Orb Sceptre Throne

the tip of a finger into the box. It looked to Antsy as if the man was about to take snuff but the finger went into one eye instead. Corien hissed his pain. After doing the other eye he peered about, blinking comically, eyes watering.

‘Well?’ Antsy asked.

‘Like pressing salt to one’s eyes. I really must talk to my alchemist about this. Tell me, is that face up there really glowing?’

A presence haunted the estate of Lady Varada. It brushed against windows and pressed against locked doors. The two colourfully dressed guards it easily bypassed to enter the main rooms of the manor house. In these empty halls it hovered near door handles and latches to find each and all dusted with a white powder the presence knew to be a rare poison sifted from the pollen of a flower found only in the near-mythical land of Drift Avalii. Other rooms it quickly sped through as if sensing the drifting fumes of scents deadly to any living creature.

Eventually, after much probing and many turnings back at dead ends, it gained access to the lower floors and here the tenebrous drifting presence coiled inwards, firmed and thickened into the figure of a slim young woman in diaphanous white cloth, silver wristlets and anklets tinkling musically on her limbs.

The girl descended a last set of raw granite steps to the deepest chamber to come to a halt where a figure crouched in the middle of the empty room, legs drawn up beneath her stomach, head bowed. The girl pressed a hand to her mouth to cover a smile but her eyes held a savage triumph.

‘Mother,’ she said. ‘You’re looking … poorly.’

The figure raised her head to peer up through tangled black hair like a sweep of night. ‘Taya,’ she answered, her voice tight with suppressed pain. ‘I asked you to stay away.’

‘You sent me away,’ Taya snapped. ‘Why, I now know.’

‘You know nothing,’ the woman snarled. She surged to her knees, revealing fine mesh chains at wrist and ankle that thrummed taut, and she gasped her agony as flames burst into life where the metal of the fetters clasped her flesh.

Taya nodded her appreciation. ‘So that is how you managed. Otataral chains. We’d wondered. Imagine. Vorcan Radok imprisoning herself.’ She pressed a hand to her lips. ‘Dare I say it? How … ironic?’

Vorcan returned to her crouch, panting and hissing her pain. ‘You’ve come. You’ve seen. Now you can go.’

The arm swept down savagely. ‘No, Mother. You do not dismiss me. Not any longer. Now it is I who dismiss you. And seeing you now … like this … I can finally do so.’ She set her hands on her hips, tsking. ‘Look at you. Such a mess. And your so-called guards! I could have slain the lot had I wished.’

Head down, Vorcan half gasped, ‘I would advise you not to draw any weapon on Lazan or Madrun. And Studlock … well, you wouldn’t know where to stick your knife to slay him.’

‘Where is that creature from?’

‘Not even I know.’

Taya’s mouth drew down in the small pout of a frown and she sighed her exaggerated boredom. ‘Well, it has been a treat talking, Mother. But I have a life worth living.’ She raised her hand to her mouth once more, this time blowing a kiss. ‘Thank you. Your wretched failure here frees me of so much. I had come dreaming of killing you but now I see that your suffering pleases me more. Farewell! Think of me often at the court of Darujhistan’s rightful king reinstated. I know I will be thinking of you.’

She backed away, climbing the steps, waving. Vorcan did not raise her head.

Some time later another figure came shambling down the stairs, long tatters of his cloth wrappings trailing behind. Studlock bowed, ‘She is gone, mistress.’

Vorcan nodded heavily. ‘Good. None interfered? Madrun? Lazan?’

‘None. Your instructions were most precise. Only she and the other are to be allowed to pass.’

She sank lower, relaxing, the chains clattering. ‘Good. Good.’

Studlock rubbed his cloth-wrapped hands together, perhaps as a gesture of worry. ‘What shall we do, mistress?’

‘We will wait. Wait and see. His arising will be contested. We will see what form that will take.’

‘But who, mistress? Who will contend?’

‘The same as before.’

The strangely jointed hands fell. ‘Oh dear. Him.’

A short stout man (generous of diameter, thank you!), dapper in waistcoat and frilled sleeves, daintily crosses the mud and open sewer channel of the town of broken hopes west of the dreaming city. And what is this? Does that city now whimper and grimace in its sleep? Does the dream threaten to slide into nightmare? Does a crowned figure stalk the edges of its vision?

And where all the frustrated failed gods take it does this meandering alley lead?

Vexed hero turns aside to a file of washerwomen bent to task at nearby trickle of stream. He pauses, struck breathless for the nonce by glorious vista of said washerwomen’s backsides presented. He mops brow with handkerchief, sighs wistfully. Then, remembering errand, approaches.

‘Good washerwomen! Would you be so kind as to help a poor lost soul?’

The stolid women slow in their hearty slapping of wet garments and muscular wringing of alarmingly wound cloth. ‘Who in Oponn’s poor jest are you?’ one welcomes rather undemurely.

‘I am but a humble petitioner hoping to find my way to a resident of these parts.’

‘Who’s ’at?’ another fine strapping figure of her trade asks, and spits a brown stream of chewing leaf juice.

After hastily shifting silk-slippered foot aside of striking juice our heroic quester bows gallantly. ‘Why, an old woman. Living alone. A widow, truth be told, many times over. Some think her perhaps crazy and ignorantly ascribe to her charges of witchery and hexing … and such …’

Enquirer splutters to silence as all slapping and wringing of cloths cease. All eyes turn narrowed and flashing to the fine generous figure of our innocent searcher — who extends one foot to his rear, poised.

‘Get ’im!’

‘Slimy rat!’

‘The nerve!’

Later that same evening a family of Maiten town was quite mystified to find a fat fellow in black and red silk finery, rather faded, hiding behind their goat pen. ‘Yes?’ the father asked, quite slowly, worried that perhaps the poor man had lost his senses.

The man straightened up, his head coming almost to the shoulders of the father. He adjusted his stained clothes, brushed soapsuds from his lapels, glanced about. ‘Just admiring your handsome animals, good sir. Ah! You wouldn’t by any chance happen to know of an old woman living alone hereabouts, that is about here — one whom the uncaring world unjustly ostracizes with calumny and obloquy?’

The father’s brow furrowed as he attempted to make sense of the question. He motioned upriver. ‘Well, there’s a crazy old witch further along at the edge of town.’

The rotund fellow bowed. ‘My thanks, keeper of such handsome animals.’

Later, after much dodging of roving packs of washerwomen armed with wet laundry, the out-of-breath and by now very hungry wanderer came across a straw-roofed wattle-and-daub hut upon the threshold of which sat a nest-haired old woman, pipe in mouth, busy kneading the mud with her naked toes.

He bowed in a lace-sleeved flourish. ‘Ah! Queen of the dreaming city! What a privilege! I am come to pay my respects.’

The old woman peered up, eyes red and unfocused. A vague smile came and went around her pipe. ‘Slippery ball of fish oil … do you bring offering?’

‘But of course.’ Another flourish and a wrapped object the size of a walnut appeared. He bowed, holding it out.

The old woman snatched it up with a speed that belied her years. She tore the paper and pinched off a piece of the dark gum within and pushed it into her pipe. Fumbling behind her at the hearth fire inside the hut, she found