down at the pale yellow door with mute anguish in her one visible eye while the sky gradually darkened behind her. Finally, when the moment of her urgent need for a voice was long past, she spoke.

  ‘I ran as fast as I could, but when I reached my mother’s house, the bird was already dead.’

  Since the closing of the yellow door, no word had been spoken in the rooms that lay immediately behind it. Foral Yatt sat in a hard wooden chair beside the open fire, amber light flickering across one side of his lean face. Rawra Chin stood by the window, her vivid crimson darkening to a dull, scab-like burgundy against the failing light outside. Uncertain how best to gauge the distance that had arisen between them, she watched the play of firelight upon the velvet of his shaven skull until the absence of conversation was more than she could endure.

  ‘I brought you a gift.’