Foral Yatt slowly turned his head towards her, away from the fire, so that the shadow slid across his face, and his expression was no longer visible. Rawra Chin immersed one chalk-white hand in the black fur of the bag she carried, from which it emerged holding a small copper ball between the mirror-tipped fingers. She held it out to him and, after a moment, he took it.

  ‘What is it?’

  She had forgotten how captivating his voice was, dry and deep and hungry, quite unlike her own. Calm and evenly modulated, there remained a sense of something watchful and carnivorous lurking just beyond it, pacing quietly behind the accents. Rawra Chin licked her lips.

  ‘It’s a toy … a toy of the intellect. I’m told that it’s very relaxing. Many of the busiest merchants I know find that it calms them immeasurably after the bustle of commerce.’

  Foral Yatt turned the smooth copper sphere between his fingers so that it gleamed red in the glow of the fire. ‘What’s so special about it?’

  Rawra Chin took a step away from the window, her first tentative movement towards him since entering the House, and then paused. She let her black fur bag drop with a soft thud, like the corpse of an enormous spider, on to the empty seat of the room’s other chair. A certain establishing of territory accompanied the gesture, and Rawra Chin hoped she had not overstepped in her eagerness. Foral Yatt’s face was still in shadow, but he did not seem to react adversely to the wedge-end represented by the bag dozing before the hearth. Encouraged by this lack of obvious rebuke, Rawra Chin smiled, albeit nervously, as she replied to him.

  ‘There might be a lizard asleep inside the ball, or there might not. That’s the puzzle.’

  His silence seemed to invite elaboration.

  ‘The story goes that there exists a lizard capable of hibernating for years or even centuries without food or air or moisture, slowing its vital processes so that a dozen winters might pass between each beat of its heart. I am told that it is a very small creature, no bigger than the top joint of my thumb when it is curled up.

  ‘The people who make these ornaments allegedly place one of the sleeping reptiles inside each ball before sealing it. If you look closely, you can see that there’s a seam around the middle.’

  Foral Yatt declined to do so, remaining seated, his back towards the fire, holding the ball in his right hand and turning it so that molten highlights rolled across its surface. Though an impenetrable shadow still concealed his expression, Rawra Chin sensed that the quality of his silence had changed. She felt whatever slight advantage she had gained begin to slip away. Why wouldn’t he speak? Unable to keep the edge of unease from her voice, she resumed her monologue.

  ‘You can’t open it, and, and you have to think about whether there really is a lizard inside it or not. It’s to do with how we perceive the world around us, and when you think about it, you start to see that it doesn’t matter if there’s a lizard inside there or not, and then you can think about what’s real and what isn’t real, and …’

  Her voice trailed off, as if suddenly aware of its own incoherence.

  ‘… and it’s said to be very relaxing,’ she concluded lamely, after a flat, dismal pause.

  ‘Why did you come back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know.’

  It was as if her words had hit a mirror, rebounding back at her full of new meanings and implications, warped out of true by some fluke of the glass. Rawra Chin’s fragile composure began to crumble before that flat, disinterested voice.

  ‘I … I don’t mean that I don’t know. I just mean …’ She looked down at her pale, well-kept hands to find that she was wringing them together. They looked like crabs mating after having been kept in the dark for too long. ‘I mean that there was no real reason for me to come back here. My work, my career, it’s all too perfect. I have a lot of money. I have friends. I’ve just completed my role as Bromar’s eldest daughter in The Lucksmith and everybody will talk about me for months. For a while, I do not have to work. I can do whatever I want. I didn’t have to come back here.’

  Foral Yatt remained silent, the firelight behind his shaven head edging his skull with a trim of blurred phosphorescence as it shone through the stubble. The copper ball turned between his fingers, a miniature planet rolling from day into night.

