VII

Boq could not believe he was heading to the Philosophy Club at last. He hoped he wouldn’t vomit at a crucial moment. He hoped he would remember the whole thing tomorrow, or at least some kernel of it, despite the headache forming vengefully in the hollows at his temples.

The place was discreet, though it was the best known dive in Shiz. It hid behind a facade of paneled-up windows. A couple of Apes roamed the street in front, bouncing troublemakers ahead of time. Avaric counted the party carefully as they fell from the cab. “Shenshen, Crope, me, Boq, Tibbett, Fiyero, and Pfannee. Seven. Boy how’d we all fit in the cab, could hardly fit us I’d think.” He paid the cabbie and tipped him, in some obscure homage still to Ama Clutch, and then pushed to the front of the silent knot of companions. “Come on, we’re the right age and the right drunk,” he said, and to the shadowed face at the window, “Seven. Seven of us, good sir.”

The face came forward to the glass and leered at him. “The name is Yackle, and I’m not a sir nor am I good. What kind are you up to tonight, Master Fellow?” Speaking through the pane was a crone, with random teeth and a shiny white-pink wig slipping westwards off her pearly scalp.

“Kind?” said Avaric, then more bravely, “Any kind.”

“I mean the tickets, sweetbread. Strutting and strumming on the sprung floor, or strumpeting in the old wine cellars?”

“The works,” said Avaric.

“You understand house rules? The locked doors, the if-you-pay-you-play policy?”

“Give us seven, and hurry up about it. We’re not fools.”

“You never are fools,” said the beastly woman. “Well, here you are then, and come what may. Or who may.” She affected a stance of virtue, like a painting of a unionist virgin saint. “Enter and be saved.”

The door swung open, and they went down a flight of uneven brick steps. At the bottom of the flight was a dwarf in a purple burnoose. He looked at their tickets, and said, “Where are you soft things from? Out of town?”

“We’re all at the university,” said Avaric.

“A motley crew. Well, you’ve seven-of-diamond tickets. See here, the seven red diamonds printed here, and here.” He said, “Have a drink on the house, watch the girlie show, and dance a little if you want. Every hour or so I close this street door and open the next.” He pointed to a huge oak door, barred with two monstrous timbers in iron hasps. “You all go in together or you don’t go in at all. That’s the rule of the house.”

There was a chanteuse singing a send-up of “What Is Oz Without Ozma,” and teasing herself with a parrot-colored feather boa. A small band of elves—real elves!—tootled and rattled out a tinny accompaniment. Boq had never seen an elf, even though he knew there was a colony of them not far from Rush Margins. “How weird,” he said, inching forward. They looked like hairless monkeys, naked but for little red caps, and without any appreciable sex characteristics. They were as green as sin. Boq turned to say, Look, Elphie, it’s like you had a passel of babies, but he didn’t see her and remembered then that she hadn’t come. Nor had Glinda, apparently. Damn.

They danced. The crowd was the most mixed Boq had seen in some time. There were Animals, humans, dwarfs, elves, and several tiktok things of incomplete or experimental gender. A squadron of well-built blond boys circulated with tumblers of rotgut squash wine, which the friends drank because it was free.

“I don’t know if I want to go any more daring than this,” said Pfannee to Boq at one point. “I mean, look, that hussy of a Baboon is almost out of her dress. Perhaps we should call it a night.”

“Do you think?” said Boq. “I mean, I’m game, but if you’re feeling uneasy.” Oh hurrah, a way out. He was feeling uneasy himself. “Well let’s get Avaric. He’s over there nosing up to Shenshen.”

But before they could make their way across the crowded dance floor, the elves began to let out a banshee screech, and the singer thrust out her hip and said, “That’s the mating call, dollies! Ladies and gentlefriends! We’re doing, and I do mean doing”—she glanced at a note in her hand—“five black clubs, three black clubs, six red hearts, seven red diamonds, and—on their honeymoon, isn’t it sweet”—she simulated gagging—“two black spades. Up to the mouth of everlasting bliss, fraidies and gentlehens.”

“Avaric, no,” said Boq.

But the crone from the front, who called herself Yackle, came knocking through the hall—having apparently locked up the front door for the time being—and she remembered the holders of the designated cards, and brought them forward with a smile. “All rides, all riders, on the ready,” she said, “here we be, at the shank end of the evening! Lighten up, lads, it’s not a funeral, it’s an entertainment!” It had been a funeral, Boq remembered, trying to invoke the warm, self-effacing spirit of Ama Clutch. But the time to back out, if such a time existed, had passed.

