He was wearing one of her costumes.

  It was a gown, long and violet, gathered in extravagant ruffs at the shoulders so that the arms were bare. The collar was high, reaching to the point just above the bulge in Foral Yatt’s throat, and below that the material was solid and opaque until it reached a demarcation line just beneath the breastbone. From there, the dress seemed to have been slashed into long strips that trailed down to the ankles, every second violet ribbon having been cut away and replaced by a panel of coral pink twine, knotted into snowflake patterns through which the skin beneath was visible. There were mirrors upon his toes and fingers.

  Entering through a chink in the wall, with a sound like a child blowing across the neck of a narrow jar, a breeze disturbed the perfumed air and caused the lantern flame to stutter. For a moment, armies of light and shadow rushed back and forth in quick-fire border disputes. The shadows gathered within Foral Yatt’s eye sockets seemed to flow across his cheek like an overspill of tar before shrinking back to pool beneath the overhang of his brow. He smiled up at her through lips fastidiously stained a rich indigo.

  ‘I had to come back. I couldn’t just leave you here.’

  The second word in each sentence was stressed in a lush and affected manner, so that even as Rawra Chin struggled to make sense of the actor’s words, so too was she striving to identify that quirk of inflection, maddeningly familiar and yet beyond the grasp of her recall.

  ‘But … what do you mean? You haven’t been anywhere. You …’

  Rawra Chin could feel something bearing down upon her, coming towards her with a hideous speed that froze the will and made evasion unthinkable. It was like stories she had heard concerning eclipses when men would see the giant moon-shadow rushing towards them across the land, a vast planet of darkness rolling over the tiny fields and pastures with a speed that was only comparable to itself. Standing there in the scented chamber, she understood their terror. The shadow world was almost upon her. Another moment and she would be crushed beneath its endless, inescapable mass.

  From the bed, Foral Yatt spoke again. The pattern of emphasis within his speech continued to dance just beyond the fringes of recognition, mocking and unattainable.

  ‘I left you. Don’t you remember? I left you because it was so important to me that people should know my name. I know it must have seemed unfair to you, but you were only ordinary, and I am a special creature. I have something rare in me, a unique charm that men have not words to describe, and though I loved you deeply, deeply, it was my duty to expose the treasure that I am to the world and all its people. Surely this is not beyond your comprehension?’

  Quite suddenly, Rawra Chin knew where she had heard the voice that Foral Yatt was using. The dark planet crashed upon her, and she was lost.

  ‘But all of that is done with, now. Now, people everywhere know my name and are drawn like moths to the fire within me, whose nature only I can put a name to. Now I am complete, and I am free to love you once more. I adore you. I worship you. I love you, love you more than anything in the world save for celebrity. But …’

  The parody was unspeakably vicious, undeniably accurate. Having identified the voice, Rawra Chin could do nothing more than accept the cruel mirror image of the face that accompanied it. Nailed by the black weight of a phantom moon, she could only watch as Foral Yatt exposed all the conceits, the inanities, the small evasions that were the components of her existence. The young man lounged upon the bed, touching a shimmering constellation of fingertips to the blue of his lower lip in a pantomime of anxiety and indecision. Looking up at Rawra Chin, his long lashes flashed an urgent semaphore pleading for sympathy while his jaw trembled beneath the burden of the words unspoken in the mouth above. Finally, when he had drawn out his melodramatic hesitation to the snapping point of absurdity, the words spilled out in a breathless cascade.

  ‘… But do you still love me?’

  He paused, blinking twice.

  ‘Despite what I did to you?’

  In one corner of the room, the idiot child began to blow across the slender neck of its jar, and the patterns of light and shade within the chamber convulsed.

  Rawra Chin, adrift upon a lurching ocean of nightmare, heard a voice speak in the distance.

  ‘Is there a lizard asleep within the ball?’

  The voice was so deep and masculine that she assumed it must belong to Foral Yatt, except that Foral Yatt’s voice wasn’t like that any more. Whose, then, could it be? When the answer came, her senses were too brutalised to ring with more than the dullest peal of despair. It was her voice. Of course it was her voice.

