‘I don’t mind doing whatever he wants. I think, you know, I think it’s good for me in a way, good for how I am as a person. Since my career broke out of the egg, nobody has told me what to do. I think that’s spoiled me. It doesn’t feel right, somehow. Not when people just defer to me all the time. I think I need someone to—’

  ‘A sticky head looked out from between the cow’s legs, and I screamed.’

  Som-Som’s interjection was so startling that even Rawra Chin, accustomed to such utterances, was momentarily unnerved. Blinking, she waited to see if the half-masked woman intended to make any further comment before continuing. ‘I’m having my clothes sent over from the lodging house. I have so many beautiful things, it hardly seems fair. Foral Yatt says that he will store my wardrobe, but he does not want me to wear the more exotic creations while I am with him. He prefers plainer things.’

  Rawra Chin glanced down at the clothing she was dressed in. She wore a simple blouse of grey cotton and a skirt of similar material. Her white-gold hair swung about her narrow shoulders and sparked life from the dusk-coloured fabric with its contrast. It lay against her blouse like wan torchlight reflected on wet, grey cobbles. Evidently satisfied with the novel restraint and subtlety of her costume, she raised her lashes and smiled across the tea bowls at Som-Som.

  ‘But enough of my affairs and vanities. Which side of luck have you yourself walked these five years gone?’

  The divided face stared back at her with its one live eye. No one spoke. Over the City of Luck, great scavenger birds dipped and shrieked, so that it sounded as if babies had been torn up from the earth and dragged wailing into the oppressive dome of the sky.

  On the fifth day after her arrival, Rawra Chin appeared upon Som-Som’s balcony wearing breeches of leather with a stout length of rope looped about the waist as a belt. She did not refer to this reversal of her sartorial tendencies, but after that Som-Som never again saw her in a skirt and supposed that this was due to Foral Yatt’s austere influence. The performer seemed also to forgo the application of face paint and the wearing of all jewellery save for a simple band of unadorned iron, which she wore upon the smallest finger of her left hand. The ten slivers of mirror were long since vanished.

  Two weeks after her return, Foral Yatt persuaded Rawra Chin to shave off her hair.

  Sitting with Som-Som the following morning, she would break off from her trail of conversation every few seconds and run one incredulous palm back from her temple and across the stubble. Her talk had a forced gaiety, and there was something nervous and darting within her eyes. Som-Som realised with some surprise that Rawra Chin no longer seemed attractive. It was as if her charisma had leaked out of her, or been sheared away as ruthlessly as the spun sunlight of her hair.

  ‘I think, I think I look better like this, don’t you?’

  Som-Som said nothing.

  ‘I mean to say that it, well, it makes such a change. And I think it will do my hair a service, after it grows back. The colourings I use had made it so brittle, a new head of hair will be such a relief. And of course, Foral Yatt likes it this way.’

  The casual delivery of this last phrase was belied by an evasive glance and an air of restless self-consciousness.

  ‘I mean, I understand how it must look, how it must look to people who don’t know him, but …’ One hand rasped lightly across her skull in a single, backward motion. ‘… But the way that I dress is important to him; the way I look, it’s so important to him, the way that I look when we make love.’

  Som-Som cleared her throat and told the performer the name of the street where she had lived before the night when her mother had led her out by the hand, through the noise and towards the Silence. Rawra Chin continued her monologue without acknowledging the interjection, her eyes hollow and sleepless with their gaze still fixed on the grubby tiles.

  ‘He’s changed, you see. He wants different things now. And, and I don’t mind. I love him. I don’t mind what he wants me to do. I even like it; sometimes I like it for myself and not just for him. But the fact, the fact that I like it, that’s something that frightens me. Not frightens me, really, but it’s as if everything is changing and moving under my feet, and as if I’m changing too, and I feel as if I should be frightened, but I’m not. It’s so easy, just slipping into it. It’s so easy just to let it happen, and I don’t mind. I love him and I don’t mind.’