  ‘It’s just that … this place, this house, it has something. There’s something inside this house, and it’s something true. It isn’t a good thing. It’s just a true thing, and I don’t know what the name of it is, and I don’t even like it, but I know that it’s true and I know that it’s here and I felt, I don’t know, I felt that I had to come back and look at it. It’s like …’

  Rawra Chin’s hands seemed to pluck and squeeze the air before her, as if the words she required were concealed beneath its skin, and by probing she could guess at their shape. Separated now, the blanched crustacean lovers lay upon their backs, feebly waving their legs as they expired upon some unseen shoreline.

  ‘It’s like an accident I saw … a farmer, crushed beneath his cart. He was alive, but his ribs were broken and sticking through his side. I didn’t know what they were at first, because it was all such a mess. There were a lot of people gathered ’round, but nobody could move the cart without hurting him even more than he was hurt already.

  ‘It was summer, and there were a lot of flies. I remember him screaming and shouting for somebody to beat the flies away, and an old woman went out and did that for him, but until then nobody had moved, not until he screamed at them. It was horrible. I walked by as fast as I could because he was suffering and there was nothing anybody could do, except for the old woman who was beating the flies away with her apron.

  ‘But I went back.

  ‘I stopped just a little way down the road, and I went back. I couldn’t help it. It was just so real and so painful, that man, lying there under that terrible weight and screaming for his wife, his children; it was so real that it just cut through everything else in the world, all the things that my luck and my money have built up around me, and I knew that it meant something, and I went back there and I watched him drown on his own blood while the old woman told him not to worry, that his wife and children would be there soon.

  ‘And that’s why I came back to the House Without Clocks.’

  There was a long hyphen of silence. A copper world rotated between the fingers of a faceless and unanswering god.

  ‘And I still love you.’

  Someone rapped twice upon the pale yellow door. For a moment there was no movement within the room save for the illusion of motion engendered by the firelight. Then Foral Yatt rose from the hard wooden chair, still with the fire at his back and his face in eclipse. Crossing the room, ducking beneath the blackened beams that supported the low ceiling, he passed close enough for her to raise her hand and brush his arm, so that it would be thought an accident of passage. But she didn’t.

  Foral Yatt opened the door.

  The figure on the other side of the threshold was perhaps forty years of age, a large and strong-boned woman with raw cheeks who wore a single garment, a tent of smoky grey fur. It covered the top of her head, with a hole cut away to reveal the face, and then its striking, minimal lines dropped away to the floor. There was no opening in the fur through which she might extend her hands, which suggested to Rawra Chin that the woman must have servants to do everything for her, the feeding to her of meals not excluded. Even in the world that Rawra Chin had known over the previous five years, such arrogantly flaunted wealth was impressive.

  As the inopportune visitor tilted back her head to speak, the flickering yellow light caught her face, and Rawra Chin noticed that the woman had an amber blemish, unpleasantly furry-looking, which covered almost her entire left cheek. The woman had obviously attempted to conceal it beneath a thick coat of white powder, with little success. The discoloration remained visible through the make-up as if it were a paper-thin flatfish that swam through her subcutaneous tissue, its dark shape discernible just below the clouded surface of her face.

  When she spoke, her voice was distressingly loud, her tone strident and somehow abusive.

  ‘Foral Yatt. Dear Foral Yatt, how long? How long has it been since I saw you last?’ Foral Yatt’s reply was professionally polite, coolly inoffensive, and yet delivered at such volume that Rawra Chin winced involuntarily, even though she stood several paces behind him. It came to her suddenly that the fur-draped woman must suffer from some defect of hearing.

  ‘It has been two days since you were here, Donna Blerot. I have missed you.’

  A wave of hotness washed over Rawra Chin, cooling almost instantly to a leaden ingot in her stomach. Foral Yatt had a customer, and she must leave him to his labours. Her disappointment was so big she could not admit that it was hers. She resolved to leave immediately, hoping to keep it one step behind her until she could reach her own rooms in a lodging house on the far side of the City of Luck. Once she was safely behind closed doors she would let it have its way with her, and then there would be tears. She was reaching for her bag, sleeping there in its chair, when Foral Yatt spoke again.

