5
THEY QUARREL AGAIN
Aurienne
urienne had expected Kentigern to be a pretty sort of spa town,A something like Bath or Brightbridge Wells. Instead, the waystone spat them into being in an alley that felt markedly seedy.
The sign for the Randy Unicorn swung overhead. Aurienne, peering at the creature in the twilight, could confirm that the unicorn was, indeed, randy. The artist had not been coy about it.
In front of them was the door to the Unicorn, lit on either side by red lanterns. This was not merely a public house, then—this was a brothel.
Two buxom women in low-cut dresses trotted out, and taught Aurienne the real meaning of titting about.
“I suppose we should ask where the hot springs are,” said Aurienne.
“I know exactly where they are,” said Mordaunt.
“Where?”
“In there,” said Mordaunt, pointing at the Randy Unicorn.
“What?”
“They’ve got really excellent baths. I suppose that’s what’s left of your
long-ago hot springs.”
“You’ve been here?”
“A few times. Best brothel in Dyfed.”
Aurienne stared at the door with concern. Under the erect unicorn curled the words Come one, come all.
“Don’t be frightened,” said Mordaunt. “The ladies won’t bite, unless you pay them to.”
“I’m not frightened of the ladies,” said Aurienne, stiffening at the very suggestion. “I work with the ladies regularly.”
“You do?”
“Yes, and they’re lovely. My Order runs drop-ins for them. What frightens me is the possibility of being recognised in the company of a Fyren.”
“Well, then, put your hood up. Hide your dress. And—slouch a bit, or something. Stop looking so much like a hoity-toity Haelan.”
Aurienne (who was not hoity-toity and who found excellent posture to be a virtue) pulled her hood high and arranged her travelling cloak so that it covered her Haelan whites. “And you?”
Mordaunt’s answer was cut off by a group of figures exiting the Unicorn.
They were all, like him, clad in black, and exuding a general air of villainy.
“Never mind,” said Aurienne, given that Mordaunt would fit right into the general miasma of disrepute.
Mordaunt held the door for Aurienne. They entered a foyer, at the front of which was a small shop selling sex toys, contraceptives, enema kits (on offer: a free jar of Laxadaisical, the Carefree Laxative), and novelty sweets (penis lollies, clitoris liquorice).
The foyer was crowded with counters, each of which served different… well, Aurienne would call them specialties, based on the signs above them.
Behind each counter was a corridor, presumably leading to rooms where these activities took place.
Aurienne squinted at the raunchy signs in the penumbra: this way for women seeking women, this way for women seeking men, this way for whips and chains, this way for groups, this way for—inanimate objects?
Absorbed by a picture of a man vigorously penetrating a boot, Aurienne bumped into a counter. This one was adorned with a painting of a pie.
“Hiya,” said the naked, muscular man behind it. “How can we inseminate
you today?”
“Erm,” said Aurienne, articulately.
Mordaunt seized her by the elbow and pulled her away.
“Sorry, mate,” he said to the naked man. “Wrong counter.”
The man nodded in friendly understanding. He had the largest penis that Aurienne had ever seen. It nodded, too. Mordaunt steered Aurienne towards the rightmost corridor. The penis all but waved goodbye at them.
“We’re here for the baths, not your breeding kink,” said Mordaunt.
“That man was remarkably well-endowed,” said Aurienne.
“They call him the Clydesdale. Since he’s so fascinated you, you can go have a play with him, but only after we’ve done the healing. Business first.”
“Thank you, but no,” said Aurienne.
“No?”
“Two words for you: bruised cervix.” Aurienne, still watching the Clydesdale over her shoulder, asked, “What do you suppose he does with it when it’s not erect?”
“Drapes it round his neck, like a feather boa,” said Mordaunt.
He dropped coins into an attendant’s hand. “Two tickets for the baths, please.”
They proceeded towards the baths by descending a steep stairway leading into a sort of underground spa. Steam rooms and massage rooms opened up on either side of them.
They came across a small group watching a show. The show consisted of a man performing autofellatio. Aurienne had to pause to admire the man’s spinal flexion.
“That is some impressive lumbar sagittal mobility,” said Aurienne.
The man uncorked himself with a pop and said, “Thank you.”
Mordaunt stared at Aurienne with a raised eyebrow, but led her onwards without comment.
The air grew steamier as they descended into the bowels of the Unicorn.
Finally, they came to a low-ceilinged room lined with curtained-off rooms.
Aurienne assumed that these were for more sex things—privacy booths, perhaps?
However, an attendant came her way, gave her a white towel, and drew her towards one of the booths. Another attendant did the same with Mordaunt.