  From the dilated pupil of the courtyard, someone called Rawra Chin’s name. Som-Som turned her gaze to the flagstones below, puzzling for a moment over the stranger who stood there before she was able to reconcile the familiar face with the unplaceable gait and manner, finally resolving these disparate impressions into Foral Yatt.

  Rawra Chin had spoken the truth. Foral Yatt had changed.

  Standing beneath them, looking up with one hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun, the bar of shadow cast across his features did not conceal the change that had come over them. The actor seemed less lean. Som-Som supposed that this was in part due to Rawra Chin’s wealth supplementing his income and his diet.

  His clothing, too, was noticeably different from the sombre and functional raiment that he had appeared to favour. Foral Yatt wore a long tunic, its blue so deep and vibrant that it bordered upon iridescence. A wide orange sash was wound twice about his waist, and the billowing pants that he wore beneath were orange also, a fragile, mottled orange, almost white in places. His feet were naked and exquisite, much smaller than Som-Som would have expected them to be. Something glittered, a sparkling fog about the toes.

  ‘Rawra Chin? Our meal is almost prepared.’

  His voice had altered, too: lighter, a patina of melody imposed upon its assured tones. And there was something else, something which above all was responsible for the striking change in his aspect, something so obvious that it escaped Som-Som completely. Rawra Chin murmured an apology as she made ready to leave, not bothering to tie up any loose ends remaining from her conversation with Som-Som. As was her custom, she reached out and squeezed Som-Som’s wrist to let the half of her brain that was cut off from sight or sound know that her visitor was leaving. In response, the half-masked woman lifted her gaze until it met Rawra Chin’s. When she spoke, her voice was filled with a sadness that seemed to have no bearing upon the content of her speech.

  ‘I do not think that the food was so good, back then.’

  Rawra Chin’s lips twitched once, a helpless little facial shrug, and then she turned and ran down the narrow wooden stairs that led to the courtyard below, where Foral Yatt awaited her.

  She joined him there and they exchanged a snatch of dialogue that was too low for Som-Som to hear before making their way towards the pale yellow door. Som-Som craned her neck to watch them go. Just before they passed from her sight, she identified the single glaring quirk that had so transformed the young actor.

  Running along his brow in an uneven snowline, curling around the topmost rim of his ears, Foral Yatt’s hair was starting to grow out.

  On the fifteenth night after her arrival at the House Without Clocks, something occurred behind the pale yellow door that gave Rawra Chin her first glimpse into the darkness that had been waiting for her for five long years. She went indoors to share her evening repast with Foral Yatt just as the sun was butchering the western horizon, and before morning, she had seen the abyss. She was not to comprehend the immensity of the hungry void beneath her for some three days further, but that first shattering look was the beginning. It was as if she dropped a pebble into the chasm that awaited her and listened for the splash. When three days later the splash had still not come, she knew that the blackness was bottomless, and that there was no hope.

  On the earlier evening, however, when she walked through the pale yellow door with the sunset at her back and the rich aroma of the pot-boil hanging before her, this shadow was yet to fall. It seemed to her that all her anxieties were containable.

  They ate their meal quickly, the two of them facing each other across the blanched wood of the table, and then Rawra Chin cleared away what debris there was while Foral Yatt retired to his bedchamber to prepare for the business of the evening ahead. Rawra Chin, scraping an obstinate scab of dried legume from the lip of his bowl, wondered idly what she would find to amuse herself tonight during the hours when her presence behind the pale yellow door was not required.

  On previous nights she had walked down to the harbour. Watching the moon’s reflection in the iron-green water, she had tried to wring some cooling trickle of romance from her situation.

  With an abbreviated cry of pain and surprise, she looked down to discover that she had split her nail upon the nub of dried and hardened food. Her nails were a ruin, she thought, all of them bitten and uneven, many of them split or with raw pink about the quick. She wondered how long it would take for them to regain their former elegance, and as she did so, she ran her other hand back over her razed scalp without being aware of the gesture.

  Foral Yatt called to her from the bedchamber and she went to see what he wanted, wiping her hands upon the coarse grey fabric of her shirt as she trudged across the rush matting.

