The entire Droste-Hülshoff family gathered at the Gurnemanz Building.
For the past few days, they had been celebrating, awaiting the patriarch, who was aboard an airship, returning home after seven years of service with the Baleful guild, linked to the Great Labyrinth Federation.
"Do you truly have a fhauren daughter?"
"Not by choice."
"They never are. They're like redheads, just born that way. A marriage can crumble over mere red strands."
"Mine will not."
"Are you satisfied with your Lady?"
"With most of them. I have five wives."
"And they agreed to receive you together? No crisis? Perhaps the Unifier has returned, and I stand before him."
Madame Cuth Riseley-Prichard performed an exaggerated curtsy.
Before her stood Edgar Droste-Hülshoff, Captain of the steam zeppelin Tide Whore.
"I wasn't mad enough to have five wives in the same city. Nor in the same kingdom. In fact, I was late to my first vows, so I could plan them with cunning."
"Were you planning what the poets sing of as true love?"
"I only found such love among your good girls. What I was planning was to distance myself."
"Distance yourself, my Lord? That afflicts one who faces avernus. One might say that fear has always been my most reliable amulet."
"What an honour. To distance myself from duties. A married man pays in taxes what it costs to travel to the Orient. Annually. It's good that there are compensations on the other side."
"Letters arrive from the Orient in twenty nights."
"If I were paper, I wouldn't mind making such a trip every twenty days. But in flesh and blood, no less than forty nights, and that under good conditions. Do you know why they gave names to the thousands of airship parts?"
"I fear I cannot reach a conclusion."
"Because each one of them can break. There is someone who assesses each one, at every stop. Imagine that amidst the clouds of the Eternal Rain, on the high seas."
"I cannot conceive of it. What would it be like?"
"Neither can I. For that, we have professionals. My time is dedicated to..."
Edgar pondered as he lit a cigar, offering it to the Madame.
Then, he lit another.
They smoked in the spacious ballroom, filled with neatly organized tables and chairs.
Only the two of them remained in the space.
Above the hall, between the black iron beams and glass, a storm with continuous lightning raged.
"You were saying, my Lord?"
"Of yours, the youngest, send her to my cabin. We still have time until we arrive."
"Have mercy on my children."
"Certainly, do not confuse me with criminals. The least used of those who are ready, that is the one I want. One I do not yet know. As for your orphans, I would rather have my own little fhauren well cared for under your protection than in those boarding schools."
"Thank you for your words, I shall send her to your quarters. Is she the fhauren of your Firstborns?"
"The good Unifier did not allow it. Praise be to His name."
And the Madame repeated:
"Praise be to His name."
"None of them have gone to the guilds yet. If before it would have been one goodbye, today I will have five. To count the Firstborn starting from the wife is to spit in the face of the faithful."
"For less, men are hanged in the Orient. And are you not also a Firstborn? They have your blood. They will be strong."
"How many of them have I not seen burn on funeral pyres?"
Edgar assumed a brooding attitude as he rose, addressing Cuth one last time:
"It has been an honour to be in your company."
"The honour was all mine, my Lord. Thank you for this ride, it saved me a station."
And they went their separate ways, the Captain heading for the stern castle, to the main cabin, and the madam making for the corridor area on the second lower deck.
Edgar unlocked and lifted the door, pushing it open with force and seeing the bed made with black-greenish sheets.
The metal furniture was integrated into the wall and the ducts of the boiler's exhaust circuit, which heated the cabin.
Scrolls filled an entire shelf.
Splinters of crystal in lamps illuminated Edgar's writing as he sat, filling out the papers with information about the completed mission.
Among the papers, uncomfortable numbers, of guild members, of the dead.
For the Federation, that's what Edgar himself represented, a number with objectives to fulfill.
"E04T5667811V."
The name signed on the documents, pronounced slowly as he wrote it on the line with the Tide Whore's stamp.
He knew. One day, someone would be filling in his number in a report of acceptable losses.
She knocked on the door and opened it, then took a step back, already inside the cabin:
"Wouldn't it be better if you told me to come in?"
Edgar's long beard moved, his mouth losing the cigar held after a puff.
Dark, fixed eyes noticing the golden hair of the ill-mannered young woman.
"Your name?"
"Etchells."
"You may enter, Etchells. Just wait a moment, You shall have my full attention."
Hunched in the uncomfortable chair, also welded to the floor, the Droste-Hülshoff patriarch let smoke escape through his nostrils.
The black beard descended from his chin to his chest, and hair of the same hue continued beyond, to the center of his broad back.
Dark eyes fixed on reading the dissertation.
The description of the hours and encounters with the undead.
