Chapter 3 – The Dark House
A vehicle that resembled a large chariot with side benches more than any standard carriage, pulled by a showy, colorful team of six feisty hippocampi – true 'sea horses', mer-stallions with strong fishtails and more muscle mass than their landlocked brethren – was being driven by Princess Llewella's regular 'coachman' (an equally buff lavender-haired native) down the underwater hill of the affluent north side of Rebma with Prince Random and the Lady Vialle in tow, clattering over the ancient cobble-shelled roads, swiftly cutting across town, down the thinner streets and avenues of the southwest side of the city into one of the oldest settled boroughs, through veritable clouds of organic detritus: nearly a mile above them the sun was rising over the True World and the tide was coming in, stirring up the currents below until the drifting debris created the impression of a fog, a real 'pea-souper' that ironically happened to be the actual color of peas. Vialle had not rewrapped her closed eyes as per her foreign husband's wishes, but she was holding part of the seaweed over her nose and mouth, and for once Random couldn't blame her; only pride kept him from asking for a section of the leaf himself – that junk was irritating his eyes, nose and throat, and it didn't smell too good, either.
But he wouldn't even close his eyes – he wanted to be able to see where he was going. While it was true that the prince had visited the City in the Bay in the past, he had never spent much time outside of the pleasures and creature comforts of the Mirror Palace (or, on rarer occasions like this one, Llewella's estate.) Technically speaking, if one knew the street layout of the City of Amber, all one had to do was to flip it on a vertical axis to know which section of town one was in in Rebma, but the practice of figuring it out had always annoyed him before, that old irritation of being in a Shadow too much like one you already know so you keep making subconscious mistakes.
Although there was no danger of mistaking Rebman architecture and culture for what lay above the surface: multistory townhouses of rounded lightly-tinted calcite-carbon limestone with enormous connected heat vents lined the streets, their octagonal pale-pastel seaglass windows lit from within like an immense modern art display. Businesses were in all the ground-floors at street-level, which was currently in the process of being illuminated again via 'leery'-like teams on their rounds, refreshing the brilliantly-burning mineral torchlamps, making them blaze an eerily 'warm' shade of chartreuse; the light was unable to cut through the murk beyond the fifth floor at present, however, the 'skyline' blurred away.
The sound of the hippocampi hooves seemed to travel unnaturally far and clear, likely waking some of the locals as the chariot slowed down to a trot, heading around a curve, into a dark alley barely big enough for the rig. There was a distinct chill in the chummy water without the light…
"You sure this is the right address?" the prince dubiously ventured the driver, but his wife had already disembarked, feeling her way along the slightly rounded concretion wall to the correct door, producing her skeleton key.
"It is all right, Husband," she called back to him, hearing him stiffly step out of the chariot himself, treading the shells in his new sharkleather moccasins, moving toward her voice; the charioteer slowly and carefully backed his vehicle out of the narrow service entryway, then clattered away from them. "This is the back door to my house – I mean our house," she gave a laugh. There was an audible chunk as the old lock turned and she shoved the door open. "I do not care to get that detritus into my waiting room; it's difficult to sweep out, seems to find its way into all sorts of crevasses," she stepped aside to let him in, closing and locking up behind them… in total darkness.
The foyer was as dark as a closed mausoleum and dank as a fish tank that hadn't been scrubbed in many a moon, the atmosphere only nominally cleaner-smelling in here than it had been outside. Random was overcome with a wave of claustrophobia as he felt her slip past him, audibly beginning to climb a staircase.
"Uh, babe? You wouldn't by any chance happen to have any candles in this joint, would you?" he tried to joke, but the question came out almost a little embarrassingly nervous.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, stricken. "I knew I had forgotten something! Please forgive me! There was so much rescheduling and planning to do, I was given such short notice before the wedding!"
"No kidding," he scoffed humorlessly.
"If you would but wait a moment, I have tapers in my office for the benefit of my sighted patients."
There was movement in the current, a gentle caress as she swept by him, a light hand momentarily on his arm, followed by the sound of another door opening, this one right in front of him. A few seconds and some scrabbling noises later, a burst of light assaulted his unadjusted eyes but quickly came into focus as the flame of a small mineral torch, perched neatly in an old green-tarnished bedside candle-holder, illuminating Vialle as she stepped back out of her office - her dark hair now carefully tied back - closing the door.
