She immediately ran her hand along her terrible scar.
'I said you're a very attractive woman.'
'Horses can be attractive, councillor.' She glanced back at him. 'But what's my face like?'
'Your face is lovely, Tuya.'
'Lovely?'
'Yes.'
He lifted his head up to take a better look at her as she dropped her gown to the floor. She knew what his reactions would be as the dreary light seemed to gather momentum on her bare skin. She reached over to a tabletop, picked up a roll-up of arum weed, but she waited until certain he was no longer looking at her before she lit it. The intense smell of its smoke wafted across the room, drifted out the window.
Still in vague shadow to his vision, she walked over to the bed, offered him the weed. He involuntarily grabbed her wrist, rubbed it gently between his fingers and thumb. His gaze was weak-willed and pathetic.
'You're beautiful,' he said. 'Delicious.'
'Prove it, Councillor Ghuda,' she said, climbing on his smile, watching him submit.
The roll-up fell to the floor, exploding ashes across the tiles.
*
Later, when he had fallen asleep again, she thought about their conversation just before he drifted off.
He talked a lot, which was unusual for a man after sex. She reflected deeply on what he had said, about the details that he had gone into.
He had shocked her.
A man in his important position should surely refrain from talking so much, but he was probably still rather drunk. They had been drinking vodka for much of the dawn. He didn't leave her until the sun was higher in the vermilion sky, the city fully awake, and her breath sour from alcohol. When he did, there was no fond goodbye, no intimate gesture. He had simply slipped on his Council robes and walked out the door.
But it wasn't his casual exit that caused her upset, it was the words he had spoken before he slept, those simple statements he had maybe or maybe not meant seriously.
Already his words were haunting her.
*
Afterwards, as he did frequently, Councillor Ghuda imagined his own cuckolding.
Four years ago it had started, four years since he realized that he couldn't invest all his emotions in one person, in his wife. He had caught her, Beula, in bed with her lips at work on a soldier from the Dragoons, and the image pursued him – his personal poltergeist – constantly undermining him. His sense of value in the world hung in the air like an unanswered question, and as a man he was unmade.
Sleeping with prostitutes helped his state of mind.
It was a fantasy, at first, an escape – then something more, a need for tenderness and cheap thrills with another woman. When he lost himself in the bad lines and the awkward over-stylized gestures, he managed to scramble something of an identity together. After the act, the women he paid for would watch him absent-mindedly whilst wiping themselves down with a towel to remove any traces of him from their body. These women would not love him, and the words they spoke were not their own, but Tuya, the woman from last night, seemed almost genuinely affectionate, as if in Villjamur, a city of introverts, two introverts could find a sense of belonging – if only for a night.
Ghuda looked up as the skies cleared, red sunlight now skidding off the wet cobbles, and the streets appeared to rust. He stepped from the shelter of the doorway into the relative brightness of the morning. He needed to get to the Council Spire to start the day's work.
Whether it was a symptom of his guilt, he didn't know, but he felt certain he was being watched. He never requested a guard to escort him anywhere, in fact usually slipped away before one might appear.
There was much to deal with for the day ahead. Primarily he had to deal with the increasing refugee problems: the labourers from elsewhere that were flocking to Villjamur to survive the coming ice age.
People were heading to the various irens to trade and shop, overseen by soldiers from the Regiment of Foot, who patrolled along the streets in pairs. It was a trenchant policy of safety he'd personally initiated to ease the citizens' concern in these anxious times. You didn't want general panic to set in, even though the public fear of crime was more intense than its current levels actually warranted.
Up the winding roads and passageways, he continued.
On the way he encountered an elderly man sitting on a stool with a sign beside him that said 'Scribe – Discretion Guaranteed'. With one palm resting flat on the small table to one side, he sipped a steaming drink with a contented look on his face. There were quite a few of these men around the city, writing love letters or death threats on behalf of those who couldn't write themselves, including those whose fingers had been broken by the Inquisition. Ghuda speculated on what he might write to Tuya, the redhead he had just spent the night with. What would he say to her? That he would like to fuck her some more because she was so good at it? That was hardly the basis of an ongoing relationship.
The incline had become a strain on Ghuda's legs, so for a while he rested on a pile of logs heaped outside one of the terraced houses. Again, he had the uneasy sensation that someone was watching him. He looked around at the quiet streets, then up at the bridges. Perhaps someone was looking down at him.
He rose to go and heard footsteps behind him, running into the distance.
A short cut led through to an iren, a trading area located in a courtyard of stone. As he stepped through a high and narrow alleyway, seemingly endless, his heart began to beat a little faster.
He quickened his pace.
He burst out onto the busy iren…
Then he felt as if his chest had exploded and its contents were spilling onto the cobbles. Except it hadn't, he was still in one piece, he was still alive, but he gaped down at the wound as it expanded, at his shredded robes exposing his flesh to the cold, damp air.
A truculent pain shot through him, and he screamed, trying to look behind him, but through welling eyes saw only a silhouette heading back, bizarrely upwards, into the darkness. He stumbled forwards, his hands clutching for wet stones, then began to spit blood on the ground. People were now crowding around him, watching wide-eyed, pointing. Sensing his life fluid filling the cracks between cobbles, the blood beetles came and began to smother him, till his screams could be heard amplified between the high walls of the courtyard. One even scurried into his mouth, scraping eagerly at his gums and tongue. He bit down so he wouldn't choke, split its shell in two, and spat it out, but he could still taste its ichors.
Councillor Ghuda was violently febrile.
*
Standing outside a bistro with a rumbling stomach and a small pie raised in one hand, Randur watched the unsteady figure shamble towards him. People scrambled in fear, men holding their women protectively, as glossy beetles began to pullulate around the victim's gaping wound.
Randur stepped aside into an alley by a gallery, too stunned now to take a first bite of the pie. A small child screamed and turned to run, while the dying man – eyes wide and aghast, and coughing blood – stumbled on into the same small passageway.
He stared straight at Randur, hunching to his knees just paces away from him. He continued to howl as the insects ripped at his flesh, tossing it into the air in a fine pink mist. He fell forwards, and was silent.
Within moments, a banshee appeared in the passageway, as if she had been following the incident all this time. Cocooned in a shawl, her face was gaunt and striking against the untidy strands of jet-black hair. With a distant look in her eyes, she sucked in a deep breath, then began her keen, her mouth opening impossibly wide.
The sated blood beetles having scurried out of the passageway, a gathering crowd soon cast a shadow over the body. Randur, having lost his appetite, handed the pie to an urchin in filthy rags.
'Welcome to Villjamur,' Randur muttered.
TWO
