The man, in profile to Umin, blinks and scratches at a scruff of unshaven morning-beard. 

Rubbing sleep glumly from his eyes. Senic stares flatley at Pyna for a breath before acquiescing with a bob of his thinning top-knot. 

He ushers the pair into a narrow foyer, unlit but for a diminutive hand-lamp held on high.

Senic, his night-cassock swishing and brooming, busies himself then. In a manner most spryly for a man of seeming late-middle years on the borders of rotundity, at the task of birthing greater illumination from a number of idle candles.

As the foyer lightens and warms, Umin focuses on a short hall and the adjacent room. Where a workbench and well-ordered shelves fraught with fulgid glass receptacles of manifold description snare his eye. 

Jars, jugs, fine pipettes and delicate flasks, and distillers aglitter. 

Full of compounds unknowable and tantalizing in the half-gloom.

All the accoutrement of a scent-maker.

The air is a mingle of rich base notes and muted overtones of innumerable pedigrees.

Honeypots to grass. Fanciful floral to sombre grave-muck.

Pyna shuts her eyes and draws in a deep and measuring breath. 

Like the parching soul at the edge of sublime thirst, who draws the first ladle of earthy-sweet from a forest-cool wellspring. 

Ah the perfumery

Something holy in

Civet and

Ambergris.

Senic grunts, occupied by his bustling candle-work.

“Who is this.” 

Addressing no one in particular. 

A Key.

A flower for me.

“Oh?” 

Senic turns and sets the last candlestick, wick-fire warbling, into a clay bowl and lifts his hand-lamp.

He studies Umin under the brightness with an unreadable expression, but the apparent flash of something akin to pity in his eyes leaves Umin feeling vaguely unsettled.

He turns then to Pyna, his face a mask.

“What does your father need of me now. I have done all I am able...”

It is not

Father, dear 

Senic.

You must open the 

Cellar for me

For me.

He stares expressionlessly at her for a number of heartbeats.

“That way is no longer safe. Well, not for the likes of...”

He trails off and throws a sidelong glance at Umin.

“No longer safe. Not for anyone. And certainly not for a poor perfumer.”

A poor

Liar dear

Senic

I need no guide only

That the way be

Pried

Open.

Senic breathes in like a man anticipating a sudden and gelid rainshower.

He rubs deliberately and painfully at his eyes.

“Very well. Anything for a few more bells sleep. Come away then.” 

He frowns and turns down the hall, slippered feet rasping softly across worn but nonetheless pretty parquetry, lamp held high. 

The pair follow past the workshop and a few unremarkable living quarters, and then into a narrow closet, reeking of mildew and something disagreeably astringent.

Senic pauses and mutters a few vinegary words.

“Can’t get their stink out. No matter the alchemy.”

“Here...”

From out of a pocket in his night-cassock he hesitantly produces a finger's breadth long, pleated paper-puzzle box that would seem at a swift glance to be a child’s plaything.

Daintily uncreasing a corner, he wets a finger against the tip of his tongue, then dips gently into the open fold, withdrawing a muddy particulate.

Leaning down and murmuring words inaudible to Umin. 

Senic paints along a pentagonal seam in the woodwork, over and over until a silvery thread runs along the furrow, filling the closet with a velvety quicksilver light.  

He stops then and leans back, stretching the crick in his spine, before once more touching the floor and unhinging a hatch where there was none before.

“He’ll not take kindly to you calling from below.”

Senic huffs out a breath, leaning back and away from the sepulchral pitfall, pungent with a fatty putrescence.

Dear Senic

We are

Expected

A honeyed sough, frank and uncaring.

Farewell

With that, Pyna moves to the lip of the waiting abyss, and unceremoniously drops into the murk. 

Her gown a momentary riot of tangles like the flapping of a mad flittermouse then, nothing.

In a sudden panic, Umin scrambles after her. 

Peering down into sinister obscurity he sees a ladder, uncertain and rickety, receding into chalky duskiness.

He begins a reluctant descent, when his movement is suddenly arrested by Senic’s heavy hand against his shoulder.

Umin looks up into Senic’s perpetually nonplussed expression.

“Have you a blade. Have you a light.”

Umin’s only response is to nod, as the trap above once again by means of some preternatural faculty, begins to slip back into its seamless and proper place.

As musty sightlessness swallows him, his final glimpse of Senic is that of eyes flinty and crinkled.

“Best you go back to the Sunlands...”

Then, nothing.

Senic

So many

Blots 

Bespeckle his

Soul

He knows the

Ways Below as few others

Know.