89. The Schism, Arriving on Schedule.
91. An Invisible Threat, Real Nonetheless.
92. Not the Highest Bid, but the Earliest.
Part VI. Election Day.
98. The Faces in the Distance.
99. Thrust, Parry, Feint, Touch.
100. The Message to the Light Wind.
108. A Lover’s Hand, A Lover’s Breath.
115. To The Faithful Departing.
About the Publisher
She smelled dawn even before the sun looked over the horizon. A low mist clung to the sleeping bodies surrounding her at intervals across the lea. Breath clouded up from her great nose in increasing puffs as wakefulness filled her body. She raised her head and glanced around the sloping green of the meadow.
The first one awake. Usual and expected. The way it should be and was.
She turned her head to the sunrise coursing down from the hilltop. A low flood of light illuminated the mist and cast the dozing members of the herd as gray, rocky islands in a sea of white. She breathed in as the morning reached her lips and, leaning back to gather the proper force of weight, hoisted herself to her feet.
Time to move into the daybreak.
The front lobby of the Solari was made entirely of marble, even the sunlight. Any hotel guest – say, this one here, with the inappropriate clothes and the reminiscing smile – standing at the entrance to the second most opulent and expensive hotel in Hennington could see in detail the shiny yet persistently flat white-flecked black marble that made up the sprawling floor, though he would be hard pressed to find a seam, the expense apparently having been poured into the material’s quality rather than its beauty. Given that the outside of the Solari was as shiny and edged as a precisely folded piece of foil, it might be surprising to this particular visitor, though perhaps not, that the interior, with its deep black expanses peppered with spots and streaks of white, could be so ominous and still. A blanket of the universe wrapped up as a present, perhaps.
Stepping inside the lobby’s marble rhombus, the visitor would see marble planters, marble doorways, a marble waterfall tastefully placed beneath a marble sculpture (of a marble-worker), a marble bellhop stand (currently vacant), marble directional signs and an enormous single marble front desk, fully twelve meters long, in the shape of a sperm whale beaching itself seemingly because of unfathomable heartbreak in the deep, deep sea. Looking behind the behemoth, the guest, if he ventured further indoors, which it seems he has, would lay his eyes on the first organic thing he would have seen so far in the lobby of the Solari, representational whales notwithstanding: a person in the form of Eugene Markham, Solari front desk clerk.
It is with surly, unhappy Eugene that this story truly begins.
Eugene sat on his back-paining swivel chair behind the whale, thinking about suicide. Not seriously considering it, just mooning over the act in the manner of many a pale twenty-something with a broken heart. His girlfriend had left him for another man, a non-Rumour no less, but that had happened so often in life it was an insipid topic of insipid pop songs. Speaking of which, Eugene’s band, Dirges For Betty, hadn’t