Serpents and Stairways

Chapter VIII - Part 1

The poetry society met at a cinema theatre, shut down for maintenance. Redvelvet foyer (the sort of material they use for coffin lining, uh-huh), colourless rectangle of the screen fluttering behind Pasha as he opened the evening, mechanical pianist's scores left on the caramel surface of their instrument...

Already on that first day Georg had realised he knew many faces. Hiding among the lovers of iambs and trochees were the old man Hermann who drove him and Dinah to the city, and Janos—the heavy man who, with Pasha, chased him through the loitering crowds of Gebal, and even that three-sheets-in-the-wind-drunk guest of the Imperial in a vatermörder, the one that had to be dragged into his room on Georg's only work day. Turns out he wasn't from Albion, and only performed the accent and manners, although... Although what if he was performing now instead? No, that would be too difficult.

Difficult.

Not a single meeting was a coincidence. Nothing ever was a coincidence. Coincidences had been cancelled in heavens: at the very first reading, by a unanimous vote of the divine parliament on questions of the twists and turns of his Fate.

So all of them had been destined for each other from the very start? He and all these people he had met in passing over the last week?

Appears so. How grim, when you think about it.

Little of that first meeting left an impression—perhaps just Janos preparing to read his poem. A massive man, that had pursued him with the stubbornness of a jaw-clenched dachshund, mumbling under his breath before going on stage, like a child learning a prayer.

Georg sensed the weightless breath of his whispers when Michel and he were walking between the chairs, aiming for the fourth row seats. The hall was half-empty, with no more than twenty people gathered. An enormous theatrical chandelier, bolted to the ceiling frescoed with daydreams of steel, remained unlit and only the candelabra were on, their electrical roots sprawling in the depths of the painted walls. Janos sat two rows lower, with his eyes closed, and was rehearsing on and on.

Georg tried to read the rhymes off his lips, but stumbled, looking at a large, not yet completely healed, gash over his ear that would definitely become a scar.

"Doesn't it feel like something illegal is going on here?" Michel asked, They don't put the meeting place on their flyers, and they assemble late where nobody would be looking for them."

"For sure."

They shrugged in sync, and sat down simultaneously—straight in the middle, opposite the greyish cinema window.

The second evening took place in an artificial golden garden, overgrown with tree-automatons with moving branches and flowers that opened in moonlight. Georg felt drained—not only because the night had fallen and they had barely started, no. He woke up that way even after fourteen hours of sleep. And even Michel, usually energising like a cup of coffee poured down one's collar, was incapable of shaking him up.

And once again, no memories—only a few images. A toothfairy, her famished upturned face staring at them through a lorgnette that facets her eyes dragonfly-round.

A girl, dressed either like a nun, or maybe like a novice, drinking cola from a glass bottle, leaning against a golden apple tree, and for a moment her gaze rests on Michel—a weighing gaze, like the scales of the philosophy-god Anubis and just as light, like a feather. Pasha and Iolaus playing Durak. Someone's reading a poem about the Titanic—a topic that still thrills people after two years. Or after only two years?

"This poem. It isn't really about the ship!" the reader says excitedly, placing the exclamation with a swing of his freckled hand, "But rather how the rich should either drown or pay a higher tax!"