Free Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) by Tanith Lee Page B

Just lying there, his quiet face shut, his eyes half open, not a mark on him.
    So Picaro lay down by him and held his hand until the medics finally came through the deadly-ending traffic. And they had to strike Picaro to get him to let go.
    An aneurysm, the autopsy established, (Ethella telling him, on the crackly line). It could happen. No prologue, no illness. Like a blow, not
on
the head but
inside
it—a breakage, and explosion of blood, and nothing visible to the layman’s eye. Quick as a blink. He had not suffered.
    Picaro didn’t go back to the apartment, the “spoiled” supper, the expensive cola. Nor did he go back to his Aunt Ethella’s. He had enough money in his pocket. He ran.
    It was two more years before Simoon caught up to him.
    “C AN’T YOU SLEEP , ’Caro? Let me do something to help you sleep.”
    Cora’s silky flesh, her warm succulent mouth, wrapping about him in the dark.
    After the things he had been thinking of, that other mouth, the mouth of a toad-goddess, devouring …
    “No, Cora. Thanks. Not now.”
    In half-light, the flicker of canal reflections through the glass, her head lifting like a snake’s.
    Unresistant, she settled beside him again, and presently he heard the renewed rustle of her sleeper’s breathing.
    Outside the room, the music had ceased. India too must be alseep.
    Picaro stayed gentle with women always. Simoon had schooled him in that, in how to see women, how to react to them, despite herself. How had she done that? Through his utter antipathy to and horror of
herself
. For she was only something
disguised
as a woman, and all the others, the real ones, elicited his gallantry, his tenderness, even in indifference, because of a kind of relief that he had met only one Simoon, and perhaps she was alone of her kind.
    W HAT WOKE HIM MUCH LATER , were the vague, subtly intrusive,
external
sounds of movement and disturbance, which he had never heard before in any other part of the Palazzo Shaachen. He lay listening. There seemed to be a lot going on, furniture perhaps being automated up through the channels in the walls, and unloaded into chambers of the building. Once also a burst of shouting came outside, not from the canal but in the alleyway between this palace and the green one adjacent.
    Cora was already up and in the Victorian bathroom, lying to her neck in bubbles. India was nowhere to be seen.
    Picaro showered and dressed. (Cora did not speak to him, nor he to her. A sort of decorum.)
    In another of the rooms he suddenly found India, drinking Masala tea, with cardamom, cinnamon, sugar, and black pepper, all of which she must have brought with her, since he had allocated only water to the recessed store cupboard. The CX point, to which she had attached the heating container, still glowed. He wasn’t surprised when she next served herself a heap of spun eggs and rice.
    She offered him nothing. The container dish—where had she concealed it on her person yesterday?—she simply left for the taking.
    Then Cora came in and ate from the dish and drank some tea, and Picaro went to the Africara in another room, standing tuning the strings of the black-brown bull, thinking of his father tuning strings of lutes and sombas, until all at once he heard the two girls at the outer door, leaving, and the door quietly closed. Uniquely, they had gone without a single further avowal or demand.
    Soon after, from below, far down in a lower apartment, he detected the faintest jangle, some keyboard instrument, and waited, again lifting his hand from the musical bull. He could turn the noise-conditioning up. He might have to, if he, or someone else, began to produce conflicting music. Or, maybe he might listen.
    The instrument must have been taken manually into a room, too fragile, evidently, to travel all the way in the walls. An old instrument, then, a genuine Victorian piano, or even its ancestral harpsichord.
    A harpsichord was normally the quiestest of keyboards …
    All the other