Radiance

“On that lawless carnival isle, the castle of Prospero became a constant Saturnalia, a house on a high icy hill where unholy lights flashed and burst through the permanent night of that world of phantasms. Even to breathe the air of those halls was to become intoxicated. To light a single lantern was to invite ghosts and will-o’-the-wisps and sirens from every gable and eave. Into this miasma the man thought he could finally disappear. But word reached the great Emperor of the shadowy isle that wonders unheard-of were afoot in the house of Prospero, a house which was quickly becoming a kingdom unto itself. The Emperor donned a mask, the face of a black coatl whose tongue dripped with nightrubies, and went to the revels to see for himself. What he saw there no man can say, yet when he emerged, he had made Prospero his only heir, and placed the coatl crown on that poor magician’s grieving head.

“This is the isle toward which our pretty silver ship flies, for whose sake our golden sails catch the sun’s good wishes and bear us both across the starry, frozen wasteland between our former lives and the End of All. And the man I speak of is Maximo Varela: Prospero, the Mad King of Pluto. I wish you your fill of him—you will have it, I’m sure, and more.”

The old woman looked back to me and laughed like a young girl. A flush rode high on her cheeks. She clapped her hands, applauding herself. “I reckon I’m as good as I ever was, don’t you? Give me a script; I’ll eat you alive and you’ll love every moment. Now clear off and quit bothering an old woman at her breakfast.”

I returned to my quarters in a consternation of curiosity and black dread. I felt, far beneath the polished green floorboards, the fragrant Ganymedean banyan with its glinting golden grain, the pneumatic array gasping into life, the intimate suckle of gravity cupping the Obolus and drawing it down, down into its long well. Very soon my work would have to begin, truly begin, rather than remaining comfortably far off, like a suit in a closet with all its attendant discomfort, ready to be worn sometime soon, but not today.

The smell of our staterooms flowed over me: sweat, skin, stale breath, lavender, talc, shoe polish, typewriter ribbons, last week’s peach-xochipilli preserves left uncovered on a night table. Above and below it all, penetrating every surface, every linen and lantern glass, was that perfume I had grown to both loathe and long for, Madame Zed’s latest vicious, stinking, delicious golden bottle: My Sin. It smelled like a forest of fallen women.

I looked down at the shape of Cythera Brass, the source of My Sin, in the emerald sheets of her bunk. She wore that witch’s unguent so often I was convinced that even her marrow would stink of its musk and spice. From her alone I had never smelled—from Uranus past Neptune’s unhinged orbit—even the slightest noxious emanation. Any foulness of air in our quarters belonged to myself alone. I smelled only My Sin on her, only that alien wood where a creature like her might cut her teeth. My warden, my minder, my leash. Her long, lovely limbs lost in sleep—but not so lost that she did not wrap her arms around her shoulders, her head sunk in her chest, guarding and girding herself even in dreaming. I despised her: for her orderliness, her efficiency, her beauty, her imperturbable calm, her—quite correct—disdain of my person, her loyalties, and her constant reminder that I was being tolerated only for the work I could perform. All aboard presumed her my wife, for she kept closer to me than any lover, always at my elbow, my side, practically barracked in my waistcoat pocket. I had risen inhumanly early in order to escape her company at breakfast—but one can never escape the quiet, implacable hell of company.