"Here, you take it," she handed it off, touching his cheek in sympathy as if he were the one disabled, for not being able to get about in the dark. She headed on up the staircase as if this was just any other day for her, hanging onto a long, thin curved railing that might've been the rib-bone of an ancient whale, enough of its calcium leached out so that it could be bended to shape.
But upon raising the light before him to advance up after her, Random's attention was instantly glued to the ceiling…
Vialle's townhouse looked like a shipwreck.
Clusters of pale yellow anemone polyps were cemented in high crevasses, along descending edges. Barnacles with delicate plum-colored frond-fingers plastered the ceiling so thickly that it bulged downward in odd areas under their accretions, their weight! The little creatures receded into their white scaly armor upon his passing, as if the light or burned compounds from the torch bothered them. Creeping brownish-khaki slime overtook high sconces, seemingly devouring the clean-lined natural architecture. They reached the first landing, and it was only too clear that the damaging parasitic organisms had spread through the whole flat: colorless worms wriggled and waved from the very top shelf of a bookcase; chairs were cemented to the floor by fauna-based calcium deposits.
"The salon," his wife announced, obviously with a little pride. "I entertain few guests, but perhaps we will have more now. Come," she reached back in his direction, found and gently tugged his wrist, leading him further up the winding stairs into the disaster area. The water had an odd tinge that bespoke more than the usual minute presence of sulfur in the kitchen (the stovetop and oven being the opened side of the geothermal heat vent that ran vertically through the whole structure for warmth.) Mats of white bacteria shoved aside clay pots…
By the time she showed him the bedroom – and its pale-pink scaleless eelpout fish, an intruder that darted under the sponge bed upon their approach – he could no longer remain silent; she was tugging him on, but he stopped her. At first she thought he was flirting, considering where they were, but…
"What is it, Husband? What's wrong? I know," she sighed, "it's hardly the Mirror Palace, but this is our home; I will strive to make your life here a happy one," she offered placatingly with a hopeful smile.
Random almost pitied her; she probably didn't even know. He set down the taper on a much cleaner side table and took her hands into his own.
"Don't take this hard, doll – I'm sure you're doing your best, but… is the housekeeping here… difficult for you?" he winced, hating how that sounded the moment it was out of his mouth. He felt even lower when she blushed in embarrassment, her head bowing.
"Between my medical practice and my pottery I scarcely have the time. One of my poorer patients sends her son here thrice a ngan to do my cleaning for me in lieu of payment for her appointments – she has a bad back, you see, and requires regular spinal adjustments which she could otherwise not afford. I suppose the result is not as polished as a maid service, but give the boy some credit: he is only twelve years old and he does my entire flat without a single verbal complaint."
"Offhand, I'd say your 'help' is a lazy, disrespectful little shithead," the prince coldly noted, glancing at the discoloring film coating the top edges of the octagonal window in the room; the glass should've all been a translucent light-blue, not olive green in patches.
"What?"
"Swim up to the ceiling directly above you with your hands raised above your head," he directed her, seeing that it was only more of the barnacles, nothing poisonous or stinging that could cause her true harm.
Vialle obeyed him, her face swept with both concern and consternation as she paddled upward against the non-buoyant medium, reaching up, kicking to keep aloft… Her fingertips and palms were tickled by the delicate feelers before they retracted and she let out a surprised yelp, feeling the mass of hardened forms, how far it spread.
"Oh!" she exclaimed in both anger and disgust, her cheeks flaming as she settled back on her feet. "His mother is going to hear about this! Is it just a ceiling infestation, or is it…?" she trailed off uneasily with a sudden sinking feeling.
"It's… probably not as bad as it could be," her new husband muttered a little uncomfortably. "It's not your fault, doll; he knew he could get away with it because you couldn't see it – aw, don't cry," he rolled his eyes, wrapping her in his arms, "we'll get this fixed if I have to hold a trident to the little brat's hide and make him do it right, how's that sound?" he stroked her soft, thick hair, hearing her chuckle through a sob, but she pushed away, sniffing.