  ‘However, it is not convenient that I should see you tonight. A member of my family has come to visit.’ Here he gestured vaguely over his shoulder towards the stunned Rawra Chin. ‘And I regret that you and I must let our yearnings simmer untended for one more day. Please be patient, Donna Blerot. When finally we meet together, you know that our union will be the sweeter for this postponement.’ Donna Blerot turned her head and gazed past Foral Yatt at the slim, crimson-swathed figure that stood in the flamelit room, almost like a flame herself within the gaudy wrappings. The dame’s eyes were frozen and merciless, boring into Rawra Chin for long instants before she turned them once more towards Foral Yatt, her expression softening.

  ‘This is too bad, Foral Yatt. Simply too bad. But I shall forgive you. How could I ever do otherwise?’

  She smiled, her teeth yellow and her lips too wide.

  ‘Until tomorrow then?’

  ‘Until tomorrow, dearest Donna Blerot.’

  The woman turned from the door and Rawra Chin heard the slow, derisive clapping of her wooden sandals as she walked back across the black courtyard. Foral Yatt closed the door, sliding the bolt across. The sound of the bolt’s passage, metal against metal, was electrifying in its implications, and Rawra Chin shuddered in resonance. The actor turned away from the closed portal and stared at her, his face brazen in the fire-glow. His face seemed less chiselled and gaunt than she had remembered it. His eyes, conversely, were so riveting and intense that she knew her recollection had not done them justice. Across a chamber so filled with swaying clots of darkness that it seemed like a ballroom for shadows, they stared at each other. Neither spoke.

  He walked towards her, pausing only to set the small copper globe upon the polished white wood of his tabletop before continuing. His pace was so deliberate that Rawra Chin felt sure he must be aware of the tension that this deliciously prolonged approach kindled within her. Unable to meet his gaze, she lowered her lashes so that the quivering light of the room became streaks of incoherent brilliance. Her breathing grew shallow, and she trembled.

  The warm, dry smell of his skin enveloped her. She knew that he was standing just before her, no more than a forearm’s length away. Then he touched her face. The shock of physical contact almost caused her to jerk her head back, but she controlled the impulse. Her heart rang like an anvil as his fingernail traced the line of her jaw.

  The ingenious arrangement of bandages that was Rawra Chin’s costume had a single fastening, concealed behind a triangular black gem in a filigree surround that she wore upon the right side of her throat. The pin pricked her neck as Foral Yatt withdrew it from the blood-red windings, but even this seemed almost unbearably pleasant to her in that aching, oversensitised state. She lifted her gaze and his eyes swallowed her whole. With his hands moving in languid, confident circles, he began to unwind the long band of brightly dyed gauze, starting from her head and spiralling downward.

  Free of the confining wrap, her thick hair tumbled down upon her white shoulders. She gasped and shook her head from side to side, but it was not an indication of denial. A wave of thrilling coolness crept down her body as progressively more of her skin was exposed to the drafts of the room. It moved across her belly and down to the angular and jutting hips, over the shaven pudenda and past the jumping, half-erect penis. It continued down her thighs and on towards the rush carpeting, where the unravelled wrappings gathered in a widening red puddle about her feet, as if her naked flesh bled from a dozen imperceptible wounds.

  He nodded his head to her once, still without a sound, and she knelt upon the floor at his feet, her knees pressed against the tangle of fallen bandages so that they would leave a faint lattice of impressions upon her skin. Closing her eyes, she allowed her head to sink forward until it came to rest against the seat of the chair in which she had placed her bag an eternity before. Its luscious dark fur and the hard wood were equally cool against her burning cheek.

  Behind her, a single brief chime, Foral Yatt’s buckle dropped unceremoniously to the rush matting. Upon an impulse, she allowed her eyes to open, their gaze drifting across the chamber, drinking in the moment in all its infinitesimal detail. On the other side of the room, the copper ball rested upon the tabletop where Foral Yatt had placed it. It was like the freshly gouged eye of a brazen speaking-head, such as certain personages in Wizard’s Row were reputed to possess.

