It had rained during the night, the sky was leaden, and peals of distant thunder rolled from the south. They walked along the avenue of pines where long ago Valcours Rigaud’s daughter had wed beneath a canopy of gold and silver spiderwebs. Now the webs spanned even between the trunks, creating filmy veils dotted with the husks of wasps and flies. Otille slashed them down with her umbrella. The entire landscape was so overgrown that Jocundra could only see a few feet in any direction before her eye met with a plaited wall of vines, an impenetrable thicket of oleander, or the hollow shell of a once mighty oak, itself enwrapped by a strangler fig whose sinuous branchings had spread to other trees, weaving its own web around a series of gigantic victims. The world of Maravillosa was a dripping, parasitical garden. Yet underlying this decay was the remnant of artful design. Scattered about the grounds were conical hills fifteen and twenty feet in height, matted with morning glory and ivy, saplings growing from their sides, like the jungle-shrouded tops of Burmese temples. Paths entered the hills, curving between mossy walls, and at the center they would find broken benches, fragments of marble fountains and sundials, and once, a statue covered in moss and vines, its hand outheld in a warding gesture, as if a magician had been struck leafy and inanimate while casting a counterspell.
‘Valcours,’ said Otille bemusedly, rubbing away the moss and clearing a circular patch of marble.
From atop one of the hills, between walls of bamboo and vines, they had a view of the house. Black; bristling with gables; speckled with silver magical symbols; a ramshackle wing leading off behind; it had the look of a strange seed spat from the heart of the night and about to burst into a constellation. Beyond the hills lay an oval pool bordered in cracked marble and sheeted with scum, enclosed by bushes whose contours were thrust up into odd shapes. Valcours, Otille explained, had been fascinated with the human form, and the bushes overgrew a group of mechanical devices he had commissioned for his entertainment. She hacked at a bush with her umbrella and uncovered a faceless wooden figure, its head a wormtrailed lump and its torso exhibiting traces of white paint, as well as a red heart on its chest. A rusted epee was attached to its hand.
‘It still worked when I was a child,’ she said. ‘Ants lived inside it, in channels packed with sand, and when their population grew too large, traps were sprung and reservoirs of mercury were opened, flooding the nests. The reservoirs were designed to empty at specific intervals and rates of flow, shifting the weight of the figure, sending it thrusting and lurching about in a parody of swordsmanship. The only ants to survive were those that fled into an iron compartment here’ - she tapped the heart - ‘and then, after it had been cleaned, they were released to start all over.’ She cocked an eyebrow, as if expecting a reaction.
‘What was it for?’ asked Jocundra. The apparent uselessness of the thing, its death-powered spurts of life, horrified her.
‘Who knows what Valcours had in mind,’ said Otille, stabbing the dummy with her umbrella. ‘Some plot, some game, But I hated the thing! Once, I was about eight, it scared me badly, and after it had stopped moving, I took out the iron compartment and dropped it in the bayou.’ She sauntered off along the rim of the pool, scuffing algae off the marble. ‘I’ve ordered the copper,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You can stay if you like.’
‘How long will it take?’ asked Donnell.
‘A week to get here, then a few weeks for construction.’ She started walking toward the house. ‘You can think about it a few more days if you wish, but if you do stay, I hope you understand that it’s a job. You’ll have to keep yourself available to me five days a week from noon until eight. For my experiments. Otherwise, you’re on your own.’ She turned and gave Donnell a canny look. ‘Are you sure you’ve told me everything about the veve, why you’re building it?’
‘I hardly know myself,’ he said.
‘I wonder how it relates to Les Invisibles,’ she said.
‘Les Invisibles?’
‘The voodoo gods,’ said Jocundra. ‘They’re sometimes called Les Invisibles or the loas.’
‘Oh,’ he said derisively. ‘Voodoo.’
‘Don’t be so quick to mock it,’ said Otille. ‘You’re about to build the veve of Ogoun Badagris out of three tons of copper. That sounds like voodoo to me.’
‘It’s quite possible,’ said Jocundra, angry at Otille’s know-it-all manner, ‘that the veve is an analogue to some mechanism in the brain and can therefore be used by mediums as a concentrative device, one which Donnell -because of his abilities - can use in a more material way.’
‘Well,’ Otille began, but Jocundra talked through her.