  Stepping through the door of the chamber, she was puzzled to discover that Foral Yatt had retired to bed, rather than preparing for the evening’s duties. He lay upon the rough cotton of the sheets with his eyes half closed and his hands resting limp upon the patches of dyed sackcloth that formed the counterpane.

  ‘I cannot work this evening. I am ill.’

  Rawra Chin’s brow knotted into a frown. He did not look discomforted nor was his voice unsteady or less masterful, and yet he said that he was sick. It was as if he meant her to understand that this was a lie but to respond as if it were irrefutable truth. Searching within herself, she discovered, with only the briefest pang of surprise or disappointment, that she did not mind. She accommodated the fiction, because that was the easiest thing to do.

  ‘But what of Mistress Ouish? There have been other nights lately when you have not worked. A room not in use is a drain on her resources. Others have been dismissed for as much.’

  Mistress Ouish, though now blind and close to death, was still the dominating presence at the House Without Clocks. Even Rawra Chin, who had not been employed at that establishment for five years, regarded the old woman with alloyed respect and fear. From his blatantly spurious sickbed, Foral Yatt spoke again.

  ‘You are right. If no work is done here tonight, it will be the worse for me.’

  He raised his lowered lids and stared directly into Rawra Chin’s eyes. He smiled, knowing that to smile altered nothing between them. The masquerade was accepted by mutual consent. His voice dry and measured, he continued.

  ‘That is why you must do my work for me.’

  It was as if there were some sudden dysfunction within Rawra Chin’s mind that rendered her unable to glean any sense from Foral Yatt’s words. ‘That’, ‘must’, ‘do’, ‘work’ – all of these sounded alien, so that she was almost convinced that the actor had coined them upon the spot. She ran the sentence through her head again and again. ‘That is why you must do my work for me.’ ‘That is why you must do my work for me.’ What did it mean?

  And then, recovering from the shock of the utterance, she understood.

  She shook her head and in her horror still had room to be surprised by the absence of soft hair swinging against her neck. Barely audibly, she said, ‘No.’ But it didn’t mean ‘I will not’. It meant ‘Please don’t’.

  But he did.

  Donna Blerot took her hand (his hand?) and pulled it up beneath the fur tent so that it came to rest upon the dampness between the disfigured woman’s thick legs. Beneath her single outer garment, the dame was naked, flesh damp and solid like dough.

  Later, burying herself in the woman’s body as Donna Blerot sprawled back across the table, gasping noiselessly like a fish upon a slab, Rawra Chin looked down at her and saw the abyss. The bell of grey fur had ridden up to reveal the body beneath, so that it now covered Donna Blerot’s face, birthmark and all. For a lurching instant, the woman looked like a drowned thing washed up on the coastline of the Sea of Luck, a sheet already covering the puffy, fish-eaten face.

  Fighting nausea, Rawra Chin shifted her glance so that it came to rest on her own body, luminous with sweat, plunging mechanically forward, jerking back, thrusting and withdrawing like a gauntlet-manikin worked by the hand of another. She regarded the jutting hardness that grew from her own loins and wondered how it was that she could be doing this thing. She felt no desire, no lust for the deaf woman and her bucking, heaving desperation. She felt nothing but shame and horror. How could her body sustain such ardour in the face of that abomination?

  Later still, Donna Blerot kissed Rawra Chin and left, closing the pale yellow door behind her. The performer sat naked in one of the wooden chairs, elbows resting upon the tabletop before her, face concealed behind her hands as if behind the slammed doors of a church. The memory of the matron’s kiss was still thick about her lips. It had seemed as if a fat and bitter mollusc were attempting to crawl into her mouth, leaving its glistening saliva trail across her chin. This imagery slithered out of her mind and down her throat, until it dropped into her stomach. There was a faint, warning spasm and Rawra Chin tortured herself with an image of their hastily devoured meal from earlier that evening. The gelatinous, half-melted skirt of fat trailing from the grey-pink fingers of meat …

  Struggling silently to keep from vomiting, she did not hear Foral Yatt leave his bedchamber until he was standing just beside her.

  ‘There. Was that so bad?’

