always bustling and others look deserted in the daytime. Population-wise, the only thing that sets our neighborhoods apart is that they’re disproportionately female, and the absence of automobile traffic is, of course, another remarkable aspect. Otherwise, they look much like ordinary streets: chic young women sail by on vintage three-speeders and sip vanilla lattes in the parlors of old brothels; folks take a tipple at any of the clapboard taverns erected by the Dutch, with their low doorways and empty kegs lined up along the curb, those last few drops of ale ever dripping from the bungholes onto the cobblestones. Grannies thumb through leather-bound grimoires in secondhand bookshops or climb the steps into a crumbling church, now a covenstead, for a spell of quiet reflection. We save all the churches the Christians tear down—it’s the irony we relish above all else.
Now, I know what you’ve been thinking: Evelyn, that doesn’t make any sense. How can you live in a building that was torn down a century ago? I shall endeavor to explain.
All over the world there are isolated pockets in which time and space cease to correspond, so that more than one person or edifice or what have you can be said to coexist in exactly the same location. Whether or not they exist at precisely the same time is still a matter of dispute among our physicists. Who knows, we might be living on the lip of a wormhole.
In the evening sometimes I look out my back window and watch the traffic on the East River, and I see awfully strange ships, boats looking entirely too old to float, furling their sails as they pull into the old slips. But I don’t spend much time thinking about it. We’re all of us living in the past anyhow, so what does it matter? Nostalgia poisons the present, that’s what I always say—but somehow I can never seem to help myself.
The Mission
8.
The wise are of the opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there, too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude.
—W. B. Yeats, “The Sorcerers”
W E HAVE our own language, too, which we use mostly for the recitation of spells. Latin, Greek, Aramaic: all are playpen chatter compared to the words we use in secret. Our tongue is so old it doesn’t have a name for itself, which is why they say it was the language spoken in the Garden.
It’s also the language we speak whenever there’s an international gathering of beldames. I know most European languages, of course, but back in the day we used it whenever we found ourselves in a place where the walls had ears. You must know there were loads of us in secret service.
They say certain personality types are naturally attracted to, and suited for, a life of espionage. Those who enter into it for material gain usually die without a farthing, though they do tend to outlast the conflicts they exploit—and that, sad to say, can’t be said for the majority of their nobler colleagues. After all, the most infamous were by definition the most inept; folks tend to forget that Mata Hari met her end before a French firing squad. Jonah was one of the best, and now hardly anyone remembers him but me.
We are deviant, naturally deceitful. Lies come as easily as breathing, though not by some innate pathological defect—it’s just that our nature necessitates it. No surprise, then, that so many beldames chose the life I did. We hid refugees and resistance members in our warrens and memorized military dispatches in a single glance, cracked safes with the tap of a finger and garbled enemy radio signals with a flick of the tongue. We spread black propaganda far more quickly than anyone from Morale Ops could have done, and made it all the more convincing. As I say, we couldn’t change what fate had already decided, but that distinction grew so
Now, I know what you’ve been thinking: Evelyn, that doesn’t make any sense. How can you live in a building that was torn down a century ago? I shall endeavor to explain.
All over the world there are isolated pockets in which time and space cease to correspond, so that more than one person or edifice or what have you can be said to coexist in exactly the same location. Whether or not they exist at precisely the same time is still a matter of dispute among our physicists. Who knows, we might be living on the lip of a wormhole.
In the evening sometimes I look out my back window and watch the traffic on the East River, and I see awfully strange ships, boats looking entirely too old to float, furling their sails as they pull into the old slips. But I don’t spend much time thinking about it. We’re all of us living in the past anyhow, so what does it matter? Nostalgia poisons the present, that’s what I always say—but somehow I can never seem to help myself.
The Mission
8.
The wise are of the opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there, too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude.
—W. B. Yeats, “The Sorcerers”
W E HAVE our own language, too, which we use mostly for the recitation of spells. Latin, Greek, Aramaic: all are playpen chatter compared to the words we use in secret. Our tongue is so old it doesn’t have a name for itself, which is why they say it was the language spoken in the Garden.
It’s also the language we speak whenever there’s an international gathering of beldames. I know most European languages, of course, but back in the day we used it whenever we found ourselves in a place where the walls had ears. You must know there were loads of us in secret service.
They say certain personality types are naturally attracted to, and suited for, a life of espionage. Those who enter into it for material gain usually die without a farthing, though they do tend to outlast the conflicts they exploit—and that, sad to say, can’t be said for the majority of their nobler colleagues. After all, the most infamous were by definition the most inept; folks tend to forget that Mata Hari met her end before a French firing squad. Jonah was one of the best, and now hardly anyone remembers him but me.
We are deviant, naturally deceitful. Lies come as easily as breathing, though not by some innate pathological defect—it’s just that our nature necessitates it. No surprise, then, that so many beldames chose the life I did. We hid refugees and resistance members in our warrens and memorized military dispatches in a single glance, cracked safes with the tap of a finger and garbled enemy radio signals with a flick of the tongue. We spread black propaganda far more quickly than anyone from Morale Ops could have done, and made it all the more convincing. As I say, we couldn’t change what fate had already decided, but that distinction grew so
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