“Then on the other hand, if you remain stubbornly straight-edged, keep sternly to the mind as she is more usually found, then you can communicate with others, because you’re all speaking the same language, as it were…but have you opened the door? Maybe the best you can do is peer through the keyhole. Maybe that’ll do…”

Lin glanced up to see which mouth he was speaking from. It was a large, feminine one near his shoulder. She wondered why it was that his voice remained unchanged. She wished she could reply, or that he would stop talking. She found it hard to concentrate, but she thought she had already extracted as good a compromise as she would get from him.

“Lots and lots of money in drugs…of course you know that. D’you know what your friend and agent Lucky Gazid is prepared to pay for his latest illicit tipple? Honestly, it would astonish you. Ask him, do. The market for these substances is extraordinary. There’s room for a few purveyors to make quite tidy sums.”

Lin felt that Mr. Motley was laughing at her. Every conversation he had with her wherein he disclosed some hidden details of New Crobulon’s underworld lore, she was embroiled in something she was eager to avoid. I’m nothing but a visitor, she wanted to sign frantically. Don’t give me a streetmap! The occasional shot of shazbah to come up, maybe a jolt of quinner to come down, that’s all I ask…Don’t know about the distribution and don’t want to!

“Ma Francine has something of a monopoly in Petty Coil. She’s spreading her sales representatives further afield from Kinken. D’you know her? One of your kind. Impressive businesswoman. She and I are going to have to come to some arrangement. Otherwise it’s all going to get messy.” Several of Mr. Motley’s mouths smiled. “But I’ll tell you something,” he added softly. “I’m taking a delivery very soon of something that should rather dramatically change my distribution. I may have something of a monopoly myself…”

I’m going to find Isaac tonight, decided Lin nervously. I’m going to take him out to supper, somewhere in Salacus Fields where I can touch his toes with mine.

The annual Shintacost Prize competition was coming up fast, at the end of Melluary, and she would have to think of something to tell him as to why she was not entering. She had never won-the judges, she thought haughtily, did not understand gland-art-but she, along with all her artist friends, had entered without fail for the last seven years. It had become a ritual. They would have a grand supper on the day of the announcement, and send someone to pick up an early copy of the Salacus Gazetteer, which sponsored the competition, to see who had won. Then they would drunkenly denounce the organizers for tasteless buffoons.

Isaac would be surprised that she was not taking part. She had decided to hint at some monumental work-in-progress, something to keep him from asking questions for some time.

Of course, she reflected, if his garuda thing’s still going on, he won’t really notice if I enter or not.

There was a sour note to her thoughts. She was not being fair, she realized. She was prone to the same kind of obsessing: she found it difficult, now, not to see the monstrous shape of Mr. Motley hovering at the corner of her vision at every hour. It was just bad timing that Isaac should be obsessed at the same time as her, she thought desultorily. This job was swallowing her up. She wanted to come home every night to freshly mixed fruit salad and theatre tickets and sex.

Instead, he scribbled avidly in his workshop, and she came home to an empty bed in Aspic Hole, night after night. They met once or twice a week, for a hurried supper and a deep, unromantic sleep.

Lin looked up and saw that the shadows had moved some way since she had come into the attic. Her mind felt foggy. Her delicate forelegs cleaned her mouth and eyes and antennae in quick passes. She chewed what she had decided would be the day’s last clutch of colourberries. The tartness of the blueberries was tempered by the sweet pinkberries. She was mixing carefully, adding an unripe pearlberry or a nearly fermenting yellowberry. She knew exactly the taste she was striving for: the sickly, cloying bitterness of a colour like vivid, greying salmon, the colour of Mr. Motley’s calf muscle.

She swallowed and squeezed juice through her headgullet. It squirted eventually onto the shimmering sides of the drying khepri-spit. It was a little too liquid: it spattered and dribbled as it emerged. Lin worked with it, rendering the muscle tone in abstract streaks and drips, a spur-of-the-moment rescue.

When the spit was dry she disengaged. She felt a sticky seal of mucus stretch and snap as she pulled her head away from the half-finished leg. She leaned to one side and tensed, pushing the remaining paste through her gland. The ribbed underbelly of her headbody squeezed itself out of its distended shape, into more usual dimensions. A fat white glop of khepri-spit dropped from her head and curled on the floor. Lin stretched her gland-tip forwards and cleaned it with her rear legs, then carefully closed the little protective case below her wingtips.

She stood and stretched. Mr. Motley’s amiable, cold, dangerous little pronouncements broke off sharply. He had not realized she was finished.

“So soon, Ms. Lin?” he cried with theatrical disappointment.

Losing my edge if not careful, she signed slowly. Takes a lot out of you. Got to stop.

“Of course,” said Mr. Motley. “And how is the meisterwork?”

They turned together.

Lin was pleased to see that her impromptu recovery from the watery colourberry juice had created a vivid, suggestive effect. It was not entirely naturalistic, but none of her work was: instead, Mr. Motley’s muscle seemed to have been thrown violently onto the bones of his leg. An analogy perhaps close to the truth.

The translucent colours spilt in uneven grots down the white that glinted like the inside of a shell. The slabs of tissue and muscle crawled over each other. The intricacies of the many-textured flesh were vivid. Mr. Motley nodded approvingly.

“You know,” he ventured quietly, “my sense of the grand moment makes me wish there was some way I could avoid seeing anything more of this until it’s finished. I think it is very fine so far, you know. Very fine. But it’s dangerous to offer praise too early. Can lead to complacency…or to the opposite. So please don’t be downhearted, Ms. Lin, if that is the last word I say, positive or negative, on the matter, until the very end. Are we agreed?”

Lin nodded. She was unable to take her eyes from what she had created, and she rubbed her hand very gently over the smooth surface of the drying khepri-spit. Her fingers explored the transition from fur to scales to skin below Mr. Motley’s knee. She looked down at the original. She looked up at his head. He returned her gaze with a pair of tiger’s eyes.

What…what were you? she signed at him. He sighed.

“I wondered when you’d ask that, Lin. I did hope that you wouldn’t, but I knew it was unlikely. It makes me wonder if we understand each other at all,” he hissed, sounding suddenly vicious. Lin recoiled.

“It’s so…predictable. You’re still not looking the right way. At all. It’s a wonder you can create such art. You still see this-” he gesticulated vaguely at his own body with a monkey’s paw “-as pathology. You’re still interested in what was and how it went wrong. This is not error or absence or mutancy: this is image and essence…” His voice rang around the rafters.

He calmed a little and lowered his many arms.

“This is totality.”

She nodded to show that she understood, too tired to be intimidated.

“Maybe I’m too hard on you,” Mr. Motley said reflectively. “I mean…this piece before us makes it clear that you have a sense of the ruptured moment, even if your question suggests the opposite…So maybe,” he continued slowly, “you yourself contain that moment. Part of you understands without recourse to words, even if your higher mind asks questions in a format which renders an answer impossible.”