He remained immersed, amidst the cloud of mint and eucalyptus, only noticing the girl near the door after a long time:
"You may wait for me on the bed, or wherever you wish."
The sound of her walking on the steel, creaking on the plated floor, followed him, and he was taken aback by her proximity.
"You wrote all this?"
"Unfortunately."
"Can't you have someone do this work? There are many who call you Lord."
"Many call me Lord precisely because only I can do this work."
She hugged him, standing behind him as he remained seated, now relaxing.
Her hands were small. They went to his neck, then to his top hat, removing it.
The same was done with his overcoat, whose golden pocket watch was placed on the creaking table, like the corridor walls, which repeated at short intervals.
The windows lit up with the lightning, oval, black, and then luminescent for brief moments.
She was barefoot, kneeling when he sat on the bed.
She removed his boots, high, protecting up to the knees. They were part of the military uniform.
Then he pulled her when her hands touched his belt.
Etchells looked up at him from his lap.
A certain mischievousness on her young face, blushing.
"Well then, my Lord. I am but an ephemeral detail in your life. And you will forget me after brief moments back home. Does that feeling please you?"
"Almost as much as your perfume."
Edgar smelled her, wild plums.
He touched her hair, then left her on the bed, listening to her:
"If you permit me, there is very little I do not know, and nothing I do not wish to learn. How may I satisfy you?"
Edgar did not answer. After walking, he searched on one of the shelves.
Then he returned to her and took her in his lap again.
Her arms around the strong man's neck.
He brought a comb, made of ivory, and began to disentangle the blond strands, carefully, under the young woman's attentive gaze.
"Speak."
"What do you wish to know? Word of honour, I will not lie."
"Speak of what you know. Who is the adolescent I have in my lap?"
"Etchells, that is her, and she is me."
"Age?"
"It is not in good taste to ask a woman for such numbers."
"Nineteen."
She became slightly irritated, admitting:
"Nineteen."
"My father married at nineteen and had me at twenty."
Edgar remembered the old man and old, disjointed memories.
The house with the family portrait, whose faces he no longer knew to whom they belonged.
The grand piano.
And the maid Liatris, who was his first time.
Good memories.
Edgar kissed Etchells's mouth, and she reciprocated, hugging him, pressing him against her low and slender body.
She wore only a light, white, semi-transparent dress, leaving her entire, curveless body on display.
He pulled the ribbon at the height of her neck, and the fabric left her.
He kissed all of her skin.
They sweated through three climaxes without him leaving her.
Her thin legs held him when he threatened to pull away.
There was no more movement in the airship.
They had reached their destination.
"So much strength, perhaps I should enlist you in my troops. I don't remember the last time I was immobilized like that."
She bit her thin, nearly colorless lips, focusing on Edgar's eyes, appreciating their depths. And she retorted:
"Make me one of yours, or a slave, equivalent descriptions are unnecessary. I can be what you yearn for."
"There is no more slavery in this world."
"There is, if voluntary."
"How can one who yearns for justice fare well, being the owner of another? Not I. Not among my people do you see such things."
"I confess to you, it becomes insipid when in refusal."
"And should I accept all your desires?"
"Not all, certainly. Just one."
"What shall I say to you? Weary days have made me a disillusioned man. Speak, I want to hear your lips."
And he kissed her again, their tongues not parting for almost an hour.
"Take me, as a maidservant."
It was the chance of her life.
"What will you do for me, or my house?"
"What will I not do?"
"I am not a man of lovers."
"What man are you?"
"A man who knows how to love a whore."
She pondered, turned away, distressed by the refusal, and accepted:
"It is what I am."
He emphasized:
"It is."
Thus they said goodbye and never saw each other again.
She returned to the other whores of Madame Cuth Riseley-Prichard, and he, changed, descended the staircase, touched by the Eternal Rain atop the Gurnemanz Building.
His wife, Kundry, ran into Edgar's arms. She carried the youngest son, Parsifal, still a baby, in her arms.
Her ample breasts, full of milk, were visible in the décolletage of her long, purple dress, getting wet as it dragged through puddles.
Kundry had seen her husband earlier that year when he diverted his route to the mansion in the Sycamore Forest.
The Firstborn, in turn, had not seen him for seven years, since the last holidays.
For the fourteen-year-old boy, it was like greeting a stranger, this inside the building, on the highest floor.
The airship moved and nearly collided with another, smaller one, coming from between the buildings on the street of constructions up to twelve stories high.
Once the fright had passed, down the corridor, Edgar recognized his seven-year-old daughter, with light blue hair, yawning, drowsy, even drooling a little, distracted, with a short horn on her forehead.
She ran to him and hugged him, spinning in the air without touching the floor.