The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [109]
Both women were in furs. Already there was a bite to the winter chill.
Although snow rarely fell on Sheol, Vali felt this year might prove an exception.
Munching on a biscuit, she watched the tiny figures of a tour group standing near the edge, peering down at the desert. Closer, in the middle of the no man's land, a group of children were playing "Masked Avengers." Their high voices carried on the wind:
The men in the masks,
The ladies in the masks,
See how they kill, see how they kill—
Six-shooters and switchblades,
Swords, daggers and poison,
We all fall down,
We all fall down.
At Reparata
JEFFREY FORD
EVERYONE REMEMBERS WHERE THEY WERE when they first heard that Queen Josette had died. I was standing in twilight on that cliff known as the Cold Shoulder, fly-fishing for bats. Beneath me, the lights of the palace shone with a soft glow that dissolved decrepitude into beauty, and a breeze was blowing in from the south, carrying with it the remnants of a storm at sea. I had just caught a glimpse of a star, streaking down behind the distant mountains, when there was a tug at my line followed hard by a cry that came, like the shout of the earth, up from the palace. I heard it first in my chest. Words would have failed to convince me of the fact, but that desperate scream told me plainly she was dead.
Josette had been an orphan left at the palace gates by a troupe ofwan-dering actors. She arrived at a point in her life between childhood and maturity, wondrously lithe and athletic with green eyes and her dark hair cut like a boy's. I suspect she had been abandoned in hopes that her beauty and intelligence might work to make her a better life than one found on the road. This was back in the days when Ingess had just begun to build his new court from society's castaways. Upon seeing her, he pronounced she was to be the Lady of the Mirrors, but we all knew that she would someday lose the title to that of Queen. The drama that brought her to this stately affair was ever the court's favorite spectacle and topic of conversation.
Her hair grew long and entangled us all in her charm and innocence. Ingess married her on a cool day in late summer five years after her arrival, and the Overseer of Situations released a thousand butterflies upon the signal of their kiss. We all loved her as a daughter, and the younger ones among us as a mother. She never put on airs or forced the power of her elevated position, understanding better than anyone the equanimity that was the soul of the Palace Reparata. Her kindness was the perfect match for Ingess's comic generosity.
With her passing, His Royal, as he had insisted on being called, came apart like light in a prism. I sat four nights in succession with him in the gardens, smoking my pipe and listening to him weep into sunrise. The quantity of tears drained him of his good looks and left him a haggard wreck, like some old crone, albeit with shining, blonde hair.
"See here, Ingess," I told him but could go no further, the logic of his grief too persuasive.
He'd wave his hand at me and turn his face away.
And so the world he had managed to create with his pirate ancestor's gold, his kingdom, suddenly lost its meaning. Before Josette had succumbed to the poison of a spider bite, Reparata was a place where a wandering beggar might be taken in at any time and made a Court Accountant or Thursday's High Astronomer. Every member of the palace had a title bestowed upon them by His Royal. There was no want at Reparata, and this made it an oasis amidst the sea of disappointment and cruelty that we, each in his or her own way, had found the world to be.
Never before had a royal retinue been comprised of so many lowly worms. The Countess Frouch had been a prostitute known as Yams in the nearby seaside town of Gile. His Royal welcomed her warmly, without judgment, as he did Tendon Durst, a round, bespectacled lunatic who believed