The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [74]
Her room was small and damp, seldom empty during the late afternoon. Most often her roommates were there—Dora, Nina, and Polly—drinking beer, shrieking with laughter. Or the landlord dropped by. Sometimes all four were cramped into the tiny space when Name of the Sun came home. The landlord was always smiling, always nodding, affable, always trying to get any of the girls to sleep with him in exchange for rent. The other three had ofttimes taken him up on his offer.
When Nahid had come back to the room with her, and everyone was crammed in there, the situation had been awkward, to say the least. Her and the kholic could barely even fit inside, let alone have privacy. But the party would inevitably break up shortly after she pulled Nahid in, looking down at the floor, sitting in a corner, not saying anything. The expressions, the gaffes, the exchanged looks and awkward silences: these had been priceless.
Now the girls must have been at a pub. Quietly, quickly, Name of the Sun unfastened her robe, eager to sleep—or to try—before her roommates tumbled in.
Had Nahid, she wondered—pulling her blouse up over her head—cast a spell over her? Were there traces of his affliction in the semen she had let spill across her stomach or had even swallowed? What could possibly cause the kholic to exert such influence over her? Name of the Sun sincerely wanted to stay away from the kholic, though images of his body, lying on the mattress with her in this very room, and memories of him holding her while she slept, and the feel of his grimy body pressed against her—the thrill of looking into his eyes, against that black mask—flickered relentlessly through her mind.
Only when she found herself thinking that maybe she should give him another chance—that it was true, what he said, she could never relate to his pain, being neither a twin nor a kholic—did Name of the Sun actually laugh out loud and bitterly force herself to imagine something, anything, else.
She brushed at her mattress to rid it of fleas as best she could. Once under her sheet, she idly began to masturbate, as she often did when she was tired and needed to sleep, but her wrist soon became sore and she recognized that the effort to come would be too great, so she lay still, unsuccessfully managing to keep her mind from dwelling on the reasons for the demise of her recent relationship, and why they seemed to make such little sense now.
The closest Name of the Sun came to being distracted was when she wondered, for a little while, about Nahid’s twin sister. Though Name of the Sun had never met the girl, she would very much like to: Octavia could attract a woman such as the chatelaine and could cause Nahid such anguish. Nahid often said that Octavia looked just like him. In which case, Name of the Sun understood the pull that the sister might have; she must have been gorgeous.
Later, still awake, though she might have slept for a moment, Name of the Sun began ruminating about Nahid’s list—his three objectives: fighting, getting high, and fucking—leaving her hand where it was, immobile on her damp mons, all arousal long-vanished.
There came a scratching at the door. She lay, alert again, listening to the patterns of sounds: not as if someone were trying to get in, but as if an animal, maybe, were digging, or some other resident of the city, sharpening claws on the wood.
Silently, she got of bed. Holding the sheet up, she called out softly.
The scratching stopped.
And began again.
Taking a deep breath, and another, Name of the Sun unbolted the door with shaking fingers, yanking it open—
The stoop was empty. She looked up the street. Down. There were people in the fog, old buildings. Wet stone and crumbling brick and the scents of the humid evening.
Nothing unusual—
Except two cognosci, racing into the crowd on all fours.
Naturally, hornblower had been more than a little reluctant to step inside Anu’s mouth. He did not really want to even look in there. But the angry sky power had waited, inert, gaping at branch level, while hornblower