“I want kreauchee!” he said. “Where is it?”
Again, a great shaking of the head from Concupiscentia, this time accompanied by whimpering.
“Where?” he shouted. “Where?”
The perfume and the veils sickened him, and he began to rip at the silks and gossamers in his rage. The creature didn’t intervene until he picked up the Bible lying open on the pillows and threatened to rip out its onion-leaf pages.
“Pleas ep!” she squealed. “Please ep! Shellem beat I if ye taurat the Book. Quaisoir lovat the Book.”
It wasn’t often he heard the gloss, the pidgin English of the islands, and the sound of it—as misshapen as its source—infuriated him even more. He tore half a dozen pages from the Bible, just to make her squeal again. She obliged.
“I want kreauchee!” he said.
“I havat! I havat!” the creature said, and led him from the bedroom into the enormous dressing room that lay next door, where she began to search through the gilded boxes on Quaisoir’s dressing table.
Catching sight of the Autarch’s reflection in the mirror, she made a tiny smile, like a guilty child, before bringing a package out of the smallest of the boxes. He snatched it from her fingers before she had a chance to proffer it. He knew from the smell that stung his nostrils that this was good quality, and without hesitating he unwrapped it and put the whole wad into his mouth.
“Good girl,” he told Concupiscentia. “Good girl. Now, do you know where your mistress got it?”
Concupiscentia shook her head. “She goallat alon unto the Kesparates, many nights. Sometimes shellem a goat beggar, sometimes shellem goat—”
“A whore.”
“No, no. Quaisoir isem a whore.”
“Is that where she is now?” the Autarch said. “Is she out whoring? It’s a little early for that, isn’t it, or is she cheaper in the afternoon?”
The kreauchee was better than he’d hoped; he felt it striking him as he spoke, lifting his melancholy and replacing it with a vehement buzz. Even though he’d not penetrated Quaisoir in four decades (nor had any desire to), in some moods news of her infidelities could still depress him. But the drug took all that pain away. She could sleep with fifty men a day, and it wouldn’t take her an inch from his side. Whether they felt contempt or passion for each other was irrelevant. History had made them indivisible and would hold them together till the Apocalypse did them part.
“Shellem not whoring,” Concupiscentia piped up, determined to defend her mistress’s honor. “Shellem downer ta Scoriae.”
“The Scoriae? Why?”
“Executions,” Concupiscentia replied, pronouncing this word—learned from her mistress’s lips—perfectly.
“Executions?” the Autarch said, a vague unease surfacing through the kreauchee’s soothings. “What executions?”
Concupiscentia shook her head. “I dinnet knie,” she said. “Jest executions. Allovat executions. She prayat to tern—”
“I’m sure she does.”
“We all prayat far the_sols, so ta go intat the presence of the Unbeheld washed—”
Here were more phrases repeated parrot fashion, the kind of Christian cant he found as sickening as the decor. And, like the decor, these were Ouaisoir’s work. She’d embraced the Man of Sorrows only a few months ago, but it hadn’t taken her long to claim she was His bride. Another infidelity, less syphilitic than the hundreds that had gone before, but just as pathetic.
The Autarch left Concupiscentia to babble on and dispatched his bodyguard to locate Rosengarten. There were questions to be answered here, and quickly, or else it wouldn’t only be the Scoriae where heads would roll.
Traveling the Lenten Way, Gentle had come to believe that, far from being the burden he’d expected her to be, Huzzah was a blessing. If she hadn’t been with them in the Cradle he was certain the Goddess Tishalulle would not have intervened on their behalf; nor would hitchhiking along the highway have been so easy if they hadn’t had a winsome child to thumb rides for them. Despite the months she’d spent hidden away in the depths of the asylum (or perhaps because of them), Huzzah was eager to engage everyone in conversation, and from the replies to her innocent inquiries he and Pie gleaned a good deal of information he doubted they’d have come by otherwise. Even as they’d crossed the causeway to the city, she’d struck up a dialogue with a woman who’d happily supplied a list of the Kesparates and even pointed out those that were visible from where they’d walked. There were too many names and directions for Gentle to hold in his head, but a glance towards Pie confirmed that the mystif was attending closely and would have all of them by heart by the time they reached the other side.