  On the bed, Foral Yatt smiled and flopped languidly on to his back. The smile he wore belonged to Foral Yatt rather than to his grotesque and pointed lampoon of Rawra Chin, but when he spoke, it was with her accents.

  ‘Perhaps I am a ball. Perhaps the unfathomable quality that men perceive in me is a lizard, coiled within me, its material reality questionable, its effects upon the mind undisputed.’

  Their eyes were locked, their awareness of each other fixed in that moment of mutual understanding that has always existed between snakes and rabbits. Licking his indigo lips, Foral Yatt luxuriated in the taste of the long instant preceding the stroke of grace.

  ‘Shall I tell you the name of my lizard? Shall I tell you the name of that thing that makes me vulnerable, makes me loved, worshipped, celebrated?’

  Knowing the answer already, Rawra Chin shook her head violently from side to side, but was unable to make the slightest sound.

  ‘Guilt.’

  There. It had been said. He knew. The lantern flame quivered. The shadows charged and then fell back, regrouping for their next assault.

  ‘You see, it is vital to what I am. It is the hurt that drives me, and without it, I am nothing. Oh, my love, I feel so ashamed of all the misery that I have brought you.’

  Standing at the foot of the bed, swaying, the wine of their supper now bitter in her belly, Rawra Chin became confused as the layers of meaning began to fold in upon each other, blossoming into new shapes like a toy of artfully creased paper. Was Foral Yatt describing feelings of his own or mimicking those agonies that he perceived in her? Did he genuinely feel remorse for the venomous charade that he had perpetrated? At the centre of the fear and confusion that tore through Rawra Chin like a hurricane, a nugget of resentment began to form, cold and bright in the still heart of the cyclone.

  How dare he apologise? How dare he plead for understanding after this insufferable pageant of debasement? The anger grew within Rawra Chin as she gazed icily down at the figure on the bed, the yielding and defenceless line of the body beneath the slatted violet gown gradually becoming as infuriating as the wheedling of that unbearable little-girl voice.

  ‘Can you forgive me? Oh, my love, you seem so stern. How thoughtless I was to injure you in such a dreadful, careless fashion.’

  Foral Yatt sat up and reached for Rawra Chin with imploring arms, pale as they emerged like swans’ necks from the ruffs at the actor’s shoulders. His eyes pleaded for release from the apparent agonies of self-flagellation that he was enduring, and his blue lips mouthed inaudible half words of explanation and apology, puckering as if for a kiss of absolution.

  With as much force as she could muster, Rawra Chin struck him across the mouth with the back of her hand, smearing the blue lip dye over his cheek and her knuckle.

  The dry smack of the blow and the bark of pain from the actor rebounded back at them from the cold stone of the walls. Foral Yatt fell back, covering his face and rolling on to his side so that he lay curled upon the patchwork with his back to Rawra Chin.

  Struck suddenly by the sight of his curving spine, visible through the dishevelled violet fringes of his gown, Rawra Chin found that the anger in her heart was matched by a sudden pressure at her loins as a burgeoning erection reared against the restricting hide of her ash-grey breeches. On the bed, Foral Yatt nursed his mouth and began to weep. Almost of their own volition, fingers that felt suddenly numb and overlarge moved towards the knot in her rope belt, where it pressed in a hard fist of hemp against Rawra Chin’s stomach.

  She raped him twice, brutally, and there was no pleasure in it.

  When it was done, she understood the damage that she had done to herself and began to sob noiselessly, in the way that men do, sitting there upon the edge of the counterpane with her shoulders shuddering in silence. Foral Yatt lay on the bed behind her, staring at the far wall. Rawra Chin’s seed had dried in a small, irregular oval on the plucked alabaster flesh above his right knee, a tight puckering of the skin beneath the thin, clear varnish. He picked at it absently with mirrored nails and said nothing.

  The wick of the lantern grew shorter, until finally it guttered and died. Thus could the passage of hours be measured, there in the House Without Clocks.

  ‘I had no right. No right to treat you like that …’

  ‘Please. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Will you stay? Will you stay here with me?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘But … what am I to do if you go? There is no reason for you to leave.’