"The barnacles are a common enough problem in this borough," she wiped at her nose, swishing her hand in the water to clean it, "probably some worms, too, but the rest! It will take weeks if not the whole ngan to clean it out properly, to set this place to rights! And my clinic opens in less than an hour! Can they smell it in there?! And of course I don't notice it because I live in it! You should go back to your sister's villa until this mess is dealt with, until it is a proper place for anyone to live – how can I even ask a prince to live here in this…this…" she started to cry again.
Frankly the girl had a point, Random coolly considered, giving the crouching eelpout peeking at them from its 'cover' the stink-eye. He didn't care to breathe and ingest all this crap – it was probably terrible for his health… but since when (beyond animal survival) had he really gone out of his way to care about that? He'd been willfully poisoning himself for fun with any number of substances for well over two shadow-human lifespans by now: a little algae and fish excrement wouldn't exactly kill him. And if he went skulking back off to Llewella under any circumstances, he knew he'd never hear the end of it – that he was a coward on top of his comprehensive catalog of real and perceived faults. Not that that accusation didn't fit the bill at times – he was in favor of continued living – but for once he was also being bribed not to be a heel. He sighed, letting his fingers drift across her abdomen, feeling her intake of breath.
"You can't get rid of me that easy, doll," he crooned, his hand drifting higher as he moved closer, "for better or worse for a whole year ready-or-not, remember?" he breathed down the column of her neck, watching her eyelids flutter, feeling her own warm breath against his chest. "You're stuck with me, babe," he teasingly kissed her temple, letting his arms go round her lithe back, her slender waist, closing the space between them, "stuck like those stupid barnacles are stuck to your ceiling. Why don't you go on down to your clinic and get freshened up there; you'll feel better. I think I can finish giving myself the grand tour – it's all one room per floor, right?" he gentled her back to the circular staircase and its bizarre, invasive marine menagerie.
She suddenly stiffened in his embrace with a gasp. "My studio!" Vialle pulled away and made as if to bolt up the stairs, but just as quickly stopped in her tracks on the landing. "No – I don't want to know about it, not right now. Later," she sighed dejectedly – then bleakly smiled in her husband's direction. "I'm sorry this is such a terrible welcome," she laughed humorlessly, "but things will get better, I promise. We will go to market for our meals until the kitchen is fixed. Start thinking of items that you might need that I do not currently have: the clam razor and about three-dozen tapers to start; that should be enough to restock the house… oh, and a manta-leather cape. You'll need a whole sharkskin suit eventually should you wish to go out after lights-out, but I'll have to save up the money for that one; it's more because they're tailored… but I suppose you already knew that," she quietly self-admonished. "The drinking water ampoules are in the kitchen; they should be safe since I keep them in a lower cupboard away from the vent. One of us will have to visit the water distribution center today so that they know to deliver more to this address," she began descending the staircase. "If you need me for anything… you know where to find me," she ended awkwardly, quickly disappearing into the murky gloom below.
Leaving him alone with the eelpout.
"You're going to be dinner, you here me? Dinner," he hissed nastily in its direction, watching it dart for cover again. There had to be a reliable way to snare the damn thing without making a mess of the bed – or the room, for that matter; 'lander'-type thinking when it came to certain things could be harder to shake than most people realized. It was a little like working in outer-space. He sighed, surveying the mess, and took up his miniature torch again, steeling his stomach for the rest; it really did smell awful.
Wait.
He crossed the bedroom and studied the ornamental window, finding the latch that would allow him to crack it open – then remembered the tide. Later then, maybe in an hour or so…
There were more pale-to-puke colored anemones and soft octocoral the higher he went up the stairwell, past another unused sitting room that the sea bottom was actively attempting to reclaim – a skinny foot-long brittle star covered part of the window like a suction-cup car ornament. Vialle had to have better ventilation up here someplace or there wouldn't be so many advanced organisms – or enough oxygenated water…
The conundrum was solved upon reaching the top landing (he had simply swum up the last three flights). The girl's studio.
Of course.