They were swept through the oak doors and along a slightly sloping passage whose walls were padded in red and blue velvet. A merry tune was playing farther on, a dancing ragged melody. A smell of roasting timm leaves—sweet and softening, you could almost feel them turning up their purplish edges. Yackle led the way, and the twenty-three revelers processed, in a confused state of apprehension, elation, and randiness. The dwarf followed behind. Boq took stock, as best his stumbling mind could manage. An erect Tiger in hip boots and a cape. A couple of bankers and their evening consorts, all wearing black masques: as a protection against blackmail or as an aphrodisiac? A party of merchants from Ev and Fliaan, in town on business. A couple of women rather long in the tooth, bedecked in costume jewelry. The honeymoon couple were Glikkuns. Boq hoped that his crowd wasn’t gawping as much as the Glikkuns were. As he glanced around, only Avaric and Shenshen looked eager—and Fiyero, possibly because he hadn’t yet grasped what this was all about. The others looked more than a little squeamish.

They entered a small dark theatre-in-the-round, with the space for the public divided into six stalls. Above, the ceiling was lost in a stony blackness. Tapers fluttered, and a hollow music issued through fissures in the wall, increasing an unearthly air of dislocation and otherness. The stalls circled and faced the central stage, which was enshrouded in black drapes. The stalls were separated from one another by vertical strips of latticed wood and slats of mirror. All the parties were being mixed up, all friends and partners separated. Was there incense in the air too? It seemed to make Boq’s mind split in half, like a husk, and allow a tenderer, complacent mind to emerge. The softer, more bruisable aspect, the private intention, the surrendering self.

He felt he was knowing less and less, and it was more and more beautiful to do so. Why had he been alarmed? He was sitting on a stool, and around him in the stall sat, almost preternaturally near, a man in a black masque, an Asp he hadn’t noticed before, the Tiger whose breath ran hot and meaty on his neck, a beautiful schoolgirl, or was that the bride on her honeymoon? Did the whole stall then tilt forward, like a gently swung bucket? Anyway, they leaned together toward the central dais, an altar of veils and sacrifices. Boq loosened his collar and then his belt, felt the gingery appetite between heart and stomach and the resulting stiffening apparatus below that. The music of pipes and whistles was slowing, or was it that as he watched and waited and breathed so, so slowly, that the secret area inside himself uncloaked itself, where nothing mattered?

The dwarf, in a darker hood now, appeared on the stage. He could see from his vantage point into all the stalls but the revelers in separate stalls couldn’t see one another. The dwarf leaned and reached a hand here, there, welcoming, beckoning. He encouraged from one stall the figure of a woman, from another a man (was it Tibbett?), and from the stall where Boq sat he gestured to the Tiger. Boq felt only faintly sorry not to be chosen himself as he watched the dwarf pass a smoking vial beneath the nostrils of the three acolytes, and help them to remove their clothes. There were shackles, and a tray of scented oils and emollients, and a chest whose contents were still in shadow. The dwarf bound black blindfolds around the heads of the scholars.

The Tiger was pacing on all fours and growling softly, tossing his head back and forth in distress or excitement. Tibbett—for it was he, though nearly out of consciousness—was made to lie on his back on the floor of the stage. The Tiger strode over him and stood still while the dwarf and his assistants lifted Tibbett and tied his wrists together, around the Tiger’s chest, and his ankles around the Tiger’s pelvis, so Tibbett hung beneath the Tiger’s belly, like a trussed pig, his face lost in the Tiger’s chest hair.

The woman was set on a sloping stool, almost like a huge tilting bowl, and the dwarf tucked something aromatic and runny up in the shadowy regions. Then the dwarf pointed to Tibbett, who was beginning to twist and moan into the Tiger’s chest. “Let X be the Unknown God,” said the dwarf, poking Tibbett in the ribs. The dwarf then slapped the Tiger on his flank with a riding crop, and the Tiger strained forward, positioning his head between the woman’s legs. “Let Y be the Dragon of Time in its cave,” said the dwarf, hitting the Tiger again.

As he laced the woman into the half-shell, stroking her nipples with a glowing salve, he handed her a riding crop with which she could lash at the Tiger’s flanks and face. “And let Z be the Kumbric Witch, and let us see if she exists tonight …” The crowd drew nearer, almost participants themselves, and the musky sense of adventure made them tear at their own buttons and nibble their own lips, leaning in, in, in.

“Such are the variables in our equation,” said the dwarf as the room darkened even further. “So now, let the true, clandestine study of knowledge begin.”