The Vorrh

Cyrena, but he longed to breathe freely, and he made a bid to escape.
    ‘Ladies, would you excuse me for a short while? It’s been a long time since I have been in this house and there are so many memories. Ghertrude, would you mind if I roamed around for a while and reconnected with my past?’
    Ghertrude and Cyrena exchanged glances. Ghertrude nodded her assent, and he took his leave, closing the elegant, tall doors behind him on a conversation that he had no desire to hear.
    He immediately bounded up the wide stairs to where his room had been. The proportions had changed again, another reflection of recollection, rather than scale. So much had happened so early, shunts of life that suddenly revealed themselves to be ill-matched and opposite.
    His room was unlocked and unchanged. He touched the bed and opened the wardrobe to see his history hanging there: so many textures and smells, so many memories of isolation. He went to the window and thoughtfully traced his finger along the spot where he had picked the paint off the shutter.
    ‘What will you tell him?’ said Cyrena.
    ‘I don’t know. Nothing will be known until the birth. I don’t want to raise a false alarm for him; he has already been through so much.’
    Cyrena nodded her agreement. ‘You are right, I’m sure. Until we are certain, it’s probably best to say nothing.’
    ‘We are becoming very good at saying nothing.’
    Cyrena agreed again in silence.
    In the attic, he opened the shutter into the breeze and the courtyard below, leaning out to get a better view. He saw Mutter moving back and forth, changing the straw in the stables. He looked towards the cathedral and watched the jackdaws circle over the spires.
    He needed to see more. He climbed into the tower and opened the swivelling eye of the camera obscura, observing the activity below, changing lenses to see inside it. The curved, white table flooded with his memory of Ghertrude, the exposed parts of her body made whiter by the table and the squeezed light. He remembered watching her confusion turn into annoyance, then transform into abandonment and, eventually, satisfaction. He recalled the same transformation in himself, only in reverse.
    ‘You mean you intend to live together as man and wife?’ Ghertrude sounded disapproving and a little horrified.
    Cyrena said nothing.
    ‘Do you really feel so much for him? You hardly know each other. What about his past? I have told you something of his dubious origin, doesn’t that concern you?’
    Cyrena’s eyes were changing colour and shape, bracing themselves to protect what sheltered behind them.
    ‘There are many things that I have not yet told you,’ Ghertrude continued, ‘things you would not believe.’
    ‘I don’t want the details about how he made love to you,’ Cyrena blurted.
    ‘Not that; things before any of that happened, when he was kept downstairs.’
    ‘Ah yes! The mysterious teachers who lived in the basement, those who you saved him from.’ Cyrena was turning on her friend, disbelief becoming her advancing weapon. ‘And then they disappeared, vanished into thin air. Am I right, is that not what you said?’
    ‘I boarded and locked all the cellar rooms after I got him out…’
    ‘You mean they might still be living down there?’ said Cyrena with a dismissive, unpleasant laugh. ‘Or did they vanish like Hoffman?’
    Ghertrude glared at the question, feeling the restraints of their friendship being pulled taut.
    ‘Well? Did they? Did Mutter spirit them away?’ pushed Cyrena, the bit between her teeth, her tastes changing from defence into attack. ‘How many others have you removed to have him for yourself? Am I next?!’
    The truth instantly quenched the rage flaring between them.
    ‘It wasn’t as simple as that,’ said Ghertrude. ‘They weren’t human, they were machines; puppet-like machines.’
    He was tightening the strings, softly strumming them to adjust their pitch. The task gave him a place to think and recollect. The matter-of-factness of balance and modification separated his mind and let him wander back into the Vorrh. Nothing had happened to his memory. He had suffered no adverse effect. Was he immune to its legendary influence? Certainly, Tsungali had been confused and Oneofthewilliams had seemed positively deranged by it.
    Cyrena’s jaw was hanging in astonishment. Ghertrude had told her everything, in great detail, with a delivery that was sparse and without emotion. There had never been