  It stared back at Rawra Chin, glittering suggestively, and all that came to pass behind the pale yellow door was reflected impartially, in perfect miniature, upon the convex surface of that lifeless and unblinking orb.

  Later, lying flat upon her stomach, with their mingled sweat drying in the hollow of her back, Rawra Chin allowed her awareness to float tethered upon the margins of wakefulness while Foral Yatt squatted naked by the fire, adding fresh coals to the fading redness that had burned low during the preceding hour. The air was heavy with the intoxicating bouquet of semen, and each of her muscles slumped in blissful exhaustion.

  Still, something nagged at her, even in the sublime depths of her sated torpor. There was yet something unresolved between the two of them, no matter how eloquent their lovemaking may have seemed. It was barely a real thing at all, more a disquieting absence than an intrusive presence, and she might have ignored it. This, however, proved more than she could bear. It was a cavity within her that must be filled before she could be complete. Though reluctant to send ripples through the calm afterglow of their congress, eventually she found her voice.

  ‘Do you still love me?’ This was followed, after a hesitant beat, by, ‘Despite what I did to you?’

  She turned her head so that the right side of her face rested against the interwoven rushes. He crouched before the fire with his back towards her as he carefully arranged cold black nuggets atop the bright embers. His skin glistened, a yellow smear of watercolour highlight running down the side towards the fire. She followed the line of his vertebrae with her eyes to the plumb-line-straight crease that bisected the hard buttocks, adoring him. He did not turn to her as he replied.

  ‘Is there a lizard asleep within the ball?’

  Taking another piece of coal in a hand already blackened by dust, Foral Yatt placed a capstone atop the dark pyramid in the scaled-down hell of the fireplace. Nothing more was said behind the pale yellow door that night.

  The following morning, Rawra Chin visited Som-Som and took tea with her, as if the five-year hiatus in their ritual had never existed. She recounted a string of anecdotes from her career, then paused to sip her infusion while Som-Som informed her that her mother had once closed a door, and that it had once been dark, and that once she had been unable to stop coughing. Rawra Chin’s smooth re-entry into the bizarre rhythms of their conversation did much to eradicate any distance between the two that might have flourished in their half decade of separation. Even so, it was not until the interlude approached its conclusion that the performer felt comfortable enough to broach the subject of her resumed relationship with Foral Yatt.

  ‘I won’t be staying here forever, of course. In another month or so, I must begin to consider my next role, and it would be impossible to do that here. But this time, when I leave, I believe I shall take him with me. I’m rich enough to keep him until he finds work of his own, and it seems ridiculous that someone with his talent should be wasting it upon …’

  Her hands performed a curious movement that was part theatrical gesture and part genuine involuntary revulsion. It was as if they were retching with violent spasms that shuddered out from the slender throat of the wrist and on towards her fingertips, where ten mirrors shivered in the cold morning sunlight.

  ‘… upon ugly, sick old women like that terrible Donna Blerot. He deserves so much better. I could look after him, I could find work for him, and then perhaps neither of us would need to come back to this place ever again, not even just to look at it. Don’t you think that would be a good idea?’

  Som-Som sipped her floral infusion through the corner of her mouth and said nothing.

  ‘I think we can do it. I think that we can love each other and be together without anything going wrong between us. It was only my ambition that pushed us apart before, and I’ve fulfilled that now. Things can be just as they were, only somewhere else, in a better place than this.’

  Rawra Chin looked so thoughtful, sucking the dazzling tip of her right index finger so that it made a small and liquid popping sound when she pulled it from between her lips. She did this twice. Behind her, birds wheeled above the diverse skyline of Liavek. When she spoke again, her voice had assumed a puzzled tone.

  ‘Of course, he has changed. I suppose we’ve both changed. He’s very quiet now, and very … very commanding. Yes, that’s it exactly. Very commanding.

  ‘It’s wonderful, I’m not complaining at all. After all, those are his chambers and he’s being kind enough to let me stay there for the next couple of months so that I don’t need to keep up my rooms at the lodging house.