Aurienne’s attendant saw her confusion and offered an explanation: “Oh —is it your first time here? You’ve got to shower before entering the baths.
There’s a basket for your clothes. The towel is only for modesty purposes.
Please don’t take it into the water.”
The attendant pulled open the curtain to reveal a shower, which she switched on for Aurienne.
Aurienne glanced at Mordaunt to see how he was taking this turn of affairs. She caught a twist of amusement across his scarred lips before he disappeared behind his own curtain. So he thought this was funny, did he? He was having a grand time, was he? That was fine. She would soon be putting a damper on his mood with another failed healing. Let the Fyren enjoy himself while he could; he was a dead man walking.
Her mood bolstered by the thought of Mordaunt’s inevitable demise, Aurienne showered. She tucked her telltale Haelan dress and satchel at the very bottom of the basket and passed it to the attendant.
Aurienne exited the shower wrapped in the Modesty Purposes towel. It offered the barest covering of tit and arse. The amiable attendant offered her a hooked stick with various protrusions, which she said was for trigger-point massages. Aurienne took it, grateful to have something to hold to hide the tācn on her palm.
Mordaunt waited for her at the entrance of the baths, dripping wet and wrapped in his own towel.
Aurienne was no stranger to communal bathing, which was the norm at Swanstone. The prospect of a shared soak with a Fyren, however, was as novel as it was unattractive. She knew, rationally, that his moral degradation couldn’t leech into the waters and infect her, but the notion of stewing together was nevertheless repugnant.
Mordaunt asked how he looked. Aurienne didn’t answer, given that he was addressing a large looking glass, for whose benefit he ran his fingers through his wet hair and adjusted his towel lower on his hips. However, she discovered that the query had been directed at her when he turned to her and said, “Hello?”
Aurienne swept a look of assessment his way. The Fyren’s state of undress revealed agreeable proportions: a well-developed chest, shapely calves, lines from shoulder to foot suggesting grace and athleticism. But he dripped with moral obscenities as well as water, and Aurienne would not be contributing to his smugness by conceding any of it. He was a Fine Specimen in the way an abscess might be a Fine Specimen; the best, most shapely, most beautiful abscess in the world still brimmed with foulness and ought to be incised and drained.
As her kindly attendant was passing by, Aurienne opted for civility and said that Mordaunt was Not Objectionable.
“Not objectionable?” repeated Mordaunt. “Not objectionable?”
She had vexed the Abscess, who remarked, ulceratively, that she looked like a lost water diviner with her stupid stick, before leading the way towards the baths.
Aurienne studied the scars that bisected his back amid lean muscle. Harm to none aside, if one were to add to the tapestry, most of the lines required to spell TWAT were already there; it wanted only two diagonals.
The baths consisted of five pools scattered among natural rock formations. The area was lit with sputtering gas lamps. Steam hovered over the water, accompanied by a whiff of sulphur. The air was hard to breathe; Aurienne’s lungs felt as though they were filling with moisture. Her hair, pinned into its usual bun, came to life and sprang curious tendrils out to palpate the atmosphere.
Here and there, through the steam, she could make out the heads of other patrons, bobbing in the water.
An attendant pointed at a sign as they walked in:
NO SEX IN THE BATHS.
PLEASE KEEP YOUR SECRETIONS TO YOURSELF.
As they passed the sign, Aurienne saw a handwritten addition below it, which someone had attempted to scrub out. It remained faintly legible: No
one wants to swim in your jizz, Scrope.
Then, below that: Too late.
Aurienne shuddered.
Mordaunt led the way to one of the farthest pools, empty save for a couple at one end, having a cuddle under an attendant’s watchful eye.
“Right,” said Mordaunt, “this’ll do.”
Without further warning, he removed his towel. Aurienne was able to look away before receiving yet another eyeful of unsolicited penis. Aurienne enjoyed penises and vulvas equally, but penises seemed, as a general rule, more prone to unasked-for exposures, which was too bad, because they weren’t as pretty as vulvas—except, perhaps, for the glossy candied ones in the shop upstairs.
Mordaunt splashed into the water and said, “Fuck me, that’s hot.”
Between the Fyren, the heat, and Scrope’s sperm, Aurienne didn’t wish to make such a wholehearted plunge. She opted to sit on the edge of the bath, Modesty Towel held firmly around the important bits, and test the water with a tentative foot.
“Aren’t you coming in?” asked Mordaunt, from somewhere behind a
cloud of steam.
“This is boiling,” said Aurienne.
“Don’t be a coward,” said Mordaunt.
“I’ll faint.”
“Was the healer in the water with the healee in the ballad?”
“The account didn’t specify; it merely indicated that the waters were curative at the March full moon. And even if it did specify, I wouldn’t get in.
