1.8 Mina de Malfois and the Honey’d Briar (part three)
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I remember once hearing it said of some chap that ‘he haunts wakes, fairs, and bear-baitings.’ Ciyerra, fandom’s ghost, kept to the spirit and not the letter of this, choosing to haunt livejournal and now, possibly, IM. It was with no little curiosity that I logged in to the séance chatroom on the night in question. I ran a quick eyeball over the list of those present and noted PrinceC amongst them. Most of the other guests were bragging about their black and pink armbands, bracelets, and tributes in a kind of devotional one-upmanship, and posting links to photos of their altars. ‘Quiet, quiet,’ the ostensible hostesses kept typing, but with little visible effect.

‘I am here,’ Ciyerra typed. The words floated across the screen in a font of such pale pink it could barely be seen, but the group fell instantly silent. I suppose atmospherics are contagious or something, because even though I’d come here for a laugh and nothing more, I started to feel a tad peculiar. Sitting alone in my apartment, I got goose-bumpily aware of how dark and empty the room behind my back was, and I took a nervous gulp of wine.

‘Will...uh...will we ever see you again?’ asked one of the room’s moderators.

‘Will you be at any more cons?’ interrupted some other person cheekily, earning instant bannination. Some of the fangirls *giggle*’d nervously.

‘Worlds within worlds within worlds,’ came Ciyerra’s response. ‘No: I will never be with you again.’

I shivered unwillingly, and felt a mild wave of annoyance with myself, but dash it all, this was unexpectedly creepy. I didn’t believe her. I just...wished I’d left the lights on, and maybe sat at more of an angle so there wasn’t so much out-of-view palpable nothingness in the empty room behind me.

‘Be careful,’ Ciyerra warned. ‘I went too deep, and got caught. It’s easier than you realize to lose the way home.’ And that was her last communication for the night, although everyone hung around for another twenty minutes or so. It was just as well, really. If even I was having this morbid over-reaction to the inherent creepiness of all this, I could only imagine that the more intense fangirls must be nearly in hysterics by now.

The thing was, even though I was perfectly aware that she’d been referring to her own entrapment via layers of con artistry and stalkerish inappropriateness, what she’d said had a kind of resonance. Sometimes when I’d been online, or curled up somewhere with my fanfic notebook, raising my head to the ‘real’ world felt almost like surfacing from some depth. Playing Sanguinity has the same effect. And to be entirely honest, the real world in question feels rather sadly flat and dull sometimes. BalletChic’s mistake, it occurred to me now, had been in surfacing too abruptly, or in failing to exercise the requisite caution when approaching the borders between layers: taking people’s real world money, and icking out PrinceC in person, because she’d wanted her fannish crush to be a real one. It was like divers who get the bends when they come up too fast. Ciyerra, like your better class of literary ghost, came bearing a warning worth heeding, really, once you’d sorted through the gibberish.

It was a relief, next day, not to have to think about her. Home from my shift, thoroughly scrubbed and freshly clad in comfortable clothes and a swashbuckling scent, I logged in to find Arc pacing the deck. We’d decided to sail around the island, rather than crossing overland to look for the Tented Tartanists, if only to avoid having to encounter the damned flagellants again. Having once laid eyes on them in mid-flog, as it were, I quailed from the thought of dropping in on them again, and Arc seemed to share my aversion.

‘According to my ded. reckoning,’ Arc was saying.

‘Dead reckoning, surely?’ I said.

‘Ded. reckoning,’ Arc insisted.

‘Now she ded from reckoning,’ said ‘my’ Elizabeth, the one I’d fled from the Unicornists with, and I snickered appreciatively. It’s funny: she’d seemed undistinguishable from the rest back when we’d been making preparations at the dock, but now that I was getting to know her I fancied I saw signs of human intelligence. She must have felt similarly chummy, because her avatar now stuck out its hand and said, ‘Call me Liz, will you?’

I shook her hand. ‘Mina,’ I said unnecessarily.

‘I know,’ she said, and grinned.

‘Bear a hand!’ Arc bellowed, and Liz shouldered one of the NPCs aside, grasping the rope with hands that looked, if not seasoned, at least capable of becoming, well, capable.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said firmly, and hove to.

