The Vorrh

passing through.
    ‘Will you send your fee?’ Muybridge remembered to say.
    ‘No, I think not,’ said the surgeon. ‘We will meet again and I might have a favour that needs your skills.’ He smiled again and gave his patient a white envelope. ‘Read this in the future,’ he said, and closed the door.
    The great German cathedral had two towers that should have been twins, but irrational time had delayed one, causing a fluctuation of ideas to warp its mirrored principle. Some shards of fashion and theology had dented its skeletal helix, making the thin needle twist out of symmetry with its sister. A slim, silver bridge joined the towers near their apex and highlighted the subtle difference between them: one tower had the clock, the other the bell. Each month, a trumpeter would celebrate the moon from the dizzying heights of the slender walkway. The pang luna ceremony, one of many that were the responsibility of Dean Casius Tulp, had been imported along with the stones, the design and the meaning of the great church.
    (Many of the natives of the area also believed that the freak changes in the weather had been smuggled in with the invaders. It was certainly true that a new cold infested the nights in the winter season. Frost had been seen for the first time after the spires had been made, and different kinds of clouds now lurked above their spikes and tried to swallow the moon. But nothing ever changed in the Vorrh; it seethed in heat and ignored any rumour of ice.)
    The dean stood in the whistling, circular room with the pallid musician and one of the younger wardens. They were all panting. After climbing the forever spiralling stairs, pointed clouds of silvered air wheezed from them into the cold chamber, two hundred feet above ground. They were like so many arctic fire-eaters: none had the energy to talk, which made their steamy speech plumes all the more vacant. They were giddy, faintly nauseous and desperately trying not to think about the space below. The inexperienced warden had already opened the arched door onto the frost-covered walkway, which trembled and sang with the wind. The musician was becoming the same colour as the platform from which he would perform tomorrow.
    Tulp spoke first. ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ he said. ‘This weather is very unusual, never seen the like of it before, just like the Old Country. Your music will be heard all the better under these conditions, it will sound out across the whole city.’
    Nobody moved or wanted to think about tomorrow, and everybody had forgotten the Old Country. Their thoughts were about the grip of their shoes, the strength of the floor and the little bit of their own personal gravity that enabled them to resist the wind. They clutched the railings, the walls, or anything of a solid nature, with a fervent vigour.
    Ghertrude’s bright head appeared through the floor and startled them with its ease. ‘Here are the keys and the moon ring, father.’ She climbed into the room with a wave of excitement that made the men grip their supports even more firmly. Giving the ancient velvet bag to the older man, she turned into the blast from the open door and, in purposeful joy, walked towards it and out onto the bridge. The men’s insides shrank, their spines and stomachs slivering over the threshold and plummeting, with the imagined falling girl, towards the hard, cobbled ground. She was laughing as the wind plucked at the fur of her collar and her hair to make another jealous imitation of fire. ‘I can almost see to the other side of the Vorrh!’ she yelled. ‘Look at the people, like ants!’ Her shoes rattled on the slender metal as she tapped her feet in excitement. She only had one hand on the silver rail; the other waved towards the abyss. Nobody went out, and nobody would have ever dared to look down. It took some effort to get her back into the tower.
    She had been fourteen at the time, and had begged to be given the job of organising the moon call every year. After ten days of incessant pleading, interspersed with silent, certain haughtiness, the dean had given in and she had been awarded the position: the first woman and the youngest in history.
    Now, all these years later, she stood again on the bridge and gazed out over the city. Flocks of birds were wheeling below, their shrill cries caught in the rising chimney smoke. Further down, a warren of business squirmed in the mud. She looked down onto 4 Kühler Brunnen, lit by the slanted rays