  ‘There’s my work. My work and my career.’

  ‘But what about me? You’re leaving me trapped here, don’t you see? I’ll never get away now. Please. I’ll do anything you want, but don’t leave me here.’

  ‘You should have thought of that before you took your revenge.’

  ‘Oh, please, I said that I was sorry. Can’t you think of what we were to each other and forgive me?’

  ‘It’s too late, my love. It’s far too late.’

  ‘I won’t let you go. I won’t let us be separated again.’

  ‘Please. I don’t want a scene. What happened last time was so embarrassing.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. I won’t make any fuss at all.’

  ‘Good. Now, I must send one of the House-waifs to order my carriage for the morning and arrange to have my wardrobe moved back to the lodging house.’

  ‘Won’t you leave me anything? Please. Let me keep the violet gown.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you see what you’re doing to me? You’re taking away everything! How has this happened?’

  ‘Don’t be naïve. We are in the City of Luck.’

  ‘Here, you speak to me of luck? I am no longer sure that luck exists. Is there luck, or is there only circumstance without form or pattern, a senseless wave that obliterates all before it?’

  ‘Is there a lizard asleep within the ball?’

  Seated upon her balcony, absently chewing the anaemic blue flowers she had plucked from her window garden, Som-Som regarded the courtyard of the House Without Clocks.

  A carriage had arrived outside the curving walls with the first shafts of dawn, some short while ago. The half-masked woman had realised that Rawra Chin must be leaving the House to return to her fabulous existence in the world beyond its seven variegated portals.

  Since Rawra Chin had originally spoken of her stay at the House in terms of months rather than weeks, Som-Som supposed that it was the dark undercurrents flowing between her and Foral Yatt that had prompted this unannounced departure. She wondered if the performer would call upon her to say goodbye before she left, and felt a pang of sadness at the thought of their separation.

  Countering this regret, there was a tremendous relief. Som-Som was glad that Rawra Chin had not allowed herself to become a prisoner of the terrible gravity that the House possessed, and for this reason alone, she hoped that luck would take the performer far beyond those walls that curved like grey, embracing arms.

  The sound of the pale yellow door opening was jewel-sharp in the silent morning, and Som-Som leaned out from her balcony to watch the elegant, crimson-bandaged figure step out on to the cold black flagstones, where the chill of the night had left a faint dusting of frost.

  To Som-Som, who had not enjoyed the perception of depth since her ninth year, it seemed that a self-propelling droplet of blood had leaked from a pale yellow gash in the skin of the House to roll across the frost-flecked black disc of the courtyard, trickling slowly towards the arch on the opposite side. Occasionally, a two-dimensional white hand became visible, depending upon the perspective, a cream petal bobbing briefly to the surface of the red blot before vanishing again.

  As the bead of crimson progressed across the yard, it became something that a person without her affliction would recognise as a human being. The figure paused at a point halfway across the courtyard and turned, tilting back its head to gaze directly at Som-Som, as if it had been aware of the half-masked woman’s scrutiny since first setting foot outside the pale yellow door. From out of the redness, a face swam into view.

  Foral Yatt stared up into Som-Som’s eyes, both the one that blinked and the one that could not.

  His expression seemed furtive for an instant, tinged with a guilt that Som-Som found disturbingly familiar, and then he smiled. Long seconds passed unrecorded while their eyes remained locked, and then he turned and continued across the wide circle of jet, passing out through the high stone archway.

  After a moment there came the sound of reins snapping, followed by a rattle of hoof upon cobblestone as the carriage horses roused themselves and cantered off down the winding thoroughfares of Liavek, where the scent of a hundred simmering breakfasts hung reassuringly between the huddled buildings.

  Som-Som sat motionless upon her balcony, her gaze still fixed upon the point where Foral Yatt had stood when he’d turned and looked at her. His smile remained there, an after-image in her mind’s eye. It was a smile of a type that Som-Som had seen before, and which she recognised instantly.