When we reached the far side of the island there was no sign of a lavender-sailed ship, but, as Xena pointed out, we had to stop anyway to recover our missing crew-women. We anchored the Honey’d Briar in a cove flanked on either side by grey, jagged, towering cliffs of a decidedly phallic aspect, and made our way along another winding path--this one, I noted, strewn with rose petals. Finally we emerged through a wrought-iron gateway, also heavily entwined with roses, and gazed at the cultists’ encampment.

Whereas the members of the Cult of the Gay Unicorn had tended towards a slender, sylphlike, almost boyish appearance, these Tartanists had chosen avatars of a buxom, womanly build. We got a clearish view of this, because several of them were immersed in a rose-scented bath of improbable milk, and the rest lounged around in equally improbable, and rather revealing, historical costumes from various eras. There were no sentries posted, but a few avatars drifted dreamily towards us. ‘What’s your opinion of slash?’ one asked sharply, and all the others turned to stare at us expectantly. Xena, who was in the lead, froze, momentarily unable to guess which was the right stance.

‘Of what?’ I asked, thinking on my feet and widening my eyes innocently. Their expressions softened instantly.

‘Nothing, my dear,’ said the first one kindly. ‘Just some unpleasantness from the outside world that you needn’t trouble yourself about here. Make yourselves at home, please. In a few hours we have our writers’ circle, and then we’ll be pledging our love to the fictional males of our choice, but until then, you’re free to explore whichever aspect of devotion interests you most.’ She’d whispered the word ‘fictional’ as though it were obscene, and made a complicated little gesture, like a religious hand-sign to ward off evil.

‘Er, thanks,’ Arc said dubiously. ‘We’re actually searching for a friend of ours called Warr1or. Have any of you seen him?’

‘Ah, yes, the anti-slasher,’ said the cultist approvingly. ‘Yes, we rescued him from that horrid fleet of Jammies, and put him to work tending our herd of dragons. The bulls, you see, are venomous, and prefer to be handled by men, whom they consider more innately respectful. Although I don’t know why,’ she added, frowning. ‘No one could respect or cherish the source of their power more than we do.’

‘Is the venom very dangerous?’ Xena asked curiously.

‘Oh, yes,’ replied a nearby cultist. ‘It can be quite lethal.’

‘Then why do you keep dragons at all?’ Xena persisted, and the cultist rolled her eyes and laughed a tinkling, feminine laugh.

‘For their milk, silly,’ she said. ‘See how soft it makes our skin?’ She held out one graceful arm, which Xena stroked appreciatively.

Arc, meanwhile, had thought of something. ‘Have any of you heard of PrinceC?’ she asked shrewdly, and a chorus of gasps and giggles answered her. The throng fell into elaborate semi-swoons, hands pressed theatrically to their foreheads. ‘We’re working with him,’ Arc continued. ‘He’ll be very displeased if we don’t return with Warr1or.’

They looked delighted by this news. ‘Ohhh, so we risk incurring PrinceC’s displeasure?’ said one breathlessly, and the others giggled in an over-excited way that rather suggested they looked forward to this outcome. Arc, recognizing that her strategy had not gone as planned, reluctantly admitted that this was so.

‘Then you must stay, and be our guests!’ said the cultist who’d spoken first, happily, and there seemed nothing for it but to wander their territory, waiting for some sort of inspiration to strike.

‘I could probably take them all,’ Xena offered as we strolled off.

‘It would be wrong to attack unarmed women,’ Arc pointed out, adding firmly, ‘and if you weren’t talking about fighting, I don’t want to hear about it.’ Xena lapsed into blushing silence. By this time we’d entered a rose garden-cum-maze, and we rounded a corner we discovered our missing Elizabeths, seated on a bench and looking shaken.

A little close questioning uncovered a sordid tale. In order to prove they weren’t members of the Cult of the Gay Unicorn, our two Elizabeths had been forced to undergo a ritual which involved, as far as we could piece together from their embarrassed mumbles, licking chocolate sauce off a doll. ‘It was huge, it was huge,’ one Elizabeth kept sobbing, and we eventually established that she meant the doll was huge: life-sized, in fact, and wearing, at least initially, a tuxedo and a white mask. Xena looked appalled, and I can’t say I blamed her.

And here we were, I remind you, doomed to attend some sort of cultic ritual in a few short hours! Who knew, I mean to say, what they had in store for us. We looked at one another, and shuddered.


next: Mina de Malfois and the Honey'd Briar (part four)