And upon the Marquis’ pronouncement, the audience came to an unequivocal close.

Pettiwren had swiftly ushered the pair out. 

Soon afterwards, Umin found himself quartered in a modest servant’s cell amongst the Marquis’ and Marquess’ personal retinue.

It was late into the first bell, and most were a’bed.

Pyna had, with her singular ghostliness, simply vanished.

Umin reclined upon his not uncomfortable pillow-strewn palette, troubled by snarled and snaking thoughts. 

Which mimicked the distempering eddies of lazy smoke that hung like poplar-creamy paint, in the looming rafters above.

Listening to the muted soundscape of sleepers beyond his curtained cell, he shuts his eyes and allows himself to drift, mouthing a meditative Koan of Uket over and over like an unending tidal ebb and drip. 

Soon sleep is dragging him down like a drowning soul trussed up in the weight of saturated wool, onto the Dream Roads.

Umin stands once again upon a quay. 

The sea is ravenously dull and opaque as mercury. 

In a blink, then at the same rails of some species of oddly proportioned and baroque watercraft, all polished curlicues and hardwood flourishes, sluggishly cutting the dull ocean’s soupy iron-dark breakers. 

Again the importance of its architecture and uncanny proportions, reeking of salt and eerie metal-craft slips from Umin’s grasp, like a trickle of blood-warm water through splayed fingers.

Thereupon his right hand propped against the oddly yielding wood-stuff of the rail, leans his old companion Ure.

He is tall and lanky and bent like a fleshy twig. 

Ure’s posture is inexpressibly wrong. 

As though he were being stretched like a figurine wrought of soft resin-gum. His characteristically toothy grin now strained, more akin to a grimace. His eyes are distended. A pair of bloating black plums.

My bargain...

Old friend

You will not come again 

There’s no passing this last horizon.

He grinds through gritting teeth, as his body is kneaded up and outwards like a ghastly streamer of warm taffy. 

Purging a sour, inhuman wail that flails like a maddened thing across the leaden breakers.

In a paroxysm of terror, Umin hurls himself into the waiting mercurial surf. 

Umin breaks the skin of sleep, gulping air like a landed fish to a familiar presence hovering above him, strange eyes refracting uncertain candle-shine.

Shhh...

Sweet how you

Struggle and

Bleat.

The hand that presses his brow is curiously warm.

There is something about this unexpected, very human-seeming heat that disturbs him.

Her skin is unusually rosy. 

A translucent peach-gleam, like from within a psalloid conch, or the smoulder of a low-burning lamp regarded through a wax-paper screen.

Husht…

Sweet. 

Sleep awhile still.

Upon the eighth bell we go to

Greet the Sea.

On the crest of Meshmin’s great

Undergalley.

An intractable coldness caresses Umin’s deeper recesses.

His heart still bobbing like a hapless cork on the iron-dark streamers and salts of his fading nightmare.