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.‘I don’t have to trust them to manipulate them.’I asked them to meet me in the sculpture-graveyards of the Greyslopes.It was exactly the kind of dark, sinister place that spies meet in cheap novels, which is why real spies never met here.But I knew Liss wouldn’t be able to resist the breathless romance of a clandestine meeting, and so I played to her expectations.The atmosphere was important.I had met the twins for the first time not long before.They had come to my rooms and invited me to join them for a drink with that uniquely threatening friendliness that can only come from people with the power to have you killed.I went along, of course.Maybe they had a special task for me.After all, as the younger sisters of Ledo, I was beholden to them as much as him, unless their plans conflicted with Ledo’s interests.It turned out they had no such task in mind, though it took me an hour to work it out.I finally established that the reason was simply that Liss was fascinated by me because I was a spy.Ledo had mentioned my name in connection with a particularly daring (and lucky) theft I had made on Caracassa’s behalf, and Liss had latched onto the idea and become obsessed.Now she wanted to be a spy, and she demanded that I recount my most dangerous exploits, my life, my techniques.Casta sat by and listened quietly while Liss grilled me.I felt uncomfortable talking about sensitive matters, and avoided them when I could do so without being caught; but I didn’t have the option of refusing her.I did, however, try to impress upon her the importance of secrecy, to which she slapped her hand across her mouth and mumbled something through sealed lips.It was hard to believe that the lesson had sunk in very far.I was left bewildered by the whole affair.Soon after, they called on me again, and this time we went out and got drunk in a club and we never spoke of matters of subterfuge once.Liss had apparently decided that being a spy was boring and that she wanted to be an explorer on the surface instead.She was now stuffed with facts about life above, which she excitedly repeated to anyone who would listen.I was to learn, when my son started dating Reitha, that they were mostly fiction.Still, whatever I had done, they had decided that they liked me.For a short period of time, they treated me like a friend, or perhaps a pet.It was difficult to tell with them whether I was an amusing project or someone for whom they had genuine affection.They made me uneasy, but I played along.Then they seemed to forget about me, and that was that.It wasn’t appropriate for me to call on them, and I wasn’t sure I’d want to anyway.I liked them a little, but they were hard to warm to and whimsical by nature.I could never feel safe with them.We were from different worlds, and theirs ruled mine.It had been several seasons since we had last spoken.I wondered how they would react to my mysterious summons, or if they would react at all.Meet me in the Greyslopes at the 27th hour, read the message.Beneath the Bleeding Coil.Simple, direct, urgent.If anything was guaranteed to make Liss clap her hands and squeal in delight, it was the promise of a secret meeting.So I waited in the midst of the sculpture-graveyard.The Ya’yeen had built this place, and many like it, in memorial to their slain siblings.They dealt with evolution by always birthing identical twins, one of which was given away to another family.When they reached adulthood, the twins were seized by an overwhelming and unstoppable drive to seek out and kill the other.In this way the stronger and smarter survived; the weaker was immortalised in sculpture by the victor.The Bleeding Coil was exactly as its name suggested: an enormous, uneven coil of metal and minerals, riddled with tiny pores through which murky yellow Ya’yeen blood dripped into a receptacle at its base, where it was drawn back up by some kind of pressure differential.That, at least, was how it appeared.The strange world of the Ya’yeen was steeped in meaning, every thought percolated through their bizarre world-view which said, as far as I understood, that everything meant something.The way a dropped piece of food fell, the path of a bat, the shape of a cavern, the way the streets of Veya were laid out.Their brains were wired for nuance, texture, subtlety.They saw things that nobody else could.Whether what they imagined was actually there was a question I didn’t care enough about to answer.When I looked at the Bleeding Coil, I saw something ugly and powerful that I actually quite liked.But to a Ya’yeen, the sculpture was a message delivered through the shape of the coil, the location of the pores and frequency of the drips, the position within the graveyard, the way the dim light of the nearby lamp fell on it, the donor of the blood the sculptor had used.They found us endlessly confusing, because we were a people who could live our whole lives without doing anything that meant anything at all
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