‘I am sure you hope it will be so, Duke,’ muttered Volospion.
‘Oh now, don’t scoff, Volospion,’ said the Iron Orchid, throwing him a slight frown. Then she beamed kindly at the Duke of Queens. ‘I find the Duke’s “sacraface” most compelling. Perhaps finally we will all follow the fashion and be dead in gold, one and all.’
‘One of us should remain alive to resurrect the rest, my hardest of perennials,’ mentioned Lord Jagged.
‘Ah! Of course. Well, Mongrove never participates. He’ll notice our absence eventually.’
‘You are to set a fashion, Uncle,’ Regina whispered to the Duke, who smiled broadly.
But Lord Volospion had overheard. ‘Yes indeed, Duke,’ he remarked. ‘I’m sure there has never been a more entertaining way of lacking inspiration.’
‘What?’ The Duke was confused.
‘Ignore him, Duke,’ said the Iron Orchid, who felt Volospion had finally crossed the line. She looked the Doctor in the eye. ‘The Doctor is still smarting from his own recent project, merely.’
She was alluding to Volospion’s creation of a village of live people made from pellucidant jade. The entire population of this glassy hamlet had immediately set about the Doctor with scorching volleys of sarcasm, none of which he had understood. He had turned to Lord Jagged to transcribe their ripe revelations, thinking to show off his grand creation in the process. When Jagged explained some of the puppets’ arcane terminology, Volospion’s humiliation was complete.
‘I stated only what was on my mind,’ he said now to the Iron Orchid, and then turned to the Duke of Queens. ‘But, my apologies, Duke. I am sure you understand the frustrations which attend creativity, from time to time.’
Baffled, the Duke gave a slight bow. ‘Indeed. Well, friends, I go to prepare. As should you all,’ he added dramatically, and then swept away, disappearing behind a far corner of the golden edifice.
At his explanation of the pyramid scheme, the party-goers speculated that he was trying for a new subtlety. ‘Compared to his pre-Kali Yuga New York this “pyramid” is quite small,’ the Iron Orchid muttered to Regina. ‘Perhaps a fifth of a mile high?’
Regina nodded.
‘And he has taken the criticism of impersonality quite literally in the notion of absorbing himself into the structure. Am I correct?’
‘I will merely say that my regal guardian has planned several weeks toward this spectacle,’ Regina told her. ‘He has spent much of that time in Principal Krill’s Silence, deep in research. Did you see him, as excited as a boy – as excited as I have seen your son Jherek become before hosting a party. It is good to see my dear Duke so taken up.’
‘His tendency to architectural gigantism may have changed,’ stated Doctor Volospion, ‘but his attire is still as gaudy as a rocket crab.’
‘Come, my dear.’ The Iron Orchid steered Regina away from the group. ‘Let us stand by the fizzing well.’
She breasted forward like a Faberge galleon, leading Regina to the stained glass well in which bioluminescent portions of jigsaw puzzle flushed and flitted like fish. The Orchid glanced back to see that she and Regina had not been followed. ‘Doctor Volospion is doing his best, but is more competitive than usual for reasons I do not at present understand. I’m sure your sensitive guardian’s party will be a spurting success.’
‘And there is a part in it for me.’
‘Really?’
‘I am to perform the sacraface upon him, with a ... a .... Well, one of these.’ She twisted her power ring and a broad swathe of flashing anzac metal swelled in her hand.
‘A giant knife?’
‘Yes. There is another word, but I have forgotten it. See how sharp? I push that end into his belly and catch some of the juices in a bowl. There are some words I must say, and then he goes down into the pyramid. It will be very touching.’
‘How long does he wish us to leave him dead?’
They were interrupted by a few sky valves which floated by, bloviating tunelessly. The two women were set to gazing aimlessly around the gathering.
A man passed in front of the sliming frame, a scintillating golden scaffold which dripped permanently with vinyl blood. To Regina’s eyes accelerated colours instantly branded the stranger against the scene. She would later think he had appeared at the Duke’s party as if signaling her. This was how things began to be changed.
2 The Rescue
Containing a Misunderstanding and an Execution
His hair and stubble pronounced the contours of his face like a martial helm, and in this form his face advertised itself as a living icon. Its combined wildness and symmetry suggested fiercely directed power. Wearing a red snakefruit jacket and purple leather pants, he was intently examining the very air around him. An occasional look of appalled disgust flinched across his face as he stalked through the crowds. He seemed to be his own shadow, a thing of brooding, brewing rage.
The Iron Orchid regarded the phenomenon in blank astonishment. This did not accord atall with the customary scattering of stancing lordalikes, pullulating aliens and fashionable phantoms which composed society at time’s end. ‘Who is that?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Regina.
‘Perhaps it is Fox Grave in a new guise. He likes to present himself as a man of bottled temper. His sky cutter is anchored near the mountains.’
‘No, Fox Grave is over there.’
The pirate Fox Grave was still looking for the treasure he buried several million years ago, its sentimental value increasing with each millennium. Today he had made his lower body into clear glass and was passing spirals of fire through it for no good reason. He peered out at them through the bars of an espaliered collar as they looked his way, then began to negotiate the eating of a sandwich.
‘Someone new, then?’ Regina wondered aloud, as she turned back to the angry young man. The stranger was staring at the scrolled horns of Baron Coma. The Baron was sipping green rose wine and chatting affably with Again the Shuttle Clue, who had a thin stick projecting from his neck from which his head swung like a censer. The stranger ran a hand across the lime gold brocade of Coma’s robe, and then turned to look directly at Regina Sparks. She felt a cellular chill flush down from her head to her toes.
Then he was gone into the crowd. ‘I believe I shall go and find out,’ murmured the Iron Orchid distractedly, wandering off after him.
When Regina turned, the stranger was standing next to her, his eyes flickering over her body of platinum black and China white, and away. ‘So they keep their concubines naked,’ he said. ‘Terrible.’
‘Concubine?’ She looked directly at him, trying to catch his wandering gaze. ‘Is that like a hedge-pig?’
He met her eye. ‘It’s natural to deny you’re owned. The halter is not about your neck but in your mind, where it may be more effective. The invisible steel of oppression -’ He was shoved by the gaster of a giant beetle as it chugged by behind him, but recovered quickly. ‘This facsimile of joy is mere thoughtlessness, in inventive costume.’
‘How do you conclude we are thoughtless?’
‘By the amount of talk.’
‘“Celebration has golden teeth,”’ Regina quoted happily from somewhere.
‘Such gaudy celebration usually denotes the fortune and freedom of all or the wielding of disproportionate power by a few.’
‘I cannot say.’
‘You cannot speak?’
Regina