  It was a wizard’s smile. It was the expression of a luck-shaper who had finally achieved a satisfaction long postponed. For an unquantifiable time, Som-Som did not move. A blank expression was frozen on to her face so that those divided features regained a semblance of unity, the living half transformed to porcelain by her bewilderment.

  Standing suddenly, she upset her chair so that it toppled to the balcony floor behind her. She moved rapidly, with an odd jerkiness. All of the training and discipline that had disguised her difficulties of locomotion were cast aside as she ran down the narrow wooden steps and across the rounded yard.

  The pale yellow door was not locked.

  Rawra Chin was seated at the table, rigid and upright in one of the straight-backed chairs. She seemed to be staring at two objects that rested on the white wood of the tabletop, barely distinct in the smoky dawn light. Approaching the table, Som-Som peered closer, squinting the eye that still possessed the ability to do so.

  One of the objects was a plain copper ball that meant nothing to her. The other item seemed more like an egg with the top cleanly sliced off.

  Except that it was green.

  Except that it had empty, staring sockets and a lipless smile.

  She noticed the odour of liquorice at the same moment that she realised Rawra Chin had not breathed since her arrival in the chamber.

  It was not a physical horror that propelled Som-Som backward through the pale yellow door, gasping and stumbling, shoved out into the courtyard by the immensity of what lay within. Neither was it an aversion to the presence of the dead. The whore of sorcerers is witness to worse things than simple mortality during the course of her service, and suicides at the House Without Clocks were frequent enough to be unremarkable. Certainly too frequent to engender so violent a reaction in one whose customers had, upon occasion, transformed into beings of a different species or entities of churning white vapour at the moment of their greatest pleasure.

  Neither was it entirely a horror that preyed upon the mind, nor wholly a revulsion of the spirit. It had no shape, no dimension at all that she could grasp, and that was the fullest horror of it. A monstrous crime had been committed, an atrocity of appalling magnitude and scale that somehow remained both abstract and intangible. Having no perceivable edges, its monstrosity was thus infinite, and it was this that sent Som-Som reeling out backward into the cold, black courtyard.

  She wanted to scream at the indifferent windows of the House Without Clocks, still shuttered against the morning light while those beyond enjoyed whatever sleep they had earned the previous evening. She wanted to cry out and wake the City of Luck itself, alerting it to this abomination, perpetrated while Liavek looked the other way, unsuspecting.

  But of course, she could say nothing. The enormity of what had occurred remained locked within her, something scaly and cold and repugnant inside her mind, which could never be seen, never be touched or spoken of to another. Curled in the unreachable dark behind the porcelain mask, it basked, beyond proof, beyond refute.

  Hardly there at all.

  NOT EVEN LEGEND

  In my experience, if a jilky is involved, it usually gets put down to a mains explosion.

  When Merelda finally made her exclamatory arrival at the CSICON get-together – she’d parked up by the old covered market and had puffed the length of Fetter Street before remembering that the ring binder with all her suggestions was still in the back seat, which was classic her – most of the others were already there. The estate agents’ street door was on the latch, and after navigating an unlit front office to the larger conference room beyond, she’d plunged into the jovial pre-meeting chatter and spent an agreeable five minutes air-kissing hello to everybody.

  At the central table’s end, she spotted fidgety and lightly stubbled Marcus Clarke, founder of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims Of the Normal, babbling enthusiastically to a lugubrious David Watkins. Watkins, always the most soberly dressed at the paranormal study group’s bi-weekly meetings, was branch manager at Chalcombe & Bentine, this being why the CSICON crowd had access to these after-hours premises. Awkwardly taking off her rain-specked coat, Merelda waved to her teacher friend Emma, who was mad on cryptids and was seated at the other end from Dave and Marcus. Various unwieldy conversations dangled from the leather-scented air and clattered like atonal wind chimes. Brian Appleby, Tall Brian, was proselytising about ghosts with Adriana, that goth media-studies lecturer who only joined, like, a few weeks ago or something. Brian Taylor, Little Brian, was nowhere about for the third meeting in a row, but then Merelda figured him and his wife – Sandra, was it? – were still getting used to the new baby.