I don’t want to swim in Scrope’s semen. Enjoy your little marinade in the
pathogen soup.”
“Coward.”
“The water is unusually milky; you must concede that.”
“Surely you aren’t suggesting that Scrope’s loads are so vast, he’s filled five pools with them?”
“Did you see the Clydesdale? Anything is possible.”
Mordaunt made a strangled sound of aggravation. He disappeared into the steam for a while, apparently doing a few laps to work off his irritation.
When he came back, he asked, “Does this feel like a thin place to you?”
“No,” said Aurienne. “I’ve literally never breathed so thick an atmosphere.”
“Me neither,” said Mordaunt. “Give it a go anyway.”
He rose out of the water and backed towards Aurienne until he was within her reach. He positioned himself strategically so that she was out of view of the attendant and the other couple in the pool.
Aurienne stared at the white nexus of scar tissue at the base of his neck with annoyance. She had already wasted seith once on him today.
Additionally, she was breaking protocol by not sanitising her hands, but her hlutoform was in the basket, along with the rest of her belongings.
“Hello?” prompted Mordaunt.
“I should be using this seith to help someone worth it,” said Aurienne.
“I’m worth twenty million thrymsas and a Pox cure,” said Mordaunt.
“It’s an inoculation, not a cure,” said Aurienne. With many furtive looks around her, she activated her tācn. Somewhere above them, the Cúsc moon glowed. Her palm met the Fyren’s wet skin. Once again, she pushed her seith into him. Once again, she felt the deadness in the extremities of his seith system and the slow-creeping decay through the rest.
And once again, her seith could do nothing. What was dead stayed dead.
She pulled out.
She didn’t need to tell Mordaunt that nothing had happened. He knew.
His quiet fuck dissipated into the haze around them.
“I told you to expect failure,” said Aurienne.
Mordaunt faced her. Steam condensed upon his face and clung to the stubble at his jawline. “There’s something in your hypothesis. There’s something in that Stone, too.”
“There might be. But the Something could take years to establish. The right conjunction of time and place and—and who knows what other factors could be at play, that were simply not captured in the old accounts? For your immediate purposes, the Monafyll Stone is a dead end.”
“What was the name of the philologist?” asked Mordaunt. “The one who translated the unknown language on the Stone?”
“Disgraced philologist,” corrected Aurienne. “Claimed to have translated. His name was Widdershins. His findings were retracted. He lost his position as a professor. He was put out to pasture. I can assure you that pursuing that line of enquiry is an even bigger waste of time.”
Aurienne wiped droplets from her face. “I’ll have another look at the data. I’m nursing an idea that certain times and places may be more powerful than others. Or perhaps there’s a cumulative effect if you’ve got enough factors layered upon one another—the right place, the right time, the right weather, the right moon. I don’t know. It’s difficult to establish patterns when the stories only provide one or two circumstantial details—details which may themselves have shifted in the telling and retelling.”
Mordaunt looked pouty among the billowing steam.
Aurienne hadn’t the time or inclination to mollycoddle. “Don’t sulk. I’ve been up front about the absurdity of this endeavour from the beginning.”
“I’m not sulking,” said Mordaunt, sulkily.
“I told you this ad hoc approach wouldn’t do,” said Aurienne. “I’ll send word when I’ve worked out the next best conjunction, for April’s full moon.
In the meantime, keep a firm grip on your expectations.”
“You can lecture me about firm grips when you can manage one on your towel.”
Aurienne looked down to discover that a breast had almost escaped confinement. She pushed the offender back into place.
Mordaunt’s sulkiness made way to smugness. Aurienne was overcome by a desire to step on his head and drown him.
The couple at the other end of the bath left and Aurienne and Mordaunt were able to give vent to their feelings. Mordaunt said that what Aurienne really wanted was a more Elastic Spirit; she was an unbearable combination
of high-handed and small-minded. Aurienne said thank you; she would consult him next time she needed advice from an Abscess with inferior hair.
Mordaunt, vexed, said, how dare she, when her bun looked like a perfect onion? Aurienne informed him, by the by, that she would never again offer a second healing at the full moon, and that he would be lucky if she showed up at all. Mordaunt said that he had paid for her services, and was she certain she wanted to make an enemy of him? Aurienne retorted, as though they weren’t enemies already? Mordaunt asked if she would stop waving her crook at him like a distraught Bo-Peep. Aurienne dropped her stick into his hands and declared that she was leaving. Mordaunt asked what he was meant to do with this stupid hook, other than strangle her with it. Aurienne said he could use it to hang himself if he wished.
These warm goodbyes exchanged, they parted.