A long smooth limestone workbench dominated the small room, with shelves upon shelves of finished pottery, both utilitarian and art pieces, lining the walls all the way down to the floor, along with abstract marine-inspired sculptures in varying sizes and even busts of human heads! The level of craftsmanship, of detail was nothing short of astonishing, even moreso knowing that the artist was blind.
An artist. Queen Moire had married him to an artist who clearly couldn't make it on art alone down here, who had learned a respectable and responsible second trade – without consigning her soul to the bottom drawer. Random had to smirk at that, setting the torch-taper down on the table. Trying to reform him by example had never gotten anyone very far, but go ahead, let the queen try – at least the idea was worth a laugh. Vialle's unused supply of fresh clay was tightly wrapped in oily-waxy packets of fishskin down on the floor in the lefthand corner, her tools piled on the clean work surface; at least that much was safe. But there was destruction in this room, too, irregularly stretched along the ceiling: the bust of a young woman and two ornamental vases sported nasty patches of calcification and critters. Climbing up on the table, he got them down to the work area, away from the intact pieces; a small octopus peeked out from one of the vases as he placed it on the table beside the others, surprising the prince!
This window has to open, he mused, edging around the table with the inhabited vase in the crook of his left arm, little rectangular-pupilled eyeballs staring over the lip. Random was right: this window not only opened easily but was relatively clean – as was the outside water by now (well, mostly, compared to this.) Gingerly grasping the irritated, squishy little beast, he managed to prise it out of the vase with only a tiny release of brown ink; reaching outside, he stuck it to the outer wall of the house and swished out most of the ink with it, closing the window again. Looking back at the marred vases, the ruined sculpture, Random found himself wishing he knew how to fix them but had no doubt that they were all wrecked beyond any easy repair. And then a very odd incongruity belatedly smacked him in the head: the pottery was glazed! But how?! A myriad of colors and even different textures met his eyes. How could she possibly do all that down here?!
A careful search of the rest of the finished pots and fat vases turned up four more cephalopodan occupants, and the last two were far harder to flush out, stubbornly gripping the inside of 'their' 'houses', glaring murderously up at him.
"Know what calamari is?" he threatened one he couldn't unstick, even using one of Vialle's sculpting spatulas. "You're begging to find out." The reluctant octopus finally moved of its own accord when the prince held its pot directly to the wall with the heat chimney behind it, undulatingly creeping up toward the lip. This one was not going to go without a fight. Crossing to the open window, holding it all the way out along with the pot, Random absently noted the lights down below at street-level, people meandering through the shops and along the thin avenue – a couple were staring up at him in confusion, one pointing as if he had just been recognized. The prince in turn made a point of grinning down at them peevishly, waving.
Get used to it, folks.
He briefly considered dropping the octopus on them, then reluctantly thought better of it – probably bad for business. This one did release a motherlode of ink, though, as it squirted away out of his grasp, practically blinding him and setting him to coughing as he got the window closed again, stumbling over to the bench to try and recover.
And that was the easy bit. Man…
As his vision cleared and his lungs gradually stopped harassing him, he blearily turned the sculpted bust to face him, studying what was left of it. The features were a little surrealistically exaggerated but sensuous, the gentle kilter-tilt of the head, the full mouth partly open… it was a portrait of someone in midkiss – at least – and it was terrible that the eyes, hair, and the top portion of the bridge of the nose were all marred…
Random blinked, and for just a second it was Vialle instead – but the fancy passed as he came to his feet. The more he thought about it the more it made an incredible amount of sense that someone who had learned to see people by touch could reproduce human physiognomy in the same manner. Good use of a strength.
His taper wafting little clouds of bubbles in its incinerating wake, the prince made his way down to what was left of the kitchen and located the aforementioned 'water ampoules', surprised to find that they were repurposed stoppered kelp bladders and not the glass and even gold flasks he had always seen in use here, reminding him just how far down the social strata his wife really was. The liquid had an inevitable vegetable tinge to it, but it was not unpalatable, although it probably tasted better with a meal. Venturing back into the lower salon, he perused the blind woman's unlikely bookshelves – only to find sheets upon sheets of un-inked and crudely raised Thari block-script! It was technically legible, but reading it proved to be a strain on his eyes in the dim light after only a short time. Most of them appeared to be medical or pharmacopoeal texts by the raised spines, only one or two for pleasure. He wondered in passing how difficult it was for Vialle to read, or if she just didn't care for it as a form of entertainment. In any event, there wasn't much diversion to be found here. In fact, there wasn't much of anything to be found in these rooms save for stowaway parasites that were undoubtedly eating holes in the walls and despoiling the indoor atmosphere!
