“Madame has exquisite taste,” remarked the vendor. “These are specially handcrafted for the more discerning palate. Of course, if yours. .” she began, turning to me.
“I’ll take two,” I said, fishing in my pocket.
“How very extravagant,” said the courtly lady, catching me off guard with an admiring look that was almost erotic.
“I like the finer things in life,” I managed.
“Indeed you do, sir,” said the vendor, all trace of contempt evaporating like spit in a hot pan.
“Aren’t you one of those Outsiders?” the lady asked, now sidling close to me provocatively and giving me a disarmingly direct look. She was a radiant creature with a sultry gaze that belied her pale skin. Large diamonds hung from her earlobes and her hair was gathered up to expose them.
“Well,” I began, nonchalantly biting the head off one of my delicacies. I chewed for no more than a second and then it hit me. “Oh my God!” I spluttered, spitting feathers and chocolate onto the pavement. “What the hell is this?”
“Sparrows dipped in chocolate,” she answered. “I thought you were familiar. .”
“Naturally,” inserted the vendor indignantly. “Did you expect some kind of substitute?”
“Oh, God,” I repeated, spitting again, and trying to suck up the bits of dried bone and tissue already halfway to my gut.
“Really!” said the courtly lady, backing away from me rapidly, “your behavior is really
“Inappropriate?!” I spluttered between coughs that left dribblings of brown phlegm down my tunic. “Inappropriate? You give me chocolate-covered real dead birds and you think that vomiting them back at you is inappropriate? That is the single nastiest thing that has ever been passed off as food! God, I think I have a teeny piece of beak stuck in my tooth. What the hell are you people thinking?”
“My first instinct,” said the vendor to the lady, “was that he lacked the refinement to appreciate sweetmeats of this quality. . ”
“Mine, too,” agreed the other, whose eyes had frozen over as if caught in a blizzard. “I don’t know why they allow these people in.”
And with that, she stalked pointedly away, though I was too busy hacking up bits of dirt-colored sparrow to take notice of her or the others who were looking me up and down with their noses wrinkled in distaste.
It’s funny how one’s enthusiasm for shopping can be dampened by a mouthful of chocolate-covered bird. The stores, whose excesses had formerly seemed so fresh and sparklingly inviting, a sumptuous feast for the eyes, a glorious display of wealth and good taste, were now merely excesses: grotesque and ridiculous. I traded my second sparrow for a thumbnail-sized tart with what looked like wafer-thin slicings of strawberry on the top. It was a beautiful little thing assembled with the skill of a goldsmith and the eye of a painter, and it tasted of absolutely nothing. I would have thrown it away but it had gone down in one swallow. Odd, really. The way everyone else was nibbling on them and extolling the “simply darling” subtleties of flavor, I began to wonder if I’d gotten a bad one. Maybe I hadn’t paid enough.
“If you could take a piece of the sky,” I remarked to the girl who had sold it to me, “and turn it into something edible, this is what it would taste like.”
“They
“No,” I said, “you misunderstand me. I don’t mean it as a compliment.”
She gave me a blank look.
“I mean,” I persisted with overly slow clarity, “they have no flavor or texture. They have nothing that would make any sane person want to eat them, let alone spend a vast amount of money on them. I cannot say they taste like soap or excrement or chocolates stuffed with bits of bird, because they do not taste at all. They are a culinary vacuum and I have already wasted more words on them than they could ever deserve. You ought to sell something with a bit of bite. Try this, for example.”
I produced a small piece of the blue cheese I had found in the woodland cave, wrapped in a thin leather cloth. “This is perhaps a bit bold for this place, but give it a try. This is a cheese with real character, a cheese to sample between sips of a dusty red wine, a cheese of boldness, sharp, but still warm, tangy but. .”
I trailed off. As I pushed the cheese under her nose, her face had blanched first with distaste, then swelled to revulsion, and wound up in something oddly like fear. Her eyes flashed from the morsel of cheese to my face. I cannot imagine what she saw there, but it seemed to fill her with dread. She backed away, staring at me with her hand over her mouth, then began to run, sobbing as she fled.
Passersby eyed me with hostile curiosity. What had I done? I tried to shrug and smile reassuringly at the faces turned toward me, but this-not surprisingly-didn’t help. Maybe I still had chocolate sparrow bits on my shirt.
I made for the library. At least there I wouldn’t feel like some absurd fish flopping about on the floor. There I could lose myself in a good book or six. Even a bad one would be better than trying to blend in with these people. It had been an odd day. But as I have learned to remind myself, things can always get worse.
SCENE XIV The Plot Thickens
I didn’t bother trying the main door to the library, but went straight to the side entrance. The door opened as easily as it had before, though a key had been pushed into the lock from the inside, as if someone had tried to lock it without realizing that the mechanism was rusted away. The writing table had been pushed back up against the second door, but it yielded as it had done before and I was in before you could say “minimum security.”
“Aliana?” I whispered, with the hushed reverence I reserve for libraries. There was no answer. I walked around a great case of medical books and peered at the main entrance, but there was no sign of her or anyone else, so I wandered through the aisles of piled and shelved volumes, wending my way back to the drama stacks. I settled here and randomly plucked a book from the shelf behind me.
And so I settled and read under the pale, glowing dome for an hour. But when I reached the fourth act, with Shatrel’s demonic machinations in full swing, the thing ended abruptly. There were thirty pages missing, cut out at the spine with a knife or scissors. I cursed quietly to myself and replaced it in the shelves. The next one I selected got a careful examination before I started reading, and this produced a curious discovery: The play’s final pages were intact, but much of the second act was missing, cut out like the conclusion of the other play. I took down a pile of books and flicked through them. Over half of them had some pages missing: a couple missing only three or four pages, some lacking a good deal more, one being reduced to no more than a dozen leaves.
I put them back and sat pensively. This was not the result of decay, neglect, or the passage of time. These books were not accidentally burned, nor had their pages fallen out of rotted bindings or been casually torn out by owners who needed a piece of scrap paper. These had been rigorously and systematically mutilated. To someone like me who had seen similar work done by the Diamond Empire in Thrusia, this could mean only one thing: censorship. But of what and by whom?
I often find that I think better on my feet, so I rose and began to pace the library floor. It was a large building and I had seen only a fraction of it. Since there didn’t seem to be anyone about, this seemed as good a time as any to see what else was there while I mulled over recent developments.
I saw it like this: Long ago, Phasdreille was the center of a glorious civilization and it produced much that was fair and wonderful to behold. The city architecture by itself would have been ample evidence of this, but so was the literature I had been reading and the paintings I had seen in the king’s palace. In more recent years, however, something of the fire that had inspired the “fair folk” had gone out. What I saw now was a society devoid of passion and intensity except in their understandable hatred for the goblins: a society ruled by fashion and ostentation, by the shallowest performance and superficiality. In such a culture, even the great literary products of its past could be considered scurrilous and disreputable. So the good people of present day Phasdreille had opted to rid themselves