  Startled by his voice, Rawra Chin moved one hand so that only half of her face remained concealed, and opened her eyes. She was looking down at the floor, and she could see nothing of Foral Yatt above the knee without moving her head, which seemed an unendurable prospect.

  His feet were as white as the flesh of almonds.

  Fixed to each of the toenails was a tiny mirror. Suspended beneath the surface of ten miniature, glittering pools, Rawra Chin’s reflections stared back at her, insects drowning in quicksilver.

  Rising unsteadily from her seat and pushing past Foral Yatt, Rawra Chin staggered to that chamber set aside for bathing and the performance of one’s toilet. Lava rose in her throat, flooding her mouth, and she was sobbing as she emptied herself noisily into a chipped and yellowed handbasin. Drained, she gagged upon emptiness until the convulsions in her gut subsided, and then raised her head to look at the room about her through a quivering lens of tears.

  Something caught her eye, a green blur twinkling from atop the chest where Foral Yatt kept his soaps and perfumes and oils. Rawra Chin wiped her eyes with the blunt edge of one hand and tried to focus upon the distracting blot of emerald. It was a fixed point on which to anchor her perceptions, still reeling in the wake of her nausea. Gradually, the object swam into definition against the damp gloom of the washroom.

  Tiny glass sockets stared at her, unblinking. Behind them, within the translucent green brainpan, unguessable dreams marinated within cerebral juices that smelled of liquorice.

  Rawra Chin stared at the skull full of poison. It stared back at her, its gaze concealing nothing.

  Time passed in the House Without Clocks. On the eighteenth night following her arrival, Rawra Chin fell to the darkness. That which had only licked and tasted her now distended its jaws and took her at a bite.

  She was drunk, although it would have happened had this not been the case. Miserable over the dinner table, she had taken an excess of wine in the hope of numbing the pangs of self-loathing. The alcohol served only to muddy her anxieties, making them slippery, more difficult to apprehend. She stood framed in the open doorway with one hand upon the pale yellow wood, looking out at the deserted courtyard, drinking great ragged lungfuls of autumn air. It did nothing to still the buzzing that droned inside her head, a dismal hive somewhere between her ears. Gazing at the indifferent black flagstones, she understood that she must leave. Leave Foral Yatt. Leave at once and return to the soothing babble of her wardrobe boys, the comforting dreariness of committing endless lines to her memory. If she did not go immediately, she would be trapped forever, crushed beneath the hulking farm wagon of circumstance, screaming for someone to brush away the flies. If she did not go immediately …

  From the chambers behind her, Foral Yatt called her name.

  She looked up from the wide obsidian pond; there reared the archway, with Liavek beyond it.

  A note of mounting impatience discernible in his voice, Foral Yatt called again.

  She turned and walked back into the house, closing the pale yellow door behind her. He was in the bedchamber, as had become customary since the evening when Rawra Chin had been called upon to service Donna Blerot, her first knowledge of a woman. She supposed that Foral Yatt had summoned her to order a repetition of that occasion, and for an instant she savoured a fantasy of refusal, but not for longer than that.

  ‘My love? Would you light the lantern for me? It is so dark in here.’ Foral Yatt’s voice, altering since Rawra Chin’s arrival in that place, had moved into an other stage of its metamorphosis. Softened to a deep velvet, it seduced rather than commanded. Her fingers struggled with the flint for a second before the tinder caught, and then she lifted the flame to the wick of the lantern. A bubble of sulphurous yellow light expanded and contracted within the chamber, wavering until the flame grew still and its light clear. Rawra Chin turned from the lamp, white-hot maggots engraved upon her retinas by the brilliance she had brought into being. Foral Yatt lay upon his side on top of the patchwork counterpane, supporting himself upon one elbow, fingertips lost in the tight blond curls at his temples. A wide band of blue cosmetic colour ran in a diagonal line across his face, overlaying the left side of his brow, sweeping down across the left eye, the bridge of the nose, the right cheek. A narrower band of red, little more than a single brushstroke, followed its upper edge over the ridges and hollows of his smooth, sculpted features, terminating beneath the right ear.