It's a well-appointed jail cell, he suddenly thought, incredulous as to how long it had taken him to see it! Moire didn't have to lock him up to put him under house arrest… because that was basically what this arrangement amounted to, with his own wife for a jailer! There was nothing to do here, and he could scarcely go and do much of anything in the city without money – which the queen had ensured would be in short supply. And the situation had just enough of a veneer of respectability and dignity that none of the House of Amber could possibly object to his treatment here, now or afterwards! He had to warily give Moire props for the subtlety of this scheme; it was almost worthy of a Barimen (although he knew that his own family wouldn't have bothered making it look quite so nice.)
Waving coral tentacles in his upper peripheral vision derailed his train-of-thought again. Being in this place the way it was made him think of being in an icebox that hadn't been cleaned out in a very long time, what was once edible and nourishing converted into science experiments, various colors of mold, dangerous bacteria and general rot obscuring the contents to the point that some of it was completely unidentifiable. And the smell… it was just too gross.
He crossed the little sitting room to the slimed window, intent on forcing the hinge open if he could, when some grooved marks in the lower wall caught his eye. It looked as if someone had pounded a chisel six times in a row down the wall; the spot had the remains of several perfectly round pockmarks that had been filled over with a kind of putty compound – imperfectly, from the stucco-like raising; the substance was likely sticky when wet, before it hardened…
The idea, the true magnitude of the work at hand, slowly descended on him. It would be like chipping legions of barnacles off the hull of a galleon in the shipyard, the hammering and prying, the caulking over. To say nothing of what would be necessary for the removal of the other organisms! And this work had to performed practically standing on one's head or constantly swimming, in order to get the angle of the blows right!
Stircraziness and indignant irritation propelled the prince to want to do something. A half-hearted search of the kitchen's cabinets and drawers turned up what had to be the correct tools: a leather-covered mallet hammer right beside a wide-spatulate chisel that matched the size of the grooves in that wall. Resignedly swimming up to the top landing, he climbed up on top of the work table (the ceiling in most of the rooms appeared to be only about nine feet high, more or less – he could reach it this way) and raised the chisel, experimentally shoving it against a barnacle accretion: it chipped away only a little calcium dust – the shit was like cement! Swinging the hammer up, he began to pound his way slowly across the ceiling, with shells, carbonate compounds and frightened little creatures clattering down about him, onto the tabletop, the floor…
It only took a few minutes of the strangely repetitive, muffled cracking noises that reverberated all the way down into Vialle's consulting room for her to excuse herself to venture upstairs to see what in the sea was going on (remembering to grab a couple extra mineral tapers on her way out.) It couldn't possibly be what it sounded like…
She followed the din all the way up to her studio.
"Husband?" she called tentatively upon her arrival, smelling dust. "What are you doing?"
"What do you think I'm doing?" he ground out, not even pausing in midswing. "I'm taking care of this damned mess! When does that brat's mother show up for her next adjustment?"
"This afternoon."
"Perfect," the prince accentuated the word with a crack that brought an entire section crashing down, exploding over the work table, the sound making the girl jump in surprise.
"Oh, Husband," she sighed, "no one expects you to do this menial labor, certainly not me. You can stop if you want to-"
"If we wait for that kid to do all this," he continued pounding, "we'll be living in this chumfest for the rest of our marriage!" He paused, glancing back across his handiwork, a thin clean swath of pocked ceiling, as he wiped calcium dust from his face – then spared a glance down at her: an expression that wavered between disbelief and incredible hope alternated in her features beneath her more thinly-covered eyes. She seemed to snap out of whatever she'd been thinking, where she'd gone, back to the present.
