The Secret of the Rose and Glove by Kevin Andrew Murphy

Author:Kevin Andrew Murphy [Murphy, Kevin Andrew]
Language: por
Format: epub
Published: 2012-10-06T19:50:59+00:00

Chapter Four: The Silver Maiden’s Key

The wheel of the year had begun again and with it the month of Abadius. Abadar, Master of the First Vault, did as he had always done, and politely but firmly informed the spirits of the dead the Night of the Pale was over.

In other lands and other times, New Year’s Day was an occasion for market fairs and festivals, but in Galt forty years after the Red Revolution, the holiday was more often a time for cleaning, putting things in order, and general tidying.

Norret Gantier kept this custom better than he ever had, bandaging his injured hand, decanting the will-o’-wisp’s luminous ichor into pre-revolutionary champagne magnums, preserving the strange sponge-like body for future study, writing notes about the curious behavior of the lightning in the elevator cage, and telling the other inhabitants of the Liberty Hostel repeatedly that he was as mystified as they were at the miraculous restoration of the unicorn-and-cockatrice statue in the reflecting pool, the sudden appearance of the siren in the dolphin fountain, the reappearance of all the frescoes about the Liberty Hostel, and whatever that glowing mess was in the elevator.

Flauric called a mandatory household meeting for all the guests to discuss these issues—which is to say, when he served up the New Year’s luncheon of Liberty Cabbage, the goose confit and sauerkraut he had left simmering since the night before, he sprang it on everyone.

Of course, those gathered in the banquet hall were already discussing it, starting with the fresco that now adorned that chamber, something between a royal wedding feast and a menagerie. Here was the duke, there was the duchess, there was Crapaudine the giant toad dressed like an old witch with a lace collar and a pointed beaver hat festooned with ribbons, alongside her horrid son, Coco the cockatrice. Further along, standing on his hind legs and dressed as a court fop, was Patapouf the unicorn, flirting with a camelopard dressed as a houri from Katapesh. The chamber depicted the alchemical process of Dissolution, not just because the wedding reception looked like a remarkably genteel afternoon tea in honor of the Mother of Monsters, but because at one end of the table sat the Green Dragon with his ward, the Green Lion, in the process of eating one of the solid gold wedding plates, the allegory for royal water dissolving gold. Not that Norret was explaining this.

There was particular consternation about the fresco in the front hall, as the image of Liberty had lost her liberty cap and the banner of the revolution but otherwise remained untouched, making her look much more like Duchess Devore—especially since her husband had appeared on the wall opposite. Norret privately surmised this was because Tintinetto had sealed his works with an alchemical overglaze derived from copal that allowed objects to resist the passage of time, and the patriotic overpainter had not been privy to this trade secret. Thus, when the fog containing the last of Norret’s universal solvent had drifted through, it stripped the additions but left the originals intact.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.