The Orchid Nursery. Louise Katz

but the rumbling growl persists though I cannot tell whence it comes, for now it seems to be all around me.

      And now a dark figure emerges from the rectangle of light, and above its head another light, and all around it smoke, blue smoke coiling. I can discern no features but can sense, with every nerve, its malevolence.

      PEARL

      12.

      A tall, broad shadow falls between me and the sky. The Ecuman, I think.

      I feel his attention on me though I cannot see his face for his torchlight has blinded me. I tightly grip the blade hidden within the folds of my cuff. Then I hear that characteristic hiss of breath inhaled through a tiny hole. A careforcer then, not an Ecuman; not a soldier, but a porter. I realise it is only the bulk of the rolled tent she wears looming up well over her head that makes her seem so large and manly above me. But now the figure turns the torchlight back on itself, under-lighting it to make quite sure I see clearly the horrible wreckage of her face, the grotesque cicatrix of her lips. The scar is new, not yet fully grafted. Xeniicut230.

      But what difference does that make? I will kill her anyway. Soon I know she will pucker up into a whistle … any moment now … I summon all my energy and nerve to attack her.

      But then she lowers the torch and directs it away from me. She walks away.

      Once she is well out of my immediate vicinity she whistles – not an alarm, but an all-clear. Why?

      They move on.

      MICA

      13.

      I understand immediately who is the creature now wilfully blinding me with that cruel light. Who else could it be, living alone in a field of mutilated gravestones with her hellhound familiar? Only the Hag. And this is where Pearl’s map has led me: so close to the very edge of things.

      At last she lowers her torch and crouches by my side. The hound stays at her heel. I do not flee; I cannot. Indeed, in my exhaustion and pain I actually allow her help me to my feet though it hurts my shoulder bone badly, one broken edge grating against the other.

      She draws me towards the door of her foul dwelling place. I am seized by the fear that I might be struck down – perhaps, after all, I could run? Or at least stumble a little further. But then, as if reading my thoughts, she speaks.

      ‘You may run away if you like, but the night is very large.’ She widens her eyes. The whites are almost blue. ‘And it is not empty.’

      This is doubtless true. And I am so very weary, my arm hanging useless at my side. And then the hound leans against my thigh, exerting an insistent pressure so that I am compelled to enter the room, but as I do I feel in my pocket with my good hand for the smooth comfort of my knife. Light from the small fire burning in the grate patterns the walls. The hound advances into the room and settles by the hearth, eyes of red regarding me with baleful menace.

      ‘You could try coming closer to the fire. Blackguard won’t bite, though I might!’ She snaps her teeth at me. Click! I jump, stumble against a fireside chair, then fall into it.

      She looks me over with the eye of a merchant considering new stock. I do not move a muscle. She sits on the arm of the chair and reaches out a hand towards my shoulder. She feels it carefully with callused fingertips, then further, to my collarbone. Now this makes me cry out.

      ‘What brings you here, to me?’ she asks as she rises and moves to a cupboard from which she withdraws a sheet. This she nips at the hem with her sharp teeth, then rips in half with a sound like a shriek. ‘And so faintingly tired so that you trip over your girlie-shroud all covered in blood and mud and god knows what-all?’ She approaches with the torn fabric which at first I think she will throttle me with, so that I lurch back. ‘Shhh,’ she hisses, ‘It’s a sling. For your arm.’

      I feel faint, and my gut is tight, but I answer her through gritted teeth as she winds the sheet about my arm and shoulder, ‘One must pass through hell to be ensouled.’ My voice sounds distant to my own ears, and echoes in my brain.

      She cackles quietly. The subject of my redemption is nothing to her of course. She is corrupt beyond healing and full of evil magic. They tried to burn her, the Hag. We all know her story. Once she had lived in one of the States, I don’t know which. Perhaps Incomparable, or Superlative. But her story has spread throughout Civilisation. Many years ago, she was found astride a Man, her face a twisted mask of foulest carnality, riding that Man as if she had a right to harness the power of the Seed-Bearers. The prideful, wicked arrogance! They say she was a demon herself, a real demon from the pit, like Lilith, Adam’s first wife and vilest incarnation of feminine mischief who was cast out of Eden for her presumption – exactly the same sin that earned the Hag her banishment. Of course the Man was censured for his weakness but the (wo)Man, the jez, slithered away like a sweaty snake. The soldiers caught her and bound her to the stake and lit the fire, but she wriggled free of the tether by magic she had learned in night-time conversation with demons over cups of sweet and salty blood. She slid out of the knotty twine and escaped.

      I learned in Instruction & Destruction class of the time four Ecumen of Houses Usama and Gabriel rode out to her in their Holy Hummer with righteous vengeance on their minds. They failed to execute her, and it was clear that she would have drawn on her fount of evil and pitted against them some nameless horror with which no Man could be expected to contend, regardless of the nobility of his station and bearing. It was obvious that an old, as yet unaugmented, (wo)Man who had spurned Perfection would have had to have given herself to Satan. How else could she have survived in isolation, on the edge of a forest full of vindictive scouts, snipers and spies from Unrule? Ecumen are no longer dispatched after her for she serves us well enough as a living example, and there is no need for Men to pollute their hands with her noisome blood.

      But she speaks again: ‘Passage through hell, you say?’ and her voice is sticky with sarcasm. ‘Young people have been alive in the world for five minutes and think that older people will find their histrionics interesting … There, that should do it.’ She tightens the knot on the sling and then pulls up another chair. It has a tapestry covering and a small piece of spring poking through the worn seat. ‘It is a function of self-centred youth to find itself fascinating,’ she continues in her raspy voice as she takes a seat too close to me for comfort, ‘regardless of being unformed and relatively featureless, as reflected in the youthful, unlined face like a flat, desert landscape. Isn’t it so?’

      I have no idea of how to answer – but it is not necessary, for she has not finished. ‘Yet I have to say, it is ironic that such hopefulness endures in one who was raised like a battery chicken. And now that you are ready for plucking and butchering you have run off. Now this is rare, so it really does interest me.’

      The Hag’s words are disgusting but her voice is refined, like the voice of a Propergander, and her accent and intonation are almost musical. I know I must be on my guard against such charm – for charm I know it to be. Have I not been schooled since childhood in ways of pleasing both by means of attracting and satisfying Men’s sexual needs, and also the subtler art of colloquy? But my gut aches and my arm throbs and the black beast glowers. Her clever, cynical eyes smile brightly at me as if expecting a response. Yet how does she expect me to answer to her presentation of me as a sacrificial chicken? Where to begin to speak to one ungraced with Truth, one whose understanding of life was formed in the muck? I choose silence, for it is written: ‘An untutored woman’s voice is the grunting of a rutting sow; her breathing silence is the soughing of the gentlest zephyr.’

      She is dark-skinned with big eyes the shape of almonds, her hair is thick and black with a stripe of white like those spiders