"If you're going to continue with this you must sweep them all into a covered pot, otherwise the barnacles will simply swim away and burrow elsewhere. I'll go get you one – and the net," she remembered out loud, darting down the pitch-black risers. Random had the odd feeling that he would never entirely get used to that sight – the sight of a girl as much at home in the darkness of the ocean floor as any of the true native species that usually couldn't make it past the pressure-barriers on the outside of the city, like these little things he was currently disturbing. And she was right: a few of them were already trying to make a break for it across the room…
Just a few seconds later, Vialle reemerged in the entryway with the aforementioned items: a covered clay pot big enough to be a large casserole dish, and a medium-sized fine-mesh net, not unlike something landers elsewhere used to clean out aquariums. She set them down on the floor just inside the door, along with the tapers.
"I would bring them to you, but I know not where they all lie underfoot," she laughed a little. "When the pot gets full, tip its contents into the kitchen heat vent to kill them, but watch your own skin and clothing; even in the absence of flames, you must treat it as an open fire, for it is fed by one. All of the vents in this borough connect up with a magma hotspot that courses underneath most of the old city, along the shelf-line. Are you sure you would not rather wait to supervise Igan?"
"Never you fear," she heard the prince utter archly through an open sneer, "I'm going to work his rotten little fingers to the bone for letting this happen to you. Now, don't you have some patients to be seeing to?"
Random well-noted the girl's suppressed smile.
"Yes, Husband," she lowered her head demurely.
"Then get out of here," he added in a flirting tone, repositioning his chisel into the wedge he'd been creating, watching her vanish in a flourish of ripples with an irrepressible grin leaking across her face…
He forcibly buried his own unwanted reaction in a volley of hammering that made his ears ring.
Several hours later and with just barely half of the ceiling uncovered – hundreds of the little culprits steamed to a crunchy crisp instantly before being blown upwards and out of the house via the 'chimney' – Vialle came back up, offering to take him to lunch. The resultant cleared area looked crazily like the shot-up ceiling of an Old West saloon to him, with no rhyme or reason as to where the bullet holes had gone. The muscles of his arms, shoulders and upper back were burning, but the exertion actually felt pretty good (no one ever guessed correctly how strong the little man truly was – due to what he was – just by looking at him.) At least it beat sitting around twiddling his thumbs waiting for time to expire. As tempting as the idea was – to simply knock off for an hour someplace else – Random knew it would be that much harder to get going again afterwards, and finally prevailed upon her to pick up a sushi-type meal for them, to be eaten quickly in the relative cleanliness of her well-lit back office.
From what little he was allowed to glimpse (as he was being hurried through, due to his currently dusty state), Vialle's medical practice looked like any number of old world and/or 'alternative' clinics he had seen over the years: a table and chairs over here, an examination/surgery slab over there and a freestanding examination chair at about midroom, shelves packed with bandages and tools, seaglass apothecary bottles and jars, albeit with punch-raised block lettering on all the labels…
About two hours later (two-thirds of the way through the studio ceiling, with the table dragged over closer to the doorway) the sounds of muffled conversation filtered in from below-stairs, frightened young-sounding pleading mixed with stern female reassurance (obviously his wife's voice) – and before he know it there were reluctant plodding footsteps coming up the risers, until…
"Husband, this is Igan," Vialle addressed him from the doorway, her hands firmly closed over the green-haired pale-countenanced boy's slouching shoulders, the tools of his chore clutched tightly in his trembling hands, his pale-green eyes wide at the sight of the room, the unexpected foreigner. "Igan, this is Prince Random Barimen of Amber – and I expect you to respect him, if not me," she added a bit coldly. "Your job today is to do a good job this time for the sake of your family's honor, if not your own hide. Husband, I leave this matter entirely up to your own judgment," she pronounced formally, letting go of the boy and proceeding stately back down the staircase.
Igan continued staring up at the still-well-tanned Lander-blonde prince where he stood upon the shifted-over table, and just barely managed to hold his ground as Random hopped down easily right in front of him, dangerous mischief gleaming in his bright blue eyes, the beginnings of a smile that made the kid squirm in his leather moccasins.
"Ready to play 'reverse Sistine Chapel' until you reach adolescence?" he grinned right in his face.