I
The House Arrives
It appeared out of the portal, like an enormous, arch-windowed omen.
Patience - Shay, to anyone who cared to ask - was sat outside a cafe on the dorsal bank of Salvia Boulevard, drinking white wine and contemplating his future, when there was a noise. It was subtle, at first, but then louder; the sound of enormous, heavy feet. Then everyone on the busy street stilled, and turned, and watched the dvermade mansion clamber out of the haemmouth.
The haemmouth was a mile-wide portal at the nadir of the huge, spherical, bone-coloured cavern; a set of shark's jaws made of iron and stone. It opened on an inky expanse of the Interstitium, a black void, studded with infrequent stars. They all watched as two long, insect-like legs fluidly lifted the first segment of the dvermade from the Interstitium, imperious window panes glittering in the fires of huge braziers, dangling from the cavern ceiling. Then the two legs were four, then eight, and a second segment of the estate followed the first. Then there was another eight legs, which swung around on the articulated ring between segments, so that their joints were better clustered to support the manor. Then came the third segment, and another eight legs, and the final segment.
It was grand, even for a dvermade mansion. Its four segments comprised a vast estate, each with multiple stories, towers and crenellations; each a patchwork of black iron plate, painted woodwork so pale its blue was almost white, dark green-black shingles on the roofs, and here and there, old, mossy stone. The last segment seemed to have some great, domed arboretum, while the tallest tower of the third segment appeared to be topped with several large sets of astronomer's telescopes. Between each segment, the mechanical ring held eight, long thin metallic legs, which shot up from the ring and hung down from the first joint, like a cellar spider's. They seemed particularly well made to Shay, and they moved with a disturbing natural grace.
Shay had seen plenty of dvermade, and he'd never seen anything like it. He was willing to bet that none of Port Jaws had, the way they all stopped to stare. The port must have seen dvermade all the time, given that they were the only way to travel the Interstitium. Shay was guessing that the ones they were used to weren't usually so grand, or seemingly impractical. Many were just straightforward pods, or ship-hulls with mechanical legs. Some were small fortresses, watch towers or small barracks that scuttled along. Others were much more carefully sculpted to resemble animals. Those were more likely to attract attention. He had once seen a house-sized mole made of shifting plates of filigreed metal and wood, years ago in a distant port. It had clambered out of a much smaller haemmouth and disgorged its crew through a port in its side.
He had never seen anything like the segmented, spider-legged mansion that made its way up the wide, shallow river, a snaking cluster of towers and arches and long, spindly legs. It strode up the gently sloping Salvia, which flowed down from Setdown, and emptied itself into the Interstitium through the haemmouth.
Shay picked up his glass and took another sip, as he watched its slow, but steady progress. It had seemed like an omen because he had been sat there, at the table beneath cafe's small awning, second guessing himself. He had been engaged in forming plans to disentangle himself from a life with which he was thoroughly disillusioned.
It wasn't a life he had chosen, either. He had been trained as an assassin since before he was properly aware what choices were, and once he had realised what his family had planned for him, he got out. He must have been about seventeen, perhaps a little older. A few years later, the prostitution had come as something of a necessity, and he'd never looked back, unless it was to check if a particular shadow held a knife.
Recently, he had realised that he had been given a set of morals, by his upbringing and circumstance, and that they didn't really match his own. Perhaps it was a consequence of getting to the point where he was no longer simply surviving day to day; now that he had breathing room to think of his life, there wasn't a lot of it that he didn't despise. He had fallen back into the murder for hire game a few years ago, and made out like an investment banker, but all the blood and the enemies tended to wear one down a little. At some point he'd come to his senses about selling his body, and realised that while he wasn't against the profession in general, the way he was going about it was pretty fucked up, and needed rectifying, if he was going to continue.
And then there was his body. He was a changeling; he could look exactly however he wanted, so long as he could sustain the change. But it wasn't like in the stories. Changelings weren't amorphous, featureless blobs that then adopted the faces of others. They had their own, unique, default forms, and Shay's happened to be that of a woman. Which he hated. It ground against his existence, whenever he was cognisant of it, making him sick and tired. It made his thoughts noisy and unclear and anxious. He could give himself a male body whenever he liked ā and that was how he spent most of his time ā but each transformation took effort, and it couldn't be sustained. Every morning when he woke, he was back to default.
He had a plan; a plan to get out and a plan to get the body he wanted. And when the strange mansion crawled out of the black onto the riverbed, he had been tearing his plan apart in his head, shredding it to pieces. It would never work, it was too out there, it was too ridiculous to imagine that he could be happy.
And then a mansion had come out of the haemmouth. Its ungainly shape was held perfectly aloft by the spindly looking legs, which moved so smoothly, even though they looked too thin to take the weight. Shay didn't really believe in omens or signs, and he was viciously opposed to prophecy, (it was personal), but there was something about the timing of the dvermade's appearance that made him smile. 'God's bowels,' he thought, 'if houses can walk, maybe I can pull this off.'
By then, the ambulatory mansion had drawn level with the bistro. It was so large it was like a street, moving along in front of him. The people on the boulevard had started to go back to their business, hurrying to appointments or carrying goods to various shops, but Shay watched it. It fascinated him.
Something - someone - caught his eye. In the second floor window of the mansion, on the second segment, was a woman. Her ink black hair hung in shallow waves in a messy bob just above her shoulders, and around the short, straight horns that jutted from her forehead and tapered gracefully. Her skin was light red, as were her horns, and it seemed to glow faintly against the backdrop of the dark room in which she stood. She had six arms; one pair was clasped in front of her chest, while the next hung loosely, and the last was folded behind her back. She wore a long white gown that reminded him vividly of a temple sacrifice from darker days long gone.
He had the impression that she was staring at him. It was too far to tell, really, but he fancied that she was. He had the uncanny feeling that he had met her before. A former client, was the first thing that sprang to mind, but no. While humans and others might merge into the mire of his memories, no one could forget a six-armed, red-skinned temple sacrifice. It was more like he had seen her one night, in his dreams.
'Well,' he thought, 'raising his glass to the woman and the house as it passed, bring me luck if you can, and luck to you too, wherever you're going.'
To his surprise, she lifted the hem of her white gown and curtsied, before turning back into the shadowy dark of the room, and disappearing.
He sat there for a little while more, finishing the wine, shuffling through his opinions about omens and signs, wondering if it meant anything, while the dvermade continued on. Eventually it, and the woman, drifted out of sight and into the back of his mind.
He paid, left and turned off the boulevard into narrow backstreets that would take him to his small, out of the way apartments. He had business to attend to. He had plans to lay.
He had a cock to steal.