The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [101]
Gwynn drew on his own pipe and looked from his old inamorata to the woman who was now her lover.
"Why don't you take her somewhere cleaner? Out of the city."
"A suburban cure? Rock beats scissors, boredom beats tragedy?"
"Shouldn't the pastoral be expected to win a battle now and then?"
"In its war with the heroic? The famous restorative power of grass and goats might work, but not against the power of her audience here, I wouldn't think."
"Then don't bring her back to them."
"And where should I take her?"
"Anywhere away from the evil comforts of prison." Gwynn exhaled a stream of smoke and pushed his hair back from his face, revealing pale, greenish, heavily slitted eyes.
Vali snorted. "When will you be packing your bags and leaving, then?"
He laughed lazily. "I tried once, but I got homesick. My soul likes it here entirely too much. But that dear soul there is of a different quality. She was always a runner."
She wanted him to be quiet. "You don't have the right to talk about souls. You only know about bodies, Gwynn."
She supposed that even more than his silence, she wanted a fight, which she wouldn't get.
He laughed again, as if he didn't mind the insult at all, and said,
"Well, this body is tired. And so are you, I daresay. I'll get us a cab." Raising himself, he took up his guns and sword from the floor and buckled them on, and took a further minute to impose order on his clothing, lastly pulling on a pair of black kid gloves that he stretched over his fingers with a slightly pedantic air.
Vali watched the back of his damask tailcoat recede into the haze of oily lamp-lit smoke. Almost all of Mona's friends had deserted her, fearing they would catch her illness. No doubt embarrassment had motivated some of them. She wondered whether it was love, loyalty, or something else that kept Gwynn hovering around.
And what about you, whom she rejects along with the rest of the world? Is this only the natural course of love ― the turning away from the partner and towards solipsism, given a public airing? And should you wear the disgrace?
She addressed her reflection in the narghile's glass belly, as if it had some power which could explain her own soul to her. But the image, distorted by the curve of the glass, showed her no oracle, only a woman in mannish clothes: dark of face, not so young, not unhandsome. The old caste scars on her cheeks didn't show in the dim reflection. Her hair was rolled into the long, tight dreadlocks worn by the military clans of Oran, her homeland in the southeastern tropics. She had kept the style for aesthetic reasons and, also, because she had no wish to discard all of her former self.
It was a common saying that everyone in Sheol was a foreigner. Smells on the wind, Mona had called the city's population once, on a day when they sat people-watching in a briefly voguish bar on Arcade Bridge.
Vali found her boots and tugged them on. Her fingers were sluggish fastening buckles and laces. All she had got out of the night's indulgence was torpor without calm.
Over the troubled sound of Mona's breathing, Vali became aware of an irregular noise behind her; a quiet scratching that inspired a mental image of a mouse scuttling over a slate floor. She looked around and saw a reedy, fair-haired teenager perched on the edge of a divan, writing in a notebook. Vali would have taken him for one more poet hunting inspiration in pipe dreams if she had not seen him give her the furtive, inquisitorial look of the gutter-begotten press. Well, she would see for herself the nonsense he was writing.
She rose, advanced, and, glaring, snatched the notebook out of his hand and skimmed the jottings therein. He had written:
Society Report: Mona Skye, the renowned sabreuse, sonneteer and despiser of the world, observed unconscious in a drug den on the notorious Sycamore Street strip. The end appears to be near-ing for the self-destructing heroine.
At the Cutting Edge: Mona Skye's worsening condition has cast a gloom over the demimonde and