Madame d’Ortolan was silent for a moment. Beyond her feet, two of the other Council people, who had not overheard what he’d said earlier, were sharing a hookah mouthpiece and a joke. The two men laughed suddenly and uproariously in a spluttering cloud of grey-pink smoke. “You know,” Madame d’Ortolan said quietly, and there was a steely edge to her voice that made him think that she had not been drunk or stoned in the least, “we have tried so hard to protect you, Tem.” She looked steadily up at him. He chose to say nothing. “We have watched you so very, very carefully, and surrounded you with so many people charged with making sure that you come to no harm from this woman, and put our best people onto the job of monitoring all your flits, and every world you go to and everything you do there. We have been so impressed with everything you’ve done, but so disappointed that we seem unable to stop this woman finding you, or prevent her taking you wherever she wants once she has, or backtracking where you’ve been with her subsequently. I find it almost unbelievable that she can do that all by herself. Don’t you think it’s unbelievable?” She played with a strand of her curling black hair, twisting it round one finger, again looking up at him wide-eyed.

“No, Theodora, I don’t,” he told her. “It happens to me. I take no part in it, but it happens nevertheless. So I find it perfectly believable. You would too.” He drank from his fishily inhabited glass.

She took the mouthpiece of the water pipe and used it to stroke his leg lightly, from upper thigh to mid-calf. “I believe you, Tem, of course,” she said absently, as though not paying attention to herself. “However, there are those who feel that we may be being a tad too lenient in all this. It does just seem so very strange that she can do what she can so terribly easily, and all without any help or cooperation from you. Perhaps we need to check how… how easy it is to flit with you like that.”

“You mean, so embraced, so contained?”

“Well, yes.” She was still watching her hand holding the hookah mouthpiece.

He waited until she brought the mouthpiece back up and then took it from her and sucked on it. “If you are saying what I think you are, Theodora, then it would be both a pleasure and an honour.”

She looked up with an open, vacant expression. “I do beg your pardon, what was it you thought I was saying?”

“I may have misinterpreted, ma’am,” Oh said on an in-breath, waving the mouthpiece through a grey-pink cloud. “Perhaps you ought to say what it was you were actually saying, to spare the blushes of us both.”

She looked at him knowingly and took the mouthpiece back, sucking daintily on it. “I think you know exactly what I was saying, Tem.”

He bowed as best he could, given that he was reclining. “Ma’am, I am at your disposal.”

She smiled. “You are amenable, Temudjin? You consent?” She reached out and took hold of one of his hands. “You see, I ask your permission rather than just take you. I think to do that is simply rude. A violation, even.”

“I am entirely amenable, Theodora.”

She gave a little tinkling laugh. “Still so formal!” She squeezed his hand. “Come then. Let us do this.”

Without further ado they were suddenly somewhere else. She was dressed just as she had been. He was not. Now he wore fancy dress; some sort of blue-and-silver-striped puffed-out outfit with shoes whose toes turned up and a giant hat shaped like an onion. Everything else felt very similar. Same fragre, same languages. They appeared to be lying on a collection of pillows and cushions similar to those they had just left, but situated on a little circular island surrounded by a wide pool of water lit from below by slowly changing lights of green and blue. The walls and ceiling were dark or invisible. The air was warm and smelled of strong, heady perfumes. There was nobody else within sight.

Madame d’Ortolan moved herself closer to him. “There. We are just beneath the floor of the Dome of the Mists. Our vacated selves are floating somewhere just overhead. This seems agreeable to you?” There was a kind of slightly delayed natural amplification behind her voice that made him suspect they were right in the centre of a perfectly circular space, her words echoing off the totality of the circumference around them.

Oh felt round the perimeter of his giant hat. “I’m not sure about this,” he said, and took it off. His voice, too, sounded strange, the echoes overemphatic, lagging behind his words just enough to clash with them. “But otherwise, yes, it’s perfectly agreeable.”

She smiled, smoothed a hand over his hair. “Let us make it more agreeable,” she whispered, and slid to him, embracing him, bringing her mouth up to his.

He had wondered if this would prove awkward or difficult, but it did not. He remembered Mrs Mulverhill asking him if he’d fucked Madame d’Ortolan yet (or had she even expressed it as her fucking him? – he couldn’t recall) and deciding at the time that his pride would not let that happen. Even that he ought to feel some sort of loyalty, some fidelity to Mrs Mulverhill, both sexual and – what? ideological? – despite feeling even at the time that this was preposterous, almost perverse. At the very, very least, he’d thought over the last few minutes, he would be cold, or difficult to persuade or rouse, or perfunctory and hinting at contemptuous.

But, faced with such flattering attention from on high, confronted with such a powerful regard from somebody who had taken such trouble to make themselves so formidably if ostentatiously attractive, there was no part of him that was not responding enthusiastically. There might, he supposed, have been something in the drug smoke or the drink, but probably, he admitted to himself, not.

Madame d’Ortolan was a highly capable lover; dextrous, smooth and with a sort of restless, almost impatient touch, forever moving her hands and mouth and attention from one place on his body to the next, as though, while never exactly dissatisfied with what she had uncovered already, she was still searching for something even better.

Both their costumes seemed to have been designed to provide easy sexual access without having to take any part of them entirely off. When he entered her, she let out a great satisfied sigh and hugged him tightly to her with all four limbs, throwing her head back to expose her long white neck and giving a sort of growling laugh. “Ah, now,” she said, half to herself. “Just there, just there.”

There was a virtuosic skill in what happened a few minutes later, when they both achieved orgasm at once. This was such a cliché in itself, and so relatively unusual, that Oh found, even in the course of it, time to be unashamedly impressed. As the sensation was beginning to ebb – the echoes of his cries and hers starting to fade around them – she took him, transitioning them together into another pair of coupled bodies. Then, moments later, into another, and another, and another. He had no time to evaluate each passing body and world, was barely aware of more than a riffling sequence of fragres, glimpses of different amounts or qualities of light – eyes open or not – and the feel of larger or smaller spaces around them. Cooler air, warmer air, varying smells of perfumes and bodily musks, even their physical state in the shape of different sexual positions; all flickered past him in a strobe of elongated ecstasies.

He did recall, despite the pulsings of such concentrated, extended pleasure, that there were people who existed in a state of perpetual sexual arousal, coming to orgasm continually, through the most trivial, ordinary and frequent physical triggers and experiences. It sounded like utter bliss, the sort of thing drunk friends roared with envious laughter over towards the end of an evening, but the unfunny truth was that, in its most acute form, it was a severe and debilitating medical condition. The final proof that it was so was that many people who suffered from it took their own lives. Bliss – pure physical rapture – could become absolutely unbearable.