The Etched City by K.J. Bishop

Author:K.J. Bishop
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction
ISBN: 9780330427104
Publisher: Tor
Published: 2003-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

The wet season arrived in Ashamoil, bringing air like hot glue, thunderstorms, and swarms of mosquitoes and midges, flies and cicadas. Moisture-trapped smoke and coal dust clotted the air above the Skamander and along the lower terraces; fabric rotted, plaster crumbled, metal rusted. The whole city sweltered and stank of overflowing drains, every whiff an omen of dysentery and cholera.

The onset of the change in the year was traditionally a time for odd fashions, as people who had the means to distract themselves from the physical discomfort attempted to do so, trying to remove their minds from their suffering bodies. The previous year’s fad had been for science, with many a kitchen being converted into a laboratory for the duration of the season. It followed that numerous souls had blown themselves up, suffocated in clouds of poison gas, started fires, and caught diseases from animals on which they were experimenting. As a reactionary consequence the present year witnessed a craze for a romanticised medieval past, saturated with magic, sans any technology whatsoever. A man called Durn Limment, who had made a large fortune in chemical dyestuffs, paints, and inks, saw an opportunity to unite fantastic pageant with commerce, and commissioned Beth to create illustrations for a bestiary. It was to be an opulent limited edition—“a modern incunabulum,” in Limment’s words, printed in his inks and bound in leather coloured with his ultramarine and gold dyes. He had told Beth that she was at liberty to do as she liked with the pictures, as long as the work fully showed off his range of colours, and was completed quickly, to take advantage of the season’s mood.

Gwynn was present to see the illustrations Beth began producing for the book. It seemed to him that they partially organised her world of undecided-upon forms into something more codified. She grouped certain elements and gave names to the results: a beast with the body of an owl, wings of fire, and the head of a laughing black child, she called Rambukul; to one with the body of a ship, the necks of nine swans, and the heads of nine lilies she gave the name Lalgorma. The oddest thing she designed was a smooth red stone with a beard of white grass, which she named Ombelex. Though it seemed an inert thing, she depicted it locked up in a heavy cage. She also created interpretations of traditional monsters, including a new basilisk with a sharp-featured male face, a cobralike hood made of peacock feathers, and a thorned tongue. The sphinx she drew was of the traditional lion-eagle-woman type, though it was whimsically playing with a glass fishing float.

While occupied on this project, she kept up with the work that provided her regular income. In particular, she laboured long hours to meet a steadily growing demand for her erotic portraits. In these, her new lover’s influence showed. She told Gwynn that as he was linear and monochromatic, he was ideally suited to the engraver’s medium. Faces and

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